The Continental Dollar Over Time, and Time Won

Speaking of the Journal of the American Revolution, I was quite intrigued by Gabriel Neville’s review of The Continental Dollar: How the American Revolution Was Financed with Paper Money by Farley Grubb.

Grubb summarizes the traditional discussion of how the first U.S. became “Not worth a Continental” like this: “traditional historiography has told us that the Continental dollar was a fiat currency—an unbacked paper money,” and “Congress printed and spent an excessive number of these paper dollars from 1775 through 1780.”

Neville summarizes Grubb’s counternarrative like this:

In May 1775, Congress printed its first $3 million in paper Continental dollars. They were not like modern money nor were they intended to circulate as currency. They were very similar to what are now called “zero-coupon bonds”—bonds that pay no interest, but trade at a discount below their value at maturity. At the time, they were called “bills of credit.” Indeed, like a modern bond, they had maturity or “redemption” dates at which time they could be turned in for their face value in specie or specie equivalents.

The colonies were responsible for using their own future tax revenue to redeem the bills, after which the collected paper was sent to the Continental Treasury to be burned. The system recognized that the colonies and Congress had little ability to raise actual money in wartime. Like all bonds, the dollars represented loans that would be paid back later. The first dollars would be redeemed in four annual tranches between 1779 and 1782, after the war was expected to be over and trade resumed. . . .

The system began to go awry with the third emission of bills. This time Congress failed to specifically set a redemption period. Congress and one of its committees each assumed the other was doing that job, and this important detail fell between the cracks (p. 118). People still had faith in the system, however, and the third redemption period was simply assumed to be 1787 to 1790, the four years following the second one.

Though it was still working, Congress fell into a pattern of rote issuance of currency while losing institutional memory and understanding of its own system. . . . No specific redemption period was set for eight consecutive emissions of dollars and at the end of that time, assuming the original system was still in effect, the final run of dollars could not be redeemed for specie until 1818. The result of this was a very deep time discount. The dollars issued in 1778 were only worth a tenth of their face value in the year they were issued.

This created a serious problem for Congress in financing the war. Congress was now using far more of its dollars to buy supplies on the market than to pay soldiers and the buying power of the newer bills was weak. Congress responded with an ill-conceived plan in 1779 that sent the dollar into a downward spiral. The redemption periods for all dollars were merged and made fungible. Congress announced that there would only be one final emission of dollars and the new redemption window for all outstanding dollars would be contracted and end in 1797. This was expected to reduce the time discount and increase the dollar’s value. It was also intended to reduce Congress’s reliance on debt. The plan, however, would have required the states to raise taxes “eighty times higher than what had historically been feasible.”(p. 168) Nobody believed that would happen and faith in the dollar collapsed.

I suppose one could argue that the story Grubb tells isn’t that different from the traditional narrative he aims to refute: instead of Continental currency being entirely unbacked and overproduced, it was not realistically backed and carelessly issued. It’s not clear if the Congress could have produced better results with more care. After all, they were fighting a war for longer than anyone expected.

Nonetheless, accuracy about details matters in economic history like every other sort of history, so I’m intrigued by this corrective.

Grubb is an economics professor at the University of Delaware. His book includes mathematical formulas as well as quotations from the Founders, and Neville says, “the vast majority of it is easily understood.”

The J.A.R. Books of the Year for 2023

Last month the Journal of the American Revolution announced its 2023 Book of the Year and the runners-up.

The top honor went to The Lionkeeper of Algiers: How an American Captive Rose to Power in Barbary and Saved His Homeland from War by Des Ekin:

[James Leander] Cathcart was one of many captured on the high seas by the Barbary pirates, who were eager to take advantage of the young nation’s inexperience and weakness. The city of Algiers becomes a subject in the book, for its politics and physical layout made escape impossible. Ekin tells the story of how Cathcart was always in the right place at the right time. Being so fortunate, he readily took advantage of his situation to go from being the chief lionkeeper in the Dey’s personal zoo to becoming the Dey’s most important non-Muslim advisor and clerk. Although Cathchart had to endure the violent and unpredictable temperament of the Dey, he was able to take care of other American captives.

Cathcart’s true importance was as a liaison between Algiers and the American government under President George Washington. The administration appeared inept and unable to handle the captured sailors’ predicament, so Cathcart became instrumental in negotiating for their release. Although he could have purchased his own freedom at any time, Cathcart made sure that all the Americans were well-cared for. Ekin’s book is an easy and exciting narrative, making the reader eager to turn the page to see how long Cathcart’s luck would hold out.

Here are the two other books held up for praise.

Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution by Eli Merritt:

Merritt argues that the men who sat in Congress between 1774 and 1783 were constantly preoccupied by fears that the states would descend into conflict over borders and resources that would shatter the Union. As a result, “the American Union was an unwelcome alliance formed by bitterly conflictual colonies”; in other words, the creation of the United States was “a shotgun wedding.”

The Untold War at Sea: America’s Revolutionary Privateers by Kylie A. Hulbert:

This reconsideration of the role privateers played in the American Revolution challenges their place in the accepted popular narrative of the conflict. Despite their controversial tactics, Kylie Hulbert illustrates that privateers merit a place alongside minutemen, Continental soldiers, and the sailors of the fledgling American navy. This book offers a redefinition of who fought in the war and how their contributions were measured.

Two Online Archeology Events on 15 Feb.

Two online events about archeology are coming up next Thursday, 15 February.

The Lake Champlain Maritime Museum will host its third annual Virtual Archaeology Conference that afternoon from 1:00 to 4:00 P.M., with staff speaking about various work going on at and around the museum.

The scheduled presentations are:

• Patricia Reid, “Legacy Collection: Leege Collection Artifacts from Arnold’s Bay”
• Cherilyn Gilligan, “Arnold’s Bay Artifacts: Conservation and Context”
• Chris Sabick, “The Excavation and Documentation of the Revolutionary War Row Galley Congress”
• Paul Gates, “Site Formation Processes: Defining the Theoretical Process of Archaeology for the Revolutionary Warship Congress”

Those will be followed by a live question-and-answer session.

Go to this webpage for more details on the museum’s program and to register.

That same evening, starting at 7:00 P.M., the Shirley-Eustis House Association will host an online lecture by Boston City Archaeologist Joe Bagley on “Archaeology at Shirley Place.”

Bagley will share new information learned about the eighteenth-century enslaved inhabitants of the estate and new insights into the former location of the 1747 Shirley-Eustis House. The presentation will include artifact discussions and digital reconstructions of the historic property before it was developed in the nineteenth century.

Go to this page to register for the Shirley-Eustis House’s event.

Both of these online events are free, but donations to the hosting organizations are welcome.

The Hive Symposium, 17–18 Feb.

On the weekend of 17–18 February, Minute Man National Historical Park will host its annual symposium for living history interpreters, The Hive.

Cosponsoring organizations include the Friends of Minute Man, Revolution 250, Freedom’s Way National Heritage Area, and the Massachusetts Army National Guard, which will host the gathering.

Though this series of presentations and workshops is designed primarily for people who participate in the park’s colonial reenactments, including the Battle of Lexington and Concord, they offer valuable information for anyone interested in local Revolutionary history.

The schedule of presentations includes:

Overview of the Minute Man 250 Thematic Framework with Park Rangers Jim Hollister and Jarrad Fuoss: The 250th anniversary of the American Revolution is well underway! The staff at Minute Man have developed an interpretive framework that carry our program through the next several years.

1774: The Empire Strikes Back, and Resistance Becomes Revolution with Prof. Bob Allison of Suffolk University: Parliament responded to Boston’s destroying the tea by closing the port and suspending the 1691 charter. The people of Massachusetts would no longer have control over their municipal governments. Instead of silencing the local resistance, these moves brought the other colonies into an alliance with Massachusetts to begin a revolution against Parliament's authority. Find out what went wrong for the Empire in 1774.

By His Excellency’s Command: General Gage, the British Army and the People of Salem in 1774 with Dr. Emily Murphy: In June of 1774 the newly appointed royal governor of Massachusetts, Gen. Thomas Gage, was eager to escape the political turbulence of Boston. Therefore, he took the drastic step of removing himself and the provincial legislature to the seemingly calmer waters of Salem. Two regiments of British regulars came with him. That summer the people of Salem came into direct contact with a display of royal power on a scale they had never before experienced. What was the social and political landscape of the town like in 1774? How did the people deal with their new neighbors?

Lives of the Embattled Farmers: The Towns of Lexington, Lincoln and Concord in 1775, a panel discussion with Alex Cain, Don Hafner, and Bob Gross: The towns of Lexington, Lincoln and Concord were farming communities. Many of the families who called these towns home had been there for multiple generations. In this panel discussion we will look at the social and economic dynamics of these three towns, their similarities and their differences.

Practical, often hands-on workshops will cover these topics:

• “Techniques for Informal Visitor Engagement” with Park Ranger Jarrad Fuoss
• “Too Clean!: Incorporating Appropriate Levels of Garment Distress into Your Historical Impression” with Adam Hodges-LeCaire
• “A Pressing Matter: Media Literacy & 18th Century Newspapers” with Michele Gabrielson
• “Women’s Hair Styles and Cosmetics” with Renee Walker-Tuttle
• “Men’s Hair Styles” with Neils Hobbs and Sean Considine
• “‘Fitted with the Greatest Exactness’: The Material Culture of Appearance of the 18th-Century British Soldier” with Sean Considine and Niels Hobbs
• “Pinning Gowns & Filling Pockets: How to Wear Women’s Clothing Well & Have Fun Pulling from Your Pockets!” with Ruth Hodges

Plus, the program includes time for sewing circles, infantry drill, consultation on kit, and lunchtime conversations.

The 2024 spring season at Minute Man will includes some events about the crucial year of 1774 in addition to the traditional Patriots Day battle reenactment. That event will be practice for the Sestercentennial in 2025, which may very well be insane.

Register to attend the 2024 Hive symposium through the Friends of Minute Man Park.

Upcoming Events on Revolutionary History at the M.H.S.

Here are three different types of online events coming up from the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Tuesday, 6 February, 5:00 to 6:15 P.M.
Pauline Maier Early American History Seminar Series
“The Social World of Revolutionary New England”
Panel discussion with:

• Nicole Breault, University of Texas, El Paso
• Christopher Walton, Southern Methodist University
• Mark Peterson, Yale University

Nicole Breault’s research centers on Boston watchmen who walked the streets at night to monitor for signs of fire, distress, and disorder. Through night constables’ reports, orders governing watches, town records, acts of the General Court, and justice of the peace records, Breault’s paper examines local-level police training prior to the professionalization of law enforcement and more broadly, quotidian acquisitions of legal knowledge in early America.

Christopher Walton’s work examines how Congregational clergy in the Connecticut Valley ministered to their communities through suffering during the American Revolution. As the religious community dealt with sickness and death locally, it learned to respond piously to loss at the battlefront. Through suffering, religion became personal as individuals took solace in religious truth and cultivated piety.

Peterson, author of The City-State of Boston, will comment on Breault and Walton’s papers (which are available to seminar subscribers).

Register for “The Social World of Revolutionary New England” here.

Thursday, 15 February, 6:00 to 7:00 P.M.
“First Family: George Washington’s Heirs & the Making of America”
Cassandra Good, Marymount University,
in conversation with Sara Georgini, M.H.S.

While George and Martha Washington never had children of their own, they raised numerous children together. In First Family, we see Washington as a father figure, and also meet the children he helped to raise. The children of Martha Washington’s son by her first marriage—Eliza, Patty, Nelly and Wash Custis—were born into life in the public eye. Raised in the country’s first “first family,” they remained well-known not only as Washington’s family, but also as keepers of his legacy throughout their lives.

As the country grapples with concerns about political dynasties and the public role of presidential families, the saga of Washington’s family offers a human story of historical precedent.

Register for “First Family: George Washington’s Heirs & the Making of America” here. This is a free public event.


Monday and Tuesday, 19–20 February, 9:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M.
“Perspectives on the Boston Massacre & the Legacy of Crispus Attucks”
Teacher Workshop

This two-day workshop is offered for Grade 3-12 educators with a focus on Grade 5, covering content relevant to Grade 5 Investigating History, Early U.S., 19th Century, and African American History.

On a cold night in March 1770, simmering conflict broke out into a riot between colonial Bostonians and British soldiers. Competing witness accounts from across all walks of Boston life made it difficult to know exactly what happened, but the night ended with the death of five colonists including Crispus Attucks, a Black and Indigenous sailor, and became a flashpoint in the conflict between colonists and British rule.

Eighty-five years later, Black historian and community leader William Cooper Nell brought Crispus Attucks back into the public’s consciousness, connecting Black participation in the Revolutionary Era to 19th-century abolitionists’ calls for emancipation and equal civil rights for Black Americans.

Using primary sources and resources from the MHS’ History Source, educators will:

• Explore conflicting witness testimonies and multiple perspectives from a diverse array of Bostonians.
• Investigate ways in which people of color have been both present for and critical actors in turning points in American history.
• Discuss how and why public memory of the Boston Massacre has changed over time–and how point of view influences our interpretation of the past.
• Model strategies for analyzing primary sources in the classroom.

This teacher workshop has a fee of $40 per person. Participants can earn P.D.P.’s or other professional credits—see the webpage for any additional fees. Register for “Perspectives on the Boston Massacre & the Legacy of Crispus Attucks” here.

“John Malcom returns thanks to Almighty God”

Like pretty much everything else in colonial Boston, the mobbing of John Malcolm had a religious aspect.

Malcolm’s parents had migrated from Ireland in 1721, and before that the family was from Scotland. When he married and had children in the 1750s, Malcolm did so in the Rev. John Moorhead’s Presbyterian meeting-house.

(That congregation eventually evolved into the Arlington Street Church. Its surviving eighteenth-century records have been digitized by Harvard, and the image above comes from a book of baptisms. Good luck using that source.)

In 1769, Malcolm made a career change and joined the Customs service. His first station was in Newport, Rhode Island. The Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles recorded in his diary the difficulties Malcolm found in worshipping there:

24 [Feb 1770]. I am told that Mr. Malcom last week signified his Desires to some of the Brethren of the first Cong. Chh. here to partake with them in the Lord’s Supper last Lords day. His motion was declined.

He is an officer in the Customs here: lately removed from Boston & settled here, & with his Family attends that Meeting. Tho’ a Congregationalist, yet not Member in Communion. with any Congrega. Chh: yet to qualify for an office had received the Sacrament at an Episcopal Chh., I think in Boston.

It is the declared principle of our Churches to receive to occasional Communion, any sober Communicants from any protestant Chhs., as Episco., Bapt., &c., if they should desire it. He pleaded this right. But the scruple arose on his Morals, which are exceptionable.

There’s no clue about what made Malcolm morally objectionable, if it wasn’t simply joining the Customs service. In 1771 he attended Stiles’s own meeting six times before leaving New England for his next assignment.

This episode shows a couple of things. First, Malcolm wanted to be part of a congregation. He preferred independent meetings, though reportedly was willing to take communion in an Anglican church if it would help his career with the royal government. I haven’t seen any evidence about where the Malcolm family was worshipping when he was back in Boston in the winter of 1773–1774.

The first newspaper essay to discuss religion in connection to the January 1774 crowd attack on Malcolm in fact never appeared in a newspaper. But in announcing that he declined to print that essay in the 3 February Boston News-Letter, Richard Draper got the main point across:

VERITAS, his Observations on the Method of Punishment inflicted on J. Malcom, in a Place professing the Christian Religion, cannot be inserted.—He concludes “I would have every one punished that is deserving of it.—But would not have it to be said by the INDIANS, We are SAVAGES.”

In other words, the violence of the attack on Malcolm made Bostonians look bad, even to people that community stereotyped as violent.

During his recovery, Malcolm himself released a couple of public statements. The Boston Evening-Post was the first to publish one, on 14 February:

Yesterday se’nnight [i.e., Sunday, 6 February] the following Note, it’s said, was sent to several Churches in this Town, viz.

“John Malcom desires Prayers of the Christian People of this Congregation, that the vile abuse received on the 25th Day or Evening of January last past, from a vile rebellious Mob, without Provocation, may be sanctified to him and his Family; and that he may bless God that his Usefulness is still spared, and that he is greatly recovered from his dreadful Wounds and Bruises he then received from the bloody and cruel Hands of these cruel Mortals here below.—

May God forgive them!

Just above that item the Fleet brothers printed a warning to peddlers not to sell tea, that paragraph ending with the threat of “a modern Dress.—Remember Pedlar Malcom’s Fate!” So that writer wasn’t in the same forgiving mood.

On 17 March, Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy published Malcolm’s next message:

Last Sunday se’nnight [i.e., Sunday, 6 March], the following curious note was sent to several churches in this town, and we hear was read at one of them, viz.

“John Malcom returns thanks to Almighty God, that again he is able to wait on him again in the public worship, after the cruel and barbarous usage of a cruel and barbarous mob in Boston, on the 25th evening of January last past confined him to house, bed and room.

“March 6, 1775.”

I haven’t found any response to these items questioning Malcolm’s faith or choice of denomination, or arguing against the point they all made about how Jesus told people to treat their enemies. Most people seem to have preferred to let that topic drop.

“The licentiousness & barbarism of the times”

Another way to look at the mobbing of John Malcolm in January 1774 is through the issue of the rule of law.

At the end of her account of the event, friend of government Ann Hulton wrote:

These few instances amongst many serve to shew the abject State of Governmt & the licentiousness & barbarism of the times. There’s no Majestrate that dare or will act to suppress the outrages. No person is secure there are many Objects pointed at, at this time & when once mark’d out for Vengence, their ruin is certain.

Yet the Massachusetts Spy ended its Whig version of events by saying:

See reader, the effects of a government in which the people have no confidence!

For Hulton, the riotous attack on Malcolm showed that the people of Boston had no respect for the law, or common decency.

And as John Rowe’s diary entry shows, the crowd could intimidate justice of the peace Belcher Noyes from interfering with their violence.

However, people in the crowd would probably have said they were enforcing the law, not breaking it. It was Malcolm who had defied the law by refusing to obey a constable’s writ. It was Malcolm who had started the violence by clubbing George R. T. Hewes. It was Malcolm who had corrupted the law by abusing his authority as a Customs officer.

And as for waiting for the legal system to address Malcolm’s behavior, the Spy story said his attackers expected he would enjoy impunity like “[Ebenezer] Richardson and the soldiers [at the Massacre], and the other friends of government.”

It seems significant that all those cases involved grown men attacking children: Richardson shooting Christopher Seider, Pvt. Hugh White clonking Edward Garrick on the head, and Malcolm threatening the unnamed child whom Hewes defended. (To be sure, all those attacks on children started with children wising off to the men, but that wasn’t a crime.)

We can see the same sort of dueling accusations of lawlessness today. People on both sides of the political aisle say the other side routinely breaks the law and gets away with it through corruption. That makes it all the more important to look at actual evidence, not just rhetoric, since anyone can wail about “the abject State of Governmt.” 

(The picture above is a 1775 engraving of the attack on Malcolm, built off the previous year’s smaller scene shown here. Once again, tea plays a big part in how Londoners understood the event. Another early image of Boston’s destruction of the tea appears at right, and in the lower center a man is urinating into a teapot.)

“He should not speak to a gentleman in the street”

Yesterday I quoted John Malcolm’s complaint about how some Royal Navy officers had treated him in 1771, cutting buttons off his cloak.

In his newspaper advertisement about the conflict, Malcolm twice used the language of duelling. One navy officer named Davis reportedly “promis’d…Gentleman-like Satisfaction,” and the Customs officer “demanded Satisfaction of him.”

Davis instead proceeded to an action that was also part of the duelers’ code, but not for a genteel equal with whom one would duel. Instead, Malcolm complained, “he struck me with a Stick.”

Clubbing or caning an opponent was not just a physical assault. It also communicated that person was of a lower social class.

When James Otis, Jr., and Customs Commissioner John Robinson met in the British Coffee-House in September 1769, they were following that code. Otis had publicly claimed the right to break Robinson’s head, and Robinson tried to grab Otis’s nose before swinging his own cane.

Decades later, Rep. Preston Brooks’s assault on Sen. Charles Sumner in the U.S. Senate chamber carried the same symbolism. Brooks had considered challenging Sumner to a duel, as he had previously dueled with other men, but another member of Congress persuaded him that dueling was too good for the anti-slavery senator.

When John Malcolm advertised in 1771 that he had given Davis “a genteel Basting or Caneing,” he wasn’t just saying he’d resisted Davis’s strike and come out ahead in their fight. He was signaling that because he’d succeeded in inflicting that chastisement he was the more worthy gentleman.

Malcolm’s behavior toward George R. T. Hewes on 25 Jan 1774 had the same symbolic dimension. The incident started when a boy criticized Malcolm for having knocked his “chips” into the snow the day before. Malcolm didn’t like being pestered by a child and started waving his cane around. Hewes then remonstrated with the man about threatening the boy.

Malcolm again resented being called out by someone from a lower class—a poor shoemaker. According to the Massachusetts Spy, he told Hewes, “You are an impertinent rascal, it is none of your business,” eventually adding that “he should not speak to a gentleman in the street” like that.

The two men then argued over their “good credit” in town. Hewes didn’t claim to be a gentleman, but he found a way to imply that Malcolm wasn’t one, either: “Mr. Hewes retorted, be that as it will, I never was tarred nor feathered any how.”

At this time, before the actual war broke out, crowds almost always reserved tarring and feathering for working-class men connected with Customs enforcement as low-level officers, sailors, or (supposed) informants. Contrary to later popular images, mobs didn’t tar and feather upper-class Tories.

By bringing up the fact that a crowd in Maine had tarred and feathered John Malcolm, Hewes was insinuating that, despite his career as a ship’s captain, colonial army officer, and higher-level Customs officer, Malcolm was not really a gentleman.

Malcolm responded as the dueling code said a gentleman could when insulted by someone beneath his rank: he clubbed Hewes on the forehead and knocked him out.

“I then gave him a genteel Basting or Caneing”

The 18 Feb 1771 issue of Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette reported that the Customs Commissioners had promoted John Malcolm from the post of Tide Surveyor in Newport, Rhode Island, to Controller in Carratook, North Carolina.

Carratook was a much smaller port, but Controller was a position of more responsibility, especially when it came to money. Malcolm had joined the service less than two years before, so that indicated the commissioners had some confidence in him.

Just below that report (in much smaller type) ran this letter:

Messieurs EDES & GILL.

Please to insert the following in your much-esteemed Paper, and you’ll oblige your humble servant, JOHN MALCOM.

WHEREAS three Officers belonging to his Majesty’s Navy us’d me very ill sometime past, by cutting Buttons from my Hussar Cloak in a private Manner, and carrying them off in their Pockets, which I resented; and on Friday the 15th Instant [i.e., of this month] I met with one of them, whose Name was Davis, two other Officers being with him—

And as said Davis had not given me Gentleman-like Satisfaction as he sundry Times promis’d, I again demanded Satisfaction of him, and he struck me with a Stick—

I then gave him a genteel Basting or Caneing, and sent him off, bidding him if he pleas’d to go and acquaint his Commodore [James Gambier] that a Boston-born Man had given him the said Davis a genteel Trimming.

JOHN MALCOM.
Boston, Feb. 1771

This newspaper item isn’t discussed in Frank W. C. Hersey’s article on Malcolm for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, or anywhere else that I can find.

The confrontation Malcolm described here bears some resemblance to his more famous street fight in early 1774, particularly his insistence on being treated like a gentleman and his whaling away with his cane when that didn’t happen.

One big difference, of course, is that Malcolm’s target in 1771 was a fellow employee of the royal government, albeit in another branch. If there was any political issue in this earlier fight, it was his suspicion that British officers looked down on him as a “Boston-born” colonial.

At this time, Malcolm aligned himself with the town—the same town that would attack him brutally a few years later. He was even using the Boston Whigs’ principal newspaper to promulgate that message.

[My photo above shows a “fist cane” that belonged to Thomas Hancock and was on display at the Massachusetts Historical Society five years ago.]

“Some excuse for such an outrageous action”

Another source on the circumstances of the mobbing of John Malcolm was Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, reporting to the Earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State for North America in London.

This text is from the Colonial Society of Massachusetts’s publication of Hutchinson’s correspondence:

I am sorry that I must acquaint your Lordship with a barbarous & inhumane act of violence upon the person of John Malcom the night after the 25th. instant, by a great number of rioters in the Town of Boston. Mr Malcom is a preventive Officer for the port of Falmouth in Casco bay, and lately seized a Vessel, in that port, for want of a Register. I have heard no complaint of any irregularity in this execution of his Office, but a great number of persons, in that part of the Province, thought fit to punish him by tarring and feathering him, & carrying him about in derision.

As he was not stripped, and the chief damage he sustained was in his cloaths, upon his making complaint to me I only sent for one of the principal Justices of peace for the County, and directed him to make inquiry into the affair, and to oblige such of the Actors as he should have evidence against to find security to answer at the next Assizes for the County, or to commit them.

He has, since his being in Boston, made frequent complaints to me of his being hooted at in the streets for having been tarred & feathered and, being a passionate man, I have as often cautioned him against giving way to his passion, or making any other Return than neglect & contempt; but having met with a provocation of this sort, in the afternoon of the 25th. from a tradesman, who, he says, had several times before affronted him, he struck him with his cane.

The tradesman applied to a Justice, who issued a warrant to a Constable, but the Constable not being able to find him, a mob gathered about his house in the evening and, having broke his windows, he pushed through the broken window with his sword, and gave a slight scratch with the point to one of the Assailants; soon after which the mob entered his house and treated him in the manner related in the News paper which I shall inclose.

This account is given to me by the Relations of Mr Malcom, who are persons of good characters in the Town. He has, for some time past, been threatned by the populace with revenge for his free and open declarations against the late proceedings [i.e., the Boston Tea Party], and has, I believe, sometimes indiscretely provoked them, which it is pretended may be some excuse for such an outrageous action.

I am informed, to day, that, although he is terribly bruised, it’s probable he will recover. I will do every thing in my power to bring the guilty persons to condign punishment. I have not heard of any except the lowest class of the people suspected of being concerned in this Riot.

The next night there was an attempt to raise another mob to search for Ebenr. Richardson lately found guilty by a Jury of Murder, but judgment being suspended His Majesty’s pardon was applied for & obtained. He is now in some very inferior employment in the service of the Customs in Pensilvania and, it is thought, a report of his being in town was spread for the sake of raising a mob. Some of the more considerate people appeared and opposed the leaders in the beginning of the affair and put a stop to it.

I am the more particular in these accounts, because I have heretofore been thought negligent in not transmitting the earliest advice of every attack upon the Officers of the Customs, though of the lowest rank. The town continuing in this state the friends of the Consignees of the East India Company judge it unsafe for them to appear there, though they are sensible that any further compliance with the demands of the people could not have been justified, and that the whole proceedings with respect to them have been unjust & tyrannical. There is no spirit left in those who used to be friends to Government to support them or any others who oppose the prevailing power.

Among the notable additions to the record from this letter are that the name of pardoned killer Ebenezer Richardson was still toxic enough to arouse the Boston crowd. Gov. Hutchinson was correct that the man had gone to Philadelphia to work for the Customs office there.

However, in November 1773 the Boston newspapers ran articles from the Pennsylvania Journal suggesting that its coverage had made that town too hot for him, and he might go to New York or elsewhere. It wasn’t out of the question, therefore, that Richardson could be back in Boston. (He did return to Massachusetts by the summer of 1774 and was found in Stoneham that September.)

Hutchinson’s letter also says, based on an account from Malcolm’s relatives, that the “tradesman” he struck (George R. T. Hewes) had “affronted” him “several times before.” Neither the immediate newspaper stories nor Hewes’s later recollections indicate that history, but it’s clear that Hewes knew who Malcolm was.

Notably, Malcolm’s own narrative skipped over that first encounter entirely, except to deny the “False pretence of his haveing the Same day used a Boy Ill in the Street.” Instead, he began the confrontation with people coming to his house and breaking windows for no good reason.

TOMORROW: John Malcolm’s street fights.

“Applyed to a particular Justice to Exert his Authority”

On 25 Jan 1774, the day that a Boston mob attacked John Malcolm, the merchant John Rowe wrote this in his diary:

John Malcom having done some violence to A man with A Sword enragd the Multitude that they took him & put him into a Cart, Tarr’d & featherd him—carrying thro the principall Streets of this Town with A halter about him from thence to the Gallows & Returned thro the main Street—making Great Noise & Huzzaing.

I did not see the Numbers attending but tis Supposed by the People that did there were upwards of Twelve hundred people. tis Said that Malcom behav’d with Great Fortitude & Resolution—this was Look’d upon by Mee & Every Sober Man as an Act of Outragious Violence & when severall of the Inhabitants applyed to a particular Justice to Exert his Authority & Suppress the People & they would support him in the Execution of his Duty he Refusd.

As you can see on the original page from the Massachusetts Historical Society, Rowe put a little asterisk next to the word “Justice” and at the bottom of the page this footnote:

B N

After I spent some time identifying that magistrate from those initials, I discovered that Clifford K. Shipton had already done so in his Sibley’s Harvard Biographies profiles.

That reluctant justice of the peace was Belcher Noyes (1709–1785), who lived near Dock Square, the neighborhood where the riot started. After graduating from Harvard College, Noyes followed his father into medicine but soon spent more of his time, and made more of his money, speculating on land in Maine, as documented at the Maine Memory Network above. In 1773 Noyes was in his sixties, not politically active, and clearly reluctant to become involved.

Rowe’s diary entry is also interesting for showing the merchant himself trimming back toward the royal side weeks after he had pleased the crowd in Old South Meeting-House by asking “whether Salt Water would not make as good Tea as fresh.” Here Rowe, for most of his career an active smuggler, takes the side of Customs Surveyor Malcolm.

“An ancedote of a hair’s breath escape” from George R. T. Hewes

It’s not that surprising that the two books based on the memories of George Robert Twelves Hewes, A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party (1834) and Traits of the Tea Party (1835), contain anecdote after anecdote placing Hewes at major events in pre-Revolutionary Boston.

After all, people’s memoirs often play up their role in history or their knowledge of events.

What’s remarkable about the Hewes books is that contemporaneous documents often bear out the little shoemaker’s memories. Details he recalled six decades later turn out to be consistent with the records of the time.

For both those books Hewes described how he had gotten into an argument with a Customs officer and suffered an injury, prompting his fellow Bostonians to attack that man. He had his own riot in pre-Revolutionary Boston!

Yet, as the account from the Massachusetts Spy shows, that’s exactly what happened on 25 Jan 1774. Hewes’s memories weren’t fully accurate—for example, he recalled this confrontation happening before the Boston Tea Party instead of six weeks after it. But they’re impressivelt consistent.

Here’s how James T. Hawke recorded Hewes’s memory in A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party:

One day, said he, as I was returning from dinner, I met a man by the name of John Malcom, who was a custom-house officer, and a small boy, pushing his sled along, before him; and just as I was passing the boy, he said to Malcom, what, sir, did you throw my chips into the snow for, yesterday?

Upon which Malcom angrily replied, do you speak to me, you rascal; and, as he raised a cane he had in his hand, aiming it at the head of the boy, I spoke to Malcom, and said to him, you are not about to strike that boy with your cudgel, you may kill him; upon my saying that, he was suddenly diverted from the boy, and turning upon me, says, you d——d rascal, do you presume too, to speak to me?

I replied to him, I am no rascal, sir, be it known to you; whereupon he struck me across the head with his cane, and knocked me down, and by the blow cut a hole in my hat two inches in length.

At this moment, one Captain [Isaac?] Godfry came up, and raising me up, asked who had struck me; Malcom, replied the by standers, while he, for fear of the displeasure of the populace, ran to his house, and shut himself up.

The people, many of whom were soon collected around me, advised me to go immediately to Doctor [Joseph] Warren, and get him to dress my wound, which I did without delay; and the doctor, after [he] dressed it, observed to me, it can be considered no misfortune that I had a thick skull, for had not yours been very strong, said he, it would have been broke; you have come within a hair’s breath of loosing your life.

He then advised me to go to Mr. [Edmund] Quincy, a magistrate, and get a warrant, for the purpose of arresting Malcom, which I did, and carried it immediately to a constable, by the name of Justine Hale [sic], and delivered it to him, to serve, but when he came to the house where Malcom was locked up, it was surrounded by such a multitude he could not serve it.

The people, however, soon broke open the door, and took Malcom into their custody. They then took him to the place where the massacre was committed, and their flogged him with thirty-nine stripes. After which, they besmeared him thoroughly with tar and feathers; they then whipped him through the town, till they arrived at the gallows, on the neck, where they gave him thirty-nine stripes more, and then, after putting one end of a rope about his neck, and throwing the other end over the gallows, told him to remember that he had come within one of being hanged. They then took him back to the house from whence they had taken him, and discharged him from their custody.

The severity of the flogging they had given him, together with the cold coat of tar with which they had invested him, had such a benumbing effect upon his health, that it required considerable effort to restore his usual circulation. During the process of his chastisement, the deleterious effect of the frost, it being a cold season, generated a morbid affection upon the prominent parts of his face, especially upon his chin, which caused a separation and peeling off of some fragments of loose skin and flesh, which, with a portion of the tar and feathers, which adhered to him, he preserved in a box, and soon after carried with him to England, as the testimonials of his sufferings in the cause of his country.

On his arrival in England soon after this catastrophe Malcom obtained an annual pension of fifty pounds, but lived only two years after to enjoy it.

On relating this adventure, the very excitement which the affront must have wrought upon him, evidently began to rekindle, and he remarked with emphasis, I shall carry to my grave the scar which the wound Malcom gave me left on my head; and passing my finger over the spot to which he directed it, there was obviously such a scar, as must have been occasioned by the wound he had described.

Hewes’s knowledge was of course more accurate about his own experiences than other details. Malcolm was awarded a sinecure but not a pension, and he lived many more than two years.

A year after that first book, Hewes sat for more interviews with the Bostonian journalist Benjamin Bussey Thatcher, and those conversations produced this version:

John [Malcom]…lived (says Mr. Hewes) at the head of Cross Street, where he worked in some capacity for a man by the name of Scott, when one day, as Hewes was returning from dinner to his shop, (for he continued at hard work all this time—as industrious and as impartial as ever,) he met Malcom at the mouth of the street.

He was engaged in an altercation with a boy who was dragging a hand-sled before him—the snow being a foot deep, or more, on the ground. The lad complained of his having turned over his chips, the day before, into the snow, and wanted to know what good that could do him.

“Do you talk to me in that style, you rascal!” said Malcom; and he was raising his cane, to give emphasis to his answer, over the boy’s head, just as Hewes came up. The latter was unarmed, and small, but it was no way of his, cost what it might, to see foul play. He stepped up to Malcom without ceremony, and warned him not to strike the lad with that cudgel. Malcom, in a rage already, now left his smaller game, and fronted Hewes:

”And do you presume to insult me, too, you scoundrel!—what have you to do with it?”

“I am no scoundrel, Sir,” said Hewes,—“and be it known to you”—

Malcom, at this, levelled a blow with his cane, which struck Hewes over the top of his head, cutting a hole two inches long through his hat, and brought him to the ground.

One Captain Godfrey came up at this moment, and helped him to rise. There was a bad wound on his temples, and the blood ran down his face in streams. “Who did this?” cried Godfrey, in a voice of thunder.

Hewes was known for a good Son of Liberty, as well as Malcom was for a Tory, and the by-standers, who were fast gathering by this time, quickly interfered. Malcom contrived to get a weapon into his hand and keep them at bay, till he could flee to is house, where he fastened himself in.

Hewes, meanwhile, had gone to Dr. Warren (Joseph) [footnote: in Orange-Tree Lane.] who was a relative (his grandmother’s sister’s son) and an old acquaintance of his; and the Doctor, after dressing his head, had advised him to get a warrant out against Malcom. He got one, accordingly, of Justice [Richard] Dana.

Constable Hale undertook to execute it. He found the house surrounded by a crowd of people. Malcom, from his back window, begged him to let him alone till morning, as he was afraid they would tear him to pieces, if he ventured out. He concluded to do so, and Hewes went away with him.

This, probably, only made the matter worse. The people became more furious, while Malcom, on the other hand, armed himself to the teeth, with sword, pistols, and broad-axe, took possession of the upper story, and threatened destruction to the first person who trespassed on the premises.

An acquaintance of his got in at the back-door, at length, by deceiving his wife, by a stratagem induced him to put his weapons by, seized him by the back in that condition, and hallooed to the people, who stood waiting to help him, which they did with a relish. They got a horse-cart, and lowered him out of the window by ropes into that.

This detail about the window appeared in the 27 January Boston News-Letter, but that newspaper retracted it the next week. According to Hewes, he had left the scene by that time. So either he heard a rumor of Malcolm being lowered out a window or read it in a newspaper, or Thatcher found the detail in the newspaper or some report based on it and inserted it into the book.

They called for feathers, and two pillow-cases-full were shortly produced—probably from Malcom’s own stores. They started for Henchman’s Wharf, and there took in a quantity of tar, the purpose of which…was soon explained by their stripping poor Malcom naked above the breast, and plastering over his upper extremities.

Thence they carted him to Butcher’s Hall [i.e., the Customs house]; thence to Shubael Hewess,’ who kept a butcher’s-market at that period on the Main Street, in a wooden house near the Old South Church, with a jutting upper story, which still stands there (and was pointed out by our veteran, on his last visit to the city.)

Here, as in King Street, a flagellation was tried. Then, they drove to Liberty-Tree—to the gallows on the Neck—back to the Tree—to Butcher’s Hall again—to Charlestown ferry—to Copp’s Hill,—flogging the miserable wretch at every one of these places, if not some more—a fact which the papers of the day overlook, for obvious reasons, though the Gazette acknowledges that he was “bruised” in such a manner “that his life is despaired of.”

Hewes states that when they left him at the door of his own house, after a four-hours’ torture, the poor creature was almost frozen, and was rolled out of the cart like a log. Dr. [Silvester] Gardiner, who met Hewes soon after, told him that it took three days to get his blood into circulation again; adding, in the same breath, the consolatory compliment, that he, as the cause of it, would infallibly be hanged, and ought to be.

The Doctor…was doubtless ignorant of one or two things which it is but justice to his patient to mention. Hewes could not be blamed, certainly, for complaining to the Justice and taking the warrant, had he done it at his own suggestion, instead of Dr. Warren’s, or any body’s else. The assault was unprovoked and outrageous; and the wound so serious that the indentation it made in his skull is as plainly perceptible to this moment as it was sixty years ago. Indeed, as the Doctor told him when he dressed it, it was within one of his life. “Cousin Hewes,” said he, good-humoredly, “you are the luckiest man I know of, to have such a skull—nothing else could have saved you;” and nothing else did. It was the narrowest of all his dodgings of death.

Nor was he accessory in any way to the disgraceful treatment which Malcom received; so far from it, that when he first heard of his miserable situation, his instant impulse was to push after the procession as fast as he could, with a blanket to put over his shoulders. He overtook them at his brother’s house and made an effort to relieve him; but the ruffians who now had the charge of him about the cart, pushed him aside, and warned him to keep off.

Malcom recovered from his wounds, and went about as usual. “How do you do, Mr. Malcom?” said Hewes, very civilly, the next time he met him. “Your humble servant, Mr. George Robert Twelves Hewes,” quoth he—touching his hat genteelly as he passed by. “Thank ye,” thought Hewes, “and I am glad you have learned better manners at last.”

Nor was that the only benefit which accrued to this unfortunate politician. The frost caused an affection which caused a considerable portion of the skin to peel off. This, with a quantity of the Tar and feathers that adhered to him, it is understood he carefully preserved, boxed up, and carried with him to England, as a testimonial of his sacrifices for the royal cause.

Hewes’s memory appears to be the only source for the statement that Malcolm preserved samples of his own skin (though Ann Hulton did write that “They say his flesh comes off his back in Stakes [steaks]”). Again, it’s not clear how Hewes would know that as a fact without any other record of it surviving. But authors love to include it.

Again, on details of his own experience, Hewes could be remarkably reliable. For example, there’s the constable he summoned to serve a writ on Malcolm, noted as “Constable Hale” and “Justine Hale” (which historian Alfred F. Young guessed was a typo for “Justice Hale”). Among the men the Boston town meeting elected as constables in 1773 was Augustus Hail.

“The Custom house would drench us with this Poison”

Within a week after he was attacked by a mob, Customs officer John Malcolm petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for compensation.

He filed a memorial “setting forth great Abuses he has receiv’d, and praying to be enabled to take Measures for immediate Relief, and for Redress.”

The Council approved this petition on 1 February and sent it down to the assembly. The lower house voted “That the Petitioner have Leave to withdraw his Petition”—i.e., rejected.

On 17 March, almost two months after the riot, Malcolm published thanks to God that he was finally well enough to go back to church.

After another few weeks, on 4 May, H.M.S. Active sailed out of Boston harbor, “with whom went Passenger, the famous ’Squire Malcom,” according to the Boston Post-Boy.

In London, Malcolm told his story to a more sympathetic audience. He petitioned Lord North on 28 July. In the new year, he even presented his case to King George III.

The London newspapers reported on Malcolm’s sufferings, including a detail that hadn’t appeared in any American account so far:

A Correspondent says he has been informed, by a Gentleman lately arrived from Philadelphia, that when Mr. John Malcomb, an Officer of the Customs at Boston, was leading, tarred and feathered, to the Gallows, with a Rope about his Neck, he was asked by one of the Mob whether he was not thirsty, which was natural to a Man expecting to be hanged.

The unfortunate Officer of the Customs, as well as he could speak, answered yes; and immediately a large Bowl of strong Tea was put into his Hands, with Orders to drink the King’s Health. Whether it was owing to Loyalty or Thirst is not material; poor Malcomb Half emptied the Bowl.

He was then told he must mend his Draught, and drink the Queen’s Health. Though he had done his utmost for the King, he found he must do something for the Queen; and having taken off Half the Remainder of the Bowl, he presented it back to the Persons from whom he had received it.

Hold! hold! cries his Friend, you are not to forget the rest of the Royal Family; come, drink to the Prince of Wales. Replenish, replenish, cries the loyal American; and instantly poor Malcomb saw two Quarts more of what he was heartily sick of. Make Haste, cries another loyal American; you have nine more Healths to drink before you arrive at the Gallows.

For God’s Sake, Gentlemen, be merciful, I am ready to burst; if I drink a Drop more, I shall die.

Suppose you do, cries one of the Mob, you die in a good Cause, and it is as well to be drowned as hanged, and immediately the drenching Horn was put to his Mouth, to the Health of the Bishop of Osnabrug; and, having gone through the other eight, he turned pale, shook his Head, and instantly filled the Bowl which he had just emptied [i.e., vomited].

What, says the American, are you sick of the Royal Family? No, replies Malcomb, my Stomack nauseates the Tea; it rises at it like Poison.

And yet, you Rascal, returns the American, your whole Fraternity at the Custom house would drench us with this Poison, and we are to have our Throats cut if it will not stay upon our Stomachs. The merciful Americans desisted, and the Procession was continued towards the Gallows.

This anecdote was reprinted in Boston newspapers, including the Patriot Massachusetts Spy, in December. I haven’t found any local response saying it was untrue. However, it’s possible that at the time everyone saw this story—not attributed to Malcolm nor any Bostonian who actually witnessed the attack—as a joke using a newsworthy event to make a point about the Customs service and the Tea Act.

London artists seized on that detail about the tea. The “New Method of Macarony Making” print I showed yesterday included a Boston rioter pressing a big pot of tea on Malcolm. In the print above, “The Bostonians Paying the Excise-Man, or Tarring and Feathering,” the mob is actually pouring tea down Malcolm’s throat.

Furthermore, in the background of that print men are emptying tea chests off the side of a ship into the water—the earliest visual depiction of the Boston Tea Party. And as a reminder of the town’s ten-year history of trouble, “LIBERTY-TREE” holds an upside-down paper marked “Stamp Act.”

Malcolm hadn’t been personally involved in the stand-off over the East India Company tea, but he worked for the Customs Commissioners who had forced the issue. For Londoners, the attack on Malcolm and the destruction of dutied tea both showed the Bostonians’ contempt for the imperial government—“Paying the Excise-Man” with violence instead of their fair share of taxes.

TOMORROW: A retrospective on the riot.

“In a most Deploreable and Dangerous Setuation”

Yesterday I quoted the Massachusetts Spy report on the 25 Jan 1774 mob attack on John Malcolm.

Here’s the Customs officer’s own account, as quoted by Frank W. C. Hersey from a “memorial” (memorandum) to the Massachusetts government asking for compensation:

…a Number of People assembled at the House of your memorialist in Boston and after insulting him with opprobrious Language, under a False pretence of his haveing the Same day used a Boy Ill in the Street, they Broke his windows and endeavourd forcibly to Take him out of his House, but from the Natural Opposition he made, or Some friendly Interposition they thought Proper to Desperse—

That about Eight OClock in the Evening of the same Day a vast Concourse of people again beset the House of your memorialist, Who were Armed with axes Clubs &ca and Broke open the door and Windows of the Lower appartments on which he Retired to an upper Chamber to make what Deffence he Could but One Mr Russell Declareing himself to be the friend of your memorialist, Came Into the Room with all the appearances of Friendship, shook hands and at same Time Desired he might be permitted to Look at the sword of your memorialist which was the only weapon he had for his immediate Deffence, which request being granted he siezed the sword and Calling out to the people assembled as afore said, they immediately Rushed in, and by violence forced your memorialist out of the House, and Beating him with Sticks then placed him on a sled they had Prepaird and Draged him before the Custom House where they gave three Huzza’s they afterwards Took him out of the sled and put him into a Cart, and Notwithstanding the severitty of the weather, Tore of his Clothes, and Tarrd and Featherd his Naked body, and in that setuation Carried him before the Provience House and ordered him to Curse The Governor and say he was an Enemy to his Country but your Memorialist Refused—

from thence they prosceeded with him to Liberty-Tree so Called, where they again ordered him to Curse the governor and the board of Commissioners, and say they were Enemyes to this Countrey, and Commanded him also to Resigne his Commission; all which he Refused.

that your Memorialist asked the People what he who was their friend had Done to Desplease them, they answered he was an Enemy to the Countrey and that they would soon serve all the Custom House officers in Like manner—

that from Liberty Tree they Carryed your Memorialist to the Gallows, put Round his Neck a Rope and threatned to Hang him if he would not Do as they had before ordered him, but he still Refused Desiring and praying they would put their threats in Execution Rather than Continue their Torture, they then Took the rope off his Neck and Tying his hands Fastned him to the Gallows, and beat him with Ropes and Sticks in most savage manner, which Compeled him to Declare he would do any thing they Desired, upon which they unbound him, and obliged him to Curse the governor and the Board of Commissioners, and Declaring at the same Time they would serve the governor in the Same manner, and Extorted a promise from him to assist &ca

and Returning with him to Liberty Tree then they made him Repeat several oathes, among which one was that he would not Discover [i.e., identify] any of the persons then present; and Carting him through the Town stopd before the Provience House and made him Repeat the above mentioned oathes.

Dureing these Transactions several Humane gentlemen at Divers Times offerd him gairments to Cover him but his Tormentors would not suffer that Indulgence, at Length they Carried yr memorialist to his House, in a most mizerable setuation Deprived of his senses

that your Memorialist is now Confined to his bed, in a most Deploreable and Dangerous Setuation in Consequence of the afore said Treatment,…

Malcolm’s account agrees in most respects with the newspaper report, as unsympathetic as that was to him.

Ann Hulton, sister of Customs Commissioner Henry Hulton, also described the attack in a letter, including some details Malcolm didn’t mention:

• “his arm dislocated in tearing off his cloaths”
• “This Spectacle of horror & sportive cruelty was exhibited for about five hours.”
• “they demanded of him to curse his Masters The K: Govr &c which they coud not make him do, but he still cried, Curse all Traitors.”
• “They say his flesh comes off his back in Stakes [steaks]”

Living in Brookline, Hulton was almost certainly passing on secondhand information. Some of her added details might be correct while others, such as Malcolm being encouraged to curse “The K[ing]:,” were probably exaggerated.

One detail in both Malcolm and Hulton’s accounts was that the Customs man was “naked” when he was tarred and feathered. The Spy stated he was stripped “to buff and breeches.” The latter is probably more accurate for our understanding, the term “naked” being less absolute in meaning then.

TOMORROW: Bringing tea into it.

(The picture above is an engraving published in London in October 1774. Titled “A New Method of Macarony Making as practised at Boston in North America,” it depicted the attack on Malcolm without using his name. This cartoon shows one of the attackers wearing a hat with the number “45” on it, linking this incident back to support for John Wilkes’s court cases in the early 1760s.)

The Attack on Customs Officer John Malcolm

I’m interrupting what turned into Amputation Week at Boston 1775 to address a Sestercentennial event.

On 25 Jan 1774, the Boston crowd attacked Customs officer John Malcolm. Coming weeks after the Tea Party, this assault became one of the most notorious incidents in the months of political debate in London leading up to war, with multiple prints published. It helped to cement Parliamentarians’ image of Bostonians as showing no respect for the law.

Today the event is not as widely remembered. The main victim was a Loyalist, he wasn’t killed, and that day’s violence, though horrible, was soon overshadowed by years of warfare.

Here’s the first report of the attack in the 27 January Massachusetts Spy:

Mr. [Isaiah] THOMAS,

Last Tuesday about two o’clock Mr. George-Robert-Twelves Hewes was coming along Fore-street, near Captain [Isaac] Ridgway’s [inn at Dock Square], and found the redoubted John Malcom, standing over a small boy, who was pushing a little sled before him, cursing, damning, threatning and shaking a very large cane with a very heavy ferril on it over his head.

The boy at that time was perfectly quiet, notwithstanding which Malcom continued his threats of striking him, which Mr. Hewes conceiving if he struck him with that weapon he must have killed him out-right, came up to him, and said to him, Mr. Malcom, I hope you are not going to strike this boy with that stick.

Malcom returned, you are an impertinent rascal, it is none of your business. Mr. Hewes then asked him, what had the child done to him. Malcom damned him and asked him if he was going to take his part? Mr. Hewes answered no further than this, that he thought it was a shame for him to strike the child with such a club as that, if he intended to strike him. Malcom on that damned Mr. Hewes, called him a vagabond, and said he would let him know he should not speak to a gentleman in the street.

Mr. Hewes returned to that, he was neither a rascal nor vagabond, and though a poor man was in as good credit in town as he was. Malcom called him a liar, and said he was not, nor ever would be. Mr. Hewes retorted, be that as it will, I never was tarred nor feathered any how.

On this Malcom struck him, and wounded him deeply on the forehead, so that Mr. Hewes for some time lost his senses.

Capt. [Isaac?] Godfrey, then present, interposed, and after some altercation, Malcom went home, where the people gathering round, he came out and abused them greatly, saying, you say I was tarred and feathered, and that it was not done in a proper manner, damn you let me see the man that dare do it better! I want to see it done in the new-fashioned manner.

After Malcom had thus bullied the people some time, and Mr. [Hezekiah] Usher the constable had persuaded him into the house, Mrs. [Ann] Malcom threw up a sash, and begged the people to go away, and Malcom came suddenly behind her and pushing his naked sword through the opening, pricked Mr. Waddel [John Wardell, d. 1816?] in the breast; the bone stopping its course, which would otherwise have reached his vitals. Mr. Waddel on this made a stroke at the window with his cane, and broke a square of glass, through which breach he again made a pass, and slightly wounded Mr. Waddel, who a second time returned the blow, and Malcom withdrawing the people dispersed.

Mr. Hewes after having his wound taken care of, went to Justice [Edmund] Quincy and took out a warrant for Malcom, and gave it to a constable, who went to Malcom’s house to serve it, but found the doors shut against him, and was told by him, from a window, that he would not be taken that day, as he should be followed by a damned mob, but would surrender to-morrow afternoon.

Here the matter appeared to subside, till in the evening the people being informed of the outrages he had committed, the threatnings and defiances he had uttered, and among other things, that he would split down the yankees by dozens, and receive 20l. sterling a head for every one he destroyed, they mustered and went to his house, which being barred against them, and he menacing with his loaded pistols, which he declared he would fire upon them if they came near him, they got ladders and beating in an upper window, entered the house and took him without loss of blood, and dragging him out put him on a sled, and amidst the huzzas of thousands, brought him into King-street.

Several Gentlemen endeavoured to divert the populace from their intention, alledging that he was open to the laws of the land which would undoubtedly award a reasonable satisfaction to the parties he had abused; they answered he had been an old, impudent and mischevious offender—he had joined in the murders at North-Carolina—he had seized vessels on account of sailors having a bottle or two of gin on board—he had in office, and otherwise, behaved in the most capricious, insulting and daringly abusive manner—and on every occasion discovered the most rooted enmity to this country, and the defenders of its rights—that in case they let him go they might expect a like satisfaction as they had received in the cases of [Ebenezer] Richardson and the soldiers [at the Massacre], and the other friends of government.

With these and such like arguments, together with a gentle crouding of persons not of their way of thinking out of the ring they proceeded to elevate Mr. Malcom from his sled into a cart, and stripping him to buff and breeches, gave him a modern jacket [i.e., tar and feathers] and hied him away to liberty-tree, where they proposed to him to renounce his present commission, and swear that he would never hold another inconsistent with the liberties of his country; but this he obstinately refusing, they then carted him to the gallows, passed a rope round his neck, and threw the other end over the beam as if they intended to hang him: But this manoeuvre he set at defiance. They then basted him for some time with a rope’s end, and threatened to cut his ears off, and on this he complied, and they then brought him home.

See reader, the effects of a government in which the people have no confidence!

Immediately after that account Thomas printed three short letters describing ways that Malcolm had threatened people or abused his government position. Obviously people were anxious to justify the attack on the following day, and the printer was happy to help.

TOMORROW: John Malcolm’s version.

[The image of the crowd removing Malcolm through a window into a cart around town was published in France in the mid-1780s to illustrate a page on the “Origine de la Révolution Américaine.”]

“Breathe their Last within the walls of his Detestable General Hospital”

As I quoted yesterday, in September 1775 commanders of the northern wing of the Continental Army besieging Boston were upset with how Surgeon-General Benjamin Church was ordering sick and wounded men moved to his hospitals in Cambridge.

Gen. John Sullivan and Dr. Hall Jackson complained that there were sick people at those hospitals! Meaning men would be more likely to catch infections there than anywhere else.

In addition, the doctors looked down on New Hampshire men as country bumpkins, and Dr. Church and his assistant surgeons weren’t as skilled as Jackson himself.

Well, Jackson didn’t come right out and say that last part (Sullivan did), but on 16 September he lambasted the central army hospitals this way:

Not an Officer or Soldier [from New Hampshire] will go to the Cambridge Hospital, they had much rather provide for themselves at Mistick at any expense, or even die in Camp with their friends than be forced into a General Hospital cram’d with the sick of 25,000 Troops; and attended by strangers from polite Places, who have never been used to the inquisitiveness and impatience of poor Country People, and are in general to apt to conster their simplicity into impertinence: it is the mind of General Sullivan, and all the Officers from New Hampshire, that unless some alteration is made, another Regiment will never be raised in that Colony.

Capt. [Henry] Dearbourn, with many others, are gone to Canada, for no other reason than to avoid the Sickness of our Camp, and dread of the general Hospital.

The arts, contrivance, and hypocricy, of some of the M—u—setts Patriots is dam—a—ble to the last degree. “A Struggle for Liberty”!—good God! my Soul abhors the Idea! If methodically to kill the wounded; to starve the sick, and languishing because they cannot Diet on Salt Pork, or will not submit to be severed from their dearest friends and relations, if these (my Dear Friend) are the Characteristicks of an Army raised for the defence of Liberty, I frankly confess I have no claim to an employment in the glorious Cause.

When Jackson wrote those words, however, the army had already formally looked into the dispute. On 7 September, Gen. George Washington laid set out a formal process in his general orders:

Repeated Complaints being made by the Regimental Surgeons, that they are not allowed proper Necessaries for the Use of the sick before they become fit Objects for the General Hospital: And the Director General of the hospital complains, that contrary to the Rule of every established army, these Regimental Hospitals are more expensive than can be conceived; which plainly indicates that there is either an unpardonable Abuse on one side, or an inexcusable neglect on the other—

And Whereas the General is exceedingly desirous of having the utmost care taken of the sick (wherever placed and in every stage of their disorder) but at the same time is determin’d, not to suffer any impositions on the public;

he requires and orders, that the Brigadiers General with the commanding Officers of each Regiment in his brigade; do set as a Court of enquiry into the Causes of these Complaints, and that they summon the Director General of the hospital, and their several Regimental Surgeons before them, and have the whole matter fully investigated and reported—This enquiry to begin on the left of the Line to morrow, at the hour of ten in Genl Sullivan’s brigade.

That inquiry ended a week later with Church being cleared of all charges. Jackson’s letter was thus carrying on an argument he had already officially lost.

There must have been similar disputes in other parts of the army because Washington ordered the same sort of inquiry in Gen. William Heath’s brigade in the central part of the lines, then in the brigades on the south wing. The commander-in-chief evidently felt that this process would force everyone to an agreement.

The second inquiry likewise ended in praise for Church. But by then the surgeon-general had left the front, pleading illness. Church even sent in his resignation from Taunton. Adjutant-General Horatio Gates wrote the doctor a flattering letter urging him to come back.

Then suddenly the conflict was resolved by an outside factor: The baker Godfrey Wenwood came to Washington’s headquarters from Newport with a ciphered letter that his ex-wife had asked him to send into Boston. Under questioning, that woman, née Mary Butler, admitted she had handled the letter for her lover—Dr. Church!

The 30 September inquiry in Gen. Joseph Spencer’s brigade was called off “on account of the Indisposition of Dr Church.” That phrase in Washington’s general orders was cover for the fact that Church was under arrest in one of his hospital buildings (shown above) for secretly corresponding with the British military.

On 4 October, Sullivan wrote in triumph:

You will by this Post Receive Intelligence from head-Quarters of Dr. Church’es having been detected in holding a Treasonable Correspondence with the Enemy—his Behaviour Towards our Sick & wounded long since Convinced me that he either was void of humanity and Judgment, or that he was Determined by untimely Removals & Neglect of Duty to Let all those under his care breathe their Last within the walls of his Detestable General Hospital.

On 17 October, Dr. Hall Jackson returned to Portsmouth. Since June, he had been working with no rank or salary. The next month, New Hampshire’s provincial government recognized his service with a commission as chief surgeon for the colony’s troops and back pay.

COMING UP: Back to Capt. Sylvanus Lowell, wounded in 1773. But first, a Sestercentennial event.