“Others struck with Cutlasses, Canes and other Weapons”

Boston newspapers published three detailed descriptions of the fight between Customs Commissioner John Robinson and Boston representative James Otis, Jr., on 5 Sept 1769.

The first appeared on 11 September, as Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette printed an anonymous news report that of course supported Otis. Picking up right after Robinson tried to pull his opponent's nose, it said:

…failing in the Attempt, he [Robinson] immediately struck at him [Otis] with his Cane, against which Mr. Otis defended himself, and returned the Compliment.

A close Engagement then ensued, and Mr. Otis having disarmed his Antagonist, several Persons in the Room prevented Mr. Otis from having fair Play, some of whom held him, while others struck with Cutlasses, Canes and other Weapons; and the Cry was Kill him! Kill him!

At this point, the Gazette writer said, “A young Gentleman, Mr. John Gridley,” came into the room and tried to protect Otis, but “was also attacked in the Manner Mr. Otis was.”

The crowd grew. “Robinson and those who were with him, retired through the back Door of the Coffee-House.—Mr. Otis and Mr. Gridley were carried off much wounded.”

The same column declared that most of the men in the room were “Officers of the Army, Navy and the Revenue.” The writer insisted that “the Plan of the intended and nearly executed Assassination of Mr. Otis, was concerted in Palmer’s Pasture.”

I’ve found a couple of references to that spot of Boston real estate. Once indeed a pasture, by 1769 it was a remnant empty lot on Pearl Street. The owner by inheritance was Thomas Palmer (1743-1820, shown above), who had married into the Royall family of Medford and later became a Loyalist. Palmer was also distantly related to the Hutchinson family.

However, I think the real significance of “Palmer’s Pasture” was that Palmer was the landlord of Customs Commissioner Charles Paxton. The 11 September Boston Gazette also included a paragraph said to have been “received from the Country before the Exploit on Tuesday Evening last.” It spoke of “Sir Charles Froth” (Paxton) and “Shan Ap-Morgan” (Robinson), who was supposedly going around “heavily armed” and making threats against “Candidus” (Samuel Adams).

In sum, the Gazette writer was broadly hinting that the Customs Commissioners had planned the violence in the British Coffee-House, with hopes of killing Otis. Which would have been quite the coincidence since Otis had threatened violence against Robinson just one week before in the same newspaper.

TOMORROW: But what did John Gridley say?

“Suddenly turned and attempted to take him by the Nose”

As quoted back here, in the 4 Sept 1769 Boston Gazette James Otis, Jr., made a novel natural-rights argument about John Robinson. He declared that if that Customs Commissioner “misrepresents me, I have a natural right if I can get no other satisfaction to break his head.”

In the 18 September Boston Chronicle, Robinson, addressing Otis directly, described what he did that Monday and the next day:

you strutted about the town, denouncing vengeance against the first Commissioner you should meet with.—On Tuesday you went to a shop, and asked, if I did not buy a stick there, and being told I had, you desired to have the fellow of it which you bought accordingly.—

The 11 September Boston Post-Boy contained Robinson’s description of how the two gentlemen finally crossed paths:

On the evening of the next day Tuesday, I went to the Coffee-house between the hours of 7 & 8, and seeing Mr. Otis without a sword, I went into a back room, where I laid mine aside, and immediately returned into the Public room.---

I then addressed myself to Mr. Otis, in these words or to this effect.—Some days ago you wanted a free conversation with me, now I want a free conversation with you:

He immediately stood up in a rage and said he was ready to answer me in any manner;

I replied have a little patience; and let me ask you whether, I did not repeatedly tell you when we met the other day, that if I had done you an injury, I was ready to give you that satisfaction you had a right to expect from a Gentleman.----How therefore could you publish the account in Edes and Gill’s paper of yesterday?

It was proposed by some persons, (his friends I suppose,) that we should go into a room.

I said, that I had been in a room with him once already; and perceiving that he frequently menaced me with his stick, I took him or at least attempted to take him by the nose.-----

The Boston Gazette’s 11 September report was of course sympathetic to Otis, but agreed on the basic details:

After a Proposal on the Part of Mr. Otis to decide this Controversy by themselves abroad, or in a separate Room, the former was refused, but the latter seemed to be consented to by Mr. Robinson, but very unexpectedly to Mr. Otis, and while he was following, Mr. Robinson in the Presence of the publick Company in the Coffee-Room, suddenly turned and attempted to take him by the Nose; and failing in the Attempt, he immediately struck at him with his Cane, against which Mr. Otis defended himself, and returned the Compliment.

The Evening-Post’s report was nearly identical but said that as Otis “was rising, Mr. Robinson…attempted to pull him by the Nose.”

Kenneth S. Greenberg has shown how nose-pulling had a strong meaning in genteel honor culture. It was a great insult as well as a physical pain. Greenberg focused on the ante-bellum American South, but that society inherited the dueling code of eighteenth-century Britain which Robinson and Otis were trying (somewhat clumsily) to follow.

TOMORROW: From nose to head.

[The picture above is “Poor old England endeavoring to reclaim his wicked American children,” published in London in 1777. Available from the Library of Congress, the British Museum, and, in color, the John Carter Brown Library.]

Hubbard on Black Soldiers at Bennington, 9 Oct.

Also at the Massachusetts Historical Society, tonight’s public lecture is “The Black Presence at the Battle of Bennington” by Phil Holland.

The event description says:

The Battle of Bennington, fought on August 16, 1777, was a critical patriot victory that led directly to the British surrender at Saratoga two months later. Led by Gen. John Stark, militia from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Vermont, and Continental troops under Col. Seth Warner soundly defeated British troops attempting to seize stores held at Bennington. This illustrated talk is the first treatment of the black presence at the battle, which extended from black soldiers from the Berkshires to the sources of the wealth that funded the New Hampshire troops.

Phil Holland is a native of Athol, Massachusetts, who now lives in Shaftsbury, Vermont. He is the author of A Guide to the Battle of Bennington and the Bennington Monument and continues to research that fight.

This event will start at 5:30 P.M. with a reception, and the talk is scheduled for 6:00. Admission is $10, but there is no charge for M.H.S. Fellows and Members or E.B.T. cardholders. Last-minute registration available through this link.

The Revolutionary Roots of the Brighton Cattle Market

Tonight at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the environmental history seminar will discuss Andrew Robichaud’s paper “Brighton Fair: The Life, Death, and Legacy of an Animal Suburb.”

This paper focuses on the great growth of Brighton, originally Cambridge’s “south precinct” or “Little Cambridge,” as a livestock market in the 1800s.

On the genesis of that market, Robichaud cites the work of local historian William P. Marchione, whose Bull in the Garden collects the traditions of butchers establishing the meat market to supply the Continental Army during the siege of Boston. Specifically, sources credit Jonathan Winship (1719-1784) and his son, also named Jonathan (1747-1814).

Documentation is harder to find, though in his article “When Cattle Was King” Marchione wrote of the Winships:

As early as 1777, as the records of the Army of New England indicate, the family’s two warehouses in Little Cambridge contained some 500 barrels of salted beef. So important was this meat supply to the revolutionary cause that the army posted soldiers to protect it against possible sabotage.

That year, Cambridge counted twelve white men and one black man living in the Winship household, the largest on the south side of the Charles River.

The 1882 Memorial History of Boston reported the Winship family was successful enough during the war to build a big house:

The Winship house, a mansion of considerable importance in its day, was erected in 1780 by Jonathan Winship, a farmer who cultivated a large tract of land in its vicinity, and who died Oct. 3, 1784, aged 65. . . . Jonathan Winship, Jr.,…contracted for the supply of beef to the French fleet that visited Boston shortly after the Revolutionary War.

In a 1982 paper in Agricultural History, “The Brighton Market,” David C. Smith and Anne E. Bridges noted that the Winships had arrived in the village a decade before the war. They had to be established to earn the Continental Army business:

Oral tradition has suggested that Brighton was the source of the Boston meat supplies as early as 1765. More probably the use of Brighton as the Boston abattoir dates from 1776 when the problem of feeding the besieging Continental army became difficult. Jonathan Winship, owner of a farm in Cambridge since 1765, took a contract to provide meat to the soldiers.

I can add that one Jonathan Winship had a direct link to Boston’s pre-Revolutionary resistance.

In the Whigs’ “Journal of the Times,” the 25 July 1769 entry described an altercation between “a grenadier of the 14th Regiment,” and “A country butcher who frequents the market.” Further entries identified the grenadier as Pvt. John Riley and the butcher as “Jonathan Winship of Cambridge.” The behavior described sounds more like a 22-year-old than a 50-year-old, but you never can tell.

Someday I’ll discuss the competing descriptions of that fight. For now, I’ll just note how the Brighton cattle market is another New England institution with a Sestercentennial connection.

“I have a natural right…to break his head”

As I described yesterday, in the 3 Sept 1769 Boston Gazette James Otis, Jr., rehashed a bunch of his grievances with the Customs office and even printed them at length.

In particular, Otis was certain that Collector Joseph Harrison had described him as “disaffected” in a report to the Board of Customs, and that those Commissioners had sent that report on to some office in London—he didn’t know which.

Why Otis was so convinced about this is unclear. Had he received a warning from a correspondent in London? Had the one Customs Commissioner who’d broken from the rest, John Temple, told him? Or had he made it all up?

It seems significant that Otis didn’t quote that report or give a date for it. Maybe he hadn’t really seen the text he described. Or perhaps the reference to him wasn’t really slanderous, except by linking him to some resistance within Boston, but he took it personally.

Harrison had offered an apology to Otis, insisting that he never wrote an “official report” meaning any such implication. Otis printed that note in the Gazette and responded with this fine screed:

Mr. Harrison is too contemptible in my opinion to take any further notice of at present, than to declare, that I think him if not a very wicked, yet a very weak old man. To charge a person by name as inimical to the Crown, and then give it under hand that no reflection was meant, is either lying or a mark of superannuation.

As to official reports, my charge against mr. Harrison was not confined to them: Had it been, he has no right to use my name in his official reports, unless I obstruct him in his office, which he knows I never did.—

The Commissioners too are far gone in the doctrine of official reports. And it seems to be a current opinion among them, that the most infamous slander imaginable, handed into their board, & sworn to no matter by whom, nor before what justice, is sufficient to support a memorial to the Treasury or Parliament.

It is strange considering the frequent conferences & communications between those able lawyers Gov. [Thomas] Hutchinson, Judge [Robert] Auchmuty, the Attorney-General, Jonathan [Sewall, who used the newspaper pseudonym] Philanthrop, and the Commissioners, these have not learnt law enough to know they have no right to scandalize their neighbours.——

’Tis stranger that Mr. [John] Robinson, even in his Welch clerkship, could not find out that if he “officially” or in any other way misrepresents me, I have a natural right if I can get no other satisfaction to break his head. None but such superlative blockheads as H. Hulton, C. Paxton, W. Burch, and J. Robinson, could think gentlemen amenable to them unless they hold under them.

With that last paragraph Otis invoked the genteel language of dueling (“satisfaction”) but then insisted that protocol didn’t apply to Commissioner Robinson. To “break his head” would show that Robinson was no gentleman.

Of course, Otis also sneered at Robinson as a Welshman and called all four hostile Customs Commissioners “superlative blockheads,” so he gave them plenty of reason to feel insulted. But the words “break his head” were a clear threat of violence.

COMING UP: Somebody’s head gets broken.

The Paragraphs James Otis Cooked Up

In his diary John Adams described how he spent the evening of Sunday, 3 Sept 1769, in the Edes and Gill print shop: “preparing for the Next Days Newspaper—a curious Employment. Cooking up Paragraphs, Articles, Occurences, &c.—working the political Engine!”

James Otis, Jr., and Samuel Adams evidently brought the young lawyer along as they prepared propaganda for the next day’s readers. Media historians often quote that entry in discussions of how Boston’s Whig press operated.

While that writing process might have been typical, the paragraphs that the Whig leaders came up with after that particular Sabbath had unusual consequences. What Otis wrote that night broke whatever gentlemen’s truce he’d forged the day before with the Commissioners of Customs.

Three items appeared over Otis’s signature on page 2 of the 4 September Boston Gazette. At the top of the first column, labeled “ADVERTISEMENT,” was a paragraph that began:

WHEREAS I have full evidence that [Commissioners] Henry Hulton, Charles Paxton, William Burch, and John Robinson, Esquires, have frequently and lately treated the character of all true North Americans in a manner that it not to be endured, by privately and publickly representing them as Traitors and Rebels, and in a general combination to revolt from Great Britain.

And whereas the said Henry, Charles, William, and John, without the least provocation or color, have represented me by name as inimical to the rights of the Crown, and disaffected to his Majesty…

Otis concluded by asking the government in London to “pay no kind of regard to any of the abusive misrepresentations of me or my country.” So there.

Next was the text of an 11 August letter from Joseph Harrison, the long-time Customs Collector, denying he’d meant to “cast any person reflection or censure” on Otis in a report to his bosses. Otis had asked Commissioner Robinson about that issue on Saturday and received no answer. In the newspaper he had more to say, which I’ll quote tomorrow.

The third item consisted of extracts from a 1761 deposition by Charles Paxton (shown above) about a political alliance of rival Customs officer Benjamin Barons, the Boston merchants, and Otis. I started out to explain that issue, and after two long paragraphs I realized the most important detail in 1769 was that nobody cared. Eight or more years before, Otis reportedly was heard to “speak disrespectfully and threateningly of the Governor.” So what? Gov. Francis Bernard had left Boston under a cloud. That political fight was over. Otis had won.

As far as I can tell, the accusations Otis was responding to hadn’t appeared in any local newspaper. There were actually very few mentions of him in the Customs office documents recently leaked from London. Those few references were mostly about how he had moderated town meetings in late 1768 just before and after the arrival of the troops.

It looks to me like Otis was seeing direct accusations against him in what were at most oblique descriptions of him leading a generally obstreperous town. Furthermore, he thought it was a good idea to publicize those charges of disloyalty instead of letting them fade away. This doesn’t seem like a canny, rational political response. It seems a manifestation of the manic mood that comes through in John Adams’s other diary comments that week.

TOMORROW: How Otis lashed out verbally.

“Otis indulged himself in all his Airs”

So far I’ve been discussing the affray between Customs official John Robinson and Boston politician James Otis, Jr., in the context of larger politics—the non-importation campaign in Boston, and the leaks of royal government documents from London.

But personal factors might have been even more important in how events unfolded. For those I turn to the diary of John Adams.

The day after Robinson and Otis had their private conversation over coffee was Sunday, 3 Sept 1769, and Adams wrote:

Heard Dr. [Samuel] Cooper in the forenoon, Mr. [Judah?] Champion of Connecticutt in the Afternoon and Mr. [Ebenezer] Pemberton in the Evening at the Charity Lecture.

Spent the Remainder of the Evening and supped with Mr. Otis, in Company with Mr. [Samuel] Adams, Mr. Wm. Davis, and Mr. Jno. Gill. The Evening spent in preparing for the Next Days Newspaper—a curious Employment. Cooking up Paragraphs, Articles, Occurences, &c.—working the political Engine!

Otis talks all. He grows the most talkative Man alive. No other Gentleman in Company can find a Space to put in a Word—as Dr. Swift expressed it, he leaves no Elbow Room. There is much Sense, Knowledge, Spirit and Humour in his Conversation. But he grows narrative, like an old Man. Abounds with Stories.

The next day, Monday, Adams and his social club met at the home of Dr. James Pecker (1724-1794). This club often talked about politics, though Pecker was a mild Loyalist. Adams wrote:

Spent the Evening at Dr. Peckers, with the Clubb. Mr. Otis introduced a Stranger, a Gentleman from Georgia, recommended to him by the late Speaker of the House in that Province.

Otis indulged himself in all his Airs. Attacked the Aldermen, [Henderson] Inches and [Samuel] Pemberton, for not calling a Town meeting to consider the Letters of the Governor, General, Commodore, Commissioners, Collector, Comptroller &c.— charged them with Timidity, Haughtiness, Arbitrary Dispositions, and Insolence of Office.

But not the least Attention did he shew to his Friend the Georgian.—No Questions concerning his Province, their Measures against the Revenue Acts, their Growth, Manufactures, Husbandry, Commerce—No general Conversation, concerning the Continental Opposition—Nothing, but one continued Scene of bullying, bantering, reproaching and ridiculing the Select Men.—Airs and Vapours about his Moderatorship [of town meetings], and Membership, and [Thomas] Cushings Speakership.—There is no Politeness nor Delicacy, no Learning nor Ingenuity, no Taste or Sense in this Kind of Conversation.

We can see Otis’s concern about the documents from London here, but Adams said he didn’t show a concern for the larger struggle. What’s more, Adams, who generally admired Otis, was really put off by how he was dominating all conversations with his stories and criticism of other Whigs.

Otis’s modern biographers, such as John J. Waters, have noted earlier moments when he acted irrationally, when his political pronouncements shifted suddenly and surprised his allies. Otis may have been dealing with bipolar disorder, and in this early September going through a period of manic behavior. Which casts a different light on what he did the next day.

TOMORROW: The paragraphs they cooked up.

Big News for Boston History Fans

The Atlas of Boston History is a big book. I just got my copy, and it’s 14 inches tall and 11 inches wide, 224 full-color pages of maps, charts, and other illustrations of Boston history.

I got a copy because I worked with editor Nancy S. Seasholes on the page spread about Revolutionary Boston. You can see the whole list of topics and contributors, and several sample spreads, at the website for the book. Needless to say, a project this big has been several years in the making.

The Atlas of Boston History will be officially launched at the Boston Public Library’s central building on Thursday, 24 October, at 6:30 P.M. Nancy will speak about the project, and there will be a question-and-answer session with her and contributors. (I hope to participate, but I’ll have to come from another event in Cambridge.)

Other Atlas events include:

• Wednesday, 30 October, 7:00 P.M.: Porter Square Books, Cambridge, author talk
• Thursday, 14 November, 5:30 P.M.: Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, author talk and panel

“Battle of Daniels Farm” in Blackstone, 5-6 Oct.

This weekend, 5-6 October, there will be a Revolutionary War encampment and battle reenactment at the Daniels Farmstead in Blackstone (originally part of Mendon), Massachusetts.

This event won’t recreate an actual battle. In fact, the scenario is based on an imaginary contingency: the British army holding Newport has driven the New England forces out of Rhode Island. The redcoats are trying to inflict further damage on American and French units in the Blackstone River Valley to relieve pressure on the port back in Crown hands.

This event also includes demonstrations of such crafts as blacksmithing, joinery, tinsmithing, spinning, and gunsmithing. There will be fencing demonstrations and artillery units showing how men worked together to fire their cannon. Battle re-enactments are scheduled for both Saturday and Sunday, quite possibly with different outcomes.

There’s also an educational component of this reenactment, which is partly sponsored by a grant through the Blackstone Valley Regional Vocational Technical High School. On Friday students will view the crafts demonstrations after I brief them about how apprenticeships worked in the eighteenth century.

On Saturday, 5 October, I’ll speak in the high school on the topic “Beyond Battle Road: The Massachusetts Militia’s Other Marches in 1774 and 1775.” That session will be first and foremost for the reenactors themselves, but anyone can attend as long as seats are available. Blackstone Valley Tech High is at 65 Pleasant Street in Upton, and that talk is scheduled to start at 7:00 P.M.

But of course the primary attraction of this weekend is the battle reenactment out at the farmstead. The camp will be open from 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. on both days. Food will be sold on the site. Vendors will have period wares. Admission to the reenactment will be $8.00 per day or $10.00 for a two-day pass, with children under twelve admitted free. There will be free parking at the J.F.K. Elementary School at 200 Lincoln Street in Blackstone and buses shuttling visitors to the farmstead continuously while the camp is open.

The weather report for this weekend predicts that both Saturday and Sunday will be dry and 60°F or above, so fine weather for fall in New England.

Breen on “Revolutionary Communities” in Worcester, 3 Oct.

On Thursday, 3 October, T. H. Breen will speak about “Revolutionary Communities: Where Americans Won Independence” at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester. This talk is based on his new book, The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America.

The event announcement says that the book “argues that without the participation of ordinary people during the colonial rebellion, there would have been no victory over Great Britain,” which is hardly surprising. The publisher’s page for the book is clearer about its focus:

Far from the actions of the Continental Congress and the Continental Army, [ordinary people] took responsibility for the course of the revolution. They policed their neighbors, sent troops and weapons to distant strangers committed to the same cause, and identified friends and traitors. By taking up the reins of power but also setting its limits, they ensured America’s success.

So it seems to be a study of the local committees and authorities who maintained order during the war.

LitHub has an extract, which says in part:

The new men took charge of community affairs before they became revolutionaries, before most of them even openly advocated national independence. They were caught up by the sudden collapse of British authority outside a few major port cities. They learned on the job, gaining a measure of self­-confidence through the daily challenge of policing politically suspicious neighbors, recruiting Continental soldiers, overseeing the local militia, collecting taxes, and supplying soldiers with food and blankets.

It was this common experience that allows us to generalize about revolutionary voices. To be sure, we recognize profound regional differences, some greater than others. South Carolina was not Massachusetts. Moreover, records in the South are not as full as those surviving in the Middle States and New England. We might note religious and economic variations or contrasting racial statistics. But such distinctions and uneven records should not dis­courage us from looking at the Revolution as a whole. After all, one can examine resistance in local communities, while at the same time making broad generalizations about a revolutionary people at war.

T. H. Breen is the John Kluge Professor of American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress, the James Marsh Professor-at-Large at the University of Vermont, and the Founding Director of the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern University. He has taught at many leading universities and written many books about early America.

(You can watch me introduce Tim speaking about President George Washington’s fraught 1789 visit to Gov. John Hancock at the Cambridge Forum here.)

This talk is scheduled to start at 7:00 P.M., and there will be a book-signing afterwards. The A.A.S. is at 185 Salisbury Street in Worcester. There is parking on Regent Street and in the lot at 90 Park Avenue. This event is free and open to the public.

“Copies of which are lately come over here”

On 20 Jan 1769, William Bollan, the Massachusetts Council’s agent—i.e., lobbyist—in London, sent urgent copies of seven letters to the senior member of the Council, Samuel Danforth.

Six of those letters were from Gov. Francis Bernard (shown here), the seventh from Gen. Thomas Gage. They described the period late in 1768 after British army regiments had arrived in Boston and local authorities were stubbornly refusing to help house them. The legislature had Edes and Gill print those letters for public consumption in April.

As Massachusetts Whigs saw it, that leak revealed how Bernard had held them up to the ministry as disloyal troublemakers even as he was promising that he spoke up for their interests. None of the Whigs were really shocked; back in May 1768 a Boston Gazette writer had said that Bernard “writes double Letters, pro and con, to be used as Occasion serves.” Nevertheless, the Whigs acted like this was a huge betrayal.

The governor's stretched credibility was torn to bits. He was already wishing for an easier, more lucrative post than Massachusetts, so he asked to be recalled to Britain for consultations. Bernard sailed away at the start of August.

Meanwhile, on 21 and 23 June, Bollan sent more documents from London. This batch included earlier letters from Gov. Bernard and dispatches from the Commissioners of Customs about all the opposition they faced in Boston, including the Liberty riot of July 1768. There were even a few anonymous letters describing Boston town meetings. Those arrived in mid-August.

That leak was what prompted James Otis, Jr., to seek out some of the Customs Commissioners. When Otis finally sat down with Commissioner John Robinson over a private “dish of coffee” on Saturday, 2 September, he explained he was responding to “the Board’s memorials to the Treasury, copies of which are lately come over here.”

According to Robinson, Otis demanded to know if he or the other Commissioners had represented him “as a rebel and a traitor” in their reports. Robinson said he couldn’t recall mentioning Otis by name at all.

The men then went back and forth over protocol. After Otis said that Commissioner William Burch had just declined to answer any questions at all, Robinson chided him for approaching the officials separately. “Why did you not apply to us as a Board, as your business is altogether official?”

Otis answered: “We might have had some altercation, which might have been construed an insult upon you as a Board, which I was determined to avoid.” What sort of “altercation” he imagined is unclear. Otis then went on to criticize things Bernard had written about him years before.

“That is your own business,” Robinson recalled saying. “I have nothing to do with it,--you and I have always been in different Boxes,---and though we might disagree in politics it is no reason that we should think ill of one another as Men,-----and I never had a bad opinion of you and a Man.”

Otis insisted, “I annually take the oath of allegeance to my King, and am resolved to clear my character.”

“If you think that I have done you any injury,” Robinson said, "I am ready to give you the satisfaction you have a right to expect from a Gentleman.”

Otis asked about remarks by “The old fellow [Joseph] Harrison the Collector,” which Robinson declined to answer. Then Otis declared, “I have been used very ill, and I am determined to have justice.”

Robinson closed the conversation, as he recalled it, by repeating his promise “to give you the satisfaction you have a right to expect from a Gentleman.” That was the language of honor. Was it also the language of dueling?

COMING UP: James Otis in a mood.

“He wanted a free conversation with us”

After his fight with James Otis, Jr., became a big deal, Customs Commissioner John Robinson published his version of what had led up to it. That account was dated 7 Sept 1769 and appeared in Green and Russell’s Boston Post-Boy four days later.

According to Robinson, on Friday, 1 September, he arrived at the Board of Customs’s meeting room in Concert Hall about 10:30 A.M. and was told that Otis had come by that morning and asked to speak to him and a fellow Customs Commissioner, Henry Hulton. After Hulton came in, the two men sent “Green the Messenger”—probably Bartholomew Green—to find Otis.

About 11:00, Otis arrived at the door with Samuel Adams. The board’s secretary invited him in, but he declined. The two Commissioners went to the door, and Robinson said:

Your servant, Gentlemen; pray what is your business with us?----

Mr. Otis answered, that he wanted a free conversation with us:

I replied, It is necessary that we should first know upon what business, Will you not walk into a room Gentlemen?

He answered, that his business was of such a nature, that it could not be transacted in our own houses, and he could not mention it until he met us: and he proposed, that each of us should bring with him a friend, and he would bring a friend with him.

I then asked him, whether his business was official?

He answered, he did not understand what I meant by official:

I replied, does it relate to us as Commissioners?

He said, it is related to his character, he wanted a free conversation with us on that subject, and that he was to meet Mr. [William] Burch [another Customs Commissioner] at the coffee-house the next morning at seven o’clock.

I answered, that as I lived in the country, I did not know whether I could attend at that time, and Mr. Hulton [who lived in Brookline] said the same in respect to himself.

Mr. Otis then said any other time will do.

We answered, we would see him at a convenient opportunity, and then parted.

I share that all to show the genteel, even arch, tone of the interaction, and to suggest how frustrating it must have been to figure out what Otis was on about. It’s notable that he didn’t have a particular beef with Robinson—he was making the same approach to three of the five Commissioners. (Of the remaining two, John Temple was a political ally of the Whigs and Charles Paxton a longtime foe, so Otis probably didn’t see approaching them as worthwhile.)

The next morning, Robinson decided he’d go to the coffee house at the same time as Burch, but he arrived late, closer to 7:30, and found Burch coming out. He and Otis ended up alone in a back room sharing a “dish of coffee.” [Because you need some kind of caffeine for a breakfast meeting.]

Finally Otis got to his grievance. In Robinson’s recollection he said:

I am informed that I have been represented to government by your Board, as a rebel and a traitor, and I have two or three questions to put to you, that I think, as a gentleman, I have a right to an answer, or at least to ask. The first is, whether your Board as Commissioners, Gentlemen, or in any other manner, ever represented me in that light, in any of their memorials or letters to the Treasury.

There had been another leak from London, and Otis was taking things personally.

TOMORROW: The Customs Commissioners’ reports.

James Otis and John Robinson

Before the month ends, I must address the sestercentennial of a significant moment in Revolutionary politics. Digging into Harvard students’ misbehavior in a Cambridge tavern, fun as that was, put off the important task of examining top officeholders’ misbehavior in a Boston coffeehouse.

I speak of the fight between Boston Whig leader James Otis, Jr., and Customs Commissioner John Robinson on 5 September 1769.

Otis was, of course, the loudest and boldest voice against Parliament’s new measures for North America. He started his political career as an advocate for the provincial government but turned against the administration of Gov. Francis Bernard and became the preferred attorney of Boston’s discontented merchants.

In the 1760s Otis dominated Boston town meetings and the Massachusetts General Court. He was a driving force behind the Stamp Act Congress and the Massachusetts Convention of Towns. Though he didn’t coin the phrase “No taxation without representation,” Otis established that principal as crux of the imperial debate.

As for Robinson, he rose through appointments within the royal government. He appears to have been born in Wales—at least Samuel Adams attacked him in print with ethnic stereotypes of a Welshman. He may also have had legal training. In 1764 Robinson arrived in Newport, Rhode Island, as collector for the Customs service. Naturally, enforcing laws against smuggling made him unpopular with local merchants and mariners, and the Stamp Act turmoil drove him out of town.

When the British government created a Board of Customs for all of North America in 1767, it appointed Robinson one of the five commissioners. He relocated to Boston, then occasionally had to relocate to Castle William because of more mob violence. He did find some friendly faces, however. By 1769 Robinson was engaged to marry Nancy Boutineau, daughter of a merchant of Huguenot descent.

As described back here, in August 1769 the Boston Whigs had managed to drive Gov. Bernard out of Massachusetts by publishing his letters to the ministry. They pushed on with their campaign against the Townshend duties, pressuring all merchants to sign a non-importation agreement.

The Customs office worked with Boston Chronicle printer John Mein to weaken that boycott by releasing data on what merchants were still importing. Meanwhile, the Whig press was running extracts of Bernard’s letters, “Journal of the Times” dispatches reprinted from newspapers in other provinces, and attacks on importers. As discussed here, the newspaper debate had already turned violent when Mein attacked Boston Gazette printer John Gill in January 1768. (James Otis was wrapped up in that fight, too.)

Two hundred fifty years ago this month, Otis had a personal bone to pick with the Customs Commissioners. On Saturday, 2 Sept 1769, John Adams wrote in his diary:

Heard that Messrs. Otis and Adams went Yesterday to Concert Hall, and there had each of them a Conference with each of the Commissioners, and that all the Commissioners met Mr. Otis, this Morning at 6 O Clock at the British Coffee House. The Cause, and End of these Conferences, are Subjects of much Speculation in Town.

Indeed, there was enough interest for the Boston Chronicle to report on 4 September:

We hear that on Friday forenoon, Mr. Otis and Mr. Adams, waited on the Commissioners of his Majesty’s Customs here, and the next morning early a meeting was held, between two of the Commissioners and the above Gentlemen, at the British Coffee-House, King-street, the design of which has not yet transpired.

TOMORROW: One side of that discussion.

How to Remember Our Revolution

Here are a couple of interesting newspaper articles from this week.

In a local section of the Boston Globe, Ben Jacques wrote about the stories of enslaved individuals in this region’s towns as preserved in old burying-grounds. This approach brings home the overlap between slavery in eighteenth-century New England and the celebrated Revolutionary movement on the local scale.

In Charleston, South Carolina, the Post and Courier reported on the launch of the state’s Revolutionary War Sestercentennial Commission. As the article notes, “more battles took place in the Palmetto State than almost anywhere else.” (The other claimants are New Jersey and New York, each with “more than 200 separate skirmishes and battles,” according to the American Battlefields Trust. The exact count depends, of course, on how one defines each fight.)

South Carolina was undoubtedly a major battleground. The British military launched two major campaigns to take Charleston, the first thwarted in 1776 and the second successful in 1780. In the second half of the war there was continuous fighting in the state, including major battles like Camden, Ninety Six, Kings Mountain, and Eutaw Springs.

The state commission should also be able to find political events in the colony leading up to the outbreak of war. Charleston was the fourth largest port in North America, the colony’s rice planters among the richest class of colonists. South Carolinians participated in the Stamp Act Congress and the non-importation movement against the Townshend duties, as this 1769 document attests.

For the present, however, the South Carolina commission is defining itself against Boston. The article even quotes one participant this way:

“Boston and Lexington and Concord stole the Revolutionary War. We’ve got to steal it back. Fortunately, the facts are on our side,” said Doug Bostick, executive director of the South Carolina Battleground Preservation Trust and a member of the commission.

Likewise, the article states, “Charleston even had its own protest of Britain’s tea tax weeks before Boston’s famous Tea Party in 1773.”

America’s first signifiant public protest against tea importing came on 3 November when a Boston crowd attacked the Clarke family’s warehouse, demanding they resign as consignees. East India Company tea arrived in Boston, the big North American port closest to Britain, on 28 November. Local Whigs immediately began holding massive meetings and patrolling the docks.

Tea chests reached Charleston on 1 December. Two days later, the merchants and politicians of Charleston had a meeting and agreed to store that tea, taking it off the ships but for legal purposes pretending it wasn’t unloaded.

Back in Massachusetts, royal officials didn’t allow such a compromise, producing the more dramatic destruction of the tea on 16 December. Parliament’s response to that act included the Boston Port Bill, Massachusetts Government Act, and other actions that led to the outbreak of war. In—it’s really hard to deny—Massachusetts.

I think a South Carolina commission can and should define itself according to how the Revolution unfolded in that state. There must be a better way to start than “launching a decade-long education campaign in March, the 250th anniversary of the Boston Massacre.” Maybe the May arrival of Charleston’s William Pitt statue. And the South Carolina sestercentennial can run more than a decade, all the way to the 250th anniversary of the British evacuation in December 2032.

Earthquakes and a Volcano in 1783

Early this month the European Geosciences Union shared a blog essay by Katrin Kleemann on Europe’s frightening geological events of 1783:

Southern Italy and Sicily experience regular earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. However, the earthquakes of early 1783 did not follow the normal pattern of one strong quake and weaker fore- and/or aftershocks. Instead, there was a seismic sequence of five strong earthquakes. A seismic sequence is an unusual event, in which one earthquake increases the stress on other parts of the fault system, which triggers subsequent earthquakes. This process is called Coulomb stress transfer.

As a sign of how dire contemporary observers thought of these quakes, Kleemann quotes an account sent to the Royal Society by Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies:

The Earthquakes in Italy were, perhaps, the most terrible and destructive of any that have happened since the Creation of the World. Four hundred towns, and about four or five times as many villages, were destroyed in this dreadful calamity. The number of lives lost, are estimated at between forty and fifty thousand.

Hamilton had already published papers about Italy’s earthquakes and volcanos. In 1770 He had even won a medal from the Royal Society for one. But he’s better known in history for his second wife’s love affair with Lord Nelson, fictionalized by Susan Sontag in The Volcano Lover.

Kleemann continues:

At the time, it was believed that sulfuric fogs were a precursor to strong earthquakes, a dry fog was observed in the days before the 1755 Lisbon earthquake – most likely produced by an eruption of the Icelandic volcano Katla. A similar fog was also reported in Calabria on February 4, 1783.

We now know that the Icelandic Laki Fissure eruption, of 1783, released large amounts of gases and ash, which were carried towards continental Europe via the jet stream. However, news of this took almost three months to reach Europe, by which time the dry fog had vanished again, making it difficult to explain the phenomenon at the time.

The sheer number of unusual subsurface phenomena observed during this time seemed overwhelming. Many theories were developed to explain the “year of awe,” one suggested the Calabria earthquakes had created a crack in the Earth, which was releasing the sulfuric fog observed over Europe. . . .

In the late eighteenth century, it was believed that all volcanoes, most often coined “fire (spitting) mountains,” were connected via fire channels inside the Earth. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions were believed to be caused by chemical reactions—between gas or metals and water for instance—in subterranean passages and caverns.

As discussed back here, in early 1784 Benjamin Franklin linked the Laki volcano to the dry fog and speculated that it affected the weather in Europe. (Of course, he also suggested the atmospheric haze might have been caused by meteors, so we mustn’t think Franklin got everything right.)

“There was an intention to extirpate them”?

At the Age of Revolutions blog, Jeffrey Ostler discusses how American Whigs’ fear of being “enslaved” or subjugated by the British Crown at the start of the Revolutionary War was mirrored by Native nations’ fears of being wiped out by settlers.

He starts with a report of a gathering of Native leaders at the central Cherokee town of Chota:

Taking a wampum belt in hand, the Shawnee spoke of a long history of injustice at the hands of the “Virginians,” a term many Native people applied to greedy settlers from Virginia and other colonies. The “red people,” he said, had once been “Masters of the whole Country,” but now they “hardly possessed ground enough to stand on.” Not only did the Virginians want their land, the Shawnee contended, they wanted their lives. It is “plain,” he said, that “there was an intention to extirpate them.” Although the term genocide had not been invented, this is precisely what the Shawnee feared Native people were up against: a project that threatened their very existence. . . .

As I was researching my recent book, Surviving Genocide, I found several examples of what I call “an Indigenous consciousness of genocide.” In March 1776, for example, a Cherokee leader named Dragging Canoe told a British agent that his nation “had but a small spot of ground left to stand upon” and that the colonists’ unrelenting demands for land proved that it was their “Intention…to destroy [the Cherokees] from being a people.”

Three years later, as the Continental Army was about to invade Iroquoia, the homeland of the Six Nations (Haudenosaunees), Mohawk leader Joseph Brant wrote of his “determination to fight the Bostonians,” another designation for rapacious colonists, observing that “it is their intention to exterminate the people of the Longhouse.”

I also discovered that U.S. officials were well aware that Native people were making allegations like those of Dragging Canoe and Joseph Brant. Evidence of their knowledge was sitting in plain sight in the first written treaty between the United States and an Indian nation—the 1778 Fort Pitt Treaty with the Delaware Nation. Article 6 of the treaty addresses the charge that “it is the design of the [United] States…to extirpate the Indians and take possession of their country.” The text, which U.S. commissioners wrote, attributes this allegation to the “enemies of the United States” (i.e., the British), who “have endeavored by every artifice in their power” to convince the Indians of this “false suggestion,” as if Native people wouldn’t have arrived at this conclusion on their own. To convince the Delawares of U.S. benevolence, the treaty promises to guarantee Delaware rights to their lands and offers to consider creating a fourteenth state for Indians.

Of course, the U.S. of A. didn’t create a state for Native citizens, and it took much of the territory that early treaties reserved for Indians. Whigs’ fear of “slavery” has been recognized as overblown—a tone-deaf metaphor that got out of hand. Natives’ fears of being pushed off their land and extirpated were unfortunately much more prescient.

Folks around here might quibble with Ostler’s description of the 1778 Fort Pitt Treaty as the first between the U.S. and a Native nation. The Treaty of Watertown, negotiated by the state of Massachusetts on behalf of the Continental Congress, was finalized in July 1776. But that was so early the Congress hadn’t yet set up a formal process for treaty negotiation and ratification, and it often escapes notice.

“What an unparallel’d Stock of Assurance & Self-Confidence”

In the fall of 1769, Boston’s non-importation controversy heated up. The town’s merchants, supported and pushed by the radical Whigs, had agreed not to order anything but necessities from Britain until Parliament repealed the Townshend duties.

Boston’s merchants had set up a committee of inspection to enforce that boycott, which had the added effect of showing the merchants of other towns that they were serious.

Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette ran on the front of each issue a short list of the merchants who hadn’t signed on. One of those names was the bookseller John Mein.

Mein, who also published the Boston Chronicle newspaper, responded by running documents from the Customs office showing what goods were being imported and by whom. Many of Boston’s most prominent merchants appeared in those documents, and they filled the newspapers with angry denials that they had actually imported anything. Or if they had, they had very good reasons.

Few of those angry denials were as angry and denialist as what Francis Green (1742-1809) published in the Boston Evening-Post on 25 Sept 1769, two hundred fifty years ago today. Mein had published Green’s manifest in late August. Green responded with a denial in the Boston Gazette on 4 September. Mein answered in his Chronicle on 7 September and then, when no reply appeared, again on 18 September.

Green then unleashed this magnificent diatribe:

To the PUBLIC.

A Most thorough Disdain of John Mein, is the true Cause of my not having hitherto given any Attention to his late public impertinent and arrogant Queries and Objections.

What an unparallel’d Stock of Assurance & Self-Confidence must this contemptible Fellow be possessed of, to imagine himself entitled to call, Time after Time, with the most audacious Effrontery, upon one and another of his Superiors, for Answers to the most pert and saucy Questions that ever issued from the conceited, empty Noddle, of a most profound Blockhead!

Who gave this Mushroom Judge, Authority, to summon even a Chimney-Sweeper to his ridiculous Tribunal? or wantonly, presumptuously, and very fallaciously to assume the respectable Title of The Public, in his romantic and indecent Addresses to an affronted Community? From whence does this so late an abject and Cap-in-Hand Beggar of Favours in a strange Country, derive the Shadow of Right, to put on a dictatorial Air, and publickly to insult his Benefactors? Ingratitude, Perverseness, and the most obstinate Self-Sufficiency, with a large Share of egregious Folly, can alone account for such Insolence and Stupidity; to the natural Consequence of which I drop him with ineffable Contempt.—

But lest any Part of the Public should be deceived by his Insinuations respecting my Importation in the Susanna, H. Johnson, Master. I now assure the World, that, (tho’ I hold not myself so cheap as to yield any Account to John Mein) if any Gentleman is yet unsatisfied, and chuses to apply either to the Committee of Merchants or to me, he may and shall be convinced, beyond all Possibility of Doubt, that I did not deviate from the Agreement in any Instance, of Course did not import any Tea.

But as I consider the entering into any kind of Contest with John Mein, as too great a Stoop, and as any Notice being taken of him, even in Opposition, may tend to make him of some little Consequence, and seems to be what he is aiming at, the Public, will, I doubt not, excuse my adding to the general Neglect of him, by never answering any of his future Publications, even though his consummate Impudence, should prompt him to be more vulgarly scurrilous, than he has already repeatedly been to the Committee of Merchants.

FRANCIS GREEN.
Sept. 20, 1769.

Green thus attacked Mein as an upstart mechanic, a recent arrival in Boston, and a purveyor of fake news who didn’t deserve to question a gentleman like himself.

For all his anger, however, Green proved to be a less than staunch supporter of non-importation. He had brought in proscribed goods. According to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, “he was dropped from [the Whigs’] ranks in 1769 for violating the non-importation agreement.” By May 1770 Green was probably arguing to end the boycott, and in early 1774 he was among the Loyalists voting to have the town meeting quash its committee of correspondence.

During the siege of Boston, Green stayed in town with the British military, was an officer in a Loyalist militia company, and evacuated to Halifax. He became just as much of a Loyalist as John Mein.

“Signally marked by idleness dissipation & intemperance”

Yesterday I quoted two letters that relatives of Charles Adams wrote at the end of May 1789, discussing his predilection to get into trouble at Harvard College.

Meanwhile, in Cambridge Prof. Eliphalet Pearson wrote the following entry into his “Journal of Disorders” with the date of 29 May:

In the evening Russell, Adams 1, Blake first & second, Sparhawk, & Ellery, went to Bradish’s [tavern], & there supped with one Green, an Englishman. The expense was mutual.

About 3 o’clock next morning the company left the house, & on their way to College grossly insulted the President by shouts & yells, challenges, imprecations, curses, threats of laying siege to, burning undermining, and burning his house, by throwing clubs & stones.

In College yard Mr. Abbot found Green & Sparhawk conducting Russell, naked, to his chamber.

Russell, being principal in these disorders, was rusticated 2d. June, & the other scholars punished 6/ each.

The faculty minutes officially repeated this account while leaving out the most interesting detail:

1. Upon examination had it appeared that Russell 1st with several others repaired on the evening of the 29th of May to the anchor tavern in Cambridge, and there, contrary to the law, supped and drank wine; that their conduct, at said tavern, was noisy and profane; that about three o’clock, the next morning, the company separated, and that a part of the same, with tumult, outcry, and abuse, highly insulted the authority and government of this Society, on their return to the College; in all which disorders and outrage said Russell was principal.

And whereas said Russell’s whole Collegiate course has been signally marked by idleness dissipation & intemperance; notwithstanding there various advices exhortation and discipline that have been used to reclaim him, and whereas such an example is highly injurious to this Society, Therefore,

Voted, that Russell be and he hereby is rusticated.

2. Voted, that Adams 1st, Blake 1st, Blake 2d Sparhawk and Ellery be punished 6/ each for going to a Tavern and being in noisy company late at night.

Memo. The sentence upon Russell was executed publickly, in the Chapel, in the usual mode, immediately after morning prayer June 2d.

This is the event that led to the recent myth of Charles Adams and friends running naked through Harvard Yard. As you can see, only one student was “naked,” and that wasn’t Adams. It was Daniel Russell, whose parallel but worse career of misbehavior at Harvard I’ve been slyly dragging along through this series.

Son of prominent merchant Thomas Russell, this young man had already been suspended from the college once and fined numerous times. He never graduated. He went into a general mercantile business on Long Wharf in Boston with John Soley, but a Masonic profile of Soley said, “The result was not favorable.” Russell died in 1804, aged thirty-five, unmarried.

It looks like the faculty couldn’t determine for certain which of the other students made all the noise and thus could do nothing more than fine them for having been in company with whoever did make that noise. That didn’t stop those scholars’ college careers. George and Francis Blake and William Pepperell Sparhawk, who had tried to get the unclothed Russell back to his dorm, all graduated in 1789. Abraham Redwood Ellery graduated two years later.

Charles Adams also graduated in the summer of 1789. At his family’s urging, he didn’t stay for commencement, which usually involved celebratory dinners on an even grander scale. Instead, the Adams family whisked Charles off to New York, where he was to read the law.

[The picture above is a study by the Danish artist Johan Edvard Mandelberg (1730-1786), courtesy of the Harvard Museums.]

“I have many anxious hours for Charles”

In early 1789, as I’ve been chronicling, Charles Adams had a couple more run-ins with the authorities of Harvard College.

Even though those incidents didn’t appear on the official faculty minutes or Charles’s permanent record, word got back to his family. That prompted a new set of conversations and correspondence. Again, we have only hints of what they knew.

On 2 May 1789, John Quincy Adams’s diary says: “Wrote to my brother Charles.” That letter doesn’t survive, but on 27 May he told their cousin William Cranch:

[With respect?] to Charles the tender solicitude, which you feel in regard to his conduct is only an additional evidence of a disposition, which I have long known to be peculiarly yours. it adds to the number of obligations for which I feel myself indebted to you, but it cannot add any thing to the settled opinion which I have of the excellency of your heart.—

I wrote him a very serious Letter three weeks ago and conversed with him at Haverhill upon the subject in such a manner as must I think lead him to be more cautious. However I depend much more upon the alteration which is soon to take place in his situation, than upon any advice or counsel, that I can ever give him. I am well convinced that if any thing can keep him within the limits of regularity, it will be his knowlege of my fathers being [near him and the?] fear of being discovered by him.—

The “alteration” John Q. wrote about was Charles’s impending graduation that summer. The family had already planned for Charles to move to New York, where his father was serving as Vice President, and study the law there.

We might marvel at the idea that New York City would offer fewer temptations than Cambridge, but the Adams family consensus was clear—the problem wasn’t Charles so much as Charles’s companions at college.

Abigail Adams expressed her feelings to John Q. on 30 May:

I have many anxious hours for Charles, and not the fewer, for the new scene of life into which he is going, tho I think it will be of great service to have him with his Father, & more to take him intirely away from his acquaintance. I have written to him upon some late reports which have been circulated concerning him. I hope they are without foundation, but such is the company in which he is seen that he cannot fail to bear a part of the reproach even if he is innocent.

The letter that Abigail wrote to Charles doesn’t survive, either.

Abigail actually opened that topic by expressing concern for her youngest son, Thomas Boylston Adams. As I’ve written, his college disciplinary record was even cleaner than John Quincy’s—he hadn’t done anything! But still a mother worried:

I must request you in my absence to attend to your Brother Tom, to watch over his conduct & prevent by your advice & kind admonitions, his falling a prey to vicious Company. at present he seems desirious of persueing his studies preserving a character and avoiding dissipation, but no youth is secure whilst temptations surround him, and no age of Life but is influenced by habits & example, even when they think their Characters formed.

Even as Charles’s relatives wrote to him, however, he was getting in trouble again at the Blue Anchor Tavern.

TOMORROW: Naked in Harvard Yard.

“A snow ball was sent against the chapel windows”

As I wrote back here, in December 1788 Harvard professor Eliphalet Pearson began to keep a “Journal of disorders &c.”

It’s possible Pearson had assembled a similar notebook previously and it just doesn’t survive. But I think internal evidence strongly suggests that this journal was a response to an extraordinary spate of student disturbances in the 1788-89 academic year.

The most prominent study of this document is Leon Jackson’s “The Rights of Man and the Rites of Youth: Fraternity and Riot at Eighteenth-Century Harvard,” published in the History of Higher Education Annual in 1995 and then slightly anachronistically in The American College in the Nineteenth Century. (Thanks to Boston 1775 reader Ed Bell for alerting me to the second, more easily read publication.) Jackson treats the record as an undifferentiated whole, documenting a “day after day” litany of drinking, vandalism, and rudeness.

I think it’s more striking that the disorder of the 1788-89 year tapered off abruptly. From June to December 1789, Prof. Pearson recorded only one more disciplinary item in his journal, and he added only one in all of 1790. (Both involved Benjamin Foisson Trapier, a younger brother of Paul, who ended up never graduating.) The journal has no entries for 1791 or all of 1792 until December.

Thus, while we can look at the overall nature of Harvard student disturbances as Jackson did, we should also ask why those events clustered and died off. What made 1788-89 such a troublesome time for the Harvard faculty?

The first incidents Pearson recorded involved a faculty member breaking up a party in a dormitory, the faculty punishing one of the students involved, then that entire class protesting at prayers or lecture by making noise or throwing things. This happened with the juniors, then the sophomores. But tutors had broken up such parties before without seeing such a backlash. Why was this winter different?

Historians have paid a lot of attention to Harvard student activism in the pre-Revolutionary decade: the vandalism of Gov. Francis Bernard’s portrait in 1765, the “Butter Rebellion” of 1766, the identification of a “rebellion tree” in 1768, and so on. The political atmosphere of that period seems to have made the students unusually militant about their own grievances.

Was the same dynamic at work in 1788-89? The economy was still pretty bad. The Shays Rebellion had occurred a couple of years before. The national government was changing. Did that social environment produce a more militant student body? One problem with that theory is that the Harvard student body came largely from the socioeconomic class opposed to popular resistance.

Another possible factor was individual dynamics. I noted yesterday how a couple of the troublemakers in early 1789 came from South Carolina. Before the Revolution, those boys might have gone to Britain for their college experience. Now they were in Cambridge. Were scholars from outside New England more apt to push back against the Harvard establishment?

Pearson named some particular troublemakers, but he also described entire classes protesting en masse. Even before this winter, John Quincy Adams had noted how the freshman class disrupted the sophomore class recitations simply for the sake of rivalry. Such group behavior seems to have been a form of bonding among the boys.

Leon Jackson’s main finding concerned fraternal organizations such as Phi Beta Kappa, which came to Harvard in the early 1780s. Several other student social groups appeared at this time. Jackson said that students who were in fraternal societies were less prone to bad behavior. Looking over the names in Pearson’s journal and on the Phi Beta Kappa roll, I agree that there’s only a little overlap. One exception, appearing on both lists, was Charles Adams.

It’s also striking to me how much the disorder that Pearson chronicled focused on religious services. Classes started by “scraping” the floor to make noise when professors were speaking but soon escalated to throwing coins and pebbles. Professors came into the chapel to find the furnishings in a heap. Chapel windows were broken, in one case the glass striking a faculty member inside. Was there a theological dispute fueling the trouble? Or was attacking that building just the easiest way to target faculty?

That focus on religious services gives a more significant cast to an event that Prof. Pearson recorded on 26 Mar 1789:

Sunday at evening prayers, while the President was praying, a snow ball was sent against the chapel windows, by Adams 1, as by him confessed to Mr. Webber.

The president of the college was Joseph Willard (1738-1804). Samuel Webber (1759-1810) taught mathematics and natural philosophy; he would succeed Willard as president of the college. And “Adams 1” was Charles Adams.

Remarkably, this incident didn’t get into the faculty minutes. There was no official punishment for Adams. Maybe there would have been if the snowball had broken the window. Or if Adams hadn’t convinced Webber that he was sorry, or had been throwing at someone else. Or if Adams wasn’t doing well in his classes and close to graduating.

I must also note that in spring 1789, Adams’s father had become the second highest elected official in the U.S. of A.

TOMORROW: Back at the Blue Anchor Tavern.

(The picture above comes from the Museum of the American Revolution’s depiction of an earlier snowball thrown in Harvard Yard, in the winter of 1775-76, as recalled by Israel Trask.)