Ever since a mob destroyed Thomas Hutchinson’s house in 1765, a dark rumor has persisted that the Stamp Act riot wasn’t about the Stamp Act. Contemporaries thought a group of Maine landowners called the Kennebec Proprietors had instigated the riot.
On the surface, the inflamed mob smashed Hutchinson’s furniture and drank his wine because they believed he supported the Stamp Act.
But it was the destruction of his papers that caught people’s attention at the time.
Thomas Hutchinson
As chief justice, Hutchinson had thwarted the Kennebec Proprietors’ expansion plans in Maine. He himself owned land in Maine as a partner in a rival landowning company, the Pejepscot Proprietors. He had once produced a paper that undermined the Kennebec Proprietors’ land claims. That fueled suspicions that the 1765 mob attack was aimed at destroying that very document.
The Rev. William Gordon, three years after the event, wrote, “The mob… was led on to the house, by a secret influence, with a view to the destruction of certain papers, known to be there.”
Give Me Land, Lots of Land
In colonial America, land equaled wealth. Land companies bought large tracts of land to establish townships and settlements. They would control the settlers like feudal lords, expecting them to abide by their rules and pay rents.
Boston merchants formed the Kennebec Proprietors in 1749 and bought roughly 1,500 square miles of land in Maine from the New Plymouth Company: The Proprietors’ land stretched 15 miles from the Kennebec River on both sides, from Merrymeeting Bay to Skowhegan Falls in the north.
Dr. Silvester Gardiner by John Singleton Copley. Courtesy Seattle Art Museum.
Company partners would choose different sides in the American Revolution. James Bowdoin II would sympathize with the Patriot cause, as would Thomas Hancock’s nephew, John. Sylvester Gardiner and Benjamin Hallowell would support the British Crown.
Hutchinson also owned land in central Maine as founder of the Pejepscot Proprietors. The proprietors owned Newcastle, parts of Casco Bay, Merrymeeting Bay and land along the Androscoggin River.
The Kennebec Proprietors vs. Clark and Lake
Hutchinson’s grandfather had an interest in another land company, Clark and Lake. Like the Kennebec Proprietors, it claimed the lower Kennebec River valley on the eastern shore—what are now Arrowsic Island, Georgetown, Woolwich, Phippsburg and Bath.
If you know Maine geography, you can see where the trouble started. It came to a head in 1756, when a five-man committee formed to arbitrate the dispute.
Map of the Kennebec River
The Kennebec Proprietors hired James Otis as their lawyer. Otis would later deliver a speech denouncing writs of assistance, which, as a judge, Hutchinson had issued to collect taxes. John Adams later said that “the child independence” was born from that speech.
As the five-man arbitration committee got underway, Thomas Hutchinson walked in. “Gentlemen, I do not know but I have found a Paper that may shorten your work.”
The paper defined boundaries between the two companies. It had belonged to Hutchinson’s grandfather and it supported Clark and Lake’s claims. Most of the disputed land went to Clark and Lake.
Over the next decade, the Kennebec Proprietors continued to try to expand their footprint in Maine. Through his role as judge and part owner of the Pejepscot land, Hutchinson continued to thwart them.
The Stamp Act Riot
Someone had warned Hutchinson of the mob’s approach. By the time the crowd arrived, Hutchinson had already sent most of his children away and barred his doors and windows. Hutchinson’s daughter persuaded him to leave just in time.
The Thomas Hutchinson house before the mob got to it.
The rioters smashed through his front door with an ax and poured into the house through all available doors and windows. Once inside, they took everything they could move: clothes, silver, paintings. Seeking shelter at one neighbor’s house, Hutchinson had to scamper through the gardens to a house more distant when he learned the mob searched for him.
By four in the morning, the house had nothing left but bare walls and floors. Men who had fought in battle said they’d never seen such fury.
Kennebec Proprietors Conspiracy Theory
Bostonians knew of the feud between Hutchinson and the Kennebec Proprietors.
The Rev. William Gordon believed the mob had destroyed the paper that Hutchinson had brought to the arbitration committee nine years earlier. Wrote Gordon, “There is a dark rumour, that the mob… was led on to the house, by a secret influence, with a view to the destruction of certain papers, known to be there, which would prove that the grant to the New Plymouth company on Kennebec river, was different from what was contended; and that the said papers were never found afterwards.”
The Kennebec River from Bath
Ebenezer Mackintosh, a shoemaker, played a key role in inciting the riot and fueled theories that he had been paid to egg on the mob. Some people thought he was told specifically to destroy the Kennebec papers. Hutchinson had his suspicions. Hutchinson wrote that Mackintosh was “a poor fellow” and that it was “probable that he was employed, and could discover who employed him.”
Hutchinson questioned Mackintosh after the riot, but Mackintosh refused to name anyone. As a working-class shoemaker, he probably resented Hutchinson’s wealth and power.
Grievances
No one has ever been able to find out who, if anyone, paid Mackintosh.
As a conspiracy theory, the notion that the Stamp Act riot was about the Kennebec Proprietors has flaws. Before the mob sacked Hutchinson’s house, it had destroyed papers in the home of another Kennebec Proprietor: Benjamin Hallowell.
But Hallowell was also a customs official. Rioters targeted his official customs books, account ledgers and seizure records. By destroying these, the mob wiped out the evidence of who owed customs duties and who had been prosecuted for smuggling.
So, the theory goes, the mob that attacked Hallowell was driven by different grievances than the secret instigators who pointed them toward Hutchinson’s archives. The attack on Hutchinson’s house was largely a Loyalist vs. Loyalist affair over real estate.
After the Revolution
The land dispute became moot during the Revolution. Massachusetts seized the Kennebeck Proprietors’ land and sold it off to pay its war debts. The Loyalist partners fled Boston.
The Pejepscot Proprietors survived the war, but only because they had influential Patriots among their members.
During the war, settlers squatters flooded onto Pejepscot lands and refused to pay rents or acknowledge the company’s land titles. After the war, the new Massachusetts government refused to evict them. The state passed laws that favored the actual occupants over absentee landholders.
The commonwealth forced the Pejepscot company to sell its remaining lands at rock-bottom prices directly to the settlers. It gradually liquidated its holding over the next 50 years.
Adams Weighs In on the Kennebec Proprietors
In 1761 John Adams traveled to Pownalborough (now Dresden), Maine, as the Kennebec Proprietors’ lawyer. His job was to evict settlers from Kennebeck lands, a task he found distasteful.
Pownalborough Courthouse – still standing and open to the public
Although he took their money in 1761, Adams later grew suspicious of land speculators. During the Revolutionary era, he criticized large proprietary land companies, arguing that they exploited settlers and created unjust monopolies.
Shortly after his 1761 trip, he wrote, “The people in the eastern country, who had settled on the lands of the Proprietors, were in a very unhappy situation. The Proprietors were perpetually harassing them with lawsuits, and the poor people were unable to contend with them.”
In his political treatise, “A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States,” Adams wrote: “The aristocracy of land, of money, of talents, of physical strength, of cunning, of eloquence, is formidable to liberty.”
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Wirh thanks to Cory Michael Davis, “Divided Ownership, Wild Speculation: An Investigation of the Connections between Thomas Hutchinson and Land Speculation in Eighteenth Century Maine.”
Images: The featured image was colorized by ChatGPT. Map of the Kennebec By The original uploader was Papayoung at English Wikipedia. – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Pauk using CommonsHelper., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12252962. Map of Pejebscot territory By Open Street Map – https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=11/43.8241/-69.9719, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=123207743
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