“Command of a vessel without arms, and with but one eye”

Aside from having several children, what did Sylvanus Lowell do after being so badly injured at the Marblehead smallpox hospital in 1773?

First he returned to the maritime business, as shown by this advertisement from the 23 Mar 1774 Essex Journal, published in Newburyport:

For NEWFOUNDLAND,
THE Schooner ROSE, JACOB LOWELL, master, now lying at Marquand’s wharf, will sail by the first of April.—For Freight or Passage apply to Robert Jenkins, or Silvanus Lowell.
Newbury Port, March 21st, 1774.

Shortly after that, Parliament closed the port of Boston to most trade from outside Massachusetts, thus making secondary ports like Newburyport more important for about a year.

But then the war began, and sailing out of any Massachusetts port put ships at risk for being seized by the Royal Navy. At the same time, the province needed military supplies, and there was money to be made in privateering.

Sylvanus Lowell, despite his injuries, went back to sea. As the Newburyport Herald copied from the Saco Democrat in 1830:

No better evidence of his enterprising spirit is watnng, than the fact of his obtaining command of a vessel without arms, and with but one eye. It is said he was enabled to do much of his own writing, by screwing a pen into the hook attached to his arm.

In February 1777, the Massachusetts board of war commissioned Lowell to sail to St. Eustatia to trade for salt and these goods:

500 Effective Fire Arms, fit for Soldiers, with Bayonets —
500 Soldiers Blankets —
50 Barrels Gun-powder —
200 ps Ravens Duck or Tent Cloth —
300 lb Twine —
25 Casks 20d Nails —
30 do 10d do
15 do 4 do
If the above Articles are not to be got, bring the proceeds in Russia Duck, Cordage from 4½ Inches downwards, Coarse Checks & Linnens —

He commanded a crew of at least nine men. The captain was back by July, when he bought a house in Newbury for his growing family.

In 1779 Lowell became captain of a privateering brig listed as the Porgee (also Porgee and Pauga), with a letter of marque from New Hampshire. Though descendants recalled it as “a large war-ship,” the American War of Independence at Sea website says it carried only four guns and eleven men.

Nonetheless, the Porgee managed to capture a ship called the Lively, as shown by a legal notice in the 17 July 1780 Boston Gazette. AWIatsea.com says the ship then received a Massachusetts letter of marque and went out under another captain.

In 1781 Capt. Lowell invested in a privateering sloop named the Betsey, and reportedly he commanded other privateers himself. According to his 1830 obituary:

About 3 days before Peace was concluded, he was captured by the British; but by the time they reached the shore, this news was received, and he was liberated and sent home.

After this, he followed the sea 7 years, as master of a vessel out of Newburyport, in the employ of Tristram Dalton.

Dalton had backed many privateers during the war, including the Betsey.

Levi Mills of Newburyport sailed under Capt. Lowell to Richmond on the “good ship Diana” one winter in the mid-1780s. According to an item about Mills’s journal published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, this tobacco-buying trip meant navigating the ice and shoals of the James River.

In 1791, as I wrote yesterday, Lowell’s second wife Elizabeth died. By the end of the year he married a third wife, also named Elizabeth. It also appears that the captain’s remaining eye started to fail around this time, eventually leaving him totally blind.

Lowell “quit the sea,” sold that Newbury house, and moved his whole blended family up to Maine, where some of his siblings had already settled. His stepdaughter Fannie later described the part of Biddeford where they made their new home as “then a wilderness.”

I’m not sure how Sylvanus Lowell supported his family after that, but reportedly the children grew up “in comfort.” In Biddeford the captain was “greatly esteemed.” Around 1825 Lowell “was visited with a severe shock of the numb palsy,” and he died on 21 July 1830, aged 86. His third wife survived him for another nine years.

“Of these injuries he was confined some time”

You may have noticed that the two newspaper articles I’ve quoted about Sylvanus Lowell’s injuries and recovery didn’t state his full name.

The Boston and Newburyport newspaper printers referred to him only as “Captain Lowell” of Newburyport, trusting readers to know who that was if they really deserved to know.

Last fall I decided to fill in that missing name by looking for other sources mentioning such an unusual accident.

Not only did I luck out in finding references to the captain, but his given name turned out to be Sylvanus. There were other Sylvanus Lowells in New England during his lifetime, of course, but the combination was rare enough to track him further.

Among the sources that named Capt. Lowell are:

• Delmar R. Lowell, The Historic Genealogy of the Lowells in America (1899): “Capt. Sylvanus…On ‘Cat Island,’ in Boston Harbor, he lost his two arms and one eye while firing a cannon.”
• Biographical Sketches of Representative Citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1901): “Captain Sylvanus Lowell, who shortly before his marriage lost both his arms by the accidental discharge of a cannon, the right one being taken off just below the elbow, and the left just above it, and also lost the sight of one eye.”
• John J. Currier, paper delivered to the Historical Society of Old Newbury (1911): “Sylvanus Lowell…was a sea captain, and while firing a salute on one of the islands in Boston harbor had the misfortune to injure both arms so that amputation was necessary, and at the same time lost the sight of one eye.”

The earliest source to provide a full name, and also more detail about the injury (not necessarily more accurate), was the captain’s obituary in the 7 Aug 1830 Newburyport Herald:

In 1773, he, with many others, were at Cat Island, in Boston harbor [sic], to be inoculated for the Small Pox—the physicians directed that two cannon should be taken to the Island for their amusement and recreation.—

Capt. L. was engaged in loading one of these, and while ramming down the cartridge, the piece went off—his left arm was blown off above the elbow, and his right just above the wrist; the right of one eye was entirely destroyed, and he was otherwise injured.

Of these injuries he was confined some time.

As you can tell from the date of that obituary, Capt. Lowell lived more than fifty-five years after his accident, even though most people felt he would die soon after.

But what sort of life did Lowell have, given his lack of hands and damaged sight? He had been a ship’s captain before, but how did he make his living afterward?

TOMORROW: Plus, a war broke out about a year later.

(Contrary to what those quoted sources say, Cat Island wasn’t in Boston harbor but off the coast of Marblehead. It’s legally part of Salem. In the 1850s the Salem Steamboat Company developed a seaside resort on the island. Because some of the investors were from the city of Lowell, they renamed their property Lowell Island. Thus, for several decades the site of Capt. Lowell’s injury shared his name. The resort didn’t last, though. The place is now home to a day camp and officially called Children’s Island. Presumably there are no working cannon for the children’s “amusement and recreation.”)

Two Online Archeology Events on 15 Feb.

Two online events about archeology are coming up next Thursday, 15 February.

The Lake Champlain Maritime Museum will host its third annual Virtual Archaeology Conference that afternoon from 1:00 to 4:00 P.M., with staff speaking about various work going on at and around the museum.

The scheduled presentations are:

• Patricia Reid, “Legacy Collection: Leege Collection Artifacts from Arnold’s Bay”
• Cherilyn Gilligan, “Arnold’s Bay Artifacts: Conservation and Context”
• Chris Sabick, “The Excavation and Documentation of the Revolutionary War Row Galley Congress”
• Paul Gates, “Site Formation Processes: Defining the Theoretical Process of Archaeology for the Revolutionary Warship Congress”

Those will be followed by a live question-and-answer session.

Go to this webpage for more details on the museum’s program and to register.

That same evening, starting at 7:00 P.M., the Shirley-Eustis House Association will host an online lecture by Boston City Archaeologist Joe Bagley on “Archaeology at Shirley Place.”

Bagley will share new information learned about the eighteenth-century enslaved inhabitants of the estate and new insights into the former location of the 1747 Shirley-Eustis House. The presentation will include artifact discussions and digital reconstructions of the historic property before it was developed in the nineteenth century.

Go to this page to register for the Shirley-Eustis House’s event.

Both of these online events are free, but donations to the hosting organizations are welcome.

The Messages from Philadelphia’s “Committee for Tarring and Feathering”

The Boston Tea Party was splashing up in other American cities two hundred fifty years ago today, on 25 Dec 1773.

The Boston committee of correspondence had sent a silversmith named Paul Revere south with its version of the tea destruction on 17 December.

Revere rode through New York and then headed to Philadelphia, arriving on 24 December. The news from Boston was printed as a special supplement to the Pennsylvania Gazette, combining newspaper reports and the committee’s statement.

That news encouraged the people of Philadelphia to maintain their resistance to the East India Company tea—which was plenty strong already.

The following day, the ship Polly appeared in the Delaware River, heading upstream. It carried almost seven hundred chests of tea (I’ve seen sources putting the count at either 697 or 698), more than double the number from the three ships the Bostonians had raided.

Back in mid-November, a broadside had appeared in Philadelphia, warning “the DELAWARE PILOTS” and the populace that “a Ship loaded with TEA was now on its way to this Port.” That handbill was ominously signed “THE COMMITTEE FOR TARRING AND FEATHERING.”

This of course was not an official Philadelphia committee, unlike Boston’s standing committee of correspondence, the ad hoc committees the Boston town meeting named to confer with different men, or even the similar committees later named by “the Body of the People.”

It’s therefore impossible to say how much support Philadelphia’s “committee for tarring and feathering” had at the start of the confrontation. That group could have been just a handful of guys with access to a printing press. But their broadside rallied people to take a hard stand.

In case the initial threat wasn’t clear enough, on 27 November the committee distributed a second broadside promising that any pilot who helped guide the tea ship into the port of Philadelphia would find “TAR and FEATHERS will be his Portion.”

That ship was now identified as “the (Tea,) SHIP POLLY, CAPTAIN AYRES; a THREE DECKER.” As for Samuel Ayres himself, the committee warned him of “a Halter around your Neck----ten Gallons of liquid Tar decanted on your Pate----with the Feathers of a dozen wild Geese laid over that to enliven your appearance!”

The committee spoke again on 7 December. It now said the Polly was not a three-decker after all, but “an old black Ship, without a Head, or any Ornaments.”

As for Capt. Ayres:

The Captain is a short, fat Fellow, and a little obstinate withal.----So much the worse for him.----For, so sure as he rides rusty, We shall heave him Keel out, and see that his Bottom be well fired, scrubb’d and paid.----His Upper-Works too, will have an Overhawling----and as it is said, he has a good deal of Quick Work about him, we will take care that such part of him undergoes a thorough Rummaging. . . .

We know him well, and have calculated to a Gill and a Feather how much it will require to fit him for an American Exhibition.

That sort of pressure had already convinced the East India Company’s consignees in Philadelphia to disavow their assignment and thus any responsibility for the tea. But of course that didn’t necessarily mean anything to His Majesty’s Customs Service.

The Dartmouth had entered Boston harbor, as the Customs department defined it, before anyone in town could warn off Capt. James Hall. That started the clock for the ship’s owners to unload or face confiscation. Customs supervisors refused to bend their rules.

The physical and legal geography of Philadelphia was different. Even though by 25 December the Polly was as far north as Chester, Pennsylvania, clearly within the North American mainland, it was still twenty miles away from the port of Philadelphia. Thus, under Customs standards it hadn’t officially arrived, and Capt. Ayres could turn around without suffering legal consequences, loss of his cargo, or damage to himself.

Which he did.

The Fortunate Timing of the Boston Tea Party

Last Saturday we enjoyed ideal weather for the sestercentennial of the Boston Tea Party: cool enough to remind us it was December, but not bitter, rainy, or windy.

Two days later, a storm blew through eastern Massachusetts, with downpours, high winds, and many power outages.

So we were lucky.

That happy concatenation made me think about a point James R. Fichter has been making in his book Tea and his talks about it: just a couple of days’ change in how the tea ships crossed the Atlantic Ocean could have produced a very different outcome.

As soon as Bostonians raided one tea ship, Fichter argues persuasively, the royal authorities would have taken steps to guard the others, most likely by bringing them under the protection of the Royal Navy.

Why didn’t Gov. Thomas Hutchinson and Adm. John Montagu do that already? Because they adhered to the British legal system, in which the military didn’t act without civilian government requests, and the civilian government didn’t call on the military until a crime was actually under way or had taken place.

Imagine, Fichter asks, if the Dartmouth had arrived within the bounds of Boston harbor a couple of days earlier. In that case, its Customs-regulations deadline for unloading would have fallen on 14 December, when the Beaver was still in smallpox quarantine off Rainsford Island and thus not within reach of the populace.

Or if the Beaver had arrived two days later than it did, it would still have been in quarantine on the night of 16 December, when the Dartmouth’s time was up.

Either way, the men of the Tea Party could have emptied the Dartmouth and Eleanor as they did, but the navy would probably have escorted the Beaver to Castle Island, where its tea could have been stored in the fort. That was where almost all the tea from the William, wrecked on Cape Cod, would end up shortly afterward.

As it was, the Beaver was moved to Griffin’s Wharf late on 14 December, giving the town’s radical activists a day to complete their planning before the authorities made their final refusal to let the Dartmouth sail back.

Would the destruction of two cargoes of tea instead of three, more than £6,000 worth of property instead of £9,000, have changed the response from the royal government? It’s impossible to say, but the complete destruction of all the tea in the harbor at once certainly looked like a bigger triumph for the Bostonians and a bigger crime to London.

Or another possibility: What if the ship carrying tea to Charleston, the London, was delayed long enough that its Customs-reglations deadline fell after news of Boston’s destruction of the tea had arrived in the city? Would the Charleston radicals have felt emboldened to destroy that tea instead of letting it be landed and stored? Would the Charleston government officials have felt safe with the same arrangement?

And if more than one American port had destroyed expensive shipments of the East India Company’s tea, would Lord North and his colleagues have thought that Coercive Acts aimed at one colony would work?

We have no way of knowing, but we do know the men destroying the tea on 16 Dec 1773 had ideal weather for their work.

The Dangers of Guarding the Tea Ships

There’s so much Boston Tea Party content being posted that I can’t keep up, especially as I’m putting the finishing touches on my two new presentations in the next two days.

But here’s one item that caught my eye in the artist Cortney Skinner’s feed.

On 9 Dec 1773, the Boston News-Letter published the following bits of local news about the people’s response to the tea ships:

Upon Capt. [James] Bruce’s Arrival on Friday last, he was directed to carry his Ship to the same Wharf where Capt. [James] Hall lay, whereby the Watch, voted by the People, may the more easily take Care of both Vessels:

Twenty-five Men have watched each Night since the 29th ult. sometimes with Arms.—

A List of the Commanders each respective Night has been sent, but cannot be inserted unless it is at the Request of the Gentlemen themselves—which, when signified to us, we shall readily comply with.

Capt. Bruce had no Tea on board excepting the Teas shipped by the East-India Company.—Capt. Shepard who arrived on Saturday had no Tea on board.

Capt. [Hezekiah] Coffin in a Brig who has some of the East-India Company’s Tea on board, is arrived at Nantasket. . . .

Last Tuesday Evening, being very dark, and rainy,…one of the Watch of the Tea-Vessels, accidentally fell from the Wharf, into the Dock, but the Tide being down and the Place muddy, he was taken up without Hurt.

In this article, dock means, as Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote, “A place where water is let in or out at pleasure, where ships are built or laid up.”

On that same Tuesday night a shipwright named Stephen Ingels fell off Ballard’s Wharf in the North End and drowned, leaving “a poor Widow and two or three Children,” so I know I shouldn’t laugh at the man falling off Griffin’s Wharf while protecting the town from tea. But I’m getting a little punchy.

The Departure of Jacob Bates

On 12 Dec 1773, two and a half centuries ago today, the equestrian Jacob Bates left America.

We know this from a couple of newspaper items published the next day.

The Boston Evening-Post:

Yesterday Morning sailed for London the Brig Dolphin, Capt. Scott, in whom went Passengers, Mr. Nathan Frazier, Merchant; Capt McKenzie, of Newbury; Mr. Bates, who lately performed the Feats of Horsemanship here) and Doctor John Sprague, jun.

The Boston Post-Boy:

Yesterday Morning sailed for London, the Brig Dolphin, Capt. James Scott, with whom went Passengers, Mr. Nathan Frazier, Merchant, Doctor John Sprague, jun. and Mr. Jacob Bates, the famous Horseman.

That second report is the only time that American newspapers mentioned Bates’s first name, as far as I found. That’s how we can link this Bates to the Jacob Bates who performed in Europe, shown above.

Capt. Scott regularly sailed from Boston to London for John Hancock. Back in November he had arrived with news of four tea ships on their way, and he was leaving just before the resulting crisis was resolved.

Bates’s departure was notable enough to be reported in the Connecticut Gazette. And months later another performer invoked his name in the 16 July 1774 Providence Gazette:

HORSEMANSHIP,
By Christopher H. Gardner,
The original American Rider, who will perform, on one or two Horses, on Tuesday the 26th Instant, all the Parts which were exhibited in America by the celebrated Mr. Bates, in several of which Parts it is allowed by good Judges he fully equals, or rather exceeds, any thing of the Kind ever performed on this Continent.

N.B. Notice will be hereafter given of the particular Place and Hour of riding.

Providence, July 16, 1774.

Clearly Bates, having performed in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Newport, had left his mark on the continent.

Celebrations of Phillis Wheatley’s Boston Pub Date

At the end of November 1773, the ship Dartmouth was moored in Boston’s inner harbor, watched by a militia-style patrol of volunteers to ensure the tea it carried was not unloaded and taxed.

The Rotch family’s vessel, under the command of James Hall, brought other cargo as well. Among those items were copies of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.

Wheatley had recently become legally free, and she was counting on sales of those books for her income.

Fortunately, by 1 December the local Whigs made clear that everything could be unloaded from the Dartmouth except the East India Company tea, so the books came ashore.

Historians only recently recognized the connection between Wheatley’s book and the Boston Tea Party because no one mentioned it at the time. Wheatley may have been worried 250 years ago today, but by the time she was writing the letters that survive she had her books on dry land and was busy promoting orders.

Wheatley wrote that her books would arrive “in Capt. Hall,” using the common way of referring to a ship by its master rather than its name. About ten years ago Wheatley biographer Vincent Carretta, researcher Richard Kigel, and others realized that the captain of that name arriving in Boston around that time had to be James Hall on the Dartmouth.

The sestercentennial of the Tea Party thus coincides with the sestercentennial of the publication of Phillis Wheatley’s book in America, and both events are being commemorated this season.

Ada Solanke’s play Phillis in Boston will have its last performances for the year in Old South Meeting House, the poet’s own church, on Sunday, 3 December. That site-specific drama depicts the poet, her friend Obour Tanner, her husband-to-be John Peters, her recent owner Susannah Wheatley, and abolitionist Prince Hall. Order tickets here.

The next evening, 4 December, the Boston Public Library will host “Faces of Phillis,” a free program discussing the poet from various perspectives. It will start with a staged reading of parts of Solanke’s plays about Wheatley. Then there will be a panel featuring Solanke, sculptor Meredith Bergmann, and Kyera Singleton of the Royall House & Slave Quarters museum. The evening will conclude with Boston’s Poet Laureate, Porsha Olayiwola, performing a dramatic reading of her own work and one of Wheatley’s poems.

“Faces of Phillis” is scheduled to last from 6:00 to 7:30 P.M. Register for that event here.

Fichter on the Fate of the Tea

We’re one month out from the sestercentennial of the Boston Tea Party, so we’ll be consuming an increasing amount of that topic.

The anniversary has brought a new study of British North America’s tea crisis: Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773-1776 by James R. Fichter.

Fichter is a professor of international history at the University of Hong Kong, closer to where the Chinese tea began its global journey than to where it went into the salt water. He is also the author of So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism and editor of British and French Colonialism in Africa, Asia and the Middle East: Connected Empires across the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries.

Tea looks at the data on consumption and sale of tea in North America, showing that people continued to consume it even as it became freighted with political meaning. It was a source of caffeine, after all.

In fact, Fichter points out, of the five ships carrying East India Company tea that landed in America, one way or another, two cargos were eventually consumed on the continent. Champions of the traditional narrative might respond that none of that tea was drunk by Patriot Americans under Crown government as initially intended. Details are in the book.

Earlier this month, Fichter chatted long-distance with the Emerging Revolutionary War team. The recording of that discussion can be viewed on Facebook and on YouTube.

Fichter will also be in Boston on 16 December as one of the speakers at the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts’s Tea Party Symposium. You can now use that link to register for a seat in advance.

The Tea Party Sestercentennial, 15–16 Dec.

This year will see the 250th anniversary, or Sestercentennial, of the Boston Tea Party.

As the most photogenic of the pre-war Revolutionary events, the destruction of the taxable tea has been a very big deal for about two centuries of those 250 years. Before that, it appears, the first rule of the Tea Party was that you didn’t talk about the Tea Party.

This December, we’ll be talking a lot about the Tea Party.

On Friday, 15 December, Revolutionary Spaces’ Old South Meeting House will host its recreated “Meeting of the Body of the People,” representing the gatherings in that same space right up until the destruction of the tea began.

Like last year, I’ll be participating as the voice of the narrator booming from the gallery. The real stars will be the people portraying Samuel Phillips Savage, Samuel Adams, Dr. Thomas Young, Francis Rotch, and such observers as Phillis Wheatley, including some of the area’s top reenactors and museum professionals.

Tickets for this event are $40 for an adult, with discounts for seniors, teens, children, and Revolutionary Spaces members. Even though Old South can squeeze in thousands, this will probably sell out. The event starts at 6:15 P.M. on Friday, and there will be no follow-up on the waterfront that night.

On Saturday, 16 December, the exact anniversary date, there will be a program at Faneuil Hall titled “Act One: Faneuil Hall & The Boston Tea Party, A Protest in Principle: A Retrospective on Revolution.” That’s scheduled to take place from 4:00 to 5:30 P.M.

To be frank, I’m not sure what this event will be, but it doesn’t matter since all seats inside Faneuil Hall have already sold out. The program will be shown on screens outside the hall for the general public.

Then that evening’s action will move to the Old South Meeting House, where we’ll do another “Meeting of the Body of the People.” This event has also sold out, which is why Revolutionary Spaces and its volunteers just added the performance on Friday the 15th.

Outside on the steps at Franklin and Washington Streets, near Old South, reenactors will portray citizens of colonial Boston discussing the politics of the day. This “Patriots and Loyalists” program will run from 6:00 to 7:00 P.M., free and open to the public.

At 7:30 P.M., the crowd from Old South and the area around it are invited to follow the fifes and drums to the waterfront. This walk is longer than back in 1773 since the land has been extended. The event description for “Huzzah for Griffin’s Wharf” says there will be a sight of British soldiers, though in 1773 all the regulars were on Castle Island.

Finally, at around 8:00 P.M. spectators can line the Harborwalk near the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum to watch from across the water as men storm aboard the Beaver and Eleanor to effect the “Destruction of the Tea,” loose leaves donated by people all over the country. There will be some bleacher seating, but the audience is expected to number in the thousands, so most folks will stand.

As in 1773, this action is expected to be disciplined and quick, so the whole event should be over before 9:00 P.M.

“His Majesty’s Ship under my Command ran on the Rocks”

On 11 Dec 1774, Capt. William Maltby of H.M.S. Glasgow wrote from off Cohasset to his commander, Adm. Samuel Graves, with some bad news:

His Majesty’s Ship under my Command ran on the Rocks at this Place Yesterday Morning at 5 O’Clock.

She is now at an Anchor in a very narrow Place environ’d with Rocks and about half her Length from some of them, her Rudder is lost and she has received very considerable damage, if timely Assistance arrives, I hope She will be saved, She now makes as much Water as all the Pumps can free, I am taking every Method for her Preservation, but want Craft for Her Guns &ca.

as there is a little more Water than She draws at Low Water, but it would be very dangerous to throw her Guns Overboard here as She would strike on them at Low Water; for other particulars I refer You to the Bearer who seems to be a very communicative and civil Person.

The man Maltby entrusted with that message was Ebenezer Dickinson. He evidently did his job since the next afternoon Maltby could file this report:

Sir, I have your favor by Mr Dickinson, Lieutenant [Alexander] Greme is arrived in the Sloop; Lieutenant [Joseph] Nunn in the Halifax; Mr [William] Lechmere by Land; You may be assured I shall lose no time or Opportunity in doing everything in my power for the Preservation of the Ship,

an able Carpenter with two or three of that Profession would be of great Service in constructing a Rudder of this Plan.

I purpose to get the Ship in safety to Night if possible, until I can get. her in a Condition to come to Boston; If the 40 Men are completed to a 100. it will vastly contribute to forward the Ship as her Men are much fatigued already; I must refer You to Lt Lechmere for particulars of which he has heard and seen

In a postscript the captain added: “the reason I mention the Men after what You have said in your Letter, the Officers are of Opinion that the King’s Men are more to be depended on than Others.”

Graves’s letter doesn’t appear to have survived, but I’m guessing Maltby wanted men already in the Royal Navy to help with the salvage effort, not trusting locals, even if they were experienced sailors. In late December, there was already an open split between rural Massachusetts and the Crown.

Graves was especially displeased about this accident since H.M.S. Glasgow had just been refurbished in Halifax. It was, he wrote, “a clean Ship, compleatly stored and victualled.” And it had nearly reached Boston. As Capt. John Barker of the army wrote in his diary, the Glasgow ran aground “within two or three Leagues of the Light House.” But that proximity also meant the navy was able to hurry resources out to Maltby. The frigate was refloated, moved into Boston, and slowly repaired by early March.

At the time of the accident, the Admiralty office had sent orders for Capt. Maltby to report to Spithead because he had “served three years successively.” He was in line for a new command. However, the grounding spelled the end of Capt. Maltby’s naval career.

On 10 Jan 1775 the merchant John Rowe wrote in his diary:

Capt. Maltby of the Glasgow Man of Warr was try’d this day by a Court Martial on board the Somerset & suspended.

The Glasgow’s gunner was court-martialed at the same time. Presumably Maltby sailed home to Britain shortly afterward, but I can’t trace him.

Adm. Graves reassigned the Glasgow to Capt. Tyringham Howe. During the Battle of Bunker Hill, the frigate fired shot across Charlestown Neck to discourage more provincials from going onto the peninsula.

Meanwhile, Lt. William Finnie, whom Maltby had wounded in a duel on Noddle’s Island back in 1773, was serving with the Marines’ 61st Company, also listed as grenadiers. He was among the many Marine officers killed in the Bunker Hill battle.

(The map shown above, viewable at Boston Rare Maps, was published in 1774. It includes at the bottom right “Konohasset Harbour” and the “Konohasset rocks.”)

“Send her a doll not a fine one”

On 16 Sept 1779, Sarah Bache wrote from Philadelphia to her father, Benjamin Franklin, in France with news of his grandchildren:

Willy and our little Black ey’d parrot [Betsy] who I am sure you would be fond of if you knew her, (she is just the age Will was when you came from england, and goes down stairs just like him) both join in love to you, she desires you would send her a doll not a fine one, but one that will bear to be pul’d about with a great deal of Nursing, there is no such things to be had here as toys for Children

Betsy Bache had just turned two.

It took a long time for Sarah Bache’s request to get across the Atlantic and the gift to return. Not until 23 June 1781, when Betsy was well over three and a half, did she receive a present from her grandfather. Her mother wrote:

The things you sent me by C[ap]t. Smith came to hand safe he arrived in Boston, and I got them brought in a Waggon that was comming . . . Betsy was the hapiest Creature in the world with her Baby told every body who sent it

On 1 October, Sally Bache gave birth to another daughter. Her husband reported that they would name this baby Deborah after her grandmother, Franklin’s late wife.

Sarah resumed writing to her father on 19 October, saying:

the Children are delighted with their new Sister, and Betsy has gone so far as to say she loves her better than the Baby that came from France

A few weeks later we find the new Bache baby now nicknamed by her toddler brother, and we catch a last glimpse of that hard-to-find, long-traveled French doll:

Willy, Betsy, Luly Boy and Sister Deby De join in duty the last two names are of Louis’s making, they have just been striping the French Baby and dipping her in a tub of cold water—

(The first letter quoted above can be viewed here, courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.)

The Boarding of the Betty in Great Detail

Earlier this year the Cowper & Newton Museum in England posted an article headlined “John Newton, Tide Surveyor, and the boarding of the Betty.”

The authors are Darren White and Glen Huntley, who collaborate as Bygone Liverpool.

They begin:

When the Cowper & Newton Museum shared with us a photograph of a small paper exhibit from its collection—a boarding docket from John Newton’s time as a tide surveyor (1755–1764) in Liverpool—we didn’t think we would be able to unlock its secrets because there wasn’t that much information listed in it.

But they then proceed to assemble a long, detailed, and richly illustrated examination of the circumstances behind that document.

Through newspapers White and Huntley were able to confirm that the ship Betty had come from Virginia, and that it carried tobacco. They discuss Newton’s duties [see what I did there] as a Customs officer, and how the River Mersey looked to arriving ships.

American sources provided information on the Betty’s captain, Thomas Brereton. British sources illuminated the ship’s several owners.

Then it turns out the Betty was made into a privateer in 1761. The authors even found a diagram showing how it had sailed out of Chesapeake Bay that September in a protective convoy of tobacco ships.

The article traces the Betty to its demise off the coast of Ireland in 1763, with a final conflict between different groups fighting for the spoils of the wreck.

It’s a long read that goes in many directions, but it’s a wonderful example of what one can learn just by pulling on a few threads of historical evidence.

In 1764 Newton was ordained within the Anglican church, leaving the civil service and becoming curate for Olney. He’s best known as the author of the hymn “Amazing Grace” and the rueful pamphlet Thoughts on the Slave Trade.

Carp on Land, Colonial Ports, Global Trade…

The Economic History Association’s EH.net site has shared Benjamin L. Carp review of Jeremy Land’s Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution, 1700–1776.

Land is currently Postdoktor in the Department of Economy and Society at the University of Gothenburg and a visiting scholar at the University of Helsinki. He received Ph.D. at Georgia State University in 2019.

Carp summarizes Land’s argument this way:

First, he argues that scholars should understand Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia, as well as the smaller towns in their orbit, as a complex, integrated “port complex” or “port system” rather than fetishizing them as entrepôts for distinct regions (15). . . . Together they formed a “nodal center” that was independent of the British metropole (3).

Second, with that in mind Land argues that these cities’ mercantile interests developed and deployed their own resources, rather than acting as handmaidens to British sources of capital. Indeed, he argues, the metropole often stumbled as an inadequate manager of colonial economic interests. By contrast, since American merchants owned a third of the empire’s merchant marine tonnage, “colonial investment was quite capable of sustaining itself without being dependent on British capital” (51). . . .

Third, the British didn’t actively opt for a policy of “salutary neglect” toward the colonies (151). Imperial officials went through earnest phases of trying to enforce mercantilism, particularly after incurring debts during the Seven Years’ War, but these officials also went through phases of accommodating local merchants or leaving them alone. Ultimately, a lack of imperial capacity to enforce customs laws or provide sufficient specie forced the American cities to go outside the British Empire for circulating currency, specie, and trade routes.

Trade with the Caribbean and outside the empire was on the whole more important to American merchants than was trade with Great Britain. By referring to “trans-imperial trade networks,” Land avoids any romantic, Han Solo-esque associations we might have with smuggling and takes a clearer look at American trading networks outside the British Empire (2). While illegal trade can be difficult to document, Land finds plenty of suggestive evidence. As perhaps the best example, he draws from an earlier co-authored article to demonstrate that Lisbon records show 73% more trade with Philadelphia than the Philadelphia customs house records (Land and Dominguez, 2019, 148–49).

(That’s “Illicit Affairs: Philadelphia’s Trade with Lisbon before Independence, 1700-1775,” published in Ler Historia in 2019 and available here.)

By trading outside the empire, northern merchants had mounted a “resistance” to British mercantile policy long before the 1760s, and the customs service was essentially powerless to enforce its Navigation Acts (2). Although the British Empire ramped up its enforcement efforts after 1763, these efforts backfired. American merchants decided that “membership in the British Empire … was not worth the effort” (3).

At the end of the Revolutionary War, however, many American merchants were shocked to discover that they could no longer trade with those British Caribbean islands, or with the metropole (i.e., London and other British ports). There followed a painful adjustment as the nation tried the China trade, feelers into other empires, and finally a trade pact with Great Britain. Membership in the British Empire may not have been worth it, but independence wasn’t easy either.

Two Wheatley Biographies, Compared and Contrasted

The Los Angeles Review of Books just ran Hollis Robbins’s assessment of what the headline calls “Two New Books About Phillis Wheatley.”

One of those books is David Waldstreicher’s The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, published earlier this year. The other is the new edition of Vincent Carretta’s biography, originally titled Phillis Wheatley in 2011 and now revised and expanded as Phillis Wheatley Peters.

By some measures Carretta’s book wouldn’t count as new, though it certainly has new material. Its inclusion in this review not simply as a foil for Waldstreicher’s book but in sharing the spotlight seems to reflect how Robbins, dean of humanities at the University of Utah, prefers Carretta’s approach:

Getting to know Wheatley via Carretta means being immersed in the material facts of life of one portion of the globe between the years 1750 and 1800: colonial America, the slave trade, shipping lanes and trade between Europe and the colonies, merchant and church life in Boston, what books were available, who read what, and what political revolutions were brewing. . . .

Getting to know Wheatley via Waldstreicher is far easier—his book brings Wheatley to the present and to present-day readers, presuming that she would think and speak as we think and speak. . . . He offers a Phillis Wheatley ready for her TikTok close-up.

As examples of the different approaches, Robbins presents passages showing how the two books discuss the same subjects. One of those is the poem “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” which I discussed last month.

Here are extracts from that contrast:

When, nearly 70 pages in, Carretta’s readers finally get to Wheatley’s first published poem, “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” (1767), about a schooner laden with whale oil that survived the most terrible gale in memory, sufficient details about the key players (Nathaniel Coffin was an Anglican Boston merchant and an enslaver of a young girl named Sappho while Hussey was one of several sons of a prominent and prosperous Nantucket Quaker merchant and owner of whaling vessels) have been offered to support Carretta’s claim that “Phillis was already commenting on transatlantic economic and political subjects by the time she was about fifteen years old.” . . .

Waldstreicher opens his book with this very poem, to begin his argument that Wheatley’s poetic expressions must be a matter of what she personally experienced and felt. . . . [W]hile it is not at all wrong to wonder whether the trauma of the poet’s Middle Passage sparked her drive to write so forcefully and so well, it is a question, not a certainty. . . . But Waldstreicher’s readers don’t really have a choice to agree or not with his conjectures and conclusions that “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” was more about Wheatley than about Hussey and Coffin. Waldstreicher does not mention that Coffin was an enslaver in talking about the poem. An endnote disputes Carretta’s claim, saying that “there were many Coffins and Husseys” in the area. But shouldn’t readers be told it is a possibility?

Later in the review Robbins brings in a third author, of sorts. She asked ChatGPT’s GPT-4 “what might modern readers assume Phillis Wheatley was thinking when she wrote ‘On Messrs. Huffey and Coffin’ in 1767.” This appears to be a way to saying that even a machine can make assumptions about Phillis Wheatley’s thoughts and feelings, with the tacit implication that Waldstreicher’s book may do that in a more convincing (and better written) way but Carretta’s “careful archival research and scrupulous historical accuracy” is more valuable.

Now as I read Waldstreicher’s endnotes about that early poem, he identifies Coffin not as Nathaniel Coffin of Boston but as Richard Coffin of Nantucket—and I found that identification convincing. Did Richard Coffin enslave people? I don’t know. He’s not as well documented as the rich merchant from Boston, but there’s no evidence that merchant was in danger of drowning in September 1767.

Carretta’s connection between “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” and slaveholding thus seems more strained than Waldstreicher’s linkage of maritime danger and the teen-aged Phillis’s memory of her own Atlantic crossing. And that assessment is based on researching the historical context of the event, which is indeed Carretta’s strong point but which Waldstreicher has managed as well.

The Journey of Phillis Wheatley’s First Published Poem

As related in yesterday’s posting, a storm in September 1767 pushed a schooner packed with whale oil onto Cape Cod.

But that ship wasn’t lost, the cargo was preserved, and nobody died. Not much drama after all.

Nonetheless, the stories of two survivors—evidently Nantucketers Stephen Hussey and Richard Coffin—contained enough emotion to inspire John Wheatley’s enslaved teen-aged servant Phillis to write 24 lines of poetry (plus a prose interlude).

Titled “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” that poem appeared in Samuel Hall’s Newport Mercury on 21 Dec 1767—the first recognized publication by Phillis Wheatley. You can read the lines here alongside Amelia Yeager’s essay about the publication for the Newport Historical Society.

David Waldstreicher starts his new study of the poet, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, with this poem and returns to it often as a touchstone of her work, particularly for her braiding of classical and Calvinist motifs and her ocean imagery.

The poem and its publication raise some small questions beyond the identity of the two men, discussed yesterday. One is why Hussey’s name appears first in the poem’s title and in the anecdote published with it in the newspaper even though Coffin was the ship’s captain and the only person named in the reports of the grounding.

I suspect this was a matter of personality. Hussey seems to have been a sociable man, connecting the Boston and Nantucket business communities before the war; serving in Whig political gatherings; speaking for Nantucket businessmen to both the British and Patriot governments during the war (islanders wanted to stay neutral for both economic and religious reasons); and eventually taking a post with the federal Customs bureau. I suspect he just told the story better.

Another question is whether Phillis Wheatley and the family who owned her sought this publication. I think the answer to that is clear in how the poem appeared in the Boston Post-Boy when that newspaper reprinted it on 11 Jan 1768. The “Wheatley” name was eliminated:

• “belonging to one Mr. Wheatley of Boston” became “belonging to a Gentelman [sic] of Boston”
• “being at Mr. Wheatley’s, and, while at Dinner” became “being at Dinner”
• The name at the bottom of the poem changed from “Phillis Wheatley” to simply “PHILLIS.”

Obviously printers John Green and Joseph Russell thought the Wheatleys didn’t want their surname linked to the poem. They may even have heard directly from the family. However supportive of their protégée and property the Wheatleys became later, at the start of 1768 they were still reticent about what we’d call publicity.

I suspect that’s why this poem didn’t appear in a Boston newspaper until after it could be credited as “From the Newport Mercury.” John Wheatley was a wealthy merchant who occasionally advertised, the sort of gentleman local newspaper printers would want to keep happy.

Still, someone must have circulated the poem privately in manuscript for it to get from Boston to Newport. That might have been the Wheatleys, sharing the news among friends and expecting it to stay private. Conversely, the poem might have been spread by Hussey and Coffin within their Quaker network. (I doubt the teen poet had developed her own out-of-town network yet.)

I tested a couple of other possible explanations for the first publication in Rhode Island:

• Did the Newport Mercury run poetry while the Boston papers weren’t yet in that habit? No, Boston printers shared a lot of poems in the 1760s.
• Was Capt. Coffin’s near-shipwreck bigger news in Rhode Island than in Boston since it involved a Nantucket ship? Not only is Nantucket closer to Newport, but both places had large Quaker communities. However, Samuel Hall didn’t pick up the Boston reports about the schooner grounding. (The Providence Gazette for 10 October did carry the second item, reporting Coffin’s ship was safe.*)

In the end, I think someone in Newport who didn’t know the Wheatleys learned about the poem and the story behind it, and asked the local printer to publish it. Hall in turn was beyond John Wheatley’s reach.

What would have prompted such a Newporter to send to poem to Hall? That person was clearly struck by how the author was “a Negro Girl,” and enslaved at that. That’s not merely a footnote to the poem; it’s in the preface, the implicit reason for printing it.

Even the name “Phillis Wheatley” at the bottom of the poem might be significant. Many other early publications credited the poet only by her first name. For example, Ezekiel Russell’s broadside of her elegy to the Rev. George Whitefield said: “By PHILLIS, a Servant Girl of 17 Years of Age, Belonging to Mr. J. WHEATLEY, of Boston.” By 1770 the Wheatley family had become comfortable having their names attached to such publications, but the prevailing style was still not to formally acknowledge enslaved people’s surnames.

Those details make me think whoever asked Hall to print the poem wanted readers of the Newport Mercury to know an enslaved girl had written it—and perhaps to see that that girl was an individual. And, though nothing about the presentation commented on the injustice of slavery, was it possible to avoid that thought?

(* In the database that I access through Genealogy Bank, the 10 October and 3 October Providence Gazettes are mushed together. Looks like something went wrong when they were photographed for microfilm.)

“Castaway on the Back of Cape-Cod”

On Thursday, 1 Oct 1767, the biggest local story in the Boston News-Letter was the weather:

The Beginning of last Week we had here very serene pleasant Weather, until Wednesday Evening, when at about 8 o’clock came on, and continued for several Hours, a most violent Storm of Wind and Rain, with some Thunder and Lighting…

Among the consequences lower down in that paragraph:

Capt. Coffin in a Schooner loaded with Oil was castaway on the Back of Cape-Cod, the Cargo and People saved, and in hopes of getting the Vessel off.

In fact, for all the worry during the storm about ships, fishing vessels, and pleasure boats, “Through the Goodness of Divine Providence no Lives were lost” at sea. (A father and son, aged 84 and 52 respectively, both died after losing their separate ways on roads north of Boston.)

Four days later, on 5 October, the Boston Post-Boy followed up on that story:

Capt. Coffin in a Schooner loaded with Oyl, was cast ashore in the Storm mentioned in our last, on the Back of Cape Cod; but the Vessel has since been got off, and arrived here Yesterday.

That incident fits the details reported in the Newport Mercury on 21 December, as quoted yesterday:

Messrs Hussey and Coffin,…belonging to Nantucket, being bound from thence to Boston, narrowly escaped being cast away on Cape-Cod, in one of the late Storms; upon their Arrival, being at Mr. [John] Wheatley’s, and, while at Dinner, told of their narrow Escape

Unfortunately, none of these newspaper items gives Coffin’s or Hussey’s full names. And lots of men from Nantucket shared those surnames, their families intermarrying just to confuse matters further.

However, for his recent Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley David Waldstreicher spotted that on 7 October the merchant John Rowe wrote in his diary that he “Din’d at home with Stephen Hussey, Abisha Folger junr Richard Coffin Isaac Paddock All four from Nantucket.” That was three days after “Capt. Coffin” and his oil had arrived safely in Boston.

What’s more, in September 1775 Stephen Hussey and Richard Coffin were co-owners of a whaling brig named the Mayflower, according to British Treasury records.

So it looks like the two men from Nantucket who told their story of nearly being shipwrecked on Cape Cod in late September 1767 were most likely Stephen Hussey and Richard Coffin.

This was probably the same Stephen Hussey (1735–1805) who “was a blacksmith, shipsmith, and whaling merchant.” Having been elected to represent his town at the Massachusetts Convention of 1768 and the Provincial Congress, he became the island’s first Customs Collector under the new federal government.

TOMORROW: The Newport connection?

“The vote of the town complying with his excellency’s proposal”

On Sunday, 23 Apr 1775, Boston’s emergency town meeting considered whether to accept Gen. Thomas Gage’s condition for letting people leave the besieged town: all Bostonians had to turn their firearms over to the selectmen to be stored in a central place.

Massachusetts’s militia law required most men to own and train with firelocks. Provincials were proud of that self-defense system. Indeed, they were now relying on it to resolve their dispute with Crown authorities.

Furthermore, Gen. Gage’s demand that men lock up their guns may have come as a surprise; that issue doesn’t appear on the records of the town meeting the day before.

Nonetheless, Bostonians wanted to get out of the town, to be away from the expected battles and food shortages.

As soon as the town’s committee put their understanding of the agreement with the governor in writing, the men at the town meeting acted on it:

Whereupon, Voted,
That the town accept of his excellency’s proposal, and will lodge their arms with the select men accordingly.

Voted, That the same committee be desired to wait upon his excellency the governor with the vote of the town complying with his excellency’s proposal, and the committee are desired to request of his excellency that the removal may be by land and water, as may be most convenient for the inhabitants.

The men at that meeting wanted out. Unlike the previous day’s vote on a promise not to attack the redcoats, this vote wasn’t recorded as unanimous. But it came quickly, and there’s no indication of any counterproposals.

The record published in the 26 June Boston Gazette doesn’t indicate how long the committee’s further consultation with Gage took, instead continuing:

The Committee appointed to wait upon his Excellency, report; that they accordingly waited upon him, and read the vote of the town, which was accepted by his Excellency; and at the same time his Excellency agreed that the inhabitants might remove from the town by land and water with their effects, within the limits prescribed by the Port Act:

Parliament had outlawed most sea voyages from Boston to ports outside of Massachusetts, and Gage felt he had to maintain that law.

…and also informed the committee he would desire the Admiral [Samuel Graves] to lend his boats to facilitate the removal of the effects of the inhabitants, and would allow carriages to pass and repass for that purpose: Likewise would take care, that the poor that may remain in Town should not suffer for want of provision after their own stock is expended, and desire that a letter might be wrote to Doctor [Joseph] Warren, chairman of the committee of the [Massachusetts Provincial] Congress, that those persons in the country who may incline to remove into Boston, with their effects, may have liberty so to do without molestation.

The town unanimously accepted of the foregoing report, and desired the inhabitants would deliver their arms to the Selectmen as soon as may be.

The townsfolk then voted to adjourn their meeting until “Tuesday morning the 25th of April, ten o’clock in the Forenoon.” And most of the men went home to find their guns.

TOMORROW: Implementing the agreement.

How Samuel Swift Sought Scipio

While researching the Boston lawyer Samuel Swift last month, I came across a series of advertisements he placed in Boston newspapers in 1770.

The Boston Evening-Post, 28 May:

SCIPIO, a smooth fac’d Negro Fellow, pretty black, 22 Years old, on the 23d Inst. [i.e., of this month] ran away from his Master; he has since chang’d his Cloaths: His Hair or Wool grows something onward upon his Cheeks, is good natured and artful, inclines to a Seafaring Life; bent his Course towards Providence or Rhode-Island. Whoever will convey him to his said Master in Boston, shall be handsomly rewarded by
SAMUEL SWIFT.

P.S. It may be needless for any Captain of a Ship or other Vessel to harbour him, as it may not eventually be either for their Profit or Honor, he is such an Urchin.

Boston, May 26, 1770.

Usually people seeking other people they claimed as property put the same ad in as many newspapers as they could afford, and then kept those ads running week after week until the runaway was found or they gave up. But Swift wrote multiple versions of his notice.

The Boston Gazette, 4 June:

Run-away from his Master the 23d Instant, a Negro Fellow about 22 Years old, has since chang’d his Cloaths. His Hair or Wool grows pretty much on his Cheeks, smooth-fac’d, his Fore-teeth jet out a little, is artful and good natured, went towards Providence. Whoever conveys him to his Master, shall be well rewarded, by
SAMUEL SWIFT.

N.B. It is taken for granted all Captains of Vessels will discountenance him.

Boston, May 26, 1770.

Those ads didn’t have any effect, so on 28 June the Boston News-Letter published this:

TO all worthy Brothers and other Generous Commanders of Ships or other Vessels sailing between the Poles,—as also to all the valourous Sons of Zebulon and others, however dispers’d upon the wide surface of old-Ocean, or upon any Island or Main-laid upon this habitable Globe, into whose Hands these may chance to fall:—

Note well,—THAT on the 23d of May 1770, SCIPIO, a Negro Man near 23 Years old, Ran from the Subscriber,——He is five Feet and 3 or 4 Inches high, little more or less, and well set, his Hair or Wool (unless shav’d) comes low upon his Cheeks, his Fore-teeth rather splaying, has an Incision mark on one of his Arms where he was Inoculated, and 2 or 3 Scars in his Legs where he was lanc’d, is pretty black, with a flattish-Nose, tho’ not that flat so peculiar to Negroes, is very Artful—Speaks plain but something inward and hollow, inclines much to the Sea, will make an able Seaman, and is a Cooper,—

If he returns voluntarily he shall not be whipt as he deserves, but I will either sell him to a Good Ship-Master, or lett him as he shall chuse, till he has Earnt his prime Cost, &c, when I will give him his Freedom,—but if any shall bring or convey him to his Master, shall be paid EIGHT DOLLARS, by
SAMUEL SWIFT.

P. S. I at present forbear mentioning the Ship I am satisfy’d he went off in.

The word “Brothers” in the top line might have been an address to Swift’s fellow Freemasons. “Sons of Zebulon” referred to mariners, but rarely enough that it’s an example of Swift’s uncommon phrasing.

The term “prime cost” usually appears in Boston newspapers of this time to mean a good price for the consumer, so Swift appears to have been promising Scipio he wouldn’t have to pay the maximum amount for his freedom. But he’d still have to pay.

Swift’s last ad continued to run through late July. I see no evidence Scipio ever came back to the attorney, voluntarily or not.

“The Displeasure of our Honoured Masters”

Sir Francis Dashwood, baronet, served as chancellor of the exchequer in the government of the Earl of Bute. That went poorly for both of them, and Dashwood’s tenure lasted less than a year.

After leaving government, Dashwood made his case for inheriting the Despencer barony, the oldest in Britain not held by a peer with a higher title. That peerage gave him a guaranteed seat in the House of Lords.

Toward the end of 1766 the new Baron le Despencer was appointed one of the two postmasters general of the British Empire. This was a sinecure granted to various aristocrats, who in British society of the time usually failed upward.

In that year the other postmaster general was the Earl of Hillsborough, who was soon made Secretary of State for the colonies. The next appointee was the fourth Earl of Sandwich, who had previously been First Lord of the Admiralty and Secretary of State for the Northern Department (i.e., northern Europe) and would hold both those posts again.

Despencer, in contrast, kept the job of postmaster general until his death in 1781. He may not have totally ignored the job, though the real work was done by department secretaries Henry Potts (d. 1768) and Anthony Todd (1717–1798, shown above). That situation made Despencer a boss of the two deputy postmasters general for the colonies: John Foxcroft of New York and Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania.

Franklin had held that appointment since 1753. He had been quite successful, even making the American postal service profitable for the first time. By the mid-1760s Franklin was living full-time in London, focusing on representing Pennsylvania and other colonies to Parliament, but he continued to manage the postal system with Foxcroft. It brought him a valuable income.

Within the British government’s system of patronage appointments, that meant Franklin had a strong incentive to keep the Baron le Despencer happy. Sucking up to your bosses never hurt. Neither did sucking up to lords. And when those lords were your bosses, you went all out.

As a taste of how this worked, in February 1769 Foxcroft wrote to Franklin from Virginia, reporting that he and Gen. Thomas Gage had disagreed about when a packet ship should sail. Even though the regulations gave Foxcroft the authority to make that decision, Hillsborough took Gage’s side. “I have fallen under the Displeasure of our Honoured Masters,” Foxcroft lamented. “I hope my Dear Friend that you will be able to prevent any disagreable consequences taking place from this unfortunate mistake.”

We don’t know what happened next, but Foxcroft kept his appointment—probably because Hillsborough had moved on to the Colonial Office. Sandwich was a navy man, after all, and might not have gone out of his way for army concerns. When the system ran on personal favors and connections, a change of person could mean a lot.

As part of keeping the bosses in good humor, Franklin appears to have helped with Despencer’s agricultural experiments. He got favors in return, such as an invitation to dine on a buck from one of the postmasters’ estates. But those interactions were arranged through the secretaries, not directly.

TOMORROW: Forging a more personal connection.