McCurdy on Flavell’s The Howe Dynasty

John G. McCurdy, author of Quarters, recently reviewed Julie Flavell’s The Howe Dynasty: The Untold Story of a Military Family and the Women behind Britain's Wars for America for H-Net.

McCurdy starts with the challenge of getting close to the British commanders in the Revolutionary War:

Some of these generals and admirals are unknowable because of their aristocratic stoicism and others because their papers have been lost. The Howe brothers are particularly enigmatic for both reasons…

Flavell’s approach was to widen her lens, so her book looks at multiple generations of the Howe family. More important, it looks at the female Howes, who left longer paper trails than the brothers but haven’t been well studied. In particular, Flavell drew on the letters of their sister Caroline.

When a set of sources is the only material you have, there’s always a challenge not to overstate their importance or the importance of the people who produced them. But Flavell makes the case for Caroline Howe as an important contributor to the family’s rise within the British establishment:

George, Richard, and William all headed to North America for the Seven Years’ War and earned accolades for their heroic service. Yet their success would have been impossible without the clever politicking of their mother, sisters, and wives. Because “a great deal of public business was also transacted in private settings,” Flavell observes, the dinners, parties, and visits “gave women many informal levers of influence” (p. 51).

Following Britain’s victory in the war, the brothers returned to England with three simultaneously holding seats in Parliament. Wielding both official and unofficial power, the siblings constituted a formidable Howe “interest” (p. 103).

From inside Caroline’s residence at Number 12 Grafton Street, the Howes watched events in America build toward revolution. In one of the most compelling chapters of The Howe Dynasty, Flavell unearths that it was Caroline who arranged for peace talks between her brother Richard, Benjamin Franklin, and representatives of the cabinet in late 1774. Over a seemingly innocent game of chess, Caroline orchestrated “this last-ditch and secret government peace initiative” as the British government sought to prevent an imperial rupture (p. 137).

In 1776, Richard and William Howe were back in America, tasked with both commanding the imperial military and negotiating peace. A little more than a year later, William had taken the American capital while Richard maintained the Royal Navy’s command of the sea. That wasn’t enough.

Yet even indomitable women could not salvage William’s command after the British loss at Saratoga. Although William seized Philadelphia and dealt Washington’s army another blow, his decision to leave the Hudson Valley to General John Burgoyne was assailed in the British press once Burgoyne surrendered and the French entered the war on the side of the Americans. In May 1778, Sir William Howe departed for England, leaving the war to other men.

For the remainder of the American Revolutionary War, the Howes fought for their reputation in London. They demanded a Parliamentary investigation into their leadership, which they received although William was not exonerated. Even Caroline lost her influence. As the Howe interest declined, she was no longer “courted as a woman who had the ear of government ministers” (p. 313).

Because she didn’t. The family that rose together subsided together. Ultimately, however, Richard won a major naval victory against Revolutionary France, restoring the Howe stature.

Speaking of William Molineux

The Patriot leader William Molineux died unexpectedly on 22 Oct 1774. That news came as the long political confrontation between Boston and royal officials was turning into a military confrontation between Massachusetts and the Crown.

Molineux had been one of the most visible of the Boston Whigs since the non-importation movement. He was always at the front of the crowd during outdoor protests, pushing for harder responses in meetings. In 1774 alone Molineux:

• was defying a judicial order to serve on a jury as a protest against the judges accepting salaries from the tea tariff.
• led Bostonians in booing the Customs Commissioners at a banquet in May. 
• addressed the crowd in Cambridge during the Powder Alarm in September.
• helped to collect cannon for the resistance in October. 

And then Molineux was dead. His sudden disappearance from the scene raised tensions and sparked rumors. It also caused his memory to fade since he wasn’t around for the Revolutionary War or the new federal government.

For The Road to Concord I wrote a long chapter about Molineux leading up to his death, what I thought would be the most detailed study of him yet published. And then, because the manuscript was too long, I cut that chapter and another that weren’t tightly tied to the main narrative about stolen cannon.

Last month Bob Allison and Jonathan Lane of Revolution 250 invited me to come onto the coalition’s podcast. They suggested I might have something to say about Molineux. Well, I had a lot to say about Molineux!

You can listen to that conversation through Buzzsprout and other major podcast platforms.

[I’ve provided a link to the audio podcast. If you watch the video on YouTube or Facebook, it’s not just that that camera performs poorly in dim light. Right now I really do have a beard.]

Listen in on Rex v. Wemms: The Boston Massacre Trial

On 28 Feb 2020, I attended a meeting at the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum about upcoming commemorations of the Sestercentennial. Evan O’Brien, the museum’s creative director, hosted as chair of the Revolution 250 commemorations committee.

That was one week before the Sestercentennial of the Boston Massacre. As I detailed here, Revolutionary Spaces was about to host an anniversary gathering at Old South and an expanded reenactment in and around the Old State House. Prof. Serena Zabin was coming to town to present The Boston Massacre: A Family History. Exhibits were open at the Massachusetts Historical Society and Old State House.

Our meeting on that February Friday was looking ahead to a subsequent series of events in Revolutionary Boston: the trials of Capt. Thomas Preston and eight British enlisted men for allegedly carrying out the Massacre. Those legal proceedings took place in the late fall of 1770, so we were thinking about how to commemorate them in late 2020.

A reenactment of the soldiers’ trial held promise as a public event; a series of reenactments in different Massachusetts shire towns held even more. We have an unusually full transcript of that proceeding from shorthand writer John Hodgson and printer John Fleeming. Prof. Joseph McEttrick of the Suffolk University Law School had edited that record into a script he produced with students in 1999.

McEttrick, the Suffolk alumni association, and the Bostonian Society mounted a larger production of the trial reenactment at Faneuil Hall in May 2000. That was one of the first historical events I volunteered for, helping to produce the printed program and greeting attendees. The turnout was so big that I didn’t get to see more than a few minutes.

Joe McEttrick was at the meeting in February 2020, offering his script as a basis. But we knew it needed to be adapted. He’d designed that dramatization to maximize the number of university students and alumni who could participate. A Revolution 250 touring production needed a smaller cast and a shorter run time. And even a pared-down version would need significant funding. So there was a lot of work ahead.

At the time of that meeting, we were also hearing about this new coronavirus, eventually called Covid-19. It wasn’t yet clear how that disease spread or how dangerous it would be.

(On top of the natural ignorance about an unstudied virus, there was misinformation coming from the top of our government. The President had told a reporter on 7 February, “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. . . . It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. This is deadly stuff. This is deadly stuff.” But publicly he claimed the disease was no worse than seasonal flu and complained about testing programs.)

As I recall that first meeting, we proceeded with the assumption that the epidemic would be resolved by the fall. By the time the Massacre commemorations came a week later, we were doing elbow handshakes and worrying about transmission through the air, though it was unclear what we could do about it. A week after that, I gave a lecture to four people, widely spaced, and then we largely stayed home. For months.

It turned out that my best contribution to those commemoration discussions was a casual remark that the soldiers’ trial could be made into an audio drama and distributed like a podcast. For several years I’ve listened to drama podcasts, from post-war detective shows and westerns to the B.B.C.’s new adaptation of The Dark Is Rising. It struck me that an audio production could sidestep the challenges of finding venues and rehearsing a large cast through long speeches, and it could last longer and reach more classrooms.

For reasons we know all too well, no Massacre trial reenactment came to pass in late 2020. But early the next year, Evan O’Brien shared the news that he was moving ahead with an audio production. He wanted to include female voices, so I sent the testimonies of Jane Whitehouse, a witness at Capt. Preston’s trial, for him to mix in.

Last month, the Revolution 250 podcast debuted its completed production of Rex v. Wemms: The Boston Massacre Trial, directed by Evan O’Brien. It has a full voice cast drawn from local historical interpreters and actors. Logging in at a bit under two hours, the material focuses on the question of whether Pvts. Edward (Hugh) Montgomery and Mathew Kilroy should be convicted of killing Samuel Gray, Crispus Attucks, or others. We hear actual eyewitness testimony and eighteenth-century legal arguments.

This recording debuted around the 252nd anniversary of the soldiers’ trial, not the exact Sestercentennial, but it can be a teaching resource for many years to come. It’s a testament to Evan O’Brien’s creativity and perseverance under challenging conditions. Have a listen.

“America’s typ’d by a SNAKE”

Last week the Age of Revolutions website shared its lists of the most-read postings of 2022 and the earlier postings that people had most revisited. On the second list is my 2021 article “Join, or Die: Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?”

G. Patrick O’Brien of the University of Tampa chimed in on Twitter:

We read @Boston1775’s “Join, or Die: Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?” this semester, and students loved how creative it was. One student is even researching the reappropriating of the snake by modern, far-right groups. A great piece to teach students about thinking broadly!

That’s very gratifying, of course.

I expanded on one footnote in that article back here. Here’s more material about Revolutionary snake symbolism that I didn’t have space to include beyond a brief mention.

As the North American colonists’ confrontation with the Crown government heated up in 1774, some Whig newspaper printers adopted new mastheads incorporating snakes as symbols of the resistance.

James Rivington, a decidedly not-Whig printer, put these lines into his New-York Gazetteer on 25 August:

For the New-York Gazetteer.
On the Snake, depicted at the Head of some American News Papers.

YE Sons of Sedition, how comes it to pass,
That America’s typ’d by a SNAKE — in the grass?
Don’t you think ’tis a scandalous, saucy reflection,
That merits the soundest, severest Correction,
NEW-ENGLAND’s the Head too; — NEW ENGLAND’s abused;
For the Head of the Serpent we know should be Bruised.

This verse pointed out the great paradox in the American Whigs’ adoption of snakes as symbols: For centuries, western culture had treated snakes as Very Bad Things. The lines brought up both Biblical and classical precedents:

• According to the King James Version of Genesis 3:15, God told the snake, “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”
• In his third Eclogue, Virgil wrote, “latet anguis in herba,” meaning, “a snake lurks in the grass.”

With such powerful authorities warning against snakes, why should people admire them now?

Margaret Draper and John Howe’s Boston News-Letter reprinted that item from New York on September 8. A week later, Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy (which had a new masthead with a massive venomous snake on it, as shown above) responded in kind:

On reading the piece, (inserted in Draper’s last paper) relative to the Snake at the head of some of the American Papers.

YE traitors! the Snake ye with wonder behold,
Is not the deceiver so famous of old;
Nor is it the Snake in the grass that ye view,
Which would be a striking resemblance of you,
Who aiming your stings at your own country’s heel,
Its Weight and resentment to crush you — should feel.

There we see the devastating, impossible-to-refute argument of ‘I know you are, but what am I?’

“Go with the New-Year’s sun, my boy”

Carrying on a Boston 1775 tradition, I present one of the verses carried around (and usually composed) by printers’ apprentices to signal the new year.

This sample appears to have been created by the young printers at the American Mercury of Hartford, Connecticut, for the new year of 1789, reprinted in that newspaper on 5 January, and then reprinted in the Massachusetts Centinel two days later.

I quote the Centinel version:

A VISION of the PRINTER’s BOY.
Presented on the New-Year, by the Carrier of the MERCURY, in Hartford.

As late soft slumber clos’d my eyes,
A lovely form shot from the skies,
Approach’d my bed with aspect meek,
And thus it spake, or seem’d to speak.

“Go with the New-Year’s sun, my boy,
Go, bid your anxious country joy;
This is the year ordain’d by fates,
To rear the glory of the States.”

Raptur’d I gaz’d—The voice and mien,
Methought, I knew: I erst had seen
Columbia’s genius—’Twas the same
Who spake, and thus pursu’d the theme.

“I, who Columbia’s heroes fir’d
To arms, more lately have inspir’d
Th’ assembled Sages with a plan
To finish what those arms began.
Thence thro’ the States I wing’d my way,
To scatter wisdoms sacred ray:
I kindled up the glowing flame
Of zeal, to raise Columbia’s fame.
The fed’ral States to union drew,
And bade, The glorious work pursue.

“One state is doom’d awhile to be
A mark, by which the rest may see
And shun the gulph, which quick embrogues
Blind paper-mongers, cheats and rogues.

“Now wisdom shall the elections guide,
Wisdom in Congress shall preside—
No secret foes or antifeds
Shall once presume to lift their heads;
No object there shall be pursu’d,
But publick peace and common good.
Science and virtue shall revive,
Arts, commerce, manufactures thrive,
Just laws shall private rights maintain,
Slav’re no more shall clank her chain,
No wars again infest the ground,
But peace shall wall the country round.
Plenty shall crown the peasant’s toil,
And Heav’n on all his labours smile,
The desart, cultur’d to a field,
Blessings before unknown shall yield;
Where beasts of prey now stalk and roar,
Tame flocks shall feed and play secure;
Where the tall forests mock the skies,
Cities, with taller spires, shall rise;
And golden harvests wave their heads,
Where the wild thicket boundless spreads.
Here liberty shall stretch her hands
To all th’ oppress’d from distant lands,
’Till tyrants shall no more oppress,
And freedom all the nations bless.”

The genius spake, and from my sight
Shot upwards to the realms of light.
I woke—arose—scarce stay’d to dress—
I ran and put this work to press,
Resolv’d to hand it to the town,
Whose bounty will my labour crown.

This verse was, of course, promoting the new U.S. Constitution against the “antifeds” and the “One state” (Rhode Island) which had so far refused to participate in the process. As I discussed last year, American newspapers printed a lot of verse supporting the Constitution, almost none against it.

Inaugurating a Boston 1775 Membership Tier

When I launched Boston 1775 in 2006, it was on the front side of a wave of history blogs. Over time, public and professional attention shifted to group blogs, then social-media feeds, then podcasts.

This past year, a number of history bloggers moved to Substack and similar platforms that offer a combination of free and subscription-only content.

It also became clear to me that lots of people now read Boston 1775 by email rather than on the web. The posts in that channel arrive hours after they go live on this website, with different formatting, and ads I can’t control.

All that has made me want to try something beyond the 2006 approach. Since I’m wary of any enterprise that involves registering myself for new platforms, I decided to expand my use of Ko-fi. The initial concept behind that website was that you could use it to buy a creator a cup of coffee—i.e., make a quick thank-you gift of $3 or so. Now it’s offering a channel for sharing exclusive material.

I’ve therefore created a Boston 1775 membership tier on Ko-fi called “Buff and Blue.” People can still make small, one-time donations to my ice cream fund, and I’ll be heartily grateful. But for people who choose to send $3 each month, I’ll respond with some exclusive “content,” as the kids say.

Presently I’m envisioning that content over the course of the year to include:

• Four longer articles with full citations about the American Revolution. Some of those would be drawn from material that’s appeared on Boston 1775 or in publications no longer available, polished and updated.
• Four reviews of books, articles, museums, historical novels, movies, or other cultural enterprises related to Revolutionary history.
• Four invitations to ask questions about Revolutionary New England or propose topics for investigation, which could seed new blog posts or articles.

I’m not saying that Ko-fi subscriptions are necessary for me to continue my research and writing. (In fact, I paid more up front to upgrade my page.) I don’t expect this revenue stream to fund my research travel or books, or even my entire ice cream budget.

Rather, I’m committing to the extra content to push myself to be more productive. A daily deadline for the blog keeps me exploring new topics. A monthly deadline will, I hope, give me the impetus to reshape material into longer and longer-lasting forms and finish up articles I already have in the works.

So please check out the Boston 1775 page at Ko-fi and consider signing up for the extra “Buff & Blue” content. This is an experiment. At the end of 2023, I’ll solicit readers’ feedback, assess the enterprise, and make adjustments if necessary.

(In addition, I’ve created a Mastodon account. This software operates somewhat like Twitter, my preferred social-media network, but without the problems brought on by Twitter’s new ownership. If you’re already participating on that site, look for me at @[email protected].)

“Printing ink is made of nut-oil”

In his Cyclopaedia, or An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, published in many editions in the early 1700s, Ephraim Chambers wrote: “Printing ink is made of nut-oil, or linseed-oil, turpentine, and lamp-black.”

The manufacturing process was complex, and no doubt part of the art and mystery of being a printer. One leading figure in that profession in London was John Baskerville (1707–1775, shown here).

Fifty years after Baskerville’s death, T. C. Hansard (1776–1833) published in Typographia what he understood to be the man’s method of making ink:

He took of the finest and oldest linseed oil three gallons, this was put into a vessel capable of holding four times the quantity, and boiled with a long-continued fire till it acquired a certain thickness or tenacity, according to the quality of the work it was intended to print, and which was judged of by putting small quantities upon a stone to cool, and then taking it up between the finger and thumb; on opening which, if it drew into a thread an inch long or more, it was considered sufficiently boiled. This mode of boiling can only be acquired by long practice, and requires particular skill and care in the person who superintends the operation, as, for want of this, the most serious consequences may occur, and have very frequently occurred.

The oil thus prepared was suffered to cool, and then a small quantity of black or amber rosin was dissolved in it, after which it was allowed some months to subside; it was then mixed with the fine black…to a proper thickness, and ground for use.

The “fine black” was soot collected from “glass-pinchers’ and solderers’ lamps,” according to William Savage’s On the Preparation of Printing Ink (1832). For red ink, printers used vermilion, a mercury compound.

The “most serious consequences” Hansard warned about meant fires. He advised printers not to boil linseed oil inside their shops, and also to be prepared to smother any oil fire by “instantly closing the pot or vessel, so that no air can draw in to feed the flame.”

The boiled linseed oil turned into a type of varnish. That base made printing ink very sticky, so it adhered to the printing type and then to paper without flowing or smearing.

“Ink of a Very Different Sort”

Anisha Gupta and Renée Wolcott of the conservation department at the American Philosophical Society have shared an interesting series of blog posts about iron gall ink and the problems it can produce.

Iron gall ink has been around at least since the 300s. It offered scribes the advantage of being close to permanent, especially on parchment—but when the formula is off, it can damage that material.

Gupta explained what went into this type of ink:

Iron gall ink is comprised of four main ingredients:

1. Oak gall nuts. Oak gall nuts are a tree’s protective reaction to wasps depositing eggs beneath its bark. They are not actually nuts! Once collected, these are then soaked in a solvent.

2. Solvents. Acidic solvents, such as beer or wine, or allowing mold to grow on the gall nuts as they soak help produce gallic acid and increase the color of the ink.

3. Ferrous sulfate. Ferrous sulfate reacts with gallic acid to produce a blue-black iron-tannin complex.

4. Gum Arabic. Gum Arabic increases viscosity (improves ink flow), keeps pigment particles in suspension, binds ink to the writing surface, and gives the ink shine and depth.

The formation of the iron-tannin complex releases sulfuric acid, so iron gall ink is always extremely acidic, with a pH of 1-3. Acids attack the cellulose chains that paper is made of, shortening the chains and making the paper brown and brittle. If the iron gall ink contains an excess of iron (II) ions, it will also catalyze oxidation of the paper or parchment, which results in crosslinking and brittleness.

Wolcott highlighted a notebook from Benjamin Franklin’s papers recording his early experimentation (of course) with the substance:

at the very back of the book…Franklin had recorded the results of six iron gall ink recipes, including “Benj. Franklin’s Ink” from June 17, 1731, “Joseph Breitnall’s Ink” and “Ink of a Very Different Sort” from the same date. (Oh, how I wish I knew what made the different ink different!)

“Persian Ink made by James Austin” was “stir’d up June 19, 1731.” The “Japan Ink written June 22, 1731” was likely made from a commercial ink powder that could be mixed with water, and it has aged the most poorly, with brown haloes around the inked lines. “B. Franklin’s New Ink,” “written Aug. 3, 1731” and noted to be “pale when first wrote” has probably aged the best.

Finally, Wolcott showed an example of damage caused by iron gall ink that was too acidic for its paper.  

Iron gall ink was used in quill pens, so it had to flow and then dry. A completely different type of ink was developed for printing.

TOMORROW: Printers’ ink.

Thomas Boylston Adams and His Relations

In 1772, John and Abigail Adams had a third son, whom they named Thomas Boylston Adams (shown here, some years later).

The following August, John Adams explained this baby’s name this way:

Sept. 15. 1772 Thomas Boylston Adams was born at Braintree and Christened the next Sunday by Mr. [Anthony] Wibert. The childs great, great Grandfather was of the name of Thomas Boylston and built the Old house at Brooklyne where my mother was born; My mother had also an Uncle of the same name The father of the late Nich. Boylston Esq. and the present Thomas Boylston. Merchant.

As discussed the last couple of days, Adams personally knew the brothers Nicholas and Thomas Boylston.

He also knew—heck, everyone knew—that Nicholas had died in 1771 without any children. He had left most of his huge fortune to a nephew, born Ward Nicholas Hallowell (1749–1828). In return, that young man had legally changed his name to Ward Nicholas Boylston in 1770.

Nicholas’s brother Thomas also had a large fortune. He also had no children. Was he also looking for an heir?

And might knowing there was a little boy in the extended family who already bore his name (albeit from a common ancestor) have caught Thomas’s attention? Did the Adamses consider the prospect of an inheritance, even a little bit? After all, “Thomas Boylston. Merchant” did get a mention in this genealogical note about the baby, despite being only a first cousin twice removed.

As it turned out, Thomas Boylston lost his money in the failure of a London mercantile firm in 1793. He even spent time in a British debtors’ prison before dying in 1798. So there was no fortune to inherit.

John Adams’s Dinner with the Hotspurs

As described yesterday, John Adams finally got to see the inside of his mother’s cousin Nicholas Boylston’s Boston mansion on 16 Jan 1766.

Adams had apparently heard stories of the witty analysis around Boylston’s dinner table, and he finally got to experience that.

Nicholas Boylston’s younger brother Thomas (1721–1798, shown here in another John Singleton Copley portrait) was on that night’s guest list. So was the Boylstons’ brother-in-law Benjamin Hallowell, already a high Customs officer. (Adams also noted the presence of two gentlemen named Smith, but he didn’t record them saying anything notable.)

Adams’s description of the banter in his diary began:

The Conversation of the two Boylstones and Hallowell is a Curiosity. Hotspurs all.—Tantivi.—

Samuel Johnson defined hotspurs as men “violent, passionate, precipitate and heady.” “Tantivy” was a hunting cry that for a century had been associated with British Tories.

Nick. is a warm Friend of the Lieutenant Governor [Thomas Hutchinson], and inclining towards the Governor [Francis Bernard]. Tom a firebrand against both. Tom is a perfect Viper—a Fiend—a Jew—a Devil—but is orthodox in Politicks however.

Adams wrestled with how to regard Thomas Boylston, who seemed to be on his side but was nastier than he then liked. Adams also revealed that he shared the nastiness of his society in using “Jew” to mean a betrayer.

Hallowell tells stories about [James] Otis and drops Hints about [Samuel] Adams, &c., and about Mr. Dudley Atkins of Newbury. Otis told him, he says, that the Parliament had a Right to tax the Colonies and he was a d—d fool who deny’d it, and that this People never would be quiet till we had a Council from Home [i.e., appointed instead of elected], till our Charter was taken away, and till we had regular Troops quartered upon Us.

Those were the very measures that Parliament adopted in 1774. Did Otis really speak as Hallowell described? If so, was he warning about what the London government would do, or have to do, to quell resistance? As for defending the Crown’s right to tax, Otis did occasionally make such remarks, to the annoyance of his Whig colleagues. But Hallowell wasn’t an unbiased source.  

Returning to that royal appointee:

He says he saw Adams under the Tree of Liberty, when the Effigies hung there and asked him who they were and what. He said he did not know, he could not tell. He wanted to enquire.

He says Mr. Dudley Atkins was too well acquainted with the Secret of some riots there, to be entirely depended on, in his Account, &c.

Typically, Samuel Adams was careful not to incriminate himself. And in fact he was almost certainly not involved in planning the Loyall Nine’s anti-Stamp Act protest in August 1765. I’ll discuss Dudley Atkins in a separate posting.

Back to Adams’s host:

Nick Boylstone is full of Stories about Jemmy [Otis] and Solomon Davis. Solomon says, Country man I dont see what Occasion there is for a Governor and Council and House. You and the Town would do well enough.

Solomon Davis (1716–1791) was another of Boston’s Whig merchants, like Otis originally from Barnstable. If Boylston quoted him correctly, Davis saw merit in a more democratic government for the colony, akin to a town meeting. But he was much more interested in commerce than politics.

That meal gave John Adams plenty to think about.

How John Adams “Dined at Mr. Nick Boylstones”

John Adams finally got his invitation to dinner at Nicholas Boylston’s mansion in January 1766.

Adams’s mother was a Boylston, first cousin to this Boston merchant. However, Adams visited Boylston’s home only after becoming a rising young lawyer from Braintree, in Boston for court business and a whirl of political conversations.

On 14 January, for instance, Adams dined at town clerk William Cooper’s house with Thomas Cushing, speaker of the house; William Story, an Admiralty Court official; and John Boylston, yet another cousin on his mother’s side.

Adams recorded in his diary:

Boylstone, affecting a Phylosophical Indifference about Dress, Furniture, Entertainments &c., laughed at the affectation of nicely distinguishing Tastes, such as the several Degrees of Sweet till you come up to the first degree of bitter, laughed at the great Expences for Furniture, as Nick Boylstones Carpetts, Tables, Chairs, Glasses, Beds &c. which Cooper said were the richest in N. America.—The highest Taste and newest Fashion, would soon flatten and grow old.

The next evening, Adams met with “the Sons of Liberty, at their own Apartment in Hanover Square, near the Tree of Liberty.” This was the group also called the “Loyall Nine,” principal organizers of the protests that had negated the Stamp Act the year before. They were preparing to celebrate the law’s expected repeal.

Finally came this diary entry:

Thurdsday. Jany. 16th. 1766.

Dined at Mr. Nick Boylstones, with the two Mr. Boylstones [Nicholas and his brother Thomas, probably], two Mr. [James and Isaac?] Smiths, Mr. [Benjamin] Hallowell and the Ladies [the Boylstons’ sister Mary Hallowell and possibly James Smith’s wife, Elizabeth]. An elegant Dinner indeed!

Went over the House to view the Furniture, which alone cost a thousand Pounds sterling. A Seat it is for a noble Man, a Prince. The Turkey Carpets, the painted Hangings, the Marble Tables, the rich Beds with crimson Damask Curtains and Counterpins, the beautiful Chimny Clock, the Spacious Garden, are the most magnificent of any Thing I have ever seen.

Even though those luxurious furnishings might “soon flatten and grow old,” they awed the young country lawyer.

TOMORROW: Dinner conversation.

[The image above shows how John Singleton Copley remade his portrait of Nicholas Boylston, shown yesterday. Harvard College commissioned this copy in 1773, after the merchant had died and left money for a professorship. To match other paintings Copley had made for the college, he turned his original composition into a taller, full-figure portrait. As a result, Boylston was immortalized in honking big red slippers.]

A “Christmas eve” in John Adams’s Imagination

On 23 July 1813, John Adams wrote to his son-in-law, William Stephens Smith, then serving in the U.S. House of Representatives.

That letter was about political affairs, with the war going badly for the U.S. of A., but another big theme was how no one appreciated John Adams.

In making that case, the former President drew up a picture, possibly conjectural, of a Christmastime tradition among certain Boston gentlemen of the mid-1700s:

Remember the fate of Cassandra. The prophet of ill ’tho’ as true as a goose’s bow is always detested. I also have been now and then reckoned among the minor prophets. Not a bone of any Goose ever picked by Jo Green, Nick Boylston, & Master Lovel on a Christmas eve, tho’ they had Nat Gardner for a guest, and exhausted all their wit, Gibes, & Jokes upon it, ever foretold an approaching winter, with more certainty that I have foreseen two or three small events in the course of my Life, such as the American Independence, & the result of the french revolution for example. But I was always execrated for it; & persecuted worse than the hebrew prophets, when they were set in the stocks.

“Jo Green” was Joseph Green (1706–1780), known for his biting literary wit. That seems to have manifest mostly in semi-anonymous verse poking at the Rev. Mather Byles, Sr., and anything new in town, like Freemasons. After a career as a merchant, Green took a post in the Customs service and then had to evacuate town as a Loyalist.

“Nick Boylston” was Nicholas Boylston (1716–1771), Green’s even more wealthy business partner. He and Green, both bachelors, owned houses near each other on School Street. Boylston is best known these days for his portraits by John Singleton Copley (one shown above). For those he posed as a wealthy man of learning, wearing a casual banyan and nightcap and leaning on a book. But I don’t recall any example of Boylston’s own writing or wit.

“Master Lovel” was John Lovell (1710–1778), master of the South Latin School for decades. He, too, was known for writing poetry, in his case serious verse and in various languages. Like Green and Boylston, Lovell’s surviving portrait shows him in a nightcap instead of a formal wig, signalling that he was concerned more with learning than with commerce. He, too, left Boston with the British troops in March 1776.

“Nat Gardner” was Nathaniel Gardner, Jr. (1719–1760), regarded in the 1750s as Boston’s leading poet, particularly in Latin. He was Lovell‘s usher, or assistant master, at the grammar school. Gardner died at forty-one and was soon largely forgotten. In 1989 David S. Shields wrote a study designed to bring him and his work back “from limbo.”

The appearance of Gardner at this Christmas Eve gathering shows that Adams was imagining a scene in the 1750s, when he himself was a university student, country schoolmaster, and legal trainee. He wouldn’t have been invited.

Nonetheless, Adams left a picture of how Boston’s small intellectual crowd spent their Christmas Eves, exchanging witticisms over a roasted goose.

“Declaring that we were all Torys at Nantucket”

As I discussed yesterday, the British government exempted the island of Nantucket from its Restraining Act, which limited trade with America.

At the time, Nantucket’s chief industry was whaling, and the chief market for its products was Britain. Neither the islanders nor the home country wanted to derail that business.

Furthermore, most Nantucketers were Quakers, so they had a religious reason, or excuse, to remain neutral in the imperial government’s conflict with the thirteen colonies.

In May 1775, the Continental Congress responded to Parliament’s law by forbidding anyone in the thirteen colonies from trading with parts of the continent that still supported the Crown. That was followed on 29 May by a special resolution:

That no provisions or necessaries of any kind be exported to the island of Nantucket, except from the colony of the Massachusetts Bay, the convention of which colony is desired to take measures for effectually providing the said island, upon their application to purchase the same, with as much provision as shall be necessary for its internal use, and no more. The Congress deeming it of great importance to North America, that the British fishery should not be furnished with provisions from this continent through Nantucket, earnestly recommend a vigilant execution of this resolve to all committees.

At the time, Nantucket—or to be exact, the town of Sherburne—wasn’t participating in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. The congress had tried to appoint a committee of correspondence for Nantucket County in April, but the men it named hadn’t taken up the call.

In July, the provincial congress wound down its work. It called on all towns, including Sherburne, to elect a new, official Massachusetts General Court. Among the congress’s final resolutions was:

whereas, the inhabitants of Nantucket have by them, large quantities of provisions in their stores, and are fitting out a large fleet of whaling vessels, whereby they intend to avail themselves of the act aforementioned [the Restraining Act], and the provisions they have by them may be unnecessarily expended, in foreign and not domestic consumption:

therefore, Resolved, that no provisions or necessaries of any kind be exported from any part of this colony to the island of Nantucket, until the inhabitants of said island shall have given full and sufficient satisfaction to this Congress, or some future house of representatives, that the provisions they have now by them, have not been, and shall not be, expended in foreign, but for domestic consumption.

Meanwhile, on 6 July a Nantucket sea captain returned to the island from a voyage to Philadelphia. He had hoped to bring back a load of flour. But, wrote Kezia Coffin, “the Congress would not suffer him to bring any declaring that we were all Torys at Nantucket.”

COMING UP: More tacking around Nantucket Island.

“The Island of Nantucket, employed in the whale fishery”

In the early spring of 1775, even before the Battle of Lexington and Concord, Parliament took steps to clamp down on New England and its allies.

Given that almost all of Massachusetts had set up a rival government in open defiance of the Massachusetts Government Act, that New Hampshire had driven away Gov. John Wentworth, and that the elected governors of Connecticut and Rhode Island were doing as little as possible to support royal policy, Parliament felt stricter measures were justified.

On 30 March it enacted the New England Restraining Act, also called the New England Trade and Fisheries Act. This law restricted trade and barred ships from the rebellious colonies from the rich fishing grounds off Newfoundland. However, that law also included a clause exempting whaling vessels from Nantucket from its new rules.

Nantucket was then the center of the North American whaling industry, which supplied a great deal of the whale oil, spermaceti candles, and other products that Britain used. In addition, many of the island’s leading families were Quakers and thus religious pacifists.

The Nantucket whaling captains could thus make the case in London both that they wanted no part in any coming war, and that their business was too important to interfere with. As a result, Nantucket got this special exemption.

When Parliament passed the Prohibitory Act in December 1775, authorizing the Royal Navy and privateers to capture ships from the rebellious colonies, that new law once again exempted ships from Nantucket:

XL. Provided also, and it is hereby further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That nothing in this act contained shall extend, or be construed to extend, to any ship or vessel, being the property of any of the inhabitants of the Island of Nantucket, employed in the whale fishery only, if it shall appear by the papers on board that such ship or vessel was fitted and cleared out from thence before the 1st day of December, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five; or if the master, or other person having the charge of any such ship or vessel as aforesaid, shall produce a certificate under the hand and seal of the Governour or Commander-in-Chief of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay, setting forth that such ship or vessel (expressing her name, and the name of her master, and describing her built and burthen) is the whole and entire property of his Majesty’s subjects of the said Island of Nantucket, and was the property of one or more of them on or before the 25th day of March, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.

In the same year, the American governments were also trying to figure out what to do with Nantucket. The options shrank as war arrived, since in that situation people tend to view neutrals as helping the other side.

TOMORROW: A local headache.

An Act to prohibit all Trade and Intercourse with the Colonies

On 22 Dec 1775, King George III approved the repeal of the Boston Port Bill, which Parliament had passed in early 1774.

His approval also repealed the Restraining Acts passed in early 1775. Those laws barred New England fishing ships from the rich grounds off Newfoundland and limited trade from nine North American colonies.

(Why only nine? The government in London was under the impression that New York, Delaware, North Carolina, and Georgia hadn’t singed onto the Continental Congress’s boycott of British goods.)

Those repeals were the good news. The bad news was that they were superseded by a stricter law:

An Act to prohibit all Trade and Intercourse with the Colonies of New-Hampshire, Massachusetts-Bay, Rhode-Island, Connecticut, New-York, New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, the three lower Counties on Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North-Carolina, South-Carolina, and Georgia, during the continuance of the present Rebellion within the said Colonies respectively

The meat of this law was to make American ships legal targets of the Royal Navy and British privateers:

all ships and vessels of or belonging to the inhabitants of the said Colonies, together with their cargoes, apparel, and furniture, and all other ships and vessels whatsoever, together with their cargoes, apparel, and furniture, which shall he found trading in any port or place of the said Colonies, or going to trade, or coming from trading, in any such port or place, shall become forfeited to his Majesty, as if the same were the ships and effects of open enemies, and shall be so adjudged, deemed, and taken, in all Courts of Admiralty, and in all other Courts whatsoever.

Many pages of legislation followed, all concerned with setting up the rules and procedures for seizures at sea.

To be sure, there were a couple of exceptions. One was ships serving the Crown military and loyal territories:

such ships and vessels as shall be actually retained or employed in his Majesty’s service, or to such ships and vessels as shall be laden with provisions for the use of his Majesty’s fleets, armies, or garrisons, or for the use of the inhabitants of any town or place garrisoned or possessed by any of his Majesty’s troops, provided the masters of such ships and vessels respectively shall produce a licence in writing

The other exception was surprisingly close to the heart of the rebellion.

TOMORROW: The exception off the Massachusetts coast.

“How to tell the story of chocolate and trade and enslavement”

Boston.com offers an article by Madeleine Aitken detailing an important shift in historical storytelling by the Old North Church’s historical wing, now called Old North Illuminated:

Nearly a decade ago, the church opened a Colonial-themed chocolate shop where re-enactors in traditional costumes ground cacao by hand and told tourists about the chocolate trade and its relevance to Boston. The store was called Captain Jackson’s Historic Chocolate Shop, named for Captain Newark Jackson, who they believed to be a key figure in both the historic church and Boston’s 18th century chocolate trade with the British.

The church commissioned Prof. Jared Hardesty to do some deeper research into Jackson for the chocolate-shop employees to use.

This research eventually turned into “Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Slavery, Smuggling, and Chocolate,” a book Hardesty released in the fall of 2021 [review quoted here]. The book exposed Jackson as not only being a cacao trader, but a human trafficker and a slave holder — he transported, owned, and traded enslaved people. . . .

“The board made the decision to take Captain Jackson’s name off of the shop and off of the program, but there was a strong desire to still tell the story, just in an honest and comprehensive way,” said Nikki Stewart, executive director of Old North Illuminated, the organization that works to preserve and share the church’s story.

Maddy Rodriguez, the chair of the board of Old North Illuminated, said finding out about the true history of Jackson was a “shock.”

“I think it was really jarring because of the fact that up to that point, the chocolate program had been super successful. It was a unique opportunity for guests, especially families, to engage with the history of Old North,” Rodriguez told Boston.com. “To hear that the person that we had decided to name the exhibit after was involved in smuggling human beings in the slave trade was just completely opposite to that intent, that mission, that previous feeling that we had had.”

So they pivoted, re-envisioning how to tell the story of chocolate and trade and enslavement.

That admirable decision has resulted in several educational units for different grades, a new interpretive plan, a revamped audio tour, and a “complete redesign of the exhibit and signings inside the church,” scheduled to debut in the summer of 2023.

How Big Was a “Half Chest” of Tea?

Returning to the leafy details of the Boston Tea Party, earlier this month I quoted the Boston Gazette reporting that Ebenezer Withington had found “a half chest which had floated and was cast up on Dorchester point.”

Around the same time John Rowe wrote that people had confiscated “about half a Chest of Tea” from Withington.

Rowe’s report was almost certainly secondhand. The Gazette article could also have been hearsay, or could have come from an eyewitness to the tea confiscation and burning.

Withington’s own surviving statement said nothing about the quantity of tea or the size of the container it arrived in.

The phrase “a half chest” prompted local historian Charles Bahne to comment:

The East India Company's official inventory of the tea destroyed in Boston — which I discussed in these pages on December 17, 2009 — indicates that this particular cargo was shipped in full chests, weighing an average of 353 pounds each (net weight, not counting the chest itself); and in smaller chests that averaged 77 pounds net. Those smaller chests were about a quarter the weight of a full chest, so presumably they were "quarter chests". There don't seem to be any "half chests" on board.

So where did Withington's half chest come from?

Christopher Sherwood Davis, who researched the shipments for the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum, then responded:

It's my theory that "half chest" functioned as a generic term for a smaller chest, while also being a more technical term for a chest one half the weight of a whole chest. Much like how "barrel" is both a generic term for a cask and a type of cask with a specific volume. Drake's Tea Leaves has the Polly's freight invoice for the tea, and it refers to the same 130 chests as both "half" and "quarter" in different places. The Dartmouth's logbook also calls the chests "half chests", but as you pointed out the average weights are more consistent with the quarter chests.

That accords with other reports of measurements I’ve seen from merchants and mechanics. It wasn’t yet a time of exactitude.

Another source on tea shipments that I’ve mentioned is Dan Du’s doctoral thesis, “This World in a Teacup: Chinese-American Tea Trade in the Nineteenth Century.” On page 42 Du transcribed a chart that Jonathan Donnison, captain of the General Washington, entered into his log in 1791. That chart shows different dimensions for chests of different types of tea.

According to the General Washington log, “Half Chests of Bohea Tea,” the basic kind of black tea, were 2'10" long, 2' broad, and 1'3.5" deep. That’s over 7 cubic feet.

In contrast, a “Chest of Souchong Tea,” which was more expensive, was 1'5" long, 1'4" broad, and 1'.5" to 1'3" deep. That's about 2 cubic feet.

A “Half Chest of Hyson” was listed as about the same size as a “Chest of Souchong.” Donnison set down two listings for a “Chest of Hyson,” differing by a full foot in length (at least as transcribed). Even at the higher length, the resulting container wasn’t as big as the “Half Chests of Bohea.”

Now those figures from the Du thesis might be in error, or they might apply only to chests from Capt. Donnison’s suppliers in 1791 and say nothing about the East India Company’s shipping containers two decades earlier. But they do suggest that a “chest of tea” or “half chest of tea” was far from a standard measurement. To understand what a “chest of tea” meant, one had to know the type of tea inside. The more precious the leaves, the smaller the standard container of those leaves.

None of the reports about Ebenezer Withington’s tea said anything about the type of tea he’d found. The Gazette’s use of “a half chest” suggests he hadn’t brought home one of the large containers of Bohea that made up the bulk of the East India Company’s shipment, but his box could have counted as a full chest of Souchon or Hyson. That in turns suggests that Withington had lucked out (for a while) in finding a supply of a more expensive variety.

Button Gwinnett as a MacGuffin

Carolyn Wells wrote more than eighty books during her career as one of the most popular American mystery novelists of the first half of the 1900s (as well as another eighty books in other genres).

In Murder in the Bookshop (1936), Wells’s MacGuffin is a small book signed by Button Gwinnett, delegate to the Second Continental Congress from Georgia.

Gwinnett was one of the fifty-six men who signed the Declaration of Independence. He died less than a year later, on 19 May 1777, leaving behind a much sparser paper trail than his colleagues who didn’t engage in dueling.

In the nineteenth century, there was a craze for collecting historical autographs, which resulted in the mutilation of lots of letters and forms. Wealthy Americans competed to own a signature from each Declaration signer. Gwinnett was the rarest. As of 2016, only fifty-one examples of his signature were known to survive, with only ten of those in private hands.

It would thus make sense for a book signed by Gwinnett to be worth a lot of money, possibly even worth killing for. A character in Murder in the Bookshop describes the object of desire this way:

“It’s a small book, a pamphlet, but in fine condition. It is entitled Taxation Laws of Great Britain and U.S.A. Gwinnett was a student of Government and Politics and this was his book. He had not only autographed it on the fly-leaf but had signed it two other times and, moreover, had made annotations in his own hand on various pages. So you can grasp the importance of the book. Such finds do occur, but very seldom.”

My eyes perked up at that description, but not because I imagined the book as valuable. I knew that there were no ‘taxation laws of the U.S. of A.’ by the time Gwinnett died in 1777 or for many years afterward. The U.S. government didn’t become a legal entity until the adoption of the Articles of Confederation in 1781, and didn’t gain the power to levy taxes until after the new Constitution in 1789.

Thus, there couldn’t have been a copy of Taxation Laws of Great Britain and U.S.A. printed in time for Gwinnett to sign it. Was that a clue? Perhaps the detective would reveal this book was a fraud, and the finger of suspicion would swing toward the book dealer.

But as I read a little further, it became clear that all the characters in Murder in the Bookshop behave absurdly. No one comes across as a genuine, logical person.

Wells knew the world of book-collecting well—she amassed a top-notch collection of Walt Whitman material. She wanted to set a story in that milieu. But by this point in her writing career, she was putting out four mysteries a year, and it seems that she expected readers to value the right twists (secret lovers! second murder! kidnapping! masked genius!) more than logic.

“Not only relishing the sociable but actively contriving it”

Like the Georgian Papers Programme, Digit.En.S is a study of eighteenth-century Britain funded by the E.U. and based at a continental university.

Digit.En.S hosts the Digital Encyclopedia of British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century, designed to “Explore the wide range of topics related to British Sociability from 1650 to 1850 and learn about the circulation of models of sociability that shaped European and colonial societies.”

Be that as it may, I enjoyed Allen Ingram’s profile of James Boswell:

…he was, quite simply, good company – attentive, amusing, intelligent and above all lively. [Samuel] Johnson, most clearly, and [Pasquale] Paoli, once exiled in England, became lifelong friends and were pleased to see him often during his annual spring visits to London from Edinburgh. Through Johnson in particular, Boswell became friends with a set of men he might not otherwise have met, or met so soon and so favourably. These included Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds and Oliver Goldsmith; but other friends, like John Wilkes, and various members of the Scottish nobility, were already part of Boswell’s circle, and would remain so – indeed, he even contrived a dinner in London in May 1776 that brought Johnson and Wilkes, the bitterest of political rivals, together in an atmosphere of sociability and mutual good humour, though the good humour found its focus in making jokes at Boswell’s expense.

But this was part of Boswell’s talent, not only relishing the sociable but actively contriving it. He could be immensely self-promoting, often in a highly embarrassing way, as at the annual dinner of the Company of Grocers in London in November 1790, in the presence of Prime Minister William Pitt, an honorary member of the Company, when Boswell sang the semi-satirical ballad, ‘William Pitt, The Grocer of London’, six times, apparently by popular acclaim, in a misguided attempt to curry favour from Pitt in his political ambitions. But Boswell seems to have been utterly beyond embarrassment, especially at large social occasions, and especially after consuming alcohol. . . .

Drinking for Boswell almost always took place within a social context. He was not particularly choosey, though, about the nature of that context, or about the location of his drinking. As long as there was company, he would drink: with lords and ladies, as at Northumberland House, where Trafalgar Square now is, where the set surrounding the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland congregated, as he did in London during his visit of 1762-1763; or with politicians and genteel tradesmen, as at the Grocers’ dinner cited above; or with his legal friends and acquaintances back in Edinburgh, as he did all his life; or with prostitutes in London, or Edinburgh, or anywhere, as he also did all his life; or, as he did returning to Edinburgh from Auchinleck in March 1777 with an old friend, Richard Montgomery, ‘at some low ale-house’, where ‘I drank outrageously’ and ‘arrived at Edinburgh very drunk’.

Boswell’s taste in women and in female society was if anything even wider than his taste in alcohol and his expectations of the kind of sociability that was possible from it changed the further down the social scale he went. Few if any of his sexual relationships were with women of the highest social class. With such women his expectations were similar to the sociability he enjoyed with men, with the bonus of their being female: he enjoyed their company and was able to flirt as an amusement rather than as a preliminary to anything. . . . [In contrast,] His relationship with the actress ‘Louisa’ (Anne Lewis) in London in 1762-1763…observes all the polite social niceties, with a mix of gallantry, wit and deference:

‘Madam, I was very happy to find you. From the first time that I saw you, I admired you.’ ‘O, Sir.’ ‘I did, indeed. What I like beyond everything is an agreeable female companion, where I can be at home and have tea and genteel conversation. I was quite happy to be here. ‘Sir, you are welcome here as often as you please.’ (London Journal 115)

The pay-off, however, when it comes is a level of physical reality far beyond ‘tea and genteel conversation’: ‘A more voluptuous night I never enjoyed. Five times was I fairly lost in supreme rapture. Louisa was madly fond of me; she declared I was a prodigy.’

Boswell published essays, travel accounts, and his biography of Johnson in his lifetime, but he came back to life only in the 1900s when his private diaries were discovered and put into print.

“The Secret of the Faculty Wife” at Contingent

Contingent is an online history magazine. It explains: “Our writers are adjuncts, museum workers, independent scholars—all people who work outside the tenure-track professoriate.” Learn more here.

Recently the Contingent editors commissioned a series of articles about the intersection between history and mystery stories. The article launching that “History & Mystery” series today is “The Secret of the Faculty Wife,” my look at Lillian McCue, who in her early forties created a career as mystery author Lillian de la Torre.

I wrote about De la Torre’s whodunnit stories about Dr. Samuel Johnson earlier this fall. This short article looks at the situation from another angle: the choices of a faculty wife, restricted by sexism and the employment policies of the Depression from fulfilling her own intellectual potential.

That situation has been in my head more since finding an essay my mother wrote around 1970 when she was in a similar situation. Her graduate studies in English literature had stalled out as she had two children, now my brother and I were going off to school, and it wasn’t clear what she should do with her time. As it turned out, Mom earned a doctorate in chemistry and later a nursing license, becoming college faculty in both fields. She finished her work life as a piano technician and knitting consultant.

That’s not the same plight as contingent faculty members, who have too much teaching to do for too little pay and not much hope of advancing up the professorial ladder. But it’s close enough that I thought the story of Lillian McCue’s career would speak to this audience.

I’m looking forward to seeing how other writers approached the “History & Mystery” theme.