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How John Adams Became A “Church going Animal”

It took a lifetime of study and reflection for John Adams to come up with his religious credo. In the end, the self-styled church going animal boiled it down to just four words.

He was an elderly ex-president, free of the public spotlight’s glare, when he finally confessed the essence of his faith to an old rival.

Church going Animal

John Adams spent his decades of rural retirement exchanging rich letters with friends and devouring key volumes on foreign faiths. A descendant of Puritan immigrants, he saw the world while serving as an American statesman in revolutionary Europe. Between his diplomatic tasks, Adams grew fascinated with comparing different religious beliefs. Frequent travel heightened his interest.

Adams was a lifelong student of church and state. He took notes on sermons, looked up biblical references, and explored aspects of ancient Egyptian religion. Writing to old colleague Dr. Benjamin Rush in the summer of 1811, Adams reflected on the pivotal role of religion in his life.

“It is notorious enough, that I have been a Church going Animal for Seventy Six years, i.e. from the Cradle,” he wrote.

John Adams, Church going Animal

A Providential Turn

Like one of his beloved oak trees, Adams’s faith had deep roots in New England culture. As a young man, he studied theology at Harvard College and considered becoming a Congregationalist minister. Back in Braintree, his family parish (now the United First Parish Church of Quincy, Unitarian Universalist), was battling through a controversy.

In John Adams’ words, the church’s new pastor Lemuel Briant was “a jocular and liberal scholar and divine.” A teenaged John Adams heard plenty of Briant’s radical theology. Shedding older Puritan ways, Briant told his community that practicing a Christian life–rather than repeating dogma–would open up a path to salvation, but only if they chose it.

Briant’s sermons sent a ripple. This idea was a fairly new one for worshippers to weigh.

Several local clergy took issue with Briant’s message. As the controversy unspooled, the preacher’s wife left him, after claiming that he had committed “several scandalous sins.”

Scandalous Sins

Church officials launched a full investigation into Briant’s moral character. From 1749 to 1753, Adams kept an eye on the pamphlets that supported or criticized Briant’s beliefs.

“I may say I was born & bred in the centre of Theological & Ecclesiastical controversy,” he recalled. “It broke out like the eruption of a volcano and blazed with portentious aspect for many years.”

Though he agreed with Briant’s spiritual outlook, Adams was troubled by the way that society had treated the minister. Lemuel Briant made it through the inquiry, but his health was broken, and he died in 1754.

To Adams, the whole debate bred a “Spirit of Dogmatism and Bigotry.” He was convinced that pursuing a career in the pulpit would “involve me in endless Altercations and make my Life miserable, without any prospect of doing any good to my fellow Men.” Far better, he thought, to study law.

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/church-going-animal-ufpc.jpg

Where John Adams started out as a church-going animal. The United First Parish Church of Quincy, Mass.

Puritan Echoes

By 1765, John Adams had opened his practice and begun a family with wife Abigail. New England’s unique religious history ran alongside his commute between Boston and Braintree.

Take the rows of locust trees lining Salem’s “Witchcraft Hill,” which reminded him of the Puritans’ fiery witchcraft trials, and of “that memorable Victory over the Prince of the Power of the Air.”

He knew little for certain about his own Puritan ancestors, but John Adams was proud to invoke them and their legacy of dissent. When he sat down to write his Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law that summer, Adams harkened back to family history. He was anxious to show that “ordinary” men and women could overturn tyranny, no matter the conditions they inherited.

“Their greatest concern seems to have been to establish a government of the church more consistent with the scriptures, and a government of the state more agreable to the dignity of humane nature, than any they had seen in Europe: and to transmit such a government down to their posterity, with the means of securing and preserving it, for ever,” Adams wrote.

The Cost of Freedom

According to John Adams, harnessing Providence’s will with a liberal education had emboldened the Puritans’ Great Migration. He applauded their drive to reform the Church of the England, and to seek out new streams of profit in the early American colonies.

Adams had a political lesson for his peers of 1765, too. He drew on the actions of the “vexed” Puritans to ignite the revolutionary imagination of his family and friends. Adams reminded readers that Puritan colonists had laid their faith in American success, opening schools and carving out towns. Their freedom, he wrote, came at great cost.

“Be it remembred, however, that liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker,” he wrote. “But if we had not, our fathers have earned, and bought it for us, at the expence of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.”

A World Within

John Adams spent much of the 1770s and the 1780s on the road, traveling first to the Continental Congress, and then serving as an American minister to Europe. As he moved around the Continent, Adams sought out diverse religious experiences in France, the Netherlands, and England. He recorded foreign rituals and new beliefs, and he grew to appreciate the sensory impact of religion.

While he embraced the idea of religious toleration, Adams did not always find it easy to practice. An early experience at a Catholic mass in Philadelphia left him dazzled by the organ music but choking on incense. The “Grandmother Church” had “Every Thing which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant,” John told Abigail. “I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.” He remained curious about beliefs beyond his own, acquiring books and writing to clergy.

Adams spent his final years at Peacefield, immersed in reading about foreign faiths and cultures. When he and Thomas Jefferson renewed their correspondence in 1812, religion became a favorite subject. “I have been a diligent Student for many years in Books whose Titles you have never Seen,” Adams teased his former rival.

At Jefferson’s request, and after a lifetime of seeking, John Adams unveiled his religious credo: “Be Just and Good.”

End Notes

Notes on the author of How John Adams Became A “Church going Animal”

Sara Georgini, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., earned her doctorate in history at Boston University. She is the series editor for The Papers of John Adams, part of the Adams Papers editorial project based at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the author of Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family (Oxford University Press, 2019). Follow her on Twitter: @sarageorgini. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: John Adams. Portrait, pastel on paper by Benjamin Blyth, ca. 1766. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and United First Parish Church (Unitarian Universalist), Quincy, Massachusetts.

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David Ruggles, the Go-To Conductor on the Underground Railroad

David Ruggles helped 600 enslaved people to freedom during the 1830s despite attempts to kill him, kidnap him and burn down his business. A free black man born in Connecticut, he ultimately paid for his courage. He suffered ill-health, character assassination and a shortened life.

David Ruggles,

David Ruggles wrote fiery articles on the evils of slavery, antagonizing moderate abolitionists as well as slaveholders and advocates. He opened the first bookstore and published the first periodical by a black American. He printed, published, worked as an agent and sold copies of abolitionist newspapers.

Though he mentored such activists as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, David Ruggles has received far less attention, perhaps because of his early death.

He defended his radical views by writing that no one could be neutral on the moral issue of slavery.

David Ruggles

Born to free African-American parents in Lyme, Conn., in 1810, David Ruggles eventually had seven younger brothers and sisters

His family moved to the elite Bean Hill section of Norwich when David was very young. David Ruggles, Sr., his father, worked as a woodcutter and a blacksmith, and his mother a celebrated cook who made fancy cakes. His devout Methodist parents had him educated at the Sabbath School for the Poor in Norwich, a religious charity school.

He was so bright as a young boy that white Bean Hill residents paid for a tutor from Yale to teach him Latin.

At 16 he moved to New York, where he worked as a mariner, a common occupation for black men. Then he opened a grocery store in an African-American enclave in Lower Manhattan. At first he sold liquor, but then he realized the damage it did to the black community. So he stopped selling it.

In New York City, he began to connect with abolitionists of all kinds — black, white, male, female, rich and poor.

And so David Ruggles became active in the temperance and abolitionist movements.

Radical Abolitionist

David Ruggles believed the printed word was an essential tool against slavery. His grocery store at 1 Cortlandt St. started to sell books, pamphlets and periodicals, until a white mob destroyed it.

He began writing for radical abolitionist newspapers and for his own pamphlets against slavery. He enraged moderate abolitionists by attacking the American Colonization Society, which aimed to relocate African-Americans to Africa.

Then in 1835 he began his most dangerous work against slavery. He and several other young black men formed the New York Committee of Vigilance, an interracial group. They put their lives on the line to free kidnapped blacks. They also attacked slavers and helped escaped slaves traveling on the Underground Railroad.

Slave catchers patrolled the streets of Manhattan then, trying to kidnap fugitive slaves or free blacks and then to send them into bondage. David Ruggles and the other members of the Committee of Vigilance confronted the slavers on the streets.

Narrow Escape

In 1836, David Ruggles heard that a Portuguese sea captain held five kidnapped Africans in his ship, planning to sell them in the South. At that time slave trading was illegal but practiced clandestinely. Ruggles obtained a writ of habeas corpus and demanded the authorities take the captives to a local jail until they had a hearing on their status.

He also got the captain arrested on charges of slave trading. Then one night the captain, free on bail, and a slave catcher knocked on David Ruggles’ door and demanded to speak to him. When he refused they tried to break down his door. David Ruggles escaped, returned with a watchman and revealed the two planned to grab him and sell him into slavery.

At that time in New York, any slave brought to the state was free after nine months. Ruggles would go to private homes to tell people they were free.

Frederick Douglass

In 1838, Frederick Douglass escaped bondage in the South, arriving in New York friendless and broke.

“I had been in New York but a few days, when Mr. Ruggles sought me out, and very kindly took me to his boarding-house at the corner of Church and Lespenard Streets,” wrote Douglass. He noted David Ruggles was ‘watched and hemmed in on almost every side,’ but ‘he seemed to be more than a match for his enemies.’

Frederick Douglass

David Ruggles put up Frederick Douglass for a few days and helped him bring his fiancée to New York so they could marry. They wed in his parlor.

The Darg Affair

When Douglass showed up in New York, David Ruggles was enmeshed in a furious controversy involving a slave owner along with two other radical abolitionists, Barney Corse and Isaac T. Hopper. Virginia slaveholder John P. Darg had arrived in New York City with his slave, Thomas Hughes. Hughes came to Hopper’s house asking for help, but Hopper said no. The next day, the New York Sun reported that Hughes stole about $7,000 from Darg.

Corse and Ruggles urged Hughes to return the money, but insisted he should remain free. But Hughes had given or gambled away some of the cash. He returned what he had left to Darg, who then had Corse and Ruggles arrested for grand larceny. Though Ruggles only spent two days in jail, the press trashed him. A cartoon appeared, called ‘The Disappointed Abolitionists,’ suggesting the three had only wanted the reward money.

Moderate abolitionists, fed up with Ruggles’ radicalism, drove him out of the movement. He had written a story in an abolitionist newspaper that a black innkeeper was helping slavers. The infuriated innkeeper sued the newspaper for libel and won a judgment of $600.

The newspaper owner, nearly bankrupted by the fine, began a print campaign against Ruggles. He demanded an accounting of the Committee of Vigilance’s books. When an audit showed $400 missing, David Ruggles had to resign his position with the committee.

Abolitionist Utopia

At just 28 years old, David Ruggles’ crusade against slavery took a heavy toll on his health. He had nearly gone blind and suffered severe bowel problems. A prominent white abolitionist, Lydia Maria Child, invited him to join an abolitionist utopia in Florence, Mass.

The Northampton Association of Education and Industry centered on a community-owned and operated silk mill. Its members sought to create a society in which ‘the rights of all are equal without distinction of sex, color or condition, sect or religion.’

Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth belonged, and Frederick Douglass often visited.

David Ruggles moved to the Florence utopia in 1842. Within 18 months he recovered some of his health through the then-popular water cure, or hydrotherapy. He began studying hydrotherapy, then practiced it on wealthy members of the utopia as well as on William Lloyd Garrison.

The utopia disbanded by 1846, but David Ruggles stayed in Florence running his own hydrotherapy hospital. His health, however, declined rapidly in late 1849. He died on Dec. 18, 1849, not yet 40 years old.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Antis: Women Who Fought Against the Vote

In the late 19^th century, women known as antis began to organize against women who wanted the right to vote.

A cartoon making the antis argument. Courtesy Library of Congress.

The antis viewed suffragists as angry killjoys who wanted to intrude on politics, the proper realm of men. They argued women didn’t need the vote because men could conduct government for both sexes. Further, they contended, the vote alone assssscouldn’t fix any injustice women suffered.

Maine native Kate Douglas Wiggin, who wrote Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, supported the antis. She told a group of women in 1912 she would have ‘woman strong enough to keep just a trifle in the background, for the limelight never makes anything grow.’

As extraordinary as it seems today, the antis got plenty of support from women.

Who Were The Antis?

Suffragists started their first national organization in 1869. It would take the antis another 42 years to form theirs. They called themselves the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, or NAOWS. They passed out pamphlets that preached, ‘you do not need a ballot to clean out your sink.’ One pamphlet included household hints such as cleaning ink spots with sour milk — along with advice to ‘not waste time, energy and money’ on voting.

Other anti-suffrage propaganda pictured men caring for babies and doing household chores while women went off to vote.

The antis had many reasons for opposing the vote. Some with wealth and social prestige feared the vote would dislodge them from their comfortable positions.

Others viewed the suffragists as dangerous radicals associated with birth control, free love and the labor movement.

Some women became antis because they feared electoral politics would erode their ability to do good works. The Progressive Era, for example, got its name from women who tried to solve social problems in clubs, hospitals and settlement houses. They supported prison reform, shorter work days, an end to child labor and improved sanitation and diet.

The antis national organization. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Josephine Jewell Dodge

Josephine Jewell Dodge had wealth and prestige, but she also spent several decades promoting day care centers for working mothers. Dodge was born in 1855 in Hartford to Marshall Jewell, a prominent Connecticut politician who headed the Republican National Committee. She married Arthur Murray Dodge, son of wealthy Congressman William E. Dodge, in 1875.

After rising to prominence for her activism, Josephine Jewell Dodge turned her attention to fighting woman’s suffrage. In 1911, members of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage elected her their first president.

As an anti, she faced accusations that she was a political cats’ paw. The suffragists, who mostly supported temperance, claimed she carried water for the liquor interests.

The suffragists, of course, met the same kind of allegation. The antis charged the suffragists fronted for corrupt male organizations like Tammany Hall.

Both sides used ridicule as a weapon. And as head of NAOWS, Josephine Jewell Dodge confronted the same kind of ridicule the suffragists endured.

Ladies Riot

In 1915, a newspaper reported the antis and the suffragists nearly rioted at a meeting before the National Democratic Committee in Washington, D.C. Josephine Jewell Dodge gave a speech that affronted the suffragists.

“Charges of bribery hurled against Mrs. Dodge met with tears, then a haughty rejoinder — altogether like a men’s political affair except for the smoke,” reported the Washington Herald.

A ‘Western woman’ shook a handful of suffrage leaflets ‘under the nose of the very dignified anti,’ reported the Herald. She shouted that Josephine Jewell Dodge received $75 for delivering her speech.

“Mrs. Dodge flushed angrily and tears filled her eyes,” reported the Herald. “Then she replied in her haughtiest manner:

“As a woman of independent means I not only have never received a cent for my services, but I have financed the work of many others.”

State Chapters of Antis

The antis, just as the suffragists had, began their organizing in Massachusetts, though much later than the suffragists.

An anti-suffrage cartoon showing how the vote would backfire. Courtesy Library of Congress.

In 1895, the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women was founded by such Brahmins as Mrs. J. Eliot Cabot, Cornelia Baylis Lowell and Kate Gannett Wells. They attracted nearly 37,000 members by 1915 and had a headquarters on Boylston Street in Boston.

By 1910, the antis spread to other states, including Connecticut.

Mrs. Grace G. Markham, founded the Connecticut Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. It had branches in 161 cities and towns.

Mrs. Markham warned the ‘suffs’ had joined the Reds and wanted to incite class and race hatred.

The fight over woman’s suffrage divided many Connecticut communities, including a prominent artist colony.

In 1914, about 50 suffragists organized the Equal Franchise League in Old Lyme.

Two years earlier, 16 ladies, including art colony founder Florence Griswold, formed Old Lyme’s group of antis. Within a year the antis filled Town Hall for a speaker who denounced the suffragists. Alice Hill Chittendon explained ‘some of the undesirable results of equal suffrage already discovered.’

In January 1919, Mrs. Hermon Hubbard wrote a blistering letter to the New London Day, excoriating the newspaper for supporting the suffrage movement. She called it ‘the most radical and socialistic movement of the day.’ Six months later, she wrote a follow-up letter arguing women should stay home minding their children, ‘not running in the streets.’

New Hampshire Antis

A typical antis argument against the vote.

How did antis respond in 1920 when Tennessee approved the 19^th Amendment, reaching the threshold required to give women the vote?

Some antis refused to vote. But the diary of an Exeter, N.H., teenager shows a typical progression from anti to voter.

New Hampshire antis organized a state chapter of NAOWS, and Exeter formed its own chapter. Effie Tufts, an ardent anti, took her 16-year-old daughter Helen to hear two antis speak at Town Hall in 1913.

Helen reported in her diary that the meeting was ‘very good,’ and she had decided, “I’m an anti.”

In 1919, Helen’s father, state Sen. James Tufts, voted against the 19^th Amendment .

“Father fought it, spoke etc, but N.H. passed the suffrage amendment 18 to 10,” wrote Helen Tufts. “Worse Luck!”

She changed her tune in 1920, when at 23 she could vote for the first time.

“Mrs. Illsley came at — and took Mother and me down to VOTE!!! My first X ever put on a ballot was for Father for State Senator.”

With thanks to the Exeter Historical Society and the Florence Griswold Museum. This story about the antis was updated in 2022.

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The 18 Patriots Condemned to Death – Who Wouldn’t Die

Shortly before the American Revolution broke out, an item appeared in a Boston newspaper identifying 18 patriots condemned to death.

On Sept. 19, 1774, New England was in a state of alarm. On September 1, British troops had seized a store of powder from a Boston powder house. Word spread that war had broken out. Militias from across New England streamed toward Boston.

It was just a false alarm, but it looked much like the response to the Battles of Lexington and Concord that would play out in just a few months.

A Sam Adams Prank?

The Boston Evening-Post published a notice. It purported to be a letter tossed into a British camp, identifying 18 patriots condemned to death by the British government.

Since then, historians have debated authorship of the letter. Some suggest Sam Adams — or perhaps other patriot pot-stirrers — cooked it up. They think it was meant to inflame public opinion against the British and elevate the reputation of the patriots condemned.

Others suggest it was genuine, written by a loyalist who actually wanted the 18 men named in the letter killed. The notice read as follows:

The Letter

The following is an authentic copy of a letter, which was lately thrown into the camp, with the following direction: ‘To the officers and soldiers of his majesty’s troops in Boston.

It being more than probable that the king’s standard will soon be erected, from rebellion breaking out in this Province, it is proper that you, soldiers, should be acquainted with the authors thereof, and of all the misfortunes brought upon the Province. The following is a list of them, viz:

Samuel Adams

John Hancock

James Bowdoin

William Cooper

Dr. Thomas Young

Dr. Chauncey

Dr. Benjamin Church

Dr. Cooper

Capt. John Bradford

Thomas Cushing

Josiah Quincy

Joseph Greenleaf

Maj. Nathaniel Barber

William Denning

William Mollineux

The friends of your king and country, and of America, hope and expect from you, soldiers, the instant rebellion happens, you will put the above persons immediately to the sword, destroy their houses, and plunder their effects. It is just that they should be the first victims to the mischief they have brought upon us.

(Signed) A Friend To Great Britain And America.

(Take Note) Don’t forget those trumpeters of sedition, the printers, Edes and Gill and Thomas.

18 Patriots Condemned to Death

So who were all those patriots? Many names are well known, others less so. It includes some actual rebels and others who weren’t. They all have one thing in common: None was killed by the British. They are:

Samuel Adams, one of the 18 patriots condemned to death.

Samuel Adams – If you had to blame just one person for the American Revolution you wouldn’t go far wrong nominating Samuel Adams. Officially he positioned himself as seeking reform rather than independence. But his opposition to British taxes and military occupation of Boston put him at the political edges of the patriot cause. He frequently wrote (anonymously) and argued against British policy. And when tensions boiled over at the Battle of Lexington and Concord, Governor Gage issued a general offer of clemency for any man who would lay down his arms. But he made two exceptions: Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Adams died in 1803 after serving as Massachusetts’ governor.

John Hancock – Despite years of wooing John Hancock, the British leadership failed to retain Hancock’s loyalty. One of the richest men in America, Hancock represented Massachusetts in the Continental Congress and eventually supported the bid for independence. He would serve as an immensely popular governor of Massachusetts and ensure the Commonwealth ratified the US Constitution. He died in 1793 in Boston.

Natural Causes

James Bowdoin

James Bowdoin – James Bowdoin wrote an inflammatory report about the Boston Massacre that infuriated British officials. He would go on to be Massachusetts’ second governor, following John Hancock. His son would donate land that would become Bowdoin College in Maine. Bowdoin was unpopular as governor (his policies helped spark Shay’s Rebellion), but his funeral in 1790 was widely attended. He died of disease.

William Cooper – William Cooper, brother to Samuel Cooper, confidante of John Hancock and town clerk of Boston for more than 40 years. Cooper was a frequent, anonymous author (along with John Adams) of pro-patriot news stories. He died in 1809 of natural causes.

Doctor, Doctor

Dr. Thomas Young – Thomas Young was John Adams’ family physician after he relocated to Boston from Albany in 1766. A key organizer of the Boston Tea Party, he did not participate in the event. Instead he gave a lecture on the evils of drinking tea on the night of the sabotage, probably as a diversion. A poet, writer, philosopher and violinist, Young died in 1777 of yellow fever. He probably contracted the disease at the Continental Army hospital in Philadelphia, where he treated soldiers.

Samuel Cooper, one of the 18 patriots condemned.

Dr. Chauncey – Charles Chauncey, a leading minister in New England, he preached for 60 years at Boston’s First Church. During the run-up to the American Revolution he firmly believed in the patriot cause, trumpeting the political philosophy of the American Revolution in sermons and pamphlets. Better known as a theologian than a revolutionary, he died of natural causes in 1787.

Dr. Benjamin Church – Benjamin Church, an outspoken patriot supporter, treated soldiers injured at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Afterward, it turned out he provided intelligence to the British about American forces. He probably did it because he desperately needed money. After a period of imprisonment, Church was allowed to leave America in 1778. The ship he left on disappeared.

Dr. Cooper – Samuel Cooper, a Congregational minister at the Brattle Street Church in Boston, home parish to Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Joseph Warren and other patriot leaders. He died in 1783 of natural causes.

Writers, Soldiers, Politicians

John Singleton Copley painted this portrait of John Hancock around 1771. Courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society.

Capt. John Bradford – John Bradford, a protege of John Hancock, served as Continental Army agent and prize agent for the port of Boston during the revolution. In these roles he had to equip ships and troops. He also had to see that ships captured by privateers were sold off and the proceeds divided up properly among the government and the privateers. Bradford earned a commission himself. Hancock also made money because the privateers brought prize ships to Hancock’s wharf. About half the ships captured during the war passed through Boston, and a great many disputes broke out over how to handle them. As a result, Bradford was subject to a great deal of criticism. He died in 1784 of natural causes.

Thomas Cushing – Thomas Cushing, a long-time Massachusetts politician, rose to colonial Speaker of the House by 1775. He opposed British taxation, but initially opposed the Declaration of Independence. He was probably lumped in with the 18 patriots condemned because his name appeared on official correspondence between Massachusetts and British officials. Despite his slowness to accept independence, Cushing remained active in politics as an important supporter of John Hancock. He died in 1788 while still serving as lieutenant governor.

Thomas Cushing

Lawyer, Printer, Broker

Josiah Quincy – Josiah Quincy, a Boston lawyer, frequently wrote anonymous articles for the patriot cause. In 1774 he traveled to England to try to dissuade the government from war. He died of tuberculosis on a ship returning home, seven days after the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

Joseph Greenleaf – Joseph Greenleaf, a printer and writer who, for a time, published a magazine that promoted the patriot cause. A one-time justice of the peace, he assisted the Boston Committee of Correspondence in its work. He died in 1810 of natural causes.

Maj. Nathaniel Barber – An insurance broker, he served as militia master of Suffolk County and participated in the Boston Tea Party. Barber belonged to the political clubs that discussed the ideology behind the revolutionary cause. During the war, Barber led a militia unit and oversaw Boston’s military supplies. He died at his home in 1787.

One New Yorker

Isaiah Thomas

William Denning – William Denning stands out as the only one on the list of 18 condemned patriots without a direct connection to Massachusetts. Denning belonged to New York’s Committee of 60 (that later grew to the Committee of 100), which enforced compliance with a trade embargo. American rebels had put the embargo in place in 1774 to protest Britain’s punishment of Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party. When war broke out, Denning served as a deputy to New York’s patriot legislature, organizing wartime finances. He would go on to serve in Congress before he died in 1808 at his Wall Street home in New York City.

William Mollineux – William Mollineux, a hardware merchant, made the list of 18 patriots condemned because of his eagerness to lead public protests against British colonial government. He had a reputation before the war as incorruptible, zealous and an outspoken advocate for American liberty. But he died, of natural causes, in 1774 before the outbreak of war.

And Don’t Forget…

A final addendum to the list of 18 patriots condemned to death targeted Benjamin Edes and John Gill, who published the pro-patriot newspaper the Boston Gazette. It also named Isaiah Thomas, publisher of the radical Massachusetts Spy. All three died of natural causes, Gill first in 1785, Edes in 1803 and then Thomas in 1831.

This story about the 18 patriots condemned to death was updated in 2022.

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Joseph Dudley and the Private Bank That Sank Him

Britain’s North American colonies in the 1600s found money a volatile topic. In a financial crisis, a currency shortage would freeze commerce. So Massachusetts routinely issued currency. But its exchange rate with gold fluctuated wildly. The result: inflation.

Pamphlet Highlighting the advantages of a private bank.

Merchants, who sold on credit to their customers, hated it when the government issued fresh batches of currency. Then someone who bought goods could pay for them later in devalued currency worth less than it was at the time of the sale.

Many in Massachusetts clamored for a private bank to begin issuing currency. They not only saw it as a way to stop inflation, but also to profit from lending.

Thus, the idea of a bank was proposed. Investors would put up money or land or other valuables for a share in the bank. The bank would issue its currency based on the deposits, then lend it and demand repayment on the set value it established.

Portrait believed to portray Joseph Dudley

Joseph Dudley

The opportunity for profit drew together a group of investors and supporters, including Joseph Dudley, then a powerful judge and president of the Council of New England. They put together a plan by which they would divide profits from the bank into 112 shares. One hundred shares would go to the investors and administrators who ran the bank. Twelve shares would be set aside for “friends” of the bank who put up no money or land, but would still receive profits.

Dudley was cagey about who these friends were, writing in a letter to one supporter: “Further speech about the matter I judge not convenient until we get further advanced and have received your direction to attend to a very good and large dividend of profit.”

Historians surmise Dudley intended the money to go to Royal Governor Sir Edmund Andros, much despised by colonists for his efforts to raise taxes and begin charging rent for land. Andros’ whole scheme collapsed by 1688, and the colonists sent Andros back to England after William of Orange overthrew King James II.

William of Orange

But the idea of a bank did not die. In 1714, a group of investors emerged again to try to revive the more-than-30-year-old idea. By this time, Dudley had risen to the rank of governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Now, however, Dudley was on the other side of the push to establish a private bank. By the 1700s, the cost of ongoing war with the Native Americans was straining Massachusetts’ budget. The state issued currency to pay bills, watering down the value of existing money. Again, this currency depreciation worked to the advantage of borrowers who could repay their debts with devalued bills.

The Private Bank Returns

Property holders, however, taxed to support the government’s issuance of bills of credit, wanted change. This group of investors lobbied the Massachusetts General Court to consider a private bank once again. Heated debates arose over the merits of a private bank in pamphlets, newspapers and town meetings. Families and towns split over the question.

With Dudley now opposed, the General Court issued £50,000 more bills of credit and forbade anyone from starting a private bank without the monarchy’s permission.

By 1714 Dudley’s long career was drawing to a close. His commission expired after the death of Queen Anne that year. He first won reappointment as governor from King George I, but had it stripped away when his political enemies lobbied England to replace him.

Jeremiah Dummer, the colony’s agent in England, led the crusade to persuade King George to reappoint Dudley. But he failed, and the bank’s backers succeeded in getting a rather unsavory character named as governor: Elizeus Burges.

Burges had a history as a drunkard, womanizer and probably a murderer. But the bank advocates suspected they could bring him around to their side.

Dummer and Jonathan Belcher finally paid Burges £1,000 to give up the governorship, keeping the government in the hands of an anti-bank governor. Dummer and Belcher had a frayed relationship, but they agreed Burges was not fit to govern Massachusetts, and so they bribed him to decline the job.

For the private bank backers, the setback was painful. However, the idea of a private land bank, backed by land or other securities, would not go away. In 1740 a group of investors briefly launched such a bank, which operated until Parliament specifically outlawed it.

Thanks to: Currency and banking in the province of the Massachusetts-Bay by Andrew McFarland Davis and The Public Life of Joseph Dudley: A Study of the Colonial Policy of the Stuarts in New England, 1660-1715 by Everett Kimball. This story 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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