“No appointment of this sort could have been more unpopular”

As described last week, on 26 Oct 1768 Gov. Francis Bernard told his Council that the royal army had started renting buildings around the center of Boston to convert into barracks.

That news couldn’t have come as a surprise to the Boston Whigs. Three weeks before, they had reported just such a rumor in their “Journal of Occurrences”:

Report, that James Murray, Esq; from Scotland, since 1745, had let his dwelling house and sugar houses, for the quartering of troops, at £15 sterling per month

But soon the Whigs found something new to complain about besides Murray being Scottish. They suggested that he and the governor had agreed on a corrupt quid pro quo.

As you recall, Gov. Bernard had started to press Boston’s justices of the peace to provide legal authorization for taking over the Manufactory or other buildings in Boston. A magistrate could empower government employees to carry out some legal actions, conceivably with the help of the troops themselves. Boston’s established magistrates threw up the same obstacles as the Council. Then on 27 October the Boston Whigs reported:

The people were this morning filled with astonishment on hearing that the G——r had nominated and appointed the J——s M——y already noticed in this Journal, as one of his Majesty’s justices of the peace for the county of Suffolk; no appointment of this sort could have been more unpopular, or have raised a more general indignation.

The inhabitants being fully persuaded that by means of the steady conduct of our bench of justices in refusing to quarter and billet troops in this town contrary as they apprehend to an act of Parliament, this gentleman was added to their number, and that the G——r will not now want a Justice Gillam, or a more fit instrument to carry his purposes into the utmost execution.

It is given out that when this nomination was made [in the Massachusetts Council], there was silence for a space of time, and such signs of disgust as raised the passions and voice of this G——r, who afterwards condescended to use arguments and intreaties with his C——l in favour of his said friend, which finally prevailed to obtain the consent of a majority of two only.

Murray had been a member of the appointed governor’s council in North Carolina before joining his little sister, Elizabeth (Murray Campbell) Smith, in Boston. He wasn’t as wealthy as his sister and elderly brother-in-law, despite his efforts, but he was the sort of mature, genteel merchant who often got picked for political posts in the British Empire. As a native of Britain with family and business ties back there, Murray was a natural Loyalist. That was no problem for Bernard, of course.

In “Justice Gillam,” the Whigs alluded to Samuel Gillam, a magistrate in Surrey, England. On 10 May he had read the Riot Act twice to a crowd showing support for John Wilkes, then held in the King’s Bench Prison near St. George’s Field. After that warning had no effect, Gillam authorized soldiers guarding the prison to fire on the increasingly violent crowd. About six people were killed, more than a dozen wounded. A grand jury indicted Gillam for his part in the “St. George’s Field Massacre,” but in July the court acquitted him on the grounds that he had acted within the law. The Boston Whigs feared a similar outcome locally, and used that prospect to link themselves to the London Whigs.

The day after reporting Murray’s appointment, the “Journal of Occurrences” went back to the question of barracks:

In the morning it was known that the troops which lately occupied Fanueil-Hall, had been placed, or had quartered themselves in the buildings, which had been hired of James Murray, Esq; but owned by James Smith, Esq; of Brush-Hill, [in Milton.]

such a procedure in the face of an act of Parliament, may well surprise the inhabitants, and lead them to think that some gentlemen of the civil or military order have concluded that they have a right for certain purposes, of dispensing with those acts at their pleasure:

However this may be, it is hoped that the people will soon have the satisfaction of knowing whether such steps can be taken by any with impunity; or whether every order and person among us is not equally held to the due observance of law.

Murray was acting as agent for his ailing brother-in-law and sister. The buildings he rented, formerly used to distill molasses into sugar or rum, became known as “Smith’s barracks” or “Murray’s barracks.”

The Boston Whigs were still arguing that the Quartering Act required regiments to go into the barracks on Castle Island, far from central Boston. They had objected to the army taking over publicly owned buildings. But at this point those activists were also objecting to the army renting private properties from their legal owners.

COMING UP: A less likely landlord.

The Mystery of “William Benson a Negro Man”

On 6 Nov 1775, the Boston Gazette, then being published in Watertown, ran this announcement from the keeper of the jail at Cambridge:

Cambridge, October 20, 1775.

BROKE out of the Goal in Cambridge, the following Prisoners, Thomas Smith, and William Benson a Negro Man. Said Smith is a very noted Thief, hath been in almost all the Goals on the Continent; had on when he broke Goal, a blue Jacket, a Pair of striped Trowsers, sandy coloured Hair about 5 Feet 4 Inches high.

Said Benson the Negro had on when he went away, a dark coloured old Coat, a Pair of old black knit Breeches, about 5 Feet 6 Inches high. Whoever will take up said Prisoners, and return them to said Goal, shall be handsomely rewarded, by

ISAAC BRADISH, Under Keeper.

The name of William Benson caught my eye. I wondered if this might be the black man of that name who appears in the records of the town of Framingham.

That William Benson was born in 1732. His parents, Nero Benson and Dido Dingo, had been kidnapped from Africa to New England. They married in 1721. Nero Benson served in Massachusetts army units around 1725 and died in 1757.

William Benson was sold to a man named Joseph Collins about 1762 but somehow gained his freedom shortly afterward—though he had to fight for it. Collins and two helpers tried to forcibly take Benson back into captivity and resell him. A Middlesex County grand jury indicted Collins in 1764. He formally acknowledged Benson’s freedom and refunded the buyer’s money (or, under another interpretation, bought Benson back and freed him). Under those circumstances, the court accepted Collins’s plea of no contest and let him off with a small fine.

By early 1762 William Benson was husband to Sarah Perry of Sudbury, born in 1747. Or as Shrewsbury warning-out records from 1762 said, “Perry, Sarah, alias Benson, white, called by William Benson, (colored) his wife.”

According to William Barry’s history of Framingham and the town’s published vital records, their children included:

• Katy or Cate, born 8 Apr 1763, later the wife of Peter Salem.
• Abel, born in 1766.
• Polly, born in 1773.
• Sally, born in 1782.
• William, who died young.

Traditions in Framingham and Needham say that a black trumpeter helped to summon the militia in one part of the region on 19 Apr 1775. Various authors have named that military musician as Nero or Abel, both recorded in other documents as playing the trumpet. But Nero was dead by 1775, and Abel was no more than nine years old and didn’t mention such service in his military pension application. I’ve posited that William—Nero’s son and Abel’s father—is a candidate for being that trumpeter.

Was the same William Benson locked up in the Cambridge jail a few months later? Unfortunately, I’ve found no more detail on this escaped prisoner. On 9 October the besieging army’s general orders had said:

If any Negroe is found straggling after Taptoo beating about the Camp, or about any of the roads or Villages, near the encampments at Roxbury, or Cambridge, they are to be seized and confined until Sun-rise, in the Guard, nearest to the place where such Negroe is taken up.

That was confinement in a military stockade, not the town or county jail, but it reflects the general hostility toward blacks that Gen. George Washington’s army adopted in that season.

Of course, African-American soldiers were already serving in that army, and at the end of December Washington reversed course and decided they could continue to serve. William Benson’s son Abel became one of those Continental soldiers, signing up in 1780 at the age of fourteen (saying he was sixteen). He received a plot of Framingham land as payment. After Abel’s mother died, his father William came to live there.

“Popes and bonfires, this evening at Salem”

On 5 Nov 1768, 250 years ago today, Boston’s apprentice printers issued this broadside, one of the most elaborate surviving artifacts of the holiday they called Pope Night.

The top of their broadside says, “South End Forever. North End Forever.” Under bibliographic rules, that’s become the title of the sheet, even though its creators probably thought their publication was “Extraordinary Verses on Pope-Night.”

Someone worked hard on the long poem that followed—so hard they didn’t remember that the 5th of November commemorated an event in 1605, not 1588.

That broadside highlights how in the mid-1700s Boston observed the 5th of November differently from every other New England seaport. Only in Boston was the youth population large enough, and the neighborhood pride fervent enough, for there to be rival Pope processions that ended up brawling. Other seaports had one main procession followed by a feast and a bonfire, with no intervening violence.

In the 1760s Boston’s town leaders worked hard to reconcile the South End and North End gangs against the common enemy of royal officials and Parliament’s new revenue-raising laws. That’s how he get this broadside celebrating both ends of town equally.

Here’s Donna Seger’s discussion of the 5th of November in Salem from her Streets of Salem blog last year:

…it is to our second President [John Adams] that we owe the first reference to Pope Night in Salem, long before he became our second President. When he was attending court in Salem he made the following note in his diary for November 5, 1766:

Spent the evening at Mr. Pynchon’s [on Summer Street–a house that is still with us but much changed], with Farnham, [Jonathan] Sewall, Sargeant, Col. Saltonstall &ct. very agreeably. Punch, wine, bread and cheese, apples, pipes and tobacco. Popes and bonfires, this evening at Salem, and a swarm of tumultuous people attending.

Pope Night certainly continued on after the Revolution: I can find references up to 1819 in the Reverend William Bentley’s famous diary. His entry for the 5th of November, 179[5] reads:

Not all the revolutions which have passed over our Country can efface the remembrance of this anniversary. The boys must have their bonfire. But the light of it is going out. We have little concern in powder plots of Kings at this day. . . .

Every other year or so the Reverend makes a Pope Night entry, all of which express his increasing irritation, until his final words on the matter in 1819:

We have had this evening the full proof of the obstinate power of superstition & habit. The 5 of Nov. was celebrated by the ritual & rubric of the English Church for political purposes. The history of the plot against all fact most pertinaciously insisted upon [as real], & the popular celebration, by the carrying about the Pope & the Devil, most zealously encouraged. Tho we have lost all connection with Great Britain & have detected the fraud & the purpose, yet our common people still keep the 5 of Nov. and we had a roaring fire on the Neck on this occasion. We had not the old fashion transportation through the streets, nor the riots & quarrels, but we had enough to shew us that old habits are invincible against all the light which can be offered them.

And after 1820 or so, no other Salem references, save Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Old Times” where Pope Night is something distinctly past.

The “holiday” seems to survive over the nineteenth century in a few other places, namely Marblehead, Newburyport, and Portsmouth, where it became known as Pork Night. I think the boys of Salem transferred all of their mischief and mayhem and bonfire-building energies to two other more American holidays: Halloween and the Fourth of July.

At the start of the twentieth century, Halloween had inherited the Pope Night traditions of bonfires and young people going door to door asking for treats. By the end of the 1900s only the trick-or-treating was left in most of America. These days that tradition seems to vary greatly by neighborhood.

Tracing the Life of Dr. Joseph Warren

For decades we had only two solid biographies of Dr. Joseph Warren, both well researched for their times but showing their age: Richard Frothingham’s Life and Times of Joseph Warren (1865) and John Cary’s Joseph Warren: Physician, Politician, Patriot (1964).

Then in the last decade two new biographies have come out. Both are products of years of parallel research that uncovered new evidence and proposed new understandings about Warren.

The first was Samuel Forman’s Dr. Joseph Warren: The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Birth of American Liberty from 2011. I met Sam after that book appeared, and we’ve worked together on topics like a proper site for a Dr. Warren monument in downtown Boston, how the late doctor’s mattresses ended up at Gen. George Washington’s headquarters, and the real story of Deborah Champion.

This year brought Christian Di Spigna’s Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr. Joseph Warren, the American Revolution’s Lost Hero, a product of decades of research. I met Christian in Williamsburg a couple of years ago, became friends, and gave him feedback on his manuscript before publication.

Christian is speaking at the Massachusetts Historical Society on Wednesday, 7 November. As of now that event is sold out. He’ll be at the Museums on the Green in Falmouth on Thursday, 8 November, and the David Library of the American Revolution in Pennsylvania on Thursday, 6 December.

Warren’s life lends itself to an exciting biography. One of the challenges of the form is that people are much better documented after they become famous, leaving relatively little contemporaneous evidence about the actions that made them famous and a lot of evidence about later, uneventful years. But the shape of Warren’s life is like the graph of rising action for a novel: it slants up with the Revolution in Boston, accelerates in 1774, and reaches a dramatic climax at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

All biographers of Dr. Warren seem to be inspired by his heroism and quick to give him the lion’s share of credit for political projects he contributed to. I’m skeptical about some such judgments, such as that Warren wrote the Mucius Scævola essays, directed the Boston Tea Party, or was posed to become a national political figure (though even contemporaries like Peter Oliver made that claim). Warren was still a young man in a society that valued seniority and deference to group actions.

Of course, we have no way of knowing what the doctor might have accomplished in his forties and beyond. He shouldered more and more responsibilities in late 1774 and early 1775. In those months Boston’s older political leaders became busy with continental affairs (Samuel Adams, Thomas Cushing), left town (Dr. Thomas Young, Josiah Quincy, Jr.), died (William Molineux), or were traduced (Dr. Benjamin Church). I think the story of Warren’s political career isn’t that he was crucial to every Boston Whig effort from the mid-1760s on but that he grew into the position of being crucial in 1775.

Forman and Di Spigna disagree on some questions about Warren, emphasizing different pieces of evidence or interpreting them differently. Both books are worth reading and considering, and both add to our knowledge about a man who became vitally important to Revolutionary Boston.

The Legacy of Francis Lewis

I’ve written a couple of times about Deborah Lewis, a child born to John and Thankful (Crowell) Lewis of Yarmouth in 1730. The family soon moved to Tisbury on Martha’s Vineyard.

In the summer of 1764, still living on the island, Lewis made a major change. Adopting the name Francis Lewis, he began living as a man. He married a young widow, Anne Luce, and they had at least five children between 1765 and 1782.

Francis Lewis lived through the Revolution, the new Massachusetts and U.S. Constitution, the Jeffersonian ascendancy, and the War of 1812. He died in 1823, a ninety-three-year-old great-grandfather.

Francis Lewis is an example of a transgender American well before hormone treatment and gender-change surgery became available (over sixty years ago now). At birth he was perceived as “bearing a similarity of both Sexes,” but his family and local authorities decided he was a girl. He was listed in vital records as female and had the limited rights of a woman well into adulthood. We don’t have his account of those first thirty years, or of his last sixty years, but we can presume the decades after 1764 were more comfortable and happy for him.

Currently, according to a draft memo reported by the New York Times, officials in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are trying to establish that: “Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth. . . . The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

Francis Lewis was identified at birth as a female and listed as such on his society’s equivalent of a birth certificate. But that society was able to recognize that designation as incorrect—even with no knowledge of “reliable genetic evidence.” The proposed H.H.S. approach would make us go backward at least two and a half centuries.

Closer to home, we in Massachusetts are faced with a referendum, this year’s Question 3, which would revoke protections from discrimination against transgender people. Again, I think of Francis Lewis. According to his death notice, Lewis’s “family has always deserved and received the respect of those who knew it.” Transgender people deserve the same respect from us today.

“Compleat Quarters were provided for all the troops”

Yesterday we left Gov. Francis Bernard stymied by both Boston’s justices of the peace and the Massachusetts Council in his effort to secure barracks for the king’s troops in Boston closer than Castle William.

By his own account, Bernard told his Councilors:

I said that I was now at the End of my tether: for as they had declared before, that they would adhere to the Act of parliament, and had refused to act in that liberal Way which I thought was their duty when the King’s Necessary Service was obstructed, I could propose nothing farther to them.

For I foresaw that if I proposed to hire [i.e., rent] & fit up houses &c for the troops, they would answer that did not become their business till the public houses were full. But if any Gentleman thought it was to Any purpose to put such a question I was ready to do it: this was declined by Silence.

According to the Boston Whigs, Bernard

recommended their appointing one or more persons, to join with General [Thomas] Gage, in hiring barracks for the troops in this town; the G——r apprehending it best that those who it is likely will finally be saddled with the expence, should be assisting or at least advising in this matter. The Council were utterly against this proposal, as the barracks at Castle-Island still remained empty, and it would have countenanced the quartering of troops in this town; and as the barrack-masters had before taken upon themselves to hire barracks at their own direction and risque.

Would any local citizen take the financial risk of paying for those barracks and waiting to be reimbursed? If providing barracks was the colony’s responsibility, as the Quartering Act said, then the Massachusetts General Court would have to authorize that expenditure. And leaders of that legislature had already warned that they were in no hurry to do that.

But Gov. Bernard was taking a different path: the army would put up the initial money to rent barracks. He wrote:

I then informed them that by reason of this general refusal of quarters the General found himself obliged to hire & fit up houses at the expence of the Crown for the reception of the troops, who now (Oct 26) especially they who were encamped, began to feel the Want of Warm quarters; and as he thought the Expence would ultimately fall upon the province; He desired that I would appoint a Commissary to join with & assist his officers in providing such houses, especially with regard to the Œconomy of the Expences. I therefore desired their Advice & Assistance in making such appointment.

This after a long debate was refused, they saying that if they should join in such appointment, it would be admitting that the province ought to be charged with the Expence; and I could appoint Auditors to examine the Accounts without them.

I thereupon put an End to this Business, having been employed in it from Sep 19 to Oct 26 in all 38 days, without any prospect of doing Any thing to purpose, but under an Obligation of trying evry Effort, before I gave it up.

The army was already implementing Gen. Gage’s plan. According to Bernard, “the General, who foresaw how this Negotiation would end, had employed his Officers to hire & fit up houses for the Troops: so that by the time I had received the definitive refusal, Compleat Quarters were provided for all the troops.”

The question of who would ultimately pay those rents was unresolved. There was also the issue of how the Quartering Act required colonies to supply certain provisions for the barracks, such as firewood. The Council had ordered Massachusetts’s commissary to supply the barracks at Castle William, but not any buildings in the center of town. Bernard concluded, “therefore it is not done, nor like to be done.”

But at least by the end of October all the troops had somewhere in town to sleep.

COMING UP: The regiments’ new landlords.

“Your Excellency will therefore excuse our doing anything”

During the conflict over the Manufactory building, Gov. Francis Bernard was still pushing other ways to find housing for the two-plus regiments in town.

The governing law was the Quartering Act of 1765. That required colonies to provide barracks for army troops, which Massachusetts did at Castle William—but the Crown didn’t want the troops off on that island.

The next option in the law was government-owned buildings—but locals didn’t want troops in Faneuil Hall, the Town House, and Manufactory.

After that came “inns, livery stables, ale houses, victualling houses, and the houses of sellers of [wine and spirits]”—and no one wanted to force citizens to turn over those properties without strong local authority behind the order.

Gov. Bernard had gotten no cooperation from his Council, so he tried another branch of local government. He put pressure on Boston’s justices of the peace. Those magistrates were appointed, not elected, so they supposedly owed more loyalty to the Crown.

The governor started that effort on 20 Oct 1768, the same day that Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf actually got into the Manufactory. In a letter to London, Bernard explained:

I therefore summoned all the acting justices to meet me in the Council chamber: Twelve of them appeared; I acquainted them that the General demanded quarters for two regiments, according to the Act of parliament; they desired to take it into Consideration Among themselves; I consented, & We parted.

Two justices, 2 days after this [i.e., 22 October], attended me with an Answer in writing, whereby the whole body refused to billet the Souldiers. But these Gentlemen informing me that the Justices had been much influenced by the Argument that the barracks at the Castle ought to be first filled &c, I showed them the Minutes of the Council whereby the barracks at the Castle were assigned for the Irish Regiments; and they must be considered as full. This was quite new to them, the Council themselves having overlook’t this effect of their Vote. I gave them a Copy of this Vote & returned the Answer desiring them to reconsider it.

Three days after [i.e., 23 October] the same Gentlemen informed me that they had resolved against billeting the Souldiers but could not agree upon the reasons to be assigned for the refusing it:

At that meeting, according to the Boston Whigs, Lieutenant Governor Chief Justice Thomas Hutchinson insisted to the magistrates that Bernard “required their answer not in the usual way, but in writing, and under their hands.”

The justices therefore got another day to prepare a written reply to Gov. Bernard. (Meanwhile, the Manufactory option had collapsed.) The Boston Whigs included the 24 October result in their “Journal of Occurrences”:

May it Please Your Excellency,

Your Excellency having been pleased to demand of us to quarter and billet a number of officers and soldiers in the publick-houses in this town: we would beg leave to observe that in the act of Parliament, a number of officers are mentioned for that purpose, namely constables, tytheing-men, magistrates, and other civil officers of the town, which upon enquiring we cannot find have been applied to; and also that by the same act of Parliament the justices are not empowered to quarter and billet the said officers and soldiers, but in default or absence of the aforementioned officers; your Excellency will therefore excuse our doing anything in this affair till it is properly within our province.

William Stoddard
Richard Dana
John Ruddock
Nathaniel Balston
John Hill
Edmund Quincy
John Avery
John Tudor

Dana (shown above) and Ruddock would take the selectmen’s complaint against Capt. John Willson days later. With justices Hill and Quincy, they would also collect most of the depositions about the Boston Massacre. Avery’s namesake son was one of the Loyall Nine. So these men included the most radical of the magistrates.

Gov. Bernard had started this conversation with “Twelve” justices, but only eight signed that letter. The governor reported: “2 others were against billeting & gave other reasons for their refusal; 2 others argued for billeting, but declined acting by themselves after so large a Majority of the whole body had declared for the contrary Opinion.”

Stymied again, Bernard called his Councilors back in. The Whigs’ version of that meeting began:

the Governor proposed in the forenoon their submitting the dispute relative to quartering troops in this town, to the opinion of the judges of the Superior Court [i.e., Hutchinson’s court]; which extraordinary motion was with great propriety rejected.

Gov. Bernard had no legal avenues left to pursue. There was only one way for the army to solve the problem of housing its troops for the winter: throw money at it.

COMING UP: So where did the soldiers go?

“The Negroes shall be free, and the Liberty Boys slaves”?

As I described back here, on the night of 28 Oct 1768 Capt. John Willson of the 59th Regiment was reportedly heard “to persuade some Negro servants to ill-treat and abuse their masters, assuring them that the soldiers were come to procure their freedoms.”

The next day and again on Monday, 31 October, the Boston selectmen’s official business included “Taking Depositions relative to Capt. Willson & Negros.” Selectman John Rowe’s diary confirmed that “they were all present” for the Saturday discussion.

One result of those meetings was officially that “The Several Constables of the Watch [were] directed by the Selectmen, to be watchful of the Negros & to take up those of them that may be in gangs at unseasonable hours.” Or as the Boston Whigs interpreted it for newspaper readers in other ports:

In consequence of the late practices upon the Negroes of this town, we are told that orders have been given by the Selectmen to the town watch, to take up and secure all such Negro servants as shall be absent from their master’s houses, at an unseasonable time of night.

It’s notable that the selectmen’s directive specified “those of them that may be in gangs” while the report for other colonies referred to “all such Negro servants.” In practice the watchmen probably were stopping all black people, in groups or alone, enslaved or free. Not that there was any real evidence for an incipient uprising.

The selectmen also took action in the court system. The Whigs’ “Journal of Occurrences” reported on 31 October, 250 years ago today:

The following complaint was regularly made this day, viz

to the worshipful Richard Dana and John Ruddock, Esqrs. two of his Majesty’s justice of the peace for the county of Suffolk, and of the quorum.

The subscribers Selectmen of the town of Boston, complain of John Willson, Esq; a captain in his Majesty’s 59th Regiment of foot, a detachment whereof is now quartered in the said town of Boston, under his command, that the said John, with others unknown, on the evening of the 28th day of October current, did, in the sight and hearing of divers persons, utter many abusive and threatening expressions, of, and against the inhabitants of said town, and in a dangerous and conspirative manner, did entice and endeavour to spirit up, by a promise of the reward of freedom, certain Negro slaves in Boston aforesaid, the property of several of the town inhabitants, to cut their master’s throats, and to beat, insult, and otherwise ill treat their said masters, asserting that now the soldiers are come, the Negroes shall be free, and the Liberty Boys slaves—to the great terror and danger of the peaceable inhabitants of said town, liege subjects of his Majesty, our Lord the King, and the great disturbance of the peace and safety of said town.

Wherefore your complainants, solicitous for the peace and wellfare of the said town, as well as their own, as individuals, humbly requests your worship’s consideration of the premises, and that process may issue against the said John, that he may be dealt with herein according to law.

Joshua Henshaw
John Rowe
Joseph Jackson
Sam. Pemberton
John Hancock
Henderson Inches

Boston elected seven selectmen, but only six signed this complaint to the magistrates. Who was the seventh? None other than John Ruddock, one of the magistrates who took the complaint. Bostonians must have known that he’d been in the discussion that led to that legal action before him. But people in other American ports wouldn’t have spotted that maneuver.

The next day, 1 November, the Whigs reported:

In pursuance of a complaint made to Mr. Justice Dana, and Ruddock, relative to Capt. Willson and others, a warrant was issued by those justices for taking up said Willson and bringing him before them, which was delivered to Benjamin Cudworth [1716-1781], a deputy sheriff of the county, who being opposed in the execution of it, applied to the high sheriff [Stephen Greenleaf], who with divers constables went to apprehand him; at first he also met with opposition from one of the officers, but the said Willson soon after surrendered himself to the sheriff, who brought him before the justices at Faneuil-Hall, which was crowded with people; and after the examination of divers witnesses upon oath, the complaint, was so well supported, that the justices ordered him to become bound with sufficient sureties for his appearance at the Superior Court in March next, to what shall then be alledged against him, touching the matters complained of, as also for his good behaviour in the mean time.

Sheriff Greenleaf had tried to seize the Manufactory for the Crown earlier in the month, but here he was taking Capt. Willson before the law. In both cases, Greenleaf was doing his main job to serve legal papers. (He wasn’t a peace officer the way we picture sheriffs in the Old West.)  The magistrates held their hearing in Faneuil Hall, “crowded with people,” which only a couple of days before had been crowded with troops.

John Rowe recorded the 1 November action in his diary, “Capt. Willson was carried before Justice Dana for some Drunken Behaviour & bound over to the Sessions.” Rowe had signed that formal complaint, of course. But privately he referred to Willson’s alleged incitement to bloody rebellion merely as “some Drunken Behaviour.”

As usual, Rowe was playing both sides. He spent part of that evening socializing with James Otis, William Molineux, and other Whiggish merchants and the rest at a gathering with Gen. Thomas Gage, Col. James Robertson, Col. William Dalrymple, Col. Maurice Carr, and other high-ranking army officers.

Hagist on the Soldiers of the Boston Garrison, 1 Nov.

On Thursday, 1 November, Don Hagist will visit the site of Gen. George Washington’s main headquarters in Cambridge to speak about Washington’s adversary: “The Boston Garrison, 1775-1776.”

The event description:

We all have an image of the “embattled farmers” who served in the Continental Army, but who were the British soldiers? What sort of men filled the ranks of the regiments that fought for the King? Far from ruffians or conscripted criminals, the British army of the era was largely a force of career soldiers who had voluntarily enlisted after trying their hands at other trades.

This talk will look at the demographics of a typical British regiment serving in Boston in 1775 and 1776, presenting the nationalities, ages, background and experience of the common soldiers that served in it. It will show the diversity of the army by detailing the careers of several individual soldiers. The real stories of these professional soldiers are sure to be surprising.

Don Hagist is the author of British Soldiers, American War, collecting the few surviving first-hand accounts of British soldiers fighting in America, and of his similarly-named blog, British Soldiers, American Revolution. He’s also the managing editor of the Journal of the American Revolution.

This lecture is free, but to reserve a seat call 617-876-4491 or email reservationsat105@gmail.com. It will start at 6:30 P.M. in the carriage house at the back of the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, 105 Brattle Street in Cambridge. Parking on site is limited to a couple of spots for handicapped drivers, but after 6:00 P.M. the street-parking regulations in the neighborhood loosen up.

“Fanueil-Hall was cleared of the troops”

Back on 1 Oct 1768, the selectmen of Boston told Lt. Col. William Dalrymple that he could house His Majesty’s 14th Regiment of Foot in Faneuil Hall.

(The picture of Dalrymple here is a caricature from 1804 after he had retired from the army and gone into politics.)

Of course, Dalrymple had asked for that lodging only “till Monday following, promissing upon his honor to quit said Hall at that time.”

And then on 4 October, the day after he’d promised to leave, the colonel “asked the favor of having the further use of Faneuil Hall till Wednesday next, when he would withdraw his Troops from thence.”

Then the next day he sent word “that it was not in his power To remove the Soldiers from Faneuil Hall” until barracks were ready.

Since most of Boston’s politicians were determined to force all the soldiers into the barracks on Castle Island, and Col. Dalrymple and Gov. Francis Bernard were determined to keep them in Boston proper as the Crown had ordered, that stalemate remained.

On 21 October, Boston’s seven selectmen voted to order this letter sent to Dalrymple:

I am directed by the Board of Selectmen to address you by Letter, Requesting that Faneuil Hall which is now occupied by part of your Regiment, and was to be cleared agreeable to your assurances when desired, may be delivered up this Day or to Morrow

By Order of the Selectmen.
William Cooper Town Clerk

It took almost another week, until 27 October, before the Cooper could log in a response:

The Selectmen received this Day a Message from Collo. Dalrymple, by Mr. [John] Rowe, acquainting them, that the Hall should be cleared & delivered this Evening agreeable to their requirement

The Boston Whigs happily reported in their “Journal of Occurrences” for that day: “This day Fanueil-Hall was cleared of the troops and delivered up to the Selectmen by Col. Dalrymple.”

In Boston Under Military Rule, a 1936 compilation of that “Journal,” Oliver M. Dickerson noted that the same item was dated 26 October, or one day earlier, when it was eventually reprinted in the Boston Evening-Post. He concluded that that was the correct date for the troops’ move.

But actually the move appears to have taken longer—until 29 Oct 1768, or 250 years ago today. On that day selectman Rowe, the liaison to the army command, finally wrote in his diary: “This day the Troops went from Fanewill Hall into the Barracks.”

The next day the Whigs reported more news in their “Journal”: “Last evening the encampment on the Common broke up, and the soldiery [of the 29th Regiment] retired into winter quarters in this town, but by whom they have been quartered remains yet to be enquired.” So all the soldiers were under roofs for the winter.

COMING UP: Where had all the troops gone?

“They should be able to drive all the Liberty Boys to the devil”

Back on 12 October, I quoted the Boston Whigs’ complaint about Capt. John Willson of the 59th Regiment of Foot keeping a man confined for enticing a soldier to desert.

On the evening of 28 Oct 1768, 250 years ago today, Capt. Willson offered Bostonians a new reason to complain about the royal government’s decision to station troops in their town.

In a dispatch dated the next day, the Boston Whigs declared:

…the most atrocious offence and alarming behaviour was that of a captain, the last evening, who in company with two other officers, endeavoured to persuade some Negro servants [i.e., slaves] to ill-treat and abuse their masters, assuring them that the soldiers were come to procure their freedoms, and that with their help and assistance they should be able to drive all the Liberty Boys to the devil; with discourse of the like import, tending to excite an insurrection.

Depositions are now taking before the magistrates, and prosecutions at common law are intended, the inhabitants being determined to oppose by the law such proceedings, apprehending it the most honourable as well as the most safe and effectual method of obtaining satisfaction and redress; at the same time they have a right to expect that General [Thomas] Gage will not remain an unconcerned spectator of such a conduct in any under his command.—

Here Americans you may behold some of the first fruits springing up from that root of bitterness a standing army. Troops are quartered upon us in a time of peace, on pretence of preserving order in a town that was as orderly before their arrival as any one large town in the whole extent of his Majesty’s dominions; and a little time will discover whether we are to be governed by the martial or the common law of the land.

As a society with slaves, Boston feared the prospect of rebellions—probably not in the form of a town-wide insurrection, since the black population was so relatively small, but within households. White slaveowners remembered examples of people poisoned by servants kept in bondage.

The Boston Whigs also knew that the cities to the south receiving their newspaper dispatches had larger enslaved populations and thus even more fear about those people rebelling. As with the stories of white soldiers scourged on the Common by black drummers, publicizing the case of Capt. Willson would bring them sympathy from other colonies.

[Image above from the 1 Sept 1768 Boston News-Letter via the Adverts 250 Project’s compilation of every newspaper advertisement mentioning slavery in colonial America.]

Events to Remember Abigail Adams

Earlier this week I attended the launch of the “Remember Abigail” commemoration, a yearlong series of events honoring Abigail Adams.

We’re in the midst of some dates related to Adams: her wedding anniversary (25 Oct 1764), her death (28 Oct 1818), and her husband’s birthday (30 Oct 1735, N.S.). In addition, her own birthday was 22 Nov 1745, N.S.

The launch took place at the Massachusetts State House, and the Massachusetts Historical Society, home of the Adams Family Papers, was a host. But a lot of the participating organizations are on the South Shore where Adams lived most of her life: the Abigail Adams Historical Society, First Church, and public library in Weymouth; Adams National Historical Park, the Thomas Crane Public Library, and United First Parish Church (“Church of the Presidents”) in Quincy; and the Hingham Historical Society.

The first public events are scheduled for this weekend, but with today’s poor weather report they’re now all slated for Sunday, 28 October.

10:00 to 11:00 A.M.
Commemoration of Abigail Adams’s Death

Join the Abigail Adams Historical Society, stewards of the Abigail Adams Birthplace, as we mark the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Abigail Adams’s death with a special service and readings commemorating her remarkable life. The First Church in Weymouth is one of the oldest continuing congregations in the United States and the church where Abigail Adams's father, Reverend William Smith, served from 1734 to 1783.

At the First Church in Weymouth, 17 Church Street in North Weymouth; cosponsored by the Abigail Adams Historical Society. No reservations necessary.

10:00 A.M. to 12:00 noon
Adams Family of Boston Walking Tour

Follow the words and history of four generations of Adamses. John, Abigail, and their descendants were prolific writers. The trove of documents they left behind intimately describe their lives, public service, and Boston from the eve of the Revolution to the turn of the twentieth century.

Tickets from Boston By Foot; $15, or $5 for B.B.F. members.

1:00 to 3:00 P.M.
Boston Women’s Memorial 15th Anniversary

Join us as the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail celebrates the 15th anniversary of the Boston Women’s Memorial on the Commonwealth Mall. Festivities will include the reflections by Mercy Otis Warren, Arbour Tanner, and Elizabeth Brown Blackwell on their friendships with the memorial’s figures: Abigail Adams, Phillis Wheatley, and Lucy Stone.

On Commonwealth Mall between Fairfield and Gloucester.

Check the RememberAbigail.org website for upcoming events through November 2019.

The Merriams of Mason, New Hampshire

Yesterday we left Sarah and Abraham Merriam in Lexington at what might have been a low period of their marriage.

Their son Jonas died in 1772. In 1773 the confession of Levi Ames, hanged for burglary, suggested that Abraham had given Ames all the information he needed to rob Sarah’s father, Daniel Simonds. In 1774 Abraham Merriam was assessed as one of Lexington’s poorest men.

In 1775, of course, the first fatal shots of the Revolutionary War were fired in Lexington. Over the next few years, Abraham Merriam or his namesake eldest son, born in 1757, served several stretches in the army and Massachusetts militia, often as substitutes for other men. That was one way poor men could support themselves.

In April 1776 Daniel Simonds died, followed two months later by Abraham’s father, Jonas Merriam. The couple may have inherited some property, or might simply have been relieved of the burden of caring for an elderly relative.

That same year, Sarah gave birth to the couple’s last recorded child, Zadock. That offers our first evidence that the Merriams were still together as a couple.

Sarah Merriam’s older sister Mary was mother to Benjamin Mann of Woburn. In the early 1770s he moved just over the province’s northern border to Mason, New Hampshire, which is celebrating its sestercentennial this year. Mann returned to Massachusetts as a captain in the Col. James Reed’s Continental regiment, seeing action at Bunker Hill, and he stayed in the Continental Army through 1776. Back in Mason, he served in many town offices.

Over time many of Mann’s relatives joined him in Mason. His 1773 house, shown above, remains the town’s anchor, home of the selectmen’s offices, historical society, and library.

About 1780 Sarah and Abraham Merriam and their children moved to Mason as well. Abraham’s last military service was linked to that town. The family settled “on the Wilton road” on part of the land granted to Mann. Most of the Merriam children married in Mason, though the youngest, Zadock, appears to have gone to Boston.

According to the Mason town records, “Mr. Abraham Merriam” died in that town on 26 Nov 1797. Sarah, “Widow of Abraham Merriam, [aged] 69 y.”, died there on 12 Sept 1807. Their life doesn’t seem to have been easy, but they did stick together, and they appear to have found a measure of stability in post-independence New Hampshire.

(Bonus trivia: Benjamin Mann was both an uncle of John “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman and the father-in-law of Samuel “Uncle Sam” Wilson.)

Abraham Merriam and “envy against his father-in-law”

Yesterday I noted Sarah McDonough’s recent blog post for the Lexington Historical Society about how the notorious Levi Ames had robbed the house of the Rev. Jonas Clarke in the spring of 1773.

Alexander Cain, who knows more than a bit about Lexington, also wrote about Ames’s nefarious activity in that town last March at Historical Nerdery.

Cain drew particular attention to this passage from Ames’s autobiographical confession:

I stole ten or eleven dollars from Mr Symonds, of Lexington, whose son-in-law, Mr. Meriam, while I was in prison, informed me where the money was and how to get it, but he never received any of it; I supposed he gave me this information through envy against his father-in-law, through whose means he was then confined for debt.

Naturally, I was curious about the family dynamics there. Who were “Mr Symonds” and “Mr. Meriam”? Did a man put his son-in-law in jail for debt? Did the debtor just grouse about all the money his wife’s father had at home, or was Ames accurate about his fellow prisoner wanting him to rob a particular house?

Cain quoted a line from Clarke’s diary offering one lead: “Mr. Joseph Simond’s House broke open his watch stolen &c.” However, the only Joseph Simonds I could find in town that year, a militia lieutenant during the siege of Boston, was too young to have had a son-in-law. In addition, Ames was clear about robbing “ten or eleven dollars from Mr Symonds,” not a watch.

Instead, I think Ames’s victim was Daniel Simonds (1693-1777), whose daughter Sarah (1739-1805) married Abraham Merriam (1734-1797). There were a lot of Simondses and Merriams in and around Lexington at the time, but this family seems like the best candidate for that tale.

Ames spoke of two stretches in jail (or “goal,” as New Englanders then spelled it) before his final one. Once he was jailed “at Cambridge,” and once he was “in Concord goal.” Ames didn’t specify dates or when he met “Mr. Meriam,” but both those jails served Middlsex County, which included Lexington and its neighbors.

Though born in Lexington, Alexander Merriam was listed as “of Concord” when he married Sarah Simonds on 22 Apr 1756. The couple had children on a regular schedule: Abraham (1757), Ezra (1760), Silas (1762), Sarah (1766), Jonas (1769), Abigail (1772), and so on.

Notably, two of the last three children were listed in the Lexington town records as having been born in Woburn. The Merriams were living in one town while attending church in another. For a farmer to do that suggests that Abraham didn’t own enough land to support himself and was working for someone else.

Indeed, in a 2012 report for the Lexington Historical Society titled Research for the Re-Interpretation of the Buckman Tavern, Lexington, Massachusetts: Conceptions of Liberty, Mary B. Fuhrer discussed Abraham Merriam among the “Truly Poor Men in Lexington’s 1774 Valuation.” She wrote:

Abraham Merriam, 40, was one of six sons. His father Jonas was still alive in 1774, but appears to have sold his land. Since all of Abraham’s brothers moved away by 1774, it is probable that his father sold his estate and divided it equally among his many sons to allow them to purchase frontier estates elsewhere. . . . This appears to be a case where there were simply too many sons to allow any one to be favored with the homestead and still have enough resources left to provide for all the others.

We get another glimpse of Abraham Merriam’s financial situation in this document owned by the Lexington Historical Society and nicely digitized for our enjoyment. It’s a bond dated May 1771, by which Merriam borrowed £100 from Benjamin Waldo of Boston, promising to pay that sum back with interest within a year or be liable for £200. Waldo was a well established merchant captain and fireward. One of the witnesses to that bond was Daniel Simonds, Merriam’s father-in-law.

On the back of that document are notations of the payments Waldo received. None came from Abraham Merriam (at least directly), and none came on time. Instead, the first payments starting in 1774 were from Nathaniel Simonds, Sarah Merriam’s brother.

Was this the debt that landed Abraham Merriam in jail? Or was this big loan an attempt to consolidate debts after a jail term and start over? What responsibility did Daniel Simonds bear for that debt—did he push his son-in-law into taking out that loan, or was his son-in-law simply upset that the older man didn’t dip into the pile of cash in his house to repay it? Did Jonas Merriam sell his son Abraham’s inheritance to get him out of debtor‘s prison? Barring more family documents, we won’t know.

And how did that situation appear to Sarah Merriam? In 1772 her son Jonas died, but she still had five children to care for, including a newborn. Abraham had evidently been in debtor’s prison at least once. And then in 1773 Levi Ames’s confession was published, airing the accusation (no doubt easily deciphered by folks in Lexington) that her husband had set up her father to be robbed.

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?

Levi Ames and the Clarke Family’s Silver

The Revolution250 coalition has a Twitter account and a Facebook page. I’m one of the people who contributes to those feeds, promoting upcoming events and celebrating past ones, like the “Boston Occupied” reenactment earlier this month.

Last year, I started posting a “resource of the day,” sometimes an upcoming event exploring Revolutionary Massachusetts but more often a website or quotation pegged to a past happening on that date. I figured that would keep the accounts active even when we don’t have a big commemoration to crow about. Sometimes the challenge is coming up with a proper event and link; sometimes it’s choosing among several possibilities.

In August the news of the day was the capture of a young criminal named Levi Ames in 1773. Then, drawing on the notes kept by Boston printer John Boyle, the Rev250 feeds noted each milestone in Ames’s legal journey through trial, sentencing, and hanging. For his story in detail, visit Anthony Vaver’s Early American Crime.

Those Rev250 postings caught the eye of Sarah McDonough, Programs Manager at the Lexington Historical Society. This week on the society’s staff blog she shared a local link to the story that Boyle didn’t mention:

It wasn’t until May 22nd of 1773 that Ames made it to Lexington. He went straight for homes with money, starting with Reverend Jonas Clarke. While the family was asleep, recovering from a measles outbreak, Ames broke into the home and stole Lucy Clarke’s wedding silver, including a tankard, pepper box, and sugar tongs. The spree continued over the next few months, until the burglar was caught in August with stolen goods belonging to a man named Martin Bicker.

And that was when Rev250 took up the tale. But another strand of Ames’s story leads back to the Clarke house in Lexington (shown above):

After hearing of the sentencing, Reverend Clarke travelled to Boston to convince Ames to repent before his execution. We now know Clarke as a dynamic public speaker, but this was one of his greatest achievements – not only did he convince Ames to confess to stealing the family silver, but Ames also revealed where it was hidden, and Clarke happily returned home with his stolen goods that same day.

Richard Kollen discusses Clarke’s perspective on events in the biography The Patriot Parson of Lexington, Massachusetts.

TOMORROW: More digital detection about Ames in Lexington.

Call for Papers at 2019 Book History Conference in Amherst

The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (S.H.A.R.P.) will hold its 27th annual conference in Amherst, Massachusetts, from Monday, 15 July, to Thursday, 18 July 2019.

The conference theme is “Indigeneity, Nationhood, and Migrations of the Book,” and here is the call for submissions:

What is the role of place in book history: from “native tongue” to “Native writing,” author’s homeland to author’s house, sites of reading to websites? Print capitalism has been adduced as a factor in the consolidation of vernaculars and national literatures and the rise of the national imaginary from Europe to its colonial regimes. Rather than viewing the relation between indigenous and European communication practices as a hierarchical and sequential one of center and periphery—“literacy” replacing “illiteracy” (whether dismissed as “inferior” or eulogized as “authentic”)—what could we learn by instead exploring it as one of encounter and continuing evolution?

Consider the setting for SHARP19: New England—the very name connoting old and new “worlds”—was at once native land for the original inhabitants, with their established social and communication systems, and a site in which European settlers, rather than simply replicating the homeland (making a “new” England), created out of many sources and influences a different, distinctly American culture. Successive generations of arrivals—from captive Africans and indentured Asians to voluntary, if often unwelcome, immigrants—writing in their mother tongues or in English, transformed the very notion of an “American” language and literature. Alfred Kazin, son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Russia, provocatively entitled his pioneering 1942 study of modern American prose, On Native Grounds. How have literacy and print functioned here and around the world on a spectrum including oppression, resistance, assimilation, and dialogue?

We invite book historians to train their eyes on indigenous cultural practices, national literatures, colonized and colonizing texts, landscapes and sites of literary life, and textual migration and exchange in a global context.

S.H.A.R.P. sessions are generally ninety minutes long, consisting of three 20-minute papers and a discussion period. Proposals must include a title, abstract (250 words maximum), and short biography of the presenter (100 words). Proposals for full panels must also include a panel title and abstract (250 words) as well as information about each paper in the panel. The organizers welcome “lightning talks, posters, and digital project demonstrations,” with the same requirements as paper proposals. The submissions window closes on 1 December. For more details, see the call page.

“The Soldiers were withdrawn”

On 22 Oct 1768, 250 years ago today, the Boston Whigs had a surprise to report:

This morning we are told that the sheriff [Stephen Greenleaf], whom to carry on the allusion we will call the General, has raised the siege of the Manufactory, with the trifling loss of all his honour and reputation—the troops were withdrawn under cover of the night, and it is hoped as the season is now advanced, that they will be soon ordered into winter quarters at Castle Island; sufficient supplies have however been sent into the Manufactory to serve in case the attack should be renewed

Gov. Francis Bernard explained the action in a report to the Secretary of State in London. First he blamed his Council, but then he acknowledged:

…the building not being immediately wanted, The Soldiers were withdrawn on the Evning of the Second day. Thus this building belonging to the Government & assigned by the Governor & Council for his Majesty’s Use, is kept filled with the Outcast of the Workhouse & the Scum of Town to prevent it’s being used for the Accommodation of the Kings Troops[.]

Thus the big confrontation over the Manufactory came to an end.

To be sure, army sentries remained in the cellar of the building, causing some difficulty for the Brown family of weavers. Those soldiers would not be pulled out until 4 November. John Brown filed his lawsuit against Sheriff Greenleaf on 24 October, and that would linger in the courts for the rest of the year. But the threat to the families inside the Manufactory was over.

Bostonians had stood up against the royal officials’ demands. Those officials shied from going beyond the widely accepted bounds of British law and from provoking violence. The result was that the local Whigs felt they had won a round. So of course they felt encouraged to do it again.

The town retained the memory of that confrontation—in a way. In August 1785, a former overseer of the Manufactory died at the age of sixty-five. The Massachusetts Centinel called him “An honest man—the noblest work of God.” The 15 September Independent Chronicle went on at length about his virtues. And his gravestone in the Granary Burying Ground read:

ELISHA BROWN
of BOSTON.
who in Octr 1769, during 17 days
inspired with
a generous Zeal for the Laws
bravely and successfully
opposed a whole British Regt.
in their violent attempt
to FORCE him from his
legal Habitation.
Happy Citizen when call’d singley
to be a Barrier to the Liberties
of a Continent.

That was, of course, the wrong date for the Manufactory siege.

(Elisha Brown’s gravestone above photographed by Wally Gobetz, via Flickr.)

“The siege of the Manufactory House still continues”

Yesterday we left the Manufactory building (shown above in its role as the Massachusetts Bank in the 1790s) under siege by British troops, who themselves were surrounded by townspeople. The crisis over where those soldiers would spend the winter had come down to that one big building beside the Common.

Dr. Thomas Young’s dispatch for the Boston Gazette reported:

Friday morning bread and butter were denied, and no person allowed to speak to them for several hours. The sick were denied the visits of their physicians, and Dr. [Benjamin] Church’s apprentice in the afternoon had several pushes with a bayonet as he was attempting to convey them medicines.

For outside consumption the Boston Whigs described the next moves:

The siege of the Manufactory House still continues, and notwithstanding one of their bastions has been carried by assault; the besieged yet shew a firmness peculiar to British Americans:

The children at the windows crying for bread this morning, when the baker was prevented supplying them by the guards, was an affecting sight. Some provision and succours were however afterwards thrown into the Castle with the loss of blood, but no lives.

Back to Dr. Young in the Gazette:

Some gentlemen deploring the imminent ruin of their country, & fearing some ill consequences from the resentment of the people, who had been insulted by the guards, kept with them to moderate ’em, while others laid before the members of his Majesty’s council the distress & danger they conceived the people subjected to by the unprecedented actions of the sheriff.

The Whigs provided this account of the Council meeting:

The Council met in the forenoon at the G——rs, those of them who were in the late vote greatly disturbed, that such an illegal method should be taken by the G——r to carry it into execution, they were still more disturbed at the treatment received. Council met in the afternoon at their own chamber, and are to meet again on the morrow. The C——l have been really in a most uncomfortable situation for some time past, tho’ very frequently called together by the G——r, it is rather to give a colour and countenance to what he had done or is projecting, than to receive their information and advice.

Dr. Young:

The council assembled, and after some deliberations waited on his Excellency, and signified that their advice to clear the factory intended no more than to clear it by law. His Excellency said it appeared to him to empower him to clear it as he most conveniently cou’d:

Gov. Francis Bernard described that discussion this way: “some of the Council declaring that it was not intended to use Force, altho’ they knew that it could not be done without.”

Evidently the Council’s majority now said that they had authorized the governor to evict the Brown family and others from the Manufactory by law, taking them to court if necessary, but not by physical force. Of course, that would hardly have solved the army’s immediate need for housing. But it cast a little more doubt on the legality of the sheriff’s and army’s actions the previous afternoon.

So the royal government eased back a little. Dr. Young reported, “it seems the consequence of this meeting was a recall of the troops about 7 that evening, leaving only a small guard in the cellar, and one or two at the window.” The Whigs claimed: “In the evening terms of accomodation were proposed to Mr. [John] Brown of the Manufactory, but rejected with disdain.” The siege continued, just less intensely.

Meanwhile, “Col. [William] Dalrymple was required by the Selectmen to remove from Faneuil-Hall this day or on the morrow, agreeable to his word of honour, the troops which have occupied it for too long a time already.”

TOMORROW: But where could all those troops go?

“This day the Sheriff got into the Factory House”

On 20 Oct 1768, 250 years ago today, John Rowe wrote in his diary:

This day the Sheriff got into the Factory House.

That line left out a lot of drama, I have to say.

According to the Boston Whigs, the day began with the royal governor pressing yet another set of officials—this time the men he and his predecessors had appointed as magistrates—into using their authority to find quarters for army regiments:

This morning the justices of the town were called upon to meet the Governor [Francis Bernard], General [Thomas] Gage, and King’s-Attorney [Jonathan Sewall], at the Council Chamber; when met the Governor required of them to provide quarters for the troops in this town, but received for answer, that they apprehended that this application did not then come properly before them.

Out at the Manufactory, the Boston Gazette reported, Sheriff Stephen] Greenleaf was observing the building with a neighbor who supported the royal government, Dr. Silvester Gardiner (shown above). Those men noticed that, as I wrote yesterday, some workers in the Manufactory’s cellar were leaving a window open so they could go out to the courtyard easily.

Sometime after noon, the sheriff made his move. After “one of the workers had just gone out,” Greenleaf hurried over to follow him inside. The young man “turned hastily” and tried to close the window. The sheriff “attempted to get his fingers under the sash.” In the struggle, “a square of glass [was] being bent in.” In a little while Sheriff Greenleaf’s “much superiour strength and formidable appearance,” with “drawn sword, menacing speech and actual violence,” scared the worker away.

The Gazette report went on:

the sheriff returning to the sash, forced it up, and entered feet foremost with sword in hand. Mr. Brown then at some distance in the cellar hearing the scuffle and the glass break, hastened to the window, but a loom intervening, the sheriff had fully forced entry before mr. Brown could oppose him. A small scuffle happened between them, in which neither party received much harm.

Two of the sheriff’s deputies with his servant following, he sent one of the deputies to the officer of the piquet with a written order to come with his guard to the factory immediately. On his arrival the sheriff ordered him to place two centinels at each door, two or more at the gate, and ten in the cellar, then read him a paper, giving him full possession of the yard, charging him to let any one come out of the house, but none go in.

Finding the people gather fast about the gate, he issued orders for another company, the posting of which gave the compleat idea of a formal blockade.

According to Harbottle Dorr, that account came from Dr. Thomas Young. That radical physician might have actually been inside the Manufactory at the time, as he had been the day before.

Gov. Bernard put more blame on the people inside the building:

Upon a third attempt The Sheriff finding a Window open entered: upon which the people gather’d about him & shut him up; he then made a signal to an Officer without, who brought a party of soldiers who took possession of the yard of the building & releived the Sheriff from his Confinement.

On the other hand, the Boston Whigs emphasized the sheriff’s violence:

About noon the inhabitants were greatly alarmed with the news that Mr. Sheriff Greenleaf, accompanied by the soldiery, had forced an entry sword in hand, into one of the cellars in the Manufactory-House; Mr. Brown one of the inhabitants, in attempting to disarm him, received several thrusts in his cloaths, the sheriff’s deputy entered with him; he then gave possession of the cellar to some of the troops:

In a legal complaint dated four days later, the weaver John Brown named the men taking over his rented home as “Stephen Greenleaf of Boston aforesaid, Esq; and Joseph Otis of said Boston, gentleman, together with divers other malefactors and disturbers of the peace of our said Lord the King.” Otis was the keeper of the jail and courthouse. Like Greenleaf, he was appointed, not elected. Unlike Greenleaf, he kept his position after the Revolutionary War began.

The Whig report continued:

A large number of soldiers immediately entered the yard, and were placed as centinels and guards at all the doors of the house, and all persons were forbid from going in and out of the same, or even coming into the yard. The plan of operation being as it is said to terrify or starve the occupants out of their dwellings.—

Great numbers of the inhabitants assembled to be eye witnesses of this attack of the sheriff, upon the rights of citizens, but notwithstanding they were so highly irritated at his conduct, there was no outrageous attempts made upon him or his abettor, the people having had it hinted to them, that our enemies in advising to this step, had flattered themselves with the hopes that some tumults and disorder would arise, which might be improved to our further prejudice.

Gov. Bernard’s version was: “This occasioned a great Mob to assemble with some of the Cheifs of the Faction. They were Very abusive against the Soldiers, but no Mischeif was done.”

And of course there was a legal argument going on in the midst of it all, per the Whigs:

The sheriff refused giving Mr. Brown a copy of his warrant or orders for this doing, and only referred him to the minutes of Council for his justification, a copy of which was also refused him. We now see that the apprehensions of the people respecting an ill improvement of the late vote of Council was not without just grounds.

This night the sheriff procured guards of soldiers to be placed at his house for his protection, a measure that must render him still more ridiculous in the eyes of the people.

All the while, Brown complained, he and his family had been “expelled, amoved, and put out” from their home.

Well, not the whole building. Though that “large number of soldiers” held the cellar, courtyard, and doors, there were still civilians inside the upper floors of the Manufactory, determined to stay. And “Great numbers of the inhabitants” surrounded the soldiers and the site.

TOMORROW: Would this stand-off lead to more violence?