Acknowledgments
At the end of a complex project extending over nearly three decades, there are many people to thank for their help along the way. Chief among them are Elizabeth Marshall and Margaret A. Hogan. Marshall assembled copies for nearly all the additional letters printed in these volumes beyond Hutchinson’s letterbooks kept at the Massachusetts State Archives, a task involving not only much correspondence within the United States but travel to England as well. She established the files and procedures that the editors continued to use for subsequent volumes after her retirement from the project in 2019. She carefully compared the various copies of each letter and reviewed all proofs before the publication of the first two volumes. Her contributions to the early years of the project were invaluable.
Prior to volume 3, we relied on Hobson Woodward of the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society for a final review to make certain the Hutchinson project conformed to the general standards adhered to by the documentary editing profession. Beginning in 2019, Margaret Hogan took on all the functions previously supplied by both Marshall and Woodward, bringing a new level of scholarly expertise to day-to-day operations. As editor in chief, I have relied heavily on her meticulous care and good judgment. Jane E. Ward has been a steady help all along, keeping a careful eye on the calendar of letters, sometimes drafting source notes for later review, and willingly taking on the time-consuming task of securing illustrations. Matt Snider of California State University at Fullerton provided the tentative decoding of passages in the letters which Hutchinson wrote in his personal cipher. Ainsley Winship and Chianna Calafiore, students at Northeastern University, participated in the double-blind proofreading of many of the transcriptions.
Over the years, many historians have generously allowed us to draw on their knowledge of Hutchinson and Boston’s prerevolutionary politics. Bernard Bailyn was a great friend and encourager of this project from its inception until his death. Colin Nicolson of the University of Stirling, the superb editor of The Papers of Francis Bernard, has cooperated closely throughout, including reading drafts of each volume. Few people know Boston politics in the 1760s and 1770s better than Neil L. York, the editor of Portrait of a Patriot: The Papers of Josiah Quincy Jr., whose timely corrections saved us from countless embarrassing errors. As readers of his blog Boston1775 know, J. L. Bell possesses a minutely detailed knowledge not only of all of Boston’s inhabitants but of what they might be doing on any given day! We are extremely grateful for the willingness of all three historians named here to take time away from their own work to help with The Correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson. Stacy Schiff shared generously her research and insights into the life of Samuel Adams. Regrettably, her outstanding book The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams did not reach the editors in time for references to it to be incorporated into this volume.
All historians, but documentary editors in particular, would be helpless without careful assistance behind the scenes from talented librarians and archivists. The principal people and institutions to acknowledge for The Correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson are Michael Comeau, executive director, and John Hannigan, curator, of the Archives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts at Columbia Point; Peter Drummey, chief historian and Stephen T. Riley Librarian, and Brenda M. Lawson, senior vice president for collections and content development at the Massachusetts Historical Society; the staff of the National Archives of the United Kingdom at Kew; the staff of the British Library; Joanna Terry, head of archives and heritage at the Staffordshire County Council; and the staff of the William L. Clements Library of the University of Michigan. Needless to say, this can be only a partial list of the many members of the library profession to whom we are grateful.
Jeanne Abboud has been the patient and talented designer of all the Hutchinson volumes, seeing them through the transition from Microsoft Word files to handsomely printed and bound books. Scribe, Inc., is responsible for converting all files into HTML for publication on the Colonial Society website. Kate Mertes compiled the index for this volume.
We gratefully acknowledge the permission of the Earl of Dartmouth to publish material from the Dartmouth Heirloom Trust at the Staffordshire County Record Office.
John W. Tyler
1 Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 360, 367; TH History, 3:251–52.
2 TH History, 3:253.
3 TH History, 3: Appendix V, p. 405.
4 See TH History, 3: Appendix W, pp. 406–10, for the text of TH’s message.
5 Votes and Proceedings, p. 30.
6 Brown, Revolutionary Politics, pp. 78–79.
7 The “Great Controversy” between Hutchinson and the General Court is best followed in Reid, Briefs, which provides the texts of all the messages together with Reid’s insightful commentary.
8 Bailyn, Pamphlets, 133.
9 John Adams to William Tudor, 8 March 1817, JA Works, 2:311.
10 JA Diary and Autobiography, 2:77.
11 See Nos. 1084 and 1102, below.
12 For the petition, see JHR, 49:287.
13 These resolves were later published as The Votes and Proceedings.
14 Schwartz, “Jarring Interests,” pp. 316–17; JHR, 50:viii.
15 JHR, 50:26–27.
16 Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Cushing, 2 December 1772, Franklin Papers, 19:399–413; JA Diary and Autobiography, 2:79–81.
17 JHR, 50:29.
18 JHR, 50:40–41, 58–61.
19 For the circulation of rumors related to the letters, see No. 1117, below.
20 TH History, 3:289.
21 For Adams’s statement, see No. 1113, below.
22 For TH’s belief in Story’s innocence, see No. 1171, below.
23 Bailyn, Ordeal, p. 286.
24 See No. 1120, below.
25 For Lord Dartmouth’s doubts concerning the legitimacy of the Massachusetts claim, see No. 1130, below.
26 See appendix 1, below.
27 See No. 1149, below.
28 Tyler, Smugglers & Patriots, pp. 192–93.
29 Norton, 1774, p. 13.
30 Labaree, Boston Tea Party, pp. 111–12.
31 Norton, 1774, pp. 19–20.
32 Tyler, Smugglers & Patriots, p. 203.
33 Labaree, Boston Tea Party, pp. 121–22, 124–25.
34 Labaree, Boston Tea Party, pp. 137–41.
35 Norton, 1774, pp. 35–39.
36 Franklin Papers, 20:513–16; Boston Post-Boy, 14 March 1774; Franklin Papers, 21:13–18.
37 The theory that it was Pownall was carefully worked out by Bernhard Knollenberg in “Benjamin Franklin and the Hutchinson Oliver Letters,” Yale University Library Gazette, 47 (July 1972): 1–9, and also agreed to by Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 286–87.
38 TH Diary, 1:209, 194; Bailyn, Ordeal, pp. 286–88.
39 Israel Mauduit, Franklin before the Privy Council, White Hall Chapel, London, 1774, on Behalf of the Province of Massachusetts to Advocate the Removal of Hutchinson and Oliver (Philadelphia: John M. Butler, 1859).
40 Alfred F. Young, “George Robert Twelves Hewes (1742–1840): A Boston Shoemaker and the Memory of the American Revolution,” WMQ 38 (October 1981): 592–97.
41 See No. 1132, below.
42 Barbara Black, “Massachusetts and the Judges: Judicial Independence in Perspective,” Law and History 3 (Spring 1985): 101–62.
1 For TH’s message, delivered 2 July 1772, see JHR, 49:87–89.
2 At this point in the AC, TH wrote then crossed out with a large X the following text: “The Council seem willing to join with me and I must do them the justice of acquainting your Lordship that they are better disposed than they have been for some years past several of the members who have been first chosen within three years past having just notions of the nature of Government and opposing with freedom and good sense the absurdities which have so long prevailed. I omit nothing in my power to cultivate the good disposition of these members and to encourage it’s spread among the rest and during the present Session, there has been a decency and propriety in all the proceedings of the Council. I hardly expect to close the Session without something improper from the House but the friends of Government are more numerous than they have been and I am greatly mistaken if the majority of the people of the province are not tired of the late disordered state of affairs and do not wish to see government restored & the Faction suppressed, and we should have seen the effect of this change of temper in the change of Members of the Legislature if the enemies to Government were not more active & zealous than the friends to it. I have but little in my power to induce people to give themselves any great trouble on the side of government and they engage in this cause from a principle of virtue and a sense of duty without any views to their private or personal benefit.”
3 Thomas Scammell was inspector of the king’s timber in Maine. For his letter, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 988.
1 On 5 June 1772, EH married Mary (Polly) Watson, the daughter of George Watson of Plymouth and Elizabeth Oliver Watson, the eldest daughter of Peter Oliver, for whom see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 241. Peggy (MH) was TH’s younger daughter, who still lived with her father. Jack Clark was most likely Jonathan Clarke (b. 1744), son of Richard Clarke, one of the consignees of the East India Company for the tea sent to Boston in 1773.
2 TH allowed WSH, his youngest son, to pass briefly through London on his way to study at the University of Edinburgh.
1 The exchange of messages concerning the governor’s salary can be found at JHR, 49:107–08, 147–52. In appendix V to TH History, vol. 3, TH asserted that the author of the House’s resolutions on the subject was Joseph Hawley.
2 TH’s adherence during the summer of 1771 to royal instructions that accompanied his commission, particularly the twenty-seventh instruction forbidding him to assent to any money bill that taxed the salaries of royal officials, sparked controversy with the General Court; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 876.
3 The exchange of messages concerning the need for repairs to the Province House can be found at JHR, 49:137, 142–43.
4 The final compromise, whereby the House requested TH to issue a proclamation against trespass in the King’s Woods, appears in JHR, 49:126–27.
5 The territory in dispute lay west of the Connecticut River and above the Massachusetts border with New Hampshire. It eventually became the present state of Vermont.
6 For TH’s correspondence with Governor William Tryon of New York concerning the town of Hinsdale, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 928.
7 The House approved the salaries for William Bollan and Benjamin Franklin, and the Council concurred on 14 July 1772; see JHR, 4:121–22, 124–25.
8 For the assault on Arthur Savage, the comptroller of customs at Falmouth, before the chief justice and the warrants issued, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 931.
1 The petition to the king, which sought permission for Massachusetts to pay its own governor and for relief from that part of the Townshend Acts establishing a civil list for North America, can be found at National Archives UK, CO 5/174, f. 291.
2 Dudson Kilcup (1702–1767) was a notary and occasional government scribe. Presumably Oliver intended to write “not” in place of “it” at the end of the sentence.
3 For the vote in favor of paying Benjamin Franklin, see No. 1003, immediately above.
1 TH sought to manage public reaction in England to the House’s petition to the king by publishing his own message to them at the conclusion of their legislative session; see JHR, 49:147–52.
1 TH’s last letter to Lord Hillsborough was No. 1003, above. TH canceled all the text from this point until the end of the paragraph.
2 The reference to “taking away the Charter” may refer to the reforms Lord Hillsborough proposed, together with Sir Francis Bernard, in 1770. See TH Correspondence, 3: No. 720.
3 The first resolve contended that, according to the charter, the General Court was the sole judge of what constituted adequate provision for the governor (JHR, 49:106–07). TH provided an account of the several votes on this resolution, including the departure of some of his key allies from the session, in TH History, 3:256–57.
4 TH believed that the House’s contention should not go unchallenged, so he presented a counterargument in his concluding message of the session (JHR, 49:147–52).
5 Here TH requested that rather than vacating the charter as an immediate response to the provocative resolves of the House, that some warning of possible punitive action should be communicated to the governor first, so that the General Court would have the opportunity to rescind their resolutions.
6 Despite TH’s contention here that he disliked argumentative messages from the chair, he would be unable to resist engaging in a prolonged argument with the House concerning constitutional issues during the first months of 1773. This debate brought him a rebuke from Lord Dartmouth, who was then secretary of state.
7 Here TH once again named James Bowdoin, the father-in-law of John Temple (see BD), who had recently been appointed surveyor of customs in England, as the source of his troubles within the Council.
8 TH’s complaint regarding multiple sessions of the General Court within a single year was a frequent theme in his letters.
9 The last-minute petition to the crown was the subject of Andrew Oliver’s letter; see No. 1004, above.
10 TH refused to assent to the bill paying Benjamin Franklin’s salary as a separate agent for the House (JHR, 49:125). Both he and Sir Francis Bernard maintained that any provincial agent needed approval of all three branches of the government: the House, the Council, and the governor.
11 The exchange of messages on the condition of the Province House was printed in the House journal, see JHR, 49:137, 142–43.
12 TH appointed his brother Foster Hutchinson, who lacked legal training and was widely criticized as unqualified for the job, to a seat on the Superior Court in 1771.
1 The 64th Regiment under Captain Thomas Armstrong (no dates), an Irish regiment previously stationed at Halifax and briefly at Boston from 1768 through 1769, replaced Colonel William Dalrymple’s 14th Regiment, which was then dispatched to subdue the island of St. Vincent in the West Indies from a rebellion by the indigenous Caribs. TH’s 43rd instruction was written in such a way as to support the premise that he was still commander-in-chief of all fortifications within the province despite the fact Castle William was effectively under royal control and had been staffed by British Regulars since September 1770.
2 Colonel William Dalrymple arrived at Boston with the 14th Regiment in 1768. He assumed command as senior officer after the departure of Colonel Alexander Mackay in July 1769 (and was therefore in command at the time of the Boston Massacre). Despite the fact that Dalrymple had been considered as a possible candidate to succeed Francis Bernard as governor (see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 477), he and TH cooperated effectively during the years of Dalrymple’s command.
1 For the request of the House and Council for TH to intercede, see JHR, 49:259.
2 For TH’s trip to London in 1741 and intercession on behalf of those towns originally created by Massachusetts, see TH Correspondence, 1: Nos. 1–5.
3 Samuel Robinson (1707–1767) was a justice of the peace in the town of Bennington, in what eventually became Vermont.
4 For TH’s letter to Governor William Tryon of New York and the latter’s response, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 928.
1 For Peter Livius, see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 684.
2 TH to John Pownall, 21 April 1772, TH Correspondence, 4:448 (calendared but not printed).
3 Livius correctly predicted the future course of events. Hillsborough ran afoul of the powerful investors in the Grand Ohio Company, who included George Washington’s brothers, Benjamin Franklin, and Sir William Johnson. Hillsborough resigned as secretary of state for the colonies on 31 August 1772, when the rest of the cabinet failed to support him concerning settlement west of the Appalachians (TH History, 3:259n). He erred, however, in his guess that Chatham would succeed Hillsborough.
4 See TH to Peter Livius, 7 May 1772, TH Correspondence, 4:449 (calendared but not printed).
1 In his letter No. 25, written 9 May 1772, TH announced he had no news to report. Therefore, it appears in the calendar but was not printed; see TH Correspondence, 4:450. For letter No. 26, dated 29 May 1772, and letter No. 28 on 15 June 1772, see TH Correspondence, 4: Nos. 986 and 990.
2 The instructions from the town of Boston, as they appeared in the Boston Post-Boy, 25 May 1772, asserted the province was governed by an “exterior power” attempting to levy “an illegal tax” that would reduce citizens to the “condition of slaves.” They also criticized TH for failing to accept a salary paid by the province and refusing his assent to both a money bill (taxing the members of the American Board of Customs Commissioners) and a bill that would have paid the salaries of the agents of the House and Council.
3 TH’s letter No. 28 recounted the compromise whereby TH saw fit to permit the return of the General Court to Boston; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 990.
4 Henceforth, the salaries of the justices of the Superior Court would be paid by the crown.
5 John Phillips, commander of the provincial garrison of Castle William, had been without employment since the takeover of the fort by regular troops in September 1770; see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 695.
1 Charles Phelps (1717–1789) was a lawyer and land speculator in the Connecticut River Valley. TH’s letter to Lord Hillsborough, No. 33, outlined the case for Hinsdale and the other towns in New Hampshire, originally granted by Massachusetts but now threatened by New York’s new assertion of authority over the upper Connecticut Valley; see No. 1008, above.
2 For Israel Williams, see BD. No letter from London written in the spring of 1772 was found mentioning such an exchange.
3 “Outrée,” French, meaning outrageous.
4 Jonathan Hunt (1738–1823) was later lieutenant governor of Vermont.
1 For Timothy Ruggles, see BD.
2 Thompson was most likely Robert Thompson (d. 1788), who had inherited land in America from a Puritan ancestor. The Whatelys and Thompson descended from the same grandmother. See No. 1113, below. The death of Thomas Whately (see BD), an important correspondent of TH, would lead to the unauthorized publication of their letters, provoking one of the most significant crises of TH’s career as governor. Heneage Finch (1751–1812), Lord Guernsey, eventually the 3rd earl of Aylesford, was elected member of Parliament for Castle Rising on 10 June 1772.
3 Samuel Danforth (see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 350n) was the senior member of the Council and acted as its president.
4 Richard Acklom Harrison (1750–1813) succeeded his father, Joseph, as collector of customs at Boston. See also TH Correspondence, 2: No. 321.
5 Israel Mauduit (see BD) was a leading Dissenter in London and actively corresponded with Andrew Oliver concerning the affairs of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, a missionary effort among Native Americans. There was in May 1772 a bill before the House of Lords for relieving Dissenters from subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England to avoid civil penalties. Both Lords Chatham and Shelburne spoke in favor of the bill (Parliamentary Debates, 6:148).
6 Charles Steuart was the paymaster general for the American Board of Customs Commissioners. Lord Mansfield (see BD) had before him the famous Somerset Case, involving Steuart; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 924n16.
7 John Williams was appointed inspector general of customs by the American Board of Customs Commissioners in November 1767 and suffered in the Liberty riot in June 1768; see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 326. Duncan Stewart (1732–1793), became collector of customs at New London in 1764 and was recently in London. He remained in his post until 1777, when as a loyalist he was forced to flee. Their dispute concerned Stewart’s claim for compensation of a boat burned in New London’s Liberty riot, the smallest of the three riots sparked by the same incident.
1 For Richard Acklom Harrison, see No. 1012, above.
2 Sir Francis Bernard suffered a stroke sometime between December 1771 and January 1772 (TH Correspondence, 4: No. 953).
3 For hints of an independent salary for judges in Massachusetts, see No. 1010, above.
4 TH proposed treating the funds from the crown as a supplement to salaries provided by the legislature in TH Correspondence, 4: No. 971.
5 For the fullest description of his reaction to the resolves of the House, which were to be presented by Benjamin Franklin as a remonstrance to the king, see No. 1006, above.
6 The House declared a royal instruction specifying a permanent salary for the governor as an invasion of the province’s charter rights (TH History, 2:285–86).
7 “Procul a jove” is a shortened version of the familiar Latin quotation “Procul a jove, procul a fulmine,” meaning “far from Jove, far from [his] thunder.”
8 For Thomas Flucker, the secretary of the province, see BD. A relation of the Bowdoin family, he had large landholdings in Maine (possibly the subject of Bernard’s intended letter).
9 Concerning the exchange of lands east of the Kennebec River for those to the west of the Connecticut River and north of the boundary of New Hampshire, see No. 1011, above.
10 Despite repeated messages from TH, the General Court refused to discourage unauthorized settlements in the territory east of the Kennebec. For the proposal to annex New Hampshire to Massachusetts Bay, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 873.
1 The subject of this letter concerns speculation about who might succeed Andrew Oliver (whose health was poor) should he die in office as lieutenant governor. The abbreviation “JE” may stand for John Erving Jr. (see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 907), who despite being the brother-in-law of James Bowdoin, “Mr. B,” seemed well disposed to TH as governor.
2 TH could mean either Samuel or John Adams (for both, see BD), but since he wrote, “I have mentioned J A” in the penultimate paragraph, John Adams is more likely.
3 Bowdoin’s son-in-law, John Temple, was recently made surveyor general of customs in England. Neil R. Stout frames a convincing argument that Temple obtained this appointment by blackmailing Thomas Whately, then a member of the North administration, with the publication of their earlier correspondence (Neil R. Stout, “The Missing Temple-Whately Papers,” MHS Procs. 104 [1992]: 123–47).
4 Before Andrew Oliver’s appointment, the lieutenant governorship was an unpaid position. But Oliver was awarded a salary of £300, partly as compensation for his sufferings during the Stamp Act riots and partly as a way of strengthening the authority of royal government in the province (TH Correspondence, 3: No. 720).
5 It is unclear whom James Gambier would have proposed, but TH had once considered the independently wealthy Isaac Royall as a suitable successor when he himself thought of resigning the lieutenant governorship (TH Correspondence, 2: No. 253).
6 Here TH speculated that Thomas Flucker would not accept the position without a salary.
7 Once again, the likely person indicated by the “Mr. ——g” would be John Erving Jr.
8 The space left blank should be understood to be the “lieutenant governor’s.”
9 For Arthur Lee and the “Junius Americanus” Letters, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 743. Lee’s letter of 29 January 1770 declared Andrew Oliver a “partisan against the province” (Arthur Lee, Political Detection or the Treachery and Tyranny of Administration Both at Home and Abroad Displayed in a Series of Letters Signed Junius Americanus [London: J. and W. Oliver, 1770]).
10 The hint, possibly pertaining to John Adams, remains obscure since the last found letter from Sir Francis Bernard was dated 13 June 1771; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 872.
11 “J A” in this instance probably stands for John Adams and “Str.” for William Story; see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 677, and TH Correspondence, 4: No. 998. Story’s home was attacked during the Stamp Act riots while he was deputy registrar of the vice-admiralty court. He had recently returned from London, where he had been pleading for relief from his obligation to make good money owed the court by Nathaniel Wheelwright (see BD), a Boston merchant who went bankrupt in 1765. Story had accepted a note of hand from Wheelwright at John Temple’s behest and was now being sued by the advocate general of the court. Seeking to avoid deeper bankruptcy himself, Story sought forgiveness of the obligation as a sufferer in the riots.
12 In a letter to Lord Hillsborough printed in the London Public Advertiser on 10 June 1772, Junius Americanus warned that Story had already been indemnified for his losses in the riot by the Massachusetts General Court. At the same time, the writer also reprinted letters to Hillsborough by both Sir Francis Bernard and Charles Paxton (see BD), endorsing Story’s cause, implying they were both somehow complicit in a plot to defraud the government. All the letters were eventually printed in the Boston Evening Post for 24 August 1772. By “public dortor,” TH meant the common sewer.
13 The omitted words would be “John Temple” and “England.” It was Temple who first introduced TH and Whately to one another as correspondents; see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 274.
1 No letter to TH dated 12 June 1772 was found, nor was the pamphlet it contained. The language of the first sentence concerning a “debt” of letters (as well as the content of the first paragraph) strongly suggest the intended recipient was Israel Mauduit, a leading advocate for Dissenters; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 930.
2 John Locke, A Letter on Toleration (London: Churchill, 1689).
3 For the opposition of English bishops to a bill before Parliament intended to provide relief for Dissenters, see No. 1012, above.
4 Concerning the salaries of the judges, see No. 1010, above.
5 With the accession to the British throne in 1714 of George I, the ruler of the Duchy of Hanover, Britain and Hanover became joined together under the same crown but enjoyed separate governments.
6 The description of the “gentleman in Ireland” fits TH’s correspondent John Hely Hutchinson (see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 355) but none of John Hely Hutchinson’s letters to TH was found.
7 The British revenue schooner Gaspée was burned in Narragansett Bay the night of 9–10 June 1772; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 989.
8 The “Gentleman” was not identified.
1 The first page of the Boston Gazette for 24 August 1772 contained a lengthy letter by “A Whig Proselyte” (continued on 4 October) sharply critical of TH’s concluding message to the House, which defended his independent salary. The same letter also by implication compared the king to the seventeenth-century Stuart monarchs, Roman emperors, and the Ottoman sultan.
2 TH once again referred to John Temple’s appointment as surveyor general of customs in England.
3 Perhaps mistaking Benjamin Franklin for Michael Francklin, lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, who was seeking to assume Sewall’s place as admiralty court judge at Halifax. See TH Correspondence, 4: No. 895.
4 Perhaps John Robinson (see BD) was seeking a customs post or appointment as vice-admiralty court judge in Charleston?
5 Concerning John Robinson’s exchange of offices with Jonathan Sewall (see BD), the attorney general of Massachusetts, who also held the post of vice-admiralty court judge in Halifax, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 790.
6 John T. Apthorp and his wife, Hannah Greenleaf Apthorp, died at sea during a winter voyage to the Carolinas; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 953.
7 For Admiral John Montagu, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 890.
8 For Lieutenant William Dudingston, commander of HMS Gaspée, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 989.
1 No letter from John Pownall bearing this date was found.
2 This reference appears to confirm John Pownall as the recipient of the unaddressed letter No. 1006, above.
3 Aaron Briggs, a sixteen-year-old mixed-race boy and indentured servant from Prudence Island, confessed to being one of the party that boarded the Gaspée and identified wealthy Providence merchant John Brown (see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 989) and Simeon Potter (1720–1806), a slave trader and privateer of Bristol, Rhode Island, as leaders of the group. He was held aboard HMS Beaver, but Captain Robert Linzee (see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 652) refused to surrender him to Governor Joseph Wanton and the Rhode Island courts. Later testimony cast doubt on the veracity of Briggs’s statement (Records of the Colony of RI, 7:93–108).
4 TH provided Livius with a letter of introduction to Pownall while apparently unaware of Livius’s ongoing conflict with New Hampshire governor John Wentworth; see No. 1009, above.
5 Among TH’s letters to Pownall, the one prior to this was dated 15 June 1772 and marked “not sent.” That draft makes no mention of the judges’ salaries. Therefore, he either sent another later letter or revised his draft to include the subject; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 991.
1 Lord Hillsborough’s letter assured TH that he had spoken with Lord North, who agreed on the necessity for crown-supported salaries for Massachusetts judges; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 987. TH proposed £250 as the amount to pay the associate judges in his private letter of 27 April 1772; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 971.
2 Richard Reeve was secretary of the American Board of Customs Commissioners from 1769 through 1772; see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 353.
1 For Robert Linzee, see No. 1017, above.
2 For Lord Sandwich, now first lord of the admiralty, see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 284.
3 Linzee was being sued for alleged violations of law while making customs seizures in Rhode Island. A similar number of cases were brought against Lieutenant William Dudingston, commander of HMS Gaspée, before its destruction in Narragansett Bay; see No. 1021, below.
1 Although TH would be unaware of the change until late October, Lord Dartmouth succeeded Lord Hillsborough as secretary of state for the colonies in mid-August 1772.
2 For the resolves of the House and the remonstrance to the king, see No. 1006, above.
3 TH replied to the resolves in a message proroguing the General Court on 14 July 1772; see JHR, 49:127–32.
4 TH described the General Court’s unwillingness to fund repairs to the Province House in No. 1003, above.
5 TH mentioned the matter of the grants made by New York governor William Tryon in Hinsdale in No. 1003, above, but Dartmouth would not yet have seen TH’s fuller statement on behalf of the rights of the Massachusetts grantees there that was the subject of No. 1008, above.
6 TH lamented the refusal of the General Court to do anything to stem the rapid, unauthorized settlement of the Eastern Country in No. 1001, above.
1 Concerning provision for Captain John Phillips, see No. 1010, above.
2 “Proximus ardet” is shortened from the phrase in Virgil’s Aeneid (2:312) “proximus ardet Ucalegon,” which refers to the fact that Ucalegon’s house was already on fire, prompting Anchises and Aeneas to flee Troy. Here TH meant that the nearby problem in Rhode Island might quickly spread to Massachusetts.
1 Chief Justice Peter Oliver and Robert Auchmuty, judge of the regional vice-admiralty court (for both see BD), were appointed the royal commission of inquiry charged to bring to justice those who set fire to HMS Gaspée.
1 Henry Lloyd (1709–1795) was a Boston merchant and parishioner of King’s Chapel. He left Boston for Halifax at the time of the British evacuation in 1776 and died in London.
2 TH had asked Palmer to inquire if a British magazine would be willing to print TH’s message in response to the resolves of the House; see No. 1005, above.
3 TH requested that a new set of pulpit furnishings, one of his perquisites as a newly commissioned royal governor, be given to King’s Chapel; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 967.
4 For WSH’s cold, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 995.
1 For the first hint that the dispute over the Ohio Company would cause the resignation of Lord Hillsborough, see No. 1009, above.
2 For Lord Weymouth, see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 284.
3 Thus, TH had recommended between £250 and 300 as a suitable salary for the associate justices.
4 Immediately after the transfer of Castle William to royal control in September 1770, TH urged Thomas Gage and Lord Hillsborough of the need for him to maintain direct supervision over both the keeper of provincial stores at the Castle and the gunner, whose job it was to note the entrance and exit of all shipping from the harbor; see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 693.
5 On the need for a new flag at the Castle, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 865.
1 The Massachusetts Spy for 10 September 1772 printed a letter “To the King,” signed Akolax, which reminded George III of the fates of his Stuart predecessors and directly criticized him for appointing tyrants like TH, as well as “a junto of Custom House officers and Roman Catholicks” to oppress the colonies. The piece appears in some ways to be modeled on “A Letter to the King,” reprinted from the London St. James Chronicle, which was printed in the Boston Gazette for 31 August 1772 but with fewer references to affairs in England and more to events in the colonies.
1 John Turner (see TH Correspondence, 1: No. 41) was the naval officer and deputy customs collector at Salem. John Temple accused Sir Francis Bernard of collusion in 1764 with James Cockle, the dismissed former collector; see TH Correspondence, 1: No. 72.
2 John Bernard, the actual collector, was intending to go to Salem to take up the office himself; see No. 1028, below.
1 In addition to passing along rumors of Lord Hillsborough’s resignation and discussing the case of Captain Phillips, TH urged Gage in his letter of 24 September, No. 1024, above, to divide the gunner’s job at the Castle among four men in order to maintain a twenty-four-hour watch over ships entering and leaving the harbor.
2 Sir Guy Carleton (1724–1808), later 1st Baron Dorchester, who succeeded James Murray as governor of Canada in 1768, had been in England since 1770 consulting on the disposition of civil and religious affairs in that province, which were ultimately embodied in the Quebec Act of 1774 (14 Geo. III, c. 83).
1 John Atkinson (1742–1803), a British merchant, arrived in Boston in 1770 and began a partnership with another established merchant, Richard Smith (dates unknown). Atkinson left Boston together with the British fleet in 1776 and served with a loyalist regiment during the Revolutionary War. Smith was banished from Massachusetts in 1778.
2 Turner’s letter was No. 1026, above.
1 TH’s letter to Andrew Oliver of 11 October 1772 was not found. TH Jr. married Andrew Oliver’s daughter Sarah in 1770 (Harvard Graduates, 14:289–95). “In ano” was Oliver’s decorous Latin description of an anal fistula.
2 Margaret, the daughter of Andrew Oliver, married John Spooner Jr. in 1762; see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 324.
3 For William Burch, a member of the American Board of Customs Commissioners, see BD.
4 Robert Thompson was not identified but see No. 1113, below.
5 Peter Oliver (1749–1795), Harvard College 1769, was the son of the lieutenant governor and was in London from 1771 through 1773 studying medicine at Guy’s Hospital. He eventually became a surgeon serving in the British army during the American Revolution (Harvard Graduates, 17:188–90).
1 Turner’s sent letter, which TH included in this letter to Bernard, was not found.
2 News from England of an independent salary for the judges was reported in the Boston Gazette on 28 September 1772. The town meeting adopted a petition to TH asking whether there was any truth to the matter on 28 October. The text of this petition, together with TH’s answer to it, was printed in the Boston Gazette on 2 November 1772. TH refused to disclose the contents of any confidential messages received from higher authorities.
1 In the so-called Revolution of 1772, the new Swedish king, Gustav III, in a bloodless coup d’état, forced his Parliament to adopt a new instrument of government, granting him much greater power.
2 Prince William (1743–1805), Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, was the younger brother of George III. The phrase “captain general” implies the highest general rank in the army, although the post of commander-in-chief was vacant since the death of William’s uncle, the Duke of Cumberland (for whom, see TH Correspondence, 1: No. 200). Henry Seymour Conway (see BD), lieutenant general of the ordnance, eventually exchanged positions with Jeffery Amherst, governor of Jersey, on 22 October 1772.
1 None of these letters from Sir Francis Bernard was found.
2 The subject of Bernard’s letter of 1 August was clearly the continuing financial embarrassments of his near-bankrupt son John Bernard, whom TH was assisting. John Bernard was indebted to the London firm of Lane, Son & Frazier (see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 872). Future loyalist Richard Lechmere (1727–1814), the Boston agent of Lane, Son & Frazier, had evidently secured a lien for them on the property in 1771.
3 John Bernard’s dispute with his former business partner Thomas Goldthwait (see BD), who was truckmaster and commander of Fort Pownall in Maine, was at the heart of his financial difficulties; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 941. For Jedidiah Prebble Jr., whom the House chose as truckmaster instead of Goldthwait, see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 639. For Goldthwait’s request that TH acquiesce in the choice of Prebble and TH’s explanation to Lord Hillsborough, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 970.
4 For the exchange of offices between Jonathan Sewall and John Robinson, see No. 1016, above.
5 For the judgment in August 1771 in James Otis Jr.’s (see BD) case of assault against Robinson, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 884. The case was settled during the August term of the Superior Court and the terms reported in the Boston Gazette for 15 September 1772.
6 The arrangement proposed by Sir Francis Bernard is evident from No. 1037, below, whereby Sewall would assume the role of solicitor of customs as well as attorney general.
7 For Duncan Stewart, see No. 1012, above, and No. 1037, below.
8 For the treasonous addressed to the king that was printed in the newspapers, see No. 1025, above.
9 Thomas Flucker, the secretary of the province, owned large land holdings in Maine.
1 For TH’s letter No. 33, see No. 1008, above.
2 This earlier document may have been incorporated in the “State of the Claim of Massachusetts Bay to the Country between the Rivers Kennebec and St. Croix” listed as an enclosure to the DupRC. The renewed land claim came from William Alexander (1726–1783), who styled himself Lord Stirling—a claim not recognized by the House of Lords. He later became a major general in the Continental Army.
3 For the petition of the town meeting, see No. 1031, above.
1 John Robinson’s letter to TH by the September mail was not found.
2 For David Lisle, who was suspended as solicitor of the American Board of Customs Commissioners in 1768, see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 338. He evidently returned to his old position; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 790. For Duncan Stewart, see No. 1033, above. For the former plan for a direct exchange between Sewall and Robinson, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 790.
3 “Mr. Johnson” was not identified.
4 For a three-way exchange among Robinson, Sewall, and Michael Francklin (see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 477), the lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, see also TH Correspondence, 4: Nos. 790, 895. For the apology to Lord Sandwich, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 955.
1 For Governor Thomas Pownall, see BD.
1 For the address and TH’s response, see No. 1031, above.
1 TH’s letter No. 3 to Lord Dartmouth was No. 1039, above.
2 Dissatisfied with TH’s response to its first address, the town met again on 30 October, issuing a second address stating that judges who served at pleasure rather than during good behavior were contrary to the rights of Englishmen and requested TH to convene the General Court so that citizens might have a constitutional means of protest. See Boston Gazette, 2 November 1772.
3 The livery companies, or craft guilds, of London had the exclusive right to elect senior civic officials, such as the lord mayor, the aldermen, and the members of Parliament representing the city.
1 Only one of WSH’s two letters was found; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 995.
2 EH married earlier that summer; see No. 1002, above. WSH’s aunt was Grizzel Sanford (see BD), who moved into the governor’s house after the death of TH’s wife, Margaret Sanford Hutchinson (see BD), to help raise his children, all grown now except for MH, his younger daughter.
1 No letter from John Wentworth written on 16 October 1772 was found. Peter Livius, while chief justice of New Hampshire, challenged the way Wentworth disposed of some lands his uncle Governor Benning Wentworth (see BD) had illegally granted himself and accused Wentworth before the Council of maladministration. The Council supported Wentworth, and Livius was removed from office for judicial partiality in 1772. See Lawrence Shaw Mayo, John Wentworth, Governor of New Hampshire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1922), pp. 74–76.
2 For TH’s nephew Nathaniel Rogers, see BD. For Rogers’s visit to London in 1767–1768, see TH Correspondence, 2: Nos. 284, 307.
3 For William Parker, see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 684.
4 None of the newspaper pieces, allegedly by Livius, was identified.
5 This sentence is quoted from TH to John Pownall, 21 April 1772, calendared but not printed in TH Correspondence, 4:448.
6 For Livius’s complaint to the Board of Trade, see N.H. Papers, 18:623–25.
7 No articles pertaining to Livius were found in Boston newspapers for 1772.
8 The Korahites were one of the three main divisions of the House of Levi. Korah, leader of the faction, assisted by Dathan and Abiram (two particularly quarrelsome and seditious Israelites), led a rebellion against Moses and were swallowed up in a crevice (Numbers 16:1–35).
1 At its gathering on 30 October, the town meeting requested TH to convene the General Court so that a constitutional means might be found to oppose the independent salaries of the judges. In his response, TH said that to do so would cede the crown’s right to choose the time and place for the General Court to meet and encourage other towns to make similar requests. On 2 November, the town met again and appointed a twenty-one-person committee of correspondence to encourage other towns to communicate Boston’s position and request that they express their own sentiments in return (Boston Gazette, 9 November 1772). According to Richard D. Brown, Samuel Adams had in mind as early as September 1771 forming some sort of corresponding society, and TH’s message played perfectly into Adams’s hands. See Brown, Revolutionary Politics, pp. 45–48, 56–57.
2 James Otis Jr. was chair of the committee.
3 For William Molineux, see BD. For Thomas Young, see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 326. For Joseph Greenleaf, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 926.
4 The Latin phrase “pro re nata” means literally “for the thing born,” which is generally understood as “as the situation arises.”
5 TH prorogued the General Court until 6 January 1773.
6 The salary of £200 for each of the puisne justices was £50 less than what TH thought was the minimal acceptable amount.
7 For John Robinson’s letter, see No. 1037, above. If Sewall and Robinson might be otherwise provided with adequate salaries, TH favored eliminating the Halifax vice-admiralty court, which was subject to appeal to the vice-admiralty court in Boston anyway.
8 The London merchant firm of Lane, Son & Frazier was apparently paying the necessary fees for the warrants for the judges of the Superior Court.
1 See TH Correspondence, 4: No. 984.
2 For Thomas Oliver, see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 640.
3 Thomas Oliver studied civil law at the Inns of Court but never practiced law in Boston (CSM Pubs., 28:37–66). For his cousin Richard Oliver, who played a prominent role in the “printers’ crisis” of 1771, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 853.
1 Thomas Goldthwait’s letter to TH of 12 October 1772, calendared but not printed.
2 Beginning in 1704 and as recently as 1771, Parliament enacted bounties on colonial timber to reduce Britain’s dependence on the Baltic for this critical commodity. Ungranted lands in Maine east of the Kennebec belonged to the crown. Thus, when Maine timber was cut by illegal settlers, the king was paying a bounty on his own trees.
3 For the Massachusetts claim to lands west of the Merrimack River, see TH Correspondence, 1: Nos. 1, 5.
4 Newichawanock was the Abenaki name for the Salmon Falls River, a tributary of the Piscataqua, which together form the southernmost part of the eastern border of New Hampshire. The border north of the headwaters of the Salmon Falls was also determined by the Privy Council in 1737 (during the reign of George II).
5 For the royal patent of Sir Ferdinando Gorges to lands in Maine, see TH Correspondence, 1: No. 213, 2:496, and 4: No. 933.
6 TH initially discussed the matter in his letter No. 15, TH to Lord Hillsborough, 5 November 1771 (calendared but not printed in TH Correspondence, 4:435). Lord Hillsborough told TH he referred the matter to the Privy Council in TH Correspondence, 4: No. 934. “Primus inter pares” is a Latin phrase meaning “first among equals.”
7 The specific divorce case was not identified. “Ab mensa et toro” is a Latin legal phrase meaning from “from bed and board.”
1 Lord Sandwich’s letter was not found, but for TH’s response to it, dated May 1772, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 975.
2 TH’s letter to Lord Sandwich was No. 1044, above.
3 For a more complete discussion of the legal doubts concerning the power of the vice-admiralty court to commit a prisoner to a Massachusetts jail, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 975.
4 A mittimus directs a sheriff or other officer to commit a person to prison and a jailer to receive him.
1 Ansell Nickerson claimed to be the sole survivor of an attack by pirates when the fishing vessel he was aboard was discovered adrift in the waters between Chatham and Nantucket on 15 November. There was blood on the deck but no sign of his cousin, brother, brother-in-law, and a small boy, the other members of the crew. Nickerson asserted that he survived by hanging, undiscovered, over the stern of the vessel while the pirates were aboard. When the news reached TH in Boston, he found the story incredible and ordered Nickerson’s arrest. A case of piracy necessitated convening a special court of admiralty, including some the highest officials of the colony, as well as two customs collectors. After many delays, the court finally convened on 28 July 1773 with Josiah Quincy Jr. and John Adams representing Nickerson and TH presiding. A divided court acquitted Nickerson two days later. The basis of the acquittal is unclear: it may have been an insufficiency of evidence or concern that the jurisdiction of the special court did not include murder, only piracy. TH continued to believe Nickerson was guilty. The relevant letters pertaining to the case are not printed but calendared at the end of the volume: Edward Bacon to TH, 16 November 1772; TH to Unknown, 22 November 1772; TH to William Tryon, 23 November 1772; TH to John Wentworth, 23 November 1772; TH to Edward Bacon, 24 November 1772; TH to Sir Francis Bernard, 26 November 1772; TH to John Wentworth, 27 November 1772; TH to John Montagu, 30 November 1772; Peter Oliver to TH, 30 November 1772; Edward Bacon to TH, 2 December 1772; TH to John Wentworth, 3 December 1772; and TH to James Fisher, 8 December 1772. The clearest account of the case is found in JA Legal Papers, 2:335–40. TH also mentioned the case in TH History, 3:301.
1 No letters written by Sir Francis Bernard to TH after 17 June 1771 were found.
2 Alexander Leslie (1731–1794) was lieutenant colonel of the 64th Regiment. He was briefly in Boston from November 1768 to July 1769. He returned in 1772 after the departure to assume local command there. He was ordered by Thomas Gage to lead an abortive raid on Salem on 26 February 1775 to confiscate contraband weapons.
3 By “the point,” TH presumably means Dorchester Neck, that part of the mainland closest to Castle Island. Without the need to transport troops over water, soldiers could be in Boston much sooner than otherwise.
1 TH gave a letter of introduction to his son WSH to present to Peter Livius, asking the latter’s care and oversight for the young man. See TH to Peter Livius, 7 May 1772, calendared but not printed.
2 For George Meserve, stamp distributor for New Hampshire, see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 499.
1 Votes and Proceedings was divided into three parts: “First, a State of the Rights of the Colonists and of This Province in Particular; Secondly, a List of the Violations and Infringements of Those Rights; Thirdly, a Letter of Correspondence with the Other Towns.” The committee that prepared the first part included James Otis Jr. as chair, assisted by Samuel Adams and Josiah Quincy Jr. (see TH Correspondence, 1: No. 108). A committee including Joseph Warren (see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 259), Joseph Greenleaf, and Thomas Young wrote the second, and the third was the work of Benjamin Church (see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 359), Nathaniel Appleton, and William Powell. Appleton (1731–1798) was a Boston merchant and author of the pamphlet Considerations on the Slave Trade (Boston: Edes & Gill, 1767). Powell was a Boston merchant who signed the nonimportation agreement of 1 March 1768 and an agreement not to import tea of 20 January 1774.
1 In November, Captain Robert Keeler (c. 1735–1711) of HMS Mercury seized a quantity of coffee and molasses that he contended was illegally imported by Nathaniel Shaw Jr (c. 1745–1782) of New London. John Andrews (d. c. 1795), judge of the Rhode Island Vice-Admiralty Court, condemned the goods. Rather than appeal the decision to the regional vice-admiralty court in Boston, Shaw sought a prohibition from the Rhode Island Superior Court, Chief Justice Stephen Hopkins presiding. (For Stephen Hopkins, also the former governor of Rhode Island, see BD.) Hopkins issued a prohibition until the superior court could hear the case in February, but in the meantime the marshal of the vice-admiralty court sold the goods, and the ultimate disposition of the value of the cargo, the subject of several appeals, remained unresolved before the Revolution. (See Carl Ubbelohde, The Vice Admiralty Courts and the American Revolution [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960], pp. 168–69.) Hopkins, the author of The Rights of the Colonies Examined (Providence: William Goddard, 1765), that is, “seven years ago,” argued that charter colonies received the right to legislate for themselves and establish their own courts and were therefore not subject to acts of Parliament concerning their internal affairs if they were passed subsequent to the receipt of their charters. See also Ernest E. Rogers, Connecticut’s Naval Office at New London during the War of the American Revolution: Including the Mercantile Letter Book of Nathaniel Shaw, Jr. (New London, Conn.: New London Historical Society, 1933), pp. 241–42, 245, 247.
2 For Samuel Fitch, who was a lawyer in Connecticut before becoming advocate general of the vice-admiralty court, see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 414.
3 Votes and Proceedings, as in No. 1051, immediately above.
1 TH’s letters No. 1 and 2 were Nos. 1034 and 1038, above.
2 TH’s letter No. 35 to Lord Hillsborough, No. 1025, above, included a copy of “To the King” from the Massachusetts Spy for 10 September 1772.
1 TH drew his characteristic wavy line through the center of this and the following two paragraphs, indicating they were probably not included in the final draft of the letter.
2 This sentence was written in the margin and marked for insertion here.
3 For the Virginia Resolves, see TH Correspondence, 1: No. 101.
4 For the Declaratory Act, see TH Correspondence, 1: No. 170.
1 TH Jr. (Tommy) married Sarah, the daughter of Andrew Oliver, the lieutenant governor. They had a son, Thomas, who was baptized 23 February 1772. Peter Oliver Jr. (the son of the chief justice) married SH (Sally), TH’s elder daughter, on 1 February 1770. They had a daughter, Margaret, born 17 January 1771 and a son, also named Thomas, born 15 July 1772. Presumably they were all living in Middleborough, either in the home of the chief justice or the house he built for his son Peter when he married. Peggy, mentioned here, was likely to have been TH’s younger daughter, who may have been accompanying her older sister.
2 In all likelihood, Oliver referred here to the special court of admiralty being convened to hear the case of Ansell Nickerson; see No. 1048, above.
3 Whatever the manuscript was that accompanied Oliver’s letter was not found. The town of Middleborough pointedly ignored the call to enter into a correspondence with Boston on political affairs (Brown, Revolutionary Politics, p. 98).
4 Ebenezer Sprout (1717–1786) was a captain of the militia and tavern-keeper in Middleborough. Benjamin White (1716–1774) was the representative for Middleborough in 1772. The other three selectmen were not identified.
5 Bridgewater and Plympton are Plymouth County towns located between Plymouth and Middleborough. Taunton, just west of Middleborough, is the seat of Bristol County. For Daniel Leonard, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 752.
1 The two Massachusetts members of the commission were Chief Justice Peter Oliver and Robert Auchmuty Jr., the judge of the regional vice-admiralty court. Joseph Wanton was governor of Rhode Island.
2 The newspapers TH enclosed with this letter contained debates over and proposed amendments to the Votes and Proceedings of the town of Boston. The last newspaper listed in the source note, however, the Boston Gazette for 21 December 1772, printed resolutions by the towns of Plymouth, Roxbury, and Cambridge opposing independent salaries for the judges, similar to those passed by Boston, and establishing their own committees of correspondence, as did the Boston Evening Post for 21 December 1772.
1 The Boston Evening Post for 21 December 1772 included an article disclosing the powers and instructions of the Gaspée Commission.
1 Thomas Gage’s letter of 20 December 1772 is calendared but not printed in this volume.
2 Daniel Horsmanden (c. 1691–1778) was chief justice of New York, and Frederick Smythe Jr. (b. c. 1732) was chief justice of New Jersey.
1 John Calef (1726–1812) was a physician and representative from Ipswich who voted to rescind the Circular Letter in 1768 and eventually became a loyalist.
2 For the Massachusetts members of the commission, see No. 1056, above.
1 John Pownall’s letter was not found.
2 No letter written by Admiral John Montagu in either December 1772 or January 1773 was found.
3 Darius Sessions (d. 1809) was deputy governor of Rhode Island from 1769 to 1775. He was the first magistrate on the scene after the burning of the Gaspée and heard many of the initial depositions. The chief justice was Sessions’s friend and neighbor Stephen Hopkins, for whom see No. 1052, above. Both men might truly say that no one from Newport was involved, since it was generally assumed the attackers were from Providence.
4 For Aaron Briggs, a mixed-race man who confessed to participation in the attack, and Simeon Potter, whom he identified as a leader, see No. 1017, above.
5 The Gaspée Commission was established to inquire into acts of alleged high treason, summon witnesses under oath, and arrange for indicted criminals to be transported by Admiral Montagu to England for trial, but removal to England could only take place after suspects had been indicted by a Rhode Island grand jury, something very unlikely to happen. As early as 1768, Lord Hillsborough had suggested to Francis Bernard that the 1543 treason statute of Henry VIII might provide a legal basis for sending those colonial offenders to England for trial (see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 335n), but as TH pointed out, the colonies did not exist in 1543 and Parliament had never extended the statute to include the colonies. For more information on the legal details of treason in the colonies, see Neil L. York, “Imperial Impotence: Treason in 1774,” Law and History 29 (August 2011): 665–68, and York, “The Uses of Law in the Gaspée Affair,” Rhode Island History 50 (November 1992): 9.
6 Parliament passed the Dockyards etc. Protection Act 1772 (12 Geo. 3 c. 24) during the previous session, which also would have allowed for the transportation of suspects to England, but when the Gaspée Commission was formed, the new law was not mentioned, in part, because it raised a question of ex post facto law, since no one in the colonies could possibly have been aware of its existence (an issue TH raised in this letter).
7 If the attack occurred on the “high seas” it would have been a matter for the vice-admiralty courts, but since the Gaspée clearly ran aground within the boundaries of Rhode Island, it was a matter for the Rhode Island courts, and the apprehension of a suspect, thus, would depend on Rhode Island magistrates. See No. 1052, above.
8 The question of whether Massachusetts could tax the salaries of the American Board of Customs Commissioners first arose in the summer of 1771, when TH refused his assent to a new tax law (TH Correspondence, 4: No. 876). He was able to avoid the issue in 1772 thanks to a large surplus in the Massachusetts treasury, which meant no new taxes were necessary.
9 “Canere surdis” is Latin, meaning “to sing to the deaf.” It is a slight misquotation of Virgil, “Non canimus surdis,” Ecologues, 10:8.
10 The remainder of the letter from this point is in TH’s handwriting.
1 TH’s letters Nos. 3, 4, and 6 were dated 30 October, 3 November, and 13 November, respectively, Nos. 1039, 1040, and 1045, above. Letter No. 5, dated 11 November, was calendared but not printed in this volume.
2 TH wrote to John Pownall on 13 November, No. 1046, above, describing, in less circumspect language than his letter to Lord Dartmouth, agitation against independent salaries for the judges and the forming the Boston Committee of Correspondence.
3 TH’s letter No. 3 of 30 October, No. 1039, above, enclosed the message of the 28 October 1772 town meeting asking whether rumors of an independent salary for the judges were true. TH had replied that, because of the confidentiality of all communication from the ministry, he was unable to disclose any information. Letter No. 4 of 3 November, No. 1040, above, informed Dartmouth of further interchanges with the town meeting and of the formation of the Boston Committee of Correspondence.
4 In a long letter written on 9 December 1772, Lord Dartmouth expressed his view that the discontent of the colonies was caused by a misunderstanding of the relationship between the colonial assemblies and Parliament. In every society, he wrote, there must be “a supreme uncontrollable Power, an Absolute authority to decide and determine.” See No. 1053, above.
5 In his letter No. 6, TH suggested that Massachusetts should relinquish all claim to land east of the Penobscot in exchange for that part of New Hampshire west of the Merrimack River that was taken in from Massachusetts when a new boundary was established between the two colonies in 1737; see No. 1045, above.
6 Thomas Scammell was appointed surveyor of the king’s woods in Maine in November 1770. Although he arrived in America in order to begin the task in the summer of 1771, the vast size of the territory, harsh weather, and wilderness conditions meant the task was still incomplete; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 870.
7 TH’s letter No. 5 of 11 November informed Dartmouth that he had granted permission to John Bernard, the former governor’s son, a leave of absence from his job at the Naval Office to return to England for a year. This letter was calendared but not printed in this volume.
1 The Boston Gazette for 11 January 1773, which TH enclosed with this letter, contains a paragraph headed “Newport, January 4” that purported to summarize a letter from Lord Dartmouth to Governor Joseph Wanton stating the king’s intent to punish severely any of his servants who obstructed the legal trade of or in any way insulted or abused his subjects in Rhode Island. The newspaper editors were guilty of selective emphasis. Dartmouth did indeed include such language in the penultimate paragraph of his 14-page letter to Wanton explaining the establishment of the Gaspée Commission, but the main point of the letter concerns the need to apprehend those guilty of burning the king’s warship, not a desire to punish the excesses of Lieutenant William Dudingstone or over-zealous customs officers. See Dartmouth to Joseph Wanton, 14 September 1772, National Archives UK, CO 5/1284, ff. 140–47.
1 TH’s opening message to the General Court was printed in JHR, 49:138–43, but also appears in Reid, Briefs, pp. 15–23, where each document is skillfully introduced and annotated.
1 Williams’s letter to TH, dated 2 January, was not found. The two men corresponded routinely on militia and judiciary appointments for Hampshire County; see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 358.
2 TH wrote twice to Lord Hillsborough discussing the claims of the residents of Hinsdale in Nos. 1003 and 1008, above. For Lord Dartmouth’s response, see No. 1020, above. Dartmouth’s letter No. 3, dated 4 November 1772, where he mentioned the case of Hinsdale being referred to the Board of Trade has been calendared but not printed in this volume.
3 Words missing due to a hole in the MS have been supplied from the AC.
4 It appears that Williams, in his missing letter, had mentioned the act of the New York Assembly, dated 8 March 1772, extending the bounds of Albany County to the west bank of the Connecticut River; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 986. What TH meant by “new government” is less clear. Did he mean that a new colony might be made from the lands west of the Connecticut, or that New York might attempt to assert its authority there?
5 TH believed that the early departure of some of his supporters from the western towns doomed efforts to block the resolves, adopted by the House in July, concerning the governor’s salary (TH History, 3:257). Williams failed to attend earlier sessions of the General Court, despite TH’s exhortations; see TH Correspondence, 4: Nos. 956, 980.
6 For discriminatory laws against the Baptists of Ashfield, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 796.
1 The Gaspée Commission made little progress in its inquiries. According to TH, “Such persons as they had groundlessly suspected, they had no difficulty convening; but the persons really concerned in the fact, they either were never able to apprehend, or, if any such were apprehended, no witnesses would appear to testify against them” (TH History, 3:262n).
2 The Council presented its response to TH’s opening message on 25 January, the text of which can be found in Reid, Briefs, pp. 32–44. The House made its reply the next day, also printed in Reid, Briefs, pp. 53–73.
1 For the replies of both the House and Council, see No. 1067, immediately above.
2 TH would, in fact, reply twice to the arguments presented by the House and Council before the session was over.
1 The identification of the intended recipient is based on the first sentence of the last paragraph.
2 James Bowdoin chaired the committee that drafted the response of the Council. For the arguments of Lords Chatham (“Mr. Pitt”) and Camden, see TH Correspondence, 2: Nos. 256, 274.
1 Town leaders in Plymouth, Marblehead, and Roxbury had close personal ties to members of the Boston Committee of Correspondence and were among the first to reply, but by the end of January, 70 out of 260 Massachusetts towns had responded. The number grew by another 40 during February (Brown, Revolutionary Politics, pp. 81–82).
2 Lord Dartmouth’s predecessor, Lord Hillsborough, adamantly opposed the idea of separate agents for the House and Council and refused to receive them. TH’s official instructions forbade the practice, but TH did not receive them until 3 July 1771 (TH Correspondence, 4: No. 875). Since Dennys DeBerdt had died in April 1770, Dartmouth suggested his heirs might still be paid.
3 This paragraph pertains to a case of Ansell Nickerson, for which see No. 1048, above.
1 TH sent such a letter to Edmund Trowbridge on 5 February (calendared but not printed in this volume).
1 “Slipped your wind,” that is, died.
2 An infundibulum is a small distension of an artery or other vessel, usually in the brain.
3 Here and in several places below, the printer left blank spaces, unable to read the original manuscript. Each blank likely represents between four and six words but it is impossible to determine exactly. See also note 12, below.
4 Although TH’s letter to Peter Oliver was not found, “a certain house” presumably means the House of Representatives, which had recently responded to TH’s opening message defending the supremacy of Parliament.
5 A bilious colic is an intense pain of the upper abdomen caused by a gallstone preventing the draining of bile from the gall bladder.
6 “Suspendatur” is Latin for “let him be hanged,” the phrase traditionally uttered by English judges at the conclusion of a sentence for a capital crime.
7 A syllabub is dessert made from milk or cream curdled by an acidic or alcoholic drink, often thickened with gelatin and sweetened.
8 The oracle of Delphi, before making pronouncements, induced a trance by inhaling gaseous fumes emitted from a fissure in the rock beneath her tripod.
9 “Idis rebus nunquam [per bella peribus]” is an ambiguous Latin phrase, traditionally said to have been uttered by the oracle of Dodona (not Delphi) when consulted by a general before a battle. Depending on how one punctuates the phrase, it means either “you will go, you will return, never in war will you perish,” or “you will go, you will never return, in (the) war you will perish.”
10 Perhaps a reference to the recent communication from the House.
11 Linsey woolsey is a coarse twill fabric made from wool and cotton.
12 At this point, the printer included an asterisk directing readers to the following note: “Quere, Whether it is not probable he might have made an addition of one or two more, and so overset his ink upon the letter; for it is so blurr’d where the blanks are, that it is not possible to make out the words.”
13 The OED suggests that “rubbers,” when used in the plural in this way, derived from the game of bowls and meant “adversity” or “difficulty.”
14 Peter Oliver had been chief justice of the Superior Court since August 1772. On 21 January 1773, the General Court voted salaries for each justice of the Superior Court as a way of flushing out information concerning whether they were to be paid independent salaries by the crown. On 8 February, the General Court requested to know whether he had assented to the legislation. For TH’s response, see No. 1076, below. Although the issue of independent salaries for the judges would remain in the background throughout 1773, it remerged with a vengeance in early 1774, when each associate justice was obliged to renounce his crown salary and accept payment from the legislature. Only Oliver, paid at a higher rate by the crown, held out, resulting in demands for his impeachment. Thus, Oliver correctly foretold his own fate.
15 The reference is not exactly clear. Perhaps Oliver believed that the campaign against independent salaries for the judges was part of a pattern whereby Samuel Adams and others repeatedly raised new issues designed to lead step by step to independence and that there was no protection for those who opposed him. TH’s letter No. 1076, below, lends support to this interpretation.
1 In this instance, TH used the phrase “grand Incendiary” to describe Samuel Adams.
2 For TH’s message and the replies of the Council and the House, see No. 1067, above.
3 For James Bowdoin as the author of the Council’s response, see No. 1069, above.
4 TH was the godfather of James Gambier’s daughter Jenny (TH Correspondence, 4: No. 954).
5 John Temple was then in England, and TH suspected him of stirring up trouble for him there; see No. 1014, above.
1 TH delivered a long reply to the responses of the Council and the House on 16 February; see Reid, Briefs, pp. 84–102.
1 Gil Belcher (d. 1773) of Sheffield was accused of counterfeiting New York currency. New York authorities applied for extradition but were initially refused by Timothy Woodbridge because their warrant did not specify where the crime occurred, but another justice, John Ashley Sr. (1709–1802) of Sheffield, ordered the arrest of Belcher and his associates and had them turned over to the sheriff of Albany County. They were eventually tried and hanged in Albany. For the petition of the General Court, see JHR, 49:217–18, 246, 252–53. For a more detailed account of the legal complexities of the incident, see Taylor, “David Ingersoll,” pp. 56–60.
2 TH alluded to New York legislation, enacted 12 March 1772, extending the bounds of Albany County to the west bank of the Connecticut River; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 986. Part of what made the Belcher case so threatening was the appearance that New York might actually attempt to assert its jurisdiction in western Massachusetts, as well as in the New Hampshire Grants. Within weeks of TH writing this letter, on 8 March the New York Assembly unanimously adopted “A State of the Right of the Colony of New York with Respect to Its Extreme Boundary of Connecticut River.” That report described the claim of Massachusetts to any land west of the river as being no better title “than a possession acquired by force and intrusion,” but this language may have been a negotiating tactic aimed at forthcoming boundary talks with Massachusetts. See Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Colony of New York, from 1766 to 1776, Inclusive, 9 vols. in 1 (Albany, N.Y.: J. Buel, 1820), 1773:92–108, 119.
3 TH referred to the so-called line of peace stipulated by the Board of Trade in 1757, parallel to and twenty miles east of the Hudson River, which constituted the provisional, unsurveyed boundary between the two colonies (Schwartz, “Jarring Interests,” p. 300).
1 On 21 January 1773, prompted by the rumors of impending salaries from the crown, the House approved grants for the justices of the Superior Court. It then inquired on 29 January if TH had assented to the provision they had voted. He replied on 4 February that although he had received word of crown salaries for the judges, they had not yet received their warrants for payment, therefore he did not know which part of the judges’ past service was covered by the crown and was temporarily withholding his assent lest they be paid twice for the same time period (JHR, 49:168,196, 208).
2 On 12 February, the House sent TH a message, in response to his previous messages, asking if he knew whether the judges would refuse their crown salaries. Then again, on 16 February, there were further messages and counter-messages on the same subject (JHR, 49:224–25, 242).
3 TH refused his assent to this legislation on 23 February. On 3 March, the House passed a series of resolutions strongly condemning payment of the judges by the crown, describing it as an “oppressive” and “despotic” measure and calling any judge who accepted such a salary as an “enemy of the Constitution” and a favorer of arbitrary government (JHR, 49:255, 281–82).
4 The salaries voted by the House on 21 January matched those provided for the associate judges by the crown but provided £100 less for the chief justice (JHR, 49:168).
5 TH once again called for repairs to the Province House on 19 February. On 25 February, the House refused to make any repairs as long as TH still received his salary from the crown (JHR, 49:247, 260–61).
1 Sir Francis Bernard’s letter of 5 August 1772 was not found.
1 The freemen of the livery companies of London, with their origins in medieval craft guilds, retained certain specified rights, among them to elect four members of Parliament, the lord mayor, sheriffs, and other civic officers.
1 This law was enacted in 1634 (Nathaniel Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay [Boston: By order of the legislature, 1853], 1:172).
2 TH remained deeply suspicious of John Temple’s activities while in London; see Nos. 1014 and 1073, above.
1 On 25 and 26 January 1773, the Council and House responded to TH’s opening message. TH offered a rebuttal to their messages on 16 February.
1 Thomas Cushing was the “popular man,” who as “head of the Commons” would have signed all their communications.
2 TH here alluded to failed attempts to prosecute Isaiah Thomas, printer of the Massachusetts Spy, for the letter “To the King” in the issue for 10 September 1772. See No. 1025, above.
3 Hillsborough’s letter to TH recommending a job be found for William Story was not found, but Francis Bernard’s letter of recommendation on Story’s behalf, dated 24 February 1772, was eventually published in the Boston Evening Post for 24 August 1773. For TH’s response to Hillsborough, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 998.
4 While he was still deputy registrar of the vice-admiralty court, Story’s house was attacked during the Stamp Act riots. He was included in the same act of compensation and general amnesty that reimbursed TH; see TH Correspondence, 1: No. 230. In 1763, John Adams listed Story as a member of the North End Caucus, which often took the initiative in promoting the patriot cause (JA Diary and Autobiography, 1:238–40). Story also carried with him to London letters of recommendation from Thomas Cushing to Benjamin Franklin (Thomas Cushing to Benjamin Franklin, 2 October 1771, Franklin Papers, 18:223–24; Samuel Adams to Arthur Lee, 27 September, 2 October 1771, Samuel Adams Papers, New York Public Library).
5 Story’s letter to TH was not found but evidently threatened him with publishing letters TH would not wish to be made public if he did not find a place for Story; see Nos. 1082 and 1167, below.
1 A close comparison of this letter with No. 1081, above, suggests the intended recipient was Sir Francis Bernard.
2 Samuel Rogers (1709–1772) was a 1725 graduate of Harvard College, served as a representative from Ipswich in 1761–1763, and was appointed register of probate for Essex County in 1762.
3 TH himself was the judge of probate for Suffolk County from 1752 until he was succeeded by his brother Foster in 1769.
1 This letter from William Palmer to TH, 17 October 1772, was calendared but not printed.
1 This mildest of rebukes from Lord Dartmouth foreshadowed later criticism of TH for initiating his long debate with the General Court on the supremacy of Parliament in colonial affairs; see No. 1102, below.
1 By “soon after the charter,” TH meant the first charter of 1629. For the law passed in 1634, see No. 1079, above.
2 For Lord Chatham’s doctrine, see TH Correspondence 2: No. 274.
3 “The Gentleman of the Law” was John Adams, who drafted for the House an extremely learned response.
1 In TH’s letter of No. 1075, above, he expressed concern over the arrest of the counterfeiter Gil Belcher by the sheriff of Albany County for crimes committed within Massachusetts boundaries. Many in western Massachusetts saw the incident as an initial attempt by New York to exercise its authority in all the lands west of the Connecticut River. The opinion of the Council is described in No. 1094, below.
1 TH’s previous letter to Lord Dartmouth was No. 1076, above. It was written after his response to the answers of the Council and House but before their rejoinders to him, which came on 25 February and 2 March, respectively. It also contained material on the resolves of the House concerning the judges.
1 Sir Francis Bernard’s country house, Nether Winchendon, was located in the Vale of Aylesbury, in Buckinghamshire.
2 The Speeches of His Excellency Governor Hutchinson, to the General Assembly of the Massachusetts-Bay. At a Session Begun and Held on the Sixth of January, 1773. With the Answers of His Majesty’s Council and the House of Representatives Respectively (Boston: Edes & Gill, 1773).
1 The Remembrancer, cited in the source note above, stated that this letter was “apprehended” to be written to Sir Francis Bernard “tho it is not certain,” but also see note 2 below.
2 No letter written to anyone on 27 February 1773 was found. The date mentioned may perhaps be a slip of the pen for 23 February since TH’s short letter to Richard Jackson of that date fits the description here. See No. 1078, above.
3 In 1702, Parliament passed legislation requiring all officeholders to take an oath renouncing any allegiance to the Stuart dynasty and the temporal power of the pope (13 & 14 Will. 3, c. 6).
1 Presumably, Fenton meant the previous Harvard College commencement in June 1772.
2 “Ecclaircissement” is a word of French origin that implies a sudden enlightening of things previously obscure.
1 Here, Edes & Gill in the printed version of the letter added a footnote of their own asking why, if the E. Ludlow letter were of no concern to TH, did he present it to the Council for their consideration on 2 March.
2 The italics presumably were added by Edes & Gill, who then proceeded in a footnote to ask how many weeks “may be enumerated between the 1st of March, on which E. Ludlow first appeared, and the 11th, the Date of his Excellency’s letter.” The mistake about the dates supports a later contention that TH was confused as to which newspaper article the two men were discussing; see No. 1098, below.
3 Jonathan Sewall was the attorney general of the province.
1 TH’s letter to Fenton of 13 March was not found.
1 Neither Tryon’s letter of 1 March, nor his first letter of 8 March, mentioning Livingston, was found.
2 Tryon’s second letter dated 8 March, No. 1086, above, attempted to assure TH that the arrest of Gil Belcher and his confederates did not signal that New York was intending to exercise its jurisdiction in land claimed by Massachusetts west of the Connecticut River, even though it included the opinion of the Council described here.
3 Counterfeiting currency was a capital crime in New York but not in Massachusetts; see No. 1075, above.
1 The address complained that crown salaries for judges endangered the impartial administration of justice, since it made them completely dependent on the executive. For the letter to Benjamin Franklin, see JHR, 49:287. Franklin did not receive this letter and the enclosed petition until 2 June, at which time he also received a second letter and petition dated 24 March. He elected to present both to Lord Dartmouth simultaneously (Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Cushing, 4 June 1773, Franklin Papers, 20:221–22).
2 TH refused to give his assent to a new edition of the province laws on 12 January (JHR, 49:152).
3 This sentence was omitted from both the DupRC and the AC.
4 On 22 March, or perhaps slightly before, Thomas Cushing received a parcel of seventeen private letters, primarily written to Thomas Whately by TH and Andrew Oliver (JA Diary and Autobiography, 2:79–81). Cushing acknowledged receipt of the letters in his response to Franklin, dated 24 March, and asked to retain copies in Boston, which Franklin had requested him not to do (Thomas Cushing to Benjamin Franklin, 24 March 1773, Franklin Papers, 20:123–25). TH was already suspicious long before this time that his enemies in England might be trying to obtain copies of letters he had written to there (TH Correspondence, 4: No. 793), and more recently his worries had centered on John Temple; see No. 1014, above.
5 Lord Dartmouth’s letter No. 5, written No. 1063, above, expressed the king’s satisfaction with TH’s responses to the Boston town meeting’s inquiries about the judge’s salaries.
1 This letter appears to relate closely to No. 1089, above, which the editors think was possibly addressed to Richard Jackson, based on No. 1078, above, and No. 1133, below.
2 “Hic labor hic opus” is a common quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid, book 6, 1:129, meaning “This is the task, this is the hard work.”
1 Margaret Spooner was Andrew Oliver’s daughter; see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 324. Mary Sanford Oliver was Andrew’s wife and WSH’s aunt; see TH Correspondence, 1:53.
1 TH was told that John Fenton was the author of “To the Community” in the Boston Gazette for 8 February 1773.
2 Fenton made this demand concerning the “E. Ludlow” letter in the Boston Gazette for 1 March 1773 in No. 1090, above.
3 TH responded to Fenton’s letter in No. 1091, above.
4 The anachronism was TH’s use of the word “weeks” to describe the interval between 1 and 11 March; see No. 1091, above.
5 The published letters and Fenton’s sworn denial of authorship of the “E. Ludlow” letter appeared in the Boston Gazette for 15 March 1773.
1 In early January, Timothy Woodbridge, a justice of the peace for Berkshire County, complained that the sheriff of Berkshire County had arrested one of Gil Belcher’s fellow counterfeiters at the request of New York authorities but had not received a warrant for the arrest from anyone in Massachusetts; see Timothy Woodbridge to TH, 2 January 1773, and TH to Woodbridge, 6 March 1773, both calendared but not printed in this edition. The charge was not true. The New York warrant had been endorsed by fellow Berkshire justice John Ashley Jr. (Taylor, “David Ingersoll,” p. 58). Although Woodbridge was a key government party ally on the Council, TH had asked him to delay any further proceedings so as not to upset the forthcoming boundary discussions with New York; see TH to Woodbridge, 25 March 1773, calendared but not printed. See also Schwartz, “Jarring Interests,” pp. 310–11.
2 William Tryon sent the report of his Council together with his letter to TH on 8 March 1773, No. 1086, above. The opinion of the Council justified trial in New York for crimes committed against the laws of that province, even though the crimes may have taken place outside its boundaries.
1 The most recent session of the General Court passed “An Act to Regulate the Sale of Goods Sold at Public Vendue and Limit the Number of Auctioneers” (JHR, 49:292). In his letter to the Lords of Trade, 26 March 1773 (calendared but not printed), TH stated he believed that the power to limit the number of auctioneers ought to be given to the governor and not to the selectmen as the legislation provided.
2 The Boston town meeting for 25 March 1773 unanimously adopted the report of the committee chaired by Samuel Adams charged with defending the town against the “gross Misrepresentations and groundless Charges” in TH’s message to both houses of the legislature. It defended the legality of the town meeting, which had adopted the Votes and Proceedings and the right of the town to act as a corporation (Boston Gazette, 29 March 1773).
1 The word “Irish” was sometimes used colloquially in a derogatory sense, meaning illogical, paradoxical, or foolish (OED).
2 The Boston Evening Post for 5 April 1773 carried a long “Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend,” which refuted a number of points TH made in his final speech before proroguing the General Court. Samuel Dexter was the councilor from Dedham, but no other evidence than TH’s claim links him to the article.
3 For the attacks made on TH for misrepresentation of the town of Boston, see No. 1100, immediately above.
4 The most recent letter from Israel Williams the editors found was dated 5 March 1772, so clearly the reference to the New York line appeared in a missing letter (TH Correspondence, 4: No. 951).
5 In the hilly country of the New York–Massachusetts border, an “air line” of twenty miles distant from the Hudson River would extend much farther than a line measured with surveyor’s chains on the surface of the earth. A measurement of 140 rods would constitute .44 miles.
6 A slip of the pen. TH meant “east.”
1 TH’s letters Nos. 11, 12, and 13 were Nos. 1067, 1068, and 1076, above.
1 In the AC, TH began the letter with the material below, then cancelled them and began the letter again: “The Persons who have the principal influence on all the publick members of this Province triumph much in having the concurrence and approbation of the Virginia Assembly; and have published in the news papers a set of Resolves which they allege that they have received from them: These Resolves are said to have been in consequence of Letters from hence and I have no doubt that like Letters were sent by the same persons to some of the other Colonies if not to all of them. There came one to Rhode Island while the Commissioners were sitting. The Assembly then declined taking any notice of it. If these Resolves said to be from Virginia are genuine its probable other Assemblies will follow the example.
“An affair of less moment the Council of this Province have advised and desired me to transmit an Account of to your Lordship. A Warrant has been issued by a Justice of Peace for apprehending Persons charged with counterfeiting the Bills of credit of New York. The Warrant was issued by a Justice in that Government but enforced by a Justice in this and the Sheriff of Berkshire apprehended them in this Province and carried them to the bounds of New York according to the temporary line agreed upon and delivered them to the Sheriff of the County of Albany where they were tried for Facts committed within this Province found guilty by the Jury & Sentence of death was passed upon them. Whilst under sentence they made repeated Application to me to interpose with Governor Tryon in their behalf and the Council and Assembly applied to me likewise to the same purpose. The Council of New York were of opinion that a fact of that nature though committed in another Government might be tried and punished in the Government of New York according to their laws and the men have been since executed. In compliance with the advice and desire of the Council of this Province I will cover Copies of the several Letters & papers upon the Subject.”
In the second cancelled paragraph, he recapitulated the case of Gil Belcher, first discussed in No. 1075, above, but then in the final draft omitted any mention of it, perhaps because Belcher was already dead and TH did not wish to exacerbate further the pending negotiation of the New York boundary.
The Boston Gazette for 12 April 1773 printed a “Letter from a Gentleman of distinction in Virginia to his Friend in this town,” which included resolutions by the Virginia House of Burgesses establishing a committee of correspondence. It was followed by a letter from “Candidus,” a frequent penname of Samuel Adams, asserting that no measure taken by the town in defense of liberty had been so significant as the establishment of the committee of correspondence by the town meeting of 20 November 1772.
2 For the record of a conference between TH and Orenay of the Penobscot tribe, see National Archives UK, CO 5/763, ff. 155–56.
3 “An Act against Jesuit and Popish Priests,” Mass. Acts and Resolves, 1770, chap. 1, 423.
1 Franklin held out the hope that the tea duty might be repealed but warned, “In the mean time I must hope that great Care will be taken to keep our People quiet, since nothing is more wish’d for by our Enemies, than that by Insurrections we should give a good Pretence for increasing the Military among us, and putting us under more severe Restraints” (Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Cushing, 9 March 1773, Franklin Papers, 20:98–100).
2 Thomas Danforth, Harvard College 1762, was the second son of Samuel Danforth, the senior member of the Council. Although he shared many of his father’s scientific interests, he became a lawyer. In April 1773, he sailed for England seeking preferment. He returned later that same year as the register of the court of vice-admiralty, a position he held until the evacuation of Boston. He accompanied Lieutenant Governor Thomas Oliver to England and was proscribed as a loyalist (Harvard Graduates, 15:217–20).
1 No such letter from WSH was found.
2 TH wrote to William Robertson, the renowned Scottish historian, in May 1772 asking him to watch over WSH while he was studying at the University of Edinburgh, where Robertson was a professor (TH Correspondence, 4: No. 981). Robertson’s response was not found.
1 A rebate on customs duties paid on exports from Great Britain and a reduction of duties paid in America were all part of the discussion surrounding efforts to aid the troubled East India Company. Lower prices, it was hoped, would rekindle demand for English tea in North America (Labaree, Boston Tea Party, pp. 67–73).
1 For the circular letter, see Lord Dartmouth to TH, 2 February 1773, calendared but not printed in this volume.
2 For the case of murder on the high seas, see No. 1070, above. The final disposition of the case is described in TH History, 3:300–02.
3 For the law establishing commissions for the trial of pirates, see also No. 1070, above.
4 28 Henry 8, c. 15, allowed for the transportation to England for trial of those accused of murder and piracy on the high seas.
5 TH probably had not yet have received Lord Dartmouth’s letter of 3 March 1773, No. 1084, above, expressing reservations that TH had entered so particularly into the constitutional issues between the colonies and Great Britain in his messages to the General Court. Dartmouth’s letter of 3 February, No. 1070, above, merely expressed the wish that the colonies might be reconciled to a more proper acknowledgment of the authority of Parliament.
6 Prior to the receipt of this letter, TH had refused to give his assent to any grants to either Dennys DeBerdt (or his heirs) for his service as the separate agent of the House; see No. 1070, above.
7 For the Massachusetts law taxing the salaries of the commissioners of the customs, see No. 1065, above.
1 For the opinion of the Council of New York that offenses against New York law committed outside the province could still be tried in New York, see No. 1094, above.
2 The two councilors not reelected (whom TH had in mind) were Harrison Gray and Thomas Hubbard, both government party men. A third councilor, Thomas Sanders of Gloucester, was also not reelected.
3 The three councilors whom TH vetoed were Jerathmiel Bowers, William Phillips, and John Adams.
1 The Tea Act of 1773, one of Parliament’s efforts to aid the troubled finances of the East India Company, had received the royal assent just three weeks earlier.
2 For the law establishing commissions for the trial of pirates, see No. 1070, above. Written in the margin at this point is “4 Mar 1762. History of Board of Trade.”
3 For the law from the time of Henry VIII allowing suspects in cases of murder committed abroad to be tried in England, see No. 1107, above.
4 The law Lord Dartmouth questioned was “An Act against Piracy and Robbing upon the Sea,” Mass. Acts and Resolves, 1696, c. 4.
1 The previous fifteen words were written sideways in the lefthand margin.
2 The previous sentence was written sideways in the lefthand margin.
1 TH’s letter to Lord Dartmouth No. 20 was dated 1 June 1773, No. 1108, above.
2 This is the case of Gil Belcher and his fellow counterfeiters, described in No. 1075, above.
3 These were the inhabitants of Nobletown, where the border dispute first turned violent in July 1766, an event most fully described in Papers of Francis Bernard, 3:199–207, but referred to a number of times by TH; see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 275; 3: No. 497; 4: No. 997.
4 After reviewing the various messages and counter-messages between TH and the General Court during the previous winter, Lord Dartmouth ordered TH to avoid entering into further debate over constitutional issues; see No. 1102, above.
1 There is a strong possibility Dartmouth never sent this document. No received copy has been found (it was unusual for TH not to retain a copy of a letter from the secretary of state). Also, Dartmouth’s secretary docketed it only as a draft and not as a letter sent. P. D. G. Thomas posited in Townshend Duties Crisis (p. 245) that Dartmouth did not send the letter because he failed to obtain agreement from the rest of the cabinet for his proposals.
2 The manuscript bears no date, but because it was intended to enclose a copy of Dartmouth’s letter to Franklin it could not have been written before 2 June. P. D. G. Thomas believed it to have been written in mid-June, after the cabinet had considered and rejected the proposal it contained concerning the salaries of the judges.
3 It must have been Thomas Danforth who told Lord Dartmouth of this opportunity. Lord Dartmouth’s letter to Franklin conveyed a stern rebuke from the king to the Massachusetts petitions of 14 July 1772 and 6 March 1773. Such doctrines, the crown believed, could not possibly emanate from the people of Massachusetts but must be “the Artifices of a few who seek to create groundless Jealousy and Distrust, and to disturb that Harmony and Union, the Preservation of which is so essential for the mutual Interest both of the Mother Country and of the Colonies” (Lord Dartmouth to Benjamin Franklin, 2 June 1773, Franklin Papers, 20:222–24).
1 No letter addressed to TH and written on 9 April was found.
2 This was Samuel Adams, one of the four members from Boston and clerk of the House.
3 The conditions were that the originals were to be returned and that no copies were to be made, either in print or in manuscript.
4 TH’s letters were TH Correspondence, 2: Nos. 322, 328, 334, 350, 357, and 432, dating from 18 June 1768 to 20 October 1769. For Andrew Oliver’s four letters dated 7 May 1767 to 12 August 1769, see Letters Sent to Great-Britain, pp. 18–36.
5 William Whately, a London banker, was the brother and executor of Thomas. Oliver’s letter to Whately was dated 1 June 1773. His letter to Robert Thompson (not otherwise identified) was written two days later. Both are reproduced in TH Diary and Letters, 1:84–85.
6 Thomas Cushing, speaker of the House, declared to TH that the intent in founding the Boston Committee of Correspondence was to draw all the colonies together in a network of opposition; see No. 1079, above.
7 Lord Hillsborough urged TH to “endeavour to bring back the Assembly from these Excesses, by Argument and Persuasion”; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 925.
1 This letter appears likely to be a response to a lost letter from Richard Jackson, based not only on TH’s description of how much it pained him to be at variance with his correspondent but also on the advice contained in the last paragraph concerning the value of lands in Maine, about which TH previously wrote to Jackson; see TH Correspondence, 4: Nos. 787, 804.
2 “Inops concilii” is a Latin legal term meaning “without counsel.”
3 Here again, TH appealed to his previous instructions from Lord Hillsborough; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 925.
4 By the congress at New York, TH meant the Stamp Act Congress of 1765.
1 The House first resolved to ask for the removal of TH and Andrew Oliver on 16 June. The formal address was passed and signed on 23 June (JHR, 50:58–61, 75–76).
2 For the publication of Francis Bernard’s letters, see TH Correspondence, 2: Nos. 368–73.
1 No letter from Smith written on 12 June 1773 was found. Smith (see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 286) was together with TH, one of the chief architects of the compromise that led to the resolution of the border controversy with New York. Nevertheless, he represented a number of New York landholders in the previously disputed area still on appeal in England (Schwartz, “Jarring Interests,” pp. 306–07).
2 For the vote of thanks, see JHR, 50:85.
3 TH had been considering resigning his office since early June; see No. 1110, above.
4 One issue the commissioners skirted in their meeting at Hartford was the highly conjectural claim by Massachusetts to territory west of the Great Lakes, which TH regarded as “a mere ideal visionary project” (Schwartz, “Jarring Interests,” pp. 315–16).
5 Smith married Janet Livingston (1730–1819).
1 No letter written by Bernard on 5 May 1773 was found.
2 “Mr. P” in this instance was presumably John Pownall.
3 In addition to the letters from TH, Andrew Oliver, Nathaniel Rogers, and Robert Auchmuty, there were also in the parcel four letters to Whately from Thomas Moffat, written from New London or Boston, dated from 7 February through 15 December 1768; one letter from George Rome in Rhode Island dated 22 December 1767; and one from Charles Paxton aboard the Romney dated 20 June 1768. Only Paxton’s letter requested troops be sent. See Letters Sent to Great-Britain, p. 37. MH’s handwriting ended and TH’s handwriting began with “Rh. Isld. or Conncut.”
4 JHR, 50:75, recorded the vote in the House as eighty yeas and eleven nays. The Boston Gazette for 28 June 1773 recorded eighty-two and twelve.
5 For TH’s request for a leave, see No. 1115, above.
6 For the original text of the letter, see Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Cushing, 6 May 1773, Franklin Papers, 20:199–203.
7 Bernard’s country house, Nether Winchendon, was located in the Vale of Aylesbury.
1 The resolution concerning the judges was passed on 28 June and the letter to Lord Dartmouth approved on the morning of 29 June, the day the General Court was prorogued (JHR, 50:94, 97).
2 TH addressed the irregularity of such a meeting in his letter to Whately dated 10 December 1768 (TH Correspondence, 2: No. 350).
3 Here TH referred to his letter to Whately (see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 328). It informed Hillsborough of the extension of the nonimportation agreement and did not mention a need for troops.
4 The grants to Dennys DeBerdt’s estate, as well as to William Bollan and Benjamin Franklin, were among the first actions of the new session (JHR, 50:25).
1 WSH was studying in Edinburgh.
1 The chief justice was Daniel Horsmanden, who was serving on the Gaspée Commission.
2 In this sentence, the first H stands for “Hancock” and the second and third for “House.”
1 TH’s letter No. 23 was No. 1118, above.
1 “The chief incendiary” in this instance was Samuel Adams. According to No. 1113, above, Adams had made such a statement of intent before the House.
2 Lord Shelburne wrote to Francis Bernard on 17 September 1767 commending him for his veto of several persons who had been chosen as members of the Council the previous spring (Papers of Francis Bernard, 3:407–08). After the letter finally arrived in February 1768, Bernard provided the House with the letter so that it might be read but insisted that no copy be taken. The House believed that such a letter from the secretary of state could only be the result of misrepresentations by Bernard and fired off an angry response. The message of the House, which was printed in the Boston Gazette on 22 February 1768, contained lengthy extracts from Shelburne’s letter, thus violating the conditions under which the letter was made available. See TH Correspondence, 2: Nos. 299, 302, as well as Boston Gazette, 22, 29 February 1768.
1 Isaac Lyman (1724–1810) was born in Northampton, Massachusetts; graduated from Yale in 1747; and became the minister of the First Church in York, Maine in 1749.
2 Lyman’s letter to TH was not found.
3 Meaning a great noise and confusion, a running pursuit. The origin of the phrase comes from a popular fifteenth-century English ballad recounting a Scottish border skirmish (OED).
4 TH was rebuked by Sir Francis Bernard for his reluctance to advocate for a crown-appointed Council (TH Correspondence, 4: No. 742).
5 “Decens & rectum” are Latin words meaning “decent and upright.”
1 According to No. 1113, above, Samuel Adams made this declaration before the House.
2 TH referred to the resolutions charging him with undermining the constitution and requesting his removal, first passed by the House on 16 June (JHR, 50:58–61).
3 Here TH shortened a phrase from Horace’s Epistles, book 1, part 1, 1:13–14, “Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri,” which literally means “not being obliged to swear [allegiance] in words to a master” but should be understood as “on the word of no one” or “taking nothing for granted.”
1 TH’s previous letter to Sir Francis Bernard was of 29 June 1773, No. 1117, above, in which he appeared to be responding to a letter from Bernard, not found, dated 5 May.
2 TH regarded the petition for his removal as the joint work of Samuel Adams in the House and James Bowdoin in the Council.
3 After the demise of the Dominion of New England, the Plymouth Colony sought its own charter but was included in Massachusetts Bay under the new charter of 1691.
4 Maine, Sagadahoc (the territory from the Kennebec to the St. Croix), and Acadia (modern New Brunswick and modern Nova Scotia) were incorporated into Massachusetts Bay by the charter of 1691 (TH History, 2:4–5). Acadia remained a contested area between England and New France for nearly a century, only gradually becoming part of the British Empire from 1667 until 1763.
5 At this point, TH wrote in his own hand and then canceled the following: “I think now that if this Proceeding be presented with spirit in England it will humble the Party here more than is generally expected. Some that they draw in repent already and even A—— discovers a concern in his countenance not usual, but he retains all his malignity against both you and me. I hope the June Packet will bring Letters from you.”
6 On 30 June, Thomas Cushing acknowledged receipt of a letter from Benjamin Franklin dated 6 May. The next surviving letter from Franklin is dated 7 July and does not match TH’s description of its content. Therefore, TH may be referring to a missing letter; see Franklin Papers, 20:271–76.
7 This paragraph was written in TH’s hand on f. 518 and marked for insertion at the end of the letter.
1 For TH’s letter of [10] August 1768, see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 328.
2 “Of our kidney” is a colloquial expression that means “of our mind or way of thinking.”
3 TH was not alone in believing Franklin to be the author of An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania (London: R Griffiths, 1759). Franklin had commissioned TH’s friend Richard Jackson to write it, and Franklin’s son William supplied Jackson with many of the materials. See Joseph E. Illick, “The Writing of Colonial Pennsylvania History,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 94 (January 1770): 3–25. As late as 1779, TH still believed Franklin to be the author. See TH Diary, 1:252.
4 Franklin’s letter to Thomas Cushing of 7 July defended himself against censures of the House but appeared to be a reply to a lost letter from either Cushing or the House; see Franklin Papers, 20:271–76.
5 The letter was presumably from Admiral Samuel Hood, commander-in-chief of the North American station from 1767 to 1770.
1 TH’s letters first appeared in print as excerpts surrounded by the Council’s commentary on them in the Boston Gazette for 28 June 1773.
2 TH placed a wavy X over the first two paragraphs of the letter, suggesting they were excised from the final copy.
3 According to the JHR, 50:58–61, the House voted to accept the draft of the petition by a vote of eighty-three to twenty-eight.
1 For the opinion of the Council of New York, see No. 1094, above.
2 For the discussion of land now within the boundaries of New York but first acquired by residents of Massachusetts through purchase from the Indians, see Nos. 1108 and 1111, above. “Mokockhonnock” may be a misspelling of the name of the Housatonic Indians, who were the original owners of land along the border.
3 TH’s letter No. 20, dated 1 June 1773, No. 1108, above, as well as containing his prediction about the character of the new assembly, also included his apology for exacerbating poor relations between the crown and Massachusetts by raising constitutional issues in his debate with the General Court, which Dartmouth thought best left in abeyance.
1 The concentration of mast trees in the area east of the Kennebec was considered such an important imperial resource that, according to the Massachusetts Charter of 1691, the granting of new townships in the region by the General Court needed to be confirmed by the crown before they became valid (JA Legal Papers, 2:247–48).
2 For the claim of Massachusetts to lands in Maine, Acadia, and Nova Scotia as described in the 1691 charter and the extent to which English subjects actually occupied them, see TH History, 2:4–5, 65–74. For how changing fortunes of war with the French may have affected land claims in Sagadahoc, the area between the Kennebec and St. Croix Rivers, see TH History, 2:169. For the case laid before the attorney general in 1731 that upheld the Massachusetts claim, see TH History, 2:288. The Latin legal phrase “jure postliminii” provides a shorthand description of the legal principle that property lost by subjects to a foreign power during a war must be restored to them if it is reconquered. TH provided an extended answer to Dartmouth’s concern about the Massachusetts claim to Sagadahoc in the various drafts of TH to Lord Dartmouth, 16 October 1773, Nos. 1159–61, below.
1 Dartmouth’s letter of 2 June, No. 1109, above, urged TH that “Questions that have been so unhappily agitated [in his debate with the General Court] maybe avoided & the public business of the Province carried on with that harmony and Good Humour that ’till of late Years distinguished its Councils.”
2 The commission was summoned to decide the case of Ansell Nickerson, who was accused of an act of piracy off Cape Cod; see No. 1070, above.
1 The crown salaries for the associate judges were to be £200 each, and that of the chief justice £400; see No. 1024, above. The interlineation is in TH’s hand.
2 The salaries voted by the General Court were £250 each for the associate justices and £300 for the chief. On 25 June 1773, treasurer Harrison Gray reported to the House that the justices elected to draw only half the amount of their provincial salaries for 1772, since they assumed they would be paid during the second half of the year by the crown (JHR, 50:86–87).
1 TH’s previous letter was likely to have been No. 1114, above.
2 TH initially suspected James Bowdoin as one of the figures behind the plot to disclose the Whately letters, thinking TH had slighted him by not paying sufficient regard to Bowdoin’s arguments in the reply to TH’s opening message to the General Court concerning the supremacy of Parliament. The principal co-conspirators in the House were likely Samuel Adams and Joseph Hawley. See No. 1125, above.
3 The way in which John Hancock came by copies of the letters and, therefore, enabled them to be printed without breaking the engagement to Franklin was first described in No. 1121, above.
4 The resolves of the House, first passed on 16 June, which were the basis for the petition to the king, described the content of TH’s and Andrew Oliver’s letters as criminal (JHR, 50:58–61).
5 The publication in January 1769 of letters written by Francis Bernard, the previous governor, led to calls for his removal; see TH Correspondence, 2: Nos. 368–73, 394–98.
6 No letter from Jackson dated 22 May 1773 was found.
7 Such a belief would be a logical extension of Franklin’s letter to Thomas Cushing of 2 June 1773 (Franklin Papers, 20:222–24).
8 “Ultima ratio” is short for the Latin proverbial expression “ultima ratio regum,” meaning the last argument of kings, that is, force of arms.
1 No letter from John Pownall dated 25 June 1773 was found.
2 For Dartmouth’s letter to Franklin, see No. 1133, immediately above.
3 Without Pownall’s letter to TH of 22 June, it is difficult to know what proposals the ministry was considering, but the second appears to have been the elimination of the Massachusetts provincial vice-admiralty court, since the regional vice-admiralty court also was based in Boston.
4 TH was referring to the resolves to petition the king to remove TH and Andrew Oliver from office (JHR, 50:58–61).
1 TH’s messages can be found at JHR, 50:70, 72. The correct dates of the messages were 21 and 22 June 1773.
1 TH recommended consideration of the petition of the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard for recognition of their claim to Chappaquiddick in his opening message to the General Court on 26 January 1774; see JHR, 50:102.
2 TH’s description of the need for the treasurer to be a “favorite of the people” obscures the fact that the incumbent treasurer, Harrison Gray, often supported TH in the deliberations of the Council. Gray would, however, fail to be reelected in 1774.
3 TH Jr. was appointed a justice of the Inferior Court of Common Pleas for Suffolk County on 31 December 1772.
1 The only letter found written by WSH within the previous year was WSH to TH, 22 June 1772; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 995.
2 The letter to this point is in TH’s handwriting. The remainder is in MH’s hand.
3 WSH was secretary to Attorney General Jonathan Sewall prior to his departure for Britain.
4 TH to the Duke of Grafton, 20 August 1773, calendared but not printed in this edition.
1 The Virginia House of Burgesses established its own committee of correspondence on 12 March 1773 and called on all colonial assemblies to do likewise. After news of Virginia’s action appeared in the Boston papers, TH wrote both Lord Dartmouth on 17 April and John Pownall two days later, Nos. 1103 and 1104, above. Since TH mentioned in the following sentence his reluctance to put what he was saying in a public letter, the recipient of this letter was clearly intended to be John Pownall and is presumably a draft for No. 1140, immediately below.
2 Metcalf Bowler (1726–1789) was speaker of the Rhode Island House of Deputies. Rhode Island was the first colony to respond affirmatively to the Virginia Resolves, on 7 May. The New York Assembly adopted its own committee of correspondence on 20 January 1774, soon after the session opened.
3 TH was in Hartford the preceding May, meeting with delegates from New York to resolve the disputed western boundary of Massachusetts. William Samuel Johnson (1727–1819), Yale College 1744, was a member of the upper house of the Connecticut legislature and a judge of that colony’s Supreme Court. A prominent Anglican, he was a delegate to the Stamp Act Congress and opposed the Townshend Acts, but he had misgivings about independence and refused election as a delegate to the first Continental Congress. Nevertheless, he played a prominent role in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and was one of the first senators from Connecticut.
4 The Speaker of the House was Thomas Cushing.
1 For Robert Thompson and William Whately, see No. 1113, above.
2 This description fits John Temple, whom TH suspected of prompting Thomas Whately to cease corresponding with him; see No. 1014, above.
3 William Bollan was the other suspect described here, since TH repeatedly vetoed payments to Bollan as the separate agent of the Council. Indeed, Bollan did transmit to Massachusetts letters that, when published, rendered it impossible for Francis Bernard to continue as governor.
4 Beginning in 1769, a quarrel within the First Church in Bolton, Massachusetts, led to an attempt to dismiss its minister, Reverend Thomas Goss (1716–1780), Harvard College 1737. Neither side agreed to recognize the authority of a council of neighboring ministers when it attempted to arbitrate. In the summer of 1771, the town constable physically restrained Goss from taking the pulpit, and a ministerial colleague in nearby Sterling who supported Goss was also later driven out by his congregation. A council of leading clergymen, led by Charles Chauncy, denounced any effort by Bolton to call a new minister independently without consulting the neighboring ministerial association. Eventually, the controversy spilled over into the newspapers and the courts. A council of Congregational ministers meeting in Boston in May 1773 published a pamphlet, entitled Observations upon the Congregational Plan of Church Government, Particularly as It Respects the Choice and Removal of Church-Officers, Supported by the Testimony of the Fathers of New-England, and Unanimously Offered to the Consideration of the Churches, by the Convention of the Ministers of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay, at Their Annual Meeting in Boston, May 26, 1773, and Continued by Adjournment to July 23 (Boston: John Boyle, 1773), which asserted that the authority of clerical councils was superior to the more democratic will of the members of an individual congregation. A second convention met again in Boston on 24 August, and Boston newspapers throughout September were full of letters taking issue with the conventions’ conclusions (Harvard Graduates, 10:175–85; Joseph S. Clark, A Historical Sketch of the Congregational Churches of Massachusetts [Boston: Congregational Board of Publication, 1858], pp. 212–14; Robert E. Cray, “The Congregational Way Assailed: The Reverend Thomas Goss in Revolutionary Massachusetts,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 43 [Winter 2015]: 125–43).
5 The bishop of St. Asaph hailed the remarkable growth of the colonies and urged a revival of good will between them and the mother country “without enquiring too curiously into the grounds of past animosities.” He further observed, “The true art of government consists in not governing too much.” See A Sermon Preached before the Incorporated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts; at Their Anniversary Meeting in the Parish Church of St. Mary-le-Bow, on Friday February 19, 1773, by the Right Reverend Jonathan Lord Bishop of St. Asaph ([Boston]: Thomas and John Fleet, 1773).
1 The issue first arose in November 1771, when TH wrote to Lord Hillsborough about a difference in opinion between the Council and himself (TH to Lord Hillsborough, 5 November 1771, calendared but not printed, TH Correspondence, 4:435). Lord Hillsborough responded that he had referred the matter to the Privy Council (TH Correspondence, 4: No. 934), and TH once again reminded Lord Dartmouth, the new secretary of state, of the issue in No. 1045, above.
2 The response of the House on 26 January 1773 concluded with this sentiment, regretting that TH’s opening speech to the General Court forced it to either meekly accept or contest his assertions of parliamentary supremacy (JHR, 49:190).
1 TH’s letter No. 25 was No. 1131, above.
2 Samuel Adams and John Hancock were the two town representatives attending the annual commemoration of the first Stamp Act riot on 14 August 1773 in Roxbury; see No. 1146, below.
3 The person refusing to serve on the petit jury was William Molineux; see Molineux’s application to be relieved of the fine levied for his nonattendance (William Molineux to TH, 4 February 1774, calendared but not printed). His exchange with Chief Justice Andrew Oliver was reported in the Massachusetts Spy on 2 September 1773. The statement made by the grand jury to the court on 31 August was summarized in the Boston Gazette for 6 September and printed in its entirety the following week.
1 George Rome wrote a letter to Thomas Moffat, whose correspondence was also dispatched from England together with TH’s and Andrew Oliver’s. Rome was jailed for contempt by the Rhode Island Assembly for refusing to answer its questions; see No. 1176, below.
2 William Story threatened TH with the information that he had seen letters in England that would be damaging to TH if publicly known in Massachusetts; see No. 1081, above. Thus, TH initially suspected Story of having brought the Whately letters from England; see No. 1176, below.
3 Thomas Goldthwait, the former business partner of Sir Francis Bernard’s son John, contributed to John Bernard’s near bankruptcy when Goldthwait sued Bernard for debt; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 941.
1 Thomas Gage returned to England with his family in June 1773.
2 TH here hinted that either James Bowdoin or John Temple might succeed him as governor.
1 For the statements by the grand jury and the request of the petit juror to be excused, see No. 1143, above.
2 The judges of the Superior Court were appointed by the governor and received their commissions from him; consequently, they had previously been paid out of the province treasury with the approval of the General Court. If the justices were now to receive salaries from the crown, perhaps they should have royal commissions as well? But there was no mention of the crown’s appointing Massachusetts justices directly in reforms to the charter suggested by Bernard and Hillsborough in late 1770 or in any of Bernard’s letters that have been found (see Papers of Francis Bernard, 6:331–36).
1 William Tryon’s letter to TH of 27 August 1773 was calendared but not printed in this edition.
2 Such a claim probably rested on the account Benjamin Franklin included in his letter to Thomas Cushing, dated 6 May 1773, of his interview with Lord Dartmouth, in which Dartmouth severely criticized TH for his role in the long debate with the General Court the previous winter (Franklin Papers, 20:199–203).
1 Lieutenant John Crosse (d. 1773) assumed command of HMS Tamar in March 1773, together with Lieutenant James Montagu, the admiral’s nephew. He died 10 August “at Carolina” according to the Boston Evening Post, 13 September 1773. Montagu then assumed sole command of the vessel. The letter mentioned, TH to [John] Crosse, [August 1773], was calendared but not printed in this edition.
2 John Adams was the first lawyer mentioned. The second was not identified but was perhaps Joseph Hawley.
3 Thomas Whately was the initial recipient of TH’s letters. For suspicions concerning James Bowdoin’s role in the affair, see No. 1133, above.
4 This account of John Hancock’s receiving a second copy of the letters, so that the House might print them without breaking the conditions under which the originals were dispatched, was first described in No. 1121, above.
5 The “Man of honour & in great favour with the Ministry” would aptly describe Thomas Pownall, or to a lesser extent Benjamin Franklin.
6 In this instance, TH intended A——s to mean Samuel Adams.
1 On 5 July 1773, Dartmouth wrote a circular letter to all the colonial governors (calendared but not printed in this volume) requiring them to answer a certain number of queries related to agriculture and industry in each of their provinces. TH’s answers appear as Appendix 1 to this volume.
2 The first essay by “A,” which appeared in the Boston Gazette for 13 September 1773, attacked the idea that salaries for judges should be paid by the crown but credited Lord Dartmouth as a man with good intentions who wished for reconciliation. In the same essay, “A” termed TH a “soft & oily tongued” tool of Lord Hillsborough. A second essay by “A” the following week criticized Dartmouth’s wish that the colonies would cease to assert their constitutional ideas.
3 This decision was a reversal of the justices’ earlier determination to receive only half of their £250 yearly salary paid by the General Court. They had done so anticipating that a pending warrant from the crown would cover the second half of the year; see No. 1132, above.
1 TH previously attributed a similar opinion to John Adams; see No. 1148, above.
1 A tear in the MS caused the loss of some material, which has been supplied in brackets from context.
1 Reverend Eli Forbes (1726–1804), Harvard 1751, was minister of the Second Church in Brookfield, Massachusetts. Following the Stamp Act, he tried to remain politically neutral, but in 1771 he delivered the Artillery Sermon, an important occasion in Boston, and dedicated it to TH. He became increasingly unpopular as political tensions rose afterward and requested to be dismissed from his parish in 1775, when he moved to Gloucester.
2 An obsolete definition of the word “feint” is “phantasm” (OED).
3 The pamphlet was Letters Sent to Great-Britain, containing the printed text of the Whately letters.
4 In the 24 June 1773 Boston Weekly News-Letter, Jonathan Sewall began writing a series of letters defending TH under the pen name “Philalethes.” Sewall examined what the printed letters actually said in order to contradict the various assertions made about TH and Andrew Oliver in the resolutions of the House and Council.
5 Christ’s response to the Pharisees in Matthew 22:17–22, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s,” is often cited as an admonition that affairs of state and religion should remain separate.
6 “Colonii” is the Latin word for “colonies.”
7 Reverend Joshua Eaton (1714–1772), Harvard 1735, began a career as lawyer but was converted by George Whitefield and became minister of the First Church in Spencer, Massachusetts. Eaton was politically conservative and wrote TH on 10 February 1772, recommending the appointment of Colonel John Murray (1720–1794) as a justice of the peace (TH Correspondence, 4:443). Murray represented Rutland in the General Court from 1751 through 1774, when he became a mandamus councilor. His lands were confiscated during the Revolution, and he died in exile in New Brunswick, Canada. Eaton’s friend Eli Forbes collected and published seven of Eaton’s sermons after this death, which Forbes sent TH together with this letter. See Some Short Account of the Life and Character of the Reverend Joshua Eaton of Spencer, ed. Eli Forbes (Boston: Rochard Draper and John Boyles, 1773). See also Harvard Graduates, 9:533–38.
8 In his second letter in the Boston Weekly News-Letter, printed 1 July 1773, “Philalethes” wrote, “We ought . . . judge as we wish to be judged, remembering that it may be our own Turns next—— the Fence is broke and we are all liable to have our most private Communications betrayed by false Friends or unprincipled Enemies.”
9 No letter from Forbes to TH regarding Jeduthan Baldwin (1731–1788), selectman and town clerk of Brookfield, was found. After Baldwin’s death, his wife, Lucy, married Eli Forbes in 1793, after he removed to Gloucester.
1 No letter sent by Israel Mauduit in the summer of 1773 was found, so it is impossible to know who was meant by “the person of artful address,” but the balance of the letter suggests that TH was beginning to suspect some involvement by Benjamin Franklin. The “other person” based on TH’s earlier suspicions was likely to be John Temple; see No. 1148, above.
2 Franklin was indeed in regular correspondence with House Speaker Thomas Cushing and Reverend Dr. Samuel Cooper but, curiously enough, not with James Bowdoin.
3 Franklin’s reputation for influence was greatly enhanced by reports of his recent interview with Lord Dartmouth; see No. 1147, above. The other person recently introduced to Dartmouth was not identified, but the third possibility, “a Gentleman who has been in the place formerly,” was clearly Thomas Pownall.
1 TH’s “Answers to Queries” are printed as appendix 1 in this volume. A copy of the Massachusetts tax valuation list for 1761 was enclosed with this letter. The list for 1771 is a widely used research tool, see Bettye Hobbs Pruitt, The Massachusetts Tax Valuation List (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978).
2 Tétouan in northern Morocco is that country’s second major port on the Mediterranean Sea.
3 For Guy Carleton, governor of Canada, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 801. The River Chaudière extends 115 miles south from Quebec, almost to the border with Maine. Carleton’s letter was not found.
1 Dartmouth’s letter No. 10 and his separate letter both were dated 4 August 1773, Nos. 1129 and 1130, above.
2 For the inhabitants of Nobletown, see No. 1111, above.
3 In his separate letter of 4 August, Lord Dartmouth expressed doubts about the Massachusetts claim to the lands in Maine between the Penobscot and St. John Rivers.
1 Edward Montagu (1717-1798) was the brother of Admiral John Montagu, commander-in-chief of the North American Station.
1 The date of the Stamp Act was 1765. The Seven Years’ War ended in 1763. Thus, the earlier date would include the Revenue Act of 1764 (Sugar Act) as one of the objectionable pieces of legislation.
2 TH included among the moderate group Speaker of the House Thomas Cushing, Reverend Dr. Samuel Cooper, and James Bowdoin and his allies among the Council.
3 Here TH identified Samuel Adams as the chief advocate for total independence.
4 TH’s letter No. 27, dated 16 September 1773, No. 1149, above, included the first essay by “A,” which appeared in the Boston Gazette for 13 September 1773. TH believed “A” to be Adams.
5 “Quamdiu se bene gesserint” is a Latin legal phrase meaning “during their good behavior.”
1 Although a rift developed between Samuel Adams and John Hancock in 1771 (see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 922), it was subsequently repaired, and TH offered no corroborating evidence for his claim that Adams and Hancock disagreed over the use of the Whately letters.
1 For the terms of Dartmouth’s proposal and background in TH History on how the changing fortunes of war may have affected the Massachusetts claim to the area, see No. 1130, above.
2 The remainder of this paragraph was written sideways in the lefthand margin.
3 For the petition of Massachusetts to be relieved of the expense of defending Port Royal from French attach, see TH History, 2:68. Pemaquid Point in present-day New Harbor, Maine, was the site of a series of English forts near the mouth of the Damariscotta River.
4 From 1676 through 1700, Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie, 3rd Baron de Saint-Castin (1652–1707), commanded the French and Indian settlement adjacent to Fort Pentagoet at the mouth of the Penobscot estuary (the present site of Castine, Maine). The Treaty of Ryswick, ending King William’s War in 1697, officially returned Acadia to French control.
5 Important historical documents were scattered in the street when TH’s house was looted during the Stamp Act riots of 1765; see TH Correspondence, 1: No. 136.
6 Massachusetts governor Francis Nicholson seized Port Royal a second time in 1710, but Acadia was once again returned to France by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 767.
7 For Samuel Waldo, the victor of the siege of Louisburg and investor in Maine lands, see TH Correspondence, 1: No. 138; 2: No. 403. In March 1630, John Beauchamp (c. 1595–c. 1652) of London and Thomas Leverett (d. 1650) of Boston, England, obtained a thirty-six-square-mile grant of land, known as the Muscongus Patent, from the Council for New England. The claim lay dormant until the company was reorganized by the heirs of Beauchamp and Leverett in the 1720s. Waldo obtained a controlling interest in the group and successfully challenged a conflicting grant made to Colonel David Dunbar, lieutenant governor of New Hampshire and surveyor of the king’s woods in 1729. See By His Excellency Jonathan Belcher Esq; . . . A Proclamation: Whereas at a Council Holden at the Court at Kensington . . . upon the Petitions of Divers . . . Proprietors of the Lands Lying between the Rivers of Kennebeck and St. Croix, in the Improvem[ent of Which] They Were Interupted by David Dunbar Esq; . . . Given at the Council Chamber in Boston, the Sixteenth Day of February 1732 (Boston: J. Draper, 1732 [i.e., 1733]). Henceforth, the tract was known as the Waldo Patent.
8 For Sir William Phips, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 767.
9 “Civilian,” meaning an expert in Roman or modern civil law. For “jure postliminii,” see No. 1130, above.
10 Thomas Coram (1668–1751) was an English merchant who in 1718 unsuccessfully petitioned to settle poor families in Maine where they would produce hemp and naval stores. Coram finally obtained an order to occupy the land in 1730, but it was soon revoked by the same order that blocked Dunbar’s attempt at control of the region, as in note 6, above; see TH History, 2:199, 288.
11 “Salus populi” is a Latin phrase meaning the “health, or good, of the people.”
1 For the unsuccessful petition of William Armstrong for a grant of lands in Sagadahoc, see TH History, 2:169.
1 Pierre Dugua de Mon(t)s (c. 1558–1628), lieutenant general of Acadia, explored the Maine coast looking for a more salubrious location after the failure of the French settlement at the mouth of the St. Croix River in 1604–05.
2 Jeremiah Dummer (1681–1739), Harvard 1699, was agent for the province of Massachusetts from 1710–1721. For his proposal, see TH History, 2:169.
1 TH intended to send an earlier version of this letter and its enclosure on 10 October (TH to Dartmouth, 10 October 1773, calendared but not printed), but the ship sailed before the letter could be put on board.
2 TH referred to his private letter of 9 October, No. 1157, above.
3 TH enclosed the letter Eli Forbes wrote him on 26 September, No. 1152, above.
4 At this point in the AC, TH wrote then crossed out the following: “In closing this letter to your Lordship I also cover a News paper which is a continuation of the same design & suppose to be wrote by the same person, who wrote the piece in the paper the week before, and it corresponds with what he is continually inculcating upon the people never to be satisfied with any Partial concessions.” The newspaper TH evidently considered sending was the Boston Gazette for 20 September containing a second letter by “A” (who TH assumed was Samuel Adams). That letter disparaged Dartmouth’s wish that the colonies would cease to assert their constitutional ideas.
1 TH was replying to Eli Forbes, No. 1152, above.
2 Some Short Account of the Life . . . of Joshua Eaton; see No. 1152, above.
1 Benjamin Franklin wrote to the House of Representatives on 7 July 1773, “It would be best and fairest, for the Colonies in a general Congress now in Peace to be assembled, or by means of the Correspondence lately proposed after a full and solemn Assertion and Declaration of their Rights, to engage firmly with each other that they will never grant aids to the Crown in any General War till those Rights are recogniz’d” (Franklin Papers, 20:277–86).
1 For Franklin’s long letter to the House, see No. 1164, immediately above.
1 The ruling of the attorney and solicitor general evidently pertained to the dispute over the Muscongus Patent among Samuel Waldo, Thomas Coram, and David Dunbar; see No. 1149, above.
2 “Ex abundanti” is short for the Latin legal term “ex abundanti cautela,” meaning “out of an excess of caution.”
1 No letter written by Edward Montagu on 23 August 1773 was found.
2 On 27 September 1773, the Boston Gazette printed on its first page a public letter from Junius Americanus addressed to Lord Dartmouth, which first appeared in London in the Public Advertiser on 29 July 1773. In it, Junius Americanus speculated that Lord Dartmouth should not have been surprised if upon reading the letters that TH and Andrew Oliver had written to Whately, the people of Massachusetts had risen up and “put the authors of them to an instant DEATH.”
3 TH assumed the “chief manager” to be Samuel Adams and the “brother Representative” to be John Hancock.
4 TH believed Adams, clerk of the House of Representatives, was both the author of its messages as well as the newspaper writer of many of the most critical articles attacking him.
5 TH continued to believe that John Temple obtained the letters from Whately’s estate without the awareness of William Whately, his brother’s executor; see No. 1141, above. TH began to suspect Franklin of having transmitted the letters; see No. 1148, above.
6 For William Story’s threat, see No. 1081, above. For TH’s initial suspicion that Story brought the letters from England, see No. 1176, below.
7 For Andrew Oliver’s efforts to find out who obtained the letters, see No. 1113, above.
8 Edward Montagu (1717-1798) was the brother of Admiral John Montagu, commander-in-chief of the North American Station. He was admitted to the Middle Temple and practiced law as a Master in Chancery. He acted also as the agent for the Virginia House of Burgesses (1759-1773). “Nunc dimittis” are the opening words of the Vulgate translation of the Song of Simeon (Luke 2:29–32) upon first seeing the Christ child, “Now lettest thy servant depart in peace.”
1 William Whately, the banker, was the executor of his brother Thomas’s estate; see No. 1167, immediately above.
2 For James Pitts, see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 365. Pitts married Elizabeth Bowdoin, the sister of James, in 1732. John Temple married Bowdoin’s only daughter (also named Elizabeth) in 1767.
3 Although the Council took these words out of context, they are very close to what TH actually wrote: “There must be an abridgment of what is called English Liberty.” See TH Correspondence, 2: No. 357.
4 The biblical King David was proverbial for his unshakeable faith in God.
5 The quoted words may represent what TH intended to say but they do not match anything in Letters Sent to Great-Britain.
6 The Latin words “currente calamo” mean “offhand” or “without due reflection.”
7 The Committee on Plantations exonerated New Hampshire governor John Wentworth from the charges of maladministration brought by Peter Livius, the former chief justice, on 29 July 1773. TH previously wrote Wentworth a long letter explaining his relationship with Livius and pleading that he had no involvement in the charges; see No. 1042, above.
8 Among the people to whom TH wrote in August 1773, Richard Jackson and James Gambier stand out as possible intended recipients of this letter. Jackson was slightly more likely than Gambier since TH wrote to Gambier on 2 January 1774, No. 1214, below, apologizing for leaving Gambier’s letter so long unanswered.
1 The scribe likely miscopied this number. It was Dartmouth’s dispatch No. 11, No. 1135, above, which granted TH permission to go to England.
2 At this point in the margin are the words “1st. Sept. 1773.”
3 TH first acquainted Lord Dartmouth with this long-pending issue in No. 1142, above.
1 TH was summarizing the contents of No. 1135, above.
2 These words were directly quoted from Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Cushing, 24 August 1773, Franklin Papers, 20:374–75.
1 For the early rumor that Story brought the letters and his denial of it, see Nos. 1081, above, and 1176, below.
2 This statement tends to confirm the editors’ contention that TH’s letter written on 24 May 1768 to an unknown correspondent was TH’s first letter to Thomas Whately; see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 315.
1 In this instance, TH may have given too much credit to the committees of correspondence. The idea of forcing the resignation of the consignees was first suggested by Thomas Mifflin writing as “Scaevola” in a Philadelphia broadside on 9 October. It was reprinted in the Boston Gazette on 25 October, which evidently provided the impetus for the anonymous messages delivered to the consignees’ houses on the night of 1 November (Norton, 1774, pp. 13–14).
2 The other consignees, besides TH’s sons TH Jr. and EH, were Richard Clarke & Sons and the firm of Joshua Winslow & Benjamin Faneuil Jr. Faneuil (1701–1785) was the nephew of Peter Faneuil and left Boston with the British fleet in March 1776, eventually moving from London to Bristol after having lost most of his wealth. Winslow the tea consignee (1727–1801) has long been confused with another Joshua Winslow (1737–1775), of the firm Joshua & Isaac Winslow, who were primarily West India merchants and distillers. The tea consignee, after participating in the fall of Louisbourg, became commissary general of Nova Scotia and developed wide business interests on the Chignecto Peninsula. He returned briefly to Boston for the education of his daughter but moved to live with his relatives in Marshfield soon after the incident at Clarke’s warehouse. During the war, he was arrested as a loyalist but later fled to Canada, dying at Quebec (Robert Wilson III, “‘We Were Declared Enemies to the Country’: Two Letters from Joshua Winslow, a Consignee of the East India Company,” WMQ 94 [December 2021]: 564–78).
3 The meeting at the Liberty Tree to which the consignees were summoned but did not appear took place on 3 November 1773.
4 Nathaniel Hatch (1723–1784) of Dorchester, a graduate of Harvard College in 1742, was a member of the Suffolk County Court of Common Pleas and later a mandamus councilor and loyalist refugee.
5 Hugh Finlay (1732–1801), previously postmaster at Quebec, became surveyor of post roads by 1773 and kept a journal of his travels. For more on the route from the Chaudière to the Kennebec, see No. 1154, above.
6 No. 4 was established in 1744 as a frontier outpost on the upper Connecticut River to guard against incursions by the French and their Indian allies on land claimed by Massachusetts. It is now in southern New Hampshire.
1 The proceedings of the town meetings and the response of the consignees were printed in the Boston Gazette, 8 November 1773.
1 The Romney left Boston on 14 October (Boston Gazette, 15 October 1773).
2 Hood used the word “killed” here in a figurative sense. On 13 November, Edmund Burke delivered a witheringly sarcastic attack on Lord Barrington, the secretary of war, over the impending war with Spain (W. Cobbett and T. C. Hansard, Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England: From the Norman Conquest, in 1066. To the Year, 1803 [London: T. C. Hansard, 1813], 16:1044–48). The editors are indebted to Neil York and Colin Nicolson for this reference.
3 Hood’s father, Reverend Samuel Hood (1689–1777), vicar of Butleigh in Somerset and a prebendary of Wells Cathedral, was apparently not as near death as he assumed.
4 For the letter to Lord Hillsborough, see No. 1151, above.
1 A letter from George Rome, a London merchant residing in Rhode Island, dated 22 December 1767, was included in the packet of letters dispatched by Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Cushing in the spring; see No. 1117, above. The letter was sharply critical of the Rhode Island government and courts. The Rhode Island Assembly summoned Rome to appear in South Kingstown in October 1773, and after questioning him declared his answers evasive and contemptuous. He was imprisoned and remained there until the end of the legislative session. Rome’s testimony and the proceedings against him were printed in the Newport Mercury, 8 November 1773.
1 Lord Dartmouth’s observation can be found in No. 1129, above.
2 For Rome’s letter and the Rhode Island Assembly’s proceedings against him, see No. 1175, immediately above. Tape and a fold have obscured parts of the text; the bracketed material is supplied from context.
3 There was perhaps greater danger than TH realized. At the request of members of the Rhode Island Assembly, Thomas Cushing, speaker of the Massachusetts House, wrote to Benjamin Franklin in an attempt to have Rome’s letter or an attested copy sent back to the colonies (Thomas Cushing to Benjamin Franklin, 18 September 1773, Franklin Papers, 20:406–08).
4 For the letter from England stating that William Whately suspected William Story rather than John Temple, see No. 1168, above.
5 TH had already written William Whately on 31 October 1773, No. 1171, above.
1 John Ashley’s letter of 23 September 1773 was not found. For John Ashley Sr., see No. 1075, above.
2 The gentleman who had been in the opposition was not identified.
1 William Tryon’s letter of 4 November 1773 was not found.
1 Reverend Stephen Williams (1693–1782) was minister of the First Church in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, from 1716 through 1782.
2 No letter sent to TH on 25 October 1773 was found.
3 “Principibus placuisse viris” is a Latin quotation from Horace’s Epistles, book 1, 17:35–36, meaning “to have won the approval of important people is not the last degree of praise.”
1 William Molineux acted as spokesman for the committee. For an account of the same event and the newspaper version of it, see No. 1172, above. TH also enclosed with that letter two first-person accounts of the confrontation from Joseph Green and Benjamin Davis (National Archives UK, CO 5/762, ff. 422–25).
2 Jonathan Clarke, a junior member of Richard Clarke & Sons, had been in England.
3 For TH’s permission to leave for England and the reassurance not to worry about his reputation there, see No. 1135, above.
1 Benjamin Labaree speculated that the recipient of this letter may well have been Andrew Oliver (Labaree, Boston Tea Party, p. 118).
2 This was the language of the report of the Boston committee of correspondence, approved by the town meeting on Thursday, 30 November 1772, and published as The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston.
3 The Latin words “inter nos” mean “between us.”
1 TH appears to have assumed that John Temple obtained the letters and Benjamin Franklin dispatched them to Massachusetts.
2 For TH’s reasons for exonerating William Story, see No. 1171, above.
1 The AC itself is dated 8 November, but since it mentions the arrival of the tea ships, the 2 was clearly omitted.
1 James Hall was the captain of the Dartmouth, owned by the Rotch family of Nantucket and Dartmouth (now New Bedford), Massachusetts. It was the first of the tea ships to arrive on 28 November 1773. The Body of the Trade met on 29 November at Old South Meeting House in order to accommodate the large crowd. TH’s unlikely claim that Adams and Hancock were part of the guard is unsupported by town clerk William Cooper’s list of volunteers. See www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=425&mode=large&img_step=3&pid=2&br=1#page3.
2 The painter John Singleton Copley (1738–1815), Richard Clarke’s son-in-law, appeared before the town meeting to plead for more time for the consignees to gather and consider the instructions they had just received from England the night before. The meeting adjourned until the next morning when the consignees declared it was not in their power to return the tea, but they proposed storing it until they could receive further directions from the East India Company (Boston Gazette, 6 December 1773).
3 Talbot was not further identified. Following TH’s instructions, Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf appeared before the meeting and read TH’s order to disperse. The gathering voted to disregard the governor’s instruction but adjourned until the afternoon, hoping to hear from Richard Clarke, James Hall, and Francis Rotch (1750–1822).
1 James Hall was the captain of the vessel, and Francis Rotch appeared as the representative of the family firm; see No. 1185, immediately above.
2 Once the vessel was entered at the Custom House, it could not be cleared without paying duty on the tea. The purpose of this regulation was to prevent fraudulent applications for drawbacks on the duties already paid in England. The twenty-day limit, by which time the ship would need to be unloaded and the duty paid, would expire on 17 December.
3 John Rowe (see BD) was one of Boston’s principal merchants and the owner of the Eleanor, the third tea ship, not yet arrived.
4 TH did indeed summon the justices of the peace and enjoin them to do their duty to prevent riots, as well as notify John Hancock, the commander of the Company of Cadets, Boston’s elite militia unit, to stand by to enforce order (Boston Gazette, 6 December 1773).
1 TH’s letters Nos. 27, 28, and 29 were dated 16 September, 1 October, and 8 October 1773, Nos. 1149, 1154, and 1155, respectively, above. In his letterbook, TH did designate his letter of 2 September 1773 as No. 26, but both versions of it were marked “not sent.” He later stated parts of No. 26 were incorporated into No. 27; see TH to Dartmouth, 13 March 1774, calendared but not printed in this volume.
1 Although undated, this private letter is likely to have been written at nearly the same time as the public letter immediately above, since the contents pertain to TH’s letter to Lord Dartmouth of 9 October 1773, No. 1157, above, which Dartmouth mentioned having received in that communication. TH’s letter was docketed as received on 8 November.
2 “Quamdiu se bene gesserint” is a Latin legal phrase meaning “during their good behavior.”
1 TH’s letter No. 31 was No. 1173, above.
2 Jonathan Clarke arrived home from London earlier in the day; see No. 1181, above.
3 For the petition of the consignees and the reluctance of the Council to act, see No. 1181, above.
4 For sending the sheriff to order the meeting to disperse, see No. 1185, above.
5 For Colonel Leslie, see No. 1049, above.
1 The Council first met to consider the petition of the consignees on Friday, 19 November, but the matter was continued until Tuesday the 23rd, when a committee was formed to prepare a response. The committee returned swiftly with a report that TH suspected had been prepared in advance by James Bowdoin and was intended for publication. TH warned that the language of the report might lead to calls in England for a change in the way the Council was chosen. The Council requested another delay until the 29th, when the report, very little altered, was unanimously adopted, although TH claimed three or four members were really opposed including Samuel Danforth, the Council’s senior member (TH History, 3:306–08).
2 The lawyer was not identified.
3 The AC included the following postscript, crossed out by TH’s characteristic wavy X: “I have directed the Secretary to endeavour to [procure] [illegible] of the doings [of particular persons] & of their [writings?] and determinations but he does not yet find any persons who dare to give it.
“The whole of the proceedings of the proper town meeting as distinguished from the mob meeting or what they call the body of the people may I doubt not be blind from the town records whenever called for & I suppose there is no part of the proceedings [of this body] as the Leaders of it have published them but what persons may be found to give oath to what [stndd?] mostly to hear what passed and never approvd of or joined in any one act but then a regular process will be necessary that they may not [three illegible words] but on the contrary to be committed to what they do. [I beg your Lordship] that the contents of [illegible] and of what I distinguish as private letters & write with the greatest confidence in your Lordship especially may not return here. I am with the greatest respect Your Lordship’s faithful humble Servant.” The material in square brackets has been deciphered from TH’s personal code and should be considered conjectural.
Boston 3rd. Decr. 1773
Dol. Scott
My dear Sir, Altho’ My Lord Dartmouth did me the great honour to dispatch the Kings Order of leave for my going to England the 17. August, a very few days after he had received my request, yet by reason of the extraordinary length of the Vessels passage it did not come to my Hands until the 14th. Novr. a time when the Town of Boston was in such confusion that, if any Vessel had been bound to England & the season had been ever so agreable, I shou’d have doubted whether my leaving the province cou’d have been justified. The whole business of the letters was turning fast to the shame of all who had been concerned in the plot, and a Gentleman, who is very observant had congratulated me upon the fair prospect of being a popular Governor. When a new Subject the news of the Intended importation of Tea by the East India Company afforded an occasion for renewing our disorders. The first thing suggested was that it was a plan of mine to recommend myself to Administration. The history of the proceedings against the Consignees of the Teas had hitherto been very much like those against the Stamp masters but hitherto not so Successfull, & they are now Shut up in Castle William to be secure against the rage of the Town or as they sometimes say the Body for not complying with the most unreasonable ^wild extravagant^ demands ever heard off. I must refer you to the News papers for the History of the resolves of the Town & other proceedings but I will inclose the printed Account of the doings of this week which exceeds every thing which has yet been done. H—— who had been moderator of the Town meeting took care to keep clear of this & they drew in a Nephew of Doctor F——ds who I really pity.1 H—— notwithstanding has exposed himself by his unguarded Speeches more than ever before. You see they print their Account without any attestation but tho’ it is called a meeting of the people yet it is all under the Selectmen of this Town who attended the whole meeting as I am informed together with Adams & Phillips representatives.2 Surely this will not pass without something effectual. I must observe there is nothing in this last Affair which can charge the Province in general all being down by the people of Boston & a few from half a dozen Towns round about drawn in by the Artifices of Boston expecting them to share in the Criminality & so lessen their own share. I cou’d be content to part with what Estate I have in the Town which is not inconsiderable if the Inhabitants wou’d be content & it cou’d be effected to be seperated from the rest of the Province. I think my Government wou’d be very easy to me. If it be practicable to reform the Town or to put it out of the power of those who have brought it into this disorder to go on until they have completed the ruin of Town & Province you are so well acquainted with the state of things here that you are as able to suggest the proper measures for that purpose as I am, and if it was otherwise it wou’d be hardly safe to trust any proposals for that purpose liable not only to miscarry in its passage but to be pilfered after the receipt of it, unless the example which shall be made of those who have lately been guilty of such Villainy shall deter others from the like for the future. It may be said by some there will not be sufficient evidence to subject particular persons to censure. There are the printed Votes of the Town. Who are the Selectmen that call the meetings, who the moderator who the Committees &c.? Tho the paper I inclose has not the name of the printer yet the Facts that are in it are notorious, it is part of a news paper which all the printers were injoined to publish as you will see by the Inclosed letter from the Secretary.3 There are great numbers of people who can testify to every part but dare not do it voluntarily & cannot be compelled. It is in every body’s mouth that H—— said at the Close of the meeting he wou’d be willing to spend his fortune & life itself in so good a cause, but the Secretary says he can’t find any body will make Oath to it. In such a case are not publick printed papers presumptive evidence sufficient to proceed with? This I must submit. Until there is an issue to the present confusion which no endeavours on my part shall be wanting to make a favorable one, I am unable to say what will be Proper or what I shall be able to do respecting my personal concerns. I may perhaps form some judgment before the vessels are sailed which are now loading for London. I am,
AC (Massachusetts Archives, SC1/series 45X, 27:581–82); in TH Jr.’s hand.
1 John Hancock presided at the 5 November meeting, but Jonathan Williams (1700–1788), a merchant who had married the niece of Benjamin Franklin, was elected moderator of the meeting of the Body on 29 November. Ironically, Williams’s son Jonathan Jr. (1751–1815), who had stayed with his great-uncle in England in 1771 serving as his accountant and traveling companion, had, as recently as April 1773, sought Franklin’s help in securing a consignment of East India Company tea for his father and himself (Jonathan Williams Jr. to Benjamin Franklin, 20 April 1773, Franklin Papers, 20:175–77).
2 Samuel Adams and William Phillips were two of Boston’s representatives to the General Court in December 1773. The other two were Hancock and Thomas Cushing, the Speaker.
3 Presumably, this paper was the broadside “Boston, December 1, 1773. At a Meeting of the People of Boston and the Neighboring Towns at Faneuil-Hall,” Digital Public Library of America, http://dp.la/item/ac7cb0395f7e44b45b459a456c7bf392. Most copies include Edes & Gill as the printers.
1 For Mr. Lane, see No. 1033, above.
2 Richard Clarke, his two sons Jonathan and Isaac Winslow, Benjamin Faneuil, and TH Jr. all sought refuge in Castle William after the meeting of the Body on 30 November.
3 EH and MH were staying with Chief Justice Peter Oliver in Middleborough during the crisis.
1 The “Gentleman” who passed along this information to TH was not identified. Here TH apparently suspected Jonathan Williams Jr., whose father had recently chaired the meeting of the Body of the Trade on 29 November. There may have been some grounds for suspicion since the Williamses had been a conduit for at least one letter to Thomas Cushing; see Jonathan Williams Jr. to Benjamin Franklin, 28 June 1773, Franklin Papers, 20:246–47.
1 Richard Clarke, who decided his nerves could no longer withstand the tumult and controversy, gave his power of attorney to his two sons Jonathan and Isaac Winslow Clarke (1746–1822).
2 According to the Boston Gazette for 6 December 1773, John Rowe appeared before the meeting of the Body on 30 November, and when he was informed Francis Rotch had engaged to send the tea back aboard the Dartmouth, Rowe “expressed his sorrow” that his ship, the Eleanor, “should be concerned in bringing any of that detestable and obnoxious commodity [i.e. tea].” He then publicly speculated “whether Salt Water would not make as good Tea as fresh.” See L. F. S. Upton, “Proceedings of Ye Body Respecting the Tea,” WMQ 20 (April 1965): 294.
3 The remainder of the letter from this point was written sideways in the lefthand margin.
4 Two or three words missing due to damage to the MS.
1 William Palmer’s letters to TH of 26 August and 17 September 1773 were not found.
2 Here and throughout, letter material in square brackets is either conjectural or blank because the margins of the MS are torn.
3 TH here described the vote of the town meeting of 5 November.
4 Here the bottom edge of the paper is torn and several words are missing.
5 TH here described the meeting of the Body of the Trade on 29 November.
6 On 25 and again on 30 November, the New York consignees declared they would not carry out their commission if the tea was taxed, and on 1 December they applied to Governor William Tryon to take the tea under his protection (Labaree, Boston Tea Party, pp. 95–96).
7 Joseph Loring (b. 1750) was the captain of the William, the fourth tea ship, which had grounded on Cape Cod on 10 December.
8 James Hall was the captain of Dartmouth, the first tea ship to arrive; see No. 1185, above.
9 Francis Rotch was representing his family firm which owned the Dartmouth; see No. 1185, above.
10 Palmer had advanced more money to WSH than TH had budgeted; see No. 1192, above.
1 Both ACs mistakenly identify the recipient as “George” Whately.
2 TH had long suspected John Temple of playing a principal role in procuring the letters; see No. 1141, above.
3 Here TH, perhaps understandably, conflated Jonathan Williams Jr. (see Nos. 1191 and 1193, above) and John Williams, inspector general of customs in North America, the brother of Jonathan Williams Sr. (The inspector general was thus not a blood relation to Franklin but an in-law of his niece.) The inspector general had been at variance with the American Board of Customs Commissioners since its flight to Castle William in 1768 after the Liberty riot when Williams, to the displeasure of the majority of the board, chose not to follow its example but to remain in Boston (see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 329). John Williams departed for London in the fall of 1770 without leave from the board and was unsuccessfully petitioning for other posts (Joseph R. Frese, “The Royal Customs Service in the Chesapeake, 1770: The Reports of John Williams, Inspector General,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 81 [July 1973]: 280–85).
4 James Bowdoin was John Temple’s father-in-law.
5 For the complete list of persons to whom Franklin specified the letters might be shown, see No. 1193, above.
6 George Rome wrote TH prior to 8 November 1773; see No. 1175, above.
7 In his postscript, written sideways in the lefthand margin, TH presumably alluded again to John Williams, the inspector general.
1 TH here referred to his private letter of 2 December 1773 to Lord Dartmouth, No. 1190, above.
2 TH initially wrote then crossed out this paragraph, along with a second paragraph reading as follows: “I sketched out a few thoughts without any intention of laying them before your Lordship, but venture to do it humbly hoping that if they shall appear unimportant your Lordship will forgive what has been occasioned by zeal to contribute in a small degree to His Majesty’s service. I am with the greatest Respect My Lord Your Lordships most obedient humble Servant.” He then wrote below this a clean version of the first paragraph and a new complimentary close as reproduced here.
1 TH described the meetings of the Body of the Trade on 29 and 30 November in No. 1189, above.
2 For Colonel Alexander Leslie, see No. 1049, above.
3 For this promise by James Hall, master, and Francis Rotch, owner, of the Dartmouth, see No. 1186, above.
4 No independent confirmation of this offer was found.
5 On 1 December, since the consignees had already resigned, the New York Council recommended to Governor William Tryon that the tea be taken under government protection in the barracks at the Battery. On 15 December, the Council reaffirmed that recommendation. Only the arrival of Paul Revere on 21 December with the news of what had happened in Boston occasioned sufficient public pressure to cause Tryon to give instructions that the tea ship Nancy be stopped at Sandy Hook and ordered to return to England, which did not occur until 18 April 1774 (Labaree, Boston Tea Party, pp. 96, 154–56).
6 The selectmen of Boston were John Scollay (1712–1790), John Hancock, Timothy Newell (c. 1718–1799), Thomas Marshall (1719–1800), Oliver Wendell (1733–1818), Samuel Austin (c. 1721–1792), and John Pitts (1737–1815). William Cooper was the town clerk. The town representatives were Samuel Adams, John Hancock, William Phillips, and Thomas Cushing (Speaker of the House). William Cooper was a registrar of probate for Suffolk County (TH Correspondence, 2: No. 389).
7 No other source for this exchange was found.
8 No independent confirmation of this rumor was found.
1 Samuel Phillips Savage, a Boston insurance broker who had been living in Weston (see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 527), presided at the meeting of the Body on 14 December 1773.
1 “Transpire,” in this instance, means for something secret to become apparent or known.
1 This letter was left unsealed and enclosed in a letter to Lord Dartmouth of the same date (calendared but not printed in this volume), so that Dartmouth could decide whether to forward it to the directors.
2 The Boston town treasurer in 1773 was David Jeffries (1714–1784).
3 The members of the committee who accompanied William Molineux to the Clarke’s warehouse were William Dennie (c. 1725–1771), Joseph Warren, Benjamin Church, Nathaniel Barber (see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 320), Joseph Henderson (d. 1794), Gabriel Johonnot (1748–1820), Edward Proctor (b. 1733), and Ezekiel Cheever (c. 1720–1793) (Testimony of Joseph Green and Benjamin Davis, National Archives UK, CO 5/762, ff. 422–25).
4 TH’s 340 chests accords with East India Company records whereas a variety of other sources say 342.
5 The story of the fate of the tea aboard the William, the fourth tea ship headed to Boston that wrecked off Cape Cod, is fully recounted in Mary Beth Norton, “The Seventh Tea Ship,” WMQ 73 (October 2016): 680–710.
1 Letters Nos. 34, 35, and 36 were Nos. 1189, 1199, and 1200, respectively, above.
2 Jonathan Clarke rode to Provincetown to secure the tea aboard the William (Norton, 1774, p. 40).
1 Believing that it would be unsafe for them to conduct business in Boston, members of the American Board of Customs Commissioners and their families took refuge at the Castle soon after the first tea ship arrived (Henry Hulton, p. 288).
2 TH summoned the Council on 21 November to respond to a request from the consignees for the government to take the East India Company’s tea under its protection, On 29 November, the Council unanimously adopted a report prepared by James Bowdoin, Samuel Dexter, and John Winthrop that condemned the Tea Act and justified the popular response to the arrival of the tea ships. The report was printed in the Boston Gazette, 27 December 1773. By contrast, the New York Council, when confronted by the resignation of the consignees there, advised Governor William Tryon to land the tea at the Battery and store it at Fort St. George; see No. 1198, above.
3 On 13 November, the Plymouth town meeting passed resolutions denouncing the Tea Act, condemning the consignees, and supporting the actions of the Boston town meeting. A week later, Edward Winslow (1714–1781), a future loyalist and collector of the port of Plymouth, and George Watson (1718–1800), a future mandamus councilor who was both the son-in-law of Peter Oliver and the father-in-law of EH, led a failed effort to rescind the same resolutions. Consequently, they and thirty-eight other citizens issued their own protest against the Plymouth resolutions (Boston Post-Boy, 20 December 1773; Boston Weekly News-Letter, 23 December 1773). For the marriage of EH and his relations by marriage, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 993.
4 The Plymouth town meeting appointed a committee to communicate their resolutions to Boston and other towns composed of John Torrey (1717–1776), who was deacon of the First Church in Plymouth; James Warren, for whom see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 403n; and William Watson (1730–1815), who became a committed Whig at this time, was later a member of the provincial congress, and eventually became collector of Plymouth under the U.S. government, replacing his loyalist cousin.
5 For Jonathan Clarke’s trip to Cape Cod, see No. 1203, immediately above.
1 TH provided his account of the Council’s deliberations in No. 1190, above.
2 Here TH was alluding to the controversy that ensued following the dismissal of Reverend Thomas Goss by his church in Bolton; see No. 1141, above.
1 No letter dated 8 December 1773 from Israel Williams was found.
2 No letter dated 18 December 1773 from Israel Williams was found.
3 Williams’s letter of 18 December appears to have pertained to an application to the governor of New York for a grant of land in disputed territory.
4 TH intervened with Lord Hillsborough when New York’s Governor William Tryon attempted to grant land in Hinsdale, a town whose inhabitants had long held title to their lands from Massachusetts; see No 1008, above.
5 For the attempt to establish a new colony in the Ohio Country, see No. 1009, above.
1 TH’s letter No. 37 was No. 1203, above.
2 TH’s account of the Council meeting is found in TH History, 3:315.
3 TH made a memorandum of the various people departing for England soon after the Boston Tea Party; see No. 1208, immediately below.
4 When TH reminded the Council of its oath to keep its proceedings confidential near the close of its meeting on 27 November, James Bowdoin insisted he was not bound to keep secret information that might lead to “ruin of the country”; see Mayo, Additions, pp. 68–69. On 27 December, the Boston Gazette printed the proceedings of the Council for 19, 23, 27, and 29 November, as well as 21 December.
1 For the depositions of Andrew Mackenzie, Nathan Frazier, William Turner, Dr. Hugh Williamson, and Dr. William Tyler before the Privy Council, see James Munro, ed., Acts of the Privy Council of England, Colonial Series (London: Wyman and Sons, 1912), 6:550–55.
1 In all likelihood, William Molineux made this statement when, once again, calling on Richard Clarke & Sons to resign their commission as part of a committee dispatched by the town meeting on Friday, 5 November; see Boston Gazette, 8 November 1773.
2 Dr. Thomas Young was intended here.
3 The Reverend Doctor Joseph Sewall was the pastor of Old South Church from 1713 until his death in 1769.
4 The remainder of the letter is in TH’s hand.
1 TH’s last letter to Edward Montagu was No. 1167, above.
2 TH here alludes to a letter written by Tryon on 4 November 1773 that was not found; see No. 1178, above.
3 “Singing to the deaf”; see No. 1062, above.
4 The remainder of the letter is in TH’s hand.
5 The arrival at New York of the news of the Boston Tea Party on 21 December caused Governor William Tryon to abandon his earlier plan to land the tea at Fort George. The tea ship destined for New York was blown off course and did not arrive in New York until 19 April 1774 after Tryon had already left the province. At Philadelphia, the news of what transpired at Boston arrived just before the tea ship headed there on 27 December. It was intercepted four miles south of the town, and the captain was obliged to send it back (TH History, 3:316–17; Norton, 1774, pp. 35, 38).
6 The New York Council initially advised landing the tea at the military barracks at Fort George but withholding it from sale (Norton, 1774, p. 37).
1 For Gideon Hawley, see TH Correspondence, 1: No. 123.
2 At this point in the MS, TH inserted an asterisk and added in the margin, “Mr Kirkland.” Samuel Kirkland (1741–1801), Princeton 1765, was a missionary for the New England Company among the Oneida and Tuscarora people of western New York. TH corresponded with Sir William Johnson about his activities; see TH Correspondence, 4:429, 432–33.
1 No letter written to TH on 2 October 1773 was found, but the recipient of this letter was evidently the same unknown person as in No. 1194, above.
2 Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et Montesquieu (1689–1755), speculated that climate might substantially influence the nature of man and his society (The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent [London: Nourse and Vaillant, 1750], book 14).
3 This and the following paragraph were cancelled in the letterbook and apparently redrafted immediately below.
4 William Burch was a member of the American Board of Customs Commissioners.
5 For James Bowdoin’s role in drafting the Council’s response and arranging for its printing, see No. 1207, above.
1 James Bowdoin wrote the response of the Council to TH’s formal request for advice when the consignees asked that the government take the East India Company’s tea under its protection. He then arranged for the publication of the proceedings (usually regarded as confidential) in the Boston Gazette for 27 December 1773; see No. 1207, above.
2 The tea ship Nancy bound for New York was driven off course by a winter storm and did not arrive (after wintering in the Caribbean) until 19 April 1774, when it was not allowed to pass Sandy Hook and enter the harbor. The Polly was intercepted in the Delaware River south of Philadelphia on 27 December and forced to turn back. TH’s mention of “North Carolina” is probably a slip of the pen for South Carolina, where the tea first arrived on 2 December 1773. The consignees there resigned their commissions at a public meeting the next day. On 17 December, as the twenty-day limit approached, another public meeting in Charleston resolved that the tea should not be landed. On 22 December, when the limit expired, the collector unloaded the tea, with the approval of the governor and Council, and stored it in the Exchange Building. None of this news had yet reached Boston (Norton, 1774, pp. 32–34).
1 The penultimate sentence of the letter (“I have received His Majestys Order in Council respecting the judicial authority of the Governor founded upon your opinion.”) suggests that the intended recipient was Richard Jackson, to whom such legal questions were sometimes referred by the Privy Council.
2 TH makes the boycott of East India Company tea sound like a more formal engagement than it actually was. The idea was first advanced in a broadside written by Thomas Mifflin, which circulated in Philadelphia on 9 October; see No. 1172, above.
3 At this point, the letter appears to have been continued on a page torn out of the letterbook. Based on internal evidence, the editors have joined it with a fragment found elsewhere in TH’s letterbooks as the missing conclusion of the letter. A large portion of the upper lefthand corner of the second page is missing, accounting for the substantial gaps in the transcription, which in many cases involve multiple words.
4 The statement that the consignees had been “prisoners” in the Castle for five to six weeks, and the fact that TH’s letterbook copy of his letter to No. 1217, below, is written on the recto, is consistent with the date of 2 January 1774 indicated at the head of the first part of the letter and supports the conjecture that the undated fragment is the missing conclusion of the letter.
5 From this point, the letter continues in TH’s handwriting. Missing words are the result of tears at the bottom of the MS page.
1 Francis Maseres (1731–1824) was an English lawyer, mathematician, and member of the Royal Society who served as attorney general of Quebec from 1766 through 1770. Maseres is regarded by some as the compiler of Fair Account.
2 Maseres was the author of a number of pamphlets on mathematics and Canadian legal reform, but perhaps the most relevant for TH’s concern was his essay Considerations on the Expediency of Admitting Representatives from the American Colonies into the British House of Commons (London: B. White, 1770).
3 The “blundering fellow” was not identified. Perhaps William Molineux fits the description?
4 TH evidently enclosed a copy of the Boston Gazette for 27 December 1773, which published the proceedings of the Council with regard to the East India Company tea.
1 Lord Dartmouth’s letter put an end to a long-standing dispute between TH and the Council as to whether or not the governor had veto power over the decisions of the Council when it met as a court of appeal considering questions of the administration of wills and questions of marriage and divorce. The order of the Privy Council, based on the advice of the king’s top legal advisors, was that the governor’s vote carried no more weight than any other Council member, a disappointing directive, alluded to in No. 1215, above.
2 This indication of the royal will prompted TH to include a condemnation of the committees of correspondence in his opening message to the legislature later in the month (JHR, 50:103).
3 John Greenough (1742–1781) of Wellfleet, a merchant and justice of the peace for Barnstable County, was the first official to reach the wreck of the William, the fourth tea ship that ran aground off the back shore of Cape Cod. He assisted Jonathan Clarke in rescuing much of the cargo and transporting it to Boston (Norton, 1774, pp. 39–46).
1 Samuel Swift (1715–1775), Harvard College 1735, a lawyer and TH’s Milton neighbor, remained a warm friend despite the wide political differences that separated him from TH. Swift was a member of the Sons of Liberty as well as the Boston Committee of Correspondence. He served on a committee appointed by the Boston town meeting on 9 March 1773 to vindicate the town from the aspersions TH cast on it.
1 For Richard Acklom Harrison, see No. 1012, above.
2 For Robert Hallowell, see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 713. Hallowell was appointed deputy collector on 17 June 1768 (MHS Procs., 46:467).
1 John Dean Whitworth (b. 1749) was a merchant and the son of Miles Whitworth Sr., a prominent Boston physician with government party leanings. A loyalist, John Dean was taken prisoner during the Battle of White Plains, New York, and jailed in Boston in November 1776. See also No. 1221, immediately below.
2 Captain James Hall gave information related to the Boston Tea Party before the Privy Council on 19 February 1774 (Docs. Am. Rev., 8:53).
1 No letter written to TH on 18 October 1773 was found.
2 David Black, a merchant of Boston, was included in the Massachusetts Banishment Act of September 1778.
3 William Turner Sr. (1745–1792) was a dancing and fencing master who became a concert entrepreneur. He purchased the Concert Hall on Hanover Street in October 1769 with a mortgage from John Hancock (CSM Pubs., 54:1057–77). He and John Dean Whitworth both testified before the Privy Council about the Tea Party on 19 February 1774 (National Archives UK, CO 5/7, ff. 87, 101). James Henderson (not otherwise identified) was also summoned to testify before the Privy Council (Calendar of Home Office Papers from the Reign of George III [London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1899–], 3:184). Although described as “active in opposing Government,” Henderson was, when fighting broke out, a loyalist and eventually included in the Massachusetts Banishment Act.
4 No letter from Tryon written on that date was found.
5 Tryon’s house burned the night of 29 December 1773.
1 Letters Nos. 30, 31, and 33 were dated 4, 6, and 15 November 1773, Nos. 1172, 1173, and 1180, respectively, above, and describe early efforts to pressure the consignees to resign. Letter No. 32 was dated 8 November 1773 and calendared but not printed.
2 The hearing before the Privy Council was initially scheduled for 11 January 1774, but Benjamin Franklin requested a postponement while he sought legal counsel. The news of the Boston Tea Party arrived in London on 20 January, and the hearing on the petition for the removal of TH and Andrew Oliver finally took place on 29 January 1774 (Skemp, Making of a Patriot, p. 4).
3 For the imprisonment of George Rome by the Rhode Island Assembly, see Nos. 1175 and 1176, above.
1 No letter written by Tryon on 29 December 1773 was found. TH alluded to the looting of his own house in the Stamp Act riot of 26 August 1765.
2 For Peggy Hutchinson’s meeting with Margaret Wake Tryon at Hartford, see TH to William Tryon, 23 May 1773, which was calendared but not printed.
3 The tea was landed in Charleston on 22 December and stored in the Exchange Building by the collector of customs; see No. 1214, above.
4 For the request from customs, see No. 1219, above.
1 Jonathan Clarke sailed for England on 7 February (Boston Evening Post, 14 February 1774).
2 TH’s letter of leave to come to England was No. 1135, above.
1 EH and his wife had taken refuge with Chief Justice Peter Oliver in Middleborough. Peter Oliver Jr. was a physician and the evident recipient of the wine. William Tupper (1725–1824) appears to have transported goods back and forth from Boston for other residents of Middleborough. A letter from Peter Oliver Jr. to EH dated 7 December 1775 mentioned “Neighbour Tupper” having joined the patriot cause (Thomas Weston, History of the Town of Middleborough [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906], p. 152).
1 TH’s message to the General Court can be found at JHR, 50:102. Although TH avoided the subject of the Boston Tea Party, he did mention royal disapproval of the committees of correspondence. By “what I lately received from the Council,” TH meant the message he received when he required its advice on how to respond to the Boston Tea Party, which was then reprinted in the Boston Gazette on 27 December 1773; see No. 1214, above.
2 John Malcolm (d. 1788), after an earlier career as ship captain, became comptroller of customs at Currituck, North Carolina. The fact that he was dismissed from that post for corruption did not prevent him from being appointed comptroller at Falmouth in the district of Maine. There, in October 1773, he seized the brigantine Brothers for an irregularity in the ship’s register and was tarred and feathered on 1 November (CSM Pubs., 34:249–473).
3 The tradesman who confronted Malcolm was George Robert Twelves Hughes, whose life was memorably recounted by Alfred Young in “George Robert Twelves Hewes (1742–1840): A Boston Shoemaker and the Memory of the American Revolution,” WMQ 38 (October 1981): 561–623, which was expanded into The Shoemaker and the Tea Party (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999).
4 TH enclosed the Boston Weekly News-Letter for 27 January 1774.
5 For the freeing of Ebenezer Richardson after his long imprisonment, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 957. Richardson did not remain long in Philadelphia. He and his co-defendant George Wilmot sought Thomas Gage’s protection in Salem during the summer of 1774 and were staying with his sister in Stoneham when her house was attacked during the Powder Alarm on 1 September 1774 (Boston Gazette, 3, 24 May 1773).
1 The letter in question was most likely No. 1169, above.
2 William Burch was a member of the American Board of Customs Commissioners.
3 Malcolm’s sworn deposition to the governor and Council, dated 30 January 1774, can be found in CSM Pubs., 34:446–47.
1 William Whately had let it be known among his friends that he suspected John Temple of removing letters other than his own when Temple called on him asking to examine his dead brother’s correspondence. A controversy ensued in the pages of the London Public Advertiser throughout the fall of 1773, and the two men fought a duel on 11 December in which Whately was injured. Fearing further violence, Benjamin Franklin exonerated both men in a letter to the London Chronicle dated 25 December, saying neither gave him the letters and that he alone transmitted them to Massachusetts (Franklin Papers, 20:513–16). He did not say how he obtained them. The news of the duel, as well as Benjamin Franklin’s acknowledgment of his role, was first reported in the Boston Gazette on 7 March 1774. TH did not mark the date he received Gage’s letter on the manuscript, so it is impossible to determine if he was aware of the event before it was published in the newspapers.
2 John Dunning, 1st Baron Ashburton (1731–1783), was solicitor general from 1768 until his resignation in 1770 when he broke with the Duke of Grafton’s administration (TH Correspondence, 3: No. 501). Dunning was suffering from a “disorder on his lungs” when he appeared before the Privy Council and was thus difficult to hear (Skemp, Making of a Patriot, pp. 5–6).
3 “Nervous” meaning “expressing or arising from passion or strong emotion; passionate, emotional; earnest” (OED).
1 TH’s letters Nos. 34, 35, and 36 were dated 2, 15, and 17 December 1773, Nos. 1189, 1199, and 1200, respectively, above, and recount the growing resistance to the landing of the tea. The letter to the directors of the East India Company, dated 19 December, No. 1202, above, contained an account of its final destruction.
2 For the hearing of the petition to remove TH and Andrew Oliver, see No. 1228, above.
1 Alone among TH’s three sons, EH had not made a trip to London. TH Jr. went in 1766 to press for compensation for his father’s losses during the Stamp Act riots, and WSH made a prolonged visit to London on his way to study in Edinburgh. He stopped in London again on his way from Edinburgh and had not yet returned to Boston. EH did finally get his wish to go to London when he accompanied the governor at the time of his final departure from the province on 1 June 1774.
2 After initially taking refuge at Castle William with the other consignees, EH had gone on to stay with Chief Justice Peter Oliver in Middleborough.
3 Richard Clarke, Jonathan Clarke, and Isaac Winslow Clarke evidently thought it safe enough to leave Castle William to dine at Customs Commissioner William Burch’s home in Roxbury.
1 For TH’s opening message to the General Court, see No. 1226, above. At that time, he had not yet received the responses of the House and Council. The House responded on 5 February with a long defense of the need for committees of correspondence, which can be found at JHR, 50:129–31.
2 Edmund Trowbridge was the first to comply with the demand of the House not to accept a royal salary on 26 January (JHR, 50:113).
3 The House voted its petition for the removal of Peter Oliver as chief justice on 11 February (JHR, 50:146–51).
4 The resolution postponing the meeting of the Superior Court passed the afternoon of 14 February (JHR, 50:154).
5 In TH’s reply of 15 February, he refused to sign the resolution and asserted that the Council could not meet as a judicial body without the governor present (JHR, 50:159).
1 TH forwarded a letter from Benjamin Franklin to the House of Representatives, dated 7 July 1773, that urged convening a congress of all the colonies (Franklin Papers, 20:277–86); see No. 1165, above.
2 The other letter was probably Franklin to Thomas Cushing, 1 November 1773, which stated, “The Letter of the two Houses of the 29th of June, proposing as a satisfactory Measure the Restoring Things to the State in which they were, at the Conclusion of the last War, is a fair and generous Offer on our Part” (Franklin Papers, 20:455–57). As a letter written to Cushing and not to the House of Representatives, it could indeed be described as private.
3 The House replied on 16 February 1774, warning TH against disregarding the advice of the Council by attempting to block Oliver’s removal (JHR, 50:168–69).
4 The reference is not absolutely clear, but presumably TH referred here to James Bowdoin, who had dominated the Council since TH failed to win reelection in 1766 (with the exception of one year, 1769, when Francis Bernard vetoed Bowdoin’s election).
5 Edmund Trowbridge, whom TH described as “of weak nerves and a timid spirit,” was the first to comply with the demand of the House not to accept a royal salary on 26 January 1774 (TH History, 3:317; JHR, 50:113).
6 It is not clear which of the other three associate justices believed he and his family were not safe, but a good guess would be TH’s brother Foster Hutchinson. For the submission of the associate justices, see JHR, 50:137–39.
7 Nathaniel Ropes of Salem was “confined to his house by the Small pox,” and Edmund Trowbridge was the judge “who is very infirm & who first complied.” Thus, it appears only William Cushing was able and willing to attend the meeting of the court.
8 For Andrew Oliver’s earlier indisposition, see No. 1014, above.
9 Concerning the unconstitutionality of such demands, see John P. Reid, In Defiant Stance: The Conditions of Law in Massachusetts Bay, the Irish Comparison, and the Coming of the American Revolution (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), pp. 132–33.
10 Consignee Jonathan Clarke sailed for England on 7 February 1774; see No. 1224, above.
1 That letter was No. 1232, immediately above.
2 The House’s resolution demanding the removal of Peter Oliver was printed in the Massachusetts Spy for 17 February 1774. Oliver had married Mary Clarke, the sister of Richard Clarke, Jonathan’s father (TH Correspondence, 1: No. 143).
3 For the presentation of the second petition, see JHR, 50:167–68. The somewhat confusing sequence of events is also described in TH History, 3:318–19.
4 Presumably, the arrangements were made by William Tyng (1737–1807), a Falmouth merchant and sheriff of Cumberland County, as well as a future loyalist exile.
1 “Felones de se” is Latin for felons to themselves, that is, suicides.
2 Deuteronomy 32:30: “How should one chase a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight, except their Rock had sold them, and the Lord had shut them up?”
3 There were twenty-eight members of the Council.
1 Richard Clarke, Isaac Winslow Clarke, and Benjamin Faneuil remained at Castle William. TH Jr. was in Milton, and EH in Middleborough with his wife and sister SH.
2 Walter Logan handled Sir Francis Bernard’s American business affairs (TH Correspondence, 2: No. 394).
1 The articles of impeachment, dated 24 February 1774, are printed in JHR, 50:194–200.
2 The message of the House is printed in JHR, 50:233–36; that of the Council appears in Massachusetts Archives, Legislative Council Records, 30:257.
3 The prorogation and TH’s message of 8 March appear in JHR, 50:242.
4 The brig Fortune arrived on 6 March with twenty-eight and a half chests of tea aboard (Norton, 1774, p. 58). The tea was not the property of the East India Company but consigned by private merchants. Nevertheless, it was destroyed when customs officials would not permit its return to England.
1 William Browne (1737–1802), Harvard College 1755, was descended from one of the province’s oldest families, He studied law but instead of practicing lived off the income from his estates. He represented Salem in the General Court from 1762 through 1768, at which time he was turned out for voting to rescind the Circular Letter. He became a justice of the Essex County Court of Common Pleas in 1770, resigning to join the Superior Court in 1774 when appointed by Thomas Gage. Gage also appointed him a mandamus councilor. Browne left Massachusetts in March 1776 and became governor of Bermuda from 1781 to 1788.
1 No letter dated 1 December 1773 from WSH was found.
1 Presumably, this was Robert Thompson, a correspondent of Andrew Oliver and an acquaintance of Thomas and William Whately; see No. 1113, above.
2 TH Jr. married Andrew Oliver’s daughter Sally in October 1770. Daniel Oliver was a lawyer in Hardwick, about seventy miles west of Boston; see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 611.
3 For Andrew Oliver’s involvement in the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England (also known as the New England Company), see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 391. For political tensions with the American members of the SPGNE, see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 495.
1 For the testimony of Bostonians before the Privy Council, see No. 1221, above.
2 For the text of the king’s message, delivered in the House of Lords on 7 March and in the Commons on four days later, see Peter Force, ed., American Archives: Fourth Series, Containing a Documentary History of the English Colonies in North America from the King’s Message to Parliament of March 7, 1774 to the Declaration of Independence of the United States (Washington, D.C.: St. Clair Clark and Peter Force, 1833), 1:5. In its response, the House of Commons promised to use every means in its power to secure the execution of the laws and the due dependence of the colonies.
3 This paragraph outlines the essence of the Boston Port Bill as proposed by Lord North on 14 March (Parliamentary Debates, 7:69–72).
1 The letter was not found.
2 John Montagu replaced Samuel Hood as head of the American Station. Hood resided at Catherington in Hampshire.
1 No letter of that date from the directors of the East India Company was found.
2 For Joshua Winslow, who was then in Marshfield, see No. 1172, above.
1 Dartmouth’s letter No. 14 was dated 8 January, No. 1222, above.
2 For the message of the Council on the destruction of the tea, see No. 1214, above.
3 The House sent TH a message on 7 March objecting to the assertion in his previous message that the charter did not grant the Council the power to impeach (JHR, 50:232–36). The Council’s message was printed in the Boston Gazette for 14 March 1774.
4 The issue of deficiencies in the supply of gunpowder was carried over from the previous session of the General Court. For the House’s message and TH’s response in this session, see JHR, 50:114, 131.
5 The House voted salaries for the four associate justices on 1 March, the same day it approved articles of impeachment against the chief justice (JHR, 50:217). On 7 March, the House stated its objections to TH’s refusal to agree to grants for agents Benjamin Franklin and William Bollan (JHR, 50:236).
6 After being cashiered as postmaster general for his role in the letters affair, Benjamin Franklin suggested that a private mail service could put the royal mail (funded in part by the Tea Act) out of business ([John Temple] to James Bowdoin, 20 February 1774, Franklin Papers, 21:117–19).
7 In all likelihood, the messenger was William Goddard (1740–1817), printer of the Pennsylvania Gazette; see the source note to No. 1253, below.
1 The New York Assembly voted Tryon £5,000 compensation for the loss of the contents of his house.
2 Tryon departed for England on 7 April 1774 and returned on 25 June 1775.
1 Hugh Hall (1693–1773), Harvard College 1713, was the son of the governor of Barbados. He became a distiller and general merchant in Boston. Trecothick & Apthorp and Champion & Dickinson were both prominent London firms trading with America.
2 The hope of employment in England was apparently the subject of WSH’s missing letter of 1 December 1773, alluded to in No. 1239, above.
3 Nathan Smith patented in March 1763 both the process and machinery for making an oil-cloth floor covering, for which the sizing, or glue, binding paint to the cloth was not water soluble, a distinct improvement over previous floorcloth. His factory was on Trevor Place near the present site of Harrod’s in Knightsbridge (“Trevor Square Area: Smith & Baber’s Floorcloth Factory,” in Survey of London, vol. 45, Knightsbridge, ed. John Greenacombe [London: London County Council, 2000], pp. 105–06). The postscript is in TH’s hand.
1 In his letter of 9 March 1773, TH proposed William Browne of Salem, who did indeed become a justice of the Superior Court during the administration of Thomas Gage as governor; see No. 1238, above.
2 In the same letter of 9 March, TH also suggested William Burch for lieutenant governor.
3 The secretary of the province was Thomas Flucker, who took office in 1771.
4 For Thomas Oliver, see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 640. Oliver was issued a commission on 28 May 1771 and sworn in by Thomas Gage on 8 August (CSM Pubs., 2:307–08). He was a distant cousin of London alderman Richard Oliver, who was a political ally of William Beckford and played a prominent role in the printers’ crisis of 1771 (TH Correspondence, 4: No. 853).
1 Clarke’s father and brother were Richard Clarke and Isaac Winslow Clarke, fellow tea consignees.
1 The Boston annual town meeting took place on 14 March 1774. For Arthur Lee, who was chosen to act as an alternate agent for the House in the absence of Benjamin Franklin, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 743.
2 Lee’s letter to Thomas Cushing, the Speaker of the House, was not found. Perhaps it was enclosed with the original copy of TH’s letter, which was not received at Whitehall? A scribal copy of the duplicate lists three enclosures, but Lee’s letter was not among them.
1 Mauduit’s previous letter to TH was not found.
2 In the London Chronicle for 8 January 1774, William Whately published his account of his duel with John Temple, together with those of several witnesses, which implied Temple had taken unfair advantage of Whately’s lack of swordsmanship. (The Massachusetts Spy reprinted Whately’s statement on 24 March 1774.) Whately also filed a chancery suit against Benjamin Franklin on 7 January intended to force Franklin to disclose more about his role in the letters affair and suing him for any “profits” made from the disclosure of his brother’s letters (Franklin Papers, 21:13–18).
3 “Outré” is French meaning “outrageous.”
4 For the end-of-session messages of the House and Council, see No. 1245, above.
5 Despite political differences, John Hancock ordered his company of cadets to fire three volleys at Oliver’s graveside. A large crowd of unsympathetic onlookers, who had followed the funeral procession, then gave three cheers, breaking the solemnity of the occasion (Harvard Graduates, 7:412–13). John Adams commented on the death of the lieutenant governor: “This is but the second death which has happened among the Conspirators, the original Conspirators against the Public Liberty, since the Conspiracy was first regularly formed, and begun to be executed, in 1763 or 4.” He regarded the first “conspirator” to die as Judge Chambers Russell in 1766 (JA Diary and Autobiography, 2:88–95).
6 Ebenezer Pemberton Jr. was TH’s minister at the New Brick Church, where Pemberton’s government party politics and declining popularity forced his retirement in February 1774 (Harvard Graduates, 6:546). Andrew Eliot, the minister of New North Church, was a friend of TH and shared TH’s historical interests. Eliot tried to avoid, as much as possible, political and theological controversy (Harvard Graduates, 10:128–61). The “two other doctors,” Samuel Cooper and Charles Chauncey, were leading patriots. All were members of the Council for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England.
1 TH meant that the less he and Rome corresponded, the less involved Rome would be in whatever conspiracy TH and Oliver were suspected of being engaged in.
1 TH’s previous two letters on the subject were dated 9 and 29 March, Nos. 1238 and 1248, above.
2 It is difficult to say which members of the Council TH might have regarded as plausible candidates for the lieutenant governorship. Isaac Royall had been considered a possible candidate for lieutenant governor at the same time as TH, and TH himself proposed Royall’s name when he was considering resigning the job in 1767 (TH Correspondence, 1: No. 17; 2: No. 253). Jeremiah Powell (1720–1783) of Yarmouth, Maine, was appointed to the Mandamus Council later in 1774 but served as Council president from 1776 until 1779 in the new state government. William Brattle (see BD) was vetoed as a councilor by Sir Francis Bernard in 1769 but switched over to the government party in 1770 and left Boston with the British fleet in 1776 (TH Correspondence, 3: No. 680). John Erving Sr. (see BD) was another who had switched political sides. A noted smuggler in earlier years, he appeared to have changed his politics following the nonimportation movement but was probably unsuitable, having been born in 1692 and therefore one of the oldest members of the Council. TH could count Timothy Woodbridge as a staunch ally, but he lived in faraway western Massachusetts.
3 The lieutenant governor traditionally received no salary as long as the governor was present within the province, but Andrew Oliver was granted a salary at the time TH was appointed governor in order to enable him to switch from the job of secretary to the lieutenant governorship without financial loss, an action that was justified as compensation for his sufferings during the Stamp Act riots (TH Correspondence, 2: No. 414).
4 William Browne of Salem was the first name mentioned to Dartmouth in the letter of No. 1238, above.
5 TH suggested Thomas Flucker, secretary of the province, in his letter of No. 1248, above.
6 Under Joseph Dudley as governor, the post of lieutenant governor was vacant from the departure of Thomas Povey on 28 January 1706 until the appointment of William Tailer on 4 October 1711.
1 TH gave his private letter of 17 February 1774, No. 1232, above, to Jonathan Clarke, the tea consignee, to deliver to Dartmouth by hand.
2 John Pownall’s private letter of 9 April was not found.
1 The abbreviated words in the sentence should be understood as Franklin, the Speaker (Thomas Cushing), the two Adamses (Samuel and John), and the two Doctors Chauncey and Cooper.
2 Benjamin Franklin’s declaration concerning his involvement appeared in the London Chronicle for 25 December 1773; see No 1228, above.
3 Mr. Frone was not further identified.
1 TH’s previous letter to Rome was No. 1252, above.
1 For Alexander Wedderburn, the solicitor general who, at the request of Israel Mauduit, represented TH in his hearing before the committee of the Privy Council, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 808. Wedderburn excoriated Benjamin Franklin in a speech on 29 January 1774 that led to Franklin’s dismissal as postmaster general.
2 The Letters of Governor Hutchinson, and Lieut. Governor Oliver, &c., Printed at Boston, and Remarks Thereon: With the Assembly’s Address, and the Proceedings of the Lords Committee of Council: Together with the Substance of Mr. Wedderburn’s Speech Relating to Those Letters, and the Report of the Lords Committee to His Majesty in Council (London: J. Wilkie, 1774).
1 The late-arriving letter via the packet was likely to have been No. 1228, above, since it contained Gage’s version of the proceedings of the committee of the Privy Council on the petition for TH’s removal. The other letter from Gage was not found, but presumably Gage had not yet been appointed to succeed TH and, therefore, was written before 2 April 1774.
2 For Franklin’s appointment as agent, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 750.
1 No letters written by Charlton Palmer on these dates were found.
2 TH had already written Alexander Wedderburn two days before; see No. 1258, above.
3 When William Tryon departed New York on 7 April 1774, he left the government in the hands of Lieutenant Governor Cadwalader Colder. Tryon remained governor until 1778.
4 TH wrote Palmer (see BD) on 17 February concerning Palmer’s American landholdings (calendared).
1 Whately’s letter of 24 January 1774 was not found.
2 The news of the duel between John Temple and William Whately was reported in the Boston Gazette on 7 March 1774. The article was a condensation of Temple’s account of the duel, first printed in London in the Morning Chronicle on 27 December 1773. For Whately’s very different account of the duel, see No. 1251, above.
3 TH’s first letter to William Whately (No. 1171, above) showed an awareness that Andrew Oliver had written Whately, but since it exculpated William Story from having transported the letters to Boston, it tended to cast more suspicion on Temple. TH’s second letter (No. 1196, above) said, “I have never charged Mr. T. I dont charge him with want of veracity in denying the fact. I would however sooner suspect the veracity of a man than I would suspect him of so foul an action.”
4 For the choice of TH Jr. and Daniel Oliver as executors, see No. 1240, above.
1 Presumably EH, who after leaving the Castle, visited, along with his wife, his father-in-law, George Watson, on 17 January. Greeted by a mob there, they sought refuge in a snowstorm at Peter Oliver’s in Middleborough.
2 TH Jr. went to TH’s house in Milton after leaving the Castle in mid-January. Finding the townspeople there hostile, he fled to Middleborough.
3 Since Oliver’s attempted impeachment, angry crowds sought to block his attendance at circuit court meetings. Jonathan Sewall was the attorney general. James Putnam was a highly successful Worcester lawyer and judge of the county Court of General Sessions, whom TH had tried to persuade to become attorney general in 1768, when it appeared Sewall would resign (TH Correspondence, 2: Nos. 402, 414). Putnam’s name led a list of those protesting against a resolution of the Worcester town meeting applauding the Boston Tea Party. Soon afterward, two of his cows were stolen and his gristmill was set ablaze. Putnam was in Boston at the time and remained there until he left with the British troops in 1776, eventually becoming a judge of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court (Harvard Graduates, 12:57–64). A letter from John Adams to Robert Treat Paine confirmed that Putnam warned Oliver not to attend; see John Adams to Robert Treat Paine, 9 April 1774, Papers of John Adams, vol. 2, December 1773–April 1775, ed. Robert J. Taylor et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 81–82.
4 Oliver here referred to future meetings of the Superior Court at Barnstable on Cape Cod, home of the Mashpee and Nauset Indian bands, and Plymouth, Oliver’s own county seat.
5 Nathan Cushing (1742–1812) was a cousin of TH’s former colleague on the Superior Court bench John Cushing and his son William Cushing, whom TH appointed to succeed his father. A graduate of Harvard College in 1763, Nathan was appointed a justice of the peace by Francis Bernard in 1769. In March 1774, the Scituate town meeting adopted a resolution, drawn by Cushing, denouncing the Tea Act. Presumably John Cushing made the sneering remark.
6 Neither Ebenezer Spooner (1718–1776) of Middleborough nor Ichabod Shaw (1734–1821) of Plymouth appears to have been appointed.
7 The coroner from Middleborough was not identified.
8 A move to dismiss John Temple from his post as surveyor general of customs in England appeared to be underway as early as 19 January, a week before the Privy Council met to hear the petition to remove TH. Franklin was dismissed from his job as postmaster general for the colonies on 8 February, the day after the final report of the Privy Council was issued (Boston Weekly News-Letter, 24 April 1774).
9 Governor Joseph Wanton of Rhode Island and Frederick Smythe, chief justice of New Jersey, both served on the Gaspée Commission with Peter Oliver; see No. 1059, above.
10 Presumably Oliver meant the accounts of costs associated with the Gaspée Commission.
1 No letter from TH to WSH written on 25 April was found.
2 TH alluded to a letter from WSH dated 1 December 1773 (not found) in his letter to WSH of 9 March 1774, but without any surviving letters from WSH, it is impossible to say what offices were hinted at.
1 TH complained of the Council’s unwillingness to endorse any government response to the destruction of the tea; see No. 1210, above. The message of the Council, so at odds with TH’s own views, was written by James Bowdoin and printed in the Boston Gazette, 27 December 1773.
2 The order of the Privy Council dismissing the petition for TH’s removal was issued on 7 February 1774.
3 Presumably, TH meant Samuel Adams when he referred to “the Chief” in this instance.
4 Admiral John Montagu, Edward’s brother, was nearing the end of his posting as commander in chief of the North American Station.
5 No letter from Montagu concerning WSH was found, but TH urged his son to consult Montagu for advice about his future while in Britain; see No. 1156, above.
1 News of the Boston Tea Party arrived in Dover, England, on 19 January. The ministry debated about possible responses throughout late January and February. On 7 March, the king’s speech (written by his ministers) denounced “the violent and outrageous proceedings” at Boston “obstructing the commerce of this Kingdom” and “immediately subversive of the Constitution.” Lord North introduced the Boston Port Bill on 14 March, and it received the royal assent on 31 March (Peter Force, ed., American Archives: Fourth Series, Containing a Documentary History of the English Colonies in North America from the King’s Message to Parliament of March 7, 1774 to the Declaration of Independence of the United States [Washington, D.C.: St. Clair Clark and Peter Force, 1833], 1:6, 40, 60).
2 Because of their involvement in the letters affair, Benjamin Franklin and John Temple lost positions as postmaster general for the colonies and surveyor general for customs in England, respectively; see No. 1258, above.
3 Hoping for further instructions from England, TH delayed issuing the writs for the May elections to the last possible moment; see No. 1260, above.
4 Many of the tangled business affairs of John Bernard, Sir Francis’s son, took place at Fort Pownall at the mouth of the Kennebec, leading to a lawsuit by Thomas Goldthwait, the fort’s commandant and truckmaster; see No. 1033, above.
1 TH would not have troubled Lord Dartmouth himself with this sort of detail. Therefore, it is likely this letter was addressed to John Pownall as chief secretary to Dartmouth.
2 The last letter TH received from Lord Hillsborough informed him of “the provision His Majesty has been pleased to make for the Support of His Law Servants in the Province of the Massachuset’s Bay”; see No. 1010, above.
3 Samuel Quincy was appointed solicitor general at what he understood to be a salary of £250 in March 1771 (Harvard Graduates, 13:478–88).
1 They were fellow classmates in the Harvard Class of 1727.
2 The quotation was taken from Lord Dartmouth’s private letter to TH, No. 1255, above.
3 In recent years, TH had come to rely increasingly on Worthington as his chief ally in western Massachusetts, while Williams had been less dependable when needed at the General Court. The two Hampshire County men had both quarreled and cooperated in the past. See Carl I. Hammer, “‘To Promote Religion and Learning’: The Failure of Queens College, Hampshire College, Massachusetts, Revisited,” in The History of Universities, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 33:105–56.
4 Reverend Stephen Williams (1693–1782) was minister of the First Church in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, from 1716 through 1782. His letter to TH was not found.
1 William Browne had not yet been appointed in the place of Nathaniel Ropes, who had died earlier in the year. The four justices in commission were Peter Oliver, Edmund Trowbridge, Foster Hutchinson, and William Cushing; see Nos. 1238 and 1253, above.
2 On 19 April, the Worcester County grand jurors presented a remonstrance to Justice Edmund Trowbridge that they would refuse to serve if Oliver attended the session, as no man could be obliged to be tried before a judge who “by his own Confession stands convicted in the Minds of the People of a Crime more Heinous (in all probability) any that might come before him” (Boston Gazette, 9 May 1774). Trowbridge merely assured the jurors that Oliver was unlikely to attend and proceeded to hold court.
1 No enclosure was found.
1 Lord Dartmouth had recently raised a question whether the Massachusetts claim to Sagadahoc, the area between the Kennebec and St. Croix Rivers, was legitimate; see No. 1130, above. TH’s statement here concerning the boundary with Nova Scotia might have been more nuanced had he received that letter before preparing these responses. TH did prepare a careful answer to Dartmouth’s doubts two weeks after transmitting these answers to the secretary of state; see Nos. 1159–61.
2 On 12 May 1773, commissioners from New York and Massachusetts meeting in Hartford successfully resolved the long-disputed boundary with New York; see No. 1108, above.
3 The question in dispute concerned which of the two rivers that combine to form the Piscataqua constituted its headwaters: the Newichawanock (now known as the Salmon Falls River) or the Cocheco, five or six miles further west. In 1737, the Privy Council chose the Salmon Falls (a decision more favorable to New Hampshire). See No. 1045, above. See also TH History, 2:296–97.
4 For this dispute, see TH History, 3:4–5.
5 “Sagadahock” and “Capowack” are early names for the Kennebec River and the island of Martha’s Vineyard, respectively.
6 For the tension between land titles deriving from the New Plimouth Company and purchases from the Indians, see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 896. The topic of illegal settlements in eastern Maine was a frequent subject in TH’s correspondence with Lord Hillsborough, Dartmouth’s predecessor.
7 For the Newichawanock River, see note 3 above.
8 The Gurnet is a headland at the entrance to Plymouth Bay. Although the water directly behind it is shallow, there is an unusually deep water anchorage just west of Clark’s Island, not far away.
9 TH asked Lord Hillsborough as early as 5 November 1771 whether the governor’s vote was determinative when there was a dispute between the governor and the Council in such cases, or whether the governor’s vote was to be counted as merely one vote among all the others in the Council; see TH Correspondence, 4: No. 934. The question was referred to the Privy Council. In his response to these queries, TH described what was current practice while awaiting the Privy Council’s decision. The answer finally came from Lord Dartmouth in a letter written 28 October 1773, No. 1169, above, which TH had not yet received.
10 Pigs, that is, the oblong blocks into which smelted iron is poured.
11 The area between square brackets was first erased and then overwritten in TH’s hand.
1 For the lord mayor’s remonstrance to the king on 14 March 1770, see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 503. Henry Howard (1739–1779), 12th Earl of Suffolk, was at this time a critic of the North administration, but soon after the death of George Grenville in November 1770 he would assume leadership of the Grenville clique and bring it into loose alliance with the followers of Lord North.
2 George Lyttelton (1709–1773), 5th Baron Lyttelton, served in the Duke of Newcastle’s ministry as chancellor of the exchequer in 1755–1756 and was a close political ally of both William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, and Richard Grenville Temple, 2nd Earl Temple. For Chatham, see BD; for Temple, see TH Correspondence, 1: No. 206.
3 In the winter and spring of 1770, Lord North’s new administration was assailed on all sides by previously antagonistic political leaders, including the followers of Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquis of Rockingham (BD), and William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne (BD), as well as those of Chatham, Temple, and Grenville.
4 By a “bill against your associations,” Mauduit meant an outlawing of the American nonimportation agreements. Sir Francis Bernard warned as early as December 1769 that such legislation might not be possible given the depth of parliamentary divisions; see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 484.
5 William Palmer wrote TH on 12 April saying he had paid the fees for his commission as governor; see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 569.
6 For Frederick Lord North’s steady consolidation of power since first taking office, see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 563. Although Chatham and Camden (see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 256) had first taken office at the same time as Augustus Henry Fitzroy, 3rd Duke of Grafton (see BD), and the duke succeeded Chatham as de facto leader of the ministry during Chatham’s illness, both men broke with Grafton in mid-January 1770 during the Wilkes controversy and the addresses in response to the king’s speech; see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 501. After Grafton’s resignation as of 28 January as first lord of the treasury, he was no longer under any obligation to mince words about Chatham and Camden.
7 One of two protests adopted by a number of opposition peers on 4 February, Camden’s handiwork laid out the legal arguments against the majority view challenging the results of the Middlesex election that reelected John Wilkes (William C. Lowe, “The House of Lords, Party, and Public Opinion: Opposition Use of the Protest, 1760–1782,” Albion 11 [1979]: 143–56). The warrant Mauduit held in his hand presumably authorized the £800 increase in Camden’s pension.
8 TH evidently sent Mauduit a copy of TH Original Papers. For his description of the first charter, see TH History, 1:15–18.
9 TH wrote Mauduit in TH Correspondence, 3: No. 495, concerning possible American commissioners of the New England Company. In the notes to that letter, the persons represented by the letters B and G were conjecturally, but incorrectly, identified as Thomas Boylston and Harrison Gray. The four persons elected in 1770 were John Barrett (1708–1786), longtime deacon of New North Church in Boston; Matthew Griswold (1714–1799), of Lyme, Connecticut, a lawyer and chief justice of that colony; Charles Chauncy; and Samuel Cooper (Frederick L. Weis, “The New England Company of 1649 and Its Missionary Enterprises,” CSM Pubs., 38:211). Thomas Flucker was a close government party ally of TH.
10 TH’s nephew Nathaniel Rogers met Mauduit shortly after arriving in London in December 1768; see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 284. TH may (or may not, the evidence is thin) have sought the post of secretary of New Hampshire for Rogers in late 1769, just before his return to America; see TH Correspondence, 2: No. 491.
11 Dennys DeBerdt unsuccessfully presented the petition of the Massachusetts General Court for the dismissal of Francis Bernard as governor, beginning in November 1769, but the case faltered for lack of supporting evidence. The charges were finally dismissed by the Privy Council on 17 March 1770; see TH Correspondence, 3: No. 555.
1 Peter Oliver in a jocular mood can be hard to follow. “Illustris senipes” is Latin for “noble steed.” “Felix quem facient aliena pericula camtusu” should read correctly “felix quem faciunt aliena pericula cautum”—“happy are they who can learn caution from the danger of others.” Since the original manuscript is lost, it is impossible to know if the incorrect Latin was Oliver’s or the printer’s. “Prope urbem, prope mortem” means “near to the city, near to death.”
2 Oliver alluded to the recent postponement of the trial of Captain Thomas Preston, caused in part by the fact that Oliver had recently fallen off his horse and was unable to travel to Boston for the sitting of the court.
3 The doctor was the chief justice’s son and TH’s son-in-law, Peter Oliver. Mapewontaquash was not identified. The words “little I know, therefore little shall I say” were evidently a formulaic opening for the confessions of faith made by John Eliot’s Indian converts. See Joshua D. Belin, “A Little I Know: Translation and Interculturalism in the John Eliot Tract,” in CSM Pubs., 71: 52–83. The king approved TH’s appointment as governor on 14 April 1770, but because of various delays his commission was not proclaimed in Boston until 14 March 1771.
4 Statford the oracle was not identified.
5 Oliver’s intent is clear, despite problems with the Latin. “Utile” in this instance means “privy,” as in that other euphemism for the same place, “the necessary.” The way “du’ces” is printed suggests an accent over the letter u, in which case the word would be the second person plural form of the verb “duco,” “to lead,” but this may be another printer’s error. “Duces” without an accent would mean “leaders.” Oliver seemed to mean “an hour spent in the privy brings more pleasure than an age among the leaders of politics.”
6 The book was not identified. Perhaps the Bible?