HUTCHINSON AT THE ALBANY CONFERENCE

9. [Representation of the Present State of the Colonies], [9 July 1754]

10. Report on the Albany Conference, [25 October 1754]

The coming of the French and Indian War consolidated Thomas Hutchinson’s reputation as an indispensable figure in Massachusetts government and imperial affairs, a position that was reinforced by his service at the Albany Conference in 1754. An effort to promote stronger intercolonial cooperation in the shadow of impending war with France, the Albany Conference convened on 19 June. Although Hutchinson arrived two days late, he quickly emerged as one of the leading figures at the conference. On 24 June, the delegates appointed a committee (composed of Hutchinson, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Theodore Atkinson of New Hampshire, William Pitkin of Connecticut, Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, Benjamin Tasker of Maryland, and William Smith of New York) to investigate the creation of a colonial union. Over the next two weeks, the committee produced both the [Representation of the Present State of the Colonies] and the Albany Plan of Union. The [Representation] is notable for its defense of Britain’s most extreme claims to territory in North America as well as its criticism of Native American trade and land sales that benefited the colonists but also led to the alienation of many of the Iroquois, one of the principal problems the conference hoped to rectify. None of Hutchinson’s letters regarding the Albany Conference were found. The Plan of Union printed here is a revised version drafted by a committee of the General Court, since the plan devised at Albany had failed to receive endorsement by the Massachusetts legislature earlier in the fall. This second plan, written in Hutchinson’s hand, included all the colonies and did not divide them into northern and southern districts as approved at Albany. It faded into oblivion after the Massachusetts House voted to submit it to the towns for their consideration but then refused to vote the necessary funds to print the document.

9. [Representation of the Present State of the Colonies]1

[9 July 1754]2

That his Majesty’s Title to the Northern Continent of America appears to be founded on the Discovery thereof first made, and the Possession thereof first taken in 1497, under a Commission from Henry the 7th. of England to Sebastian Cabot.3

That the French have possessed themselves of Several parts of this Continent, which by Treaties have been ceded & Confirmed to them.

That the Right of the English to the whole Sea Coast from Georgia on the South to the River St. Lawrence on the North, excepting the Island of Cape Bretton & the Islands in the Bay of St. Lawrence, remains plain & indisputable. That all the Lands or Countries Westward, from the Atlantick ocean to the South Sea, between 48 & 34 degrees North Latitude, were expressly included in the Grant of King James the first to divers of his Subjects So long Since as the year 1606, & afterwards Confirmed in 1620 & under this Grant the Colony of Virginia claims an Extent as far West as to the South Sea; & the Ancient Colonies of the Massachusetts Bay & Connecticutt were by their respective Charters made to Extend to the Said South Sea;4 So that not only the Right to the Sea Coast, but to all the Inland Countries from Sea to Sea, has at all Times been Asserted by the Crown of England.

That the Province of Nova Scotia or Acadie hath known & determinate Bounds by the Original Grant from King James the first; & that there is Abundant Evidence of the Sense which the French had of these Bounds while they were in possession of it; & that these Bounds being thus known the said Province, by the Treaty of Utrecht, according to its ancient Limits, was ceded to great Brittain,5 & remained in possession thereof untill the Treaty of Aix la Chapelle, by which it was Confirmed.6 But by Said Treaty it is Stipulated that the Bounds of the said Province Shall be Determined by Commissaries, &c.

That by the Treaty of Utrecht the Country of the five Cantons of the Iroquoise is expressly Acknowledged to be under the Dominion of the Crown of Great Brittain.

That the Lake Champlain, formerly called lake Iroquois, & the Country Southward of it as far as the Dutch or English Settlements, The Lakes Ontario, Erie, & all the Countrys Adjacent, have by all Ancient Authors, French & English, been Allowed to belong to the five Cantons or Nations; And the whole of these Countries, long before the said treaty of Utrecht, were by the said Nations put under the Protection of the Crown of Great Brittain.

That by the Treaty of Utrecht there is reserved to the French a Liberty of frequenting the Countrys of the 5 Nations & other Indians in Friendship with great Brittain, for the Sake of Commerce; as there is also to the English a Liberty of frequenting the Countrys of those in Friendship with France, for the same purpose.

That after the Treaty of Utrecht the French built Several Fortresses in the Country of the five Nations, & a very Strong one at a place called Crown Point, to the south of Lake Champlain.7

That the French Court hath evidently, Since the Treaty of Aix la Chapelle, made this Northern Continent more than ever the Object of its Attention.

That the French have most unjustly taken possession of part of the Province of Nova Scotia; & in the River St. John’s & other parts of said Province they have built strong fortresses;8 & from this River they will have during the Winter & Spring Season a much easier communication between France & Canada than they have heretofore had, & will be furnished with a harbour more Commodiously Situated for the Annoying the Brittish Colonys by Privateers & men of war than Louisburg itself.

That they have taken possession of & begun a Settlement at the head of the River Kennebeck, within the bounds of the Province of Maine, the most Convenient Situation for Affording Support & Safe Retreat to the Eastern Indians in any of their Attempts upon the Governments of N England.9

That it Appears, by Information of the Natives, the French have been making preparations for another Settlement at a place Called Cowas on Connect. River, near the head thereof, where it is but about ten miles distant from a Branch of Merimack River, and from whence there is a very near & easy Communication with the Abenakis Indians, who are Settled on the River St. Francis, about 40 miles from the River St. Lawrence; And it is Certain that the Inhabitants of N. Hampshire, in which province this Cowas is Supposed to Lye, have been Interrupted & Impeded by the French Indians from making any Settlement there.10

That Since the Treaty of Aix la Chapelle the French have Increased the Number of their Forts in the Country of the great Lakes & on the Rivers which run into the Missisippi,11 & are Securing a Communication between the 2 Colonys of Louisiana & Canada, & at the same time putting themselves into a Capacity of Annoying the Southern Brittish Colonys, & preventing any further Settlements of his Majesty’s Dominions.

That they have been gradually Increasing their Troops in America, transporting them in their Ships of War, which return to France with a bare Complement of men, leaving the rest in their Colonys; & by this means they are less observed by the power of Europe than they would be if Transports, as usual heretofore, were provided for this purpose.

That they have taken Prisoners, divers of his Majesty’s Subjects, Trading in the Country of the Iroquois & other Inland parts, & plundered Such prisoners of Several thousand pounds sterling; & they are Continually Exciting the Indians to destroy or make prisoners the Inhabitants of the Frontiers of the Brittish Colonys, which prisoners are Carryed to Canada, & a price equal to what Slaves are Sold for in the Plantations is demanded for their Redemption & Release.

That they are Continually drawing off the Indians from the Brittish Interest, & have lately perswaded one half of the Onondaga Tribe, with many from the other Nations along with them, to remove to a place Called Oswegatchie, on the River Cadaraqui, where they have built them a Church & Fort;12 and many of the Senecas, the most Numerous Nation, Appear to be wavering, & rather incline to the French; and it is a Melancholy Consideration, that not more than one hundred & fifty Men of all the Several Nations have Attended this Treaty; altho’ they had Notice that all the Governments would be here by their Commissioners, & that a large Present would be given.13

That it is the evident design of the French to Surround the Brittish Colonys, to fortify themselves on the back there of, to take & keep possession of all the Important Rivers, to draw over the Indians to their Interest, & with the help of such Indians, Added to such forces as are already Arrived & may hereafter be sent from Europe, to be in a Capacity of making a general Attack on the Several Governments; And if at the same time a strong Naval force be sent from France, there is the utmost danger that the whole Continent will be Subjected to that Crown; And that the danger of Such a Naval force is not meerly Imaginary, may be argued from past Experience; for if it had not been for the most Extraordinary Interposition of Heaven, every Seaport town on the Continent, in the year 1746, might have been ravaged & destroyed by the Squadron under the Command of the Duke De’Anville, notwithstanding the then declining State of the French, & the very flourishing State of the Brittish Navy, & the further Advantage Accruing to the English from the possession of Cape Bretton.14

That the French find by Experience they are able to make greater & more Sure advantages upon their Neighbours in peace than in War. What they Unjustly possessed themselves of after the peace of Utrecht, they now pretend to have a Right to hold, by virtue of the Treaty of Aix la Chapelle, untill the true boundary between the English & the French be settled by Commissarys; but their Conquests made during War they have been obliged to restore.

That the French affairs relative to this Continent are under one direction, & constantly regarded by the Crown & ministry; who are not Insensible how great a Stride they would make towards an Universal Monarchy, if the Brittish Colonys were added to their Dominions, & Consequently the whole Trade of North America Engrossed by them.

That the said Colonys being in a divided, disunited State, there has never been any Joint Exertion of their force or Counsels to Repel or defeat the Measures of the French, & particular Colonys are unable & unwilling to maintain the Cause of the Whole.

That there has been a very great Neglect of the Affairs of the Iroquois, or as they are Commonly called, the Indians of the Six Nations; & their Friendship & Alliance has been Improved to private purposes, for the sake of the Trade with them, and the purchase or Acquisition of their Lands, more than to the publick Service.

That they are Supplied with Rum by the Traders in vast & almost Incredible quantities. The Laws of the Colonys now in force being insufficient to restrain the Supply; & the Indians of every Nation are frequently drunk, and Abused in their Trade, & their Affections thereby Alienated from the English; they often wound & murder one another in their Liquor, and to avoid revenge, flee to the French; and perhaps more have been Lost by these means than by the French Artifices.15

That purchases of Lands from the Indians by private persons, for Small Trifling Considerations, have been the Cause of great Uneasiness and discontents; & if the Indians are not In Fact Imposed on & Injured, yet they are apt to think they have been; & indeed they Appear not fit to be intrusted at Large with the Sale of their own Lands; and the Laws of Some of the Colonies, which makes such Sales void unless the allowance of the Government be first Obtained, Seem to be well founded.

That the granting or Patenting vast Tracts of Land to private persons or Companys, without Conditions of Speedy Settlement, has tended to prevent the Strengthening the frontiers of the particular Colony where such Tracts Lye, and been prejudicial to the rest.

That it Seems Absolutely Necessary that Speedy & Effectual measures be taken to Secure the Colonies from the Slavery they are threatened with. That any further Advances of the French should be prevented, & the Encroachments already made removed. That the Indians in Alliance or Friendship with the English be Constantly regarded under some wise direction or Superintendency. That Endeavor be used for the Recovery of those Indians who are lately gone over to the French, & for Securing those that remain. That Some discreet person or persons be Appointed to reside Constantly with each Nation of Indians; Such person to have no Concern in Trade and duly to Communicate all Advices to the Superintendents.

That the Trade with the said Indians be well regulated, & made Subservient to the public Interest more than to private gain.

That there be forts built for the Security of each Nation, and the better Carrying on the Trade with them. That warlike vessels be provided sufficient to maintain his Majesty’s Right to a free Navigation on the Several Lakes. That all future purchases of Lands from the Indians be void, unless made by the Government where Such Lands Lye, & from the Indians in a Body, in their publick Councils. That the Patentees or Possessors of Large unsettled Territories be enjoined to Cause them to be Settled in a reasonable time, on pain of forfeiture.

That the Complaints of the Indians relative to any Grants or Possessions of their Lands Fraudulently obtained be Enquired into, & all Injuries redressed. That the bounds of those Colonies which Extend to the South Sea be Contracted & Limited by the Alleghenny or Apalachian Mountains; and that Measures be taken for Settling from Time to time Colonies of his Majesty’s Protestant Subjects Westward of said Mountains, in Convenient Cantons to be Assigned for that purpose; And finally that there be a Union of his Majesty’s Several Governments on the Continent, that so their Councils, Treasure, & Strength may be employed in due proportion against their common enemy.

SC (Massachusetts Historical Society, Ms. N–1751); this handwritten document, not in TH’s hand, is part of the “Journal of the Proceedings of the Congress Held at Albany in 1754,” MHS Colls., Third Series, 5 (1836): 64–69. Every colony with delegates in attendance at the conference received a certified copy of the proceedings, but the only sets that seem to have survived are at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Rhode Island State Archives, the New York State Library, the John Carter Brown Library in Rhode Island, and the Maryland State Archives, as well as the copy transmitted by Lieutenant Governor James DeLancey to the Board of Trade on 22 July 1754, which is at the National Archives UK. Contemporary printings: A True Representation of the Plan Formed at Albany, ed. Stephen Hopkins (Newport, RI, 1755).

10. Report on the Albany Conference

[25 October 1754]1

To his Excellency William Shirley Esq Governour in chief, the honourable the Council and House of Representatives of his Majesty’s Province of Massachusetts bay.

The Report of the Commissioners appointed, on the part of the Government of the said Province, to meet with Commissioners from his Majestys other Governments at the City of Albany, on the 14th June 1754—

Pursuant to the Commission & Instructions ^which we had the honour to receive^, we proceeded to Albany, and there joined the Commissioners from the Governments of New hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pensilvania, & Maryland: His Honour the Lieutenant Governor of New York was also present, as were four of the Council of that Province, but the said Council did not appear as Commissioners, or shew any special powers to act in behalf of that Government.2 Upon our first arrival we laid our Commission before the Lt. Governor, and the Commissioners from the several Governments, and afterwards we thought it convenient & accordingly ^offered to^ produced all the Instructions which we ever receiv’d relative to the business of this meeting, that so the ready & free disposition of this Province to come into any reasonable measures for his Majestys Service might more fully appear, & that no question might be made whether, notwithstanding the ample powers given us by our Commission, we were not limited or restrained by private Instructions from the execution of them.3

The Commissions from the other Governments were also produced, but ^the powers from divers of them appeared to be very insufficient for the purposes which your Comissioners conceived to be mainly intended by this meeting.^4

The several publick Conferences with the Indians held by the Lieutenant Governor of New York in the presence, & with the concurrence of the Commissioners from the several Governments; as also a Representation of the present state of his Majestys Colonies on the Continent with relation to the French & Indians, which was unanimously agreed to by the Commissioners; and a Plan of an Union of the Colonies, which was so far settled & agreed to by the Commissioners as that they ordered the same to be laid before their respective Constituents, and a copy thereof to be transmitted to each Government who did not send Commissioners; these are all contained in the Journal or Minutes of the proceedings of the Commissioners, an attested copy whereof is herewith presented.5 But there are divers matters not contained in this Journal, and yet relative to our Commissions, & of importance to his Majestys Service, & the Interest of his Colonies which we beg leave further to report.

William Shirley, 1750. Hutchinson changed his political loyalties to Shirley after Shirley displaced Jonathan Belcher as governor. Shirley became the commander-in-chief of British forces in North America after the death of General Edward Braddock. By Thomas Hudson. Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, NY.

The Commissioners from the several Governments were fully sensible that the Indians of the six Nations were in the utmost danger of being wholly lost by ^to^ the English; that the defection was continually increasing, as also the french influence which was the cause of it, all which was evident by the smallness of the number of Indians that attended this Conference, although a very large Present was expected,6 and by the free acknowledgment of those that did attend that great numbers were removed from their ancient Castles to the french Frontiers, & that others were kept back by french artifices and management; and those Indians who profess still to be in friendship with the English appeared, to such of the Commissioners as had been present at former Treaties, to be much cooled in their affection & esteem; and their indifference was evident not only from the air & manner of delivering their publick speeches, but from the expressions contained in them, and also from the behaviour of some of the principal Indians in private conference or discourse.

Besides the french influence which the Indians are under, there likewise appears to be a great uneasiness & dissatisfaction concerning the purchases of their Lands, made or alledged to have been made by the Inhabitants of New York; they complained of the want of a due regulation of the Trade; & of the great neglect & inattention of those to whom Indian Affairs have been committed.

It appeared to the Commissioners by a Letter from the Right honourable the Lords of Trade, communicated by the Lt. Governor of New York, that this dissatisfaction was one great cause of their ^Lordship’s^ ordering a meeting of Commissioners from all the Governments,7 and that it was therefore incumbent on the said Comissioners publickly to have enquired into the grounds ^there^ of this dissatisfaction, in order effectually to have removed the same; but his Honour the Lt. Governour did not apprehend it to be the intention of the said Letter that Commissioners from other Governments should make enquiry concerning purchases made by the Inhabitants of New York, & confirmed by the Governor of that Province in his Majesty’s name, and therefore all the Conferences relative to this Complaint were held between the Lt. Governor & Council, and some of the principal Indians of the nations which were dissatisfied; and all the share which the Comissioners had was, after these conferences were over, to send, on a proposal from the Lt. Governor, to send one Gentleman of each Colony, in order to hear those Indians declare; that they were so far satisfied as to be willing to suspend any farther enquiry into this Complaint for one year longer.

It appeared ^probable^ to your Commissioners that these purchases have been transacted, on the part of the Indians, by artful designing men ^of their own nations^ who have taken what consideration has been paid principally to them selves, and the body of the Nation remained either unacquainted or dissatisfied therewith; and that some of these purchases have, by surveys, been extended beyond the intention of the contracting Indians themselves. And your Commissioners cannot omit observing that the purchases & grants of such vast Tracts or Countries of Land, as are comprehended in some of the Patents complained of, upon the frontiers of the British Colonies, can have no tendency to strengthen his Majesties Dominions, provided there be no obligations to speedy settlement, it not being very material whether the Title to this Country remains in the Natives, or be transferred to particular persons Inhabitants of any Province, so long as the Lands remain unimproved; and we are humbly of opinion that any quit rents, arising from such grants, can bear no proportion to the expence & charge, which are the necessary consequences of discontent, & uneasiness among the Indians, much less to the final loss of them from the British Interest.

With respect to the Trade carried on between the English & Indians on the frontiers of New York, your Commissioners found, upon enquiry, that, on the payment of twelve pence per gallon duty to that Government by the English Trader, the Indians may be supplyed with unlimited quantities of Rum at Oswego & other licensed places on the said frontiers; that by this means they are almost continually drunk and, at least, imagine that in their drink they have been abused & imposed upon in their trading. Your Commissioners think it necessary further to observe that a constant Trade is carried on in the City of Albany between the Inhabitants & the French Mohawks or Cagnawauga Indians,8 and that a great part of the goods sold ^employed in the general Trade^ by the English go first to the French, and from them to the Indians; from ^these two [facts]^ it appears that the English are able to supply the Indians at cheaper rates & to allow them higher prices for their Furrs than the French are able to do; and inasmuch as the securing, and more firmly attaching the Indians, is of vastly greater importance than all the advantages of a private Trade, we are humbly of opinion that if the whole Indian trade was under the direction of some disinterested Party ^Government^, or Company, and all private Trade restrained, and only a sufficient profit raised from such ^publick^ Trade to support the charge of carrying it on, in such case the French might be undersold, greater quantities of the English Manufactures consumed than are at present, and the Indians made sensible that it is their Interest to forsake the French & become attached to the English.

It further appears to your Comissioners that the great sums which are from time to time expended in presents, and the charges of Treaties with the Indians of the six nations might be employed in a different manner to much greater advantage; for great part of these presents are always left in the City of Albany, being purchased from the Indians by the Inhabitants, & Traders, and Rum, amongst other things, supplied in lieu thereof, and the remainder is soon expended or lost, & as soon forgot, and then for many months if not years the Indians think themselves wholly neglected & disregarded; whereas a much less sum distributed by faithful discreet persons, constantly to reside among them, for the relief of any poor sick or otherwise necessitous families, agreeable to the practice of the French, would be more likely to engage the affections of the English Indians, & secure them to the English, & ^the residence of such persons amongst the Indians^ would be attended with this further advantage, that seasonable intelligence might be ^always^ obtained of any attempts of the French to draw over the Indians & proper means used to defeat them.

We have nothing to add on the subject of the Representation of the state of his Majestys Colonies &c. but with respect to the Plan of an Union of the several British Governments your Commissioners were in some doubt, whether it might not be convenient that the Colonies should be divided into at least two Districts, as the great distance of the two extream parts of his Majestys Governments from each other, must render it always very burthensome to some or other of the Members to give their attendance, be the place of meeting where it will, and in a Government of so large an extent there will be danger of some parts being neglected or unequally considered; but as the designs of the French may probably require the united strength & councils of the whole British Continent, and as it seemed to be of the last importance that all Affairs which relate to the Indians should be under but one direction, and considered without any special regard to any particular Governments, we were induced to prefer the present Plan.9

We think our selves further bound to observe that an happy harmony subsisted among the Commissioners ^but the insufficiency of the powers from several of the Governments rendered it impracticable for them to come into any conclusive union & agreement which your Commissioners in pursuance of their Instructions would most earnestly have endeavoured on the part and in the behalf of this Province.^10

All which is humbly submitted. Samuel Welles,11 Tho Hutchinson, Ol Partridge, John Worthington

AC (Massachusetts Archives, SC1/series 45X, 4:459–64); in TH’s hand, though signed by Wells and others; undated.

11. A Plan of Union 1

[26 December 1754]

A Plan of Union of his Majestys Colonies on the Continent for their mutual defence & security

It is humbly proposed that by Act of Parliament the House of Representatives of each Colony be enjoined within a limited time after the passing of such Act to chuse Members to represent them in a Grand Council in the following proportion viz.

Massachusets bay	7	New hampshire	2
Connecticut	5	Rhode Island	2
New York	4	New Jersey	3
Pensilvania	6	Maryland	4
Virginia	7	North Carolina	4
South Carolina	4
		In the whole	48

That the President for said Grand Council be appointed ^by^ & ^receive his Salary from^ the Crown and that as soon as conveniently may be after such appointment he call a meeting of the Council to be held first in the City of Philadelphia.

That the Assent of the President be made necessary to all Acts of the Council, saving the choice of a Speaker.

That the Council without their ^own^ consent shall neither be dissolved nor prorogued nor continued sitting longer than six weeks at any one time.

That the Council shall meet once in every year and at such other times as they shall adjourn to, as occasion shall require: the place for the next meeting always to be determined before such adjournment, and upon an emergency the President having obtained in writing the consent of seven of the Members may call a special meeting of the Council at any time or place provided due & timely notice be given.

That the Members of the Council be paid Ten shillings sterling for every days journeying & attendance twenty miles to be accounted a days travel.

That upon the expiration of three years there shall be a new Election of Members for the Council and always upon the death or resignation of any member his place shall be supplied by a new choice at the next sitting of the House of Representatives of the Colony to which the ^deceased Member or resigning Member belonged.^

That no Member of the Council shall be chosen or appointed to any Office civil or military by the President or Council.

That twenty five Members shall be a Quorum provided there be among them one or more Members from a major part of the Colonies.

That in case of the death or other incapacity of the President the Speaker of the Council for the time being shall be vested with the powers & authorities of a President to continue until there be an appointment by the Crown.

That the President with the advice of the Council may hold & manage all Indian Treaties in which the general interest or welfare of the Colonies may be concerned and shall have the sole power of making peace with or declaring war against the Indian nations, of restraining & regulating all Indian Trade by Laws & Orders with penalties annexed not extending to Life or Limb, all Offences against such Laws or Orders to be tried & determined within the Government where the Offence shall be committed according to the course of judicial proceedings in such Government in like manner as if such Offence had been committed against the Laws of such Colony, and any Offence that may be committed in any parts ^that shall not be within the certain bounds of any Colony shall & may be tried and determined in the Colony where the Offender shall be taken.^2

That the President and Council shall have power to raise and pay Soldiers and build Forts for the Defence of any of the Colonies & for removing all encroachments upon his Majestys Territories and for the annoyance of his Majestys Enemies but not to impress in any Colony without the consent of its Legislature.

And in order to raise monys sufficient for these purposes

That the said President and Council be impowered to lay some general Duty on Wines & Spirituous Liquors or other ^luxurious consumption^ as shall appear to them just & equal on the several Colonies, each Colony to pay ^in proportion to their members^ and if it shall appear that the sum raised by any Colony falls short of such proportion and the deficiency shall not forth with be paid by such Colony then & as oft as it shall so happen the said President & Council shall have power to lay an additional duty on such Colony until the deficiency be made good; and if the Sum raised from any Colony shall exceed it’s proportion the surplus shall remain or be paid into the General Treasury of such Colony. And the Accounts of the Disposition of all monys raised shall be annually settled that the Members of the Council may make report of the same to the respective Assemblies.

That the President & Council shall appoint Officers for collecting all such Duties as shall be agreed on and all laws & orders for enforcing the payment thereof in ^any &^ every Colony ^and also all laws & orders for restraining supplies to & communication with any of his Majestys Enemies whether by Flaggs of Truce or in any other manner^3 shall be as ^fully &^ effectually observed & executed as if they had been the Laws of that particular Colony ^where any Offence shall be committed^ and all Offences against such laws & orders shall be tried & determined accordingly.

That the ^President & Council^ may appoint a General Treasurer ^to reside^ in such Colony as they shall judge most convenient and also a particular Treasurer for each Colony and from time to time may order the Sums in each treasury into the General Treasury or draw on any particular Treasurer as they shall think proper, but no mony shall issue out of any Treasury without the special order of the President by the advice of the Council except when sums have been appropriated to particular purposes and the President shall be specially impowered to draw for such sums.

That the supreme command of all the military force employed by the President & Council be in the President and that all ^subordinate^ military Officers be appointed & commissioned by the President with the advice of the Council and all civil Officers as Treasurers Collectors Clerks &ca. shall be chosen by the Council & approved by the President and in case of vacancy in any civil or military office the Governor of the Colony where the vacancy shall happen may appoint some person to supply the same until the pleasure of the President & Council shall be known.

That notwithstanding the powers granted to the President & Council for the general defence of the Colonies yet any Colony shall be at liberty upon an emergency to come into any measures for their particular defence ^or for the defence of any neighbouring Colony when attacked^ the reasonable charge whereof ^to^ be allowed by the President & Council ^and^ paid out of the general Stock but no Colony shall be at liberty to declare War against any Enemy or to begin any Hostilities except they have the direction or allowance of the President & Council.

That the continuance of the powers granted to the President & Council be limited to the term of six years from their first meeting unless at the expiration of said six years there should be war between Great Britain & France in which case the said power shall continue until the end of such war and then expire and in case any Stock shall ^then^ remain in the general Treasury the same shall be restored to the several Governments in proportion to their respective contributions. Which is humbly submitted per Sam Wells per order

AC (Massachusetts Archives, SC1/series 45X, 6:171–75); in TH’s hand, though signed by Wells; undated; docketed, “In Council Decr. 26. 1754 Read & sent down.” In Albany Congress, Newbold cites another copy of this document at the Massachusetts Historical Society in the Samuel P. Savage Papers (Letters and Papers 4 [1721–1760]), but it was not found despite a thorough search.

12. To Robert Hale

Boston 20th. Decr 1755

Dear Sir, I have kept up a constant correspondence with Mr. Bollan ever since he went first to England.1 In the beginning of it I wrote like a Merchant Yours I received by such a ship of such a date & then went on to answer his letter paragraph by paragraph but I soon discovered my unpoliteness, for in fifty letters I have received from him he has never taken any notice of any from me & scarce ever said any thing relative to them.2 When I found my mistake I followed the mode, for Custom is so respectable a thing, with me, that whenever ^even^3 any new word or expression comes into fashion I am very early in following it. Let me direct you with a paper I have met with among the files & at the same time convince you that what is very tolerable in one age is very ridiculous in another. When you have copied it Return it that it may go back to its depository. Yours affectionately,

Tho Hutchinson

Hai in senatu escaravi. Plura otiosus.4

RC (Massachusetts Historical Society, Saltonstall Family Papers); at foot of letter, “Colo. Hale.” Enclosure not found.

1 Harvard Graduates, 8:xiii.

1 The period from his departure on 1 June 1774 until his death in England on 3 June 1780 was covered by his great-grandson Peter Orlando Hutchinson in TH Diary and Letters and was, therefore, not included in this edition.

2 Bailyn, Ordeal, p. 334; MHS Procs. 13 (1873–1875): 217–32.

3 MHS Procs. 13 (1873–1875): 217–32.

4 Although some authors were known to have sent triplicates of their transatlantic correspondence, Hutchinson did not follow this practice.

5 Massachusetts Archives, 27:79.

1 17 March 1766, JA Diary and Autobiography, p. 306.

2 Bailyn, Ordeal, p. 2. In addition to Bailyn’s National Book Award-winning narrative, there are five other major biographies of Hutchinson. The first, James K. Hosmer’s Life of TH, admirably attempts to restore the neglected loyalist’s reputation after a century of patriotic filiopietism. Again Hutchinson can do no wrong in Clifford K. Shipton’s deftly written sketch in Harvard Graduates, 8:149–217. The several works of Malcolm Freiberg, including “First Fifty Years” and his 1950 PhD dissertation, Prelude to Purgatory, constitute in some ways the most detailed examination of Hutchinson’s early years. William Pencak’s America’s Burke shows the most sensitive appreciation of Hutchinson as an historian. The latest biography, Andrew Walmsley’s Thomas Hutchinson and the Origins of the American Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1999), slight in substance and in scholarship, purports to revise Bailyn but really rests on an unsophisticated reading of Ordeal.

3 Malcolm Freiberg, “How to Become a Colonial Governor: Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts,” Review of Politics 21.4 (1959): 646.

4 TH History, 1:49–65.

5 Harvard Graduates, 8:149.

6 TH to Israel Williams, 30 October 1773.

7 Samuel Adams to Stephen Sayre, 23 November 1770, in The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing, 4 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904–1908), 2:68.

8 Freiberg, “First Fifty Years,” p. 36.

9 TH Diary and Letters, 1:47.

10 Translated as “I had not expected [this] from you.” TH Diary and Letters, 1:46.

11 TH Diary and Letters, 1:48.

12 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 12, 30–31.

13 Jonathan Belcher to Francis Harrison, 27 June 1734, MHS Colls., Sixth Series, 7 (1894), p. 77.

14 Malcolm Freiberg, “Thomas Hutchinson and the Province Currency,” NEQ 30.2 (1957): 194–95; Hosmer, Life of TH, pp. 22–23.

15 Freiberg, “First Fifty Years,” p. 50.

16 John Eliot, A Biographical Dictionary Containing a Brief Account of the First Settlers, and Other Eminent Characters . . . in New England (Salem, MA: Cushing and Appleton, 1809), p. 272.

17 Boston Gazette, 31 January 1763.

18 Freiberg, “Province Currency,” p. 196; Hosmer, Life of TH, p. 27.

19 Freiberg, “Province Currency,” p. 197; Hosmer, Life of TH, pp. 28–29; Pencak, America’s Burke, p. 15.

20 Freiberg, “Province Currency,” pp. 199, 201, 205–07; Pencak, America’s Burke, p. 15; TH Diary and Letters, 1:54.

21 John Adams to Joseph Ward, 24 October 1809, in The Journal and Letters of Samuel Curwen, ed. George A. Ward (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1864), p. 568.

22 TH to Henry Seymour Conway, 1 October 1765.

23 Freiberg, “First Fifty Years,” p. 53; Lawrence Henry Gipson, “The Drafting of the Albany Plan of Union: A Problem in Semantics,” Pennsylvania History 26.4 (1959): 295–96. Gipson attributes a much larger role at the conference to Hutchinson than does Freiberg.

24 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 40–41; Hosmer, Life of TH, pp. 43–44; TH to Lord Loudoun, 23 April 1757; Freiberg, “Colonial Governor,” p. 654.

25 TH to Israel Williams, 25 August 1757; Thomas Pownall to the Earl of Halifax, 4 September 1757, Library of Congress, Peter Force Papers, series 9, box 7.

26 Bailyn, Ordeal, p. 43; TH to Israel Williams, 17 July 1758; TH Diary and Letters, 1:60.

27 TH Diary and Letters, 1:61; Freiberg, “First Fifty Years,” p. 54; Bailyn, Ordeal, p. 42; TH to Jeffrey Amherst, May 1760. Hutchinson was also aware that Pownall had opened and then destroyed several letters Abercromby had written to Amherst, convincing him of Pownall’s underhandedness.

28 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 42, 44; TH Diary and Letters, 2:61.

29 Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London: Macmillan Company, 1929).

30 Hosmer, Life of TH, p. 44; Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 45–46; Francis Bernard to Lord Barrington, 19 April 1760, Barrington-Bernard Correspondence, p. 12.

31 Bailyn, Ordeal, p. 47; TH Diary and Letters, 1:64–65; Hosmer, Life of TH, p. 44.

32 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 48–50. Francis Bernard to Lord Shelburne, 22 December 1766, Papers of Francis Bernard, vol. 3 (forthcoming). Both Hutchinson and Otis provided accounts of their interview that were essentially consistent; see the Boston News-Letter, 7 April 1763, for the former and the Boston Gazette, 4 and 11 April 1763, for the latter.

33 Francis Bernard to Lord Shelburne, 22 December 1766, Papers of Francis Bernard, vol. 3 (forthcoming). The story of the vigorous resistance of Otis and the Boston merchants to renewed customs enforcement was most fully told in Tyler, Smugglers & Patriots, chap. 1, “The Long Shadow of Benjamin Barons: The Politics of Illicit Trade at Boston, 1760–1762.”

34 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 52, 54; Hosmer, Life of TH, p. 66.

35 Pencak, America’s Burke, pp. 40–43; Emory Washburn, Sketches of the Judicial History of Massachusetts from 1630 to the Revolution in 1775 (Boston, MA: Little Brown and Company, 1840), p. 306; TH Diary and Letters, 1:66.

36 Cited in Hosmer, Life of TH, p. 48.

37 TH History, 3:64.

38 Bailyn, Ordeal, p. 55; TH History, 3:67–68.

39 Quincy, Reports of Cases, pp. 471–77; JA Legal Papers, pp. 125, 106–07. Adams’s account of the entire proceedings are at JA Legal Papers, pp. 123–44.

40 For the most authoritative overview of the case, see Smith, Writs Case. None of the correspondence between Hutchinson and Bollan regarding the writs was found. A draft of TH’s writ of assistance, the one that would be used as the basis for all future writs of assistance in Massachusetts, is printed in JA Legal Papers, pp. 144–47.

41 John L. Bullion, A Great and Necessary Measure: George Grenville and the Genesis of the Stamp Act, 1763–1765 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1982).

42 TH History, 3:77–83; Bailyn, Ordeal, p. 107; Pencak, America’s Burke, p. 64.

43 Boston Gazette, 8 July 1765; Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 65–66. See the calendar for a full listing of Hutchinson’s correspondence during this period.

44 TH to Richard Jackson, 16 August 1765.

45 TH History, 3:86–88.

46 At least that is what Hutchinson himself came to believe, as he later wrote in the short narrative of his life composed for his family: “But having occasion to send to the Ministry a number of Depositions concerning illicit trade, they were all sworn to before the Attorney General, or some other Justice of Peace, except the Depositions of the Deputy Judge of Admiralty Court, which, for what reason the Lt. Govr knew not, the Govr desired might be attested by the Lt. Govr as Chief Justice. These Depositions were all seen at the Plantation Office by Briggs Hallowell, a merchant of Boston. He reported that complaint was made in them of John Rowe, Solomon Davis, and other merchants, as illicit traders, and that they were sworn before the Lt Governor, when indeed he had not any knowledge of the names being mentioned nor of the contents of any of the depositions except that of the Judge. This arriving at the time when the people were inflamed with the expectation of the Stamp Act, they were more easily induced to violence against any Crown officers; and these merchants, as one of them, Mr. Rowe, acknowledged, stirred up the mob to attack the houses of the Custom House officers, the Register of the Admiralty, and the Chief Justice.” TH Diary and Letters, 1:67.

47 TH History, 3:89.

48 TH Diary and Letters, 1:70–71.

49 Two accounts have been located of Hutchinson’s speech; both are published in this volume (see pp. 287–88).

50 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 114, 143.

51 Bailyn, Ordeal, p. 110.

52 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 112–13, 117–19.

53 Bailyn, Ordeal, p. 68.

54 Bailyn, Ordeal, p. 132.

55 TH History, 3:140.

56 Bailyn, Ordeal, p. 124.

57 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 115, 128.

58 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 128–30; Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 198, 200.

59 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 150–53.

60 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 156–57; TH to Thomas Gage, 25 February 1770.

61 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 158–59; TH Diary and Letters, 1:80.

62 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 161–64; Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” p. 210; TH to Lord Hillsborough, 27 March 1770.

63 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 165–67, 169. Hillsborough’s letter to Hutchinson is known only through a paraphrasing of the letter Hutchinson himself made in his diary in 1778 (TH Diary and Letters, 2:192). Bailyn theorizes that Hutchinson must have kept the letter with him when he went to England. No copy of the letter was found, but Bernard’s letter to Hutchinson, dated 13 May 1770, conveyed Hillsborough’s sentiments almost exactly as Hutchinson later stated them in TH Diary and Letters.

64 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 169, 194.

65 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 176–77; TH History, 3:74.

66 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 170.

67 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 206–07.

68 The complete exchange between Hutchinson and the General Court is reprinted in Briefs Am. Rev.

69 Briefs Am. Rev.; Bailyn, Ordeal, p. 208; TH History, 3:269.

70 Hosmer, Life of TH, p. 394.

71 TH to James Gambier, 19 February 1773.

72 John Adams to William Tudor, 8 March 1817, in The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 10 vols. (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1856), 2:311.

73 Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Cushing, 6 May 1773, Franklin Papers, 20:200–01.

74 Lord Dartmouth to TH, 10 April 1773; Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 216, 218–19.

75 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 223, 228. Two more letters, one each from George Rome and Thomas Moffatt, were added in later printings of the pamphlet.

76 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 223, 227, 230, 250; Hosmer, Life of TH, p. 271.

77 TH to Alexander Mackay, 23 February 1773; Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 286–87. According to John Pownall, no less a figure than Lord North believed Temple to be the guilty party. Three anonymous articles in The Public Advertiser appearing between August and November 1773 accused Temple, as well as the Boston News-Letter, 28 April 1774.

78 TH Diary and Letters, 1:91; Francis Bernard to TH, 17 November 1769. See also Sheila L. Skemp’s excellent short book: The Making of a Patriot: Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit (Oxford, UK, Oxford, 2013).

79 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 241, 245; Quincy as “Nedham’s Remembrancer,” Boston Gazette, 20 December 1773–7 February 1774; Sewall as “Philalethes,” Boston News-Letter, 24 June, 1 July 1773; Catherine Barton Mayo, “Additions to Thomas Hutchinson’s History of Massachusetts Bay,” AAS Procs. 59 (1949): 62.

80 TH History, 3:303.

81 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 260–61.

82 Bailyn, Ordeal, p. 260; TH History, 3:313; Frothingham cited in Hosmer, Life of TH, p. 299.

83 Lord Dartmouth to TH, 9 April 1774.

84 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 274–77, 290.

85 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 275–80.

86 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 284, 295, 315.

87 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 293–94, 302, 313, 344.

88 The manuscript version of the “Account” is held by the Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. [Thomas Hutchinson], Strictures upon the Declaration of Congress; In a Letter to a Noble Lord, &c. (London, 1776).

89 Pencak, America’s Burke, pp. 1, 17, 60, 62–63.

90 TH to Israel Williams, 26 April 1765.

91 Harvard Graduates, 8:169–70; Quincy, Reports of Cases, p. 244.

92 Pencak, America’s Burke, pp. 79, 119, 122, 197.

93 Printed in part in TH Diary and Letters, 1:45–105.

94 Cited in Bailyn, Ordeal, p. 375.

1 Richard Partridge (1681–1759) was an agent for Massachusetts and Belcher’s brother-in-law. Jonathan Belcher Jr. (1710–1776) was the second son and namesake of the governor and was residing in London at this time. A lawyer, he eventually served as chief justice and lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia.

1 TH sought audiences with members of the Privy Council and the Board of Trade during his sojourn in London (TH History, 2:290–97; Belknap, New Hampshire, 2:98–141). For documents relating to his efforts, see N.H. Papers, 19:177–628. For TH’s ultimate lack of success, see Privy Council Acts, pp. 600–01; Journal of Trade, 8:203; N.H. Papers, 19:510–14, 534, 536.

1 The “first beginner and principal agitator” was almost certainly Elisha Cooke Jr. (1678–1737), one of the representatives from the town of Boston and a leader of the popular party. The “creature” was possibly James Allen (1697–1755), Boston merchant, legislator, and a future political opponent of TH.

2 Presumably Parliament was considering a bill, possibly the Plantation Trade Act of 1741, that restrained the export of provisions to the foreign West Indies, which could affect Massachusetts trade adversely (Papers of Francis Bernard, 1:478).

3 Benjamin Avery (d. 1764), originally a Presbyterian minister and later a physician in London, acted for several years as secretary to the Dissenting Deputies, a lobbying group of Protestant Dissenters founded in 1732 to advocate repeal of the Test Act that barred anyone not affiliated with the Church of England from holding a position in the government. The Dissenting Deputies had close ties with North America, and Massachusetts in particular, given the province’s history of religious dissent. What the “hint” was is unknown.

4 Belcher was referring to his son, Jonathan Belcher Jr.

5 Perhaps Belcher was referring to Joseph Blanchard (1704–1758), representative from Dunstable and member of the New Hampshire Council from 1741 to 1758. Blanchard apparently invested heavily in the Land Bank, which Parliament was on the verge of suppressing.

6 Grub Street was a street in Moorfields, London, proverbial as a haunt for literary hacks.

7 Spencer Compton, 1st Earl of Wilmington, (1673?–1743) was the Speaker of the House of Commons from 1715 to 1727, lord president of the Privy Council from 1730 to 1742, and first lord of the treasury and nominal head of the ministry from 1742 until shortly before his death in 1743.

8 Belcher was referring to himself in the third person.

9 Suffolk County sheriff Edward Winslow (circa 1668–1753) held warrants for the arrest of Richard Carter, John Bray, Nathaniel Spear, and David French. The truth behind reports of a planned “rebellion” remains unclear. At the time, Belcher received word from various informers that as many as 20,000 people from communities surrounding Boston intended to storm the town in protest that Land Bank bills were not in circulation, but the march never took place (George Athan Billias, “The Massachusetts Land Bankers of 1740,” University of Maine Bulletin 61 [April 1959]: 34–35).

10 Belcher was probably referring to an extension of what was commonly called the Bubble Act, enacted in Britain in 1720 in the wake of the South Sea Bubble Crisis to prohibit private companies from issuing bills of credit to the public. The Massachusetts agent Francis Wilks wrote Belcher on 27 March 1741 to inform him that a bill extending the Bubble Act to America was progressing through Parliament.

11 Wilks (1696–1742), New England merchant resident in London, was serving as the agent for Massachusetts. He supported Belcher in opposing the Land Bank. On 7 April 1741, the Massachusetts House of Representatives voted to dismiss Wilks from the agency and pay him the balance of his accounts: £1,000 old tenor (JHR, 18:226–27, 229–30). In April 1741, Agent Richard Partridge submitted a bill to the House of Representatives for £225 for his services in helping settle Massachusetts’ northern boundary dispute with New Hampshire. The House objected to him setting his own terms and granted him only £100 (JHR, 18:222).

12 William Baker (1705–1770), alderman of the city of London, prospered in the North American trade. Belcher was apparently referring to a MS that TH had drafted, probably on the currency issue. The document was not found.

13 The “special affair” was the disputed towns between Massachusetts and New Hampshire and thus the boundary line between the two colonies.

14 The money was granted by the Massachusetts General Court for the expenses of TH’s agency.

15 Belcher owned nearly 1,000 acres in the disputed territory.

16 The letter, Belcher to the Lords of Trade, 7 May 1741, addressed continuing confusion over the boundary between Massachusetts and New Hampshire (Massachusetts Historical Society, Jonathan Belcher Letterbooks 7:225–27). Belcher’s reference to the “Governour” was another rather confusing allusion to himself.

17 TH’s “scheme” was presumably another iteration of the plan he proposed in 1739 for gradually returning Massachusetts to a specie-based economy by borrowing in London for a period of ten years an amount of silver equal to Massachusetts’ unredeemed currency.

18 TH lived adjacent to William Clarke’s house in the North End. Clarke’s son-in-law was Christopher Kilby (1705–1771), a native Bostonian working as a merchant in London. Kilby replaced Wilks as agent later in 1741 and served until 1748.

19 From Cicero’s First Oration against Cataline, translated as, “O the times! The manners!”

1 Lynde (1666–1745) was chief justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court. Born in Massachusetts, he studied law in London at the Middle Temple before returning to New England to begin his law practice. Lynde served as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from Salem sporadically between 1703 and 1712. In 1713, he took a seat on the Governor’s Council, where he remained until 1737. In 1712, Lynde was appointed to the Superior Court and became chief justice in 1728, in which capacity he served until his death in 1745. He was the father of TH’s friend and future fellow justice Benjamin Lynde Jr.

2 The lord president of the Privy Council was the Earl of Wilmington.

3 By “surprizing revolutions” Hutchinson probably referred to the Land Bank controversy in Massachusetts. The division of the Massachusetts and New Hampshire governments and Benning Wentworth’s appointment as governor of the latter signaled the failure of TH’s mission to keep Belcher as head of both. The disputed towns, which TH was sent to England to secure for Massachusetts, were also placed within New Hampshire’s borders by the settling of the boundary line, marking yet another failure for TH.

4 Sir Harry Frankland (1716–1768), collector of customs from 1741 to 1757, became a baronet at the death of an uncle in 1746. Frankland was TH’s neighbor on Garden Court Street.

5 The Duke of Grafton was Charles Fitzroy, 2nd Duke of Grafton (1683–1757). Lord Euston was George Fitzroy, Earl of Euston, (1715–1747) eldest surviving son of the 2nd Duke of Grafton. TH described Euston’s election to Parliament in TH History, 2:303, where it was given as one of the reasons for Belcher’s dismissal.

6 The “affair of the money” referred to Belcher’s resistance to attempts to inflate the Massachusetts currency.

7 Richard Partridge was an agent for the Land Bank.

8 Belcher’s instructions at the time of his appointment limited the bills of credit that the government could pass and the amount of money in circulation at any one time (Instructions to Mass. Governors, pp. 1198–99, 1206–07, 1277–80).

9 The September Bill was another way of referring to the Land Bank scheme.

10 From Virgil’s Ecologues, Book 3, line 104, translated as, “You would be to me as great Apollo.” The proposal was not found, but it was mentioned in No. 3 above.

11 Eliakim Palmer (1708–1749) was a 1727 Harvard classmate of TH. He was born in Boston, lived in England, and later served Connecticut and Massachusetts as agent. Martin Bladen (1680–1746) was a member of the Board of Trade.

12 Benjamin Browne (1706–1750) was a Harvard College graduate of 1725 and wealthy merchant of Salem. He opposed inflationary financial measures.

13 The old agent was Francis Wilks, who apparently advanced TH the £300 granted him by the General Court for his agency.

14 Wilks submitted his accounts to the House of Representatives in a letter dated 27 November 1740, along with a list of articles he had purchased on the province’s behalf. The House voted on 6 April 1741 to approve all these charges and furthermore to allot Wilks an additional £100 for the purchase of gunpowder. How much gunpowder was included in Wilks’ November account is unknown (JHR, 18:222).

15 Foremost among the controversies in which Massachusetts was involved during this period was the dispute about the border between Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Many lawsuits resulted from the confusion regarding the border.

16 The Narragansett Papers were not identified, but presumably they concerned the boundary dispute between the two colonies.

1 The Earl of Wilmington was the lord president of the Privy Council.

2 King George II appointed Benning Wentworth.

3 The Order of Council for the Massachusetts boundary was dated 9 April 1737. A copy of it appears at the date 5 September 1737 in JHR, 15:150–52.

4 John Thomlinson Sr. (d. 1767) was a London merchant and agent for New Hampshire from 1734 to 1767. On TH’s appearances before the Board of Trade, see Journal of Trade, 7:361, 380–81, 383–84, 386.

5 The Massachusetts government granted charters to several towns in the disputed territory in southern New Hampshire in the 1730s, in part to strengthen its claim of ownership (Roy Akagi, The Town Proprietors of the New England Colonies [Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963; orig. pub. 1924]).

6 TH did not leave England until 11 October 1741. He landed at Cape Cod on 30 November 1741.

1 Although elected a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives several times between 1733 and 1772, Williams frequently excused himself from traveling from Hampshire County in western Massachusetts to attend the sessions of the General Court in Boston, as did many of his fellow representatives. Poor attendance of the representatives from western Massachusetts was a frequent topic of discussion between Williams and TH, particularly in the 1760s since TH believed that the conservative representatives from western Massachusetts could help undermine the influence of the Boston-led popular faction in the province’s government.

2 TH himself proposed the bill, “An Act for Drawing in the Bills of Credit of the Several Denominations Which Have at Any Time Been Issued by This Government and Are Still Outstanding, and for Ascertaining the Rate of Coin’d Silver in This Province for the Future” (Mass. Acts and Resolves, 3:430–41). It was enacted on 26 January 1748/9, but TH subsequently lost his seat in the House of Representatives in May 1749 as the unpopular consequences of deflation set in.

3 A phrase widely attributed to Suetonius, one of Julius Caesar’s commanders, after crossing the Rubicon River, translated as, “the die is cast.”

4 Oliver Partridge was a mutual acquaintance and Williams’ neighbor.

1 From Virgil’s first Eclogue, line 6, translated as, “God has granted us this peace.”

2 The long-anticipated redemption of the currency was underway and set to end the following March.

3 Spencer Phips (1685–1757) was lieutenant governor of Massachusetts from 1741 until his death on 4 April 1757. During much of the 1750s, he served as acting governor, most notably from 1749 to 1753 while William Shirley was out of the province negotiating boundary disputes with France and lobbying his superiors in London for currency reform in the other three New England colonies. The General Court began its third session of the legislative year on 10 January 1751.

4 The reference to the “Canada bills” was presumably to the reimbursement of out-of-pocket expenses Williams incurred in recruiting and supplying troops for military service in expeditions against Canada during King George’s War.

1 The Governor’s Council passed its third and final version of this bill on 25 April 1751. The House of Representatives did the same, and Governor William Shirley approved it the same day (JHR, 27:233; Mass. Acts and Resolves, 3:554–62).

2 TH wrote the province’s law for redeeming paper money for silver.

1 The title of this document is taken from the minutes of the Albany Conference for 1 July 1754, when the delegates requested that the committee formulating a plan of union should also prepare a “representation of the present state of the Colonies” (Franklin Papers, 5:344–52, 366–74; Newbold, Albany Congress, pp. 80–86). TH later claimed that he was the primary author of this document, although no copy of it in his hand was found (TH Diary and Letters, 1:55).

2 The committee presented the [Representation] to the delegates on 6 July. Over the next three days, the members of the conference discussed and revised it before finally approving it on 9 July, when it was entered into the meeting minutes.

3 The Italian explorer Sebastian Cabot (circa 1484–circa 1557) sailed under the English flag, possibly as early as 1497 on a voyage accompanying his father John Cabot (circa 1450–circa 1498), who journeyed within sight of the coast of Newfoundland and claimed the region for King Henry VII. In 1509, Sebastian Cabot made his own voyage to the New World, landing in Hudson Bay.

4 The 1629 charter of Massachusetts set the colony’s western boundary as the “South Sea,” although at that time the extent of the North American continent was unknown. The Connecticut charter of 1662 also claimed the “South Sea” as its western border.

5 The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) brought to an end Queen Anne’s War. By its terms, Great Britain received Newfoundland, Acadia, and Hudson Bay while France secured Cape Breton Island and its holdings on the St. Lawrence River. The boundaries of none of these territories were well defined, however, leading to conflict between the French and British in the region.

6 Signed in October 1748, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle marked the end of King George’s War by restoring the prewar status quo.

7 In the 1730s, the French constructed a fort at a narrow strait on the southern reaches of Lake Champlain, naming it Fort St. Frederic. It would become the target of two British sieges during the French and Indian War before finally falling to British forces in 1759, when the British began building their own fortification there named Crown Point (Chartrand, Forts of New France, pp. 31–32).

8 In 1748, the French constructed Fort Saint-Jean where the St. John River joins the Bay of Fundy. They also established several other outposts in Nova Scotia at this time (Chartrand, Forts of New France, p. 31).

9 Governor William Shirley took a force of 800 men to Maine in the summer of 1754 to investigate these rumors, reaffirm the cooperation of the Native Americans in the region, and construct more English forts along the Kennebeck River. Details of this expedition can be found in Shirley to Sir Thomas Robinson, 19 August 1754, printed in The Correspondence of William Shirley, ed. Charles Henry Lincoln, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan Company, 1912), 2:72–83.

10 There was a rumored French settlement in an area known as the Upper Coos, located in northern New Hampshire. A June 1754 expedition ordered by Governor Benning Wentworth and led by Captain Peter Powers (1707–1757) and John Stark (1728–1822) failed to find any evidence of such a settlement (Burt Garfield Loescher, History of Rogers’ Rangers, 4 vols. [Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 2001], 3:16).

11 Between 1748 and 1754, the French constructed seven substantial fortifications in this region: one in the St. Lawrence Valley, one near Lake Champlain, two in New Brunswick, and three around Lake Erie (Chartrand, Forts of New France, p. 7). The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle also returned the formidable fortress of Louisbourg to the French, to the outrage of New Englanders, who had captured it in 1745.

12 Fort de La Présentation was built as a mission fort in 1749. By the mid-1750s, it was a meeting place for French-allied Native Americans, particularly the Iroquois. In 1758, the French government assigned a military commander to the fort but abandoned it the following year.

13 At issue was the number of Native Americans who attended the reading of the opening speech of the Albany Conference, delivered by Lieutenant Governor James DeLancey (1703–1760) on 29 June 1754. Other estimates placed the number closer to 200. Regardless of the number in attendance, the Iroquois caused the delegates a great deal of anxiety by showing up to the conference several days late, heightening colonists’ fears regarding the state of Anglo-Iroquois relations. At the conclusion of the conference, the Native Americans were given food, firearms, and alcohol, which required thirty wagons to transport to their villages. Although on a larger scale than usual, such transfers of goods to the Native Americans were standard British practice for these types of negotiations. For more on Anglo-Native American relations at the Albany Conference, see Newbold, Albany Congress, pp. 49–71.

14 Jean-Baptiste-Louis Frédéric de La Rochefoucauld de Roye, Duc d’Anville (1709–1746), commanded a massive French fleet sent to North America in June 1746 during King George’s War to recover Louisbourg after it fell to the British the previous summer. Storms at sea took a heavy toll, wrecking some ships and dispersing the survivors. With the remnants of the fleet, D’Anville put in at Halifax in August 1746. He committed suicide the following month.

15 Alcohol, and particularly rum, had long been a pillar of the colonial fur trade. British policy fluctuated on the legality of supplying the Native Americans with rum, but even when British law permitted its barter, so much of the fur trade was conducted illegally that the official regulations were largely irrelevant. In the years leading up to the Albany Conference, Native American leadership, particularly among the Mohawks, began protesting the prevalence of the rum trade, and more British and Americans began speaking out against the practice. The few governors who attempted to regulate the trade found it beyond their control, though. The common practice of conducting land deals with intoxicated Native Americans was considered one of the chief sources of tension in Anglo-Native American relations (Timothy J. Shannon, Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000], pp. 29, 46, 48).

1 On 25 October 1754, the Massachusetts delegates to the Albany Conference submitted this report to the Governor’s Council, which sent it down to the House of Representatives on 1 November. At the time, committees from both the Council and House were in the process of examining the Albany Plan of Union, which Governor William Shirley presented to them on 18 October. The General Court as a whole did not discuss the plan until December (Newbold, Albany Congress, pp. 141–47).

2 The lieutenant governor of New York was James DeLancey, and the four councilors from New York were Joseph Murray (1694–1757), William Johnson, John Chambers (1711–1765), and William Smith (1697–1769).

3 The Massachusetts General Court instructed its delegates to work for “a general firm and perpetual union and confederacy with the other colonies” for conducting Native American affairs and apportioning expenses and troops required for their common defense (Freiberg, “First Fifty Years,” p. 52). The instructions to the commissioners are at Massachusetts Archives, SC1/series 45X, 4:468–70, dated 17–19 April 1754, and were reprinted in “Journal of the Proceedings of the Congress Held at Albany in 1754,” MHS Colls., Third Series, 5 (1836): 9–10.

4 The Massachusetts delegates were granted far more authority and greater powers by the province’s legislature than were the delegates from other colonies. In fact, only the Massachusetts legislature authorized its commissioners to the conference to consent to colonial union (Newbold, Albany Congress, pp. 45–48).

5 The enclosure, the “Journal of the Proceedings of the Congress Held at Albany in 1754,” was not found with this document, but a copy of it is at Massachusetts Historical Society, Ms. N–1751 and printed in MHS Colls., Third Series, 5 (1836).

6 The “very large Present” was gifts of trade goods for Native Americans attending the conference.

7 The Lords of Trade ordered Sir Danvers Osborn (1715–1753) to organize a conference in a letter dated 18 September 1753 (reprinted in “Journal of the Proceedings of the Congress Held at Albany in 1754,” MHS Colls., Third Series, 5 [1836]: 19–22). At the time the letter was written, Osborn had only recently been appointed governor of New York and did not assume office until 10 October 1753. He committed suicide two days later, leaving DeLancey in charge. The letter from the Lords of Trade only specified Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia in the invitation to gather in New York. New Jersey and Virginia chose not to send delegates, and Rhode Island and Connecticut were invited later, at Shirley’s suggestion (Newbold, Albany Congress, pp. 23, 38).

8 Caughnawaga was a settlement of Iroquois converts of the French located near Sault St. Louis on the St. Lawrence River.

9 The “present plan” was what is commonly known as the Albany Plan of Union but was formally titled “A Plan of Perpetual Union for His Majesty’s Colonies in North America.” It was approved by the delegates at the Albany Conference on 10 July 1754. The Massachusetts General Court would discuss other plans, though (No. 11, below). The Massachusetts delegates’ support for the plan’s central idea uniting all the colonies into a single entity represented a change in position, since the commissioners arrived favoring a division into northern and southern districts. Whether TH himself favored such a division is unknown, since no document outlining his plan for the Albany Conference was found. The issue of TH’s role in the authorship of the Albany Plan of Union has sparked considerable debate. Lawrence Henry Gipson was inclined to see him almost as coauthor with Benjamin Franklin of the final version of the plan, while Malcolm Freiberg saw TH’s role on the committee as more limited (Gipson, British Empire, 4:126–42, 151–66; Freiberg, “First Fifty Years,” p. 53; Lawrence Henry Gipson, “The Drafting of the Albany Plan of Union: A Problem in Semantics,” Pennsylvania History 26 [October 1959]: 291–316; Franklin Papers, 5:374–87). For TH’s own account of the conference, see TH History, 3:14–18.

10 Because of the limited authority granted to the other delegations by their colonial legislatures, the commissioners decided that the Albany Plan of Union had to be approved by each colonial assembly before it could be presented to the Board of Trade. There was also disagreement on whether achieving union was best done through the voluntary action of the colonies or an act of Parliament. Over the course of the next year, however, each colonial assembly either rejected the Albany Plan of Union outright or tabled it for further review (Newbold, Albany Congress, pp. 135–71).

11 Wells (1689–1770) was a 1707 graduate of Yale and a minister from Connecticut, who married a wealthy Boston woman and moved there. He served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives intermittently from 1727 to 1760 and on the Governor’s Council in the 1730s and 1740s.

1 The General Court began debating the Albany Plan of Union in early December, but even before reaching a decision on that plan, a movement arose to formulate a different plan of colonial union. The committee originally formed by the House of Representatives and the Governor’s Council to consider the merits of the plan drafted at the Albany Conference met again, added a few new members to its ranks (most notably TH), and drafted a substitute plan, entitled “The Grand Court of the Five United British Colonies” (Massachusetts Archives, SC1/series 45X, 6:177–79; not in TH’s hand). It was presented to the General Court on 11 December and proposed a union of only the New England colonies plus New York. While each house was debating the merits of this substitute plan, both the House and Council rejected the original Albany Plan of Union on 14 December. A few days later, the General Court rejected the substitute plan as well but did not abandon the idea of colonial union altogether. Instead, the House and Council voted on 19 December to form another committee to draft another plan for colonial union, this one to include all of the American colonies, not just those in New England. TH took the lead on this committee of thirteen members of the House and Council, and on 26 December, the committee presented to the Council its new plan for colonial union. The Council immediately sent it down to the House for consideration. The House decided that the representatives needed to consult their constituents before they could move forward on the new plan, but the adamant opposition to the plan at the 17 January 1755 Boston town meeting (led by TH’s neighbor and Benjamin Franklin’s good friend William Clarke) ended any hopes of its adoption (Newbold, The Albany Congress, pp. 143–55; JHR, 31:152–53, 163, 181–82).

2 The text was interlined in the margin with marks for its position.

3 The text was interlined in the margin as insert A with marks for its position.

1 Governor William Shirley sent William Bollan to England in late 1745 as the Massachusetts agent to recoup the province’s expenses in King George’s War, specifically Massachusetts’ expenses associated with the siege of Louisbourg. Bollan remained in Britain for nearly the rest of his life.

2 None of TH’s early correspondence with Bollan was found. The earliest located letter between the two is a letter from TH to Bollan, dated 14 July 1760.

3 The text was interlined without mark for position.

4 This quotation was a gloss on Cicero, Ad Familiares, Book 12, Letter 20, to Quintus Cornificius, which reads in the original, “plura otiosus; haec cum essem in senatu exaravi.” As TH wrote it, it reads, “This I’ve written in the Senate. More when I have time.”

1 William Shirley recruited of a large number of provincial troops in the spring of 1756 in anticipation of an assault on Crown Point (Anderson, Crucible of War, pp. 137–40).

2 The removal of the French posts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point on Lake Champlain was the great object of military preparations in the spring of 1756.

1 The other letter was possibly TH to Loudoun, 7 March 1757.

2 The Fort at Number 4 was the northernmost British outpost in the Connecticut River valley throughout much of the French and Indian War. The fort was undermanned and undersupplied at the start of the war, but as the conflict progressed it became an increasingly important staging ground for attacks against the French and served as the terminus for a road to the strategically positioned fort at Crown Point near the southern tip of Lake Champlain. The Fort at Number 4 was abandoned by the British in 1761, no longer necessary after they secured their hold over Canada.

3 TH traveled to England in 1741 to argue that twenty-six towns in southern New Hampshire should be annexed to Massachusetts when the border between the colonies was established. His mission ultimately failed when British officials ruled the towns part of New Hampshire.

4 Theodore Atkinson (1697–1779) was an influential politician from New Hampshire and close associate of the powerful Wentworth family. He held offices as councilor, secretary of the province, colonel in the militia, and delegate to the 1754 Albany Conference. In the late 1730s, Atkinson served on the commission to expand New Hampshire’s boundary at Massachusetts’ expense. Parker, the carrier of the petition, was not further identified.

5 Whether following TH’s advice or not, Loudoun eventually chose to lay siege to Louisbourg.

1 Having a low opinion of colonial forces, Loudoun requested substantially fewer provincial troops than his predecessor William Shirley had asked for the previous spring (Anderson, Crucible of War, pp. 180–81, 184).

2 Loudoun wrote to TH on 18 April 1757, but the letter was not found. TH was referring to an effort to lift the embargo for the fishing fleet. In March 1757, Loudoun instituted an embargo on all shipping to and from America unless it was for military business. He hoped to curb the exchange of goods and information with the French and to emphasize the British government’s authority over colonial affairs, hence strengthening his own ability to organize the war effort. All colonial governments initially complied, but by early summer the assemblies of Virginia and Maryland moved to lift the embargo (Anderson, Crucible of War, pp. 182–84).

1 The enclosure was not found but was presumably a letter to TH from Robert Hale, which TH was forwarding to Williams.

2 TH was referring to a dispute over precedence on the Governor’s Council. In light of his recent appointment as lieutenant governor, TH assumed the chair at meetings of the Council, causing great umbrage to Sir William Pepperell (1696–1759), merchant, member of the Governor’s Council, and military general. Pepperell was the victor of the siege of Louisbourg in 1745, for which he was made a baronet by King George II, and he believed that therefore the chair belonged to him.

3 “Cap Osborne” was John Osborne, TH’s stepfather. Jacob Wendell (1691–1761) of Boston served on the Council from 1734 to 1760. He married Sarah Oliver in 1714 and was thus connected to the Hutchinson-Oliver family. Samuel Watts Sr. (1697–1770) of Chelsea served on the Council from 1742 to 1762.

4 John Chandler II (1693–1762) of Worcester served on the Council from 1743 to 1762.

5 “Mr. Oliver” was TH’s brother-in-law, Andrew Oliver. Since Sir Harry Frankland’s baronetcy was an earlier creation than Pepperell’s, Frankland would have taken precedence over Pepperell if he had had a seat on the Council.

6 There is no record of when TH’s commission as lieutenant governor was read to the General Court, but it was published on 1 May (Boston Gazette, 1 May 1758).

7 The Boston Post-Boy published an account of the landing on Cape Breton Island on 5 June 1758 as British forces prepared for their assault on Louisbourg.

8 Thomas Pownall prorogued the Massachusetts General Court until 4 October 1758.

1 Admiral John Byng (1704–1757) was court-martialed and executed for the defeat of his squadron off Minorca in 1755.

2 TH was presumably referring to a scheme to send him, then lieutenant governor, as special agent to England.

3 Benjamin Pratt (1711–1763) was a representative for Boston in the General Court from 1757 to 1759 and a strong supporter of Governor Thomas Pownall. A lawyer and close friend of the Otis family, Pratt subsequently refused to take part in the writs of assistance case. He eventually became chief justice of New York’s superior court.

4 With this abbreviation, TH was presumably alluding to John Tyng (1705–1797), 1725 Harvard graduate, merchant, and member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives standing for several different communities between 1731 and 1778. Tyng was also a colonel in the militia, in which capacity he played a prominent role in organizing the province’s military forces during the French and Indian War. He became a close friend and supporter of Pownall and headed a group opposed to TH during Pownall’s administration.

5 The secretary to the Board of Trade was John Pownall, brother of the governor.

6 Isaac Royall Jr. (1719–1781) of Medford was a merchant and distiller, with substantial business interests in the West Indies. A member of the Council from 1751 to 1774, he was also perhaps a rival candidate for lieutenant governor during this period.

1 TH was suspicious that Governor Thomas Pownall (“the first magistrate”) had opened and perhaps destroyed letters from General James Abercromby, requesting reinforcements from General Jeffery Amherst after the July 1758 defeat at Ticonderoga, in which Abercromby’s large army was prevented from capturing the fort by a smaller French force. The battle was the bloodiest of the war, with Abercromby’s troops suffering nearly 2,000 casualties. Knowledge of treasonable conduct while failing to report it would constitute “misprision of treason.”

2 One of TH’s responsibilities as lieutenant governor was the apprehension of deserters from provincial forces. A copy of the warrant TH issued for deserters on and near Cape Cod (written in his own hand) is at Massachusetts Historical Society, J. M. Robbins Papers, dated 29 July 1758.

3 Thomas Pownall made a brief excursion in August 1758 to the Penobscot region in response to rumors of an impeending French attack. Soon after Pownall's return to Boston on 25 August, a French and Indian force attacked along the Kennebec River instead, but soon withdrew.

4 Robert Monckton (1726–1782) was the lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia from 1756 to 1761.

5 Massachusetts claimed the entire Penobscot region, thus Pownall was not technically outside the province and, therefore, TH would still be lieutenant rather than acting governor.

6 The massacre at Fort William Henry the previous year dealt a great blow to colonial morale and made a French invasion of New England appear imminent.

7 Thomas Fitch (1700–1774) was the governor of Connecticut from 1754 to 1766. Generally a conservative figure, Fitch resisted the spread of the Great Awakening in Connecticut and opposed efforts to extend Connecticut’s borders to the west. TH was perhaps referring to an effort by Pownall to organize a regional defense of New England.

8 Major General Edward Braddock (1695–1755) was commander-in-chief of British forces in North America between February and July 1755. Braddock led the disastrous campaign against the French and their Native American allies in the Ohio River valley and was killed in action near Fort Duquesne in mid-July.

9 Governor William Shirley succeeded Braddock in July 1755.

10 Lord Loudoun succeeded Shirley in July 1756.

11 Abercromby assumed command in early 1758. A supporter of Loudoun, he arrived in America in the summer of 1756 and served as Loudoun’s second-in-command. After Loudoun was recalled in late December 1757, Abercromby was ordered to attack Canada the following summer via Lake Champlain. His attempt to capture Fort Ticonderoga proved a disaster (see note 1, above). William Pitt, secretary of state for the southern department, recalled him in the fall of 1758 and installed Amherst in his place.

12 Oliver Partridge was their mutual friend and Williams’ neighbor.

13 The quotation is from Horace’s “Odes,” Book 2, Poem 3. TH added his own punctuation and misspelled both “laetitia” and “Delli.” Freely translated, it reads: “Remember to keep a level head when life’s path is steep; likewise when the going is good, to restrain it from excessive joy, Dellius; for you are sure to die.”

1 The Massachusetts House of Representatives had been in session since 29 December 1758.

2 Lord Howe was Richard Howe (1726–1799), whose later service as an admiral in the British navy during the American Revolution earned him an earldom. His elder brother was George Augustus Howe, 3rd Viscount (circa 1725–1758), second-in-command of the British forces dispatched to capture Fort Ticonderoga in July 1758. George Howe died at age 33 in the first volley of a preliminary skirmish. The Massachusetts General Court provided for an obelisk in his memory at Westminster Abbey.

3 Fort George at Castine, Maine, commanding Penobscot Bay, was intended not only for defense but also as an assertion of the claims of Massachusetts to the land between the Penobscot and St. John rivers, territory that the British had recently seized from the French. Governor Thomas Pownall made the fortification of the Penobscot region a priority during his administration (Anderson, Crucible of War, p. 223). The “General” was Jeffery Amherst.

4 The proposal was apparently that TH should be sent to England as agent for the province.

5 William Bollan served as the agent from Massachusetts throughout this period, beginning in 1745.

1 Amherst assumed command of British forces in North America on 18 September 1758, so this unsigned letter was probably written by him.

2 Major General James Wolfe (1727–1759) commanded a combined British-American force that left Louisbourg on 4 June bound for the Île d’Orléans, from which he planned to launch an attack on Quebec (Anderson, Crucible of War, p. 344).

3 Nathaniel Wheelwright was a Boston merchant and military contractor.

4 Correspondence between Amherst and Governor Thomas Pownall for this period can be found in the National Archives UK, WO 34/27.

1 Partly because of Jeffery Amherst’s distrust, Thomas Pownall was replaced as chief executive in Massachusetts by Francis Bernard, the governor of New Jersey, in November 1759. Pownall did not turn over his duties to Bernard, however, until the following summer.

2 The end of 1759 saw a shuffle of colonial governors following the death of Jamaica’s governor, George Haldane (1722–1759). Bernard was transferred from New Jersey to Massachusetts, while Pownall was slotted to take over the governorship of South Carolina, a position he would hold for about a year although he would never travel to the province (Papers of Francis Bernard, 1:39–43).

3 As lieutenant governor, TH could assume command only when Pownall left the province. Though not technically absent (the Penobscot region was claimed by Massachusetts as a part of the district of Maine), Pownall was upset by TH’s broad use of discretionary power during Pownall’s time away from Boston, and TH was loathe once again to incur the departing governor’s wrath.

4 “Colo. Partridge” was Oliver Partridge.

1 Governor Thomas Pownall spent several weeks in Penobscot, Maine, the previous year.

2 Pownall may have taken issue with TH’s decision to dispatch some Massachusetts troops directly to Quebec without Pownall’s knowledge.

1 Thomas Pownall was returning to Britain, leaving TH in charge of the government of Massachusetts until Francis Bernard’s arrival two months later.

2 On 30 May 1760, the Massachusetts House of Representatives voted to increase the bounty for new enlistments by £3, meaning that each new recruit would receive £9 for enlisting (JHR, 37:11).

3 Charles Lawrence (1709–1760) was governor of Nova Scotia from 1756 until his death. As lieutenant governor, he gave the controversial order in 1755 to remove the Acadians from Nova Scotia, some of whom TH subsequently helped resettle in New England.

4 Lieutenant Colonel William Arbuthnot was the commander of Fort Frederick on St. John River.

5 Major Gabriel Christie (1722–1799) was deputy quartermaster general of the British army in Canada during the French and Indian War.

6 Boston merchants collectively set terms concerning payment for the goods supplied by them or the use of merchant vessels for transport.

1 Thomas Pownall sailed for England on 3 June 1760, leaving TH at the head of the provincial government.

2 Massachusetts ended up raising 4,000 men in 1760, part of a force of 14,500 American troops serving under Amherst (Anderson, Crucible of War, p. 389).

1 Thomas Hancock (1702–1764), uncle of John, provisioned British troops during the French and Indian War.

2 The letter was No. 24, above.

3 Castle William was a fortified island commanding the channel leading to Boston’s inner harbor. It later served as both a summer retreat and a safe haven for provincial officials fleeing Boston mobs.

4 The Massachusetts House of Representatives sent TH a message on 19 June concerning soldiers stationed at Fort Cumberland. The message was couched in respectful terms and promised that the House was “desirous to do all in their Power to promote his Majesty’s Service, and quiet the Minds of those uneasy people.” TH’s response, dated 20 June, was equally cordial (JHR, 37:76, 79).

5 TH may have been referring to the failed French attempt to retake Quebec in the spring of 1760 (Anderson, Crucible of War, pp. 391–96).

6 James Murray (1719?–1794) was one of the three brigadiers who assisted Major General James Wolfe at the siege of Quebec. Murray was governor of that province at the time this letter was written. The letter from Murray to which TH refers was not found.

1 Fort Frederick was constructed by the British at the mouth of the St. John River on the Bay of Fundy in 1758. Fort Cumberland was located on the isthmus of Chignecto connecting New Brunswick and Nova Scotia—one of the northeasternmost forts in North America. Originally built by the French in 1751, who called it Fort Beauséjour, it was intended to counter the newly constructed British fortification of Fort Lawrence. The British captured Fort Beauséjour in June 1755 and changed the name to Fort Cumberland. It was the first French fort the British captured in the French and Indian War (Chartrand, Forts of New France, pp. 19–20).

1 The letter was not found.

2 TH was at the head of the provincial government during the two months between Thomas Pownall’s departure on 3 June and Francis Bernard’s arrival on 2 August 1760. For Bernard’s installation as governor, see Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 49–50; Papers of Francis Bernard, 1:48–50.

3 John Tyng opposed TH during Pownall’s administration, but he lost his political influence with the arrival of Bernard, who quickly allied himself with TH. Tyng was also marginalized as an opposition leader by the rise of the Otis family.

4 The Speaker of the House of Representatives was James Otis Sr.

5 TH was probably referring to William Brattle.

6 Castle William in Boston Harbor offered a summer retreat for the provincial governor and his family.

7 Amelia Offley Bernard (circa 1719–1778) married Bernard in 1741, a union that ultimately produced ten children. It was through her uncle, Lord Barrington, that Bernard gained political influence.

8 The General Court reconvened on 17 December 1760.

1 The Speaker was James Otis Sr., but the letter was not found. TH was possibly referring to the petition of Isaac Searl of West Hoosack (now Williamstown), Massachusetts. Williams had a long-standing feud with Searl, dating back to at least 1757, when Searl publicly acknowledged that he had slandered Williams. In June 1760, Searl brought a memorial before the Massachusetts House of Representatives, claiming that Williams had been “arbitrary and illegal” in the sale of Housatonic land, which Williams had been selling for years in partnership with James Bowdoin. The matter of Searl’s memorial dragged on for months until the House held a public hearing on the issue on 8 April 1761, which Williams refused to attend. The House found in Searl’s favor but no action seems to have been taken (Harvard Graduates, 8:303, 308–09; JHR, 37:205, 311).

2 Governor Francis Bernard nominated TH for the chief justiceship of the Massachusetts Superior Court on 13 November 1760. James Otis Jr. believed that the next vacancy on the Superior Court had been promised to his father, Otis Sr.

3 Customs seizures were divided three ways, with one-third going to the king (but actually paid to the province treasury), one-third to the governor, and one-third to the officer making the seizure. Benjamin Barons’s role in the merchants’ challenge to the customs service is more fully described in Tyler, Smugglers & Patriots, pp. 25–63; Smith, Writs Case, pp. 184–201. Bernard saw him as the center of a conspiracy to destroy the customs service and wrote repeatedly to his superiors in London about “Baron’s party,” detailing how Barons had “plaid the Devil in this town” (Papers of Francis Bernard, 1:72, 83, 94, 119–20, 122–23, 128–29, 138–39, 145–46, 170–71, 175–77).

4 The MS was torn.

5 The treasurer was Harrison Gray (1711–1794), a Boston merchant and ultimately a loyalist, who served as treasurer of Massachusetts from 1753 until 1774. The General Court appointed a commission on 24 December 1760 to investigate the matter. Its report was read before the House on 13 January 1761 and accepted by both the House and Council the same day (JHR, 37:180–81).

6 Bernard’s message to the Massachusetts General Court was dated 16 January and read before the House on the same day. After the General Court made the alteration Bernard requested, he gave his consent to the suit on 31 January. The House’s final petition and Bernard’s message are at JHR, 37:231–47.

7 No such office as adjutant general existed in provincial Massachusetts, so TH’s reference is obscure. He may have intended to write “advocate general,” meaning Otis Jr.

8 An inexact recollection of the Aeneid I, line 604, translated as, “the consciousness of right.”

9 The MS was torn.

1 The letter was not found.

2 TH’s sarcastic use of the word “friend” almost certainly referred to Thomas Pownall, who had been in England since his departure from Massachusetts the previous summer. TH had long suspected Pownall of trying to discredit him in England.

3 The MS was torn here and in all instances of square brackets in this letter.

4 TH’s commission as lieutenant governor had to be reissued after King George III ascended the throne of England on 25 October 1760, as did the commissions of all other royal officials. His new commission was dated 13 March 1761 and was sworn to on 26 November.

5 The House passed “An Act for Making Several Species of Foreign Gold Coin a Lawful Tender, and for More Effectual Preventing the Forging and Counterfeiting Money” on 17 November (JHR, 38:123).

6 On 6 March 1762 Governor Francis Bernard signed into law the bill making gold legal tender. The “ill consequence” TH feared did not materialize, the price of silver bullion in England falling at about the same time and eliminating any profit to be made by exporting silver instead of gold. One month after the law was passed, Bernard wrote to the Board of Trade that the law had been “very necessary” and had “had all the good effects expected from it” (Papers of Francis Bernard, 1:191).

7 TH listed his reasons for supporting the fixed currency on 9 December 1761, a list that was published in the Boston Evening Post on 14 December and subsequently set off a print war with James Otis Jr. In so publicly opposing a more flexible circulating medium (i.e., silver and gold), TH added to his reputation as the political arm of creditors and plutocrats.

8 The General Court approved the letter on 28 November and ordered Secretary Andrew Oliver to send it to Bollan (JHR, 38:163). The letter is at Massachusetts Archives, Letterbooks of the Secretary, SC1/series 117X, 2:333–36.

9 Charles Apthorp (1698–1758) was an army contractor and Boston merchant.

10 Bollan presumably advanced the necessary money for the commission as a favor to a friend.

11 The enclosed document was TH to Isaac Barré, 14 December 1761. Barré (1726–1802) was a member of Parliament from 1761 to 1774 and a supporter of colonial rights. TH met him in Boston in 1759 during Barré’s service in the French and Indian War.

1 TH became embroiled in a newspaper war with James Otis Jr. in December 1761. On 14 December, he published an article in the Boston Evening Post about the bill to make gold legal tender in Massachusetts. Otis answered him with articles in the Boston Gazette on 21 December and 28 December. TH’s further publication “on the same subject” was a history of the provincial currency from 1631 to 1761, which appeared in the Boston Evening Post on 4 and 11 January 1762. By calling Otis a “Bear” TH was alluding to him as a rough, unmannerly, or uncouth person (OED). He apparently thought the same of James (Jemmy) Allen, with whom TH had quarreled in the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1748.

2 Dated 2 January and printed in the Boston Evening Post on 11 January, this piece favored TH’s currency views over those of Otis.

3 No such bill was entered in JHR for 13–15 January (the first three days of the new session). Although TH clearly dated the postscript “15” in the MS, it could be a mistake. Possibly he intended to write “25” instead, as the House passed a similar bill on 23 January, though it lacked the provision TH mentioned for issuing notes payable in dollars at 6 shillings.

4 TH’s “papers” were the newspaper articles discussed above in note 1.

5 Spanish silver coins (OED).

1 The MS was cut here and in all instances of square brackets in this letter.

2 The proposed statute, entitled “An Act for the Better Enabling the Officers of his Majesty’s Customs to Carry the Acts of Trade into Execution,” was passed by the Council on 20 February 1762 and by the House of Representatives—which amended it to specify the informer and place of concealment—on 6 March, when Governor Francis Bernard refused it as being “plainly repugnant and contrary to the Laws of England” (Quincy, Reports of Cases, pp. 495–96; JHR, 38:271, 278, 292, 294, 299). The justices of the Superior Court presented a unanimous opinion also on 6 March, stating, “That if this Bill should pass into a Law the Superiour Court would be restrained from granting a Writ of Assistance in the manner they have heretofore done and in the manner such Writs of Assistance are granted by the Court of Exchequer in England” (Quincy, Reports of Cases, pp. 497, 498; Barrington-Bernard Correspondence, pp. 51–55). Sir Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, (1676–1745) was an English statesman famed for his manipulation of royal patronage and funds to maintain a majority in the House of Commons.

3 “C P” was customs official Charles Paxton. The dissatisfaction of Boston merchants late in 1760 with Paxton’s use of funds allegedly owed the province in vice-admiralty seizures resulted in two cases against him: Gray v. Paxton (1761) and Province v. Paxton (1762). The first was thrown out on a technicality, but the second was begun in the Suffolk Inferior Court, where Paxton lost. However, he then appealed to the Superior Court, which found in his favor (Quincy, Reports of Cases, pp. 541–52).

4 On 19 February in voting the usual grants to provincial civil officers for 1761, the House omitted the customary £40 extra allowance to TH as chief justice. The House granted all the Superior Court justices the same amount as in 1760, namely £700 (JHR, 38:262; JHR, 37:323–24).

5 For the translation, see No. 28 note 8, above.

1 Charles Wyndham, 2nd Earl of Egremont, (1710–1763) served as secretary of state for the southern department and a member of the Privy Council from 1761 to 1763. The brother-in-law of George Grenville, Egremont spent much of his tenure negotiating the Treaty of Paris (1763)—the final terms of which he disliked—and opposing the radical John Wilkes. Although the war in North America had come to a close, Egremont requested in 1761–1762 that the American colonies raise two-thirds the number of men they had raised in 1760, or roughly 9,200 men (Anderson, Crucible of War, pp. 518–19).

2 On 16 April 1762, the Massachusetts House of Representatives voted to raise 620 men above the 2,000 authorized on 3 March (JHR, 38:287, 289, 308–10; see also pp. 168, 222, 273–75, 277, 290, 299, 302–03). TH later wrote in his history that the total number raised was “satisfactory” (TH History, 3:70).

3 The clan TH referred to was the Otis family and its connections. Their “scheme” was to remove Bollan from the Massachusetts agency. Bollan had long been TH’s friend and political ally, and TH opposed Thomas Pownall’s attempt to displace Bollan as agent in 1759. James Otis Jr., as part of his campaign against TH, was once again seeking to topple Bollan, exploiting the agent’s vulnerability as an Anglican in a largely Congregationalist colony (Kammen, A Rope of Sand, pp. 78–79).

4 The House passed “An Act for Incorporating a Society for the Founding and Regulating an Academy in the Western Parts of the Province” on 24 February 1762. Israel Williams’s plans for a college in western Massachusetts placed TH in an awkward position, since as an overseer of Harvard College, he might be expected to oppose such a scheme. There is no mention of the plan in the Council records during this period, but Bernard recorded that the Council “refused,” and in a letter to the Board of Trade dated 12 April, he stated that the Council had rejected the bill on the same day the House had passed it (Papers of Francis Bernard, 1:191, 193).

5 The blank space in the MS was probably for John Temple’s name.

6 The MS was torn here and in all other instances of square brackets that follow.

7 “Mr. J P” was John Pownall, the secretary to the Lords of Trade.

8 The “L of the T” was a reference to the Lords of the Trade.

1 TH wrote the date of this letter as “24 April” but was in error. The election of Jasper Mauduit as agent occurred on 23 April, not 24 April (see note 3, below).

2 James Otis Sr. and Jr. were both serving in the Massachusetts House of Representatives at this time, and William Brattle served on the Governor’s Council.

3 Mauduit received 54 of 90 ballots cast among the three candidates. Others who were considered for the agency were TH himself and Richard Jackson, whom Governor Francis Bernard supported (JHR, 38:327; see also pp. 324, 325–26, 328, 330, 331, 332, 333; Bernard to John Pownall, 25 April 1762, Papers of Francis Bernard, 1:201–03; Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 78–79; Kammen, A Rope of Sand, pp. 79–81).

4 While TH was absent in Maine in early June on the eastern circuit of the Superior Court, the General Court named him to such a joint committee, which in two days produced instructions for Mauduit (JHR, 39:70, 75; the instructions appear in Jasper Mauduit, pp. 39–54).

5 Introduced on 17 April, the bill failed on 20 April to receive its necessary third reading by a vote of 50 to 43 (JHR, 38:311, 312, 318, 319–20).

1 Bollan’s letter to TH was not found, and the nature of his advice is unknown.

2 For more on the bill that made gold legal tender in Massachusetts, see No. 29, above.

3 Bollan’s “publick letter” was to Secretary Andrew Oliver, 12 February 1762 (Jasper Mauduit, pp. 24–27).

4 The Boston representatives to the Massachusetts General Court chosen in May 1762 were Thomas Cushing, James Otis Jr., John Phillips (1701–1763), and Royall Tyler (1724–1771), a Boston member of the House of Representatives from 1759 and a close friend of Otis. Tyler served as an overseer of the poor, a political trimmer, and generously supported Harvard College with large donations.

1 On this conjectured date see note 4, below.

2 While the French and Indian War continued to rage in other parts of the world, New Englanders feared that the French might try to regain control over their lost territory in Canada. Belcher, the governor of Nova Scotia, attempted to secure maritime Canada by removing many of the French settlers there. In late August 1762 some 700 Acadians aboard nine vessels arrived in Boston Harbor from Halifax. While the Massachusetts authorities debated their fate for almost a month, the refugees remained aboard their transports. Belcher’s letter to TH was not found, but Governor Francis Bernard and the Council considered the matter from 26 August to 6 September. General Jeffery Amherst maintained that the Acadians were no threat to security in Nova Scotia, and in a series of letters sent to Belcher during 1761 and 1762, he opposed their removal from the province. Amherst was therefore unwilling to pay any money to effect their removal. Massachusetts at last refusing to pay their passages, the French neutrals were returned from whence they had come, with the problem of their transportation charges also reverting to Nova Scotia. TH, who had been sympathetic to the plight of exiled Acadians in Boston in 1755, was unable to help this time (Boston News-Letter, 26 August, 30 September, 14 October 1762; Mass. Council Records, 15:172, 173, 173–74; JHR, 39:91, 107–08, 109, 110, 115–16; John Bartlet Brebner, Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia [New York: Columbia University Press, 1937], pp. 43–48; Gipson, British Empire, 6:332–33, 337–38). On TH’s involvement in 1755–1756 with the victims of an earlier Acadian removal and on his sympathetic assistance to some of them, see Gipson, British Empire, 6:325–26; Freiberg, “First Fifty Years,” p. 41.

3 TH rode the judicial circuit as a member of the Superior Court.

4 The two ships arrived on 8 November 1762 in Boston, where all four of the city’s newspapers noted their arrival and printed, in greater degree or less, news to 28 September from the London newspapers they brought (Boston News-Letter, 11 November; Boston Evening Post, 15 November; Boston Gazette, 15 November; and Boston Post-Boy, 15 November). If TH received copies of the “London prints,” he could not have written the present letter before the 8th; if he first saw in the Boston News-Letter the details he summarized here, he could not have written it before the 11th.

5 At the conclusion of the French and Indian War, John Russell, 4th Duke of Bedford, (1710–1771) was the British ambassador appointed to treat for peace with France, while Louis Mancini, Duc de Nivernais, (1716–1798) was the French ambassador appointed for the same purpose with the British. For more on both individuals, the Treaty of Paris of February 1763 that resulted from their efforts, and the matters TH discussed in the balance of this letter, see Gipson, British Empire, 8:283–313; Cambridge Modern History, 12 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 6:346–47, 428–29.

6 The secretary of state was the Earl of Egremont. William Beckford (1709–1770) was the lord mayor of London, a political ally of William Pitt, and a West Indian sugar merchant.

7 Internal, domestic, or civil (OED).

1 TH’s nephew, Nathaniel Rogers, sailed for England in August 1761 and returned to Boston in July 1762.

2 The new agent was Jasper Mauduit. The old agent was Bollan himself, who was voted out of the agency by the legislature on 19 April 1762.

3 Thomas Pownall tried and failed to dislodge Bollan from the agency when Pownall served as governor of Massachusetts in the late 1750s.

4 TH’s reference was probably to Randle (or Randall) Wilbraham (circa 1697–1770), a lawyer and member of Parliament from Oxford.

5 From Horace, Odes, Book 3:1, translated as, “I hate the rabble and keep them from me.”

6 Jasper Mauduit, whose health was marginal, hoped his brother Israel might share the agency with him. The point did not carry when the General Court met again in January 1763. After two readings of letters from Jasper, apparently dated 17 and 29 July 1762, and the appointment of a nine-person committee to consider the question, the House of Representatives ruled on 17 January 1763 that Israel was empowered to act as Massachusetts agent only when his brother Jasper could not, provided there was no extra expense to the province. The Council, however, did not concur, and the matter was dropped. Nevertheless, as Jasper’s health declined Israel increasingly represented Massachusetts’ interests in England as the province’s unofficial agent (JHR, 39:125, 128, 138–39, 155, 160, 169, 189).

7 The MS was torn.

1 Nathaniel Rogers sailed for London in August 1761 and was back in Boston by July 1762. The letter from Jackson was not found.

2 TH referred to the currency controversy of the winter of 1760–1761.

3 Paraphrased from Ovid’s Remedia Amoris, translated as, “resist or withstand the beginnings.”

4 The corner of the MS was worn here, with an estimated two or three words missing.

5 TH probably meant Joseph Harris (1702–1764), assay master of the mint from 1748, monometallist, and author of An Essay upon Money and Coins, 2 vols. in 1 (London, 1757–1758).

6 TH wrote this marginalia at the bottom of the page and marked its placement in the MS with an X within a circle.

7 Bollan’s successor was Jasper Mauduit, who was indeed suffering from declining health.

1 Drafted by TH as chairman of a joint legislative committee, this “defence” was an attempt to secure royal confirmation of some twelve townships granted early in 1762 in the area between the Kennebec and St. Croix rivers, which was also claimed by Nova Scotia. Accepted by the Massachusetts General Court at the start of the next year, it was sent to England but arrived too late to be of use (Francis Bernard to Jackson, 6 December 1762, Papers of Francis Bernard, 1:307–09; see also JHR, 38:265–67; JHR, 40:14–15). Its text was printed as an appendix to JHR 39, entitled “A Brief State of the Title of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay to the Country between the Rivers Kennebeck and St. Croix.”

1 The letter was not found.

2 Meaning “utterly,” or the literal translation, “by the whole extent of the heavens.”

3 TH was referring to James Otis Jr.

4 Otis’s pamphlet, A Vindication of the Conduct of the House of Representatives of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay (Boston, 1762), appeared in mid-November and, among other things, attacked Governor Francis Bernard and the Council for outfitting a province vessel during a legislative recess, sending it off on a protective mission, and then asking after the fact for House authorization for expenses incurred. Otis’s pamphlet, TH later wrote in his history, “was calculated to raise a spirit against the council, of which the lieutenant-governor was president, and whose character was attacked in newspaper publications, to some of which Mr. Otis affixed his name” (TH History, 3:71).

5 “Choates paragraph” was not a law book citation but apparently a reference to a written work, which was not located, by John Choate (1697–1766), Essex County probate judge, Essex Inferior Court judge, and councilor.

6 The case TH referred to concerned Phinehas Adams, a Medway yeoman, who died intestate in 1756. TH, as Suffolk probate judge, named his widow administratrix of the estate, which the next year was divided among her, a son, and two daughters. She petitioned TH for permission to finance debts arising thereafter by the sale of the children’s portions. Sensing “several points of great importance necessary to be determined” and being “diffident of his own abilities,” TH had the case transferred to the governor and the Council sitting as the provincial Supreme Court of Probate. There the case was heard on 11 November 1762 and 22 January 1763 and argued on 8 February, when the court—at which were present, among others, Cushing and Choate but not TH himself—denied Adams’s request (Probate Records of the Council, 1761–1784 [State House, Boston], ff. 26–28).

7 Thomas Prince’s A Chronological History of New England in the Form of Annals, 2 vols. (Boston, 1736–1755) ended at 1633. Gilbert Burnet’s Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time, ed. Sir Thomas Burnet, 2 vols., appeared in London in 1723–1724.

8 This was possibly an abbreviation for “rascals.”

9 Volume 3 of TH History, covering his “own times” (1749–1774), was first published in 1828, almost half a century after TH’s death.

1 The attendance at the General Court of representatives from the western portion of the province had long been a source of contention between TH and Williams.

2 Oliver Partridge was their mutual friend and Williams’s neighbor.

3 TH’s reference was to an attempted invasion of Portugal, England’s ally, by the Spanish in 1762 (Anderson, Crucible of War, p. 497).

1 The letter was not found.

2 TH’s was perhaps referring to John Turner (1708–1786), naval officer and customs collector at the port of Salem, although others by the same name are possible. Neither TH’s letter nor Turner’s response, if there was one, were found.

3 The satirical piece, written by James Otis Jr. and published in the Boston Gazette on 31 January 1763, charged TH with having made money “the Subject of his Contemplation, and the Object of his Wishes for some Years.” It also accused TH of desiring to be named Massachusetts agent so that he could “rise higher. . . . The Arts of Hypocrisy and Chicanery he has cultivated and improv’d to Perfection.” Bollan for his part was described as “a certain fluttering, sputtering Military Scribe, a notorious tool, . . . the Eccho of some of his Master’s.”

1 TH was presumably referring to the news of the birth of David Chesebrough’s granddaughter in Halifax in mid-January (Anna Chesebrough Wildey, Genealogy of the Descendants of William Chesebrough of Boston, Rehoboth, Mass. [New York: T. A. Wright, 1903], pp. 27–28, 55, 192).

2 For James Otis Jr.’s jibes against TH, see No. 41, note 3, above.

3 John Martin was one of TH’s tenants on his Rhode Island estates. TH owned property on Conanicut Island (present-day Jamestown Island) in Narragansett Bay, which came to him through his wife in a family settlement shortly after their marriage in 1734.

4 TH rode the judicial circuit for the Superior Court and, as chief justice, enacted regulations in 1762 that required judges and lawyers to wear gowns and wigs when appearing in court (John M. Murrin, “The Legal Transformation: The Bench and Bar of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” in Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, ed. Stanley N. Katz [Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1971]: 438).

5 Francis Willet (1694–1776) was one of TH’s neighbors in Saunderstown, Rhode Island. The other people mentioned in this paragraph were not identified.

6 TH was referring to his deceased wife, Margaret Sanford Hutchinson, who was from Rhode Island.

1 The Treaty of Paris concluded the French and Indian War and was signed on 10 February 1763.

2 Lemonier was not identified, nor is it known why Bollan requested information about him.

3 The brother was Israel Mauduit. Jasper Mauduit’s letter was not located, but his report of a meeting of American agents held in London on 19 May 1763 appears at Massachusetts Archives, SC1/series 45X, 22:272–79.

1 Although he was elected as a councilor at large on 26 May 1762, Peter Oliver was not sworn in until 25 February 1763.

2 TH was referring to James Otis Sr. and James Otis Jr.

3 On 21 March, the younger Otis delivered a speech at the Boston town meeting that celebrated the rights of the colonies and obliquely accused TH and others of undermining them. An ensuing newspaper war culminated in letters by Otis in the Boston Gazette on 11 and 14 April.

4 Williams’s home county was Hampshire. The distance between Hampshire County and Boston often prevented Williams, and other western delegates, from attending sessions of the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

5 John Carteret Granville (1690–1763), a favorite of King George II, served repeatedly as secretary of state and finally as lord president of the Council (1753–1761).

6 John Russell (1626–1692) was a minister in the frontier settlement at Hadley in the Connecticut River valley. He hid the regicides Edward Whalley and William Goffe in his house for several years.

7 TH was probably referring to Katherine (Willard) Gibbs (1724–1769), second wife of Henry Gibbs (1709–1759) and the daughter of former province secretary, Josiah Willard.

1 This letter was probably written to Bollan, who was in ill health during the autumn of 1762. Whitworth (see note 2, below) presumably visited him in England.

2 Miles Whitworth (d. 1779) was a Boston physician and future loyalist.

3 This November letter was not found.

4 Jasper Mauduit was appointed the agent for Massachusetts in the spring of 1762.

1 Jackson’s comments on currency were presumably made in a letter now missing.

2 Jackson’s letters to Francis Bernard were not found.

3 TH was referring to Massachusetts agent Jasper Mauduit, who was appointed to the position in April 1762.

4 Already the London agent for several West Indian islands, John Sharpe (1700–1756) in 1755 declined the offer to succeed William Bollan as Massachusetts agent. Bollan had resigned in a letter to the General Court dated 14 April, but when Sharpe declined the position, the post reverted to Bollan once more on 30 October.

5 Bernard convened the legislature again on 21 December 1763.

6 In April 1763, shortly after the conclusion of the peace, John Wilkes published North Briton No. 45, publicly criticizing the king’s speech of 23 April, which endorsed the Treaty of Paris. A proceeding for seditious libel ensued. Wilkes was arrested without a warrant and held in the Tower of London. He filed a countersuit and was awarded damages amidst much popular acclamation. The Wilkes affair raised issues of free speech and brought the urban crowd to new prominence in public affairs (Jack Lynch, “Wilkes, Liberty and Number 45,” Colonial Williamsburg Journal [Summer 2003]; Arthur Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006]).

7 Philippe de Comines (1447?–1511) was a French historian, courtier, diplomat, and author of The Memoirs of Philip de Comines, first printed in French in 1524–1525, with numerous later editions and translations. The reference in Comines’ Memoirs reads, “King Edward IV. the same that had an Interview with Lewis XI. at Picquigny (where the French outwitted the English in the Treaty of Peace that was concluded there).” Which edition TH used is unknown but the cited passage may be found in Memoirs (London: Printed for John Phillips at the Black Bull in Cornhill, 1712), 2:673.

8 Incendiaries or firebrands; those who kindle discontent and strife (OED).

9 TH was referring to Pontiac’s Rebellion.

10 Major Pierre Joseph Neyon de Villiers (d. 1779) was the commander of the primary French post in the northern Mississippi Valley, Fort de Chartres, in Illinois. Villiers granted aid to the Native Americans involved in Pontiac’s Rebellion until he received word of the Treaty of Paris in late 1763.

11 In a private transaction with representatives of the Six Nations, the Pennsylvania commissioners to the Albany Conference secured “a vast area” of Native American lands in Pennsylvania for £400 in New York currency on 6 July 1754. Five days later, the commissioners sold their so-called Wyoming lands of some 5 million acres in central Pennsylvania to the Susquehannah Company (a Connecticut land group) for £2,000 in New York currency.

12 The Molasses Act was first enacted in 1733 and repeatedly renewed. The 6-pence-per-gallon duty on foreign molasses imported into the colonies was largely ignored by customs officials. TH correctly predicted here that even a reduction in the duty would provoke popular resentment on constitutional grounds.

1 Governor Francis Bernard was on the second of three trips during his tenure in New England to Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine. He left Boston about 15 September and returned about 7 October (Papers of Francis Bernard, 1:14). Lord Egremont’s proclamation and instructions came in the form of a circular letter to American governors dated 9 July 1763, informing them of a new act of Parliament entitled “An Act for the Further Improvement of His Majesty’s Revenue of Customs; and for the Encouragement of Officers Making Seizures; and for the Prevention of the Clandestine Running of Goods into Any Part of His Majesty’s Dominions.” Passed in April 1763, the act empowered officers of British men-of-war in North American waters to seize and prosecute violators of the Acts of Trade and to share in the profits of any resulting condemnations. For the circular letter, see National Archives UK, CO 5/65, ff. 171–79; Papers of Francis Bernard, 1:381–82. For the text of the act, see Statutes at Large, 25:345–51.

1 The letter was not found.

2 Increase Mather (1741–1763) was TH’s nephew, the son of TH’s sister Hannah Hutchinson Mather (1714–1781) and the Reverend Samuel Mather (1706–1785) (Horace E. Mather, Lineage of Reverend Richard Mather [Hartford, CT: Lockwood & Brainard, 1890], p. 110).

3 A small war vessel carrying mortars for throwing bombs (OED).

4 The terms of the Treaty of Paris of 1763 returned the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon in the Gulf of St. Lawrence off the south coast of Newfoundland to France. This transfer effectively permitted France to share the cod fishery with Great Britain, which was a disappointment to Massachusetts fishing26 interests.

1 TH was probably referring to further news of Pontiac’s Rebellion. Governor Francis Bernard received Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine as a gift from the General Court in February 1762 and traveled there in September–October 1763 (Papers of Francis Bernard, 1:14, 179–87; Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 73–74).

2 For Egremont’s instructions to the colonial governors, see No. 47, note 1, above.

1 Even after TH established that similar writs were common in England, the use of writs of assistance in Massachusetts remained a matter of considerable controversy. A draft of a writ of assistance, in TH’s hand and dating from May 1763, is reproduced in Thomas Hutchinson and His Contemporaries (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society Picture Book, 1974), Item #12. The surveyor general was John Temple.

1 In an effort to win back James Otis Sr.’s favor after not appointing him a justice of the Superior Court, Governor Francis Bernard offered him appointments as judge of probate and first justice of the Court of Common Pleas in Barnstable County (TH History, 3:69–70). Otis accepted and took office on 1 February 1764 (Whitmore, Mass. Civil List, p. 105).

2 TH insisted on referring to Jasper Mauduit as “the new agent” throughout this period, although Mauduit had held the position since April 1762.

3 The abbreviation was most likely for the word “Treasurer,” who was Harrison Gray.

4 TH was presumably referring to a commission for handling money reimbursed to the province for its expenses in the French and Indian War.

5 This reference was the first intimation in TH’s letters of the Grenville administration’s intention to fashion new revenue legislation for the colonies that would eventually be embodied in the Sugar Act, or Revenue Act of 1764, as well as a proposed stamp duty.

6 The settlement of the boundary lines was part of disputes dating back more than a century between New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. The latter two had each been granted sea-to-sea charters in 1629 and 1662, respectively. However, in 1664, the Duke of York secured a grant for the recently conquered Dutch colony of New Netherland (which was renamed New York in his honor) that specified its eastern boundary as the Connecticut River and included land that extended far to the north, cutting across both Massachusetts and Connecticut’s claims. New Hampshire exacerbated the situation in 1749 by establishing several townships in the region between the Hudson and Connecticut rivers in what is today the state of Vermont. Numerous conferences were held by representatives of the colonies, but the matter was not resolved until the 1790s.

7 TH was probably referring to another proposal that he go to England as the province’s agent.

8 Sir William Temple (1628–1699) was a statesman and author who wrote Essay on the Original and Nature of Government (1680). The source of TH’s quotation was not found.

9 Richard Jackson was already an agent for Connecticut, so he could not represent both colonies in the ongoing boundary dispute.

10 None of these letters were found, and the identity of the “partisan” is unknown.

11 William Pitt resigned as secretary of state for the southern department on 5 October 1761 when the cabinet refused to declare war on Spain. George III asked him to form a new ministry in August 1763, but Pitt insisted on a number of conditions unacceptable to the king, and George Grenville remained in power.

12 From Horace’s Satire, Book I, Satire 1, 7. “Militia est potier” is translated as, “A soldier’s life is better”; “nemo, quam . . . vivit” is translated as, “No man living is content with the lot which either his choice has given him or chance has thrown in his way.”

1 The Act of Parliament was the forthcoming Revenue Act of 1764.

2 Translated as, “a suicide,” or literally, “an evildoer upon himself” (OED).

3 TH was referring to Pontiac’s Rebellion.

4 The “young fellow” was Joshua Rands, whose account of his adventures was published in the Boston News-Letter on 9 December 1763. TH’s account here was fuller in some details than the newspaper version.

5 The fall of Fort William Henry in New York in August 1757 and the subsequent massacre of its surrendered occupants was one of the greatest disasters to befall British forces in America during the French and Indian War. Louis Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm, (1712–1759) led the French and Native American forces besieging the fort but disclaimed responsibility for the Native American massacre of surrendered British and colonial troops that followed.

6 The report was printed in the Boston Evening Post, 12 December 1763.

7 Jeffery Amherst’s successor was Thomas Gage.

1 An outbreak of smallpox in Boston in late December 1763 prompted people to avoid large public gatherings. The epidemic lasted until early June 1764. For the spread of the disease and official efforts to promote inoculation, see Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:38.

2 The building known as Old College, housing the library and scientific apparatus at Harvard, burned on the night of 24 January 1764. For a detailed description of the Harvard College fire, which destroyed the oldest of its three buildings and its library of some 5,000 books, see “An Account of the Fire at Harvard-College, in Cambridge; with the Loss Sustained Thereby,” Early Mass. Broadsides, Item #21.

1 The General Court met in Cambridge beginning on 18 January 1764.

2 In a letter to Jackson dated 2 February 1764, Governor Francis Bernard stated that TH was also disinclined to accept the agency because he did not want to leave his children while Boston was in the midst of a smallpox epidemic (Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:43).

3 The House of Representatives vote of 1 February was 41 to 32 to excuse TH; in the Council, deadlock occurred on 2 February (JHR, 40:256–57; Mass. Council Records, 25:186–87).

4 The enclosed letter was No, 55, above. Edward Sedgwick (circa 1722–1781) was undersecretary of American affairs since 1763 under Halifax.

5 TH’s reference was to another colonial border dispute (Gipson, British Empire, 3:145). He did not end up serving on such a commission.

6 Jackson’s letter was not found.

1 The recipient of this letter might have been John Cushing, given the letter’s references to the Superior Court and TH’s letter to Cushing, No, 53, above.

2 The February session of the Superior Court in Boston was canceled for fear of spreading contagion.

3 TH’s answer was No. 54, above.

1 TH’s answer was No. 54, above.

2 TH’s letter was No. 55, above.

3 “L.” wrote in the Boston Gazette on 6 February: “What yields particular consolation to some, who call themselves the patrons of liberty, is, that as the various offices his Honor now sustains will become vacant; no one gentleman in the province will be found capable of acting in them all; consequently they must be divided among a number. And in this case there will be little or no danger of any ONE man’s arriving to such a degree of power and influence as to become the object either of dread or envy.”

1 The recipient of this letter is unknown, although it was certainly one of TH’s London correspondents. It is possible that this letter was the final version of No. 58, above, although there was no indication that letter was a draft or was not sent. There is also a formal tone to this letter that is not consistent with TH’s other correspondence with William Bollan.

2 The three TH referred to were Thomas Cushing, James Otis Jr., and Royall Tyler.

3 TH put the question to the Massachusetts General Court in No. 54, above.

4 TH wrote to Lord Halifax for leave in No. 55, above.

5 TH was referring to whether or not Parliament would enact the Revenue Act, which would be disadvantageous to Massachusetts trade. Parliament considered the matter in March and adopted the Revenue Act on 5 April.

1 The letters to which TH referred were No. 55, above, and TH to the Lords of Trade, 8 February 1764. The Lords of Trade heard TH’s letter read on 1 May but took no action (Journal of Trade, 12:45).

1 TH was referring to Nos. 56 and 60, above.

2 The first volume of TH History was published on 7 December 1764 in Boston and in London the following year.

3 Jackson’s silence dissuaded TH from dedicating his first volume of TH History to Lord Halifax (No. 73, below). It was published without a dedication.

4 Governor Francis Bernard’s account was in a letter to Jackson dated 2 February 1764 (Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:43–47).

1 The letter was No. 63, below.

2 TH’s answer to the Massachusetts General Court was No. 54, above.

3 TH’s letters were Nos. 55, above, and TH to the Lords of Trade, 8 February 1764.

4 TH was presumably referring to a consignment of tea, an item that he continued to import despite his retirement from most business.

5 George Franklyn, John Martin, and Gershom Remington were all tenants on TH’s Rhode Island land.

6 TH originally wrote “about” then interlined “near” above it without crossing out the original word.

7 TH’s two youngest children, WSH (age eleven) and MH (age ten), were with their unmarried aunt, Grizell Sanford. They were subsequently inoculated against smallpox in the spring of 1764.

1 For Ezra Stiles’s history of New England, projected but never completed, see Edmund Morgan, Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1974), pp. 145, 466–67. This letter launched a correspondence between the two men in which they discussed writing and New England history.

2 TH had just completed volume 1 of TH History, which was published the following December.

1 Boston merchant and selectman John Scollay (1711–1790) was immersed in financial difficulties during the economic downturn following the end of the French and Indian War.

2 TH’s letter was No. 55, above.

3 TH was referring to volume 1 of TH History.

1 At the prompting of Governor Francis Bernard, the Massachusetts House of Representatives unanimously voted on 26 January to fund the rebuilding of Harvard Hall, and the Council immediately concurred (JHR, 40:228–29; Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:43, 46).

2 Joseph Sewall (1688–1769) was a 1707 Harvard graduate, minister of the Old South Church, and son of jurist Samuel Sewall. Despite his conservative religious views, Sewall emerged as a strong supporter of political radicalism in the 1760s.

1 John Seldon (1584–1654) was an English jurist, antiquarian, and Orientalist. Gerard John Vossius (1577–1649) was a German classical scholar and theologian. Stiles was referring to Greek chronological tables covering close to 1,500 years of classical antiquity, which were deciphered by Seldon and published in Marmora Arundelia (London, 1628–1629).

2 Jeremiah Dummer (1681–1739) was the colonial agent for Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire and the author of A Defence of the New-England Charters (London, 1721).

3 Translated as, “The beginnings of such a state coming into being and of so great an empire to be.” The source of Stiles’s quotation was not found.

1 TH’s “performance” was his first volume of TH History, which would be published in December.

2 Translated as, “There is a great adversary ready for me—expectation.” The source of the quotation was not found.

3 TH’s request was No. 55, above, and TH to the Lords of Trade, 8 February 1764.

4 Anne Hutchinson (1591–1643), TH’s great-great-grandmother, was tried late in 1637 for her Antinomian beliefs and banished from Massachusetts. TH included a transcript of her trial in TH History, 2:366–91.

5 TH’s nephew was Nathaniel Rogers.

6 Some of these documentary materials appeared as appendices in volume 1 of TH History; some of the “most valuable” planned as appendices in volume 2 (1767) were lost in the looting of TH’s house during the Stamp Act riot of 26 August 1765; others appeared in TH Original Papers, published anonymously in 1769. TH’s history of his own times was published posthumously in 1828.

7 TH was referring to James Otis Jr.

1 Neither letter was found.

2 TH wrote No. 55, above, and TH to the Lords of Trade, 8 February 1764, requesting leave to go to England as a special agent for the province.

3 TH was generally regarded as the leading advocate of hard money policies in Massachusetts since the reform of the currency in 1749.

4 All royal commissions automatically expired with the death of King George II on 25 October 1760 and were reissued under the seal of King George III. No such letter from William Bollan was found.

5 TH’s duties as chief justice took him to the district of Maine, the most distant of the Superior Court circuits. The men who went with TH were probably government party men from Maine with business before the Superior Court.

6 Printed in JHR, 41:72–77 under the date of 13 June, the letter written by James Otis Jr. instructed agent Jasper Mauduit to seek repeal of the Revenue Act and oppose passage of the Stamp Act. The letter was the work of a seven-member committee named on 1 June that included Boston representatives Thomas Cushing, Oxenbridge Thacher, and Otis. Otis’s MS, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston, 1764; reprinted in Pamphlets, pp. 408–82), was read in the House on 8 and 12 June and was then referred to this committee and ultimately included with the letter sent to Mauduit (JHR, 41:53, 66, 77). The Speaker of the House was Samuel White (1710–1769), representative to the General Court from Taunton on and off between 1749 and 1765. He served two terms as Speaker of the House of Representatives, May 1759–April 1760 and May 1764–February 1766, before being elevated to the Council, where he served until 1768.

1 For the date this letter was sent, see note 5, below.

2 Neither the “first letter” nor the letter of 16 April was found.

3 The fees were for “an order of leave of absence” as special agent. See No. 219, below.

4 TH gave such instructions in a letter to Robert Wilsonn dated 5 September [1764].

5 TH was referring to his essay, No. 71, below, although he did not send this MS to Jackson until about 4 September, see No. 70, below.

6 The pamphlet was James Otis Jr.’s The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston, 1764; reprinted in Pamphlets, pp. 408–82).

7 For the letter to agent Jasper Mauduit, see No. 68, note 6, above.

8 TH was probably referring to Joseph Harris.

1 The “foregoing” was probably No. 69, above. TH’s thoughts on the state of the colonies was No. 71, below, but in the absence of the MS that TH sent to Jackson, determining the nature of this new “guise” is impossible. Only TH’s letterbook copy, not written in his own hand, was found, but curiously in a letter to Jackson, No. 73, below, TH claimed to have no copy of the essay he sent Jackson.

2 Oxenbridge Thacher’s Sentiments of a British American (Boston, 1764; reprinted in Pamphlets, pp. 483–98) was published on 3 September. The newspaper was possibly the Boston Gazette of 3 September.

3 Governor Francis Bernard was at Mount Desert Island.

1 The title came from No. 69, above, in which TH described the essay using these words.

2 Jackson’s remarks on the subject were probably contained in his various letters to TH, most of which were not found.

3 Alternative reading: “likewise that”

4 Here and below, square brackets were used for conjectured text that was torn away in the MS, unless otherwise indicated.

5 The reference was to a land-tenure existing chiefly in Kent, early distinguished by the equal division of property among a deceased man’s sons (OED).

6 The text was supplied by Knollenberg’s correction in NEQ (see source note).

7 Granted in 1683, the Charter of London guaranteed certain rights and privileges to the city government. It became the model for cities all over England.

8 The 1707 Act of Union admitted Scotland to England’s trading monopoly but deprived it of parliamentary independence.

9 The text was supplied by Knollenberg’s correction in NEQ (see source note).

10 The text was supplied by Knollenberg’s correction in NEQ (see source note).

11 Acadia, covering what is today much of the maritime provinces of Canada, passed between the French and British throughout a series of colonial wars in the eighteenth century until finally reverting to the British in 1763 along with the rest of New France (Canada). Likewise, ownership of the colony of Surinam passed back and forth between the Dutch and the British in the mid-seventeenth century until the Treaty of Westminster in 1674 ended the Anglo-Dutch wars and ceded Surinam to the Dutch. Both territories were used as bargaining chips in larger negotiations.

12 A legal term meaning a hearing to determine by what authority someone possesses a liberty.

13 TH was referring to the Glorious Revolution of 1689. The Dominion of New England was a reorganization of colonial governments during the reign of James II that negated all previous colonial charters in the region and in New York and New Jersey. All of this land was subsequently incorporated into the dominion in 1688. The arrival in New England of news of the abdication of James II resulted in the overthrow of Sir Edmund Andros, governor of the Dominion of New England, in 1689.

14 This reference was to the Roman system of taxation in its many forms: rents, tithes, and property taxes on all manner of personal, tangible goods (Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman, Essays in Taxation, rev. ed. [London: Macmillan, 1895, 1917], p. 36).

15 From Cicero’s first letter to Atticus discussing his prospects for the consulship in 63b.c.e., translated as, “Gaul looks like counting heavily in the voting.”

16 Translated as, “a small likeness.”

17 Publius Servilius Rullus was tribune in 64b.c.e. and an advocate of land reform. Cicero delivered four speeches against his proposals, which were subsequently dropped.

18 Marcus Livius Drusus, the Elder (d. 108b.c.e.) was a Roman tribune who proposed radical changes to the Roman colonial system, suggesting the establishment of a dozen new colonies, mainly as a political tool to undermine popular support for Gaius Gracchus (168–133b.c.e.). The twelve new colonies were never established.

19 Chancellor of the Exchequer George Grenville offered a resolution to the House of Commons on 9 March 1764 that included the phrase, “it may be proper to charge certain Stamp Duties in the . . . Colonies and Plantations.” The bill, though, had not yet been written.

20 TH’s reference was an allusion to Jackson and Governor Francis Bernard, both of whom distinguished between external taxes or customs duties, which they did not oppose, and internal or direct taxes, which they did oppose. For a comparison of TH’s views with Bernard’s, see Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 94–95.

21 The Revenue Act of 1764 (also known as the Sugar Act) was passed by Parliament on 5 April. It imposed a duty (where none had existed before) of £7 per tun on wines imported into America from the Azores or the Madeira Islands. News of its passage reached Boston in early May.

22 There is no ending punctuation in MS.

23 TH’s reference was to Sir Ferdinando Gorges, A Briefe Narration of the Originall Undertakings of the Advancement of Plantations into the Parts of America. Especially, Shewing the Begining, Progress and Continuance of That of New-England (London, 1658), p. 41. Gorges encouraged the settlement of New England between 1605 and 1635, although he never journeyed to the New World. Maine was originally deeded to him as a proprietary colony and therefore his personal possession.

24 TH originally wrote “assurance” in the MS, then crossed out “assur” and interlined “depend.”

25 Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia was the location of the fortress of Louisbourg, which fell to American forces twice, the first time in 1745 during King George’s War. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which ended King George’s War in 1748, restored the fortress to France, thus necessitating the need to capture it again in 1758 during the French and Indian War.

26 The additional country was Canada, which France ceded to Britain by the Treaty of Paris in 1763.

27 The text was supplied by Knollenberg’s correction in NEQ (see source note).

28 The text was supplied by Knollenberg’s correction in NEQ (see source note).

29 The MS ended abruptly here, but the presence of “few” as a catchword at the bottom of Massachusetts Archives, SC1/series 45X, 26:96 implies continuance of this copy of the document on an additional page or pages, now missing.

1 En route to Massachusetts in the summer of 1764, Bollan put in at Lisbon when his ship needed repair. Unable to find substitute transportation, he returned to England. Bollan’s letter of 14 April was not found.

2 Bollan was dismissed from the agency on 19 April 1762.

3 Three days after TH became acting governor on 3 June 1760, following the departure of Governor Thomas Pownall for England, Bollan was re-elected province agent (JHR, 37:24, 30, 34, 35–36).

4 During the previous legislative year, some of Bollan’s friends had suggested him for the special agency that was voted to TH on 28 January 1764.

5 After Bollan was dismissed from the agency, James Otis Jr. and his supporters insisted that Bollan reimburse the province for over £1,200 in commissions Bollan claimed, a disagreement that dragged on for years afterward.

6 The “present Agent” was Jasper Mauduit.

7 TH was referring to sugars imported from the French Caribbean island of Anguilla into Salem on a forged clearance. Allegedly at the instigation of Governor Francis Bernard, Salem customs collector James Cockle, who initially entered the goods, brought a claim for triple damages (over £10,000). After both admiralty and civil court cases, the owners eventually acquiesced to a judgment of £3,000 rather than appeal the case to England. As governor, Bernard was entitled to one-third the value of the forfeiture. Cockle, who owed his appointment to Bernard, was subsequently suspended by Surveyor General John Temple in a move that exacerbated relations with the governor. The fullest account is Jordan D. Fiore, “The Temple-Bernard Affair,” Essex Hist. Colls. 90 (1954): 53–83; Bernard’s correspondence on this controversy appears in Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:125–28, 130–31, 136–37, 187–90, 193–208, 215–16, 242–45, 277–79, 484–520; see also TH History, 3:117–18; MHS Colls., Sixth Series, 9 (1897): 26–29, 57–58; Quincy, Reports of Cases, p. 423; Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 91–92, 99–103.

1 Very few of Jackson’s letters to TH, including this letter of 13 August 1764, were found.

2 Secretary of State Lord Halifax refused TH permission to travel as the Massachusetts agent to England earlier in 1764, although his letter to TH was not found. The Lords of Trade never responded to TH’s request.

3 The surveyor-general was John Temple, and the misunderstanding became known as the Temple-Bernard Affair.

4 The manuscript to which TH referred was most likely No. 71, above. It was originally enclosed in No. 69, above, but TH did not send the MS or the letter until about 4 September 1764. See No. 70 above, when it was marked “by Jarvis.”

5 The first volume of TH History was published in Boston in late 1764.

6 The passage to which TH referred from Ovid’s Tristia, Book I, lines 1–2 was “Parve—nec invideo—sine me, ibis in urbem. Ei mihi, quod domino non licet ire tuo!” Translated it reads, “Little book, you will go without me—and I grudge it not—to the city. Alas that your master is not allowed to go!” TH meant that the first volume of TH History would travel to London once it was printed, while he (as agent) would not.

1 The word is undecipherable in the MS, although the first part clearly reads “gov” followed by several indistinguishable letters, which could be an abbreviation for either “governor” or “government.”

2 In 1622 John Mason (1586–1635) and Ferdinando Gorges received a joint patent for the land between the Merrimack and Kennebec rivers. They divided the patent in 1629, with Gorges taking what would become Maine and Mason taking what would become New Hampshire. Mason died while preparing for his first voyage to New England and left his landholdings to his grandson, who was later unable to defend his claim. The Mason landholdings remained in dispute until well into the eighteenth century.

3 Governor Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire insisted that the boundary of the colony extended as far west as Massachusetts’ western border, although many thought New Hampshire could only lay claim to land within sixty miles of the coast.

4 Massachusetts, New York, and New Hampshire all claimed the land west of the Connecticut River (present-day Vermont) in the eighteenth century. In an effort to secure New Hampshire’s claim, Wentworth granted dozens of townships in the region in the 1750s and 1760s, hoping to populate it with people who would want it to be part of New Hampshire.

5 John Tufton Mason (b. 1713) was a descendant of John Mason. John Tufton Mason inherited the disputed title to the family holdings in New Hampshire in 1705 but let the claim lay dormant for several decades, finally selling all of his New Hampshire holdings to the so-called Masonian Proprietors in 1746 for £1,500. The Masonian Proprietors, twelve New England landholders, immediately began granting townships to settle people on the land and solidify their claim to the territory, thus establishing dozens of towns in southern New Hampshire.

6 Samuel Allen (d. 1705) bought the claim in 1691 from John Mason (d. before 1696) and Robert Tufton Mason (d. 1696), descendants of the original patent holder John Mason. Allen became governor of New Hampshire from the time he purchased the patent until his death. Allen’s son attempted to maintain the family’s claim to the New Hampshire holdings, but the title was eventually determined to have reverted to the Mason family. For New Hampshire land practices and the role of the Masons and the Masonian Proprietors, see Otis Graham Hammond, The Mason Title and Its Relations to New Hampshire and Massachusetts (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1916).

7 Alternative reading: “pretense”

8 Most new townships were granted with conditions that typically included setting aside land for a meetinghouse, a church, and a school. There could also be limits on how the land was parceled out to prospective settlers and the establishment of other community-oriented features such as graveyards, gristmills and sawmills, pasturage, and poor farms. If these conditions were not met within a specific period of time, the patent could be forfeit.

9 Alternative reading: “200”

10 In 1733 the Massachusetts General Court finally made good on a promise to grant land to veterans of King Philip’s War, sometimes known as the Narragansett War after the principal theater of action. The seven townships involved were known as the Narragansett Grants, and two were located in Maine. Although TH left the space blank, he probably referred to Narragansett No. 7, which became the town of Gorham, Maine (Roy Akagi, The Town Proprietors of the New England Colonies [Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963; orig. pub. 1924]).

11 The other Narragansett township in Maine was No. 1, which became the town of Buxton.

12 For services and sufferings during and after the capitulation in 1757 of Fort William Henry, Colonel Joseph Frye (1711–1794) requested and received a Maine township in March 1762, later named Fryeburg in his honor (JHR, 38:126, 209, 286).

13 Public service or trust turned to private gain or party advantage (OED).

14 TH was referring to the Council of Plymouth. For the history of the Maine tract granted the colony of New Plymouth in 1629, its sale for £400 to Antipas Boies, Edward Tyng, Thomas Brattle, and John Winslow in 1661, the resurrection of their title in 1749 with the incorporation of “The Proprietors of the Kennebeck Purchase from the late Colony of New-Plymouth,” and the rise and fall of that land purchase company, see Gordon E. Kershaw, The Kennebec Proprietors, 1749–1775: “Gentlemen of Large Property & Judicious Men” (Somersworth, NH: New Hampshire Publishing Co., 1975). In 1756, when conflicting claims between the Kennebec Proprietors and the Clark & Lane Company were under arbitration, TH produced an agreement dated 1654 outlining the boundaries between the New Plymouth Company and Clark & Lane that led to a decision greatly to the disadvantage of the Kennebec Proprietors. In 1763, the Kennebec Company petitioned the General Court for a change of venue in yet another case, and the General Court’s choice of TH as special agent at that time may have resulted, at least in part, from the eagerness of the proprietors to have him out of the province temporarily (Cory Michael Davis, “Divided Ownership, Wild Speculation: An Investigation into the Linkages between Thomas Hutchinson and Land Speculation in 18th Century Maine,” undergraduate honors thesis, University of Maine [2010]).

15 On the 1629 grant to John Beauchamp of London and Thomas Leverett of Boston and its later history, see MHS Colls., Fourth Series, 2 (1854): 226–29.

16 General Samuel Waldo (1695–1759), eighteenth-century promoter of Maine, held an enormous tract of land in the region known as the Waldo Patent and recruited immigrants to settle it.

17 Action by the Massachusetts House of Representatives on the release to the Waldo heirs took place on 3 March 1762 (JHR, 38:287).

18 A succession of Massachusetts governors spent the 1720s in conflict with the House of Representatives over the annual choice of provincial officers and Massachusetts’ policy towards the Native Americans. For an extended account, see TH History, 2:174–279.

19 The “gentleman of NH” was Wentworth, who was surveyor-general of the king’s woods in America from 1743 to 1766 as well as governor. Since the late seventeenth century, the biggest pine trees were preserved under English law for use as masts for the ships of the British navy. Any pine tree measuring between 36 and 75 inches in diameter at its base, regardless of whether it was on private or public land, was considered the king’s property. Stiff penalties fell on anyone who ignored the law, particularly as Wentworth tightened up enforcement procedures in the 1760s (Joseph J. Malone, Pine Trees and Politics: Naval Stores and Forest Policy in Colonial New England, 1691–1775 [Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1964], pp. 124–43).

1 This date was the earliest one on the document. The petition was sent with a letter of transmittal from the Council and House of Representatives to Jasper Mauduit, [3 November 1764] (a printed extract of which appeared in Speeches, pp. 24–25). Governor Francis Bernard also transmitted copies of the petition to the Board of Trade and Secretary of State Lord Halifax. The letter that accompanied Halifax’s copy, dated 10 November 1764, included an overview of Bernard’s own opinions of the colonists’ concerns. In a letter to Richard Jackson dated 17 November 1764, Bernard also laid out more particulars on the process by which the petition was drafted, giving credit to TH for his ability to get “the lead in his hands” of the whole “Transaction.” The main point of contention between the House and Council, according to Bernard, was whether Parliament should refrain from taxing the colonies as a matter of right or privilege. In the end, Bernard believed that even those who were initially opposed to TH’s assertion of privilege were satisfied with the final result (Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:161–67, 183–85).

2 This sentence was written in an unidentified hand in the Dft, and in the Mass. Council Records copy the passage is followed by: “and that great nursery of seamen destroyed.”

3 The passage that reads “That the ^restraints^ . . . yet uncultivated.” was Insert A. TH clearly marked on the Dft its intended position.

4 The word was illegible on the Dft and supplied from the Mass. Council Records copy.

5 Word omitted from the Mass. Council Records copy.

6 The passage that reads “That this construction . . . of his property.” was Insert B. TH clearly marked on the Dft its intended position.

7 In the Mass. Council Records copy, this passage reads: “Courts of Vice Admiralty have, so far as the Jurisdiction of the said Courts hath been extended deprived the Colonies”

8 In the Dft, a one-letter symbol appears here which looks like a capital “G.” It is unclear whether this symbol is in TH’s hand. The word was supplied from the Mass. Council Records copy. The same symbol appeared below, and again the Mass. Council Records copy supplied the missing word.

9 The document was marked with a letter “C” here, which was then crossed out. On a separate piece of paper, not attached to the document nor written in TH’s hand, was the following material, preceded by a letter “C”: “This is a right we humbly conceive belongs essentially to the Subjects of Great Brittain, The People of this Province count it their glory to be denominated such subjects, such they are declared to be in the Royal Charter as well as by acts of Parliament and therefore with all deference they hope the present Parliament will continue and confirm this invaluable Priviledge to them. Amendment proposed by House but nonconcurd by Council.” This passage does not appear in the Mass. Council Records copy.

10 The Mass. Council Records copy reads “hitherto.”

11 The word was illegible on the Dft and supplied from the Mass. Council Records copy.

12 The word was illegible on the Dft and supplied from the Mass. Council Records copy.

13 The Mass. Council Records copy reads “must.”

14 The words were illegible on the Dft and supplied from the Mass. Council Records copy.

15 The Mass. Council Records copy ends here.

1 The “5” in the dateline may possibly have been overwritten from an “8.”

2 The heads of the popular party TH was referring to were probably James Otis Jr. and Oxenbridge Thacher.

3 Adopted by the Massachusetts House of Representatives on 22 October and rejected by the Council on 24 October, the address asserted colonial independence from parliamentary taxation as a matter of right. One section of the address reads, “Now we have ever supposed this to be one essential Right of British Subjects, that they shall not be subjected to Taxes, which in Person, or by Representative they have no Voice in laying” (JHR, 41:102, 111; Massachusetts Archives, SC1/series 45X, 22:415; the entire MS is at pp. 412–18).

4 See the crossed out paragraph in No. 75, above.

5 TH was referring to Insert C of the petition, No. 75, above. Council rejection of the controversial insert occurred on 2 November 1764.

6 Such agreement was reached on 3 November (JHR, 41:135). The final version of the petition was much more tempered than the address rejected in October. TH’s role in the revision of the petition—soon disowned by the House in a letter to Agent Jasper Mauduit—enhanced his reputation for caution, enabling his critics to suggest he favored the Stamp Act. On the drafting of this letter of transmittal to Mauduit, dated 3 November, see JHR, 41:134, 137; Jasper Mauduit, p. 167; an SC of the letter is at Massachusetts Archives, Letterbooks of the Secretary, SC1/series 117X, 2A:80; printed extracts appear in Speeches, pp. 24–25.

7 The letter was not found.

8 Governor William Shirley’s own comments on Thomas Pownall’s presence in New England early in 1755 include no mention of TH. (The Correspondence of William Shirley, Governor of Massachusetts and Military Commander in America, 1731–1760, ed. Charles Henry Lincoln, 2 vols. [New York: Macmillan, 1912], 2:138).

9 Pownall had written a strong recommendation for TH in a letter to Lord Halifax on 4 September 1757 (Library of Congress, Peter Force Papers, Series 9, Box 7).

10 The letter, if written, was not found.

1 TH’s transcription of the petition to the House of Commons, dated 3 November 1764, was not found. His draft is No. 75, above.

2 Among the many points raised in the petition was an objection to the fact that smuggling violations, according to Section 41 of the Revenue Act of 1764, would henceforth be tried in the juryless vice-admiralty court at Halifax, a more costly and less favorable venue than the Massachusetts courts.

3 The “new Judge” of the vice-admiralty court throughout America, with headquarters at Halifax, Nova Scotia, was Dr. William Spry (d. 1772). Spry’s “Adverstisement,” published at Halifax on 16 October 1764, announced that the court would try “all Causes, civil and maritime, arising in any Province of America, or the maritime parts thereof or thereto adjacent, may be prosecuted” (Boston News-Letter, 1 November 1764).

4 TH probably referred to Thomas Wood, An Institute of the Laws of England: or, the Laws of England in their Natural Order, According to Common Use, 2 vols., 9th ed. (London, 1763), the most popular handbook on English law until the publication of William Blackstone’s Commentaries in 1769.

5 The Chancery case of Mourgue v. Buissiers (1755) laid down the principle that uncles would share equally with nephews and nieces under a decree of distribution.

6 The reference was to Richard Burn, Ecclesiastical Law, 2 vols. (London, 1763). TH was presumably looking in the section headed “Wills. Distribution,” which in the sixth edition (London, 1797)—the only edition available to the editors—was at 4:392–485. He had requested a copy of the first edition from Robert Wilsonn on 20 April 1763.

7 Neither the opinion of the late attorney general (probably James Otis Sr.) nor the present attorney general (Edmund Trowbridge) were found.

1 The lawyers in question were James Otis Jr. and Oxenbridge Thacher.

2 The agent was Jasper Mauduit, although his brother Israel had begun acting in that capacity informally as Jasper’s health failed.

3 Dated 7 July 1764, Bollan’s letter to Secretary Andrew Oliver stated, “notwithstanding the unkind Usage I have received from former General Courts . . . I resolved that in case the present Court shou’d after making a Just and reasonable Settlement with me respecting past Services, propose my undertaking to Defend the Rights and Interest of the Province upon this great Occasion . . . I wou’d undertake the Arduous Task” (Massachusetts Archives, Letterbooks of the Secretary, SC1/series 117X, 2A:56–57; the quote appears on p. 57). Bollan also wrote a letter to Speaker Samuel White on 7 July on this topic in which he covered the same ground (Massachusetts Archives, SC1/series 45X, 22:379–81). Bollan’s accounts had long been a source of contention.

1 Gold Selleck Silliman (1732–1790) was the eldest of Silliman’s seven children, a Connecticut lawyer, and future Revolutionary War officer.

2 The letter from Silliman to TH was not found.

3 Drafted by Governor Thomas Fitch with the assistance of Silliman, George Wyllys (1710?–1796), and Jared Ingersoll, Reasons Why the British Colonies, in America, Should Not Be Charged with Internal Taxes, by Authority of Parliament; Humbly Offered, for Consideration, in Behalf of the Colony of Connecticut (New Haven, 1764) was authorized by the Connecticut legislature in May and accepted in October as that colony’s official remonstrance against the Stamp Act (Conn. Colony Records, 12:256, 299).

4 Vigorous, powerful, forcible; free from weakness and diffuseness (OED).

5 Richard Jackson was the agent from Connecticut at this time.

6 The “late Act” was the Revenue Act of 1764.

7 TH wrote two such letters: one to Lord Halifax, No. 55, above, and one to the Lords of Trade, 8 February 1764.

8 From Juvenal’s Satires, 6.223, translated as, “in place of reason, their wish.”

1 Dated 27 November 1764, this letter from the committee of the Massachusetts General Court to Jasper Mauduit explored the boundary difficulties with New Hampshire and Nova Scotia’s conflicting claims to the so-called eastern country (Massachusetts Archives, SC1/series 45X, 56:432–37). TH’s “paragraph” is quoted below in the notes of the second version of this letter. On 8 June the House of Representatives named a seven-man committee to examine the petitions of certain individuals granted land by Massachusetts but lost to New Hampshire by the determination of the joint boundary between the two provinces. “[A]s . . . private Property was not to be affected by the Settlement of the controverted Line,” the House directed the committee “to state the Case to the Agent of the Province, to solicit that those Lands in Controversy be restored, or an Equivalent be given in some other Way, as to Justice appertains” (JHR, 41:54–55; see also pp. 47, 301–04).

2 The representative from New York was William Bayard (circa 1729–1804), according to TH History, 3:83, as well as No. 172 (Version I), below. Bayard, a New York merchant, was later one of the five New York delegates chosen for the Stamp Act Congress. Approved on 18 October (along with two others to King George III and the House of Lords), the New York Assembly’s petition to the House of Commons conceded Parliament’s power to regulate trade but insisted on exemption from all parliamentary taxation (“the People of this Colony . . . nobly disdain the thought of claiming that Exemption as a Privilege.—They . . . glory in it as their Right”). For the text of the petition to the Commons, see Prologue, pp. 8–14.

3 TH’s great-grandfather was Edward Hutchinson (1613–1675) of Alford, Lincolnshire and Boston, Massachusetts (TH Diary and Letters, 2:464; TH Ancestors, p. 7).

1 Closing quotation mark editorially supplied. TH’s “paragraph,” written in his hand, is at Massachusetts Archives, SC1/series 45X, 56:435–36, and is preceded there by two sentences: “We know that none of our grants will be of any validity without the Royal confirmation. Our principal view in making grants of the townships was the cultivating and improving His majesty’s dominions which otherwise must remain a Wilderness and can be in no respect beneficial to the nation.” The paragraph itself reads: “We should be glad to be informed whether the exception be to our right to originate any grants, or whether it be to the particular grants either as to the Persons to whom the townships were granted, the conditions of the grants or to any other matter either in point of form or substance. If there be any prospect of the grants obtaining His Majesty’s Confirmation we doubt not the General Court will do every thing proper on their part in order to promote the settlement of so considerable a part of the Province. By a proper application for that purpose you will no doubt be able to satisfy yourself and us upon these points.”

1 The rest of this paragraph, comprising approximately twenty lines of closely written text, has been revised extensively and then crossed out so heavily that it is illegible.

2 TH was probably referring to the Reverend Jeremiah Condy (1709–1768) of Boston, who was also a bookseller and may have assisted in the printing of volume 2 of TH History.

1 Barlow Trecothick (1718?–1775) was a merchant of Boston and London, alderman of London, New Hampshire agent from 1766 to 1774, member of Parliament from 1768 to 1774, and brother-in-law of the Reverend East Apthorp.

2 William Wood (1679–1765) was the secretary to the Board of Customs in England and author of A Survey of Trade in Four Parts . . . Together with Considerations on our Money and Bullion, Its Exportation Discuss’d, Scarcity of Silver Coin Accounted for, the Means of Procuring a Plenty and Free Circulation of Both Species (London, 1718).

3 Edward Sedgwick was the secretary to the Board of Trade.

1 Boldfaced material was written in TH’s code or cipher, the key to which appears at Massachusetts Archives, SC1/series 45X, 27:79 (see illustration on p. xxx).

2 The book TH wrote was volume 1 of TH History.

1 TH was probably referring to No. 84, below.

2 Rates were established by “An Act for Granting unto His Majesty Several Rates and Dutys of Impost and Tunnage of Shipping,” passed in 1734, and an act of 4 February 1764, similarly titled (Mass. Acts and Resolves, 2:674–79 and 4:669–76).

3 That is, smuggled (OED).

1 The title was supplied by the editors and came from TH’s own description of the MS in his letter No. 83, above. This document was the only MS found among TH’s papers that answered the description he gave Wood in that letter.

2 The text was interlined without mark for position.

3 The text was interlined without mark for position.

4 The “last war” was the French and Indian War.

1 The letter was not found.

2 For Bollan’s letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, see No. 78, above.

3 Bollan probably meant “quantum meruit,” translated as, “as much as he deserves.” In this instance, it is used as a legal term describing the amount a person should be paid when no contract exists.

1 Together with No. 81, above, TH sent copies of volume 1 of TH History to Jackson to distribute.

2 J. Richardson, bookseller and publisher in Paternoster Row, London, issued the second edition (but first London edition) of volume 1 of TH History in 1765.

3 Thomas Hay, 8th Earl of Kinnoull, (1710–1787) was made a lord of the treasury in 1754 and subsequently joint paymaster, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and privy councilor, before returning to private life in Perthshire after the dismissal of the Duke of Newcastle in 1762.

4 Thomas Fleet (d. 1797) and John Fleet (d. 1776), publishers of the Boston Evening Post, also published the first volume of TH History in Boston. TH’s second volume of TH History was published in 1767.

1 On 27 October 1764 the House of Representatives named a five-man committee, with Captain Edward Sheaffe as chairman, to inquire during the General Court recess into the perquisites of civil officers also receiving government grants, further instructing it on 3 November to inquire into those of all other officers receiving annual grants and their services (JHR, 41:117, 136). TH regarded the reduced salaries that resulted from the inquiry as a punishment meted out by James Otis Jr. and his allies in the General Court for TH’s role in softening the language of the Massachusetts petition against the Stamp Act.

2 TH’s fellow justices on the Superior Court bench—his “brethren”—were John Cushing, Benjamin Lynde Jr., Peter Oliver, and Chambers Russell. The letter to which TH referred was presumably a letter addressed to the Superior Court, which was not found.

3 The salary of a Superior Court justice was £800 (JHR, 40:206).

4 TH’s recollection does not match JHR, which showed that he received from the House a grant of £40 on 15 September 1762 and an additional £30 on 23 February 1763 (JHR, 39:104; JHR, 39:271). Earlier in 1762, in March, TH complained to William Bollan that the House had not voted him any additional salary for his services as chief justice (No. 31, above).

5 Translated as, “one year with another.”

6 The MS was torn.

1 The Dft ends here.

2 Governor Theophilus Eaton (1590–1658) was co-founder of the New Haven Colony and its first governor, a position he held from 1643 until his death. John Davenport (1597–1670) was a Puritan minister and co-founder of the New Haven Colony.

3 John Wheelwright (1592?–1679) delivered a controversial Fast Day Sermon on 19 January 1637 that caused him to be brought before the General Court to answer charges of sedition. For the text, see MHS Procs. 9 (1866–1867): 256–74.

4 John Coggeshall (1601–1647), deputy to the General Court, removed to Rhode Island in the wake of the Antinomian Controversy.

5 Thomas Shepard (1605–1649) was the first pastor of the First Church in Cambridge. For Stiles’s notes on the sermon, see NEHGR 26 (April 1872): 162–163. Sir Henry Vane (1613–1662), governor at the time of the Antinomian Controversy, was dropped in the election of 1637 in favor of John Winthrop (see note 7, below). Later, in 1644, Vane intervened in England on the colony’s behalf when Massachusetts was threatened with the loss of its privileges. In 1662, he was executed for his participation in Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate.

6 John Cotton (1585–1652) was the minister of the First Church in Boston and sometime supporter of Anne Hutchinson. Numa Pompilius (755?–672?b.c.e.) was the second king of Rome, ruling from 715 to 672b.c.e. He reputedly established most Roman religious practices.

7 John Winthrop (1588–1649) was the first governor of Massachusetts and noted opponent of Anne Hutchinson. Winthrop was often at the center of political and religious controversy in the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was known for his anti-democratic tendencies, which brought him into conflict with other early settlers in Massachusetts.

8 John Endecott (1588–1665) was an early governor of Massachusetts and stalwart Puritan. William Vassall (1592–1655) was an early settler in Massachusetts and resided in Roxbury and Scituate before moving to Barbados.

9 Stiles was referring to the charter of 1692, which made Massachusetts a royal province and thus no longer a self-governing colony. The executive and judiciary branches were both considered to be dependent upon the Crown because the colonial governor was appointed by the British government and colonial judges were appointed by the governor.

1 TH miswrote the year as “1764,” but this letter was undoubtedly a reply to No. 88, above.

2 Reverend William Harris (1720–1770) wrote An Historical and Critical Account of the Life of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1762), a voluminously annotated work.

3 In TH History, TH wrote, “Another company removed from Hartford with Mr. Peter Prudden for their minister, and settled a little West from New-Haven and called the place Milford” (TH History, 1:75n). Peter Prudden (1601–1656) was the first pastor at Milford, Connecticut, beginning in 1640. Despite what TH wrote in this letter, Prudden did leave Hartford, Connecticut, with a group of followers to found the town of Milford.

4 The settlement at Southold, Long Island, like Prudden’s group at Milford, was an offshoot of the New Haven Colony (TH History 1:75n).

5 The Pequot War was believed to result in the virtual annihilation of the Pequot tribe in southern New England. Some Pequots who survived the conflict were either sent as slaves to the West Indies or fled to other Native American tribes. The Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation received federal recognition in 1983.

6 William Robertson (1721–1793) wrote The History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI, 2 vols. (London, 1759).

7 For more on the sermons, see No. 88, notes 3 and 5, above.

1 Jasper Mauduit talked about resigning the agency throughout 1764 because of ill health, asking the House to relieve him by appointing another agent. James Otis Jr. and his followers preferred Mauduit’s brother Israel as a successor, but Governor Francis Bernard successfully lobbied for Jackson. The selection of Jackson was seen by many as a setback for Otis and his allies (JHR, 41:174–75; Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” p. 105).

2 Jackson was a member of the Church of England, thus prompting questions about his suitability to represent a province founded on religious dissent, as Massachusetts had been. He was also already the agent for Connecticut, resulting in a potential conflict of interest considering the ongoing boundary disputes between Massachusetts and Connecticut (Kammen, A Rope of Sand, pp. 78–82).

3 In his own letter to Jackson of this same date, Bernard detailed how he “zealously promoted” Jackson’s interest. Bernard also promoted TH’s interests to serve as agent at a future date, though. In a letter to Jackson dated 6 February 1765 he emphasized TH’s own suitability for the position, stating “there is no one more capable to represent the rights, & intrests of the Province than he is.” Bernard then asked Jackson to request from Lord Halifax a leave of absence for TH so that if he were to be chosen by the General Court to act in that capacity, he could depart for England without censure from British officials. The fear of such censure, and the possible loss of his various commissions in Massachusetts, prevented TH from accepting the agency when it was offered in early 1764 (Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:217–23, 224–26).

4 The editors conjecture that TH intended these blanks to represent “Governor” and “Surveyor General,” a reference to the Temple-Bernard Affair.

1 The House appointed a committee to look into both Bollan and Jasper Mauduit’s accounts on 27 October 1764. Both men had long-standing disputes with the House over their charges and fees. The committee was comprised of Joseph Lee, Thomas Gray (1721–1774), Jerathmiel Bowers, Oxenbridge Thacher, and Thomas Cushing (JHR, 41:117; Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:234–35).

2 By “Goffe” TH means Attorney General Edmund Trowbridge.

3 To bind or oblige (OED).

4 Bollan returned to England early in 1750, five months after his arrival in Boston in mid-September 1749 with £183,649—Parliament’s reimbursement of Massachusetts’ expenses incurred in the 1745 capture of Louisbourg, the French fortress on Cape Breton Island. Provincial reimbursement for his services was not forthcoming until January 1752.

5 The other agent was Jasper Mauduit, who replaced Bollan in the spring of 1762 and the letter to which TH referred was probably Mauduit to the Speaker of the House, 8 April 1763 (Jasper Mauduit, pp. 98–101).

6 Mauduit wrote two letters in 1764 requesting to be relieved from his duties as agent, at one point stating “I find myself decaying apace.” Copies of these letters are found at Massachusetts Archives, Letterbooks of the Secretary, SC1/series 117X, 10 August 1764 (2A:60–61), 31 October 1764 (2A:83). When the General Court convened on 9 January 1765, it took up the matter of settling on a new agent.

7 TH was referring to one of Aesop’s fables whose moral was that in union there is strength.

8 The “applications” to which TH referred were the colonial protests against the proposed stamp duty. For how those applications were treated by British officials in England, see No. 95, notes 2 and 5, below.

1 TH enclosed a letter to George Franklyn, 2 November 1764, in his letter to David Chesebrough of the same date. His letter to Franklyn concerned improvements made to the property Franklyn leased from him.

2 Grizell Sanford was actually TH’s spinster sister-in-law. She inherited property in Rhode Island.

3 TH was referring to the paper money of Rhode Island, the quantity of whose emissions undermined the currencies of the other New England colonies.

4 According to medieval tradition, salamanders could withstand flame without harm.

5 Chesebrough’s wife was Margaret Sylvester (1719–1782).

6 Wimble was not identified but was probably a ship captain.

7 Presumably TH ordered the captain to bring to Boston any unsold tea previously consigned to Chesebrough.

1 William Parker (1703–1781) was a lawyer and judge, who served in the New Hampshire legislature from 1765 to 1774. He met TH when he served as clerk to the commission to settle the boundary between New Hampshire and Massachusetts in the 1730s.

2 TH’s book was volume 1 of TH History. If Parker’s observations on TH’s book were made in a letter rather than in person, the letter was not found.

3 The proceedings to which TH referred were possibly the decision to remove Benning Wentworth as governor of New Hampshire. The ministry began looking for a replacement for Wentworth in 1764, citing Wentworth’s age and irregularities in his government. Wentworth’s nephew John was appointed in his stead on 22 July 1766 (N.H. Papers, 18:565; Belknap, New Hampshire, 2:260).

4 Clause 9 of Thomas Pownall’s instructions as governor, dated 17 February 1757, contained such a proviso (Instructions to Mass. Governors, p. 1902).

5 According to his nephew and successor John Wentworth, one of the complaints against Benning Wentworth was his “Passing Acts of Assembly, relative to private Property, without a suspending clause till his Majesty’s Pleasure was known; and delaying to transmit these Acts and others for a much longer time, than his Duty admits” (N.H. Papers, 18:561).

6 The agent in question was presumably Increase Mather or one of the early agents under the charter of 1692, whose letters TH would have been reviewing for his work on volume 2 of TH History.

7 TH was possibly referring to a donation to Harvard College from the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge.

1 Misdated, but mention of No. 71, above, and Jackson’s potential appointment to the Massachusetts agency indicate that the letter was written in 1765.

2 TH’s previous letter to Jackson was dated 28 February 1765.

3 The letter from Jackson was not found.

4 TH’s manuscript was most likely No. 71, above, which he sent to Jackson in early September 1764.

5 For the letter that the House of Representatives wrote to agent Jasper Mauduit and printed, see No. 68, note 6, above. For the petition the Massachusetts General Court sent to the House of Commons, see No. 75, above.

1 TH’s reference was to his eldest son, TH Jr., who joined his father in business as a merchant in the early 1760s, and Foster Hutchinson, TH’s younger brother.

2 Concern about the progress of the Stamp Act in Parliament continued to preoccupy Massachusetts throughout the first half of 1765. During the winter of 1764–1765, George Grenville and Thomas Whately collected information and formulated the details of the Stamp Act, paying only the slightest regard to the suggestions of American colonial agents. The legislative petitions against the act, by which the colonists set such store, were never read on the floor of the House of Commons, and the protests of their agents were brushed aside. On 13 February 1765, Grenville presented the bill in the House of Commons, where it was passed on 27 February. The House of Lords gave its assent to the bill on 8 March, and King George III granted his on 22 March. Because of slow communication, the fact of its enactment and the details of its provisions were not known in Boston until two months later (Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, pp. 54–74; Kammen, A Rope of Sand, pp. 108–17).

3 The member of Parliament was not identified, nor the letter found.

4 For the petition, see No. 75, above.

5 Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina also submitted legislative protests against parliamentary taxation in 1764. New York and Virginia’s statements were strong assertions of colonial rights (Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, pp. 35–40).

1 The letter was not found.

2 Made from ashes of burned hardwood trees and used to manufacture soap and glass, potash was a growing export from New England in the 1760s, helping farmers secure needed cash as they cleared their land. Williams must have expressed an interest in the trade in the now-lost letter.

3 Governor Francis Bernard had, in fact, been “scheming this way at Mount Desert” since late 1762 (Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 83–85). Papers of Francis Bernard, vols. 1 and 2, contain numerous letters from Bernard outlining his plans for Mount Desert Island in particular and Maine in general.

4 The election of the Council annually occurred the last Wednesday in May.

1 Governor Francis Bernard and Surveyor General John Temple were involved in a customs dispute in 1764 that became known as the Temple-Bernard affair.

2 The reference to Rhode Island was to another customs dispute involving Temple, Bernard, and John Robinson over a seizure in mid-April in Taunton, Massachusetts, on the border with Rhode Island. Temple later accused Bernard of negligence in supporting Crown officials in enforcing the customs laws, prompting the Council to speak up in Bernard’s defense (Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:246–49, 251–59, 264–72).

3 At its meeting on 17 April 1765, the Council passed the following resolves: “Resolved—That it appears to the Council that his Excellency the Governor, proceeded with all necessary dispatch; that the Council could not conveniently have met on Friday night, that the meeting on Saturday was at Nine o’clock, in the morning, and earlier than usual, that above an hour was spent waiting for the Surveyor Generals papers, after which the Deputy Secretary was sent to him for them. It further appears that the Complaint afterwards made in the Conversation aforesaid, by the Surveyor General, that the Governor had done nothing at all, and that the Proclamation and Orders to the Justices &c. were of no more Signification than so much tobacco papers, for that there was of no more Provision made than the Laws had made before, was groundless indecent and affrontive to the Authority constituted by his Majesty within this Government. That the Proposal of the Surveyor General for raising the militia was improper and of dangerous tendency, and that the Answer given by his Excellency that the militia was not to be charged with the Execution of the Laws, but was to be aiding to the Civil Magistrate in executing them, and that sufficient Provision by advice of Council was made for that purpose, was just, agreeable to truth and pertinent. That the Surveyor Generals expectation, that the Governor should have applied to the Chief Justice for a Writ of Assistance, was improper it being the practice for the Surveyor General to apply for such Writ himself, and this Board are informed by the Chief Justice that he has done it in many instances, and has never yet been refused in any one Instance. It further appears to the Council, that the Governor during his Administration has given all Support and Encouragement to the Officers of the Customs, in carrying the Acts of Trade into Execution, and that nothing has greater tendency to weaken his hands than such undue Returns as has been made upon this Occasion” (Mass. Council Records, 15:369–70).

4 As governor, Bernard received one-third the value of seizures within his district, thus giving him an incentive to actively pursue customs violators. For how much Bernard earned through customs seizures during his early years as governor, see Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” p. 91.

5 TH wrote Bollan for a copy of an English writ of assistance on 5 March 1761, and Bollan provided him with one enclosed in a letter, which was not found, dated 13 June (Smith, Writs Case, pp. 387–89, 391–93).

1 Informers, accusers, denouncers (OED).

2 Salem custom collector James Cockle was Bernard’s ally, and his conduct was at the heart of the Temple-Bernard affair.

1 The annual election of representatives to the General Court took place on 14 May 1765. Stiles’s 25 March letter was never sent and served as the basis for drafts of the current letter (Dft 1 and Dft 2).

2 The arrival in America in April 1689 of the news of the Glorious Revolution in England prompted the deposition in Boston of Sir Edmund Andros (1637–1714), the much-hated governor of the Dominion of New England.

3 Lycurgus (700?–630b.c.e.) was a Spartan lawgiver. John Locke (1632–1704) was the renowned author of Two Treatises on Civil Government (1689), whose Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669) proved too complex for the colonists to implement.

4 For TH’s account of Edward Whalley, see TH History 1:183–87.

5 Simon Peas (1695–1769) married Martha Willet (b. 1698), the sister of TH’s friend Francis Willet, about 1720. When referring to “Col Whaley,” Stiles believed he was speaking of Edward Whalley, but he was actually speaking of Whalley’s younger brother, Robert (1615–1719).

6 Samuel Sewall (1652–1730) was a judge at the Salem witchcraft trials (the only one to publicly express regret over the matter), the author of the antislavery work The Selling of Joseph (Boston, 1700), and a member of the Massachusetts Superior Court from 1692 to 1728, serving as chief justice for the last ten years of that period. Francis Willet’s father was Andrew Willet (1655–1712).

7 Francis Willet’s wife was Mary Taylor (1678–1769).

8 Stiles identified this source simply as “Mr. Smith” in his History of Three of the Judges of King Charles I (Hartford, CT: Elisha Babcock, 1794), pp. 339–40.

9 Stiles was almost certainly referring to one of the six daughters of Whalley’s brother, Robert.

1 Although Jackson accepted the Massachusetts agency in April, TH apparently did not learn of Jackson’s acceptance until later in the summer (No. 102, below).

2 The most controversial of all George Grenville’s colonial reforms, the Stamp Act required that specially issued stamped paper that carried a tax be used in printing of a wide variety of documents, including newspapers, college diplomas, playing cards, legal documents, ship clearances, almanacs, books, and nearly anything that was printed. The stamped paper was to be supplied by stamp distributors in each colony, who were political appointees charged with collecting the tax. Although the bill became law on 22 March, news of its passage did not reach Boston until 27 May. The legislation was scheduled to go into effect on 1 November. TH clearly underestimated the depths of resentment generated by the act. Although he himself opposed the act, TH believed Massachusetts must submit to the supreme authority of Parliament, and he quietly recognized that as a member of the executive branch he would be responsible for enforcing the provisions of the law (Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, pp. 54–74).

3 Incendiaries or firebrands; those who kindle discontent and strife (OED).

4 The House of Representatives agreed to award TH £40 by a 42–41 vote on 1 February (JHR, 41:205–06).

5 The popular party first attempted to purge TH and other government supporters from the Council in May 1765, but TH retained his seat. Opposition efforts were more successful in 1766.

6 From 1748 to 1767, tea shipped from Britain to America was subject to an excise duty (approximately 25 percent) payable on first importation into England, making the possible profits from selling smuggled tea worth the risks for many colonial merchants.

7 The “pious fraud” was committed by Nathaniel Brooke, a London publisher. In 1654, Brooke published an account of the settlement of the Massachusetts town of Woburn. The Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour in New England appeared anonymously but was later established to be the work of a zealous Puritan settler named Edward Johnson (1598–1672). Five years later, Brooke published another account of life in the New England colonies, this one written by Ferdinando Gorges (1629–1718), grandson of the founder of Maine, Sir Ferdinando Gorges. On his own initiative, Brooke combined Wonder-Working Providence with Gorges’s book, which was titled America Painted to the Life (London, 1659). The publisher also erroneously attributed the added pages to the elder Gorges, which prompted the younger Gorges to publish an angry denunciation of Brooke in 1660. Since the elder Gorges had little in common with the Puritan founders of Massachusetts, his supposed authorship of The Wonder-Working Providence seemed both impossible and offensive to many.

8 TH was referring to copies of the 1765 London edition of volume 1 of TH History.

1 George Grenville estimated that the Stamp Act would produce £40,000 to £50,000 annually (John L. Bullion, A Great and Necessary Measure: George Grenville and the Genesis of the Stamp Act, 1763–1765 [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982], p. 150).

2 By “executive court,” TH meant a court of justice. It “executed” the laws made by a “legislative” court.

3 The Stamp Act required that Harvard College diplomas and certificates of matriculation be issued on the new stamped paper. No such tax was levied on degrees issued at Oxford and Cambridge.

1 TH was probably referring to William Ellery Jr. (1727–1820), a close friend of Stiles, and later a signer of the Declaration of Independence and chief justice of Rhode Island.

2 In the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Prince William of Orange accepted the British crown at the invitation of Parliament, becoming King William III of England. He ruled alongside his wife Queen Mary II as joint monarchs.

3 Translated as, “as required.”

4 TH’s friend was Francis Willet. For Willet’s account of the history of Edward Whalley, see No. 98, above.

5 The original MS that TH enclosed was not found, but Stiles printed a copy of the letter in his History of Three of the Judges of King Charles I (Hartford, CT: Elisha Babcock, 1794), p. 118. Sometime before 1656, William Goffe married Whalley’s daughter Frances, from whom he was separated from the time of his flight to America until his death in 1679. Frances remained in England, and the two maintained a passionate and bittersweet correspondence throughout Goffe’s exile, employing pseudonyms to protect their identities.

6 TH was presumably referring to a woman Stiles believed to be Whalley’s granddaughter (No. 98, note 9, above).

1 The letter was not found.

2 Pownall’s book of this title appeared anonymously in London in 1764; subsequent editions—1765, 1766, 1768, 1774, and 1777—appeared under his name.

3 The customs collector of Rhode Island was John Robinson.

4 Jibes (OED).

5 Samuel Robinson (1705–1767), formerly of Hardwick, was a captain in the French and Indian War and a pioneer settler in Bennington, Vermont. In 1766–1767 he traveled to England on behalf of the New Hampshire grantees (see note 6, below).

6 Governor Benning Wentworth sold several patents granting townships in the contested area in what would become Vermont. The borders between New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire had long been in dispute in this region as a result of unclear geographical markers in colonial charters and conflicting land patents. TH served periodically as the province’s representative in attempts to adjudicate the boundaries, a controversy not finally resolved until 1880.

7 The claim of Robert Livingston (1718–1775) to 172,000 acres of land in the disputed territory lay at the center of the ongoing border controversy between New York and Massachusetts.

8 TH was instrumental in drafting Massachusetts’ address, No. 75. On 8 July 1765, the Boston Gazette ran an anonymous communication, “To the PRINTERS,” which read in part: “THE People of Virginia have spoke very sensibly, and the frozen Politicians of a more northern Government say they have spoke Treason: Their spirited Resolves do indeed serve as a perfect Contrast for a certain tame, pusilanimous, daub’d insipid Thing, delicately touch’d up & call’d an Address; which was lately sent from this Side the Water, to please the Taste of the Tools of Corruption on the Other. . . . we have been told with an Insolence the more intolerable, because disguis’d with a Veil of public Care, that it is not prudence for us to assert our Rights in plain and manly Terms: Nay, we have been told that the Word RIGHTS must not be once named among us! Curs’d Prudence of interested designing Politicians! . . . See what is already the Consequence of your impudent Temerity—a whole Continent awakned— alarm’d—restless—I had almost said—disaffected.”

9 Adopted by Virginia’s House of Burgesses on 30 May 1765 after days of debate, the Virginia Resolves stated that Americans had certain rights as Englishmen, including the right to be taxed only by their representatives (Burgesses Journals, 1761–1765, p. 360; Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, pp. 92–103). Since the Virginia Resolves were the most forceful assertion of colonial rights yet, their publication in Massachusetts in early July drew attention to TH’s role in softening the language of Massachusetts’ own petition and fed suspicions that he was, in fact, a secret favorer of the act. Governor Francis Bernard told his superiors in London that the Virginia Resolves “proved an Alarm bell to the disaffected” and to John Pownall, Bernard wrote that “The Spirit of Rebellion which those Resolutions . . . breath is such as must make them abhorred by all loyal Subjects: yet it is inconceivable how they have roused up the Boston Politicians” (Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:295, 301). The copy that TH sent was not found, but it was probably from the Boston Post-Boy, which published the resolves on 1 July 1765.

1 TH still had not heard from Lord Halifax regarding his proposed leave of absence to travel to England as the province’s special agent concerning the Revenue Act of 1764, although he had written him months before on 3 February 1764, in No. 55, above.

2 Jared Ingersoll landed in Boston in late July 1765 on his return trip from England. While in England, Ingersoll first lobbied against the Stamp Act and then tried to limit the scope of its provisions once he knew that passage was inevitable. He was returning to Connecticut to take up his duties as the colony’s stamp master (Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, pp. 241–42).

3 Colonel John Foster (1648–1711), Boston merchant, was TH’s maternal grandfather and great-uncle by marriage. Colonel Thomas Hutchinson (1664/5–1739), TH’s father and also a Boston merchant, was apprenticed to Foster and in 1703 married Foster’s daughter Sarah (circa 1664–1752). The letters to which TH referred were not found.

1 The majestic elm that would become known as the Liberty Tree stood at the corner of the present Washington and Essex streets and was the rallying place for Boston patriots until August 1775 when British soldiers cut it down. The initials “A O” stood for Andrew Oliver, the recently appointed stamp distributor. Much of the information in the notes that follow can be found in Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, pp. 128–31; Hoerder, Crowd Action, pp. 92–97; Boston Gazette, 19 August 1765.

2 The sheriff was Stephen Greenleaf.

3 TH and Governor Francis Bernard had trouble convincing the other members of the Council to take decisive action. On the day after the riot, Bernard wrote the Board of Trade that “Many Gentlemen, especially some of the Council, treated it as a boyish sport, that did not deserve the Notice of the Governor & Council.” After the sheriff reported that the effigy could not be removed peaceably, Bernard bewailed that the Council continued to be “allmost unanimous in advising that nothing should be done” although “they were averse to having such advice entered upon the Council Book” (Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:301–02). A description of the actions of the Council can be found in National Archives UK, CO 5/823, f. 282.

4 By “court house” TH meant the Town House, which is now called the Old State House, located at Washington and State streets. Oliver had erected a small building at his dock, on nearby Kilby Street, although he did not plan to use it as his stamp office.

5 Fort Hill was a fortified waterfront elevation overlooking Boston Harbor that was leveled between 1866 and 1872. Oliver’s house was nearby.

6 The colonel of the militia was Joseph Jackson (1707–1790). In Bernard’s letter to the Board of Trade detailing the events of the evening, he stated that Jackson thought the militia would be useless, “for as soon as the drum was heard, the drummer would be knocked down, & the drum broke; he added,” Bernard wrote, “that probably all the drummers of the Regiment were in the Mob” (Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:303). The order was not found.

7 The MS was torn here and at all other instances of square brackets in this letter, unless otherwise indicated.

8 The governor’s proclamation read in part: “I have therefore thought fit with the advice of His Majesty’s council to issue this Proclamation requiring all Justices of peace and all officers civil and military to use the utmost endeavours for discovering apprehending & bringing to justice all & every of the persons concerned in the outrages ^unlawful assembly^ aforesaid. And I do hereby promise that whosoever shall discover & detect any of the persons concerned in the outrages aforesaid so that they or any of them may be lawfully convicted shall receive out of the Publick Treasury of this Province the sum of One hundred pounds as a reward to be paid upon the conviction of such offender or offenders; and any person concerned therein over & above the reward aforesaid upon discovery of any of his accomplices as aforesaid shall Receive his Majesty’s free & gracious pardon.” This copy of Bernard’s 15 August 1765 proclamation, in TH’s hand, is at Massachusetts Archives, SC1/series 45X, 88:174–75; a printed copy appears in Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:334.

9 SH, MH, and WSH were all at home at the time. TH sent them to the house of his sister, Hannah Mather, who lived nearby, where he later joined them.

10 The leader was not identified but was probably Ebenezer Mackintosh.

11 TH’s country estate in Milton was about ten miles south of Boston. Other than returning to Boston on business a few times, TH remained at Milton until 26 August, when the whole family returned to Boston, believing the disruptions had ended.

12 The letter to which TH referred was No. 102, above.

1 Governor Francis Bernard had not officially received word from his superiors in London about the stamped paper, but he assumed it would arrive sometime in the fall, given that the Stamp Act was due to go into effect on 1 November 1765. The stamped paper was in fact en route from England but didn’t arrive in Boston until mid-September. Bernard wrote to Thomas Bishop, commander of the HMS Fortune, on the same day he wrote this letter to TH (Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:312, 364).

1 TH incorrectly cited the date of this disturbance, which occurred on the night of 14 August. Because of the similarities between this letter and No. 103, above, many of the notes have not been duplicated.

2 TH probably fled to the house of Andrew Oliver’s eldest son, Andrew Oliver Jr. (1731–1799).

3 On 19 August 1765, the Boston Evening Post and the Boston Gazette stated that Oliver resigned his post as stamp master on 15 August 1765, the day after the first riots.

1 Presumably TH’s fellow justices on the Superior Court wished to adjourn as a result of the civil disturbances.

1 Galatians, Chapter 5, Verses 12 and 13 reads, “I would they were even cut off which trouble you. For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.” The text of Mayhew’s sermon was not found, but Charles Akers reconstructed much of it in Called unto Liberty: A Life of Jonathan Mayhew, 1720–1766 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 202–07. Mayhew delivered the sermon on 25 August, the day before the attack on TH’s house, and some later blamed his sermon for inciting the violence that followed.

2 The text was interlined vertically in the left margin.

1 Josiah Quincy Jr. placed his record of this speech as the first item for the August term that began on 27 August 1765 (“5. Geo. 3. in BR&C”).

1 TH’s signature was clipped out of another document and affixed to this one.

1 This illegible text comprises only a single capital initial, which could be a “B” (possibly referring to General William Brattle), “H,” or “C.”

2 The MS was blotted.

3 The MS was blotted.

1 AC: “humbly” omitted.

2 Governor Francis Bernard described the attack of TH’s house is his letter to Lord Halifax, 31 August 1765 (National Archives UK, CO 5/755, ff. 287–300; Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:337–45).

1 Charles Paxton’s house was not damaged, but those of Benjamin Hallowell and William Story were attacked. The “insult” TH received referred to the events of 15 August, when a crowd converged on his North End home. For a more detailed account of the events on 26 August, see Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, pp. 132–33; Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 117. TH’s own published account follows this letter closely (TH History, 3:89–91).

2 TH’s eldest daughter was SH.

3 TH fled to the house of his brother-in-law, the Reverend Samuel Mather.

4 TH was presumably referring to his youngest son, WSH, who was at home on this evening.

5 The house to which TH and his family removed belonged to Thomas Edes (Freiberg, Prelude to Purgatory, p. 112).

6 Among the items lost that evening were the manuscripts TH had been assembling for his history of Massachusetts, some of which were later returned to him. TH said the “public papers” were depositions concerning smuggling, but they may have included documents related to contested land near the Kennebec River in Maine (TH History, 3:89–90; Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, p. 133). His advertisement of some missing items appeared in the Boston Evening Post on 2 September 1765 (reprinted in WMQ, Third Series, 8 [October 1951]: 583–84).

7 The “first mob” was primarily against Andrew Oliver on 14–15 August. The “encouragers” on both occasions were the Loyal Nine, a small group of political opponents who became the basis of the Sons of Liberty in Boston. The leader for both riots was Ebenezer Mackintosh. For more on the composition of the crowd involved in the riots, see Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 117–19. The people of Boston unanimously disavowed the events of the night before in a town meeting on 27 August at which “a great number of the actors and promoters” of the disorders were present (TH Diary and Letters, 1:70; BTR, 16:152).

1 Mayhew’s letter to TH was No. 107, above.

1 The enclosed letter was No. 110, above.

2 TH’s letter to Jackson was No. 111, above.

3 A pipe or large cask, equivalent to half a tun or two hogsheads (OED).

4 TH was referring to public disapproval with the Stamp Act, which had been building ever since the previous winter when rumors began to surface of the British government imposing such a tax to generate revenue.

5 Translated as, “by fair means or foul.”

1 Dft: “My dear Sir friend”

2 Dft: preceding five words interlined.

3 Dft: preceding three words interlined.

4 Dft: word interlined.

5 Dft: remainder of sentence interlined.

6 Dft: “greatly damaged”

7 Remainder of sentence in the Dft: “tarried in the house my self until I was drove out.”

8 Stephen Greenleaf was the sheriff.

9 Remainder of sentence in the Dft: “no care was taken to apprehend any person concerned except only that the governor issued a proclamation.”

10 For Governor Francis Bernard’s proclamation, see No. 103, note 8, above; Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:334.

11 Remainder of sentence in the Dft: “saying any thing to me or my knowing or having any suspicion of this intention published that he would resign his commission.”

12 Dft: “intended”

13 Dft: word interlined in place of “ord”

14 TH’s eldest daughter was SH. They fled to the house of his sister Hannah Mather and her husband, Samuel.

15 Dft: “without saying any [illegible] and before morning entirely emptied it.” The remainder of this paragraph in the Dft presents much the same information but in a different order and with some variations noted below.

16 By “sister” TH meant his sister-in-law, Grizell Sanford. TH’s two eldest sons, TH Jr. and EH, were also his business partners. Further down in the Dft, TH wrote a variant of the preceding passage: “Besides my furniture my own & familys apparel books papers bonds &c there was near 900£ stg in money in the house belonging to myself my sister & two sons which was all carried away.”

17 Dft: preceding six words omitted.

18 Bollan’s daughter Frances (b. circa 1745) was soon to leave Boston for England (Boston Evening Post, 16 September 1765).

19 Sentence to this point in the Dft: “Some gentle[men] of the army say they had seen towns sacked [illegible] by an enemy”

20 Dft: “fury”

21 Sentence to this point in the Dft: “I who never expect any advantage from the stamp act & who have said & done everything in favour of the colonies which could be said or done”

22 Dft: “rage and fury”

23 Dft: “stirred”

1 TH left blank the space where the date would normally be placed.

2 The newspaper was not identified but TH’s last letter to Jackson was No. 111, above. Newport’s Stamp Act riots began on 27 August 1765. Riots in other colonies followed in early September, forcing the resignations of other stamp masters.

3 The “western” was the western circuit of the Superior Court in the Berkshires.

4 The fable concerned the old man and the donkey, the moral of which was that with a new government nothing changes for the poor except the name of their master.

5 Roger Hale succeeded Benjamin Barons as collector of customs at Boston in the spring of 1762 and was probably about to depart for England.

1 TH was referring to the Revenue Act of 1764 (also known as the Sugar Act) and the Stamp Act, respectively.

2 For the writs of assistance case, see Smith, Writs Case, to date the only book-length study of this topic.

3 The text was interlined without mark for position.

4 This maxim of Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), as cited in the legal ruling known as Dr. Bonham’s Case, reads: “And it appears in our books, that in many cases, the common law will control acts of parliament, and sometimes adjudge them to be utterly void; for when an act of parliament is against common right and reason, or repugnant, or impossible to be performed, the common law shall control it, and adjudge such act to be void” (Dr. Bonham’s Case [1610], 8 Coke Rep.). Using an eighteenth-century abridgement, James Otis Jr. had quoted Coke’s dictum in 1761 when arguing against writs of assistance (JA Legal Papers, 2:117–21, 127–28; Smith, Writs Case, pp. 358–61).

5 Alternative reading: “felld”

6 The other Crown officials whose homes were attacked that night were William Story and Benjamin Hallowell, respectively.

7 Presumably TH had assisted his London business associate Charlton Palmer in collecting some of Palmer’s local debts.

1 Socrates was condemned to drink poison by the vote of an Athenian jury. Aristides the Just (530?–468?b.c.e.), Athenian statesman and general, was ostracized by the Athenian assembly. Publius Cornelius Scipio Nascia Serapio was a Roman consul in 138b.c.e., who according to the historian Valerius Maximus deserved the thanks of the Roman people for his role in the downfall of Tiberius Gracchus (163–132b.c.e.) but was instead dispatched for his own safety as ambassador to Pergamum, where he died.

2 This sentiment was expressed by Seneca (4–65a.d.), Roman statesman and philosopher, in his De Providentia, 2:9.

3 Thomas Gage, then stationed at New York, was commander-in-chief of British troops in North America. In the wake of Stamp Act rioting in Boston, Governor Francis Bernard asked the Council if troops were required to enforce the peace. Since the Council saw no such need, Bernard wrote to Gage on 29 August, “I cannot ask for them; nor can I with safety declare my own thoughts upon the occasion.” Gage offered reinforcements anyway, but Bernard declined the offer on 13 September (Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:332–33, 349–51, 359–60; Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 120–22).

4 Rogers was probably referring to Bernard’s declaration to the Council of 5 September 1765, in which he stated that the stamped paper, when it arrived, would be lodged at Castle William and left unopened. Bernard hoped to prevent a public assault on the Castle to destroy the paper and thereby preserve it for use after the Stamp Act went into effect on 1 November 1765. His declaration was printed in the Boston Gazette on 9 September 1765; see also Mass. Council Records, 16:38–39. Bernard also ordered that the defenses of the Castle be strengthened (Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:327–28).

5 Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden was serving as acting governor of New York throughout this period. Colden refused to call the New York Assembly into session in an effort to prevent the Assembly from electing delegates for the Stamp Act Congress, which was to convene in New York in October. Instead, the members of the Assembly’s Committee of Correspondence elected themselves to attend the congress as representatives from New York (Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, p. 108).

6 Major Thomas James was commander of the Royal Artillery at Fort George in New York City when it was attacked on 1 November 1765. It was alleged that James had said that New Yorkers would be forced to use the stamps, which were kept at the fort for safekeeping. His house was later attacked and plundered.

7 Zachariah Hood (d. 1789) was a merchant and stamp distributor for Maryland. He was expelled from the colony by an urban crowd on 2 September 1765 and sought shelter at Fort George in New York.

8 The MS was torn here and in the other instances of square brackets in this paragraph and the next.

9 Rogers’s version of events was somewhat garbled: Samuel Chase (1741–1811), a representative to the First and Second Continental Congresses and future associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, led a crowd on 26 August that destroyed Hood’s warehouse (not his house). A subsequent tavern brawl led to the wounding (not the death) of an officer from the British sloop Hornet.

1 Governor Francis Bernard publicly announced that he lacked the authority to distribute the stamped paper lodged at Castle William, thus defusing a potential crisis. The Massachusetts General Court responded negatively to Bernard’s urgings to accept the Stamp Act as law, stating “We deeply regret it, that the Parliament has seen fit to pass such an act as the stamp act: we flatter ourselves that the hardships of it will shortly appear to them in such a point of light as shall induce them in their wisdom to repeal it: In the mean time we must beg your Excellency to excuse us from doing any thing to assist in the execution of it” (Speeches, pp. 39–48).

2 By October 1765, it became clear that the Massachusetts General Court would not compensate TH for the losses he sustained in the riot of 26 August. Some representatives believed that compensation was more properly the responsibility of the town of Boston, while others regarded the riot as a simple accident, like fire or inclement weather, for which TH, a rich man, should unfortunately sustain the loss. With such dismal prospects of reimbursement in New England, TH redoubled his letter-writing campaign to friends and acquaintances in England in order to promote the idea of compensation. Only a sampling of these letters follow, however, in order to avoid repetition.

3 TH laid out his case to Henry Seymour Conway in No. 119, below, but he did not send a formal petition to Conway until 27 October 1765, No. 128, below.

4 Translated as, “between us.”

5 Translated as, “to speak what one thinks or think what one would wish.”

1 At the Council meeting held on 27 August in the immediate aftermath of the attack on TH’s home, a five-man committee was formed to work with TH to draft an estimate of his losses, as well as the losses of the other victims. The committee included Thomas Hubbard, Thomas Flucker, Royall Tyler, Harrison Gray, and TH himself. Their estimate did not appear in the Council’s MS journals, although TH included an attested copy in the petition he sent to Henry Seymour Conway, No. 128, below. In addition to the figure TH derived from compiling his inventory, the estimate also included an estimate for the damage to the house, which the committee found to be just over £950. Governor Francis Bernard’s speech stated, “I must Recommend to you to do an act of justice, which at the same time will reflect credit on yourselves: I mean to order a Compensation to be made to the Sufferers in the late Disturbances. Their losses are too great for them to sit down with; one of them amounts to a very large Sum” (Bernard to the House of Representatives, 25 September 1765, JHR, 42:123; Speeches, p. 42).

2 That is, important (OED).

3 The letter was not found, but TH wrote to William Bollan on 5 March 1761. For TH’s efforts to secure a sample writ from England, see Smith, Writs Case, pp. 387–89, 391–93.

4 Among the steps TH took to warn people of the dangers of not complying with the Stamp Act was to instruct juries from his position as judge of the possible repercussions of the offense.

5 AC: preceding three words omitted.

6 TH later enclosed this “authentick copy of the particulars” in his letter No. 128, below.

7 AC: “applying”

1 Presumably TH enclosed the Boston Gazette of 30 September 1765, whose unsigned attack on Governor Francis Bernard for recessing the General Court from 27 September until late October contained this paragraph: “The Judges of the Superior Court, while the Assembly was sitting, were at Springfield, and the Justices of the Plymouth County and others were oblig’d soon to leave the Assembly—all of whom his Excellency, tis said, highly esteems for their Advice, parliamentary and political, as well as judiciary, and from his Excellency’s Message may account for the late unexpected Adjournment.” In the same issue also appeared the following: “Some gentlemen who have Seats in a certain great As——y, and hold Places under the ———, we are told will use all their Influence to persuade their Fellow Townsmen, that the best and most certain Way to prevent their being made Slaves of by others, is to put their own Chains on themselves; and that submitting to Burdens is the readiest Way to get rid of them.”

2 The printers of the Boston Gazette were Benjamin Edes and John Gill.

3 The text was interlined without mark for position.

4 The abbreviation was for the word “Assembly.” For Connecticut stamp master Jared Ingersoll’s forced resignation at Hartford on 19 September 1765 (his second that day), see Lawrence Henry Gipson, Jared Ingersoll: A Study of American Loyalism in Relation to British Colonial Government (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1920), pp. 177–87; Connecticut Gazette, 27 September 1765. Major John Durkee (1728–1782) of Norwich, Connecticut, organized that province’s resistance to the Stamp Act by leading an orderly assemblage of 500 people to confront Ingersoll.

5 In his opening address to the General Court, Bernard urged the members to accept the Stamp Act as the law of the land, a sentiment that the House adamantly rejected in their answer to the governor’s speech (No. 118, note 1, above).

6 In the same speech, Bernard recommended that the General Court compensate TH for his loss in the Stamp Act riots (No. 119, note 1, above).

7 TH’s appeal to the Crown was in his letter to Secretary of State Conway, No. 119, above, and his formal application for relief was contained in a second letter to Conway, No. 128, below.

8 The letter was not found.

1 East Apthorp’s letter to TH was not found. Apthorp’s answer to Jonathan Mayhew was A Review of Dr. Mayhew’s Remarks on the Answer to his Observations on the Charter and Conduct of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London, 1765). Apthorp had been engaged in a debate with Jonathan Mayhew since at least 1763 regarding the rumored plans of the Anglican Church to extend its scope in America. Mayhew viewed Anglican ambitions (and the possibility of an American episcopate) as a threat to religious liberty in the colonies, and by the time of the Stamp Act crisis, he had established through his widely circulated pamphlets a connection between religious liberty and political liberty in the minds of many New Englanders. The vocal Apthorp spoke for the Anglicans in a controversy that played out in the pulpit and in newspapers and pamphlets (Pamphlets, pp. 156–58; Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution, 1763–1783 [New York: Norton, 1973], pp. 122–24; Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 74–77).

2 The footnote, which appears on p. 59, reads, “See the excellent and truly Honourable Mr. Hutchinson’s Hist. of the Massachusetts-Bay.” The reference concerned the hanging of Quakers in seventeenth-century New England.

3 The balance of the verse reads, “Only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.” For Mayhew’s sermon, see No. 107, note 1, above.

4 For the Council’s estimate of TH’s losses, see No. 119, note 1, above.

5 TH’s formal petition to the king was contained in No. 128, below.

6 The Stamp Act was to take effect on 1 November.

1 TH wrote Bollan on 1 September 1765, No. 114, above, with an account of the disturbances of August. Bollan received this letter before he received TH’s letter of 20 August, No. 105, above, which went into greater detail about the riots of 14 and 15 August. In his letter to the Marquis of Rockingham, Bollan wrote briefly of the “outrageous proceedings of a mob at Boston” and said that TH was “the chief sufferer” who has “on several great and difficult occasions behaved with a proper spirit and fidelity to the Kings government, as well as justice to the province.”

2 The lord president of the Council in Rockingham’s administration was Daniel Finch, 8th Earl of Winchilsea (1689–1769).

3 In this second letter to Rockingham, Bollan again stressed TH’s “good character” but also stated that TH’s more detailed account of the earlier riot (i.e., that of 14–15 August) placed the events “in a more dangerous light,” condemning “these collected bodies of the worst of men, who under pretence of reforming the state leave no safety in it for the Best.”

4 The “promoter” of the law was the former first lord of the treasury George Grenville, who adamantly opposed any effort to repeal the Stamp Act.

5 Sir George Savile (1726–1784) was invited to participate in the Rockingham administration but declined. He voted for the repeal of the Stamp Act but warned that the colonists might be encouraged to make excessive demands in the future.

1 Hawley (1727–1807) was a missionary among the Native Americans, first in New York then in western Massachusetts and finally, after 1757, near Plymouth, Massachusetts. During the 1750s, he frequently served as an interpreter at meetings between Native Americans and colonists, most notably at the Albany Conference, where TH probably met him.

2 “Onohoquaja” was one of the many variant spellings for Oquaga or Onoquaga, one of the principal Oneida villages on the upper Susquehanna River in western New York. Sir William Johnson (circa 1715–1774) was superintendent of the northern Native American tribes from 1755 until his death, and Hawley worked closely with him on Native American affairs.

3 Hawley’s biblical reference was to Matthew 6:20: “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.”

4 Reverend Eleazer Mosely or Moseley was a Presbyterian missionary from Boston.

1 The MS was torn here and in all other instances of square brackets in this letter.

2 TH’s formal application to the king was No. 126, below.

1 The MS was torn here and in all other instances of square brackets in this letter.

2 The text was interlined in TH’s hand but without a mark for position.

3 The remainder of the text was written vertically in the margin in TH’s hand.

4 The MS was heavily reworked here.

5 In response to Governor Francis Bernard’s speech at the opening of the legislative session on 25 September 1765 in which he urged the General Court to compensate the victims of the Stamp Act riots for their losses, the House of Representatives refused to do so. On 24 October 1765, in a message to the governor, the House replied: “Your Excellency is pleased to recommend a compensation to be made to the sufferers by the late disturbance:—we highly disapprove of the acts of violence which have been committed; yet till we are convinced that to comply with what your Excellency recommends, will not tend to encourage such outrages in time to come, and till some good reason can be assigned why the losses those gentlemen have sustained should be made good, rather than any damage which other persons, on any different occasions, might happen to suffer, we are persuaded we shall not see our way clear to order such a compensation to be made. . . . We cannot conceive why it should be called an act of justice, rather than generosity, unless your Excellency supposes a crime committed by a few individuals, chargeable upon a whole community” (JHR, 42:137–38; Speeches, p. 48).

6 TH’s petition to the Crown for compensation was enclosed in No. 128, below.

7 Approximately eight words were illegible in the MS here.

8 Approximately fifteen words were illegible in the MS here.

1 “Burnt china,” probably Batavia ware, was a Chinese export porcelain with a brown underglaze decorated with blue, white, or red glazes on top.

2 Usually “patty pans” were tin forms with scalloped edges for baking small pies, but in this instance TH perhaps meant glass or ceramic dishes of a similar shape.

3 The words “A large looking-glass cut down by a neighbor and saved” were inserted below the line in the AC.

4 By “Hall,” TH meant a parlor or room for the formal entertainment of guests. What later centuries would call a “hall” or “hallway,” TH referred to as the “entry.”

5 “Painted oyl clothes” were oil cloths used as painted canvas floor coverings.

6 The line clearly reads “8 chairs Morocco leather 9..10” in the AC, but the total at right still reads “11..10.”

7 Japanned meant furniture decorated with metal leaf over gesso on black or red grounds in imitation of oriental lacquerware.

8 “Turkey work” was an English weave that imitated that of Turkish carpets.

9 By “3 stands of wax work in glasses,” TH probably meant decorative waxwork figures under small glass domes.

10 TH meant a filigree or wirework done with tweezers.

11 Boiling textiles removed grease and other impurities from the cloth, rendering it softer, fluffier, and ready to receive dyes more uniformly.

12 Camlet, a rich, soft woven cloth, was originally made from camel hair but later made from worsted wool or a blend of Angora goat hair and silk (Montgomery, Textiles in America, p. 188).

13 Herrateen or harateen was a worsted upholstery textile.

14 A “scotch carpet” was a double-cloth, woven, ingrain carpet.

15 Total at right reads “20..13”

16 This mangled word was probably a misspelling for “veneered.”

17 The words “& part of (?)” were inserted in the AC.

18 TH was referring to wine from the Western Islands, now known as the Azores.

19 Fontenac was a Spanish brandy.

20 Shagreen was a rough untanned leather typically dyed green.

21 “Sweetmeat knives” was another term for dessert knives.

22 By “surtout,” TH meant “A long loose overcoat with one or more spreading collars called ‘capes’” (C. Willett Cunnington, Phillis Cunnington, and Charles Beard, A Dictionary of English Costume [Philadelphia, PA: Dufour Editions, 1960], p. 209).

23 “Cloth” in eighteenth-century menswear meant wool that was plain-woven, fulled (deliberately shrunk), napped, and shorn. The resulting material would be similar to that found on a billiard table. Here TH probably meant a wool suit of pompadour color, the pink-red shade associated with Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764), mistress of France’s King Louis XV.

24 Ducape silk was a plain woven, stout silk.

25 Padusoy or pou de soie was a tabby or the heaviest of dress silks, usually corded and brocaded.

26 Rateen was a thick twilled woolen cloth, twill woven.

27 A banyan was a loose dressing gown, which could be made in a variety of fabrics: flannel, printed cotton, damask, or plain silk.

28 The Dictionary of English Costume says a roquelaur or roquelaure was “A knee-length cloak with a single or double cape-collar, and buttoned down the front; a back vent for wearing on horseback” (p. 184).

29 The words “besides what saved” appeared in the AC.

30 The words “&c saddle bag, portmanteau &c.” appeared in the AC.

31 “Holland” was a generic name for linen cloth.

32 This and the “8” on the line below were obscured by the binding of CO 5/755.

33 TH misspelled the word “bureau.”

34 “Lustring” was a light, crisp, plain silk of high luster.

35 By “lawn” TH meant linen.

36 A stomacher was a triangular or u-shaped panel that filled the opening of a woman’s gown or bodice from the bust to the waist.

37 Dimity was corded muslin. At this early period, dimity was not thin; it was relatively stout, usually white in color.

38 TH was probably writing an abbreviation of “calamanco” (see note 50, below).

39 A capuchin was a hooded cloak.

40 Russel was a glazed worsted, often patterned but not always. In this context, the “Russel quilt” was probably a quilted petticoat, following a typical shorthand of calling quilted petticoats “quilts.”

41 TH perhaps meant a satin jockey cap.

42 A tucker was usually a piece of lace worn around the top of or tucked into a woman’s bodice.

43 In this context, “dresden work” (as opposed to the fabric known as “Dresden”) was fine needle lace or embroidery, usually in floral designs on semi-sheer cotton or linen ground fabric (Susan Burrows Swan, Plain & Fancy: American Women and Their Needlework, 1700–1850 [New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977], p. 226).

44 A “clouded burdet” was possibly a silk with indistinct or “clouded” patterning. Clouded refers to a loom patterning similar to today’s ikat, with a pattern printed on the warp before weaving, giving an indistinct effect after the wefts have been woven in. Most “clouded” textiles of the period were silk in fiber content.

45 Spatterdashes were long gaiters worn to protect a rider’s legs from water and mud.

46 Hair bags were garments for gathering and protecting a man’s hair.

47 TH probably meant “curtains [and] valences,” perhaps to a bed, but possibly for a window. The “&c” implies that there was more to the set, possibly additional bed furnishings.

48 Allapeen was a textile of mixed materials, either wool and silk, or mohair and cotton.

49 A “cardinal” was a cloak, usually of red or scarlet cloth. The Dictionary of English Costume says: “In 18th c. a ¾-length hooded cloak, usually of scarlet cloth” (p. 38).

50 Calimanco, Montgomery’s Textiles in America says, was “[a] worsted ‘stuff . . . [with] a fine gloss upon it,’” (p. 185) often in quite brilliant colors (see note 38, above).

51 Cambric was a fine, thin white linen originally made in Cambrai, France, often used for lace or ruffles.

52 AC: not interlined but appeared as part of the text

53 AC: “16”

1 TH’s application to the Crown was enclosed in No. 128, above.

2 The MS was torn.

1 That is, important (OED).

2 TH’s application to the Crown was enclosed in No. 128, above.

3 As lieutenant governor, TH was in charge of the province from April to May 1759 when Governor Thomas Pownall was in Maine, from 3 June to 2 August 1760 after Pownall left for England but before Governor Francis Bernard arrived, and for a few short periods in 1762, 1763, and 1764 when Bernard was at Mount Desert Island, Maine. Technically, because Maine was part of Massachusetts and the governor was not actually out of the province, the only stretch of time when TH was unequivocally at the head of the government was in the summer of 1760.

1 TH’s petition to the Crown was enclosed in No. 128, above.

1 Lord Adam Gordon (1726–1801), colonel in the British army and member of Parliament, visited Boston in September 1765 and was entertained by leading members of the provincial government.

2 TH’s petition to the Crown was enclosed in No. 128, above.

3 The judges of the Inferior Court of Common Pleas for Essex County were John Choate, John Tasker (1707–1761), Benjamin Pickman (1707 - 1773), and Caleb Cushing (1703–1807). To which judge TH was referring is not clear. Newbury’s Stamp Act riot occurred on 25 and 26 September 1765.

4 The MS was blotted here and in other instances of square brackets in this paragraph.

1 In No. 137, below, TH explanied that he was at his country home in Milton when he wrote this letter rather than in Boston.

2 Despite his expectations, Governor Francis Bernard did not have to flee the province or even retreat to the comparative safety of Castle William during the tense weeks when the Stamp Act was supposed to be in effect. He did, however, have his belongings packed and ready to go in anticipation of such a flight (Bailyn, Ordeal, p. 111).

3 The Stamp Act took effect on 1 November 1765. Andrew Oliver, the stamp distributor, had resigned the previous August, and popular opposition to the act prevented the landing of stamped paper. The paper was instead stored at Castle William in Boston Harbor. Without the stamped paper, compliance with the law was impossible, placing royal officials in an awkward situation. Legal documents were required to be executed on stamped paper in order to be valid, and so neither the courts nor the customs house could operate according to the provisions of the law and remained closed. Nevertheless, the general expectation was that business should proceed as usual, since most colonists regarded the repeal of the Stamp Act as a foregone conclusion. This situation put significant pressure on TH as the province’s chief judge. He would eventually resign his probate court judgeship in favor of his brother rather than open the court in defiance of a parliamentary statute, and he postponed sittings of the Superior Court while awaiting definitive notice of repeal.

4 The Superior Court met during this period only to transact business that did not require stamped paper. The popular party would soon try to force the courts to proceed with all business, whether that business legally required stamps or not.

5 The House of Representatives chose Dennys DeBerdt as its special agent on 5 November, but he was empowered to act for the House only, not the General Court (JHR, 42:167; No. 135, below). The Stamp Act Congress met in New York from 7 to 25 October 1765. The Massachusetts commissioners were Timothy Ruggles, James Otis Jr., and Oliver Partridge.

6 TH formally petitioned the Crown for compensation for his losses in No. 128, above.

1 TH applied to the Crown for relief in No. 128, above.

1 Although the majority of the delegates to the Stamp Act Congress eventually assented to a petition declaring that the colonists’ rights as Englishmen were violated by the Revenue Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act, Massachusetts delegate Timothy Ruggles, who presided over the congress, refused to sign it. For the texts of the petitions, see Prologue, pp. 62–69.

2 AC: “task”

3 Stamp Master Andrew Oliver did not receive his commission until 30 November 1765, by which time he had already resigned the post.

4 TH’s petition to the Crown was enclosed in No. 128, above.

1 The petition was No. 75, above.

2 Andrew Oliver was already serving as secretary for the province when he was appointed stamp master.

3 TH’s petition to the Crown was enclosed in No. 128, above.

1 The letter informed Jackson of the appointment of Dennys DeBerdt as special agent of the House of Representatives. Notice of the vote appears at JHR, 42:182, and a copy of the letter is at Massachusetts Archives, Letterbooks of the Secretary, SC1/series 117X, 4:1–2. See also Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:404–07.

2 The member from Boston was Samuel Adams, who was serving his first term as clerk of the House.

3 Major Thomas James was the commander of Fort George.

4 Stamp Act uprisings took place in New York on 1 September and in early November 1765. Although the colony’s stamp master resigned in September, crowds gathered on successive days in early November in response to a rumor that Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden was planning to enforce the act. Even after New Yorkers burned Colden’s carriage and looted James’ home, the crowd did not disperse for several days, sparking rumors that it would attack the fort and ignite a full-scale war.

5 Ebenezer Mackintosh, the leader of the South End crowd, hosted together with Samuel Swift, the leader of the North End crowd, a celebration known as the Union Feast involving nearly 200 people who gathered to celebrate the alliance of the two rival groups. Mackintosh and Swift organized Boston’s first peaceful Pope’s Day festival in years on 5 November 1765. Which merchants attended the event is unknown. Popular demonstrations took place on 1 and 5 November but were conducted in a “most regular manner” (Boston Gazette, 11 November 1765; George P. Anderson, “Ebenezer Mackintosh: Stamp Act Rioter and Patriot,” CSM Pubs. 26 [1924–1926]: 15–64).

1 The letter was not found.

2 “Mr R” was Timothy Ruggles, who left the Stamp Act Congress in the middle of its session, after disapproving of language that challenged Parliament’s right to tax the colonies. Like Ruggles, Robert Ogden (1716–1787) of the New Jersey delegation resigned from the congress rather than sign the petitions it drafted. The bolded material was TH’s cipher. The key for the cipher appears at Massachusetts Archives, SC1/series 45X, 27:79 (p. xxx).

3 The blank place in the MS was probably for the gangs.

4 The Albany Conference of 1754 considered a plan credited to Benjamin Franklin for intercolonial union and defense. TH might have worked on the plan with Franklin (No. 10, note 9, above).

5 Heinrich Eberfrud Luther, printer and chancellor of state at Frankfurt, joined Massachusetts in sponsoring the settlement of German immigrants in Maine in 1751. When the German settlement later proved too small to be self-sustaining, the Massachusetts General Court backed away from its commitment to provide support (TH History, 3:9).

6 The Treaty of Aix-La-Chapelle of 1748 ended the War of the Austrian Succession, known as King George’s War, in America. The following year, Lieutenant Governor Spencer Phips proposed encouraging the settlement of German Protestants in the district of Maine.

7 Samuel Waldo, who owned the Muscongus Patent of over 500,000 acres in the district of Maine, settled fifty families of German immigrants at Waldoborough in 1740.

8 Isaac Winslow (1709–1777), merchant, land speculator, and subsequently mandamus councilor, married one of Waldo’s daughters. Thomas Flucker first married a sister of James Bowdoin; his second wife was another of Waldo’s daughters.

9 No such letter to Governor Francis Bernard has been found.

1 The letter was not found.

2 In late October, Boston Customs Comptroller Benjamin Hallowell and Collector William Sheaffe (1705–1771) wrote to both Attorney General Trowbridge and Advocate General Robert Auchmuty (circa 1723–1788) seeking guidance on opening the port either with or without stamped paper. When the Stamp Act went into effect on 1 November, the customs house remained closed. In numerous letters over the course of several weeks, neither Trowbridge nor Auchmuty provided a clear answer. The answer that Trowbridge sent to Hallowell and Sheaffe on 30 November read, “I do not look upon myself as the Proper Person by whose advise You (in an affair of such importance, and which seems to be at present a matter rather of prudence than of Law) are to govern yourselves and therefore must be excused advising you either to grant Cockets or Clearances upon unstamped Papers or to refuse to do it” (Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, pp. 141–45; quoted on p. 143).

3 The surveyor general was John Temple, and the advocate general was Auchmuty.

1 The MS was blotted.

2 The Quartering Act of 1765 obliged those colonies where British troops were stationed in barracks (as opposed to frontier posts) to provide basic supplies at the colony’s expense. Both Thomas Pownall and TH opposed a 1758 order by Lord Loudoun that troops be quartered in inns, public houses, and private homes at the expense of the householder rather than the public. Instead, the Massachusetts General Court passed a law on 12 October 1758 that allowed troops to be quartered in inns and public houses but said nothing of private homes (“An Act Providing for the Reception and Accommodation of His Majesty’s Forces within This Province,” Mass. Acts and Resolves, 4:165–66). Pownall apparently lobbied on behalf of New York City, which as the headquarters for the British army in North America housed the majority of peacetime troops on the continent. Benjamin Franklin played a significant role in revising the Quartering Act (Franklin Papers, 12:106–07, 205).

3 Pownall’s book The Administration of the Colonies was published anonymously in London in 1764. The dedication of the second edition (1765), which appeared under Pownall’s name, read: “To the Right Honourable George Grenville, First Lord Commissioner of His Majesty’s Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, &c, &c, &c.”

4 The letter was not found, but TH sent it to Pownall enclosed in No. 120, above.

5 Pownall and Franklin supported the creation of a single currency system in the colonies based on paper currency that bore interest and was backed by the Bank of England. They met with George Grenville in February 1765 to propose such a plan, but Grenville was preoccupied with drafting the Stamp Act. Pownall subsequently published a pamphlet entitled Considerations on a Paper Currency, which did not cite Franklin but referred to “an intelligent observer” who was probably Franklin. Although the pair proposed the plan several times over the next few years, it was never enacted. When expanding the second edition of his book in 1765, Pownall considered including a more thorough discussion of colonial currency but instead published just a single sentence on the issue: “Some matters which were intended to have been inserted here, are suspended for the present, for reasons which I hope may lead to more public benefit, than the making them public in this work could do” (Franklin Papers, 12:49). Pownall did not elaborate on the subject until the fourth edition of his book in 1768.

6 Until the end of the eighteenth century, the most widely accepted weights and measuring system for dry goods in England was based on standards held at the city of Winchester, long an important trading center. By the 1760s, the Winchester measure was increasingly replaced by the imperial system of measurement.

7 Among the primary criticisms of the changes enacted in colonial policy in the early 1760s was the extension of the power of the juryless vice-admiralty courts. The change was aimed at punishing violators of the acts of trade, since the vice-admiralty courts were far less likely than colonial courts to acquit smugglers. Another source of complaint was the shortage of coinage in the colonies due to the unfavorable balance of trade with Great Britain. The little silver that circulated in the colonies was chiefly Spanish and Portuguese. In the first edition of The Administration of the Colonies (London, 1764), Pownall advocated relaxing the Navigation Acts and passing “An Act for Ascertaining the Rates of Foreign Coin in Her Majesty’s Plantations in America” in order to encourage the importation of Spanish coin into the colonies. Pownall even hoped that Spanish and Portuguese coin might eventually become the backing for a currency issued throughout the colonies.

1 This letter may have been written to Peter Oliver, as No. 143, below, appears to be a response.

2 This quotation was from No. 110, above.

3 This quotation was from No. 128, in which he enclosed his formal application to the Crown for compensation.

4 TH’s accounting of his losses was No. 127, above. The total amount he claimed was £2,218.1.6, with another £950.16 estimated for the house itself.

5 George Clark (1676–1760) was lieutenant governor of New York from 1736 to 1743. His losses as a result of a fire during a 1741 slave uprising were ultimately made up by parliamentary grant.

1 This undated MS appeared in TH’s letterbook between letters dated 8 December and 21 December 1765. It was not tipped into the volume, as the essay began on the back of the page containing the 8 December letter, and it was followed immediately by the 21 December letter on the same page. TH most likely wrote this summary in response to William Bollan’s request in No. 122, above, which TH probably did not receive until late November. TH eventually sent this essay to Bollan on 27 December 1765. Richard Jackson later mentioned receiving a similar MS from TH at the end of 1765 that he passed along to Henry Seymour Conway (see No. 170, below). If Jackson were mistaken about the date he received his MS, the two MSS might possibly be one and the same.

2 By mid-April 1765, rumors were circulating in the colonies that Parliament had passed the Stamp Act despite colonial opposition.

3 TH was presumably referring to James Otis Jr. as the “One” who was “zealous in the opposition.”

4 The Virginia Resolves were adopted by the House of Burgesses on 30 May 1765.

5 This word was possibly a misspelling for “cautiously.”

6 Alternative reading: “tools”

7 The stamp officer for Massachusetts was Andrew Oliver.

8 Secret depositions were taken before TH in 1761 as part of the effort to dismiss Benjamin Barons as collector of customs. Several Boston merchants were identified by name as smugglers in these documents. Briggs Hallowell (brother of the collector of customs, Benjamin Hallowell) saw these while in London from 1763 to 1764 and transmitted copies to James Otis Jr. (Tyler, Smugglers & Patriots, pp. 61–62). See also No. 111, for other conjectures about the nature of these documents.

9 On 28 August 1765, Governor Francis Bernard issued a proclamation promising £300 for information about the leaders of the attack upon TH’s house on 26 August and £100 for information about participants who played lesser roles in the riot (Boston Evening Post, 2 September 1765; Papers of Francis Bernard, 2: 335–36; Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 122–23).

10 This much-quoted dictum was made by Sir Edward Coke in Bonham’s Case (No. 116, note 4, above).

11 TH was probably echoing a sentiment voiced at the town meeting on 27 August 1765 when members expressed their detestation of the riots that occurred the night before.

1 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121–189a.d.) was an emperor and Stoic philosopher.

2 Epictetus (circa 55–135a.d.) was a slave and Stoic philosopher. Oliver’s “favourite Emperor” was Marcus Aurelius, as in note 1, above.

3 Robert Bradford (1704–1782) of Plymouth and Kingston served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives as Kingston’s delegate from 1759 to 1762 and again in 1770.

4 The letter that Oliver received from TH may have been No. 141, above.

5 TH was facing demands to conduct business as a judge of the probate court, even though, in his role as chief justice, he prompted the Superior Court to do no business without stamped papers.

6 Lucius Sergius Catalina (circa 108–62b.c.e.) was famously accused by Cicero of conspiring to overthrow the Roman Republic. “Massianello” was a misspelling of the common abbreviation of Tommaso Aniello (1622–1647), the fisherman-turned-leader of waterfront crowds who sought to overthrow Spanish rule in Naples. By the eighteenth century, among the governing classes Masaniello’s name was a byword for populist demagoguery.

7 A variation on an ancient Greek proverb written in Latin and translated as, “If a people wishes to be deceived, let them be deceived. Whom God wishes to destroy, he first drives mad.” This proverb is often mistakenly attributed to Euripides.

8 On 8 November, Governor Francis Bernard prorogued the General Court until 15 January 1766, hoping that Parliament would have repealed the Stamp Act by then.

9 On the advice of several leading patriot lawyers, the Boston town meeting of 15 November 1765 petitioned Bernard and the Council to use their executive power to require the courts to open out of necessity, even without stamped paper. The Council met on 20 December and heard Boston’s representatives James Otis Jr., Jeremiah Gridley, and John Adams argue the point but then adopted Bernard’s view that the executive branch did not have the power to issue orders to the judiciary (Bernard to Henry Seymour Conway, 21 December 1765, National Archives UK, CO 5/755, ff. 435–38; Papers of Francis Bernard, 2:444–45; Mass. Council Records, 16:76–79; Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 132–34).

10 The Boston Customs House, following the example of other colonies, eventually began entering and clearing ships without stamps on 17 December.

11 Oliver’s wife was Mary (Clarke) Oliver (circa 1713–1775), daughter of William and Hannah (Appleton) Clarke and sister of tea consignee Richard Clarke.

1 This letter from Bollan to TH could have been No. 122, above.

2 The Boston newspapers of the previous week contained accounts of the public resignations of the stamp distributors of Maryland and New York, as well as renewed demands that Andrew Oliver give public assurances that he would not act in that role in Massachusetts. Oliver complied on 17 December 1765 at the Liberty Tree before a crowd of several hundred people.

3 Despite what TH wrote in this letter, Governor Francis Bernard encouraged TH to resign his position on the probate court in favor of TH’s younger brother Foster. Bernard accepted TH’s resignation and appointed Foster in his place for a twelve-month temporary appointment the following day. Such an appointment could be made without using stamped paper (Bailyn, Ordeal, p. 111; Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, pp. 147–48).

1 Conway apparently never received the RC of No. 128, above, only the DupRC, which was enclosed with this letter.

2 TH’s account of his losses was No. 127, which he enclosed in No. 128, both above. Although several Boston men were charged in September and October with participating in the riot that destroyed TH’s house, none was ever tried. Some escaped from jail in early October, and others were released after a grand jury found insufficient evidence to prosecute them (No. 142, above; Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 122–23).

3 The Boston Customs House opened on 17 December, and the courts began operating in late December, beginning with the Probate Court for Suffolk County, from which TH resigned rather than conduct business without stamps and therefore in violation of the law.

4 In regard to the opening of the customs house and the courts, Governor Francis Bernard tried to walk a thin line, attempting to accommodate as far as possible those who thought the law should be ignored without technically violating the law himself or suggesting that any other Crown officials violate the law (Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, pp. 140–48; Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” p. 132–37).

5 This leave of absence was probably conveyed to TH in a letter from Conway, now missing. TH later wrote to both Benjamin Franklin and probably Israel Williams (the letter was unaddressed but in Williams’ papers) that his leave of absence remained in the hands of Richard Jackson in London (No. 176, below; No. 219, below).

1 William Pitt refused frequent solicitations to form a coalition with the Marquis of Rockingham during the one-year period that the Rockingham ministry was in power. When Parliament convened on 14 January 1766 to discuss the Stamp Act and the ensuing riots in America, Pitt spoke forcefully in the Americans’ defense and urged the total repeal of the Stamp Act.

1 The British navy’s seizure of ships lacking clearances on stamped paper led to a riot in New York on 17 December 1765.

2 On 18 December 1765, a special session of the Boston town meeting passed a memorial declaring the functioning of the court system essential to the preservation of their rights (BTR, 16:159–60). Governor Francis Bernard and the Council referred the issue to the Inferior Court of Common Pleas of Suffolk County and the Probate Court of Suffolk County. The former was scheduled to convene in the second week of January, and the latter was already late in holding its scheduled session (Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, p. 147).

3 As a judge of the Probate Court for Suffolk County, TH was under considerable pressure to convene the court and proceed to business without the use of stamped paper. In response, he resigned his seat on the court on 21 December 1765, and Bernard appointed TH’s younger brother Foster to the judgeship instead.

4 TH was referring to James Otis Jr. and the pressure he was bringing to bear on opening all the courts. Although TH had avoided personally violating the Stamp Act by resigning from the Probate Court, the issue of opening the Superior Court was still unresolved, even though the court was not schedule to meet until March.

5 TH’s petition to the Crown was enclosed in No. 128, above.

6 TH wrote to Bollan three times: No. 118, No. 135, and No. 144, all above.

7 “Goffe” was TH’s familiar name for Attorney General Edmund Trowbridge, who had recently been at the center of the debate over opening the customs house.

8 The MS was blotted.

9 The duplicate letter was not found, but TH may have meant the duplicate copy of No. 145, above, which was found only as a SC. The “short addition of our present state” was probably TH’s essay, No. 142.

1 Polybius (201–120b.c.e.), historian of the Roman Republic, followed the tradition of Aristotle, who assumed in his Politics that democratic government would in time degenerate into anarchy.

2 Archibald Kennedy (circa 1736–1794), captain of HMS Coventry, was the son of a father of the same name. The father served for a long time as collector of customs at New York. The son lived in New York City for nearly all his life before becoming the 11th Earl of Cassilis, when a distant relative died without a male heir in 1792. Kennedy then moved with his family to Scotland (Franklin Papers, 4:117). Halifax was the home of the vice-admiralty court for the region, where all trade violations were tried before the juryless court.

3 As governor of Canada, James Murray took the unpopular stance of supporting the continuation of French civil law to adjudicate private matters, a policy that received the official endorsement of the Crown in 1774 with the passage of the Quebec Act. Alexander Colville, 7th Baron Culross, (1717–1770) was the admiral in command of North American waters, stationed at Halifax.

4 Instead of resigning as chief justice of the Superior Court, TH absented himself from the court’s opening session in March.

5 Three letters from “Hampden” to “Pym” appeared in the Boston Gazette on 9, 16, and 23 December 1765. Harbottle Dorr (1730–1794) identified the style as James Otis Jr.’s in the marginal notations on his copy (Massachusetts Historical Society, Dorr Collection). The letters criticized British regulation of American trade.

1 The letter was No. 100, above, in which TH enclosed a letter from William Goffe to his wife, Frances Whalley Goffe, dated circa August 1674, which was not found.

2 Dft 2: “elucidated by the help of your Key Lights.”

3 Dft 2: “American Legislators”

4 Dft 2: “Spirit of Englishmen would admit ^required^.”

5 Dft 2: “^Esteem &^ Respect”

6 Stiles probably meant TH’s good name.

7 Dft 2: “Your Family Pieces of Antiquity, Medals, Coins”

8 Dft 2: “printed the first part?” The first volume of TH History, which covered Massachusetts’ founding up to the year 1692, was published in December 1764, but many of the original documents on New England history that TH was collecting were lost in the attack on his home of 26 August 1765.

9 Sentence moved later in Dft 2.

10 Last two words omitted in Dft 2.

11 Stiles prefaced this paragraph by writing “See 2 leaves forward” in Dft 2, which would be the beginning of Version III.

12 Parenthetical comment omitted from Dft 2.

13 Dft 2: “a sincere Friend”

14 Translated as, “from the beginnings.”

15 Dft 2: “Least of all Obstat principiis is not applicable here”

16 Dft 2: “expect. so [illegible] are not to be bullied. ^I hope never . . . such Resistance.^”

17 “On . . . Atlantic” omitted from Dft 2.

18 Dft 2: “under this Anticipation”

19 Dft 2: “shall assure”

20 In Dft 2, Stiles interlined “conceived on opposite . . . Legislature?” and crossed out two lines of text that are now illegible.

21 Dft 2: “but this apart, may it not be asked how long”

22 Dft 2 included the following text at this point: “For instance had Eng America been settled only with the 20 or 30 Families at Plym 1620 & in Two Centuries increased to but 100 Thousand souls, they would continue too [illegible] to be ruled ^by [illegible] State^ otherwise than in the Way of [illegible] or Edict Royal But”

23 Dft 2: “And if it be conceded”

24 Dft 2: “separate Parliament”

25 Dft 2: “litigated”

26 William Molyneux (1656–1698) was a representative in the Irish Parliament for Trinity College, Dublin from 1692 to 1695 and author of The Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated (1698).

27 Dft 2: “if at all exercised”

28 Parenthetical comment omitted in Dft 2.

29 Dft 2: “Mississippi may perhaps admit”

30 The passage “Party Representation . . . Century)” interlined in Dft 2 over four lines of crossed out illegible text.

31 Dft 2: “a Majority”

32 As the Roman Republic grew in size, so did plebian demands for access to positions of honor within the state, resulting in an expansion of the Senate as more plebians entered the ranks of the patricians.

1 Chauncey Whittelsey (1717–1787) was a 1738 Yale graduate and minister of the First Church of New Haven after 1758. Stiles was possibly referring to Samuel Hopkins (1729–1811), 1749 Yale graduate and minister of the First Church in Hadley after 1755.

2 “Goldsmith’s Letter” was not found.

1 Stiles wrote several lines across the page, apparently to indicate that he intended to copy the material after this point in the first version of the letter (Version I) into the final version he sent to TH.

1 The letter was not found.

2 Richard Dana (1700–1772), justice of the peace and prominent patriot, administered the oath to Oliver when in December 1765 Stamp Master Andrew Oliver swore—for the second time—he would not enforce the Stamp Act in America.

3 Governor Francis Bernard prorogued the General Court until 15 January 1766, but he and the Council dealt with the Boston town meeting’s memorial to open the courts before that by passing the question onto the courts themselves.

4 After protracted wrangling among Crown officials, the customs house began clearing ships from Boston without stamped paper on 17 December 1765.

5 Cushing was referring to Plymouth Harbor.

6 Thomas Clap was seeking to rehabilitate himself with Bernard after initially supporting James Otis Jr. He was successful enough to obtain a number of militia commissions for his followers but was also identified as an ally of Bernard’s in the minds of the people, making him a target of anti-government sentiment.

7 Clap’s “affair” was a reference to Clap’s 1760 conviction for accepting bribes in exchange for military commissions and favorable rulings from the bench of the Inferior Court of Common Pleas.

1 The MS was blotted.

2 The MS was blotted.

1 The judge was TH’s fellow Superior Court justice Chamber Russell, who also served on the vice-admiralty court.

2 The act to which TH referred was commonly known as the Molasses Act of 1733.

3 TH resigned his position as probate judge for Suffolk County on 21 December 1765.

4 After being appointed chief justice in 1760, TH read the law extensively to compensate for his lack of formal legal training.

5 Benning Wentworth was surveyor of the king’s woods until 1766 when he was replaced as both governor of New Hampshire and surveyor of the woods by his nephew John Wentworth.

1 The customs house opened on 17 December 1765. The sheriff was Stephen Greenleaf.

2 TH resigned as judge of the Suffolk probate court on 21 December.

3 The New York town meeting of 26 November 1765 sent instructions to the province’s assembly arguing that the Stamp Act should be ignored. By the end of December, the customs house and the courts in New York were effectively open for business.

1 Benjamin Franklin’s letter to TH was not found; TH’s answer was No. 138, above.

2 TH’s reference was to the Stamp Act Congress, held in New York City from 7 to 25 October 1765.

3 TH often called James Otis Jr. the “great incendiary.”

4 Translated as “a power within a power,” or an instance of divided sovereignty.

5 Governor Francis Bernard appointed TH’s younger brother Foster to the post for a twelve-month period. TH never did resume his position on the bench of the probate court.

6 Bostonians assumed the Stamp Act would be repealed in early 1766, but the process took much longer than most anticipated. Royal assent to the repeal did not come until 18 March, and word of the repeal did not arrive in Boston until 16 May. The expectation of repeal made it difficult for TH to maintain his opposition to opening the courts and allowing business to proceed without stamps. As his correspondence makes clear, even his close political associates like Peter Oliver did not agree with his position. TH’s resistance to opening the Superior Court gave an early premonition of his inflexible devotion to the letter of the law that he would later display in the events surrounding the Boston Tea Party.

1 The “Revolutions” were the Stamp Act riots and the emergence of the resistance movement that followed.

2 Jared Ingersoll reportedly wrote letters to England in the fall of 1765 suggesting ways to modify the Stamp Act so that it could be enforced. To contradict those reports, Ingersoll gave the Connecticut Sons of Liberty copies of all his letters to England, some of which were selectively edited and printed in the New London Gazette in late December 1765. In response, Ingersoll published a statement in the Connecticut Gazette on 10 January 1766 promising in future to have his letters to England approved by patriot leaders before he sent them.

1 Nathaniel Ropes (1726–1774) was appointed chief justice of the Probate Court for Essex County to fill the place of the recently deceased John Choate.

2 TH’s fellow justice on the Superior Court was Chambers Russell, who was also judge of the vice-admiralty court.

3 The General Court opened its new legislative session on 15 January 1766. Governor Francis Bernard’s speech, delivered to the General Court on 16 January, simply announced the opening of the winter session and recommended that the Court conduct its “ordinary business” (Speeches, p. 63).

4 For the memorial of the Boston town meeting regarding the opening of the courts, see No. 147, Version 1, note 2, above.

5 Cushing’s letter to TH was No. 149, above.

6 “Sally” was SH, TH’s eldest daughter.

1 Which of TH’s several letters to Bollan was forwarded to the Marquis of Rockingham is unknown.

2 Translated as, “with full strength.”

3 The identities of both the “gentleman of consequence” and the “political chieftain” are unknown, but the latter may have been Thomas Pownall.

1 The Massachusetts House of Representatives passed a resolution on 23 January stating, “That the Shutting up the Courts of Justice in general in this Province, particularly the Superiour Court, has a manifest tendency to dissolve the Bands of Civil Society.” The resolution further stated that judges should proceed with business immediately (JHR, 42:214–15; Boston Gazette, 27 January 1766; Speeches, pp. 64–67; see also Papers of Francis Bernard, 3:60–61).

1 TH’s letter to Oliver was not found.

2 As a member of the Council, Oliver was summoned to Boston to consider the House’s resolution of 23 January calling for the opening of the courts in violation of the Stamp Act.

3 James Stanhope, 1st Earl of Stanhope, (circa 1673–1721) English statesman and soldier, became secretary of state for the southern department in 1714 and shared the leadership of the House of Commons with Robert Walpole. The source of this quotation was The Memoirs of the Life and Writing of William Whiston (London, 1749–1750), p. 304.

4 In Genesis 49:6, Jacob on his deathbed warns his sons against their brothers Simeon and Levi: “O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united: for in their anger they slew a man, and in their selfwill they digged down a wall.”

5 Oliver’s letter to his brother, Secretary Andrew Oliver, was not found.

1 TH maintained in the Council that the House’s resolution demanding the opening of the courts was “nugatory,” since the Superior Court was independent of the legislature. He was subsequently attacked in the Boston Gazette both for his arrogance and his plural office-holding (Boston Gazette, 27 January 1766). See No. 160, note 7, below, for the quotation from the Boston Gazette.

2 James Otis Jr., writing in the Boston Gazette under the pseudonym “Freeborn Armstrong” on 27 January, accused TH and the other justices of the Superior Court of conflict of interest by voting in the Council on a House resolution requiring judges to return to the discharge of their duties.

3 The Billingsgate Fish Market in London was proverbial for coarse and abusive language. The Boston Gazette article stated that Peter Oliver and Benjamin Lynde Jr. were summoned to the Council, of which both were members, to help decide the matter of opening the Superior Court, of which both were justices. Thus, it was said, they judged in “their own cause.”

4 Grub Street near Moorfields in London was a center for literary hackwork of all kinds.

5 In response to the House’s resolution, Governor Francis Bernard and the Council referred the question to the justices of the Superior Court, a shift prompted by TH (Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” p. 137).

1 Cushing’s letter to Peter Oliver was not found.

2 The three men were scheduled to meet with the other Superior Court justices to discuss the General Court’s demand to open the courts.

3 Cushing’s draft of an answer to the Council of the same date, which was never sent, is at Massachusetts Archives, SC1/series 45X, 44:581–82.

4 An extralegal organization formed in the wake of the Stamp Act crisis, the Sons of Liberty became the backbone of the patriot movement. In Boston, the group formed around a small cadre of particularly vocal protestors known as the Loyal Nine. By December 1765, the Sons of Liberty were publishing announcements in their own name and were the leading opposition party in Boston (Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, pp. 85–86; Hoerder, Crowd Action, p. 93). Cushing’s reference to “the Father” was possibly meant to indicate James Otis Jr.

5 “F.A.” was Freeborn Armstrong, the pseudonym for James Otis Jr. writing in the Boston Gazette (No. 159, note 2, above).

6 Cushing undoubtedly meant Boston.

7 Cushing may have been referring again to Otis’s article in the Boston Gazette on 27 January in which TH comes in for particularly harsh criticism. Otis wrote, “The Resolve was the same Day sent up to the Hon. Board for their Concurrence, when the Hon. Thomas Hutchinson, Esq. Lieutenant Governor and Chief Justice of the Superior Court, who on this Occasion also sits as President of the Council, a Place he has usurped after engrossing all the Places of Honor and Profit in the Province, moved to give it the go-by, saying it was Impertinent and beneath the Notice of the hon. Board or to that Effect. But his Highness was overruled” (Boston Gazette, 27 January 1766).

8 The House of Representatives voted on 23 January 1766, and the measure passed by a margin of 81 to 5 (JHR, 42:214–15; No. 157, note 1, above).

9 The governor’s “special friend” was presumably Thomas Clap, although Clap’s actions and their repercussions for Governor Francis Bernard are unkown.

10 Beginning in February 1764, James Otis Sr. was chief justice of the Barnstable Court of Common Pleas. By “our court” Cushing meant the Massachusetts Superior Court, which was the highest court in the province.

11 Bernard was trying to convince his superiors in London that he should return to England to make a full report of the situation in Massachusetts. At the same time, TH was still considering a trip to England to seek compensation for his losses during the riots of 26 August 1765.

1 This quotation was from the Council’s resolve to the Superior Court. The resolve does not appear in Mass. Council Records, but is in Speeches, dated 30 January 1766, and reads, “Resolved, that the vote of the House of Representatives of the 23d instant, relative to the opening of the several Courts of the province, be furthered for consideration—and that it be recommended to the Justices of the Superior Court of Judicature to meet together as soon as may be, and determine whether they will open the said Court at the next term and proceed upon the trial of civil actions, and all other business as usual, or not; and that they communicate such their determination to this Board—and the Secretary is directed to write to each of said Judges immediately by express, and enclose to each a copy of this resolve” (Speeches, p. 66).

2 The Superior Court was scheduled to convene on 11 March 1766.

3 TH was considering traveling to England in the spring of 1766 to further his bid for compensation for his losses in the Stamp Act riots.

1 TH’s letter to Kinnoull (No. 130) was dated 27 October 1765 in TH’s letterbook, so either Kinnoull wrote the date of this letter incorrectly or TH wrote it incorrectly on his AC.

1 “Bodwin” was an incorrect spelling of James Bowdoin’s name. “Goffe” was the nickname of Attorney General Edmund Trowbridge. “Tyler” was Royall Tyler. “Otis” was James Otis Jr. “Sheaffe” was Edward Sheaffe (1711–1771), a ship captain and shipwright from Charlestown and a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1752 and again from 1764 until his death. “Dexter” was Samuel Dexter (1726–1810), who represented Dedham in the House from 1764 to 1767 and again in 1775. He was also on the Council from 1768 to 1773. Dexter was responsible for the custody of TH’s papers in the early months of the Revolution.

2 The answer of the justices of the Superior Court to the Council’s resolve on conducting business in the court was No. 161, above.

3 TH’s draft of the justices’ answer was not found.

1 Jeremiah Gridley (1701/2–1767) was a prominent Boston attorney. Both James Otis Jr. and Oxenbridge Thacher studied in his office, but Gridley argued for the Crown against his former pupils in the writs of assistance case in 1761. In late 1765, he was appointed by the Boston town meeting to a committee to petition for the reopening of the courts.

2 Translated as, “from necessity.”

3 The Boston Gazette for 3 February 1766 printed the statement of the Council, which denied that TH had disparaged the honor of the House of Representatives and argued that there was no conflict in being both the president of the Council and the chief justice of the Superior Court. James Otis Jr., writing under the pen name “Freeborn Armstrong” in a letter printed in the same edition of the paper, implied that the resolves of the Council would be more credible if the Council printed the entire transcript of its proceedings on 24 January 1766. No transcript of the Council proceedings was found.

4 In the second half of this paragraph, Cushing referred to an earlier piece that Otis published in the Boston Gazette as “Freeborn Armstrong” (No. 159, note 2, above).

1 The letter was not found.

2 Of Richard Jackson’s three known letters to TH during this period (15 November 1765, 29 November 1765, and 26 December 1765) none was found.

3 TH Jr. was scheduled to depart Massachusetts for England on 1 April 1766.

4 Governor Francis Bernard hoped to return to England to give a report of affairs in Massachusetts to his superiors, but he did not depart Massachusetts for England until the summer of 1769.

5 Although the controversy over whether the Superior Court would conduct business without stamps had abated, confusion remained regarding what the court would actually do when it convened on 11 March 1766.

6 James Otis Jr. published a series of newspaper articles in the Boston Gazette during the winter of 1766 criticizing TH and his supporters.

7 Benjamin Lynde Jr. was TH’s fellow justice on the Superior Court.

8 In the winter of 1765–1766, members of the House of Representatives reprimanded Timothy Ruggles for his refusal to sign the address of the Stamp Act Congress the previous October, saying he had contravened their instructions (JHR, 42:254, 271–72).

1 Oliver was probably referring to a letter from TH delivered by Oliver’s son Daniel (1738–1768). The letter was not found.

2 TH’s petition to the king was enclosed in No. 128, above.

3 Oliver was referring to unfounded rumors that he had sheltered at his house in Middleborough the governor (Francis Bernard), the secretary (Andrew Oliver), and the lieutenant governor (TH) during the Stamp Act protests.

4 Oliver was referring to his fellow Superior Court justice, Chambers Russell.

5 TH’s first volume of TH History was published in December 1764.

6 The MS was torn here and in all instances of square brackets following this point.

1 The letters were not found.

2 When this letter was communicated to the Council or read to the House is unknown. There is no mention of it in either Mass. Council Records or JHR. Any information the letter contained about the repeal of the Stamp Act must have been of an informal nature, since Parliament did not take up the issue until the middle of January, more than two weeks after Jackson wrote the 26 December letter to TH.

3 TH wrote to Lord Kinnoull (No. 130), to Lord Loudoun (No. 136), and to Lord Gordon (No. 132), all above. The letter to Lord Edgcumbe was not found.

4 The petition, addressed to the king and dated 25 October 1765, was enclosed in No. 128, above.

5 Governor Francis Bernard was hoping for leave to come to England himself, which he knew would not be allowed if the lieutenant governor was not in the province.

6 TH Jr. was scheduled to depart for England on 1 April 1766.

7 After several weeks of debate, the House of Commons, sitting as a committee of the whole, voted to bring in a bill for repeal of the Stamp Act on 22 February 1766 by a vote of 275 to 167. The repeal bill passed on 4 March. It faced stiff opposition in the Lords but passed on 17 March. The next day, the king gave his assent to the repeal. The text of the repeal can be found at Prologue, p. 155.

8 The Act of Union in 1707 united the English and Scottish parliaments as the British Parliament. Before the union, the Scottish Parliament dealt exclusively with the affairs of Scotland and had no oversight over the American colonies.

9 Hanover was the German principality ruled by the kings of England after the accession of the elector of Hanover as King George I in 1714. The governments had no formal connection except in the person of the monarch.

10 The only known copies of the Stamp Act arrived in Boston in private letters, one of which was subsequently published in the newspapers. Bernard did not receive an official copy of the act, not even by the date on which it was scheduled to go into effect (Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, p. 140).

1 Governor Francis Bernard was contemplating his own trip to England at this time. Both the governor and the lieutenant governor could not be absent from the province at the same time, though. The SC in the Sheffield Archives began with the next sentence.

2 A Captain Kirkland, sailing in the ship Endeavour from London, arrived in Boston in mid-February and met with the reception TH described (Boston Evening Post, 3 March 1766).

3 For James Otis Jr.’s newspaper articles denouncing TH, see No. 159, note 2, above.

4 The SC in the Sheffield Archives ended here.

5 Jasper Mauduit wrote to the Massachusetts House of Representatives on 4 September 1765 expressing his outrage over the House’s “meanness” in voting to pay him a salary of £100 (Jasper Mauduit, pp. 180–84). His letter was read to members on 16 January 1766, and the House responded on 20 February with a letter from Speaker Thomas Cushing (an SC, misdated 29 February 1766, is at Massachusetts Archives, Letterbooks of the Secretary, SC1/117X, 4:6–9; JHR, 42:296–97).

1 Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, (1699–1773) was a privy councilor at 33, ambassador, politician, wit, and author of a famous series of letters to his illegitimate son. During the 1760s, he became a strong advocate against coercive measures enforcing parliamentary will upon the colonies. Chesterfield attended the proceedings in the House of Lords on 24 February, taking the oaths Bollan mentioned that same day. The Lords considered the repeal of the Stamp Act on 24 February as well in a very full chamber. There is no record of whether or not Chesterfield spoke on the matter (JHL, 31:281). For a reconstruction of some of the speeches delivered in Parliament concerning repeal, see Great Debates in American History, ed. Marion Mills Miller, 14 vols. (New York: Current Literature Publishing Co., 1913), 1:40–56, 58–67.

2 Translated as, “with full power or authority.”

3 Robert Henley, 1st Earl of Northington, (1708–1772) was the lord chancellor of Great Britain.

1 The debate in the House of Commons raged from 21 to 24 February 1766 and produced several speeches that offered spirited defenses of American rights. For one of the few contemporary accounts of the debate, see D. H. Watson, “William Baker’s Account of the Debate on the Repeal of the Stamp Act,” WMQ 26 (April 1969): 259–265. For the efforts of Jackson and the other American agents to further the repeal, see Kammen, A Rope of Sand, pp. 117–24.

2 Formally titled “An Act for the Better Securing the Dependency of His Majesty’s Dominions in America upon the Crown and Parliament of Great Britain,” the so-called Declaratory Act insisted on Parliament’s right to enact laws for America. It received the king’s assent on 18 March 1766, the same day the Stamp Act was repealed. So intent were the colonists on the repeal of the Stamp Act, they paid little attention to the passage of the Declaratory Act. For the text of the act, see Prologue, pp. 155–56. The Declaratory Act was modeled on the Irish Declaratory Act of 1719, which established a separate Irish Parliament that deferred to the British Parliament.

3 Parliament ultimately decided to address the king to give instructions through the secretary of state to royal governors requiring assemblies in the colonies where riots took place to compensate victims. Accordingly, Henry Seymour Conway wrote Governor Francis Bernard on 31 March 1766 (Houghton Library, Sparks 4, 11:4).

4 Jackson was probably referring to No. 142, above.

5 The London edition of the first volume of TH History was published at the end of 1765 by printer J. Richardson.

6 TH sent Jackson explicit instructions to distribute complimentary copies of TH History (No. 81, Version 2, and No. 86, both above).

7 William Dowdeswell (1721–1775) was chancellor of the exchequer in the Rockingham administration from July 1765 to August 1766. Sir John Cust (1718–1770) was Speaker of the House of Commons from 1760 to 1770. Charles Yorke (1722–1770) served his second term as attorney general under the Marquis of Rockingham. William de Grey, 1st Baron Walsingham, (1719–1781) was solicitor general from 1763 to 1766. Lord Hillsborough was in the midst of the second of three stints as first lord of trade in the Rockingham ministry. William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, (1705–1793) served as lord chief justice from 1756 to 1788.

8 Several of Bernard’s letters were laid before the House of Commons on 14 January 1766 (Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 139–41).

1 In accordance with the justices’ ruling, the Salem sitting of the Superior Court transacted no business because no stamped paper was available. TH’s account was not found.

2 Translated as, “first of all.”

3 TH’s letter to Oliver was not found.

4 The Superior Court was due to start its session on 11 March 1766, though it was not clear whether the court would conduct business without stamped paper.

5 Demonstrations against the Stamp Act took place in Halifax, Massachusetts, less than ten miles away from Peter Oliver’s house in Middleborough.

1 Presumably Thomas Pownall was also in communication with John Hancock.

2 AC 2: “tax”

3 The 18 pence duty was imposed on imported sugar prior to 1764, when it was replaced with the Sugar Act. The Molasses Act of 1733 imposed a 6 pence per gallon duty on molasses imported from foreign islands in the West Indies, an effective prohibition, had it been fully enforced. A 6 pence duty per month was imposed on all seamen for the support of Greenwich Hospital, founded by Queen Mary for the support of injured and infirm seamen and their widows and orphans. The “late act” was the Revenue Act of 1764, also known as the Sugar Act.

4 Passed at the same time as the Revenue Act of 1764, this resolution was known simply as the fifteenth resolution as it was the fifteenth component of George Grenville’s plan to reorganize the administration of America. The resolution put the colonies on notice of Grenville’s intent to raise money through a stamp duty, although details of the proposed legislation were not yet public.

5 The address of the New York Assembly was far more outspoken than the carefully guarded resolution TH drafted for the Massachusetts General Court (New York Journals, 2:769–79).

6 TH was referring to himself in the third person. He was the “promoter of the measure.”

7 The stamp master, or distributor, was TH’s brother-in-law Andrew Oliver.

8 For the Virginia Resolves, see No. 101, notes 8 and 9, above.

9 AC1 was torn, and this word was interlined in an unknown hand. The word appears clearly in AC2 in WSH’s hand.

10 By “puffs” TH meant inflated speech, bombast, braggadocio (OED). On 9 December 1765, nearly 250 Boston merchants entered into a nonimportation agreement to protest the Stamp Act. Luxury goods, particularly traditional clothing items associated with mourning, were among the items banned. Bostonians had also adopted a nonimportation agreement in August 1764 to protest Grenville’s early colonial reforms.

11 Clodius (93?–52b.c.e.), Roman politician and demagogue and the enemy of Cicero, was presumably another of TH’s nicknames for James Otis Jr.

12 Thomas Dawes (1731–1809) was a builder, coroner, and leading patriot.

13 John Rowe (1715–1787), one of Boston’s largest merchants, was an adroit political trimmer, who managed to remain in good standing with patriots at the same time he supplied British regulars camped in Boston and owned one of the ships involved in the Boston Tea Party. Solomon Davis (d. 1791), merchant and smuggler, was a leader in the controversy over Benjamin Barons and the writs of assistance case and later served on a number of merchant and Whig committees.

14 James Otis Jr. was at the height of his political influence in 1766, while Governor Francis Bernard and the Council tried to adhere to British law without openly challenging the patriots.

15 For the newspaper attacks on TH’s actions in the Council, see No. 159, note 1, above.

16 The printers of the Boston Gazette were Benjamin Edes and John Gill. For the Council’s resolutions supporting TH, see No. 164, note 3, above.

17 For the answer of the justices of the Superior Court, see No. 161, above.

18 The Superior Court convened its spring session on 11 March 1766 without TH, who absented himself rather than conduct business without using stamped paper.

19 An incendiary or firebrand; those who kindle discontent and strife (OED). TH generally referred to James Otis Jr. when using this term.

20 John Bradbury (1736–1821) was a councilor from Maine. Nathaniel Sparhawk (1715–1776), a wealthy merchant, was also a councilor from Maine.

21 AC 2 ended here.

22 This informal network of communication among the Sons of Liberty anticipated the founding of the committees of correspondence in 1772 (Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, pp. 89–90).

23 Writing in the Boston Gazette of 24 February 1766 as “A Colonist”—a piece continued in the 3 March issue—Otis mentioned TH History and lambasted TH for the humble tone of the Massachusetts 1764 petition against the proposed Stamp Act (No. 75, above). Otis took issue with TH for believing “that the readiest Way to get rid of the Burthen of the Stamp Act, was to submit to it, and then humbly to Hope for Tenderness &c.” (Boston Gazette, 24 February 1766).

24 The MS ended thus and in the middle of a page. TH apparently decided to abandon this version of the letter at this point and started a new version that appears below.

1 Daniel Dulany (1722–1797) was a lawyer, secretary of the province of Maryland, and author of Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies: For the Purpose of Raising Revenue by Act of Parliament (Annapolis, 1765; reprinted in Pamphlets, pp. 598–658).

2 John Dickinson (1732–1808) was a lawyer, representative from Philadelphia to the Pennsylvania legislature, delegate to the Stamp Act Congress, and author of The Late Regulations Respecting the British Colonies . . . Considered (Philadelphia, 1765; reprinted in Pamphlets, pp. 659–91). Dickinson later wrote Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (1768) and served as a member of the Continental Congress.

3 Samuel Witt (1691–1779) was a representative from Marlborough. Colonel Joseph Gerrish (1708–1776) was a representative from Newbury. Governor Francis Bernard declined to approve Gerrish’s elevation to the Council for four successive years beginning in 1766. Colonel Jerathmiel Bowers (1717–1799) was a representative from Swansea. The other abbreviation in this list was probably for Samuel Dexter.

4 The abbreviations in this list probably stood for John Erving, William Brattle, Nathaniel Sparhawk, Harrison Gray, James Otis Sr., John Bradbury, and Royal Tyler.

5 TH Jr. traveled to England later that spring and called on Thomas Pownall in London.

1 Oliver’s son was Daniel Oliver. Peter Oliver was contemplating traveling to Salem for the convening of the Superior Court session for Essex County, although it remained unclear whether the Superior Court was going to conduct business without stamps.

2 Traditionally, the town of Middleborough collected a fee from those catching and selling herring that came up the Nemasket River every spring, since the town maintained weirs for that purpose. Beginning in October 1764, the town tried to sell the fishing rights to this catch to a single bidder at auction, a contraction of the trade that upset people from surrounding towns (Thomas Weston, History of the Town of Middleboro Massachusetts [Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1906], pp. 498–503).

1 Governor Francis Bernard had not written to Jackson yet, but he would do so on 29 March 1766 (Papers of Francis Bernard, 3:125–26). Bernard wrote to Secretary of State Henry Seymour Conway on 28 February (Papers of Francis Bernard, 3:98–101).

2 Bernard would not journey to England to give his report on the state of the colonies until the summer of 1769.

1 By the mid 1760s, James Otis Jr. had begun showing signs of the mental instability that would undermine his influence in the 1770s (Waters, Otis Family, pp. 177–81).

1 Arthur Haywood (1717–1795) was a merchant of Liverpool.

2 No previous correspondence between TH and Haywood was found.

1 This undated letter appears in the letterbook between letters of 29 March and 14 April and was written sometime before 3 April when TH Jr. embarked.

2 The power of attorney, dated 29 March 1766, is in the Hutchinson and Oliver Family Papers II at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

3 These business dealings dated back at least twenty years between his business, Hutchinson & Goldthwait, and the London mercantile firm run by Samuel Storke (d. 1746) and his son Samuel Storke Jr. (d. 1753). That firm, known under a variety of names, was reconstituted as Champion & Hayley shortly after the death of the younger Storke. George Hayley (1723–1781) was a prominent London businessman, handling much of the Storke family’s trade in America. Hayley was the brother-in-law of the English radical John Wilkes and apparently shared his Whig views.

4 Lane, Son & Fraser was another prominent London merchant firm in the North American trade. TH wrote a letter presumably to Thomas Lane on 28 March 1766.

5 Charlton Palmer was another of TH’s London business contacts.

6 “Mr. R” was TH’s nephew Nathaniel Rogers, who traveled to England to establish his own business connections. The letter from Palmer to TH was not found.

7 The minister at Marblehead was John Barnard (1681–1770). His brother was not identified but must have been in England for some time. The connection between the Barnard and Hutchinson families is not known.

8 TH’s letter to Arthur Haywood was No. 178, above.

1 The MS was not addressed or titled, but it was presumably the invoice TH mentioned in No. 179, above, written to guide TH Jr. in his purchases for the family while in London.

2 “Sally” was SH, TH’s eldest daughter.

3 “Peggy” was MH, TH’s other daughter.

4 TH was probably referring to John Tillotson (1630–1694), archbishop of Canterbury and leading theologian of Latitudinarian opinions. John Gay (1685–1732) was a poet and author of the immensely popular The Beggar’s Opera.

5 Leitch was TH’s London tailor, otherwise unidentified.

6 “Colo Foster” was Colonel John Foster, TH’s grandfather.

7 Meaning banter or good-natured teasing (OED).

1 TH’s letter to Bollan was actually dated 25 January 1766, No. 157, above.

2 Bollan referred to language in the resolution of the House of Lords instructing colonial governors to require their assemblies to compensate sufferers in the Stamp Act riots.

1 TH was probably referring to letters he received from William Bollan, No. 169, and from Richard Jackson, No. 170, both above.

1 The Superior Court agreed to conduct business without the use of stamped paper at its 11 March 1766 meeting, but no cases were heard because Massachusetts lawyers were unwilling to try cases whose legitimacy might later be questioned. For that reason Peter Oliver did not want to make the trip to Salem for the convening of the Essex County session of the Superior Court.

2 TH was absent from the Superior Court’s first meeting of the session on 11 March 1766.

3 William Oliver (b. 1743) was one of Peter Oliver’s six children.

1 The “private memorandum” was probably the power of attorney TH enclosed in No. 179, above. If Parliament voted to compensate TH, William Bollan would likely have received the money on TH’s behalf.

2 Bollan may have passed TH’s power of attorney to Jasper Mauduit, who replaced him as Massachusetts agent in 1762.

3 Sally and Peggy were TH Jr.’s sisters, SH and MH, respectively.

4 TH continued to believe throughout the spring of 1766 that his duty to Parliament obliged him to prevent the Superior Court from conducting business that would have required the use of stamped paper had it been available. Meanwhile, James Otis Jr. “pressed hard for judgment” in cases he was arguing before the Superior Court. In taking this position, TH not only isolated himself from his fellow justices but also became the subject of patriot wrath as news began to trickle back to Boston that the bill for the repeal of the Stamp Act was making its way through Parliament. For more on the controversy surrounding the business of the Massachusetts Superior Court, see Francis Bernard to the Lords of Trade, 10 March 1766 (Papers of Francis Bernard, 3:111–15). John Adams stated that during the Superior Court’s session on 29 April, “Hutchinson seemed in Tortures.” Adams was scathing in his diary regarding the justices’ reluctance to conduct business that required stamps, writing, “The Times are terrible, and made so at present by Hutch[inson] C.J.” (JA Diary and Autobiography, 1:305, 310–11).

1 James Otis Jr. seemed less concerned about the possible implications of the Declaratory Act when he spoke before the Boston town meeting, and Boston celebrated news of the repeal in grand style, treating it as a public holiday with musicians, fireworks, open houses, and decorations. Church bells rang throughout the day, punctuated by the guns at Castle William and ships in the harbor. Much of the celebrations occurred around the Liberty Tree, where Stamp Master Andrew Oliver resigned his post months before (Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, p. 296).

2 According to No. 179, TH gave his son a power of attorney to collect any money granted in compensation for the destruction of his house. If TH Jr. were to agree to an estoppel, meaning that he agreed to the compensation offered as a final settlement, TH would be precluded from making further claims.

1 Bollan perhaps referred to James West (1704–1772) and Charles Gray (circa 1692–1782), both members of Parliament. For Parliament’s instructions regarding compensation for the riot victims, see No. 170, note 3, above.

2 Rose Fuller (1708–1777), member of Parliament, was one of the leaders of the West India interest, lobbying for the protection of the Jamaican sugar trade.

3 Despite his outspoken advocacy of the repeal of the Stamp Act, William Pitt refused to join the Rockingham ministry.

1 The “grand incendiary” was James Otis Jr.

2 TH interlined a sentence or two here and then crossed them out so heavily that they are illegible.

3 TH wrote this word over one that he had erased thoroughly.

4 Joseph Russell (1702–1780) was chief justice of the Rhode Island Superior Court from May 1765 to June 1767.

5 The word “colony” was written as a catchword for the next page, so presumably there was another page or pages, which the editors did not find.

6 TH wrote this paragraph vertically in the left margin.

1 The letter was No. 168, above.

2 The pamphlet was presumably Bollan’s The Freedom of Speech and the Writing upon Public Affairs Considered (London, 1766), the last part of which pertaining to the colonies (pp. 137–60) he reprinted as A Succinct View of the Origin of Our Colonies (London, 1766).

3 The letter from Secretary Andrew Oliver to Bollan was not located, but Bollan used much the same language he used here in a letter to Oliver dated 30 April 1766 (an SC appears in Massachusetts Archives, Letterbooks of the Secretary, SC1/117X, 2A:107–24; an extract appears in Speeches, p, 67–68).

4 The Revenue Act of 1766 further reduced the duty on foreign molasses from 3 pence to 1 pence per gallon, an amount Boston merchants advocated in their petitions against the Revenue Act of 1764.

5 The MS was torn.

6 The letter was not found.

1 TH Jr. left Massachusetts on 3 April 1766, bound for London.

2 The letter was No. 170, above.

1 The letter was not found. TH’s destination is not known, but he may have been traveling for his circuit for the Superior Court.

2 The “great haranguer” was presumably James Otis Jr.

3 The abbreviation stood for customs collector Charles Paxton.

1 The letter was No. 180, above.

2 The MS was torn here and in instances of square brackets that follow.

3 James Otis Jr. was chosen Speaker of the House on the morning of 28 May. Governor Francis Bernard promptly vetoed his election to the office.

4 Balloting for councilors from the district of Maine (including Sagadahoc) took place after voting for councilors from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

5 Bernard negatived six prospective councilors: Joseph Gerrish (1708–1776), Thomas Saunders (1729–1774), James Otis Sr., Jerathmiel Bowers, Nathaniel Sparhawk, and Samuel Dexter (JHR, 43:10). For the change the election brought to the composition of the House and Council, see Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 143–45; Papers of Francis Bernard, 3:151–52, 155–56.

1 The controversial Land Bank scheme ended in a major political shake-up in 1740, similar to the Council elections on 28 May 1766. In the 1766 upheaval, preparations to punish those suspected of favoring the Stamp Act began with a intense newspaper campaign two months prior to the elections. James Otis Jr. and his supporters published a list of twenty-seven names in the Boston Gazette on 31 March 1766, urging voters to remove them from office at the May elections. Two-thirds of the members listed were not returned to the House of Representatives in the election on 19 May. On 28 May, with voting for House officers and Council members occurring simultaneously, Governor Francis Bernard sought to negotiate a compromise that would save TH and his allies from being purged from the Council. When he was unsuccessful, Bernard vetoed the choice of Otis as Speaker of the House and the seating of new councilors chosen by the House to replace TH and the other government party councilors. Thus, the Council that year would number twenty-two members, rather than the usual twenty-eight (Freiberg, Prelude to Purgatory, pp. 143–50; Walett, “The Massachusetts Council,” p. 607).

2 Benjamin Lynde Jr. and George Leonard (1698–1778) of Norton both relinquished their Council seats.

3 Samuel White and James Pitts (1710–1776), brother-in-law of James Bowdoin, were both from Boston.

4 Jeremiah Dummer Powell (1720–1783) served on the Council from 1766 to 1772 and was later a mandamus councilor.

5 The MS was torn here and in other instances of square brackets in this letter.

6 Secretary of State Henry Seymour Conway wrote to Bernard on 31 March authorizing him to instruct the General Court to compensate victims of the riot (Papers of Francis Bernard, 3:134–35). Bernard either had not yet received the letter or had not yet informed TH of its contents. On 3 June, Bernard recommended compensation in a message to the House soon after the opening of the session (Speeches, pp. 81–84). TH worried that Bernard’s peremptory tone had alienated the House, though. Many members of the House shared TH’s view when they read Conway’s letter, which was published in the Boston Gazette on 9 June 1766. For the controversy over Bernard’s speech, see Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 145–46.

7 Martin Howard Jr. (circa 1725–1781), a Newport, Rhode Island attorney, was an outspoken defender of Parliament’s right to tax the colonies, a position he espoused in A Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax to His Friend in Rhode Island (Newport, 1765; reprinted in Pamphlets, pp. 523–44). Before the Stamp Act crisis, Howard championed a proposal to revoke Rhode Island’s charter in favor of a new royal charter. On 28 August 1765, Howard’s house was badly damaged by an urban crowd, and he and his family fled to England. A few months later, the Crown appointed him chief justice of North Carolina. He and TH probably met during the Albany Conference where they served as delegates from their respective provinces.

1 The letter sent by Scott was not found.

2 Joseph Harrison (b. 1709) was private secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham and would later be appointed collector of customs at Boston.

3 The letter to Jackson was probably No. 174, above. TH’s letter to the Marquis of Rockingham was No. 182, also above.

4 A satire of James Otis Jr., portrayed as “Bluster,” appeared in the Boston Evening Post on 31 March 1766. John and Thomas Fleet were the owners of the newspaper.

5 Dartmouth’s appointment as secretary of state turned out to be an unfounded rumor. Instead, Henry Seymour Conway, who had been secretary of state for the southern department since July 1765, became secretary of state for the northern department in May 1766, which meant he no longer oversaw American affairs. The new secretary of state for the southern department was Charles Lennox, the 3rd Duke of Richmond (1735–1806), who held the position for the summer before it was taken over by the Earl of Shelburne.

6 TH Jr.’s aunt was Grizell Sanford. As a member of TH’s household, she lost many personal items in the riot of 26 August 1765. TH Jr. was presumably purchasing replacement items for her. The letter from TH Jr. to Nathaniel Rogers was not found.

1 TH’s last letter to TH Jr. was No. 192, above.

2 For Governor Francis Bernard’s speech to the House recommending compensation for TH, see No. 192, note 6, above; Papers of Francis Bernard, 3:158–62.

3 The House’s answer to Bernard’s speech stated that “the Sufferers . . . have never applied to this House, (as we conceive) in a parliamentary Way for Relief” (JHR, 43:143). The entire exchange appears in Speeches, pp. 81–91, 93–96.

4 On 28 June 1766, the House established a committee of inquiry into the issue of compensation for the sufferers of the Stamp Act riots. The committee met during the legislative recess and gathered evidence regarding the events of August 1765, the people involved, and the losses suffered. The results were kept secret until the full house met at the beginning of the next session, in October. At that time, the committee reported that it had been unable to discover any new facts about the riots (JHR, 43:142).

5 All colonial governors received letters from Secretary of State Henry Seymour Conway instructing their provincial governments to award compensation to the victims of the Stamp Act riots (No. 192, note 6, above).

6 TH rode the eastern circuit of the Superior Court, which was in Maine. His letter to Richard Jackson was No. 196, below.

1 Two similar but not identical versions of this letter appear in the letterbook with the second version marked “Duplicate in part.” Since an RC was not found, it is not known which version TH sent, but since the second version is signed it is the one printed here, with one significant difference between the versions noted (see note 5, below).

2 The letter in question was No. 191, above.

3 The vouchers were enclosed in No. 128, above.

4 James Otis Jr. was elected Speaker of the House on 28 May, but Governor Francis Bernard immediately vetoed the appointment.

5 AC 1: “but as they . . . both houses” omitted.

6 Secretary Andrew Oliver, Judge Peter Oliver, and Attorney General Edmund Trowbridge were among the government party men who were removed from the Council in May 1766. One of the chief complaints against TH and his allies was that they held multiple offices and dominated provincial politics. For Sagadahoc, see No. 191, note 4, above.

7 No address to the king or Parliament during the session was found in JHR, but the address to the king appears in Speeches, pp. 91–92, and professes the House’s gratitude for the repeal of the Stamp Act and loyalty to the king. A second address was not to Parliament but to “Divers Noblemen and Gentlemen, in England for Their Efforts in Procuring a Repeal of the Stamp Act” (Speeches, pp. 92–93). Chief among them was William Pitt and the Duke of Grafton, but the address named twenty-three other British politicians and ministers of state as well.

1 Jackson’s letter to TH dated 12 March 1766 was not found.

2 The post TH lost was as judge of the Probate Court for Suffolk County, which he resigned in December 1765 in the face of pressure to proceed to the court’s business without the use of stamps. The other post that was “Rendered doubly burdensome” to him was as lieutenant governor.

3 Governor Francis Bernard wrote to Jackson on 31 May and 7 June 1766 (Papers of Francis Bernard, 3:155–56, 470). The House’s first choice for Speaker was James Otis Jr., but Bernard refused to allow the appointment.

4 The message from the Council chided Bernard for the way in which he depicted the violence of the Stamp Act riots and the general tenor of the province, stating, “When your Excellency is pleased to mention ‘inflammations, distractions, infatuations, and the fury of the people,’ you seem to refer to some enormities committed by unknown and abandoned persons, in a time of universal uneasiness and distress. But your Excellency cannot mean to impute these enormities, justly abhorred by all ranks among us, to the body of this people, or any branch of the government. Detestable as they are, they can never lessen the reputation of this province” (Speeches, pp. 84–87).

5 By “flummery” TH meant newspaper flattery of himself.

6 The Boston town meeting of 26 May 1766 instructed its representatives to the General Court “to keep up a constant and friendly intercourse with the other English governments on the continent. That you conciliate divisions and differences, if any be now subsisting, or should hereafter arise; ever preferring their friendship and confidence, to the demands of rigorous justice without them” (Boston Evening Post, 2 June 1766).

7 TH traveled to Maine on the eastern circuit of the Superior Court.

1 By “Resolves” TH Jr. meant the Declaratory Act

2 “Sally” and “Peggy” were SH and MH, respectively, TH Jr.’s sisters.

1 TH was referring to his second son, EH. The letter in question was No. 194, above.

2 TH’s letter to Richard Jackson was No. 196, above.

3 In a message to Governor Francis Bernard on 25 June 1766, the House reiterated its claim that compensating the Stamp Act riot sufferers would be an act of generosity, not justice (JHR, 43:124–25; Speeches, pp. 93–94). Bernard’s message in response, dated 27 June 1766, stressed that the king and Parliament expected the assembly to compensate the Stamp Act riot victims, whether the perpetrators were discovered or not. Bernard also offered assistance for any investigation the House wished to launch into the matter. Furthermore, he emphatically stated that granting compensation was an issue of “Humanity and Justice, rather than meer Generosity” (JHR, 43:134–35; Speeches, pp. 94–95).

4 For the Council’s estimate of TH’s losses, calculated in the fall of 1765, see No. 119, note 1, above.

5 TH went to Maine on the eastern circuit of the Superior Court. Falmouth (present-day Portland) was the largest town in the area and hence the location of court proceedings for the Superior Court.

6 TH’s “last” to TH Jr. was No. 194, above.

7 William Bollan’s letter to TH was No. 186, above.

1 TH’s two letters to Andrew Oliver were not found. For William Bollan’s publications on American affairs, see No. 188, note 2, above.

2 There were twenty-two members of the Council in the summer of 1766.

3 Both acts enabled Wales and Calais (while it was still English territory) to send representatives to Parliament.

4 For the exchange of messages between Governor Francis Bernard and the House of Representatives, see No. 198, note 3, above.

5 The committee that was appointed that same day included Timothy Ruggles, Samuel Dexter, Edward Sheaffe, John Hancock, and Stephen Hall Jr. (1704–1786), a representative from Medford (JHR, 43:137).

6 William Stoddard (1693–1775) was justice of the peace for Suffolk County. The identity of the sailor is unknown. “Sister Sanford” was Grizell Sanford. Since the wives of TH and Oliver were sisters, Grizell was sister-in-law to both men. She was a member of TH’s household, so her belongings were plundered in the looting of TH’s house on 26 August 1765.

1 TH Jr. bought items to replace those destroyed in the 26 August 1765 riot. Sally was SH, TH Jr.’s sister, and his aunt was Grizell Sanford.

2 TH’s included a set entitled Universal History in his list of books taken from his house on the night of 26 August 1765. This list was apparently written on scraps of paper, now lost, but James K. Hosmer saw these scraps of paper when working on his biography of TH in 1898 (Hosmer, Life of TH, p. 362). The letter to Governor Francis Bernard, which presumably TH Jr. was forwarding for another correspondent, was not found.

3 The letter was possibly No. 192, above, since it was described as the letter that was carried by Jarvis in No. 194, above.

4 Richard Jackson’s letter to TH was not found, unless TH Jr. was referring to No. 170. For Parliament’s order to the province, see No. 170, note 3, above. TH’s application to the British government was No. 128, above. John Roberts (1712–1772) and Soames Jenyns (1704–1787) were both members of the Board of Trade.

5 The abbreviation stood for Governor Bernard, who wanted to keep TH in Massachusetts because he was hoping to return to England himself. The governor and lieutenant governor would not both be allowed to be absent from the province at the same time.

6 William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, (1721–1765) was the uncle of George III and commander-in-chief of British forces. Nicknamed Butcher Cumberland, he vigorously—some say viciously—put down the Jacobite rising in Scotland in 1745.

7 The abbreviations stood for Bernard and James Otis Jr., respectively.

8 TH’s letter to Bollan was No. 191, above.

1 TH was returning from three weeks in Maine, where he had ridden the circuit for the Superior Court. Neither letter of 14 or 16 May was found.

2 With little discussion or controversy, the New York Assembly voted on 19 June 1766 to compensate those who lost property in the city’s Stamp Act riots of the previous year. In Massachusetts, Governor Francis Bernard prorogued the General Court on 28 June 1766 after the House refused to make any determination regarding compensation for those who suffered in the Stamp Act riots. The House did not meet again until 29 October 1766.

3 Charles Viner (1678–1756) was the author of A General Abridgement of Law and Equity (Aldershot: Printed for the Author, [1741]–1751).

4 TH wrote to Charlton Palmer on 24 June 1766, but no letters from Palmer during the first half of 1766 were found, nor was the letter TH indicated he intended to write to Palmer in early July.

5 This abbreviation stands for “old tenor” currency.

6 The next known letter from TH to William Bollan was No. 204, below.

7 Peter Chardon (d. 1775) was a merchant from Barbados. His letter to TH was dated 31 May 1766.

8 Fire destroyed about half of Bridgetown, the principal town of Barbados, on 14 May 1766.

1 No such letter from TH to TH Jr. was found.

2 The abbreviation was for James Otis Jr.

3 J. Richardson was TH’s London printer.

1 Jackson later mentioned receiving a letter from TH of this date, but no other letter with this date was found (No. 220, below). This letter’s placement in the letterbook indicates that it was written in July 1766, as the page was between letters dated 6 and 23 July.

2 TH was riding the eastern circuit of the Superior Court in Maine for about three weeks in June.

3 Secretary Andrew Oliver was in regular communication with Jackson and probably transmitted a copy to him of the General Court’s proceedings relative to compensation for the victims of the Stamp Act riots. TH enclosed a printed copy in No. 204, see note 4, below.

4 Governor Francis Bernard postponed the second session of the General Court until 29 October 1766.

1 TH was riding the eastern circuit of the Superior Court in Maine for about three weeks in June. Both of Bollan’s letters to him, dated Nos. 186 and 188 (TH apparently copied the dates incorrectly in this letter), are above.

2 TH’s letter to Secretary Andrew Oliver was not found, but Oliver’s response, No. 199, is above. For Bollan’s book and its distribution, see No. 188, above. Although no list of names was found, Governor Francis Bernard, Speaker Thomas Cushing, and the twenty-two members of the Council were also supposed to receive copies from TH or Oliver.

3 For the paragraph, see No. 188, above.

4 The collection was published as Proceedings of the Governor, Council, and House of Representatives of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay, Concerning an Indemnification for the Sufferers by the Rioters in Boston, from August 27, 1765 to June 28, 1766 (Boston, MA: Green and Russell, 1766).

5 Bernard did not convene the General Court until 29 October 1766.

1 Customs collector Charles Paxton sailed to England in late July 1766.

2 TH Jr. had been writing TH from England all spring and summer. TH Jr.’s comments about London must have been contained in a letter that was not found.

3 TH Jr.’s brother WSH entered Harvard in the summer of 1766.

4 In addition to Foster Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver, TH Jr.’s other uncles included Samuel Mather, who married TH’s sister Hannah; William Welsteed (1696–1753), who married TH’s sister Sarah (1708–1775) but was deceased when this letter was written; and William Marchant, who married TH’s sister Abigail (1709–1790). To which of TH Jr.’s uncles TH referred is unknown. Peggy was TH Jr.’s sister, MH.

5 TH wrote Richard Jackson in No. 203 and William Bollan in No. 204, both above.

1 The space was left blank in the MS, but the editors assigned a date on the basis of TH Jr.’s next letter, bearing the date 26 July, in which he said he had already written his father another letter earlier that day (No. 207, below).

2 Governor Francis Bernard twice urged the House to reimburse the victims of the Stamp Act riots during the General Court’s session in June. For the House’s response to Bernard’s speech regarding compensation for the victims of the Stamp Act riots, see No. 194, note 3, above; for his message to the House on this same topic later that month and the House’s response to it, see No. 198, note 3, above.

3 As the summer wore on, Lord Rockingham’s ministry was losing its influence, as Edmund Burke (1729–1797), private secretary to Lord Rockingham, no doubt knew. Rumors abounded as to who would replace Rockingham at the head of the government, with the most popular choice being William Pitt and his ally Richard Temple Grenville, 2nd Earl of Temple, (1711–1779) who was the brother of George Grenville. The brothers did not share political views, though. Temple was far more sympathetic to the Americans.

4 TH Jr.’s reference here remains unclear. Sailors were paid with “tickets” that were redeemed for cash at the end of each voyage, and many sold their tickets at a discount before the voyage was complete. No other references to the subject were found in TH’s correspondence.

1 The letter of the same date was No. 206, above. TH’s letter is No. 198, also above.

2 The Marquis of Rockingham’s administration ended on 2 August 1766 and was succeeded by a ministry headed by William Pitt, now Earl of Chatham, who became lord privy seal. Since Pitt was ill much of the time, he was greatly assisted by Augustus Fitzroy, 3rd Duke of Grafton, who held the post of first lord of the treasury.

1 TH Jr. had written two letters to TH recently, Nos. 206 and 207, above. The other letters TH Jr. referred to were probably No. 198 and No. 201, both above.

2 The letter from Thomas Pownall to TH Jr. was not found.

1 Francis Waldo (1728–1784) was comptroller of customs at Falmouth (now Portland) in the district of Maine from 1758 to 1770. He was held hostage by an angry crowd that pelted his house with stones while others retrieved a portion of a cargo he seized earlier in the day (Boston Evening Post, 25 August 1766; Papers of Francis Bernard, 3:204–05).

2 Sylvester Gardiner (1708–1786) was an accomplished physician and surgeon who trained in both England and France. He was an importer and retailer of medicines and an investor in Maine lands as one of the Kennebec Proprietors. Gardiner aggressively pursued the eviction of settlers on what he believed to be company land, even though the settlers had purchased title from the Clark & Lake Company (Cory Michael Davis, “Divided Ownership, Wild Speculation: An Investigation of the Linkages between Thomas Hutchinson and Land Speculation in 18th Century Maine” [University of Maine, honors thesis, 2010]).

3 The Privy Council ordered the secretary of state to instruct the colonial legislatures to compensate all victims of the Stamp Act riots. Henry Seymour Conway communicated this order to Governor Francis Bernard on 31 March 1766, and Bernard addressed the legislature on the subject on 3 June and again on 27 June before the General Court adjourned for the summer. For the exchange, see Speeches, pp. 81–96.

4 Before its summer adjournment, the Massachusetts House voted to seek the advice of the towns concerning compensation for the sufferers of the Stamp Act. Since residents of the town of Boston feared they would be held responsible for restitution if the legislature failed to approve it from the provincial treasury, James Otis Jr., as a Boston representative, may have initially favored compensation from the province, but as TH intimated in this letter, Otis’s position on compensating the victims of the Stamp Act riots changed several times.

5 Letters from Richard Jackson, No. 170, and William Bollan, No. 180, both above, hinted at the possibility that TH might expect some lucrative appointments in addition to compensation for his losses. This view was confirmed by TH Jr.’s letter to his father, No. 206, also above.

6 Paxton’s reward for his services as a customs official was appointment as one of the five members of the new American Board of Customs Commissioners. He arrived back in Massachusetts with two of his fellow commissioners, William Burch and Henry Hulton, on 6 November 1767.

1 Although Lord Bute no longer had a formal role in the government, many believed him to still be a powerful influence on George III.

2 The Board of Trade was formerly part of the Privy Council but by this change was separated from it and placed in an advisory role.

1 Chambers Russell was a fellow justice of the Superior Court and judge of the vice-admiralty court. When he sailed for England on 16 October 1766, he carried with him a petition requesting the salary of the judge of the admiralty court be paid by the royal government and not the province (Papers of Francis Bernard, 3:238–39). Charles Townshend became chancellor of the exchequer in the Chatham–Grafton ministry on 2 August 1766.

2 The General Court opened its new session on 29 October 1766.

3 The MS was obscured by tape here and at subsequent instances of square brackets in this letter.

4 TH was presumably referring to the Daniel Malcom affair. On 24 September 1766, Boston merchant Daniel Malcom (1725–1769) refused to allow customs agents and Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf access to his warehouse despite a writ of assistance. Under the threat of a riot from a gathering crowd, the officers retired without executing a search (see Papers of Francis Bernard, 3:232–35).

1 Governor Francis Bernard convened the General Court for its second session on 29 October 1766.

2 In the General Court’s first legislative session of the year in June, Boston town members argued against the province granting compensation to sufferers of the Stamp Act riots. During the break between the first and second sessions, however, some key Bostonians concluded that the General Court should compensate the victims of the riot so that the town of Boston alone would not be forced to pay. Not surprisingly, many representatives from the rest of the province reached the opposite conclusion during the recess, stating that the town of Boston was solely responsible for paying for the damages.

1 TH Jr. had been in England from May to September 1766. Bollan’s most recent letter to TH may possibly have been dated 25 September 1766, No. 210, above, but most likely was another letter that was not found.

2 For Governor Francis Bernard’s efforts to secure compensation from the General Court for the victims of the Stamp Act riots, see Nicolson, “Infamas Governor,” pp. 146–48. Bernard convened the General Court on 29 October 1766.

3 Stamp Master Andrew Oliver, Comptroller of the Customs Benjamin Hallowell, and Deputy Registrar of the Admiralty William Story all had property damaged in the Stamp Act riots of August 1765 and were seeking compensation for their losses from the General Court.

4 Two such letters from Dennys DeBerdt, special agent of the House of Representatives, appear in Speeches, pp. 101–02.

1 TH Jr. called on Jackson repeatedly during his sojourn in England the previous summer.

2 The question was: “Whether this House will Order a Compensation to be made to his Honour Thomas Hutchinson Esq; for the Losses he sustained, out of the public Treasury?” The House considered this question on 31 October 1766 (JHR, 43:159).

3 This abbreviation possibly stood for the word “recompense.”

4 The House considered TH’s petition for compensation separately from the other victims, probably because his losses were so great.

1 TH’s reference to the “Superior courts office” suggests that this letter was written to a justice of the Superior Court, possibly Peter Oliver.

2 Governor Francis Bernard in his speech of 29 October 1766 said, “I have thought proper to call you together, that you may have an opportunity to give a positive answer to what I recommended to you, by order of his Majesty, last session. . . . I heartily wish it may be such as will answer the expectations and desires of your friends in Great Britain” (Speeches, p. 97). The committee that investigated the Stamp Act riots during the legislative recess reported to the House on 30 October that it could not identify any of the rioters because witnesses told them that the people who caused the damage were in disguise. TH, Secretary Andrew Oliver, Benjamin Hallowell, and William Story presented their petitions to the House later that same day. For a summary of all four petitions, see JHR, 43:155–56, 158. Only Story’s original petition, dated 29 October 1766, was found (Massachusetts Archives, SC1/series 45X, 44:604–06).

3 The abbreviation stood for Joseph Hawley.

4 The MS was torn here and in the other instance of square brackets in this letter.

5 Hawley’s client, Seth Warren, was indicted for riot in Hampshire County after he attempted to liberate a man arrested for debt at a time when the courts were closed because of the Stamp Act, an event known as the Berkshire affair (Boston Evening Post, 6 and 23 July 1767).

6 The abbreviation stood for Jerathmiel Bowers.

7 The representatives from Boston were James Otis Jr., Thomas Cushing, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock.

8 These abbreviations stood for Timothy Ruggles and William Bourne (1724–1770), who was a representative from Marblehead.

9 Both the lottery and an effort to form a committee to assess each town’s contribution failed to garner sufficient support in the House (JHR, 43:170–71).

10 The two Salem members were William Browne (1737–1802) and Andrew Oliver Jr. Israel Taylor (1710–1779) was a representative from Harvard. Josiah Dwight (1715–1768) was a representative from Springfield. Ezra Taylor (1720–1807) was a representative from Southborough. Richard Saltonstall III (1732–1785) was a representative from Haverhill. Which Prescott TH meant is unclear: either Charles Prescott (1711–1779), representative from Concord; James Prescott (1721–1800), representative from Groton; or Jonas Prescott (1703–1784), representative from Westford.

11 TH probably meant Joseph Harrison, a former private secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham who had recently arrived in Boston to serve as collector of customs. John Powell was a merchant and naval contractor, who had recently been in England.

12 “Respect” was probably an abbreviation for “Respective.”

13 The bill granting compensation to the victims of the Stamp Act riots also contained a clause that granted immunity to the rioters (JHR, 43:178–79). For the text of the bill, see Boston Evening Post, 17 November 1766; Boston News-Letter, 20 November 1766. For Bernard’s account of the proceedings described in this letter, see Papers of Francis Bernard, 3:242–47, 252–55.

1 The reference to the adjournment of the General Court, declared by Governor Francis Bernard on 13 November, makes it clear that the earliest this letter could have been written was 14 November, a date that suits well since the next letter in the letterbook is dated 15 November.

2 TH Jr. returned to Massachusetts from England on 26 October 1766.

3 TH became a source of “popular debate and altercation” first because of the Stamp Act riots of August 1765 and then the protracted negotiations to secure compensation for TH’s losses in the riots, as well as a political shake-up in the Council in May 1766. The Boston town meeting to which TH referred was held on 8 October 1766 (BTR, 1758–1769, p. 188).

4 Bernard adjourned the General Court to early December, shortly after the House brought in a bill to compensate the victims of the Stamp Act riots.

1 For Governor Francis Bernard’s recommendation to the House of Representatives, see No. 192, note 6, above.

2 Dft: “assembly”

3 Dft: “until . . . allowed” omitted.

4 The General Court convened on 29 October 1766, although Bernard originally planned not to call them until after the first of the new year.

5 In the Dft, the sentence to this point was written vertically in the margin.

6 TH’s petition, apparently dated 30 October 1766, was not found. The member who spoke against granting compensation was Joseph Hawley.

7 Dft: “rescue and convicted”

8 For the bill of compensation and indemnity, see No. 215, note 13, above.

9 Lord Shelburne’s letter to Bernard, dated 13 September 1766, was conciliatory but also praised Bernard and emphasized the king’s “paternal regard” for the colonies (Papers of Francis Bernard, 3:224–25). Bernard apparently read the letter before the assembly, as a copy appears in Massachusetts Archives, SC1/series 45X, 22:497–98 and in Speeches, pp. 99–100.

1 The message accused Governor Francis Bernard of denigrating the honor of the House and exceeding his instructions from Secretary of State Henry Seymour Conway in pressing for compensation for the riot sufferers, thus prompting some towns to vote against the measure (JHR, 43:191; Speeches, pp. 97–98).

2 The abbreviation stood for England. The “grand incendiary” was James Otis Jr.

3 The abbreviations in this sentence stood for Speaker of the House, a position for which Otis was nominated but Bernard vetoed, and the Council, which had just twenty-two members after Bernard had vetoed six prospective councilors whom he found objectionable.

4 The “common adversary” was presumably Otis again.

5 In 1749, when TH was Speaker of the House, Representative James Allen was expelled for his denunciation of Governor William Shirley.

6 For Bernard’s speech to the General Court urging them to compensate the victims of the Stamp Act riot, see TH to TH Jr., No. 192, note 6, above.

7 For letters from Jasper Mauduit and Dennys DeBerdt mentioning accounts from New England attributed to TH, see Jasper Mauduit to Speaker, 4 September 1765 (Jasper Mauduit, pp. 180–84); TH to Jasper Mauduit, No. 222, below; Dennys DeBerdt to James Otis Jr., 2 July 1766 (CSM Pubs., 13 [1912]: 317). In the letter to Otis, DeBerdt wrote, “If any one is doing ill offices between you and the ministry, I should be glad they may be detected & loose their Influence.”

1 TH’s reference was probably to Joseph Hawley who had spoken forcefully against compensating him for his losses in the Stamp Act riots, but it could also be to James Otis Jr.

2 Governor Francis Bernard hoped to return to England in the summer of 1766 to make a full report on the state of affairs in Massachusetts, but Crown officials did not approve of him leaving the province.

3 The present ministry was headed by the Earl of Chatham, who had been at the head of government since August.

4 This order of leave was not found, nor is its date of issue known. TH could have received it in response to his requests to the ministry in February 1764 when the House of Representatives elected him agent.

1 An undated letter written by TH to Jackson (No. 203) appears in TH’s letterbook between letters dated 11 (No. 202) and 23 July 1766 (No. 204), both above. Hence the editors assigned a conjectural date of 22 July to this letter, which is also above.

2 Approximately seven words crossed out and illegible here.

3 High corn prices caused a series of riots in the west country of England during September and October 1766.

4 Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend would soon introduce his own plan to generate revenue from America by taxing the importation of tea, painter’s colors, lead, and glass (Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” p. 152).

5 TH Jr. arrived back in Massachusetts on 26 October.

6 Extracts of several letters Jackson wrote to Bernard from November 1765 to March 1766 appear in Speeches, pp. 69–73.

7 TH’s letter to Jackson recommending Charles Paxton is No. 203, above.

1 For the bill for compensation, which included a general indemnity for the rioters, see No. 215, note 13, above.

1 Jasper Mauduit’s brother was Israel Mauduit. For Parliament’s recommendation regarding compensation for the victims of the Stamp Act riots, see No. 170, note 3, above.

2 Mauduit’s letter to Speaker Thomas Cushing, dated 5 June 1766, is at Massachusetts Archives, Letterbooks of the Secretary, SC1/117X, 3:23–27.

3 The first volume of TH History was published in Boston in 1764 and in London in 1765, but it covered Massachusetts history only up to 1692. The discussion about the relationship between the House and its agents, then, focused on the relationship in the seventeenth-century, not TH’s own times, so his reference to TH History is unclear.

4 There is no record of the letter being read in the House of Representatives or of the controversial passage that James Otis Jr. laid claim to, although on 4 November, the House was considering its response to Mauduit’s letter to Cushing (JHR, 43:165).

1 For the bill of compensation and indemnity, see No. 215, note 13, above.

2 Bollan laid his case before the House of Representatives regarding money still owed him by the province for his services as agent, a dispute that had been ongoing since 1762.

3 James Otis Jr. remained highly influential in the House of Representatives.

4 For Bollan’s publications, see No. 188, note 2, above.

5 For Mauduit’s letter, see No. 222, above.

6 This abbreviation stood for Andrew Oliver Jr.

1 TH’s letter to Lynde of 18 November 1766 was not found. John Scollay filed a petition of bankruptcy in early 1765, one of the first merchants to suffer in the financial collapse that began with the failure of Nathaniel Wheelwright in January of that year. Lynde referred to his fellow Superior Court justices John Cushing and Peter Oliver as his brothers.

2 John Pickering (1740–1811) was a 1759 graduate of Harvard who was just becoming involved with local politics at this time. By the late 1760s, he was committed to the patriot cause. Elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1769, he became an outspoken critic of TH in the early 1770s.

1 For the bill of compensation and indemnity that Joseph Hawley promoted, see No. 215, note 13, above.

2 Williams wrote four lines of text at the end of this paragraph and then crossed them out so heavily that they are illegible.

3 Williams was referring to TH’s possible appointment as special agent to represent the interests of Massachusetts in boundary disputes with New Hampshire and New York.

4 Williams was perhaps referring to Joseph Hawley, TH’s most recent adversary.

1 On 6 December, both the House (by a vote of 53–35) and Council (by a vote of 14–1) awarded TH £3194, 17 shillings, 6 pence as compensation for damage to his property in the Stamp Act riots (JHR, 43:209–10, 213; Mass. Council Records, 16:176).

2 Thomas Clap was Cushing’s chief adversary in Scituate.

3 A long letter by “John Hampden” (presumably James Otis Jr.) criticizing Governor Francis Bernard’s conduct during the Stamp Act crisis was printed in the Boston Gazette on 24 November and 1 December 1766.

4 The Superior Court was scheduled to convene in March 1767.

1 The committee’s report is at JHR, 43:210–11.

2 Richard Jackson was not officially dismissed as Massachusetts’ agent until 5 February 1767 (Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” p. 151).

3 As lieutenant governor, TH could attend Council meetings ex officio, but because the House of Representatives did not elect him to the Council in the May elections, he could neither vote nor speak. The issue of the lieutenant governor’s presence at Council meetings arose again in February 1767, when TH wrote a series of letters defending the lieutenant governor’s right to attend Council meetings ex officio.

4 The letter was not found. The agent for the House of Representatives was Dennys DeBerdt.

5 The letter in which TH criticized James Otis Jr. and that TH Jr. showed Lord Rockingham was not found.

6 DeBerdt was in regular communication with Speaker of the House Thomas Cushing (Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” p. 151).

7 The letter to which TH referred was presumably to Secretary of State Lord Shelburne, No. 232, below.

1 The text was interlined without a mark for position.

2 TH proposed acting as an agent for Massachusetts in the ongoing boundary dispute between Massachusetts, New York, and New Hampshire if he ended up going to England to solicit compensation.

3 William Samuel Johnson (1727–1819) was the agent for Connecticut, not New Hampshire.

4 Governor Francis Bernard continued to warn his superiors in England about the anti-government feeling in Massachusetts, particularly to the secretary of state for the southern department, Lord Shelburne. Shelburne apparently intimated to Dennys DeBerdt some of Bernard’s feelings toward the opposition in Massachusetts, and DeBerdt conveyed these sentiments to Speaker of the House Thomas Cushing (Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 150–51; Papers of Francis Bernard, 3:257, 276–82, 284–89).

1 By “old friend” TH sarcastically meant James Otis Jr., whom the Boston town meeting instructed to vote in favor of awarding compensation.

2 The bankruptcy of Boston merchant Nathaniel Wheelwright in January 1765 touched off a series of associated bankruptcies as creditors called in their debts (J. L. Bell, “A Bankruptcy in Boston, 1765,” Massachusetts Banker [4th Quarter 2008]: 14–23; Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, pp. 31–32; Anderson, Crucible of War, pp. 668–69, 824; 824n; Archer, Enemy’s Country, p. 21).

1 Secretary Andrew Oliver received £172.4, Benjamin Hallowell received £385.6.10, and William Story received £67.8.10 (Mass. Council Records, 16:178; JHR, 43:189–90).

2 James Otis Jr. was at the forefront of those who criticized Governor Francis Bernard for the way in which he depicted the political opposition to his superiors in London (Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” pp. 150–52).

3 TH Jr. visited with Pownall when he was in England in the summer of 1766. Pownall began serving in Parliament in 1767.

1 TH’s letter to Oliver dated 29 November 1766 was not found. This reference to dizziness was the first indication of the onset of an illness that plagued TH throughout 1767, a disorder he blamed on weak nerves (Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 28, 139, 145).

2 TH moved his family into the newly repaired house on Garden Court Street sometime in December 1766.

3 Daniel Oliver frequently carried letters between Oliver and TH.

1 The conjectured date comes from the letter’s placement in the letterbook. The two letters on the page before this one were dated 8 December 1766 and the letter written below this one on the same page was dated 7 December [1766]. It should be noted that the pages following this one in the letterbook were not in chronological order, although all of the letters were written in 1766.

1 Benjamin Lincoln (1733–1810) was a justice of the peace, militia officer, and member of the House of Representatives from Hingham and Cohasset. He later became a major general during the American Revolution, served as secretary at war under the Articles of Confederation, played a key role in the suppression of Shays’ Rebellion, and was appointed collector of the port of Boston from 1789 to 1809.

2 In December 1765, TH resigned his post as judge of the Suffolk County Probate Court when patriot leaders put pressure on him to conduct the court’s business in violation of the Stamp Act. Instead, TH’s brother Foster was appointed to the position for a twelve-month period. Foster remained in the position from that point on but was not formally appointed until 3 August 1769.

3 The remainder of text was written vertically in the margin.

1 Cushing’s letter to TH was No. 226, above. TH’s letter to Cushing was not found. John and Thomas Fleet were the publishers of the Boston Evening Post, in which appeared a long letter written by “X” on 8 December 1766 that was more critical of Governor Francis Bernard than TH. Its reference to TH reads, “the representative body of this people have wisely put it out of the power of a compensated Tory to harass his fellow creatures (if he will allow mankind to be such) by making indemnity as general as compensation.”

2 Translated as, “as far as madness.”

3 Joseph Hawley was subject to despondency and melancholy, which led to his withdrawal from public affairs after 1776.

4 TH and his allies feared that even more of them would be removed from positions of importance in the province in the next general election, which took place in May 1767.

5 Thomas Clap was Cushing’s adversary in local politics. Clap had a reputation for unscrupulous dealings in politics and the law, and he tried to ingratiate himself with Governor Francis Bernard to protect himself from charges of bribery and corruption.

6 The first abbreviation probably stood for Artemas Ward (1727–1800), who was a representative from Shrewsbury and the future commander of American troops during the siege of Boston, although no mention was found of his removal from an office at about this time. The second abbreviation was for John Chandler III (1721–1800), a member of the Council.

7 Translated as, “May God avert it.”

8 The General Court was prorogued until 21 January 1767.

1 The Massachusetts House of Representatives passed two resolutions on 5 December 1766. The first stated, “Resolved. That it was the indespensible Duty of the Sufferers to have applied to the Government here, rather than to the Government at Home; and that the neglect of any of them to petition to this Assembly till October last, while they were complaining at Home, is very reprehensible.” The second stated, “Whereas it appears to this House by the Resolutions of the Honorable the House of Commons of Great Britain, that it was their Opinion that the Resolutions of diverse Assemblies in America, had a Tendency to encourage the Riots that happened there. Resolved, That this cannot be said of the Resolutions of the House of Representatives of this Province, as the said Riots happened about two Months before any such Resolutions were made” (JHR, 43:210–11; Speeches, pp. 100–01).

2 On 4 December 1766, the House drafted and approved a letter to Lord Shelburne in response to his letter to Governor Francis Bernard, dated 13 September 1766, which Bernard had read to the Assembly. A copy of the House’s letter to Shelburne is at Massachusetts Archives, Letterbooks of the Secretary, SC1/117X, 4:19–21).

3 The Duke of Newcastle’s letter to the Speaker of the House, dated 20 September 1766, was read to the House of Representatives on 4 December 1766 (JHR, 43:206; an SC of the letter is at Massachusetts Archives, Letterbooks of the Secretary, SC1/117X, 3:35–36). Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle (1693–1768), one of the chief ministers in the ministry of William Pitt, had been out of favor with the king since 1762. Newcastle was a vocal advocate for the repeal of the Stamp Act. The House also received letters from Lord Poulett (30 August 1766, 3:30–31), Sir George Saville (18 September 1766, 3:31), George Cooke (15 September 1766, 3:32), General Howard (28 August 1766, 3:32–33), William Dowdswell (4 September 1766, 3:33), Henry Seymour Conway (2 September 1766, 3:34), Lord Edgcumbe (14 September 1766, 3:34), Isaac Barré (13 September 1766, 3:35), and Lord Shelburne (19 September 1766, 3:37).

4 Massachusetts merchants had long complained of Bernard’s vigorous prosecution of smugglers.

5 Bernard used the word “requisition” in his opening speech to the General Court on 3 June 1766 to describe a “recommendation” from Secretary of State Henry Seymour Conway that the General Court compensate the victims of the Stamp Act riots (JHR, 43:29–33; Speeches, pp. 81–84).

6 Bernard wrote two letters to Henry Seymour Conway, requesting leave to come to England, but British officials wanted him to remain in Massachusetts for the time being (Papers of Francis Bernard, 3:77–80, 98–101).

7 The General Court was prorogued until 21 January 1767.

1 TH referred to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Many Englishmen saw this revolution and the ascendancy of Parliament that followed as an important turning point for the establishment of British liberties.

2 Volume 2 of TH History was published in Boston on 9 June 1767.