“The Inhabitants of Boston are on the move”

Among the items in the London newspapers that arrived in Marblehead in the first week of April 1775 was this:

Yesterday a messenger was sent to Falmouth, with dispatches for General [Thomas] Gage at Boston, to be forwarded by a packet boat detained there for that purpose.

It didn’t take long for the Massachusetts Patriots to figure out that if this report had gone into the newspapers, and those newspapers had traveled to New England, then those dispatches could have made it to New England, too. And in that case, the royal governor might already be preparing to act on them.

Decades later, Mercy Warren wrote of the royal authorities in Massachusetts: “from their deportment, there was the highest reason to expect they would extend their researches, and endeavour to seize and secure, as they termed them, the factious leaders of rebellion.”

I can’t actually find those italicized words in the writings of royal officials, and “deportment” is a lousy basis for such a conclusion. But the Patriots may have had a more solid basis for expecting arrests, possibly from sympathetic people in Britain.

On behalf of the imperial government, the Earl of Dartmouth had written to Gage: “the first & essential step to be taken towards re-establishing Government, would be to arrest and imprison the principal actors & abettors in the Provincial Congress.” That letter didn’t arrive in Massachusetts until 14 April, but it looks like Patriots anticipated it after those Marblehead arrivals.

Most of the rest of the letter from James Warren to his wife Mercy that I’ve been discussing is about that worry—that Gage’s government would start arresting resistance leaders. On 6 April, James wrote from Concord:

The Inhabitants of Boston begin to move. The Selectmen and Committee of Correspondence are to be with us, I mean our Committee, this day. The Snow Storm yesterday and Business prevented them then. From this Conference some vigorous resolutions may grow. . . .

I am with regards to all Friends and the greatest Expressions of Love and regard to you, your very affect. Husband, JAS. WARREN

Love to my Boys. I feel disposed to add to this long letter but neither time nor place will permit it.

Then on 7 April James went back to his letter with more information and a warning:

I am up this morning to add. Mr. [Isaac] Lothrop [another Plymouth delegate] is the bearer of this and can give you an Acct. of us.

The Inhabitants of Boston are on the move. [John] H[ancock] and [Samuel] A[dams] go no more into that Garrison, the female Connections of the first [Lydia Hancock and Dorothy Quincy] come out early this morning and measures are taken relative to those of the last [Elizabeth Adams, who didn’t make it out before the siege]. The moving of the Inhabitants of Boston if effected will be one grand Move. I hope one thing will follow another till America shall appear Grand to all the world.

I begin to think of the Trunks which may be ready against I come home, we perhaps may be forced to move: if we are let us strive to submit to the dispensations of Providence with Christian resignation and phylosophick Dignity.

God has given you great abilities; you have improved them in great Acquirements. You are possessd of eminent Virtues and distinguished Piety. For all these I esteem I love you in a degree that I can't express. They are all now to be called into action for the good of Mankind, for the good of your friends, for the promotion of Virtue and Patriotism. Don’t let the fluttering of your Heart interrupt your Health or disturb your repose. Believe me I am continually Anxious about you. Ride when the weather is good and don’t work or read too much at other times. I must bid you adieu. God Almighty bless you. No letter yet. What can it mean? Is she not well? She can't forget me or have any Objections to writing.

James Warren appears to have gone home to Plymouth a few days later and then immediately gone on to Rhode Island to try to convince that elected government to help prepare a New England army. He was in that colony when word came of shooting at Lexington.

James Warren: “News we have”

On 6 Apr 1775, James Warren was in Concord, representing Plymouth in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress.

He started writing home to his wife, Mercy, that day. That letter contains a passage I’ve quoted many times in my Road to Concord talks, but there’s a lot more going on, too.

So over the next few days I’ll analyze of Warren’s whole letter.

My Dear Mercy,—

Four days ago I had full Confidence that I should have had the pleasure of being with you this day, we were then near closeing the Session. Last Saturday we came near to an Adjournment, were almost equally divided on that question, the principle argument that seemd to preponderate, and turn in favour of sitting into this week was the prospect of News and News we have.

Last week things wore rather a favourable aspect, but alas how uncertain are our prospects. Sunday Evening brought us accounts of a Vessel at Marblehead from Falmouth, and the English Papers etc by her. I have no need to recite perticulars. you will have the whole in the Papers, and wont wonder at my forgoeing the pleasure of being with you. I dare say you would not desire to see me till I could tell you that I had done all in my power to secure and defend us and our Country.

We are no longer at a loss what is Intended us by our dear Mother. We have Ask’d for Bread and she gives us a Stone, and a serpent for a Fish.

That last line is an allusion to Matthew 7:9–11.

The British news that Warren alluded was printed in the Essex Journal of Newburyport before spreading to other papers. “Capts. Barker and Andrews” had sailed from England on 17 February, bringing the latest.

The Essex Journal reprinted a long report on debate in Parliament on 5 April and an even longer one on 12 April. Those two articles don’t agree in all the details, but they’re clear on the basic developments.

For years the Massachusetts Whigs had hoped that their pleas, protests, and persistence would prompt a change in British government policy. Instead, the Lords refused to hear the latest petitions from America.

The Earl of Chatham, formerly William Pitt and still America’s favorite, moved that Parliament repeal the Coercive Acts and remove troops from Boston. Other peers argued for “compelling the Americans to the immediate obedience of the legislature of the mother country.” Ultimately the House of Lords rejected all of Chatham’s proposals by margins like 77 to 18.

Furthermore, on 9 February both houses of Parliament had signed off on an address to the king that declared in part:

…we find that a part of your majesty’s subjects in the province of Massachusetts Bay have proceeded so far to resist the authority of the supreme legislature; that a rebellion at this time actually exists within the said province. . . .

we consider it as our indispensible duty, humbly to beseech your majesty that you will take the most effectual measures to enforce due obedience to the laws and authority of the supreme legislature; and we assure your majesty that it is our fixed resolution, at the hazard of our lives and properties, to stand by your majesty against all rebellious attempts…

The king’s official response was to promise “the most speedy and effectual measure for enforcing due obedience to the laws, and the authority of the supreme legislature.”

And that was just the official record. The London newspapers also threw in comments like “Lord N—h is determined that the Americans shall wear chains.”

TOMORROW: Keeping up spirits, keeping up defenses.

Anderson on the Glover Houses of Marblehead, 18 Mar.

On Monday, 18 March, Judy Anderson will discuss “Five Glover Houses in Marblehead” at the Abbot Public Library.

Registration to attend this event in person has been closed, but I believe people can still listen in on Zoom.

The event description says:

Dive into Marblehead’s architectural heritage through a talk about five Glover family homes from the mid-1700s, with photos, beginning with General John Glover’s handsome Georgian-style home located on today’s Glover Square, near the public Town Landing on Front Street. Glover’s heroism in the American Revolution is well known. But this talk will feature stories about the homes, lives and families of General Glover and his three brothers.

General Glover’s home is one of Marblehead’s most significant houses, among nearly 300 homes that still survive from the 1700s, before the American Revolution began in 1775. Its elegant front doorway frame also makes it among the most stylish, since only about a half dozen from that time remain that were not updated or remodeled as styles changed. Unlike most homes from the 1700s, the Glover house also retains much of its original interior woodwork craftsmanship. In addition, one of its two front rooms has finely carved woodwork in the “Federal” or neoclassical style, from the decades before the War of 1812.

In 1781, toward the end of General Glover’s retirement from nearly seven years of grueling service in the Revolution, he purchased a farmhouse that is now located on a uniquely shared historic site in Swampscott, Marblehead and Salem. The house is thought to have been built in the 1750s in what was then Salem, though new evidence suggests it may have been built as early as 1732, the year Glover was born.

Over the fifteen years before General Glover’s death in 1797, he would serve in elected offices on the local, regional and state level, including as a Marblehead selectman, a Massachusetts state legislator, and on state committees that ratified the U.S. Constitution and oversaw land distribution in northern New England.

Judy Anderson is a social and cultural historian with a focus on architecture, daily life, and women’s and family history. She was curator of Marblehead’s Jeremiah Lee Mansion for a decade, and can lead expert walking tours of the town.

This talk coincides with a campaign to “Save the General Glover Farmhouse,” the home John Glover bought in 1781. Before the Revolution, that house had belonged to Superior Court justice William Browne.

This event will run from 6:30 to 8:00 P.M. Here is the link to attend by Zoom.

“Of these injuries he was confined some time”

You may have noticed that the two newspaper articles I’ve quoted about Sylvanus Lowell’s injuries and recovery didn’t state his full name.

The Boston and Newburyport newspaper printers referred to him only as “Captain Lowell” of Newburyport, trusting readers to know who that was if they really deserved to know.

Last fall I decided to fill in that missing name by looking for other sources mentioning such an unusual accident.

Not only did I luck out in finding references to the captain, but his given name turned out to be Sylvanus. There were other Sylvanus Lowells in New England during his lifetime, of course, but the combination was rare enough to track him further.

Among the sources that named Capt. Lowell are:

• Delmar R. Lowell, The Historic Genealogy of the Lowells in America (1899): “Capt. Sylvanus…On ‘Cat Island,’ in Boston Harbor, he lost his two arms and one eye while firing a cannon.”
• Biographical Sketches of Representative Citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1901): “Captain Sylvanus Lowell, who shortly before his marriage lost both his arms by the accidental discharge of a cannon, the right one being taken off just below the elbow, and the left just above it, and also lost the sight of one eye.”
• John J. Currier, paper delivered to the Historical Society of Old Newbury (1911): “Sylvanus Lowell…was a sea captain, and while firing a salute on one of the islands in Boston harbor had the misfortune to injure both arms so that amputation was necessary, and at the same time lost the sight of one eye.”

The earliest source to provide a full name, and also more detail about the injury (not necessarily more accurate), was the captain’s obituary in the 7 Aug 1830 Newburyport Herald:

In 1773, he, with many others, were at Cat Island, in Boston harbor [sic], to be inoculated for the Small Pox—the physicians directed that two cannon should be taken to the Island for their amusement and recreation.—

Capt. L. was engaged in loading one of these, and while ramming down the cartridge, the piece went off—his left arm was blown off above the elbow, and his right just above the wrist; the right of one eye was entirely destroyed, and he was otherwise injured.

Of these injuries he was confined some time.

As you can tell from the date of that obituary, Capt. Lowell lived more than fifty-five years after his accident, even though most people felt he would die soon after.

But what sort of life did Lowell have, given his lack of hands and damaged sight? He had been a ship’s captain before, but how did he make his living afterward?

TOMORROW: Plus, a war broke out about a year later.

(Contrary to what those quoted sources say, Cat Island wasn’t in Boston harbor but off the coast of Marblehead. It’s legally part of Salem. In the 1850s the Salem Steamboat Company developed a seaside resort on the island. Because some of the investors were from the city of Lowell, they renamed their property Lowell Island. Thus, for several decades the site of Capt. Lowell’s injury shared his name. The resort didn’t last, though. The place is now home to a day camp and officially called Children’s Island. Presumably there are no working cannon for the children’s “amusement and recreation.”)

“His left arm was blown off and never found”

Last month I left ship’s captain Sylvanus Lowell lying near death at the smallpox hospital in Marblehead harbor in early December 1773.

Lowell had gone to that island hospital for inoculation. But then he loaded the island’s cannon for some sort of celebration, and it had exploded, severely injuring his neck, one eye, and both arms.

I paused to fill in the background of the doctor treating patients at that hospital, Hall Jackson, and his career in amputations.

That drew me into how Dr. Jackson volunteered as a military surgeon for the New Hampshire regiments at the siege of Boston, and how he got into a feud with Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., over whose hospitals were healthier.

And then I hit the Sestercentennial of the mobbing of John Malcolm in Boston, so I had to cover that significant incident.

Meanwhile, fans of Capt. Lowell must have been on tenterhooks, wondering what would become of him.

Good news! The next status report on the patient appeared in the Essex Journal, published in Newburyport, on 26 Jan 1774:

Capt. Lowell of this town, whom we some time ago mentioned to have been terribly wounded by the discharge of a cannon at the Essex Hospital, having recovered, the cure merits notice, and does great honour to the physician who has the care of the Hospital.--

He had been inoculated but twelve days, and the small-pox was just making its appearance, when the accident happened, by which his left arm was blown off and never found, and the remaining part was amputated within four inches of his shoulder: The right hand and part of the arm were torn to pieces; and this arm was amputated just below the elbow:

The large vessels of the neck, the windpipe and the lower jawbone, from the chin to the ear, laid quite bare; and three of the upper fore teeth broken off with a piece of the jaw: The coats of the right eye pierced and its humours discharged, and the bone between the eye and the nose broken through; the other eye greatly hurt, the whole skin of the face and breast much hurt, and several shivers of bones driven into the cheeks in different places:

Besides this, he also had a wound four inches long in the inside of his thigh, which was so filled with powder that it was not discovered ’till several days after the accident.

Notwithstanding, in the short space of thirty-seven days he is so far recovered as to need no further care of a Surgeon.

Lowell remained on the island until 16 January. On that day the Marblehead mariner Ashley Bowen wrote in his journal:

This day some snow. Came from Cat Island Captain Lowell. Ditto Jackson desired him not to snowball anybody.

I’m not sure whether to read “Ditto Jackson” as “Jackson also came from the island” or as “Doctor Jackson.” That has a bearing on who made the very dark joke of telling a man with no hands left not to throw snowballs.

As Lowell returned home, there was rising fear among Marbleheaders that the hospital’s security was too lax to keep infectious clothing and people away from the larger community. That anxiety came on top of resentment at the hospital pricing inoculation out of reach of most ordinary people. For more on that controversy, see Andrew Wehrman’s “The Siege of ‘Castle Pox’” in the New England Quarterly.

The night after the Essex Journal ran its article praising the skills of “the physician who has the care of the Hospital,” a score of locals went onto Cat Island and burned that hospital to the ground.

TOMORROW: What was left for Capt. Lowell.

(The picture above, courtesy of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, is Ashley Bowen’s rendering of Cat Island “Ware the Pestt House Was arected for Enocolation for Small Pox in the Year 1773.”)

“We have not yet heard of his being dead…”

In late 1773 and early 1774, Marblehead and surrounding towns were concerned and then convulsed with the new private smallpox hospital on Cat Island.

I haven’t written anything about the Essex Hospital because of:

• other events at that time, like the destruction of certain tea in Boston harbor.
• other events at this time, which kept me too busy to tackle more series.
• a thorough discussion of the whole episode by Andrew Wehrman in his New England Quarterly article “The Siege of ‘Castle Pox’” and his book The Contagion of Liberty.

I like to add to stories and not just repeat them at length if they’ve been told well recently. So check out The Contagion of Liberty for the short, scorching life of the Marblehead smallpox hospital.

But I did ferret out details of one anecdote tangential to that story. It starts with this article in the 7 Dec 1773 Essex Gazette, published in Salem:

Last Saturday Capt. ——— Lowell of Newbury-Port, a Patient at the Essex-Hospital, in charging a Cannon, (a Four Pounder) just after its being fired, and not properly sponged, the Cartridge took Fire while he was ramming it down: By which unhappy Accident both his Arms were blown almost to Pieces, one Hand entirely carried away with the Rammer; one Eye lost, and the other very much hurt, if not ruined; and the Skin and Flesh so tore away from below his Chin, and towards one Side of his Neck, as to lay his Wind-Pipe almost bare.

As the Accident happened near the Hospital, he was immediately carried in, and Doctor [Hall] Jackson proceeded to the Amputation of both Arms, one just above, and the other below the Elbow. We have not yet heard of his being dead, but it was thought he could not live long.

An eighteenth-century cannon has to be sponged out with a thick cloth on the end of a pole after every firing, as shown above, to ensure that there are no burning embers left inside the tube.

Furthermore, during that sponging someone has to keep his thumb over the touchhole, or the person pulling out the sponge risks can suck in more air through the back of the cannon and feed those embers.

Having all embers extinguished is especially important if a person wants to fire the cannon again, inserting another cartridge of gunpowder into the tube.

If any powder catches fire and explodes while someone is working at the mouth of the tube, the person can suffer exactly the same injury that Capt. Lowell did: having his arms blown off.

My addition to this story so far is that the unfortunate captain’s first name was Sylvanus.

TOMORROW: The patient’s prognosis.

Gomes Prize for The Contagion of Liberty

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

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

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

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

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

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

Events in Marblehead and Quincy, 15 July

Weather permitting, on Saturday, 15 July, folks in Boston’s North Shore and South Shore regions can both enjoy local Revolutionary-era events on the grounds of historic sites.

The recreated Glover’s Marblehead Regiment will hold its annual encampment at Fort Sewall from 10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Scheduled events include:

• 10:15 A.M. and 2:00 P.M.: Children’s Drill
• 10:30 A.M.: March through town with music past Gen. John Glover’s home
• 11:30 A.M.: Skirmish with Crown forces at Seaside Park
• 3:30 P.M.: Battle with Crown forces on Gas House Beach
• 5:00 P.M.: Cannon salute to close camp, followed by sea chanties

Meanwhile, down in Quincy from 11:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. the Dorothy Quincy Homestead will host Henry Cooke speaking on and demonstrating “The Tailor’s Art: Making Clothing and Making a Living in 18th-Century New England.”

Cooke is an internationally recognized expert on Revolutionary-era tailoring, having among other commissions created clothing for figures of George Washington on display at Mount Vernon. He’s also a stalwart of local reenactments—his face will be familiar to anyone who’s enjoyed the tea meetings in Old South Meeting House in recent years.

More to See at History Camp America 2021

Yesterday I shared the video preview of my presentation at History Camp America 2021, coming up on 10 July.

There are seven more video previews of sessions at this page, ranging from Fort Ticonderoga in the north to the Buffalo Soldier National Museum in ths south.

Here are more scheduled History Camp America sessions with some link to Revolutionary New England:

• Video tour of Fort Ticonderoga
• Video tour of Buckman Tavern in Lexington
• “Reimagining America: The Maps of Lewis and Clark” by Carolyn Gilman
• “The Amphibious Assault on Long Island August 1776” by Ross Schwalm
• “Saunkskwa, Sachem, Minister: native kinship and settler church kinship in 17th and 18th-century New England” by Lori Rogers-Stokes
• “‘Thrown into pits’: how were the bodies of the nineteen hanged Salem ‘witches’ really treated?” by Marilynne K. Roach
• “Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates” by Eric Jay Dolin
• “Inconvenient Founders: Thomas Young and the Forgotten Disrupters of the American Revolution” by Scott Nadler
• “Slaves in the Puritan Village: The Untold History of Colonial Sudbury” by Jane Sciacca
• “Surviving the Lash: Corporal Punishment and British Soldiers’ Careers” by Don Hagist
• “Saving John Quincy Adams From Alligators and Mole People” by Howard Dorre
• “Lafayette’s Farewell Tour and National Coherence – The Lafayette Trail” by Julien Icher
• “Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern: The Headquarters of the Revolution” by Andrew Cotten
• “The Fairbanks House of Dedham: The House, The Myth, The Legend” by Stuart Christie
• “First Amendment Origin Stories & James Madison Interview” by Jane Hampton Cook & Kyle Jenks
• “Historic Marblehead – A Walking Tour” by Judy Anderson
• “The Second Battle of Lexington & Concord: re-inventing the history of the opening engagements of the American Revolution” by Richard C. Wiggin
• “To Arms: How Adams, Revere, Mason, and Henry Helped to Unify their Respective Colonies” by Melissa Bryson

Plus, there are a hefty selection of other sessions about history farther afield, before and after.

Again, registration costs $94.95, and for another $30 folks can receive a box of goodies from History Camp sponsors and participating historical sites. Registrants can watch videos and participate in scheduled live online discussions on 10 July, and will have access to the entire video library for a year.

Monumental Events, Upcoming and Recorded

Here are links to four events, two upcoming and two already recorded, about how we preserve and commemorate American history in concrete forms.

Last November, historian Judy Anderson gave an online talk about “The History of Fort Sewall.” Marblehead built a fortification on a rocky point overlooking its harbor in 1644 and then rebuilt and strengthened the structure in several stages through the end of the eighteenth century.

Today the town uses the site as a public park. Anderson spoke about how changes at the fort reflected shifts in Marblehead and the broader Atlantic world.

That illustrated talk can now be viewed on YouTube.

On Wednesday, 7 April, the Paul Revere House and the Cyrus Dallin Art Museum in Arlington will host an online presentation about Cyrus Dallin, the sculptor who spent more than half a century working to see his statue of Paul Revere installed in the North End. In the meantime, Dallin created some other iconic sculptures, including the Angel Moroni on the Salt Lake Temple and the “Appeal to the Great Spirit” in front of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

“A 57-Year Ride: Cyrus Dallin’s Quest to Raise his Iconic Paul Revere Statue” will start at 6:30 P.M., and folks can register here.

On Thursday, 8 April, Revolutionary Spaces will host a panel discussion on the theme “A New Space for Our Ideals: Revolutionary-Era Buildings As Monuments.” The event description says:

Many Americans visit Revolutionary Era sites to connect to our national founding story and ideals. These places were not built as monuments, but previous generations turned them into just that: Iconic places that venerate the past to create a collective American identity. Yet the stories embedded in these sites are often of white founding fathers with ideas that continue to inspire us, and actions that fall well short of their rhetoric.

“A New Space for Our Ideals” asks us to reckon with the role these Revolutionary sites play as monuments in our society, and how we might view them as an invitation to a contemporary conversation about our national values.

The panelists for that discussion will be:

• Gary Sandling, Vice President of Visitor Programs and Services at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation
• Nathaniel Sheidley, CEO of Revolutionary Spaces
• Kyera Singleton, Executive Director of the Royall House & Slave Quarters
• Karin Wulf, Professor of History at William & Mary and Director of the Omohundro Institute
• moderator Cristela Guerra, arts and culture reporter for WBUR’s The ARTery

That online event will start at 5:30 P.M., and here’s the registration link.

Finally, for a more light-hearted look at the same themes, Revolutionary Spaces also offers an installment of its Tea Party Tonight! “history-themed comedy talk show” with Rob Crean on the theme of “Monuments and Historical Memory.” This episode features as guests the artist and activist Tory Bullock and the historian Jacqueline Beatty. It can be viewed here.

All these online events are free to the public, so donations to the Marblehead Museum, Paul Revere House, Cyrus Dallin Art Museum, and Revolutionary Spaces are welcome.

(The photograph above shows Cyrus Dallin’s statue “Memory” in Sherborn.)

“Leslie’s Retreat” Commemorations, 21 Feb.

On 21 Feb 1775, Dr. Benjamin Church secretly told Gen. Thomas Gage that “Twelve pieces of Brass Cannon mounted, are at Salem, & lodged near the North River, on the back of the Town.”

Gage was hunting for the brass cannon of the Boston militia train, which had disappeared from armories under redcoat watch the previous September. He therefore ordered Lt.-Col. Alexander Leslie to lead an expedition to Salem on Sunday, 26 February.

That mission got the name “Leslie’s Retreat,” which shows how well it went for Lt.-Col. Leslie. It’s an episode in many books, including my own The Road to Concord. I’m pleased with two contributions to the story:

• showing the event through the eyes of nine-year-old Samuel Gray.
• debunking the familial claim that John Pedrick was crucial to spreading the alarm; he was actually a Loyalist at the time.

In recent years, Salem has revived the celebration of Leslie’s Retreat, not as a period reenactment like some others but as a community event. Unfortunately, the pandemic makes all such events harder.

This year, the Leslie’s Retreat coalition has various ways to commemorate set up for Sunday, 21 February, all designed for safely distanced households.

2:30-2:45 P.M.
City-wide Bell Ringing
And general noise-making.

3:00-4:00 P.M.
Bridging the Divide: Civil Conflict, Violence, and Negotiation in 1775 & Today
An online conversation among historians Robert Allison, Peter Charles Hoffer, and Chenoh Sesay, Jr., moderated by Diana Dunlap. Register to listen here.

As People Choose
Traveling the Leslie’s Retreat Trail
There are two routes mapped, 3.0 and 5.3 miles long, which individuals and families can walk or run when the weather is amenable. One could even award oneself a badge.

As for Lt.-Col. Leslie, he was promoted to general in 1776 and saw action in many campaigns of the war, ending up as the last British commander of Charleston, South Carolina.

Online Architecture History Courses from Marblehead and Deerfield

This week I heard about two online courses on New England architecture being taught in the coming weeks.

For the Marblehead Museum, Judy Anderson will speak about “The Architectural History of Marblehead” and how the town’s buildings reflect its development over 350 years. Anderson has delivered versions of these talks at the museum and for the town, and now she’s going digital.

This course will take place over four Wednesdays, 10:00 to 11:30 A.M., with this schedule:

• 3 February: British settlement in 1629 and boom town through the 1760s
• 10 February: Georgian style developing across the 1700s until the economy crashed during the war
• 17 February: Post-Revolution “Federal” style, the 1830s recovery, and Abbot Hall cornerstone laid in 1876
• 24 February: Major fires in 1877 and 1888, the town as a resort, post-World War development

The sessions will explore topics like why Marblehead streets and houses look the way they do, the major defining elements of each architectural period and style, and how economic conditions and national events affected the town’s houses.

The cost for this course is $60, or $50 for Marblehead Museum members. Register at this webpage.

In March, Eric Gradoia, Historic Deerfield’s Director of Historic Preservation, will explore “The Vernacular Architecture of Early New England” for that museum.

These talks will trace the evolution of the dwelling house with respect to architectural trends, advances in technology, and social customs. Gradoia will focus on vernacular architecture: common buildings, purpose-built, that employ local building traditions and materials in their construction.

Each session will cover a distinct period from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Talks will cover typical house forms, building plans, construction practices, and architectural details unique to each period, along with discussions on such broader themes as architectural treatise and print material, the transition from craft-based building practices to machine-manufactured materials, and design movements and public tastes.

This course will also take place on Wednesdays, but from 6:00 to 8:00 P.M.:

• 3 March: First Period: English Tradition and the New World Dwelling
• 10 March: Georgian Architecture: New England Classicism and the Rural Residence
• 17 March: Federal Architecture: The Refined and Elegant House
• 24 March: Greek Revival and Picturesque Architecture: Building in the Age of Technology

Gradoia will present live via Zoom webinar, with a link sent to registrants prior to the event. Recordings will be available to registrants for up to 30 days after each session.

The cost for this Historic Deerfield course is $125, $110 for members, and $80 for students. Register online at this page.

Anderson on “The History of Fort Sewall,” 5 Nov.

On Thursday, 5 November, the Marblehead Museum will present an online talk by Judy Anderson on “The History of Fort Sewall.”

Marblehead built a fortification on a rocky point overlooking its harbor in 1644. The structure was substantially rebuilt in 1705 for Queen Anne’s War), in the mid-1740s for King George’s War, and at the end of the eighteenth century during the Quasi-War. From two large cannon its armament grew to a reported thirty guns in 1776.

In the early 1800s the site was named after Samuel Sewall (1757-1814) of Marblehead, who served as a justice on Massachusetts’s high court. Federal and state troops staffed Fort Sewall periodically until 1898, whenever America sensed a possible threat to its coasts.

Fort Sewall is now once again owned by Marblehead and functions as a public park, but some of its structures are over two centuries old. With the site’s 375th anniversary in view, the town undertook a program of research and renovation which included preserving masonry, increasing access, and commissioning new research into the site’s history by architect Rick Detwiller.

Anderson, a local historian who served as curator at the Jeremiah Lee Mansion, will speak about the historical context for the fort through the ages, tracing how Marblehead grew and changed and what was happening in the broader Atlantic world when people built and renovated the site.

This talk is scheduled to start at 7:00 P.M. on Thursday. The cost of accessing this talk is $15, or $10 for members of the Marblehead Museum. Here’s the link to register.

Upcoming Programs from the Marblehead Museum

The Marblehead Museum’s upcoming online events include two about the Revolutionary period.

Thursday, 17 September, 7:00 P.M.
A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes

Marblehead author Eric Jay Dolin discusses his new book, a history of the American hurricane, or, more specifically, the hurricanes that have hit what is today the United States. It follows the intriguing and at times rather nasty history of meteorology, with advances by gifted amateurs and skilled experts alike. It recounts the death, destruction, and despair caused by hurricanes as well as stories of charity, kindness, humor, and resilience. Finally, it considers how hurricanes have influenced the course of empire, the outcomes of war, and the fortunes of individuals.

Access to this event costs $15, or $12 for Marblehead Museum members. Register through this page.

Thursday, 1 October, 7:00 P.M.
Revolutionary Networks

Prof. Joseph Adelman explores the influence of printers on political ideology in the Revolutionary period. Adelman argues that printers—artisans who mingled with the elite but labored in a manual trade—used their connections to shape political thinking and mobilize the masses. Using a database of 756 artisans to peer into the print shops of colonial America, Adelman shows how those businesspeople balanced their political beliefs and interests against their commercial interests, the customs of the trade, and the prevailing mood of their communities. He details how printers developed networks that helped to create first a revolution and then a new nation.

Access to this event costs $15, or $12 for Marblehead Museum members. Register through this page.

“Assertions that Salem, Marblehead and Newbury had departed”

On 31 July 1770, Faneuil Hall hosted another meeting of “The Trade and Inhabitants of the Town of Boston.” The group of people invited to participate had widened again to include not just businessmen but all “Inhabitants.”

Per the report in the 13 August Boston Gazette, the spur for this meeting appears to have been “some very positive Assertions that Salem, Marblehead and Newbury had departed from the Non-Importation Agreement.”

In his copy of that newspaper, Harbottle Dorr wrote that those assertions came from the merchant John Amory (1728-1803, shown here courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts).

Amory and his brother Jonathan (1726-1797) had a mercantile house together. They hovered in the political middle—not taking strong stands, signing the non-importation agreement but not following it strictly, protesting against too much protest. Eventually John would be a Loyalist exile while Jonathan remained in America.

At this juncture, it appears, John Amory was telling his colleagues in the Boston business community that other ports in the province would soon be bringing in goods, so they might as well drop their boycott.

The meeting responded by appointing a committee of William Molineux, William Phillips, William Cooper, William Greenleaf, and, for diversity, Ebenezer Storer ”to repair forthwith to the Towns above said and Haverhill” and find out what was going on.

In addition, the Body named a larger group of top Whig politicians—John Hancock, Phillips, Samuel Adams, Molineux, Greenleaf, Dr. Joseph Warren, Dr. Thomas Young, John Adams, Josiah Quincy, Richard Dana, Henderson Inches, Thomas Cushing, and Jonathan Mason—“to consider what may be proper to be done toward strengthening a Union of the Colonies.”

On 7 August, the Molineux committee returned from Essex County and “reported that the Conduct of our Brethren in said Towns was honorable and sincere.” The Boston meeting that day “VOTED UNANIMOUSLY” to express their “utmost satisfaction” and “sincere Respect” for their colleagues to the north.

That gathering then appointed a similar committee—Molineux, Cooper, William Whitwell, Thomas Boylston, and Mason—to take the same message to “Providence and New Port in Rhode Island.”

Only after that 7 August meeting—two weeks after the initial 31 July response to Amory—did Edes and Gill report on these proceedings. The Boston Whigs had evidently been sitting on the story until they had good news to announce. It wouldn’t have helped the non-importation movement for other port to read any hint that some Massachusetts towns were dropping out.

TOMORROW: What really happened in Salem?

Michael Angelo Warwell, Bit Player in the Boston Massacre

In 1741, in the English market town of Totnes, a baby was baptized with the name Michael Angelo Warwell.

The reason for such a baroque name was that the boy’s parents, John and Maria Warwell, were artists. According to the Rev. Samuel Reynolds, writing in 1740, John Warwell was “a painter and a player.” He was the first professional visual artist to confirm the “very great genius for drawing” of the minister’s son Joshua.

Warwell wasn’t a portraitist, as Sir Joshua Reynolds would be. Instead, he specialized in decorative painting, particularly as architectural accent. In the 1750s he did some sort of work for the the shellwork grotto at Goldney Hall, shown above.

Michael Angelo Warwell followed his father’s other career path, into the theater. Sometime before 1765, he sailed for North America. We know this because his parents followed, putting an advertisement in the 19-31 Oct 1765 South Carolina Gazette:

THIS IS TO INFORM Mr. MICHAEL ANGELO WARWELL…that his father and mother are arrived in the Planters Adventure, Miles Lowley, commander, at Charles-Town, South Carolina, with intent to settle there…

The Warwells set up a household in Charleston near Gov. Thomas Boone’s. John advertised that he painted “HISTORY PIECES: HERALDRY: ALTAR PIECES: COACHES, LANDSCAPES: WINDOW BLINDS, SEA PIECES: CHIMNEY BLINDS, FLOWERS: SKREENS, FRUIT: GILDING.” He also offered to mend and clean pictures, paint rooms, and construct “Deceptive Temples, Triumphal Arches, Obelisks, Statues, &c. for Groves or Gardens.”

On 9 June 1767, the South Carolina Gazette reported that “Mr. Warwell, Sr., a noted limner,” had died. The “Sr.” indicated that the younger Mr. Warwell, still only in his mid-twenties, had made a name for himself locally.

On 11 August, Maria Warwell announced that she was planning to leave South Carolina and wanted to settle her debts. She added:

And while she waits for a passage, she will be much obliged to those who will employ her, in mending in the neatest and most durable manner, all sorts of useful and ornamental china, viz. beakers, tureens, jars, vases, and busts; statues, either in china, glass, plaster, bronze, or marble; should a piece be wanting, she will substitute a composition in its room, and copy the pattern as nigh as possible.

By April 1768, the Warwells’ Charleston house had become the new Customs House. That agency might have been expanding as it collected new revenue through the Townshend duties. I have no idea whether the Warwell family owned the house and thus dealt with the Customs service themselves, but that link seems notable in light of Michael Angelo Warwell’s future friendship with a Customs officer.

The younger Warwell became part of David Douglass’s American Company, a set of theatrical entertainers who came together to perform plays and also offered concerts solo or in small groups. The company was in New York in July 1769.

Warwell collaborated with an actor named Hudgson and a tavern owner named Burns to deliver, “By Permission of his Excellency the GOVERNOR,…an Attic Evenings ENTERTAINMENT.” The two performers read extracts of poetry and plays and sang songs. Admission cost five shillings. According to advertisements in the New-York Gazette and New-York Journal, Warwell’s repertoire included “Bright Author of my present Flame,” “A Song in the Anacreonick Taste,” “A Song set by Dr. Henry Purcel,” “A Martial Song, in Character,” and “a Two Part Song by Mr. Warwell and Mr. Hudgson.”

Warwell then headed north. New England wasn’t a fertile field for theater. In fact, in Boston it was illegal. But that meant there was an upper-class set curious about theater-adjacent entertainment. Performers like Warwell could offer “lectures” and “concerts” that gave people just a taste of the London stage.

On 5 Jan 1770, the New-Hampshire Gazette ran this item, sent from Marblehead on New Year’s Day:

Mr. Hall, by giving the following a Place in your useful Paper, you will oblige one of your Readers.

GENEROSITY and COMPASSION united.

ON Monday the 18th Instant, in the Evening, Mr. M. A. Warwell, Gent. read (at the Assembly Room in this Town) the Beggar’s Opera, to a Number of Gentlemen and Ladies, and to universal satisfaction. His Tickets amounting to £.7-6-9 lawful Money, the whole of which he generously gave as a Charity to the poor and distressed Widows & Orphans of this Place, who are real Objects of Pity and Commiseration.—May the above Example excite others, in their several Capacities, to go and do likewise.

The next month, Warwell was in Plymouth, sitting in on the 7 February meeting of the Old Colony Club. The record of the next day’s meeting says:

This evening was read at the Hall the “Provoked Husband,” a comedy, by Mr. M. A. Warwel, to a company of about forty gentlemen and ladies, by invitation of the Club.

Warwell sat in on two more club meetings that month.

But on 5 March, he was in Boston. And that’s how Warwell got involved in the legal maneuverings around the Boston Massacre.

(I haven’t found any trace of Michael Angelo Warwell after March 1770. However, in the spring of 1771 a Thomas Warwell read The Provoked Husband and sang songs on the Caribbean island of St. Croix—maybe that was a brother.)

COMING UP: Warwell’s memorable fifth of March.

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.

Looking at “Leslie’s Retreat”

Today Salem commemorates “Leslie’s Retreat” on 26 Feb 1775, so I’m highlighting Donna Seger’s Streets of Salem posting about that event. She explores three points, to which I’ll add my thoughts.

“How many damn cannon(s) were there in Salem?”

Seger concludes that the most reliable number comes from Samuel Gray, as I quoted it here. Now I adore this account for preserving the forthright experience of a nine-year-old boy, but I don’t trust all the details. Young Samuel may not have been told accurate information, and he may not have remembered it exactly decades later.

I think the best source for the number of cannon involved in the incident at Salem is a small green notebook deposited at the Massachusetts Historical Society. David Mason used that notebook as he was gathering cannon for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. Mason arranged for blacksmith Robert Foster to build carriages for the cannon tubes he collected from town fortifications, the Derby family, and other sources.

On one page of the notebook Mason totaled his own charges for the congress, including for “paint’g 17 Carridges Limbers &c.” On another page he wrote, “fosters acct. 17 field Pieces” [though that figure could also be read as 19]. So I think the most likely number of cannon in Foster’s smithy on the morning of 26 Feb 1775 was seventeen.

But the cannon Mason had collected in north Salem were only one part of what the Provincial Congress amassed in late 1774 and early 1775. That rebel government had artillery pieces in Worcester, Concord, and perhaps other towns. What’s more, some towns acquired cannon of their own. I wrote a whole book about Massachusetts’s effort to arm itself for war, and I still can’t say exactly how many damn cannon there were.

“Major Pedrick was a Tory!”

Quite definitely. According to many Salem historians, John Pedrick fooled Lt. Col. Alexander Leslie into letting him carry a warning about the redcoats marching in from Marblehead. But all contemporaneous sources show Pedrick favored the Crown.

Pedrick’s daughter Mehitable told stories about her family’s brave feats in the Revolution. Even some of her descendants didn’t believe those tales, but her daughter Elizabeth did, and she spread them to local historians. I discussed those family legends in the last chapter of The Road to Concord.

“‘Anniversary History’ was alive and well in 1775.”

Seger notes how newspaper reports of Leslie’s expedition appeared in New England newspapers alongside remarks about the anniversary of the Boston Massacre. With redcoats marching on the streets of Boston and Marshfield, and popping up on a Sunday in Marblehead and Salem, the threat of another confrontation ending in death was very real.

A year later, the date of the Massacre determined when the Continental Army moved soldiers and cannon onto Dorchester Heights. In the cannonade that provided cover for that operation, just a year and a few days after “Leslie’s Retreat,” David Mason was wounded by a bursting mortar.

“Popes and bonfires, this evening at Salem”

On 5 Nov 1768, 250 years ago today, Boston’s apprentice printers issued this broadside, one of the most elaborate surviving artifacts of the holiday they called Pope Night.

The top of their broadside says, “South End Forever. North End Forever.” Under bibliographic rules, that’s become the title of the sheet, even though its creators probably thought their publication was “Extraordinary Verses on Pope-Night.”

Someone worked hard on the long poem that followed—so hard they didn’t remember that the 5th of November commemorated an event in 1605, not 1588.

That broadside highlights how in the mid-1700s Boston observed the 5th of November differently from every other New England seaport. Only in Boston was the youth population large enough, and the neighborhood pride fervent enough, for there to be rival Pope processions that ended up brawling. Other seaports had one main procession followed by a feast and a bonfire, with no intervening violence.

In the 1760s Boston’s town leaders worked hard to reconcile the South End and North End gangs against the common enemy of royal officials and Parliament’s new revenue-raising laws. That’s how he get this broadside celebrating both ends of town equally.

Here’s Donna Seger’s discussion of the 5th of November in Salem from her Streets of Salem blog last year:

…it is to our second President [John Adams] that we owe the first reference to Pope Night in Salem, long before he became our second President. When he was attending court in Salem he made the following note in his diary for November 5, 1766:

Spent the evening at Mr. Pynchon’s [on Summer Street–a house that is still with us but much changed], with Farnham, [Jonathan] Sewall, Sargeant, Col. Saltonstall &ct. very agreeably. Punch, wine, bread and cheese, apples, pipes and tobacco. Popes and bonfires, this evening at Salem, and a swarm of tumultuous people attending.

Pope Night certainly continued on after the Revolution: I can find references up to 1819 in the Reverend William Bentley’s famous diary. His entry for the 5th of November, 179[5] reads:

Not all the revolutions which have passed over our Country can efface the remembrance of this anniversary. The boys must have their bonfire. But the light of it is going out. We have little concern in powder plots of Kings at this day. . . .

Every other year or so the Reverend makes a Pope Night entry, all of which express his increasing irritation, until his final words on the matter in 1819:

We have had this evening the full proof of the obstinate power of superstition & habit. The 5 of Nov. was celebrated by the ritual & rubric of the English Church for political purposes. The history of the plot against all fact most pertinaciously insisted upon [as real], & the popular celebration, by the carrying about the Pope & the Devil, most zealously encouraged. Tho we have lost all connection with Great Britain & have detected the fraud & the purpose, yet our common people still keep the 5 of Nov. and we had a roaring fire on the Neck on this occasion. We had not the old fashion transportation through the streets, nor the riots & quarrels, but we had enough to shew us that old habits are invincible against all the light which can be offered them.

And after 1820 or so, no other Salem references, save Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Old Times” where Pope Night is something distinctly past.

The “holiday” seems to survive over the nineteenth century in a few other places, namely Marblehead, Newburyport, and Portsmouth, where it became known as Pork Night. I think the boys of Salem transferred all of their mischief and mayhem and bonfire-building energies to two other more American holidays: Halloween and the Fourth of July.

At the start of the twentieth century, Halloween had inherited the Pope Night traditions of bonfires and young people going door to door asking for treats. By the end of the 1900s only the trick-or-treating was left in most of America. These days that tradition seems to vary greatly by neighborhood.

Mixed Reactions to the Massachusetts Convention

The Boston Whigs weren’t surprised there was pushback against their Convention from Massachusetts towns where friends of the royal government dominated local politics—such as Hatfield, as I quoted yesterday.

But they may have hoped for a positive response from Marblehead and Salem, two of the largest towns in the province with a mercantile communities also hit by the Townshend Act and stricter Customs enforcement. Instead, both those towns were in political turmoil, so they didn’t make a clear response.

Salem’s representatives to the Massachusetts General Court in the spring of 1768, William Brown and Peter Frye, had both voted to rescind the body’s Circular Letter. Neither would be reelected. The new representatives for May 1769 were strong Whigs Richard Derby, Jr., and John Pickering. But the Convention came in the midst of that shift.

Likewise, of Marblehead’s representatives, Jacob Fowle had voted to rescind and William Bourne had sat out that vote; neither would be reelected. Richard Brown found that Marblehead didn’t even meet to consider Boston’s invitation. George A. Billias suggested that the loss of several fishing vessels that summer gave the town bigger things to worry about.

Another notable result came from Northampton, to the west. That town regularly sent Joseph Hawley, a respected lawyer and strong Whig, to the General Court. But its citizens voted overwhelmingly—66 or 65 to 1—not to send Hawley or anyone else to the Convention. At the same time, little Montague, which often sat out the regular legislature, sent Moses Gunn to the Convention.

Cambridge was a politically active town, and so close to Boston that it wouldn’t have been much expense to send a delegate. But it also had a relatively large and very wealthy Anglican community, and those citizens kept the town from responding quickly.

The citizens of Cambridge didn’t meet about Boston’s invitation until 26 September, four days after the Convention had started. Katie Turner Getty kindly shared her notes on that meeting, which show that attendees chose Samuel Whittemore, a septuagenarian militia captain from the western part of town, as moderator. But the meeting’s only recorded action was to adjourn “to Tuesday next at three of the clock in the afternoon.”

That would seem to put the next session of the meeting in early October, but that same Monday the Boston Gazette reported:

The Torries [sic] in Cambridge have had the Address, with the Aid of a veering Whig, to get the Town Meeting adjourned to Thursday next.

That would be Thursday the 29th, which is indeed when the men of Cambridge came together again. By then the Convention was nearly over, but Lucius Paige’s town history said the meeting considered

whether it be the mind of the inhabitants of this town to proceed on the article in the Warrant, relating to the choosing a person to join with the committees of Convention of the other towns in this Province, now sitting in Boston, and it passed in the afiirmative.

The town voted to send two delegates to the Convention—more than it had sent to the last General Court. The local Whigs may have been trying to make up for lost time.

Cambridge’s first choice was Andrew Bordman, who had represented the town in that last legislature. He “declined the service.” The town asked Deacon Samuel Whittemore (1721-1784), son of the meeting moderator. He also declined. The town then asked Capt. Whittemore, who said yes. Finally the town chose Thomas Gardner as the second delegate, and he agreed as well.

But neither Whittemore nor Gardner arrived in time to be listed among the Convention attendees by Robert Treat Paine. Both remained politically active, with Gardner taking over for Bordman in the General Court. Whittemore is famous for being wounded during the Battle of Lexington and Concord; Gardner died of wounds suffered at Bunker Hill.

Getty and I are both curious about the identity of the “veering Whig” who delayed Cambridge’s response. Was it Bordman, who had been one of the “Glorious 92” but didn’t want to attend the unofficial Convention? Was it old Samuel Danforth, a Council member who lived in Cambridge and was voting with Gov. Francis Bernard on a couple of issues that week? (Another Council member from Cambridge, William Brattle, voted firmly against Bernard and therefore hadn’t started “veering” yet.) Whittemore as moderator might have had the influence to adjourn the meeting, but he probably wouldn’t have been chosen as delegate after that. Absent a more revealing local source, we’ll never know.

(Read Katie Getty’s Journal of the American Revolution article about Samuel Whittemore here.)