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John William Sterling, a Well-Respected Man With a Secret

John William Sterling was a corporate lawyer during the Gilded Age, a conservative, upper-class businessman, the kind of man the Kinks describe as “a well-respected man about town.”

John William Sterling

In 1911, his name and resume appeared in Distinguished successful Americans of our day. From it we learn he graduated with honors from Yale College and Columbia Law School. He advised railroad barons in building and dismantling railroads, and he served on the boards of nine large banks and gas companies. Appropriately for a man of his stature, he devoted his time to philanthropy—prestigious charities, the kind people noticed. Eminently clubbable, he belonged to the exclusive Metropolitan, Union and American Yacht clubs.

Like the Kinks’ well-respected man, John William Sterling lived in a world built around punctuality. A Wall Street Journal correspondent described him as, “almost taciturn, and excessively devoted to his profession. He sat before his desk every morning, not later than eight o’clock, and was usually the last one in the office to close the desk and go home.”

That same correspondent also noted he had an unusual relationship that was ‘often spoken of and commented upon.’ That relationship was with a cotton broker named James O. Bloss.

John William Sterling

He was born in Stratford, Conn., on May 12, 1844. His father, also John William Sterling, was captain of the Splendid, one of the largest clipper ships during the China Trade. His mother, Catherine Plant, belonged to a prominent Stratford family; her father, David, served as a U.S. congressman and as the state’s lieutenant governor. His parents both had ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower.

Sterling Homestead

He studied at Stratford Academy, where he probably knew another young man who would lead his entire life as a bachelor, James Buchanan Mitchell. Graduating as class valedictorian, he entered Yale as the Civil War broke out.

Jonathan Ned Katz, a historian of human sexuality, notes in an essay that Sterling slept with Mitchell at Yale. His journal in September-October 1862 records: “I slept with Jim Mitchell last night an.” Katz suggests they had an ongoing relationship, as Sterling and Mitchell both chose to attend Columbia Law School.

Sterling and classmate at Yale.

His sleeping with Jim Mitchell may not have aroused much comment, wrote Katz, or at least it didn’t arouse much suspicion about what went on.

At Yale, Sterling belonged to Skull and Bones. He graduated with honors from Yale in 1864 and then from Columbia Law School in 1867 as class valedictorian.

Soon after his admission to the bar that year, he met a young cotton broker about his own age, James O. Bloss. Bloss also came from an old New England family, though he grew up in Rochester, N.Y.

Three lines of poetry clipped from the New York Times and pasted into the back of his Commonplace Book suggest Sterling’s feelings toward the man he called “Blossy.”

Once more I give me body and soul to thee,
Who hast my soul for ever: cliff and sand
Recede, and heart to heart once more are we.

Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote those lines in his poem “In Guernsey / To Theodore Watts.”

In 1872 John William Sterling and James O. Bloss went house-hunting, and they settled on 21 West 25^th St. They would live together for nearly 50 years.

Partners

John William Sterling rocketed to the top of the then-burgeoning corporate world. He went to work as a clerk in a New York law firm and made partner in 1870. Three years later he had his name on the door as a partner in Shearman & Sterling. He advised another close friend, James Stillman, chairman of the board of National City Bank, then the nation’s largest. (Stillman’s great-grandson, Whit Stillman, is an Academy Award-nominated film director.)

Sterling also advised William Rockefeller, co-founder of Standard Oil and H.H. Rogers, whose firm merged with Standard Oil, as well as railroad tycoons Jay Gould and Jim Fisk.

He once said the ideal client is ‘a very wealthy man in very great trouble.’ His clients paid him handsomely for his advice, and he made a fortune.

The Sterling mansion, now a community center

In 1886, Sterling built a stately mansion, Sterling House, in Stratford, presumably a weekend house he shared with his sisters. Today the National Register of Historic Places lists the Sterling mansion, now the Sterling House Community Center.

By 1890 he and Blossy moved uptown to 221 East 47^th St., where they had four servants. Eventually they moved to 912 Fifth Ave., overlooking Central Park.

Neuroticism

Sterling clearly valued his reputation as a man of means and prominence in society. And so as Katz points out, ‘his contravention of society’s marital standard, and, perhaps, its sexual proprieties, would have been a profound source of conflict and anxiety.’

His mother was said to be happy her son didn’t inherit his father’s love of the sea. Actually, he had more than a touch of hydrophobia. He had a ‘deep-rooted antipathy to the ocean,’ wrote John Anson Garver in a biographical sketch of Sterling. He didn’t even like to take ferries, and never traveled abroad.

Anson Phelps Stokes, secretary to Yale after 1899, recalled that Sterling wouldn’t go to bed until the housekeeper poked the closet with a stick and looked under the bed to make sure there were no burglars. He had iron bars on his bedroom window and an iron door with an electric lock he controlled with a button by his bedside. Bloss slept in the room with him and his valet in an adjoining bedroom.

In Harriman vs. Hill, author Larry Haeg describes Sterling as a chain-smoking, fast walker with a fear of public speaking and a penchant for scheduling meetings at odd minutes, like 3:17 p.m. He ate dinner in the same chair at the same table six nights a week at the Union Club.

He also locked his office at work and always paid for his investments in cash. That made him a very wealthy man.

A Strange Postscript

John William Sterling died suddenly in Canada on July 5, 1918. He left $18 million to Yale and the rest to Blossy, who he named as executor of his estate.

That caused a bit of trouble. Bloss died five months later, on Dec. 15, 1918, without having completely executed the will.

Further, Sterling had died before he could execute the will of another wealthy man, his friend James Stillman, who died March 15, 1918. And Stillman had been named executor of the estate of James Gordon Bennett, who died May 14, 1918.

The first three men who died left $75 million.

Eventually Yale got its money, the largest bequest to a university up to that time.

Sterling’s gift was used to build Yale’s Law School, the Divinity School quadrangle, a School of Medicine, the Hall of Graduate Studies and the Sterling Memorial Library. He also endowed the Sterling professorships, who have included such notables as William O. Douglas, Wilbur Cross, Harold Bloom, Edmund Morgan and Paul de Man.

With thanks to Jonathan Ned Katz, “An Understanding…Held Them Together“

NRHP: Sterling Homestead By Doug Kerr – https://www.flickr.com/photos/dougtone/6439034575/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44722867; Sterling House Community Center By Jerry Dougherty – http://public.fotki.com/GCDOUGHERTY/all-towns-and-cities/stratford-ct/stratfordsterlinghouse.html, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29522854. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Canaan Mob Destroys the Noyes Academy, Foreshadowing the Civil War

In 1834 a group of New Hampshire abolitionists decided to establish a school for black students. At first, Noyes Academy seemed relatively uncontroversial. But that would soon change.

Henry Highland Garnet portrait in the National Portrait Gallery

Scheduled to open in March 1835, some 14 black students – boys and girls, mostly teenagers – made their way north to the small town of Canaan.

Noyes Academy Students Arrive

Henry Highland Garnet, 19, arrived at the school exhausted from travel and with an injured leg. Black passengers had to sit on the outside of carriages, making for a cold and miserable journey. He was warmly welcomed by Charles Kimball, a lawyer and supporter of Noyes Academy. Kimball would host most of the black students at the academy, and Garnet rested while he anticipated starting his studies. Garnet and his family had escaped from slavery in Maryland. He was raised in New York.

The trip to New Hampshire soon turned terrifying. As news of the interracial school spread, anti-abolitionists in Canaan and neighboring Hanover, Dorchester and Enfield began agitating. They posted road signs directing travelers to “Nigger Town.”

Proslavery newspapers piled on. The New Hampshire Patriot in June of 1835 carried an attack on the school:

Post Card View of Canaan, N.H.

“Since the establishment of the school, it has been no uncommon spectacle to witness colored gentlemen walking arm in arm with what ought to be respectable white females. And that respectable people opposed to the school, as well as others, have been invited to parties where the colored portion of the school were also invited guests.

“It is said that one of the principal agitators of the slave question in this state, George Kimball, Esq., and his family, sit at table with a half dozen colored people, while a white girl attends upon them as servant.”

Lawbreaking

By July 4th, ominous rumors began to circulate that a riot was planned and the school would be attacked. On the night of the fourth, a large group of anti-abolitionists marched to the door of the school.

Dr. Timothy Tilton, a town magistrate, had taken up a position inside the building. Tilton opened the window and shouted that the crowd was breaking the law. He then began calling out the names of the agitators he recognized. Faced with the threat of prosecution, the crowd dispersed and the school survived.

The anti-abolition forces, led by Ben Porter and Jacob Trussell, next turned to Town Meeting for help. They drafted a resolution declaring the academy a “nuisance” and directing a committee to remove it at town expense to a location to be chosen by selectmen.

The Abolition Debate

Tiny Canaan, N.H., had become the temporary focal point for the nation’s abolition debate. Trussell was a Mason and drew political support from his network in the secret society both in Canaan and elsewhere. George Kimball, meanwhile, was a lawyer and postmaster and an Anti-Mason. He brought in financial support for Noyes Academy from abolitionists throughout New England.

The resolution declaring Noyes Academy a nuisance passed at Town Meeting, and work moving the school was to commence on August 10.

The day the work was to start began sunny and pleasant, but soon a gang of men again marched toward the school. Some townspeople took to the street to shout at the drunken mob, but retreated, fearing the destruction of their own houses.

Dr. Tilton again tried to intervene, but Porter and Trussell pushed him aside, citing the legal authority granted them by the Town Meeting. The town’s lawyer later issued an opinion that the mob acted illegally. However, prosecution was unlikely because of the controversial nature of the abolitionist cause.

Pushing past Tilton, the mob began smashing the fence in front of the school. The men assembled a team of some 90 oxen to literally pull the school from its foundation. It would take several days, uncounted quantities of rum and lots of broken chains, but eventually the group pulled the school to the town common to await the selectmen’s decision on where to put it. The mob also delivered an ominous threat to the students at the school. They had one month to leave town.

By now, the number of black students had dwindled. There remained only five boys and one girl.

The Mob Again

On September 10, the mob reassembled. It hauled the school to its final resting place and led a parade through town, firing a cannon in front of the houses of abolitionists, shattering some windows and rattling others.

The children and teacher scattered to schools elsewhere. Jacob Trussell read a victory speech. “The abolitionist monster that ascended out of the bottomless pit, is sent headlong to perdition, and the mourners go about the streets. To you, gentlemen, who have assisted in attaining the glorious victory, I present you hearty and sincere thanks.”

The town paid $135.39 to the committee that oversaw the moving of the school. While efforts were made to revive the school as a white-only institution, it stayed largely vacant. In 1838 the town voted funds to restore it, but in December of that year a “midnight mob” ransacked the building, stealing new windows recently installed. It burned in 1839. No one tried to extinguish the fire.

Looking back on the episode some years after the Civil War, some had repented their part in the rabble, while some remained unmoved.

Unrepentent

Deputy Sheriff Samuel Cobb, despised in the community, had served on the committee that moved the school. The sheriff himself had stayed well clear on the day of the moving, receiving reports from men on the scene.

“Cobb never repented the part he took in producing the chaos in those days. It is said that for a long time after those events he was in the habit of hissing and spitting at clergymen whom he knew to be abolitionists,” according to The History of Canaan, New Hampshire.

Likewise, Jacob Trussell never repented. He sought and received a vote from Town Meeting assuring him that the town would defend him against any legal claims arising against him for his role in the destruction of the school.

His church, the Congregational Church, gave him less support. The church excommunicated him in 1839 for what he had done and distributed its findings that he was not in good standing with the church.

Henry Highland Garnet

Among the students at the school were a number who went on to become active abolitionists. Most famously, they included Henry Highland Garnet, who would continue his education and become a minister and abolitionist leader.

Garnet’s views – that armed conflict was the best way for slaves to win freedom – put him out of favor among mainstream pre-Civil War abolitionists. Garnet actively recruited and ministered to black soldiers who fought in the Civil War. In 1865 he delivered a sermon to Congress – the first black minister to do so – on the ending of slavery. Long after the Civil War, Garnet sought and won the appointment as ambassador to Liberia. He wanted to visit Africa, if only to die there. He did die there in 1882.

The records show that Garnet once returned to Canaan and preached at the Congregational Church. After he finished speaking, he was approached by Ben Porter, one of the men who led the charge in destroying Noyes Academy.

Porter then apologized for his part in destroying the school. He only lacked a little moral courage to make him go up at the close of the speech and make public confession to the whole audience, he told Garnet.

Thanks to The history of Canaan, New Hampshire, by William Allen Wallace. This story last updated in 2022.

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A Rhode Islander in England, 1828, Is Shocked By English Drinking Habits

America’s drinking habits were changing for the better as the new country passed its 50^th anniversary, at least according to a Rhode Island mill owner.

Beer Street Gin Alley by William Hogarth

Zachariah Allen, a Rhode Island businessman, had many talents as an inventor, writer, merchant and philanthropist. He built a fire-safe mill, patented the first steam cutoff valve and invented the first home hot-air furnace.

Zachariah Allen’s Allendale Mill in North Providence today

In 1828, he traveled to the workshops of England and wrote about what he saw in his book, The Practical Tourist. He visited iron mines, silk mills, a pin factory and a limestone quarry. He also reviewed new marvels, like the train, the telegraph, the steamboat – not unknown in America then, but still rare.

English Drinking Habits

He also visited English taverns, and he didn’t like what he saw. “A deluge of beer, beer, is now spread over the land, to increase the evil of drunkenness,” he wrote.

Allen compared the secret tippling of the American worker with the public beer-drinking marathons of the Englishman.

English emigrants are heard to exclaim, after being a short time in the United States, that their fellow-workmen, the Americans, do not take any pleasure.

By that, explained Allen, they meant “that the American mechanics do not hold festive meetings, or participate in the carousals at public houses, which these foreigners have been accustomed to indulge in before they left the Old Country.”

The United States, then 52 years old, had optimism and prosperity, Allen wrote. And that, he concluded, explained why Americans had much better drinking habits.

Better Drinking Habits

Zachariah Allen

By 1828, temperance began to take hold in America. It began in 1784 with a treatise by Benjamin Rush on the ill effects of alcohol. In 1789, the first temperance society formed in America. That year, 200 farmers from Litchfield, Conn., got together to ‘discourage the use of spirituous liquors in doing their farm work.’

Temperance societies spread, and 40 years later Allen noted approvingly that 800,000 people subscribed to them in the United States. He wrote that the temperance movement halved the consumption of spirituous liquor in just a few years.

Temperance took root in England, too, but it took a different form than in America. English authorities tried to wean people from gin – the bad beverage – and steer them toward the good beverage – beer. In 1751, artist William Hogarth published a print called ‘Beer Street and Gin Alley.’ It depicted happy, productive beer drinkers vs. slatternly ginners.

In 1830, England repealed the beer tax — a mistake, Allen thought. The deluge of beer spread over England, he wrote, increased “the evil of drunkenness.”

It is in vain to asset that strong beer and porter, as consumed by the mechanics and laboring classes in England, form a beverage healthful and necessary to brace their sinews for toil.

Slinking Into A Dram Shop

Unlike the English, who openly spent hours in taverns, American workmen felt shame about their drinking, Allen claimed. The American toper, he wrote, “swallows a hasty draught” after “slinking into a dram shop.”

[B]ehind a screen, or in an obscure corner, usually prepared for secrecy and expedition, he takes his glass as privately as possible. This done, he carefully wipes his mouth, perhaps with his sleeve, and sallies forth, emboldened to court observation in the broad daylight. The beer-drinker, on the contrary, usually requires half a day to get drunk upon his more diluted potation, and then his shameless condition is veiled by the approaching darkness.

Allen then concluded that the American workman has more hope of advancement than the Englishman. “He knows that the path to wealth in the broad field of adventure is open before him,” he wrote. With talent, industry and enterprise, the American laborer could attain even the country’s highest honors, he wrote. That happened with Ben Franklin, noted Allen, and many other distinguished Americans.

The English Laborer

Allen observed that the English laborer, “whilst he smokes his pipe and drinks his beer at the ale-house in company with his wife or associates,” appears perfectly contented. He liked his situation and his state of “blissful enjoyment,” wrote Allen. However, he didn’t look forward to greater happiness or distinction in society.

From their extremely limited education, they seem aware that advancement to a higher station, than that which they fill, can with the utmost difficulty be attained, surrounded as they are by competitors struggling for their daily bread.

The American laborer, on the other hand, had a “buoyancy of feeling,” wrote Allen. He attributed “the peculiarly free institutions of the American republic,” as well as free public education.

That buoyant feeling “sustains him, amid his severest privations and efforts, with cheering prospects of success in his calling.”

This story was updated in 2022.

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Josh Billings, The Funny Man Who Showed Mark Twain the Way

Josh Billings was one of America’s most popular funny man until his comic heir, Mark Twain, came along. He was a ‘platform humorist,’ a 19^th-century version of Conan O’Brien or Jimmy Kimmel. There were dozens of them back then, but Billings outearned them all at $100 per talk.

Josh Billings

He was a late bloomer who tried his hand at a number of professions before hitting on the comic formula that made him famous. He used the slang of the day and delivered short, punchy aphorisms.

“Brevity iz power,” was one of them.

“The way tew Fame is like klimbing a greast pole; thare aint but phew kan do it, and even then it don’t pay,” was another.

Berkshire Beginnings

He was born Henry Wheeler Shaw in the small Berkshires town of Lanesborough, Mass., on April 21, 1818. His father, Henry Shaw, was a U.S. congressman; so was his grandfather, Samuel Shaw.

He attended district schools and at 14 was admitted to Hamilton College. He didn’t last long. According to one version, he was expelled for removing the clapper from the campus bell. According to another, he never made it back after his freshman year. The story goes that on his way back to college he took a stage from Lanesborough to Albany, then boarded a canal boat for Utica. He met two adventurers bound for St. Louis on the boat, and he was so enthralled by their tales of the west that he didn’t stop traveling until he reached the banks of the Mississippi. He ‘tramped the streets of St. Louis, a homeless vagrant,’ wrote his biographer, Francis Shubael Smith.

He joined a party of adventurers who aimed to cross the plains, climb the Rocky Mountains and visit the coast of Mexico. They engaged a geologist from a German university and set out with letters of introduction. The letters, acquired with the help of Josh Billings’ prominent father, were from John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay and Martin Van Buren.

The venture failed, but young Henry Shaw continued to roam the West. He and two friends ran out of money in Napoleon, Ind., so they decided to give a mock lecture on mesmerism. Henry gave the lecture as ‘Mordecai David.’ The room was packed, the lecture was a success, but it would be years before Josh Billings took to the stage again.

In 1845, he returned to Lanesborough and married his childhood sweetheart, Zipha Bradford, a direct descendant of William Bradford. They had two daughters, Grace and Kate.

A series of moves followed: To the western territory, where he farmed; to Virginia, where he ran a coal mine; to the Ohio and Kanawha rivers, where he worked as a steamboat captain. Finally he moved to Pouhgkeepsie, N.Y., where he dealt real estate.

Josh Billings

One day in 1858 a newspaper editor walked into his real estate office and asked him to write a column. Under the nom de plume Josh Billings he wrote 20, spelled properly, but they attracted little attention. He stopped writing.

Petroleum Nasby, Mark Twain, Josh Billings

A year later, he read a piece about a mule by Artemas Ward. It was similar to one he had written, but it used quirky spelling. Billings thought his work was better, so he tried again with phonetic spelling. His Essa on the Muel was such a hit it launched his career as a humorist. Soon after, he went on the lecture circuit.

He wore his dark hair long, refused to wear a tie, walked onto the stage without an introduction, sat down to talk and often had a pitcher of milk on a table in front of him, according to his biographer David Kesterson. Billings neither touched nor mentioned the milk, though the title of his lecture was Josh Billings on Milk.

He delivered one-liners using a formula of pungency, brevity and quaintness – one that Twain would later adopt. Lines like, “It is better, to kno less, than to kno so mutch that aint so.” Or, “For ages past the philosophers hav been crying aloud on the street korners, and hous tops, but the phools hav allwuss run the world, and allwuss will.”

Billings met Mark Twain in 1869 when both were working Boston’s Redpath Lyceum Bureau. Critics note that Billings’ rustic humor paved the way for Twain, 17 years his junior. The two men became friends, along with another popular humorist, Petroleum Nasby.

From 1869 to 1879, Josh Billings published his most popular work, a spoof of the Old Farmer’s Almanac. In it he predicted ‘rather cold’ in January, dandelions would appear in May and ‘grate warmth’ in July. He peppered his almanac with such aphorisms as,

When people loze their property they generally loze everything else, in the estimashun ov the world, except their faults and vices.

Strange Ending

Josh Billings died on Oct. 14, 1885, in the Hotel del Monte in Monterey, Calif.

John Steinbeck described what happened next in Cannery Row. The local constable delivered his body to the town’s only doctor, who doubled as an amateur mortician. The doctor threw Billings’ entrails into a gulley behind his house before packing his torso with sawdust. A dog found his stomach, liver and intestines; the dog’s owner, a small boy, took them to his boat, where he intended to use them for fish bait. Just as the boy started to row out to sea, some local men stopped him and retrieved Billings’ remains. They forced the doctor to give Billings’ a proper burial.

Here are more of his lines:

I hate to be a kicker,
I always long for peace,
But the wheel that does the squeaking,
Is the one that gets the grease.

Consider the postage stamp, son. It secures success through its ability to stick to one thing till it gets there.

Solitude is a good place to visit, but a poor place to stay.

I luv a Rooster for two things. One is the crow that is in him, and the other iz, the spurs that are on him, to bak up the crow with.

Man iz the only kreature that laffs, Angels dont, Animals kant, and Devils wont.

With thanks to Life and Adventures of Josh Billings: With a Characteristic Sketch of the Humorist by Francis Shubael Smith. This story was updated in 2022.

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Crispus Attucks, ‘The First To Defy, The First To Die’ in the Boston Massacre

On the wintry night of March 5, 1770, a tall, angry sailor named Crispus Attucks led a resentful mob of civilians in a fight with British soldiers at Dock Square in Boston.

19th-century lithograph of the Boston Massacre, emphasizing Crispus Attucks

Tensions had risen between the British soldiers and the colonists since Parliament passed the hated Townshend Acts. They imposed import duties on paper, paint, lead, glass and tea.

For two years, British troops had been posted in Boston to protect Crown officials who tried to collect the tariffs.

In response, Boston boycotted British goods, which imperiled the livelihoods of struggling laborers. And off-duty British soldiers edged out American dockworkers. In addition, colonial sailors resented the British for impressing them into service in the Royal Navy.

As a result, working-class civilians and soldiers had clashed in the weeks and months before the Boston Massacre on March 5.

On that night, an argument between a wigmaker’s apprentice and a British sentry attracted a crowd, dockworkers, Irish immigrants and sailors like their leader, Crispus Attucks.

As W. Jeffrey Bolster writes in Black Jacks,

…a crowd of mostly white sailors followed a seafaring man of color into danger; and this time, into history.

Crispus Attucks

Attucks was born around 1723 somewhere near Framingham, Mass., perhaps Natick, the praying Indian town. His mother belonged to the Wampanoag tribe, and his father was an African-American slave. His mother may have been descended from John Attucks, hanged for treason because he sided with his people during King Philip’s War.

Crispus Attucks was enslaved for 27 years, probably by a man named William Brown of Framingham. In 1750 he won his freedom by running away to sea. Or he may have bought his freedom. In any case, he often worked on whalers, and in between voyages he worked as a ropemaker.

Crispus Attucks

Seafaring was one of the few occupations free men of color could enter. Twenty-five years after the American Revolution, one-fifth of the 100,000 men employed as sailors were African-American.

The sea allowed room for black leaders. White sailors would follow a skilled black seamen who could help navigate a ship out of danger.

African-American sailors also provided a vital communications link between North and South and among Africans everywhere. For example, they helped Boston abolitionist David Walker spread his inflammatory pamphlet, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, by taking copies to Southern ports.

And though the sea represented enslavement to Africans, it also gave a lifeline to freedom for people like Attucks. Northern sea captains not only employed black sailors, they helped southern slaves sail to freedom on their ships; Frederick Douglass, for example, disguised himself as a sailor to escape slavery.

The Boston Massacre

On the night of the Boston Massacre, Crispus Attucks had just returned from a voyage to the Bahamas. He planned to sail to North Carolina. But he first joined the growing crowd harassing the sentry in Dock Square.

Witnesses said his eerie war-whoop egged on the angry civilians. They threw snowballs, sea coal and oyster shells at the sentry. Attucks then poked him with a stick, called him a ‘lobster’ and said he would have one of his claws.

British runners alerted the officer of the watch, Capt. Thomas Preston. Preston then gathered seven men and joined the sentry on the steps of the Custom House. They loaded their muskets.

According to most accounts, Crispus Attucks led the crowd forward. He shouted, “Come on you rascals, you bloody backs, you lobster scoundrels, fire if you dare, God damn you, fire and be damned, we know you dare not.”

In the confusion, one soldier discharged his musket – hitting Attucks, according to witnesses. Soon after the soldiers fired into the crowd.

Paul Revere’s famous engraving of the Boston massacre.

First To Die

Crispus Attucks died on the spot, the first killed in what Samuel Adams named as the Boston Massacre. Samuel Gray , a ropemaker, and James Carpenter, a sailor, died alongside Attucks. Samuel Maverick, a 17-year-old, died the next day of his wounds. Patrick Carr, an Irish immigrant, died two weeks later.

After the killings, patriots carried the body of Crispus Attucks to Faneuil Hall, where it lay in state. Then they buried the four dead victims as heroes in the Granary Burying Ground.

Attucks became an icon of the black abolition movement.

In antebellum New York at the Coloured Seaman’s Home, boarders dined under a framed portrait of Attucks. In 1858, black abolitionists celebrated the first ‘Crispus Attucks Day’ at Fanueil Hall. Thirty years later, a monument was erected on Boston Common in honor of Attucks and the other victims, “the first to defy, the first to die.”

Reenactors typically reprise the Boston Massacre around the anniversary.

With thanks to MassMoments and Black Jacks. This story about Crispus Attucks was updated in 2023.

Image of Crispus Attucks By Original uploader was Mav at en.wikipedia. Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3559623

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The Rev. William Bentley, on the Alert for Salem Fires in January

At the turn of the 19^th century, the Rev. William Bentley was constantly on the alert for Salem fires. But unlike many townspeople he didn’t rush to condemn the victims.

Salem fire fears were exacerbated by calamitous, well-known fires in New York City and elsewhere.

Fighting a Fire – (Painting by William Chappel, 1770s, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Edward W. C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps, and Pictures, Bequest of Edward W. C. Arnold, 1954)

New Englanders who lived in densely populated towns like Boston and Salem always had anxiety about the threat of fire, especially on very cold days.

Local officials passed all sorts of laws to prevent fires. They put arsonists to death. When Joshua Lamb’s home in Roxbury, Mass., burned down in 1681, his black servant Maria took the blame. She was found guilty and burned to ashes on Boston Common.

Salem Fires

William Bentley took a kindlier view. He was the beloved Unitarian minister of the East Church in Salem, Mass., from 1783 to his death in 1819. Bentley gave half his salary to the poor, lived modestly and emphasized good works over harsh doctrine. He was interested in everything. Little escaped his attention, and he wrote it all down in his diary. He chose Salem fires as a frequent topic.

On Jan. 18, 1806, William Bentley noted in his diary that two fires were wrongly blamed on arson:

We have news of a House burnt in Bradford & a Barn in Haverhill. As is usual, blame is not fixed upon neglect but incendiary purposes. These fires are kindled by great carelessness.

Bad Master

William Bentley, always on the lookout for Salem fires.

The open hearth was the center of New England domestic life and the center of New England’s homes. Nathaniel Hawthorne made the central hearth a major feature in The House of the Seven Gables.

But as New Englanders used to say, “Fire is a good servant, but a bad master.”

After Boston’s first 70 years, Cotton Mather complained “ten times has the fire made notable ruins among us.”

Congregationalist ministers like Mather viewed fires as evidence of God’s displeasure with mankind.

But William Bentley, a product of the Enlightenment, tried to avert calamitous fires through prevention and prompt intervention. He also belonged to one of Salem’s fire clubs.

Fire Clubs

Fire clubs existed in Salem since 1744, according to Cyrus Mason Tracy in his 1878 book, Standard History of Essex County, Massachusetts, Embracing a History of the County from Its First Settlement to the Present Time: With a History and Description of Its Towns and Cities. The Most Historic County of America.

Each member was required to have two substantial leather buckets, and they were usually painted with the name and device of the club. Many of these buckets may still be found hanging in the front or rear hall-ways of the old houses of Salem, usually under the stairs or on some projections or cornice.

The owner kept the buckets handy, and when a fire alarm went off, he took his buckets and repaired to the scene of the fire. Or at least he was supposed to.

He then helped passing water from the cisterns to the tubs of the engines, or threw it onto the fire directly. Tracy also wrote each fire club member had a bag to take property from buildings, and a bed-key to take down the old-fashioned bedsteads. Most of the clubs had ladders at convenient places about the town, he wrote.

In 1805, Bentley’s club tried to prevent fires by discouraging the “smoaking” of “segars” (cigars).

On December 12, 1805, he wrote:

Our Fire Club dinner. Great consent of parties. The measure most urged was to unite our efforts with other clubs to prevent the smoaking segars along the streets & in shops & outhouses. Many distressing fires are imputed to this careless practice.

Cold Januaries

Bentley was constantly on the alert for fire, not just in Salem. On Jan. 29, 1806, he wrote, “We had some apprehensions, from the ringing of the bell this evening, of a fire at Marblehead, but we found it was the First Night Lecture…

January was an especially bad month for fires.

On Jan. 5, 1804, he wrote,

The uncommon severity of the season has called for great caution in our wooden towns. Several fires have been arrested at their first appearance as at Col. Lee’s & Dr. Oliver’s, the one from firing a chimney & the other from a beam under a hearth as in the old construction.

On the morning of Jan. 18, 1804 another day of sudden cold, there was a slight earthquake. Wrote Bentley, “The people in general ran to their windows to see what heavy carriage was passing, & thence to their chimneys to see whether they were on fire.”

Horse Out of the Barn

Leather fire buckets

The day after a Salem fire, people inevitably drew up proposals to prevent another one. On the cold night of Jan. 16, 1806, a fire burned down three new houses in Carpenter Street. It started among shavings by children feeding the fire while their parents attended a lecture. Most of the men in the neighborhood were at the same lecture, and the fire spread to two other wooden houses. The next day, Bentley wrote,

it was proposed to make it an obligation to rebuild in brick. We see the great danger to which we are exposed from the very great number of Wooden buildings.

Twelve days later, the cry of “fire” awakened the town. The Cushing & Co. printing company burned down.

The next day, Bentley wrote:

…the town officers gathered this day to take some precautions respecting stoves used in Shops & Offices, & prevention the spread of fires.

With thanks to The Encyclopedia of New England.

This story last updated in 2023.

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