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Mary Gray Bidwell, Connecticut River Goddess, Dies Too Soon To Help Her Husband

Mary Gray Bidwell and her husband Barnabas resembled in many ways John and Abigail Adams. Both belonged to the local gentry, and they had brains and ambition. Like the Adamses, they loved each other and corresponded regularly during Barnabas’ long absences on political business.

But unlike Abigail Adams, Mary Gray Bidwell died at the age of 44, leaving her husband vulnerable to his political enemies.

“Barnabas Bidwell’s life didn’t exactly spin out of control after his wife, Mary Gray Bidwell died suddenly in February of 1808,” wrote Brian Burke. “But without knowing it, he had suddenly become more vulnerable to the tides of political fortune.”

Mary Gray Bidwell

The seven wealthy families who ruled the towns and villages along the Upper Connecticut River Valley were known as the Connecticut River Gods. Mary belonged to four of them: the Stoddards, the Partridges, the Dwights and the Williamses. She undoubtedly knew the other three, the Ashleys, the Pynchons and the Porters.

The River Gods, also known as the Mansion People, set the tone for the region’s culture and fashion. They also maintained political control of Western Massachusetts

Into that milieu Mary was born May 28, 1764, in Stockbridge, Mass.

Stockbridge around 1912

When she was still a young girl, her father suffered physical and economic setbacks. So she went to live with her mother’s brother, Marshall Spring, in Watertown, Mass. Her uncle made sure she received a good education. She fell in love with a rising political star, 32-year-old Barnabas Bidwell. At 29, she married him in Watertown, and the newlyweds moved to The Elms, a house he’d bought earlier in Stockbridge.

They lived across the street from Pamela Dwight, a river goddess married to Judge Theodore Sedgwick. Mary’s mother, Pamela Dwight’s second cousin, moved in with the Bidwells.

Mary moved comfortably among the local elite. A contemporary wrote of her,

In polished society she well was regarded:
Her manner mild her taste refined
She social talents always shone
Her wit and charm for every kind.

A portrait of her, featured on the cover of the book, Remarkable Women of New England by Carol Owens, reveals an elegant beauty.

Barnabas Bidwell

Barnabas Bidwell, the son of the Rev. Adonijah Bidwell, graduated from Yale College and studied law at Brown. And he was going places, with help from his neighbor Judge Theodore Sedgwick.

Barnabas Bidwell

Like Sedgwick, Barnabas Bidwell belonged to the Federalist Party, and with Sedgwick’s help he rose swiftly. Elected to the Massachusetts General Court as representative and senator, he then moved on to Congress in 1805.

But not as a Federalist.

By 1805, Barnabas Bidwell had switched sides to the Democratic-Republican Party, hated throughout much of New England. In Congress, he defended President Thomas Jefferson’s embargo on trade with Britain and his purchase of Florida.

By then Bidwell had earned the enmity of his former mentor. When Sedgwick retired from Congress in 1801, he wrote a letter to the editor summing up the Federalist Party accomplishments.

Bidwell wrote a nasty response: “…a solid majority will eventually oppose and crush them [the Federalists] And blessed be God that day appears to be fast approaching.”

Then he attacked Sedgwick personally. Sedgwick did not forget.

It All Unravels

Barnabas Bidwell returned to Massachusetts in 1807 as the commonwealth’s attorney general. Mary Gray Bidwell died suddenly on February 1, 1808.

Mary’s mother died shortly thereafter. Her cousin, Pamela Dwight Sedgwick, had died shortly before Mary did. Thus, Barnabas Bidwell no longer had the protection of three women who might well have prevented Judge Sedgwick from exacting revenge.

Berkshire County

Early in his career, Barnabas Bidwell was appointed treasurer of Berkshire County, a position he held in name only. Clerks did all the work while he rose through the political ranks. He still served as Berkshire County treasurer when his name came up for consideration as a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

Theodore Sedgwick

Sedgwick’s political allies picked that moment in 1810 to frame Barnabas Bidwell. They accused him of embezzling from the Berkshire County treasury.

A clerk, since dead, had actually been responsible for a minor discrepancy in the Berkshire County accounts. But the Federalists exaggerated Bidwell’s role in the scandal, and he fled to Canada.

It took seven years for the matter to be cleared up. Bidwell paid a fine, but remained in Canada where he won election to the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada. He never took office, though, because opponents successfully claimed he was a fugitive from justice and an immoral character.

He lived in Canada the rest of his life, so much different than if Mary Gray Bidwell had lived longer. Mary, her mother and her cousin Pamela Dwight Sedgwick would probably have intervened to suppress the accusations against Barnabas.

Barnabas Bidwell died in 1833.

While mourning his wife, he had written a poem to her:

The rain patterns on the roof
And from the eves descends.
The storm keeps visitants aloof
And even shuts out friends.
So sweetly all my moments flew
When Mary was my bride
How oft I do those scenes review
With Mary at my side.

This story about Mary Gray Bidwell was updated in 2023.

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Jefferson Davis in New England – The Unlikely Campaign

Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis, who would go on to become president of the confederate states during the Civil War, was no stranger to New England.

A firebrand and die-hard defender of the south and all its traditions – including slavery – Davis twice traveled to New England in the 1850s. The first trip came in 1853. Davis visited the region in his official capacity as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce to tour military installations.

Both trips were designed to escape the south’s summer heat, but Davis’ second visit was also to help him restore his health and perhaps steer the nation away from war.

Gracious Maine: Jefferson Davis in New England

Davis left Baltimore for Boston aboard a steamer on July 3, 1858. After an overnight stop in the city, he caught a second steamer to Portland.

His tour of Maine included a stop at the home of General Henry Knox in Thomaston, a trip to Lead Mountain and a stop in Belfast to review a state militia meeting. In Brunswick – once home of abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe – he was honored with an honorary degree. And in Portland, he agreed to address the Cumberland County Democractic Convention.

Jefferson Davis

Davis was quite an attraction. The Republican press had vilified Davis and his extreme views as a man of the “ultra south.” Crowds in New England who came to see him might well have expected a raving tyrant. What they got was a smooth, elegant southern gentleman with impeccable manners and exotic green-tinted glasses to protect his eyes.

Davis was largely blind in one eye due to an persistent infection, which he hoped the moderate northern climate would help him ease.

At the Democratic Convention in Portland, he sounded a note of conciliation. Were the differences between north and south really so great as to demand a war;

“Shall narrow interests, shall local jealousies, shall disregard for the high purposes for which our union was ordained, continue to distract our people and impede the progress of our government towards the high consummation which prophetic statesmen have so often indicated as her destiny?”

“No, No, No,” the crowd thundered in reply.

Boston Wowed

As he began his return journey home in October, Davis stopped again in Massachusetts. He toured Daniel Webster’s Marshfield homestead.

Charles G. Greene, founder and editor of Boston Post, hosted a reception for Davis on Sat Oct. 16 and he socialized with prominent Massachusetts’ democrats, such as Caleb Cushing.

Republican Nathaniel Banks was governor of Massachusetts at the time of Davis’ visit. Banks was a moderate Republican who had won support of Massachusetts’ fervent abolitionists in part by firing Judge Edward Loring. Loring had enforced the Fugitive Slave Act, which required northern states to return escaped slaves to the south rather than grant them asylum.

On October 11, Davis addressed the state Democratic Convention held at Faneuil Hall to nominate Erasmus Beach to run for governor against Banks. (He would fail in the general election).

Again, Davis sounded his somewhat conciliatory tone. He defended slavery. And he called it an issue of state’s rights. (Though he didn’t extend the states’ rights argument to the right to grant asylum to escaped slaves.)

But he crafted a message designed as music to the ears of New Englanders wary of war. Was Massachusetts, home of John Hancock and Samuel Adams, really ready to discard all that the country had achieved over these regional disagreements?

Jefferson Davis, Peacemaker?

He sang the praises of John Hancock for snubbing President George Washington when the president visited the commonwealth in 1789. Hancock had asserted that the governor of each state should be of superior rank to the president in matters of protocol.

Davis reserved his harshest criticism for the abolitionists, painting them as bent on destroying the country. “The political agitator, like the vampire, fans the victim to which he clings but to destroy,” he said.

In summation, Davis said he hoped that those hoping to split the nation would not succeed.

“Why, then, I would ask, do we see these lengthened shadows, which follow in the course of our political day? Is it because the sun is declining to the horizon? Are they the shadows of evening; or are they, as I hopefully believe, but the mists which are exhaled by the sun as it rises, but which are to be dispersed by its meridian splendor?”

Davis, in his speeches, stressed that the differences between the south and north were not so great as to require a split. But he never said exactly what compromise he supported to avert it, leaving the listener to form his own conclusions.

Eruption in the South

In the north, moderates might well be persuaded that Davis’ position was softening, that he was suggesting an end to slavery might be acceptable for the preservation of the union. That interpretation was pleasing to some.

In the South, the Davis’ visit to New England was viewed as something like treason.

The Charleston Mercury in South Carolina declared Davis was a “Union Mormon.” It said “Jefferson Davis we know is no more.”

Davis needed to harden his rhetoric and in November of 1858, he did so. In a speech to the Mississippi legislature, he declared that the south must secede if an abolitionist were to be elected president.

“I love the flag of my country with even more than a filial affection,” he said. “I glory in the position which Mississippi’s star holds in the group; but sooner than see its lustre dimmed—sooner than see it degraded from its present equality—would tear it from its place to be set even on the perilous ridge of battle as a sign round which Mississippi’s best and bravest should gather to the harvest-home of death.”

This story about Jefferson Davis in New England was updated in 2023.

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The Prohibition Era Begins in Litchfield, Conn. in 1789

In 1789, Ephraim Kirby, Jebediah Strong, David Buel and more than 100 of their neighbors decided to swear off strong drink. They came together to form the beginnings of the Litchfield Temperance Association, a movement that would evolve into the Prohibition Era more than a century later.

The pact the men signed represented a radical departure in everyday thinking about alcohol that gained popularity after the American Revolution. At that time, cider, beer and wine were liberally consumed and distilled spirits were dispensed to workers. Many stores commonly provided a free dram of an alcoholic drink to customers at any time of day.

Benjamin Rush by Charles Wilson Peale

Birth of the Prohibition Era

As early as 1785, Pennsylvania’s Dr. Benjamin Rush challenged common assumptions about the health effects of alcohol. His temperance/intemperance thermometer ranked beverages in relation to their benefits and drawbacks. The likely outcomes to people who consumed each beverage accompanied the thermometer. Water, milk and small beer, he proposed, inspired serenity of mind, long life and a good reputation. Wine, porter and strong beer brought a person cheerfulness and nourishment when taken in small amounts at mealtime. People who restricted their drinking to these beverages were considered temperate, by Rush’s measures.

The Prohibition Era begins

From there Rush’s scale plunges into intemperance, ascribing outcomes to the various drinks. Punch: sickness, idleness, gaming and jail. From there matters got worse. The beverages increased in potency through toddys, cordials and straight gin, brandy and rum. Similarly, the consequences escalated from lying, swearing and racing horses to swindling, burglary and murder. Eventually they led to insanity, dropsy, epilepsy, hospitalization, life in prison and the gallows.

Litchfield Temperance

The men of Litchfield clearly accepted the wisdom of avoiding intemperance. The pact they signed read as follows:

So many are the avenues leading to human misery that it is impossible to guard them all. Such evils as are produced by our own folly and weakness are within our power to avoid. The immoderate use which the people of this State make of Distilled Spirits is undoubtedly an evil of this kind. It is obvious to every person of the smallest observation that from this pernicious practice follows a train of evils difficult to be enumerated.

Like Rush, they ascribed dire outcomes to strong drink.

The morals are corrupted, property is exhausted, and health destroyed. And it is most sincerely to be regretted that from a mistaken idea that distilled spirits are necessary to laboring men, to counteract the influence of heat and give relief from severe fatigue, that a most valuable class of citizens have been led to contract a habit of such dangerous tendency. Hence arises the inability to pay public taxes, to discharge private debts, and to support and educate families.

The Prohibition Era Begins

And then they took a pledge:

Seriously considering this subject, and the frowns of Divine Providence in denying many families in this part of the country the means of a comfortable subsistence the present year by failure of the principal crops of the earth, we think it peculiarly the duty of every good citizen to unite his efforts to reform a practice which leads so many to poverty, distress, and ruin. Whereupon we do hereby associate, and mutually agree, that hereafter we will carry on our business without the use of distilled spirits as an article of refreshment, either for ourselves or those whom we employ, and that instead thereof we will serve our workmen with wholesome food and common simple drinks of our own production.

Jebediah Strong

The temperance men appended to the pact a statement signed by Jebediah Strong only:

By necessity and on principle, in consequence of little experiment and much observation, I have effectually adopted and adhered to the salutatory plan herein proposed during several months past, and am still resolved to persevere until convinced that any alteration will be productive of some greater good, whereof at present I have no apprehensions whilst human nature remains the same.

The signers of the pact included Litchfield’s most influential men. Ephraim Kirby, whose name appears first on the list, was a Revolutionary War veteran and political leader who became a confidante of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson appointed him as tax collector for Connecticut and later a judge in the new territory of Mississippi. He was busy at work establishing the first court system in the territory that would become Alabama when yellow fever struck him down in 1804 at the age of just 47.

David Buel, meanwhile, championed the temperance movement for decades.

First Congregational Church of Litchfield, where Lyman Beecher preached his temperance sermons

Litchfield took center stage in the temperance movement again in 1826 when Rev. Lyman Beecher delivered six sermons on intemperance. They were published in multiple translations and were popular for decades. Buel, meanwhile, moved to Troy, N.Y. , where he lived to 90. He never stopped spreading the temperance message.

Jebediah Strong

For Jebediah Strong, however, the path of temperance proved too difficult. Strong, who had signed the addendum to the pact declaring he intended to abstain from spirits, resumed drinking.

Strong was a political leader, town official and lawyer. One uncharitable biographer labeled him a pettifogger, an unscrupulous and petty lawyer. An unpleasant, short, limping man, he held power by pretending to take all sides of an issue, depending on who he spoke to. He was especially unpleasant in his home. In 1790 he was arrested for beating his wife.

Tapping Reeve

Judge Tapping Reeve (who also signed the temperance pact), ordered Strong placed under bail of 1000 pounds and scheduled for trial. The Hartford Monitor reported: “Nothing could be more satisfactory than this sentence among his acquaintances in Litchfield and elsewhere, who have long known the infamy of his private character, while his hypocrisy and intrigues have been imposed upon the good people of the state at large.”

In the end, Strong’s wife, Susannah, divorced him. He died in 1802, a beggar and a drunkard.

Thanks to: Sketches and Chronicles of the Town of Litchfield, by Payne Kenyon Kilbourne. This story was updated in 2022.

Image of Congregational Church: Highsmith, C. M., photographer. (2011) First Congregational Church, Litchfield, Connecticut. Litchfield United States Connecticut, 2011. October. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2012631563/.

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How a Slave and a Counterfeiter Made the Fugio Cent, the 1st U.S. Money

A convicted counterfeiter and a Connecticut slave made the first U.S. coin, called the fugio cent, in fulfillment of a government contract obtained through a bribe.

A fugio cent

As a young man, Abel Buell got caught counterfeiting five pound notes. As punishment, authorities cut off the top of his ear and branded his forehead with the letter ‘C.’

Buell later made the first map of the United States, sold at auction to the Library of Congress for $2 million in 2010.

Far less is known about the enslaved man, known only as Aaron. He was only recently discovered to be one of the workers who made the first coins of the United States, along with a freed black man, white workers and children, according to numismatist and historian Christopher McDowell.

Abel Buell, Aaron and the others didn’t make the first fugio coins at a U.S. mint. Instead, the U.S. government gave a contract to make the fugio cents at the Connecticut mint. That early effort at outsourcing didn’t go well.

“It was a fiasco,” said McDowell, who uncovered the story of the Connecticut mint. The tale underscores the early fragility of the United States, the genius of the first Connecticut Yankee and the struggles of the people who actually worked to build the country.

The Connecticut Mint

In 1785, Connecticut opened the first state mint in New Haven. One building stood on the current Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop (formerly his gun factory) in Hamden.

Painting of Eli Whitney’s gun factory

In 1787, the infant U.S. government asked for bids to produce the first official U.S. coins. One of the Connecticut mint’s owners, James Jarvis, bribed the assistant U.S. Treasurer, William Duer, to get the contract.

Under the contract, the Connecticut mint had to produce 300 tons of copper coins. But there wasn’t anywhere near that much copper in the United States. Jarvis went to England to find a partner who would supply more copper, but he returned empty handed.

The mint produced only 1200 pounds of coins before it failed for lack of copper. That failure revealed William Duer’s dishonesty. Jarvis had given Duer a note for $10,000 on the condition he collect on it if the mint failed. Duer, however, had sold the note to two men, who came to Jarvis to collect.

Jarvis refused to pay, saying the note had no value because the conditions hadn’t been met. And that, said McDowell in an interview, is how we know about the bribe.

The Fugio Coin

Today there are many low -grade fugio cents, but collectors will pay $10,000 or more for a rare example in excellent condition.

The fugio cent earned its name from the caption ‘fugio’ above an image of the sun shining on a sundial. Fugio, Latin for ‘I flee/fly,’ and the words ‘mind your business’ below the sundial form a rebus meaning ‘time flies, do your work.’ The reverse side includes thirteen chain links and the captions, ‘we are one’ and ‘United States.’

Ben Franklin originally came up with the fugio design for Pennsylvania notes he printed.

Thomas Jefferson later remembered the disaster of the Connecticut mint. In 1792, a debate broke out about whether the U.S. government should build its own mint or not. Jefferson successfully argued in favor of a national mint.

Abel Buell

Buell’s ingenuity rivaled that of Sam Slater, who built the first textile mill in Rhode Island.

William Duer

He joined the Connecticut mint after the owners got the contract to make the fugio coin. William Duer may have been dishonest, but it would have looked bad to include a convicted counterfeiter on a proposal to mint money.

As a young man, Buell used his skill at engraving to alter the plates for five-pound notes to plates for larger denominations. Then he printed them.

No one detected the alterations, but his neighbors suspected something odd was going on because Buell’s kept his lights on late at night. A neighbor climbed a ladder one night to peer into Buell’s second floor and caught him printing money on a homemade press.

Historian John Warner Barber in 1836 described the rest of his punishment:

The tip only of Buell’s ear was cropped off: it was held on his tongue to keep it warm till it was put on the ear again, where it grew on. He was branded on the forehead as high up as possible. This was usually done by a hot iron in the form of a letter designating the crime, which was held on the forehead of the criminal till he could say the words “God save the king.”

The Ingenious Fugio Cent Maker

The mint owners, however, needed Abel Buell. He knew metallurgy at a time in America when very few people had the skill. Buell could work with steel, needed to make dies for coins. He had the refined ability to do intaglio engraving.

Buell designed the press and the rolling machines for the mint. Then he served as mint master, melting copper, refining copper and making copper into sheets.

“He was one of the few people who could do it,” said McDowell.

Aaron

But Buell didn’t do it all.

Several years ago, ledgers from the Connecticut and federal mint were rediscovered in the New Haven Museum archives.

McDowell studied those ledgers. He learned that 33 workers in addition to Aaron made the first fugio coins: children, indentured apprentices, white unskilled laborers, white craftsmen and a free black man.

Aaron worked the press, taking copper blanks and stamping the fugio image onto it.

For that work, Aaron’s wages of four shillings a day went to his master, a man named Levi Hubbard. But Aaron had a side deal: If he worked extra hours, he could keep his overtime wages.

Aaron worked a lot of overtime, said McDowell.

Fiasco

Abel Buell traveled to England in 1790 after the mint failed. People have long thought he left the United States to avoid the long arm of the law, McDowell said. However, subsequent research shows he went to learn the secrets of the British textile industry.

Like Sam Slater, Abel Buell memorized the secrets of large-scale cotton manufacturing and brought them back to America.

In New Haven, Buell established one of the country’s first cotton mills. He printed the first map of the United States, and he created the first movable type made in America.

The first map, by Abel Buell.

But Abel Buell died penniless in a New Haven an almshouse in 1822. The man responsible for minting the fugio cent was buried in a pauper’s grave.

His problem, said McDowell, was that he always came too early to the party. “He made movable type 20 years too soon, he built a cotton mill 20 years too soon.

“Abel Buell was Eli Whitney before there was an Eli Whitney,” McDowell said. “He was the first Connecticut Yankee.”

McDowell wrote the 2015 book, Abel Buell and the History of the Connecticut and Fugio Coinages This story last updated in 2022.

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The New England Opium Trade

The New England opium trade in the early 1800s produced considerable wealth for America. As it was never seen as a wholesome pursuit, however, those who prospered from it tended to downplay its significance — much the way many family histories marginalized slave trading.

And in truth America’s trade in opium was insignificant compared to Britain’s role in promoting opium. For centuries, opium – harvested from poppy plants – made its way around the globe as a fairly insignificant product.

Wellcome Library, London
The boiling and testing of opium by Chinese men watched by a European man. Wood-engraving by F. Dadd, c. 1880.

Smoking opium took hold in China as a remedy for toothaches and other pains. But its addictive qualities quickly drove consumption for recreational uses. By the early 1700s, the damage done by opium addiction was readily apparent in China’s flop-houses and drug dens. As early as 1729 Chinese officials tried to enforce bans on the drug.

But Britain’s East India Company was becoming addicted to opium, too. Some historians argue that opium had replaced tea in importance to the East India Company because of its high profit margins. Demand was non-stop and competition was virtually non-existent. By 1793, Britain had a virtual monopoly in supplying Indian opium to China. Merchants used a precise system of harvesting, delivering and selling opium into the market.

But the politics of the drug remained complicated. By 1800 the Chinese government had outlawed opium yet again. Even in Britain it was viewed as unwholesome.

The New England Opium Trade

The East India Company, meanwhile, demanded Indian farmers sell their opium to the company, cutting out competition. The company would refine the opium and sell it to smugglers. The smugglers could deliver it freely to China’s markets rather than having to deal through China’s official Canton factory system. British ships themselves were strictly forbidden to carry opium into China.

This convoluted mechanism for selling opium left plenty of room for profit. That fact was not lost on New England merchants developing their own China trade.

The New England opium trade began as a necessary trade-balancing strategy. The Chinese had tea, porcelain and silk that Americans wanted. But America (as well as Britain) had far fewer goods that interested the Chinese.

China also demanded payment in silver. That demand burdened America and Britain, which had little access to silver. In looking for another commodity that could be traded with China, the British had identified opium as such a product. American traders decided to follow suit.

American vessels had been operating on the fringes of the opium trade prior to 1800, but in 1805 the trade blossomed. The Philadelphia firm Willings & Francis and James and Benjamin Wilcocks took the first leaps into opium. They sent ships to Turkey to purchase opium that the East India Company didn’t control for shipment to India.

But New Englanders were not far behind. Thomas Jefferson’s trade embargoes in 1807 and 1808 crippled New England merchants. With American-based vessels restricted to port and under the thumb of customs officials, the concept of trading products that never needed to enter American jurisdictions had immense appeal.

Family Businesses

The Cabot family had launched the opium trade in the 18th century. Then in the next century, James and Thomas Perkins of Boston contacted their nephew John Cushing to urge him to investigate the business. Cushing. the Perkins’ representative in China, belonged to the first group of traders to set up a permanent post there.

Cushing would become a millionaire in his own right during his 30 years in China overseeing the interests of Perkins & Co. He would return to Boston as one of its wealthiest men and most eligible bachelors.

Other families that accumulated great wealth from the New England opium trade include the Cushings, Welds, Delanos and Forbes.

How much Perkins & Co. and the other New England China traders made from the trade in opium is unknown. They engaged in numerous lines of business, from loaning money to importing Chinese goods.

Volatility

Jacques M. Downs, an historian of the opium trade, notes the market became more volatile as New England and other American merchants rushed into the opium business. Unlike the precise approach of the East India Company, these independents would rush to Turkey for opium and back to China as fast as possible. The margins were so high at some points, traders would buy opium exported to London and return to China with it to sell at a profit.

However, when too many shiploads of opium arrived in Chinese ports, the price collapsed. One trader noted in 1807 that the opium trade had “disappointed many this past season” because of oversupply.

England began getting better control over opium sales with the end of the War of 1812 and the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. British interests began monopolizing a greater share of Turkish opium. By 1862, after fighting two wars with China (called the Opium Wars), Britain and France forced China to open its markets and legalize the opium trade.

America’s appetite for opium, meanwhile, had grown rapidly. With trade embargoes lifted after the War of 1812, opium imports skyrocketed. In 1840 New Englanders imported 24,000 pounds of opium. That was enough to draw the attention of the federal government, which quickly taxed the stuff.

This story was updated in 2022.

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John Adams’ Seriously OCD Nephew Founds the Boston Athenaeum

The stately Boston Athenaeum at 10-1/2 Beacon St. owes its storied existence to William Smith Shaw, the obsessive, sickly, curmudgeonly, hard-drinking nephew of John Adams.

Today the Boston Athenaeum oozes elegance with its scarlet leather-bound doors, gilt-edged books and marble busts. But in 1807, it was little more than the obsession of the odd bibliomaniac who served as its first librarian.

William Smith Shaw, wrote a contemporary, ‘fastens on everything new, rare, and antique, with an earnestness which baffles all denial.’

Some called Shaw’s compulsive hoarding of books a ‘symptomatic disease of the upper class’ during the early, anxious years of the new American republic.

William Smith Shaw

William Smith Shaw was born in the chaos of the American Revolution on Aug. 12, 1778, in Haverhill, Mass. His father was village minister John Shaw; his mother, Elizabeth Smith, was Abigail Adams’ sister. He was sickly as a child, and at the age of eight he ran into a low-hanging clothesline, which injured his windpipe and wrenched his spine. At 12 he caught his ankle in a fencepost hole, which left him with a limp throughout his life.

Portrait of William Smith Shaw by Gilbert Stuart.

His portrait by Gilbert Stuart shows a hunched, pasty-faced gentleman with a book in front of him.

While Shaw studied at Harvard, his father died, leaving his family impoverished and forcing him to work for his tuition.

After he graduated in 1798, he worked as personal secretary for his uncle, President John Adams. When George Washington died, William Smith Shaw traveled to Mount Vernon to give Congress’s condolences to Martha Washington.

He keenly felt the political uncertainty of the age. After his uncle lost a brutal campaign for re-election, Shaw castigated President-elect Thomas Jefferson as ‘a man eternally wavering from one extreme to the other’ who headed an ‘unprincipled jacobinic faction.’

Shaw felt lonely and anxious in the raw, wet town of Washington. He wrote that he found friends in the society of books.

“[They] come at my call and return when I desire them–they are never out of humor and they answer all my questions with readiness.”

Anthology Society

The Boston Athenaeum today

William Smith Shaw moved to Boston and set up a law practice. He never married, despite his mother’s pleas, but formed intense friendships with several young gentlemen his age. They were all anglophiles, and they all yearned to be men of letters. They included Arthur Maynard Walter, Joseph Stevens Buckminster and Robert Hallowell Gardiner

In 1804, William Smith Shaw and his friends took over a floundering magazine and called it the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review. They used it as an excuse for a club they called the Anthology Society. The young men met to smoke cigars, drink and laugh, and meetings sometimes lasted into a ‘vulgar hour.’

The notes to one meeting read, “No other business was transacted, the members feeling rather wild in a strange room. The beef was good and the wine bad.”

Soon the Anthology Society received too many books to review, too many periodicals in exchange for subscriptions. The young men needed a place to put it all, so they rented a room on Congress Street. Shaw, Walter and Gardiner brought their books to put on a shelf.

In 1806, Shaw was appointed clerk of the federal court, which freed him up to act as the reading room’s librarian. A $10 membership fee allowed subscribers to visit the reading room from 9 am to 9 pm.

The Boston Athenaeum in 1855

The next year they formally established the Boston Athenaeum, with trustees, subscribers and William Smith Shaw as librarian. Sometimes he was the only trustee who came to the bimonthly meetings, and one year the trustees managed a quorum only once.

Devastating Loss

The deaths of two close friends may have exacerbated his OCD tendencies. He was devastated when Arthur Maynard Walter and Joseph Stevens Buckminster died before they turned 30.

Shaw became so obsessed with his collecting that he designed his clothing with large pockets in which to hold pamphlets and periodicals during the day. People nicknamed him Athenaeum Smith.

His letters reveal a growing desperation to acquire books: “I cannot urge upon you too strongly to spare no pains to send me the interesting books published in NYork as soon as possible,” he wrote.

Perhaps he was beginning to invest in books and pamphlets what he could no longer invest in human relationships.

Judge William Tudor observed of him:

…that dog Shaw goes everywhere. He knows everybody. Everybody knows him. If he sees a book, pamphlet, or manuscript –– Oh! Sir! the Athenæum must have this. Well, have it he will and have it he must, and have it he does, for he seldom goes out of a house without having something under his arm; and his large pockets, made on purpose, are crammed. Now, he never refuses anything whatever.

Eccentric and Gauche

William Smith Shaw’s obsession with the Boston Athenaeum bordered on lunacy.

He made a list of his responsibilities as librarian: “Every morning, Sweep News-rooms/dust the tables, chairs &c and the Library-room–After breakfast, clean the Lamps & Lamp-room, see that the books are in their places ad even with the shelves.”

1876 painting of the Athenaeum’s picture gallery

He gloried in the institution. It was ‘one of the greatest strides toward intellectual advancement this country has ever witnessed,” wrote Smith.

The trustees grew frustrated by his possessiveness. Though they asked him to do it repeatedly, he refused to separate his own books and periodicals from the Athenaeum’s.

It didn’t help that he was eccentric and gauche. He was uncouth in mind and body, wrote his friend Robert Hallowell Gardiner, but indefatigable in his labours for promoting the success of the work in which we were engaged.

In the end, booze got the better of him. In 1823, the Boston Athenaeum fired William Smith Shaw from his job as librarian. Gardiner explained why: ”…Intemperance made him incapable of attending to the decencies of life.”

He only lived a few more years, dying at 48 in 1826.

10-1/2 Beacon St.

After Shaw’s departure, the Boston Athenaeum began thriving. In 1847, the cornerstone was laid for the current Neoclassical building at 10-1/2 Beacon Street, next to the Old Granary Burying Ground.

Its illustrious members included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, both Oliver Wendell Holmeses, John Quincy Adams, Amy Lowell and John F. Kennedy. It also held an art collection that became the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Today the Boston Athenaeum is open all day Monday through Friday and part of the day over the weekend.

Images: Boston Athenaeum exterior by CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=722802.

With thanks to Culture Club: The Curious History of the Boston Athenaeum By Katherine Wolff. This story about the Boston Athenaeum was updated in 20212

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