“Likewise This Day Published”

As I reported yesterday, in February 1769 the printer Ezekiel Russell advertised the publication of Pvt. William Clarke’s play The Miser in the Boston Gazette and Boston Post-Boy.

On 6 March Russell had the Edes and Gill shop expand that ad to promote another pamphlet as well. I was amused by the juxtaposition of the two titles. The second part of the expanded notice read:

LIKEWISE THIS DAY PUBLISHED,
(Price Eight Pence,)
And Sold at the above Place,
ANOTHER High Road to Hell,—An ESSAY on the pernicious Nature and destructive Effects of the modern Entertainments from the PULPIT.—Occasioned by a Pamphlet, entitled, The Stage the High Road to Hell, &c.——Said to be wrote by the learned Mr. PIKE, one of the Author of the Twenty Six Cases of Conscience, and an eminient Sandemanian Speaker in LONDON. 


The Russell print shop was thus simultaneously marketing both a theatrical comedy and a pamphlet built on a denunciation of the theater as the quickest path to damnation.

You might think that Boston’s orthodox Congregationalists would have been in accord with English authors denouncing plays and “modern Entertainments from the PULPIT” since they also disliked theater and high-church Anglicanism. They certainly wouldn’t have favored Henry Flitcroft’s response to the first pamphlet, titled Theatrical Entertainments Consistent with Society, Morality, and Religion.

But the Russell shop presented The Stage the High Road to Hell as the work of the Rev. Samuel Pike, a convert to Sandemanianism. (I don’t see any bibliographers echoing that credit, so I don’t know how reliable it is.) Likewise, Another High Road to Hell is thought to have been written by another Sandemanian: John Chater, one of the first edition’s publisher who was also a former minister.

The Sandemanian sect was a recent arrival in New England. They weren’t yet seen as allies of the royal government, but the descendants of early Puritan settlers were nonetheless suspicious of their ideas. Another High Road to Hell is thus another example of the Russell print shop printing something unusual—and they advertised it in the radical Whigs’ favored newspaper.

The Launch of the Boston Chronicle

This is the Sestercentennial, or 250th anniversary, of the first issue of the Boston Chronicle.

For a decade Boston had been a four-newspaper town. The oldest weekly was Richard Draper’s Boston News-Letter, founded in 1704 and almost always allied with the royal establishment. It appeared on Thursdays.

On Mondays three other papers came out: Edes and Gill’s radical Boston Gazette and the more middle-of-the-road Boston Evening-Post from the Fleet brothers and Boston Post-Boy from Green and Russell.

The Boston Chronicle joined the crowd on Mondays. It offered people a nicer reading experience with handsome typography and a little more white space on its pages. Starting in early 1769 the paper really shook things up by coming out on both Mondays and Thursdays.

The men behind the Chronicle were John Mein and John Fleeming. Unlike the printers of Boston’s other newspapers, they weren’t from old New England families. They had both moved into the colony from Scotland in 1764. Furthermore, they were both adherents of the Sandemanian or Glasite sect, which New England Congregationalists viewed with suspicion.

Mein was a bookseller while Fleeming was a printer. Together they published pamphlets, almanacs, and other items as well as the newspaper. Mein’s London Bookshop also functioned as a lending library; for “One Pound, Eight Shillings, lawful Money, per Year,” patrons could borrow any volume from his list of 1,200 titles. And by any volume, that meant one volume at a time.

Perhaps because of their closer ties to Britain, perhaps because of their church’s teaching to obey political authorities, perhaps because of political ideology, Mein and Fleeming’s Chronicle supported the Crown more strongly than any other Boston newspaper, even the News-Letter. The very first issue included an essay from London that harshly criticized William Pitt, a darling of American Whigs.

For a while the Boston Chronicle looked like a good business proposition. The Customs house and friends of the royal government supported the paper during the debates over non-importation and the Townshend duties. That support, in the form of printing contracts and advertisements, was probably what allowed the newspaper to start coming out twice a week.

In turn, Mein wrote and Fleeming printed slashing attacks on the Boston Whigs. Eventually Mein lost that fight (physically and fiscally) and had to retreat to Britain. Fleeming closed the newspaper on 25 June 1770 but stayed in town until the evacuation of 1776. Though the Boston Chronicle lasted only two and a half years, in that time it was a crucial voice in Massachusetts’s political debate.

(Front page of the 21 Mar 1768 Boston Chronicle above courtesy of Todd Andrlik’s Reporting the Revolutionary War website.)

A Schoolmaster During the Siege

I’ve shared reminiscences from Benjamin Russell and Harrison Gray Otis of how their Boston public schools closed in April 1775 with the outbreak of war (and how their stories got intertwined). That was the end of town-sponsored education in Boston until after the British military left the next March. Families probably kept up lessons for little kids, teaching them to read—which had always been a private responsibility. But I didn’t think anyone was teaching the handwriting, business math, or Latin and Greek of the public schools.

Then I found a mention of Elias Dupee in Zechariah Whitman’s 1842 history of the Ancient & Honorable Artillery Company. That eventually led me to this sentence in Caleb Snow’s 1828 History of Boston:

During the siege, the town schools were suspended: a few children attended the instructions of Mr. Elias Dupee, who remained in Boston, and gratuitously devoted himself to his employment of a teacher, in which he took peculiar delight.

A number of other books repeat that statement, sometimes in different words but without additional details. Oliver A. Roberts’s later history of the Ancients & Honorables says that Dupee was a Freemason and held several town offices, including tax collector and constable. From 1764 to 1769 he regularly advertised in Boston newspapers that he was selling goods in a “New Auction-Room,” which moved around a bit; in February 1769 he was “over Mr. John Dupee, Mathematical Instrument Maker’s Shop.”

Poking around for more information about Dupee’s pedagogical career, I found that on 9 Apr 1776 private-school teacher John Leach wrote from Boston to one of the public-school masters, John Tileston, then staying at Windham, Connecticut:

The Selectmen have been so busy that I have not had opportunity to see them in a Body. The people are flocking into Town very fast, and there are great Numbers already Come in. I see Mr. Webb, and Mr. Holmes, and Mr. Parker, and several of our Friends, and they are all of opinion that you had better return to your school as soon as you can. . . . Martin [Master? Samuel] Hunt is in Town, and Dupee still continues at your Schoole

So during the siege Dupee used the North Writing School, owned by the town. The selectmen voted to reopen the public schools on 5 June. Tileston was back by then, and the records don’t mention Dupee.

At some point Dupee set up his own school in the Sandemanian meeting-house off Middle Street (now Hanover) in the North End. The Sandemanians were a Christian sect out of Scotland that had won over some locals in the decade before the Revolution. Many left with the British troops. On 5 Oct 1785, selectmen Moses Grant and John Andrews became “a Committee to treat with Mr. [Isaac] Winslow respecting a Schoolhouse lately improved by Mr. [Elias] Dupe known by the Name of Sandemons Meeting house.”

Within a month, the selectmen and Winslow on behalf of the Sandemanians agreed to a rent of £20 per year, minus what “three indifferent Persons” judged to be the fair cost of the town’s repairs “to the Wood House & Necessarys.” That suggests Dupee may not have been teaching in that building very recently; he was the latest user, but perhaps not a recent one.

That building became known as the Middle Street Writing School and was assigned to Master Samuel Cheney. Tileston was still at the North Writing School, so it looks like the North End’s youth population was growing enough to require two schools in that part of town. In 1789 Boston undertook a big education reform, and the next year the town gave up the lease and built new schools for itself. Elias Dupee never became one of Boston’s public schoolmasters.

The 27 Dec 1800 Constitutional Telegraphe of Boston reported at the top of its list of deaths: “Suddenly, on Wednesday last at Dedham Mr. Elias Dupee, formerly a Schoolmaster in this town, Aged 74.” Dedham town records say he died “of old Age” at the house of Daniel Baldwin, where he was boarding, and was aged 76. Some sources say Dupee had been born in 1716, and was thus 84.

TOMORROW: The Constitutional Telegraphe?!

[The thumbnail above shows the historical marker for the site of teacher John Tileston’s house in the North End, courtesy of Leo Reynolds’s Flickr stream under a Creative Commons license.]

A Dispute within the Artillery Company in 1768

Here’s an anecdote from Zachariah Whitman’s 1842 History of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company. As I’ve described before, that organization wasn’t a part of the provincial militia but a private organization men joined to improve their military skills and show they had what it took to be officers. According to Whitman:

In 1768, several regiments of British troops were in Boston. On a field day, under command of Capt. [William] Heath, then Lieutenant [Footnote: It was customary before the Revolution, and so continued until recently, to give the Lieutenant the privilege of command one field day during the year.], it appearing probable that the Ar. Co. would not leave the Common until after the roll-call of the troops, their commanding officer sent orders that he must retire without beat of drum, and that there must be no firing at the deposit of their standard.

The Company opposed a compliance; but Lieut. Heath, conceiving it his duty to comply with the orders of a superior officer in his Majesty’s service, marched to Faneuil Hall in silence, and without firing.

This appeared to some of the members an infringement of their privileges. One Hopestill Capen, then Orderly, resented it so highly, that he went to the top of his house, and fired his musket three times, and even many years after would not vote for Gen. Heath.

Remarkably, while Heath served in the American army from the very first day of the Revolutionary War to the very last, Capen, who had resented the orders of an army officer, became a Loyalist. He had joined the Sandemanian sect, convinced of his religious duty to obey the king. Despite the general Sandemanian teaching of pacifism, during the siege Capen joined Boston’s Association, a Loyalist militia.

The photo above, from the Boston Public Library’s Flickr collection, shows Capen’s house and rooftop as they appeared in 1930.

“Kissed Him, Before All the Company in the Room”

After last week’s postings on Boston’s Sandemanian congregation and the theological debate they inspired, a longtime Boston 1775 reader asked me, “So there was all this fuss over kissing?”

It wasn’t just the kissing, I tried to explain. The Sandemanians irked the descendants of Puritans by challenging their claim to worship properly according to the Bible. The congregation’s political loyalty to the Crown made them suspect in another way. The kissing was just the issue that people chose to argue over.

Then I happened across this passage from John Adams’s diary. On this date, 6 June 1771, he was at Stafford Springs, Connecticut, drinking some of the mineral water there for his health. Adams kept bumping into people he knew from Boston and his travels on the legal circuit:

In the afternoon [Sandemanian merchant] Colburn Barrell and his Wife and Daughter came, and took Lodgings at our House. Drank Tea and spent the Evening with them. When the Dr. [William McKinstry of Taunton] took his Hat to go out to a Neighbours to lodge, Colburn sprung out of his Chair and went up to the Dr., took him by the Hand And kissed him, before all the Company in the Room. This is Sandemanianism.

So, yeah, I guess it was about the kissing.

Shippie Townsend, Author

In the spring of 1768, a pamphlet was published in Boston with the title A Modest Account concerning the Salutations and Kissings in ancient Times: In a Letter to a Friend, Requesting the same: Wherein Mr. Sandeman’s Attempt, to revive the holy and charitable kiss, and the Love Feasts, is considered. The title page gave the name of the author as “Constant Rockman, M.A.”

In fact, that essay had been written by the Rev. Samuel Mather of the North Bennet Street meeting-house (shown here, courtesy of Reformation Art). On 17 May, he sent the pamphlet to Thomas Hollis, a British philosopher and Harvard benefactor, with a cover letter that said:

I beg leave now to put into your Hands...a Letter obtained from me thro’ Importunity from Dr. [Charles] Chauncey, my Friend and Neighbour, and some others: which I have publish’d under a fictitious Name, lest some Offence might be given by my writing on such a Subject; tho’, I think, there is not any Thing justly exceptionable in it.

Mather had chosen the pseudonym “Rockman” as a contrast to the leader of the sect he was opposing, Scottish preacher Robert Sandeman. As I described yesterday, Sandeman had established a small church in Boston following his father-in-law’s unusual view of Christianity, and then moved on to Danbury, Connecticut.

On 25 July, the Boston Gazette carried the first advertisement for a response:

THIS DAY PUBLISHED,
And to be Sold by NICHOLAS BOWES, opposite the Old
Brick Meeting-House in Cornhill.
[Price 6d.]
An INQUIRY
Whether the Scriptures enjoin the Kiss of Charity, as
the Duty of the Disciples of Christ, in their Church
Fellowship in all Ages.——Or, only allowed it to the
First Disciples, in Consequence of the Customs that
then prevailed.
Occasioned by a LETTER lately Published by CON-
STANT ROCKMAN, M.A.
Intitled “a Modest Account concerning the Salutati-
ons and Kissings in ancient Times,” &c.
Containing some Remarks thereupon.

Bowes added helpfully that customers could also buy the “Rockman” letter at his shop. Which was, incidentally, right across the street from where the Rev. Dr. Chauncy preached. It was a small town. (I haven’t even mentioned that young Henry Knox was working as an apprentice at Bowes’s shop.)

The Inquiry essay was written by Shippie Townsend, a leading member of the Sandemanian meeting. He was a successful blockmaker—the period equivalent, perhaps, of the owner-manager of a tool and die shop. He hadn’t been to Latin School or college, and he was taking on the latest in Boston’s most learned line of ministers, the Mathers. So Townsend started his “letter” this way:

Apprehending something in Mr. Rockman’s Letter, about which we were lately conversing, contrary to what the Apostle glories in, in 2 Corinth. iv. 2. And fearing lest some who are exercised about the will of God in this matter, may receive a wrong bias, from the slight and craftiness wherewith the scripture texts seem to be mentioned.

Having no acquaintance with Hebrew or Greek, and scarce any with the ancient Fathers, and no common place-books, I set down, having only the Bible before me, to see if by a plain literal reading the divine will, may not been seen with controversy.

In other words, Townsend presented his lack of higher learning a virtue. He might not know about ancient languages (or complete sentences), but he could read the plain words of the Bible.

The next year, a committee from the Old South Meeting-House visited Townsend and another lapsed congregant, Col. Richard Gridley, and asked them to return to that fold. Both men convinced their visitors that their new theological views were sincere and firm, as described back here.

In fact, Townsend had discovered that he liked writing about religious questions. Four years later, in 1773, he published another tract titled An Attempt to Illustrate the Great Subject of the Psalms. This time he didn’t need an earlier essay to prompt him; he just had some theological ideas to share. The war interrupted Townsend’s publishing career, but he would resume it in the 1780s.

TOMORROW: Townsend and Gridley end up in the same faith again.

People Who Prayed in Glas Houses

In 1728, a Presbyterian minister named John Glas was asked to leave his pulpit in Tealing, Scotland, because he had published some unorthodox religious views. He then started a small Christian sect that lasted for about a century. In Scotland his adherents were called “Glasites.” In North America they became known as Sandemanians after Robert Sandeman, Glas’s son-in-law and chief disciple.

In late 1764 Sandeman arrived in Boston, come to convert people to “a return to the religious practices of the primitive Christians,” in the words of Jean F. Hankins’s article on the movement in the New England Quarterly for 1987. The Religious Creeds and Statistics of Every Christian Denomination in the United States and British Provinces, published by John Hayward in 1836, described what set the Sandemanians apart from other Protestant congregations:

They differ from other Christians in their weekly administration of the Lord’s Supper; their love-feasts, of which every member is not only allowed, but required to partake, and which consist of their dining together at each other’s houses in the interval between the morning and afternoon service; their kiss of charity used on this occasion, at the admission of a new member, and at other times when they deem it necessary and proper; their weekly collection before the Lord’s Supper, for the support of the poor, and defraying other expenses; mutual exhortation; abstinence from blood and things strangled; washing each other’s feet, when, as a deed of mercy, it might be an expression of love; the precept concerning which, as well as other precepts, they understand literally; community of goods, so far as that every one is to consider all that he has in his possession and power liable to the calls of the poor and the church; and the unlawfulness of laying up treasures upon earth, by setting them apart for any distant, future, or uncertain use.

They allow of public and private diversions, so far as they are not connected with circumstances really sinful; but apprehending a lot to be sacred, disapprove of lotteries, playing at cards, dice, &c.

Sandeman started to hold religious services in 1765, first at blacksmith Edward Foster’s house, later in the long room of the Green Dragon Tavern and the North Latin School. He eventually moved on to Danbury, Connecticut, where he died in 1771.

By then there were regular Sandemanian meetings not only in Boston and Danbury, but also in Providence, Rhode Island, which worried the Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles. Like other Congregationalist ministers, he distrusted any form of worship that didn’t fit into his established hierarchy.

To be sure, there were significant religious differences between mainstream New England Calvinism and the Sandemanian creed. Though Glas and his followers rejected good deeds as a way to salvation, they didn’t emphasize repentance from sins like Puritans and their revivalists. Sandemanian worship services seemed strange, with all that foot-washing and kissing. And though they praised charity and brotherhood, eighteenth-century Congregationalists liked the idea of private wealth; the new sect’s emphasis on communal meals, weekly collections for the poor, and a theoretical abjuration of individual property seemed to be taking Christianity too far.

There were other, non-religious reasons that most New Englanders distrusted the Sandemanians. In the 1760s folks were suspicious about anything from Scotland. And Glas’s belief that true Christians shouldn’t get involved in politics came out as support for the established government—i.e., the Crown.

Thus, in the late 1760s the Boston Sandemanians gained a reputation as friends of the royal government. By then the group included some notable men, most drawn away from Congregationalist meetings:

• Walter Barrell, Inspector-General of the Customs
• merchants Isaac Winslow and Colburn Barrell
• Hopestill Capen, who was Benjamin Thompson’s employer and Isaiah Thomas’s landlord

The royal government’s favored printer, John Mein, was also linked to Sandeman, though not apparently a member of the church.

Among the most visible Sandemanians in Boston was Shippie Townsend, who had withdrawn from the Old South congregation by 1769, as discussed yesterday. Townsend even hosted Sandemanian services in his house in the North End for a while before the group bought property for their own church. And when a Congregationalist minister published a pamphlet meant to refute Sandeman’s preaching, Townsend took up his pen.

TOMORROW: A blockmaker becomes an author.

No, No, We Meant that Other Sect Is Contemptible!

People outside New England noticed the Boston Gazette’s criticism of “two or three weak and imbittered Persons, of the most insignificant and contemptible of all Sects,” for opening their shops on the Patriots’ Thanksgiving in December 1774. And some of those people didn’t realize, as the Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles did, that the sect at issue was the Sandemanians rather than the Quakers.

Memories of Massachusetts’s seventeenth-century persecution of Quakers were still vivid enough to cause problems for the Massachusetts delegates to the Continental Congress. Furthermore, unlike the small and weak Sandemanians, Quakers had political power and wealth in the Middle Colonies. Therefore, the Patriots moved to correct the misunderstanding.

On 18 Feb 1775, the Pennsylvania Ledger in Philadelphia carried a “Letter from a Gentleman in Boston, to his Friend in this city, dated Feb. 1, 1775”:

The day appointed by the provincial congress for a public thanksgiving, a number of persons, in this town, showed their disapprobation thereto, by opening their shops as usual, for which they were treated in an uncivil manner, and those persons were said to be Quakers.

I therefore think it my duty, as an honest, impartial, and most unbiassed member of this community, and one who wished nothing more ardently that that a true, fair, and candid representation of facts might appear, to assure thee, and I can of my own certain knowledge assure thee, that it is a most malicious and injurious falsehood, and no doubt, propagated by the base enemies of our invaluable constitutional rights and privileges, for the most vile and malevolent purposes—for I do well know, that the Friends in this town, did not open their shops on said Thanksgiving day; nor have I heard the least unfriendly or uncivil expression uttered by any of the inhabitants of this town against them, as a people, for many year; but, on the contrary, I do most certainly know, that they are always, and on all occasions, treated with full as much (and I think more) catholic tenderness, friendly and neighbourly kindess and affection, than persons of any other sect of denomination amongst us.

I especially like how the writer dropped the Quaker “thee” into his prose.

This letter acknowledged what the earlier report in the Boston Gazette had not: that “uncivil” criticism of the shopkeepers had come from locals as well as passing British soldiers. Furthermore, while describing Bostonians’ kindness toward the Quakers—who had political power in the Middle Colonies—the writer glossed over the community’s hostility toward the Sandemanians.

One day before the date of that letter, Samuel Adams wrote on the same topic to Stephen Collins, a Quaker merchant he had met in Philadelphia, with some more detail:

It is also a Misrepresentation that the sect taken notice of for opening their Shops on our late Thanksgiving Day, was that of the People called Quaquers. They were the Disciples of the late Mr. [Robert] Sanderman, who worship God here without the least Molestation according to their own manner, and are in no other Light disregarded here but as it is said they are in general avowed Friends of the Ministerial Measures.

This is what I am told, for my own part I know but little or nothing about them. The Different denominations of Christians here (excepting those amongst them who Espouse the cause of our Enemies) are in perfect peace and Harmony, as I trust they always will be.

Adams was being disingenuous here, in several ways. First, he and his colleagues bitterly opposed Catholicism, as did most of the British Empire; the Massachusetts Thanksgiving proclamation even referred to the “Protestant Succession” as something to be thankful for.

Second, the Sandemanians’ religion and politics were intricately entwined. Their faith required them to be Loyalists, or at least loyal to whatever government was in power. And the newspaper’s criticism of them wasn’t limited to their support of “the Ministerial Measures”; it described the Sandemanians as “the most insignificant and contemptible of all Sects, (who make Pretensions to Christianity).”

Finally, some of those Sandemanians were vocal in Boston politics, so it’s hard to believe Adams when he wrote, “for my own part I know but little or nothing about them.” I’m sure he had opinions.

Not Everyone Observes Thanksgiving in 1774

Not everyone in Boston observed the Thanksgiving holiday on 15 Dec 1774, as the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had asked people to do. This report appeared in the 19 December Boston Gazette:

On the late Thanksgiving-Day two or three weak and imbittered Persons, of the most insignificant and contemptible of all Sects, (who make Pretensions to Christianity) opened their Shops; five or six Soldiers passing one of them, made a full stop, and asked the deluded Owner whether he was not ashamed so to insult his Countrymen, and advised him to shut up his Shop and hide his Head, adding, that he was an Enemy to his Country.—

As this was said by a Soldier, they may perhaps spare the cry of Persecution on the Occasion.

I have no doubt that soldier was speaking sarcastically, parodying what he expected the local political leaders to say about those shopkeepers. And the fact that radical printers Edes and Gill were able to ascribe those words to a soldier doesn’t hide the fact that they obviously agreed with them.

What “Sect” were those shopkeepers from? We find the answer in the journal of the Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles. Five days after describing how he had held a Thanksgiving service in his Rhode Island meeting-house, Stiles wrote:

The Sandimanians opened Shops in Boston on Thanksgiving day last & the Episcopa[ls]. at Cambridge refused to observe it: the young Dr. Biles Episco. Clergyman refused to open his Church in Boston to the great Offence of his little Flock, which are more for Liberty than any Episco. Congregation north of Maryland.

The Sandemanians were a small Christian sect following the ideas of a Scotsman named John Glas (shown above, courtesy of the University of Dundee) and his son-in-law Robert Sandeman, who had moved to New England to spread the word. Part of their doctrine was obedience to government authorities, so they firmly supported the royal governor. There was a small group of Sandemanians in Boston, a small group in southeastern Connecticut, and even smaller groups elsewhere.

The other people Stiles specified as not observing the Thanksgiving were Anglicans. Cambridge was one of the few Massachusetts towns—perhaps the only one not on the seacoast—with an Anglican church and congregation. The Rev. Mather Byles, Jr., was minister at Christ Church in Boston, now also called Old North. (He was the son of the more famous Rev. Dr. Mather Byles, who remained a Congregationalist minister even as he supported the royal governors.)

Stiles’s remark about the younger Byles’s North End congregation wishing to observe Thanksgiving in church might not have been accurate. He was often a little too eager to record news that confirmed his political sensibilities, and I’ve learned not to take the reports in his diary at face value. However, as the Gazette report shows, Stiles was correct about the Sandemanians’ choice to ignore the holiday.

TOMORROW: Criticism of the Sandemanians’ non-Thanksgiving becomes a political issue.