Thirty Minutes of History at Old South

The Old South Meeting House is trying out a new type of event later this month: “30-Minute History.” From 1:00 to 1:30 P.M. on Tuesday, 24 June, and Wednesday, 25 June, the historic site will host talks on aspects of Boston’s Revolutionary politics by two history professors. The cost per session is $5, but they’re free to members of Old South.

On the Tuesday, Prof. William M. Fowler of Northeastern will discuss “Will the Real Samuel Adams Please Stand Up?” It was a remark about Christopher Seider in Bill’s biography of Adams, Radical Puritan, that turned me from someone interested in history generally to someone with a particular interest in the American Revolution in Boston. So you can lodge your complaints with him.

The next day, the 25th, Prof. Robert J. Allison of Suffolk University will talk on “There’s No Party like a Boston Tea Party.” In the same short and sweet mode as the talk, Bob has written a book on the destruction of the tea.

New Deathways in a New Republic

I’ve added a new term to the topics list at the lower right: deathways. I’ve been looking for a term to cover several related topics: deaths, funerals, memorials. At this past weekend’s Omohundro Institute conference, a paper by Erik Seeman reminded me of that useful, if anachronistic, umbrella term.

Prof. Seeman’s paper looked at certain deathways—coffins and grave markers—linked to people of African descent in eighteenth-century America. His examples came from segregated burying-spaces. In New York, the Trinity Churchyard was closed to blacks in 1697, forcing the creation of what’s now called the African Burial Ground. Newport also had a burying-ground for people of African descent, and the marker above comes from it.

In Boston, however, blacks and whites seem to have been interred in the same burying-grounds. Crispus Attucks was put in the same vault with other victims of the Boston Massacre, though of course he might have been a special case. The example of John Jack in Concord, other anecdotes, and the lack of contrary evidence indicate that colonial Massachusetts deathways didn’t include separate burials for blacks.

The first hint of such separation that I’ve stumbled across comes several years after the Massachusetts courts, in what conservatives would term “judicial activism,” ruled in 1783 that the state’s constitution didn’t allow slavery. Over the next decade, I believe, African-Americans tried to feel out their place in Boston society, seeking either equal treatment in the white-dominated institutions or (more often) autonomy for black-dominated ones. And that effort seems to have affected their funerals, though it’s not clear how.

On 7 Sept 1791, the selectmen responded to “a number of Free Negroes” who had asked to select an “Undertaker at the Funerals of the Blacks.” The selectmen refused, saying that would interfere with the work/income of the church sextons. The African-Americans renewed their request a year later. On 25 Sept 1792 the selectmen’s records state:

On the Petition of the Blacks that Henry Richard Stevenson, may have the care of burying the Blacks—Voted that the said Stephenson have a License to take care of the Funerals of the Blacks, in all respects except breaking Ground.

Not all was settled, however. Years later, on 25 Apr 1798, the selectmen summoned Stevenson and a colleague after some sort of complaint:

Stephenson & Boston Faddy, who have been employ’d in burying Negroes attended—& being heard after enquiry of Mr Blaney—finding that Stephenson had behaved to his —— [directions? satisfaction?] was permitted to proceed agreable to former directions untill further Orders—& Boston forbid to bury any Corps without particular direction obtain’d therefor of the Selectmen—

All these quotations are from the 27th volume of the published Boston town records. Alas, they offer only the thinnest of clues to what the citizens and selectmen were thinking.

Henry Stevenson is otherwise known largely through the records of Boston’s Trinity Church. He and another black man were baptized there on 13 July 1788, with Prince Hall being one of the sponsors. On 26 October, Stevenson married Hannah Patterson, and she was baptized on 9 November. Over the following years, Stevenson sponsored the baptism of several other African-Americans. The 1790 census lists “Henry Stephinson” as head of a Boston household consisting of two non-white free people.

Boston Faddy was also linked to the town’s Anglican churches. He was buried by King’s Chapel on 26 Dec 1801, his age stated as “50 years,” meaning he had been born about 1751. The earliest record of Boston Faddy, however, relates to the baptism of his son James Buffum on 13 Apr 1789. His wife Nancy and a man named Cuff Buffum were the other sponsors. In 1795, Faddy sponsored the baptism at Trinity Church of a son of George Middleton.

On 31 Aug 1792, Faddy’s daughter was buried out of Trinity, and in August 1794 young James died. On 24 Oct 1796, Nancy Faddy was buried at King’s Chapel, her age listed as fifty-one. In 1797 and then again in 1801 there are records of Faddy filing intentions to marry Mary Freeman, the latter only a few weeks before he died. A 1798 tax list recorded Boston Faddy as owner of a property in the West End valued at $300; Cuff Buffum was living there. Faddy’s profession was “bell-ringer,” according to Jacqueline Carr’s After the Siege.

More Graven Images

After yesterday’s posting about carvings and lichen on gravestones, Boston 1775 reader Bob O’Hara sent me this welcome pointer to another online resource:

One of the most valuable (and least known) online resources for gravestone studies is the Farber Collection of gravestone photographs at the American Antiquarian Society. This collection was put online by David Rumsey as part of his website.

These are research-quality images of more than 9000 stones, most from eastern New England and most made prior to 1800. The website uses a special interface making it a bit tricky, but allowing for a good deal of special control. (Click the “Insight Browser” link on the main page for access.)

David Rumsey’s site is mainly devoted to his map collection. But it also includes a lot more.

Bob also offers us a gallery of his own photographs of New England gravestones from the late 1700s, from Fitchburg’s first burying ground. And I’ll note the Dublin Seminar’s two volumes on Puritan gravestone art.

Students of Gravestones and Stone Walls

With all these conferences on my schedule, I’ve been feeling a little pressed for time. Fortunately, with all these conferences on my schedule, I’m learning about websites that I can link to, and thus appear to be interesting without creating any content myself.

For instance, yesterday at the Omohundro Institute conference I heard from W. Dean Eastman and Kevin McGrath about PrimaryResearch.org, which archives a set of innovative local history projects for high-school students.

Among the intriguing units is a census of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century gravestones. Researchers—whether in high school or not—get the tools to map when in their local old New England burying-grounds the fashion in graveyard art shifted from images of skulls to images of the soul (looking like a cherub) to classical-style visuals. Eastman wrote about this project at Common-place a few years back.

Another PrimaryResearch.org project involves mapping and aging the “Stone Walls of New England.” But how can a group of young people figure out the ages of piles of stone? The team looked into lichen coverage as a possible yardstick, which required some interdisciplinary study of the types of lichen. They found that “Crustose lichens grow at a rate of one millimeter per year,” which implies that one can measure a patch of lichen on a wall and calculate back how many years it’s been growing—theoretically.

Any new yardstick like this has to be tested by using it to measure things one already knows the answer for. To test the notion of “lichenometry,” the students needed to find other New England stones that could be exactly dated. And where could those be? Hmmm. Graveyards!

Of course, the local environments for two walls might be different enough to affect lichen growth, making this method a general tool at best. But coming up with and testing a new way to examine the past is a terrific way to learn about history as a method of inquiry, not just a never-ending set of facts.

Bloody Menotomy

Earlier this week, I wrote about the experiences of the Adams family of Menotomy during the Battle of Lexington and Concord. That part of Cambridge, now called Arlington, saw some of the bloodiest fighting during that battle, and the worst losses on the American side. There were a couple of reasons:

• By then the British troops included the reinforcement column that Col. Percy had led out of Boston early on the morning of 19 Apr 1775. Unlike the soldiers who had marched to Concord the night before, they had slept well and hadn’t walked so far.
• Percy deployed flanking companies to clear the area on either side of the road back to Boston.
• Some provincial militiamen became too aggressive and came close to the road, waiting to shoot at the redcoat column as it passed. Instead, they were caught from behind by those flankers.

As a result, twelve provincials and two regulars were killed in close fighting in and around the Jason Russell House. In all, about half of the men killed that day on each side fell in Arlington. (Reenactment shown above courtesy of the Arlington Historical Society.)

Back on Patriots’ Day, Lori Stokes at The Historic Present made the case that the Revolutionary War really began in Menotomy. “When the British returned at last to Boston,” she wrote, “it was the fighting at Menotomy that convinced them this was a war and not an isolated incident.”

(As you know, Boston 1775 has posited that the war began in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.)

Life on the Streets and Commons Now Available

The latest volume of articles from the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, about life in public spaces, is now available. It includes my essay, “‘I never used to go out with a weapon’: Law Enforcement on the Streets of Prerevolutionary Boston.”

This paper focuses on the experiences of Benjamin Burdick, Jr., who was Constable of the Town House Watch in 1770. That means he was in charge of a four-man squad that patrolled the center of town at night. This post quoted a document spelling out the duties of a Constable of the Watch. (I owe Prof. Cornelia Hughes Dayton a special thanks for pointing me to the file of such town documents in the Boston Public Library.)

Historians have long known that Burdick was present at the Boston Massacre. He testified for the town’s report on the event and at the trials that followed. But people didn’t realize that he was on the scene as the closest thing Boston then had to a police officer; they thought he was just another man in the crowd.

Burdick testified that he brought “a Highland broadsword” to King Street on 5 Mar 1770, and some people have interpreted that to mean he was looking for a fight. He also described pushing to the front of the crowd, giving warnings to the soldiers and Crispus Attucks, fetching men to carry away the bodies after the shooting, and trying to memorize the shooters’ faces—basically, thrusting himself forward all the time.

Once I spotted Burdick’s name in town records related to the watchmen, I realized that all his actions made sense as part of his law-enforcement duties. Even carrying the sword wasn’t surprising since watchmen had had several confrontations and fights with army officers between October 1768 and March 1770. Burdick’s testimony that “I never used to go out with a weapon” showed how much he thought Boston had changed after army regiments were stationed there.

In the article I also discuss Edward Langford, a watchman who reported to Burdick; why British army officers had more recorded confrontations with watchmen than enlisted men; and the ups and downs of the town watch system. This research eventually led me to the story of Pvt. John Moies, which didn’t make it into the paper.

The other articles in Life on the Streets and Commons cover a wide range of periods and places in New England culture, from the Shaker communities to the Big E in Springfield.

Conferences in the Upcoming Fortnight

In the next two weeks, I plan to attend three different history conferences in Massachusetts.

• The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, publisher of the William & Mary Quarterly, is having its annual meeting at Suffolk University in Boston on 6-8 June.
• The Mass History conference on “Sustaining the Future of Massachusetts History” will take place at on 9 June at Holy Cross College in Worcester. It’s co-sponsored by Mass Humanities, the University of Massachusetts Amherst Program in Public History, and the Massachusetts Historical Society.
• This year’s Dublin Seminar, with a focus on “New England and the Caribbean,” will convene at the White Church in Deerfield on 14-16 June.

If I can make the technology work, I might try some version of live-blogging from those venues. But I’ll be lucky if I manage to keep my name tag the right way up.

Looking ahead, the New England Historical Association has issued a call for papers on any historical topic for its meeting at Endicott College in Beverly on 25 Oct 2008. The deadline is 15 June.

As a result, I might well post fewer original words here for a while, and more links to other places.

If you’re at any of those events, please say hello. I’ll be the one wearing the name tag that reads, “NHOf W,I ¡IH”.

Tracking the Tale of Joel Adams

Yesterday I left nine-year-old Joel Adams in his Arlington home shortly after some British soldiers had marched on toward Boston on the afternoon of 19 Apr 1775. Four of Joel’s siblings were hiding in the house, their parents were hiding outside, and those soldiers had set the furniture on fire.

Joel and his siblings hurried to douse the flames with water from a cask outside, and with their father’s home-brewed beer. There was some damage to the family pewter, but the house survived and no one was injured.

Joel’s mother, Hannah Adams, gave an indignant deposition about how the soldiers had treated her to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. His father, Joseph Adams, and a fellow deacon eventually bought the local meeting’s communion service back from a silversmith in Boston. And the Adams children grew up to tell their story of the redcoat home invasion to their baby sister Ann, their own children, and their grandchildren.

Samuel Abbot Smith printed this story in his West Cambridge on the Nineteenth of April, 1775, published in 1864. (The Arlington Historical Society has reprinted this short book, as shown above. Smith did a good job of collecting his town’s lore.) Smith cited:

Mrs. Thomas Hall, grand-daughter of Mrs. Adams. Rev. Mr. Brown’s sermon on James Hill. S. G. Damon’s article in Christian Register, Oct. 28. 1854.

It’s always wise to seek the earliest printed version of a story, so I began looking for that sermon and article (since Mrs. Hall is probably no longer available).

Locating an undated sermon by a man named Brown about a man named James Hill isn’t easy. I got lucky and stumbled across a reference to its publication in 1852 under the title “Old Age.” So that went onto my to-do list the next time I visit the American Antiquarian Society, which has a great collection of such things.

As for the article, I thought I’d gotten lucky when I found Harold Murdock’s footnote for this same anecdote in The Nineteenth of April, 1775:

This is the story as repeated in 1854 by Mrs. [Ann] Hill, then in her eightieth year, to Samuel Griffin Damon: see Christian Register, October 28, 1854, vol. 39, p. 169.

Clearly Murdock had traced back the article since he included more detail than Smith had.

I learned that the Christian Register was a weekly newspaper published for Unitarian churches from 1821 to 1957, and that the Harvard library system has a full run on microfilm. So a couple of years ago I went into Cambridge to find this story.

The staff at the university’s main library told me this microfilm was in the collection of the Divinity School library, on the other side of campus. So I had a pleasant walk over there, found the right building, found the right desk, asked for the reels, and started cranking away.

And the first thing I discovered was that Murdock’s citation to “vol. 39, p. 169,” had no visible link to the date of 28 Oct 1854. Volume 39 covered the year 1860. Cranking and scrolling and peering at the closely set columns, I still couldn’t find Ann (Adams) Hill’s recollection in October 1854. By then my eyes were beginning to swim, so I’m going to check again later. Until I read the earliest printed versions of his tale, Joel Adams stays on my list of Lost Youth.

Joel Adams and the Redcoats

I’m concluding “Lost Youth Week” at Boston 1775 with two postings on the story of Joel Adams and the redcoats. On 19 Apr 1775, the Adamses were living in the western part of Cambridge, then called Menotomy and now called Arlington. According to vital records, the family consisted of:

• father Joseph, fifty-nine-year-old deacon of the local meeting.
• mother Hannah, Joseph’s second wife.
• Thomas, born in 1751 and not yet married.
• Rebecca, born in 1753.
• Susanna, born in 1758.
• Mary, born in 1761.
• Nathan, born in 1763.
• twins Joel and Amos, born in 1765.
• Daniel, born in 1768.
• Abigail, born in 1772.
• little Ann, born less than three weeks before on the first of April.

It’s possible some of those children had died, or were living elsewhere in 1775.

On the night of 18-19 April, the British troops sent to search Concord had marched west past the Adams house. Col. Percy’s reinforcement column marched past that morning, and in the afternoon the family learned that the soldiers were coming back. The house was close to the road, and thus well within the area where the redcoats and provincial militia companies were conducting a running battle. Probably Thomas Adams, then twenty-three years old, was already with his company.

Father Joseph Adams was at home as the fighting neared, and he decided it would be best to run and hide in a neighbor’s hayloft, leaving his wife and children behind. The British column arrived. Some soldiers entered the house, probably to ensure there were no militiamen hiding inside. They found Hannah Adams in her bed with little Ann and told her to get out. She fled with the baby to the “corn-house,” leaving five other children behind.

The soldiers kept searching the house and spotted one of those kids peeking out from under a bed. A redcoat asked this boy, “Why don’t you come out here?”

Joel Adams answered, “You’ll kill me if I do.”

“No, we won’t,” said the soldier, so Joel crawled out and started following the soldiers around his house. The redcoats were thus up against one of the most indomitable forces of nature: a nine-year-old who thinks he’s in the right.

By this time, the soldiers were pocketing various things they thought they might be able to carry back to Boston and sell, including bits of the family silver and the works of their clock. (The workless clock is preserved at the Jason Russell House.) Then the men found the communion silver that Deacon Adams was guarding for his meeting-house.

Joel told the soldiers not to touch those things. “Daddy’ll lick you, if you do,” he reportedly said. Meanwhile, Daddy was still hiding in that hayloft. (That rendering of Joel’s words looks like a late-nineteenth-century portrayal of childhood, not an eighteenth-century one, indicating a story passed down orally.)

We can guess how fond the soldiers had grown of Joel from what they did when they left: they made a pile of wood chips and broken furniture on the floor of the Adams house and set it on fire.

TOMORROW: What happened next, and tracking down the tale.

Family Day at Minute Man Park, 8 June 2008

On Sunday, 8 June, Minute Man National Historical Park will host its first “Family Day,” sponsored by the non-profit Friends of Minute Man National Park. The event will last from 1:00 to 4:00 P.M. in the vicinity of Hartwell Tavern, off Route 2A in Lincoln about a mile west of the Visitor Center in Lexington.

Among the activities will be demonstrations and talks by the Stow Minutemen and other historical re-enactors, musket demonstrations, children’s crafts, and fife and drum performances. General admission is free, though tickets will be required for the oxcart rides. (Photo below courtesy of the National Park Service.)



(As the park’s website explains, there’s a walking path from the large Lexington Visitor Center parking area through the scenic woods, a culvert, and more scenic woods to the Hartwell Tavern. There’s also limited parking and space for dropping off and picking up people near the tavern itself.)

“They Called Us Young Rebels.”

Back in November 2006, I quoted two letters from late January 1775, describing how Boston’s schoolboys had confronted Gen. Frederick Haldimand over their freedom to ride their sleds on an icy slope outside his house. Those letters weren’t published until the late 1800s, but Bostonians also passed on the anecdote orally between the Revolution and the 1840s.

As usually happens, without solid documentation the story became distorted over time. When Benson J. Lossing included a version of the tale in his volume Seventeen Hundred and Seventy-Six (1847), he evidently understood that it had happened in 1770 and involved Gen. Thomas Gage rather than his second-in-command.

This month, I found that Lossing had picked up his version of the dialogue between the boys and Gage from Samuel Griswold Goodrich’s school textbook The First Book of History, for Children and Youth. The edition available on Google Books is dated 1849, but the book was first published in Boston before 1845, and perhaps as early as the 1830s. (Goodrich had the annoying habit of giving the same title to different books and different editions.)

Here’s Goodrich’s version, with the paragraphs numbered for reading aloud in a classroom, I suspect:

15. Meanwhile, the jealousy of the people toward the soldiers continued to increase. Even the children caught the general feeling, as a story will show you. During the winter, before the Port Bill passed, the boys were in the habit of building hills of snow on the Common, and sliding down upon them to the pond. The English troops beat down these hills, merely to provoke the children. The boys complained of the injury, and set about repairing it. However, when they returned from school, they found the snow hills beat down again.

16. Several of the boys now waited upon the British captain, and informed him of the conduct of his soldiers; but he would have nothing to say to them; and the soldiers were more impudent than ever. At last, they called a meeting of the largest boys, and sent them to General Gage, commander-in-chief.

17. He asked why so many children had called upon him. “We came, sir,” said the tallest boy, “to demand satisfaction.” “What!” said the general; “have your fathers been teaching you rebellion, and sent you to show it here?” “Nobody sent us, sir,” answered the boy, while his cheek reddened and his eye flashed; “we have never injured or insulted your troops; but they have trodden down our snow hills, and broken the ice on our skating ground. We complained, and they called us young rebels, and told us to help ourselves if we could. We told the captain of this, and he laughed at us. Yesterday our works were destroyed for a third time; and, sir, we will bear it no longer.”

18. The general looked at them with admiration, and said to an officer at his side, “The very children draw in a love of liberty with the air they breathe.—You may go, my brave boys; and be assured, if my troops trouble you again, they shall be punished.

Goodrich had heard a tale with several errors. “The winter, before the Port Bill passed,” was the winter of 1773-74, when there were no British regiments patrolling Boston. The 1775 sledding site was down Beacon Hill onto School Street, not on the Common; that didn’t become the town’s main sledding area until the 1800s. The contemporaneous letters say nothing about “hills of snow” or a “skating ground.” But at heart it’s clearly the same story that Boston Patriots had enjoyed in 1775.

This image of the meeting between the schoolboys and a general comes from an 1878 schoolbook by Goodrich, one of several graphic depictions of the story from the late 1800s.

There might be an even earlier version of this story in print. In his memoir A New England Boyhood (first published 1893), Edward Everett Hale wrote:

Mrs. Child, in her Juvenile Miscellany, gave the impression that the coasting scene, in which the Latin School boys defied General Gage, began with coasting on the Common. But she was wholly wrong there. . . . The story was told me by Mr. Robins, the last survivor of the delegation, in the year 18—.

Hale, born in 1822, had enjoyed Lydia Maria Child’s magazine Juvenile Miscellany until she came out as an Abolitionist. Had she published a version of the sledding story? Or had Hale read it in Goodrich’s schoolbook but misremembered the source as Child’s magazine? (Hale was mistaken in trusting Jonathan Darby Robins on this story; that man had left the South Latin School well before 1775, and therefore was unlikely to have been “the last survivor of the delegation” to Gen. Haldimand.)

I’m still looking for a Juvenile Miscellany version of the sledding tale. Unfortunately, since that magazine was published for children (and edited by a woman, yet), there are few complete collections in libraries and no indexes. I’ve checked biographies of Child and books that she assembled from her magazine material. No luck yet.

Who Was Samuel Adams’s “Servant Boy Job”?

On 13 Apr 1772, Samuel Adams wrote to his friend James Warren, a merchant in Plymouth (shown at left):

I am much obligd for your Care in procuring for me a Boy.

I shall be ready to receive him about the middle of next month and shall take the best care of him that shall be in my Power till he is 14 years old, perfecting him in his reading and teaching him to write and cypher [i.e., do arithmetic] if capable of it under my own Tuition for I cannot spare him the time to attend School. Will strictly regard his Morals and at the End of time I will if his parents shall desire it, seek a good place for him to learn such a Trade as he and they shall chuse.

This is an interesting look at Adams’s class expectations. Though not a rich man, he had household servants looking after him and his family—including a woman named Surry, who was legally enslaved. Adams sent his own son to the Latin School and Harvard, but planned to teach this boy more rudimentary knowledge at home because “I cannot spare him the time to attend School.”

During Samuel’s absence from Boston to attend the Continental Congress starting in mid-1774, he and his wife Elizabeth exchanged some letters that mention a boy named Job. Elizabeth on 12 Sept 1774:

PS. . . . [Surry?] and Job send their dutty.

Samuel to Elizabeth, 17 June 1775:

It is a great Satisfaction to me to be assured from you that your Mother & Family are out of Boston, and also my boy Job. I commend him for his Contrivance in getting out. Tell him from me to be a good Boy. I wish to hear that my Son and honest Surry were releasd from their Confinement in that Town.

Samuel to Elizabeth, 30 July 1775:

Pay my proper Respects to your Mother & Family, Mr & Mrs. Henshaw, my Son & Daughter, Sister Polly &c. Tell Job and Surry that I do not forget them.

Finally, on 28 Sept 1778, Samuel wrote to his “dear Betsy” with this praise:

I think you have done well in putting your Servant Boy Job an Apprentice to a Sail Maker. I hope you will injoyn it on him to let you see him often, that you may give him your Advice, and tell him it is my Desire that he would attend to it. I love the Boy, and am still of opinion, that if he is properly mannagd he will make a good Citizen.

By this point Samuel was referring to the boy as Elizabeth’s servant rather than his own; she was clearly running the household while he was away for so many months in Philadelphia.

A couple of generations later, one of Adams’s descendants wrote a biography of him that stated:

Another member of the family was a servant boy, whose education Mr. Adams attended to as conscientiously as though he had been his own child. The boy lived to become an influential mechanic in Boston, and was conspicuous in 1795-96 as an active politician in electing his old master to the Chief Magistracy [i.e., governor] of the Commonwealth.

So it looks like young Job lived with Samuel Adams’s family probably from 1772, and certainly from 1774, through 1778. He would therefore have had an intimate perspective on the period of the Boston Tea Party, the return of British troops, the start of the war, the siege of Boston, the Declaration of Independence, and the difficult months that followed. If Elizabeth Adams found an apprenticeship for Job when he was about to turn fourteen, as her husband had planned, that means he’d been born in 1764 and grew up with the Adamses from about age eight. Then he went to work for a sailmaker, at least at first. And the family recalled that he was still in Boston and politically active about twenty years later.

Researchers interested in Adams, in the history of childhood, in the American working class and its politics—we need to find this person!!!!!

Whatever Happened to Charles Bourgate?

Yesterday I described the tragical-comical story of Charles Bourgate, a French servant boy who thought it would be a good idea to accuse his master of participating in the Boston Massacre. That worked great for about eight months in which Charles appears to have gotten free room and board in the upper floor of the Boston jail as the province housed him as an important witness. But then he was convicted of perjury and whipped, and he vanished from the record.

I shift forward four and a half years to October 1775, when an American army was invading Canada. One of the young officers in that expedition was Capt. Henry Dearborn (shown here, later in life). He became very sick. Which is a little ironic, since he was a doctor.

On 25 Oct 1775, Dearborn wrote in his diary that “Charles gather’d me some herbs in the woods, and made me Tea of them, I drank very Hearty of it and next morning felt much Better.” That attendant was one of the two young men Dearborn wrote about on 5-6 November:

at evening Charles Hilton [a private in Dearborn’s company, captured at Quebec], and Charles Burget, a French Lad, [who had] Inlisted, at Fort Western, who was a native of Canady, Came back for me with Two Horses, we Stay’d here all night.

I hir’d an Indian to Carry me down the River, 9 Miles, to one Sonsosees, a French-mans, one of Charles Burgets relations, where I hir’d Lodgings and took my Bed Immediately. I was this time in a High fever. I kept the Two Charles’s to take Care of me.

On 9 December, having recovered from a violent fever that left him in delirium, Dearborn wrote:

at this time I concluded to send Charles Burget, my french Lad to Quebec, to see if he could procure me something from an Apothecary to help my Cough and to assist nature, in Carrying off my fever, he went and in four days return’d, but to my great mortification Brought nothing for me but bad News, which was, that our people had not got Possession of Quebec. . . .

I now began to be very uneasy and wanted to be with the Army and the Seventh day I set out in a Carriall to Quebec, and the 9th. day I Cross’d the River St. Laurence, I join’d my Company who Seem’d very Glad to see me, they told me that they had been inform’d by one of our men that Came not many days since from Sattagan that I was Dead, and that he saw Charles Hilton, and Charles Burget making a Coffin for me.

It’s too much to ask for Dearborn’s Charles Burget to be the lost Charles Bourgate. The age is a match—Bourgate was fourteen in late 1770, so he would have been nineteen in 1775, still a “boy” but also old enough to be a soldier. The names don’t match exactly, but they’re close enough for how British-American mangled French names in the eighteenth century (“Sonsosees” = Saint-Souci?). However, Bourgate was said to have been “born in Bordeaux,” and Dearborn called Burget “a native of Canady.” And it’s always dangerous for a historian or genealogist to read too much into a similarity of names with no other evidence.

Nevertheless, if I were writing a novel about Charles Bourgate, I’d make him Charles Burget as well, enlisting in the Continental Army and sticking to Capt. Dearborn with the same fervent loyalty that he’d shown back in Boston. I don’t know what happened to Charles Burget after the invasion of Canada, either.

Charles Bourgate: questionable witness

Charles Bourgate (whose name was also rendered as Charles Bourgat, Charles Bourgatte, and even Charlotte Bourgatte) was yet another youth caught up in the Boston Massacre. In March 1770, he was indentured to Edward Manwaring, a Customs officer who normally worked in Douglastown on the Gaspé peninsula in Canada. They had spent that winter in Boston, living with a family named Hudson on Back Street. According to various sources, Charles had been born in Bordeaux, was fourteen years old, and could not sign his own name.

There are two conflicting versions of what Charles Bourgate did on the night of the Massacre. He said that he left the Hudsons’ when church bells rang to see what the alarm was. When he got to the Customs House, one of the family who lived in that building, Hammond Green, yanked him inside, and several men forced him upstairs. A tall man with a sword-cane loaded three guns and forced Charles to fire two of them out the window. The boy insisted that he had shot “up the street and in the air.” He then left the room as his master Manwaring fired the third gun. The tall man offered him money to keep quiet, but Charles nobly declared he would tell a magistrate what had happened if asked. He then ran back to the Hudsons.

And indeed, a few days after the shooting Charles did tell Justice Richard Dana this story. In response, Manwaring produced a friend, John Munroe, who swore that the two had been together at the Hudsons’ house all evening. After thinking hard in jail overnight, Charles told Dana that he remembered a man named Munroe had been at the Customs House, too. That made Munroe into a potential defendant, so he couldn’t be an exculpatory witness. Both men, Green, and another Customs employee were indicted for murder, though only Charles was put in jail. This was a form of protective custody, I suspect, as well as a way to make sure he didn’t disappear.

In a 16 Mar 1770 letter to the Boston Gazette, Manwaring described Charles as “a boy under age, without principle, sense, or education, and indeed unacquainted with our language.” But many Whigs thought the story of “the French boy” had exposed the dreadful conspiracy within the Customs office that they had long suspected. Boston’s official narrative report on the “horrid Massacre,” written mainly by James Bowdoin, placed great weight on his testimony. Henry Pelham drew a gun firing from an upper window of the Customs House in his engraving of the Massacre, which Paul Revere copied.

By the time the Customs officials’ trial started on 12 December, however, people seemed much more dubious. Capt. Thomas Preston and most of the British soldiers had been acquitted, with two convicted of manslaughter. Charles told his story again. Defense attorneys quickly put up witnesses who said they had seen no shots from the Customs House. Two women who lived in the Customs House said they had watched the confrontation from the very room that Charles described, and there had been no men with guns.

Elizabeth Hudson then offered the other story about what Charles had done back on 5 March. She testified that Manwaring and Munroe had been at her house all night. And as for Charles, she said, his master had “kept him there the whole evening, until after the bells had all ceased ringing, and until after ten o’clock.”

The court brought Charles back to the stand and asked what he had to say about Hudson’s testimony. He insisted he had told the truth. The judges summoned four men known for speaking French well and asked them to question the boy. He passed up the opportunity to claim that this was all a linguistic misunderstanding and stuck to his story.

The defense attorney then called James Penny, a debtor who had been living in the jail. He testified that Charles had admitted:

That what he testified to the Grand Jury and before the Justices…was in every particular false, and that he did swear in that manner by the persuasion of William Molineux, who told him he would take him from his master and provide for him, and that Mr. Molineux frightened him by telling him if he refused to swear against his master and Mr. Munro the mob in Boston would kill him: and farther that Mrs. Waldron, the wife of Mr. Waldron a taylor in Back-street, who sells ginger bread and drams, gave him the said Charles gingerbread and cheese, and desired him to swear against his master.

Charles denied that his testimony could be bought for gingerbread and cheese, but he had no credibility left. The jury acquitted all the Customs men without getting up from their seats to confer. The judges sent Charles back to jail to face perjury charges. Molineux soon placed angry notices in the newspapers declaring he had never told Charles to say anything but the truth. And I think he may very well have told the boy that, but in a way that made clear exactly what he wanted to hear.

In the spring, Charles was convicted of perjury and sentenced to stand for an hour at the whipping-post on King Street and suffer twenty-five lashes. On 28 March, the merchant John Rowe wrote in his journal:

This Day The French Boy & a Charcoal Follow stood in the Pillory. The French Boy was to have been whipt but the Populous hindered the Sheriff doing his duty.

Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf oversaw the end of the job two days later.

And then Charles Bourgate disappears from the historical record. Did he have to go back to Manwaring, or had that official gladly tossed him aside? Did Molineux or the other local Whigs look after him? Did he wish to return to French-speaking Canada, or to Bordeaux? Alas, he’s a lost youth.

TOMORROW: Or is he?

Lost Youth Week Begins with Edward Garrick

I’ve decided to make this “Lost Youth Week” at Boston 1775, talking about some young people in Revolutionary Boston whom I’d really, really like to find in the historical records. The documentation for youths of working age is even more spotty than the records of adult men since they often left their families but still didn’t pay taxes, own real estate, join churches, or advertise their services. (Boys may be easier to track than adult women, however, since they had a wider range of given names, and they didn’t change their names over their lifetimes.)

My first lost youth is Edward Garrick, apprentice to barber John Piemont in 1770. On the night of 5 Mar 1770, he said something cheeky that Pvt. Hugh White didn’t like. White called Edward over to the sentry box near the Customs House and clonked him on the head. That started the cycle of violence on King Street that ended in the Boston Massacre.

That fall, Edward testified at the trial of Capt. Thomas Preston. Some other apprentices, such as Bartholomew Broaders, mentioned him in their own testimony. Those depositions and lawyers’ notes from the trial supposedly preserve some of Edward’s own words. But then he disappears from the records.

If Edward Garrick was in his mid- to late teens in 1770, as his behavior indicates, then he would have been in his twenties during the Revolutionary War, and thus the right age to serve in the army. But he’s not listed clearly in Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors in the War of the Revolution. Did his experience in 1770 commit him to the Patriot cause?

I haven’t found any mention of Edward Garrick (or Gerrish, as some people wrote down his name) in the surviving records of the churches of Boston, the Overseers of the Poor, or the newspapers. I’d especially like to find a birth or baptism date for the lad since that would shed a little more light on the dispute on King Street. Boys could go to work as early as about eight years old, and they remained “boys” in the eye of the law until they were twenty. Pvt. White could therefore have been facing a little boy or a young man taller than he was. As I said above, everyone assumes Edward was in his mid- to late teens, but we don’t know.

It’s possible Edward Garrick was born outside Boston; came in to train as a barber, as Ebenezer Fox did during the war; then went back to his home town after the war began. In which case, he could turn up in some rural church records. Anyone?

Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Brooklyn

This November will mark the hundredth anniversary of the erection of the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park. The monument is currently undergoing restoration. At right is a photo from late last year, showing the column enshrouded in scaffolding and mesh.

During the Revolutionary War, the British military kept many of its prisoners from privateers and battles on ships anchored in New York harbor. The American authorities, knowing that they had a numerical advantage in available men, dragged their feet about exchanging their British and Hessian prisoners for these captives. As a result, many Americans were held for years. The poor food, terrible sanitation, and close conditions aboard those hulks meant that many prisoners died of disease and were buried along the shore of Wallabout Bay.

Over the decades, those graves eroded, and skeletons were exposed; this was quite a controversy in the early republic. While previous generations honored the memory of the dead as we do, they weren’t as invested in matching remains with individual people. Locals collected those bones and placed them together in a vault near the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The picture below shows that monument as it appeared in the 1840s. It was in less picturesque disrepair twenty years later.
Fort Greene was built in Brooklyn during the War of 1812 and named after Gen. Nathanael Greene. In 1864, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux produced a design for a park around that site with a new monument to the dead prisoners of war. However, it took until 1908 for people to raise the funds for that memorial column and to complete its construction. Shortly thereafter, skyscrapers sprang up all over Manhattan, and the column’s viewing platform seemed low and quaint.

The Fort Greene Park Conservancy is now leading the effort to restore the monument and the park as a whole. They are also planning for a grand celebration of the monument’s centenary this fall, featuring author David McCullough as keynote speaker. And it looks like they could use financial help from anyone who cares to give.

Google Books and Bartholomew Broaders

On Friday morning, Microsoft announced that it was ending its Live Search Books service, in essence acknowledging that Google Books was so far ahead it couldn’t compete. I’m not surprised. At one point I found a few volumes on Live Search Books that hadn’t shown up on Google Books yet, but the downloads were slower and less flexible. And the amount of material on Google Books is just mind-blowing.

Here’s one discovery that would have been nearly impossible without Google Books. It involves Bartholomew Broaders, one of the apprentices of barber and wigmaker John Piemont who was involved in the beginning of the Boston Massacre. Pvt. Hugh White clubbed Broaders’s young co-worker, Edward Garrick, for speaking insolently of the 14th Regiment. According to his own testimony, Broaders yelled at White, demanding “what he meant by thus abusing the people.” A sergeant chased the boys away, but they returned and gathered the crowd that eventually grew threatening. Garrick and Broaders were gone by the time that soldiers fired at that crowd, but they each left testimony about their earlier experiences.

What happened to Broaders after 1770? He was drafted as a private in Lt. Col. Jabez Hatch’s Boston militia regiment in mid-1777 and served for five weeks. Town records show that Boston chose Broaders to be one of its constables in 1783 and 1784. This job usually involved delivering writs and reminding people of the law, not full-time police work. Among the weighty tasks the selectmen gave Broaders and colleagues were viewing coal baskets, trucks, and carts to make sure they weren’t so big as to cause “damage & destruction of the Pavements.”

From church records, I found that Broaders married a young widow named Priscilla Bennett in 1778, and they had six children baptized in the West Meeting-House between 1780 and 1786. Real estate records show that they bought land on Ann Street near the drawbridge that defined the border of the North End in the 1790s.

Broaders got out of the barbering business, which was wise. In pre-Revolutionary Boston, both gentlemen and fashionable tradesmen wore wigs. Learning how to shave heads and build those wigs looked like a lucrative future. But then fashions changed, men started to wear their hair more naturally, and there must have been far less demand for journeymen barbers. (Another trainee in this profession who went into other work was Ebenezer Fox.)

Broaders owned a shop selling “slops,” or sailors’ clothing, according to the 1800 Boston directory. A reference I haven’t fully tracked down says that Bartholomew and Priscilla also ran the Federal Eagle tavern on Fore Street, where the U.S.S. Constitution (shown above, courtesy of the navy) recruited its men. (Bartholomew’s old master Piemont also lived on Ann Street, and had also opened a tavern, though he called his a coffee-shop.) The Massachusetts Mercury says that Priscilla died in 1801, aged forty-five.

By 1802, it was clear that something was wrong with Bartholomew Broaders. According to the Boston selectmen’s records for 10 November of that year:

In compliance with a Warrant from the Honble. Thomas Dawes Jr. Judge of Probate within the County of Suffolk; the Selectmen made inquisition as to the circumstances of Bartholomew Broaders, and find the said Broaders incapable of taking care of himself—& are of opinion that Guardians should be appointed for him

In the 27 Apr 1803 Independent Chronicle, the young lawyer Luther Richardson announced that he had been appointed Broaders’s guardian because the man was non compos mentis. Perhaps court records have more to say about Broaders’s age and condition; I haven’t dared to look yet.

What does this have to do with Google Books? For whatever reason, that reference to Broaders in the selectmen’s minutes didn’t get into that volume’s index. I could therefore have diligently checked his name in the index of every volume of that long series and never found a pointer to this entry. But because Google Books creates texts of the printed material it scans and makes those texts searchable, it brought this reference back to the surface.

Boston History Museums Looking Up and Down

The Old State House museum’s tower is being renovated, as the Boston Globe reported last week. The photo on the right, by David L. Ryan, shows the scaffolding that now sheathes the structure.

The Bostonian Society, owner of that historic structure, has created a not-unfamiliar-looking blog showing progress on the tower from the inside.

Meanwhile, up in the North End, the Paul Revere House is mapping its site using lasers and radar. I’m not sure I understand all that the Globe was saying, but here’s the gist:

Now surveyors from the Boston firm Harry R. Feldman Inc. and an academic team from UMass Boston [led by Prof. Allen Gontz] are collaborating to create a three-dimensional digital picture of the house and associated structures, the garden where water was once drawn from a hand-dug well, and even what's below ground, down to about 10 feet.

A picture of what’s above the surface, created by the Feldman firm using a laser scanner, is being stitched together electronically with a radar-generated image of what's underground produced by the UMass Boston team, so history—even the remains of a privy—can be protected as the space is enlarged.

The Globe also offers a slide show, and a video with the article.

Both museums remain open as this work goes on.

Swiftboating Samuel Adams

Yesterday I listed a litany of factual errors in William H. Hallahan’s The Day the American Revolution Began. Such misstatements and exaggerations pile up so badly when it comes to Samuel Adams that I suspect they reveal outright bias on the author’s part.

As a start, Hallahan ascribes practically every political development in greater Boston to Adams. If he mentions other Massachusetts organizers at all, they’re either nobly opposed to Adams’s methods or under his thumb. Often they disappear from their own stories. For example, it’s well established that James Otis, Jr., broke with the Crown in 1760 after Gov. Francis Bernard appointed Thomas Hutchinson as Chief Justice of the province instead of Otis’s father. Yet Hallahan calls that moment the “Start of bitter quarrel between Hutchinson and Sam Adams” [295]. Adams was a local political figure in that year; he wasn’t elected to the Massachusetts legislature until 1765.

As another example, the Suffolk Resolves were drafted by a committee of Whigs from inside and outside Boston in September 1774, with Dr. Joseph Warren usually credited as the principal writer. They followed a series of similar resolutions adopted by county meetings to the west. At the time, Adams was in Philadelphia. But Hallahan says those resolves were “written under Sam Adams’s direction” [300], and he had “prepared for dominating the Continental Congress with this document” [135].

Hallahan rarely passes up opportunities to denigrate Adams, even when there are no facts to back up such a judgment. In a timeline entry for 1768, he writes, “Sam Adams and Sons of Liberty fail to stop troops from landing as threatened, becomes [sic] laughingstock of the colonies” [298]. Adams had never threatened to stop the troops from landing; William Molineux did, and the evidence of even him becoming a “laughingstock” in thin indeed. For 1770: “Adams’s gang enforces nonimportation agreement. Many small businessmen bankrupted.” Molineux and Dr. Thomas Young are documented as leading the nonimportation protests, not Adams. And who were these “many small businessmen” who went bankrupt?

James M. O’Toole’s article “The Historical Interpretations of Samuel Adams,” published in the New England Quarterly in 1976, describes how other authors have fallen into similar errors. Biographies of Adams in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries portrayed him as behind everything good that happened in Boston during the Revolution. After that it wasn’t such a big leap, once Americans recognized that violence, disorder, and intimidation were also part of the resistance movement, to blame those on Adams as well. But he wasn’t in charge of everything, either good or bad. He was a leading voice in a mass movement, but there were other leaders, there were lots of people involved, and in life there are many events no one can control.

Part of the received wisdom about Adams is that he was vital for bringing on the Revolution, but had nothing to contribute after independence. Hallahan is only too happy to subscribe to that idea. It requires ignoring Adams’s admired service in the Congress through 1781 and in Massachusetts government for the rest of his life. Hallahan writes, “He fought bitterly against the new constitution, which he was as an intrusion on the rights of the states.” While Adams had doubts about the U.S. Constitution, he eventually voted to ratify it. The book never acknowledges Adams’s terms as Massachusetts governor.

When The Day the American Revolution Began characterizes Adams’s thinking and importance in history, Hallahan appears to be looking for ways to criticize the man, and his rhetoric gets tied up in knots. The result are head-scratchers like this:

Samuel Adams’s reputation was unequivocal. In his inner circle, among those who worked under his direction—and they included well-educated, intelligent idealistic men such as Dr. Joseph Warren—he was revered. Most people outside his own circle hated him, some with a murderous passion. He was well-known throughout the colonies, admired and emulated by some few but hated by many who regarded him as a waterfront thug, a manipulator, a political jobber, an intimidator, a blackmailer, a mob leader, a destroyer, and a newspaper propagandist of the worst sort. A criminal out of control, a terrorist and an outlaw. [99]

Aside from there being no evidence for Adams as “a waterfront thug,” “a political jobber,” or “a mob leader,” much less “a terrorist and an outlaw,” this rant makes no internal sense. If Adams was “revered” and “admired and emulated” by some people but “hated” by others, then his reputation couldn’t have been “unequivocal,” which means beyond questioning or doubt. Adams’s reputation was obviously mixed.

I find Hallahan’s other commentary on Adams to be so contradictory that it’s hard to see the rational thought behind it. Page 231 describes Adams this way: “A true democrat, he believed all people in society should live on the same level. No privileges. No lording it over others.” Yet two pages earlier, Hallahan writes: “Samuel Adams was not seeking justice. He wanted power—the king’s power.” These statements are contradictory, and they’re both false.

On page 234, Hallahan declares, “Samuel Adams was not an innovator.” Yet just one page earlier he writes, “Samuel Adams had forged a new political weapon,” and on page 240 he goes back to stating, “Adams was the first man in history to learn how to brilliantly use newspapers as instruments of propaganda.” Does Hallahan bear such animus that he can’t grant that Adams was an innovator? And does he fear Adams’s newspaper essays enough to suggest that the British government should have attacked the free press (“Perhaps it is not too strong to say that the gravest mistake made by Crown authorities in the colonies was in not shutting down the newspapers” [77])?

The book’s most ridiculous accusation against Adams appears in the timeline entry for 1769: “Adams breaks into mansion of absent Bernard, finds his private papers, starts newspaper propaganda campaign” [298]. Some of Gov. Bernard’s letters were indeed printed in Boston that year, but they had been leaked by people inside the government in London. Hallahan’s belief that Samuel Adams was a housebreaker is laughable.

I’ve already written about how Hallahan accuses Adams of arranging for some unknown individual to fire a gun as British troops marched onto Lexington Green so as to produce “a few dead farmers” and start the Revolutionary War. That accusation appears over and over in the book with increasingly incendiary rhetoric but not increasing evidence—no evidence at all, in fact.

It’s not a period term, but the best label I can think of for how The Day the American Revolution Began treats Samuel Adams is “swiftboating.”

A Nifty Idea Wasted through Sloppy Research

A few days back, I promised a fuller explanation of what I find wrong in The Day the American Revolution Began, by William H. Hallahan. By “wrong” I don’t mean I disagree with the author’s theories and conclusions, or his general approach to studying or writing history, or his use of the serial comma. I mean “wrong” as in basic errors of fact.

Hallahan had a nifty idea for a book. In addition to relating the history of the Concord alarm of 19 Apr 1775 in Massachusetts, The Day the American Revolution Began promises to describe how other parts of America and the world reacted to the news of that fight, in many cases weeks later. The Revolution thus “began” on different days in different places. That’s a fresh, interesting take. Unfortunately, the book was badly researched and written, biased in its treatment of the subjects, and inaccurate in its statements.

Where to begin? Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver was not a brother of Chief Justice Peter Oliver [page 58]. Thomas Brattle was not William Brattle [57-8, 286]. James Warren was not a “brilliant physician” [35], but a merchant; obviously Hallahan mixed him up with Dr. Joseph Warren. And speaking of Joseph Warren, he was not the “Loyalist governor” of Rhode Island [79]; that was Joseph Wanton.

William Molineux was not “a draper” [234], but a hardware merchant. Henry Knox did not lose fingers in a hunting accident “many years before” the siege of Boston [73], but three years before, in July 1772. There’s no evidence that Paul Revere’s horse “collapsed, and died on the Concord road” [284]; we don’t know what happened to it.

John Adams didn’t retire from politics in 1770 [298]; he was elected to represent Boston in the Massachusetts General Court in the middle of that year. Oddly enough, on page 71, Hallahan falsely dates that same election to 1771. Adams was not a close friend of newspaper essayist Daniel Leonard [59-60]; rather, he had been a close friend of Jonathan Sewall, and mistakenly thought Sewall wrote Leonard’s Massachusettensis essays.

There were not “500 indictments for smuggling” pending against John Hancock in 1775 [25]; there were none. At no point were Boston Customs inspectors “pitched overboard into the harbor” [76]. John Malcolm was not “A [sic] elderly dockworker” [60], but a middle-aged Customs official. Malcolm was not attacked in January 1774 by “a gang celebrating the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party” since that event had occurred only six weeks before. He was attacked because he had clubbed shoemaker George R. T. Hewes.

The Boston Massacre did not occur in 1765, but in 1770 [85]. Gen. Thomas Gage did not bring the unpopular 29th Regiment back to Boston in 1774 [85]. British soldiers had not “already tarred and feathered others” in New England before Thomas Ditson, Jr., on 8 Mar 1775 [7].

Lt. Edward Thoroton Gould did not die “of his wound not long after” signing a deposition for the Provincial Congress when he was a prisoner of war [285]. He was exchanged for other prisoners, sailed to England, got married, testified in John Horne Tooke’s state trial, and lived for many years.

The sloppiness extends to the book’s illustrations. Page 1 shows a picture of Faneuil Hall as it appeared after Charles Bulfinch greatly expanded it in 1805. Page 245 shows a picture of the Houses of Parliament that were being constructed half a century later. In other words, neither view has any connection to the day the American Revolution began, however that’s defined.

And then there’s all that Hallahan had to say about Samuel Adams.

TOMORROW: Don’t get me started.