“First instructed in it, by a Guramantee-Servant”

As described yesterday, the Rev. Dr. Cotton Mather tried to convert Onesimus, an enslaved young man he received in 1706, to his form of Christianity. But the man was more interested in marrying, having children, and earning his own money.

On 31 July 1716, the minister was reaching the end of his patience. He wrote in his diary:

My Servant Onesimus, proves wicked, and grows useless, Froward, Immorigerous. My Disposing of him, and my Supplying of my Family with a better Servant in his Room, requires much Caution, much Prayer, much Humiliation before the Lord. Repenting of what may have offended Him, in, the Case of my Servants, I would wait on Him, for his Mercy.

“Froward” meant “contrary.” “Immorigerous” meant “rude.” As for “Disposing of him,” the minister hadn’t yet made up his mind about what to do.

Remarkably, that same month Mather wrote to a correspondent in the Royal Society of London, describing Onesimus’s intelligence and knowledge of the seemingly radical practice of smallpox inoculation. That 12 July 1716 letter said:

Enquiring of my Negro-man Onesimus, who is a pretty Intelligent Fellow, Whether he ever had ye Small-Pox; he answered, both, Yes, and No; and then told me, that he had undergone an Operation, which had given him something of ye Small-Pox, and would forever praeserve him from it; adding, That it was often used among ye Guramantese, & whoever had ye Courage to use it, was forever free from ye Fear of ye Contagion. He described ye Operation to me, and shew’d me in his Arm ye Scar, which it had left upon him…

In 1713 and 1716 the Royal Society published two accounts of smallpox inoculation from European physicians who had traveled and worked in Turkey. Soon afterward, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her diplomat husband returned from Constantinople, and in London she also talked up this way of obtaining immunity from the virus.

In 1721, a smallpox epidemic broke out in Boston. Mather allied with a local physician named Zabdiel Boylston to try using inoculation locally. Since that treatment meant giving people the disease, though hopefully a mild case, it prompted a lot of opposition from people who thought the point of medicine was to produce fewer sick people, not more. Opponents included the European-educated Dr. William Douglass and the printer of the newspaper Douglass helped to fund, James Franklin.

Boylston published a pamphlet drawing on the Royal Society publications and adding more arguments, some from Mather. The minister cited what he had learned from Africans. Of course, opponents of inoculation used that source to ridicule the idea.

The argument became so heated that someone threw an incendiary bomb at Mather’s house. But eventually Boylston was able to inoculate enough people to make a scientific case that the new treatment saved lives. It became a standard regimen for the rest of the century, though communities still worried about careless doctors not keeping their infectious patients isolated from the public.

Mather wrote about the controversy in his 1724 manuscript “The Angel of Bethesda,” which echoed that earlier pamphlet in how he described learning about inoculation:

There has been a Wonderful Practice lately used in Several Parts of the World, which indeed is not yett become common in o’r Nation.

I was first instructed in it, by a Guramantee-Servant of my own, long before I knew, that any Europaeans or Asiaticks had the least Acquaintance with it; and some years before I was enriched with the Communications of the learned Foreigners, whose Accounts I found agreeing with what I received of my Servant, when he shewed me the Scar of the Wound made for the Operation; and said, That no Person ever died of the Small-pox in their Countrey that had the Courage to use it.

I have since mett with a considerable Number of these Africans, who all agree in One Story; That in their Countrey grandy-many dy of the Small-Pox: But now they learn This Way: People take Juice of Small-Pox, and Cutty-skin, and Putt in a Drop; then by’nd by a little Sicky, Sicky: then very few little things like Small-Pox, and no body dy of it; and no body have Small-Pox any more. Thus in Africa, where the Poor Creatures dy of the Small-Pox like Rotten Sheep, a Merciful GOD has taught them an Infallible Praeservative. Tis a common Practice, and is attended with a Constant Success.

This passage has been analyzed for Mather’s presentation of an African dialect and for the way he portrayed Africans as backward while also drawing on their medical knowledge.

Indeed, the whole 1720s argument over smallpox inoculation in Boston has attracted a lot of scholarship, and I haven’t tried to recount it all here. Among the most recent studies are Stephen Coss’s The Fever of 1721, Amalie M. Kass’s “Boston's Historic Smallpox Epidemic” in the Massachusetts Historical Review, and Margot Minardi’s “The Boston Inoculation Controversy of 1721-1722” in the William and Mary Quarterly.

By the time that controversy raged, the Rev. Cotton Mather had already disposed of his frustrating servant, and source of medical knowledge, Onesimus.

TOMORROW: What happened to Onesimus?

Onesimus Mather Unchristianized

In 1706 the Rev. Cotton Mather published a pamphlet titled The Negro Christianized: An Essay to Excite and Assist that Good Work, the Instruction of Negro-Servants in Christianity.

Thirteen years before, Mather had published Rules for the Society of Negroes, encouraging the small but growing population of Africans in Boston to worship as Christians. He also gave money for reading lessons. At the same time, his pamphlets assured slaveholders that their human property could be baptized and still remain human property.

Mather’s wealthy parishioners, those most likely to own slaves, evidently thought he was just the man to become a slaveholder himself. In December 1706, the minister wrote in his diary:

This Day, a surprising Thing befel me. Some Gentlemen of our Church, understanding (without any Application of mine to them for such a Thing,) that I wanted a good Servant at the expence of between forty and fifty Pounds, purchased for me, a very likely Slave; a young Man, who is a Negro of a promising Aspect and Temper, and this Day they presented him unto me. It seems to be a mighty Smile of Heaven upon my Family; and it arrives at an observable Time unto me. I putt upon him the Name of Onesimus; and I resolved with the Help of the Lord, that I would use the best Endeavours to make him a Servant of Christ, and also be more serviceable than ever to a Flock, which laies me under such Obligations.

I can’t help but think that day contained even more surprises for the young men thereafter known as Onesimus. That name, meaning “useful,” been assigned to many enslaved men in the Roman Empire. Mather knew it best from the epistle to Philemon, in which Paul sent an escaped slave named Onesimus back to his master with an admonition for them both to do better.

Onesimus had been born in Africa, and Mather later described his people as “Guramantese,” most likely Coromantee from what is modern Ghana. What the young man’s original name was, how he came to Boston, what he thought of his new home—we know none of that.

Christianizing Onesimus proved to be harder than Mather expected. For one thing, the minister—all the while exploiting the man’s labor for his own family—believed he stole things. On 2 Dec 1711 Mather wrote:

I must keep a strict Eye on my Servant Onesimus; especially with regard unto his Company. But I must particularly endeavour to bring him unto Repentance for some Actions of a thievish Aspect. Herein I must endeavour that there be no old Theft of his unrepented of, and left without Restitution.

Yet Mather was also acceding to the man’s pressure for more autonomy. In 1712 he wrote:

Having allowed unto my Servant Onesimus, the conveniences of the Married State, and great Opportunities to get money for himself, I would from hence take occasion mightily to inculcate on him, his obligations to keep the Rules of Piety, and Honesty; and Particularly Charge him, to devote Part of his gains to Pious Uses.

The big surprise to Mather seems to have been that Onesimus was, well, smart. The only way the minister found he could affect his servant’s behavior (which suggests he tried other methods) was persuasion, as he wrote on 2 Aug 1713:

My Negro Servant is one more Easily govern’d and managed, by the Principles of Reason, agreeably offered unto him, than by any other methods. I would oftener call him aside, and assay to reason him into a good Behaviour.

Mather laid out a course of education on 2 Dec 1713:

There are several Points, relating to the Instruction and Management of my Servant Onesimus, which I would now more than ever prosecute. He shall be sure to read every Day. From thence I will have him go on to Writing. He shall be frequently Catechised. I would also invent some advantageous Way, wherein he may spend his Liesure-hours.

The minister enlisted other family members in this effort as well, writing in 1712 that after catechizing his children, “I also made one of them, to hear the Negro-Servant Say his Catechism.”

Mather treated any misfortune as an opportunity for theological education—any misfortune of Onesimus’s, that is:

• 2 Jan 1714: “My Servant burying of his Son, it gives me an Opportunity, to inculcate agreeable Admonitions of Piety upon him.”
• 20 Mar 1716: “My Servant has newly buried his Son; (Onesimus his Onesimulus). Lett me make this an Occasion of inculcating the Admonitions of Piety upon him.”
• 28 May 1717: “Onesimus’s Recovery from a dangerous Fitt of Sickness, must be improv’d for his Awakening to Piety.”

“Onesimulus” was a coinage meaning “Little Onesimus” in Latin. I presume Mather insisted on that name.

Despite all that effort, Onesimus never declared himself to be saved, asked to be baptized, or joined a congregation. In Mather’s eyes he remained unchristianized.

I should note that most of the times the Rev. Dr. Mather wrote of Onesimus’s faults he also chided himself for not having corrected those faults already. He was using his diary entries to prod himself into improving. And he was, after all, supposed to be an expert.

TOMORROW: Fighting the epidemic.

(For more on how the Rev. Cotton Mather wrestled with his servant Onesimus’s religious life, see Kathryn S. Koo’s “Strangers in the House of God” [P.D.F. download].)

Why There Are No James Otis Papers

When James Otis, Jr., died in 1783, John Adams was in Europe as one of the U.S. of A.’s first diplomatic ministers.

While occasionally peeved by Otis’s moods, Adams admired the older man greatly for his learning, legal skills, and early resistance to claims of greater royal authority.

On 14 Jan 1818, Adams wrote to the newspaper editor and American chronicler Hezekiah Niles:

After my return from Europe [in 1788], I asked his daughter [Mary Lincoln] whether she had found among her father's manuscripts a treatise on Greek prosody.

With hands and eyes uplifted, in a paroxysm of grief, she cried, “Oh! Sir, I have not a line from my father's pen. I have not even his name in his own handwriting.”

When she was a little calmed, I asked her, “Who has his papers? Where are they?”

She answered, “They are no more. In one of those unhappy dispositions of mind, which distressed him after his great misfortune, and a little before his death, he collected all his papers and pamphlets, and committed them to the flames. He was several days employed in it.”

Adams evidently also told this story to Ezekiel Sanford (1796-1822), who four years after graduating from Yale College published A History of the United States before the Revolution, with Some Account of the Aborigines (1819). In an appendix he quoted letters and newspaper reports about Otis’s fight with John Robinson and then stated:

The wounds received in this encounter, were, at length, the occasion of his death. He became, at times, extremely melancholy; and, in one of his fits, he committed all his papers to the flames. The business occupied him several days; and ‘it was by this means,’ says Mr. John Adams, ‘that we have lost the history of our revolution.”

I thought that quotation might have appeared in Adams’s letter to Niles, but I can’t find it there or anywhere else, making me think Sanford heard or received it directly from Adams.

The Massachusetts Historical Society and the Columbia University libraries both have significant collections of Otis Family papers. But those documents come from James Otis, Sr., and his other two sons, Joseph and Samuel Allyne Otis. “There are a few letters from and relating to…James Otis of Boston (1725-1783) who was one of the more colorful and incendiary figures in pre-revolutionary New England,” says the Columbia catalogue.

It seems that at the end of his life James Otis, Jr., was indeed a Great Incendiary.

History Summit online, 25 April

With book launches and tours canceled because of the pandemic, authors are turning to technology to promote their work and talk with readers.

On Saturday, 25 April, twenty-two authors will appear online as part of History Summit 2020. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is the organizer of this effort, as well as one of the authors.

It looks like the authors are inviting questions through that website (and other platforms), and preparing videos to go online on 25 April.

The books being highlighted cover a broad range of history, from the Roman Empire to twentieth-century politics. They’re also written for a range of audiences. Some are already out, others on their way.

Here are the titles that touch on eighteenth-century America:

• Lindsay M. Chervinsky, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution
• Serena Zabin, The Boston Massacre: A Family History
• Jamie L.H. Goodall, Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay: A Brief History of Piracy in Maryland and Virginia
• David Head, A Crisis of Peace: George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution
• Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History
• Sarah Jane Marsh, Most Wanted: The Revolutionary Partnership of John Hancock & Samuel Adams
• Joshua R. Greenberg, Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic
• Whitney Martinko, Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States

And there’s more for people interested in other periods.

(Online meeting of the Continental Congress image above by the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, with apologies to John Trumbull.)

“Jury went out after noon and did not agree all night”

On 20 Apr 1770, Benjamin Lynde, acting chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court, wrote in his diary:

Fair. Richardson and Wilmot’s tryal, begun morn. and Jury went out after noon and did not agree all night.

As recounted yesterday, Lynde indeed presided over the trial of former Customs employees Ebenezer Richardson and George Wilmot for murder.

The jury actually started deliberating about 11:00 P.M. Per the rules of the time, they were shut into a room of the courthouse and not given any food or drink or allowed to sleep. That was to encourage them to reach a verdict. (And of course it saved the government money.)

Those jurors had been drawn from Suffolk County outside of Boston, on the assumption that Bostonians might be biased. We have their names, and I wish I knew which towns they came from in order to nail down their identifications. I’m going to assume they’re the most prominent men of those names from Suffolk County outside Boston since a man had to be at a certain economic level to be on the jury list. (And because it’s easier to search where the light is best.)

The foreman was Jonathan Deming. A man of that name lived in the part of Needham that eventually became Wellesley. He was born in Boston in 1723, possibly son of a sea captain from Wethersfield, Connecticut, who later retired to the country. From his twenties Deming filled various town offices in Needham. In November 1768, Boston ministers published his intention to marry Elizabeth Clark, but that doesn’t appear to have worked out since in November of 1770 Deming went to Charlestown and married Esther Edes. He was in his late forties, but she was sixteen years younger, and they had three children over the next few years. Jonathan died in 1791 and Esther in 1792.

Apparently Deming and all the other jurors quickly agreed that Wilmot was innocent of the charge of murder. Most also agreed that Richardson was guilty. There were two holdouts from a quick unanimous verdict, Deming later testified:

Mr. Lothrop was satisfied as to Fact, but not Law. Mr. Clap not so fully satisfied as to Law.

Thomas Lothrop was from Hingham, the portion that became Cohasset in 1770. He had been born in 1738. After his father died and his mother remarried, he went to live with a rich uncle who left him an estate. Lothrop served in the French and Indian War, becoming a lieutenant, and in town government his neighbors chose him to be clerk, moderator, selectman, and eventually representative to the Massachusetts General Court. He married Ruth Nichols in 1760; they moved into a big house “near the cold spring” and raised twelve children.

Notably, as Massachusetts’s conflict with Britain heated up, Lothrop was active on Cohasset’s committee of correspondence and committee of inspection. He was also a militia officer, rising to lieutenant colonel in the 2nd Suffolk regiment during the war. Lothrop lived until 1813.

Seth Clap was born in Dedham in 1722, two years before part of that old town broke off to become Walpole, where he lived the rest of his life. Clap married Mary Bullard in 1745 and they had ten children before she died. In February 1769 Clap married Elizabeth Weatherbee, and they got right to having more children, the first arriving in November. Ultimately they had six. Clap served Walpole in various ways: as a schoolteacher as a young man, as a town clerk in his fifties, and in 1758 by “making a place in the meeting-house to secure the town stock of ammunition.” He died in 1788.

There’s no sign that Lothrop or Clap supported the royal government in 1770. In other words, their reluctance to convict Ebenezer Richardson wasn’t due to their politics. They were sincerely concerned about whether he should be convicted of murder for shooting at a crowd attacking his house. Lothrop later said, “I did not fall in so soon as some, for I thought the time might be as well spent in Argument.” Clap agreed, “At first going out I was not so clear as afterwards.”

In the wee hours of 21 April, 250 years ago today, Deming and the rest of the jury worked at winning over those two men. Clap apparently noted that under British common law a man was not guilty of murder if he killed someone breaking into his house. But that was only at night, other jurors replied. Richardson had shot young Christopher Seider “in the Day,” and that won Clap over. Deming assured him that “the Court knew the Law.”

What finally moved Lothrop was his fellow jurors’ belief that “if the verdict was not agreeable to Law the Court would not receive it.” The judges had already made clear they believed Richardson did not commit murder. Thus, a man could vote to convict him of a capital crime and not feel that he was necessarily sending the man to his death.

After dawn, the twelve jurors finally agreed on a verdict. About half an hour later Deming announced their decision in the courtroom. Wilmot was free to go, but everyone really cared about the other defendant. As Judge Lynde wrote in his diary:

Fair; Jury agreed abo. 9; Richardson guilty.

Judge Peter Oliver later wrote of the Whig crowd: “the Courtroom resounded with Expressions of Pleasure; ’till, even one of the Faction, who had some of the Feelings of Humanity not quite erased, cried out, ‘for Shame, for Shame Gentlemen!’—This hushed the clamorous Joy.”

The judges then adjourned court until 29 May, when one of the first orders of business would be sentencing Ebenezer Richardson.

The Trial of Ebenezer Richardson

On 20 Apr 1770, 250 years ago today, Ebenezer Richardson went on trial for the killing of young Christopher Seider.

This was just short of two months after the fatal confrontation at Richardson’s house in the North End, but for the Boston Whigs that was too long.

They suspected that the judges and attorneys who leaned toward the Crown had delayed the trial to cool the passions aroused by the violent death of a child. The Crown was definitely trying to delay the Boston Massacre trials.

At various times the provincial Attorney General, the appointed defense attorney, and some judges didn’t show up for procedures in Rex v. Richardson and Wilmot. But at last on 20 April everyone was present.

Justice Benjamin Lynde presided, with Edmund Trowbridge, Peter Oliver, and William Cushing on the bench with him. The prosecutors were Massachusetts solicitor general Samuel Quincy and Robert Treat Paine, hired by the town of Boston. The newly appointed defense attorney was Josiah Quincy, Jr.

The two sides agreed on the basic facts of the case. After Richardson had tried to break up a boys’ protest outside of importer Theophilus Lillie’s shop, the boys attacked his house. The violence and damage escalated. Eventually Richardson fired a musket full of birdshot out of his window. Christopher Seider fell, mortally wounded.

The question was whether Richardson was rightfully defending his home and family from attack. Did the boys’ actions justify a lethal response? Was Christopher participating in illegal activity? Did Richardson aim at the child? Possible verdicts included guilty of murder, guilty of manslaughter, and not guilty entirely.

(Of course there was also the sailor George Wilmot, who had gone into Richardson’s house to help but hadn’t fired a gun.)

Samuel Quincy opened by questioning the prosecution witnesses, as his partner’s notes show. They played down the danger from the riotous boys and talked about Richardson’s anger. Among those witnesses were the Whig activists Edward Procter, David Bradlee, and Dr. Thomas Young.

Josiah Quincy’s notes preserve his strategy to win over the jurors:

1st. To open the Defence with a proper Address to the Jury to remove all popular Prejudices and Passions and engage them to make a fair, candid and impartial Enquiry and to give their Verdict agreeable to Law and the Evidence, uninfluenc’d by any other Motive; to mention the manner of my becoming engaged as Council for the Prisoners, explain my Duty and the Part I ought and am determin’d to act.

2d. The Witnesses for the Crown having been carefully and thoroughly cross-examined, to produce those for the Prisoners, and endeavour to find out what the Nature and Degree of Provocation offered; how far the Attack upon the house was carried; Whether and to what Degree the Windows were demolished before the firing, and whether the Door was broke open, and any Attempt made upon it; whether any actual Attempt was made to enter; or any Evidence of such Design from threatning Words; Whether Men as well as Boys were not concerned in that Attack; What Weapons were used or thrown into the house; and whether any One within was wounded; and upon the whole whether this is not to be consider’d as an Attack upon the Persons of the Prisoners.

3d. To sum up the Evidence and state the Facts as they shall appear upon Evidence.

4thly. To explain the Nature of the Crime of Murder and the different Kinds of Homicide, as justifiable, excusable (as se defendendo) and felonious: and to shew the Distinction between felonious Homicide of Malice prepense, which is properly Murder, and without such Malice, which is Manslaughter.

The defense witnesses included Richardson’s daughters Sarah and Kezia, possibly Harvard student William Eustis, schoolmaster Elias Dupee, and one of the Dr. Perkins. The witness testimony and then the legal arguments of Paine and Josiah Quincy lasted well past dark.

An unofficial factor in the courtroom were the many people who had come to see the trial. So many, in fact, that there were complaints of pickpocketing afterward. Judge Oliver called this audience “a vast Concourse of Rabble.”

Today we expect a judge to sum up legal issues and options for the jury but to leave the decisions to them. At this time, however, the multiple judges also advised on guilt and innocence. A report sent to Gov. Francis Bernard said that all those gentlemen felt the facts favored Richardson’s case:

They said it appeared by the Evidence that the prisoner was attacked in his own house by a number of tumultuous people. That what he had done was in his own defence. That self-defence was a right inherent in every man. . . . they were convinced the jury could find him guilty of nothing more than manslaughter.

According to acting governor Thomas Hutchinson, his friend and relation on the bench went even further:

Mr. Just. Oliver doubted whether it could amount to that and with great spirit charged the death of the Boy upon the Promoters of the Effigies and the Exhibitions which had drawn the people together and caused unlawful and tumultuous assemblies and he did not excuse such as had neglected suppressing these Assemblies as the Civil Magistrate had done.

At that, Oliver heard someone in the audience shout, “Damn that Judge, if I was nigh him, I would give it to him!” Other Crown informants said they heard people call, “Remember, jury, you are upon Oath”; “Blood requires blood!” and “Damn him, hang him! Murder, no manslaughter!”

At 11:00 P.M. the jurors went into a private room to deliberate. The defendants were supposed to be taken back to the jail, but the judges had heard that some spectators had brought “an Halter, ready at the Door of the Court Room,” to hang Richardson. (People had nearly lynched him on the day of the shooting.) Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf locked the defendants inside the courthouse instead.

The judges also waited in the building for most of the crowd to disperse. They finally ventured out at midnight. Even so, one Crown informant said, “The judges were hissed and abused in a most shameful manner in passing from the bench to their carriages.”

Meanwhile, the jury was still deliberating.

TOMORROW: The verdicts.

Lt. Jacob Rogers and the “Confusion” in Charlestown

One of the more unusual accounts of the start of the Revolutionary War came from Jacob Rogers, former commander of the Royal Navy ship Halifax.

In 1774 Lt. Rogers left the navy (more on that eventually), married Anne Barber, and settled in her home town of Charlestown.

Most of that town was on a peninsula between the Charles and Mystic Rivers, as shown here. The common spilled onto the westerly side of the neck connecting that peninsula to the rest of Massachusetts.

In October 1775, Rogers related his experiences on 19 April in a petition to the Massachusetts legislature. He wrote:

We were alarmed with various reports concerning the king’s troops, which put everybody in confusion

About ten in the morning I met Doctor [Joseph] Warren riding hastily out of town and asked him if the news was true of the men’s being killed at Lexington; he assured me it was. I replied I was very glad our people had not fired first, as it would have given the king’s troops a handle to execute their project of desolation. He rode on.

In the afternoon Mr. James Russell [a town official and appointee to the mandamus Council] received a letter from General [Thomas] Gage, importing that he was informed the people of Charlestown had gone out armed to oppose his majesty's troops, and that if one single man more went out armed, we might expect the most disagreeable consequences.

A line-of-battle ship lying before the town; a report that Cambridge bridge was taken up [at the site of the Anderson Memorial Bridge]; no other retreat but through Charlestown: numbers of men, women, and children, in this confusion, getting out of town.

Among the rest, I got my chaise, took my wife and children; and as I live near the school-house, in a back street, drove into the main street, put my children in a cart with others then driving out of town, who were fired at several times on the common, and followed after. Just abreast of Captain [John] Fenton’s, on the neck of land, Mr. David Waitt, leather-dresser, of Charlestown, came riding in full speed from Cambridge, took hold of my reins, and assisted me to turn up on Bunker’s Hill, as he said the troops were then entering the common.

I had just reached the summit of the hill, dismounted from the chaise, and tied it fast in my father-in-law [William Barber]’s pasture, when we saw the troops within about forty rods of us, on the hill. One [Daniel?] Hayley, a tailor, now of Cambridge, with his wife, and a gun on his shoulder, going towards them, drew a whole volley of shot on himself and us, that I expected my wife, or one of her sisters, who were with us, to drop every moment.

It being now a little dark, we proceeded with many others to the Pest House, till we arrived at Mr. [Samuel] Townsend’s, pump-maker, in the training-field; on hearing women’s voices, we went in, and found him, Captain [Nathan] Adams, tavern-keeper, Mr. Samuel Carey, now clerk to Colonel [Thomas] Mifflin, quartermaster-general, and some others, and a house full of women and children, in the greatest terror, afraid to go to their own habitations.

After refreshing ourselves, it being then dark. Mr. Carey, myself, and one or two more, went into town, to see if we might, with safety, proceed to our own houses. On our way, met a Mr. Hutchinson, who informed us all was then pretty quiet; that when the soldiers came through the street, the officers desired the women and children to keep in doors for their safety; that they begged for drink, which the people were glad to bring them, for fear of their being ill-treated.

Mr. Carey and I proceeded to the tavern by the Town House, where the officers were; all was tumult and confusion; nothing but drink called for everywhere. I waited a few minutes, and proceeded to my own house, and finding things pretty quiet, went in search of my wife and sisters, and found them coming up the street with Captain Adams.

On our arrival at home, we found that her brother [Edward Barber], a youth of fourteen, was shot dead on the neck of land by the soldiers, as he was looking out of a window. I stayed a little while to console them, and went into the main street to see if all was quiet, and found an officer and guard under arms by Mr. David Wood’s, baker, who continued, it seems, all night; from thence, seeing everything quiet, came home and went to bed, and never gave assistance or refreshment of any kind whatever. Neither was any officer or soldier near my house that day or night.

The next morning, with difficulty, I obtained to send for my horse and chaise from off the hill, where it had been all night, and found my cushion stole, and many other things I had in the box. Went to wait on Gen. [Robert] Pigot, the commanding officer, for leave to go in search of my children; found Doctor [Isaac] Rand, Captain [Joseph] Cordis, and others, there for the same purpose, but could not obtain it till he had sent to Boston for orders, and could not find them till next night, having travelled in fear from house to house, till they got to Captain [Daniel] Waters’, in Malden.

Rogers wrote this account in an attempt to absolve himself of the accusation of having helped the British military in some way. Because he had been a Royal Navy officer himself until just one year before the war broke out, many people suspected him, even after his wife had lost her teen-aged brother to British gunfire.

For more of Rogers’s attempts to clear his name, see Katie Turner Getty’s article for the Journal of the American Revolution. But see also her quotation from Rogers’s petition to Parliament in 1783, when he portrayed himself as a Loyalist and claimed that he “gave every relief and assistance in his power…to his Majesties’ troops on their retreat to Charles Town in refreshing the Officers and Men [and] procuring surgeons to dress the wounded.” So Lt. Rogers might have been even more busy on the night of 19 Apr 1775 than his first account suggested.

The Story of the Soldier and the Spoons

In The Battle of April 19, 1775, Frank W. Coburn included this anecdote about the aftermath of the British march:

About a sixth of a mile yet farther along, stood the home of Samuel Hastings, near the Lexington boundary line, yet within the town of Lincoln. Hastings was a member of Capt. [John] Parker’s Lexington Company, and was present and in line for action when [Maj. John] Pitcairn gave that first order to fire [or not].

As the British column swept along, one of the soldiers left the ranks and entered the house for plunder, unmindful of the dangers lurking in the adjoining woods and fields. As he emerged and stood on the doorstone, an American bullet met him, and he sank seriously wounded. There he lay, until the family returned later in the afternoon, and found him. Tenderly they carried him into the house, and ministered to his wants as best they could, but his wound was fatal. After his death they found some of their silver spoons in his pocket. He was buried a short distance westerly from the house.

Publishing in 1912, Coburn credited this story to two great-grandsons of Samuel Hastings, Cornelius Wellington (born 1828) and Charles A. Wellington (born 1837), both members of the Lexington Historical Society. Of course, both were born over half a century after the battle.

It’s significant that the story had not surfaced in print before, even in The Hastings Memorial, an 1866 family genealogy that included entries about Samuel Hastings, his family, and their Revolutionary experiences.

Alexander Cain of Untapped History researched the Hastings family in depth for the Lexington Minute Men and his book We Stood Our Ground. He recently wrote about Samuel Hastings, Jr., again on the Historical Nerdery blog.

On the story of the wounded soldier with the spoons, Cain now warns:

There are no period records or accounts of the family encountering a wounded soldier. More importantly, the Hastings’ homestead was not located on the Boston Road near the Lincoln and Lexington lines as many 19th and 20th Century accounts claim. Instead, it appears the homestead was further in the interior of Lexington and away from the fighting.

Cain’s essay then follows the younger Samuel Hastings through his capture alongside Gen. Charles Lee in late 1776. Did he return to Lexington? Check it out.

Ebenezer Richardson’s New Attorney

On 17 Apr 1770, 250 years ago today, the Massachusetts Superior Court convened to try Ebenezer Richardson and George Wilmot for murdering young Christopher Seider.

At least, the court tried to. The attorney whom the judges had ordered to represent Richardson, Samuel Fitch, didn’t appear. He was apparently home sick.

The judges therefore assigned the principal defendant a new lawyer: Josiah Quincy, Jr. (shown here in a posthumous portrait by Gilbert Stuart).

Already, back in late March, Quincy had agreed to help defend Capt. Thomas Preston and the eight soldiers charged with murder for the Boston Massacre. He explained his decision in a firmly worded letter to his father, which I quoted here.

That letter also said the top Boston Whigs supported young Quincy’s choice. They wanted the military men to receive what all of Britain would have to acknowledge was a fair trial. It’s not so clear that they felt the same about representing Richardson, but for Quincy the principle had been established.

Josiah Quincy would have to argue against his older brother, Massachusetts solicitor general Samuel Quincy, on the prosecution team with Robert Treat Paine. But the brothers didn’t have the most curious conflict in the case.

One of the judges overseeing the trial was Edmund Trowbridge, attorney general of Massachusetts from 1749 to 1767. Back in the early 1750s, he had also represented the Rev. Edward Jackson of Woburn in his defamation case against Roland and Josiah Cotton. Just when it looked like Jackson had lost his suit, another man admitted that he had fathered the illegitimate child that the Cotton brothers had blamed on Jackson.

That now-admitted real father was none other than Ebenezer Richardson. He had had to move out of Woburn into Boston. And he had to find a new form of employment—which involved serving Trowbridge as a confidential informant. In a document sent to London in the early 1760s, Trowbridge even cited Richardson for being “very serviceable to me in detecting a conspiracy to father a bastard child on the parson of a parish.” But in the small world of the colonial Massachusetts bar, that wasn’t enough of a conflict to take Trowbridge off the bench for this trial.

The judges rescheduled Richardson and Wilmot’s case for 20 April. In other words, Josiah Quincy had three days to prepare.

The Later Adventures of Solomon Brown

In 2008 and 2011 I wrote about Solomon Brown of Lexington, who did as much as any individual to start the Revolutionary War in that town.

At the age of eighteen, Solomon Brown:

• spotted British army officers riding through town and alerted local militia leaders.
• volunteered to ride to Concord to warn people there, only to be stopped by those same British officers and thus to become one of the first detainees of the war.
• shot twice at the British troops from Buckman Tavern—after they fired at militia men in the common, he said, but conceivably before.

That day wasn’t Solomon Brown’s last effort in the war. In April 1777, two years after the memorable shots at Lexington, Brown enlisted in Capt. Benjamin Eustis’s company of Col. John Crane’s artillery regiment. He had the rank of sergeant. Army records described him as 5'10" tall with a light complexion.

Brown served three years in the Continental artillery, though for several months in 1777 he was reported as being sick in Boston. In November 1778, Lt. Col. Cornelius Van Dyck appointed Brown the “Conductor of Military Stores” at Fort Schuyler in New York. He remained in the army until 1 Apr 1780, when Gen. Henry Knox discharged him.

According to the short history of New Haven, Vermont, in Hamilton Child’s Gazetteer and Business Directory of Addison County, Vt., for 1881-82, “After leaving the army he remained in Nine Partners, N.Y., two years, then came to this town in 1787.” The years don’t add up, but Brown definitely settled in New Haven, bringing his first wife and child from Dutchess County to live in a log house.

Solomon Brown managed to build a brick house to replace that one before his first wife died in 1802. He remarried and had more children by his second wife. Another local chronicler said Brown “was a noted character and an honest store keeper at the foot of Beech Hill.” He held many town offices and became a church deacon. He or his namesake son, born in 1796, was active in the Anti-Masonic Party in 1831 and 1832.

Brown lived long enough to apply for a Revolutionary War pension, but his affidavit was entirely about his three years in the Continental Army, not his memorable day of militia service in 1775. He was too far away for Elias Phinney to get a first-hand statement for the History of the Battle of Lexington (1825).

Thus, the only recorded statement from Solomon Brown about the events of 18-19 April was the deposition he and his fellow detained messengers, Jonathan Loring and Elijah Sanderson, supplied to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress that month. They complained about being detained by the British officers at pistol point. The three men then offered no explanation of why they had been riding to Concord in the middle of the night, nor did Brown say anything about shooting his gun at dawn.

Solomon Brown died at New Haven, Vermont, on 6 June 1837. His gravestone, shown above, states proudly that he was born at Lexington and had reached the age of “82 years & 5 months.” Among the property he left to his family “the musket from which was sent the first shot.”

Legends of Paul Revere’s Departure from Boston

After the publication of “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Henry W. Longfellow in 1860, there was a lot more attention on the silversmith and his activity on 18-19 Apr 1775.

Little stories that Paul Revere’s descendants had told within the family soon became parts of America’s national story. Some of those tales do, as W. S. Gilbert wrote, “give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.” Maybe too much artistry.

Are all those anecdotes reliable? Were any created to entertain and instruct children, who then grew up with them as unquestionable truth?

We can say for sure that those dramatic stories came from, or were supported by, descendants of Paul Revere. They’re not just random folktales.

One source was John Revere (1822-1886), son of Joseph Warren Revere (1777-1868), the silversmith’s eleventh child. Since Joseph Warren Revere wasn’t alive in 1775, he had only secondhand knowledge of that April through his parents or siblings. Likewise, John Revere never knew his grandparents nor most of his father’s siblings, so his knowledge was probably thirdhand.

Paul Revere’s own 1798 description of his ride said simply: “two friends rowed me across Charles River.” In a letter dated 11 Oct 1876, quoted by Elbridge H. Goss in his 1891 biography of Revere, John Revere wrote more, starting with how that boat was hidden under “a cob-wharf at the then west part of the town, near the present Craigie Bridge,” which is now the Charles River Dam.

The two men who rowed Revere across remained publicly unnamed for a century. In November 1876 the Old South Meeting House exhibited a “Pocket-Book of Joshua Bentley, the Ferryman who carried Paul Revere across to Charlestown,” then owned by a descendant in Lexington.

Joshua Bentley (1727-1819) is variously described as a boatbuilder and a ship’s carpenter. He “lived directly opposite Constitution Wharf,” according to a grandson. In the late 1880s that was on Commercial Street near Hanover Street, sticking out the top of the North End. (The current Constitution Wharf is in Charlestown.)

The Bentley family was rising in society. Joshua’s second son, William, graduated from Harvard College in 1777 and became a minister in Salem, as well as an opinionated diarist. In 1780 the Massachusetts General Court appointed Joshua Bentley himself as clerk of the laboratory assembling artillery shells. For that reason, Boston’s 1780 tax records identify him as “Clark to Conll [William] Burbeck,” the comptroller of that state enterprise. Bentley’s family recalled him as a ”commissary.” So he was part of the same crowd of socially mobile, politically active mechanics as Revere. Eventually Joshua Bentley moved out to Groton to live with a daughter, and he was buried there.

Citing John Revere’s 1876 letter, Goss identified the other rower as shipwright Thomas Richardson. This letter added that “Richardson, with two others, laid the platform for the American guns at Bunker Hill; one of the three was killed by a cannon ball from the British.” However, Goss also quoted that letter as saying, “John Richardson, his brother, was with Paul Revere in notifying the inhabitants of Charlestown of the intention of the British to march to Concord.” Does that suggest that John, not Thomas, was in the boat? Without the full letter, there’s some ambiguity.

The 1780 tax records show a bevy of Richardsons working as shipwrights in the North End, including John; John, Jr.; and Thomas. The elder John was presumably the one who died in 1793 at age seventy-seven; he lived near the North Church. Another John Richardson died in 1789; that could have been John, Jr., but the name is too common to be sure.

There are two delightful—perhaps too delightful—anecdotes about Revere’s departure from Boston. One was first put into print by Samuel A. Drake in his History of Middlesex County (1879):

A tradition also exists in the Revere family, that while Paul and his two comrades were on their way to the boat it was suddenly remembered that they had nothing with which to muffle the sound of their oars. One of the two stopped before a certain house at the North End of the town, and made a peculiar signal. An upper window was softly raised, and a hurried colloquy took place in whispers, at the end of which something white fell noiselessly to the ground. It proved to be a woollen under-garment, still warm from contact with the person of the little rebel.

John Revere stated in his 1876 letter: “The story is authentic of the oars being muffled with a petticoat, the fair owner of which was an ancestor of the late John R. Adan, of Boston; Mr. Adan having repeated the account to my father within a few years of his decease.”

City councilor John Richardson Adan (1794?-1849) lived in a house originally built in the seventeenth century and standing on North Street as late as 1893, as shown above. Adan also stated that his grandfather was the last person Dr. Joseph Warren spoke to before leaving town on the Charlestown ferry early on 19 April. So he definitely wanted people to know about his ancestor’s connections with famous Revolutionaries.

What else can we find out about that anecdote? John R. Adan’s parents were Thomas Adan (also spelled Eden) and Mary Swift, who married in 1791. Mary’s father was a shipwright named Henry Swift (1746-1789?), captain of the North End gang during the 1765 Stamp Act demonstrations. In 1768 Henry Swift married Mary Richardson—a daughter of shipwright John Richardson, Sr.? In 1798 Mary Swift was taxed for what appears to be the house shown above, then said to be at the corner of Ann Street and North Street. (The name of Ann Street was later changed to North Street, and North Street to North Centre Street.)

So here’s a scenario to test: Thomas or John Richardson realized he and Joshua Bentley needed cloth to muffle their oars while they rowed Paul Revere to Charlestown. Richardson went to the house of his sister, now Mary Swift. She supplied a petticoat. The story and the house descended in her daughter’s family to her grandson, John R. Adan.

(Another measure of how small Boston society was: In the 1820s John R. Adan served on the city council with John Dumaresque Dyer, mentioned yesterday.)

Yet another family tradition came from a different branch of the Revere family. The silversmith’s daughter Mary (1768-1853) married Jedediah Lincoln of Hingham. Their grandson William Otis Lincoln (1838-1907) told Goss that he had “often heard his grandmother tell this” story:

When Revere and his two friends got to the boat, he found he had forgotten to take his spurs. Writing a note to that effect, he tied it to his dog’s collar and sent him to his home in North Square. In due time the dog returned bringing the spurs. 

Mary Lincoln witnessed the events of April 1775 as a child, so she could indeed have seen this happen or heard about it immediately afterward. However, this is also literally a grandmother’s tale, and it would definitely have entertained the grandchildren. So it seems the least likely of these legends.

Some Out of Town Jasper

As I quoted yesterday, in 1853 a story surfaced saying that Josiah Waters, Jr., had delivered intelligence about the impending British army march on 18 Apr 1775.

This story is significant in predating Henry W. Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” which romanticized the event and focused people’s attention on Revere over all the other people involved in the Lexington Alarm.

It also came with a provenance: from Waters himself to Joseph Curtis to his relation Catherine Curtis to the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Though that story might have evolved along that path of transmission, it’s always good to know that path.

Waters reportedly credited his knowledge of the British military plans to “Jasper, an Englishman, a gunsmith by trade, whose shop was in Hatter’s Square.” This man “worked for the British,” gaining their trust. He rented space to the family of a sergeant major who ended up “telling him all their plans.” Or at least the plans that a sergeant major would be privy to.

Of course I went looking for traces of a gunsmith named Jasper working in pre-Revolutionary Boston. I didn’t find any. But I did find a man named Jasper who came from Britain and worked with metal, so he could have repaired gunlocks along with other things.

William Jasper moved from Britain to North America soon after the end of the French and Indian War. The first sign of him is this advertisement from the 29 Aug 1763 New-York Gazette.

WILLIAM JASPER, cutler, Just arrived from England, is now settled in New York, near the Fly, Queen-Street, near the Burling’s and Beekman’s Slip next Door to Mr. Murray’s, takes this Method to acquaint the publick, That he makes all kinds of Surgeons instruments, and grinds and cleans them; makes Razors, Pen knives, scissars, and all kinds of Edge Tools, which he also grinds; and makes Cutlery in general; makes Buckles of the best Block-Tin, wrought and plain Men’s Gold and Silver Ware; Pinking-Irons of all Sorts; Sadlers Tools; Fret-Saws; Hatters knives; likewise draws Teeth with great Ease and Safety, being accustomed to it for many Years. He likewise has brought over a Quantity of Copper and Tin Hard-Ware. All Persons that please to favour him with their Custom, may depend upon being served in the best and cheapest Manner.

A cutler, according to Dr. Samuel Johnson, was “one who makes or sells knives.” Jasper made all sorts of bladed tools, from surgeon’s scalpels to fret saws, and he also offered some dentistry.

In 1768 William Jasper was in Boston, marrying Anne Newman on 29 June 1768. This couple appears on the list of marriage intentions read in all the pulpits, and it’s not clear to me where they actually wed. I also can’t find records of the couple having children, though there’s a mention of them having done so.

The Curtis story said Jasper the gunsmith had a shop “in Hatter’s Square,” which was also known as Creek Lane and later Creek Square. It was near the center of town, literally on the Mill Creek that defined the edge of the North End. I can’t situate William Jasper the cutler there, but he must have rented a shop somewhere.

Weapons collectors have found William Jasper’s name on a couple of blades possibly made during the war. Above is his maker’s stamp on a spontoon head from the late 1700s. In For Liberty I Live, Al Benting described a halberd inscribed with Jasper’s name. I don’t see any sign that he made guns, though perhaps he repaired them.

There was also a William Jasper among the American prisoners of war taken on the Boston-based privateer Rising States on 15 Apr 1777 and housed in Forton Prison in Britain. I have no idea what happened to that man and thus whether he could be the cutler. But the surname Jasper was rare in Massachusetts.

The next time William Jasper appeared in a newspaper was this notice in the 8 Aug 1782 Continental Journal:

TO THE PUBLIC.

JASPER, Surgeon Instrument Maker in Boston, has lately invented and compleated an Instrument for drawing Teeth perpendicular, which was never done before, for which if he can have a patentee from Congress, it shall be universally known, if not, let it die in oblivion.

I see no indication that the Confederation Congress considered granting Jasper a patent for this new dental instrument. There was no statutory process for the national government to grant patents until 1790, and the Congress had a lot of other business to handle in 1782.

Finally, the Continental Journal of 23 Nov 1786 reported that “Mr. William Jasper, Cutler,” had died in Boston. Anna Jasper administered William’s estate, relying on two men to complete the paperwork since she couldn’t sign her name. William Jasper’s property, evaluated at £24.6.6, included metal-working tools, some old books and pictures, and household utensils, but no real estate. Probate judge Oliver Wendell signed off on the administration, which included a general mention of children.

On 10 Apr 1791 a woman named Nancy Jasper married Joseph Jones in the Rev. Thomas Baldwin’s Second Baptist Meeting-house. Was this the widow Anne Jasper? Or a daughter of the 1768 marriage? The next year, on 25 Mar 1792, another Baptist minister, the Rev. Samuel Stillman, married Mary Jasper to John Dumaresque Dyer. Was this a daughter of the cutler William Jasper? If the family had been Baptist before the war, that would explain why there are no records of the children being baptized soon after birth, as there usually are for Congregationalist and Anglican families.

Thus, the sparse record of William Jasper’s life in America shows that he could have been Josiah Curtis’s informant in April 1775 but is far from confirmation of that story.

Did Josiah Waters Obtain the News of the British March?

Some accounts of the Battle of Lexington and Concord in April 1775 credit Josiah Waters of Boston with helping to provide intelligence about the British army’s plans to Dr. Joseph Warren. How did Waters enter the historical picture?

Waters’s role seems to have been first mentioned in print in 1853, when the New England Historical and Genealogical Register published an article titled “Revolutionary Incidents,” based on the recollections of Joseph Curtis, then 86 years old.

Curtis spoke of “Col. Josiah Waters of Boston, a staunch whig, and who afterwards acted as engineer in directing the building of the forts of Roxbury.” The article summed up the story this way:

The Americans obtained this news, through an individual by the name of Jasper, an Englishman, a gunsmith by trade, whose shop was in Hatter’s Square; he worked for the British, but was friendly to the rebels; a sergeant major quartered in his family and made a confidant of him, telling him all their plans. Jasper repeated the same to Col. Waters, who made it known to the Committee of Safety. The Colonel has often told this story, years after, to his then young friend, Joseph Curtis, who is still living.

There were two men named Josiah Waters in pre-Revolutionary Boston, father and son. The father was born in 1721, became a militia captain by 1770, and died in 1784.

Josiah Waters, Jr., was born to that man and his wife Abigail in 1747. After the war he became active in the Massachusetts militia, rising to the rank of colonel and collecting “many facts, for a history,” before dying in 1805. So when Joseph Curtis referred to “The Colonel,” he meant the younger man. Curtis was in his thirties when Col. Waters died, so he had plenty of time to hear that veteran’s stories.

Both father and son were involved in building forts in Roxbury early in the siege of Boston. Gen. William Heath’s memoir mentioned “Capt. Josiah Waters of Boston” as an impromptu engineer, and in a 21 October 1775 letter John Adams referred to “young Josiah Waters” as another. In 1776 the Connecticut legislature appointed Josiah Waters as engineer for Fort Trumbull in New London with Josiah Waters, Jr., as his assistant. (However, Gen. John Thomas wrote that neither Waters had “great Understanding” of either fortifications or gunnery “any further than Executing or overseeing works, when Trased out.”)

I mentioned Abigail Waters, Josiah, Sr.’s wife (and Josiah, Jr.’s mother). She was a daughter of Deacon Thomas Dawes and thus an aunt of William Dawes, Jr. In 1773, as discussed here, Capt. Waters and Adjutant Dawes were both asking the Boston selectmen if they could use Faneuil Hall for militia training.

The fact that Josiah Waters, Jr., and William Dawes, Jr., were first cousins becomes significant in looking at another of the details Joseph Curtis recounted about the start of the war:

The intelligence, that the British intended to go out to Lexington, was conveyed over Boston Neck to Roxbury by Ebenezer Dorr, of Boston, a leather dresser, by trade, who was mounted on a slow jogging horse, with saddle bags behind him, and a large flapped hat upon his head, to resemble a countryman on a journey. Col. Josiah Waters…followed on foot, on the sidewalk at a short distance from him, until he saw him safely past all the sentinels.

There was a Roxbury farmer named Ebenezer Dorr, but no other source connects him to the 18 April alarm. Many sources, some contemporaneous, credit William Dawes, and Curtis probably just muddled that name. (After all, Yankees would drop the R in “Dorr.”) But it’s reasonable that Dawes’s cousin might have watched to make sure he got out of town safely.

Was Waters also a conduit of crucial information about the British march for Dr. Joseph Warren? There are multiple stories of Bostonians reporting on British military activity, and we know Warren didn’t rely on a single source. Waters may well have supplied helpful intelligence, but he wasn’t the only Bostonian to do so.

TOMORROW: What about this gunsmith named Jasper?

Prepping for Patriots’ Day 2020 Online

The anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord is coming up on 19 April, so I’ll shift topics (mostly) from the Sestercentennial of the reaction to the Boston Massacre to the opening of the Revolutionary War.

Of course, right now we’re all quarantining like smallpox patients with red flags hung outside our homes. The traditional ceremonies along Battle Road have been canceled for this spring.

But local historical organizations are using technology to fill the gap a bit. For example:

• The Lexington Historical Society is offering a Virtual Patriots’ Day collection of virtual tours of its historic sites, footage of past events, new videos, and online activities.
• Minute Man National Historical Park is offering “Ask a Ranger” sessions on Facebook Live on 17 and 24 April at 10:00 A.M. Check out the park’s Facebook page for video interviews with veteran reenactors and historians, spotlights on archeological finds, and more. 
• Old North Church launched a video series called “99% Sure” with a discussion of who hung the lanterns for Paul Revere. (See the Boston1775 discussions of John Pulling, Robert Newman, and Thomas Barnard.)

There may well be other online events out there that slipped my mind tonight.

This year’s History Camp Boston also had to be postponed, from last month to, we hope, 11 July. So History Camp organizers Lee Wright and Carrie Lund are trying out a series of virtual events through the organization’s Facebook page, and I’ll be their first guest.

Lee, Carrie, and I will talk about some of the myths and realities of the Battle of Lexington and Concord in a Facebook Live conversation scheduled to start on Thursday, 16 April, at 8:00 P.M. Here’s a teaser video we made last week as we tested our technology.

This is a chance for you to ask questions, too! Are you wondering about common myths, or particular realities, of the start of the Revolutionary War? Carrie and Lee are compiling a list of queries from the comments of those Facebook postings. And I can collect them here.

We hope people will also be able to send in questions in real time during the conversation. Of course, I won’t be able to dig into those topics beforehand and appear as if I had an answer all along.

“The Town make choice of a proper Person to deliver an Oration”

Yesterday I described how Bostonians commemorated the first anniversary of the Boston Massacre in 1771, including Dr. Thomas Young delivering a political oration in the Manufactory.

Six days later, on Monday, 11 March, Boston had its first town meeting of the year. As usual, attendees took up the first day with electing various officials, from the selectmen on down.

One agenda item on the second day was “Whether the Town will determine upon some suitable Method to perpetuate the memory of the horred Massacre perpetrated on the Evening of the 5. of March 1770—by a Party of Soldiers of the 29. Regiment.” Town leaders were getting on the commemoration bandwagon.

The meeting assigned that topic to a committee of active upper-class Whigs: John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Dr. Benjamin Church, Benjamin Kent, Richard Dana, Dr. Joseph Warren, and Samuel Pemberton. A second committee was chosen to vindicate the townspeople from “some partial and false publications” about the Massacre trials the previous fall.

The perpetuation committee returned on Tuesday, 19 March with this recommendation:

That for the present the Town make choice of a proper Person to deliver an Oration at such Time as may be Judged most convenient to commemorate the barbarous murder of five of our Fellow Citizens on that fatal Day, and to impress upon our minds the ruinous tendency of standing Armies in Free Cities, and the necessity of such noble exertions in all future times, as the Inhabitants of the Town then made, whersby the designs of the Conspirators against the public Liberty may be still frustrated–

And the Committee in order to compleat the Plan of some standing Monument of Military Tyrany begg’d to be indulged with further time

The meeting “Voted unanimously” to adopt that plan for an oration. (No “standing Monument of Military Tyrany” would be erected for more than a century.)

The next question was who should deliver the oration. Dr. Young already had a text, of course, but now that was old news, and possibly too radical as well. Instead, people proposed two possible orators:

• Samuel Hunt, master of the North Latin School
• James Lovell, longtime usher, or assistant master, of the South Latin School

The townspeople “as directed then withdrew and brought in their Votes.” Not only did James Lovell win, but he was “unanimously chosen.” (I wonder how Mr. Hunt took that. Maybe it was supposed to be an honor just to be nominated.)

The same committee, with the addition of Samuel Swift, was sent off to invite Lovell to speak at Faneuil Hall on Thursday, 2 April, at 10:00 A.M. In essence, this would be a special edition of the usual “Thursday Lecture,” or sermon, that one minister or another had delivered on Thursday mornings for years. But this oration would also be an official session of the town meeting.

As it happened, on 2 April such a big crowd came out to hear Lovell that the meeting had to officially adjourn from Faneuil Hall to the Old South Meeting-House, the largest enclosed space in town (shown above). Afterwards, the town asked for Lovell’s text so that it could print his oration and spread its message. You can read it here.

All of those steps became an annual ritual in Boston: the proposal in town meeting to commission an oration, the committee visiting a respectable young gentleman with a speaking invitation, the adjournment on 5 March (or 6 March if the anniversary fell on the Sabbath) to Old South, the town’s publication of the text. Even in 1776, when Boston was under siege, there was an oration for Bostonians in exile out in Watertown. That tradition lasted until 1783, after the Revolutionary War ended.

And it all started with the town meeting deciding to commemorate the Massacre one month after the first anniversary.

“An Oration containing a brief Account of the Massacre”

On Tuesday, 5 Mar 1771, Bostonians commemorated the first anniversary of the Boston Massacre.

I write “Bostonians” and not “Boston” because those commemorations weren’t official town acts. Rather, some of the more radical Whigs organized the events privately.

Paul Revere had pictures of the Massacre, Christopher Seider, and wounded America illuminated in his North End windows, as described here.

“The Bells of the several Congregational Meeting-Houses” rang for an hour after noon and then again from 9:00 to 10:00 P.M. The bells of the Anglican churches presumably stayed silent.

In addition, the Boston Gazette for 11 March reported:

An Oration containing a brief Account of the Massacre; of the Imputations of Treason and Rebellion, with which the Tools of Power endeavoured to brand the Inhabitants, and a Discant upon the Nature of Treasons, with some Considerations on the Threats of the British Ministry to take away the Massachusetts Charter, was delivered on the Evening by Dr. [Thomas] Young at the Factory-Hall, being the Place where the first Efforts of Military Tyranny was made within a few Days after the Troops arrived.

Edes and Gill’s front page for that issue of their Boston Gazette was very unusual, as shown above. It had big type, mourning banners, oversized headlines, wide columns, and other typography more common to see on broadsides than on newspapers of the day.

Dr. Thomas Young had been personally involved in the October 1768 dispute over the Manufactory. He had supported the Brown family against the regiments that tried to take over that large province-owned building, and he reported on the conflict for the newspapers. So it made sense to return to that site for his speech.

Young had also been at the forefront of the non-importation protests, both in the streets and in newspapers. On the evening before the Massacre, he was out on the streets carrying a sword, albeit trying to keep the peace by telling people fighting with soldiers near their barracks to go home. So naturally he had a lot to say about “the Threats of the British Ministry.”

On the other hand, Dr. Young was an unorthodox voice in Boston. He was a New Yorker in New England. He was a deist in a devout town dominated by Congregationalists. He was a democrat in a society that still expected deference to the genteel. For more about Dr. Thomas Young and his role in the Revolution, check out Hub History’s interview with Scott Nadler on the man.

Given Dr. Young’s many forms of radicalism, it’s easy to understand why his oration wasn’t endorsed by the town. There’s also no sign that that speech was ever published. The description in the Boston Gazette, which I suspect came from Young himself, is all that we have of it.

TOMORROW: But the idea of a commemorative oration caught on.