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Mather Byles, the Witty Loyalist Even the Patriots Liked

Boston’s Rev. Mather Byles was a Loyalist through and through. His loyalty to England never wavered throughout the American Revolution. What set him apart from others, however, and what may explain his ability to remain in Boston unmolested until his death in 1788, was his wit.

Mather Byles portrait by John Singleton Copley

Mather Byles , a Harvard-educated clergyman born in 1706, became pastor of the Hollis Street Congregational Church in Boston in 1733. Though he did not use his pulpit to push his politics, everyone knew his views. Yet the colonial leaders viewed him highly. Because of his charm and wit, he often spoke at funerals of high officials.

Mather Byles

Mather Byles viewed the coming Revolution as probably inevitable, given the festering relations between the colonies and the crown. However, he viewed the undisciplined violence of the revolutionary leaders as particularly odious.

He is perhaps most famously remembered for his retort when questioned why he didn’t support the uprising of the Sons of Liberty. The quote attributed to him:

“Which is better — to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants one mile away?”

During the siege of Boston, Mather Byles remained in his home and reportedly had good relations with the British who occupied the city. His influence did not extend so far as to protect his church, however, as the occupying forces converted it to a barracks.

The Evacuation Of Boston by W.J. Aylward (New York Public Library).

Upon the departure of the British, Byles did not flee. His congregation, however, soon removed him from his post (a decision fellow ministers were not comfortable with). Massachusetts officials charged and convicted him of aiding the British and speaking against the Revolutionary cause.

Though ordered to leave Boston in 1778, the aging minister simply refused. Eventually the colonists learned to tolerate him, partly because they considered him more a buffoon than an enemy. Mather Byles could never resist a pun or a witticism, even in the direst circumstances.

The Mather Byles Wit

Some examples of his humor:

When he witnessed the parade of celebrating revolutionaries returning to Boston, he observed the rotund form of Henry Knox. He knew Knox as a bookstore operator before the outbreak of the war.

Henry Knox by Gilbert Stuart 1806

“I never saw an ox fatter in my life,” Byles reportedly said as Knox passed by. Knox’s assessment of the remark? He called Byles a ‘damned fool.’

When Byles came before the judges who were to hear charges against him, he was ushered into their chambers and offered a seat by the hearth, as it was a cold day. His retort:

“Gentlemen, when I came among you I expected persecution, but I could not think you would have offered me the fire so suddenly.”

After they convicted him, Byles refused to leave Boston. The town leaders now had the quandary of what to do with the obstinate old minister.

Observatory

For a time they placed him under house arrest, and posted a sentry in front of his home. That scenario generated several farcical scenes attributed to Byles. Asked once by a visitor what the guard was doing outside, he replied: “Oh, that is my observe-a-Tory!”

On another occasion, he supposedly asked his guard to bring him water from a nearby well. When the guard refused to leave his post, Byles offered to stand in for him while he fetched the water, and the guard agreed.

While the sentinel went for a bucket of water, Byles shouldered his musket and marched to and fro while waiting for him to return.

Eventually, the town fathers got sick of guarding Byles. They temporarily removed his guard, reinstated him, and then permanently abandoned the operation. That gave him the opportunity to explain that, “I have been guarded, re-guarded, and disregarded.”

Thanks to: The Famous Mather Byles by Arthur Wentworth Hamilton Eaton. This story about Mather Byles was updated in 2022.

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Mary Latham Marries an Older Man – And Regrets It

Around 1643, Mary Latham fell in love with a boy who rejected her. About 17 years old and impetuous, Mary Latham decided to marry the next man who asked. It was a bad decision.

Illustration: “Mary Dyer being led” by unknown 19th century artist – Brooklyn Museum

Despite her friends’ advice, she married a much older man, who had little to offer. She quickly grew dissatisfied with the marriage. Her story ended with the only known execution in America for adultery.

What we know of her comes from the diary of John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Unhappy Marriage

Mary’s husband was “an ancient man who had neither honesty nor ability, and one whom she had no affection unto,” Winthrop writes.

“She did frequently abuse her husband, setting a knife to his breast and threatening to kill him, calling him old rogue and cuckold, and said she would make him wear horns as big as a bull,” wrote Winthrop.

John Winthrop. American Antiquarian Society

“Whereupon, soon after she was married, divers young men solicited her chastity, and drawing her into bad company, and giving her wine and other gifts, easily prevailed with her.”

Now everything might have proceeded without a problem except Mary Latham took up with a man named John Britton. Britton, a professor in England, came to the colonies, but he was not a Puritan.

“He opposed our church government, etc., and grew dissolute, losing both power and profession of godliness,” Winthrop wrote. Britton was “a man ill affected both to our church discipline and civil government.”

Confessions

Britton also apparently couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He confessed to his affair with Mary Latham. The magistrates in Plymouth, where Mary lived, wasted no time in shipping her to Boston to face the charges against her.

At first, Mary Lataham denied the allegation. Britton had made advances, she said, but had not succeeded.

A witness against her said, “a company met at Britton’s and there continued drinking sack, etc., till late in the night, and then Britton and the woman were seen upon the ground together, a little from the house.”

The jury found her guilty, and soon after that Mary confessed. She not only admitted the affair with Britton, but she named 12 other men, two of them married, that she had been with. The scandal produced a roundup of five of the men, though the others could not be found. The accused denied everything and for lack of witnesses or confessions they went free.

Mary Latham, however, had far less luck. The court sentenced her and Britton to death. Though a number of magistrates argued that death was not an appropriate punishment for adultery, they were outvoted.

Britton petitioned the court for a lesser sentence, but the court denied his request. Mary was penitent, and both stood a good chance of getting pardoned. Despite the strictness of the Puritan laws, criminals who repented often received pardons.

Winthrop concludes their story on March 21, 1644: “They were both executed, they both died very penitently, especially the woman, who had some comfortable hope of pardon of her sin, and gave good exhortation to all young maids to be obedient to their parents, and to take heed of evil company, etc.”

This story about Mary Latham was updated in 2023.

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In 1679 Rebecca Rawson Takes a Husband – And Soon Regrets It

Rebecca Rawson was a living morality tale for all Puritan New Englanders. But for vanity, she might have lived a wonderful life.

Rebecca Rawson (The American portrait gallery; containing correct portraits and brief notices of the principal actors in American history)

Rawson was born in 1656 in Newbury, Mass., to Edward and Rachel Rawson. Her father went on to become Secretary of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He built a large estate and a family of nine children, who lived in relative luxury.

Local boys courted the beautiful Rebecca Rawson, and she could have had any one she wanted. However, when Thomas Hale arrived in Massachusetts, he caught Rebecca’s eye.

‘Sir Thomas Hale’

Hale said he was Sir Thomas Hale, nephew of the Lord Chief Justice in England. Rebecca and her family were impressed with the notion that she might marry a lord, and when he asked, she agreed. In July of 1679, Rebecca and Thomas married in a large wedding, he with a fancy suit and she with a silken gown. With her considerable dowry and personal belongings packed up, they set sail for England.

Sunlight and Shadow: Newbury Marshes by Martin Johnson Heade. National Gallery of Art.

Upon arrival in London, the exhausted couple spent the night at an inn. The next morning, Thomas went back to the docks to retrieve their trunks, which he promised to send to Rebecca. The trunks soon arrived, but with no keys to open them.

As the day wore on, and Thomas did not reappear, Rebecca had the locks forced and discovered the trunks emptied of any valuables.

Thomas Hale, she soon discovered, was Thomas Rumsey, a local con man who had preyed on naïve New Englanders before. Not only that, he already had a wife and two children.

Much to her dismay, Rebecca soon discovered she was pregnant with Thomas’s child. Embarrassed and penniless, Rebecca decided she would not return to New England. Instead, she found a home in London and for 13 years supported herself and her son as an artist and handywoman.

Port Royal

Eventually, her father wrote to her and urged her to return to Boston and live with him. Rebecca Rawson agreed. She set sail, first for Port Royal in Jamaica, and from there she planned to return to New England.

Port Royal was a lawless, pirate haven, rich in both money and sin. Rebecca’s ship arrived in June of 1692 and lay in port on June 7 when an earthquake struck. The earthquake killed 2,000 of the 6,500 people in Port Royal.

Port Royal sometime before 1692

Descriptions of the event recount the ground opening up and swallowing people, ships pushed ashore, houses collapsing and the cemetery flooding.

The harbor filled with the corpses of new earthquake victims and the long-buried dead.

Rebecca Rawson died in the earthquake at age 36.

Rebecca Rawson Recalled

Sarah Anna Emery in her Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian, recalled her story. Master storyteller John Greenleaf Whittier made her story the centerpiece in his fictionalized tale of New England life, Leaves from Margaret Smith’s Journal in the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

John Greenleaf Whittier

In it, he says of Rebecca Rawson:

“My grandmother, who affectionately watched over Rebecca, and comforted her in her great affliction, has often told me that, on coming to herself, her poor cousin said it was a righteous judgment upon her, for her pride and vanity, which had led her to discard worthy men for one of great show and pretensions, who had no solid merit to boast of. She had sinned against God, and brought disgrace upon her family, in choosing him. She begged that his name might never be mentioned again in her hearing, and that she might only be known as a poor relative of her English kinsfolk, and find a home among them until she could seek out some employment for her maintenance, as she could not think of going back to Boston, to become the laughing-stock of the thoughtless and the reproach of her father’s family.”

This story about Rebecca Rawson was updated in 2022.

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Karl Muck Departs the Boston Symphony Orchestra in World War I Era Scandal

Henry Lee Higginson founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1881, and for nearly 40 years made it an unparalleled success. Until, that is, the last year of his life when musical director Karl Muck became enveloped in a scandal that turned the symphony into a political flashpoint during World War I.

Karl Muck

When America entered World War I in April of 1917, Higginson had reason to worry about his conductor. Muck, then 57, was born in Germany and had connections in government circles. Still, he was a musician, not a military man.

Karl Muck

Higginson had been somewhat bold to engage Muck in the first place. He had conducted the orchestra from 1906 to 1908 as a guest, and Higginson brought him back in 1912 more permanently. The press praised the decision. The BSO had traditionally used unknowns in the role of conductor, rather than more famous, established conductors like Muck.

Higginson talked about the issues surrounding the war with Muck, and he agreed to stay apolitical. And for a time, it worked. The BSO continued its performances, and Muck kept quiet.

By 1917, orchestras were starting to add The Star Spangled Banner to their concert lineups and the BSO was slow to adopt the custom. After a November concert in Providence, Muck was accused of refusing to play the national anthem. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, correct. Muck didn’t like anyone telling him what he had to perform. Still, he had not refused. A request to perform the song did not reach him. Higginson had simply ignored it.

Carnegie Hall

The issue simmered and rose up again as the end of 1917 approached. Muck and the BSO were scheduled to play three nights at New York’s Carnegie Hall the following year. The socialites of New York, led by Mrs. William Jay, began agitating against his performance, as well as German opera performances.

Boston Symphony Orchestra

Their fight broke into the press. Higginson tried to calm the waters by spreading the story that Muck was Swiss. While he was born in Germany, his father had obtained a Swiss passport for him as a youngster and Higginson tried to pass the conductor off as a neutral party.

By the end of December, however, the controversy was growing. The City of Pittsburgh banned Muck from performing. Leaders in Springfield, Mass., said they would not rent space for a BSO concert.

And in New York, Mrs. Jay continued her protests and letter-writing. She did not want Muck performing at Carnegie Hall.

The press reported, “Her letters were without effect on Major Higginson, except to move him to inform Mrs. Jay that her letters were a distinct annoyance.”

Officials in Washington, D.C. forced cancellation of a BSO concert there. They declared Muck, along with 22 other members of the orchestra, was an enemy alien and not allowed to enter the city.

On March 14, 1918, Muck strode to the podium at Carnegie Hall. The press reported he received a 1-minute and 42-second standing ovation. When the crowd quieted, he struck up a rendition of The Star Spangled Banner that received another ovation.

Arrest

The public controversy over Muck died, temporarily. Behind the scenes, however, pressure to remove Muck was growing. Higginson privately laid out his intentions. At the close of the season in May, he would announce Muck’s departure and he, himself, would also resign. He never got the chance to put his plans into action.

On March 25, police arrested Muck as a hostile alien. He resigned from the symphony at the end of March. Then at the start of April he was sent to a Georgia internment camp, with 4,000 others of German descent.

Muck and several others had to be taken to the camp under guard amid threats from people who said they would take him from the train and hang him. For his part, Muck said he was pleased with the change. He couldn’t smoke cigarettes at the Cambridge, Mass., jail, something he could do in the internment camp.

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had promised to rein in the practices of the Justice Department, but it was no aid to Muck. The Justice Department wanted to question him about his friendship with Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm and his knowledge of the Kaiser’s plans for America.

As April progressed, Swiss officials dropped their defense of Muck. They no longer claimed he was a Swiss citizen. Higginson resigned from the orchestra, handing it over to a board of directors.

Arrest of Karl Muck (center)

Deportee

Since his first day at the camp, Muck and others were offered the option of being sent to Germany if they wished. At the urging of his wife, Muck finally agreed to deportation, and in August of 1919 he was boarded a ship to Europe.

He gave interviews in which he was bitter about his treatment. America was under mob rule, he said, though he said his life in the internment camp was largely comfortable. He noted that the BSO had 29 musicians in the internment camp, and he doubted the symphony could recover.

Back in Germany, he told reporters that his internment resulted from police and FBI looking at his shorthand notations for the music to Bach’s The Passion of St. Matthew. They mistook it, he said, for some sort of spy code. He would conduct the Berlin Philharmonic that fall.

Henry Higginson

In November 1919, just four days after the official end of World War I, Henry Higginson died at age 85 from complications of surgery earlier in the year. Boston mourned the successful banker and Civil War soldier. No one had questioned his loyalty during the Muck affair, or his decision to stand by Muck, though some thought it curious.

The public was about to hear the final piece of the story.

The Real Story

In December, the newspapers in Boston and New York published a “Now it can be told” account of Karl Muck’s internment and deportation. “Love and Intrigue Mingle in the Story of Karl Muck Deported Orchestra Leader,” read the headlines on a series of articles that began just before Christmas.

This account of the story revealed that when police investigated Muck they learned of his affair with Rosamond Young, a 20-year-old opera singer from a wealthy Boston-area family. He had met her years before when she visited Germany.

Police pressured him with a threat of a morals charge into accepting internment. Higginson had also realized the scandal would end any possibility of salvaging Muck’s job.

Following his arrest, Muck had asked the girl to burn his letters to her, but she did not, and police discovered them. The newspapers published excerpts revealing an odd mix of incriminating details that showed Muck to be both infatuated with the girl and still very much in love with Germany.

“Dream of me darling. Dream of the throbbing moments we spent together, and dream of the hours we will yet spend,” he wrote in one letter.

In another, he promised he would take the girl with him to Germany and marry her.

“It will be only a very short time when our gracious Kaiser will act upon my request and recall me to Berlin,” he wrote. Once there,”our Kaiser will be prevailed upon to see the benefit to the Fatherland in my obtaining a divorce and making you my own.”

Valuable Servant

Muck explained that he wanted to return to Germany sooner, but had agreed to stay in the United States at the request of Germany’s ambassador to America:

“He insisted I am the fatherland’s most valuable servant in this country. In the name of our gracious Kaiser he begged me to remain here.”

No evidence emerged that Muck provided any material aid to the Germans. The closest thing to an actual allegation against him was his loyalty to Germany and, in the event of an invasion, he belonged to a group of German Americans who would help the enemy.

Muck would have many more successful years as a conductor in Germany before he died in 1940.

Images: Boston Symphony Hall By mooogmonster – CIMG2733, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=955273. With thanks to Melissa D. Burrage, The Karl Muck Scandal; Classical Music and Xenophobia in World War I.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The ‘Loyal Nine’ Christen the Boston Liberty Tree

Andrew Oliver discovered on August 14, 1765 that he had made a terrible career move – a decision that ultimately gave birth to the Liberty Tree of Boston, an important symbol of revolutionary fervor in the Massachusetts Colony.

When Parliament passed the Stamp Act in March of that 1765, Oliver, secretary to the province of Massachusetts and brother-in-law of future governor Thomas Hutchinson, won the appointment of tax stamp administrator for Massachusetts.

A 1774 British print depicts the tarring and feathering of Boston Commissioner of Customs John Malcolm in front of the Liberty Tree of Boston.

Though he did not favor the act personally, Oliver went along with the new job. The act required that documents, such as newspapers and contracts, bear the stamp showing taxes had been paid on them. This was something of an escalation of the disagreements between the colonies and the crown.

While England had long sought ways to make the colonies pay their own way, the Stamp Act would have teeth. Wills, contracts and other documents would have no legal weight if they were not written on paper that bore the official stamp. Being the administrator of the tax stamps would be a powerful and lucrative position.

The colonists had a long history of sliding around many of England’s trade rules that were designed to raise revenue, but the stamp act, colonists feared, would be hard to get around. No stamp and a contract could be ruled invalid. Making matters worse, the tax had to be paid in British Pounds Sterling.

Access to hard currency was always a problem in the colonies. And by refusing payments in either local currencies or other forms, the colonies could find themselves hard pressed to have enough British money available to meet their needs.

The Liberty Tree

Though the tax as proposed was relatively modest, the more forward thinking colonists realized the amounts could be raised at will once the precedent of a tax was established. And the merchants who were skilled at avoiding British laws realized that their skills could soon be rendered worthless.

These merchants in Boston were the early forerunners of the Sons of Liberty, and a group of them formed a political organization called “The Loyal Nine.” They set about fending off the Stamp Act. Their protests went public on August 14, 1765, when they hanged Andrew Oliver in effigy from a tree at the corner of Orange (now Washington) and Essex Streets.

On that day, the Liberty Tree was born. At first, the officials didn’t know exactly what to make of the protest. They debated responding and removing the dummy from the tree. But they concluded that taking action would provoke a response when the protest was meant to be peaceful. They were wrong.

The protesters had every intention of driving their point home. As the day wore on, they took the dummy down from the tree and proceeded to march to a building Oliver had constructed at his wharf. Believing that the structure was intended to be part of the Stamp Act enforcement, the group tore it down.

They then proceeded to Oliver’s home, where they burned the dummy and ransacked his offices. Oliver resigned. He told the Loyal Nine that he would not enforce the Stamp Act.

Death of Andrew Oliver

Similar tactics were employed elsewhere in the colonies, and soon the King found himself with no way to implement the tax. Though later repealed, it had set some important precedents. Among them: the establishment of the Liberty Tree as a rallying point for the Sons of Liberty and their followers.

It would serve its purpose for 10 years. Both the Patriots and the British troops used it as a scene for tar and feathering. The British used it to make their point when handing out punishments to the rebels.

The tree was a rallying point for patriots right up until its end, during the siege of Boston in 1775. In 1776, the British troops chopped it down in a show of defiance before they fled the city. Andrew Oliver, by then, was no longer around to care about the tree.

After his elevation to lieutenant governor when Hutchinson assumed the governorship in 1771, he died in 1774. The Sons of Liberty had grown much larger by that point, and were so boisterous that few of Oliver’s family dared attend his funeral for fear of attack.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Charles Ponzi and ‘The Best Show Since the Landing of the Pilgrims’

On July 24, 1920, the Boston Post published a story about an impressive investment opportunity that was taking off and making investors wealthy, almost overnight. Within days, however, the story began unraveling and the newspaper began asking tougher questions. It would be the beginning of the end of Charles Ponzi and his remarkable money-making scheme.

Charles Ponzi

The basis of Ponzi’s schemes was nothing more than currency trading, which is still done profitably today. What Ponzi discovered was that you could send someone a postage reply coupon with an international letter, which they could use to pay the postage on a letter in reply.

But if the recipient didn’t want to reply, he could also exchange the coupon for stamps (or cash) through the post office. And if you bought it in a country where it cost one cent to mail a letter and redeemed it in a country where it cost two cents, Ponzi concluded you could make considerable profit.

Like all too-good-to-be-true deals, this one had a catch. Redeeming the coupons took time and paperwork that would easily eat up more than the profits it would yield.

But that didn’t stop Ponzi from soliciting investors. In exchange for using their capital, he promised he would double their money in 90 days. Soon, he had investors lining up to give him money at his newly formed “Securities Exchange Company.”

His scam was simply to pay people their profits by using new, incoming funds. Soon, some of his investors grew nervous and wanted out. Ponzi feared that as word spread, he would soon lose all his backers and would be exposed.

He turned to former Boston Post reporter William McMaster for help. McMaster, acting as Ponzi’s publicist, succeeded in getting the Post to place the positive story prominently in the paper. With the glowing story appearing in a newspaper with enormous circulation, investors stopped fleeing. But even more importantly, it brought in a tidal wave of new cash.

By 1920, however, Ponzi already had a troubled past. He had served jail time in Canada for forging a check. And there were many people skeptical of his claims. The Boston Post soon decided to revisit the Ponzi story, this time with a more seasoned journalist doing the looking: Clarence W. Barron, for whom Barron’s investment magazine is named.

Barron began questioning Ponzi’s story. Then McMaster joined in. McMaster, instrumental in helping Ponzi stabilize his scam, soon realized what he had done and decided he needed to try to put things right.

With people literally mortgaging their homes in some cases to invest, Ponzi was scrambling to find a way to keep his scheme running. He took control of a bank, Hanover Trust, and had hopes of using it as a source of funds to prop up Securities Exchange Company.

But McMaster was soon doing some snooping and some simple math. He concluded that there were not enough postal certificates in existence to be supporting the profits Ponzi was claiming, and soon after the Post bought his story exposing Ponzi. The scam artist sued the paper and covered the payments to his investors who were now rushing for the exits for five days. But with the Post continuing to hammer away at Ponzi, reporting that he had bought no postal coupons at all, the Securities Exchange Company crashed down in August.

Ponzi cost his investors millions and would serve jail time, but he was an unrepentant scammer, moving on to real estate swindles and financial scams in his native Italy, where he returned after being deported. He ended his days in Brazil, a fugitive. But even through to his death at age 66, he still loved the spotlight. In a final interview, he told the reporter:

“Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price. Without malice aforethought I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the landing of the Pilgrims! It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over.”

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