John Adams and “the important Secret”

John Adams’s diary offers a case study of how well the Massachusetts Whigs kept the secrets that Benjamin Franklin asked Thomas Cushing to keep.

Adams received the “Collection of Seventeen Letters” on 22 March 1773. Since he was no longer a member of the Massachusetts legislature, he definitely wasn’t on Franklin’s list of people Cushing could share the letters with. But evidently he was supposed to take the letters to someone else while attending a county court.

At some point Adams copied the cover letter, omitting Franklin’s name (if he’d even received the original revealing it). He also copied out the most damning letter by Thomas Hutchinson. As far as I can tell, there’s no clear evidence of when Adams made that copy—it might have been after the letters were published. But Franklin had asked for no one to make copies.

We can presume Adams told his wife Abigail about the letters. She doesn’t seem to have been as active in political discussions then as she would be later, when she didn’t have four children under the age of eight to look after. But John was probably already sharing what was on his mind, and those letters certainly were.

On 24 April, John wrote in his diary:

I have communicated to Mr. Norton Quincy, and to Mr. Wibird the important Secret. They are as much affected, by it, as any others.

Norton Quincy (1716-1801) was Abigail’s favorite uncle. He lived in some seclusion in Braintree after the death of his wife, so he probably wouldn’t pass on the secret.

“Mr. Wibird” was the Rev. Anthony Wibird (1729-1800), the Adamses’ minister, not yet in his dotage. Given New England’s deference to clergymen, discussing the letters with him was at least understandable.

Adams went on, indicating he had already discussed the letters with two members of the General Court:

Bone of our Bone, born and educated among us! Mr. [John] Hancock is deeply affected, is determined in Conjunction with Majr. [Joseph] Hawley to watch the vile Serpent, and his deputy Serpent [William] Brattle.

The Subtilty, of this Serpent, is equal to that of the old one.

The “vile Serpent” was Gov. Hutchinson. William Brattle was a member of the Council who had been a big supporter of the anti-Stamp Act demonstrations in 1765 but then moved over to the royal authorities’ side after becoming a militia general. He and Adams had a public argument over judicial salaries.

But those weren’t all the people who knew.

Aunt is let into the Secret, and is full of her Interjections!

I’m not sure which lady Adams meant by this. I think he had only one living aunt at the time, Bethiah Bicknell of Braintree, and they weren’t particularly close. He referred to many other older female relatives as “Aunt,” however, so who knows what lady was interjecting about “the important secret”?

Adams had also heard how other people knew and might spread the word:

Cushing tells me, that [Council member Jeremiah Dummer] Powell told him, he had it from a Tory, or one who was not suspected to be any Thing else, that certain Letters were come, written by 4 Persons, which would shew the Causes and the Authors of our present Grievances. This Tory, we conjecture to be Bob. Temple [of Medford], who has received a Letter, in which he is informed of these Things. If the Secret [should leak] out by this means, I am glad it is not to be charged upon any of Us—to whom it has been committed in Confidence.

Because of course it would look bad if the Whigs couldn’t keep a secret.

The next afternoon, Adams attended the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper’s meeting in Boston:

Dr. Cooper was upon Rev. 12.9. And the great Dragon was cast out, that old Serpent called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole World: he was cast out into the Earth and his Angells were cast out with him. Query. Whether the Dr. had not some political Allusions in the Choice of this Text.

Adams felt Cooper was poor at keeping secrets, judging by his remark the following month after hearing Hancock speak of political plans. “Cooper no doubt carried it directly to Brattle, or at least to his Son Thomas,” Adams wrote. “Such a leaky Vessell is this worthy Gentleman.”

As I quoted yesterday, in June 1773 Cushing assured Franklin that only two other people knew he had supplied the letters—but one of those two was Cooper.

So really it’s remarkable that the letters came as a surprise to anybody in Boston.

“It was Impossible to prevent the Letters being made public”

On 14 June 1773, Massachusetts speaker of the house Thomas Cushing wrote a letter to Benjamin Franklin in London. He had a thorny topic to address.

Franklin had sent Cushing a bundle of letters written by royal officials and supporters in New England a few years before. The letters came with strict conditions of secrecy about who could see those documents; Franklin insisted that they not be copied or published.

Cushing stressed how he had really, really tried to keep the letters as secret as Franklin had asked:

I have endeavoured inviolably to keep to your Injunctions with respect to the papers you sent me, I have shewn them only to such Gentlemen as you directed, no one person excepting Dr. [Samuel] Cooper and one of the Committee of Correspondence know from whom they Come or to whom they were sent. I have constantly avoided mentioning your name Upon the Occasion so that it never need be known (if you incline to keep it secret) who they Came from or to whom they were sent and I desire so far as I am Concerned my name may not be mentioned, for as I hold an office in the Government subject to the Governor’s negative, it may be a damage to me.

Notwithstanding all my Care and precaution it is now publicly known that such Letters are here; the Governor [Thomas Hutchinson] suspects they were brought over by Mr. William Storey; Considering the number of Person’s who were to see them (not less than Ten or fifteen) it is astonishing to me they did not get Air before.

When I first received them I was in great doubt whether to Communicate them to one single person or not, for when I considered the number of Persons I was directed to Communicate them to, I apprehended, it would be almost Impossible to Keep them secret, however I considered further that they Contained matters of Importance that very nearly affected the Government, that they were sent as much to the Persons named in your Letter as to my self and consequently that they had as good a right to determine what Improvement was to be made of them.

In 1765 William Story was deputy registrar of the Admiralty Court in Boston. A mob had attacked his house on 26 August, the same night people did much greater damage to Hutchinson‘s mansion. Later his career in the royal government stalled. He had resigned and moved to Ipswich with his second wife.

In 1771 Story sailed for London “to settle an Affair of his own relating to the Admiralty Court, in which the Commissioners of the Customs as he says declare it is out of their power to do him Justice”—which means he had first tried to work through the Customs board and been disappointed.

On that trip Story carried a letter of introduction from Gov. Hutchinson to Lord Hillsborough, Secretary of State, and another from Samuel Adams to Arthur Lee, Virginia-born agent for the Massachusetts house. He was ready to work both sides.

Story didn’t get what he wanted, and he returned to Massachusetts. Evidently Hutchinson thought he might have brought back the sensitive letters. Story hadn’t done that, but he had finally come down on the side of the Whigs. In 1775 Ipswich elected him to the Massachusetts General Court, and he became one of the busiest members of the wartime legislature.

Back to Cushing. The speaker finally got around to the news that back on 3 June he’d broken his promise to Franklin and let the whole house hear the letters read aloud in a stream of 355 words spinning around the subject:

Besides one of the Gentlemen to whom they were to be Communicated had advice of their being sent before they were Communicated to him, if not before their arrival, and it was strongly suspected for some time by his Informer that they were secreted on purpose to preserve the Governor, so that If I had determined it not to be prudent to reveal them under the restrictions I was laid, it would have been out of my power to have prevented it’s being known that such Letters were sent,

however they were kept very secret till the annual Election [of the Council] when it generally got abroad that such Letters were come and as some of the Persons to whom they were sent were members of the Court they thought they were Obliged to mention that they had seen such Original Letters,

this made the rest of the Members very sollicitous to have a sight of them and they talked of moving the House to send for Persons and papers as they said they had a right to such knowledge and Intelligence as very nearly and Essentially affected the public and rather than have any public order about it and by that means let the House have the Entire possession of the Letters,

it was thought adviseable by those to whom they were sent to Communicate them to the House provided they would engage they should not be printed nor Copied in whole or in part and that they Should return them again after a Convenient time when called for, which Engagement the House Entered into and they were read, upon which the House resolved it self into a Committee of the Whole House and after due Consideration the Committee reported to the House that it was their opinion that it was the design and Intention of these Letters to overthrow the Constitution of this Government and to Introduce arbitrary Power within this Province, which report was accepted by the House–101 Members for it, but 5 against it, and then the Letters were Committed to a Committee of nine to Consider what was proper to be done thereupon.

But wait, there was more! At least one copy of all the letters was circulating in Boston. That required more explanation.

While this matter was under Consideration of the House several Vessells arrived from London by Whom, it was reported, that Copies of these very letters were arrived and Wednesday the 9th Instant Mr. [John] Hancock Informed the House that he had received a Number of Letters which were said to be Copies of those that were before the House, and as the House were under some Engagements with respect to the Letters that had been Communicated to them, he moved that the Copies he had received might be Compared with those before the House and if they proved to be true Copies the House might have them and make what use of them they thought proper.

So the house was still keeping the original letters that Franklin had sent under wraps. People were sharing copies of those letters from a source that no one ever named. Copies that for all anyone knew might have been made in London, and not during the months when the originals were being passed around in Massachusetts or the recent days when the legislature was hotly debating them.

This was a great releif to the House as they were under some Difficulty about proceeding upon the other Letters under their present Engagements as they were thereby prevented from taking any Copys of them in whole or in part. What determinations the House will Enter into I cannot at present say, but it is universally apprehended that the G–v–r will never be able to recover the Confidence of this People and that his Usefullness is at an End.

I have done all in my power strictly to Conform to your restrictions, but from the Circumstances above related you must be sinsible it was Impossible to prevent the Letters being made public and therefore hope I shall be free from all Blame respecting this Matter.

The next day, the Massachusetts house officially voted to have “a sufficient Number of printed Copies of the Letters” made. In fact, the printers Edes and Gill had recorded the house’s order for 316 copies of the letters back on 10 June, four days before Cushing wrote to Franklin. In his long explanation he managed not to mention that the letters were already being set in type.

But after all, the speaker might as well have concluded, how could this disclosure in Boston harm Franklin’s career?

“A particular Account of all the Plans of Operation”

In 1772, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson entertained thoughts of peeling John Hancock away from the Boston Whigs, thus depriving that party of major financial support.

With troops no longer stationed in town and no new taxes coming from London, the populace wasn’t feeling so many irritants. Samuel Adams had a hard time finding issues to rally people around. Hancock, his political instincts flowering, recognized that reality and stopped supporting militant actions.

I don’t think Hutchinson ever had a real chance of winning the young merchant to the side of the royal government—Hancock was too eager for popular acclaim. But the governor did throw out some favors.

One was giving Hancock the command of the Company of Cadets. Hancock loved the title “Colonel” and the chance to design new uniforms for that militia unit.

Hutchinson’s tactic seemed to bear fruit after a confrontation in May 1773. Hutchinson hosted a public dinner with the Customs Commissioners among the guests and the Cadets as his honor guard. Two of those young men, Moses Grant and James Foster Condy, left the ranks and joined the crowd yelling at the Commissioners. Hancock publicly took the position that military discipline had to overrule political positions and expelled Grant and Condy from the company.

Later that same month, at the start of the legislative term, the Massachusetts General Court elected a new Council. Hancock made the list, as he had before. This time, Gov. Hutchinson approved his name. He probably hoped the grateful merchant would become a more sedate member of the upper house.

On the day before the Council election, however, Hancock had visited Edmund Quincy’s house. Abigail Adams was there, and she reported to her husband John that Hancock “gave before a large Company of both Sexes…a particular Account of all the Plans of Operation for tomorrow, which he and many others had been concerting.” By that point the letters from London had been circulating among top Whigs and were no doubt part of those plans.

On 27 May, Secretary Thomas Flucker came to the house chamber with Gov. Hutchinson’s invitation for Hancock and select other members to move across to the Council.

Hancock declined.

A week later, on 2 June, Samuel Adams revealed the “Hutchinson letters” to the house. Hancock took the job of chairing the committee of the whole that discussed those documents. He apparently drafted the committee’s conclusion that they had been designed to “introduce arbitrary Power into the Province.”

When the Massachusetts Spy ran the first report on that ominous closed-door session, it also stated:

We are desired to inform the public, that the Hon. John Hancock, Esq; commander of the Cadet company, and ten of the members, then present, were against the late vote for expelling two of their members.

Hancock thus signaled that he was on the side of the popular protest, free from the governor’s influence.

“The people of the town had grown very uneasy“

The 3 June 1773 issue of the Massachusetts Spy broke the news that the Massachusetts General Court was considering “some extraordinary discoveries” and how “some men in power would appear infamous to the highest degree.”

In the same issue, printer Isaiah Thomas ran this item:

A report is propagated in town, which we are well informed had its birth in his Majesty’s Castle-William, that a formidable mob will make an appearance to-morrow evening. However the enemies to our rights and privileges may wish this to be the case, yet let them be told, that a people who are blessed with such a Legislature as the present, have no need to take the punishment of traitors into their own hands.

The allusion to Castle William pointed to the army regiment stationed on that fortified island, or the Customs officials who occasionally took refuge there. If there had indeed been a rumor, the newspaper was blaming the royal government instead of the Whigs. And if there hadn’t been, it was starting the rumor and blaming the royal government anyway.

At the same time, however, the Spy was trying to keep public anger from turning violent, assuring readers to keep their faith in the legislature.

Behind closed doors that legislature was forming a response to the bundle of letters that speaker Thomas Cushing had received from Benjamin Franklin in London. One step was publication—on 10 June the house contracted with Edes and Gill to print over 300 copies of the letters. Another was a formal resolution, adopted on 16 June and also sent to the printers.

According to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, the most prominent writer of those letters, the General Court was actually dragging its feet in order to keep the public on edge and riled up. In his persona of disinterested historian Hutchinson would later write that already

…the people of the town had grown very uneasy at being so long alarmed with a declaration of measures of so dangerous, as well as criminal tendency and design, without an opportunity of forming any judgment upon them.

Hutchinson’s history of Massachusetts complained that the legislature “adjourned for three days…and kept the publick in suspense from Thursday to Tuesday, every day producing a new report of passages in the letters, more and more criminal.” In fact, the legislature met six days out of every week in June with the single exception of Monday, 7 June.

Nevertheless, Hutchinson was correct in discerning that “the principal design of this whole proceeding was to make the governor obnoxious to the people of the province.” And it was working.

TOMORROW: How Mr. Hancock made his move.

“A person in the street had put into his hands a number of papers”?

In his 9 June 1773 response to the Massachusetts house about his letters, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson insisted he hadn’t written anything secret or oppressive. He then went on:

I am at a Loss for what Purpose you desire the Copies of my Letters the Originals of which you have in your Hands. If it is with a View to make them Publick, the Originals are more proper for that Purpose than the Copies. 

Hutchinson was a historian, after all—always use original sources if they’re available.

He continued:

I think it would be very improper and out of Character in me to lay my private Letters before you at your Request: My publick ones I am restrained from laying before you without express Leave from his Majesty. Thus much however I may assure you, that it has not been the Tendency and Design of them to subvert the Constitution of this Government, but rather to preserve it entire, and I have Reason to think they have not been altogether ineffectual to that Purpose.

It’s not clear whether Hutchinson knew then that the man who had sent those letters, Benjamin Franklin, had insisted that they not be made public. But the Whig legislators put in motion a way of doing so.

Immediately after the governor’s reply was read in the house, John Hancock spoke up to say:

…he had received Copies of certain Letters signed Thos. Hutchinson, Andw. Oliver, Charles Paxton, and Robert Auchmuty, which he supposed were Copies of the Letters before the House, and moved that they might be compared.

According to Hutchinson’s later history, which isn’t entirely reliable:

…a pitiful expedient was found out. Mr. Hancock acquainted the house, that a person in the street had put into his hands a number of papers, which appeared to him to be copies of the letters which were lying before the house, and he moved that they might be compared; and an order passed for that purpose. It seems to have been intended as an excuse for the publishing of what had been delivered upon an express condition not to publish.

On 10 June, the house formed a committee headed by Joseph Hawley “to consider of some Means honorably to make this House fully possessed of the Letters communicated by Mr. [Samuel] Adams under certain restrictions.”

In recounting this move, Hutchinson applied particular acerbity to the word “honorably.” He reported:

In a very few hours, Mr. Hawley reported from this committee, that Mr. Adams had acquainted them, that, as copies of the letters were already abroad, and had been publickly read, the gentleman from whom the letters were received [i.e., speaker of the house Thomas Cushing] gave his consent, that the house should be fully possessed of them, to print, copy, or make what other use of them they pleased, relying on the goodness of the house that the original letters be returned, in their own time, they retaining attested copies of the same for their use.

That was a very close paraphrase of the legislative record. That day, the house contracted with the Edes and Gill print shop in Boston to print 316 copies of the letters that related to Massachusetts (omitting those focused on Rhode Island and Connecticut) and 300 copies of the house resolves condemning those letters. That order came to almost £20.

Hutchinson wrote:

The house then ordered the letters to be printed, but, before they were suffered to be made publick, the resolves of the house upon them were printed and dispersed in newspapers through the province, and a recital of any parts or expressions in the letters was carefully avoided, and only the general design and tendency of them declared.

The governor knew he'd lost control of the narrative.

TOMORROW: Public opinion.

“If genuine, they must be private Letters”

When we left the Massachusetts General Court on 2 June 1773, members of the lower house had voted overwhelmingly to condemn a collection of letters from Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver, and others as intended “to overthrow the Constitution of this Government, and to introduce arbitrary Power into the Province.”

The next day, the house chose a committee of nine to prepare a longer response to those letters. At its head were Thomas Cushing, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock, of course. Also on that Thursday, the Massachusetts Spy reported on the house vote—and reported in dire tones about “extraordinary discoveries…which will bring many dark things to light.”

That brought a note to the chamber from Gov. Hutchinson, carried by provincial secretary Thomas Flucker. Hutchinson declared, “I have never wrote any public or private Letter with such Intention…” He asked to see a transcript of the house proceedings. (It had met as a committee of the whole to keep the most serious discussions private.) And he asked to know what letters the legislators were talking about.

That afternoon the house voted to give Hutchinson the dates of the letters “Provided his Excellency will order to be laid before this House Copies of all the Letters of the same Dates written by his Excellency relating to the publick Affairs of this Province.”

The next day was King George III’s birthday. There was a militia parade on the Common and down King Street, with Hancock leading the Cadets, Adino Paddock the artillery train (both units with musical bands), and Henry Knox appearing as a junior officer of the new grenadier company. Cannon were fired in all the town batteries, Castle William, and the navy ships in the harbor.

At noon, Gov. Hutchinson and the Council toasted the king in one chamber of the Town House while the house toasted him in another. In the evening there were fireworks.

On Saturday, the house sent a committee with the dates of the letters and renewed its request for all letters Hutchinson had written on those dates. The governor later called this “a very rude resolve.” It presented him with two possible traps. First, any deviation between the letters that the legislators had and his drafts or copies might be spun as deceptive. Second, the house was asking for more letters than it had on hand.

The Monday newspapers reported on the exchange between the house and the governor. It wasn’t until Wednesday, 9 June, that Hutchinson responded:

I find by the Dates of the Letters with my Signature that, if genuine, they must be private Letters wrote to a Gentleman in London, since deceased; that all, except the last were wrote many Months before I came to the Chair [i.e., while he was still lieutenant governor]; that they were wrote not only with that Confidence which is always implied in a friendly Correspondence by private Letters, but that they are expressly confidential; notwithstanding which, they contain nothing more respecting the Constitution of the Colonies in general than what is contained in my Speeches to the Assembly, and what I have published in a more extensive Manner to the World; and there is not one Passage in them which was ever intended to respect, or which, as I am well assured, the Gentleman to whom they were wrote, ever understood to respect, the particular Constitution of this Government as derived from the Charter.

In those details, Hutchinson was correct. The letters had gone to Thomas Whately, a British official who died in 1772. Hutchinson had spoken openly and at length to the General Court about how colonial legislatures had to be subordinate to Parliament. His letters didn’t recommend changes to the Massachusetts charter—but other letters in the collection did, and by this point people were viewing them all as a whole.

TOMORROW: The question of publication.

A Sampling of the 2019 Battle Road Season

The Patriots’ Day season starts this Saturday, 6 April, with three annual events in three towns:

• Bedford Pole Capping in Bedford, 10:30 A.M.
• Meriam’s Corner Exercise in Concord, 1:00 P.M.
• Paul Revere Capture Ceremony in Lincoln, 3:00 P.M.

Two of the events thus commemorated took place on 19 Apr 1775. The pole capping is a more recent community celebration, though Liberty Poles were undoubtedly part of the Revolutionary landscape.

Here’s something I don’t recall seeing before: The town of Lexington has the domain name patriotsday.com. It redirects to the town website, which includes this page of local events from Saturday, 13 April, to Monday, 15 April—legally Patriots’ Day. These opportunities include tours of the Lexington Historical Society’s museums and reenactments of the fights in Lexington.

Back to the Minute Man National Historical Park website for a listing of events it hosts, and to Battleroad.org for related events elsewhere, including:

• Parker’s Revenge, Saturday, 13 April, 1:00 P.M.
• Jason Russell House fight, Arlington, Sunday, 14 April, noon. 
• “Warlike Preparations” at the Barrett Farm, Sunday, 14 April, 1:00-4:00 P.M.
• Lincoln Fife & Drum Salute, Sunday, 14 April, 2:00-4:00 P.M.
• Robbins’s Ride in Acton, Sunday, 14 April, 5:00-6:00 P.M.
• Revere’s arrival at the Lexington parsonage, Sunday, 14 April, 11:30 P.M.
• Marches from Stow and Westford, Monday, 15 April, arriving at the bridge about 9:00 A.M.
• North Bridge Fight and Concord Parade, Monday, 15 April, 8:30-10:00 A.M.

There are also events that by tradition take place on the actual anniversaries instead of the legal holiday:

• Lantern procession and Ceremony at North Bridge, Thursday, 18 April, 7:45-8:45 P.M.
• Sudbury Militia March, Friday, 19 April, arriving at the bridge about 11:30 A.M. 

And back to Minute Man Park for “The War Has Begun” on Saturday, 20 April, reenacting how Massachusetts communities responded to the strain of the siege of Boston.

This is just a sampling of the historical events taking place around Patriots’ Day, drawn from Middlesex County. Many other communities have their own traditional commemorations.

“William Dawes’s Secret” in Roxbury, 7 April

On Sunday, 7 April, I’ll speak to the Jamaica Plain Historical Society and the Roxbury Historical Society about “William Dawes’s Secret.”

Here’s our event description:

William Dawes, Jr., is known today only as the other rider who carried news of the British army march to Lexington in April 1775. Like the more famous Paul Revere, Dawes was deeply involved in the Patriot movement for years before and after that date. This talk reveals Dawes the militia organizer, the fashion icon, even the arms smuggler whose secret mission for the Patriots’ Committee of Safety helped bring on the Revolutionary War.

Dawes appears in The Road to Concord as the Committee of Safety’s liaison to whoever in Boston knew where the militia train’s stolen cannon were hidden. His descendants in the late 1800s said that he had participated in stealing those cannon as well. I’ll lay out that episode, but also talk about Dawes’s family ties to Roxbury, his work in Worcester during the war, and how he came to be buried in Roxbury today.

This talk will take place at the First Church of Roxbury at 10 Putnam Street, and the Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry is cosponsoring it. We’ll start at 2:00 P.M., and afterwards there will be light refreshments and books for sale. The event is free and open to the public.

The American Enlightenment and the Transatlantic Cod Trade

On Thursday, 4 April, the Yale Center for British Art will host this year’s Lewis Walpole Library Lecture: “Was There an American Enlightenment?” by Caroline Winterer, Anthony P. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities and Director at the Stanford Humanities Center.

The event description:

The American Enlightenment is often viewed as a singular era bursting with new ideas as the U.S. sought to assert itself in a new republic free of the British monarchy. In this talk, Stanford historian Caroline Winterer shows how the myth and romanticization of an American Enlightenment was invented during the Cold War to calm fears of totalitarianism overseas. She’ll then look behind the 20th-century mythology, rescuing a “real” eighteenth-century American Enlightenment that is far different than the one we usually imagine.

Winterer is the author of American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (Yale, 2016). Her previous books include The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900 and The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910. She received an American Ingenuity Award from the Smithsonian Institution for an article mapping the social network of Benjamin Franklin.

Winterer’s talk will began at 5:30 P.M. in the lecture hall of the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel Street in New Haven.

On Sunday, 7 April, the Salem Maritime National Historic Site’s visitor center will host a symposium on “Salt Cod for Silver: Yankees, Basques, and the North Shore’s Forgotten Trade.”

The program will explore the nearly two-hundred-year-long trading relationship between the New England ports of Salem, Marblehead, and Beverly and the Spanish Basque port of Bilbao.

As the event title suggests, in the years before the Revolution, shipping fish to Spain provided a major infusion of cash money for Salem and nearby ports. One of the mercantile firms handling that trade in Bilbao was Gardoqui & Sons, and during the war it turned to shipping arms back to the new U.S. of A.

The symposium participants will be:

• Xabier Lamikiz, University of the Basque Country
• David Hancock, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
• Karen Alexander, University of New Hampshire Gulf of Maine Cod Project
• Donald C. Carleton, Jr., organizer and moderator

This symposium is presented in partnership with Historic Beverly, the Marblehead Museum, Salem State University Department of History, and Bilboko Itsasdarra Itsas Museoa (Bilbao Maritime Museum).

This free public event will be held in the Salem Visitor Center at 2 New Liberty Street from 2:00 to 4:00 P.M. Seating is limited to the first 200 people who arrive.

“To gaze at an invisible Eclipse on the first of April”

In the 1730s Benjamin Franklin printed John Jerman’s American Almanack several times even as he was establishing his own Poor Richard’s Almanack.

Franklin had a habit of ribbing his rivals through the voice of Richard Saunders, his almanac-making pseudonym. Specifically, “Saunders” suggested Jerman was about to turn Catholic, which even in Philadelphia was suspicious.

Eventually Jerman chose to work with different printer, telling readers that Franklin had maligned him. “Saunders” responded in his almanac for 1744:

My Adversary J--n J----n has indeed made an Attempt to outshine me, by pretending to penetrate a Year deeper into Futurity; and giving his Readers gratis in his Almanack for 1743 an Eclipse of the Year 1744, to be beforehand with me: His Words are, “The first Day of April next Year 1744, there will be a great Eclipse of the Sun; it begins about an Hour before Sunset. It being in the Sign Aries, the House of Mars, and in the 7th, shows Heat, Difference and Animosities between Persons of the highest Rank and Quality,” &c.

I am very glad, for the Sake of these Persons of Rank and Quality, that there is no manner of Truth in this Prediction: They may, if they please, live in Love and Peace. And I caution his Readers (they are but few, indeed, and so the Matter’s the less) not to give themselves any Trouble about observing this imaginary Great Eclipse; for they may stare till they’re blind without seeing the least Sign of it. . . .

I leave him to settle the Affair with the Buyers of his Almanack as well as he can, who perhaps will not take it very kindly, that he has done what in him lay (by sending them out to gaze at an invisible Eclipse on the first of April) to make April Fools of them all.

I’ve found lots of quotations and some discussions of this passage, but I haven’t found confirmation that Jerman indeed made such a prediction. According to a N.A.S.A. website, there was no eclipse on that date, and that would have been an unusual mistake for an experienced astronomer.

Of course, Jerman might have been making an April Fool’s joke that “Saunders” insisted on taking literally. Or “Saunders” could have made the whole thing up, the same way he made up the stuff about Jerman becoming Catholic.

“The Tendency and Design of the Letters”

On 2 June 1773, the lower house of the Massachusetts General Court listened to a reading of the bundle of letters that Benjamin Franklin had sent from London.

The record doesn’t show whether Samuel Adams did the reading as the assembly’s clerk, but he certainly orchestrated the moment.

Members noted that the authors of those letters included Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, Customs Commission Charles Paxton, and Admiralty court judge Robert Auchmuty. All royal appointees who had advocated accepting Parliament’s new taxes and other laws.

The representatives decided to make themselves into “a Committee of the whole House” to discuss what to do next, then broke for midday dinner.

At three o’clock the members returned to their chamber. Speaker Thomas Cushing stepped down from the chair, and member John Hancock took his place as chair of the committee of the whole. At the end of the discussion, Hancock put forward this report:


That it was the Opinion of the Committee, that the Tendency and Design of the Letters read in the Forenoon and committed to their Consideration, was to overthrow the Constitution of this Government, and to introduce arbitrary Power into the Province.

The men in the chamber approved that accusatory statement by a vote of 101 to 5. The next morning, they decided, they would choose a committee of nine to make a formal response to the letters.

All that happened on a Wednesday. Two print shops in Boston were preparing newspapers to be published on Thursday morning.

Richard Draper’s Boston News-Letter had detailed reports on the opening days of the legislative session, including the house’s vote to form a committee of correspondence and the Council’s reply to the governor’s opening address. (Ordinarily the two houses would reply together, but this year the house had declined.) The News-Letter had no mention of the letters.

Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy, on the other hand, laid out the Whig line:

For several days past some extraordinary discoveries have been talked of, which were expected to amaze the whole province. Hints have been thrown out, that the characters of some men in power would appear infamous to the highest degree; all seemed to be a general surmise and expectation, until yesterday about eleven o’clock before noon, when the galleries in the Commons House of Assembly, were ordered to be cleared of all present.

This confirmed the general opinion, and we are well informed, that very important matters will soon transpire, which will bring many dark things to light—gain many proselytes to the cause of freedom—make tyrannical rulers tremble, and give occasion for the whole people to bless the providence of God, who causeth the wicked man to fall into the pit he hath digged for another.

Way to raise expectations, Mr. Thomas.

COMING UP: More maneuvers around secret letters.

“Letters of an extraordinary Nature”

When the Massachusetts General Court convened in Boston’s Town House in May 1773, one of the first substantial pieces of business the house did was to respond to a letter from the House of Burgesses in Virginia suggesting a committee to trade information and coordinate action.

On 28 May, Boston representative and house clerk Samuel Adams proposed setting up a committee of correspondence. Four staunch supporters of the royal government voted against it. The committee was soon stacked with strong Whigs.

The next day other committees took up the issues of banning slave imports, improving the militia, getting rid of Boston’s old powder house, and paying the legislature’s lobbyists in London, including Benjamin Franklin.

For a while, the Council kept asking for the house to join in a response to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s address opening the session, and the house kept putting that off. Adams himself went up the Council chamber to explain why. The Council stopped asking.

Then on 2 June:

The House was informed by one of its Members, that he had Matters that greatly concern’d the Province, to communicate with the Leave of the House. And the same Member moved that the Galleries be cleared.

Word went out that all members should come into the chamber, and the doors were closed.

Then Mr. Adams acquainted the House, that he had perceived the Minds of the People to be greatly agitated with a prevailing Report that Letters of an extraordinary Nature had been written and sent to England, greatly to the Prejudice of this Province:

That he had obtain’d certain Letters with different Signatures, with the Consent of the Gentleman from whom he had received them that they should be read in the House under certain Restrictions, namely that the said Letters be neither Printed nor Copied in Whole or in Part; and accordingly he offered them for the Consideration of the House.

The “Gentleman” who had given the letters to Adams was Thomas Cushing, speaker of the house, who had received them from Franklin. As quoted back here, Franklin had asked those letters to be shown around only to a small circle of men.

Adams argued that public concern meant that the entire house should hear the letters read aloud. Of course, if “the People” were “greatly agitated” about those documents, that was because Adams and his political allies had been talking about them for months.

TOMORROW: Behind closed doors.

“No Copies of the whole or any Part to be taken”

On 24 Mar 1773, as described yesterday, Thomas Cushing promised Benjamin Franklin that he and other Massachusetts Whig legislators wouldn’t make any copies of the letters Franklin had sent from London with his approval.

Franklin had also specified that those letters should circulate only to a small number of men. But two days before Cushing wrote, they were in the hands of a man who wasn’t on Franklin’s list.

On 22 March John Adams wrote in his diary:

This Afternoon received a Collection of Seventeen Letters, written from this Province, Rhode Island, Connecticutt and N. York, by [Thomas] Hutchinson, [Andrew] Oliver, [Dr. Thomas] Moffat, [Charles] Paxton, and [George] Rome, in the Years 1767, 8, 9.

By 1773 Hutchinson was governor, Oliver lieutenant governor, and Paxton still a Customs Commmissioner. Dr. Moffat of Connecticut and Rome of Rhode Island were supporters of the royal governments in those colonies, which still elected their governors. The full collection also included letters Nathaniel Rogers, a young merchant and nephew of Hutchinson who had died in 1770, and from Robert Auchmuty, an admiralty court judge, to Hutchinson.

Adams’s diary entry recorded what he had heard and thought of the letters:

They came from England under such Injunctions of Secrecy, as to the Person to whom they were written, by whom and to whom they are sent here, and as to the Contents of them, no Copies of the whole or any Part to be taken, that it is difficult to make any public Use of them.

These curious Projectors and Speculators in Politicks, will ruin this Country—cool, thinking, deliberate Villains, malicious, and vindictive, as well as ambitious and avaricious.

The Secrecy of these epistolary Genii is very remarkable—profoundly secret, dark, and deep

Adams used the word “Secrecy” twice in three short paragraphs—once referring to the leaker’s conditions about the letters, and again referring to the supposed schemes of the men who wrote those letters. In Adams’s eyes, some secrecy was necessary, other secrecy was nefarious.

Decades later, on 28 Jan 1820, Adams told the botanist David Hosack how he had helped to spread the word about the documents that spring:

I was one of the first Persons to whom Mr Cushing communicated the great bundle of Letters of Hutchinson and Oliver, which have been transmitted to him as Speaker of the House of Representatives by Dr Franklin their Agent in London—I was permitted to carry them with me upon a Circuit of our Judicial Court—and to Communicate them to the chosen few—

they excited no suprise; excepting at the Miracle of their acquisition—how that could have been performed nobody could conjecture—none doubted their Authenticity; for the hand writing was full proof, and besides all the leading Men in opposition to the Ministery had long been fully convinced that the writers were guilty of such malignant representation—and that those representations had suggested to the Ministery their nefarious projects

While I’ve learned to take Adams’s late-life reminiscences about his central place in some incidents of the Revolution with a grain of salt, this story fits with the contemporaneous evidence.

Adams returned the bundle to Cushing when he came back from riding circuit. Evidently those documents continued to circulate among Whigs in Boston, but still secretly. On the eve of the May session of the new Massachusetts General Court, Adams wrote in his diary:

The Plotts, Plans, Schemes, and Machinations of this Evening and Night, will be very numerous. By the Number of Ministerial, Governmental People returned, and by the Secrecy of the Friends of Liberty, relating to the grand discovery of the compleat Evidence of the whole Mystery of Iniquity, I much fear the Elections will go unhappily.

The “Elections” Adams referred to there weren’t the towns’ elections of representatives to the new house, which had already taken place. Rather, he meant the choice by that new house and the outgoing Council of men to sit on the new Council. Adams knew that he himself was up for consideration, and he had mixed feelings about that:

For myself, I own I tremble at the Thought of an Election. What will be expected of me? What will be required of me? What Duties and Obligations will result to me, from an Election? What Duties to my God, my King, my Country, my Family, my Friends, myself? What Perplexities, and Intricacies, and Difficulties shall I be exposed to? What Snares and Temptations will be thrown in my Way? What Self denials and Mortifications shall I be obliged to bear?

The legislature’s strong Whig majority indeed voted Adams onto the Council, the last of the eighteen men named from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. (There were separate choices for Councilors from the Plymouth, Maine, and northern Maine districts and for two members at large.)

The next day, Gov. Hutchinson vetoed Adams’s membership, along with two other men. So he needn’t have fretted.

TOMORROW: The letters in the legislature.

“I have engag’d that it shall not be printed”

In the spring of 1773, the Boston Whigs had an incendiary document that they wanted to share with the public. But the person who supplied that document had asked them not to make copies or circulate it widely.

The document was a collection of letters from Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver, and other friends of the royal government to the British official Thomas Whately in the late 1760s. The person who had supplied that collection was Benjamin Franklin, the London lobbyist for the Massachusetts house.

On 2 Dec 1772 Franklin had sent the letters to Thomas Cushing, speaker of the house, saying:

On this Occasion I think it fit to acquaint you that there has lately fallen into my Hands Part of a Correspondence, that I have reason to believe laid the Foundation of most if not all our present Grievances. I am not at liberty to tell thro’ what Channel I receiv’d it; and I have engag’d that it shall not be printed, nor any Copies taken of the whole or any part of it; but I am allow’d and desired to let it be seen by some Men of Worth in the Province for their Satisfaction only.

In confidence of your preserving inviolably my Engagement, I send you enclos’d the original Letters, to obviate every Pretence of Unfairness in Copying, Interpolation or Omission. The Hands of the Gentlemen will be well known. . . .

I therefore wish I was at Liberty to make the Letters publick; but as I am not, I can only allow them to be seen by yourself, by the other Gentlemen of the Committee of Correspondence, by Messrs. [James] Bowdoin, and [James] Pitts, of the Council, and Drs. [Charles] Chauncey, [Samuel] Cooper and [John] Winthrop, with a few such other Gentlemen as you may think it fit to show them to. After being some Months in your Possession, you are requested to return them to me.

Chauncy and Cooper were Boston’s most respected Whig ministers. Winthrop was a Harvard professor.

On 24 March, Cushing wrote back:

I have communicated them to some of the Gentlemen you mentioned. They are of opinion, that though it might be inconvenient to publish them, yet it might be expedient to have Copys taken and left on this side the water as there may be a necessity to make some use of them hereafter, however I read to them what you had wrote me upon the occasion, and told them I could by no means Consent Copys of them or any part of them should be taken without your express Leave, that I would write you upon the subject and should strictly Conform to your directions.

Despite Cushing’s assurances, other men besides the six Franklin had specified had already seen the copies of the letters.

TOMORROW: Information wants to be free.

The Rev. Dr. Stiles Ponders When “Dr. Church was wavering”

On 16 Mar 1773, the Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles of Newport put some Massachusetts news into his diary:

At Boston the Sons of Liberty celebrated or commemorating the Anniversary of the Massacre 5th. Inst. [i.e., of this month] when Dr [Benjamin] Church delivered an Oration in the Old South Church or Meetinghouse. Gov. [Thomas] Hutchinson had sent for Dr. Church and endeavored to dissuade him, but without Success.

Church had been born in Newport, and Stiles, a fan of Boston’s Whigs, knew members of his family.

In the fall of 1775, a ciphered letter sent through Newport revealed that Dr. Church was in secret correspondence with people in Boston. This was a bombshell for Patriot leaders. (Some of their wives, knowing that Church was flagrantly cheating on his own wife, were less surprised by this betrayal.)

Patriot men reluctantly concluded that Church had been a paid informant for Gen. Thomas Gage for months. They still lacked definite proof (which didn’t become public until the twentieth century), so they still didn’t know when Church started to cooperate with the royal authorities or what information he had shared.

On 28 Jan 1777, Stiles was back at his diary, pondering the mysteries of Dr. Church. He started by recalling the moment he had recorded almost four years before, but in a different light:

Dr. Church was wavering when he delivered his Oration in 17—. He was a firm Patriot at penning the Suffolk Resolves Sept. 1774—he was already corrupted at the Battle of Lexington Apr. 1775. It is matter of Inquiry, the time of corruption?

I tho’t his conduct odd, and Bravado like, in going into Bo[ston]. after Lexington, carrying in Letters, being taken up, carried before Gen. Gage, in being suffered to talk so laconicly as it was said he did to Gage.

In the Summer of 1775 he was up at Newp[or]t., but little seen by Friends of Liberty, & his Cousin Ch[urch]. then said he was not good. Col. Ezra R[ichmond (1721-1800)] tells me Dr. Ch[urc]h. was at Newp[or]t. between 5th. March & Lexington, he spent Eveng. with the Dr. at Dighton & found him unaccountable & shrewd & sagacious.

The Col. asked, wh[at] would the End of these things be? His Answer vague, yet implying that after fightg. awhile the affairs would be compromised, yet so that America would be conquered & G[reat]. B[ritain]. carry her point.

Also said, he & [John] Hancock &c had been invited to dine with Gen. Gage who treated them with great Politeness & Affability, & beg’d them to use their Influenee to prevent the Oration 5 March—that a week after Gage sent for him—& says Chh., what would you think of £30000.—

The Colonel thinks he reallized 25 Thousd. So his Conversion in March 1775; He is now in Bo[ston]. Goal [jail].

In researching The Road to Concord, I concluded that Dr. Church started to feed Gage serious information on 25 Feb 1775, immediately after the doctor had attended three days of meetings with the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s committee of safety and supplies.

What then should we make of this story of Gage traducing Church with thousands of pounds a couple of weeks later? Why would the governor make such an offer to a man already working for him? Why, for that matter, would Church report such an offer to anyone else? (Assuming, of course, that Stiles correctly recorded what Richmond had told him, and that Richmond accurately remembered what he had heard.)

I conclude that when Dr. Church talked about Gage’s money, he was boasting to Richmond about an offer he had ostensibly turned down as a way to burnish his Patriot credentials. Perhaps that story was fueled by a guilty conscience or simple wishfulness—we know Church was eager for money, a running theme in his surviving reports to his handlers during the siege of Boston. But the doctor surely wasn’t trying to raise suspicions about his loyalty that summer.

A couple of years later Richmond, feeling certain of Church’s treachery but baffled by the motive behind it, looked back on that conversation and saw it as a confession. He could then express his belief that the doctor “reallized 25 Thousd.” When, of course, he and Stiles had no better information on that point than before.

“There the people were much frightened”

Yesterday we left James Reed of the “Woburn Precinct” (Burlington) hosting about a dozen British soldiers in his house on the afternoon of 19 Apr 1775.

Some of those redcoats had given themselves up in Lexington in the morning while others had seen hard fighting on their way back from Concord. Testifying in 1825, Reed said, “Towards evening, it was thought best to remove them from my house.”

Reed’s house was probably prominent. It was located near a highway through Middlesex County. John Hancock and Samuel Adams had stopped there early that day, long enough to send back to Lexington for Lydia Hancock and Dolly Quincy before they all moved on to the parsonage where the widow Abigail Jones was ready to feed them.

But a prominent house wouldn’t have been an asset if the British military came looking for its lost men. The Massachusetts militia had defeated a force of over a thousand men with two cannon, but they knew there were thousands more soldiers, and scores more cannon, inside Boston.

Reed therefore gathered some other militiamen and moved the prisoners on:

I, with the assistance of some others, marched them to one Johnson’s in Woburn Precinct, and there kept a guard over them during the night.

There were simply too many Johnsons in Woburn to identify this one with certainty. I think the most prominent local man of that name was Josiah Johnson, a militia officer who would be elected to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress the following month. But some of his cousins might dispute that.

Reed evidently stayed at one Johnson’s house with the redcoats and his fellow guards because he stated:

The next morning, we marched them to Billerica; but the people were so alarmed, and not willing to have them left there, we then took them to Chelmsford, and there the people were much frightened; but the Committee of Safety consented to have them left, provided, that we would leave a guard. Accordingly, some of our men agreed to stay.

Having moved his charges further northwest into the Massachusetts countryside, Reed got to go home to his less-crowded house on 20 April.

The people of Billerica and Chelmsford and nearby towns probably worried about a British military attack just as much as people in Woburn. And that’s where my talk last Saturday about those P.O.W.’s intersects with that day’s other presentation, by Alexander Cain of Historical Nerdery and Untapped History.

Alex explored the “Great Ipswich Fright,” a panic on 21 April in towns along the North Shore from Beverly to Newburyport. Almost all the militiamen from those Essex County towns had gone down to the siege lines. That morning a British naval vessel appeared at the mouth of the Ipswich River. That set off a panic of people fearing that enraged redcoats would land, burn, and pillage—perhaps on their way to those prisoners that Patriot officials had insisted on holding in Chelmsford.

James Reed and His Prisoners of War

In 1825 James Reed of Burlington testified about his experiences on 19 Apr 1775. At that time, Burlington was still part of Woburn, and Reed turned out with a company of Woburn militiamen. They reached Lexington shortly after the British column had passed through, killing eight men on the common.

Reed stated:

I also saw a British soldier march up the road, near said meeting-house, and Joshua Reed of Woburn met him, and demanded him to surrender. He then took his arms and equipments from him, and I took charge of him, and took him to my house, then in Woburn Precinct.

Reed’s house appears in the photo above, from the collection of the Cary Memorial Library in Lexington. That shows the house in 1955 as Route 128 was constructed nearby. Rob Cotsa reported last year that “The house was moved to construct the Burlington mall and later was destroyed by fire.”

Back to Reed’s recollection:

I also testify, that E. Walsh brought to my house, soon after I returned home with my prisoner, two more of said British troops; and two more were immediately brought, and I suppose, by John Munroe and Thomas R. Willard of Lexington; and I am confident, that one more was brought, but by whom, I don’t now recollect. All the above prisoners were taken at Lexington immediately after the main body had left the common, and were conveyed to my house early in the morning; and I took charge of them.

Thus, Reed had taken one redcoat to his house, but by noon he was in charge of six. All of these men were stragglers from Lt. Col. Francis Smith’s column. They hadn’t seen any fighting, and there was no chance they were wounded. Not did Reed mention any of them putting up any resistance. They were deserters as much as prisoners of war.

Reed’s “I suppose” suggests he had heard John Munroe’s recollection in his own 1825 deposition:

On the morning of the 19th, two of the British soldiers, who were in the rear of the main body of their troops, were taken prisoners and disarmed by our men, and, a little after sun-rise, they were put under the care of Thomas R. Willard and myself, with orders to march them to Woburn Precinct, now Burlington. We conducted them as far as Capt. James Read’s, where they were put into the custody of some other persons, but whom I do not now recollect.

Remarkably, Munroe’s father Robert had just been one of the first men killed on the town green, as he stood nearby. Thomas Rice Willard had watched the firing from the window of a house.

As for Reed’s house in Woburn, it was just beginning to fill:

In the afternoon five or six more of said British troops, that were taken prisoners in the afternoon, when on the retreat from Concord, were brought to my house and put under my care.

Those men had been all the way out to Concord and seen hard fighting on the way back. Reed said nothing about any of those regulars being wounded, however. It looks like the hurt regulars were cared for by local doctors closer to the line of march instead of marched up to the next town. With ten to twelve of the enemy to look after, Reed might have been getting nervous.

TOMORROW: What to do with the Massachusetts army’s first prisoners?

“Speak Out!” at Old South, 27 Mar.

On Wednesday, 27 March, the Old South Meeting House will host the fifth annual “Speak Out!” commemoration of the annual Boston Massacre orations, co-sponsored by the Bostonian Society.

The event description says:

Each year from 1772 to 1775, massive numbers of men, women, and children gathered here at Old South Meeting House to commemorate the anniversary of the Boston Massacre, with rousing speeches by John Hancock, Benjamin Church, and Dr. Joseph Warren. Join us to hear excerpts of these speeches, performed by an inter-generational group in the same hall where the orations took place 240 years ago!

This year’s program will include excerpts from the “Crispus Attucks Memorials” delivered in 1858 by William Cooper Nell and Dr. John Sweatt Rock, which zeroed in on the institution of slavery in relation to the rhetoric of liberty.

This occasion isn’t just for listening to speeches, though. Audience members can choose to read selected excerpts, and the most rousing orators in youth and adult categories will receive prizes.

Folks who want to study the texts in advance can send a request to [email protected] with the subject line “Orations Reader.”

This event will start at 6:00 P.M. It is free and open to the public, but Old South asks people to register here.

The picture above shows William Cooper Nell (1816-1874), who in addition to being one of Boston’s foremost civil-rights activists in the mid-1800s was also a Revolutionary War historian.

“If one old Yankee woman can take six grenadiers…”?

In his 1864 address West Cambridge on the Nineteenth of April, 1775, Samuel Abbott Smith told the story of six regulars surrendering to “Mother Batherick” after the supply wagon they were rolling west was attacked.

Smith added:

The squib went the rounds of the English opposition papers, “If one old Yankee woman can take six grenadiers, how many soldiers will it require to conquer America?”

Within ten years, that story and that line were appearing in an American school textbook, The Franklin Fourth Reader by G. S. Hillard:

16. The drivers are said to have surrendered themselves to an old woman whom they met, whose protection they begged. Whereupon there went the rounds of the English papers belonging to the opposition this interesting sum in the Rule of Three: “If one old Yankee woman can take six grenadiers, how many soldiers will it require to conquer America?”

The line has been quoted in many histories of the battle, from Colonial Society of Massachusetts publications to Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride to popular compendiums published in the last few years.

But all the citations for the statements about that gibe in British newspapers appear to go back to Smith, writing almost ninety years after the event on a different continent. No author points to an actual newspaper or politician in Britain saying such a thing.

I don’t have access to a British newspaper database, but I’ve looked for such a statement quoted in American newspapers during the war and in the books and magazines scanned on Google Books. And I’m still looking.

Samuel Phillips Savage: “ye fire fell all around us”

When the Great Fire of Boston broke out in March 1760, merchant Samuel Phillips Savage was one of the town’s selectmen, thus bearing extra civic responsibilities.

Two weeks later, Savage wrote an account of the fire. He heavily revised his draft, crossing out and inserting many phrases and even scribbling a whole new paragraph in between the lines of another.

Savage evidently kept that draft for his records, and it’s now held at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The document doesn’t state the letter’s recipient, but it must be someone who lived nearby because he or she had already heard about the fire.

Savage wrote back:

I am obligd for your Sympathy with the Afflictd Town of Boston on Acct of the late awfull Fire,

I was wak’d with the Cry just after two and when I left the house which was not till I had fully dresd me, I could scarce see any Effects of the Flames but before I got way there the whole house were it began was on fire and by a little after day it had distroyd 345 houses, Warehouses & Shops, never did my Eyes behold so amazing a Scene—

in the hight I happened to be on the top of Fort hill, leading a poor old Woman of 80 just escaped with her life to a Brothers house who had escaped, then I beheld a torrent of Fire, impitously carrying all before it, & would I believe how watered [?], had the town reached 20 Miles farther in yt direction for not one house is left in the exant to leeward of ye Wind.

Once in ye hight of the fire, trembling for fear of the Magazine I went to speak at a fireward who stood in the Midst of fire, then I can say without Exageration that I never in my life was in a greater Storm of Snow or knew it snow faster than ye fire fell all around us.

the Engines then provd useless—their Every attempt provd in vain, the flames had their Commiss’. and tryumphed over, the

And there that page ends.

Here’s the paragraph interlined after “Town of Boston”:

We are really worthy yr pity, you canot have any just Idea of the Calamity, and yet I have not heard One murmering Word. I was out the whole Night and happend abt the hight to be on top of the adjoined hill assisting a aged Woman who had escaped the Flame of her own house and wanted my help to lead her to a friends—the Sight was awfull, I confess at the time the thought of its being a Stroke of heaven absorbd all other Considerations. The loss [?] seemd nothing—but although so many have sufferd and come so greatly yet our Xtian benevolent Neighbors help us.

When transcribing this letter, I struggled with several words, particularly “impitously.” Then I went home and discovered that Savage must have written a variation of “impiteously,” meaning “pitilessly.”

“Watered,” which appears in an inserted phrase written hastily and in small letters, is still a guess. The sentiment is clear—Savage didn’t see any way to stop the fire from going where the wind took it, which fortunately was to the harbor.

(In quoting the letter above, I omitted crossed-out words, didn’t note inserts, and broke the text into shorter paragraphs for easier reading.)