The Point of a John Adams Presidential Library

As I noted yesterday, earlier this year Mayor Thomas Koch of Quincy raised the idea of moving John Adams’s books from the Boston Public Library, where they’ve been for a century and a quarter, to his city.

That was part of an ambitious speech as Koch began his sixth term. At the time, of course, there was no pandemic in the U.S. of A. killing a thousand people a day, squelching tourism, slowing the economy, and taking a big bite out of municipal budgets. That situation has pushed a lot of big plans out further into the future.

Nonetheless, this month, as the Patriot-Ledger reported on 14 August, Koch took the first step in trying to claim the John Adams library:

The city has formally requested that the John Adams book collection be brought back to Quincy in a letter to the Boston Public Library, which has kept and maintained the 3,000 volumes for more than 120 years. Mayor Thomas Koch says he wants the artifacts returned to Quincy, the president’s final resting place, and ultimately used as the focal point for a presidential library.

“My objective is to return this treasure of our local and our national history to the citizens of Quincy and dedicate a presidential library of sorts to John Adams and feature his collection as its centerpiece, among other important displays of our history,” the mayor’s letter, addressed to BPL President David Leonard, said. “I fully recognize the importance of this undertaking and am willing to commit the necessary resources to see the proper care of the collection as well as prepare a suitable home for it.”

Mayor Koch’s request is based on the idea that that the Adams books were merely loaned to the Boston Public Library in the 1890s. I don’t see such language in the publications of the time. Indeed, as I wrote on Friday, while the Adams Temple and School Fund still referred to the books as the property of Quincy, the press of the time referred to the transfer of those books to the Boston Public Library as a “gift.”

The Adams Temple and School Fund lasted into this century with its last beneficiary being the Woodward School, founded just about the time the Adams books went to Boston. A few years ago, that school sued the city of Quincy for not exercising more fiduciary care over the fund. I don’t claim to understand the ramifications of the court’s decisions, but that case might have brought new attention to John Adams’s 1822 deeds to the city.

Mayor Koch now proposes to house the books in the Adams Academy building. That was the former President’s original vision, but the books have never actually been there. By the time that academy opened fifty years later, people appear to have thought better of housing thousands of antique books and hundreds of teen-aged boys in the same space. That building is now home to the Quincy Historical Society, so it is a center of local heritage.

Koch’s proposal makes clear that he envisions the “John Adams Presidential Library” as a historical display for the public. As another example of such city projects, Koch “pointed to the $32 million Hancock-Adams Common, the park in front of city hall, as a preservation investment that current and future residents and visitors will enjoy.” The statue of John Adams in that park appears above.

When WBUR radio covered this story, it reported: “The country’s second president granted his books and papers to the people of Quincy in a deed in the 1820s.” That’s only partly true. John Adams’s deed covered his books, not his papers. The family retained his documents, and eventually the Adams Manuscript Trust donated them to the Massachusetts Historical Society. The city of Quincy has no claim on those papers.

And that brings up a major problem with this proposal for a “John Adams Presidential Library.” Presidential libraries are usually the repositories of Presidents’ papers and are always supposed to be places to study their lives and administrations. Simply having John Adams’s books would not create a Presidential library as scholars understand the term. The mayor’s comments on the project show no sign that it would be designed for researchers, not just tourists and local students on field trips.

Indeed, the mayor’s remarks to the press suggest that the driver of this proposal is to affirm local pride, to show that Quincy can boast the same historical resources as Boston. Of course, Quincy is already home to Adams National Historical Park, with the houses of two Presidents and the book collection of one—but that’s a federal facility. A “John Adams Presidential Library” would be the city’s own shrine to one of its august citizens.

On Twitter, former Adams Editorial Project staffer Christopher F. Minty (now managing the John Dickinson Writings Project) reacted to these developments about John Adams by quoting from a letter of Thomas Boylston Adams IV in 1962 when Massachusetts was considering a monument to the former Presidents. “I think it would be a pure waste of money to put up a statue or similar memorial,” that descendant stated; “The only memorial which I consider suitable to them is their writings.”

For people studying those writings, John Adams’s papers and John Adams’s books are now housed in major research libraries about half a mile apart on Boylston Street. I think the Boston Public Library’s Rare Books and Manuscripts department could use more funding, but it offers a full scholarly infrastructure. Back in 1893, the Adams Temple and School Fund said the books should go to Boston because more scholars would visit them at a bigger library in a bigger city. I think that’s still true.

Looking at John Adams’s Things Today

Since the Boston Public Library opened in its current location in 1895, it’s been the repository of John Adams’s book collection.

The B.P.L. had a handsome exhibit of those books in 2006-07, as shown here courtesy of Brian O’Connor. More recently it digitized the collection through the Internet Archive.

Scholars have long studied those volumes, many of which include Adams’s notes responding to what he read. Now everyone can look at images of those pages and see how, for instance, he engaged in a running debate with Mary Wollstonecraft on the French Revolution.

John Adams and his family also left a very large archive of manuscripts—letters, diaries, trial notes, drafts of essays, expense accounts, and so on. In 1956 the Adams Manuscript Trust donated all those papers to the Massachusetts Historical Society. Since then the M.H.S. has managed an extensive program to transcribe and publish the family documents, both for scholars and the public.

The text of the published papers appears online within the M.H.S. website and at Founders Online. Images of the correspondence of John and Abigail Adams, John Adams’s autobiography and diary, and John Quincy Adams’s diaries, among other documents, can also be viewed online.

The Adams family also deeded their historic houses in Quincy to the National Park Service, starting in 1946. The Adams National Historic Park complex now includes a stone building erected in 1870 for John Quincy Adams’s library, significantly larger than his father’s (though he inherited about 10% of those books).

In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt forged a new path for handling his Presidential and other papers. He established a library on his estate at Hyde Park, New York; raised money to fund it; and turned it over to the U.S. government through the National Archives. That became a model for a new institution: the Presidential library. Soon Harry S Truman and Herbert Hoover followed that example. After the Watergate crimes, the U.S. Congress mandated that Presidents’ official papers remained part of the National Archives, no longer their personal property.

Presidential libraries have become so popular that private and public institutions have been establishing libraries for earlier Presidents. Some of those places are the repositories of the President’s papers, but others aren’t.

For instance, the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon doesn’t own Washington’s papers; those are, for the most part, at the Library of Congress and the Library of Virginia. It doesn’t own Washington’s own books; the bulk of that collection is at the Boston Athenaeum. But the library at Mount Vernon has quickly established itself as a study center with a large collection of published studies, fellowships, and public programs.

The Presidential libraries also often function as shrines to their subjects, on par with their birthplaces and mansions. Those libraries are tourist sites as much or more than anything else. There’s ongoing tension between showing each President at his best and promoting objective, scholarly assessments of his actions and legacy. 

All that brings me to this year’s twist in the story of the John Adams Library. In January Thomas Koch began his sixth term as the mayor of Quincy. In his inaugural address he outlined several ambitious plans for city institutions. Among them, according to the Quincy Patriot-Ledger:

Koch said he will work to bring the John Adams Book Collection back to the city and create a John Adams Presidential Library in the Adams Academy Building. The book collection was loaned to the Boston Public Library decades ago, Koch said, because the city didn’t have the facilities to care for or display them.

“I am proud to say that thanks to the passion and hard work of a lot of people, those reasons no longer apply. That’s why I plan to petition the Boston Public Library and the City of Boston to return the books to their rightful home in Quincy,” he said.

Now that’s not what Adams Temple and School Fund said in 1893 when it decided to move the Adams collection to the Boston Public Library. The books were then in Quincy’s recently built Thomas Crane Public Library, and there doesn’t seem to have been any suggestion they weren’t safe. Rather, the alleged problem was that nobody was coming to Quincy to study them.

TOMORROW: How would this proposal for a John Adams Presidential Library work?

“The most appropriate and useful place for the collection”

Yesterday I quoted John Adams’s deed donating his library to the town of Quincy.

The former President also granted the town some of the land he owned to build an academy, where the library was supposed to go, and a new Congregational church.

In February 1827 the Massachusetts General Court approved the incorporation of the Adams Temple and School Fund to oversee the property and investments, collect more money, and bring Adams’s vision to reality.

Adams was clear in his final deed about what his priorities were:

Though I presume not to dictate to the town, yet it is my wish, that the building of the Academy and the establishment of a classical master should be provided for before the Temple, of which I see no present necessity…

For Adams, the resources ideally were to go toward the school, presumably the library inside it, and finally the church. There was already, after all, a serviceable meetinghouse.

Instead, the new church was built from local granite and opened in 1828, two years after Adams died. It is now known as the “Church of the Presidents” since both he and his son John Quincy Adams attended services and were buried there.

The Adams Academy took a lot longer to raise money for. John Adams’s grandson Charles Francis Adams finally saw it become reality in 1872. Four years later, there were 140 boys studying there.

But that school ran into competition from both older academies and newer public and parochial high schools. The Adams Academy closed in 1908. The stone building then hosted other civic and charitable organizations. Since the 1970s it’s been the headquarters of the Quincy Historical Society.

In the mid-nineteenth century, John Adams’s books were housed at various places around Quincy, including the town hall. During this time, a rare copy of Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan disappeared from the collection while autograph hunters cut Adams’s signature out of others. In 1882 the fund’s trustees chose to locate the library not at the academy but in the town’s new Thomas Crane Public Library.

But that arrangement didn’t last, either. In 1893 the Boston Public Library was designing a grand new building in the Back Bay. The president of its trustees wrote to the supervisors of the Adams Temple and School Fund about their thoughts on the John Adams Library:

They are so impressed with the great interest and historical value of the collection that they feel it will not be out of place to ask you if it is not possible to place it in some position where it would be more accessible to the students to whom it would be useful. . . .

As the new Public Library building in Boston is nearing completion, it has occurred to the Trustees that the most appropriate and useful place for the collection would be in that building, where it would be of great use to a great number of students who resort to the Boston Public Library from all parts of the country, and where its value would be increased by the convenience of using it in connection with the large collection on kindred subjects already collected, and where it might also serve as a nucleus for one of the most important constitutional libraries in the United States.

According to Lindsay Swift of the B.P.L., in Quincy the Adams collection “was practically unused for it was of a character little calculated to interest readers in a small community.” What’s more, the larger library’s trustees offered “a separate alcove with a suitable inscription over it” if the books came to Boston.

In November 1893, the Adams Temple and School Fund supervisors decided that “the intent of President Adams would be better carried out by placing the Library where it would be more accessible to students and investigators,” in the words of Charles Francis Adams, Jr. They approved the transfer of the volumes into the new Boston building.

Reports on this transfer, such as in the 17 Dec 1893 Boston Herald, referred to it as a “gift” from the fund to Boston’s future library. At the same time, the fund’s official resolution still referred to those books of John Adams as “the Library belonging to the city of Quincy.” So what institution had legal claim to the old President’s books?

TOMORROW: A call from Quincy in 2020.

When John Adams Gave Away His Library

In the summer of 1822, John Adams was feeling generous toward his home town and considering his legacy. The ex-President was then eighty-six years old.

On 25 June, Adams deeded to the town of Quincy two tracts of land to fund a stone “Temple” for the town’s Congregational Society, under certain conditions. On 8 July, a town meeting accepted that gift.

On 25 July, President Adams deeded more land to build a stone schoolhouse for an academy. He noted that his long-gone colleagues John Hancock and Josiah Quincy, Jr., had grown up in part on that land. On 6 August, the town accepted that gift and its conditions.

Finally, on 10 August the former President made a third gift:

KNOW all Men by these Presents, That I, John Adams, of Quincy, in the County of Norfolk, Esquire, in further consideration of the motives and reasons enumerated in my two former Deeds, do hereby give, grant convey and confirm to the inhabitants of the town of Quincy in their corporate capacity, and their successors, the fragments of my Library, which still remain in my possession, excepting a few that I shall reserve for my consolation in the few days that remain to me, on the following conditions, viz.

Condition first, That a Catalogue of them be made, recorded in the town books and printed, together with the three Deeds, in sufficient numbers to perpetuate the remembrance of them.

Condition second, That those books be deposited in an apartment of the building to be hereafter erected for a Greek and Latin School or Academy.

Condition third, That these books be placed under the direction of the five gentlemen mentioned in my former deeds as supervisors of the Temple and School Fund, with the addition of the Rev. Mr. [John] Whitney and the successive settled Ministers of the Congregational Society, and also of the future settled Ministers of the Episcopal Society, while they shall remain such.

Condition fourth, That none of the books shall ever be sold, exchanged or lent, or suffered to be removed from the apartment, without a solemn vote of a majority of the superintendents.

Condition fifth, The books may be removed to any place the Committee of the town shall direct, or remain where they are, at the pleasure of the Committee of the town; locked up and the keys held by the Committee during my life, and the pleasure of my Executors afterwards.

Article sixth, I make no condition of this, but submit it to the consideration of the town whether it may be expedient to build the Temple on the Hancock Lot near the Academy? Nothing would be a higher gratification to me or more honorable to my memory; and I could wish that the triangle on which the present Temple stands should be left forever as a common Training Field, and for other accommodations of the inhabitants of the town.

Article seventh, Though I presume not to dictate to the town, yet it is my wish, that the building of the Academy and the establishment of a classical master should be provided for before the Temple, of which I see no present necessity, and I cannot think that this can ever be construed a deviation from the plan and intentions of the Donor, notwithstanding any thing in the two former deeds; and if any descendant of mine should ever presume to call it in question, I hereby pronounce him unworthy of me; and I hereby petition all future Legislators of the Commonwealth to pass a special law to defeat his impious intentions, and this I think can never be adjudged an Ex post facto law.

Article eighth, It is not my intention or desire to make any condition of what follows; but I ask leave to suggest to the town the propriety of applying the income of the Coddington School lands to the uses of this Academy, and to give authority to the superintendents of the Library to apply such parts of it, as they shall judge expedient, to the purchase of books annually to augment and increase this Library. Those books to be kept by themselves in separate alcoves to be denominated the Coddington Alcoves. That gentleman’s first residence was in this town, and he [William Coddington] was an honor to it. He was a man of large and liberal mind. He removed with the excellent Roger Williams to Rhode Island, and became the father, founder, and first Governor of that colony. This will be a proper memorial of respect and gratitude for that very ancient and noble donation.

Adams signed that document in the presence of his nephew William Smith Shaw and his late colleague’s son and grandson, now Josiah Quincy and Josiah Quincy, Jr.

The Quincy town meeting had already voted to authorize a committee to express thanks for “the gift of his very valuable library” on top of everything else.

A catalogue of Adams’s books was published in 1823 along the transcriptions of the deeds, town meeting resolutions, and other legal documents connected with his gift. That slim book listed 2,756 volumes in all. There were twenty-three pages of English books, nineteen pages of French books, five pages of Latin books, two of Greek, and two of Italian and Spanish. They were still in the former President’s possession as the committee worked on funding the academy and church.

TOMORROW: What happened to that library?

“I hereby revoke all and every Sentence”

Recently I came across this advertisement in the 13 Oct 1768 Boston News-Letter:

Whereas the Wife of me the Subscriber has eloped from me, and I am apprehensive she will run me in Debt. I hereby forbid all Persons from trusting her on my Account, as I will not pay any Debt she may contract from the Date hereof;—and all Person are forbid harbouring, entertaining or carrying her off at the Peril of the Law.

Thomas Baker.
Boston, October 4 1768

That was a standard legal formula for abjuring an estranged spouse’s obligations, usually deployed by men. Can this marriage be saved?

Evidently it could. This appeared in the News-Letter on 10 November:

WHEREAS I the Subscriber here undermentioned has through the Innovations and groundless Suspicions of ill-minded Persons, treated my Wife Elizabeth Baker in a scandalous manner, by publishing her in the public Prints, and by the Cryer of this Town; be it known to all persons whatever, that I hereby revoke all and every Sentence that has been printed or said by the Cryer of this Town in my Behalf.

Boston, November 3, 1768.

Witness my Hand, THOMAS BAKER.

It is further expected that no Person will attempt casting any Reflections on my Wife for any Thing that is past, as they will answer the Consequence.

Alas, I haven’t found any more about this Thomas and Elizabeth Baker. In fact, as of January 1769, there was another couple in Boston with exactly the same names, which rather confuses matters.

How I Zoomed My Summer Vacation

It’s the part of August in New England when the sky is overcast, the air has a chill, and hurricanes sometimes pass by. Back when I was growing up, my family always managed to be on a New Hampshire lakeside during that week, shivering in sweaters on the little beach.

So with those reminders of summer coming to an end, even though each day can seem just like the last, I’m round up links to the videos I’ve participated in since the pandemic shutdown began.

With History Camps canceled around the country this year, organizers Lee Wright and Carrie Lund turned to producing online events highlighting historical authors and sites.

Here’s my conversation with Lee and Carrie about The Road to Concord. And here are links to all the other interviews they’ve done since. On this upcoming Thursday, the conversation will feature Jim Christ, President of the Paoli Battlefield Preservation Fund.

Lee and Carrie also organized America’s Summer Road Trip to feature over a dozen historic sites across the country. I collaborated with Ranger Jim Hollister and Lee to show off both famous and little-known parts of Minute Man National Historical Park, and here’s that video.

Ranger Jim and I also had a video conversation about the weapons collected in Concord in early 1775 and what that led to. And I got to participate in the park’s group reading of Henry W. Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Look for some other friendly faces in Boston’s Revolutionary history scene. There are many more videos on Minute Man’s Facebook page.

Christian Di Spigna and Randy Flood of the new Dr. Joseph Warren Historical Society are interviewing historians about smallpox in the eighteenth century and other topics. Here’s my conversation about the ripple effects of the 1764 smallpox epidemic and other topics. And here’s the whole list of videos.

Roger Williams is convening History Author Talks featuring two authors with related books plus a third as moderator. Here’s my conversation with Nina Sankovitch, author of American Rebels, with Paul Lockhart in the chair. Again, this is an ongoing series. The next session on Tuesday, 25 August, will feature Don Hagist (Noble Volunteers), Stephen Taaffe (Washington’s Revolutionary War Generals), and Gregory J. W. Unwin.

The Death of Prisoners after the Battle of Bennington

New England troops and Crown forces, including French-speaking Canadians and German-speaking Hessians and Brunswickers, fought the Battle of Bennington on 16 Aug 1777.

The much larger American force won handily, killing more than 200 of the enemy and capturing 700.

On the day after the fighting, the Americans marched many of those prisoners of war across what’s now a state line to the Bennington Meetinghouse and locked them in under guard.

After dark on 17 August, the sentries around the building heard a loud crash inside. It’s not clear what broke—perhaps a bench that prisoners were resting on. Some of the men inside the church appear to have feared that the packed galleries were going to collapse, so they tried to push their way out.

In an article about this event for the Johannes Schwalm Historical Association, Michael P. Gabriel argued that the galleries didn’t collapse because the meetinghouse remained in use for another quarter-century. But perhaps some benches or railings fell onto people.

Outside the church, the guards heard the crash. They saw men pushing out the doors and windows. They feared their prisoners were trying to escape. The language barriers multiplied the confusion.

American soldiers fired their guns into the church. Others used their bayonets to round up the men who had made it outside.

In his article, Gabriel highlighted the experience of Dr. Julius Friedrich Wasmus and Dr. Friedrich Sandhagen, surgeons captured with the Brunswick regiments. They were dining with a local doctor at a militia captain’s house. The crashing, shouting, and shooting caused the hosts to rush out.

After a few minutes alone, the two German doctors decided to return to the Catamount Tavern, where they had been assigned. But on their way they ran into a group of militiamen hurrying toward the disturbance with their weapons. At the head of this group was the Rev. Thomas Allen of Pittsfield, a gung-ho Patriot keyed up by the battle.

Deciding these two German men were trying to escape, Allen started hitting Sandhagen with the flat of his sword. The militiamen cocked their muskets. Wasmus was afraid he would be killed. “I have never seen a man so enraged as this noble pastor,” he wrote.

Suddenly Dr. Wasmus was grabbed from behind. An American major had come across the group and recognized the captives. He pulled them away from the zealous minister, explaining who they were, and shoved them toward the meetinghouse.

At that site, the German surgeons started treating the injured. Wasmus counted two dead and five wounded. Eventually the prisoners were able to explain to their captors why they had tried to leave the meetinghouse. The local doctor sent over the dinner that his guests had missed.

Gabriel reports that American memories of the incident varied. Some veterans described the night in their pension applications, still convinced they had helped spoil an attempted escape. (Indeed, five prisoners seem to have vanished in the night.) Or they blamed the prisoners for the “disturbance.”

At least one man, however, felt he had unjustly participated in killing prisoners of war. When John Collester of Blandford, Massachusetts, applied for a federal pension, he listed many short-term enlistments and didn’t mention the event in Bennington. But in an 1850 speech to the local literary association, William H. Gibbs reported what the veteran had told him:

The prisoners were quartered in a church for the night, and placed under the care of seven sergeants, upon whom Mr. Collester was requested to keep a vigilant eye, About the middle of the night a crash was heard, and the soldiers rushed to the windows, when the guards were commanded to fire upon them. Seven were killed and restored. But morning opened a new revelation. The galleries of the church being weakened by the multitude of their occupants, had fallen, and crushed some and frightened others. Our aged and venerable townsman, on learning this fact, regretted the part he had acted, although in the discharge of his duty.

Many of the wounded prisoners remained in the Massachusetts countryside under guard with Dr. Wasmus kept to care for them. He spent time in Brimfield, Westminster, and Rutland before finally getting exchanged in 1781.

“Improper to sustain a commission”

On 16 Aug 1775, the Continental Army issued its internal response to the fiery British raid on the Penny Ferry landing in Malden, described back here.

As quoted in Col. William Henshaw’s orderly book:

Captain Eleazer Lindsey of Colonel Gerrish’s regiment, tried by a general court-martial for absenting himself from his post, which was attacked and abandoned to the enemy; the court, on consideration, are of opinion that Captain Lindsey be discharged the service, as a person improper to sustain a commission.

This was one of a series of court-martial proceedings in that week. On 13 August orders had gone out for some men to be confined, and the next day Gen. Nathanael Greene (shown here) assembled a panel of high-ranking officers in the Harvard College chapel.

On 18 August, Greene’s panel tried Col. Samuel Gerrish and unanimously found “That he behaved unworthy an Officer” during the British assault on Sewall’s Point. The court-martial cited “the 49th Article of the Rules and Regulations of the Massachusetts Army,” which was a grab-bag clause:

All Crimes not capital, and all Disorders and Neglects, which Officers and Soldiers may be guilty of, to the Prejudice of good Order and military Discipline, though not mentioned in the Articles of War, are to be taken cognizance of by a general or regimental Court-Martial, according to the Nature and Degree of the Offence, and be punished at their Discretion.

The court recommended that Gerrish “be cashiered, and render’d incapable of any employment in the American Army.” Gen. George Washington approved that sentence the next day.

On 25 August, the commander-in-chief transferred the company formerly under Capt. Lindsey out of the regiment formerly under Col. Gerrish and back into the regiment of Col. Ruggles Woodbridge.

I’ve already quoted what Washington wrote about these actions to his overseer on 20 August. Nine days later he wrote something similar to Richard Henry Lee:

I have made a pretty good Slam among such kind of officers as the Massachusets Government abound in since I came to this Camp, having Broke one Colo. and two Captains for Cowardly beh[aviour in] the action on Bunker’s Hill—Two captains for drawing more provisions and pay than they had men in their Company—and one for being absent from his Post when the Enemy appeared there, and burnt a House just by it.

Besides these, I have at this time one Colo., one Major, one Captn, & two Subalterns under arrest for tryal—

In short I spare none & yet fear it will not all do, as these Peeple seem to be too inattentive to every thing but their Interest.

Washington’s comments don’t line up exactly with the court-martial sentences. Gerrish was formally charged with poor behavior well after Bunker Hill, and both Lindsey and Capt. Christopher Gardner could be described as “being absent from his Post when the Enemy appeared there, and burnt a House just by it.” But the overall trend is clear.

The Landlord of Liberty Tree

This is how the merchant John Rowe described Boston’s first public protest against the Stamp Act in his diary:

A Great Number of people assembled at Deacon Elliots Corner this morning to see the Stamp Officer hung in Effigy with a Libel on the Breast, on Deacon Elliot’s tree…

The great elm that held the effigy and provided shade for that protest hadn’t yet been dubbed Liberty Tree. In the coming months, the Sons of Liberty would come up with that name, hammer a plaque into the side of the tree, and make it a political gathering-point. As of mid-August 1765, however, that elm was still “Deacon Elliot’s tree.” And who was he?

As far back as May 1733, when the Boston town meeting debated setting up official marketplaces, one of the proposed sites was “near the great Tree, at the South-End, near Mr. Eliot’s House.” When the 31 May Boston News-Letter reported on that hotly contested vote (364 yeas to 339 nays), it referred to “the great Trees at the South End.” That phrase suggests that there were multiple large trees near Eliot’s house, but one particularly big one. It had probably been growing there for over a century, since before Englishmen came to the Shawmut peninsula.

As for clues about “Deacon Elliot,” this advertisement appeared in the 17 June 1734 New-England Weekly Journal:

TO BE LETT,
A Good convenient House, adjoyning the South Market place, with a large Garden in good Order; Inquire of Mr. John Eliot Stationer, living near the great Trees.

When proposals for publishing an American Magazine went around in 1743, “Mr. John Eliot, at the great Trees at the South-End,” was one of the men collecting subscriptions (along with “Mr. Benja. Franklin, Post Master in Philadelphia”).

John Eliot was born in 1692, a descendant of some of Boston’s earliest British settlers. He was a great-nephew of the famous Rev. John Eliot, “Apostle to the Indians.” The young man appears to have followed his uncle Benjamin Eliot (1665-1741) into the business of bookbinding and stationery sales. He also commissioned small books from printers, almost all sermons and other religious literature. As early as 1716 Eliot was issuing these publications “at his shop at the south-end.”

It appears Eliot inherited that land in the South End, as well as property out in Brookline. In 1708, when the Boston selectmen laid out the southernmost stretch of the main road through town, they defined Orange Street as from the old Neck fortifications to the Eliot house. With, presumably, the great elms nearby.

As he neared the age of thirty, Eliot married Sarah Holyoke. Her brother, the Rev. Edward Holyoke, was a Marblehead minister who became president of Harvard College. The Eliots had eight children between 1721 and 1735.

In the early decades of the eighteenth century, the south end of Boston was still sparsely populated. Then the Hollis Street Meetinghouse was built for the Rev. Mather Byles in 1732. The town opened its south market, and soon the area had more houses and streets. We can see that growth in how Eliot’s title pages described his business:

• “at his shop, the south end of the town,” 1724
• “in Orange Street at the south end of the town,” 1734
• “near the South Market,” 1741

Even after the consolidation of Boston’s marketplaces at Faneuil Hall in 1743, the neighborhood grew.

Deacon Eliot’s big trees remained a handy landmark for people entering or navigating town. Newspaper advertisements tell us Josiah Quincy, Sr., lived “opposite to the great Trees, at the South End,” until he struck it rich in privateering and moved to a country estate in Braintree. Other sites in the neighborhood included the house of auctioneer and deacon Benjamin Church, Sr.; the leather workshop of Adam Colson; and a building once called “the Half-Moon, or Land-Bank House.”

Isaiah Thomas later wrote of Eliot:

He published a few books, and was, many years, a bookseller and binder, but his concerns were not extensive. However, he acquired some property; and being a respectable man, was made deacon of the church in Hollis street.

Thomas simply missed the period when Eliot was most active in publishing. After his uncle’s death in 1741, the deacon appears to have cut back on new ventures and lived off his real estate and shop.

Sarah Eliot died in 1755 at the age of sixty. Deacon John Eliot was then sixty-three years old. He married again to a woman named Mary, then in her forties, but she died in 1761. The deacon’s daughters Sarah and Silence remained unmarried, so one or both might have kept house for him after that.

In August 1765, as described yesterday, the Loyall Nine used the boughs of Deacon Eliot’s tree to hang Andrew Oliver in effigy. The figures of several other royal appointees and political enemies followed in the subsequent years. The Sons of Liberty put up a flagpole beside the tree and raised a banner—the Union Jack on a red field—to call public gatherings. Christopher Seider’s funeral train stopped at the tree. So did the processions of men being tarred and feathered.

The way people referred to the tree as belonging to Deacon Eliot suggests it stood on his property with the branches extending over the street. It’s not clear how near Eliot’s house was to the tree, or whether he had a fence around his land. (The picture above was created decades after the tree was cut down in 1775, and there’s no way to know how accurate it was.) How did Eliot feel about the large political gatherings right outside his house? About his property being identified with rebellion?

Though Eliot doesn’t show up on the records as an active Whig, he does seem to have supported that cause and accepted the new identity for the elm outside his house. The 10 Apr 1769 Boston Gazette included an advertisement saying that land and “a large Building thereon, commonly known by the Name of the South Market,” was to be sold by court order. Prospective buyers were invited to “inquire of John Eliot at Liberty-Tree.”

On 14 August that year, the elderly deacon was among the many local dignitaries who dined with Boston’s Sons of Liberty at Lemuel Robinson’s tavern in Dorchester. In 1770, when William Billings advertised his New-England Psalm-Singer, one of the of the four places where people could buy it was “Deacon Elliot’s under Liberty-Tree.”

By that time, Deacon Eliot was in his late seventies. He didn’t live to see all that his elm tree inspired. On 22 Nov 1771, the Boston News-Letter ran this death notice:

Last Thursday died here, Mr. John Eliot, Deacon of the Church under the Pastoral Care of the the Rev’d Dr. Byles—He justly sustain’d the Character of an Honest Man, and a good Christian—His Remains were decently interr’d on Saturday last.

Three days later an ad in the Boston Gazette called on people with debts to settle with Eliot’s estate to meet with the administrators, Joseph Eliot and Thomas Crafts, Jr. The former was probably his son (1727-1782), who moved to Natick, as did his unmarried sisters. The latter was a member of the Loyall Nine who watched over Liberty Tree from his nearby workshop.

The gravestone for Deacon John Eliot and his two wives still stands in the Granary Burying Ground.

When Did the American Revolution Begin?

Is this the anniversary of the day the American Revolution began?

That of course depends on accepting the idea that the American Revolution started on an identifiable day instead of building up gradually. Some revolutions are seen to start with a bang, like the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, and others aren’t.

If there was one day when the political tensions between the imperial government in London and the North American colonies turned into (as yet unrecognized) revolution, I argue that day was 14 Aug 1765.

That’s when Boston’s Loyall Nine took American dissatisfaction with Parliament’s new Stamp Act out from legislative chambers, courtrooms, and newspaper essays into the streets. Specifically, into the main street through Boston where it met Essex Street in the shadow of a great elm.

In a notebook where he made notes on major historical events, the Rev. James Freeman collected details on the 14 August protest:

The effigies of the distributor of stamps [Andrew Oliver], pendant, behind whom hung a boot newly soled with a Grenville sole, out of wc. proceeded the Devil was exhibited on the great tree in main street. The spectacle continued ye whole day wh.out the least opposition.

About evening a no. of reputable persons assembled, cut down the effigies, placed it on a [wagon?], and covering it with a sheet, they proceeded in a regular solemn manner, amidst the acclamations of the populace thro the town, till they arrived at ye Court House [Town House], where after a short pause, they pass’d, & proceeding down King’s Street, soon reached a certain edifice then building for ye reception of stamps wc they quickly levelled with ye ground it stood on & wh the wooden remains therefrom march’d to Fort Hill, where kindling a fire the[y] burnt the effigies.

The gentleman who was to have been the distributor of the stamps had his house [?] near the hill, & by that means it received from the populace some small insults, such as breaking the windows of his kitchen which would have ended there, had not some indiscretions been committed by his friends within, wc so enraged the people, that they were not to be restrained from entering the house; the damages however was not great

Colonial politicians had gotten into many disputes with London and its appointees, such as the Boston merchants’ lawsuit against Customs officer Charles Paxton’s writs of assistance. But those disagreements went through formal, legal channels. So did the early objections to the Stamp Act. We have to go back to Massachusetts’s uprising against Gov. Edmund Andros in 1689 to find a big extralegal move against the government—and that was of course part of Britain’s Glorious Revolution.

Boston had seen public disturbances, including the Knowles Riots in 1747. But this Stamp Act protest was something new. It was action against an official British law, not how particular officials were carrying out a disputed policy. The protest was designed not just to communicate anger to men in authority but also to educate and rile up ordinary people—the demonstrators stopped farmers coming into town and asked if their goods had been properly “stamped.”

Furthermore, Boston’s protests provided the template for more anti-Stamp Act actions up and down the Atlantic coast. Almost all those demonstrations included effigies of royal officials festooned with signs to make sure no one missed the point, bonfires after dark, and some light rioting. That produced a continental movement, not just a local brawl. Eventually that movement and the principles it promulgated, such as “no taxation without representation,” built into the American Revolution.

(I should note that James Freeman’s account must have been digested from newspapers and older people’s memories. In 1765 Freeman was only six years old and living in Charlestown.)

“Brisk Firing” along the Rivers in 1775

When we last peeked in on Malden during the siege of Boston, a British raiding party from Charlestown had crossed the Mystic River and burned the building at the Penny Ferry landing.

The Continental Army officer assigned to that spot, Capt. Eleazer Lindsey, was no help. Reports differ about whether he had gone home or took just that moment to go home in a hurry.

The British floating battery remained in the Mystic River, threatening those parts of the American siege lines.

A week later, on 13 Aug 1775, there was another exchange of fire. It started when some British boats came to resupply the floating battery. Capt. William T. Miller of Rhode Island, stationed on Prospect Hill, told his wife there were “2 Boats that were armed from Bunkers hill.” The historian Richard Frothingham later stated there were “two barges and two sail boats, on their way from Boston.”

Men guarding Malden’s ferry landing opened fire. Capt. Miller wrote that the British boats “were Drove back by the brisk firing of Some field pieces from Malden this day which Caused them in a Very great Hurry to Retreat and Run ashore on Bunkers hill Shore.”

Those small cannon might have been the two that had arrived in April from Newburyport. If so, the men firing them appear to have been a local guard rather than men from Lindsey’s company. In addition, Lt. Col. Loammi Baldwin’s soldiers at Winnisimmet in Chelsea fired on the British boats.

There were no known casualties on either side. The Continentals were quite pleased with their performance in comparison to the previous week, though presumably the redcoats would have gone back to their lines anyway.

Both Lindsey and Baldwin reported to Col. Samuel Gerrish of Newbury. His regiment was spread out over several spots along the northern wing of the siege lines. When a group of officers from the regiment sent a petition to Gen. George Washington complaining that they hadn’t been paid, they signed from the “Camps at Chelsea, Malden, Medford, and Sewells Point” near what is now the B. U. Bridge.

Gen. William Heath’s memoir records a similar British attack on that Brookline fortification a couple of weeks earlier, on 31 July:

A little before one o’clock, A.M. a British floating-battery came up the river, within 300 yards of Sewall’s Point, and fired a number of shot at the American works, on both sides of the river.

Some of the works on the Cambridge side survive as Fort Washington Park. The picture above, a detail from Henry Pelham’s map of the siege, shows the area in 1775. (Pelham’s map has north on the right.)

That attack might have been the occasion when Col. Gerrish chose not to shoot back at the British but instead told his men to hunker down behind their walls. Reportedly he said, “the rascals can do us no harm, and it would be a mere waste of powder, to fire at them with our 4 pounders.” That was the wrong attitude for an officer already under criticism for how he had behaved at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

COMING UP: Washington’s “pretty good Slam” among the officers.

Paula Bagger with More on Marlborough

After my series of postings about Revolutionary conflict in Marlborough, Paula Bagger of the Hingham Historical Society filled me in on some details about the household of Loyalist merchant Henry Barnes. She has researched that family in the course of making important discoveries about the enslaved artist Prince Demah.

In particular, Paula identified the little girl whom Dr. Samuel Curtis quizzed about the two undercover British army officers who visited the house in March 1775. So I’m sharing Paula’s information as a “guest blogger” posting.

The “child” was undoubtedly Christian (“Chrisy”) Arbuthnot, the daughter of Christian Barnes’s brother William Arbuthnot from Hingham. Born in 1765, Chrisy would have been ten years old whereas the other young women who lived with the Barneses from time to time (Catharine Goldthwait and several Murray nieces of Elizabeth Inman) were older. The Barneses became Chrisy’s guardians when William Arbuthnot, a widower, died in the late 1760s.

Chrisy decamped to England with the Barneses in 1776 and died in 1782 in Bristol.

As for Catharine Goldthwait (1744-1830), who remained in Marlborough trying to preserve the estate in 1775, she traveled to England in the late ’70s or early ’80s. She spent time with her parents, Thomas and Catherine (the latter Henry Barnes’s sister), who had settled in Walthamstow outside London. But she seems to have spent some time with the Barneses in Bristol as well.

In July 1795, Catherine wrote Deborah Barker of Hingham to tell her that Christian Barnes had died in April. Henry Barnes died in London in 1808.

In England, Catharine Goldthwait met and married eighty-year-old Dr. Silvester Gardiner, a wealthy Loyalist widower [shown above]. They returned to America together. After Gardiner died, she married the merchant William Powell of Boston, a wealthy Patriot widower. She had no children of her own but adopted a niece and then two great-nieces.

Thanks, Paula!

One of the oddities I came across while researching this extended family is that Catharine Goldthwait’s sister Mary (1753-1825?) married Francis Archibald in Maine, was widowed, and fell into mental illness—the reason her teen-aged daughter came to live with Catharine Powell in Boston and eventually take her aunt’s last name. Mary Archibald lived on relief in the homes of various Maine householders, including now-famous Revolutionary War veteran Joseph Plumb Martin for several years.

COMING UP: Gossip about Marlborough’s Dr. Curtis.

“I will take your Body and I will Tar it”

When I was posting about Henry Barnes’s conflict with his Marlborough neighbors in the summer of 1770, I looked for the text of the anonymous threatening letter he reported receiving in late June.

But I couldn’t find that text and had to settle for quoting the proclamation Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson issued about it.

Later I came across the text of that letter in E. Alfred Jones’s The Loyalists of Massachusetts, so I’ll quote it today.

Henry’s wife Christian had already told her friend Elizabeth Smith about the local protesters:

the first thing that fell a Sacrifice to their Mallace and reveng was the Coach which caused so much desention between us they took the cushings out of and put them in the Brook and the next night Cut the Carraig to Peices.

I first interpreted that “desention” to be between the Barneses, perhaps arguing over the expense of the coach. But in another letter Christian Barnes told Smith about “the Person that cut your Coach to Peices,” meaning that vehicle had first belonged to Smith or her late husband. So now I’m wondering if there had been some disagreement between the two ladies over that coach—perhaps Smith insisting that the Barneses take it as she left for Britain and Christian Barnes trying to resist.

The anonymous letter referred to the coach as a “booby hut,” a New England term for a carriage or coach body put on sleigh runners, as John Hancock’s coach has been preserved. Was that just a pejorative reference, or had the Smith carriage been left on runners since the winter?

In any event, Henry Barnes’s public complaints about the destruction of that vehicle spurred the anonymous writer:

I understand you are about carrying your Old dam’d Booby Hutt to the General Court and from thence Home to England to get recompence for all the damage you have sustained since you have been an infamous Importer or a common Enemy to the Country—

Therefore if you only want recompence for the damage you have done the Country in Importing goods contrary to the Agreement of Body of Merchants on this Continent I will recompence you without going there or any where else for I am determined to fetch you to terms even if I do it at the expence of my own Soul, or the Coat of a Sore Back or any other punishment in this World only for the good of my Country, for I stile myself a Son of LIBERTY,

therefore if you will Shut up your Store and Sell nothing out, nor Import any goods till the Importation takes place you shall sustain no more damage

But if not I will Fire your House and Store and destroy all your substance you have on the earth, And I will take your Body and I will Tar it, and if nothing else will do but Death you shall have it certainly, and so you will have no more Notice and if you do it by the 20th June 1770 Good and well, and if not you may depend upon my being as good as my word and so I will never write no more and so I stile myself Inspector General

I find it striking that this letter doesn’t speak in the voice of the community as Whig missives usually did. Instead, the writer emphasizes himself as an individual—willing to sacrifice for the country, to be sure, but speaking and acting on his own. That makes me inclined to think it didn’t come from Alpheus Woods or another member of the Marlborough town committee to enforce non-importation but from someone riled up by the conflict and perhaps not in his right mind.

“My succeeding to the post he holds from the crown”

Almost three years after Nathaniel Rogers died suddenly, he was back in the news.

Rogers was the author of one of the “Hutchinson Letters” that Benjamin Franklin leaked to the Boston Whigs in the spring of 1773.

Gov. Thomas Hutchinson wrote only six of those letters. Another six came from his friends and political allies (four from Andrew Oliver, shown here, and one each from Charles Paxton and Robert Auchmuty), and the last from his nephew, Rogers.

Those letters were collected by Thomas Whately, a Member of Parliament interested in the administration of the American colonies. Many of the writers discussed the challenges of governing Massachusetts, with some hints or recommendations about changing its constitution.

In contrast, Rogers’s letter was all about wanting the job of provincial secretary. It reveals just how such appointments were negotiated in this period, with a lot of discussion about money and little about the public interest or policy.

Boston, Decem. 12th 1768.

My Dear Sir,

I wrote you a few days ago, and did not then think of troubling you upon any private affair of mine, at least not so suddenly; but within this day or two, I have had a conversation with Mr. [Andrew] Oliver, secretary of the province, the design of which was my succeeding to the post he holds from the crown, upon the idea, that provision would be made for governor [Francis] Bernard, and the lieutenant governor [i.e., Uncle Hutchinson] would succeed to the chair, then the secretary is desirous of being lieutenant governor, and if in any way, three hundred pounds a year could be annexed to the appointment.

You are sensible the appointment is in one department [i.e., the Colonial Office], and the grant of money in another [the Treasury, funded by Customs revenue under the Townshend Act]; now the present lieutenant governor has an assignment of £200 a year upon the customs here; he has not received any thing from it as yet, and is doubtful if he shall; he has no doubt of its lapse to the crown, if he has the chair; if then by any interest that sum could be assigned to Mr. Oliver as lieutenant governor, and if he should be allowed (as has been usual for all lieutenant governors) to hold the command of the castle, that would be another £100. This would compleat the secretary’s views; and he thinks his public services, the injuries he has received in that service, and the favorable sentiments entertained of him by government, may lead him to these views, and he hopes for the interest of his friends.

The place of secretary is worth £300 a year, but is a provincial grant at present, so that it will not allow to be quartered on: And as I had a view upon the place when I was in England, and went so far as to converse with several men of interest upon it, tho’ I never had an opportunity to mention it to you after I recovered my illness—I hope you will allow me your influence, and by extending it at the treasury, to facilitate the assignment of the £200 a year, it will be serving the secretary, and it will very much oblige me.——

The secretary is advanced in life, tho’ much more so in health, which has been much impaired by the injuries he received, and he wishes to quit the more active scenes; he considers this as a kind of otium cum dignitate, and from merits one may think he has a claim to it.

I will mention to you the gentlemen, who are acquainted with my views and whose favourable approbation I have had. Governor [Thomas] Pownall, Mr. John Pownall, and Dr. Franklin.—My lord Hillsborough is not unacquainted with it—I have since I have been here, wrote Mr. [Richard] Jackson upon the subject, and have by this vessel wrote Mr. [Israel] Mauduit.

I think my character stands fair—I have not been without application to public affairs, and have acquired some knowledge of our provincial affairs, and notwithstanding our many free conversations in England, I am considered here as on government side, for which I have been often traduced both publickly and privately, and very lately have had two or three slaps. The governor and lieutenant governor are fully acquainted with the negociation and I meet their approbation; all is upon the idea the governor is provided for, and there shall by any means be a vacancy of the lieut. governor’s place.

I have gone so far, as to say to some of my friends, that rather than not succeed I would agree to pay the secretary £100 a year out of the office to make up £300, provided he could obtain only the assignment of £200—but the other proposal would to be sure be most eligible.

I scarce know any apology to make for troubling you upon the subject; the friendship you shewed me in London, and the favourable expressions you made use of to the lieut. governor in my behalf encourage me, besides a sort of egotism, which inclines men to think what they wish to be real. I submit myself to the enquiries of any of my countrymen in England, but I should wish the matter may be secret ’till it is effected.

I am with very great respect and regard, my dear sir,

Your most obedient, and most humble servant,

NATH. ROGERS.

Rogers thus privately lobbied for annual payments to Oliver as lieutenant governor that would be equal to the secretary’s salary and thus make it worthwhile for him to vacate that post. If those arrangements couldn’t work out, Rogers even promised to pay Oliver £100 a year himself until the man (already “advanced in life”) died. These days we’d consider this scheme a kickback, a sinecure, and taxation without representation. In the British patronage system of the eighteenth century, it was common.

Rogers’s planning helps to explain why, despite his Whiggish political philosophy, he accepted the Townshend Act and resisted the non-importation effort to stop it. And his string-tugging worked. When Rogers died, the London government was preparing a commission to make him provincial secretary. Instead, in his absence the job went to Thomas Flucker.

After this letter became public in 1773, the Boston radicals interpreted it as more evidence of the Hutchinson circle scheming to take powerful positions and Customs revenue for themselves. John Adams judged that Hutchinson and Oliver had been among “the original Conspirators against the Public Liberty, since the Conspiracy was first regularly formed, and begun to be executed, in 1763 or 4,” but “Nat. Rogers, who was not one of the original’s,…came in afterwards.”

The Life and Death of Nathaniel Rogers

Nathaniel Rogers was born in Boston in 1737. His mother was a sister of Thomas Hutchinson, who later that year was chosen to be both a selectman and the town’s representative to the Massachusetts General Court.

Young Natty was orphaned as a small boy, and his Uncle Thomas raised him, treating him as another son. He didn’t attend Harvard College, but he nonetheless gained a degree by getting a master’s degree from the University of Glasgow and then asking Harvard to recognize that with a reciprocal (ad eundem) bachelor’s.

While Rogers was in Britain, he came across a copy of New-England’s Prospect by William Wood, a guide to joining the new Massachusetts Bay Colony published in 1634. This was just the sort of historical source his uncle liked. Rogers arranged for it to be reprinted in Boston in 1764, adding a long introduction that fit the founding of Massachusetts into the overall Whig history of Britain.

The political philosophy Rogers expressed in that introduction fit well alongside the arguments James Otis, Jr., was making in his pamphlets about recent Crown laws violating long established rights. In fact, James Bowdoin apparently assumed Otis wrote the introduction, writing his name into a copy.

Rogers saw himself as a Whig and a proponent of American interests. On a trip to London in 1767, he wrote to his uncle about former prime minister George Grenville:

Mr Greenville seems our most bitter enemy, & takes every opportunity to render us obnoxious. The only motion this session upon American matters was made by him, that an Enquiry should be entered into by the House upon a certain Boston paper of Octo. 5. containing the most virulent aspersions & insinuations . . .

As far as I can judge from the very short time I have been here, nothing like threatning will do here, it will serve to enflame minds already much agitated but representations supported by facts & strong reasoning will be attended to. America appears of Consequence, & the Nation in general seems interested, the Manufacturers & commercial people so far as their Interest is Affected are on our side, but all the Landed Interest are against us.

He also blamed the Customs service for having “stretched their Authority to the utmost,” which was “one great cause of their ill usage.”

Nonetheless, as Rogers’s warning against “threatning” suggests, he opposed the political methods of the Boston Whigs: public demonstrations, boycotts, harsh rhetoric in the newspapers, legislative confrontations with the governor, and of course riots. He was pleased when the Crown cracked down on his home town, writing, “We were grown into a most wretched state before the arrival of the troops. . . . the firmness of parliament will be the only cure of these Evils.”

Ultimately, Rogers was invested in the imperial patronage system. He used his connections with Lt. Gov. Hutchinson in business and in seeking royal appointments. He married into the extended Wentworth family that supplied New Hampshire with its governors, and he adopted his wife’s Anglicanism. In London he tried to line up support for himself to succeed Andrew Oliver, his uncle’s brother-in-law, as royal secretary of Massachusetts.

In the fall of 1769, Customs house records revealed that Rogers had continued to ship in goods from Britain in defiance of the non-importation agreement. A 4 October Boston town meeting condemned him along with a few other importers. That same day Hutchinson wrote to the absent governor:

Rogers…thinks himself in immediate danger and desired to know if I could protect him. I told him that if he could pitch upon any particular person he might go & make oath before a Justice of peace & he would bind him to keep the peace &c. I could do no more for him. He will not be able to hold out unless he quits the Town.

In early January 1770, William Molineux led a polite but ominous crowd to Rogers’s door. He still refused to yield—unlike his cousins, the Hutchinson brothers. Hosting British army officers in his house might have helped. But in May, with the regiments removed and the Whigs ramping up pressure, Rogers left for New York.

By then, however, Nathaniel Rogers’s name had become notorious. The Sons of Liberty paraded his effigy around the city, then hanged and burned it. He left Manhattan in the middle of the night. A few days later, another effigy appeared outside his inn on Long Island. Back in Boston in June, he found people “repeatedly breaking his windows and in a most beastly manner casting tubs of ordure at his door.” He tried New Hampshire but turned down a seat on that colony’s high court because he still held out hope for an appointment in Massachusetts.

Returning in Boston, on 9 August Rogers visited Justice Edmund Quincy to swear out a complaint against someone for harassing him. Hutchinson wrote:

As he held up his hand to swear that he had grounds to suspect the person the Justice observed a Tremor and asked if he was not well and advised him not to give himself so much concern. He had got but a few steps from the Justices door by the Post Office when he complained of being ill to a woman who stood at her shop door and who asked him in where he remain’d near half an hour fancying he should grow better but an apoplectic fit came on, his countenance changed to black instantly and before I could get to him after notice given to me he was in the Agonies of death.

Nathaniel Rogers died at the age of thirty-three, 250 years ago today.

TOMORROW: Posthumous notoriety.

The Marriage of John Fleeming and Alice Church

The 17 Aug 1770 issue of the New Hampshire Gazette of Portsmouth included this announcement:

Last Week was Married in this Town, by the Rev. Dr. HAVEN, Mr. JOHN FLEMING, of Boston, Printer, to Miss. ALICE CHURCH, Daughter of Mr BENJAMIN CHURCH, of the same Place, Merchant,----an agreeable young Lady, adorn’d with the Qualifications requisite to render that honorable State happy.

Records of the Rev. Samuel Haven’s meetinghouse specify that the couple were married on 8 August—250 years ago today.

Boston newspapers reprinted that news in the following week, with the 21 August Massachusetts Spy (cramped for space) leaving off the encomium to the bride but identifying her father as an “Auctioneer.”

Alice’s father, Benjamin Church, Sr., was indeed well known in Boston for his vendue-house. He wasn’t a native of the town but had been born in Bristol, Rhode Island, in 1704. His father died when he was two, and he grew up mostly in the household of his paternal grandfather, also named Benjamin Church, famous in New England for leading guerrilla war against Native nations in the late 1600s.

After graduating from Harvard College in 1727, the younger Benjamin Church went into business in Newport. He married Elizabeth Viall that October, and they had two children before she died in 1730. Church married again in 1732, to Hannah Dyer of Boston. He continued to develop his auction house in Newport.

Around 1740, Church moved his business and family to Boston. He owned various real estate, invested in the Land Bank, and established a new vendue-house in the South End. He specialized in selling cloth and other goods just off the ships. Church also served in public posts: as a minor town official and a deacon in the Rev. Mather Byles’s Hollis Street Meetinghouse. He penned Latin poems and a biography of his grandfather.

Benjamin and Hannah Church had eight children. Benjamin, Jr., was the first boy, born in 1734 and graduating from Harvard twenty years later. He became a physician and, by the late 1760s, one of the leaders among Boston’s Whigs, known for his genteel manners and satirical verse. In March 1770 Dr. Church performed an autopsy on the body of Crispus Attucks.

Alice Church was one of Benjamin and Hannah’s younger girls, baptized at the Hollis Street Meetinghouse in 1749. That meant she was around twenty-one years old when she married printer John Fleeming. He was older, but we don’t know by how much, only that he had been in business since arriving in Boston from Scotland in August 1764.

There are some mysterious aspects of this wedding. First, John Fleeming had been partner to John Mein in printing the Boston Chronicle. In that newspaper and subsequent political pamphlets, Mein sneered at Dr. Church the “Lean Apothecary.” Some have interpreted that to mean Dr. Joseph Warren, but Mein’s own handwritten “Key” to the pamphlet (now in the Sparks Manuscripts at Harvard) states he meant Church and further described him as:

One of the greatest miscreants that walks on the face of the Earth who has cheated & back bitten every Person with whom he ever had the least Connection—Father Mother & friend & more than once foxed his Wife &c &c &c

So right away we can ask how John Fleeming and Alice Church ever became friendly.

The next big question is why did they get married in New Hampshire. Massachusetts couples went over the border if they were eloping or needed to marry quickly because a baby was on the way. There’s no evidence to confirm either of those possibilities, but we know little about the Fleemings.

Church researcher E. J. Witek noted a possible third factor. John Fleeming had taken refuge on Castle Island at the end of June after shutting down the Chronicle, so he might not have felt safe going to a church in Boston. Still, I think he could have found a minister closer to home than Portsmouth.

John Fleeming was connected to the Sandemanian sect while Alice Church had been raised in the Congregationalist faith. They were married by a Congregationalist minister. But the Fleemings had a daughter named Alicia baptized at King’s Chapel, an Anglican church, on 17 July 1772 (and Dr. Benjamin Church was one of the baby’s sponsors). Again, questions but no answers.

The family link between John Fleeming and Dr. Benjamin Church became an issue of state in 1775 when Gen. George Washington and his staff realized that Church had tried to send a ciphered letter into Boston via his mistress, Mary (Brown) Wenwood. Deciphered, that letter turned out to be to Fleeming. In his defense, Church turned over a letter he had received from his brother-in-law. It said things like:

Ally joins me in begging you to come to Boston. . . . your sister is unhappy under the apprehension of your being taken and hanged for a rebel . . . If you cannot pass the lines, you may come in Capt. [James] Wallace, via Rhode Island, and if you do not come immediately, write me in this character, and direct your letter to Major [Edward] Cane on his Majesty’s service, and deliver it to Capt. Wallace, and it will come safe. . . . Your sister has been for running away; Kitty has been very sick, we wished you to see her; she is now picking up. I remain your sincere friend and brother…

That reads like a genuine familial friendship even though the men were on opposite sides of the war. And the link was forged 250 years ago today.

(While researching the Church genealogy, I realized that Dr. Church’s older half-sister Martha was stepmother to the teen-aged assistant teacher at the South Writing School in 1774, Andrew Cunningham. Both Dr. Church and young Cunningham, his step-half-nephew, are players in The Road to Concord, one helping to conceal the Boston militia train’s stolen cannon and the other helping Gen. Thomas Gage hunt for them.)