Kleiser on Land’s Free Trade Argument about the Revolution

The H-Early-America list just ran Grant Kleiser’s review of Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution (1700-1776) by Jeremy Land, an economic history published last year in Leiden.

The review frames the book’s main inquiry as: “Was this a conflict over free trade? That is, was a major cause of the American Revolution the fact that Great Britain restricted British North Americans’ ability to conduct commerce with people outside of the British Empire? Land’s answer is a resounding yes.”

There are, Kleiser says, three main claims in the introduction:

First, Land stresses that historians should consider colonial eighteenth-century Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston as a “cohesive port complex,” rather than thinking of them as serving distinct regions (p. 2). Land argues that “merchants in these three cities ... often complemented and cooperated with one another, creating intricate networks of credit, business, and trade” (p. 2).

Second, according to Land, this port complex’s robust mercantile economy was perfectly capable of operating without British sources of capital and often competed with English merchants and the English mercantilist agenda. Through rigorous quantitative methods, Land demonstrates that these three cities’ trade with the British Isles was less significant than trade with the rest of North America and the globe. Therefore, “the region was economically less oriented toward Britain than to the rest of the world,” which became “a constant source of tension between the colony and metropole” (p. 2).

Finally, Land stresses that British politicians did not pursue a policy of “salutary neglect” toward the colonies. Rather, they often tried to enforce “mercantilist” policies, particularly after the Seven Years’ War raised Britain’s sovereign debt exponentially. However, the inability of the imperial state to effectively enforce customs laws while also failing to provide adequate specie (i.e., gold and silver) made many British North Americans realize that resistance, that is, continuing to trade beyond the British Empire, was both possible and necessary.

I’m happy to agree that when viewed at some distance the three biggest ports in British North America, and indeed the others, were able to work together, despite differences, competition, and tensions. Certainly by the Revolutionary period they were doing so—that’s why there was a Revolution.

I’m also open to the argument that British imperial policy may not have been “salutary neglect” by choice, but at least sometimes by necessity as the government dealt with issues elsewhere. Land ultimately seems to go along with the traditional view that North Americans resented the stricter trade enforcement and more vigorous collection of taxes that most of the governments under George III tried. But did colonists seek “free trade” or a return to the previous form of regulation?

Land’s second point raises more questions for me. It seems to separate trade with Britain from trade everywhere else in the world, including parts of the British Empire, particularly in the Caribbean. I’d like to see the separation drawn between trade within the British Empire and trade outside of it.

Kleiser summarizes that part of Land’s argument as “the general lack of demand in Great Britain for these [North American] exports forced these traders to look outside the British Empire for profitable markets (e.g., the foreign West Indies) to acquire specie and afford highly demanded British manufactured goods.” But what about the demand outside Great Britain but inside the British Empire? That was what the New England economy fed on.

The book concludes that Boston, New York, and Philadelphia’s trade beyond the British Empire “was quite significant and more important than the direct trade with Britain and Ireland,” presumably in financial terms. But how did those commercial routes compare with trading between British colonies? Also unclear to me is whether North American trade in general would have been so safe or profitable without British imperial power—i.e., the Royal Navy—in support.

There’s no question that taxes on trade led to increasing friction and resistance in the North American port from 1765 to 1774. But that still seems several steps away from Land’s claim that “Britain’s military occupation of Boston was the first salvo in a battle for equal access to global markets.”

Kleiser chides Land for overstating British policy as barring all trade outside its empire. In fact, merchants could do business in foreign ports as long as they didn’t carry in specific “enumerated goods” (e.g., tobacco and indigo, not big crops for Boston, New York, and Philadelphia) and paid duties on what they brought back. Furthermore, British governments in the 1760s carved out exceptions to its rules, suggesting that if the resistance was all about business, folks could have struck a deal.

Kleiser concludes:

Overall, Colonial Ports offers an accessible overview of eighteenth-century commercial networks in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Nonspecialists and undergraduates will welcome its clear language, argumentation, and historical background, while specialists will gravitate to its exhaustive quantitative analysis and data tables on the contours of this trade.

For a scholarly book priced at over $100, “nonspecialists and undergraduates” might prefer to seek copies in libraries, smart economic actors as they are.

“Volumes of dense smoak” in Liverpool

EPOCH, published by Lancaster University in Britain, just shared an eye-opening article by Dabeoc Stanley on “Liverpool’s Eighteenth-Century Second-Hand Smoke Problem.”

Liverpool had grown in size and wealth in the eighteenth century as a port for Britain’s colonial and slaving ventures.

If you were to walk Liverpool’s streets in 1784, however, you would struggle to see this material wealth, indeed you would probably be struggling to breathe. The culprit was second-hand tobacco smoke. A petition to the Commissioners of Customs signed by more than 40 ‘respectable persons’ of Liverpool, and dated to June 1784, described:

… volumes of dense smoak … [that] cloud the streets to the annoyance of all passengers and fill the rooms of every house … to a degree perfectly offensive and intolerable … Within the reach of the smoak the furniture of our houses is spoiled, life is rendered comfortless to all, many are afflicted with sore eyes and only the young and healthy at some time can breathe.

In foggy or calm conditions, the wind was not sufficient to carry off the smoke, allowing it to accumulate in Liverpool’s streets and squares, creating a smog every bit as suffocating as that of London.

Those vapors had many sources: brick kilns, salt works, an oilhouse rendering whale blubber, and of course fires for cooking and heating. Tobacco smoke added to the hazy mix.

But tobacco fires were also the result of government policies, as Stanley traces. First, merchants could get a “drawback” on tobacco duties if they claimed they were reshipping that commodity outside the British Isles. That gave them an incentive to pump up the weight of their outgoing tobacco with “sand, dirt, and all manner of rubish.” They could then smuggle that untaxed tobacco into Britain through the Isle of Man.

In response to such smuggling, Parliament beefed up its laws. After 1750, Customs officers were to burn all the tobacco they confiscated as contraband or damaged.

In Liverpool, that condemned tobacco was first burned in a seaside furnace away from the center of town. But officials discovered that tobacco sent to that relatively isolated place too often went missing. So in 1783 a new “immense chimney” was built behind the Custom House in the middle of the city’s business district.

That’s why a year later locals complained about the effects of tobacco smoke on people’s health and property values. (And some of them might have preferred the opportunities of the previous system.)

Nonetheless, the situation didn’t change until 1802. That January, “a most tremendous gale” knocked the big chimney onto the Customs House, incidentally destroying lots of paperwork. (Again, some merchants and marines in Liverpool might have been pleased with this outcome.)

“Command of a vessel without arms, and with but one eye”

Aside from having several children, what did Sylvanus Lowell do after being so badly injured at the Marblehead smallpox hospital in 1773?

First he returned to the maritime business, as shown by this advertisement from the 23 Mar 1774 Essex Journal, published in Newburyport:

For NEWFOUNDLAND,
THE Schooner ROSE, JACOB LOWELL, master, now lying at Marquand’s wharf, will sail by the first of April.—For Freight or Passage apply to Robert Jenkins, or Silvanus Lowell.
Newbury Port, March 21st, 1774.

Shortly after that, Parliament closed the port of Boston to most trade from outside Massachusetts, thus making secondary ports like Newburyport more important for about a year.

But then the war began, and sailing out of any Massachusetts port put ships at risk for being seized by the Royal Navy. At the same time, the province needed military supplies, and there was money to be made in privateering.

Sylvanus Lowell, despite his injuries, went back to sea. As the Newburyport Herald copied from the Saco Democrat in 1830:

No better evidence of his enterprising spirit is watnng, than the fact of his obtaining command of a vessel without arms, and with but one eye. It is said he was enabled to do much of his own writing, by screwing a pen into the hook attached to his arm.

In February 1777, the Massachusetts board of war commissioned Lowell to sail to St. Eustatia to trade for salt and these goods:

500 Effective Fire Arms, fit for Soldiers, with Bayonets —
500 Soldiers Blankets —
50 Barrels Gun-powder —
200 ps Ravens Duck or Tent Cloth —
300 lb Twine —
25 Casks 20d Nails —
30 do 10d do
15 do 4 do
If the above Articles are not to be got, bring the proceeds in Russia Duck, Cordage from 4½ Inches downwards, Coarse Checks & Linnens —

He commanded a crew of at least nine men. The captain was back by July, when he bought a house in Newbury for his growing family.

In 1779 Lowell became captain of a privateering brig listed as the Porgee (also Porgee and Pauga), with a letter of marque from New Hampshire. Though descendants recalled it as “a large war-ship,” the American War of Independence at Sea website says it carried only four guns and eleven men.

Nonetheless, the Porgee managed to capture a ship called the Lively, as shown by a legal notice in the 17 July 1780 Boston Gazette. AWIatsea.com says the ship then received a Massachusetts letter of marque and went out under another captain.

In 1781 Capt. Lowell invested in a privateering sloop named the Betsey, and reportedly he commanded other privateers himself. According to his 1830 obituary:

About 3 days before Peace was concluded, he was captured by the British; but by the time they reached the shore, this news was received, and he was liberated and sent home.

After this, he followed the sea 7 years, as master of a vessel out of Newburyport, in the employ of Tristram Dalton.

Dalton had backed many privateers during the war, including the Betsey.

Levi Mills of Newburyport sailed under Capt. Lowell to Richmond on the “good ship Diana” one winter in the mid-1780s. According to an item about Mills’s journal published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, this tobacco-buying trip meant navigating the ice and shoals of the James River.

In 1791, as I wrote yesterday, Lowell’s second wife Elizabeth died. By the end of the year he married a third wife, also named Elizabeth. It also appears that the captain’s remaining eye started to fail around this time, eventually leaving him totally blind.

Lowell “quit the sea,” sold that Newbury house, and moved his whole blended family up to Maine, where some of his siblings had already settled. His stepdaughter Fannie later described the part of Biddeford where they made their new home as “then a wilderness.”

I’m not sure how Sylvanus Lowell supported his family after that, but reportedly the children grew up “in comfort.” In Biddeford the captain was “greatly esteemed.” Around 1825 Lowell “was visited with a severe shock of the numb palsy,” and he died on 21 July 1830, aged 86. His third wife survived him for another nine years.

Matthias Hammond’s House and Anne Proctor’s Doll

With all these stories about Founders’ children and dolls, I thought I should show an actual doll from the period.

The Hammond-Harwood House Museum stands in Annapolis, Maryland. The architect William Buckland designed it just before he died in 1774, and his assistant John Randall completed the building for a young tobacco planter named Matthias Hammond (1750–1786).

Hammond had just been elected to the Maryland General Assembly by Annapolis’s anti-taxation party. He was also a new member of the vestry of St. Anne’s Parish. With those responsibilities, he presumably wanted a house in town.

However, Hammond doesn’t appear to have ever lived in his Annapolis house for an extended period. Instead he stayed on his slave-labor plantation in what is now Gambril. He also never married, and thus never raised children in the house.

In 1926 St. John’s College bought the building to use as a museum, but ran into financial straits during the Depression. The Hammond-Harwood House Association formed in 1938 to maintain the site as an independent museum of architecture and the decorative arts.

Among the artifacts in the museum’s collection is this doll from a Baltimore family.

The museum’s webpage explains:

She is a Queen Anne style doll and dates to about 1785. She may have been made in England, starting as a block of wood and slowly taking shape as a carver turned the block on a lathe. It is easy to see why six-year-old Ann Proctor would have been attached to her, perhaps so attached that she insisted her doll be included in this portrait of her:

That’s a Charles Willson Peale painting from 1789. The museum notes that the doll is actually smaller than Peale painted it, so as not to distract from Anne (and her parrot). But clearly the doll had a lot of meaning for the Proctors.

The Boarding of the Betty in Great Detail

Earlier this year the Cowper & Newton Museum in England posted an article headlined “John Newton, Tide Surveyor, and the boarding of the Betty.”

The authors are Darren White and Glen Huntley, who collaborate as Bygone Liverpool.

They begin:

When the Cowper & Newton Museum shared with us a photograph of a small paper exhibit from its collection—a boarding docket from John Newton’s time as a tide surveyor (1755–1764) in Liverpool—we didn’t think we would be able to unlock its secrets because there wasn’t that much information listed in it.

But they then proceed to assemble a long, detailed, and richly illustrated examination of the circumstances behind that document.

Through newspapers White and Huntley were able to confirm that the ship Betty had come from Virginia, and that it carried tobacco. They discuss Newton’s duties [see what I did there] as a Customs officer, and how the River Mersey looked to arriving ships.

American sources provided information on the Betty’s captain, Thomas Brereton. British sources illuminated the ship’s several owners.

Then it turns out the Betty was made into a privateer in 1761. The authors even found a diagram showing how it had sailed out of Chesapeake Bay that September in a protective convoy of tobacco ships.

The article traces the Betty to its demise off the coast of Ireland in 1763, with a final conflict between different groups fighting for the spoils of the wreck.

It’s a long read that goes in many directions, but it’s a wonderful example of what one can learn just by pulling on a few threads of historical evidence.

In 1764 Newton was ordained within the Anglican church, leaving the civil service and becoming curate for Olney. He’s best known as the author of the hymn “Amazing Grace” and the rueful pamphlet Thoughts on the Slave Trade.

A New Tavern Opened in Brunswick Town

Archeologists from East Carolina University announced that they are exploring the site of an eighteenth-century tavern in Brunswick Town, North Carolina, once capital of that colony.

The building was located by a student using ground-penetrating radar. It appeared as “a submerged structure measuring roughly 400 square feet (37 square meters) and buried under 5 feet (1.5 m) of earth.” A dig revealed more details, including the fact that the structure was destroyed by fire. The walls collapsed in a way that protected the crawl space under the floorboards from the flames, thus preserving an unusually large assortment of everyday objects.

LiveScience reports:

The objects hidden in the building’s crawl space include the brass tap from a wine barrel, unused tobacco pipes, broken mugs and goblets, crushed liquor bottles, and other items typically found in a tavern. An Irish halfpenny dated to 1766 helps narrow down the tavern's latest possible date of operation.

The Charlotte Observer also noted “iron tools that historians can’t yet identify.”

The British military burned Brunswick Town in 1776, and most people abandoned that settlement. (Gov. William Tryon had moved away in 1770, which didn’t help the local economy.) The archeologists seem to think, however, that this building had been destroyed in the preceding decade.

Strikingly, the artifacts include “thimbles, straight pins and clothing fasteners associated with the town’s female populace.” The archeologists note those might have been a male tailor’s tools. Nevertheless, those discoveries led to speculation that the tavern was also a brothel.

Another oddity is that there is no paper record of a building having stood on that spot. Researchers studying Brunswick Town have relied on this 1769 map, but it shows no structure there. So perhaps the business burned before 1769, or perhaps the business was lying really low.

Lowell Lecture Series on Archeology in Boston

The Lowell Lecture Series organized by the Paul Revere House and hosted by Old South Meeting House is under way. This year”s theme is archeology, and these talks are still coming up.

Tuesday, 13 September, 6:30-7:30 P.M.
Dig Boston: How, When, and Why Archaeology Happens in the Hub
While Boston’s history began many thousands of years ago, archeological investigations are a relatively recent development. City Archaeologist Joseph M. Bagley discusses the ins and outs of conducting an archaeological dig in Boston through the lens of recent excavations at Old North Church, the Seaport Shipwreck, and Malcolm X’s house.

Tuesday, 20 September, 6:30-7:30 P.M.
Knee Deep in Paul Revere’s Privy: Archaeology at the Paul Revere House Lot
Archaeological investigations conducted by The Public Archaeology Laboratory, Inc. at the Paul Revere House site from 2011-2013 resulted in the recovery of nearly 10,000 artifacts and a range of landscape and infrastructural features, including drains, cisterns, privies, and sewer pipes. PAL Senior Archaeologist Kristen Heitert will show how many of the artifacts speak of the former residents themselves, such as “Home Rule” tobacco pipes possibly smoked by newly arrived Irish immigrants; and the skull of a small terrier, perhaps a pet or a practical ratter.

Tuesday, 27 September, 6:30-7:30 P.M.
From Hills to Islands: Ancient Adaptations to the Inundation of Boston
Some 6,000 years ago, Boston was well inland from the ocean, but as rising sea levels poured in tidal waters around the hills east of Boston, ancient Native Americans lost no time adapting to and enjoying the change. While Martin Dudek, Senior Project Manager of Commonwealth Heritage Group, will focus on the Native American sites on Spectacle Island, he will also include a brief overview of other exciting archaeological sites worked on for the Big Dig.

All these lectures are free, and Old South has plenty of seating.

(The photograph above comes from a 2013 Boston Globe article about a dig behind the Old North Church.)

The Life and Death of David Murray

On 10 Apr 1755, shoemaker David Murray and Mary Fitzgerald married at the New South Meetinghouse, having announced their intention the previous October.

Soon afterward, Boston employee Robert Love visited them at their home on Blowers’s Wharf in the South End, according to Cornelia Hughes Dayton and Sharon H. Salinger in their study Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston.

Over the next fifteen years the Murrays had children, but David remained a journeyman, never doing well enough at making shoes to open his own shop.

Then, on 12 Aug 1771, the Boston Evening-Post carried this item:

Last Thursday Afternoon [i.e., 8 April] David Murray, a Shoemaker belonging to this Town, was found dead on the Beach near the Neck, an some Marks of Violence appearing on several Parts of his Body, and the Jury of Inquest being of Opinion that his Death was occasioned by some violent Blows, one Willson, a Tobacconist, who had been with him in  a Boat to the Castle, and came off with him from thence the Evening before, was taken up and examined, and telling many contradictory Stories relative to the Affair he was the next Day committed to Goal on a strong Suspicion of being the Means of his untimely End.

The indictment accused Willson of beating Murray to death with his fists. Within a month, Willson was on trial for murder. His attorney: Josiah Quincy, Jr.

TOMORROW: Quincy’s plea to the jury.

Word Problems

The University of Pennsylvania library holds a notebook created in Southampton County, Virginia, between 1786 and 1791, according to the notations inside. It shows someone learning practical arithmetic through word problems like these:

An Overseer and 28 Negroes made 37660 lb. Tobacco, I Demand the Overseers Part, who was to have 1 1/2 Shares?

An Overseer and 50 Negroes made 1575 Barrels of Corn — 42000 Pounds of Tobacco — 3150 Bushels of Peas. I demand the Overseers Part, and what was left for the Employer, allowing the Overseer 2 1/2 Shares?

A little thought reveals that the “Negroes” are irrelevant to the calculations. Which was the real problem, wasn’t it?

A page in the back of the book has “Southampton County” written on it several times. It also has the words “Hamilton County, Northwestern Territory” and, at top, possibly the name “Bennet.” James Bennett was one of the first members of the “Legislative Council” elected in the Northwest Territory in 1799. Had he come from Southampton County, Virginia? Was the student who used this notebook a member of his family? If so, by moving into the Northwest Territory the family gave up direct participation in America’s slavery system. But as the arithmetic problems show, that system pervaded nearly all parts of life.

Joshua Johnson Receives a "small neat looking man”

Here’s more from Louisa Catherine Adams’s memoir of living in London in the 1790s, when her father, Joshua Johnson, was serving as a consul-general of the U.S. of A. in Britain. Johnson had been born in Maryland but moved to England, married, and entered business there before the war:

It was about this time that a Gentleman called on my father a small neat looking man in a very handsome chariot with livery Servants &ce. He walked into the Office entered into conversation very agreeably and then presented some papers to my father which concerned some American business to be done before the Consul—

My father returned the papers for signature and stood to see the name when to his utter surprize he discovered that it was the Traitor [Benedict] Arnold, and he deliberately took up the pen with the Tongs and put it into the fire—

The gentlemean sneaked off endeavouring not to notice the act—This trait will give you a real insight into your Grandfathers character—He was a perfect Gentleman in his manners and universally respected—

Adams wrote out this recollection around 1825 when her husband, John Quincy Adams, was President and his political rivals were trying to make hay of his marriage to a Englishwoman. She therefore had a strong reason to portray her father as a strong supporter of the U.S. of A.

Did Arnold really call on Johnson? (He wasn’t particularly “small” for his time, certainly not compared to some men in the Adams family. And what sort of “American business” did he expect to conduct?) Did Johnson really show his distaste for Arnold so openly? All we can say for sure is that Adams left this story for her descendants.

At another point in her memoir, Adams characterized her father’s move to Nantes in France in 1778 as politically motivated—getting closer to America’s new ally. But the footnotes in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s new edition of Adams’s papers suggest that he also had financial reasons: the war had hurt his main business of importing tobacco from North America to Britain. But telling stories about grandfather’s patriotism was a republican mother’s duty.

Lucia Stanton, Thomas Jefferson, and George Granger

Common-place shares an interview with Lucia Stanton, a self-effacing historian at Monticello, on the publication of her collection Those Who Labor for My Happiness: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

As “Cinder” Stanton describes her career, she started out helping to annotate Thomas Jefferson’s detailed account books and was pulled into writing about the man’s many enslaved workers:

As we developed the content of the new outdoor tour, we tried to prevent his voice from drowning out the voices of the almost four hundred men, women, and children who lived in slavery on the 5,000-acre Monticello plantation during his lifetime. His nearly 20,000 surviving letters swamp their baker’s dozen.

Furthermore, in his writings Jefferson inflated his own agency, sometimes with the breezy use of the personal pronoun (“I work myself upwards of 100 spindles,” he said in connection with his textile shop). And the accounts of Monticello visitors obscured the enslaved with the passive voice (“toddy was brought” and “fires were lighted”). Jefferson’s Farm Book and letters provide names, ages, locations, and occupations but are virtually silent on emotions, values, and even talents, since most of the references to enslaved people deal with negative events like unsatisfactory work, punishment, illness, or death. The slaves’ labor, not their lives, is invariably the issue. The human dimension is almost entirely missing from the Jefferson archive. . . .

Jefferson is the organizing spirit of a web of connections that endlessly entice the researcher and lead to continual illumination as well as further uncertainty. Although he never wrote any kind of tribute to George Granger, phrases such as “George says” or “George knows” or “concluded with George to” help to reveal the remarkable knowledge and character of the only enslaved man to serve him as overseer. Fragmentary references assembled in chronological order bring a towering figure out of the mist, as well as the contours of a story of life at Monticello that George Granger himself might have told.

The casual remark of Jefferson’s son-in-law that tobacco was Granger’s “favorite crop” evokes a man anxiously scanning the western sky for portents of the rain needed for transplanting or stretching a tobacco leaf over his knuckles to determine if the crop was ready for stripping. In Jefferson’s request for seed of the Canada lily that “George found for me in the woods” we can see a man walking the slopes of Monticello with an observant eye and an appreciation of the natural world.

Late in life, Granger was given the challenging twin commissions of making a productive crop for his master and disciplining his own community and family members. Entries in several different records show that on the first day of November 1799, Jefferson consulted his overseer about the expected cider yield of a bushel of apples, and on the second day Granger was dead at the age of sixty-nine.

Stanton’s primary purpose in such research wasn’t publication, like many academic historians, but helping to improve how the staff of Monticello interpreted the site to the public:

All the visitors came armed with preconceptions. Many white people wanted to hear that Jefferson was a “good master” who would have freed his slaves if he could have. Some black visitors viewed slavery through a lens dominated by whips and rape. Many of both races said they would have run away or rebelled if they had been a slave.

And the same story could elicit totally different interpretations. When a guide spoke of the garden plots where Monticello’s enslaved families raised an assortment of produce, some saw them as a sign of a kind and indulgent Jefferson allowing his slaves the time and place to supplement their diet. To others they reflected his severity in depriving them of enough food to sustain health.

Both missed the point by seeing the situation in terms of Jefferson rather than of the enslaved people themselves. Over centuries, slaves throughout the South struggled to maintain one of their few customary rights, the right to cultivate their “own” garden plots in their “own” time. These provided not just a better diet but access to money, for Monticello’s families sold their surplus produce to the Jefferson household and elsewhere. Without minimizing the harshness of the institution of slavery, we wanted to tell a story not just of oppression, but of creative responses to oppression.

For her book, Stanton collected her major behind-the-scenes essays on slavery at Monticello over the years rather than rewriting them into a single study. Those Who Labor for My Happiness thus preserves the site’s shifting interpretations as Stanton and her colleagues brought forward new evidence or looked at older evidence from a new angle.

Whatever Happened to Major Box?

After the Revolutionary War, Maj. Daniel Box petitioned the Rhode Island government for support, stating that his fall from a horse back in December 1776 had “so fractured the arm that several pieces of the bone have been extracted, and the wound is still open and the hand entirely useless.”

The state granted him a pension. And when I first read that, I assumed it meant that the fall had put him out of action.

But other records show that Box remained active in the Continental Army despite his injury. He was still a brigade-major until 1779, when the Continental Congress reorganized its military and did away with that post. That December, the Rhode Island legislature voted to pay Box over £449 “for his pay and subsistence as major of brigade.” The following July, the state recognized him as having been “in Continuous service since 1775.”

Box’s name also appears in a report on the Continental Army mutinies of 1781, but it’s unclear to me which side of that conflict he was on. It’s striking that he remained at the same rank from 1775 on.

In 1782, Daniel Box married Polly Field of Rhode Island. Six years later, he was the administrator of her father’s estate. They had one child, also named Polly, according to Frederick Clifton Pierce’s Field Genealogy.

On 14 Sept 1782, the Newport Mercury ran the first of many advertisements from Box announcing the tobacco he had on sale as a wholesaler in Providence. (The thumbnail above shows a 1777 map of Narragansett Bay, with Providence at the upper left; Box had his business at “Colonel William Wall’s Wharff.”)

Five years later, Box and George Tiffany advertised a school for “READING, WRITING, and ARITHMETIC.” Box taught the same subjects in the evening while Tiffany offered lessons in Latin and Greek. There are also records of the state paying Box as a teacher in the late 1780s and 1790s. He was probably supporting himself in his old age with the same writing skills that had allowed him to rise to sergeant in the British army, and then an administrative officer in the American.

Box died in May 1800 at an “advanced age,” according to the United States Chronicle of Providence. That newspaper called him “an active and useful Officer during our Revolutionary War.” The Providence Journal reported that his funeral included “Masonic honours.”