264 | To Thomas Gage
Cambridge near Boston Jan 30 1764
Sr.
I have just received your letter of Jan 221 at this Town to which I adjourned the general Court upon account of the small pox breaking out in Boston. I shall lay it before the House of Representatives tomorrow: but as I must send this to Boston in the forenoon, I shall have no opportunity of giving you any Account of the reception it meets with.
I laid the Requisition of Lord Halifax before the Assembly by a forcible message:2 It was referred to a large Committee of the principal Members, who reported in favour of raising Men for your Service. Nevertheless When the Report came to the House, there was a large Majority against raising the Men at the present, not refusing but postponing. The cheif arguments were that there was the greatest probability that a peace would be concluded with the Indians without coming to blows again; that when it was certain that the War would be renewed, it would be time enough to raise troops for it. A Committee was appointed to give me an Answer, in which I understand there are to be assurances that if the Indian war is revived, they will assist your forces.
This Committee has not yet prepared the Message, & therefore the Business is still open: but yet I doubt of the practicability of getting an order for raising Men now; because, the Session drawing to a conclusion the House is thin, & that will be urged against departing from the former Vote passed in a much larger house than can be shown now. Nevertheless as there is an uncommon Spirit of good humour, moderation & generosity now prevailing throughout the whole general Court, it is not impossible that they may still make a grant of some men. Whatever they do I shall inform you by the first opportunity.
The Assembly has granted all I had to ask (& in some instances more) for the strengthning our two forts in the Eastern Country; which I shall make very respectable.3 They have also empowered me to fit out two companies of Rangers, each to consist of a Captn a Surveyor & 12 men, who are to explore the Country to St Lawrence & back again. I propose to send one by the Kennebec to Chaudiere, unless I find that the Rout that I propose has been passed by Mr Montresor in which case I shall fix upon another:4 This party may return by St Francis to Casco Bay as you had proposed. The other Rout I propose is up Penobscot to St Lawrence & back to cross to St Croix & down that river to the bay of that name. I shant want Indian guides, but may be at a loss for surveyors. If you could recommend to me one or two Engineers that would like such an expedition, I would put them into additional pay (I think, of 6 pounds sterl pr month for 3 months) together with a servant.5 But if you could give leave for Ensign Miller of the 44th regiment6 (as I think, but its the same with Lt Col Tullekens)7 now at St Johns at Newfoundland to serve in one of these expeditions, I should take it as a favour; as I am particularly acquainted with his abilities for such a service, he having, whilst an officer of mine, given me great proof of his qualifications, both as an Officer & a Surveyor & Draughtsman. If He can be spared for this business & you will favour me with an order of leave, I will take care to send it to Newfoundland. The time I propose for these expeditions will be about the middle of August.
I am, with great regard, Sr your most obedient humble Servant
Fra. Bernard
His Excellency Majr Genl Gage.
1. William Wildman Barrington (1717-93), second Viscount Barrington, MP for Plymouth, and treasurer of the Royal Navy, 1762-65. He was the eldest of the five sons of John Shute Barrington (1678-1734), the first viscount Barrington, whose sister, Ann Shute, was Amelia Offley’s mother. Lord Barrington was godfather to Amelia’s eldest son, Frank.
2. There is a short biography in the introduction to Bernard Papers, vol. 1. For full details, readers should consult Colin Nicolson, The ‘Infamas Govener’: Francis Bernard and the Origins of the American Revolution (Boston, 2001).
3. John Temple (1731-98) was appointed surveyor-general of Customs in 1761. His father Robert was a British army officer and his mother, Mehitabel Nelson, the daughter of a New York merchant; the families of both parents connected Temple to the British aristocracy. To an English-born official such as FB, however, Temple appeared altogether too close to the Americans when in 1767 he married the daughter of Boston merchant James Bowdoin. Promoted to the American Board of Customs Commissioners, stationed at Boston, Temple’s relationships with his fellow commissioners deteriorated rapidly and the Treasury removed him from that Board in 1771. Much of Temple’s career was shaped by his disputes with FB and other officials, although whatever sympathy he had for the American cause was not a major factor in these run-ins. In 1785, he returned to America as the British consul–general to the United States and a year later became the eighth baron Temple.
4. See for example the list of collectors in the New-York Mercury, 13 Feb. 1764.
5. The other ships were HMS Cygnet (18 guns), Capt. Leslie; HMS Jamaica (14 guns), Capt. Gidoin; and HMS Magdalene (8 guns), Capt. Dougdale. For a summary see Neil R. Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 1760-1775: a Study of Enforcement of British Colonial Policy in the Era of the American Revolution (Annapolis, Md., 1973), 27-43, 51-53.
6. See Thomas C. Barrow, Trade and Empire: The British Customs Service in Colonial America, 1660-1775 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 178-180, 186; Oliver M. Dickerson, The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution (New York, 1974), 84-85; John W. Tyler, Smugglers & Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the Revolution (Boston, 1986), 33; Nicolson, The ‘Infamas Govener’, 89-90.
7. I am indebted to Owen Dudley Edwards for drawing my attention to Temple’s comment, dated 1771, and quoted in Frank Edward Manuel, James Bowdoin and the Patriot Philosophers (Philadelphia, 2004), 88.
8. By the King, a Proclamation for improving and better regulating the countries and islands ceded to the Crown of Great Britain by the last Treaty of Peace (London, 1763).
9. See Bernard Papers, 1: 12-13, 35n41, 387-89.
10. Beamish Murdoch, A History of Nova-Scotia, or Acadie (Halifax, N.S, 1865), xii, 449.
11. William O. Sawtelle, “Sir Francis Bernard and His Grant of Mount Desert,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 24 (1920): 197-254.
12. No. 187, Bernard Papers, 1: 321.
13. Bernard makes frequent reference to the proceedings of the assembly and the Governor’s Council in the correspondence printed in this volume, but I have not transcribed any of his speeches or messages. For these readers should consult the published journals, JHRM, and the unpublished records of the Council in CO 5/820-CO 5/828. I have, however, included numerous cross-references to legislative proceedings as an aid to research.
14. Thomas Hutchinson (1711-80), lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, 1760-69; chief justice, 1760-69; acting governor, Aug. 1769-Jan. 1771; and the last civilian governor, 1771-74. He died in exile in England. Hutchinson was FB’s closest ally and adviser, though often they disagreed about FB’s plans for reforming colonial government.
15. See Nicolson, The ‘Infamas Govener’, 139-140; John L Bullion, “British Ministers and American Resistance to the Stamp Act, October-December, 1765,” WMQ 49 (1992): 89-107.
16. APC, 6: 408.
17. JBT, 12: 318.
18. George Chalmers, “Papers relating to New England, 1643-1786,” Sparks MS 10, MH-H; John Almon, A Collection of Interesting, Authentic Papers, relative to the Dispute between Great Britain and America; shewing the causes and progress of that misunderstanding, from 1764 to 1775 (London, 1777); Barrington-Bernard.
19. Standard biographical directories include: Mark Mayo Boatner, ed., Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (New York, 1966); Joseph Foster, ed., Alumni Oxonienses: the Members of the University of Oxford, 1715-1886, 4 vols. (Oxford and London, 1888); Edward. A. Jones, The Loyalists of Massachusetts: Their Memorials, Petitions and Claims (London, 1930); David E. Maas, ed. and comp., Divided Hearts: Massachusetts Loyalists, 1765-1790: A Biographical Directory (Boston, 1980); Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, eds., The House of Commons, 1754-1790, 3 vols. (London, 1964); John A. Schutz, ed., Legislators of the Massachusetts General Court (Boston, 1997) (hereafter LMGC); Search & ReSearch Publishing Corp, Early Vital Records of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to About 1850 (Wheat Ridge, Conn., 2002); John L. Sibley, Clifford K. Shipton, Conrad Edick Wright, Edward W. Hanson, eds., Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University [title varies], 18 vols. to date (Cambridge, Mass., 1873-) (hereafter BGHU); James H. Stark, The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the Other Side of the American Revolution (Boston, 1910); Nancy S. Voye, Massachusetts Officers in the French and Indian Wars, 1748-1763 (microfiche, Boston, 1975).
20. American National Biography Online (New York, 2005-, at http://www.anb.org); Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online (Toronto, 2003-, http://www.biographi.ca); Newsbank Inc. America’s Historical Newspapers. Archive of Americana. Early American Newspapers Series 1, 1690-1876 (2008-, available via subscription at GenealogyBank.com, http://www.genealogybank.com/gbnk/newspapers/); Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online (London, 2004-2006, http://www.oxforddnb.com) (hereafter ODNB-e). The British Army Lists, published annually since 1740, are not online, but Worthington C. Ford, British Officers Serving in America, 1754-1774 (Boston, 1894) is available at the Internet Archive.com. Also useful is J. C. Sainty, et al. eds., Officeholders in Modern Britain, 1660-1870, 11 vols. (London, 1972-2006), available at British History Online (via http://www.british-history.ac.uk/catalogue). Contemporary almanacs and court-registers are accessible through Eighteenth Century Collections Online, published by Gale Cengage Learning (http://find.galegroup.com/ecco/). For example, The Court and City Kalendar: Corrected to January 30, or, Gentleman’s Register, for the year 1765 . . . (London, 1765).
1. The Council’s record books are Council Executive Records, 1760-1769, CO 5/823 and CO 5/827; there is also a set of nineteenth-century transcripts in Council Executive Records, 1692-1774, 13 vols. [vols. 2-14], GC3-327, M-Ar.; the corresponding volumes for 1760-69 are vols. 15 and 16.
2. There are two contemporaneous sets of the Council’s legislative records. One was kept in Boston and is in Council Legislative Records, 1692-1774, 24 vols., GC3-1701x, vols. 23-28, M-Ar. The other was sent to London: Council in Assembly, Massachusetts, 1760-1769, CO 5/820-CO 5/828. This project utilizes the London copies, for it was this set that was prepared for and consulted by ministers and officials.
3. A second edition was also published that year with a variant title and additional papers. Select Letters on the Trade and Government of America; and the Principles of Law and Polity, Applied to the American Colonies. written by Governor Bernard, at Boston, In the Years 1763, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. Now first published: To which are added The Petition of the Assembly of Massachuset’s Bay against the Governor, his Answer thereto, and the Order of the King in Council thereon (T. Payne: London, 1774). It was reprinted in Boston by Cox and Berry and advertised for sale on 27 Oct. 1774.
1. An act for the better securing and encouraging the trade of His Majesty’s Sugar Colonies in America, 6 Geo. 2, c. 13 (1733). Acting under the instructions of Surveyor General John Temple, the Customhouse officers of Boston, Falmouth, and Salem announced in the province newspapers that the Molasses Act of 1733 would “be in all it’s Parts fully carried into Execution.” The announcements, dated 26 Dec. 1763, were published on 2 Jan. 1764 in the Boston Gazette, the Boston Evening-Post, and the Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser.
2. Fort William Henry had been constructed at the southern end of Lake George in 1755 as a bastion against French and Indian incursions from Fort Carillon (renamed Fort Ticonderoga by the British) but was captured in 1757. After surrendering to Gen. Montcalm, and leaving the fort on 9 Aug., the garrison of over two thousand British Regulars and Provincials (from Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New Hampshire), under the command of Lt. Col. George Monro, was attacked by Native Americans in search of booty. Some 185 were killed and between 300 and 500 taken captive. In response, Massachusetts and Connecticut mobilized between them 12,000 provincial militia—their largest single deployment of the war—and dispatched them to Fort Edward on the Hudson River to await a French incursion that never materialized. Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (New York, 2000), 123, 195-200.
3. A memorial of the merchants and traders of the towns of Boston, Plymouth, Marblehead, Salem, etc., presented to the House on 27 Dec., protested that the impending renewal of the Molasses Act was “prejudicial” to Massachusetts’s trade. JHRM, 40: 132, 182-83.
4. Smudged correction.
5. Five months after the January proclamation, Temple claimed that vigilant enforcement of the trade laws had severely restricted the importation of foreign molasses. The only cargoes of molasses coming into the province during this period were through Salem, and upon clearances issued at the British island of Anguilla for a total of 1,500 hogsheads. This aroused Temple’s curiosity as to Salem’s attractiveness as an entrepôt, and four months later he accused the Salem collector and FB of fraud. Temple to the commissioners of Customs, Boston, 25 Jun. 1764, Temple Papers, 1762-1768: JT Letterbook, 47-49.
6. FB’s figures on the West Indies trade would have been supplied by James Russell, whose reports for 1762 and 1763 FB had forwarded to the Board of Trade. Bernard Papers, 1: 215, 350. The loss of business confidence that FB mentions here contributed to Boston’s economic downturn at the beginning of the year. See No. 340.
7. Select Letters, 11: “problem.”
8. No. 256, Bernard Papers, 1: 447-449.
9. Not found.
10. On 1 Nov, the Countess of Leicester packet boat, Capt. Willson, sailing from Falmouth, Eng., to New York was lost on the North Carolina “Wash” (or sandbanks) with the loss of five people, and though the mail was reputedly recovered some thirty to forty miles away, FB evidently never received anything. Boston Gazette, 12 Dec. 1763.
11. FB had petitioned the Privy Council for confirmation of the Mount Desert grant. See No. 248, Bernard Papers, 1: 436-437.
12. On 4 Feb.
13. John Pownall (1724/5-95), secretary to the Board of Trade, 1745-68.
14. The “paper” FB sent to John Pownall has not been found but was entitled “An Enquiry into Act of 2 Geo 3 [3 Geo. 3, c. 22]” and was enclosed in Nos. 257 and 258, Bernard Papers, 1: 450-452.
15. Richard Jackson (1721/2-87), a barrister and MP for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, 1762-68; he was also FB’s business agent and his favored candidate for the province agency.
16. An act for granting certain duties in the British Colonies and Plantations in America; for continuing and amending, and making perpetual, an act passed in the sixth year of the reign of his late Majesty King George the Second, (entitled, an act for the better securing and encouraging the trade of his Majesty’s Sugar Colonies in America), 4 Geo. 3, c. 15 (1764).
17. See Nos. 229, 241, 256, 258, Bernard Papers, 1: 390, 428, 447-49, 451.
1. No. 235, Bernard Papers, 1: 419-420; No. 237, ibid., 422-423. Both of Halifax’s letters requested full information about the Acadians in Massachusetts and instructed FB to communicate directly with the secretary of state concerning this matter of policy, instead of going through the Board of Trade.
2. No. 233, ibid., 397-398.
3. This group headed to the French-controlled island of St. Pierre in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. No. 288. It has been suggested that FB permitted the departure in the misguided expectation that it would be sanctioned by Halifax. Richard G. Lowe, “Massachusetts and the Acadians,” WMQ 25 (1968): 212-229, at 227. Such a view over-simplifies both the governor’s position (as outlined in this and subsequent letters) and the policy issues raised by Halifax (in the directives listed in note 1 above).
4. FB was probably thinking of how he might persuade the Acadians to settle in the new Penobscot townships or on Mount Desert. If that is so, then he kept it secret from London. Nothing came of this idea and FB instead looked to engage German immigrants for his Mount Desert township. See No. 309.
5. George Montague-Dunk (1716-71), the earl of Halifax, secretary of state at the Northern Department, 14 Oct. 1762-Aug. 1763, and at the Southern Dept., Aug. 1763-Jul. 1765. He returned to the Northern Dept. on 22 Jan. 1771.
1. Gage’s covering letter has not been found, but it enclosed Halifax’s letter to FB of 19 Oct., No. 238, Bernard Papers, 1: 423-424.
2. FB to Thomas Gage, Boston, 2 Jan. 1764, Gage.
3. Not found.
4. Jeffery Amherst (1717-97), Gage’s predecessor as commander-in-chief of the British Army in North America, 1758-63.
5. John Small (1722-60), a British army officer. See No. 207, Bernard Papers, 1: 357-35. Small’s maps of the Kennebec River and the Penobscot River are in ibid., 408 and 410.
6. John Montresor (1736-99) was a British military engineer with the rank of ensign and attached to the 48th Regiment of Foot. He designed many British fortifications in North America. He was also a talented surveyor and cartographer, and in this letter FB is referring to a copy of Montresor’s 1761 map of the sources of the Chaudière, Penobscot, and Kennebec Rivers, for which see Library of Congress: Map Division, G3730 1761. M6 Vault. Any journey to Quebec through the interior was extremely arduous and potentially hazardous, and twice Montresor had endangered his life traversing and plotting a route to Boston in 1761-62. Amherst cited Montresor’s map when highlighting flaws in Small’s cartography of the region “above Fort Halifax.” No. 218, Bernard Papers, 1: 372-373. However, several errors in the Montresor map disoriented the Patriot soldiers who accompanied Gen. Benedict Arnold on his ill-fated expedition to Canada in 1775.
7. Thomas Gage (1721-87), British general and commander-in-chief in North America, 1764-75.
1. Stephen Greenleaf (1704-95), sheriff of Suffolk County from 1757 to 1776.
2. See No. 242, Bernard Papers 1: 429.
3. On 13 Jan., the Boston selectmen learned that the smallpox had “broke out” in the North End of the town. The first named victim was Mrs. Benjamin Adams, who lived in Fish Street, near the Old North Meeting House; she had been confined to “her Chamber” with the disease for nigh on five weeks. In the next few days, three other families in the neighborhood were reported to have contracted smallpox: the widow Domett’s, Thomas Anderson’s, and Daniel Warren’s; a fifth family was also named, that of Benjamin Labree who lived near the Rev. Andrew Elliot’s New-North Church. The selectmen initially tried to stop the disease from spreading by quarantining dangerously-ill victims in their own home and removing the sick family members to the province hospital at “New Boston” (Rainsford Island); the premises in Fish Street were barricaded and guarded to prevent access. By the following week, however, when it was evident that the disease had spread beyond Fish Street, shopkeepers started advertising that they were moving business out of Boston, and local gentlemen, as FB indicates, started advocating inoculation. Boston Gazette, 16 and 30 Jan. 1764; Boston Evening-Post, 23 Jan. 1764.
4. Dr. William Barnet of Philadelphia, physician.
1. Franklin to FB, Philadelphia, 11 Jan. 1764, BL: Add 12099, f 22. FB had enlisted the help of the Crown’s postmaster general, Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), in trying to bring his eldest son Frank to Boston. Francis Bernard Jr. had been sojourning at Alexandria, Va., since Nov. FB had ordered Frank to meet the express rider David Wyer, who was taking the surveyor general’s mail from Boston to Philadelphia. FB asked Franklin to send Wyer onto Alexandria, if necessary, to pick up Frank. See No. 250, Bernard Papers, 1: 439-440. Wyer evidently did not wait around for FB’s son, and Franklin dispatched another government courier to Alexandria, carrying Franklin’s own money and riding Franklin’s own horse.
2. William Dunlap, Philadelphia postmaster. Franklin Papers, 11: 31n8.
3. Thomas Goldthwait (1718-1779), whom FB had recently appointed commander of Fort Pownall.
4. On 19 Jan. the assembly voted to enlarge the garrison. See No. 264.
5. Meaning recipe.
6. Thus in manuscript.
7. Likely Edward Broadfield of Trenton, N.J. Franklin Papers, 11: 32n2.
8. This scheme never took off though it was probably complementary to FB’s Proposals for a Fishery at Mount Desert, 5 Oct. 1764, BP, 10: 207-210. The River Penobscot was at the northern limits of the habitat of the Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrinchus oxyrinchus) and may also have supported the shortnose sturgeon (Acipenser brevirostrum), both of which species are tenuously established in the river estuary today. Stephen Fernandez, “Populations, Demographics, Distribution, and Seasonal Movement Patterns of Atlantic and Shortnose Sturgeons in the Penobscot River Estuary, Maine,” MSc Diss. Univ. of Southern Maine, 2008.
9. This clarifies the editor’s uncertainty about the financial assistance that Franklin provided, mentioned in the source note to No. 250, Bernard Papers, 1: 440.
1. Not found.
2. No. 238, Bernard Papers, 1: 423-424. FB presented the requisition to the House on 18 Jan., three days after Halifax’s letter arrived via Gage. JHRM, 40: 245.
3. A new barracks was constructed at Fort Pownall to house the provincial garrison which had been raised from eighteen to forty officers and men, while the thirteen-man garrison at Fort Halifax was augmented by fifteen extra soldiers. JHRM, 40: 208-09, 249, 262; No. 234, Bernard Papers, 1: 406.
4. See No. 261. FB had yet to see a copy of Montresor’s map of the interior, which he had hoped Gage might procure.
5. The House and Council resolved to fund two scouting parties on 2 Feb. 1764: nine privates, not twelve as FB suggests, were to be paid £3 12s. per month, with the first surveyor on £8, the second surveyor on £6 and the captain on £11. Acts and Resolves, 17: 492.
6. Francis Miller was an ensign in the 45th Regiment, a surveyor, and someone in whom FB placed considerable trust. While he was not able to participate in the Maine surveys, he was subsequently employed in drawing maps based on the teams’ work.
7. John Tulleken, the commanding officer at Louisbourg, and a lieutenant colonel of the 45th Regiment of Foot. His surname was sometimes rendered as “Tulliken” or “Tullikens.”
8. Reply not found.
1. Not found.
2. The building that was destroyed, Harvard Hall, had been erected 1678 and was the second to have occupied the site. Harvard Hall III was eventually constructed largely at the province’s expense; a sum of £2,000 was immediately appropriated and another £100 set aside to purchase a fire engine for the college. Acts and Resolves, 17: 470; JHRM, 40: 228-229.
3. FB is paraphrasing an enclosed newspaper article which lamented the loss of five thousand volumes, inter alia, the bequest of “oriental” books made by Dr. John Lightfoot (1602–75), the Cambridge University Hebraist and biblical scholar, and the entire collection of Greek and Latin classics. The same article noted that the governor was “very active” in helping to bring water to the town fire-engine.
4. That is to say, it was the office of special agent to assist the province agent that was being proposed, not a person to fill an existing office.
5. Thomas Hutchinson (1711-80), lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, 1760-69, and chief justice since 1760. Hutchinson is hereafter referred to as “TH”.
6. The “sporting votes” were from resolute opponents of TH, including three of the Boston members (Royal Tyler, James Otis Jr., and Thomas Cushing); the town’s fourth representative, Oxenbridge Thacher, was absent. TH to unknown, Boston, 7 Feb. 1764, Mass. Archs., 26: 77-78.
7. On 27 Jan. Acts and Resolves, 17: 474-478.
8. FB is referring to an inter-provincial dispute with Connecticut concerning jurisdiction over four border towns. See No. 234, Bernard Papers, 1: 399-400. Since Jackson was the Connecticut agent, FB feared that opponents of Jackson’s candidacy for the Massachusetts agency might easily object to a potential conflict of interest.
9. The House roll call was actually 41 yeas and 32 nays. JHRM, 40: 256-259. TH notes that the non-concurrence of the Council, on 2 Feb., was because the members “were divided.” TH to Halifax, Cambridge, 3 Feb. 1764, Mass. Archs., 26: 78.
10. Thus in manuscript.
11. The letter to Jasper Mauduit had been drafted on 16 Jan. and was approved on the morning of 26 Jan., before the vote to appoint a special agent. JHRM, 40: 231.
12. Obscured by binding.
13. See No. 259. Copies of the “State of Trade” were sent to the province agent in early Feb. but arrived after passage of the Sugar Act. Tyler, Smugglers & Patriots, 74.
14. Twelve grants for townships on the east bank of the Penobscot River had been issued by the General Court in 1762. The first set of six grants had already been laid out between the Penobscot River and what FB called “Mount Desert River” (today known as Union River and Union River Bay); these were confirmed by the General Court in Feb. 1763. Acts and Resolves, 17: 169-174; Nos. 197-199, Bernard Papers, 1: 334-342. The remaining six grants, together with one additional grant reserved for war veterans, were laid out west of Union River (as can be seen in Miller’s map of Penobscot Bay and Maine, illustration on pp. 252-253). On the afternoon of 27 Jan., the House resolved that FB annex the province seal to a single grant naming over three hundred colonists as tenants in common for six townships (thus confirming the grants issued in 1762). In the letter to Jackson printed here, FB does not specify that the special agent was expected to help achieve Crown confirmation in London (though he implies as much by the reference to the “Agent” in a letter to Jackson of 22 Mar 1764, BP, 3: 225-226). Confirmation by the King-in-Council would have validated Massachusetts’s claims to the disputed territory of Sagadahoc, and probably secured FB’s title to Mount Desert Island, but neither was forthcoming until a Privy Council order of 1771. JHRM, 40: 237; Acts and Resolves, 17: 474-479. FB provides an explanation for the delay in confirming the second batch of grants in No. 277.
15. Thus in manuscript.
16. Acts and Resolves, 17: 489.
17. See No. 264.
18. Here the handwriting style changes, with the remainder of the letter being completed on 6 Feb.
19. Stephen Hopkins (1707-85), governor of Rhode Island, articulated the merchants concerns in his “Essay upon Trade,” first published in the Providence Gazette on 14 and 21 Jan. 1764, and reprinted in the Boston Evening-Post, 1 and 8 Feb. His influential The Rights of Colonies Examined (Providence, R.I., 1764) was published on 30 Nov.
20. No. 268.
21. Copies of Pietas et Gratulatio Collegii Cantabrigiensis Apud Novanglos Bostoni, Massachuttensium (Boston, 1761). See No. 133, Bernard Papers, 1: 241-242.
22. Jasper Mauduit (c.1696-1771), a London merchant and Massachusetts province agent, 1762-65.
1. Not found.
2. See No. 264.
3. Nine privates, not twelve. Acts and Resolves, 17: 492.
4. On 2 Feb 1764. JHRM 40: 258.
5. Reply not found.
1. No. 238, Bernard Papers, 1: 423-424.
2. On 21 Dec. 1763.
3. LbC: “no”.
4. The address of the New York General Assembly of 16 Nov. was printed in the New-York Gazette, 21 Nov. 1763. Lt. Gov. Cadwallader Colden’s speech to the General Assembly of 18 Nov. 1763 and Gov. William Franklin’s speech to the General Assembly of New Jersey of the same date were reprinted in the Boston Gazette, 28 Nov. 1763 and the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, 12 and 22 Dec. 1763.
5. See No. 249, Bernard Papers, 1: 437-439; No. 261.
6. News of peace negotiations initiated at Detroit in Oct.—though they were to prove somewhat premature—were brought to New York by Maj. James Moncrieff and Capt. John Montresor and reported in the New-York Gazette, 19 Dec. 1763. See also source note to No. 261.
7. See No. 264 and its source note. The majority was actually four.
8. On 31 Jan. and 2 Feb., 1764. JHRM, 40: 250, 258.
9. See No. 362.
1. 4 Feb.
2. For these proceedings see Nos. 264, 266 and 267.
3. See No. 265.
4. This tract is probably the township grant marked “7” in Miller’s map of Penobscot Bay and Maine, CO 700/MAINE19, illustration on pp. 250-253.
5. The proceedings on the census took place 2 and 3 Feb. and those concerning the township acts the following day. JHRM 40: 251-252, 266, 273-274.
6. Capt. Thomas Bishop and Lt. William Haswell of HMS Fortune had been posted to North America for three years. They had been in American waters no longer than three weeks when they seized the brig Freemason, on 22 Oct., purportedly owned by two foreign merchants, and laden with French wines. (See No. 257, Bernard Papers, 1: 445-447.) Shortly thereafter Bishop took the sloop Sally, master Daniel McCarthy and owned by Thomas Boylston, carrying rice from foreign plantations (for which see No. 325). The Fortune’s arrival from England is noted in the Georgia Gazette, 3 Nov. 1763.
7. John Nichols.
8. When the assembly refused to allow the comptroller, John Nichols, to take the oath of office, Surveyor General John Temple observed that Rhode Island was now “disputing the Crowns Authority in placing any officers with them.” The vessel seized by customs officers (at Newport, not Providence, on 18 Jan.) and subsequently rescued was the sloop Rhoda, master Christopher Shelden, and probably owned by Judge Thomas Cranston; Temple alleged that the Rhoda was rescued “with the full Approbation of the Govr. [Stephen Hopkins].” Temple to the Collector, Comptroller, and Searcher of Newport, Boston, 13 Feb. 1764. John Temple, “Establishment of the Northern District,” Customs GB II. Temple’s proclamation requesting information that could be used to initiate prosecutions was published in the Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser, 6 Feb.; the Newport Mercury, 20 Feb.; and the Providence Gazette, 25 Feb. 1764.
9. The Boston Society for Encouraging Trade and Commerce, “State of Trade” of Dec. 1763. See No. 259.
10. Alexander Colvill (1717-70), seventh Lord Colvill of Culross, rear-admiral of the white and commander of the Royal Navy’s North Atlantic station, 1763-66.
11. See No. 269.
1. Not found.
2. An act for the encouraging and increasing of shipping and navigation . . . , 12 Car. 2, c. 18 (1660); an act for the encouragement of Trade . . . , 15 Car. 2, c. 7 (1663); an act for preventing frauds and regulating abuses in the Plantation trade . . . , 7 & 8 Will, 3, c. 22 (1695).
3. 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 clandestine running of goods into any part of his Majesty’s Dominions , 3 Geo. 3, c. 22 (1762).
4. Probably from the judge of Vice Admiralty, Chambers Russell. No. 272.
5. Colvill to Philip Stephens, HMS Romney, Halifax Harbour, 22 Jan. 1764, ADM 1/482, f 334, with enclosures at ff 336-342. Colvill’s letter was received on 13 Apr. and answered by Stephens, the secretary to the Lords of the Admiralty, on 8 Dec. The Admiralty referred Colvill’s letter to the Treasury and the Board of Trade.
6. First written as “of”.
7. These letters were not sent, for which an explanation is provided in FB to Halifax, Boston, 10 Apr. 1764, BP, 3: 148-151.
1. FB likely prepared the instructions upon learning, c.13 Feb., of Frank’s imminent return to Boston. To Benjamin Franklin, Boston, 13 Feb. 1764, BP, 3: 25.
2. The inconsistent spelling of “friends” is typical of this clerk.
3. FB to James Gilpin, Boston, 4 Jan. 1766, BP, 4: 97-98.
4. This was probably a college classmate of FB’s, with whom he maintained a correspondence in the early 1760s (No. 246, Bernard Papers, 1: 244). There are three Oxford graduates named John Spicer whose dates of attendance at the university overlap with FB’s. The most likely candidate is John Spicer (b.1714), the son of a Middlesex gentleman: like FB, John Spicer matriculated at Christ Church in 1729 and graduated B.A. in 1733; Spicer was awarded his M.A. in 1735, one year earlier than FB. Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, 4: 1334. Spicer was a deputy accountant in the Post Office’s Dead Letter Office and in 1764 was promoted to be inspector of that division. Public Advertiser, 30 Oct. 1764.
1. Not found.
2. Thomas Pownall (1722-1805), older brother of John Pownall and governor of Massachusetts, 1757-60. His acquaintance with FB can be traced to their early careers in Lincolnshire, but they had not met since 1760. Nicolson, The ‘Infamas Govener’, 40-41.
3. On 23 Dec. 1763, Thomas Pownall delivered in person to the Board of Trade a memorial proposing the establishment of six townships in the St. Croix River basin, on the shoreline of present-day Passamaquoddy Bay. Pownall was acting on behalf of several gentlemen partners, including Richard Jackson. Consideration was postponed, but the matter was raised again in Jun. JBT, 11: 427.
4. Nos. 265 and 268.
5. This is probably a reference to ministerial proceedings against John Wilkes (1725-97), MP for Aylesbury, following Wilkes’s controversial prosecution for having published the North Briton, No. 45. The Grenville ministry, which Jackson supported, had resolved (a) that the North Briton was a seditious libel, and (b) on 24 Nov. that Wilkes be denied protection of Parliament. Wilkes fled to France but was expelled from the Commons on 19 Jan. and later that year convicted in his absence, though the use of general warrants in his arrest was ruled illegal. Peter D. G. Thomas, “Wilkes, John (1725–1797),” in ODNB-e, (http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29410, accessed 10 Nov. 2009).
1. Chambers Russell (1713-66), judge of the Vice Admiralty Court, 1746-66.
2. Thus in manuscript.
3. Not found.
4. Thus in manuscript.
5. Robert Auchmuty (1724-88), who had been acting advocate general since 1762.
6. Judge Chambers Russell furnished the legal opinion for FB’s argument that the Freemason—and other vessels taken by Royal Navy officers—ought to be condemned under the Navigation Acts mentioned here by FB and the profits shared according to that body of legislation. There is a copy of Russell’s sentence of the Freemason, 6 Dec. 1763, among Colvill’s Papers in ADM 1/482, ff 337-338.
7. See source note to No. 269.
8. This might be an oblique reference to Thomas Pownall, whom Colvill would have known, although Pownall’s later treatises on imperial administration do not explicitly address this issue.
9. Tight binding.
10. FB may have forwarded Colvill’s correspondence with the Admiralty, 22-25 Jan. 1764, which contained the very complaint that Colvill was making about FB. ADM 1/482, ff 334-348.
11. The continuation of the postscript is in FB’s hand.
12. Thomas Boone (1730/31-1812), FB’s successor as governor of New Jersey; governor of South Carolina, 1761-66.
1. Wills Hill (1718-93), the earl of Hillsborough, president of Board of Trade, 17 Sept. 1763-Aug. 1765 and Aug.-Dec. 1766, and the first secretary of state for the American Colonies, 1768-72.
2. Amelia Bernard (c.1719-26 May, 1778), dau. of Stephen Offley, the squire of Norton Hall near Sheffield, Yorks., and Ann Shute, the sister of John Shute Barrington (1678-1734), first viscount Barrington.
3. William Wildman Barrington (1717-93), second Viscount Barrington and Amelia Bernard’s cousin. He was MP for Plymouth and treasurer of the Royal Navy, 1762-65.
4. An “X” has been written to the left of the line, but its purpose is unclear.
5. No. 285.
1. Andrew Oliver (1706-74), province secretary 1756-70.
2. An act for granting onto his Majesty several rates and duties of impost and tonnage of shipping (passed 4 Feb. 1764). Acts and Resolves, 4: 669-676.
3. There is a contemporaneous virgule at the beginning of the sentence, probably added by the recipient’s clerk to indicate the first item of business discussed in the letter. This was standard practice at the Board. The third and fourth paragraphs are marked in a similar fashion. The alteration FB is referring to is in the last paragraph of the first section, according to the numbering added in the modern printed version. Acts and Resolves, 4: 670.
4. An oath required of merchants and owners landing produce, which oath was to be administered by the province’s commissioner or receiver.
5. An act for continuing and amending an act made in the first year of his present Majesty entitled, an act for allowing necessary supplies to the Eastern Indians, and for regulating the trade with them and preventing the abuses therein (passed 4 Feb. 1764). Acts and Resolves, 4: 688-690.
6. This issue was raised at a conference held with the Penobscot Indians on 17 Sept. 1763. CO 5/892, ff 17-18.
7. For demographic estimates see No. 234, Bernard Papers, 1: 406-407.
8. Thus in manuscript.
1. Gage’s letter is not extant but was probably a reply to FB’s request for Montresor’s plan of his overland route to Quebec. No. 261.
2. FB was hopeful rather than expectant that Miller, who had accompanied him on the Mount Desert expeditions, would be able to lead the first party leaving from Fort Pownall. He wanted Miller’s commanding officer at St. John’s, Nfld., to sanction his leave of absence without orders from the regimental commander, Lt. Col. Tulleken, at Louisbourg. (BP, 3: 30). Permission was forthcoming, but Miller could not leave his post in Newfoundland until Sept., far too late to participate in the survey, though he was able to produce the maps using the team’s reports and the journal of surveyor Joseph Chadwick. FB to Thomas Gage, Boston, 17 Dec. 1764, Gage.
3. LbC: “this”.
4. Joseph Peach was a lieutenant in the 47th Regiment of Foot. He had surveyed the St. John’s River in 1761. See No. 195, Bernard Papers, 1: 331.
5. Thus in manuscript.
6. Reply not found.
1. See No. 278.
2. Thus in manuscript.
3. The Boston Naval Office. See No. 212, Bernard Papers, 1: 362-363.
4. Thus in manuscript.
1. See No. 268n4.
2. Acts and Resolves, 17: 389-490.
3. Ibid., 17: 482.
4. This third survey team was to carry out some of the work that FB originally envisaged could be undertaken by the first party upon its return from Quebec. See No. 264. The fourth team was surveying Penobscot Bay.
1. Not found.
2. First written as “it”.
3. That is, at five shillings per one hundred acres.
4. Obscured by tight binding here and below.
5. It was not sent to Gov. Wilmot until Jun.
6. FB may have had in mind the example of the Irishman Alexander McNutt, a former officer in the British Army, who brought settlers from Ulster to Nova Scotia and New Hampshire. Murdoch, Nova-Scotia, or Acadie, 470. APC, 4: 532-33; 6: 333, 337.
7. The Board had yet to decide on the issue.
8. Trans.: “in private”.
9. Jonathan Belcher (1710-76), chief justice of Nova Scotia since 1754 and lieutenant governor, Nov. 1761-26 Sept. 1763. Belcher and FB had corresponded on the boundary issue, for which see No. 127, Bernard Papers, 1: 232-233.
10. See No. 275 and FB’s subsequent discussions with Wilmot in No. 334.
11. One of the Fox Islands, possibly Little Deer Island.
12. Jackson was secretary to chancellor of the Exchequer George Grenville, who was concurrently first lord of the Treasury.
13. The New England newspapers contained reports from Philadelphia about the Paxton Riots and the massacre of Indians at Lancaster, Penn. They reprinted the address to Gov. John Penn (1725-95) from Pennsylvania’s frontier counties protesting infringements to their constitutional rights and complaining about the proprietors’ Indian policy; also printed was a rebuttal defending the governor’s policy. Boston Gazette, 19-26 Mar., 1764, Providence Gazette, 31 Mar. 1764, Newport Mercury, 19 Mar. 1764.
14. Benjamin Franklin. FB must have realized that both Franklin and Jackson had contributed to an anti-proprietor pamphlet published in London. Richard Jackson and Benjamin Franklin, An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania from its origin; so far as regards the several points of controversy, which have, from time to time, arisen between the several governors of that province, and their several assemblies. Founded on authentic documents (London, 1759); Carl Van Doren, ed., Letters and Papers of Benjamin Franklin and Richard Jackson, 1753-1785 (Philadelphia, 1947), 6-7.
1. No. 255, Bernard Papers, 1: 445-447.
2. Colvill to Philip Stephens, HMS Romney, Halifax Harbour, 22 Jan. 1764, ADM 1/482, f 334. The Admiralty copied Colvill’s letter to the Treasury and the Board of Trade. For FB’s reaction see also Nos. 269 and 272.
3. 3 Geo. 3, c. 22.
4. FB to the Board of Trade, 18 Feb. 1764, an original (but non-extant) version of FB to the earl of Halifax in BP, 3: 141-144.
5. Ibid. The missive to Halifax of 18 Feb. iterated much of what is contained in paragraphs one and two of the letter to the Board printed here. However, in this letter FB omits a passage wherein he complains of a personal slight by Colvill. See source note to No. 272.
6. Not found.
7. See No. 269.
8. Thus in manuscript.
1. FB’s intelligence came from Thomas Goldthwait at Fort Pownall, in a letter dated 26 Mar. claiming that the squaw Oso had reported that an insurrection was being planned. Mass. Archs., 33: 289-291.
2. Thus in manuscript.
3. First written as “disappointed”.
4. James Murray (1722-94), a British Army general and governor of Quebec, 1763-66.
5. “I have discovered that a motion has been made among the Penobscot Indians for rising against the English: and tho’ it was rejected by allmost evry one, except the proposer & the seconder, yet it occasioned a visible surliness among them, the observation of which was the occasion of making the discovery.” To Richard Jackson, Boston, 24 Apr. 1764, BP, 3: 232-233.
1. Benning Wentworth (1696-1770), governor of New Hampshire, 1741-66.
2. Left marginalia: line marking the passage from “threatned . . . Such proclamation”.
3. Dr. Samuel Mather, a physician of Northampton, was a special justice of the court of Common Pleas in Hampshire Co.
4. CO 5/823, f 216. By His Excellency Francis Bernard, Esq.; . . . A proclamation for enjoining all . . . his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace . . . and all other Magistrates and Officers . . . to be assisting the Surveyor-General [of Woods] . . . Given at the Council-chamber in Boston, the Ninth Day of July, 1763, Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, 14 Jul. 1763. The proclamation simply reminded all of Massachusetts’s civil officers of their duty to assist the king’s surveyor-general.
5. Manuscript damaged.
1. Not found.
2. 3 Geo. 2, c. 22.
3. Archaic rendition of “sermon,” in this instance, meaning convinced by.
4. FB informed John Pownall that the governor of Nova Scotia had relinquished his entitlement to a third of the seizures. Boston, 24 Apr. 1764, BP, 3: 230-231.
1. Unknown.
2. The lords of the Bedchamber to whom Wilbraham refers were known as “Gentlemen of the Bedchamber,” an office in the royal household usually reserved for peers of the realm. There had been nine appointees since 1761. The King had twelve grooms of the Bedchamber in 1764; of the four appointed since Grenville became prime minister in 1763, three proved to be firm supporters of the administration in the House of Commons: the Hon. Augustus John Hervey (1724-90), Charles Hotham (1729-94), and Henry Seymour (1729-1807). By 1764, George III had appointed just one groom of the Privy Chamber, one S. Pegge. Office-Holders in Modern Britain, 11: 20-24, 38-42; Namier and Brooke, House of Commons, 1754-1790, 2: 616-618, 641; 3: 423-424.
3. Wildman’s Club was an important focal point in the growth of the opposition to Grenville. It was formed by the “younger and more radical members” of the duke of Newcastle’s Whig party and attracted the support of the Rockingham Whigs. D. H. Watson, “The Rise of the Opposition at Wildman’s Club,” Historical Research 44 (1971): 55-77. Wilbraham was likely recalling a recent anti-Grenville pamphlet, published by John Almon, attacking the Tory “Cocoa Tree,” an informal gathering of parliamentary Tories. A Letter From Albemarle Street to the Cocoa-Tree, On Some Late Transactions (London, J. Almon, 1764).
4. Trans.: “destroy the state, nay, destroy heaven.”
5. On Wilkes see No. 271n5. Wilbraham was reputedly an influential contributor to the debates on the John Wilkes controversy. Wilbraham endorsed the legality of Wilkes’s arrest, despite Wilkes’s protestations about parliamentary privilege being breached, but argued that general search warrants were illegal. Namier and Brooke, House of Commons, 1754-1790, 3: 637.
6. George Grenville, a former ally of Pitt, was invited by King George III to form a ministry, which he did on 16 Apr. 1763, as both first lord of the Treasury and chancellor of the Exchequer. Grenville promptly set about improving the colonial system. In this respect, the work of his administration focused on enforcing the trade laws with greater rigor and generating more revenue from the colonies by way of new and existing taxes; these were to be used to offset the costs of maintaining a British military presence in North America and to relieve some of the burden falling on British taxpayers.
7. Trans.: “a sound mind in a sound body”.
8. Randle or Randall Wilbraham (1694-1770) of Rode Hall, Cheshire, was a prominent lawyer and had been an MP for Newtown since 1754. He was an independent Tory, as his strictures on partisanship above might suggest, who voted with the Grenville ministry but did not oppose Rockingham’s repeal of the Stamp Act. He retired from politics before the 1768 general election. Namier and Brooke, House of Commons, 1754-1790, 3: 637.
9. The Court of the King’s Bench, England’s highest common law court.
10. Trans.: “how wonderful to tell.” Wilbraham’s sarcasm reveals his mistrust of the political ambitions of Sir Fletcher Norton (1716-1789), MP for Wigan, a staunch Grenvillite and attorney general, 1763-65.
11. Reply not found.
1. No. 273.
2. Halifax and Hillsborough.
3. He meant to write “new”.
4. Select Letters: “public Offices”.
5. Select Letters: “little piece.”
1. 30 May to 15 Jun. JHRM, 41: 3-91.
2. An act for erecting part of the town of Newbury into a new town by the name of Newburyport (passed 28 Jan., signed 4 Feb. 1764). Acts and Resolves, 4: 676-678.
3. See No. 59, Bernard Papers, 1: 130-131.
4. Joseph Gerrish and Capt. Moses Little
5. Insertion in LbC; added here for clarity.
6. An act for ascertaining the number and regulating the House of Representatives (30 Nov. 1692). See Bernard Papers, 1: 160–161, 229–230, 352.
7. 13 Jun. 1764. JHRM. 41: 72-77.
8. FB is referring to a line in the instructions to Mauduit where it was noted that there was impending a “brief State of the Rights of the Colonies, drawn up by one of our Members.” Ibid., 77. James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston, 1764). The first advertisements for Otis’s pamphlet appeared in the Boston Evening-Post and other newspapers on 23 Jul.
9. The Stamp Act Congress was to convene at New York on 7 Oct. 1765; it ended proceedings on 25 Oct.
10. Fort Pownall was under the command of Capt. Thomas Goldthwait and Fort Halifax under Col. William Lithgow.
11. Thus in manuscript.
12. In Jul. 1763, FB dispatched Capt. Bradbury Saunders, commander of the province sloop Massachusetts, as envoy to the Maine tribes. He returned to Boston with three sachems: Meserwanderomet, Ectambuit, and Sauro Woraromogasa. They represented the Penobscots (who were concentrated in two towns, one fifty miles above Fort Pownall on the Penobscot River and the other further north, above the confluence of the Passadumkeag and Penobscot Rivers); the Indians of Machias Bay; and the Passamaquoddies (sometimes rendered as Passimaquodies) who lived mainly on what FB called the western side of the “Bay of St. Croix” (Passamaquoddy Bay on the US side of the Maine-New Brunswick border). [Minutes of a Conference with the Indians of Maine, 22 and 23 Aug. 1763], Mass. Archs., 29: 482-488; ibid., 33: 234-235.
13. FB’s message of 5 Jun, in JHRM, 41: 29-32.
14. The Governor and Council clearly expected the sachems to pledge unconditional loyalty to the king on behalf of their tribes. This they did, but the sachems had already extracted a concession of sorts from FB, for the message that he had sent them by Saunders confirmed that colonial homesteads on the eastern side of the Penobscot River were not authorized, notwithstanding that the General Court had issued township grants. Mass. Archs., 29: 482-488; ibid., 33: 234-235; CO 5/823, f 217.
15. Held at Fort Pownall on 17 Sept. 1763.
16. Dr. William Crawford.
17. Editorially altered so that the year follows the month.
1. An act to enable Abigail Little of Pembroke, formerly the widow of Isaac Thomas late of said Pembroke gentleman deceased, to recover of the children and heirs of the said Isaac certain sums of money due from them to said Abigail for right of dower in the real estate that was the said Isaac Thomas’s (passed 14 Jun. 1764). Acts and Resolves, 6: 197-198.
2. No. 234, Bernard Papers, 1: 414, 418n52. A chancery court would have been able to remedy civil disputes according to the principle of equity, which in the case of Abigail Little might have led to a distribution of the estate by court writs.
3. Authorial insertion LbC: “an Answer of the Defendants”.
4. The date order has been altered.
1. Circular from the earl of Halifax, St. James’s, 14 Apr. 1764, CO 5/755, ff 89-92 (L, AC).
2. John Turner was a sailor on the schooner Desire when it was taken by a French privateer on 18 Sept. 1762. New-York Gazette, 14 Mar. 1763. He was one seven colonial Americans held as hostages, at different locations, when the ship-owners failed to negotiate ransoms with their French captors. The Desire was the property of three Newbury merchants: Bartlett Cutting, William McHard, and Jonathan Bradbury, who, despite their initial tardiness, responded to Turner’s plight after prompting by FB. Turner was the only hostage who managed (or who was allowed) to petition for relief, from his jail at Bordeaux. The petition was heard by the Board of Trade on 22 Nov., and promptly forwarded to FB by John Pownall. JBT, 11: 412; Board of Trade to FB, Whitehall; 24 Nov. 1763, CO 5/920, f 166; FB to John Pownall, Boston, 24 Mar. 1764, CO 5/891, f 224 enclosing the Answer of Messrs Cutting, McHard & Bradbury to the petition of John Turner, Newburyport, 28 Jan. 1764, ibid., ff 226-227. The Newbury merchants paid the ransom soon afterward, and Turner (evidently) was freed before Halifax’s (punitive) circular arrived. The circular directed FB to prosecute the ship-owners in the Vice Admiralty court for the recovery of the 250 guineas ransom required of the Desire’s proprietors. Halifax’s notice, dated St. James’s, 31 Mar. 1764 is in the London Gazette, 10-14 Apr. 1764.
3. 20 Jun. 1764. CO 5/823, f 248.
4. For example, the notice in the London Gazette of 7 Apr. was reprinted in the Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser, 2 Jul. 1764, under the signature of Province Secretary Andrew Oliver.
5. From the earl of Halifax, St. James’s, 12 May 1764, CO 5/755, ff 93-96.
6. No. 260.
7. Mon. Robicheau. The use of “employing” here and “employed” elsewhere indicates that Robicheau owed his status as “cheif Acadian” to FB rather than to his standing with fellow refugees (No. 293). Robicheau was more of a negotiator and go-between than a leader of the Acadians. From FB’s perspective, Robicheau’s main task was to try to persuade the Acadians to resettle in British North America. (He might even have been in the pay of the governor with the task of persuading the Acadians to locate to Mount Desert or Maine, but this is mere speculation.) Robicheau’s identity cannot be precisely established, for his was a common Acadian surname in colonial records (where it is also rendered as Robichaud). There were seven families of that name interned at a camp at Fort Edward, Nova Scotia, whence the males were deported to Boston in Aug. 1762 by Lt. Gov. Belcher, but were returned in Oct. after Massachusetts refused the accept them. It is possible, but unlikely, that the person to whom FB is referring was one of these prisoners. Bernard Papers, 1: 261-262. Another possibility is that FB’s contact was one of the “Robichaux” males listed in a General Court report of 21 Apr. 1761 as being domiciled in Middlesex Co. Mass. Archs., 24: 463. The most likely candidate, however, is Louis Robichaud, who (subsidized by the province) lived in Cambridge for eleven years before the Revolution and led weekly prayer meetings for the refugees. He did not leave Boston for Quebec until c.1774. Pierre Belliveau, French Neutrals in Massachusetts: the story of Acadians rounded up by soldiers from Massachusetts and their captivity in the Bay Province, 1755-1766 (Boston, 1972), 192-199.
8. Jacques Robins, whose precise origins are unknown, had aimed to establish a settlement at Miramachi, then within Nova Scotia’s boundaries, with the support of Gov. Montague Wilmot. He petitioned the Board of Trade for a land grant in Apr. 1763 only to be refused in May 1764. Thomas B. Akins, ed., Selections from the Public Documents of the Province of Nova Scotia (Halifax, N.S, 1869), 340-341; JBT, 11: 356; 12: 52-55; Nos. 231 and 233, Bernard Papers, 1: 394-395, 397-398. To help with resettlement at Louisbourg, FB provided Robins with a letter of introduction to Lt. Col. John Tulleken, the garrison commander. FB notes that his “knowledge” of Robins came from a letter “from him” dated London and covered by another from John Pownall; “from whence” FB deduced that Robins “had a communication” with the Board and thereupon treated him with proper “Civility.” FB to Tulleken, 28 Apr. 1764, BP 3: 38. FB might have been less supportive had he been aware that the Board had rejected Robins’ petition, but he was keen to expedite resettlement in British territory, in accordance with British policy, and was mindful of the General Court’s reluctance to incur additional expenses in maintaining the refugees. Bernard Papers, 1: 386.
9. See Bernard Papers, 1: 394. Jacques Vigneau Dit Maurice, his wife Marguerite Arsenau, their five children, and many grandchildren were deported from Nova Scotia in 1755 and lived at Roxbury and Boston. They subsequently settled on the French island of Miquelon, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. “Lists of Exiles,” Acadian & French-Canadian Ancestral Home Page (www.acadian-home.org., last accessed 10 Jan. 2010).
10. Trans.: “no backward step” or “no steps backward,” a commonplace motto originating with the Roman poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus).
11. Not found. This expectation proved premature. See source note to No. 292.
12. The Sugar Act, 4 Geo. 3, c. 15 (1764).
1. The allusion is to one of the most influential and enduring studies of the English common law, widely known as Coke on Littleton, in which Sir Edward Coke (1552-1624) proffered commentaries on property law contained in a Treatise on Tenures by Sir Thomas de Littleton (c.1407-81). It was the first of a four-volume series known as Coke’s Institutes and titled Institutes of the Laws of England (1628-44). Since he was a trained lawyer, FB would certainly have possessed a copy of Coke’s Institutes.
2. No. 285.
3. FB to Barrington, Boston, 20 Jul. 1764, BP, 3: 236-237.
4. See No. 290.
5. The postscript has been arranged by the editor, since the original word order is unclear.
1. 30 May-15 Jun. 1764.
2. No. 285.
3. With No. 289.
4. Select Letters, 24: the names but not the titles listed in this paragraph were replaced by dashes, thus “Lord—”.
5. Select Letters, 24: the remainder of the main text was omitted.
6. “Guilty of or addicted to atrocious crimes; deeply criminal.” OED.
7. The “Thoughts” of the anonymous writer from Newport, whom FB deemed “sensible,” engaged questions of “democracy” and those “features” of the Rhode Island government that rendered government susceptible to the dominance of the “giddy multitude” and the “baleful influence of party.” “Z. Y.,” Newport Mercury, 23 Apr., repr. Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, 31 May 1764. The reply that FB considered the work of a “Zealot” was printed in the Boston Gazette, 11 Jun. 1764, p. 2. This anonymous writer took “Z. Y.” to task about his assertion that, historically, democracy was an unstable element in government, breeding factionalism and violence. The “Zealot” ranged widely over history and political theory, but it was probably the anti-monarchical undertones of his ironic tirade against “Z. Y.” that FB found most offensive (rather than the didactic passage on the Roman republic). In the extract below, the author imagines that the return of the Stuart monarchs would unleash an age of intolerance no less violent than the fate that befell the Narragansetts at the hands of the Rhode Islanders in the seventeenth-century.
It . . . follows, that the nearer any Form of Government approaches to a perfect Republic, the freer it will be from Corruption. Was not antient Virtue, particularly among the Romans, in its Zenith, in the happy and flourishing Days of Republican Government. In those Days the Roman Dictators, Consuls and other Generals, looked down upon scepter’d Tyrants with more Contempt than the Rhode Island advocate for Despotism can upon an Indian Sachem of Narragansett, if any of the Blood royal of that illustrious House are remaining to assert their Claim with the Pretender, who I suspect is the Idol of the Author of the curious Essay before me. I collect this partly from the Manner in which he expresses himself with Regard to the Stuarts. Don’t you long Monsieur to see the Days when the smooth coated Quakers shall be all banished from your island, and from the Colony, to make Way for your Friends the Jews, and other Infidels? Don’t you also wish to see every Dissenter from the Kirks of England, Rome and Jerusalem perishing in the Flames of bigoted Faggot-binders . . .”
8. On 1 Jun. JHRM, 41: 13-14.
9. Most likely James Otis Jr. or Oxenbridge Thacher.
10. FB’s insouciance as to the possibility that he might not receive any salary was, as the last sentence indicates, contrived and provocative.
1. Samuel Waldo (1696-1759) had commanded a regiment of provincial soldiers at the capture of Louisbourg in 1745, and by the time of the second French war was the largest landowner in Maine; he tried, unsuccessfully, to lay claim to the entire interior stretching from the Penobscot coast to the St. Lawrence. Brig. Gen. Waldo’s estates were inherited largely by his eldest son Samuel Waldo Jr. (1723-70), representative for Falmouth in the General Court and a probate judge.
2. The dispute about the lands surrounding Fort Pownall must have had some bearing on FB’s decision to replace Col. Preble as the fort’s commander in 1763, even though at the time FB insisted that Preble’s removal was primarily to ease tensions with the Penobscot Indians. It seems that with the garrison unable to grow their own vegetables, Preble was able to profit from selling food to the men under his command. Bernard Papers 1: 431-432.
3. LbC: “manner following”.
4. Dates reordered by editor.
1. The Penobscot townships grants were first read at the Board of Trade on 22 May 1764 and referred to the Privy Council; they were referred back to the Board on 31 May and reconsidered on 16 Jul. JBT, 12: 58, 63, 100; APC, 4: 560.
2. See No. 274. Sir Matthew Lamb’s report on the province laws and the Impost Act was discussed by the Privy Council but no further action was taken. APC, 5: 31-33.
3. Thus in manuscript.
4. An act for incorporating the Indians and Mulattos, inhabitants of Mashpee (passed 16 Jun. 1763). Acts and Resolves, 4: 639-641. For background see Bernard Papers, 1: 95, 107-109, 181-182, 383.
5. Bamber Gascoyne (1725-1791), MP for Maldon, 1761-65, and Midhurst, 1765-68; a lord commissioner at the Board of Trade, 1763-65.
6. Jeremiah Dyson (1722-76), MP for Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, 1762-68, and a commissioner at the Board, 2 May 1764-1768.
7. George Rice (1724?-79), MP for Carmarthenshire, 1754-79, and a Board commissioner, Mar. 1761-70.
1. No. 288.
2. See No. 235, Bernard Papers, 1: 419.
3. Thus in manuscript.
4. His reluctance to travel was probably due to the smallpox epidemic. See source note to No. 260.
5. Not found.
1. Insertion by FB.
2. The New England colonies shared £235,749 for the Louisbourg campaign, while Massachusetts received nearly one-third of the £1,000,000 with which Britain’s reimbursed the American Colonies for their contributions in the French and Indian War. Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire before the American Revolution, 15 vols. (New York, 1936), 10: 51-61; Anderson, Crucible of War, 580-584.
3. Smudged. The second figure was intended to replace the first.
4. The largest number of troops recruited by Pennsylvania in a single year was 3,060, in 1759, one year after Massachusetts’s signal achievement of raising 7,000 men. Anderson, Crucible of War, 200, 322-323.
5. Thus in manuscript.
6. Postscript in FB’s hand.
1. No. 290.
2. TH was more scathing of the “great incendiary,” James Otis Jr., describing his pamphlet, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (which was published in Boston on 23 Jul.), as “a loose unconnected performance” that merely “boasts of his moderation.” TH to Richard Jackson, Boston, 23 Jul., 1764, Mass. Archs., 26: 99-100.
3. Trans.: “appealing to the people.”
4. This may be a reference to “Patriotism! A Farce. As it is acted by His Majesty’s Servants,” Newport Mercury, 30 Jul. 1764.
5. 4 Geo. 3, c. 15, Sect. 38 (1764) required governors to take an oath to “do their utmost” to enforce the act, subject to penalties (including fines and dismissal) specified in the Plantation Trade Act, 7 & 8 Will. 3, c. 22 (1695).
6. FB’s petition requesting confirmation (No. 248) had lain with the Board of Trade since Feb. but on 17 Jul. it was referred to the Privy Council, where it languished until a decision was finally made, in FB’s favor, in 1771. JBT, 11: 338-339.
7. These buildings had been put up during his second visit to the island, Sept.-Oct. 1763. No. 244, Bernard Papers, 1: 431.
8. FB’s plans for the development of Mount Desert are set out in Proposals for settling a Colony of Germans at a Town in Mount Desert, 8 Sept. 1764, BP, 10: 226-229; Proposals for a Fishery at Mount Desert, 5 Oct. 1764, ibid., 207-210.
9. Obscured by tight binding.
1. On 10 Mar. 1764.
2. An act for granting and applying certain Stamp Duties, and other Duties, in the British Colonies and Plantations in America, towards further defraying the expences of defending such parts of the said Colonies and Plantations, as direct the manner of determining and recovering the penalties and forfeitures therein mentioned. 5 Geo 3, c. 12 (1765).
1. Circular from the Board of Trade, 16 May 1764 (not found). JBT, 12: 52.
2. An act for regulating fees (passed 2 Dec. 1692). Acts and Resolves, 1: 84-88; an act for establishing and regulating the fees of the several officers, within this province (passed 13 Feb. 1760), ibid., 4: 291-299.
3. This is a clause in a statute referring to a special dispensation from the Crown to permit a particular action, regardless whether or not existing statutes might prohibit it. Based on OED.
4. In this forthcoming session the act for establishing and regulating the fees of the several officers, within this province, . . . was prepared in committee on 14 Jan. 1765, read in the House on 6 and 7 Feb., and passed 5 Mar. 1765. FB gave his consent on 9 Mar. Acts and Resolves, 4: 743-751; JHRM, 41: 151, 215-219, 258-260, 272, 283, 310.
5. The Massachusetts stamp duties act is one example. An act for granting to his majesty several duties upon vellum, parchment, and paper, for two years, towards defraying the charges of this government (passed 13 Jan. 1755). Acts and Resolves, 3: 793-796.
6. Chambers Russell, judge of the Vice Admiralty Court, 1746-66.
7. An act stating the fees of the Customhouse officers within this province (passed 20 Jun. 1716). Acts and Resolves, 2: 44-45.
8. An act for establishing a Naval Office and for ascertaining the fees (passed 28 Jun. 1701). Acts and Resolves, 1: 472-473.
9. Benjamin Pemberton presented his memorial on 27 Sept. 1750, and it was referred to the House committee reviewing the fees. JHRM, 27: 64.
10. No. 313.
11. The date order has been editorially altered.
1. Prime Minister George Grenville.
2. Scribal interlineation.
3. The Boston representatives were mandated by instructions of 24 May to persuade FB to summon the General Court “when so early notice was given by the Agent of the intention of the Ministry to burthen us with new Taxes, [and] so little regard was had to this most interesting Matter, that the Court was not even called together to consult about it till the latter end of the Year.” Reports of the Record Commissioners of Boston, 16: 121. Mauduit’s reports, as it transpired, were presumptuous in suggesting that Grenville was in favor of raising revenue by provincial legislation, which he had mooted in a speech to the Commons on 9 Mar. but did not clarify in a meeting with colonial agents on 16 Mar. See Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 76-85.
4. Thus in manuscript.
5. Jackson’s reputation as an opponent of the Stamp Tax rested largely on his work as a colonial agent in lobbying Prime Minister Grenville and his taking receipt of a treatise on the proposed stamp duty written by TH in Jul. 1764, which argued for colonial rather than parliamentary taxation; unfortunately Jackson’s American correspondence on this issue has not survived. Van Doren, Letters and Papers of Benjamin Franklin and Richard Jackson, 20-21; Bernhard Knollenberg, Origin of the American Revolution, 1759-1766 (New York, 1961), 186-187; Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 89. On Jackson and TH see Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 62-63; Hutchinson Correspondence, 1.
6. Hitherto FB’s letters to Jackson and the Board of Trade, in which he discussed Britain’s colonial reforms, had concentrated on the likely impact of the Sugar Act and had not addressed the Stamp Tax. Nos. 229, 245, 256, Bernard Papers, 1: 390-391, 432-433, 447-449. “The Principles of Law and Polity,” while proffering an orthodox defense of Parliament’s legislative sovereignty within the British Empire, noted that it would be “most adviseable to leave to the Provincial Legislatures the raising the internal taxes.” (prop. 44), Appendix 2.
7. FB finally received instructions to gather the necessary information in mid-Oct. No. 296. The assembly convened on 18 Oct. and on 3 Nov. approved a letter to Jasper Mauduit directing him to present the province’s petition to Parliament. JHRM, 41: 137.
8. Jackson joined other agents in remonstrating about the Stamp Tax in a meeting with Grenville on 2 Feb. 1765. Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 88-89.
1. Thus in manuscript.
2. Thus in manuscript.
3. Obscured by tight binding.
4. Manuscript torn.
5. Thomas Secker (1693-1768), archbishop of Canterbury from 1758 until his death.
1. Petition of Abowndrawonit on behalf of the Passamaquoddies, 30 Jun. 1763, Mass. Archs., 33: 233; [Conference with the Penobscot Indians, 17 Sept. 1763], ibid., 29: 488-492.
2. The king’s permission was required for any Crown servant to give an office or position of trust to a Roman Catholic.
3. Nelson R. Burr, The Anglican Church in New Jersey (Philadelphia, 1954), 93.
4. FB kept his own record of the conference, which he transmitted to London. [Minutes of a Conference with the Indians of Maine, 26-29 Sept. 1764], CO 5/755, ff 127-130. The conference at Fort Pownall was conducted with representatives of several Maine tribes, whom FB and others sometimes misleadingly lumped together under the label of “Penobscot Indians.” Much of the dialogue was conducted with Meserwanderomet, named as “Meser” in the documentation. (Sexton misspells the chief’s name as “Aleser” and errs also in dating the document, in “Massachusetts Religious Policy,” 310-328.)
1. James Cockle, collector of Customs at Salem, c.1760-64.
2. Benjamin Gumbs and Benjamin Roberts to James Cockle, 30 Jul. 1764, T 1/429, ff 192-193. Cockle had received a joint letter from Benjamin Gumbs (d.1768), the collector at Anguilla, and Benjamin Roberts, the naval officer there, warning that ships bound for Massachusetts were carrying forged clearance papers. The forgeries purported to show that their cargoes of molasses were not of foreign origin but the produce of Anguilla, a British colony in the Leeward Islands. Captains could use the forgeries to avoid payment of the 6d. per gallon duty on foreign molasses payable at the port of entry. FB learned from the subsequent interrogation of the smugglers that the forged clearances could be “purchased at Eustatia at about 20 portugal pieces of 36’ each.” FB to George Thomas, Boston, 3 Nov. 1764, BP, 4: 24.
3. 25 Aug.
4. The RC (not found) probably used the second-person personal in this expression.
5. For allegations concerning this particular matter see Appendix 3.1n3.
6. Temple to Board of Customs Commissioners, 3 Oct. 1764, T 1/429, ff 202-204, with an extract of another letter of the same date at f 200. See Appendix 3.1.
7. Having initiated the prosecution, FB then requested the governor of the Leeward Islands to confirm that the ships’ captains had never been issued genuine clearances. To George Thomas, Boston, 27 Aug. 1764, BP, 3: 42-43.
1. Nos. 276 and 285.
2. While the phrase is suggestive of servility, Barrington’s comment was not intended as a mild rebuke of Frank (the son of Barrington’s cousin Amelia); more likely, it was an affectation maintaining the pretence that obeisance should not be required of a family member. The phrase, however, originated with FB in No. 276, and FB might have pondered what other formulation he could have used to request that a noble Lord receive a visitor. FB was never so intimate with Barrington that he would deign to suggest that his son should “call upon” him as he might propose to a merchant or fellow professional.
3. Not found.
4. See No. 82, Bernard Papers, 1: 164-166, and for Barrington and Egremont, No. 86, ibid., 172.
5. Appendix 2 enclosed in No. 285.
6. Pownall had written FB on 12 Jul. expressing “hope” that the Mount Desert land grant would be “confirmed” (by the Privy Council) in the following week. BP, 10: 175-178. The letter was not received until 18 Oct., by which time FB had received news from Jackson that dashed his expectations for a speedy settlement. See No. 308.
7. The expression of concern for Amelia’s well-being might also have reflected Barrington’s own anxieties about the health of his wife Mary, who died on 24 Sept. 1764, having been “very ill and . . . not expected to live long.” Barrington to FB, Beckett, 3 Oct. 1764, BP, 10: 195-198. Mary was a commoner, the daughter of an ironmonger, and the widow of the Hon. Samuel Grimston, and she had been married to Barrington some twenty-four years, before she took ill. Barrington’s biographer, however, suggests that theirs was an “unhappy” marriage, sullied by Barrington’s extra-marital affairs. And yet in writing FB, whose marriage was stable and happy, Barrington’s sense of loss is palpable. Dylan E. Jones, “Barrington, William Wildman, second Viscount Barrington (1717–1793),” in ODNB-e (http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1535, accessed 26 Jun. 2011).
8. Not found.
9. The RC of FB to Barrington, Boston, 29 Jul. 1764, enclosed a third copy of “The Principles of Law and Polity” with a request that Barrington show it to Chief Justice Lord Mansfield. BP, 3: 236-237.
10. No. 383.
1. Left marginalia: “Govr. Bernard to Surveyor General”.
2. No. 302.
1. No. 301.
2. Petition of Abowndrawonit, 30 Jun. 1763, Mass. Archs., 33: 233.
3. The message has not been found. See No. 301n4.
4. James Stuart (1566-1625), the son of Mary Queen of Scots, reigned as James I of England and Ireland (1603-1625) and VI of Scotland (1567-1625).
5. While George III was the reigning British monarch at the cession of Canada in 1763, FB reveals that the Penobscots were continuing the French practice of refusing to recognize the Hanoverian monarchy. Thus, inadvertently, they were propagating the claim of the Old Pretender, James Francis Edward Stuart (1688-1766), as James III of England and Ireland, and James VIII of Scotland (still recognized as such by the Pope until his death, when Papal recognition of the exiled Stuarts as kings of these realms ceased).
6. Obscured by binding.
7. This entire paragraph is enclosed in square brackets added by a contemporary hand.
1. FB expected that Temple’s allegations would be seized upon by those merchants who had earlier supported the dissident customs officer Benjamin Barons in his campaign against the Customhouse (for which see Bernard Papers, 1: 72, 122, 132-133, 171). TH also noted that the merchants would not pass up any opportunity to embarrass FB, having recently suffered forfeitures of £3,000 (in which FB and Cockle were indubitably instrumental). TH to Jackson, Boston, 15 Oct. 1764, Mass. Archs., 26: 103-104.
2. Bottom of page in FB’s hand: “turn over 2 leaves”.
3. FB did not respond so quickly. No. 318.
4. However, it might be suggested that TH’s dissociation was a signal to Jackson that should the dispute between Temple and FB escalate, he was ready to take up the governorship. TH clarified his position a few weeks later musing to Jackson that having “lived in constant friendship with Mr. Bernard” and as a “second” enjoying “freedom of sentiment,” he was minded to resign his commission as lieutenant governor if he did not succeed FB. Boston, 5 Nov. 1764, ibid., 110-111.
1. Not identified. BP, 10: 175-178, received on 18 Oct.
2. James Rivers was an experienced undersecretary who had served four secretaries of state of the Northern Dept., most recently John Montague, (1718-92), fourth earl of Sandwich, Sept. 1763-Jul. 1765. Since 1755, Rivers had also been the “translator of southern languages.”
3. “The Grant of mount Desart will I hope be confirmed next week, I shall be happy to be the first to acquaint you of it, for I have your Interests most sincerely at heart.” From Pownall, London, 12 Jul. 1764, BP, 10: 175.
4. Not found. See No. 309.
5. ADft in BP, 10: 199-206.
6. Not found.
7. No. 306.
8. Enclosed in No. 309.
9. Not found.
10. Obscured by binding here and below.
11. Probably “A State of the Grant of the Island of Mount Desert,” [c.Oct. 1764], BP, 10: 216-219.
12. No. 313.
13. See Nos. 319 and 321.
14. Petition to His Majesty in Council, [c.Feb. 1767], BP, 12: 297-199. Barrington-Bernard, 259-263, dates this petition 1764, but it probably postdates the appointment of William Petty, the earl of Shelburne, as secretary of state, since the earl is mentioned in the text. Shelburne had been president of the Board of Trade 20 Apr.-9 Sept. 1763 and thereafter out of office until he returned as secretary of state on 30 Jul. 1766.
1. Not found, but see No. 308 for a précis.
2. Eliphalet Dyer (1721-1807) had carried Jackson a letter from FB concerning colonial boundary disputes. No. 230, Bernard Papers, 1: 391-393.
3. Proposals for settling a Colony of Germans at a Town in Mount Desert, 8 Sept. 1764, BP, 10: 226-229.
4. BP, 10: 175-178, received on 18 Oct.
5. See No. 308.
6. “A State of the Grant of the Island of Mount Desert,” [c.Oct. 1764], BP, 10: 216-219.
7. Thus in manuscript, for “Most”.
8. John Martin Shaeffer.
1. Not found, but dated Jul. 1764 and received on 10 Oct. BP, 3: 276. Jackson evidently expressed concerned that their private correspondence might have been tampered with and that their discussion about forming a new colony was somehow leaked. While there is no mention of their “Scheme” in the British newspapers, FB soon heard rumors that he might be moved to a new government. See No. 322.
2. See No. 179, Bernard Papers, 1: 306; No. 228, ibid, 387-389; No. 271.
3. Trans.: “in private.”
4. No. 278.
5. Letters obscured by tight binding.
6. No. 311.
7. The warrants were orders-in-council issued to Jackson and three others for land grants in Nova Scotia. See No. 312.
8. Meaning chosen. OED.
9. He is probably referring to West Florida, the territory between the Chattahoochee River and the Mississippi River that Spain ceded to Britain in 1763. British land speculators were intensely interested the region following the establishment of a civil government under the first Crown governor, George Johnstone (1730-87).
10. No. 312.
11. The Board of Trade was considering a memorial for land grants in Nova Scotia submitted by Florentius Vassall (1689–1778) on 11 May 1764. Vassall, a Jamaican-domiciled merchant and slave trader, had requested grants for the Island of Passamaquoddy (present-day Campobello Island) and 40,000 acres in Tatamagouche Bay, both in Nova Scotia. While in London, Vassall undertook to act as agent for the Plymouth Company (or Kennebeck Proprietors), which had title to lands fifteen miles either side of the Kennebec River. Gordon Kershaw, The Kennebeck Proprietors, 1749-1775 (Somersworth, N.H., 1975), 186-188. Florentius’s brother Leonard Vassall (1678-1727) had come to Boston in 1723 and was a major benefactor in the construction of Trinity Church; his daughter Elizabeth married Maj. Gen. John Barrington (1719-64), the younger brother of Lord Barrington, a cousin to Amelia Bernard. William H. Whitmore, “Boston Families of the Eighteenth Century,” in The Memorial History of Boston, including Suffolk County, Massachusetts, 1630-1880, eds. Justin Winsor and Clarence F. Jewett (Boston, 1880), 544; S. D. Smith and Ebooks Corporation, Slavery, Family, and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World of the Lascelles, 1648-1834 (Leiden, 2006), 24-25.
12. “A State of the Grant of the Island of Mount Desert,” [c.Oct. 1764], BP, 10: 216-219.
13. The Assembly was preparing a petition about the Sugar Act and impending Stamp Tax. See No. 315.
14. See No. 265n2.
15. No. 311.
1. Not found.
2. On the table-cloth, meaning under discussion.
3. He was responding to Jackson’s concerns about confidentiality. No. 310n1.
4. The Androscoggin River in the present day.
5. For Scotland: the Court of Session and the High Court of Justiciary. A supreme court of judicature was not established for England and Wales until 1873; before then superior jurisdiction was exercised by several courts with separate jurisdictions, inc. the Court of the King’s Bench, the High Court of Chancery, the Court of the Exchequer, the Court of Common Pleas, and the High Court of Admiralty.
6. Samuel Waldo Jr. (1723-70) of Falmouth was heir to his father’s lands in Maine.
1. John Michell (1711-66) (sometimes Jonathan Mitchell) was MP for Boston, Lincs., 1741-54 and 1761-66. Thomas Thoroton (?1732-94) was MP for Newark, Lincs., 1761-68; a political ally of the duke of Newcastle and a supporter of the Grenville administration, he opposed the repeal of the Stamp Act.
2. The “St. Croix River” identified by the survey team was the Magaguadavic River on the eastern side of Passamaquoddy Bay. The description of the grant in the paragraph that follows is referring to this river. See illustration on pp. 252-253. In later correspondence (No. 406) FB requested that the grants be laid out with reference to the Passamaquoddy River, on the western side of the bay.
3. Montague Wilmot (d.1766) was a career soldier, having attained the rank of lieutenant colonel of the 80th Regiment before his appointment as lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia in Mar. 1763; he succeeded Henry Ellis as governor in May following. The earl of Halifax was Wilmot’s patron and cousin.
4. Postscript in FB’s hand.
5. Not found.
1. No. 298.
2. See No. 340.
3. Smudged.
4. See also No. 298.
1. See No. 311.
2. This sentence in ADft: “Without that Consideration I should not recommend the dividing Connecticut, ^is desired or thought expedient^ ↑The dividing Connecticut in this manner would not be advisable↓ as it will create some internal Difficulties which are obvious to those who know the temper & disposition of the people of that Colony.”
3. Thus in manuscript.
4. Manuscript torn supplied from Dft.
5. Portland, Maine.
6. Thus in manuscript.
7. Dft: “distinctions of Religions ^Religious Divisions^”.
8. Emendation in ADft: “or upper house of Assembly”.
9. The “privy council” would come to constitute an American nobility, as he had advanced in “The Principles of Law and Polity,” prop. 89.
10. Emendation in ADft: “And this regulation will facilitate an alteration much wanted in the ^present^ Massachusetts Government”.
11. ADft: “It is well known that Constitution ^the appointment^ of the Council by annual Election is the a very faulty part of this Constitution ^the present Government of the Massachusets:^. And altho’ the Inconvenience of it is not felt in these quiet times whilst prudent & dis[. .] men preserve their weight ^authority^; yet in times of popular [re]vulsion it might go near to overturn the Government in little commotions It greatly weakens that the natural L[. ] & proper Support of it.”
12. Emendation in ADft: “constitutional”.
13. ADft: “therefore”.
14. FB’s third voyage to the region lasted from 27 Aug. to c.28 Sept. 1764.
15. Letters obscured by tight binding.
16. Dittography preserved.
17. See source note to No. 281.
18. The survey plans were consolidated in two maps by Francis Miller: A Draught of a Rout from Fort Pownall . . . to Quebec . . . by [the] Penobscot River, 1764, CO 700/MAINE17; Map of Penobscot Bay and Chadwick’s Survey of the Interior Parts of the Country From Penobscot to Quebec, 1765, CO 700/MAINE19. See illustrations on pp. 250-253.
1. Principally Appendix 2 and No. 256, Bernard Papers, 1: 447-449.
2. Select Letters: “would”.
3. Select Letters: this word omitted.
4. On 21 Mar., FB had instructed Richard Jackson to employ a high-ranking proctor to enter an appeal against the decree of the judge of the Admiralty of Rhode Island in a cause between FB and the Rhode Island governor, whereby he hoped to establish his entitlement to a share of a seizure made in Rhode Island. The dispute is not mentioned in the Admiralty Papers (ADM 2) or in the Records of the High Court of Admiralty and colonial Vice-Admiralty Courts (HCA), PRO. BP, 3: 224-225.
5. LbC: this sentence scored through.
6. Sections 60 and 61 of the Sugar Act (5 Geo. 3, c. 15), legislated a single Vice-Admiralty court for the American Colonies, which was then established at Halifax, Nova Scotia, by order-in-council. Dr. William Spry (d.1772) was the presiding judge when the court opened in Oct. 1764. The new court had both original and appellate jurisdiction, but did not replace the Massachusetts Court of Admiralty. Four courts, however, were established for all the colonies in 1768 under an act for the more easy and effectual recovery of the penalties and forfeitures inflicted by the acts of Parliament relating to the trade or revenues of the British Colonies and Plantations in America, 8 Geo. 3, c. 22 (1767). David S. Lovejoy, “Rights Imply Equality: The Case Against Admiralty Jurisdiction in America, 1764-1776,” WMQ 16 (1959): 459-484.
7. An act for preventing frauds and regulating abuses in the Plantation Trade, 7 & 8 Will. 3, c. 22 (1696).
8. Select Letters: “determine equally”.
9. No. 298.
10. FB is voicing a common concern that specie taken out of the colonies to pay taxes to Britain would be a drain on the economy. (For example, see a news article reprinted from the New York Mercury, 27 Aug. 1764, in the Boston Gazette, 10 Sept. 1764.) After the passage of the Stamp Act, however, the ministry settled on plans for collecting remittances in the colonies that would have seen most of the revenue expended there, for the upkeep of British forces. In the event, the stamp tax was not collected in the mainland colonies except Quebec, Nova Scotia, and the Floridas, bringing in but a fraction of the £60,000 expected annually. Jack M. Sosin, “A Postscript to the Stamp Act: George Grenville’s Revenue Measures: A Drain on Colonial Specie?” The American Historical Review 63 (1958): 918-923.
11. Select Letters: “means”.
12. On 9 Mar. 1759, the New York Assembly passed an act for raising £100,000 in bills of credit when it voted regiments of 2,680 for Gen. Amherst’s upcoming campaign. Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Colony of New York . . . 1743 . . [to] . . . 1765 (New York, 1766), 110.
13. Stowe copy: “wholly”.
14. The Currency Act, 4 Geo. 3, c. 34 (1764), was intended to prohibit colonial treasurers from issuing paper currency for private and public debts. The New England Colonies were not affected by this act and were restricted from issuing paper money as legal tender for the payment of public debts only, by an act of 1751. (The 1764 provisions affecting public debts were partially lifted in 1773.) FB was a hard-money advocate, but his comments here mirror what proponents of paper currency were saying about the impact of taxation: both sides feared a drain on specie. See Joseph Ernst, Money and Politics in America: A Study in the Currency Act of 1764 and the Political Economy of Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973).
15. Select Letters: “trade in America are”.
16. Select Letters: “and”.
17. Select Letters: “admit”.
18. The postscript was omitted from Select Letters.
19. An anonymous article tried to stir up resentment against FB by suggesting that Mount Desert Island should be valued at £10,000, and that FB’s request for confirmation would be accorded special consideration by the ministry. The implication was that the memorials concerning the Penobscot township grants would be allowed to languish. Another piece in the same issue observed that the assembly was preparing a petition with “effectual Care” (a dictum in royal instructions) to “remove from the Mind of the Mother Country, any Impressions that may have been made to our Disadvantage, by the late Insinuations of wicked and designing Men.” No mention was made of “The Principles of Law and Polity” but FB was the intended target (as is indicated by allusion to the “Cause of a lately suspended Officer” [James Cockle] being “so warmly espoused by a certain great Man” [FB]). Boston Gazette, 15 Oct. 1764.
20. Probably New York. See No. 319n6.
1. Stamps acts had been in operation in England since 1694. The Massachusetts stamp act was an act for granting to his majesty several duties upon vellum parchment and paper for two years towards defraying the charges of this government (passed 8 Jan. 1755). Acts and Resolves, 3: 793-796; Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 69.
1. The “Great Seal” bore the royal coat of arms of George III: the arms of England and Scotland were together in one quarter, with those of Hanover, France, and Ireland in the other three quarters. In documentation originating with British ministers and officials, the “Great Seal” was usually referred to as the province or public seal.
2. The governor’s seal was a personal seal which FB also used for secret correspondence: a “Chrystal Seal with the Arms quartered & a Scutcheon of pretence.” No. 371.
3. Stamp duty: 20s. Usually rendered as letters of marque and reprisal; these were licenses issued to ships’ captains and/or particular vessels enabling them to cross international boundaries to prosecute war, seize property, and undertake retaliatory raids.
4. The king’s writ of dedimus potestatem was a “Writ or Commission given to one or more private Persons, for the speeding some Act appertaining to a Judge, or some Court . . . granted most commonly upon Suggestion, that the Party who is to do something before a Judge, or in Court, is so weak that he cannot travel.” Jacob, Dictionary. In the instance mentioned by FB, the writ empowered governors and others to act in place of the king when administering the oaths required of appointees taking up Crown office.
5. A citation was a summons to appear in court, originally used in English ecclesiastical courts. Here summons refers to the particular writ issued to the sheriff to warn a person to appear. Compulsories are requirements in law.
6. A libel is the “original Declaration of any Action in the Civil Law.” Jacob, Dictionary. Normally used by FB and colonial lawyers to signify the commencement of a legal process against a person, as distinct from a “scandalous” report transmitted in writing.
7. Of these pleas, a replication is “an Exception or Answer made by the Plaintiff in a Suit to the Defendant’s Plea.” Jacob, Dictionary.
8. A deposition is the written testimony of a witness prepared in answer to an interrogatory; often used as evidence in court. “Interrogatories” are “particular Questions demanded of Witnesses brought in be examined in a Cause.” Jacob, Dictionary.
9. “Interlocutory” refers to unfinished business. An interlocutory order is “that which decides not the Cause, but only some Incidental Matter, which happens between the Beginning and End of it.” Jacob, Dictionary. Interlocutory decrees are judgments given during the course of and for the duration of court proceedings, and usually for a practical purpose, until final judgment is made or final decree granted.
10. Stamp duty: 5s. Probate is the process of exhibiting and proving wills and bonds in court.
11. Stamp duty: 5s. Bonds to secure payments under £10 were rated at 6d., those valued between £10 to £20 were rated at 1s., and over £20 at 1s. 6d.
12. Thus in manuscript.
13. A warrant ordering an estimation of value.
14. This is a writ granted for the exemplification—that is the copying and exhibiting—of an original record in a plea.
15. Instruments in this court were made subject to a 1s. stamp duty.
16. An information is a declaration made by an informer on behalf of the king and himself, where, if the suit is successful, the informer stands to benefit from the defendant being subject to the penalty at law; thus could informants enrich themselves by pursuing smugglers, rioters, or other lawbreakers.
17. Stamp duty of 5s.
18. A notice summoning a person to court.
19. A writ to apprehend a person and/or his goods for the purposes of answering the action of a plaintiff.
20. A writ to effect possession for a plaintiff.
21. A judicial writ summoning a person to demonstrate to the court good cause why actions against him should not proceed.
22. A writ to divide lands among coheirs or partners.
23. The writ of habeas corpus is an administrative remedy to deliver a “body” to court, and famously known as the instrument by which a person could challenge the legality of his detention. But it was also commonly used as a check on the judicial authority of a particular court or official. A writ of certiorari is a prerogative writ whereby superior and appellate courts can order an inferior court to submit a certified record for the purposes of ensuring that justice is done or to conduct a review of a case. A writ of prohibition was directed at a court that exceeded its jurisdiction, and it could be addressed to the parties in particular cases as well as the judge.
24. A writ to summon a jury.
25. Writs of assistance were general search warrants. The correct title is writs of assistants; these were writs issued under English laws instructing sheriffs and magistrates to assist named officers of the Crown to carry out their duties. They were commonly used by customs officers to search private property for contraband goods. The legality and constitutionality of these instruments were vigorously contested by the Massachusetts merchants in Paxton’s Case of 1761. One of the arguments delivered by the merchants’ lawyers (James Otis Jr., Jeremiah Gridley, and Oxenbridge Thacher) challenged the legitimacy of the Superior Court’s authority to issue writs of assistance, since that court had never done such a thing prior to Charles Paxton’s application in 1761. The merchants’ lawyers failed to overturn Paxton’s writ or prevent writs being issued thereafter. Daniel R. Coquillette and Neil Longley York, eds., Portrait of a Patriot: the Major Political and Legal Papers of Josiah Quincy Junior. Vol. 4. The Law Reports, Part One (1761-1765) (Boston, 2009), 194-207.
26. A declaration is the plaintiff’s written cause of complaint against the defendant. The plea is what the plaintiff and the defendants allege or claim for themselves in a cause about to be tried; they may be categorized broadly as either Crown pleas (suits in the king’s name) or common pleas (civil cases).
27. Both are written records given under oath, but depositions could be taken by subpoena and were made subject to cross-examination, whereas affidavits were statements given voluntarily without any cross-examination.
28. An official copy of a legal document.
29. Stamp duty: £10.
30. Stamp duties: 20s. for spirits, £3 for wine.
31. The writ of capias ad respondendum was an arrest warrant (technically, so that a magistrate could bring a defendant to answer a plaintiff); there were several kinds of writs of execution, and these were applicable after judgment had been obtained.
32. Stamp duty: 2s.
33. Thus in manuscript, meaning tenements.
34. Stamp duty: 2s. 6d.
1. FB to Halifax, Boston, 15 Oct. 1764, BP, 3: 178-179, acknowledging No. 297.
2. See No. 325.
1. 18 Oct.-3 Nov. 1764.
2. See No. 315n19.
3. See source note to No. 315.
4. In FB to the Board of Trade, Boston, 10 Oct. 1764, CO 5/892, ff 51-52.
5. No. 315.
6. The New York Assembly, between 11 Sept. and 21 Oct., approved three separate petitions to the King, the Lords, and the Commons. They were noted but not printed in the Boston Gazette, 5 Nov. 1764. The assembly’s assertion of the colonists’ “exclusive Right of Taxing themselves” in the petition to the king went much further than the Massachusetts’s assembly’s petition, which made no claim of right (for which see No. 321). Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 55-66. Journal of the Assembly of New York, 1743-1765, 769.
7. No. 320.
1. No. 286; to the Board of Trade, Boston, 18 Aug. 1764, CO 5/892, ff 37-39; 29 Sept., ibid., ff 46-48; 1 Oct., BP, 3: 174-175.
2. No. 286.
3. Representatives of these tribes arrived in Boston on 12 Aug. 1765 to “acknowledge their Subjection”: Noodogawerimet and Pierre Michael of the Norridgewalks, Joseph of the Wewenock, and Lewis of the Arasagunticooks. Boston Gazette 19 Aug. 1765.
4. Since 1760 the office of commissary general had been held by Thomas Hubbard (1702-1773), a merchant, former Speaker of the House, and councilor.
5. Debit and credit columns in double-entry book-keeping.
6. FB also relieved Jedidiah Preble of the command of Fort Pownall, notwithstanding the Prebles’ influence in the region. Unfortunately, the family history is silent on the matter of the brigadier being reproached by FB. Preble, Genealogical Sketch of the First Three Generations of Prebles in America, 41-59. But Preble’s own defense is included in FB’s record of the conference of 17 Sept. 1763. Mass. Archs., 29: 488-492.
7. Thomas Goldthwait (1718-99), originally a merchant, was representative for Chelsea, Suffolk Co., and moved to Maine in 1764, where he became one of the most influential and controversial figures in the region. FB’s respect for Goldthwait was enhanced by the latter’s handling of a minor crisis in the spring of 1764, brought on by “English” hunters trespassing on Indian land near Fort Pownall that escalated and jeopardized relations with the tribes. Bartlett J. Whiting, “Incident at Quantabacook, March, 1764,” The New England Quarterly 20 (1947): 169-196.
8. An act for continuing and amending an act made in the first year of his present Majesty entitled, an act for allowing necessary supplies to the Eastern Indians, and for regulating the trade with them & preventing the abuses therein (passed 4 Feb. 1764). Acts and Resolves, 4: 688-690.
9. The proposal for a garrison of British regulars would have taken responsibility for the establishment at the fort out of the control of the House of Representatives.
10. Sir William Johnson (1715-74) of New York, a noted interlocutor in Indian-colonial negotiations and the superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern Department.
11. After the first Stamp Act riot, a newspaper reported rumors from London that Johnson was lined up to replace a “certain governor,” whom Bostonians might have been tempted to speculate was FB. Boston Newsletter, 15 Aug. 1765.
12. Local affairs in Stockbridge town were by no means harmonious and both parties—the “English” and Mohican-Wappingers—increasingly favored separation. The underlying dispute was over land ownership: provincial land grants in Berkshire County encouraged new settlement, while the Indians themselves were being pressed to deed their own lands to the province, leaving the Stockbridge Township, by 1763, as virtually the last area of Indian-controlled land in the county. Stockbridge’s English residents returned land speculator Elijah Williams (1732-1815) in the election of 1763, ousting the Indians’ ally Timothy Woodbridge (c.1709-74). The validity of Williams’ election was challenged by Woodbridge’s supporters, but a provincial investigation upheld the result and in 1764 proposed separating the town by an act of the General Court, though the bill did not pass the assembly. Stockbridge failed to send any representative to the House in 1764, for the town’s administration was so shambolic as a result of the factional rivalry that procedures were not properly followed. In this letter, FB is probably referring to an election held in the town meeting c.21-30 Mar. 1764 that Timothy Woodbridge won with the support of the Indians. Woodbridge to FB, Stockbridge, 3 Feb. 1764, Mass. Archs., 33: 260-261. Woodbridge was elected and returned to the House in 1765. Edward Adams, Joseph Smith, and Thomas Cushing, History of Berkshire County, Massachusetts: with biographical sketches of its prominent men, 2 vols. (New York, 1885), 1: 314; Patrick Frazier, The Mohicans of Stockbridge (Lincoln, 1992), 184-187; G. Miles Lion, “The Red Man Dispossessed: The Williams Family and the Alienation of Indian Land in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 1736-1818,” The New England Quarterly 67 (1994): 46-76.
13. Thus in manuscript.
1. On 18 Oct. Bernard urged “Unity, Prudence, and Moderation.” JHRM, 41: 11.
2. These are described in No. 315n19.
3. The House approved the petition on 22 Oct. and the Council rejected it two days later.
4. On 24 Oct. JHRM, 41: 111.
5. On 25 Oct. Ibid., 112.
6. Written with a blank space between “reject” and “tion”.
7. On 3 Nov.
8. Thus in manuscript.
9. See No. 319n6.
10. No. 322.
11. The cover may have been the RC of Andrew Oliver to Jasper Mauduit, Boston, 28 Nov, 1764, Prov. Sec. Letterbooks, 2A: 61, 66-71.
1. Thus in manuscript.
2. Jonathan Williams Sr. (1719-96) was a Boston merchant and married to Franklin’s niece, Grace Harris.
3. The rumor is not mentioned in Williams’s correspondence with Franklin from this time. Franklin Papers, 11: 461.
1. The bankruptcy of James Cockle and his business partner, his brother John, was announced in the London Gazette, 27 Feb. 1759. They are described as “Fellmongers, Chapmen and Partners” and were obliged to “surrender” themselves to a Commission of Bankrupt in Mar. and Apr. so that creditors could prove their debts. They had been running a business preparing, tanning, and selling animal hides and making glue at premises occupying more than one acre and comprising a “new built” house, stables and buildings “as commodious as any in England” for such an operation. Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer, 16 Jun. 1759. The property was sold at auction and the proceeds would have been used to satisfy creditors before the commission eventually cancelled the debt. This was an infinitely preferable process to that which the law prescribed for insolvent debtors who were non-traders; unable to qualify as bankrupts, these unfortunates were held in prison until the debt was cleared by friends or family.
2. Interlineation in FB’s hand.
3. The Cockles had appointed 14 Dec. 1759 as the day for “fixing” dividends for their creditors. A last date for proving debts was scheduled for 15 Sept. 1762; a certificate discharging the Cockle brothers from bankruptcy was issued in Nov. 1766, though dividends continued to be paid by the brothers up until 1767. London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, 17 Nov. 1759; St. James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post, 1 Nov. 1766. When James Cockle left Lincoln in 1760, John Cockle would have been obliged to attend to the final dividend. This could mean that it was James who left his brother saddled with the debt when he came to Massachusetts, and not the other way round as he had professed to FB; this would explain Cockle’s reluctance to return to England immediately.
4. Trans.: “proven right in court”.
5. No. 326.
6. The Salem clerk, Sampson Toovey, had thus far provided Temple with his sole piece of incriminating evidence: that FB had received a share of the wine and lemons that merchants and ships’ captains had given Toovey when the clerk had acted as Cockle’s “Negociator.” Affidavit of Sampson Toovey, Salem, 27 Sept. 1764, T 1/429, f 205. The Whigs later published Toovey’s deposition thinking the incident might continue to embarrass FB. Boston Gazette, 12 Jun. 1769; [London] Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 24 Jul. 1769.
7. FB’s omission of the complaint against Cockle brought by the owners of the Gloucester was not disingenuous. As he explained to Halifax, he had come to the conclusion that the money which Temple claimed Cockle had extorted from them was a trumped up charge. No. 325.
1. No. 288.
2. On 28 Nov, with the Council’s agreement, FB issued a proclamation warning the colonists about the criminality of transporting the Acadians to any French colony and required shipmasters to lodge with the Naval Officer in Boston lists of any Acadians whom they had previously transported. CO 5/823, f 258.
3. Letters obscured by binding here and below.
4. The Acadians’ delegation was probably led by Paul Landry, who was the first to sign the group’s memorial submitted on 1 Dec. Paul Landry and other Acadians of that surname appear frequently in the provincial records relating to poor relief. After deportation from Nova Scotia, Paul Landry was placed at Chelmsford, Middlesex Co., where he resided between 1757 and 1759. He married another refugee, Rosalie Benoit, in 1759, and their three children were all born in Massachusetts (the last probably in Boston). The family was living at Acton in 1761, where they remained until coming to Boston in 1763 in the hope of being able to relocate to France or St. Domingue. They left for Quebec in 1766, with official permission, and settled at Yamachiche, south-west of Trois-Rivières. Mass. Archs., 24: 91, 463, 486, 513, 538, 565a; “Lists of Exiles,” Acadian & French-Canadian Ancestral Home Page.
5. Interlineation probably added by receiver: “^a Copy of the^”.
6. Charles-Henri Theodat (1724-94), the Admiral comte d’Estaing, is best known for his command of the French fleet in America in 1778. Between 1764 and 1766, he was governor of Isles sous le Vent (the French Leeward Islands) in the Caribbean, in which St. Domingue, on the island of Hispaniola, was a thriving commercial colony. Before d’Estaing’s arrival, the French home government made plans to settle German immigrants and “repatriated Acadians” in the deserted bay of Môle St. Nicholas on the northwest coast, where they were putting up new military installations. In Aug. 1764, d’Estaing contracted with North American merchants to bring in around six hundred Acadians and also relaxed trading restrictions with the British colonies. But concerns over smuggling, together with delays and escalating costs attendant to the construction of the St. Nicholas fort, led to d’Estaing’s removal in 1766. Dorothy Burne Goebel, “The ‘New England Trade’ and the French West Indies, 1763-1774: A Study in Trade Policies,” WMQ 20 (1963): 332-372, at 356, 358-361.
7. Contemporaneous brackets around “a copy of which”, probably added by receiver.
8. Brackets enclosing the first two sentences.
9. See also No. 348.
10. Possibly Capt. John Hansen, a mariner and privateer operating out of New York, as mentioned in the Boston Evening-Post, 15 Jun. 1761.
11. An ADft of Landry’s memorial (containing a full list of subscribers) and the original RC (containing emendations but no signatures) are in Mass. Archs., 24: 508, 510.
1. Thomas Lechmere (d.1766), Temple’s predecessor as surveyor general of the Northern District.
2. See Bernard Papers, 1: 132-133 and passim.
3. Thus in manuscript. FB variously used a comma or period in terminating this abbreviation.
4. No. 236, Bernard Papers, 1: 420-421.
5. No. 297.
6. Capt. Dougdale’s eight-gun schooner Magdalene arrived in Boston in the first week of Jul., and within one week seized five vessels coming “from the Eastward.” Providence Gazette, 7 Jul. 1764.
7. The Magdalene returned to Boston on Monday 2 Dec., but without Dougdale, who had been suspended at Halifax. FB likely knew of the suspension when he wrote this letter (though he does not mention it). While the grounds for Dougdale’s suspension are unknown it is possible that antagonism toward Temple may have had some bearing on Colvill’s decision. Boston Newsletter, 6 Dec. 1764. Dougdale had only been appointed to a command on 28 Dec. 1763 (recorded in the Admiralty Board minute of that day in ADM 3/71, n.p.). After the suspension, he subsequently left the service and was restored to half-pay; he later sought Admiralty approval for his decision to take employment with the East India Company. Minute of 11 Jun. 1766, ADM 3/74.
8. The Sally, master Daniel McCarthy, was owned by Thomas Boylston.
9. See No. 259.
10. Francis Waldo (1728-94), collector of the port of Falmouth, 1758-70, and representative for the town, 1762-63.
11. Identity unknown.
12. Editorially supplied.
13. He meant Anguilla.
14. Letters are obscured by binding.
15. Thus in manuscript.
16. Listed in the source note.
17. See source note.
18. The advertisement of sale notes that she was carrying 300 hogsheads of rice and 20 of tobacco. Boston Newsletter, 10 Nov. 1763. Daniel McCarthy, who had been ship master before the sale, remained in post after the Sally was seized then repurchased by Thomas Boylston. Boylston’s ownership is noted in the entry for 7 Nov. 1763 in List of Ships entered at Boston, 10 Oct. 1763-5 Jan. 1764, CO 5/850. McCarthy also captained Boylston’s vessels trading to Guadeloupe after the British occupation. Thomas Boylston to Messrs Kilby, Barnard & Partners in London, Boston, 13 May 1761, Boylston Papers, MHS.
19. George Grenville (1712-70) was a brother to Richard Grenville (1711-79), the second earl Temple and a patron and distant cousin to Surveyor General John Temple.
1. Cockle arrived in Massachusetts during the last week of Jul. 1760, to take up the post of collector at Salem and Marblehead (more than a year before Temple took charge of the Northern District). Mutual connections with Lincoln might explain why Cockle was able to gain FB’s confidence. Cockle had been appointed to the position at Salem, FB told Pownall, on the “recommendation” of John Monson (1727-74), the second baron Monson, a minor politician connected with the duke of Portland and the marquess of Rockingham. Monson’s uncle Charles Monson (?1695-1764), was MP for Lincoln, 1737-54, and had been a patron to FB. Moreover, FB was acquainted with Cockle’s father, William Cockle, an alderman of Lincoln. Boston Newsletter, 31 Jul. 1760; FB to John Pownall, Boston, 30 Nov. 1764, BP, 3: 267-269; No. 208, Bernard Papers, 1: 358-359.
2. According to FB, Cockle was the most effective customs officer in the province, with the notable exception of Charles Paxton. Cockle’s diligence, and use of the much-maligned writs of assistance, inspired the hatred of the Massachusetts merchants, long before Temple exposed Cockle’s corruption. (Notices concerning seizures of property made by Cockle that subsequently were sold by order of the Vice Admiralty Court can be found in the Boston Gazette 20 Jul. and 31 Aug. 1761.) In May 1763, FB invited Cockle to provide informal advice on the enforcement of the trade laws. No. 256, Bernard Papers, 1: 447.
3. Collusion between Custom House officers and merchants was commonplace, with officers accepting bribes in return for allowing merchants to pay duties on only part of their cargoes, as FB acknowledges in the next paragraph. Temple’s instructions for officers to enforce the Molasses Act rigorously were not issued until Dec. 1763 (No. 259). Thus, in this paragraph FB is establishing that his connection with Cockle rests wholly on their obligation to enforce an imperfect law. Subsequent paragraphs were calculated to demonstrate Cockle’s apparent ability to do just that.
4. Under the Molasses Act (sect. 1) and the Sugar Act (sect. 8) the duties and fines were payable in “ready money” (which could be silver coins of foreign origin and of different weights) but reported in sterling. The money was converted into a sterling value using a Crown standard that evaluated one ounce of silver at 5s. 6d. FB is suggesting that Cockle profited from the conversion by charging a commission from an exchange rate above 6 per cent.
5. In Appendix 3.2.
6. Benjamin Lynde Jr. (1700-81), a Salem lawyer and farmer, and long-serving member of the General Court; he had been a councilor since 1745 and a justice of the Superior Court since 1746.
7. Cockle’s commission as a justice in Essex Co. is dated 6 Jul. 1763. William H. Whitmore, The Massachusetts Civil List for the Colonial and Provincial Periods (Albany, 1870), 135.
8. Robert Hooper (1709-90) of Marblehead was a wealthy merchant twice elected to the Council (1757 and 1758), but who, by the 1760s, eschewed public service in favor of business.
9. Benjamin Pickman (1708-73), Nathaniel Ropes (1724-74), and Andrew Oliver Jr. (1731-99).
10. Collusion in fraud was subject to a £50 fine and dismissal under the Molasses Act (sect. 6). The Sugar Act (sect. 38) raised the fine to £500 per infringement.
11. No. 323.
1. No. 297.
2. Thomas Fitch (1700-74) of Connecticut.
3. See No. 268.
4. FB subsequently arranged for the chief justice to give John Fisher a “standing” writ of assistance, the first time it had been issued to a Naval Officer, shortly before he was appointed to replace James Cockle as collector of Customs at Salem in the spring of 1765. FB’s two letters to Fisher: one undated [c. Mar.] and one dated 20 Apr. 1765, BP, 4: 37-38, 41.
5. Ropes and chains that work the sails. OED.
1. No. 303; Beckett, 3 Mar. 1764, BP, 10: 195-198.
2. Thus in manuscript.
3. The subject of the Naval Office was discussed at some length by FB and Barrington between 1761 and 1763. See Nos. 82 and 166. Bernard Papers, 1: 164-165, 284-285.
4. Benjamin Pemberton (1697-1782) had been Naval Officer since 1734 and had agreed to continue jointly with Francis Bernard Jr.
5. Frank Bernard’s twenty-first birthday was on 27 Sept. 1764.
6. William Baker (1705-1770), a merchant and Alderman of the City of London and a noted friend of America.
7. Appendix 2 noted by Barrington in No. 303.
8. See No. 309.
1. No. 325.
2. Benjamin Hallowell (1724-99) had captained the province sloop King George before being appointed comptroller of Customs at Boston in 1764, which position he held in until 1770. Misspellings of his name have not been corrected.
3. Roger Hale had been a landwaiter at the port of London, before his appointment in Mar. 1762, as collector of Customs at Boston. He proved to be an effective replacement for George Craddock (judging by newspaper reports of Hale’s several seizures), and evidently was acquainted with FB’s erstwhile friend Claudius Amyand. Hale returned to England on 12 Sept. 1765. Boston Evening-Post, 31 May 1762, 16 Sept. 1765; Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser, 20 May 1765; FB to Claudius Amyand, Boston, 8 Dec. 1764, BP, 3: 269-270.
4. Thus in manuscript. The ellipsis signifies a crude phrase, probably “wipe his arse.”
5. “Unioned” refers to transferring cargo ashore by a system of ropes, hooks, and pulleys operated on the dockside. It probably derives from “Union purchases,” a method of cargo-handling based on the “principle of using the double line with a single hook for the combined process of lifting and slewing.” OED.
6. That is, a duel. FB’s account is an early indicator of Temple’s propensity for dueling. The most notorious incident proved to be Temple’s pistols and swords contest with William Whately of 11 Dec. 1773, ignited by rumors as to Temple’s part in the publication in Boston earlier that year of controversial anti-Whig letters which TH had written Whately’s now-deceased brother. On that occasion, Temple wounded his opponent and the affair prompted Benjamin Franklin to admit his guilt in purloining copies of TH’s correspondence. Thomas Hutchinson, Copy of letters sent to Great-Britain, by His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, the Hon Andrew Oliver, and several other persons, born and educated among us . . . (Boston, 1773).
1. That is, a reservation clause.
2. John Martin Shaeffer and Johann Most.
1. In proposing Jackson’s candidacy to the House, FB emphasized Jackson’s personal attributes and his experience as an agent; in writing British correspondents, FB stressed the partisan nature of Jackson’s election on 24 Jan. In neither undertaking, however, was FB was slow to highlight the one important advantage that everyone in Massachusetts supposed that Jackson’s election would provide them: a conduit to power. In a letter to Halifax, FB intimated that the House and Council had given “proof” of being presently “well disposed to Government . . . by choosing Mr Jackson Secretary of the Chancellor of the Exchequer for their Agent.” 26 Jan. 1765, CO 5/755, ff 215-216. To Pownall, FB wrote that “that Mr. Jackson’s relation to Mr. Grenville was not forgot upon this Occasion.” Boston, 26 Jan. 1765, BP, 3: 273.
2. Obscured by binding.
3. Meaning, associating with. The last letter is indistinct.
4. TH’s plurality of offices was a major source of irritation to the Whigs in the pre-revolutionary period. He was lieutenant governor from 1758 to 1771; acting governor, 1769-71; chief justice, 1760-71; and judge of probate for Suffolk County, 1752-69. The captaincy of Castle William was an honorific position.
5. Edmund Trowbridge (1709-93), Massachusetts attorney general, 1749-67.
6. This correspondent has not been identified from Mayhew’s printed correspondence. One guess is William Allen (1704-80), merchant and chief justice of Pennsylvania since 1750.
7. Possibly James Otis Jr. (1725-83), representative for Boston, 1761-69 and 1771. On 23 Jan., Otis attended the Council with a message from the House proposing to hold a joint ballot on the following day to elect the agent. Mauduit’s resignation on grounds of ill health had been accepted earlier that afternoon, whereupon the House resolved to limit the agent’s term to three years. JHRM, 41: 175.
8. The proceedings are in JHRM, 41: 203, 216-225, 293.
9. That is 23 Jan.
10. On 24 Jan. JHRM, 41: 177-178.
11. TH, who was present, reported that Jackson received a total of 66 votes, though his report is consistent in regard to FB’s other figures. TH to Jackson, 25 Jan. 1765, Mass. Archs. 25: 128 and Hutchinson Correspondence, 1.
12. This paragraph may have been a postscript but is inserted where it appears in the manuscript.
13. Around -21° Celsius.
1. William Henry Lyttleton (1724-1808), governor of Jamaica, 1761-66.
2. Ward and Orr were also owners of the vessels. List of vessels entered inwards to the port of Boston, 5 Jan.-5 Apr. 1763. CO 5/850; FB to Henry Lyttleton, Boston, 2 Apr. 1765, BP, 4: 38.
1. No. 331.
2. Left marginalia: “1”.
3. See No. 213, Bernard Papers, 1: 364.
1. No. 312.
2. Not found. FB replied on 21 Jan. and discussed the findings of Champlain, for which see note 6 below. BP, 4: 28-29.
3. Cyprian Southack (1662-1745) was captain of the province sloop Massachusetts for seventeen years, and his New England Coastal Pilot, first produced in eight sections between 1729 and 1734, provided the most comprehensive charts of the northeastern seaboard then available. FB likely is referring to the rare 1758 edition (not found) in which the separate sections were combined into a single map (and reprinted in 1775). The New England Coasting Pilot from Sandy Point of New York, unto Cape Canso in Nova Scotia and part of Island Breton with the courses and distances from place to place, and towns on the Sea-Board . . . (London, 1734); Cyprian Southack, et al., An Actual Survey of the Sea Coast from New York to the I. Cape Briton with tables of the direct and thwart courses & distances from place to place (London, 1775); Clara Egli LeGear, “The New England Coasting Pilot of Cyprian Southack,” Imago Mundi 11 (1954): 137-144.
4. John Mitchell (1711-68). John Mitchell and Thomas Kitchin, A Map of the British and French Dominions in North America, with the roads, distances, limits, and extent of the settlements, humbly inscribed to the Right Honourable the Earl of Halifax, and the other Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners for Trade & Plantations . . . ([London], 1755).
5. Henry Popple, Samuel Harding, and W. H. Toms, A Map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish settlements adjacent thereto (London, 1733); James Turner, Map of the Province of Nova-Scotia and parts adjacent (Philadelphia, 1759).
6. Pierre Du Gua De Monts (c.1558-1628). Sieur de Monts was the leader of the first French expedition to Acadia, 1604-07, and established base camps at the estuary of the “River St. Croix.” FB is referring to the maps produced by the expedition’s famous cartographer, Samuel de Champlain (1567-1653), that were subsequently published in Paris.
7. Mark Lescarbot, Nova Francia, or the Description of that part of New France, which is one continent with Virginia, described in the three late Voyages and Plantation made by M. de Ponts, M. du Pont-Grave and M. de Poutrincourt into the countries called by the Frenchmen La Cadie, 4 vols. (London, 1654); Samuel de Champlain, et al., Les voyages de la Novvelle France occidentale, dicte Canada, faits par le Sr de Champlain Xainctongeois, capitaine pour le roy en la marine du Ponant, & toutes les descouuertes qu’il a faites en ce paèis depuis l’an 1603. iusques en l’an 1629 . . . (Paris, 1632). The accounts of both de Monts and de Champlain were printed in Samuel Purchas, et al., Haklvytvs posthumus, or, Pvrchas his Pilgrimes contayning a history of the world, in sea voyages, & lande-trauells, 4 vols. (London, 1625), vol. 4.
8. That is to say, within Massachusetts’s jurisdiction, were it so proven: thus, FB requested Michael Francklin to ensure that a grant of land between the rivers Deckwessit and Passamaquoddy under the Nova Scotia seal be avoided. Boston, 9 Apr. 1765, BP, 4: 39.
9. Faint.
1. No. 324.
2. Francis Seymour-Conway (1718–94), first marquess of Hertford and older brother to Henry Seymour Conway, was ambassador to France, 1763-65. Halifax’s letter to Hertford has not been found among the ambassador’s diplomatic papers for this period in BL: Add 57831.
3. No. 314; Halifax to FB, St. James’s, 10 Nov. 1764, BP, 10: 250-253; Nos. 316 and 318.
1. Left margin: virgule marking the reference to the enclosure.
1. No. 331.
2. No. 333.
3. Not found.
4. No. 321.
5. Letters to Jackson: 14 Nov. not found; No. 321; No. 322; 10 Dec. not found.
1. No. 235, Bernard Papers, 1: 419-420. The passage reads:
For the present, I can only add that it may, perhaps, upon further Information, be judged most expedient to remove these People to Quebec: But I can, by no means, conceive it advisable to collect them in a Body, and plant them, a Papist Colony with an established Priest, on any Part of the Eastern Shore.
2. Thus in manuscript.
3. See No. 324.
4. Not found.
1. Nos. 336 and 342.
2. Thus in manuscript.
3. On 7 Mar. JHRM, 41: 297. The House concluded that Bollan had charged an excessive commission or “poundage” for all the business and services that he had conducted for the province, and on 11 Jun. resolved that he should repay over £1,200; Bollan refused and continued to defend his entitlement. JHRM, 42: 45. Malcolm Freiberg, “William Bollan, Agent of Massachusetts, part 4,” Boston Public Library, More Books 23 (1948): 168-182, at 170-171. In settling Mauduit’s account the assembly allowed him a commission of £1,514, but, much to his chagrin, gave him a retrospective annual salary of only £100, rather than the £500 he supposed he deserved. (He was also liable for the settlement of over £56,333 of province monies still in his hands.) Passed in Council 18 Jun. Acts and Resolves, 18: 26; Ford, Jasper Mauduit, 179-183.
4. FB failed to persuade the House to increase the original sum, and on 8 Nov. the assembly directed the province treasurer to pay Jackson £200. Acts and Resolves, 18: 72.
1. An act for allowing necessary supplies to the Eastern Indians, and for regulating trade with them and preventing abuses therein (passed 7 Mar. 1765). Acts and Resolves, 4: 763-766.
2. LbC: “Indian”.
3. No. 274.
4. An act for preventing fraud in debtors and for securing the effects of insolvent debtors for the benefit of their creditors (passed 9 Mar. 1765). Acts and Resolves, 4: 777-781.
5. An act providing remedy for bankrupts and their creditors (passed 31 Aug. 1757; disallowed by the Privy Council 23 Jul. 1758). Acts and Resolves, 4: 29-44.
6. The bankruptcy of Nathaniel Wheelwright, a leading Boston merchant, in Jan. precipitated several other bankruptcies in the province that threatened wider business failures.
7. The bankrupt merchants presented a petition on 6 Feb. 1764, but it was declined on 8 Feb. JHRM, 41: 216, 223.
8. On 16 Dec. 1763, the New York Assembly passed an act to continue an act, entitled, an act for the relief of insolvent debtors, and for repealing the acts therein mentioned. Journal of the Assembly of New York, 1743-1765, 738.
9. FB may have preferred a provincial bankruptcy act along the lines of the disallowed 1757 act, which was modeled on English practice. That act had conferred bankruptcy status only on traders (as did English law) and proposed the establishment of a commission to oversee the proving of debts and repayment of dividends to creditors. (These practices were continued by the British Bankrupts Act, 4 Geo. 3, c. 33 [1763].) The Massachusetts act of 1765 made no such provisions, though it did provide for court intervention and trustees to regulate the seizure of the estates of insolvent debtors. Legal processes and practices varied considerably from colony to colony, though generally colonial legislation was intended to enable creditors to pursue insolvent debtors rather than to assist debtors in discharging their debts; only Rhode Island and the Carolinas had bankruptcy laws that gave insolvents the right of action. As FB relates, the common scenario was a “general scramble” by creditors to grab whatever they could. Peter J. Coleman, Debtors and Creditors in America: Insolvency, Imprisonment for Debt, and Bankruptcy, 1607-1900 (Madison, 1974), 6-15.
10. An act for establishing and regulating the fees of the several officers within this province, hereafter mentioned (passed 5 Mar. 1765). Acts and Resolves, 4: 743-751.
11. An act for granting unto His Majesty an excise upon spirits distilled, and wine, and upon limes, lemons, and oranges (passed 7 Mar. 1765). Ibid., 4: 753-763.
12. For the province debt see No. 234, Bernard Papers, 1: 411.
13. An act for granting unto His Majesty several rates and duties of impost and tunnage of shipping (passed 8 Mar. 1765). Acts and Resolves, 4: 767-774.
14. An act to carry into execution an order of the General Court, for numbering the people within this province (passed 5 Mar. 1765). Ibid., 4: 752-753.
15. No. 234, Bernard Papers, 1: 404-405.
16. The bill was first proposed on 2 Jun. 1763, but failed to pass the House. On 20 Jan. 1764, FB urged the House to reconsider the matter; the act was eventually passed and engrossed on 26 Feb. and enacted on 9 Mar. JHRM, 40: 44, 103-104, 251-252, 260, 266; 41: 245-246, 273-274, 287, 310.
17. These bills were introduced together on 18 Jan. 1765, and after being read and passed by the House on 1 Mar. were sent up to the Council. Ibid., 41: 163-164, 280, 284, 286, 293, 295.
18. Meaning, as much as is deserved: a legal principle requiring fair payment corresponding to the value of the goods or services purchased.
19. Sir Fletcher Norton was Grenville’s attorney general, 1763-65. There is no mention of any attorney general’s report regarding Rhode Island legislation on this topic in JBT or APC. Rhode Island’s act for establishing and regulating fees was passed in May but repealed in Oct. 1764. John Russell Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England, 10 vols. (Providence, 1856), 6: 413.
20. FB to Halifax, Boston, 23 Oct. 1764, CO 5/755, ff 115-118.
21. “Admiralty jurisdictions reserved.” The Charters and General Laws of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay: Carefully collected from the Publick Records and Ancient Printed books; . . . Published by order of the General Court (Boston, 1814), 36.
22. On 6 Mar.
23. No. 313.
24. No. 298.
25. The House voted a total of £800 for the Superior Court justices on 1 Feb. 1765, and a resolve to that effect was passed by the General Court three days later. JHRM, 41: 203; Acts and Resolves, 17: 599.
26. The sum was actually £40, resolved in the affirmative. Ibid. 204.
1. Not found.
2. John Temple.
3. Thus in manuscript.
4. Sent to Pownall via Richard Jackson No. 347.
5. See illustrations on pp. 250-253.
1. Temple to FB, Ten Hills, 12 Apr. 1765, Temple Papers, 1762-1768, Taunton: 289.
1. This paper was prepared shortly after the meeting with Temple and presented to the Council on 15 Apr. CO 5/823, f 271.
2. The section covering the events of Friday 12 Apr. is omitted from Temple’s RLbC, presumably because it was missing from the copy that FB sent Temple.
3. From John Temple, Ten Hills, 12 Apr. 1765, T 1/442, f 304.
4. No. 347: copy at T 1/442, f 304.
5. Temple’s copy begins with this line.
6. Joseph Dowse (b.1747) was the surveyor, searcher, and landwaiter (usu. abbreviated to searcher) at the Salem Customhouse. He verbally related to the Council on Monday 15 Apr. his account of the meeting with FB on the Saturday evening. Dowse’s “Representation of what pass’d between the Surveyor General and Gov. Bernard,” 15 Apr. 1765, was forwarded to the Treasury by Temple. T 1/442, f 402.
7. Robinson to Temple, Taunton, 13 Apr. 1765, T 1/442, ff 215-216.
8. Barons v Lechmere, 1761.
9. On this particular point, Temple was echoing the sentiments of Robinson, who had been determined to recover the cargo that had been rescued from the Polly. Robinson had planned to get the marines from HMS Maidstone to accompany the magistrates in a house to house search. But he realized that he would require “some further Aid” from the governor if the plan were to executed legally: not only would FB need to give clear directions to the justice of the peace but the justices would also have to obtain writs of assistance (general search warrants) which, as FB instructed Temple, could only be issued by the Superior Court. A Narrative of the Proceedings relating to the sloop Polly, Rhode Island, 9 Apr. 1765, Temple Papers, 1762-1768: Taunton, 287-288. When it became clear that a search would be resisted, Robinson reported to Temple from Bristol Ferry that the “Country is in Arms,” and from Taunton jail proposed that the “Greatest Exertion of the Power of the Crown” was necessary to enforce the law. Bristol Ferry, 11 Apr. 1765, ibid., 285-286; Taunton, 13 Apr. 1765, ibid., 292-293. For copies see Appendix 3.4.
10. He was writing Stephen Hopkins, governor of Rhode Island, about the incident.
1. No. 338. Dispatch noted in BP, 4: 45.
2. No. 335.
1. John Temple to FB, Ten Hills, 12 Apr. 1765, Temple Papers, 1762-1768, Taunton: 289; FB replied with No. 342.
2. Proceedings of 13 Apr. 1765 in CO 5/823, f 271.
3. Samuel White (1710-69), Speaker of the House in 1765-65; Timothy Fales (1690-1777), Robert Treat Paine (1731-1814), Ezra Richmond (c.1721-1800), and James Williams (1724-68).
4. Temple’s first letter notifying Robinson was dispatched too early to enclose the printed proclamations. Temple to Charles Antrobus and John Robinson, Boston, 13 Apr. 1765, Temple Papers, 1762-1768: Taunton, 291. The proclamations instead went in a letter of 14 Apr. Ibid., 299.
5. Joseph Dowse, the searcher at the Salem Customhouse.
6. See No. 344.
7. 15 Apr., CO 5/823, ff 271.
8. The salutation ought to have been “His Excellency the Governor.” Temple also underlined the phrase “deliberations in Council,” which form FB interpreted as a “sneer.” John Temple to Andrew Oliver, 15 Apr. 1765, Customs GB II: Taunton.
9. CO 5/823, f 271.
10. Mass. Archs, 56: 446.
11. What follows is an edited version of the Council’s minute for Monday 15 Apr. 1765, CO 5/823, f 271 (RbC). It is a fair and accurate précis, except in one respect, for which see note 12.
12. RbC: the phrase “had acted in this business” is rendered as “proceeded”.
13. That is, complaint.
14. This clause is a quotation from the RbC.
15. Ditto.
16. RbC: “has”.
17. The following account is based upon Robinson’s Narrative of 9 Apr., yet omits some important details, which Robinson provided later, in No. 352.
18. Nicholas Lechmere and “Daniel” as Robinson first referred to him. Ibid. He gave the full name of Daniel Gutridge or Guteridge in No. 352.
19. FB was comfortable in contradicting Robinson, for the only evidence that a mob was hunting the customs officers was hearsay, albeit that the source was a magistrate, Col. Ezra Richmond.
20. This section was probably informed by verbal reports from Charles Paxton, who had brought a writ of assistance with him to Taunton. Robinson’s own account is in Charles Antrobus and John Robinson to John Temple, HMS Speedwell, 18 Apr. 1765, Temple Papers, 1762-1768: Taunton, 304-305.
21. William McWharton, according to No. 351.
22. Thus in manuscript.
23. No. 347. “Authentick” is used here because John Temple had prepared his own minute of a Council meeting held on 20 Apr. (which he did not attend) whereat the Council purportedly reviewed the discussions held on 13 and 15 Apr. Temple Papers, 1762-1768: Taunton, 305-306. These discussions were not recorded in the Council’s executive record book. CO 5/823, f 272.
1. Nos. 344 and 346.
2. Cover letter not found.
3. Francis Miller, Map of Penobscot Bay and Chadwick’s Survey of the Interior Parts of the Country from Penobscot to Quebec, 1765, CO 700/MAINE19.
4. CO 700/MAINE17. For both maps see illustrations on pp. 250-253.
5. Charts of Passamaquoddy Bay, 1764, Spencer Bernard Papers, MP/6.
6. Not found.
7. No. 314.
8. Francis Miller produced several maps from these surveys including A Plan of the Roads between Boston and Albany, 1765, Spencer Bernard Papers, MP/24; there are two “Sketch Maps” of the road from Boston to St. George’s Fort, from the 138th and the 150th miles north of Boston, 1765, in NWHMC.
1. No. 335.
2. FB raised the question of resettlement with James Murray, governor of Quebec, but without making a formal request. No. 345.
1. No. 330.
2. No. 318.
3. No. 347.
4. Thus in manuscript.
5. Smudged.
6. Thus in manuscript.
7. The verb is missing. A non-contemporaneous annotation to the manuscript suggests “spoken” was intended. The sentence can thus be read as “spoken in the humblest manner”.
8. Otis wrote three pamphlets in 1765 that retracted or qualified some of the arguments he had made about the unconstitutionality of direct parliamentary taxation in The Rights of the British Colonies. The first pamphlet, to which FB refers, was A Vindication of the British Colonies, Against the Aspersions of the Halifax Gentleman (Boston, 1765) In this essay, Brennan notes, Otis gave up claiming that the colonists had the sole right to raise taxes, a position he confirmed in two subsequent papers. Otis now preferred to question the “equity of such taxation” (p. 701) by which he challenged the fairness of the statute (the Stamp Act) rather than the authority on which it was based (parliamentary sovereignty). This was the third occasion that Otis appeared to reach what Shaw calls a “truce” with FB’s administration. Otis’s apparent inconsistency was the main reason for his waning influence, though he soon recovered his leadership position and refocused his energies in attacking TH and FB rather than Parliament. Otis’s inner turmoil may have been linked to the onset of the mental illness that bedeviled him in the late 1760s, and was indicative of genuine psychological anxieties attendant to the ideological tensions experienced by many Whig leaders during the imperial crisis. Ellen E. Brennan, “James Otis: Recreant and Patriot,” New England Quarterly 12 (1939): 691-725; Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 53, 140; Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 86-101; Nicolson, The ‘Infamas Govener’, 106-108.
1. Their meeting is discussed in No. 353.
1. No. 350.
2. William Spry (d.1772), a doctor of law, was the judge of Vice Admiralty Court at Halifax, N.S., with jurisdiction over all the colonies.
1. Jerathmiel Bowers (1717-99) of Swansea was probably a merchant by occupation and was elected to the House of Representatives each year from 1759 to 1774. His election to the Council was vetoed by FB in 1766 and by TH in 1772. Ezra Richmond (c.1721-1800), a farmer and a Louisbourg veteran, was representative for Dighton, 1752-54 and 1766-67.
2. An information is a sworn written statement setting out criminal charges, in this case against Job Smith.
3. Bowers and Richmond were both active legislators and Whigs, and their response to Robinson was certainly colored by their dislike of the trade laws. They did not require a writ of assistance to aid Robinson in recovering contraband goods. But they were correct in insisting that writs of assistance could only be issued by the Superior Court. Neither Bowers nor Richmond were possessed of such a writ and thus would have been obliged to make application to a court for the requisite authority to search Smith’s premises. The question remains, however, as to why Robinson himself did not have a writ of assistance: the problem was resolved when customs officer Charles Paxton arrived from Boston with just such an instrument. See also Appendix 3.4.
4. Probably George Leonard (c.1689-1778) of Norton, judge of Bristol County Probate Court, 1747-74, and a member of the Council from 1742 through 1765.
1. No. 346.
2. FB’s most recent attack on Temple was in No. 346, having vilified Temple with Nos. 318, 325, and 329.
3. Obscured by tight binding here and below.
4. About 15 or 16 Apr.
5. 9 May.
6. FB advised Robinson of their respective legal responsibilities in No. 350.
1. No. 297. FB’s previous reports of illicit trading mentioned Connecticut as the likely entry point for the smuggled Dutch tea that was being sold in Boston. FB frequently lamented the lax enforcement of trade laws in Connecticut and Rhode Island. No. 327.
2. FB and Temple argued about the value of informers: to FB they were an essential part of law enforcement, while Temple thought them an unnecessary expense and constant irritant in relations with local merchants. Their disagreement on this issue can be traced to the Barons controversy of 1761. Bernard Papers, 1: 136n5.
3. Contemporaneous brackets begin at the start of this paragraph and close on f 249 at “never failed in”.
4. LbC contains a left marginal annotation in FB’s hand: “here begins dup to Lords of Trade”. (The corresponding paragraph is marked by a line.) This is a reference to the duplicate of FB to the Board of Trade, Boston, 17 May 1765, for which the original is in CO 5/891, ff 260-261 (ALS, RC).
5. James Otis Jr., who resigned in 1761.
6. LbC: “Officers”.
7. For Auchmuty, FB also wrote letters of recommendation to the Board of Trade (see note 4 above), John Pownall (BP, 3: 291), and the secretary of the Admiralty (BP, 3: 292). Robert Auchmuty (1724-88), a successful barrister, had been appointed Bollan’s deputy sometime in 1762 following James Otis’s resignation (Bollan having long been resident in London) and continued as acting advocate general. (When later defending a claim for compensation submitted to the royal commission on the Loyalists, Auchmuty professed to have been “an entire stranger” to FB, before his appointment was confirmed in 1766; this was patently untrue given the assistance that he had already provided FB in prosecuting smugglers.) The office of advocate general was an unsalaried position, but Auchmuty was entitled to a share of prosecutions. In 1767, again on FB’s recommendation, Auchmuty was appointed judge of the Vice Admiralty Court in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and the following year was made judge of the new Vice Admiralty Court established at Boston with jurisdiction over New England and a Crown salary of £600. Auchmuty thereupon cut back on private practice, though he notably defended Capt. Thomas Preston and British soldiers during the Boston Massacre trials. Jones, Loyalists of Massachusetts, 12-16; ADM 2/1057, ff 251, 288-291.
8. Discounting any of the judges in the existing Vice Admiralty Court or province courts, this “Gentleman” would likely have been one of the province’s experienced barristers, such as John Worthington of Springfield or James Putnam of Worcester, rather than younger aspirants for Crown office such as Jonathan Sewall (who succeeded Auchmuty as advocate general in 1767 when Auchmuty was promoted to the bench of that court). This surmise is based on a seniority ranking from 1762 of the twenty Massachusetts barristers called to the Superior Court. Daniel R. Coquillette and Neil Longley York, eds., Portrait of a Patriot: the Major Political and Legal Papers of Josiah Quincy Junior. Vol. 5. The Law Reports, Part Two (1765-1772) (Boston, 2009), 874.
9. The matter was noted by the Board of Trade. JBT, 12: 205.
1. May have meant “subsiding”; that is to say, while Bollan nominally occupied the position he did not exercise the powers of office.
2. Unknown.
1. Not found.
2. Éclaircissement (n): the clarification or explanation of obscurities. OED.
3. No. 323.
4. See No. 329.
5. Of his Lincoln property. See No. 323n1 and 3.
1. No. 330 and the reply No. 349.
2. Richard Jackson.
3. Thus in manuscript.
4. Earlier, FB had written in a draft letter to Richard Jackson that he thought of asking the British government to undertake a “general Enquiry” into his own “Conduct” as well as Temple’s, “& the more penetrating it is the better.” Boston, 21 May 1765, BP, 4: 1.
5. On 30 May.
1. Not found.
2. Thus in manuscript.
3. No. 330.
4. He probably meant to write “Presume”.
5. The friends of government were a congeries of moderates and conservatives defined by their opposition to colonial radicalism rather more than by their tentative support of FB’s administration. While sometimes referred to as the court party, the friends of government were not exclusively a party of officeholders and lacked any partisan organization or structure. They were never managed by FB or TH, in the sense that partisanship was directed or leader-oriented, and their support had to be cultivated on most every issue. In the spring of 1765, they were probably at their strongest, comprising around one-third of members of the House, whereas Otis’s popular faction was able to depend on the support of up to one-half of the representatives. It was to the friends of government that FB appealed in the aftermath of the Stamp Act riots, in an effort to persuade the assembly to recommend submission to the act. Nicolson, “Governor Francis Bernard, the Massachusetts Friends of Government, and the Advent of the Revolution,” op cit.
6. On 30 May, FB called on the province to support three “Improvements”: the production of potash, the cultivation of hemp, and the exportation of lumber to Great Britain. JHRM 42: 9-11. The province had already established a potash farm at Watchusett Hill, Worcester Co., which had been bought by Timothy Ruggles in Jan. 1762. In Jun. 1766, the General Court passed legislation to regulate the quality of potash and pearl-ash being produced in the province. Acts and Resolves; 17: 471-472; 4: 900-901. No special measures were adopted to encourage hemp or lumber production, though FB later expressed his personal interest in cultivating hemp on Mount Desert Island in a letter to Thomas Pownall, Boston, 17 Mar. 1766, BP, 5: 95-96.
7. See No. 310.
1. The joint committee appointed on 31 May comprised councilors Thomas Hubbard and Royal Tyler and representatives Thomas Cushing, Thomas Gray, and Edward Sheaffe. Acts and Resolves, 18: 7.
1. No. 297.
2. Capt. Thomas Allen of the Gaspee came into Portsmouth, N.H., on Fri. 28 Jun. bringing with him the French schooner La Vray Amitie, master Le Sieur Pierre Jamin of Hispaniola. Portsmouth Mercury, 1 Jul. 1765; New Hampshire Gazette, 5 Jul. 1765.
3. Manuscript torn here and below.
4. No. 224, Bernard Papers, 1: 381-382.
5. Capt. Thomas Bishop and his ship HMS Fortune had been on patrol in these waters from 27 May to the second week of Jun. Connecticut Courant, 10 Jun. 1765; Boston Evening-Post, 17 Jun. 1765. According to historian Neil R. Stout, Bishop’s log book reveals that he “seized and prosecuted” only two vessels between Oct. 1763 and the summer of 1766 (which was much the same as other Royal Navy captains in the area). Royal Navy in America, 61. That might have been because, as FB notes here, that Bishop was “acting in concert” with the governor, perhaps taking a cut from the governor’s share of profits arising from any composition or any condemnation and sale.
1. A notification dated New London, 24 May, appeared in the Boston Gazette, 3 Jun. 1765. Andrew Oliver (1706-74) had been a member of the Governor’s Council since 1746 and province secretary since 1756.
2. The sum of £1,300 was granted on 5 Jun. 1765. JHRM, 41: 31.
3. See No. 290. This was probably James Otis, for Oxenbridge Thacher (1719-65) was already suffering from smallpox that he had contracted during a failed inoculation procedure. He was presently confined to bed and died of “pulmonary consumption” on 9 Jul. Clifford Putney, “Oxenbridge Thacher: Boston Lawyer, Early Patriot,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 32 (2004): 90-106.
4. Agreed on 25 Jun. 1765. JHRM, 42: 36, 108-109.
5. The assembly chose the radical James Otis Jr. and the friends of government Timothy Ruggles (1711-95) and Oliver Partridge (1712-93), representatives for Boston, Hardwick, and Hatfield respectively. Ruggles and Partridge were military veterans and highly respected local leaders in central and western Massachusetts. Ruggles had also been elected Speaker of the House in 1762 and 1763.
6. The proposal to invite the other colonies to meet in congress was first made on 6 Jun. but not formally agreed until 25 Jun. JHRM, 42: 36, 108-109.
7. These figures are for the acreage of townships.
8. Thus in manuscript.
9. Sixteen grantees were named, plus the anonymous “proprietors” of the town of Peterborough, in a series of resolves passed on 25 Jun. JHRM, 42: 102-103, 106; Acts and Resolves, 18: 44-49.
1. The act empowered the province treasurer to borrow up to £197,000 in specie, for which purpose he issued treasurer’s notes redeemable from 20 Jun. 1767. The monies borrowed were to be used to redeem government securities due in 1766. To balance the books, the tax revenue for the year 1 Apr. 1766-31 Mar. 1767 was set at the same level as the 1765 borrowing requirement. The borrowing requirement in 1766 was then reduced to £157,000 to be applied to the securities due in Jun. 1767, and tax revenue set at £165,850 for 1768. An act for supplying the treasury with the sum of £197,000, to be applied for the redemption of government securities that will become due in Jun. 1766 (passed 21 Jun. 1765). Acts and Resolves, 4: 810-812; an act for supplying the treasury with the sum of one hundred and fifty-seven thousand pounds, to be applied for the redemption of government securities that will become due in 1767 (passed 27 Jun. 1766), ibid., 880-881. Separate appropriations were made for the expenses of government: £16,800 in 1765 and £18,000 in 1766. Ibid., 812, 882.
2. For the province debt see No. 234, Bernard Papers, 1: 411.
3. An act in addition to an act, entitled an act for preventing fraud in debtors, and for securing the effects of insolvent debtors for the benefit of their creditors (passed 18 Jun. 1765). Acts and Resolves, 4: 803-804.
4. No. 340.
5. An act for raising by lottery . . . £3,200 for building another hall for the students of Harvard College to dwell in (passed and published 25 Jun. 1765). Receiver’s annotation: title marked by a virgule in the left margin.
6. Thus in manuscript.
7. Nos. 164 and 182, Bernard Papers, 1: 282-283, 311-312.
8. Hollis Hall was completed in Dec. 1763.
9. See No. 265.
10. Harvard Hall III was the “first college building in America devoted entirely to academic uses.” Bainbridge Bunting and Margaret Henderson Floyd, Harvard: an Architectural History (Cambridge, Mass, 1985), 28-29.
11. The lottery funding may have been used in 1772 to acquire and convert a private dwelling house into lodgings, subsequently known as Wiswall House. Because of the disruption occasioned by the building work, FB considered sending Thomas Bernard to the College of Philadelphia, and requested Benjamin Franklin’s advice as to whether he would be “boarded . . . under a proper restraint.” Thomas, however, attended Harvard anyway and graduated B.A. in 1767. FB to Franklin, Boston, 9 Apr. 1764, BP, 3: 35.
12. Left margin virgule, probably intended to denote the closure of the topic being discussed in this paragraph.
13. See No. 265n2.
14. Apthorp Foster, “The Burning of Harvard Hall, 1764, and its Consequences,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 14 (1911): 2-43, at 14-17. TH was not member of this committee (for he served on the library committee), but closely followed its proceedings and later praised FB for having “planned” the rebuilding and for being “a very ingenious architect.” Quoted in ibid., 2; Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts, 3: 76.
15. They are discussed in Paul G. Sifton, Historiographer to the United States: the Revolutionary Letterbook of Pierre Eugène Simitière (New York, 1987), 7-8, 135-136.
16. “The understated exterior design appears to be a competent exercise of the sort that any amateur of the period with a taste for architecture and a few reference books might have produced—until one considers its early date. It was obligingly provided by Sir Francis Bernard, the Royal Governor, and erected by Thomas Dawes. . . . All in all, Harvard Hall III, incorporating paintings and interior design, was the most sophisticated American college building before [Charles] Bullfinch, though its importance has been overlooked by architectural historians.” Bunting and Floyd, Harvard, 30.
17. Frederic C. Detwiller, “Thomas Dawes: Boston’s Patriot Architect,” Old Time New England: Bulletin of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities 68 (1977): 1-18; The building records for Harvard Hall contain no contemporary documents revealing the extent of FB’s contribution. MH-Ar: UAI. 15.12.vt.
1. Right marginalia: “Govr Bernard to Ye Lt Govr of N York”.
2. Robert R. Livingston (1718-75), New York judge, member of the provincial assembly, and leading Whig.
3. Cadwallader Colden (1688-1776), lieutenant governor of New York and acting governor, 1761-75.
1. See No. 286.
2. On 25 Jun. FB prorogued the assembly until 25 Sept. JHRM, 42: 115-117.
3. FB’s comment about the authenticity of the resolves adopted by the Virginia House of Burgesses on 30-31 May was apposite, for the colonial newspapers, beginning with the Newport Mercury on 24 Jun. 1765, did not print accurate copies. The newspapers generally failed to acknowledge that while the Virginians had debated seven resolves in total they had adopted only four; the lists as printed often included two or three resolves that had been rejected or rescinded, or, as with the Mercury, omitted one of those (the third) that been approved. Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 123-124. FB did not receive an accurate copy of the four resolves until later in year, and that came from London, BP, 10: 310. The resolves that he read in the Mercury offered, up to that point in the controversy over the Stamp Act, the most radical challenge to the constitutionality of taxing the colonists by an act of Parliament. The fourth resolve in the Mercury’s list was the fifth that failed to pass the House of Burgesses, expunged by the conservative and moderate Virginians on account of its blunt assertion that the authority to tax lay only with the colonial assembly; next came the sixth resolve, rejected by the Burgesses for hinting at resistance (claiming that the Virginians were not obliged to “yield Obedience” to any taxation levied by any body other than the provincial legislature). Last on the Mercury’s list was the notoriously antagonistic seventh, which castigated as an “enemy” to Virginia any person denying that the sole authority to levy taxes lay with the assembly; it was the beginning of the proscription and intimidation of those whom the colonists quickly took to calling “tories.”
4. The act of cleansing. OED.
5. Postscript in FB’s hand.
6. Boston shopkeeper Harbottle Dorr thought that the “ye First spirited piece” attacking the Stamp Act, to be published in the Massachusetts newspapers, was in the Boston Evening-Post, 24 Jun.-1 Jul. 1765. This anonymous article was reprinted from the New York Gazette, 6 and 13 Jun., and, like others published over the summer, it denigrated as “Tories” those colonists who criticized others for talking about opposing the act, and lauded as “Whigs” those who perceived the act to be a threat to colonial liberties. Dorr Collection of Annotated Newspapers, 1765-1776, 4 vols. MHS, 1: 111.
1. Not found.
2. William Parker (1703-1781), representative of the New Hampshire assembly, 1765-74, and a self-taught lawyer of considerable renown. In the matter referred to in this letter, Parker is acting in his capacity as a surrogate judge of the Admiralty.
1. Not found. Jackson’s previous letter to FB was dated 15 Apr. but is not extant. BP, 4: 5.
2. Jared Ingersoll (1722-81) had been sent by Connecticut to protest the Stamp Act, but was subsequently appointed as stamp distributor for that province. His appointment (and also that of Andrew Oliver) had been mentioned in the Boston Gazette, 3 Jun. 1765. A list of the stamp distributors for most of the American Colonies appeared in the Boston Evening-Post, 5 Aug. 1765.
3. In a letter to Jackson, TH noted that he had spent “3 or 4 days” in Ingersoll’s company and also expressed his relief at Jackson’s acceptance of the agency, since he had still not received an official response to his request for leave of absence. Boston, 6 Aug., 1765. Mass. Archs, 26: 145; Hutchinson Correspondence, 1.
4. This line in FB’s hand.
5. Lord Barrington, John Pownall, and John Temple. See No. 358.
1. No. 354; 20 Jun. not found.
2. Joshua Loring (1716-81) was born in Boston and rose through the ranks of the Royal Navy in America. He was made a commodore during the French and Indian War and appointed the British naval commander on the Great Lakes. War wounds had cost him a leg, and he would soon retire on half-pay to his fine mansion at Jamaica Plain. The mansion, which is still standing, was then within the bounds of the town of Roxbury, since incorporated in municipal Boston.
3. Henry Seymour Conway (1721-95) was a career soldier and former field marshal. He was an MP for five constituencies in the course of more than forty years in Parliament. He served as secretary of state for the Southern Dept. Jul. 1765-May 1766, and was leader of the House of Commons in the Rockingham administration, Jul. 1765 to Jan. 1768.
1. See No. 364.
2. The Boston Gazette. A week before the first Stamp Act riot, TH noted that the “news paper threats” had prompted officials to discuss how the violence and threat of violence might impact upon “the execution of the stamp act.” TH to Jackson, Boston, 6 Aug., 1765, Mass. Archs., 26: 145.
3. FB’s ex post facto rationalization presupposes a not unreasonable connection between the Whig newspaper writers and those who might have planned the riot. The riot was probably organized by the committee of artisans and shopkeepers known as the Loyal Nine, who included one of the Boston Gazette’s co-owners, Benjamin Edes (1732-1803). The Loyal Nine were associated with the town’s political caucuses and local politician Samuel Adams (1722-1803), and facilitated the union of the North and South End gangs, whose participation in the Stamp Act riots was vital to their success in intimidating officials responsible for its implementation. Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 161; Hoerder, Crowd Action, 92-97.
4. The proceedings of the morning of Wednesday 14 Aug. described here centered on the large elm tree, subsequently known as Liberty Tree, standing near the intersection of Essex and Orange streets in the South End. The effigy’s right hand was marked “AO” for Andrew Oliver (according to TH), while (according to the Gazette) a label attached to the breast was inscribed “HE THAT TAKES THIS DOWN IS AN ENEMY TO HIS COUNTRY.” A second effigy represented Lord Bute. TH to Richard Jackson, Milton, 16 Aug. 1765; Mass. Archs. 26: 145a-145b; Hutchinson Correspondence, 1; Boston Gazette, 19 Aug. 1765.
5. The Gazette suggests that it was the “Owner” of the tree who tried to remove the effigy until “being advis’d to the contrary by the Populace.” A “Multitude of Spectators” gathered during the course of the day, while unidentified persons protested the Stamp Tax by requiring townsfolk to have their “Articles stamp’d by the Effigy.” Ibid. This might account for the councilors’ initially describing the protest as a “sport.”
6. FB’s decision to call a Council meeting was evidently made in the morning, after he had consulted with the Boston gentlemen, but before he learned from TH that Sheriff Greenleaf and his men “did not think it safe to attempt cutting down” the effigy let alone arresting any rioter. TH to Jackson, op. cit.
7. FB’s report of the meeting greatly enriches the bland official record in CO 5/823, f 282.
8. The exact time at which the crowd arrived at the Town House is uncertain. The Gazette suggests that “Thousands” joined a procession from the Liberty Tree to the Town House coming by way of the “Main Street”—in other words a direct route along Newbury and Marlborough streets to the Cornhill. Another report likened the procession to a mock funeral, noting that the effigy, having been cut down by “a Number of reputable People,” was placed on a “Bier,” covered with a sheet and carried “in a regular and solemn Manner amidst the Acclamations of the Populace thro’ the Town,” up to the Town House. Boston Evening-Post, 19 Aug. 1765. Hoerder (op. cit.) suggests that the assemblage making its way along “Main Street” was organized by the North End gang, while the funereal procession was led by the South End mob.
9. Judging by the newspaper reports, on leaving the Town House the crowd headed eastward down King Street and turned into Kilby Street, which led onto Oliver’s Dock where the new brick stamp office was situated.
10. TH, Stephen Greenleaf, Charles Paxton, and others. TH to Jackson, op. cit.
11. FB’s assertion of murderous intent has not been taken seriously by scholars who, on the whole, consider the first Stamp Act riot to fit with patterns of oppositional action wherein crowds aimed to intimidate rather than harm their targets. Hoerder, Crowd Action, 100-101. FB’s account of the evening’s events was likely derived from conversations with Andrew Oliver and TH before the Council meeting held on the following day. The sinister motives that FB ascribes to the rioters may well have originated with Oliver (as is suggested by the penultimate paragraph of the letter printed here) though not perhaps with TH, who notes only that he thought his brother-in-law would be “in danger” had he not persuaded him to leave his house as the mob entered the front door. TH to Jackson, op. cit. The newspapers provide detailed reports of the ransacking of Oliver’s property.
12. TH recalled it as “[G—d—n] their blood heres the Sheriff with the governor stand by my boys let no man give way.” TH to Jackson, op. cit.
13. At the request of TH, who had already approached Col. Joseph Jackson. Ibid.
14. Jackson may have relayed this directly to FB rather than go through TH. It was after giving Jackson the governor’s order to summon the militia that TH made his vain attempt to disperse the mob.
15. It was published in that day’s Boston Newsletter, 15 Aug.
16. The Council proceedings of 15 Aug. are in CO 5/823, f 282.
17. The source is unknown, but may have been Oliver or one or more of the magistrates mentioned, or even TH before he left town on 16 Aug. for his home at Milton.
18. Oliver was obliged to act out the resignation again, on 17 Dec. See No. 422.
19. TH was inside the house when this incident commenced, at 9 pm, and he observed “sevral 100” people present. TH to Jackson, op. cit.
20. Crowd numbers are estimated to have been between 2,500 and 5,000 during the daytime, with people from neighboring towns joining Bostonians, and at night up to 3,000. Hoerder, Crowd Action, 98.
21. These particular claims probably derived from the discussions that FB had had with those who had been caught up in the events of the previous two days, especially TH, Oliver, and Greenleaf.
1. Annotation: “Govr: Bernard to Mr: Pownall.”
2. FB to Halifax, Castle William, 15 and 16 Aug. 1765, CO 5/755, ff 261-272 (ALS, RC).
3. The Royal Exchange Tavern in King Street.
4. Thus in manuscript.
5. He is referring Pownall to the document printed as Appendix 2.
6. LbC: “whether they would be taxed or not”.
7. Here the letter is marked with “+” referring to left marginalia: “not true”. This was likely added by the recipient.
8. The nearest garrison of British Regulars was at New York, where the commander-in-chief Thomas Gage had his headquarters.
9. No such attempt had been made, as he admits below, but FB was clearly unsettled by the mob’s visit to the Province House on 15 Aug. and genuinely feared for his own safety and that of his family (as he did again, when the Stamp Act’s implementation date of 1 Nov. drew nigh).
10. The Castle garrison totaled some sixty officers and men when at full strength, under the command of Lt. John Phillips.
11. The Bernard family had spent their summers at the Castle, after the apartments were refurbished in 1762. Amelia Bernard and the children—Thomas (aged fifteen), Shute (thirteen), Amelia (nearly eleven), William (nine), Scrope (six), and Julia (five)—probably remained there until after 8 Nov., which is the date of the last letter that their father composed at the Castle. FB travelled into Boston for Council meetings and other business but returned to the Castle most evenings. He stayed over at the Province House for “some days “ in early Sept. and again while attending to business during Oct.; he retreated again to the Castle in early Nov. John Bernard likely remained in town for much of this time, but he was at his father’s side during the retreats, acting as the governor’s clerk. Francis Jr. was still at Oxford, while nineteen-year old Jane and eight-year old Frances Elizabeth (Fanny) remained in England under the guardianship of either FB’s aunt Sarah Terry and her lawyer husband Moses or FB’s cousin Jane Beresford.
12. Thus in manuscript. LbC: “calling the Assembly”.
13. FB had continued the General Court by prorogation to 14 Aug. and on 25 Jul. he extended it to 25 Sept. Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser, 29 Jul. 1765. FB was evidently thinking of proroguing the legislature until he received further orders, but he gave this up following the second Stamp Act riot. See No. 384. There is no evidence to suggest that the riot of 14 Aug. was planned to coincide with the meeting of the General Court, although the possibility that some demonstrative action was intended should not be discounted given that the mob marched to the Town House on the afternoon of the riot.
14. Hancock expressed his determination to see the Stamp Act repealed and his fears for colonial commerce in a letter of 22 Aug. to Barnard & Harrison that also went by the Liberty. A. E. Brown, John Hancock, His book (Boston, 1898), 22. I am grateful to Stuart Salmon for bringing this to my attention.
1. FB to Halifax, Castle William, 15 and 16 Aug. 1765, CO 5/755, ff 261-272 (ALS, RC). Bell captained the Elisabeth sailing between Boston and Belfast and/or Glasgow during 1765 and 1766, but he is not mentioned in the shipping news printed in the Boston newspapers before this time. The owners of the vessel are unknown, since shipping returns kept by the Boston Naval Office (from which ownership can be established) are not extant for the period after Jul. 1765.
2. No. 373 and FB to John Pownall, Castle William, 23 Aug. 1765, BP, 4: 17-18.
3. The last word on the preceding page is obscured by the binding: “introduc[ing?]”.
4. FB’s correction suggests that he will delay sending the Boston Gazette of 19 Aug. 1765. His next letter to Pownall was No. 374, but it may not have enclosed a copy of the newspaper.
5. Interlineation by John Bernard.
1. No. 368.
2. Probably the John Galley owned by Timothy Fitch. See No. 395.
3. No. 370; FB to TH, Castle William, 19 Aug. 1765, BP, 4: 60-61.
4. FB to Halifax: “present emergency”.
5. The orders to Bishop did not specify storing the stamps in either the Castle or on board HMS Fortune but in a “Place of Security” No. 370.
6. Proceedings of 21 Aug., CO 5/823, f 283.
7. FB to Halifax: “degrees & orders”.
8. These persons are unknown.
9. The identities of the first two clergymen cannot be established with certainty. The Anglican minister might have been the Rev. Henry Caner (1700-1792), rector of King’s Chapel where FB worshipped. The third clergyman was likely Jonathan Mayhew (1720-66), the pastor of Boston’s Congregational West Church, who had authored several pamphlets protesting the establishment of an American episcopacy, 1761-65. FB made an enemy of Mayhew after threatening him with a prosecution for libel and subjecting him to a dressing down in the Council Chamber, where he unfairly accused him of admiring the regicide Oliver Cromwell. (This was an allusion to a sermon Mayhew had delivered on the centenary of Charles I’s execution.) Mayhew would shortly attract the criticism of Tories when it was suggested that a sermon he delivered on 25 Aug. may have incited the mob to destroy TH’s house in the second Stamp Act riot of 26 Aug., but which allegation the pastor strenuously and convincingly denied. Nicolson, The ‘Infamas Govener’, 75-77; Mayhew to TH, Boston, 27 Aug., 1765, in Hutchinson Correspondence, 1; Jonathan Mayhew, A Discourse, Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers, with some reflections on the resistance made to King Charles I. and on the anniversary of his death: in which the mysterious doctrine of that Prince’s saintship and martyrdom is unriddled: the substance of which was delivered in a sermon preached in the West meeting house, in Boston, on the Lord’s day after the 30th of January, 1749-50 (Boston, 1750).
10. One of the deputies was Benjamin Cudworth; the other was probably Joseph Otis, who certainly occupied the office later, as noted in Lymon H. Butterfield, ed., The Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 1: 344n1.
11. This double em dash represents an authorial line that may have been added for effect. It is not in the letter to Halifax.
12. RH4/99: 14-15. See also source note to No. 368.
1. No. 369.
2. FB to Halifax, Castle William, 22 Aug. 1765, CO 5/755, ff 275-282 (ALS, RC). See No. 373.
3. Thus in manuscript.
4. Thus in manuscript.
5. It was widely rumored that Hallowell’s mansion house on Hanover Street would be attacked. The construction of this reputedly fine building, the total cost of which amounted to more than a life-time’s earnings for a Boston laborer, had indubitably fomented resentment among the town’s lower orders as much as Hallowell’s official activities irritated the merchants. Three men broke into the house on 23 Aug. but they were not prosecuted. Hoerder, Crowd Action, 103-104. The house was probably located at the junction with Wing’s Lane. Email to the editor from Sandra L. Webber, Jamaica Plain Historical Society, 14 Oct. 2010.
6. In No. 371 FB had suggested that he would send a copy of the Boston Gazette, 19 Aug. 1765, with his next letter, which was the missive to Pownall printed here.
1. Thus in manuscript. The letter “n” is interlined as a correction but it may be non-contemporaneous.
1. Thus in manuscript.
2. William Story (1720-99) resigned as deputy registrar of the Vice Admiralty shortly after the riot. He lived in the floor above his office in a building “opposite the North side of the Court-House” (probably in the Cornhill). Boston Evening-Post, 30 Sept. 1765; Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser, 2 Sept. 1765.
3. Paxton’s landlord was one Mr. Palmer. His place was the first to be targeted by the mob, after dark. Story’s offices were next, while a second crowd visited the Hallowell place. The last property to be assailed was Hutchinson’s home.
1. The Boston Light was situated on Little Brewster Island in the outer harbor and Robert Ball was keeper between 1733 and 1774, with an annual stipend of £76 5s. 4d. (5 Feb. 1766, CO 5/823, f 295). The lighthouse was destroyed by Patriot soldiers in 1775 and rebuilt in 1783. Jeremy D’Entremont, “Boston Light.” New England Lighthouses. A Virtual Guide, 2007 (http://www.lighthouse.cc/boston/history.html, accessed 12 Dec. 2010).
1. TH estimated that approximately £900 sterling was taken from his mansion in Garden Court Street in the North End. TH to Halifax, Boston, 30 Aug. 1765, CO 5/755, ff 307-310; Hutchinson Correspondence, 1.
2. No. 372.
3. The postscript has been relocated from the left margin.
4. See No. 384.
1. Miller was allowed £30 for enlisting the men for four months. CO 5/823, f 284.
2. Richard Saltonstall (1732-85) of Haverhill served as second in command to Timothy Ruggles at Crown Point during the French and Indian War, and had been colonel of the Essex militia since Apr. 1761.
1. FB was probably referring to the rates set by the General Court in Mar. 1762, whereby privates were on £1 16s. 6d. per month. Acts and Resolves, 17: 178. The provincial soldiers at Castle William were receiving £1 4s per month. Ibid., 18: 36. Wages of provincial soldiers had reached a highpoint of £13 per campaign in 1760, with bounties at £12. Anderson, Crucible of War, 388-389.
1. Council proceedings of 28 Aug. in CO 5/893, f 284. FB is indicating that he personally favors the deployment of British Regulars, even though the Governor-in-Council had not considered such a measure necessary. That had been his position when wrote Gage on 27 Aug., No. 376 (not sent). Both letters thus suggest that FB was still hoping that Gage might be persuaded to intervene. Gage certainly possessed discretionary powers to deploy soldiers without authorization by the appropriate civil authority, but only if government had ceased to function; and he would have been mindful of the secretary-at-war’s express instructions never to use force unless “absolutely necessary.” Ian R. Christie, “British Response to American Reactions to the Townshend Acts,” Resistance, Politics, and the American Struggle for Independence, 1765-1775, eds. Walter H. Conser Jr., Ronald M. McCarthy, and D. J. Toscano (Boulder, Colo., 1986), 193-214, at 208-209.
2. Council proceedings of 21 Aug. in CO 5/893, f 283.
3. See No. 379.
4. On 6 Sept. BP, 10: 284-287 (ALS, RC).
1. FB to Halifax, Castle William, 15 and 16 Aug. 1765, CO 5/755, ff 261-272 (ALS, RC) and 22 Aug. 1765, ibid., ff 275-282 (ALS, RC). Marginal reference mark”⌖“and corresponding annotation by the secretary of state’s clerk placed at bottom of page (f 287): “None of those Letters has been received.” Thus FB’s account of the riot of 26 Aug. arrived before his correspondence concerning the riot of 14 Aug. See also source note to No. 368.
2. This and similar such comments are suggestive of popular, class-based resentment of TH’s wealth and status, as much as dislike of his plural office-holding. Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 296-297; Nicolson, The ‘Infamas Govener’, 119.
3. For a discussion of the Barons controversy and the involvement of FB and the merchants, see Bernard Papers, 1: 15, 134-136, 176-178. All the depositions are filed in Papers relating to complaints against and suspension of Benjamin Barons, collector of Customs at Boston, Massachusetts, T 1/408, ff 101-182. The Boston newspapers had recently printed extracts of a late act of Parliament (necessitated by colonial attempts to regulate and reduce customs fees) that confirmed customs officers’ entitlement to fees and set them at the rates then in force when the Sugar Act took effect in Sept. 1764. An extract from the Customs Act, 5 Geo. 3, c. 45 (1765) was published on the order of Surveyor General John Temple. Boston Newsletter, 22 Aug. and Boston Gazette, 26 Aug. 1765. On the dispute over fees see No. 340.
4. LbC: “Briggs Hallowell”.
5. Briggs Hallowell was a brother to Benjamin Hallowell, the collector of Customs at Boston. He had a store at the “lower end” of King Street selling a “great Variety of Goods, cheap for Cash or short credit.” He was in London during 1763 and early 1764, returning in May. How Briggs Hallowell managed to view the depositions about the Boston merchants, originally taken by TH during the Barons controversy, and send copies to James Otis Jr., has never been explained. Boston Evening-Post, 7 May, 15 Oct. 1764. One of the deponents against Barons was William Story, the deputy register of Vice Admiralty. His depositions, dated 24 and 30 Mar. 1761, are in T 1/408, ff 156-157, 179 (MsS, RC). On the morning of the second Stamp Act riot—before the violence—the Boston Gazette published an open letter from Story denying that he had misrepresented the merchants in a “Testimony,” as was rumored, and claimed to have shown the merchants a copy of his deposition.
6. Not found.
7. It is not possible to say with certainty whether the mob that invested Hallowell’s house was a detachment from the mob that had attacked Story’s office or a wholly separate group. But neither of these crowds was acting without direction, for they joined forces for the assault on TH’s house. Hoerder, Crowd Action, 105. The exact location of Paxton’s residence is unknown but it was centrally situated; Story’s office was opposite the Town House; Hallowell’s house in Hanover Street was on the edge of the North End and but a few blocks distant from Hutchinson’s mansion in Garden Court Street. Hallowell gave his own account of the riot in a letter to the Board of Customs Commissioners, Boston, 7 Sept. 1765, T 1/442, ff 250-251. Furniture, windows and their sashes and shutters, were destroyed; desks, books, £140 in notes and £1,000 in government securities, linen, clothing, and liquor were all looted. Hallowell attributed his unpopularity to the merchants’ resentment of his “long Knowledge” of their smuggling activities on the Atlantic seaboard.
8. Sally Hutchinson (1744-1780).
9. Inigo Jones (1573-1652), the influential English architect.
10. FB later estimated that the group engaged in “demolishing” TH’s house comprised “Between 30 or 40 of the lowest of the people.” Observations on the Massachusetts Indemnity Act, 19 Jul. 1766, CO 5/892, ff 88-93, at f 88r. TH’s losses, which he estimated at £2,218 sterling, are described in Bailyn, Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, 35-36, and detailed in Hutchinson Correspondence, 1.
11. Not found.
12. Later that day, with James Otis in the chair, the town voted its “utter detestation of the extraordinary & violent proceedings of a number of Persons unknown.” It called on the selectmen and magistrates to do “their utmost” to “suppress the like disorders for the future.” Reports of the Record Commissioners of Boston, 16: 152.
13. Proceedings of 27 Aug., CO 5/823, ff 283-284.
14. Joseph Jackson.
15. Leonard Jarvis (1716-70), a Boston merchant, was colonel of the Cadets, the governor’s honorific guard.
16. See No. 386.
17. LbC: “Roxborough”.
18. Col. Jackson was instructed to call out four companies, totaling “at least” three hundred men. The Cadets were augmented by the Boston gentlemen, and, as FB notes, detailed to guard the Customhouse. Historians tend to think FB was over-reacting, but the Customhouse was holding about £6,000 sterling in the chest (FB later told Thomas Pownall) and the collector, Robert Hale, had intimated to the Council that he feared the building would be stormed. FB to Thomas Pownall, Castle William, 28 Aug. 1767, RSA, PR.GE/110/24/: 100; CO 5/823, f 284. Described as a “Military Watch” by the newspapers and Council, armed guards patrolled the streets of Boston for three weeks until operations were suspended on 18 Sept. Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser, 2 Sept. 1765; Hoerder, Crowd Action, 111.
19. At no point were British marines or sailors from HMS Fortune called upon.
20. Art. 27 concerning the establishment of martial law. Bernard Papers, 1: 467.
21. No. 381.
22. Proceedings of the Council on 28 and 29 Aug. CO 5/823, f 284. See Nos. 379 and 380.
23. LbC: “his ^the^”.
24. FB is referring to people’s attitudes generally, and not specifically to the Boston town meeting, whose deliberations nonetheless shaped this view.
25. FB fails to mention here or elsewhere one important “condition” concerning the mobilization of the military watch to which he acceded. Ebenezer MacIntosh, the leader of the Boston mob, who was arrested on 27 Aug. (along with six other rioters) by Sheriff Greenleaf was set free following the intercession of Nathaniel Coffin, a friend of government, and other guardsmen who, probably fearing reprisals from the mob, refused to turn out until MacIntosh was released. Peter Orlando Hutchinson, ed., The Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, 2 vols. (London, 1883), 1: 71; Leslie Thomas, “Partisan Politics in Massachusetts During Governor Bernard’s Administration, 1760-1770,” 2 vols., Ph. D Diss., Univ. of Wisconsin, 1960, 1: 170-171; Nicolson, The ‘Infamas Govener’, 121-123. No other incident demonstrates so clearly the constraints under which Boston’s law officers operated. For a broader discussion of the limitations that the Whigs were able to impose on the enforcement of obnoxious imperial laws see John Philip Reid, In a Defiant Stance: The Conditions of Law in Massachusetts Bay, the Irish Comparison, and the Coming of the American Revolution (University Park, Penn., 1977).
26. This paragraph is revealing as to how far FB was regaining his composure after the riot. He had not yet abandoned the hope that Gage would send troops to Boston, no matter that the Council, including TH, had ruled out deploying the military as a police force (No. 381). But after writing Gage, FB began to explore the options for finding a political solution to the crisis. He decided to use his opening address of 25 Sept. to try and persuade the assembly to recommend compliance with the Stamp Act when it came into force on 1 Nov. FB’s realpolitik was to frighten the legislators with (a) the specter of social conflict arising from the closure of the law courts and ports; (b) the prospect of the town being held corporately liable for the damage incurred during the riot; and (c) the probability that the assembly’s failure to do anything to facilitate implementation of the act might be deemed vexatious or obstructive by the British and likely to precipitate retribution. Nicolson, ‘Infamas Govener’, 124-125.
27. The councilors resident in Boston were: Thomas Hutchinson, Benjamin Lynde, Andrew Oliver, John Erving, Thomas Hubbard, Harrison Gray, Thomas Flucker, and Royal Tyler; they were normally joined by Samuel Danforth (from Cambridge) and James Russell (Charlestown).
28. Copy: “general Assembly”.
29. CO 5/823, f 285.
30. LbC: “public”.
31. Thus in manuscript. FB is referring to himself not the “principal Gentlemen”.
32. The actual documents are not extant.
1. No. 384.
2. 5 Sept.
3. The Newport Stamp Act protest began early on 27 Aug. “before news of the Hutchinson riot could have reached” the town. Fearing violence Collector John Robinson retreated on board HMS Cygnet, and leading Tories Dr. Thomas Moffat and Martin Howard Jr., along with Stamp Distributor Augustus Johnston, all left the town. When they returned the following day, news of Boston’s riot likely “aroused the ambition” of the townsfolk, and the protestors proceeded to invest the houses of Moffat, Howard, and Johnston (who promptly resigned his commission). These events were reported in the Boston Gazette, 2 Sept. after FB composed and dispatched this letter. Jared Ingersoll resigned on 15 Sept. George Meserve, the distributor for New Hampshire, resigned on route to Boston from England, and upon arrival was fêted by the Sons of Liberty at the Royal Exchange Tavern. Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 188-201.
4. The next letter to Jackson was No. 410.
5. Smudged. Letters not found.
6. No. 369; FB misdates the second letter, which was 23 Aug., No. 374; the “letter of advice” was another of the same date to John Pownall, BP, 4: 17-18.
7. Probably the New Swallow which regularly imported goods from Bristol. Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser, 12 Nov. 1764.
1. Jeremiah Green (b.1703) had been a recruiting officer for the provincial regiments during the Canadian campaign of 1760. A distiller by occupation, his business contacts included leading Boston merchants such as Thomas Boylston and Harrison Gray. Maj. Green was the highest ranking artillery officer in the Boston militia. He likely retired after the Stamp Act Crisis, since he was already above the required age of service, and is not named in a list of officers from 1772. He was eventually succeeded by Adino Paddock (who in 1764 was the captain in command of the artillery train). Boston Evening-Post, 12 Mar. 1764; Jeremiah Green Papers, 1752-1789, Washington University Library, St. Louis.
2. The South Battery was below Fort Hill and adjacent to Rowe’s wharf.
3. An act to prevent disorders in the night (passed 1 Dec. 1703). Acts and Resolves, 1: 535-536.
1. No. 381.
2. Historians have established the identities of eleven participants in the riots; seven were arrested including Ebenezer MacIntosh, the leader of the South End gang. None were ever prosecuted. Hoerder, Crowd Action, 112-113.
3. William Sherriff, captain-lieutenant in the 47th Regiment of Foot.
4. Lt. Col. James Cunningham of the 45th Regiment of Foot.
5. Capt. James Wallace. Earlier in the year HMS Tryal had been cruising between the Turks Islands and South Carolina. Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, 28 Feb. 1765.
1. No. 384.
2. The absentees were Gamaliel Bradford, John Choate, and James Otis Sr. This meeting, which continued on 6 Sept., was one the largest gatherings of councilors during 1765-66. Seventy-six Board meetings were held in this legislative year (thirty-one of which were convened while the General Court was in session) but on no single occasion was the entire Council present: attendance averaged seventeen during legislative sessions, and nine at other times. Boston residents and executive officers attended regularly, while the Superior Court judges, including TH, missed several meetings because of circuit duties. The importance of the discussions on 5 and 6 Sept. was underlined by the rare attendance of those who lived in the western counties (above all Israel Williams of Hatfield) whom FB regarded as political allies. Their frequent absences in the aftermath of the riots severely weakened FB’s influence in the Board. (John Chandler and Timothy Paine, whose homes were in Worcester, forty miles from Boston, each came to fewer than ten Council meetings during the 1765-66 session, while Israel Williams managed only five.) In retrospect, the meetings were a turning point in the internal balance of power: the Whigs (especially James Bowdoin and Royal Tyler) emerged to challenge the friends of government and take the initiative in Board deliberations when the Crown officers failed to gain re-election in 1766. Nicolson, The ‘Infamas Govener’, 130-131.
3. CO 5/823, f 285. By His Excellency Francis Bernard, Esq; . . . A proclamation for to notify the several Members of the General Court to attend at the time to which they stand prorogued. . . the twenty-fifth day of September. . . Given at the Council-chamber in Boston, the sixth day of September 1765. Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser, 9 Sept. 1765.
4. “I make this Declaration to you; That I have no Warrant, Order or Authority whatsoever to distribute the stamped Papers, or to unpack the Bales, or separate the Parcels, or order any Person whatsoever so to do.” Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, 5 Sept. 1765.
5. Faint.
6. Manuscript torn here and below.
7. On 6 Sept. CO 5/823, f 285. See No. 391.
8. See No. 379.
9. The Boston Gazette reported that Saltonstall had had a confrontation with “3 or 400” fellow residents of Haverhill who surrounded his house. The details of the encounter are hazy (occurring sometime during the first week of Sept.) and the Gazette’s report was based on hearsay. From his perspective, Saltonstall acted with considerable restraint and good sense, refusing to risk lives by having his men present arms. But while the Gazette suggests that Saltonstall stood down his men and disbanded the company, it is apparent from FB’s accounts that the men remained under orders, ready to proceed to Boston (probably by ship, as FB had recommended), until they were dismissed on the governor’s orders. Boston Gazette, 9 Sept. 1765; No. 391.
10. In this passage, FB is developing the rhetoric of the major speech that he was to deliver to the assembly on 25 Sept.
11. FB is alluding to the impact of the embargo on coastal commerce imposed by Gen. Jeffrey Amherst between Apr. and Jun. 1762. (See Nos. 107, 111, 112, 113, 125, Bernard Papers, 1: 204-205, 208-209, 211-214, 230-231.) One Whig (“A. B.”) observed “that this Province knows by Experience what it is to undergo all the Evils of an Embargo for three Months for the Public Good, and surely the Public Good, never, never called so loud, with such a thundering, all-peircing Voice, as at present, to undergo the like again.” Boston Gazette, 21 Oct. 1765. The cessation of sea-going commerce was inevitable if ships’ captains were unable to obtain clearances to leave port should opposition to the Stamp Act prompt the closure of the Customhouse. And it was FB whom Whigs roundly blamed for the impending crisis, pointing to his stubborn refusal to give clear directions to government officials to carry on regardless of the act.
12. HMS Jamaica had left the port of Boston on 15 Aug., bound for Portsmouth, N.H. Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, 22 Aug. 1765.
13. The John left for Liverpool, on 11 Sept. BP, 5: 30-31.
1. To the Board of Trade, Castle William, 31 Aug. 1765, CO 5/891, ff 283-287 (ALS, RC) and No. 384.
2. Nos. 374 and 379.
3. First written as “5”.
4. Nos. 375, 380, and 391.
5. On 15 May 1761, the Privy Council instructed governors to continue to correspond directly with the Board in the first instance, and to contact the secretary of state only in matters requiring his “immediate Directions.” APC, 4: 154-157; JBT, 11: 338.
6. No. 388; FB to the Board of Trade, Castle William, 7 Sept. 1765, CO 5/891, ff 289-290 (ALS, RC).
7. Meaning, a personal history.
8. “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins.” Isaiah 58:1, KJV.
1. No. 375.
2. Thus in manuscript.
3. Francklin to FB 19 Aug. 1765, not found.
4. Thus in manuscript.
5. He is asking for any further news arising from the formation of the Rockingham administration earlier that summer.
1. LbC: dated 12 Sept.
2. See Nos. 394 and 397.
3. HMS Tryal, Capt. James Wallace (or Wallis) had recently arrived in Boston Harbor from the Carolinas.
4. No. 395.
1. Andrew Oliver.
2. Charles Lowndes (1699-1783), senior secretary to the Treasury (1765-67).
1. Those issues of the Boston Gazette that FB enclosed with this letter do not contain any articles attributed to James Otis Jr., whose election as moderator by the Boston town meeting was reported in the papers. FB may be referring obliquely to one article published on 16 Sept. that described the patriotic ceremony of Wednesday 11 Sept. to dedicate the South End elm as the “Liberty Tree.”
2. Meaning as per value.
3. Their identities are unknown.
1. See No. 387.
2. Thus in manuscript.
3. Timothy Fitch (1725-90) was a prosperous general merchant and slave trader who lived in Medford. His ownership of John Galley was established from the list of clearances outwards from the port of Boston, 5 Apr.-5 Jul. 1764, CO 5/850. See also No. 396n8.
1. That is, in time before the ship sailed. The letters were No. 397; FB to the Board of Trade, Boston, 28 Sept. 1765, CO 5/891, ff 325-327 (LS, RC).
2. No. 394.
3. In his address to the Superior Court of 27 Aug. TH concentrated on his own dilemma and did not specifically engage the issue of enforcement. Hutchinson Correspondence, 1.
4. Presumably, he meant to write “not a nice subject”.
5. For more detail see No. 399n3 and No. 397.
6. See JHRM, 42: 118-123.
7. Timothy Ruggles and Oliver Partridge. The Stamp Act Congress met at New York, 19-24 Oct. 1765.
8. Proceedings of the Council of 23 Sept. in CO 5/823, ff 286-287, and the House of 26 Sept. in JHRM, 42: 124-126. FB ordered that the papers be removed from the John Galley to the Castle sometime after 27 Sept. and negotiated payment with Capt. Hulme. FB promised that the expenses would be settled directly through “two Merchants,” whose account would be discharged by the Council; if the Council refused, then FB promised to give the ship’s owner, Timothy Fitch, a certificate redeemable with the Exchequer in London. According to the Council minute, Hulme was satisfied by the proposed arrangement and hired a sloop and crew for £1,500 to undertake the unloading of the stamped papers. Bad weather delayed the operation for a week, but it was finally completed by 6 or 7 Oct. Minutes of the Council for 2 and 18 Oct. 1765. CO 5/823, ff 287-289. Fitch, however, was dissatisfied by the arrangement and took his own measures to ensure payment. See source note to No. 425.
9. From here on the letter is in FB’s hand.
10. Thus in manuscript.
11. No. 397 and FB to the Board of Trade, Boston, 28 Sept. 1765, CO 5/891, ff 325-327 (LS, RC).
1. Select Letters: “Halifax” omitted.
2. No. 388.
3. Select Letters: “to try . . . execution” omitted.
4. See No. 391.
5. No. 392
6. Select Letters: “In the Mean Time . . . Submission to the Act” omitted.
7. FB insisted that only he and TH were convinced of “the necessity of carrying the stamp Act into execution” on account of the “Consequences” of non-compliance. No. 396.
8. Select Letters: “men”.
9. Select Letters: “to speak not only freely but fully”.
10. Select Letters: “for the poison”.
11. Select Letters: “induced”.
12. Obscured by tight binding and here and below.
13. John Green and Joseph Russell.
14. Select Letters: this paragraph and the next were omitted.
15. Obscured by binding and supplied for clarification.
16. See No. 400.
17. Select Letters: “charged personally”.
18. Select Letters: an additional section was included at the end of the letter, comprising two paragraphs taken from a letter to Conway of 25 Nov. 1765 (No. 414) and printed with minor editorial emendations.
I inclose with this, copies of my speech to the General Court, the answer of the House of Representatives, and my reply thereto; from all which I hope it will appear that I have left nothing undone to procure that obedience to this Act, which I think due to every Act of Parliament from all British subjects. I am told here, that I have done more than I need have done; in that I must judge for myself: certainly I have sacrificed to my duty considerably. Such I reckon my losing the general good-will and good opinion of the people, not by any act of my own, but by the unavoidable obligations of my office, in a business in which I had no concern but as an executive officer.
I would not presume to give advice to his Majesty’s Ministers of State; but yet I hope I shall be excused, when I reveal my earnest wishes, that some means may be found to make it consistent with the dignity of Parliament, to put the Stamp Act out of the question, at least for the present. For I am persuaded, that measures, which are now become more than ever necessary for bringing America into good order, will meet with tenfold difficulty, if taken before the present fermentation has subsided. At present, by artifice, prejudice, and passion, good men and bad men are unaccountably confounded together; a little time and management will separate them, and bring them under their proper arrangements.
Select Letters, 27-28.
19. Henry Seymour Conway (1721-95) was a career soldier and former field marshal, and was an MP for five constituencies in the course of more than forty years in Parliament. He served as secretary of state for the Southern Dept. Jul. 1765-May 1766, and was leader of the House of Commons in the Rockingham administration, Jul. 1765 to Jan. 1768.
20. By courtesy of a vessel from Philadelphia bringing in copies of the London Gazette. Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser, 30 Sept. 1765.
1. Faint.
1. Not found.
2. Obscured by tight binding.
3. The House had yet to adopt the radical position of denying the legitimacy of parliamentary taxation, but it is unlikely that in the autumn of 1765 the radical Whigs would have been able to command a majority on such an issue. Nicolson, “Governor Francis Bernard, the Massachusetts Friends of Government, and the Advent of the Revolution,” 50-51. The ten-man House committee appointed to draft a reply to his speech was chaired by Speaker Samuel White; it did not include any prominent radicals, but three friends of government: Gen. John Winslow (Marshfield), Thomas Foster III (Plymouth), and Joseph Lee (Cambridge). JHRM, 42: 124.
4. On 27 Sept., BP, 4: 71-72.
5. Alexander McNutt (1725-1811) was an Ulster emigrant to Virginia whose grand schemes to settle northern Irish in Nova Scotia (during the boom years of the early 1760s) was backed by the Board of Trade. The Passamaquoddy settlement to which FB refers was a colony of former New England soldiers that McNutt had planted on the St. John’s River. McNutt’s activities had prompted FB to resume lobbying for a fifth warrant (intended for himself) in the St. Croix Bay scheme in which he and Jackson were partners.
6. That is, 20,000 acres.
1. Not found.
1. Grey Cooper (d.1801), a lawyer and Rockinghamite Whig, was secretary to the Treasury, 1765-82. He won the Rochester by-election in Dec. 1765.
1. William Brattle (1706-76) held the rank of brigadier general of Massachusetts forces during the French war and was a colonel of the Essex militia. He had been a councilor since 1755. His prominence in the protests of Nov. 1765 was the high point of his radicalism; thereafter he was more moderate, and by the early-1770s was a friend of government. BGHU, 7: 10-23; Nicolson, The ‘Infamas Govener’, 130, 174-176.
2. Identity unknown.
3. Edmund Trowbridge (1709-1793), the source of FB’s information, served only one term as a councilor, 1764-65, but had been attorney general since 1749.
4. The Cambridge instructions of 14 Oct. called on the representatives to refuse to do or say anything that might assist the implementation of the Stamp Act. FB was particularly offended by the town meeting denigrating Andrew Oliver as an “INFORMER.” Another passage in the instructions proffered an inversion of the governor’s warning of 25 Sept., in as much as it cited impending social distress as a reason for resistance to the Stamp Act rather than a reason for acquiescence in its implementation. “Let this Act but take Place, Liberty will be no more—Trade will languish and die—our Cash will be sent to his Majesty’s Exchequer—and Poverty come upon us like an armed Man.” Boston Newsletter, 17 Oct. 1765.
1. Meaning “unweariedly”.
2. Obscured by binding, here and below.
3. Nonimportation was adopted by the New York merchants on 21 Oct. and by Boston on 9 Dec. See Tyler, Smugglers & Patriots, 91.
4. These volunteers were mainly merchants and shopkeepers. For the Salem association see Samuel Curwen to unknown [Salem], 15 Oct. 1765, Curwen MSS, 3, Peabody Essex Museum. The instructions to Salem representatives Andrew Oliver Jr. and William Browne, adopted later that month, emphasized the need to take preventative measures against “tumultuous proceedings.” Boston Evening Post, 28 Oct. 1765. Marblehead in Massachusetts Gazette and the Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser, 28 Oct., 1765; Plymouth in the biography of Edward Winslow Jr., BGHU, 16: 103.
5. The Constitutional Courant, 21 Sept. 1765, was a single-issue newspaper published by William Goddard (1740-1817) over the pseudonym “Andrew Marvel” and printed by James Parker at Woodbridge, N.J. It contained two articles, by “Philolutherus” and “Philopatriae.” The headline “Join or Die” accompanied Benjamin Franklin’s cartoon of a segmented snake popularized in the Pennsylvania Gazette. “Philolutherus” was reprinted in the Newport Mercury, 7 Oct. 1765 and the Connecticut Gazette, 25 Oct. 1765. FB’s misapprehension that the Courant was locally reprinted probably stems from the note appended to the cartoon in the Boston Evening-Post, 7 Oct. 1765: “There is such a Demand for the above-mentioned Paper in these parts, that, we hear, it will soon be re-published.” The Courant was included in a collection published later in the year. Copies and Extracts of Several News Papers Printed in New England, in the months of September, October, and November, 1765, and referred to in the letters transmitted from Francis Bernard, Esq; governor of the Massachusett’s Bay, to the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations (Boston?, 1765).
6. Thus in manuscript.
7. In the Courant, “Philolutherus” provided a rhetorical flourish that FB’s opponents came to appreciate: “Shall we sit down quietly, while the yoke of slavery is wreathing about our necks?” Satirical ripostes to FB’s speech of 25 Sept. appeared intermittently over the next twelve months. Albert Matthews, “The Book of America,” Procs. MHS 62 (1928): 171-197, at 189-191; Bruce Ingham Granger, Political Satire in the American Revolution, 1763-1783 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1960), 34-36.
8. Expressions of approval for the Stamp Act per se were few and far between among conservatives; criticism of popular radicalism was more prevalent. But the friends of government were unable, and in many cases unwilling, to endorse the proposals for submission to the Stamp Act that FB presented to the assembly in the autumn of 1765. Nicolson, “Governor Francis Bernard, the Massachusetts Friends of Government, and the Advent of the Revolution,” 30-52.
9. FB purchased Jamaica Plain farm from Peter and Abigail Stone in Oct. 1765 for £960 lawful money. The Stones had been living there for seven years, and their fifty-acre estate included a dwelling-house, greenhouse, out-buildings, stables, and an orchard. The mortgage that the Stones had acquired from John Osborne, TH’s father-in-law, was assigned to FB. FB improved the property and purchased adjacent lots in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Braintree. Suffolk County Registry of Deeds, CY3.13, 1205, vols. 98: 113; 108: 89-90; 123: 114.
1. “Then spoke Jesus to the multitude, and to his disciples, Saying The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. . . . Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought you to have done, and not to leave the other undone.” Matthew 23. 1-2, 23. KJV.
2. Thus in manuscript.
3. TH’s friends had been urging him to go to England and in Oct. he wrote numerous letters to friends and associates in the colonies and Britain about his sufferings in the riots. TH also formally requested compensation from the British government, for he thought it unlikely that the assembly would accede to FB’s request to make restitution (as indeed it so refused, on 23 Oct.) and that an imperial requisition being made on the assembly would only incite further wrath. Hutchinson Correspondence, 1: introduction; TH to Conway, Boston, 1 Oct. 1765, CO 5/755, ff 353-360.
4. Dated 14 Oct. 1765, not found.
5. Charles Morris (1711-81), originally of Massachusetts, had surveyed and mapped much of Nova Scotia in the 1750s and early 1760s, and, as a province councilor, was a strong advocate of immigration from New England.
6. That is, to ponder or consider carefully. OED.
1. Letters to Halifax: Castle William, 15 and 16 Aug; 22 Aug. 1765; No. 384. Letters to the Board of Trade: Nos. 368 and 373; Castle William, 31 Aug. 1765. Conway is probably referring to the date on which he personally took receipt of the originals, for all the letters reached the secretary of state’s office between 5 and 14 Oct. and the Board of Trade between 8 and 16 Oct. JHRM: this paragraph omitted from the extract that FB presented to the House.
2. Thus in manuscript.
3. JHRM: “His Majesty cannot . . . Province” omitted.
4. JHRM: “If, by lenient and persuasive Methods . . . Forces in America” omitted.
5. JHRM: the closure and postscript omitted.
6. No. 388.
1. Probably a copy of Charles Morris, Plan of Part of the Province of Nova Scotia or Accadie, 1765, CO 700/NOVA SCOTIA31. Morris’s plan was later published as an aid to Loyalist settlement of the region. A Plan of the Bay and District of Passamaquoddy, whereon is delineated the several Town Plots and alotments of Land . . . to be Granted Loyal Emigrants (London, 1784). Demeritt, “Representing the ‘True’ St. Croix,” 519-520n16.
2. That is, to Cobscook Bay.
3. At present-day St. Stephen, N.B.
4. A new paragraph has been started after a virgule in the manuscript.
5. Michael Francklin (1733-82) of Nova Scotia had been a member of the Governor’s Council of that province since 1762 and was appointed its lieutenant governor in 1766.
1. Letters are obscured by binding here and below.
2. The assembly reconvened on 23 Oct., and on the following day replied to FB’s speech of 25 Sept. The House refused to recommend any submission to the Stamp Act or to consider compensating the victims of the riots, but did not impugn Parliament’s legislative supremacy. JHRM, 42: 130-138; Nicolson, The ‘Infamas Govener’, 126.
3. Supplied from copies.
4. Samuel Adams (1722-1803) a maltster and Boston tax collector, 1756-64, had authored instructions for Boston’s representatives before he himself was elected to the House on 27 Sept. to take the vacant seat arising from the death of Oxenbridge Thacher. Adams’s popularity was such that, in defeating three other candidates, he took 47 per cent of the votes. Adams’s power-base was the Boston caucus and the town meeting; historians also suppose that he was well-connected with the Loyal Nine who had organized the Stamp Act riots. In the coming years, Adams was a bridge between the protestors in the Boston streets and the debaters in the legislative chamber. Reports of the Record Commissioners of Boston, 16: 157; William M. Fowler, Jr., Samuel Adams: Radical Puritan (New York, 1997); Ira Stoll, Samuel Adams: a Life (New York, 2008).
5. Authorship of the resolutions unanimously adopted by the House on 29 Oct. 1765 is attributed to Adams by Harry Alonzo Cushing, ed., The Writings of Samuel Adams, 4 vols., (New York, 1904), 1: 23-25. The fourteen resolves—which were never presented to the Council—proved far less radical than FB anticipated: for the resolves asserted that colonial rights were consistent with subordination to parliamentary supremacy and loyalty to the king, and omitted any mention of inter-colonial resistance (which FB had discussed in No. 369). The twelfth resolve was somewhat opaque in claiming rights of taxation: “That all Acts made, by any Power whatever, other than the General Assembly of this Province, imposing Taxes on the Inhabitants are Infringements of our inherent and unalienable Rights, as Men and British Subjects.” JHRM, 42: 151-153. This was a moderate position with regard to the spectrum of opinion in Massachusetts and the colonies generally, in so far as it did not positively establish either exemption from parliamentary authority or the right of resistance. Rhode Island, as FB mentions, was rather different. The fourth of six resolves that the Rhode Island General Assembly adopted on 2 Sept. reiterated the fourth resolution that Patrick Henry had drafted for the Virginia House of Burgesses: this resolution, which the Virginians did not approve, unequivocally asserted the “exclusive right” of the General Assembly to lay taxes. The fifth Rhode Island resolution declared that the colonists were “not bound to yield obedience to any law or ordinance” regarding taxation that did not emanate from the assembly. By the turn of the year, it was the Rhode Island viewpoint that was beginning to represent mainstream Whig opinion. Nicolson, The ‘Infamas Govener’, 126-127; Bartlett, Records of the colony of Rhode Island, 6: 452. See also No. 364n3.
6. The Rev. Samuel Cooper (1725-83).
7. First written as “Lasts”. This is a flippant comment on the English Puritans’ predilection for fasting on the eve of the Civil War. FB would have warmly agreed with the observation of William Cavendish, the first duke of Newcastle, that “much preaching breeds faction, but much praying causes devotion.” Quoted in Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in pre-Revolutionary England (New York, 1964), 69.
8. The proposal to have a fast of general thanksgiving was evidently delayed, as FB notes in No. 409, but was approved by the House on 7 Nov. and held on 5 Dec. Mass. Archs., 14: 417.
9. Meaning, a masterstroke.
10. A joint committee, including Samuel Adams, was appointed on 25 Oct, to consider the operation of public offices and law courts after 1 Nov. JHRM, 42: 143. See also No. 408n3 and No. 409.
11. Letters are obscured by binding.
12. FB’s blunt suggestion that TH be saddled with the execution of the Stamp Act hints at tension in their relationship, probably deriving from the assembly’s refusal to compensate TH, as FB recommended, and TH approaching Conway directly.
13. First written as “these”.
14. There is a change in handwriting style in the following paragraph, suggesting a pause in composition.
15. Advertisements for the Stamp Act first appeared in mid-summer, printed and sold by Edes and Gill. Boston Gazette, 24 Jun. 1765. The official imprint issued by the Governor and Council is Anno quinto Georgii III. Regis Chap. I. An act for granting and applying certain stamp duties, and other duties, in the British colonies and plantations in America, toward further defraying the expences of defending, protecting, and securing the same; and for amending such parts of the several acts of Parliament relating to the trade and revenues of the said colonies and plantations, as direct the manner of determining and recovering the penalites and forfeitures therein mentioned (Boston, 1765).
1. Colville’s letter (not found) was a reply to FB’s letter of 30 Sept. BP, 4: 73.
2. See No. 407n5.
3. The resolves adopted by the House on 29 Oct. did not address this matter. That is because a joint committee was already considering how to “prevent difficulties” on 1 Nov. The committee reported on the morning of 30 Oct. with a contentious resolve calling upon the provincial government to “direct” its officials and law courts to conduct business as usual but without using any stamped papers. The resolve is not recorded in the House journal but in the court records of the Council, where it was discussed in the afternoon. The following day the assembly referred the report for consideration until after the (imminent) return of the province’s delegation to the Stamp Act Congress. JHRM, 42: 155, 157; CO 5/826, f 239; Nicolson, The ‘Infamas Govener’, 127. FB discusses both internal divisions in the House committee and the Council’s response in No. 409.
1. Copies: “hither”.
2. On 28 Oct. the Boston Post-Boy published a paper that had been posted on the Long Wharf entitled “Liberty and Property, and no Excise.” It called for the establishment of a thirty-man committee of enforcement to prevent merchants going to the Customhouse to obtain the stamped papers legally necessary in order that their vessels could be cleared for sailing. Later in this letter, FB mentions that he had learned a parade was being planned for 1 Nov. All of this was typical of the extent to which the iconography and street rituals of the upcoming Pope’s Day celebrations were being adopted for channeling opposition to the Stamp Act.
3. Of 24 Oct. JHRM, 42: 131-138.
4. FB is referring to the thirteen resolves adopted by the Stamp Act Congress on 19 Oct., and not the resolves passed by the House of Representatives on 29 Oct. (copies of both FB sent with this letter). The Congress broke up on 25 Oct. and Otis reached Boston on Friday 1 Nov. (as FB notes later) and laid before the House the “Proceedings of the Commissioners” recently returned from Congress. These papers would have included the Congress’s resolves, which were read and approved by the House. The copy that FB saw has not been found. The Congress’s resolves were summarized but not issued in the province newspapers and, inexplicably, were not printed for publication until 1766. JHRM, 42: 163; Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser, 4 Nov. 1765; Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 144.
5. Highlighted in APC: “are much decenter . . . purposes.”
6. See No. 408n3.
7. Highlighted in APC: “The principal difficulty . . . dropped.” The resolve calling for the suspension of the Stamp Act was one of the most contentious measures debated by the Massachusetts assembly before the Revolution. That is because it purported using a provincial legislative procedure to nullify an act of Parliament. It also, as FB explains, shifted onto the governor the onus of responsibility in deciding whether or not to accept nullification as a fait accompli.
8. Copies: “must still”.
9. Obscured by binding.
10. The proceedings of 29-30 Oct. are in CO 5/823, f 290.
11. Letters obscured by tight binding.
12. CO 5/823, f 291.
13. Prime Minister George Grenville and John Husk, MP. Highlighted in APC: “There is a high tree . . . H— —K.” Bostonians erroneously believed that Husk had had some part in devising the stamp tax, which FB himself acknowledged when he noted that the effigies were “supposed to be the advisers of the stamp Act” (No. 414). On Husk, see Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 173; Bernard Bailyn, “The Index and Commentaries of Harbottle Dorr,” Procs. MHS 84 (1973): 21-35, at 24-25n. But the targeting of Husk has never been fully explained. One plausible explanation is that the Boston merchants considered Husk an important contact in London who had somehow failed them. Born in New Hampshire, Husk had been a merchant in Boston before leaving for England in 1748; he served as deputy treasurer of the chamber from 1757 to 1761, when he was appointed commissary general for Guadeloupe (Boston Evening-Post, 5 Oct. 1761). With Husk as an MP for Maldon (1763 and again in 1768), the Boston merchants initially supposed that he would support their campaign against the introduction of the Sugar Act, and sent him a copy of their State of Trade. Husk’s reply to the merchants of 14 Aug. 1764 was printed in the Boston Gazette on 29 Oct. and the Providence Gazette on 3 Nov. Husk tried to interest ministers in his own ideas about the regulation of colonial trade (setting up free ports as it transpired); he claimed to have persuaded Grenville to postpone the introduction of the stamp duty but also warned of Grenville’s determination to implement an “inland tax” in the coming year. Historian John Tyler suggests that publication of Husk’s letter “could only have strengthened the hand of Thomas Hutchinson” in moderating the province’s petition against the Sugar Act and Stamp Tax. Smugglers & Patriots, 88. Thus, the Pope’s Day rioters, by displaying Husk in effigy beside Grenville, were both parodying the empty boasts of a foolish native-son and the manifest failure of the Hutchinson-Bernard faction to avert direct taxation through dialogue with London. In a similar vein, Paul Revere’s political cartoon A View of the Year, 1765 mocked the “perfidious H—k you see/Scorn’d by his Country, fits the Rope & Tree.” Jayne E. Triber, A True Republican: the Life of Paul Revere (Amherst, 1998), 48.
Husk’s part in the Commons debates on the repeal of the Stamp Act, 21-24 Feb. 1766, is not recorded in Cobbett, Parliamentary History of England, 16: 193-205, or HCJ, 30: 596-603. However, Husk’s participation was noted by one commentator. D. H. Watson, “William Baker’s account of the debate on the repeal of the Stamp Act,” WMQ 26 (1969): 259-265, at 263. Husk was to enjoy reminding the colonists of how he championed the repeal, and his contribution was recognized by the merchants of Liverpool. Their address of Mar. 1766 (which reputedly collected 161 signatories) was printed in the Boston Evening-Post, 29 Sept. 1766, alongside Husk’s gracious letter of acceptance; there soon followed the address of the merchants of Manchester, in the Providence Gazette, 25 Oct. 1766 covered by an anonymous apologetic letter written on behalf of the colonists.
14. According to the newspapers (listed in the source note, above), three thousand townspeople, followed the effigies in an orderly procession.
15. Ebenezer MacIntosh (or McIntosh/Mackintosh), the leader of the South End gang, was the son of a Scottish immigrant and had served in the provincial regiments in 1758. A cordwainer by trade, he held a minor town office with responsibility for checking the quality of hides being offered for sale. George P. Anderson, “Ebenezer Mackintosh: Stamp Act Rioter and Patriot,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 26 (1927): 15-64. On MacIntosh’s arrest see No. 384n25.
16. FB’s depiction of the events of Pope’s Day is consistent with the news article printed in the Boston Evening-Post, 11 Nov. 1765.
17. From this line to “ . . . such importance” is in a hand similar to that of Thomas Bernard, but the difference may be due to a pause in composition..
18. On Saturday 2 Nov. Otis was elected moderator of the town meeting. The only business recorded was the withdrawal of a petition submitted by a “number of Inhabitants” asking that “Measures” be taken to prevent “Disorders” associated with the Pope’s Day celebrations. As FB indicates, the town Whigs were co-operating with MacIntosh’s marshals to ensure that the peace was preserved, thus negating any imputation that the militia were necessary to keep law and order. Reports of the Record Commissioners of Boston, 16: 158.
19. Gage evidently played host to the delegates at New York, in addition to those leading citizens and businessmen noted in C. A. Weslager, The Stamp Act Congress: with an Exact Copy of the Complete Journal (Newark, NJ, 1976), 113-115. These dinners were “followed by long and often acrimonious discussions.” Ibid., 115.
20. Highlighted in APC: “he wondered that . . . with him in that.” No. 403 suggests that Otis made this ambiguous comment before he left Boston for New York.
21. Authorial correction: first written as “deb”.
22. Highlighted in APC: “He called the Council . . . their counsels.”
23. On 1 Nov. JHRM, 42: 163.
24. On 4 Nov. CO 5/823, f 291.
25. This clause highlighted in APC.
26. The pageant outside the Town House was celebrating the “union” of the North End and South End gangs. The proceedings had commenced at noon, when both groups converged at King Street. Thereupon they “interchanged ground.” In a symbolic demonstration of unity, the North End gang, led by the shipwright Henry Swift, headed into the South End neighborhood, while MacIntosh’s South End mob processed through the North End. They met up again at the Town House, and together marched to Liberty Tree; at 6 pm they assembled atop Copp’s Hill where the effigies were consigned to a bonfire. Boston Evening-Post, 11 Nov. 1765.
27. From here there is a change in handwriting style suggesting a pause in composition.
28. No further action was taken in this session, but the resolve was reconsidered on 22 Jan. 1766.
29. FB was unequivocal on this point in a letter to Lord Colvill that he had penned before the parades passed off peacefully: “the Licentiousness of the People increases so fast, that I must certainly quit this Town some time or other before Winter.” Boston, 1 Nov., 1765, BP, 4: 84.
30. From here to the end of the letter, the handwriting is unmistakably that of FB’s.
31. Three instances of dittography in this paragraph have been omitted.
32. The adjective is missing.
33. Trans.: “they run together war and man.” This Latin apothegm encapsulates FB’s gloomy disposition that there seemed no end in sight to the troubles facing him in office. The phrase also has some currency as a political signal, given that FB asked Pownall to consider making this letter public. What it conveys is the image of a lone warrior struggling heroically against overwhelming odds, thus exonerating FB from any blame in failing to execute the Stamp Act. FB might have been thinking of Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (39-65 BC), Bellum civile sive Pharsalia, 6: 191-192: “Parque novum Fortuna videt concurrere, bellum/ atque virum.” Known as Pharsalia, Lucan’s unfinished history of the civil wars that brought about the end of the Roman republic was popular with eighteenth-century readers. Lucan’s poetical meanderings on endurance and courage were inspired by Scaeva, a centurion with C. Julius Caesar, who singularly held a fort against Pompey’s army, before succumbing to his wounds. Erin Paige Davis, “Boundary Violations: A Reflection of Pessimism in Lucan’s Bellum Civile,” 64-66, M.A. Diss., Faculty of the Graduate School at the Univ. of Missouri-Columbia, 2007; Stanley F. Bonner, “Lucan and the Declamation Schools,” The American Journal of Philology 87 (1966): 257-289, at 283.
34. His next letter to the Board of Trade was No. 416.
35. This line highlighted in APC.
36. BP, 5: 30-31. Deverson advertised an intended departure in fourteen days, in Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser, 30 Sept. 1765.
37. Cutting from the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, 17 Oct. 1765.
1. Nos. 406, 409, 413, and 415.
2. On 2 Nov. JHRM, 42: 164.
3. Dennys DeBerdt (d.1770) was a Dissenter and London merchant with extensive trading connections in the American Colonies.
4. See No. 339.
5. On 6 Nov. JHRM, 42: 175.
6. The phrase “so old and” is written over a word that cannot be deciphered.
7. DeBerdt was chosen on 5 Nov. and voted in the next day; the day after that a letter of appointment was issued. JHRM, 42: 167, 175-176. He served as agent for the House of Representatives until 1770.
8. FB had withheld his consent to a resolve requesting that Jasper Mauduit make payment to Jackson, since there was no guarantee that Mauduit would relinquish money that he claimed entitlement to. The resolve that was approved on 8 Nov. directed the province treasurer to make payment of £200 direct to Jackson. DeBerdt was also to receive £200, expressly “to solicit and pursue” the petitions of the Stamp Act Congress. Acts and Resolves, 18: 72.
9. Israel Mauduit (1708-87), brother of province agent Jasper.
10. Barlow Trecothick (?1718-75) may have lived in Boston until he was twenty-two years old; he had been apprenticed to the merchant Charles Apthorp, and moved to London in c.1750, where he eventually became a partner of the Thomlinsons and the Apthorps. An alderman of London in 1764, Trecothick was an early opponent of the Stamp Act and helped to organize the English merchants’ campaign for repeal. He was elected to Parliament in 1768 as a member for London.
11. Thus in manuscript.
12. On 6 Nov. JHRM 42: 169-172.
13. The preface of “The Times” caused a minor stir when it appeared in the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, 7 Oct. 1765. The printers, Richard and Samuel Draper, urged anyone who had purchased a copy to rip out the “insolent, impertinent” preface. The Drapers were financially reliant on their contract as printers to the Governor and Council, and might have been responding to pressure from FB who took issue with the preface’s allusion to dictatorship. Perhaps to save face, the printers now claimed to be acting at the behest of the author, who was the Whig polemicist Benjamin Church. The preface was probably written by Church himself or one of his Whig colleagues. The offensive passage was:
It was observed by Sir William Temple,* that none can be said to know things well, who do not know them in their beginnings. There are many very noisy about liberty, but are aiming at nothing more than personal grandeur and power. Are not many, under the delusive character of Guardians of their country, collecting influence and honour only for oppression? Behold Caesar! at first a patriot, a consul, and commander of the Roman army. How apparently noble his intentions, and how specious his conduct! but unbounded in his ambition, by these means he became at length a perpetual dictator, and an unlimited commander.
God gave mankind freedom by nature, made every man equal to his neighbor, and has virtually enjoined them to govern themselves by their own laws. The government which he introduced among his people, the Jews, abundantly proves it, and they might have continued in that state of liberty, had they not desired a King. The people best know their own wants and necessities, and therefore are best able to rule themselves. Tent makers, cobblers and common tradesmen composed the legislature at Athens. “Is not the body (said Socrates) of the Athenian people composed of men like these?”
That I might help, in some measure, to eradicate the notion of arbitrary power, heretofore drank in; and to establish the liberties of the people of this country upon a more generous footing, is the design of the following impartial work, now dedicated by the Author to the honest farmer and citizen.
Benjamin Church, The Times: A Poem (Boston, 1765). Church rather proved his own point by becoming one of the government’s best informers on the outbreak of the Revolution.
* Sir William Temple, An Introduction to the History of England (3d. ed.: London, 1708), preface, 3.
1. Dated Beckett, 5 Aug., and Cavendish Square, 12 Sept. 1765, BP, 10: 276-279, 296-299.
2. Barrington to FB, 12 Sept. 1765.
3. The eldest of Joshua Loring’s three sons was Joshua, a lieutenant in the 15th Regiment of Foot.
4. Not found. Pemberton’s other letters to the duke of Newcastle have survived, however, and can be found among the duke’s official correspondence. BL: Add. 32688, f 474; Add. 32695, f 411; Add. 32877, ff 136, 237.
1. Not found.
2. First written as “way”.
3. That is to say, to what Massachusetts called the Magaguadavic River. The grants were made to the east of the “St. Croix River,” even though the provinces could not agree as to which of the region’s rivers should be termed the St. Croix.
4. See No. 406.
5. James Boutineau (1710-78) was a descendant of Huguenot immigrants and a wealthy Boston merchant. His daughter married customs officer John Robinson in 1769.
6. Joseph Gerrish (1709-74), a farmer and former merchant, had been a member of the Nova Scotia Council since 1759 but had only recently been reinstated after being suspended from civil office for his part in popular protests against the province’s debtor laws. In 1766, he obtained rights to mine and export Cape Breton coal and was later deputized as a judge of Vice Admiralty.
7. Left marginalia: “PS. See next page at the bottom”.
8. Annotation in FB’s hand: “PS. Dec 11 to the letter on the other side”, meaning the preceding letter-book page.
9. Gregory Townsend, collector of Customs at Cape Breton Island since 1764.
10. FB to Montague Wilmot, Boston, 11 Dec. 1765, BP, 4: 102; FB to Colvill of the same date, BP, 4: 85-86.
11. Benjamin Green, captain of the Nova Scotia Packet, was obliged to issue a public advertisement on 20 Nov. denying that his vessel had brought stamped papers from Halifax in order that he might be able to obtain clearance to sail from the Boston Customhouse. Three days later, he entered the vessel at the Customhouse. He did not leave until 11 Dec. and was able to do so legally by sailing in ballast. Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, 21 Nov. 1765; Boston Evening-Post, 25 Nov. 1765.
1. No. 285; FB to Barrington, Boston, 20 Jul. 1764, BP, 3: 236-237. The “Principles” are printed as Appendix 2.
2. See No. 362.
3. Letters obscured by binding.
4. Thus in manuscript.
5. Thus in manuscript.
6. This pithy and prescient observation likely reflected a topic of conversation current among Crown officers.
7. The doctrine of virtual representation was commonly used by British commentators to defend Parliament’s authority to tax the American colonists: that, while the Americans did not directly elect members of Parliament or directly give their consent to taxation, they were indirectly—or virtually—represented by the members. It was first propagated by Thomas Whately, the junior secretary to the Treasury in Grenville’s administration, 1763-65, in The Regulations lately Made concerning the Colonies and the Taxes Imposed upon Them, Considered (London, 1765). FB’s advocacy of American representation in “The Principles of Law and Polity” (propositions 62-67, Appendix 2) was soon out of step with mainstream colonial opinion which argued that legislative authority in taxation should lie with the colonial assemblies.
8. Edward Poynings (1459–1521) was viceroy and lord deputy in Ireland for Henry VII of England. Poynings gave his name to a law of 1494 (10 Hen. 7, c. 22) passed by the Irish Parliament (usu. referred to in the singular possessive form, Poyning’s Law) that all legislation issued in Ireland required prior approval by the Crown. The Irish Parliament’s powers were also circumscribed by the Dependency of Ireland on Great Britain Act, 6 Geo. 1, c. 5 (1720) that declared the British Parliament’s authority to make “binding” laws for Ireland; this act was subsequently adapted for the American Colonies by the Declaratory Act, 6 Geo 3, c. 12 (1766).
9. Thus in manuscript.
10. “The Principles of Law and Polity” props. 90-92, Appendix 2.
11. “The Principles of Law and Polity” did not mention Ireland. The analogous case of Ireland emphasized the subordination of colonial institutions to imperial power, and FB clearly anticipates the American Declaratory Act (1766). Even so, there is a strong suspicion that, in the aftermath of the Stamp Act riots, FB was also thinking of the military power at the disposal of the Lord Lieutenant in Ireland.
12. He is referring to an upper legislative chamber.
13. Insertion by FB.
14. Smudged.
15. Insertion by FB.
16. FB is referring to the English Bill of Rights, enacted in 1689, and likely cancelled these lines lest the proposal for an American bill of rights be considered a concession to any claim of right to have been made by the colonists.
17. Interlineation by FB.
18. Obscured by binding here and below.
19. Thus in manuscript.
20. Manuscript torn and smudged with ink.
21. The text of this last paragraph, including the emendations, plus the closure, is in FB’s hand. This paragraph is not in Select Letters.
1. No. 397.
2. FB was angered by the Cambridge instructions and several Whig-authored articles (No. 402), and mindful of a personal attack in the Boston Gazette on 30 Sept. 1765. This anonymous piece had parodied his assertion in Council on 5 Sept. that he had “no Warrant Order of Authority whatsoever to distribute the Stamped Papers.” (See No. 393).
I now declare to all the Town,
To rich and poor, and great and small,
To high and low, and short and tall,
That I’ve no order, warrant, might,
Or whatever power, or right,
To deal about th’ aforesaid Papers,
Or peep into the’ inclosing wrappers, . . .
3. On 24 Oct. JHRM 42: 131-138.
4. FB commonly used this syntax, meaning “attack upon” or “attack on.”
5. The assembly, in short, continued to urge non-submission to the Stamp Act. It berated FB for suggesting that law and order were endangered by the impending closure of the courts and ports after 1 Nov. (since Crown officials were not prepared to break the law by conducting business without stamps). The assembly, as FB relates, also refused to vote compensation for the victims of the Stamp Act riots, repudiating any imputation that public restitution was justified or should ever be presumed appropriate to crimes “committed by a few individuals.” For a discussion of these exchanges, see Nicolson, The ‘Infamas Govener’, 125-126, 132. See also No. 416 for a continuation of FB’s narrative that expressly considers political language and terminology.
6. FB’s speech of 8 Nov. JHRM 42: 186-189.
7. On 29 Oct. Ibid, 151-153.
8. On 6 Nov. Ibid, 169-172.
9. On 1 Nov. See No. 409 for details.
10. Manuscript torn.
1. No. 409.
2. Henry Swift, a shipwright.
3. This is the first time that FB unequivocally asserts that MacIntosh was following instructions on 14 and 15 Aug. His other accounts imply that MacIntosh was being controlled, as when FB claimed that “50 Gentlemen Actors” in disguise joined the mob (No. 368) and the “heads of the mob . . . are some of the principal Men” (No. 375.)
4. The “union” had been planned by Swift, MacIntosh, and the Loyal Nine in the days before the riot of 14 Aug. Hoerder, Crowd Action, 96-97.
5. See illustration on p. 425.
6. FB’s depiction of events is consistent with the newspaper accounts, but his description of MacIntosh’s attire is from personal observation. Boston Evening-Post, 11 Nov. 1765; Boston Gazette, 11 Nov. 1765.
7. The “Union Feast” was held on 11 Nov. at the Royal Exchange Tavern for two hundred (ticketed) guests. The identities of the two gentlemen who effected the reconciliation are unknown. Hoerder, Crowd Action, 117-118. FB seems to think these men were rich merchants, judging by a comment made earlier in the letter. John Hancock, who was master of ceremonies, might have been one of them; Samuel Adams was also there, but FB is unlikely to be alluding to him.
8. Supplied.
9. Thus in manuscript.
10. FB tended to blame most every radical news article on Otis, but Otis has not been credited with authorship of the several anti-government pieces that appeared in the Nov. newspapers. However, starting on 9 Dec. in the Boston Gazette and continuing until 27 Jan. 1766, Otis appeared as “Hampden” (echoing the stance taken by John Hampden, the English Puritan, against Charles I’s ship-money tax) to fashion a reply to British writer “William Pym” who had defended colonial taxation as a reasonable and rational financial policy. These essays were truer to FB’s image of Otis than the cautious pamphlets he had written earlier in the year, in that they contained (a) an unequivocal denial of parliament’s authority to levy taxes on the colonists, and (b) a final repudiation of the notion that American representation was at all practical. Ellen E. Brennan, “James Otis: Recreant and Patriot,” New England Quarterly 12 (1939): 691-725, at 719-720.
11. The postscript to this letter is on p. 63 of BP, 4.
1. On 25 Sept.
2. The House’s answer of 24. Oct. was replying to FB’s speech of 25 Sept.
3. Of 8 Nov.
4. FB’s speech of 25 Sept. contains “you” instead of “them” as written here. JHRM, 42: 123.
5. The House’s answer of 24 Oct. reads: “We are greatly at a loss to know who has any right to require this of us, if we should differ from Your Excellency in the point of its being an act of justice which concerns the credit of the government.” Ibid., 138.
6. The houses of William Story and Benjamin Hallowell, respectively.
7. Charles Paxton.
8. That is, to confine.
9. Of 4 Nov.
10. Of 6 Nov.
11. Of 7 Nov.
12. Of 8 Nov.
13. FB’s suggestion that men of “fortune” were controlling Swift and MacIntosh (and through them the North End and South End gangs) is intriguing. Historians have concluded that if any local politicians were able to influence the gangs, then it was the Loyal Nine. Moreover, one convincing suggestion is that Samuel Adams had a hold over MacIntosh because he had taken out a warrant to proceed against MacIntosh for unpaid taxes. Hoerder, Crowd Action, 96. But neither Adams nor the traders, tradesmen, and craftsmen who made up the Loyal Nine were wealthy men. Perhaps FB is simply assuming that because William Brattle and James Otis participated in the organization of the Pope’s Day celebrations then they must have exerted and continued to possess considerable influence over Swift and MacIntosh. (He had already revealed this connection in No. 409).
14. William Legge (1731-1801), the second earl of Dartmouth, left the Rockingham ministry on 16 Aug. 1766 and was a future American Secretary under Lord North.
15. Soame Jenyns (1704-87), MP for Cambridge, 1758-80, and a lord commissioner of the Board of Trade, 1755-80. He was the author of an arch-Tory pamphlet published in London in Apr. or May 1765. The Objections to the Taxation of our American Colonies by the Legislature of Great Britain, briefly consider’d (London, 1765). Extracts were printed in colonial newspapers, including the Newport Mercury, 27 May 1765 and the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, 13 Jun. 1765.
16. John Roberts (1711/12-72), MP for Harwich, had been a lord commissioner of the Board of Trade in 1761-62, and his second term lasted until his death. William Fitzherbert (1712-72) was MP for Derby, 1761-72, and a lord commissioner, 1765-72. His association with FB probably dates from their time at Westminster School. FB wrote Fitzherbert offering to supply both he and Roberts “with such informations [on America] as I can give.” It elicited a flattering reply from Fitzherbert, who professed that during Parliament’s debates on the repeal of the Stamp Act “I never remember to have ^heard^ ye Conduct of any one ^single person^ so generally approvd.” FB to Fitzherbert, Boston, 16 Nov. 1765, BP, 5: 35; Fitzherbert to FB, London, 30 Mar. 1766, BP, 10: 358-359.
1. Not found.
1. See No. 330 for a discussion of Temple’s complaint.
2. Thus in manuscript.
3. Trans.: “there is nothing to despair about.”
4. No. 407.
1. Select Letters: essay title in quotation marks.
2. See Appendix 2.
3. Smudged. Illegible text supplied by Select Letters.
4. A note in FB’s handwriting is attached to p. 56: “Having now looked it over at a years distance I find no reason to alter my Opinion in any article excepting in regard to the allowing the Americans representatives in parliament. I then considered ^this^ as a Matter of indifference; I don’t think it so now: It seems to me at this time to be capable of being made an useful expedient or rather a refined stroke of policy”. In Select Letters: “excepting one which the alteration . . . impropriety” was omitted and the following passage substituted: “excepting in regard to the allowing the American Representatives in Parliament. I then considered this as a matter of indifference; I do not think it so now:”
5. This sentence omitted in Select Letters.
6. Originally, the image of the goddess Pallas, protector of Troy; in general usage it means a symbolic safeguard or protector of nations; used here to signify the bastion of the Whigs’ argument. OED.
7. Smudged.
8. Obscured by binding.
1. The “Printer” (perhaps Benjamin Edes, since he was a member of the Loyal Nine) ensured that both letters were published in the Boston Gazette, 16 Dec, 1765.
2. This letter was printed in the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter, 19 Dec. 1765.
3. Identity unknown.
4. John Avery Jr. was a distiller and member of the Loyal Nine, a Harvard graduate, and son-in-law of Thomas Cushing, Speaker of the House of Representatives. He was as well-connected with the Whig merchants as he was with Ebenezer MacIntosh and Boston’s street protestors.
5. Printed in ibid.
6. This may have been Daniel Oliver (1743-1826), who had graduated from Harvard in 1762 and was probably living in Boston studying for the law. (He was admitted an attorney in the Superior Court three years later.) Daniel was Andrew Oliver’s second surviving son (the ninth of seventeen children), but the emissary might equally have been one of Daniel’s younger brothers: William Sanford (1748-1813) or Peter (1749-1795), though not Brinley (1755-1774) who was still a child.
1. No. 420.
2. No. 422, which postdates this cover to Conway.
1. Oliver did not indent or mark the quotation in any way.
1. Boston, 25 Sept. 1765, CO 5/755, ff 319-320; Nos. 397, 414, and 421.
2. Meaning, the final account or ultimate reckoning.
3. See source note to No. 420.
4. Thus in manuscript.
5. On 24 Oct. See No. 409.
6. William Cooper (1721-1809) was Boston town clerk from 1761 until his death.
7. The committee members were Samuel Adams, John Rowe, Thomas Cushing, John Ruddock, Samuel Sewall, John Hancock, Joshua Henshaw, Benjamin Kent, and Arnold Welles. The relevant passage in the memorial reads: “Under the Apprehensions we make our humble Applications to your Excellency in Council, with whom the executive Power within the Province is constitutionally lodged, that you would be pleased to give such Directions to the several Courts and their Officers.” Reports of the Record Commissioners of Boston, 16: 158-159.
8. Obscured by tight binding here and below.
9. Thus in manuscript.
10. Not sent.
11. This is a variation on the phrase “Let justice be done though the heavens fall,” a common rendition of the Latin, Fiat justitia ruat caelum, that was later immortalized by Lord Mansfield in his ruling in the Somerset Case (1772) widely believed to have outlawed slavery in England.
12. Dateline of the endorsement is in the fold of the binding.
1. No. 423.
2. 20 Dec. 1765. CO 5/823, f 293.
3. James Otis was accompanied by Jeremiah Gridley (1701-67), the province’s leading barrister, and John Adams (1735-1826) of Braintree, one of Gridley’s students. Adams had practiced as an attorney since 1758 and had been admitted to the bar in 1762, but only recently had he forged links with the province Whigs; his appearance before FB and the Council was Adams’s most high-profile contribution to the protest movement to date. Daniel R. Coquillette, “Justinian in Braintree: John Adams, Civilian Learning, and Legal Elitism, 1758-1775,” in Law in Colonial Massachusetts, 1630-1800, ed. Daniel R. Coquillette (Boston, 1984), 363-376, 417.
4. FB’s assessment is borne out by Josiah Quincy Jr.’s report of Adams’s argument, in Robert J. Taylor, Mary-Jo Kline, and Gregg L. Lint, et al., eds., Papers of John Adams, 15 vols. to date (Cambridge, Mass, 1977-), 1: 152-153.
5. LbC and Copy: “unavoidably”.
6. Whether Adams, Otis, or Gridley cannot be determined from John Adams’s account of the meeting, dated Frid. 20 Dec.
The Governor said many of the Arguments used were very good ones to be used before the judges of the Executive Courts. But he believed there had been no Instance in America of an Application to the Governor and Council, and said that if the judges should receive any Directions from the King about a Point of Law, . . . they would scorn to regard them, and would say that while they were in those Seats, they only were to determine Points of Law.
Butterfield, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 1: 267.
7. LbC and Copy: “the greater”.
8. The Council’s resolve of 21 Dec. 1765, CO 5/823, f 294:
That a question in Law necessarily arises from sd. Memorial namely Whether the officers of the Courts of Law can be justified in proceeding in their respective offices with unstamped papers, and it is thereupon Resolved that it is the business of the Courts of Law to determine points of Law, nor can the Board with any propriety direct or advise the said Courts in such judgements or determinations, and in this particular point of Law under the Present State of the Province, the Board are desirous that the said Courts should be free in their judgements without any apprehension of censure from the Board. It is therefore further Resolved that the subject matter of this Memorial is not proper for the determination of the Board, nor is it in the power of the Board to afford relief in the way and manner prayed for, but the Board recommend it to the Justices of the Inferior Court of Common Pleas for the County of Suffolk to determine the aforesaid point of Law as soon as may be, and to the other Courts within the Province to determine it at or before their first respective terms.
1. No. 393; No. 401.
2. CO 5/823, f 293: “four Pounds ten shillings,” in provincial currency.
3. Of 12 Dec. 1765. CO 5/823, f 293. John Rowe (1715–87) was a prominent Boston merchant close to the Whig leadership but regarded as a moderate by FB. His vessel the Devonshire, Capt. Hugh Hunter, had brought in a second consignment of stamped papers to Castle William.
4. Lt. John Peate of HMS Jamaica.
5. Nathaniel Bethune, Nicholas Boylston, and Melatiah Bourne.
1. Walter Raleigh, The History of the World . . . (London, 1614).
2. William Fulke, Matthew Parker, and Gregory Martin, The Text of the New Testament of Iesus Christ ... (4th ed.: London, 1633).
3. Ralph Brownrig, Sixty Five Sermons (London, 1674).
4. Francis White, A Replie to Iesuit Fishers Answere to Certain Questions Propou[n]ded by His Most Gratious Matie: King Iames . . . (London, 1624).
5. Edward Pococke, A Commentary on the Prophecy of Hosea . . . (Oxford, 1685).
6. Possibly Jeremy Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living in Which Are Described the Means and Instruments of Obtaining Every Vertue and the Remedies Against Every Vice . . . (London, 1695).
7. Peter Heylyn, Cosmography in Four Books Containing the Chorography and History of the Whole World . . . (5th ed.: London, 1677). This book was not in two volumes as the manuscript seems to indicate.
8. Probably a scribal error for the 1669 edition, Peter Heylyn, Cosmographie in Four Books . . . (London, 1669).
9. Henry Hibbert, Syntagma Theologicum . . . (London, 1662). MH-H: C 1235.20.30*.
10. Jean Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion . . . (London, 1634).
11. Anthony Burgess, Spiritual Refining, or, A Treatise of Grace and Assurance Part I . . . (London, 1658).
12. William Howell, An Institution of General History, or, The History of the World Being a Complete Body Thereof . . . (London, 1680).
13. Richard Allestree, Eighteen Sermons Whereof Fifteen Preached the King . . . (London, 1669). MH-H: f EC65 Al547 669e.
14. Henry Hammond, Sermons (London, 1675). MH-H: f EC65 H1852 664sb.
15. Ezerel Tonge, Jesuitical Aphorismes, or, A Summary Account of the Doctrine of the Jesuites . . . (London, 1679).
16. Daniel Featley, Threnoikos: the House of Mourning . . . (London, 1672).
17. Peter Heylyn and George Vernon, Keimelia Ekklesiastika, the Historical and Miscellaneous Tracts of the Reverend and Learned Peter Heylyn . . . (London, 1681).
18. William Pemble, The Workes of That Late Learned Minister of God’s Holy Word, Mr. William Pemble . . . (Oxford, 1659).
19. Peter Heylyn, Theologia Veterum, or, The Summe of Christian Theologie . . . (London, 1673). MH-H: f C 1234.30.
20. Samuel Newman, A Concordance to the Holy Scriptures Together With the Books of the Apocrypha . . . (Cambridge, 1698).
21. Anthony Farindon, Fifty Sermons Preached at the Parish-Church of St. Mary Magdalene Milk-Street, London . . . (London, 1674).
22. Nehemiah Grew, Cosmologia Sacra: or A Discourse of the Universe As It Is the Creature and Kingdom of God (London, 1701).
23. Thomas Bray, Papal Usurpation and Persecution . . . (London, 1712). MH-H: f AC7 P9357 Zz712b.
24. William Cave, Antiquitates Apostolicae, or, The Lives, Acts and Martyrdoms of the Holy Apostles of Our Saviour . . . (London, 1678); Jeremy Taylor, Antiquitates Christianae, or, The History of the Life and Death of the Holy Jesus . . . (London, 1678).
25. Jeremy Taylor, Symbolon Theologikon, or, A Collection of Polemicall Discourses . . . (London, 1674).
26. Gabriel Towerson, An Explication of the Catechism of the Church of England . . . (London, 1685).
27. William Laud and John Fisher, A Relation of the Conference Between William Laud, Late Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, and Mr. Fisher the Jesuit . . . (London, 1686). MH-H: f EC L3632 639rd.
28. Robert Sanderson, XXXVI Sermons Viz. XVI Ad Aulam, VI Ad Clerum, VI Ad Magistratum, VIII Ad Populum . . . (London, 1686).
29. Robert Sanderson, Twenty Sermons Formerly Preached XVI Ad Aulam, III Ad Magistratum, I Ad Populum . . . (London, 1656).
30. Thomas Fuller, A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine and the Confines Thereof With the History of the Old and New Testament Acted Thereon (London, 1650).
31. The date is probably a scribal error for an earlier edition. Richard Field, Of the Church Fiue Bookes. By Richard Field Doctor of Diuinity and Sometimes Deane of Glocester (Oxford, 1628).
32. Jeremy Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, or, The Rule of Conscience in All Her General Measures . . . (London, 1696).
33. Anon., A Collection of Cases and Other Discourses Lately Written to Recover Dissenters to the Communion of the Church of England by Some Divines of the City of London (London, 1694).
34. Henry Hammond, The Works of the Reverend and Learned Henry Hammond, D.D. . . . (London, 1684).
35. This date relates to the first entry scored out, but there was no edition of Hammond’s Works published in that year.
36. Anthony Tuckney, Praelectiones Theologicae Nec Non Determinationes Quaestionum Variarum Insignium in Scholis Academicis Cantabrigiensibus Habitae . . . (London, 1679).
37. John Cosin, A Scholastical History of the Canon of the Holy Scripture or The Certain Indubitate Books Thereof, . . . (2d ed.; London, 1672). MH-H: *EC C8205 657sb.
38. Henry Dodwell, Separation of Churches From Episcopal Government, As Practised by the Present Non-Conformists, Proved Schismatical . . . (London, 1679).
39. William Sherlock, A Discourse Concerning a Judge of Controversies in Matters of Religion Being an Answer to Some Papers Asserting the Necessity of Such a Judge . . . (London, 1686).
40. Not found.
41. Nicholas Clagett, A Perswasive to an Ingenuous Tryal of Opinions in Religion (London, 1685).
42. James Ussher, A Body of Divinity: or, The Sum and Substance of Christian Religion . . . (London, 1702). MH-H: *EC Us750 645bi.
43. Samuel White, A Commentary on the Prophet Isaiah . . . (London, 1709).
44. First written: “25”.
45. This and similar references could refer to personal collections of pamphlets published separately but subsequently bound together by the owner.
46. Likely a personal collection (for which suggestion I am grateful to Gary Phillips).
47. Simon Patrick, The Parable of the Pilgrim Written to a Friend (London, 1678).
48. William Wake, Two Discourses, of Purgatory, and Prayers for the Dead (London, 1687).
49. William Sherlock, A Vindication of the Doctrine of the Holy and Ever Blessed Trinity and the Incarnation of the Son of God Occasioned . . . (London, 1690).
50. First written as “1697”, which is the purported publication date for the title scored out.
51. Robert South, Animadversions Upon Dr. Sherlock’s Book, Entituled A Vindication of the Holy and Ever-Blessed Trinity, &c, Together With a More Necessary Vindication of That Sacred and Prime Article of the Christian Faith From His New Notions, and False Explications of It . . . (London, 1693).
52. John Harris, A Refutation of the Atheistical Notion of Fate . . . a Sermon Preach’d . . 1698: Being the Eighth of the Lecture for That Year, Founded by the Honourable Robert Boyle, Esq. (London, 1698); idem., A Refutation of the Objections Against the Attributes of God in General in a Sermon Preach’d . . . , 1698 . . . (London, 1698); idem., Immorality and Pride, the Great Causes of Atheism: a Sermon Preach’d . . . 1697/8 . . . (London, 1698); idem., The Atheist’s Objection That We Can Have No Idea of God Refuted a Sermon Preach’d . . . 1697/8 . . . (London, 1698); idem., The Atheist’s Objections Against the Immaterial Nature of God . . . Preach’d . . . 1698 (London, 1698); idem., The Atheistical Objections Against the Being of a God and His Attributes Fairly Considered and Fully Refuted in Eight Sermons, Preach’d . . . 1698 (London, 1698); John Williams, The Certainty of Divine Revelation A Sermon Preached . . . 1694/5. Being the Second of the Lecture for the Ensuing Year, Founded by the Honourable Robert Boyle, Esquire (London, 1696); idem., The Characters of Divine Revelation A Sermon Preached . . . 1694/5 . . . (London, 1697).
53. Offspring Blackall, The Sufficiency of a Standing Revelation. A Sermon Preach’d . . . 1699/1700. Being the First, for the Year 1700, of the Lecture Founded by the Honourable Robert Boyle, Esq. (London, 1700); Samuel Bradford, The Imperfect Promulgation of the Gospel Consider’d . . . Preach’d . . . 1699/1700 (12th ed.: London, 1700). MH-H: *EC7 B5618 B700s.; idem., The Imperfect Promulgation of the Gospel Consider’d a Sermon Preach’d 1699/1700: Being an Appendix to the Lectures of the Last Year . . . (London, 1700).
54. Joseph Mede, Diatribae: Discourses on Divers Texts of Scripture (2nd ed.: London, 1648). MH-AH: Theol Safe 314 Mede.
55. John Sharp, Fifteen Sermons Preach’d on Several Occasions the Last of Which Was Never Before Printed . . . (London, 1700).
56. Edward Stillingfleet, The Unreasonableness of Separation . . . (London, 1681).
57. John Smith, Select Discourses by John Smith . . . Also a Sermon Preached by Simon Patrick at the Author’s Funeral; With a Brief Account of His Life and Death (London, 1660).
58. John Burges, An Ansvver Reioyned to That Much Applauded Pamphlet of a Namelesse Author, Bearing This Title: Viz. A Reply to Dr. Mortons Generall Defence of Three Nocent Ceremonies, &c . . . (London, 1631).
59. Herbert Thorndike, Just Weights and Measures That Is, the Present State of Religion Weighed in the Balance . . . (London, 1662).
60. Thomas Pierce, The New Discoverer Discover’d by Way of Answer to Mr. Baxter His Pretended Discovery of the Grotian Religion, With the Several Subjects Therein . . . (London, 1659).
61. William Bates, The Harmony of the Divine Attributes, in the Contrivance and Accomplishment of Man’s Redemption by the Lord Jesus Christ . . . (London, 1675). MH-H: *EC65 B3198 674hb.
62. An error for Dr. George Stanhope.
63. George Stanhope, The Success of the Gospel a Proof of Its Divine Authority. A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, November the 2d. 1702 . . . (London, 1702).
64. John White, The Vvay to the True Church: Wherein the Principall Motiues Perswading to Romanisme, and Questions Touching the Nature and Authoritie of the Church and Scriptures, Are Familiarly Disputed . . . (London, 1610).
65. Humphrey Sydenham, Five Sermons Preached Upon Severall Occasions . . . (London, 1637).
66. Smudged here and below.
67. Edward Stillingfleet, Twelve Sermons Preached on Several Occasions . . . (London, 1696).
68. George Stanhope, A Paraphrase and Comment Upon the Epistles and Gospels . . . (London, 1705).
69. Thomas Hotchkis, A Discourse Concerning the Imputation of Christ’s Righteousness to Us, and Our Sins to Him With Many Useful Questions Thereunto Pertaining, Resolved . . . (London, 1675).
70. Norton Knatchbull, Annotations Upon Some Difficult Texts in All the Books of the New Testament . . . (Cambridge, 1693).
71. Jeremy Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living in Which Are Described the Means and Instruments of Obtaining Every Vertue and the Remedies Against Every Vice and Considerations Serving to the Resisting All Temptations . . . (London, 1695).
72. Simon Patrick, Mensa Mystica, or, A Discourse Concerning the Sacrament of the Lords Supper . . . (London, 1684).
73. Lilly Butler, A Discourse, Proving, That Faith and Practice of True Christians, Are No Just Matter of Shame or Reproach (London, 1711). MH-H: *EC7 B9774 711d.
74. William Beveridge, Thesaurus Theologicus: or, A Complete System of Divinity Summ’d Up in Brief Notes Upon Select Places of the Old and New Testament . . . (2d ed.: London, 1711). MH-H: C 1116.31.2*.
75. William Beveridge, Sermons on Several Subjects, vols. 1-6 of 12 (2d ed.: London, 1709).
76. William Beveridge, Private Thoughts Upon Religion, Digested into Twelve Articles . . . (London, 1709).
77. Stanhope translated the third not the second edition. Pierre Charron and George Stanhope, Of Wisdom (3d ed.: London, 1707).
78. Probably the second edition of this oft-published work. John Scott, The Christian Life Wheren Is Shew’d, I. The Worth and Excellency of the Soul. II. The Divinity and Incarnation of Our Saviour. III. The Authority of the Holy Scripture. IV. A Dissuasive From Apostacy. Vol. V. and Last . . . (London, 1700).
79. John Scott, [Discourses] (London, 1700). MH-H: C 1344.60.15*.
80. Francis Gastrell, The Certainty and Necessity of Religion in General, or, The First Grounds & Principles of Humane Duty Establish’d in Eight Sermons . . . (London, 1697).
81. This book was first published in 1699. Francis Gastrell, The Certainty of the Christian Revelation, and the Necessity of Believing It, Established in Opposition to All the Cavils and Insinuations of Such As Pretend to Allow Natural Religion, and Reject the Gospel . . . (London, 1699).
82. John Turner, The Wisdom of God in the Redemption of Man, As Deliver’d in Holy Scripture, Vindicated From the Chief Objections of Our Modern Infidels . . . (London, 1709). MH-H: *EC7 T8545 709w.
83. Personally assembled collection.
84. William Sherlock, Several Sermons Upon Useful Subjects. Vol. II . . . (London, 1707).
85. William Sherlock, A Practical Discourse Concerning Death (12th ed.: London, 1703).
86. Samuel Clarke and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, A Collection of Papers, Which Passed Between the Late Learned Mr. Leibnitz, and Dr. Clarke in the Years 1715 and 1716 . . . (London, 1717).
87. John Hancock and Robert Boyle, Arguments to Prove the Being of God. With Objections Against It, Answer’d (London, 1707). MH-H: *EC7 H1915 707a. HOLLIS notes that “With this is bound William Whiston’s The accomplishment of Scripture prophecies, 1708.” William Whiston, The Accomplishment of Scripture Prophecies, Being Eight Sermons Preach’d at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, in the Year MDCCVII (Cambridge, 1708).
88. Michael Geddes, The History of the Church of Malabar, From the Time of Its Being First Discover’d by the Portuguezes in the Year 1501 . . . (London, 1694). MH-H: *EC7 G2672 694h.
89. R. Roger Laurence, Lay-Baptism Invalid. An Essay to Prove, That Such Baptism Is Null and Void, When Administer’d in Opposition to the Divine Right of the Apostolical Succession . . . (London, 1712).
90. Gilbert Burnet, A Discourse of the Pastoral care . . . (London, 1692).
91. Richard Duke, Fifteen Sermons Preach’d on Several Occasions (London, 1714). MH-H: C 1187.24.10*.
92. Samuel Walker, Reformation of Manners Promoted by Argument, in Several Essays, Viz. Of Reproof. Of Drunkenness. Of Lust or Impurity. Of Swearing. Of the Lord’s Day (London, 1711). MH-H: Phil 8897.1*.
93. Samuel Walker, Divine Essays Upon the Following Subjects: of Reading the Scriptures, Meditation, Self-Examination, Private Prayer, Public Worship, the Lord’s Supper (Cambridge, 1709).
94. First written: “56”.
95. Daniel Brevint, Missale Romanum, or, The Depth and Mystery of Roman Mass Laid Open and Explained, for the Use of Both Reformed and Un-Reformed Christians (Oxford, 1672).
96. William Walker, Baptismon Didache, the Doctrine of Baptisms, or, A Discourse of Dipping and Sprinkling Wherein Is Shewed the Lawfulness of Other Ways of Baptization . . . (London, 1678).
97. Jean Le Clerc, A Treatise of the Causes of Incredulity Wherein Are Examin’d the General Motives and Occasions Which Dispose Unbelievers to Reject the Christian Religion . . . (London, 1697).
98. Simon Patrick, The Glorious Epiphany, With the Devout Christians Love to It . . . (London, 1678).
99. Gabriel Towerson, Of the Sacraments in General, in Pursuance of an Explication of the Catechism of the Church of England . . . (London, 1686).
100. Gabriel Towerson, Of the Sacrament of Baptism, in Pursuance of an Explication of the Catechism of the Church of England . . . (London, 1687).
101. William Sancroft, Occasional Sermons Preached by the Most Reverend Father in God . . . (London, 1694).
102. Robert Burscough, A Treatise of Church-Government Occasion’d by Some Letters Lately Printed Concerning the Same Subject . . . (London, 1692).
103. John Conybeare, A Defence of Reveal’d Religion Against the Exceptions of a Late Writer: in His Book Intituled Christianity As Old As the Creation, &c. (Oxford, 1732).
104. William Reeves, ed., The Apologies of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Minutius Felix in Defence of the Christian Religion: With the Commonitory of Vincentius Lirinensis Concerning the Primitive Rule of Faith; Translated From Their Originals With Notes, for the Advantage Chiefly of English Readers, and a Preliminary Discourse Upon Each Author, Together With a Prefatory Dissertation About the Right Use of the Fathers (London, 1709).
105. John Ollyffe, A Practical Exposition of the Church-Catechism (London, 1710). MH-H: *EC65 Ol985 710p.
106. William Whiston, Sermons and Essays Upon Several Subjects . . . (London, 1709).
107. Richard Kidder, A Commentary on the Five Books of Moses (London, 1694). MH-AH. Theol Safe 423.6 Kidder.
108. William Pearson, Sermons on Several Occasions: Preach’d at the Cathedral of York (London, 1718).
109. Manuscript torn.
110. John Edwards, A Demonstration of the Existence and Providence of God, From the Contemplation of the Visible Structure of the Greater and the Lesser World in Two Parts . . . (London, 1696).
111. John Edwards, Polpoikilos Sophia, a Compleat History or Survey of All the Dispensations and Methods of Religion, From the Beginning of the World to the Consummation of All Things . . . (London, 1699). MH-H: *EC65 Ed967.
112. John Edwards, Sermons on Special Occasions and Subjects (London, 1698). MH-H: *EC65 Ed967 B698s.
113. John Edwards, An Enquiry into Four Remarkable Texts of the New Testament Which Contain Some Difficulty in Them . . . (Cambridge, 1692).
114. John Edwards, A Farther Enquiry into Several Remarkable Texts of the Old and New Testament Which Contain Some Difficulty in Them . . . (London, 1694).
115. John Edwards, A Discourse Concerning the Authority, Stile, and Perfection of the Books of the Old and New Testament (London, 1693).
116. Thus in manuscript. John Edwards, Some Thoughts Concerning the Several Causes and Occasions of Atheism, Especially in the Present Age . . . (London, 1695).
117. Not found. The first edition dates from 1702. John Edwards, Exercitations Critical, Philosophical, Historical, Theological . . . (London, 1702).
118. John Disney, Primitiae Sacre. The Reflections of a Devout Solitude: Consisting of Meditations and Poems on Divine Subjects (London, 1703). MH-H: *EC7.D6324.701pb. “Inscribed on t.-p.: Ex dono Authoris December ye 22. 1704.”
119. John Disney, A Second Essay Upon the Execution of the Laws Against Immorality and Prophaneness . . . (London, 1710).
120. Richard Lucas, Religious Perfection, or, A Third Part of the Enquiry After Happiness (3d. ed.: London, 1704). MH-H: *EC65 L9627 685ed v.3.
121. Date missing.
122. Henry Wharton, Fourteen Sermons Preached in Lambeth Chapel . . . (2d ed.: London, 1700).
123. William Clagett, Seventeen Sermons Preach’d Upon Several Occasions . . . Vol. I (4th ed.: London, 1704).
124. Three of Wake’s sermons were published that year. William Wake, A Sermon Preach’d at the Reviving of the General Meetings of the Gentlemen and Others of the County of Dorset in the Church of St. Mary-Le-Bow, Decemb. the 2d. 1690 by William Wake . . . (London, 1690); idem., A Sermon Preach’d Before the King and Queen at White-Hall, May the 4th . . . (London, 1690) ; idem., A Sermon Preach’d Before the Lord-Mayor and Court of Aldermanat S. Sepulchres-Church on Wednesday in Easter-Week . . . (London, 1690).
125. George Berkeley, An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (Dublin, 1709). MH-H: *EC7.B4554.7 “With extensive contemporary scholarly ms. annotations and several additional ownership marks, including that of Robert Woodhouse and John Lee (also an armorial bookplate). Bound in full calf.”
126. George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Pt. I. (Dublin, 1710). MH-H: *EC7 B4554 710t. “This copy presented as a prize by Trinity College.”
127. William Fleetwood, An Essay Upon Miracles . . . (2d ed.: London, 1702).
128. George Stanhope, Sermons Preach’d Upon Several Occasions (2d ed.: London, 1705).
129. Basil Kennett, A Brief Exposition of the Apostles Creed, According to Bishop Pearson . . . (London, 1705).
130. Benjamin Hoadly, The Reasonableness of Conformity to the Church of England . . . (London, 1712). MH-H: *EC7 H6502 703rc.
131. Benjamin Hoadly, The Measures of Submission to the Civil Magistrate Consider’d . . . (London, 1706).
132. Possibly Benjamin Hoadly, Several Discourses Concerning the Terms of Acceptance With God . . . (London, 1711).
133. Simon Patrick, Jesus and the Resurrection Justified by Witnesses in Heaven and in Earth . . . (2d ed.: London, 1703).
134. Robert Jenkin, The Reasonableness and Certainty of the Christian Religion by Robert Jenkin . . . (London, 1698).
135. John Rogers, Twelve Sermons, Preached Upon Several Occasions (London, 1730). MH-H: C 1336.39.15*.
136. Francis Bragge, A Practical Treatise of the Regulation of the Passions (London, 1708). MH-H: C 1122.55.15*.
137. Francis Bragge, Of Undissembled and Perservering Religion: in Several Sermons (London, 1713).
138. John Norris, A Collection of Miscellanies: Consisting of Poems, Essays, Discourses & Letters, Occasionally Written (4th ed.: London, 1706). MH-H: *EC65 N7946 687cd.
139. Thomas Sherlock, Several Discourses Preached at the Temple Church, vols. 3 and 4 (London, 1761).
140. This date has been included because it could signify a date of composition; however, it is probably non-contemporaneous (c.1842) having been added at the same time as an annotation at the head of the page: “This is a list of Donations by Gov Bernard & not by Hollis. J. L. S.”
141. Richard Lucas, Practical Christianity, or, An Account of the Holiness Which the Gospel Enjoins . . . (3d ed.: London, 1685). MH-H: *EC65 L9627 677pc.
142. William Turner, The History of All Religions in the World, From the Creation Down to This Present Time in Two Parts . . . (London, 1695).
143. Daniel Whitby, Sermons on the Attributes of God. In Two Volumes (London, 1710).
144. Daniel Whitby, A Discourse of the Necessity and Usefulness of the Christian Revelation (London, 1705).
145. Edmund Calamy, The Inspiration of the Holy Writings of the Old and New Testament Consider’d and Improv’d In Fourteen Sermons (London, 1710).
146. William Cave, Primitive Christianity or, the Religion of the Ancient Christians in the First Ages of the Gospel. In Three Parts (6th ed.: London, 1702).
147. Edward Stillingfleet, A Discourse Concerning the Idolatry Practised in the Church of Rome, and the Hazard of Salvation in the Communion of It in Answer to Some Papers of a Revolted Protestant . . . (London, 1672).
148. Edward Stillingfleet, A Defence of the Discourse Concerning the Idolatry Practised in the Church of Rome in Answer to a Book Entituled, Catholicks No Idolators . . . (London, 1676).
149. Edward Stillingfleet, A Discourse in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity . . . (2d ed.: London, 1697). Annotation by Sparks: “R: Sherlock”. This may be a reference to English cleric Richard Sherlock (1612-89), but who had no obvious connection with the publication cited here.
150. Gilbert Burnet, A Relation of a Conference Held About Religion at London, the Third of April, 1676 by Edw. Stillingfleet . . . and Gilbert Burnet, With Some Gentlemen of the Church of Rome . . . (London, 1676).
151. John Goodman, The Penitent Pardon’d: or, A Discourse of the Nature of Sin, and the Efficacy of Repentance, Under the Parable of the Prodigal Son (5th ed.: London, 1700). MH-H: *EC65.G6214.679pe.
152. John Wilkins, A Discourse Concerning the Beauty of Providence (4th ed.: London, 1672).
153. Thomas Bennet, A Confutation of Popery, in III. Parts . . . (Cambridge and London, 1701). MH-H: C 4227.01.2*.
154. Thomas Bennet, A Discourse of Schism . . . (3d ed.: Cambridge and London, 1704). MH-H: C 1112.48.35*.
155. Patrick Smith, A Preservative Against Quakerism . . . (London, 1732). MH-H: C 8322.732*.
156. Authorial correction. The first-written name has not been deciphered.
157. Richard Ellys, Fortuita Sacra: Quibus Subjicitur Commentarius De Cymbalis (Rotterdam, 1727). MH-H: C 1195.1.5*.
158. John Richardson and Henry Dodwell, The Canon of the New Testament Vindicated: in Answer to the Objections of J. Toland in His Amyntor (3d ed.: London, 1719). MH-AH: Theol Safe 518 Richardson.
159. John Rawlet, A Treatise of Sacramental-Covenanting With Christ . . . (6th ed.: London, 1710).
160. Thus in manuscript.
161. Richard Kidder, A Demonstration of the Messias. Part I (London, 1684).
162. Timothy Puller, The Moderation of the Church of England Considered As Useful for Allaying the Present Distempers Which the Indisposition of the Time Hath Contracted (4th ed.: London, 1679).
163. Peter King, The History of the Apostles Creed . . . (London, 1702).
164. John Kettlewell, The Measures of Christian Obedience: or, A Discourse Shewing, What Obedience Is Indispensibly Necessary to a Regenerate State . . . (4th ed.: London, 1700).
165. Daniel Brevint, Saul and Samuel at Endor, or The New Waies of Salvation and Service, Which Usually Temt Men to Rome, and Detain Them There Truly Represented, and Refuted (Oxford, 1674).
166. John Wilkins, A Discourse Concerning the Gift of Prayer Shewing What It Is, Wherein It Consists, and How Far It Is Attainable by Industry . . . (London, 1674).
167. John Wilkins, William Lloyd, and John Tillotson, Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion: Two Books (4th ed.: London, 1699). MH-H: *EC65 W6563 675oe.
168. Benjamin Calamy, Sermons Preached Upon Several Occasions (4th ed.: London, 1704). MH-H: *EC65 C1252 687sd.
169. Daniel Whitby, A Discourse Concerning: I. The True Import of the Words Election and Reprobation. II. The Extent of Christ’s Redemption. III. The Grace of God. IV. The Liberty of the Will. V. The Perseverance or Defectibility of the Saints (London, 1710). MH-H: C 1391.31.30*.
170. Annotation: “Q whether 4 Vol. or 3 in 4”. Jeremy Collier, Essays Upon Several Moral Subjects. In Two Parts . . . (London, 1703).
171. Thomas Bennet, An Answer to the Dissenters Pleas for Separation, or an Abridgment of the London Cases . . . (3d ed.: Cambridge, 1701). MH-H: *EC7 B4393 699ac.
172. Annotation correcting the title of this line: “[vindication of Liturgy]”.
173. William Falkner, A Vindication of Liturgies Shewing the Lawfulness, Usefulness, and Antiquity, of Performing the Publick Worship of God by Set Forms of Prayer . . . (London, 1680).
174. Benjamin Hoadly, A Brief Defense of Episcopal Ordination . . . (London, 1707).
175. Annotation: “Mean to be put wth. His Life.”
176. John Scott, Sermons Upon Several Occasions (London, 1704).
177. Marcus Minucius Felix and Tertullian, Those Two Excellent Monuments of Ancient Learning and Piety, Minucius Felix’s Octavius, and Tertullian’s Apology for the Primitive Christians, Render’d into English (London, 1708).
178. Gilbert Burnet, Some Sermons Preach’d on Several Occasions; and an Essay Towards a New Book of Homilies, in Seven Sermons . . . (London, 1713).
179. Edward Chandler, A Defence of Christianity From the Prophecies of the Old Testament . . . (3d ed.: London, 1728).
180. Simon Patrick, The Hearts Ease, or, A Remedy Against All Troubles . . . (London, 1699).
181. Clement Ellis, The Folly of Atheism, Demonstrated, to the Capacity of the Most Unlearned Reader (London, 1692). MH-H: Phil 8659.3*.
182. Herbert Thorndike, Two Discourses, the One of the Primitive Government of Churches, the Other of the Service of God at the Assemblies of the Church . . . ([Cambridge], 1650).
183. Joseph Bingham, The French Churches Apology for the Church of England: or, The Objections of Dissenters Against the Articles, Homilies, Liturgy, and Canons of the English Church, Consider’d, and Answer’d . . . (London, 1706). MH-H: *EC7 B5136 706f.
184. Annotation: “nonne Puffendorf”; meaning, is this not Puffendorf?
185. Richard Allestree, Officium Hominis Cum Stylo, Tum Methodo Luculentissimâ Expositum . . . (London, 1680).
186. Thomas Comber, A Companion to the Temple, or, A Help to Devotion in the Use of Common Prayer Divided into Four Parts . . . (London, 1688).
187. William Shelton, A Discourse of Superstition Wherein the Church of England Is Vindicated From the Imputation . . . (London, 1681).
188. Edward Pelling, A Discourse Concerning the Existence of God . . . (London, 1696).
189. Simon Patrick, A Continuation of the Friendly Debate . . . (London, 1669).
190. Simon Patrick, Search the Scriptures a Treatise Shewing That All Christians Ought to Read the Holy Books . . . (London, 1693).
191. Simon Patrick, A Further Continuation and Defence, or, A Third Part of the Friendly Debate . . . (London, 1670).
192. John Fell, A Paraphrase and Annotations upon all St. Paul’s Epistles, Done by several eminent men at Oxford, corrected and improv’d by the late Right Reverend and learned Bishop Fell (London, 1702).
193. Thomas Bennet, A Brief History of the Joint Use of Precompos’d Set Forms of Prayers . . . (2d ed.: Cambridge and London, 1708).
194. Benjamin Calamy, A Discourse Concerning the Rise and Antiquity of Cathedral Worship in a Letter to a Friend . . . (London, 1699).
195. Humphry Ditton, A Discourse Concerning the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. In three parts. ... Together with an appendix concerning the impossible . . . (4th ed., London, 1727).
196. William Beveridge, Private Thoughts: in two parts compleat. Part I. Upon Religion, digested into twelve articles; with practical resolutions form’d thereupon. Part II. Upon a Christian life (London, 1720).
197. Richard Allestree, Richard Sterne, et al., The Gentleman’s Calling (8th ed.: London, 1677).
198. Thomas Barlow, The Genuine Remains of That Learned Prelate Dr. Thomas Barlow, Late Lord Bishop of Lincoln . . . (London, 1693). MH-H: *EC65 B2495 693g.
199. Thomas Barlow, Several Miscellaneous and Weighty Cases of Conscience Learnedly and Judiciously Resolved . . . (London, 1692).
200. John Norris, Christian Blessedness, or, Discourses Upon the Beatitudes of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (London, 1690). MH-H: *EC65 N7946 690c.
201. William Lowth, A Vindication of the Divine Authority and Inspiration of the Writings of the Old and New Testament . . . (Oxford, 1692).
202. Gilbert Burnet, An Exposition of the Church Catechism, for the Use of the Diocese of Sarum . . . (London, 1710).
203. The Art of Contentment, by the Author of the Whole Duty of Man, &c (Oxford, 1705).
204. Jean Le Clerc, Logica, Sive, Ars Ratiocinandi (Amsterdam, 1692).
205. John Spencer, A Discourse Concerning Prodigies . . . (London, 1665).
206. Robert Sanderson, De Obligatione Conscientiae Praelectiones Decem Oxonii . . . (London, 1670).
207. Herbert Thorndike, A Discourse of the Right of the Church in a Christian State . . . (London, 1649).
208. R. R. Banks, Religion and Reason Adjusted and Accorded, or, A Discourse Wherein Divine Revelation Is Made Appear to Be a Congruous and Connatural Way of Affording Proper Means for Making Man Eternally Happy . . . (London, 1688).
209. Samuel Loveday, Personal Reprobation Reprobated Being a Plain Exposition Upon the Nineth Chapter to the Romans . . . (London, 1676).
210. First written as “Thos”.
211. Emendation by Sparks.
212. Thomas Morton, Ezekiel’s Wheels: A Treatise Concerning Divine Providence: Very Seasonable for All Ages . . . (London, 1653).
213. Thus in manuscript.
214. Simon Patrick, Jewish Hypocrisie, a Caveat to the Present Generation . . . (London, 1660).
215. Thus in manuscript.
216. This work was printed in five editions during 1669. The fifth edition with corrections is Simon Patrick, A Friendly Debate Between a Conformist and a Non-Conformist . . . (London, 1669).
217. First written: “Pages’”.
218. Solomon Pages, A Preservative Against Separation From the Church of England . . . (London, 1704). MH-H: *EC7 P1477 704p.
219. William Wake, A Practical Discourse Concerning Swearing Especially in the Two Great Points of Perjury and Common-Swearing . . . (London, 1696). MH-H: *EC7 W1377 696p.
220. This number is a non-contemporaneous addition.
221. Daniel Brevint, Missale Romanum, or The Depth and Mystery of the Roman Mass: Laid Open and Explained . . . (3d ed.: Oxford, 1673).
222. This line is in Sparks’s handwriting. Thomas Sherlock, Several Discourses Preached at the Temple Church, vols. 3 and 4 (London, 1761).
223. Josiah Quincy, III, History of Harvard University (Cambridge, 1840). 2: 484-495.
224. Several reference works were utilized: the British Library Integrated Catalogue (http://catalogue.bl.uk); Early English Books Online, published by Chadwick and Healey (http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home); Eighteenth Century Collections Online, published by Gale Cengage Learning (http://find.galegroup.com/ecco/); university online catalogues accessible via the editor’s Reference Manager v.11 and Ref Works bibliographical databases.
225. For example, comments in the HOLLIS Catalog about the publications of philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753) of Trinity College, Dublin, (and which are quoted in notes 124 and 125, above) clearly indicate that the books were owned by someone other than FB (and were perhaps even donated by Berkeley). FB is identified as the owner of only two volumes in this list, according to the Houghton Library printed book provenance file, A-D: Index (http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hou01529): Barlow, Genuine Remains; Norris, Christian Blessedness.
226. Books that were probably purchased by FB include titles by Dr. John Conybeare (1632-1755), who was the bishop of Bristol and the dean of Christ Church (when FB was a student there), and an outspoken and articulate critic of Deism; also the several works of Thomas Sherlock (1678-1761), the bishop of London and a leading clergyman of the day. For Conybeare see note 103 and Sherlock notes 139 and 222.
1. FB probably adapted the title of the paper from a pamphlet authored by Thomas Pownall, his predecessor as governor and a friend from their days in Lincoln. Thomas Pownall, Principles of Polity being the Grounds and Reasons of Civil Empire. In three parts (London, 1752). FB’s primary interest was in “Law,” whereas Pownall’s early pamphlet focused on what he termed “Civil Empire”—the social and economic relations between colonies and the mother country. There is a strong possibility, moreover, that FB wrote the “Principles” with Pownall in specifically in mind, and also, perhaps, to improve upon Pownall’s recently (and anonymously) published essay The Administration of the Colonies (London, 1764).
2. Union between the colonies and Britain was a common topic of discussion among imperial reformers. The idea was attractive for two main reasons: (a) it was assumed that it would improve metropolitan regulation of colonial affairs, and (b) ameliorate conflicts of interest with the colonies. FB, like most British writers on the topic, was primarily interested in a constitutional union between the various colonies and Britain. His reform plans imagined an incorporating union, with American representation in Parliament, but did not provide any detail. By “equitable subordination,” FB meant that all the colonies should be equally subject to British imperial authority and, as the main text proposes, that their systems of government should be uniformly modeled on constitutional principles. He did not venture the disappearance of American provincial legislatures (as happened to the Scottish Parliament after the Union with England in 1707). He also advocated inter-colonial union (propositions 83 to 84), which was not proffered by British writers, although FB did not expressly support the establishment of an American parliament. Had FB developed these ideas he likely would have suggested restraining colonial legislative autonomy (in whatever form present) along the lines of what operated in Ireland, see No. 413.
3. In this paragraph, FB is inviting the reader (in his case British ministers) to compare his style of presentation to that of other writers. The structure of the paper alludes to Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses (1517), the influential declaration of protest that initiated the Reformation. In making a virtue of this reductionist approach to spark a “Reformation” in British colonial policymaking, FB may be consciously drawing attention to the stylistic flaws of Pownall’s work: Pownall’s 1752 pamphlet is a densely dull, classical dialogue, while the first edition of the Administration of the Colonies, though insightful and erudite, is also indisputably prolix. FB was offering a discussion of “first principles which are self-evident,” while, as John Shy observes, Pownall’s search for a “precise comprehensive idea of this great crisis” encouraged him to take a discursive and holistic approach. FB addressed only issues attendant to constitutional law, whereas Pownall ranged widely over administration, commerce, and economics. The mention of “conviction” might imply criticism of Pownall for publishing on colonial affairs after he declined to serve as governor of South Carolina. John Shy, “Thomas Pownall, Henry Ellis, and the Spectrum of Possibilities, 1763-1775,” Anglo-American Political Relations, 1675-1775, eds. Alison G. Olson and Richard Maxwell Brown (New Brunswick, N.J, 1970), 163.
4. FB’s elucidation of the constitutional principles presently underpinning the American Colonies’ relationship to Britain, as set out in propositions 1 to 10, were consistent with official attitudes, that largely “adhered to the Aristotelian conception of empire as a conglomeration of ‘perfect communities’ under metropolitan control.” Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c 1500-c 1800 (New Haven and London, 1997), 13, 131-132, 137. The assertion in prop. 4 that sovereignty within the empire lay with the King-in-Parliament (and was “absolute, uncontrolable, and accountable”) anticipated the Blackstonian view that the British legislature was constitutionally “omnipotent” and “uncontrollable.” This was a thoroughly modern conceptualization and rendition of sovereignty. However, despite what FB implied in prop. 10, legislative supremacy was not theoretically illimitable or actually untrammeled, as Britain’s American critics set out to prove. Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution: the Authority to Legislate, 79-89. FB himself indicates one legal restraint in prop. 18, and political restraints in props. 31 and 44. Nevertheless, FB’s logic suggested that colonial rights and liberties were derived from the supreme authority and did not originate as “natural rights.”
5. The wording of prop. 12 reflects an amendment FB made in 1765. The original wording was: “That an Union in Parliament is impracticable to the generality of the British External Dominions.” For an explanation see No. 419.
6. According to conventional British constitutional thinking, the American Colonies, like Ireland, were dominions of the Crown but not part of the realm. Props. 11 to 13 envisaged incorporating the American Colonies (and Ireland) into the realm, as had happened with Wales (albeit after conquest). The rationale is set out in props. 14 to 16: incorporation would remove any doubts as to the constitutional status of the American Colonies, and thereafter whatever legislative rights they claimed to possess would be subordinate to, derived from, and dependent upon parliamentary authority.
7. Props. 17 to 28 consider how Britain and the colonies might negotiate their legislative relationship in a prospective union. FB’s formulation in props. 17 to 18 anticipates the assertion of Parliamentary supremacy in the Declaratory Act of 1766. Props. 18 to 21 argue for a consolidation of royal government in the colonies, through the extension of Crown jurisdiction. Props. 22 to 28 reflect FB’s own frustration at the delay in receiving Crown confirmation of the Mount Desert land grant; he does not explicitly argue for concentrating the authority to make land grants in the Crown, although that might be inferred from props. 22 to 24.
8. Parliamentary taxation was in the forefront of colonial politics in the summer of 1764, and props. 29 to 49 summarize FB’s thoughts on the matter for the first time. Props. 29 and 30 contradicted the colonists’ claims that parliamentary taxation was conditional on the colonists giving their consent, and, moreover, utterly rejected the popular idea that the colonists possessed the “rights of Englishmen” to consent to any taxes. In writing this, FB was contending with the arguments that James Otis Jr. had already advanced in the House of Representatives; he had not yet had a chance to read Otis’s Rights of the American Colonies Asserted and Proved, which was published on 23 Jul. He might have read a draft of TH’s essay on the stamp duty which TH was preparing for Richard Jackson, but which he did not complete until Jul. Perhaps the uppermost concern for FB, however, was that the clamor over taxation might derail his proposals for reform. And thus he proceeded to mollify and overcome the reader’s natural caution: parliamentary taxation would neither be onerous nor injurious (props. 31 to 33), since Parliament was duty-bound to attend to the needs of the king’s subjects; on the other hand, the colonists also had an obligation to pay taxes to pay for their own defense and government (props. 34 to 40). FB was attuned to the distinction between taxes on articles of trade and “internal” taxes (prop. 40), but did not elaborate on the spurious notion of virtual representation. Instead, he endorsed the colonists’ position that it would be expedient—“advisable”—to let the colonial legislatures raise “the internal taxes” themselves (props. 44 to 48). In Jun. 1764, both FB and the colonists still assumed that the colonial legislatures would be given every opportunity to raise the stamp duties themselves. Prop. 50, however, was wishful thinking.
9. That is, any colony possessing a legislature.
10. FB first warmed to the idea of a Crown civil list in 1759, while governor of New Jersey, and again during his early years in Massachusetts when he realized how much political leverage the House had from controlling the governor’s salary. For that reason, colonies had long resisted Britain’s requests to vote a permanent salary for governors, as FB intimates in prop. 56. In the years to come, FB’s suggestion that governors be paid out of the American revenue sparked accusations (notably from John Adams writing as “Novanglus”) that he had conspired to have the stamp tax introduced for that very purpose. While that was untrue, public debates on parliamentary taxation, together with FB’s own anxiety about his personal finances, certainly fueled his interest in this particular topic. On FB and the civil list see Sents, “Francis Bernard and Imperial Reconstruction,” 119-151; on FB’s finances see No. 24, Bernard Papers 1: 70; on Massachusetts and the civil list see Evarts Boutell Greene, The Provincial Governor in the English Colonies of North America (New York, 1898), 166-173; Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 169-175; “Novanglus, To the Inhabitants of the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay,” Boston Gazette, 30 Jan. 1775.
11. In props. 59 to 69, FB touches upon complex issues pertaining to the constitutional status of the American Colonies about which colonial and British pamphleteers would argue at length. Here, FB endorses the view of British imperial officials and ministers that, as dominions of the Crown, the colonies were not possessed of independent legislative rights and were subject to the supreme authority of the realm, which in the 1760s was the King-in-Parliament. To admit the contrary would be to create a constitutional absurdity—an “Empire in an Empire” (prop. 68), which phrase was commonly rendered in Latin as imperium in imperio. One solution to colonial complaints about particular legislation was to permit American representation in Parliament (props. 65-67). Most American writers came to reject such an idea, thinking it impractical and somewhat redundant after the Stamp Act Crisis, when Whigs argued for colonial legislative autonomy in taxation. Neither were British pamphleteers keen on the idea. (The proposal is mentioned only once—and unfavorably—in a recently published selection of British pamphlets pertaining to the Stamp Act Crisis.) There is no suggestion here that FB was advancing American representation in Parliament as an alternative to the ministerial doctrine of “virtual” representation. He was speculating on the future development of America and in constitutional terms viewed the proposal largely as a corollary to an American union with Britain. But neither was that prospect ever popular with British writers and ministers, though it was with some Loyalists in 1775-76. John Philip Reid, The Briefs of the American Revolution: Constitutional arguments between Thomas Hutchinson, Governor of Massachusetts Bay, and James Bowdoin for the Council and John Adams for the House of Representatives (New York, 1981); idem., Constitutional History of the American Revolution: the Authority to Legislate, 192-200; idem., Constitutional History of the American Revolution: The Authority of Law (London, 1993), 83-107; H. T. Dickinson, ed., British Pamphlets on the American Revolution, 1763-1785, 4 vols. (London, 2007), 1: 28.
12. Props. 70 to 79 concentrate on the institutions of colonial government, such as the legislatures, in contrast to Thomas Pownall’s Administration which dealt with how imperial agencies, such as the Board of Trade and Customhouse, managed colonial affairs. FB’s guiding principle was to extend the instruments and influence of royal government, largely by strengthening the position of Crown officials and re-drawing the structure of government currently in operation. His comments relate primarily to the chartered colonies, and, were they to have been acted upon, would have entailed the abrogation or revocation of the Massachusetts Province Charter of 1691. FB was alert to the colonists already using the charters to argue for limitations on Parliament’s authority (prop. 79); colonists came to ask the question whether or not the colonies, as dominions, were part of the English realm when the first royal charters were issued in the seventeenth century. This was a point John Adams’s “Novanglus” tried to prove and concluded that because the colonies did not belong to the realm they were not legally subject to its supreme authority, the King-in-Parliament. Charters were increasingly revered as compacts between king and people that could not be altered by the legislative fiat of an alien power. The counter-point to this was that FB’s preference for uniformity was also an expression of his sense of British identity: that by virtue of the empire, colonists belonged to a greater Britain (prop. 77). On charters and the imperial crisis see Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts,11-12, 37, 92, 216-17; Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution: the Authority to Legislate, 192-200.
13. FB’s advocacy of inter-colonial union contrasts with Thomas Pownall’s warnings that colonial unification would endanger imperial control. Shy, “Pownall, Ellis, and the Spectrum of Possibilities,” 164-166. The corollary, however, was that colonial boundaries would need to be redrawn in order to create larger provinces (prop. 91), and that Britain should consider tampering with the social foundations of government (see n14 below). His proposals for re-organizing the governments of the New England were further explained in No. 314.
14. FB’s quirky proposal for an American nobility distanced him from mainstream opinion in both Britain and the colonies, as did the unfounded optimism (props. 95-97) that he would find an American audience for the “Principles.” Jordan D. Fiore, “Governor Bernard for an American Nobility,” Boston Public Library Quarterly, 4 (1952): 125-136.
1. Benjamin Gumbs and Benjamin Roberts’s joint letter to James Cockle, Anguilla, 30 Jul. 1764, T 1/429, ff 192-193.
2. Six vessels departed between 22 and 27 Aug. Benjamin Pemberton, List of vessels clearing outward from the port of Boston, 5 Jul.-10 Oct. 1764, CO 5/850. Temple had already claimed that in return for “Gratuity’s” Cockle had given the masters of those ships “the Hint” that they might be seized. Temple to the Board of Customs Commissioners, Boston, 10 Sept. 1764, T 1/429, ff 186-188.
3. Temple to Robert Auchmuty, Boston, 3 Sept. 1764, T 1/429, ff 202-203.
4. Chambers Russell to Temple, Lincoln [Mass.], 13 Sept. 1764, Temple Papers, 1762-1768: Cockle’s Suspension: 204-204; Temple to Russell, Boston, 14 Sept. 1764, ibid., 68.
5. The correspondence listed in n4 has not been found among the enclosures.
1. Supplied from No. 326.
2. Temple to the Board of Customs Commissioners, Boston, 10 Sept. 1764, T 1/429, ff 186-189; and Boston 3 Oct. 1764, ibid., ff 202-204 (Appendix 3.1).
3. Benjamin Gumbs and Benjamin Roberts to James Cockle, T 1/429, ff 192-193.
4. Robert Auchmuty.
5. FB to George Thomas, Boston, 27 Aug. 1764, BP, 3: 42-43. Thomas was governor of the Leeward Islands, 1753-66.
6. These figures were the duties set for foreign molasses and rum under the Molasses Act of 1733, and which were twice the dutied rate for sugar.
7. Thus were the merchants “compounding” to pay one third of the value of the cargo, thereby settling their liability.
8. Not found.
9. From May 1763, the newspapers carried reports about the return of Guadeloupe and other conquered islands in the Caribbean to France under the definitive peace treaty signed in Feb.; British subjects were allowed eighteen months to clear out their effects and property (art. 8). Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser, 23 May 1763.
10. David Glover was master of the Gloucester with a share in the cargo of molasses. The vessel was owned by Glover and Gloucester merchants Philemon Warner and Hubbard Haskell.
11. William Bollan.
12. Deposition of John Smith (inn holder), Ipswich, 26 Nov. 1764, Temple Papers, 1762-1768: Cockle’s Suspension, 220-221.
13. Deposition of Philemon Warner, 15 Jan. 1765, Temple Papers, 1762-1768: Cockle’s Suspension, 211-212.
14. Deposition of Sampson Toovey, Salem, 27 Sept. 1764, ibid., 204-205.
15. FB had joined Cockle at his Salem house on 10 Oct. in order to interview the merchants Philemon Warner and Hubbard Haskell. Cockle declared that it was always his intention to return to the merchants the £50 that he had retained; with FB’s support, he hoped to persuade Warner to sign a statement to the effect that he had expected Cockle to return the money. This clumsy attempt to wrong-foot Temple was easily thwarted when Temple collected further evidence from Glover, Toovey, Warner, Haskell, all stating that they had believed Cockle had illegally kept the money as a reward for releasing the Gloucester. Declaration of David Glover, 26 Dec. 1764, ibid., 207-208; depositions of Sampson Toovey, 3 Dec. 1764, ibid., 210-211; Hubbard Haskell, 26 Dec. 1764, ibid., 206-207; Philemon Warner, 15 Jan. 1765, ibid., 211-212.
16. Listed above, plus affidavits of William Ellery, Salem, 11 Oct., ibid. 212-213, and Woodward Abrahams, 3 Oct. 1764, a copy of which is in T 1/429, f 207.
1. Temple prepared his own “minute” of the Council’s discussion on 20 Apr. (which does not appear in the official record, CO 5/823, f 271).
2. Meaning, because of their office.
1. Omitted: closing parenthesis, one of three given in this sentence.
2. Mis-spelling of “Antrobus” by scribe.
3. This entire section was authored by John Temple and written by an unknown clerk.
4. Robinson’s Narrative is at T 1/442, ff 211-214. Variant text in Temple Papers, 1762-1768: Taunton, 287-288 (L, RLbC).
5. RLbC: “this day s~ennight” meaning 2 Apr.
6. The Sugar Act (1764).
7. “Sunday” has been erased and replaced by “Saturday”. RLbC: “on Sunday”. This emendation was made by Temple or his clerk in the interest of clarity. Robinson’s testimony in No. 352 confirms that Lechmere and Guteridge were left in charge of the vessel on Saturday 13 Apr. and that the rescue took place on the “Sunday night”.
8. RLbC: “swords, Cutlashes &c.”.
9. RLbC: “upon the River for the Goods”.
10. RLbC: “would instantly rise”.
11. RLbC: “Lechmere and the Collector’s Servant”.
12. This connecting narrative was authored by Temple.
13. Variant text in Temple Papers, 1762-1768: Taunton, 285-286 (L, RLbC).
14. Variant text in Temple Papers, 1762-1768: Taunton, 286 (L, RLbC). Dateline “Bristoll Ferry 11th. April 1765”.
15. This paragraph is Temple’s narrative.
16. The next letter was extracted from a copy of No. 352 that Robinson gave Temple (not extant) and which Temple entered into his letterbooks. Temple Papers, 1762-1768: Taunton, 313-317 (L, LbC).
17. LbC: “Jerathmael”.
18. LbC: “Dogget”.
19. LbC: “Dighton”.
20. LbC omits “of Taunton”.
21. Names in handwriting of John Temple.
22. Temple’s narrative commences with this line.
23. The reference made here to the House “resolves” is not mentioned elsewhere. It is unclear as to what Richmond was meaning. Perhaps it was the bill that FB vetoed in 1762 on the grounds that it would have substituted a “wholly inefficacious” provincial writ for the general search warrants issued under the Navigation Acts. No. 99, Bernard, 1: 193-194. Alternatively, Richmond could even be citing Paxtons’s Case of 1761 when the merchants counsel contested the legality of the writs of assistance being then issued by the Superior Court.
24. Thus in manuscript.
25. Robinson’s letter is at T 1/442, ff 215-216. Variant text in Temple Papers, 1762-1768: Taunton, 292-293 (L, RLbC).
26. RLbC: “last”.
27. RLbC: “have had.”
28. Interlineation not in RLbC.
29. Temple’s narrative continues.
30. Temple’s letter is at T 1/442, ff 216-217. Variant text in Temple Papers, 1762-1768: Taunton, 291 (L, RLbC).
31. Temple is replying to the letters from Antrobus and Robinson dated Bristol Ferry, 11 Apr.
32. Continuation of Temple’s narrative.
33. George Leonard (1698-1778), judge of the courts of Common Pleas and Probate in Bristol County.
34. Autograph.
35. Autograph.
1. No. 350.
2. No. 351.
3. John Robinson, Narrative of the Proceedings relating to the sloop Polly, 9 Apr. 1765, Temple Papers, 1762-1768: Taunton; 287-288.
4. No. 352.
1. British-American mercantile firm of Thomas Lamar, Henry Hill, and Robert Bisset were active in the Atlantic wine trade, between Philadelphia, London, and Madeira.
2. Shute Barrington (1734-1826) was the youngest of Lord Barrington’s four brothers and had been canon of Christ Church, Oxford, since 1761.
3. Philip Yonge, D.D. (1709-83) was bishop of Bristol from 1758 to 1761, bishop of Norwich from 1761 1783, and a political ally of the duke of Newcastle.
4. Claudius Amyand (1719-74) likely knew FB from Christ Church, matriculating in 1736 and graduating in 1740; he had been a member of Parliament between 1747 and 1756 and under-secretary of state since 1750; he married the dowager duchess of Northampton in 1761.
5. William Walters, British army officer; major in the 45th Regiment of Foot.
6. Charles Reade, New Jersey politician: province secretary, 1748-60 and 1762, and thereafter a member of the governor’s Council; appointed a justice of the Supreme Court in 1764.
7. William Tryon (1729-88), British army officer and governor of North Carolina, 1764-71, and New York, 1771-75.
8. Hugh Palliser (1723-96), British naval officer, and governor of Newfoundland, 1764-68. In 1765, he was a commissioner investigating French claims about fishing rights in the Newfoundland waters and oversaw a major survey of the region’s coasts undertaken by Capt. James Cook. He was created a baronet in 1773 and later promoted to vice-admiral and admiral.
9. James Pringle was a British army officer and lieutenant colonel of the 59th Regiment of Foot, stationed at Nova Scotia.
10. William Shirley (1694-1771), former governor of Massachusetts, 1741-56, and governor of the Bahama Islands, 1759-68.
11. Welbore Ellis (1713-1802), an erstwhile friend to FB, but he did not maintain a regular correspondence with him: vice treasurer of Ireland in 1765-66, secretary of war between 1762 and 1765, and a member of the Privy Council.