Fichter on the Fate of the Tea

We’re one month out from the sestercentennial of the Boston Tea Party, so we’ll be consuming an increasing amount of that topic.

The anniversary has brought a new study of British North America’s tea crisis: Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773-1776 by James R. Fichter.

Fichter is a professor of international history at the University of Hong Kong, closer to where the Chinese tea began its global journey than to where it went into the salt water. He is also the author of So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism and editor of British and French Colonialism in Africa, Asia and the Middle East: Connected Empires across the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries.

Tea looks at the data on consumption and sale of tea in North America, showing that people continued to consume it even as it became freighted with political meaning. It was a source of caffeine, after all.

In fact, Fichter points out, of the five ships carrying East India Company tea that landed in America, one way or another, two cargos were eventually consumed on the continent. Champions of the traditional narrative might respond that none of that tea was drunk by Patriot Americans under Crown government as initially intended. Details are in the book.

Earlier this month, Fichter chatted long-distance with the Emerging Revolutionary War team. The recording of that discussion can be viewed on Facebook and on YouTube.

Fichter will also be in Boston on 16 December as one of the speakers at the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts’s Tea Party Symposium. You can now use that link to register for a seat in advance.

Peering into a Prison in 1799

Richard Brunton (1749–1832) came to America to fight for his king as a grenadier in the 38th Regiment. That lasted until 1779, when he deserted.

As Deborah M. Child relates in her biography, Soldier, Engraver, Forger, Brunton struggled to make an honest living in New England with his talent and training as an engraver.

One product he kept coming back to was family registers and other genealogical forms. Another was counterfeit currency.

In 1799 the state of Connecticut sent Brunton to the Old New-Gate Prison in East Granby for forging coins. To pay his accompanying fine, he made art, including a portrait of Gov. Jonathan Trumbull, a seal of the state arms, and a picture of Old New-Gate itself.

That prison, also known as the Simsbury Mines, was notorious as a place where the state held Loyalists underground during the Revolutionary War. However, in 1790 the state took over the property and rebuilt it according to a modern philosophy of criminal punishment, based on locking people up for years doing labor instead of physically punishing or hanging them. Brunton depicted the place he came to know during his two-year sentence. 

The Boston Rare Maps page for this print says:

The view suggests that coopering (barrel making) was a major activity for prisoners, as two figures can be seen at upper right engaged in the task, while another at the bottom seems to be bringing a completed barrel to a shed.

Also visible are what appear to be two African-American figures carrying buckets can be seen in the view; these figures, which are completely blackened, stand out conspicuously from the others in the view. It is documented that enslaved African-Americans worked in the copper mine that had earlier operated in the location of the prison. Whether African-American were also engaged at the prison as well is a question for further research raised by this work.

Although the engraving contains an image of a prisoner receiving the lash, as a state prison Newgate followed a relatively humane approach for the period; a prisoner could be given no more than 10 lashes, and there was a limit on time served there. Participation in labor was required of all prisoners, and in addition to coopering they also engaged in nail making, blacksmithing, wagon and plow manufacture, shoe making, basket weaving and machining.

After being released, Brunton went back to Boston, where he was arrested for counterfeiting again in 1807. He served more years in a Massachusetts state prison and finally lived out his life in Groton.

The copperplate for Brunton’s Old New-Gate image survived until about 1870, when a few more prints were made. Only a handful of copies survive, and it’s impossible to tell whether they came from the initial run or the reprint decades after the artist died.

The example shown above was recently acquired by the John Carter Brown Library in Rhode Island. Other prints are at the Connecticut Historical Society and the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Dickinson Biography to be Published in 2024

More than eleven years ago I posted this observation about how many books on Thomas Paine had come out in recent years, belying his fans’ claim that he was a neglected Founder.

As I wrote that, I looked around for a foil and landed on this:

Let’s compare Paine to, say, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, author of Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, the most influential American political essay before Common Sense.

In addition to writing that book and “The Liberty Song,” Dickinson was an important delegate to the Continental Congress, top official of Pennsylvania’s wartime government, and a delegate to the Constitutional Convention.

Dickinson was on the losing side of the debate over the Declaration of Independence but on the right side of the debate over slavery.

Dickinson made even more contributions to the American cause, such as writing the first draft of the Articles of Confederation and chairing the Annapolis Convention.

Nonetheless, back in 2011 I could find only two recent books on Dickinson, one from a press affiliated with the National Review and the other by Jane Calvert, apparently based on her doctoral dissertation.

Calvert went on to launch the John Dickinson Writings Project, where she is Director and Chief Editor, as well as becoming a professor at the University of Kentucky.

Oxford University Press has just announced that next summer it will publish Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson by Calvert. This will be the first full, scholarly, modern biographer of this important and unique figure among the Founders.  

Ironically, Calvert’s university webpage says, “Professor Calvert has also produced work on Thomas Paine.” So it’s possible to do both!

Gomes Prize for The Contagion of Liberty

On 15 Nov 1773, 250 years ago today, the Essex Hospital on an island off Marblehead took in its second round of patients for smallpox inoculation.

The dispute over that hospital, which culminated in its destruction in late January, is a reminder that not all conflicts in Revolutionary New England broke down along the lines of Patriot v. Loyalist.

Some of the local merchants who had invested in the hospital were stalwarts of the local resistance—as were some of the local laborers and seamen who destroyed it.

That sestercentennial anniversary seems like a good occasion to note that the Massachusetts Historical Society just gave the 2023 Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize for best nonfiction work on the history of Massachusetts to Andrew M. Wehrman for The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution.

Wehrman is a professor of history at Central Michigan University. Back in 2008, he received the Walter Muir Whitehill Award for his article, “The Siege of ‘Castle Pox’: A Medical Revolution in Marblehead, Massachusetts, 1764–1777.” Wehrman’s book expands on that incident to trace the debate over how to fight smallpox through the Revolutionary War.

By that time, most people understood how inoculation worked—the scientific dispute had been settled decades earlier. But there were practical problems of isolating people who had been inoculated until they stopped being infectious. Those problems were why folks in Essex County destroyed the smallpox hospital off their coast, and why Gen. George Washington waited so long before having his troops inoculated.

“The famous Jacob Bates hath lately exhibited here”

We last left the equestrian Jacob Bates as he arrived in Newport, having already exhibited his skills in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.

As I noted then, Bates didn’t advertise in Rhode Island newspapers the way he’d done in those other cities. Thus, we don’t have that sort of evidence about his shows.

But we do have a description written on 14 Nov 1773, 250 years ago today, in a letter by the lawyer William Ellery (1727–1820, shown here):

But I cannot bid you adieu in this solemn manner. Totus mundus agit histrionem. [The whole world’s a stage.] The famous Jacob Bates hath lately exhibited here his most surprising feats of horsemanship, in a circus or enclosure of about one hundred and twenty feet in diameter, erected at the east end of Mr. Honyman’s field. The number of spectators was from three to seven hundred. He exhibited four times, and took half a dollar for a ticket.

A mountebank doctor, who lately came into America from some part of Europe, (Great Britain, I believe,) and who is expected here, is now haranguing daily, from a wagon, to the good gaping people of Connecticut, and, while they are gaping, he is picking their pockets. Strolling players we have had among us. I expect that, in a few years, Drury Lane and Sadler’s Wells, &c., will be translated into America.

I wish, while we are encouraging the importation of the amusements, follies, and vices of Great Britain, America would encourage the introduction of her virtues, if she have any; for I am sure, by thus countenancing her follies and vices, we shall lose the little stock of virtue that is left among us. This I am very clear in, that exhibitions of players, rope-dancers, and mountebanks, (I must confess, indeed, there is something manly and generous in the exhibitions of Mr. Bates; for a well-formed man, and a well-shaped, well-limbed, well-sized horse, are fine figures, and in his manage are displayed amazing strength, resolution, and activity,) have a more effectual tendency, by disembowelling the purse, and enfeebling the mind, to sap the foundations of patriotism and public virtue, than any of the yet practised efforts of a despotic ministry. But it will be in vain to talk against these things, while there are a hundred fools to one wise man.

Like the person who wrote to the Boston Evening-Post quoted here, Ellery saw Bates as the sort of London showman that good New Englanders should beware of. Yet he also viewed that particular equestrian act as better than other theatricals. Indeed, he appears to have enjoyed the spectacle.

The “Mr. Honyman” who provided land for Bates’s display was probably James Honeyman, Esq. (1710–1778), a prominent lawyer and broker of marine insurance. His namesake father had been rector of Newport’s Trinity Church. In the early part of his career Honeyman was elected to various offices, including Rhode Island attorney general. By this time, however, he held royal appointments instead since he leaned toward the Crown in politics. During the war Honeyman resigned his remaining government posts and tried to sit out disputes.

William Ellery himself went on to represent Rhode Island in the Second Continental Congress, arriving just in time to vote for and sign the Declaration of Independence and remaining until 1785.

“Say, didst thou never practise such deceit?”

As I described yesterday, in March 1769 the British writer Horace Walpole asked Thomas Chatterton for more information about the fifteenth-century manuscript he said he was transcribing.

Chatterton’s 30 March reply included more verses and some remarks about his life as a poor young law clerk in Bristol, but no solid evidence. Walpole, born into wealth, became suspicious of a scam. He asked literary friends about the Rowley writings. They told him the language and form weren’t authentic.

On 4 April, Walpole sent Chatterton what he viewed as an avuncular letter, advising him to stick to his studies instead of literary forgeries. That document doesn’t survive.

Four days later, Chatterton replied, insisting that the Rowley writings were genuine. He also admitted he was “but 16 Years of Age.” And in a snit he wrote about “destroying all my useless Lumber of Literature, and never using my Pen again but in the Law.”

Then Chatterton sent another letter on 14 April, asking Walpole to return his manuscripts. This paper has a scrawled postscript: “Apprentice to an Attorney Mr Lambert, who is a Good Master; I find engrossing Mortgages &c a very irksome employ.”

Walpole went to France before returning the documents. That prompted even angrier demands from the teenager in July and August. On his return, Walpole wrote a response accusing Chatterton of “entertaining yourself at my expense” but decided not to send it. Instead, he just bundled up the Rowley papers and mailed them to Bristol.

At some point, and it’s unclear when, Chatterton summed up his feelings in a poem about Horace Walpole being mean, snobby, and hypocritical:

WALPOLE, I thought not I should ever see
So mean a heart as thine has proved to be.
Thou who, in luxury nurst, behold’st with scorn
The boy, who friendless, fatherless, forlorn,
Asks thy high favour—thou mayst call me cheat.
Say, didst thou never practise such deceit?
Who wrote Otranto? . . .

As I noted yesterday, back in 1764 Walpole had concealed his authorship of The Castle of Otranto for a year, letting people think it was an authentic medieval story. Chatterton was apparently playing the same game, but he didn’t have the standing to pull it off.

That fall, the young man turned to political writing using the name Decimus. In 1770 he left the attorney’s office and moved to London to establish a literary career. John Wilkes and other opposition politicians admired his essays, but no one paid him for them. He penned some more Rowley poems but couldn’t publish them, either.

On 24 Aug 1770 Chatterton killed himself by drinking arsenic. He was three months shy of turning eighteen. He was evidently a person of strong moods.

Seven years later, a scholar named Thomas Tyrwhitt collected some of Chatterton’s manuscripts and published Poems Supposed to have been Written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and Others, in the Fifteenth Century. He was among the shrinking number of people who thought the Rowley documents were genuine.

That book prompted articles about Chatterton, the supposed young discoverer. One detail in those reports was that Walpole had discouraged him. Indeed, a writer from Bristol said that Walpole’s dismissal had led to Chatterton’s suicide “soon after,” though a year had passed between the events.

But remember how Walpole owned a printing press? He could put out his side of the story. He printed a small private edition, enough to circulate among his many literary friends.

Meanwhile, Chatterton’s work, life, and death became yet another inspiration for the Romantics.

As a result, the exchange between Chatterton and Walpole is well known to scholars of literature and literary gossip. Some documents in their brief 1769 correspondence are already in libraries. Walpole’s early biographer, Mary Berry, had access to all the letters that survived in his papers and summarized them.

Now a few more of those documents—Chatterton’s letters, Walpole’s unsent reply, and his note on when he returned the Rowley writings—have come on the auction market. Bonhams is offering the collection for sale on 14 November. The estimated price is £100,000–150,000.

Onuphrio Muralto, Ossian, and Thomas Rowley

Last week I elaborated on a news story from Britain about the rediscovery of a detail in an eighteenth-century painting that everyone knew about from documentary sources but no one had seen for many decades. Here’s a similar story about historic letters.

I think this story begins in 1764 when The Castle of Otranto appeared, described on its title page as “Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto.” Some early reviews hailed the book as an important discovery in medieval literature.

In 1765, however, a second edition was printed, and the author came forward: the Hon. Horace Walpole, M.P. (shown here). He declared this little novel was his “attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern.” Literary scholars now credit Walpole with writing the first gothic novel, a precursor to Romanticism.

Meanwhile, the British literary world was debating the poems of Ossian, the first published in 1761. James MacPherson presented these verses as his translations of ancient Gaelic ballads from Scotland.

The Ossian poems attracted many devoted admirers, including Thomas Jefferson. Other people dismissed the verses on artistic and historic grounds; Samuel Johnson declared that Macpherson was “a mountebank, a liar, and a fraud.”

MacPherson produced none of the manuscripts he was supposedly translating, and in 1764 went off to Florida as the governor’s secretary before returning to Britain for a political career. He never admitted creating the poems himself, as most scholars now believe. Those same scholars credit “Ossian” with inspiring both genuine Gaelic scholarship and early Romanticism.

Into that literary atmosphere came a teenager named Thomas Chatterton, apprentice to an attorney in Bristol. He was a literary prodigy, having seen one of his poems published at age eleven.

Son of a widow who taught school, Chatterton started seeking out literary patrons, first in Bristol. He played the same game that MacPherson and Walpole had, claiming to have found manuscripts from centuries earlier. These poems, Chatterton declared, came from a fifteenth-century monk named Thomas Rowley.

In March 1769 Chatterton sent “The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn Englande, wrote bie T. Rowleie, 1469, for Mastre Canynge” to Horace Walpole, knowing the wealthy man had an interest in painting and publishing connections. Indeed, Walpole had his own printing press and staff of printers.

Walpole replied, “Give me leave to ask you where Rowley’s poems are to be found. I should not be sorry to print them, or at least a specimen of them, if they have never been printed.”

TOMORROW: It all goes horribly wrong.

Inaugural Meeting of Boston’s Commemoration Commission, 16 Nov.

Boston’s Office of Historic Preservation has announced the inaugural meeting of the city’s Commemoration Commission on Thursday, 16 November.

Under its mandate from the city council, the Commemoration Commission will “mark upcoming historical anniversaries, including the United States’ 250th in 2026, the 400th anniversary of the founding of the City of Boston in 2030, and other significant historical anniversaries.”

I suppose those other anniversaries include the actual outbreak of war after a military expedition from Boston in April 1775; one of the bloodiest battles of that war, fought on what’s now Boston soil in June 1775; and the town’s independence in March 1776. But from Revolutionary history the commission’s enabling legislation lists only the Congressionally-highlighted anniversary in July.

That focus on the national, official event seems a bit at odds with the commission’s goal “for all our local communities to tell the full range of our history, including the struggles and accomplishments of Boston’s communities who are too often left out of the official narrative.” Because there are definitely local, non-elite stories to tell.

The commission certainly seems to want to focus on local and community history. Its webpage lays out these goals:

The Boston Commemoration Commission will invest in inclusive and robust historical resources and preservation tools by working with diverse community voices and organizations who steward Boston’s history and City departments with responsibilities relating to historical narrative, exhibits, curricula, archives, preservation, and event-planning to deepen public opportunities to engage with history, in collaboration with state and federal partners.

The Commission exists to affirm that our diverse and intertwined community histories are of great value to the City of Boston, that historical tourism should be a driver of true shared prosperity, that inclusive and honest historical memory is a crucial public good worthy of attention and resources, and that communities all over the City should have the tools and resources to research, preserve, acknowledge, and celebrate their history.

So this inaugural meeting might be the opportunity for local historians and community groups to turn those ideals into specific ideas for commemorations.

The Office of Historic Preservation’s website also says that on 16 November “we will present a framework showcasing how historic preservation can address some of Boston’s pressing challenges in environmental sustainability, social equity, and affordable housing.” That may be part of the same event, which could indicate competing priorities—competing for time, at least.

The 16 November event will take place in the Bruce C. Bolling Building at 2300 Washington Street in Roxbury, from 6:00 to 8:30 P.M. There will also be a virtual option through Zoom. The R.S.V.P. form says the date for registering in person has passed, but it’s still possible to register for online access.

“The Imp at the Cardinal’s bolster”

Sir Joshua Reynolds completed his painting of “The Death of Cardinal Beaufort,” based on a scene from Henry IV, Part 2, in 1789.

The Shakespeare Gallery in London had commissioned this canvas for 500 guineas (£525).

Immediately some colleagues criticized the canvas for including the face of a demon.

In Shakespeare’s play the king says: “O! beat away the busy, meddling fiend that lays siege unto this wretch’s soul.” But people said that was just a metaphor; no real fiend appeared on stage, much less at the historical event.

A correspondent wrote in The Times of London on 7 May:

The Imp at the Cardinal’s bolster cannot spoil the Picture, but it does no credit to the judgement of the Painter. We rather apprehend that some Fiend had been laying siege to Sir Joshua’s taste, when he determined to literalise the idea. The license of Poetry is very different from that of Painting; but the present subject itself is complete in itself, and wants not the aid of machinery from Heaven or Hell. In this enlightened period astonishment and pity wait upon it.

The landscape designer Humphry Repton said that if Shakespeare had listed an evil spirit as one of his characters, then it might deserve a place in the painting. But otherwise not.

After Reynolds’s death another Royal Academy instructor, Edward Edwards, declared:

The Death of Cardinal Beaufort is an admirable specimen of colouring, but the introduction of the little Imp or Devil on the pillow of the Cardinal, as tormenting the wretched sinner in his last moments, is too ludicrous and puerile to escape censure; and it has been matter of great surprize, that a man of Sir Joshua’s understanding could persevere in the admission of such an object, even against the advice of his friend Mr. Burke, to whose judgment he ever paid great deference.

The portraitist William Beechey told a story of hearing Edmund Burke tell Reynolds that the devil’s face was “an absurd and ridiculous incident, and a disgrace to the artist.” After some exchange about Burke’s ability to argue either side of an issue (if paid, implicitly), Reynolds said that the fiendish face “was a thought he had conceived and executed to the satisfaction of himself and many others; and having placed the devil there, there he should remain.”

One observer who agreed with that choice was Dr. Erasmus Darwin, writing in 1791:

…why should not painting as well as poetry express itself in a metaphor, or in indistinct allegory? A truly great modern painter lately endeavoured to enlarge the sphere of pictorial language, by putting a demon behind the pillow of a wicked man on his death bed. Which unfortunately for the scientific part of painting, the cold criticism of the present day has depreciated.

Soon after “The Death of Cardinal Beaufort” debuted, Caroline Watson produced an engraving of the picture. However, within a year, apparently to meet public desire, the controversial demon’s face was rubbed out of the copper plate, leaving just a few light squiggles on later prints, such as this one from the Royal Collection (shown above).

I linked to an ArtNetUK image of “The Death of Cardinal Beaufort” yesterday. Looking at it, you might ask: What demon? Where is this imp? What were people so upset about?

That’s because, although Reynolds never altered his painting to please its critics, over the years other people’s layers of varnish and paint did. The face of the fiend disappeared.

This year the National Trust had the painting restored, and the fiend is back, as shown in the detail below.

“Whose black and bushy beard he had paid him for letting grow”

A couple of years ago I wrote about how the painter Joseph Wright of Derby employed a particular model when he wanted to portray bearded men.

Because beards were well out of fashion in eighteenth-century Britain, it wasn’t easy to find models for paintings of events in the past, when artists knew men wore beards.

I just ran across a relevant anecdote about Sir Joshua Reynolds, from his friend the Rev. William Mason.

Reynolds was painting “The Death of Cardinal Beaufort,” a scene taken from Henry IV, Part Two. That would have been in the late 1780s. Mason wrote:

He had merely scumbled in the positions of the several figures, and was now upon the head of the dying Cardinal. He had now got for his model a porter, or coalheaver, between fifty and sixty years of age, whose black and bushy beard he had paid him for letting grow; he was stripped naked to the waist, and, with his profile turned to him, sat with a fixed grin, showing his teeth.

I could not help laughing at the strange figure, and recollecting why he had ordered the poor fellow so to grin, on account of Shakespeare’s line,

Mark how the pangs of death do make him grin.

I told him, that in my opinion Shakespeare would never have used the word “grin” in that place, if he could have readily found a better; that it always conveyed to me a ludicrous idea; and that I never saw it used with propriety but by Milton, when he tells us that death

 grinned horribly
A ghastly smile.

He did not agree with me on this point, so the fellow sat grinning on for upwards of one hour, during which time he sometimes gave a touch to the face, sometimes scumbled on the bedclothes with white much diluted with spirits of turpentine.

After all, he could not catch the expression he wanted, and, I believe, rubbed the face entirely out; for the face and attitude in the present finished picture, which I did not see till above a year after this first fruitless attempt, is certainly different, and on an idea much superior. I know not whether he may not have changed the model. Yet the man who then sat had a fine, firm countenance of the swarthy kind…

I remember I told him so; and a few days after, when I called upon him, he had finished a head of St. Peter, which he told me he took from the same subject.

It’s a pity we don’t have the perspective of the porter himself, getting a few days’ off manual labor in exchange for letting his beard grow and contorting his face for a painter man.

TOMORROW: Another face revealed in that painting.

“The party at the North End were victorious”

I started looking into what happened in Boston on 5 Nov 1773 because I was curious about who the designated villains of that year were.

Did the Pope Night processions display effigies of Thomas Hutchinson, Andrew Oliver, and other Loyalists whose letters to Thomas Whately had been leaked earlier that year?

Did the gangs hang dummies of those old stand-bys, the Customs Commissioners? Or the Gaspée Commission?

Or might the young organizers have had the flexibility and speed to turn their wrath on the tea consignees, who had started to attract political attention only a couple of days before the holiday?

I’m sorry to say I didn’t find an answer to that question. I can report that the merchant John Rowe wrote in his diary that the 5th of November was “Very Quiet for A Pope Night.” There were no recorded attacks on the tea agents’ or other officials’ homes.

I suspect the town fathers clamped down on the youths’ celebrations that year as they tried to present a respectable resolve to the world through their official town meeting.

I did find who won that year’s brawl between the North End and South End gangs. On 11 November Isaiah Thomas printed this article in the Massachusetts Spy:

It has long been customary in this town, on the fifth of November, for a number of the lower class of people to carry about pageantries, in derision of the Pope and the Devil and their Powder Plot; and it has likewise been customary for the parties, North End and South, to try their skill at ‘Blows and Knocks,’ and the victory declared to them who should take away the other’s Pope, that being the name given to the pageantry

This year the party at the North End were victorious, which caused the South to give out word, ‘as the saying is,’ that they would on the Monday evening following ‘at them again:’

The consequence of this was, as we are credibly informed, that the Tea Commissioners, fearing the mobility intended paying them a visit, removed most of their valuable effects and their persons, from their respective places of residence, and left their houses guarded, within, by a number of men; but, ‘the wicked flee when none pursue,’—‘a guilty conscience needs no accuser.—

We are well assured, that neither nobility nor mobility had the least intention of disturbing them at that time.

“Mobility” was a somewhat cheeky term for the common people, and the source of the word “mob.”

The South End Gang couldn’t counterattack until the evening of Monday, 8 November (250 years ago today) because the two previous evenings were considered part of the Sabbath. But there’s no sign anyone really tried to renew the fighting that year.

Incidentally, that 5 November entry from John Rowe’s diary also lists “Mr. Wm. Burnet Brown Esq of Virginia” among the people he dined with. Back in 2019 I wrote, “Brown returned to Virginia [after he got sucked into the coffee-house brawl with James Otis, Jr.], and I’ve seen no evidence that he ever visited Massachusetts again.” But now I’ve seen evidence that he did.

“To wait upon the Messrs. Hutchinsons at Milton”

Over the two days of 5–6 Nov 1773, the Boston town meeting tried to finish the job an informal committee of businessmen (and rioters) had failed to do: convince the East India Company’s agents in Boston to resign from that responsibility.

The first step was getting those men to actually admit to having been appointed. Although there were plenty of reports that the company had decided to sell its tea through Thomas and Elisha Hutchinson, Richard Clarke and Sons, and Benjamin Faneuil and Joshua Winslow, no official paperwork had arrived.

Furthermore, those merchants were keeping low profiles after their confrontation with the crowd on 3 November.

The official record of the town meeting describe how that effort played out.

On the morning of 5 November, the meeting named a high-powered committee to ask those agents to resign: John Hancock as meeting moderator; merchants Henderson Inches, Benjamin Austin, and Jonathan Mason; and all the selectmen—Hancock again, plus John Scollay, Timothy Newell, Thomas Marshall, Oliver Wendell, Samuel Austin, and John Pitts.

Those men evidently went out with their message during the dinner break. At 3:00 P.M. the town meeting resumed with the committee’s report that Clarke and Faneuil had declined to respond on the excuse that they couldn’t consult with the Hutchinson brothers, who were out at their father’s house in Milton.

The meeting then named Samuel Adams, William Molineux, and Dr. Joseph Warren—three men not currently active as merchants but among the most radical political leaders—to deliver a more forceful demand to Clarke and Faneuil. They came back with a promise of a reply in half an hour.

The gathering then decided that Hancock, Pitts, Adams, Warren, William Powell, and Nathaniel Appleton would go out to Milton with the same message for the Hutchinsons.

Someone brought in Clarke and Faneuil’s written message on behalf of their firms. Those men stated that since they didn’t yet have the details of the tea consignment, they couldn’t comply with the town’s request. The town unanimously voted that response unsatisfactory.

The meeting resumed the next day at 11:00 A.M., “still continuing very full.” Town clerk William Cooper recorded:

The Committee appointed to wait upon the Messrs. Hutchinsons at Milton—Reported—That they had enquired the last Evening and this Morning at the House of Elish Hutchinson Esq. in this Town, and were informed that those Gentlemen were at Milton;

the Committee proceeded this Morning to Milton and calling at the Governors Seat were informed that only Mr. Elisha Hutchinson lodged there the last Night, who had set out early this Morning for Boston;

on their return they called at his House, and were told that he had been at home this Morning but had again set off for Milton—

they then went to the House of Thomas Hutchinson Esq. who was then at home, where they read and delivered to him an attested Copy of the Towns Vote, when he acquainted the Committee, that the Town might expect his answer in one quarter of an Hour—

The following Letter was soon after sent into the Moderator, signed Thomas Hutchinson, which was read, vizt.

Sir

I have nothing relative to the Teas referred to in the request or Vote of the Town, except that one of my Friends has signified to me by Letter, that part of it he had reason to believe would be Consigned to me and my Brother Jointly, but upon what terms he could not then say——

Under these circumstances I can give no other answer to the Town, at present, then that if the Teas should arrive & we should be appointed Factors, we shall then be sufficiently informed to answer the request of the Town—

I am for my Brother & self
Sir Your humble Servant
T. Hutchinson Junr.

The meeting voted that unsatisfactory with no dissent. Then the citizens declared, once against unanimously, that all the tea consignees’ behavior was “Daringly Affrontive.” They voted to send the record of this meeting to every town in Massachusetts, and thus to the newspapers.

There was one last action:

A Motion was then made, that the Thanks of the Town be given to the Honble. John Hancock Esq. the Moderator of this Meeting for the dispatch he has given to the Business thereof—but the Motion was objected to by himself and Mr. Adams, and it seemed to be the sense of the Town, that a Vote of Thanks should be only given upon very special and signal services performed for the Publick——

Hancock and his colleagues had, after all, simply been carrying out their duties as patriotic citizens. (Though I’m sure Hancock enjoyed the gesture of public praise.)

Meanwhile, in between those two town meeting sessions Boston had observed its traditional Pope Night.

TOMORROW: And how had that gone?

(The picture above, courtesy of the Milton Historical Society, is the only known image of Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s country mansion in Milton, where his son Elisha spent the night of 5 Nov 1773. John Ritto Penniman painted this picture in 1827, so it shows the house as it existed fifty years after the Revolution, having perhaps been remodeled.)

Fallout from the “Tradesmen’s Protest”

Bostonians gathered on short notice in Faneuil Hall for a town meeting on 5 Nov 1773. Their first act was to choose John Hancock as moderator.

The reason for this meeting was the news that the East India Company was shipping tea to America. By a process not spelled out, the result would be: “our liberties for which we have long struggled, will be lost to them and their Posterity.”

The town’s eventual response to that news was to endorse the resolutions of a Philadelphia meeting condemning the Tea Act, the company, and anyone who cooperated with it.

A closer problem, however, was that some locals had distributed a handbill titled “Tradesmen’s Protest Against the Proceedings of the Merchants Relative to the New Importation of Tea,” printed by Ezekiel Russell. The Massachusetts Historical Society has digitized that flyer here.

A group of merchants, claiming to speak for Boston’s business community, had issued a call to boycott tea. The “Tradesmen’s” handbill responded in kind, also claiming to speak for local businessmen. “You are hereby advised and warned by no means to be taken in by the deceitful Bait of those who falsely stile themselves Friends of Liberty,” it said. “WE are resolved, by Divine Assistance,…to Buy and Sell when and where we please; herein hoping for the Protection of good Government.”

At the town meeting, someone moved for all tradesman to gather on the south side of the hall so they could vote on whether they agreed with this handbill. This question “passed in the Negative, unanimously—there being in the estimation of the Town at least four hundred Tradesmen present.”

That afternoon Ezekiel Russell appeared and addressed the gathering. The official record reads:

He then acquainted the Town that he was the Printer of the Paper called the Tradesmen’s Protest against the Merchants, & that he was paid for the same by the Person who Employed him.—this Information was not given at the desire of the Town; it being their sense, that as a Town they had nothing to do with the Printer or Author of the said Paper——

Russell had a reputation for printing almost anything as long as he was paid. I can’t tell if in this case he kept the name of his customer secret or if town clerk William Cooper chose not to record it. In any event, the point of this item in the meeting record was that Russell was below official notice.

In the morning, “one of the Inhabitants openly declared that he saw Charles Paxton one of the Commissioners of the Customs, giving them away the Day before in Kings Street.” Paxton (shown above) had been one of the most disliked royal officials in Boston for over a decade.

On 10 November, Commissioner Paxton went to justice of the peace Edmund Quincy and swore to a deposition:

WHEREAS a Number of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston being assembled at Faneuil-Hall on Friday the 5th of November Instant, unanimously voted that I the Subscriber was a Distributor of a Paper called the Tradesmen’s Protest—

Now I solemnly declare, that I never was possessed of more than one of said Papers, which I bought for Three Half-Pence of a Boy in the Street, and not finding it worth Notice, in a few Minutes after I gave it to a Bystander, whom to my Knowledge, I never saw before nor since.—And I further declare, that I never before heard such a Paper was published or intended to be published.

Paxton had that testimony published in the Boston News-Letter and Boston Post-Boy, two Loyalist newspapers, over the following week. He remained unpopular.

TOMORROW: Talking to the tea consignees.

“The 5th. of Novr. being a day of disorder”

On 3 Nov 1773, as I described back in 2019, Boston saw its first tea-inspired violence.

The Sons of Liberty, using a note signed “O.C.,” had summoned half a dozen merchants to meet under Liberty Tree and resign their appointments as agents to sell the East India Company’s tea. Those activists were following the playbook of the first Stamp Act protest from August 1765.

When no merchants showed up, however, William Molineux led a crowd to the warehouse of Richard Clarke (shown here) and demanded a reply. Then they demanded entry, shoving their way inside.

Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, father of two of the tea agents and a more distant relative of others, described how that confrontation ended:

Mr. [Nathaniel] Hatch a gentleman of Dorchester & a Justice of peace commanded the peace & required them to disperse [i.e., Hatch read the Riot Act] but they hooted at him & after a blow from one of them he was glad to retreat. I was all the time in the Council chamber with as many gentlemen of the Council as I could get together but could not make a Quorum.

The mob, after they found the gentlemen determined, began to separate and thereupon a number of gentlemen, who were in the Street, went through those that remained, joined the Gentlemen who were with the consignees in the Warehouse, & guarded them through the mob who were discouraged from offering any further violence.

The next morning I met the Council who advised me, unanimously, to direct the Attorney General [Jonathan Sewall] to prosecute such persons as upon inquiry into this tumult should appear to him to have been Offenders and, as I am informed the Justice has evidence of the person who struck him, I doubt not I can prevail with him to bring forward a separate prosecution of that Offence.

The gentlemen of the town have shewn more resolution upon this occasion than I have known before and, hitherto, nothing has been done which can bring any imputation upon the Town in general. I wish the Select men had discountenanced the proceeding. I am informed a Town meeting is intended to morrow. I wish nothing may be done there which shall oblige me to give your Lordship a less favorable account.

Indeed, the selectmen’s records for 4 November read:

The Selectmen having receiving a Petition from a number of the Inhabitants praying that a Town Meeting may be called immediately for the purpose set forth in their Petition, whereupon,

Voted, that the Town Clerk [William Cooper] issue his Warrant for a Town Meeting Fryday next 10 O’Clock.

“Fryday next” meant the next day. That was also the 5th of November, or Pope Night, when Boston’s youth paraded with effigies of the enemies of the day, collecting money, before having a big rumble and bonfire.

Hutchinson wrote:

The 5th. of Novr. being a day of disorder, every year, in the town of Boston one of my sons thought it advisable to remove with his family to the Lieutenant Governor’s in town, the other came to me in the Country.

In other words, Thomas Hutchinson, Jr., went to his father-in-law Andrew Oliver’s house in Boston, and Elisha Hutchinson left town for his father’s mansion in Milton. Other tea consignees probably took similar protection action.

A town meeting was the most official way for Boston to take political action while the Pope Night processions were the least respectable. How would that Friday play out?

TOMORROW: The 5th of November in 1773.

Two Chests of Tea Unaccounted for?

This morning I’m speaking about the Boston Tea Party at a teachers’ workshop hosted by the Massachusetts Historical Society.

And, as I’ve written over the past couple of days, I’ll be speaking about other aspects of the Tea Party around the 250th anniversary in December.

That’s got me thinking about one small mystery of the event highlighted by Charles Bahne in a posting back in 2009.

All the Boston newspapers in 1773 reported that persons unknown had destroyed 342 chests of tea, and that number went into American histories and textbooks. But the East India Company asked the British government to compensate it for the loss of only 340 chests.

More specifically, the locals believed each ship carried 114 chests, but the East India Company tallied only 112 on the Beaver. That was the last of the three ships to arrive at Griffin’s Wharf, mooring on 15 December.

The East India Company accountants had no reason to undercount the chests. And counting goods was their job, after all.

In contrast, the men destroying the tea didn’t need a numerical total at the end of the night—they just needed to know there were no chests left in the holds.

So the simplest explanation is that the locals simply assumed that if there were 114 chests on each of the first two ships, there must be 114 chests on the third, and didn’t bother to confirm that.

But are there other possibilities? Might the Beaver have carried 114 chests of tea across the Atlantic, but then something happened to cause two of those chests not to be listed in the East India Company’s losses? I can imagine two possible scenarios:

• Two chests were slipped off the Beaver during the days it was quarantined for smallpox in the harbor, and the company chose to say nothing about those.
• The Beaver’s captain, Hezekiah Coffin, carried two chests of tea on his own account, not property of the East India Company. The Bostonians dumping tea took those as well, and therefore counted 114. Coffin kept his mouth shut.

As I said, the simplest explanation is that the East India Company figure was accurate and complete, and the local figure was based on an erroneous assumption. But this little mystery opens the door to speculation.

Grand Lodge’s Boston Tea Party 250th Symposium, 16 Dec.

On Saturday, 16 December, I’ll be one of the speakers at the Grand Lodge of Masons in Massachusetts’s “Boston Tea Party 250th Symposium.”

Back on 16 Dec 1773, the St. Andrew’s Lodge was scheduled to have a regular meeting at its headquarters, the Green Dragon Tavern. Its records say: “Lodge closed on account of the few members in attendance, until to-morrow evening.”

With Dr. Joseph Warren, Paul Revere, and several other steady members were most likely busy at Old South Meeting House or Griffin’s Wharf that night.

Freemasonry in Massachusetts has evolved since then, but one of its abiding traditions is a certain possessiveness about the Tea Party. Therefore, it’s partnered with the Dr. Joseph Warren Foundation to observe its Sestercentennial in multiple ways.

On Friday, 15 December, there will be a historic tavern tour in Boston, created in collaboration with Revolution 250. On Sunday, 17 December, at 10:00 A.M., Grand Chaplains will lead a non-denominational ecumenical service at the Grand Lodge in Boston. Both of those events are open to the public.

The symposium will take place on 16 December, the actual anniversary of the Tea Party. Scheduled to run from 8:30 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., with a break for lunch, this event will also be free and open to the public.

The lineup of speakers are:

• Brooke Barbier, “Radicalizing John Hancock: The Tea Act and the Boston Tea Party”
• R.W. Walter Hunt, “Freemasonry Before the Revolution”
• Boston-Lafayette Lodge of Perfection performing “Treason to the Crown”
• Jayne Triber, “Brother Revere: How Freemasonry Shaped Paul Revere’s Revolutionary Role”
• William M. Fowler, Jr., “A Fireside Chat”
• J. L. Bell, “How Bostonians Learned to Talk about the Destruction of the Tea”
• James R. Fichter, “Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773–1776”
• Benjamin L. Carp, “Teapot in a Tempest: The Boston Tea Party of 1773”

The symposium is scheduled to allow people to go from the Grand Lodge to Old South Meeting House and/or the Harborwalk near the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum to see the reenactments that evening.

This symposium is free and open to the public. During the day people can also take guided tours of the Grand Lodge, with glimpses of some of its rare artifacts.

My First Boston Tea Party Sestercentennial Symposium

On Saturday, 15 December, I’ll be one of the speakers participating in Stephen Ambrose Historical Tours’ “Boston Tea Party Symposium.”

This isn’t a standalone event but part of a four-day tour of Revolutionary Boston timed to coincide with the Sestercentennial of the Tea Party. The tour includes visits to the Museum of Fine Arts, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the reenactments at the Old South Meeting House and Boston Tea Party Ships.

Among the historians scheduled to talk to tour participants on Saturday and Sunday are:

• Rick Beyer, host, creator of Lexington’s “First Shot!: The Day the Revolution Began” movie and author of Rivals Unto Death, about Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.
• Edward G. Lengel, host, Chief Historian at the National Medal of Honor Museum. While overseeing the George Washington Papers, Lengel wrote Inventing George Washington, General George Washington: A Military Life, This Glorious Struggle, and other fine books.
• Robert J. Allison, professor at Suffolk University and author of The Boston Tea Party, among other reviews of Boston history.
• Benjamin L. Carp, professor at Brooklyn College and author of Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America and most recently The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution.
• Christopher Sherwood Davis, speech and accent coach for historical performers, such as those on the recreated tea ships, and Tea Party researcher who spoke at History Camp Boston 2023 and started the @TeaCrisis1773 feed.
• Kristin Harris, research coordinator at the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum for its Descendent and Grave Marker Program.
• J. L. Bell, proprietor of this Boston 1775 blog and author of The Road to Concord.

I’ll speak on Saturday about why Boston, Massachusetts, and New England were so troublesome for the British imperial government in the 1760s and 1770s.

Stephen Ambrose Historical Tours started by offering North Americans trips to the World War II battlefields of Europe. It then expanded a bit to other periods and conflicts. Rick Beyer has led a ten-day tour from Boston to Québec and a nine-day tour from Charleston to Yorktown, for instance.

Four days in Boston is therefore on the low end of the company’s offerings. Nonetheless, this event is designed for people coming from out of town and seeking hotel accommodations, meals, and guides. It’s not just a series of talks with a boxed lunch, and the price of $1,790 reflects that model.

The Tea Party Sestercentennial, 15–16 Dec.

This year will see the 250th anniversary, or Sestercentennial, of the Boston Tea Party.

As the most photogenic of the pre-war Revolutionary events, the destruction of the taxable tea has been a very big deal for about two centuries of those 250 years. Before that, it appears, the first rule of the Tea Party was that you didn’t talk about the Tea Party.

This December, we’ll be talking a lot about the Tea Party.

On Friday, 15 December, Revolutionary Spaces’ Old South Meeting House will host its recreated “Meeting of the Body of the People,” representing the gatherings in that same space right up until the destruction of the tea began.

Like last year, I’ll be participating as the voice of the narrator booming from the gallery. The real stars will be the people portraying Samuel Phillips Savage, Samuel Adams, Dr. Thomas Young, Francis Rotch, and such observers as Phillis Wheatley, including some of the area’s top reenactors and museum professionals.

Tickets for this event are $40 for an adult, with discounts for seniors, teens, children, and Revolutionary Spaces members. Even though Old South can squeeze in thousands, this will probably sell out. The event starts at 6:15 P.M. on Friday, and there will be no follow-up on the waterfront that night.

On Saturday, 16 December, the exact anniversary date, there will be a program at Faneuil Hall titled “Act One: Faneuil Hall & The Boston Tea Party, A Protest in Principle: A Retrospective on Revolution.” That’s scheduled to take place from 4:00 to 5:30 P.M.

To be frank, I’m not sure what this event will be, but it doesn’t matter since all seats inside Faneuil Hall have already sold out. The program will be shown on screens outside the hall for the general public.

Then that evening’s action will move to the Old South Meeting House, where we’ll do another “Meeting of the Body of the People.” This event has also sold out, which is why Revolutionary Spaces and its volunteers just added the performance on Friday the 15th.

Outside on the steps at Franklin and Washington Streets, near Old South, reenactors will portray citizens of colonial Boston discussing the politics of the day. This “Patriots and Loyalists” program will run from 6:00 to 7:00 P.M., free and open to the public.

At 7:30 P.M., the crowd from Old South and the area around it are invited to follow the fifes and drums to the waterfront. This walk is longer than back in 1773 since the land has been extended. The event description for “Huzzah for Griffin’s Wharf” says there will be a sight of British soldiers, though in 1773 all the regulars were on Castle Island.

Finally, at around 8:00 P.M. spectators can line the Harborwalk near the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum to watch from across the water as men storm aboard the Beaver and Eleanor to effect the “Destruction of the Tea,” loose leaves donated by people all over the country. There will be some bleacher seating, but the audience is expected to number in the thousands, so most folks will stand.

As in 1773, this action is expected to be disciplined and quick, so the whole event should be over before 9:00 P.M.

“Discovered to be active in exposing our works to the enemy”?

Benjamin Boardman (1731–1802, shown here) graduated from Yale College in 1758, and two years later he became the minister in Middle Haddam, Connecticut.

When Gen. Joseph Spencer led Connecticut troops to the siege of Boston in the spring of 1775, Boardman went along as a chaplain.

He kept a diary from 31 July to 12 November, at least, and that document was published by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1892.

Boardman recorded mostly events in the Connecticut regiments’ camp in Roxbury, particularly deaths, and news about big events elsewhere.

The minister’s frustration with rumors comes through in several places. On 9 November, for example, he wrote a detailed account of a British army raid on Lechmere’s Point in Cambridge and the Continental response. Then he added, “The above acct. cant be relied on,” and wrote down different details; “indeed there is no certainty can be come at,” he concluded.

Nonetheless, two entries stood out for me. On 31 August, the chaplain wrote:

I collected this day in cash for the encouragt. of Mr. Bushnels Machine the sum of £13.4.4. in cash out of our regt.

That must refer to the invention of David Bushnell, which turned out to be a small submarine and an underwater bomb or mine. This entry shows that Connecticut men were talking about the inventor’s work in the summer of 1775, even if they didn’t know the top-secret details.

On 31 October, Boardman’s entry was:

Bought me a flanel waistcoat this day, cost 9/2. We hear that Coll. [Joseph?] Gorham with about 40 tories are taken from ye. eastward who went after wood; also that Harry Knox, who married Secretary Fluckers daughter, and offered himself last July as a voluntary engineer to lay out our works, is taken & discovered to be active in exposing our works to the enemy.

At some later point Boardman returned to that entry, put marks around everything after the semicolon, and wrote: “Mistake of ye. clause in the crotchets.” In other words, never mind that thing about Knox. For that matter, the rumor about Gorham doesn’t seem reliable, either.

Nonetheless, this diary entry shows that some people in the American camp were suspicious about Knox’s family ties in the same month that Gen. George Washington had started angling to get him appointed to command the whole Continental artillery.

That October had started with news of “Doctr. [Benjamin] Church under an arrest for keeping up a correspd. with the enemy in Boston,” as Boardman wrote. Men were deserting both to and from the enemy. So it was easy to be suspicious about someone with such strong ties to the royal government as Knox had. Even if such rumors were quickly deemed to be unfounded.

A New Look at a Very Old Lottery

On Saturday Erich L. tweeted out a photograph of a 90-page book that the London firm of Maggs Bros. Ltd. was offering at the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair.

It’s titled Benefit Tickets in the Government Lottery of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay, for the Sum of Thirty seven Thousand Five Hundred Pounds.

Erich L. commented that this was “Arguably the most MA thing to ever show up at the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair,” as well as “the only surviving copy of the first official lottery results in the colonies.”

Indeed, according to Maggs Bros.’s sales material, this book isn’t listed in any of the standard catalogues of early American printed materials, nor found in the largest archives of our area. The firm’s representative at the fair, who really is named Fuchsia Voremberg, told WBZ that this is the only known copy of this book.

I suspect the book itself is supremely uninteresting to read. Judging by lottery results I’ve seen printed in newspapers, it probably consists of nothing but a list of the numbers on the lottery tickets with indications of which won how much money, if any. Maybe also the text of the law authorizing this new way of raising money.

In reporting on this news, Universal Hub added a link to this article about the 1744/45 Massachusetts lottery from the fine Colonial Currency webpages at Notre Dame. The Ephemera Society offers another view. And twelve years ago Neal E. Millikan published his thorough study Lotteries in Colonial America.