April Meeting, 1959

A STATED Meeting of the Society was held at its House, No. 87 Mount Vernon Street, Boston, on Thursday, 23 April 1959, at half after eight o’clock in the evening, the President, Mr. Richard Mott Gummere, in the chair.

The records of the Stated Meeting in February were read and approved.

The Treasurer reported the receipt of $9,082.37, bequeathed to the Society by James Lyman Whitney, elected a Resident Member in 1898 who resigned in 1910, which had been set up in a fund without restrictions as to its use.

Messrs. John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Rudolph Ruzicka, of Boston, were elected Honorary Members; Mr. Leonard Carl Faber, of Boston, was elected a Resident Member, and Mr. Nicholas Biddle Wainwright, of Philadelphia, a Non-Resident Member of the Society.

Mr. Whitehill reported on the journey to Charlottesville, Virginia.

The chair appointed the following committees in anticipation of the Annual Meeting:

To nominate candidates for the several offices,—Messrs. Fred Norris Robinson and Elliott Perkins.

To examine the Treasurer’s accounts,—Messrs. William Bradford Osgood and Arthur Stanwood Pier.

To arrange for the Annual Dinner,—Messrs. Walter Muir Whitehill and David Britton Little.

Mr. W. Stewart MacNutt, Professor of History at the University of New Brunswick, read a paper entitled:

New England’s Tory Neighbors

TO a greater extent than any other Canadian province New Brunswick is a by-product of the American Revolution. The visible evidences of this important historic fact have steadily diminished through the years but still today there are striking manifestations of the close connection between this new British colony of 1784 and what its founders sentimentally recalled as “the old Thirteen.” The places of honor in the New Brunswick legislature, to the right and left of the speaker’s throne, are occupied not by portraits of the present sovereign and her consort, but by those of King George III and Queen Charlotte, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds and purchased in 1821, the year following the king’s death, by his afflicted subjects. The royal coat-of-arms of the province of Massachusetts Bay hangs in Trinity Church, Saint John, where it was finally deposited by Edward Winslow of Plymouth after he had rescued it from the rancor of the rebels during the evacuation of Boston in 1776. A gentleman of Fredericton possesses the drinking mugs, said to be the finest silverware in Canada, of the first Edward Winslow of Plymouth to whom Plymouth Colony and Massachusetts owed so much. The University of New Brunswick, in frequent recollection of its founders, has had occasion to recall that it, too, is a product of the American Revolution. Of the seven loyal refugees who in 1785 addressed Governor Carleton for the establishment of an academy of liberal arts and sciences six were New Englanders.

New England had always looked to the great seaward area of Acadia or Nova Scotia that hovered over its eastern approaches as a land to be occupied by her children and grandchildren. Her fishermen had enjoyed the free use of its creeks and inlets, its beaches and islands for the purposes of their trade. Half a dozen times the French and once the Dutch had been the victims of expulsions or token expulsions in consequent of the truculent attitude of proprietorship over this undefined, debatable land that was so pronounced at Boston, Salem and Marblehead. New Englanders had occupied the rich marshlands of the Acadians, had brought to Nova Scotia the outspoken qualities of their democracy that resulted in the establishment of the first representative assembly in what is today Canada. To use the expression of a native Canadian who became a distinguished American historian, Nova Scotia was New England’s outpost. The short sea voyage of two or three days made the country the logical repository for the surplus energies of New Englanders. Boston was the metropolis for the first English-speaking inhabitants of Nova Scotia. It is not surprising that a century later a Canadian governor-general on a visit to the Maritime Provinces spoke with a certain degree of annoyance on the prevalence of the Boston cut and the Yankee twang.

The cultural and commercial pattern was to remain for a long time unchanged but Nova Scotia with its sister province, New Brunswick, partitioned from it in 1784, became, in consequence of the Revolution, a New England irredenta. Generations of New Englanders had fought for the triumph of their interests and their ideals in this northern hinterland. During the rebellion it had seemed possible that the American population of Nova Scotia would rise to declare their independence from the Crown and become the fourteenth colony in revolt. But Nova Scotia became a land in which the dispossessed and despised Tories ruled. Scarcely had the peace of 1783 been signed when Lord Sydney, the Colonial Secretary, declared that Nova Scotia should become the envy of all the American states. Thirty thousand Tory Loyalists, including, it was widely proclaimed, most of the men of honor, talent and education of the thirteen colonies had come to its shores. A new British Empire in North America would rise from the ashes of the old. A new dispensation would preserve the proper gradations in society, would award to deserving subjects of the Crown the preferments of public office. A landed gentry and an established church would guarantee that the leveling principles of New England could make no impact on the minds of men who would rejoice in the stations in life to which it had pleased God to call them. Parliament agreed that the laws of trade and navigation should remain in effect and the rebellious Americans would be made to realize the high price they had paid for their independence. The commerce of New England would be crushed. The British colonies, enriched by the bounty of the mother country and governed by enlightened principles, would draw off from the American states the best elements in their populations who would flee from the anarchy that was certain to prevail and from the demagogic government that held the loosely bound American confederacy together.

The eleven hundred Loyalists who left Boston with the British Army in June of 1776 were dispersed to the four winds. Many of them sat out the war in London, surveying with critical eye the conduct of affairs in America, pamphleteering and propagating their Loyalist sentiments, presenting to the British Government the account of their sacrifices and their hopes for compensation. The conclusion of the peace found a significant number of them taking up residence in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, especially on the new lands on the St. John River. The vast majority of those who opened up the greatest of the new areas of Loyalist settlement were those who had spent the war within the British lines at New York and who hailed from the middle colonies. But a very great proportion of those who managed the migration and who aspired to high office came from New England. The aspiration was, in the words of Edward Winslow, “the most gentlemanlike government on earth.” Yet New Brunswick was to have a very turbulent political history and the first conflict was one that might fairly be described as a fight between a New York democracy and a New England aristocracy. New Englanders, said an early issue of the New Brunswick Gazette, make good commissaries and foragers but dangerous legislators.

There were probably about a score of able New Englanders, mostly men in the prime of life, members of the oldest and most honored families in the country, who took leading places in the public life of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia after the Revolution. Most of them lived long lives, imparting their ideologies and their prejudices to the young provinces where they had chosen to make their homes. Probably the most eminent of all was Sir John Wentworth who moved his office as surveyor-general of the King’s woods from New Hampshire to Halifax and there asserted the same authoritarian jurisdiction that had made him one of the most feared of the King’s officials in the older colonies. Later his great office was joined to that of lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia and, until his death forty-five years after the Revolution, he was one of the most influential men in British North America. One can say with confidence that his early experience with the lumberers of Maine and New Hampshire impelled him later in life to deal cautiously with those of New Brunswick and Canada, and that he performed his office without loss of his reputation as a consummate man of business. His patronage was great and many of the New England Loyalists, united in memories of broken fortunes and hopes for a prosperous future, looked to Wentworth as their most likely intermediary for the favors that could be expected from the British Government.

The most martial and the most spectacular was John Coffin, a scion of the famous family of Tristram Coffin of Nantucket. A seafaring lad of Boston, he volunteered for service with the royal forces on the day of Bunker Hill. On the ascent of that fire-swept slope his conduct was so fearless that he was awarded a commission on the field and throughout the remainder of the war he was famed as one of the most redoubtable cavalry commanders on the British side. At Eutaw Springs, at the head of seventy of the King’s American Dragoons, he shattered three hundred of the enemy in open fight, losing only three of his own men and killing sixty of the rebels—all with swords, for in the precipitation of the charge he had scorned to order his men to fire. Following the battle the American General Greene, though placing a price of $10,000 on his head, publicly pronounced upon his valor. When Charleston was occupied by the enemy he made an entrance to the city in order to visit the lady to whom he was betrothed and, when his rendezvous was interrupted by a wary American patrol, he escaped capture by concealing himself beneath a hooped skirt, though he was a man of six feet, two inches. Awarded a handsome sword by Lord Cornwallis in honor of his distinguished services, he led the King’s American Dragoons to New Brunswick. His good New England reverence for genealogy was symbolized by the establishment on the St. John River of Alwington Manor, so designated from a manor of the same name on the British Channel in England that had been founded by a Norman ancestor in the eleventh century and from which Tristram Coffin had come to America.

Coffin’s career continued to be remarkable for a long time after he came to New Brunswick. He took the lead of the governor’s party in the legislature and, though some of his political methods were as abrupt as the charge at Eutaw Springs, he ultimately succeeded in discomfiting what respectable men considered to be a factious and disloyal opposition. New Brunswick was a poor country that could not support a squirearchy but Coffin continued to the end of his days to be a supporter of “the landed interest” against the rising power of the mercantile classes. Across the water in the British House of Commons his brother, Sir Isaac Coffin, was a leader in the fight to destroy the tariff preferences on British North American timber and John Coffin believed that the newly risen timber trade, devouring the country like a plague of locusts and drawing off labor from the farms, would be the ruination of the province. The Tory faith in the settled, ordered life of villages where every man would know his place but where there would be a place for every man was to have short shrift in New Brunswick.

When he died in 1838 Coffin was the senior general in the British Army. A son, following his footsteps, became a general of the Royal Artillery and two other sons became admirals in the Royal Navy. Such devotion to the Crown was not inconsistent with love for his native land. It was his custom to declare: “I would give more for one pork-barrel made in Massachusetts than for all that have been made in New Brunswick since its settlement.”

Two of the detested mandamus councilors of 1774 came to New Brunswick. One was Colonel John Murray who owned a great estate at Rutland and who never was sworn in because his journey to Boston was interrupted by a rebel mob who sacked his household. The second was Abijah Willard, said to be the wealthiest man in Lancaster, who on the morning of 19 April 1775 was riding to Beverly for the purpose of supervising the planting operations on his estate there. On his way he met the Minute Men who were marching to Concord and Lexington. He kept on riding but not in the same direction, quickly joining General Gage at Boston. On another memorable morning, two months later, he was again in company with General Gage when he saw through a field glass the tall figure of his brother-in-law, Colonel William Prescott, directing defensive operations on the heights occupied by the rebels. “Will he fight?” asked Gage. “Aye, sir,” was the reply, “he is an old soldier and will fight as long as a drop of blood remains in his veins.” Though Abijah Willard was also an old soldier he could not bring himself to take up arms against his countrymen. He became a commissary at New York and acquired a rather loathsome reputation among the generality of the Loyalists because his name stood at the head of the notorious Fifty-Five, a list of leading partisans of the Crown who applied for the extraordinarily large grants of five thousand acres of land in Nova Scotia. Though he never saw his native Lancaster again he founded a new Lancaster in New Brunswick, becoming a member of the first council of the province for the few short years before his death in 1789.

A leading Tory of Massachusetts who might reasonably be suspected of impulsiveness was William Paine, son of Timothy Paine, the mandamus councilor of Worcester. As a student of medicine in England he had been presented to the King and Queen wearing the court dress prescribed for medical men, a gray, cloth coat with silver buttons, a white satin waistcoat, satin small clothes, silk hose, a fall of lace from the collar and lace in the sleeves, a sword by his side. In 1775 he wrote to his friends in Worcester, “The colonists had better lay down their arms at once for we are coming over with an overwhelming force to destroy them.” A good story is told of this sprightly young man whose letters nearly always abound with such certain opinions. During the unsure course of events following Lexington when men’s loyalties were being determined he entertained John Adams at dinner and, following its conclusion, he rose from his place and proposed a toast to His Majesty the King. A hush descended upon the cheerful assemblage and there was a slight murmur of surprise as Adams, with darkened brow, rose to honor the toast. The relief lasted only for a moment for Adams lost no time in proposing a toast to His Majesty the Devil. Unable to accept the certain implication with dispassion, Paine was about to become unpleasant but was restrained by his clever wife who exclaimed, “Do, my dear, permit the gentleman to do honour to his friends.”

Paine served with the British forces in Rhode Island and New York, and the year 1783 found him in New Brunswick. The undisturbed possession of a small island on the Bay of Fundy coast failed to satisfy him and he moved to Saint John where he earned a precarious living by practicing medicine, keeping a garden and serving as a deputy surveyor of the King’s woods. In 1787, for the purpose of “gathering up a little property in New England,” he applied, as a half-pay officer, to the War Office for permission to visit the United States. Since his father had never been an absentee the great estate Paine was to inherit had not been confiscated. He never returned to New Brunswick, passing out a long life in wealth and dignity in his homeland.

He may have been a recreant Tory but his short residence in New Brunswick assured that he would never be forgotten. Of the seven memorialists who, in the days when New Brunswick was an almost completely unbroken wilderness, petitioned for the establishment of an institution of learning in the new province, the antecedent of the University of New Brunswick, it was Paine’s name that headed the list.

Another medical man who came to New Brunswick from Massachusetts was Adino Paddock, a descendant of one of the Pilgrim Fathers and the son of the father of the same name who cared for the famous Paddock elms on Tremont Street that adorned Boston for so long a time. As surgeon of the King’s American Dragoons he served during the latter part of the war under the command of that most notable citizen of New Hampshire, Benjamin Thompson, whose fame as a soldier was to be outstripped by his prowess as a scientist and philosopher. For a great many years Paddock was the foremost medical practitioner in New Brunswick.

In the number of its Tory partisans medicine yielded to the law for a whole host of legal luminaries departed from New England to serve in distant parts of the British Empire. James Putnam of the Salem family, a cousin of Rufus and Israel Putnam, practiced law in Worcester and was widely regarded as one of the ablest lawyers in America. In 1777 he became the last attorney-general of Massachusetts under the Crown. John Adams was his student-at-law and business partner, and, while a youth, boarded in his home. Putnam became one of the first judges of New Brunswick but his health was broken after the long conflict in which he lost almost everything he possessed. Sabine, the American historian of the Loyalists, after visiting at Putnam’s home in Saint John, said, “I have often stood at his grave and mused upon the strange vicissitudes of human condition, by which the Master, one of the giants of the American colonial bar, became an outlaw and exile, broken in fortune and spirit, while his struggling and friendless pupil, elevated step by step by the same course of events, was finally known the world over as the chief magistrate of a nation.”

Other notable barristers of Massachusetts who came to New Brunswick were Daniel Bliss of Concord, one of the addressers of Governor Hutchinson, and Jonathan Bliss of Springfield, one of the notorious seventeen rescinders from the resolutions of the General Court. Both held leading positions all their lives and both, like so many of their contemporaries, died virtually impoverished. Jonathan Sewell, attorney-general of Massachusetts, became judge of the admiralty court for Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. But the man who made a greater impression on the new institutions of the province of New Brunswick than any other was Ward Chipman of Marblehead. His father, John Chipman, was so highly respected by the members of the Massachusetts bar that when he suddenly died while pleading in court at an early age, a number of them undertook to pay for the education of his young son at Harvard College. It is on record that when Ward Chipman entered Harvard he was seventh in a class of thirty-four in order of social prominence and that when he graduated he was sixth. Perhaps his graduation alone entitles him to a degree of notice for he was the first college orator whose speech was given in the vernacular language.

From the founding of the province Chipman, an able lawyer remarkable for his plain speech and his absence of affectation as well as for his knowledge of the law, was the right-hand man of Governor Carleton especially when difficult business lay in hand. He was the writer of the first laws of the province. He drew up the charters of the city of Saint John and the college of New Brunswick. He fought the elements in the legislature who were trying to make New Brunswick a replica of any one of the disorderly colonies that had been lost. The great Loyalist principle was to avoid the errors that had produced faction and social upthrust in New England, to keep New Brunswick and the other rising colonies as unlike New England as possible. So far as this was possible in an environment similar to that of New England the governing classes of New Brunswick succeeded to a considerable degree and Chipman, among others, achieved a great reputation as a champion of Church and State. But the reason for his long success as a man of affairs lay in his ability to bargain like a good New Englander, to trim his sails according to the weather, and to subject his very businesslike type of Toryism to the public opinion of a new age. He finished a long career of public service as the champion of the mercantile classes of the province whose interests opposed the dominance of a hereditary aristocracy, an established church and the control of patronage by the Colonial Office.

Histories of Maine abound with expressions both of irritation and respect for Chipman. As agent for the British Government he won the first two rounds in the long quarrel over the northeastern boundary. When he died in 1823 he was masterfully delaying the settlement of the final round, desperately searching for new expedients in a case that was becoming increasingly hopeless. His loyalism was not of the desperate variety. He kept a good connection with his brother-in-law, William Gray of Boston, and invested a substantial portion of his savings in the Far Eastern enterprises of that most successful merchant. He sent his son to school at Salem and later to Harvard College, though at the time a legal education at Harvard was considered in some quarters as a stigma upon the career of a New Brunswick barrister. This had to be remedied somewhat later by a term or two at the Inns of Court in London. In the Chipman Papers at Ottawa there is a simple but revealing letter that testifies to the quality of the Loyalist mystique. Twitted by his rich and influential relatives upon the possibilities of his becoming a citizen of the United States, the younger Ward Chipman when he was a boy of twelve declared that “never, never, never” would he abandon his heritage as a British subject.

A quite different type of Tory, absolutely without qualities of moderation, was George Leonard, a member of the affluent Taunton and Norton family who were noted for their landed wealth and their pioneering work in ironmongery in Massachusetts. He spent the war in that happy hunting ground for leading Tories, the royal commissariat, and at one time operated a squadron of small armed vessels from Newport in Rhode Island, harrassing rebel trade and communications. He was the doctrinaire type of Tory who insisted on seeing all things in principle, turning a blind eye to immediate necessities. One of his leading principles was that public office should go to the right people and he was a persistent lobbyist at the Colonial Office, insisting that the laws should be rigidly enforced, especially against the upstart Americans who were drawing off the trade of New Brunswick to their great advantage. To the end of his days Leonard continued to fight the war of the American Revolution. He held the office of superintendent of trade and fisheries, holding authority to enforce the laws of trade and navigation in all the seas of the Maritime colonies. The task was manifestly impossible but Leonard enjoyed it. His Majesty’s right was occasionally vindicated by the seizure of a fishing vessel engaged in the illegal transit of tea and other produce of the East Indies or by the commandeering of American goods smuggled into New Brunswick by subjects of the Crown who could not perceive that such practices were false to their Tory faith.

The facts of life in colonial New Brunswick were well illustrated by the conflict between Leonard and William Wanton, collector of customs at Saint John, who was a son of Joseph Wanton, a former governor of Rhode Island. Wanton assumed his important post in 1785, greatly surprised that the Imperial Government intended to enforce the laws of trade and navigation against the United States and it is reasonably certain that he never made any attempt to enforce the laws at all. “Trading on the lines” was a profitable occupation for the subjects of both nations and Wanton made a curious arrangement with the American collector at Eastport by which the narrow channel between Moose Island and Campobello was to be regarded as neutral water. The consequence was the development of a most voluminous international trade and this slender stream, this Filum Aquae, as David Owen, the squire of Campobello, called it, became renowned as the safest anchorage in the North Atlantic.

Leonard’s seizure of the American sloop Falmouth in 1805 brought into the open the arrangement Wanton had made with his American counterpart. The trial before the court of admiralty revealed that the owner of the cargo of the Falmouth was the son of the surveyor and searcher of His Majesty’s customs and that the collector at Saint John had favored a contraband trade with the Yankees. Leonard rigorously pressed his triumph but by the time that the commissioners of customs at London brought about an investigation of the transactions at Campobello Wanton was, as they said, incredibly rich, incredibly fat and over eighty. He finished his days in peace. Yet, amid the complexities of King’s officials who used their posts to enrich themselves, of men who accepted or discarded British citizenship at the convenience of the hour, of British who acknowledged American brothers with whom they engaged in trade, of an international seagoing community of men on the Bay of Fundy to whom all restrictions on trade were alien and oppressive, Leonard, with a sense of divine mission, persisted in his course without flagging.

Of all the New Brunswick Tories he possessed the greatest pride. His estate was at Sussex Vale where as His Majesty’s Councilor, head of the bench of parish magistrates, colonel of militia and church warden, he strove to inculcate in a small population the Tory faith in a gentlemanly caste of landed proprietors whose sense of public duty would be equivalent to that of the parish magistrates of England. Adjacent was the parish of Norton, so designated from his ancestral home in Massachusetts. “The people of Norton,” he wrote to his old friend, William Knox, former under-secretary of state to Lord George Germaine at the American Office, “are peasants like those in any other part of America.” His family possessed a reputation for elegance and frequently boasted of their great connections in England. But New Brunswick could not foster such great pretensions for more than a generation. When Leonard died in 1826 and the salary payments from London came to an end, the Colonial Office witnessed the undignified spectacle of a son and a son-in-law pleading their rival claims for the continuation of the office by virtue of Leonard’s past services. Today at Sussex Vale not only the patrician attitudes he displayed but the very name of Leonard are known only to antiquarians.

There were other New England Loyalists who came to New Brunswick but no roster could be considered at all comprehensive without reference to the one who, by reason of unique qualities, became best known of all. This was Edward Winslow of Plymouth. He was the great-great-grandson of the founder of Plymouth Colony and had been the first man in Plymouth County to take a bold stand in defiance of the revolutionary committees. On the dark morning following the battle of Lexington he had guided Lord Percy’s shattered battalion back to Boston through the strange and hostile countryside. He had rescued Peter Oliver, the Chief-justice of Massachusetts, from a hostile patriot mob outside the Province House. At the evacuation of Boston he had carried off not only the royal coat-of-arms from the walls of the council chamber but the public archives of Massachusetts as well and a few years later, when peace returned and tempers cooled, he returned them to the custody of Governor Bowdoin. Like so many others he served out the war in New York where he was muster-master general of the Provincial Army, that broken, disappointed host whose apologists boasted that it was more numerous than the forces who served under Washington, whose cause was stultified and betrayed, at least in the minds of a great many of them, by the ineptitude of the King’s ministers.

Yet it was Winslow’s literary qualities that ensure him a permanent place in Canadian history. A great many years ago the Reverend W. O. Raymond of Saint John learned of the existence of a vast collection of papers in Chatham in New Brunswick and in 1901 there appeared in print a copious representation of the private correspondence of this likable and energetic man. No collection of correspondence in Canadian historiography is more readable. None can match it for eloquence and wit, for plain, blunt words that catch the spirit of America’s lost and almost forgotten Tories. Through the Winslow Papers there follow the fortunes of the Loyalists in their disillusioned days at New York, in the excitements and hazards of entrance to a new country, in the disappointments of old age as the great venture in New Brunswick failed to produce the society that was perfect and gentlemanlike. Edward Winslow’s ambitions and failures, his financial distress in later life, his refusal to submit to the frequent manifestations of a lesser perfection that he saw all around him in New Brunswick may be taken as a mirror for the times and travails of the Loyalists. Burdened with debt and by a multitude of offices that yielded him little income, he died in 1815. Among his friends his wit and good cheer were proverbial. His adversity never dimmed his spirit. “I shall go up to Heaven and shake hands with Lazarus for damme if there is any man on this earth poor enough to keep me company,” he once declared.

New Brunswick was a land of promise only for the young and the strong who could labor with their hands. When the Loyalists came the country was almost completely untouched by settlement, the dark forests brooding over slender tracts of interval land on the banks of the rivers. Gentlemen of education and some substance who were well advanced in the course of life were compelled to plant and harvest their own crops for, in a new country where free grants of land were available to all who wanted them, tenantry was an institution that could not take root. Every man had all the land he needed but land was worth only the labor expended upon it. Had the Loyalist immigration not been financed by the British Government, had the King’s bounty not been freely expended in compensations, pensions, half-pay, it is extremely dubious whether or not a permanent settlement on a large scale could have taken place on the banks of the St. John in 1783 and the years following. The hopes of New Brunswick and of all the remaining colonies in North America lay in the continued flow of public money from Britain. In 1793, when the war of the French Revolution broke out, these expectations were destroyed. For twenty-two years the British Government could afford no money and very little attention to the development of the remaining empire in North America.

The commercial prospects of the exiled Tories were blighted for a dozen years by that astute American negotiator, John Jay, who, taking advantage of Britain’s urgencies, secured the entrance of American shipping to the British West Indies. Wartime insurance rates against British shipping rose so steeply that Saint John’s fleet of sixty square-rigged vessels disappeared from the seas. Commerce languished and no fresh flood of immigrants arrived to reinforce the slight impact made by the Loyalists on the New Brunswick wilderness. That invariable barometer of impending disaster, a fall in the value of real estate, caused consternation among the few men of capital who had staked everything they possessed in the creation of landed estates in the new country. Twenty years after the establishment of the province no gain in population had been recorded. Morals declined and, amid the swelling waves of agrarian and commercial discontent, New Brunswick produced its Samuel Adamses and John Hancocks in miniature, its tinkers and shoemakers and small storekeepers who cried out for their share of the loaves and fishes of public patronage. There was no happy unanimity in dutiful obedience to the established authorities in Church and State. The politics of New Brunswick rang with contempt and envy for the privileges of the placemen, painfully reminiscent of the faction and strife that had characterized the very worst of the former thirteen colonies, Massachusetts.

Only the more long lived of the Tories saw the day when a new prosperity arrived. When it finally did come it was owing to a number of adventitious factors that had never been foreseen. One of these was President Madison’s magnificent embargo. For twenty years the small traders and fishermen of New Brunswick had been bondsmen to the Americans. But after 1808 the process was reversed as the commercial men of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia wholeheartedly entered upon the business of persuading the Americans to break their own laws. A thriving exchange of American provisions and British manufactured goods at steep discounts developed at the free ports of Saint John and St. Andrew’s. Relaxations in the laws of trade that enabled colonial vessels to enter the Mediterranean and sail directly homeward were made by the British Government. Most important of all was the interruption of the Baltic trade in timber, brought about by the compliance of the Czar of Russia to the strictures of the Napoleonic blockade. This caused the British Government to offer its expanding domestic market for timber to the North American colonies on an exclusive basis. The prosperity that resulted was of the kind never contemplated by the Tories who had dreamed of rural delights and social stratifications. The economy of New Brunswick became one of impetuous skyrocketings and disastrous tailspins, of fortunes suddenly made and just as suddenly lost, of reckless and lawless exploitation of the province’s forest resources. Timber became the great staple and the people of New Brunswick, instead of becoming a happy and bucolic peasantry revering their squires, became dedicated to the desultory habits and dubious morals of nomads and adventurers.

The War of 1812 gave fresh impetus to the favorable elements that were at work. Sheepish New England skippers made their way through the fogs of the Bay of Fundy, hove to beneath the guns of British men-of-war and offered their vessels as prizes. They were directed to sail to the nearest port, usually Saint John or St. Andrew’s where they were magnanimously reimbursed for their cargoes, either in case or in goods, and exhorted to come again on other equally inglorious but highly profitable voyages. So far as the seas about New England were concerned, the avowed British policy was to trade with the enemy. Shipwrights and carpenters of New England in order to find labor came to Saint John where their industry revitalized the city. There were humiliations too. The work of New England privateers roused the Tory animus to try reprisals. In October of 1812 there was great elation in Saint John when word arrived of the capture of the large ship Reward out of Boston along with half a dozen lesser prizes. But the cheers subsided to a murmur of dismay when it became known that the master of the Reward bore letters of safe conduct from the British consul in Boston and that her cargo of flour and dry provisions was destined for the British armies in Spain and Portugal. Again there was no reward for valor at the conclusion of the war when the British Government failed to take advantage of its favorable military position and to insist that the boundaries of New Brunswick should be pushed to the Penobscot so that a secure communication with Canada could be established.

Out of the consequences of the embargo and the War of 1812 New Brunswick and Nova Scotia found their way to a destiny of their own. This destiny was mercantile and oceanic. By the middle of the century their shipping rivaled that of New England. By the third quarter of the century it was commonly asserted that the two Bluenose provinces possessed the third or fourth largest volume of merchant shipping in the world. During the American Civil War the shipping interests of Saint John, finding the business of running the blockade highly profitable, were hoping for a southern victory and the subsequent capture of all the coastal trade of the seceded states. Yet it is scarcely possible to credit very much of this success to the Tories of the American Revolution or to their descendants. Numerically they had been overpowered by the English, Scots and Irish who had come to New Brunswick following the Napoleonic Wars. Even as early as 1825 the lieutenant-governor of the province told the Colonial Office that the Loyalists were socially on the way down, that something should be done for the representatives of the older families who had sacrificed so much for the province in its first days. Even by 1825 the affectations of a gentleman could be taken as the mark of a poor politician. The established Church of England was being dragged from its pedestal. Landed estates were being sold by the sheriff for debts contracted in the timber trade. The politics of the pork barrel, ominously similar in philosophy to that of the American Democrats, were replacing the older ideas of the privileges of the educated and of noblesse oblige.

History has dealt uncharitably with the Loyalist exiles from the victorious states of the American Union. It would be unkind, to the authors as well as to the subjects, to recapitulate upon the treatment they have received from the earlier, patriot historians of the United States. But even from the quarters where it might be expected that their virtues should be immortalized a confused and enigmatic picture emerges. Historians share the frailties of human kind, and it is both plausible and popular to magnify success and to punish failure. The punishment of King George III inexorably continues. The so-called liberal historians of both Canada and Great Britain have, in the tradition established by Charles James Fox, continued to admire and applaud the success of the great Republic. Revolution has been their breath of life and resistance to change their cause for condemnation.

That great British historian, Sir George Otto Trevelyan, whose reverence for his Whig ancestors largely inspired him to write his History of the American Revolution, had no more to say that was good for the American Tories than for the ministers who served George III. Echoing the prejudices of the English Fens, from which so many of the pioneers of Massachusetts had come, of the strenuous anti-episcopacy of Protestant dissent, of the University of Cambridge, the mother of so many enlightened young Whigs, he loses no opportunity to praise the patriots and to scorn those who opposed them. Even when, as in the back parts of the Carolinas, the war was one for Whig beef or for Tory cattle, it was for him plainly perceptible that the Whigs were a superior breed of men. Sublimely ignoring the pleas of Washington and all kinds of other good evidence that could be used to show that on the rebel side there were deserters, thieves and scavengers, he takes great delight in showing that the Tories were poltroons in battle as well as rogues in politics. He has only one good word to say for the men who served the Crown—and even here there is an ambiguity of intention—that if they had remained behind in their homeland the march of temperance legislation in the New England states would have been seriously arrested.

It has been the Trevelyan thesis that has been blown to the four winds by journalists, popularizers and oversimplifiers. Even the more sober ranks of Canadian historical scholarship have shown a disposition to make Canadian history as much as possible like American, to interpret the behavior of the Tories of the eighteenth century from the perspective and hindsight of nineteenth-century thought. Even in Canada the elemental notion that prominently emerges is that they were ridiculous in their pride, quaint because they subordinated their interests to their principles, stupid because they chose the losing side. New Brunswick, where a slender Loyalist core of the population is still sensitive to the meaningfulness of the past, has produced native historians who are censorious of Loyalist morals, critical of Loyalist arrogance and superfluous in their assertions that the Loyalist idea of managing a popular legislature was not that of the enlightened times in which they themselves lived.

Yet nobody of any consequence has ventured to dispute the importance of the task performed by the leaders of the Tory refugees from New England and the other states of the American Union. One of the most eminent of contemporary Canadian historians has entitled his chapter on the period following the American Revolution as “The Survival of British North America.” On the face of things it is perhaps one of the minor miracles of history that a British nation ever developed to the north of the emancipated and triumphant lost thirteen colonies. In 1783 to give assurance to the promise there were little more than seventy thousand French Canadians, admittedly more fearful of Boston than of Westminster, yet still only nominally loyal to Britain, and the Tories. Of these there were in the lower provinces by the sea about thirty thousand, in Canada rather less than ten thousand. This thin line of Loyalist colonization, extending from the Atlantic to Lake Huron, held firm for forty years against American assertions of manifest destiny, against all the centrifugal and disruptive forces that a hostile geography and adverse commercial pressures could muster. Somehow or other these authoritarian and determined Tories created the conscience of a common citizenship, that, two generations later, was to be the most fundamental factor in the making of Canadian confederation. An historian of persuasion as well as of learning and understanding might very well adopt as his theme that not one commonwealth but two arose out of the tumults surrounding Boston Common in the years before 1776, that the Tories who evacuated Boston took with them some of the necessary ingredients of Canadian nationality.

They brought more than mere loyalty to their new homes. As some writers have implied they were not simple and uncritical cyphers for the royal perogative. Many of them had, until the actual outbreak of hostilities, sympathized with the protests that had been made against British imperial policies in a constitutional way. Just as sincerely as the patriots they were upholders of “the rights of Englishmen.” They brought to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia the ideas of government to which New Englanders had so of frequently given expression, those of the right of a popular assembly to control taxation, the equality of all before the law and freedom of speech and of assembly. They were not very good republicans but they loved liberty. In the story of how Nova Scotia and New Brunswick advanced to self-government within the British Empire no two names are more notable than those of Joseph Howe and Lemuel Allen Wilmot. Both were sons of Tories of the American Revolution. Howe was the son of John Howe, publisher of the Massachusetts Gazette who fled to Halifax in 1776. Late in life the son, the most eloquent and reasoned of all British North Americans who sought political reform, made a speech in Boston in which he described how his father, though he had lost everything he possessed in the Revolution, never lost affection for the home of his youth or the opportunity to do a kindness to a Boston man. During the War of 1812 John Howe, King’s printer at Halifax, redeemed Boston sailors from His Majesty’s prison at Melville Island and, when he was an old gentleman, frequently returned to Boston in order to improve his health and to walk on his beloved Common.

The unrepentant Tory historian, seeking for evidence to vindicate the men who were loyal to the Crown, can find much in the times and the lives of the Tories, to sustain the allegations they themselves so frequently and rather arrogantly made, that they constituted the greater part of the wealth, the talent and the educated classes of the thirteen colonies. Especially with reference to New England, where there were fewer and more conspicuous Tories, this is so. It may be difficult to find a test for an aristocracy, but a rough and ready one is available. Historians of Harvard and Yale have not yet competed for the dubious honor of taking a census of their living graduates of the generation of the Revolution in order to discover how many of them were in the ranks of the patriots and how many were not. Certainly British North America and the colonies in the West Indies must have acquired a large proportion of them. One authority states that nearly one hundred graduates of Harvard evacuated Boston with General Gage in 1776. For the Tory it is more than mildly satisfying to discover that, when Harvard was employed as a barracks during the siege of Boston, young Benjamin Thompson was instrumental in saving the books and the scientific apparatus in the library from destruction at the hands of a revolutionary mob who believed that the college was a hotbed of Toryism. During the excitements of Shays’ Rebellion and the other uncertainties that followed in the wake of the Revolution New England may have missed the firm hands of men who had been trained to govern. But the Tory historian must ruefully record that the Tories were entirely unaware of New England’s capacity to reproduce aristocracies whose spendor would exceed their own.

It is unreasonable to suppose that even Massachusetts, where political rigors were sharper than in any of the other colonies, lost all its Tories. Tradition records that at least two rather remarkable ones, definitely not of the hole-in-corner variety, lived on in Boston, openly proclaiming their faith for fifty years after the Revolution. These were the Byles sisters who resided at their family home on the corner of Tremont and Nassau, now Common, Streets. Their brother had become the clever and erudite rector of Saint John. Their father had been the only clergyman of the Congregational Church of New England who adhered to the royal cause. Through their long lives they missed no opportunity to declare that it was better to live under a king than under a republic and to remind their hearers that as young women they had walked arm-in-arm on Boston Common with Prince William, General Howe, Lord Percy and other British dignitaries. When in 1830 the same Prince William became King of England they wrote to him to say that the family of Doctor Byles of Boston always had been and would continue to be loyal to their rightful sovereign.

Even in the twentieth century Tory murmurs have arisen. A publisher of Milk Street in Boston, James H. Stark, came to the conviction that the reputation of the Tories had been grossly abused, that important historical truths had been concealed from his fellow-citizens, that the legend of British tyranny and oppression had no sound basis in fact. His History of the Loyalists of Massachusetts, published in 1910, is a manful attempt to remedy injustice. There is nothing simple in human affairs, and the American Revolution, like other great conflicts, cannot be reduced to a contest between right and wrong. The addressers of Governor Hutchinson and of General Gage, the mandamus councilors, the victims of the Banishment Act, were, like other citizens of New England, capable of good intentions and they loved their country. Yet in the United States they have been allowed little of the chivalry and understanding that have been accorded to another group of vanquished Americans in another great civil war, the leaders of the Southern Confederacy. So long as the great debate on the American Revolution continues the American Tories cannot be completely ignored. Their points of view, their strengths and weaknesses, require interpretation by American historians that will reflect the virtues of the great American democracy, those of generosity and tolerance.

1 The prohibitive law was not cancelled until 1797.

2 Joseph Tinker Buckingham described the sheriff’s visit in “Dramatic Reminiscences,” The New England Magazine (series 2, 1832), ii. 368.

3 Detailed description of theater in FO, 10 November 1794.

4 Paine was christened Thomas. His elder brother Robert Treat, Jr. died in 1801. In 1803 he petitioned to take the brother’s name and officially became Robert Treat Paine, junior. To avoid unnecessary confusion we consistently refer to him by the latter name. See Names Changed in Massachusetts, 1892 (Boston, 1893), ii.

5 Thomas O. Selfridge, The Works in Verse and Prose of the Late Robert Treat Paine, Jr. (Boston, 1812), lxxi.

6 Leon Edel, Henry James, The Untried Years (Philadelphia, 1953), 199.

7 William Allen, American Biographical and. Historical Dictionary (Boston, 1832), 630; William Dunlap, History of the American Theatre (New York, 1832), 133; George O. Seilhamer, History of the American Theatre (1792–1797) (Philadelphia, 1891), 233.

8 Paine was granted a generous number of pages in V. L. Parrington’s Main Currents of American Thought (New York, 1930), ii. 288–295, under “the Tie-Wig School.” See also Van Wyck Brooks, The World, of Washington Irving (New York, 1944), 62.

9 For a careful treatment of his poetry and the influences upon it, with additions to those available in The Works, see Ruth Thorndike Clough, “A Study of the Life and Works of Robert Treat Paine, Jr.,” unpublished University of Maine M.A. thesis, 1930.

10 Retrospections of America, 1797–1811, ed. Mrs. Bayle Bernard, with introduction, notes, and index by Lawrence Hutton and Brander Matthews (New York, 1887), 292. Contemporary account of Bernard in Poly. (April 1806), 1–13.

11 James D. Hart on “The Power of Sympathy,” The Popular Book (New York, 1950), 61 ff.

12 CC, 12 February 1794. Zimmermann described as “Counsellor and Physician to his Britannic Majesty at Hanover.” Cf. Harold S. Jantz, “German Thought and Literature in New England,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology (1942), xli. 28.

13 CC, 12 February 1794.

14 The material on Paine’s early life is based on the unpublished letters and diaries contained in the “Paine Papers” in possession of The Massachusetts Historical Society (accession, 1940). All citations from letters refer to this collection, unless otherwise indicated.

15 Ms. letter of 28 February 1774.

16 Ms. letter of 12 July 1775.

17 Ms. letter from Cambridge, 2 June 1790.

18 Ms. letter from Hollis Hall, 29 December 1790.

19 The diary runs from 1785 to 1791.

20 Ms. letter by Joseph Willard from Cambridge, 18 November 1791. Also Faculty Records in Harvard Archives.

21 Ms. diary, 23 November 1791.

22 Ms. letter from Harvard, November 1791, addressed to Paine, senior, at Worcester.

23 Letters from Sanger, 27 February and 17 March 1792.

24 Plea in ms. letter from Bridgewater, 27 February 1792.

25 Library Charging Lists for 1790, 1791, 1792 in Harvard Archives.

26 Ms. letter from Tisdale to Paine, senior, 21 August 1792.

27 Joseph T. Buckingham in Specimens of Newspaper Reminiscences (Boston, 1850), ii, 148, identifies Paine as Menander. See also Charles Prentiss in Works of Robert Treat Paine (Boston, 1812), XXX.

28 “A Friend to Peace” was probably Benjamin Austin, who wrote for The Independent Chronicle under various names. Cf. Buckingham, “Dramatic Reminiscences,” New England Magazine (March 1832), ii. 223.

29 CC, 19 December 1792 and 22 December 1792. Another series of articles in the same paper (1792) advocated the repeal of the statute against stage plays.

30 Independent Chronicle, 24 November 1791, in clippings in Harvard Theatre Collection.

31 Robert Turnbull, The Theatre in its Influence upon Literature, Morals, and Religion (Boston, 1839), 109–110.

32 A A, 30 January 1794, iii. 18.

33 Prologue in Works, ed. Prentiss, 159–160.

34 CC, 12 February 1794.

35 Henry’s defense in CC, 15 February 1794.

36 CC, 23 April 1794.

37 Ms. Diary of Paine, senior (MHS).

38 Diary of William Bentley (Salem, 1907), ii. 127 and 132.

39 A A, 10 and 17 April 1794.

40 Ibid., 10 April 1794. Paine’s interest in Eliza Baker no doubt colored his judgment of Miss Harrison, who was a rival for some of the same parts.

41 CC, 8 March 1794.

42 Sir Henry Home (Lord Kames) on the “manifold . . . advantages of criticism” in Elements of Criticism (New York, 1866), 27–30. (The first American edition of Kames, published in Boston in 1796, reprint of 7th London edition, according to William Charvat, Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810–1835 [Philadelphia, 1936], 30.)

43 FO, 12 November 1795.

44 Orrery prospectus in CC, 6 September 1794.

45 Journal of Frances Anne Butler (Philadelphia, 1935), i. 154–155. Eighteenth-century American newspaper files merit further study.

46 Copied from Bell’s London Chronicle.

47 FO, December 1794, 70.

48 FO, 29 December 1794, 82.

49 FO, 22 December 1794, 74–75.

50 FO, 29 December 1794, 82.

51 FO, 8 January 1795, 94.

52 The Medium played 2 March 1795. Orrery notice, 2 March 1795, 155.

53 FO, 25 May 1795.

54 The address is an extension of an earlier signed version, which was employed as a prologue to The Mistakes of a Night; or, She Stoops to Conquer. The later version was “intended to have been spoken by Colonel J. S. Tyler, at the opening of the Boston Theatre” for the season of 1795–1796. Address quoted in FO, 9 November 1795, 22.

55 FO, i February 1796, 118.

56 MM, ii March 1796.

57 RG, 9 January 1800.

58 MM, ii March 1796.

59 Paine’s commentary on play in FO, 14, 21, 24 March 1796, 166, 175, 189.

60 Traveller Returned printed in The Gleaner, III. (February 1798), Act I, 116–117.

61 J. S. Murray’s note in FO, 17 March 1796, 171.

62 MM, 22 and 25 March 1796. In MM Paine was called “dog of the Orrery.” Third performance of play given for benefit of widows and orphans of Boston on 13 May 1796. Joseph T. Buckingham in his Newspaper Reminiscences (Boston, 1850), ii. 243–247, discusses the controversy. See also Arthur Hobson Quinn, History of the American Drama (New York, 1943), 126, note 2, and Vera Bernadette Field, Constantia, A Study of the Life and Works of Judith Sargent Murray, University of Maine Studies (Orono, 1931), xxxiii. 7.

63 One of the important contributors to FO was Joseph Dennie. See Harold Milton Ellis, Joseph Dennie and His Circle, A Study in American Literature from 1792 to 1812, University of Texas Bulletin (1915), 69–72.

64 FO, 30 October, 6 and 10 November 1794.

65 FO, 4 December 1794 and subsequent issues. The next year Thomas Hall and Joseph Nancrede were advertising a French and English bookstore in CC, 25 July 1795. After listing items like Molière and La Fontaine, they publicly stated their purpose: “. . . to transplant—to naturalize, into fertile America, the exotic seeds of European genius; to alleviate the burthen of American writers, by presenting them with all that has been written, on the subject they contemplate—to increase their number, by removing their fears of repeating what others have said . . . to free the New World from the Moral Tyranny, which Great-Britain has exercised for ages over the minds of Americans, by shutting every Avenue to European, and especially to French Literature.” Ellis identifies Nancrede as “a Frenchman, a bookseller, teacher, and editor” (Joseph Dennie and His Circle, 101).

66 Henry Home emphasized “incident” in a special sense: “A play analyzed is a chain of connected facts, of which each scene makes a link. Each scene, accordingly, ought to produce some incident relative to the catastrophe or ultimate event, by advancing or retarding it. A scene that produceth no incident, and for that reason may be termed barren, ought not to be indulged, because it breaks the unity of action; a barren scene can never be entitled to a place, because the chain is complete without it” (Elements of Criticism, 459).

67 FO, 29 December 1794, 82.

68 In a discussion of Mrs. Inchbald’s Every One Has His Fault, FO, 19 January 1795.

69 Commentary on acting in FO, 22 December 1795, 75; 19 January 1795, 107; 5 and 12 November 1795, 18, 25, 26.

70 Inkle and Yarico performance, 23 January 1795. FO, 26 January 1795, 114–115.

71 FO, 29 January 1795, 119.

72 FO, 10 April 1795.

73 FO, 28 September and 5 November 1795, 391, 18.

74 FO, 10 January, 5 November, 29 December 1795.

75 FO, 4 April 1796, 185.

76 CC, 28 June, 24 October, and 15 November 1794. By 16 December 1796 Baker was advertising another establishment in MM.

77 CC, 22 and 29 January, 1794.

78 CC, 22 January 1794.

79 CC, 26 February and 8 March 1794.

80 AA, 27 February 1794.

81 MM, 10 August 1798.

82 MM, 13 April 1798.

83 CC, 22 February 1794. (see also clippings in Harvard Theatre Collection).

84 FO, 18 December 1794, 71, and 29 December.

85 FO, 5 November 1795, 19.

86 FO, 29 December 1794, 82.

87 FO, 12 November 1795, 25.

88 BG, 21 November and 17 December 1804; 28 May 1807.

89 The Theatre, 83, 89.

90 Dunlap refers often to prostitutes in the audience in History of The American Theatre (cf. 211).

91 BG, 28 January 1802.

92 FO, 8 and ii January 1795. “The Service of the Prompter . . . less sonorous than usual” in 1802; BG, 7 January 1802.

93 Poly, May 1812, 235.

94 Frances Anne Butler, Journal (Philadelphia, 1835), ii. 132–133.

95 MM, 17 August 1798.

96 CC, 19 November 1796.

97 J. T. Buckingham, New England Galaxy, 21 March 1823, 284.

98 Play announcements for the 1796 season in CC.

99 New England Galaxy, 21 March 1823, 284.

100 MM, 21 March 1797.

101 Seilhamer (History of the American Theatre, 341) says this was “probably by Paine, as it was given for the joint benefit of Mr. Paine, the dramatist, and Mr. Campbell, the prompter of the theatre, with Mr. Baker, Paine’s father-in-law, as the Clown . . .” We have been unable to find more convincing evidence than these circumstances.

102 MM, 23 May 1797 and CC, 24 May 1797.

103 CC, 20 May 1797. Werter, followed by scenes from The Mountaineers, Bickerstaff’s Absent Man, and a Grand Fandango Dance. For summary of the Reynolds’ play see Stuart Pratt Atkins, The Testament of Werther in Poetry and Drama (Cambridge, 1949), 180–189 (also for bibliography of Werther poetry). William James, The Letters of Charlotte during Her Connexion with Werter (1786) was being sold by John West, November 1797. (Graves’s translation of Werther and Charlotte. The Sorrows of Werther, A German Story, to which is annexed the letters of Charlotte to a female friend, [by W. James] Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1798: in B. Q. Morgan listing.)

104 MM, 13 April 1798. Daranzel was performed twice in 1800.

105 David Everett, Daranzel; or, The Persian Patriot (Boston, 1800), Act II, scene i, 16.

106 RG, 9 January 1800.

107 RG, 4 June 1798 and MM, 8 June 1798.

108 Dedicatory address reprinted in Works, 199–201.

109 MM, 22 February 1799 and CC, 23 February 1799. Re “Adams and Liberty” see James Spear Loring, The Hundred Boston Orators from 1770 to 1852 (Boston, 1853), 286. The Ode in Works, 245–247. Dunlap’s adaptation of Lovers’ Vows opened in New York, ii March 1799.

110 She worked from a literal translation which came to her in “broken English.” See Lovers’ Vows, from the German of Kotzebue by Mrs. Inchbald (London, 1799), iv. Inchbald translation also printed in Boston 1799. Original in Theater von August v. Kotzebue (Leipzig, 1840), ii. Valuable material on Kotzebue translations can be found in Oral Summer Coad, William Dunlap (New York, 1917), 208–237; B. Q. Morgan, A Critical Bibliography of German Literature in English Translation, 1481–1927 (Stanford, 1938), 280–290; Frederick H. Wilkins, “Early Influence of German Literature in America,” Americana Germanica (1899), iii. 110–1365 and American Plays Printed 1714–1830, compiled by Frank Pierce Hill (Stanford, 1934), 25–36.

111 Menzel accused him of converting Parnassus into a brothel, and Gervinus said, “. . . we cannot dispense with, but we can despise him.” See L. F. Thompson, Kotzebue, A Survey of His Progress in France and England (Paris, 1928), 6–7; and Walter F. Schirmer, Der Einfluss der deutschen Literatur auf die englische im. 19. Jahrhundert (Halle/Saale, 1947), 23–24. German critical attacks summarized in Chapter I of Albert William Holzmann, Family Relationships in the Dramas of August von Kotzebue (Princeton, 1935).

112 Kotzebue’s averaging, in Vienna, forty-five showings annually in eighty years to 1867 “was by no means a flash in the pan,” says W. H. Bruford, Theatre, Drama and Audience in Goethe’s Germany (London, 1950), 264. See also Lawrence Marsden Price, English Literature in Germany (Berkeley, 1953), 163.

113 Orie William Long, Literary Pioneers, Early Explorers of European Culture (Cambridge, 1935), 28–29.

114 Lovers’ Vows, 1799, v.

115 Act II, scene i, 26.

116 Act V, scene 2, 88.

117 Act V, scene 2, 91.

118 Act II, scene 2, 33.

119 See also “Biographical Notice of Mrs. Whitlock, the American Siddons,” The Thespian Mirror, 4 January 1806, 9–10.

120 Payne, Lovers’ Vows (Baltimore, 1809; copy in Houghton Library). Gabriel Harrison, John Howard Payne (Philadelphia, 1885) and Willis T. Hanson, The Early Life of John Howard Payne (“with contemporary letters heretofore unpublished,” Boston, 1913). Hanson includes letter from Payne to Robert Treat Paine from New York 11 June 1809, 124–125. See also Sarah C. Paine, Paine Ancestry, ed. C. H. Pope (Boston, 1912), and Grace Overmyer, America’s First Hamlet (New York, 1957).

121 Poly, February 1812, 65. Emerald in an attack refers to Lovers’ Vows, “admitting it to be more free from faults than any other production of Kotzebue” (25 October 1806, 304).

122 Mansfield Park, I, in Novels and Letters of Jane Austen (New York, 1906), v. 187–199.

123 E, 27 December 1806, 412, and new series, 23 January 1808, i. 161. Works, 353.

124 George O. Willard, History of the Providence Stage (Providence, 1891), 73.

125 Kotzebue, The Stranger (tr. B. Thompson, Boston, n.d. [1807?]), Act I, scene i, 8. Original in Theater von A. v. Kotzebue, i. Papendick trans, published in Boston and Salem in 1799. Copy of Salem edition in Huntington Library.

126 Joseph N. Ireland, Mrs. Duff (Boston, 1882); Clapp, History of the Boston Stage, 116; Willard, History of the Providence Stage, 78; Dramatic Mirror, 3 February 1829.

127 Anna Cora Mowatt, Autobiography of an Actress (Boston, 1853), 247–248.

128 Kotzebue felt that the anecdote would sweeten his last hour: Theater von August von Kotzebue (Leipzig, 1840), ii. 125.

129 W. M. Thackeray, Pendennis (London, n.d., Chiswick Edition), i. 57.

130 Paine’s admission to the bar “at the Court of Common Pleas, for the county of Suffolk,” announced in BG, ii January 1802.

131 E. Vale Smith, History of Newburyport (Newburyport, 1854), 326.

132 Theophilus Parsons, Memoir of Theophilus Parsons, by his son (Boston, 1859), 136.

133 Newburyport Herald and Country Gazette, 15 February 1799, ii.

134 RG, 30 December 1799.

135 RG, 26 December 1799.

136 Ms. letter from Newburyport, 19 January 1800 (MHS). Paine’s earlier oration on the dissolution of the alliance with France had been highly praised by Washington himself.

137 RG, 26 September 1799 and 13 February 18005 BG, 9 December 1799.

138 BG, 17 and 20 November 1800.

139 E, ii April 1807, 173. According to Mrs. Inchbald, Cumberland lifted The Wheel of Fortune from “a critique of Kotzebue’s drama in a review.” First Boston performance of Wheel of Fortune, 4 January 1796.

140 Dunlap, Thirty Years ago; or, Memoirs of a Water Drinker (New York, 1837), 79. Coad, in William Dunlap, 278, refers to “striking resemblance” between Treadwell and Paine.

141 R. B. Sheridan adaptation. RG, 17 October, 9 and 12 December 1799 (first Boston performance, 9 December). (Thompson, Kotzebue’s Progress, 66, discusses Sheridan’s alterations: “The play is Kotzebue’s, not Sheridan’s.”)

142 BG, 16, 23, and 26 February 1801. (Paine’s criticism reprinted in Works, 39 off.) By the end of 1804 the demand for this “localized habitation” was to be carried so far that a quibbler asked of the scenery used in Paul and Virginia: “Should not the Trees exhibit the foliage of that country, and not the leaves of Europe or America?” (BG, 13 December 1804).

143 BG, 26 February 1801.

144 Pizarro; a tragedy taken from the German drama of Kotzebue and adapted to the English stage by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (tenth edition, London, 1799), Act V, scene 3, 62. A Boston reprint of Sheridan adaptation in 1809. Original in Theater von A. v. Kotzebue, iv.

145 Act V, scene 3, 64.

146 Works, 393–394.

147 RG, 26 September and 31 October 1799. Count Benyowsky was played in Salem and Providence in 1803 (Buckingham, Personal Memoirs, 1. 52). 1800 Boston reprint of B. Thompson translation listed by Morgan. Original in Theater von A. v. Kotzebue, iv.

148 BG, 10 and 13 November 1800. Hoare translation printed by S. Etheridge for E. Larkin in Boston, 1800. Copy in Houghton Library.

149 Peter Oliver, “The Boston Theatre, 1800,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, xxxiv. 554–570.

150 William Dunlap, False Shame and Thirty Years, ed. Oral Sumner Coad (Princeton, 1940); Act IV, 50.

151 Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (Leipzig, 1880), 1. 185.

152 RG, 15 and 29 September 1800; BG, 22 December 1800.

153 BG, 1 July 1802.

154 In Atheneum; or, Spirit of the English Magazines, v. [1819], 321–3235 vi. [1820], 358–360, called “the greatest dramatic genius of the age.” Dispatches from various German cities detailing the assassination, in Boston Weekly Messenger, viii. 528, 530, 564. Kotzebue references in American magazines in S. H. Goodnight, German Literature in American Magazines Prior to 1846, University of Wisconsin Bulletin (1907), iv. 247.

155 The Boston edition, in Huntington Library, differs in pagination from the London edition of the same year, though Wilkens and Morgan call it a probable reprint. The Constant Lover; or, William and Jeannette: a Tale “From the German of Augustus von Kotzebue, author of The Stranger, Lovers’ Vows, Self-Immolation, Virgin of the Sun, &c. To which is prefixed, An Account of the Literary Life of the Author. Two volumes in one. Printed for Joseph Bumstead, Boston, 1799” (trans. anon.).

156 I, vii.

157 Page viii.

158 Page ix.

159 Pages 25–26.

160 Columbian Phoenix and Boston Review (June 1800), i. 365–366.

161 The account of the proposed drama tells of Appenine scenery, an exiled Spanish prince, a lady of inferior rank but infinite virtue, a vengeful father, all involved in a Kotzebue-like climax: “Humanity saved his enemy; his enemy became his friend; and the divine impulses of friendship induced him to forego the rights of a conqueror.” Works, lvii.

162 BG, 18 February 1802.

163 Ibid.

164 BG, ii February 1802.

165 BG, 17 May 1802.

166 Review of Harlequin Ranger, BG, 7 March 1803.

167 [Sargent], Boston (Boston, 1803). (Copy in Houghton Library.) Re Abaellino, BG, 19 and 22 November 1802. (Boston printing of Dunlap’s Abaellino in 1802.)

168 BG, 13 January, 2 May, 4 July 1803. See Coad, William Dunlap, 171–173.

169 Paine’s relationship with his father and his clients had been passable in 1802. When Paine, senior, was in Worcester that year, the son wrote him about fever conditions in Boston and told of a grandchild just recovered from illness. Ms. letter signed “Your obedient son,” Boston, 30 September 1802 (MHS).

170 Thespian Mirror (New York, 1805), xi. 89.

171 Boston Weekly Magazine, ii February 1804, 63; BG, 17 October and 3 November 1803.

172 BG, 12 December 1803.

173 The Monthly Mirror, signed “N.Y., 1805” by “Terence.”

174 BG, 3 November 1803.

175 T. Allston Brown, History of the American Stage (New York, 1870), 197.

176 Ms. letter from Selfridge, Boston, 7 December 1811 (MHS). We have been unable to find any comment from Eliza Baker Paine.

177 George C. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (New York, 1927), ii. 247.

178 BG, 28 November 1803.

179 BG, 3 November 1803.

180 BG, 24 October and 8 December 1803. (Works, 397.)

181 BG, 14 and 21 November 1803. (Only second section reprinted in Works, 396.)

182 BG, 28 November 1803.

183 BG, 5 December 1803.

184 BG, 27 February 1804.

185 BG, 15 March 1804.

186 Boston Weekly Magazine, 25 February 1804.

187 Mrs. Stanley (the Honorable Mrs. Twisleton) played Elvira to Caulfield’s Rolla. BG, 3 November 1806. Re American debut of The Stranger see The American Theatre as Seen by Its Critics, 1752–1934, ed. Moses and Brown (New York, 1934), 27.

188 Carpenter’s Epilogue to White’s Foscari spoken by Mrs. Whitlock, Poly, April 1806, 58. On 30 November 1807 Mrs. Warren played Elvira “to a large and fashionable audience,” says Clapp, 91. Miss Brunton, Mrs. Merry, Mrs. Wignell, Mrs. Warren, all same actress. See Bernard, 72, note.

189 BT, 26 December 1807, 9. See Thackeray on Fotheringay’s Cora: “She had not much to do in her part, but to look handsome, and stand in picturesque attitudes encircling her child . . .” (Pendennis, i. 185).

190 Poly, April 1807, 64. Typical comment of period in Comet, 14 December 1811, 100: “This play, though immoral in its tendency, is nevertheless very interesting.”

191 E, 5 July 1806, 109. E conducted by Joshua Belcher and Samuel T. Armstrong until turned over to Oliver C. Greenleaf in October 1807.

192 Poly, July 1806, Paine’s song and Woodworth’s Ode, 275–278. (Paine’s reprinted in Works, 272–273.)

193 Boston Union Circulating Library List, July 1806.

194 Port Folio, i January 1801. See Ellis, Joseph Dennie and His Circle, 141–142.

195 E, 7 March 1807, 118; 3 May 1806, ii; 28 March 1807, 149. Kotzebue’s platitudinous remarks on various aspects of life were frequent inserts in other journals. By 1820 there were Boston excerpts from “A Mr. Muchler at Berlin” who “extracted from 107 works of Kotzebue, a collection of 905 thoughts, observations, &c. which will doubtless be very popular” (E. Athenaeum, vi. 358).

196 E, 18 October 1806, 296; 25 October 1806, 304 (review of Lovers’ Vows). Speed the Plough first played in 1800.

197 “A brief sketch of the life of Frederic Schiller, the German Dramatist; condensed from the Monthly Magazine,” E, 24 May 1806, 41; 31 May 1806, 53.

198 E, 6 December 1806, 382.

199 E, 15 November 1806, 347.

200 Poly, June 1806, 153–157 [Theatrical Recorder].

201 “Character of the Principal European Languages,” E, 17 October 1807, 500.

202 “Genius and Poetry,” E, 25 July 1807, 359.

203 E, 24 January 1807, 42.

204 E, new series (15 October 1808), i. 620. See George Bancroft’s later accusation that Kotzebue substituted for “the springs of pure and uncorrupted feeling . . . the strange, the unexpected, the extravagant” and imitated “humanity most abominably.” (Review of Taylor’s Historic Survey of German Poetry, III, in American Quarterly Review [September 1831], X. 194–210.)

205 O, 13 and 20 May 1809, 290, 291, 293, 307, 392. The blasphemous grouping went on until a Boston review of The Stranger as “a piece of snivelling vice cringing to affected virtue” could say its style “is a libel on the names of such men as Goethe and Schiller, to call German.” (Dramatic Mirror, 12 February 1829) Original Rovers; or, The Double Arrangement in Anti-Jacobin; or, Weekly Examiner, 4 June 1798, 236–239; ii June 1798, 242–246. (British concern with error re “American War” in Cabal and Love, 237.) Rovers reprinted in Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, ed. L. Rice-Oxley (Oxford, 1924), xxx.

206 Alexander Flohr in Die Satire, The Rovers; or, The Double Arrangement, Weimar, 1907 (Diss. Greifswald) indicates the specific German targets for the British attacks.

207 “George Saintsbury: Gourmet and Glutton” in Classics and Commercials (New York, 1951), 369–370.

208 Buckingham, Personal Memoirs, ii. 51–52 (note). Account of starting Ordeal with Benjamin Pollard, 62–63.

209 W. D. Howells, Criticism and Fiction (New York, 1892), 86–87.

210 First appeared under Paine’s Macklin signature in BG, 8 December 1803 (Works, 400). See also “The Rights of the Players” in Buckingham’s Comet, 7 December 1811, 91: “What right has he whose imagination in its most daring flights never soared above the shelf which contains the ledger and waste book, to insult and put to confusion the player. . . .”

211 See Joseph N. Ireland, Life of Thomas Abthorpe Cooper (New York, 1888) and Fennell, Apology for the Life of James Fennell (Philadelphia, 1814).

212 BT, 12 December 1807, i.

213 BT, 23 January 1808, 27 (Works, 353ff.).

214 R. Cooper’s visit, BG, 7 March, 8, 15, 25 April 1805.

215 BT, 30 January 1808, 30–31 (Works, 357ff.).

216 Ibid.

217 BT, 6 February 1808, 35 (Works, 366ft.).

218 Cooper and Fennell as Othello, BT, 27 February 1808, 47 (Works, 377ff.).

219 Cooper and Fennell as Iago, BT, 5 March 1808, 51 (Works, 384ff.).

220 BT, 13 February 1808, 39 (Works, 373).

221 BT, 20 February 1808, 43.

222 Article by “E. S. O.” in BT, 13 February 1808, 26.

223 BT, 5 March 1808, 51 (Works, 386–387).

224 Irving’s criticism, “Theatricks” by William Wizard, Esq., reprinted in two issues of BT, 14 and 21 May 1808, 90, 94, 95.

225 BT, 6 February 1808, 35.

226 BG, 8 April 1802.

227 BT, 6 February 1808, 35.

228 BT, 13 February 1808, 39 (Works, 37off.).

229 E, new series, 16 April 1808, i. 310–311.

230 BT, 6 February 1808, 35.

231 Ms. letter in MHS, Boston, 7 December 1811.

232 Port Folio, 7 November 1807, 299. See also lengthy posthumous review of Paine’s poetry in same journal, series 4 (1813), i. 441–457.

233 BG, 9 February 1809 and 23 March 1809. O, 29 April 1809.

234 A decade ago Douglas was revived at the Eaglet Theater in Sacramento (20, 21, and 29 October 1949).

235 Monthly Anthology and Boston Review (February 1810), viii. 91 and (February 1808), V. 97–98.

236 BG, 8 January 1810. Sixth performance given 23 February 1810.

237 Ibid.

238 Bioren wrote for The Whim, ed. Fennell and Thomas Waterman (Philadelphia, May 1814), i. 13.

239 Works, 214ff.

240 Dramatic Mirror, 12 February 1829.

241 BG, 8 November and 13 December 1810.

242 The Poor Lodger (Boston, 1811), Act V, scene i, 80.

243 Ibid., 90.

244 American Captive performed in Boston, ii December 1811. For Paine’s connection with it see CC, 7 December 1811. Play reviewed in Comet, 14 December 1811, 100–101. In 1808 Paine had assisted another native playwright, John D. Turnbull, with The Wood Daemon; or, The Clock has Struck!, Boston, 1808 (first performance, 9 May 1808).

245 BG, 19 April 1810. For posthumous renditions of Paine’s songs see The New England Palladium, 22 April 1814.

246 BG, 4 February 1811.

247 BG, 3, 14, 24 January and 7 February 1811.

248 William Dunlap, Memoirs of George Frederick Cooke (London, 1813), ii, 208–211.

249 BG, 14 October 1811.

250 Comet, 26 October 1811, 14, 16; 14 December 1811, 100.

251 “The evning [sic] at ¼ past 8 o’clock my Son Rob. T. Paine passed this after a short illness at my house.” Ms. Diary of Robert Treat Paine from 1785 on (MHS).

252 BG, 14 and 18 November 1811 and CC, 16 November 1811

253 Ms. letter from Boston, 7 December 1811 (MHS).

254 Buckingham in Newspaper Reminiscences, ii. 274, says Prentiss was “at sundry times a correspondent of . . . (the) Boston Gazette.” For Prentiss’ own work see Haven; or, The Merited Gallows, in A Collection of Fugitive Essays in Prose and Verse (Leominster, Mass., 1797). (Houghton Library.)

255 Ms. letter from Boston, 23 November 1811 (MHS).

256 Comet, 7 December 1811, 94–95, reported that the theater was “handsomely filled” for Boston’s “favorite poet,” that “every lover of native genius” mourned his passing to “his narrow house.” Paine had worked over original prologue, intending to add sketches of the principal English dramatists.

257 William Dean Howells, The Vacation of the Kelwyns, an Idyl of the Middle Eighteen-Seventies (New York, 1920), 114–116.

258 Walter Camp, incidentally, was one of its alumni.

259 Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts in the College Library.

260 Tolstoy, it would seem, is leaner in 1957 than in The Farnsworth Room in 1921.

261 Iveagh MSS. O.35, printed in Appendix 7. MSS. O.4 is an itemized statement of solicitor’s costs between Michelmas term 1708, when the suit was begun and Hilary 1715. The amount was £192 - 6 - 4, of which about half was allowed by the court out of the Hopkins estate, and the other half paid by the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel. Matthew Evans receipted the bill on 30 March 1715.

262 The Maharajah Duleep Singh, ex-ruler of the Punjab, settled at Elveden in 1863, and became lord of the manor of Eriswell by purchasing the Company’s estate in 1869. No other Company records seem to have been handed over, apart from a few estate documents of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

263 Elveden is owned by the Earl of Iveagh, K.G., C.B., C.M.G., through whose courtesy these documents have been consulted. It is a pleasure to acknowledge this kindness, and the excellent facilities provided by Mr. James Speed. I owe my introduction to the records to Mrs. Alan Rowe, The Elms, Ixworth, Suffolk, who deserves the credit for discovering them.

264 An abstract of Sir Henry’s will was printed in New England Historical and Genealogical Register (Boston, 1884), V. 38, 313–316, together with those of his nephews, Henry and Edward Hopkins.

265 A complete copy of Henry Hopkins’ will is in Iveagh MSS. O. i. He left “all that household stuff he has of mine in Clare Hall” to one fellow, and memorial rings to a number of others.

266 See footnote 9.

267 John Winthrop, The History of New England, James Savage, ed. (Boston, 1853), ii. 266. For Governor Hopkins, see D.N.B., D.A.B., J. H. Trumbull, Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut (Hartford, 1850–1890), and Charles P. Bowditch, An Account of the Trust administered by the Trustees of the Charity of Edward Hopkins (privately printed, 1889). E. Oviatt is surely mistaken in supposing that it was the death of his brother Henry, Warden of the Fleet, that took Edward home in 1652; The Beginnings of Yale (New Haven, 1916), 82. Judging from the date at which his will was proved, Henry was still living.

268 This is inferred from a statement in the later evidence that the income was about £50 a year; the price of land was usually based on a twenty-year purchase.

269 These statements are based on a study of the accounts of Thomas Cullum (1587–1664), draper, sheriff of London, and baronet. Starting with less than £300 at the end of his apprenticeship in 1616, he was worth about £50,000 in the year of Hopkins’ death, 1657. His cousin, Nicholas Crisp, an altogether bigger operator, who was caught on the losing side of the Civil Wars, put his losses at £200,000 A. Simpson, “Thomas Cullum, Draper,” Economic History Review, second series, xi. No. 1, 1958.

270 This form of words is adopted from the Information filed in Chancery by the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel (Iveagh MSS. O.5). It is the same as appears in the abstract of the will cited note 4, above. For a copy of the will in the possession of the trustees, see Bowditch, op. cit., 52–56.

271 For the Yale-Eaton relationships, see E. Oviatt, op. cit., 18–19.

272 Iveagh MSS. O.5; see note i, above.

273 For further details, see E. Oviatt, op. cit., 84–85; J. H. Trumbull, op. cit., i. 341, 374, 578; S. E. Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), ii. 362; Harvard College Records (Colonial Society of Massachusetts, xv, xvi [1925]), i. 199, 215.

274 These facts are summarized in the Information (Iveagh MSS. O.5) and the subsequent proceedings of the court.

275 Ibid.

276 Iveagh MSS. O.13.

277 See Appendix 4.

278 Everard Exton made certain admissions in his answer to the bill which caused the Corporation to wonder if the legacy from the New England estate had ever been discharged. They took counsel’s opinion and were advised that they could sue for a discovery of what happened to the New England estate through the Attorney General there (Statement of the Case, with Mr. How’s opinion, 14 March 1708/9; Iveagh MSS. O.3).

279 This is one interpretation which may be placed on the remark in his letter (see Appendix 7). On the other hand, he may only be claiming credit for the success of the action, which depended in part on his use of the proceedings in the Exchequer case. Iveagh MSS. O.14, O.17.

280 Iveagh MSS. O.13. Exton said, among other things, that the Fitches had insisted the £500 was theirs, because the trustees originally appointed by Edward Hopkins were all dead and nobody had come forward to claim the legacy. For his own part, he said he had advanced the Fitches more than they would probably get under the final settlement, and therefore never felt able to do anything about the legacy.

281 Joint and Several Answers of Patience Fitch, widow, Phillippa Coleman and Judith Page, Iveagh MSS. O.18. See also O.19, O.20.

282 Iveagh MSS. O.7.

283 See Appendix 2.

284 Recorded in the statement of costs, Iveagh MSS. O.4.

285 See Appendix.

286 On ii December 1710 Matthew Evans applied for permission to use the Exchequer proceedings (Fitch v. Exton) as a means to discover what assets of Edward Hopkins came into the hands of Henry Dally, on the grounds that the inventory of Hopkins’ estate had perished in the fire.

287 Decree of 7 March 1710/11. Iveagh MSS. O.13.

288 Harvard College Records, op. cit., ii. 836–837.

289 Ibid.

290 Ibid., I. 388

291 Henry Newman’s petition, Iveagh MSS. O.15.

292 See Appendices 3 and 4.

293 Harvard College Records, op. cit., i. 398.

294 I.e., the document printed in Appendix 6, below; see Bowditch, op. cit., 12–14.

295 S. E. Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 90.

296 See Appendix 6.

297 S. E. Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 56.

298 See Appendix 7.

299 See Appendix 8.

300 An earlier draft continued at this point with the following sentence, which was later struck out: “and that the said Trustees be Accountable to the General Assembly of the said Province for the management of their said Trust, when they shall be thereto required.” Iveagh MSS. O.28, endorsed, “A copee of Agreement between Mr. Newman and Mr. Gunston for the settlement of Mr. Hopkins Charity.”

301 The earlier draft (see note 4, above) originally read: “to commence the 1st day of May after opening their Commission.” This was queried as follows: “Qu: What is meant by Commission above mentioned? Is it intended that the Trustees be appointed by Commission under the Great Seal and thereby incorporated? Or that they be only named Trustees by my Lord Keepers Decree or order in Chancery? If the last, then it should be expressed to the following effect viz:—that Samuel Sewall Esquire be Treasurer for the first year to commence from the first day of May after the first Meeting of the said Trustees pursuant to my Lord Keepers Decree or order.”

302 The object of this petition, made to the Court of Chancery on 15 September 1713, was to prevent losses; “the said money hath laine dead in the Master’s hands which is a Losse to the said School and Colledge and the Exchange between London and New England is likely to fall very considerably in a short time which will be a further Lessening the said Charity.” However, it was 22 December 1714. before the court order was obtained. Iveagh MSS. O.36; Bowditch, op. cit., 14–15.

303 Mr. Howlett had used an English grace at the dinner on 21 November 1957.

304 Mr. Foote happily returned for the dinner on 21 November 1958, although in the following years he was unable to be present.

305 Printed in [L. H. Butterfield et al., ed.] Walter Muir Whitehill, A Record Compiled by His Friends (Minot, Massachusetts: privately printed, 13 September 1958), 3–6.

306 Printed in The Review of Politics, xxi (1959), 646–656.

307 Published in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, lxxv (1963), 27–38.

308 Letter from Barrell to Major John Webb, 3 February 1794, Letter Book, 105. Copies of this and many other letters referred to in this article are in a letter book (hereafter cited as L.B.) by Joseph Barrell, covering the years 1792 to 1797, at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

309 Letter at Massachusetts Historical Society.

310 See The Memorial History of Boston, ed. Justin Winsor (Boston, 1883), iv. 208; and Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., Second Series, vii (May, 1892), 416–421.

311 Copy, in the handwriting of John Hoskins, of letter from Barrell to Captain Gray of the Columbia at Macao, Mass. Hist. Soc.

312 The medals were struck at the time of the departure of the vessels, since Dr. William Bentley of Salem describes them in his diary on 30 September 1787. See William Bentley, The Diary of William Bentley, D.D. (Salem, 1905–1914), i. 76. See also Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., i (December, 1791), 25, 26.

313 Revere papers, Mass. Hist. Soc.

314 Bentley, Diary, i. 264. In 1793, Barrell ordered “Also one of the largest globes you can get with partitions for fish, birds, and mice,” from John Horshand & Co. (L.B., 61). He mentioned the globe sent before was handsome, but had a crack. A globe of this sort can be seen at the Salem Towne House at Old Sturbridge Village.

315 See Samuel Adams Drake, Historic Mansions and Highways Around Boston (Boston, 1904.), 172.

316 Bentley, Diary, i, 395.

317 This description of the house is drawn largely from Rev. Edward G. Porter, “Demolition of the McLean Asylum at Somerville,” Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., Second Series, x (April, 1896), 548–552. Porter viewed the building at the time of its demolition. The best illustrated article on the house is Frank C. Brown, “The Joseph Barrell Estate, Somerville, Massachusetts: Charles Bulfinch’s First Country House,” Old-Time New England, xxxviii (January, 1948), 52–62.

318 The stairway was saved after the house was torn down in 1896 or 1897. It was then incorporated in a house built for Mr. Francis Shaw in Wayland. This house, too, was taken down in 1942 and the stairway was given to the Somerville Historical Society, where it has recently been re-erected.

319 20 December 1792, L.B., 4.

320 25 May 1793, L.B., 54, 55.

321 L.B., 13.

322 Barrell to Thomas Martin, 13 February 1793, L.B., 25.

323 10 March 1793, L.B., 31.

324 21 March 1793, L.B., 39.

325 26 March 1793, L.B., 40.

326 Charles A. Place, Charles Bulfinch, Architect and Citizen (Boston, 1925), 148.

327 31 March 1793, L.B., 44, 45.

328 17 May 1793, L.B., 45.

329 28 May 1793, L.B., 55, 56.

330 9 December 1794, L.B., 154.

331 18 June 1793, L.B., 60.

332 Barrell to Shaler and Hall, 1 July 1793, L.B., 64.

333 18 May 1794, L.B., 115.

334 Bentley, Diary, ii. 28.

335 Barrell to Thomas Dickson, 4 November 1793, L.B., 78.

336 Barrell to Daniel McCormick, 26 February 1794, L.B., 110.

337 Barrell to Benjamin Joy, 2 December 1794, L.B., 148.

338 L.B., 158.

339 McIntire papers, F.P. 5. McIntire made sketches of details of the Barrell house and the Thomas Russell house, both in Charlestown, and both designed by Bulfinch.

340 6 February 1795, L.B., 163. Barrell had tried to order suitable stones in 1793 from New York, but could not get what he wanted (L.B., 78).

341 29 October 1793, L.B., 76.

342 1 March 1795, L.B., 172.

343 9 November 1795, L.B., 213.

344 21 December 1795, L.B., 225.

345 25 August 1793, L.B., 67.

346 See Thomas Bellows Wyman, The Genealogies and Estates of Charlestown (Boston, 1879), 60, 61.

347 Dennie to Jeremiah Mason, 6 August 1797, reprinted in Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., xvii (March, 1880), 363. Hannah married Benjamin Joy the following year.

348 29 January 1796, L.B., 238.

349 Barrell to John Hoskins, 21 December 1795, L.B., 225.

350 15 April 1795, L.B., 189.

351 29 January 1796, L.B., 238.

352 1 March 1795, L.B., 172.

353 See Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., i (January, 1799), 124; and ibid., i (December, 1834), 482n.

354 Revere papers, Mass. Hist. Soc.

355 2 January 1797, L.B., 337.

356 15 November 1793, L.B., 84.

357 Barrell to Colburn Barrell, L.B., 233.

358 Quoted in Gardens of Colony and State, ed. Alice G. B. Lockwood (New York, 1931), i. 34.

359 30 July 1796, L.B., 291.

360 3 August 1793, L.B., 71.

361 Dwarf peaches, letter to John Horshand & Co., London, June, 1793, L.B., 61. Espaliered peaches, letter to Nathaniel Barrell, 29 September 1793, L.B., 73.

362 25 August 1793, L.B., 67.

363 5 December 1794, L.B., 150.

364 A copy at Winterthur bears the Revere bookplate of John Gardiner of Gardiner’s Island.

365 19 December 1793, L.B., 93.

366 3 June 1794, L.B., 122.

367 Barrell to Nathaniel Barrell, 29 October 1793, L.B., 76; and Barrell to Thomas Dickson, London, 28 May 1793, L.B., 55. At one time, Pleasant Hill was also called Poplar Grove.

368 Barrell to J. M. Pintard, 13 March 1795, L.B., 179.

369 Windsor, Boston, iv. 622.

370 Barrell to Thomas Dickson & Co., 28 June 1793, L.B., 63.

371 For information on the connection between Pleasant Hill and the Derby Mansion, see Fiske Kimball, Mr. Samuel McIntire, The Architect of Salem (Portland, 1940). Plans and sketches of Pleasant Hill are shown in figs. 122, 123, and 128. See also Fiske Kimball, “The Elias Hasket Derby Mansion in Salem,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, lx (October, 1924), 273–292.

372 His illness was of a mental nature. On 29 August 1796 (L.B., 298), he wrote, “Any seeming inattention in me you will please to impute to the right cause, a distress of the mind, which for the moment, makes everything on earth appear of little value.”

373 Porter, 549, 550.

374 See Charles, Henry F., George and Samuel B. Barrell, “Statement of Facts Relative to the Conduct of Mr. Benj. Joy, Executor of the Last Will and Testament of Joseph Barrell” (Boston, 1816); and Benjamin Joy, “A True Statement of Facts in Reply to a Pamphlet lately published by C., H. F., G., and S. B. Barrell” (Boston, 1816). Both at Mass. Hist Soc. Joy stated that Pleasant Hill had cost $48,000, and that Barrell was indebted to him for $92,000 resulting from poor land speculations.

375 Bentley, Diary, iii. 155.

376 See Place, 222, 223. Also see N. I. Bowditch, A History of the Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston, 1851), 27.

377 The same view, engraved by George Girdler Smith from a painting of Hammit Williams which was based on a sketch done by Edward Seager, is shown in Bowditch, opposite p. 376. A view showing the McLean Asylum in the background and the Bulfinch building of the Massachusetts General Hospital in the foreground, engraved by James W. Watts, is shown on the frontispiece of Bowditch. Both views are reproduced in MGH-Massachusetts General Hospital–150th Anniversary, Boston Herald (9 April 1961), 13 and 4 respectively (special section).

378 Drake, 178.

379 Barrell to Colburn Barrell, 1 December 1794, L.B., 148.

380 Composition ornaments, see letter of 18 June 1795, L.B., 193.

381 The dinner, cooked by the Society’s caretaker, Mrs. Joseph Greene, consisted of a beef consommé, coquille St. Jacques, roast squab, and meringue glacé, with Chablis Grand Cru Moutonne 1955 and Remy Chambolle Musigny 1953 to accompany it. If there is a problem in the cost of the dinners, it is the number of members who enjoy coming to eat them, rather than “the wine and food you choose,” “you” referring presumably to the Dinner Committee, of which the Editor is Chairman.

382 Published as Independent Historical Societies An enquiry into their research and publication functions and their financial future (Boston: Boston Athenæum, distributed by Harvard University Press, 1962), xviii + 593 pages.

383 Mr. McCorison has published related material in “The Bayley-Hazen Military Road,” Vermont History, xxvii (June, 1959), 57–68, and “Colonial Defense of the Upper Connecticut Valley,” Vermont History, xxx (January, 1962), 50–62.

384 According to its By-laws, the museum was established, “For literary, educational and benevolent purposes, chiefly in interpreting and communicating the history of the wool textile industry in America, in collecting, preserving and exhibiting objects of historical, antiquarian, artistic or technological interest or value, in publishing, acquiring and maintaining books, records and other writings on any subject or subjects having any such interest, in maintaining archives and reference libraries, and in acquiring, maintaining, exhibiting and publishing pictures, photographs, drawings and models of any and all kinds.”

385 J. Leander Bishop, A History of American Manufactures from 1608 to 1860 (Philadelphia, 1864), i. 310.

386 Bishop, i. 305.

387 The weaver William Rix was working in Boston by 1640 and evidence indicates that the trade was practiced early in the establishment of other settlements. Arthur H. Cole, The American Wool Manufacture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926), i. 14.

388 Abiel Abbot, History of Andover from its Settlement to 1829 (Andover, 1829), 50.

389 Cole, i. viii; 48 ff.

390 Cole, i. 16.

391 As quoted in William R. Bagnall, The Textile Industries of the United States (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1893), 57.

392 A typical gathering was the one held in Rowley, Massachusetts, in 1769. “A number of thirty-three respectable ladies of this town met about sunrise, with their wheels, to spend the day at the house of the Rev’d Jedediah Jewell, in the laudable design of a spinning match. At an hour before sunset, the ladies then appearing neatly dressed, principally in homespun, a polite and generous repast of American production was set for their entertainment, after which, being present many spectators of both sexes, Mr. Jewett (sic) delivered a suitable and instructive discourse from Rom. xii, 211: ‘Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord.’” Bagnall, 58.

393 Bagnall, 37.

394 Bagnall, 70.

395 Bagnall, 260.

396 Bagnall, 150.

397 American Watchman (Wilmington, Delaware), 12 August 1812.

398 Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker, 1840–1860 (Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1959), xiv.

399 Thomas C. Cochran and William Miller, The Age of Enterprise (New York, 1961), 21.

400 John R. Commons, A Documentary History of American Industrial Society (Cleveland, 1910), vii. 50–51.

401 Victor S. Clark, History of Manufactures in the United States (New York, 1949), i. 529.

402 There were more indentures, but the rest have disappeared. At present there is only one between 1734 and 1739. Between 21 April 1756, and 1 November 1773, there were 483 children bound out, but only 390 indentures are extant. Thus, there may have been as many as 25 per cent more than the 1,100 apprentices, 1734–1805. But between 2 April 1785, and early January, 1790, the lists and indentures correspond exactly in numbers. Hence, all that can be said for sure is that there were at least 93 more children bound out than there are indentures for the whole period. Compare the indentures abstracted below with the fragmentary lists in “Admissions, 1760–74,” Records of the Boston Overseers of the Poor, Massachusetts Historical Society. Here after cited as Overseers Records.

403 The copy of Thomas’s indenture abstracted below carries only the signatures of Fowle, two overseers, and two justices. Thomas’s personal copy, now at the American Antiquarian Society, has the signatures of eight overseers and two justices.

404 See Clifford K. Shipton, Isaiah Thomas, Printer, Patriot, and Philanthropist, 1749–1831 (Rochester, 1948). For Peter Thomas’s offices, see Robert Francis Seybolt, The Town Officials of Colonial Boston, 1634–1775 (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), 124, 149, 156, 182. Mr. Marcus McCorison, librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, kindly allowed me to consult the typescript of the recently located “Diary” of Isaiah Thomas, soon to be published. Thomas recorded that his grandfather had also been an Overseer of the Poor.

405 Lawrence W. Towner, “A Good Master Well Served, A Social History of Servitude in Massachusetts, 1620–1750,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Northwestern University, 1955, appendix J.

406 Even in the case of slavery, the English were not without recent experience. English ships had dabbled in the slave trade, and Paul Baynes, who died in 1619, spoke familiarly of Blackmoor slaves. See his An Entire Commentary Upon . . . Ephesians . . . (London, 1643), 694.

407 Towner, “A Good Master,” Ch. I.

408 Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family . . . (Boston, 1956), Chs. IV–V.

409 For representative legislation, see Records of the Governor and Company of . . . Massachusetts Bay . . . , ed., Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, 5 vols. in 6 (Boston, 1853–1854), (1633), 109, (1636), 186; ii (1646), 180. Hereafter cited as Mass. Recs. See also The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts . . . , ed. Max Farrand (Cambridge, Mass., 1929, p. 11).

410 Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County Massachusetts, ed. George Francis Dow, 8 vols. (Salem, 1911–1921), i–v, passim. For the particular instances cited see: 1. 25, 68, 82–83, 158, 209; ii. 60. For the order to bind out Guppy’s children see the Essex Institute Historical Collections, ix (1869), 151.

411 Mass. Recs., iv. part ii, 395–396.

412 File 49 (1668), Files of the Middlesex County Court (Middlesex County Court House, Cambridge, Mass.).

413 Record Commissioners of the Town of Boston, Reports, 39 vols. (Boston, 1881–1909), vii. 67. Hereafter cited as Boston Records.

414 Records of the Hampshire County Court, i (1680), 36, Hampshire County Court House, Northampton, Massachusetts.

415 Ibid.

416 Records of the Suffolk County Court, 1671–1680, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, xxix–xxx (1933); ii (1676), 751. Hereafter cited as Suffolk County Court.

417 Ibid., i (1674), 442.

418 Ibid., i (1672), 184, (1673), 258; ii (1677), 870–871; Records of the Middlesex County Court, iii (1679), 290; case of Mary Henly, 1691/92, ibid., vols. 1689–1699, n.p.

419 Suffolk County Court, ii (1675), 646–647.

420 Mass. Recs., v. 240–241. I have followed the wording of this law as reproduced in The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts . . . , ed. William H. Whitmore (Boston, 1887), 270.

421 Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), passim.

422 Criminals, particularly thieves, and a few poor debtors were exceptions. See Towner, “A Good Master,” Ch. IV. In 1756 a law was enacted, for three years, allowing the overseers or selectmen of a town to bind out a poor adult for one year, his wages to be used to support his family. In 1759, a law was enacted for five years allowing the mother of a bastard child to be indentured for five years if her charges had been born by the town or if her child became a charge to the town before it was five years of age. Neither law was re-enacted. Acts and Resolves . . . of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay . . . , 21 vols. (Boston, 1869–1922), iii. 926–928; iv. 178–179. Hereafter cited as Acts and Resolves.

423 Acts and Resolves, i. 67.

424 Ibid., i. 538–539, 654–655; II. 242. These acts were usually temporary, renewed from time to time, but not always soon enough to avoid lapsing.

425 Boston Records, viii. passim; Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness . . . (New York, 1938), 393–394; Clifford K. Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates (Cambridge, Mass., 1873–), vi. 448. Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 3rd Ser., i (1825), 152.

426 Acts and Resolves, ii, 756–758. Except for a law in 1771, which required that boys be taught reading, writing, and ciphering, no significant change was made in this law during the colonial period. In 1778 and 1794 the state of Massachusetts empowered all towns to appoint overseers of the poor and the overseers to bind out the children of the poor as apprentices or servants. The educational provisions were the same as revised in 1771. Parents who were assessed town or district taxes were not liable to having their children bound. Ibid., v. 161–162; The General Laws of Massachusetts from the Adoption of the Constitution to February, 1822, ed., Theron Metcalf, 2 vols. (Boston, 1823), i. 438–449.

427 This and the following paragraphs concerning the poor apprentices are based on the the table of indentures below.

428 See Ann Cromartie (1769) and Ann Wilkinson (1784), below.

429 In some cases, where they had been left off, they were inserted afterwards.

430 See the Miscellaneous Files (by date) of the Overseers of the Poor, Department of Public Welfare, Boston, Massachusetts.

431 “Admissions, 1768–1774,” Overseers Records.

432 This estimate is based on a random sampling of the names of four hundred apprentices checked against Elsdon C. Smith, Dictionary of American Family Names (New York, 1956). In 1790, it may be pointed out, Massachusetts’ population was composed roughly of the following linguistic and national stocks: English, 82 per cent; Scotch, 4.4 per cent; Ulster Irish, 1.6 per cent; Irish, 1.3 per cent; German, .3 per cent; Dutch, .2 per cent; and French, .8 per cent. See “Report of the Committee on Linguistic and National Stocks in the Population of the United States,” American Historical Association, Annual Report for 1931 (Washington, D. C., 1932), i. 124.

433 The Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681–1724, ed., Worthington C. Ford, Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 7th Ser., vii–viii (Boston, 1911–1912), i. 226 n. Report of Committee of Repairs, 25 September 1819, “Register of Letters, etc., 1817–1834,” 2, Overseers Records.

434 Completed copies of this form are scattered throughout the volumes in which the indentures, below, are bound. Boston Indentures, 1734–1805, 6 vols., City Clerk’s office, City Hall, Boston.

435 Ibid., iv. 143.

436 Ibid., iv. 63.

437 John Ruggles to Overseers, n.d., ibid., iv. 103.

438 Ibid., v. 22.

439 William Williams to Royall Tyler, 23 January 1770, ibid., iv. 15.

440 The apprentice was Anthony Haswell (1771), below. For Thomas, see note 3 on page 418 above.

441 Overseers of the Poor of Canton, Massachusetts, to Overseers of Boston, 25 June 1805, “Papers, 1733–1854,” Overseers Records.

442 Isaiah Thomas claimed that his master did not instruct him in reading or writing. In fact, he claimed that Fowle was unable to spell or punctuate. See Thomas’s “Diary,” American Antiquarian Society. Between 1786 and 1792, most girl apprentices were to be taught reading, writing, and ciphering.

443 Carl Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman (New York and London, 1950), 135–137.

444 “The Boston Directory . . . ,” (1796), Boston Records, x. 221–296.

445 Ibid., x. 263, 274, 267.

446 Only one apprentice was assured land in his indentures. Francis Dizer (7/22/66), who was apprenticed to both husbandry and surveying, was promised twenty acres of unimproved land and, if he behaved himself, a set of surveying instruments. Two boys were promised cattle: Richard Caswell (8/3/48), a yoke of oxen or £40 O.T., and Barzallai Eddy (10/10/98), two three-year-old oxen and a heifer of the same age.

447 W. Graham Millar, “The Poor Apprentices of Boston; Indentures of Poor Children Bound Out by the Overseers of the Poor of Boston, 1734–1776 . . . ,” M.A. Thesis, College of William and Mary, 1958.