By Kathryn Lasdow, Assistant Professor of History, Suffolk University, Boston
It might surprise readers of this post to learn that women played a significant role in Boston’s late-colonial and early-national real estate market. Who were these women, and what kinds of properties did they own or rent? What impact did they have on the evolving cityscape of the bustling port? The traditional narrative of Boston’s urban development has mainly focused on the contributions of men—businessmen, merchants, and craftsmen—who envisioned, funded, and built the city. However, what has intrigued me most about Boston’s evolution is the involvement of women as property owners, renters, and occupants. As a NEH Long-Term Fellow, I uncovered this hidden history while undertaking revisions for my forthcoming book Wharfed Out: Improvement and Inequity on the Early American Urban Waterfront. Here are two stories drawn from MHS collections that shed light on the presence and influence of women in Boston’s early real estate market.
Hannah Rowe’s Wharf: Inheritance and Financial Know-How
In 1787, Hannah Rowe inherited waterfront real estate valued at $20,000 from her late husband, John Rowe.[1] As a widow, Hannah no longer faced the legal constraints of coverture, which stipulated that a woman’s property became her husband’s upon marriage. The wharf once synonymous with his successful merchant business now belonged to her, making her one of the most economically powerful waterfront real estate owners in early national Boston.
When looking for Hannah Rowe in the archive, I delved into sources left behind by her husband to uncover evidence of her proximity to merchant business. John’s diary, a meticulous but concise record that he kept in the 1760s and 1770s, corresponded to Hannah’s life in middle age. John frequently mentioned counters with “Dear Mrs. Rowe” and his business associates as they navigated the economic challenges posed by the American Revolution and its impact on the wharf.[2] Hannah was present for many of these conversations and likely listened to and participated in them. John mentioned how she “assisted [him] very much.”[3] [See Fig. 1]
However, it was Hannah’s real estate transactions during her widowhood, spanning approximately eighteen years from her husband’s death in 1787 to her own death in 1805, that truly showcased her financial skill. I examined both the Samuel Chester Clough Atlases and the “Inhabitants and Estates of the Town of Boston, 1630-1822” (Thwing database) to uncover Hannah’s strategic purchase of various properties. [See Fig. 2] Hannah engaged in at least twenty-four property transactions, managing a diverse portfolio that included parcels of undeveloped land, homes, warehouses on Merchant’s Row, the Lamb Tavern, and water rights along the harbor.[4] She used mortgages as an investment opportunity and a means to safeguard her funds through real estate holdings.
Hannah Singleton’s Plight: Boarding House Keeping and Renting
Fig. 3: Letter from Hannah Singleton to Francis Cabot Lowell, September 14, 1805, Ms. N-1603, MHS.
For women of modest means, the journey to property ownership was more complex. Financial precarity often pushed women to rent rather than shoulder a mortgage burden. This was certainly the case for Hannah Singleton, a widow who leased a house from merchant Francis Cabot Lowell and struggled to run a boarding house. In the Francis Cabot Lowell Papers, I unearthed a letter she wrote to Lowell in September of 1805. [See Fig. 3] “I’m very sorry,” Hannah wrote, “it is not in my power to pay the rent immediately.” She assured him that she would have the money in a few days and pleaded with him to allow her “to remain in the house until [she could] get another.” Aware of Lowell’s position as her landlord, Hannah implored him not to “distress” her.[5]
In this brief exchange, we see Hannah Singleton attempt to navigate the fluctuating real estate market while beholden to a male landlord. The sources do not reveal her fate, but she may have remarried. The 1806 tax assessment lists a woman named Hannah Doane on Nassau Street, the same street where Hannah Singleton’s boarding house was located.[6]
The stories of these two Hannahs in early Boston demonstrate that women found ways to work within and transcend societal expectations regarding female financial behavior, making their own significant impact on the waterfront and the urban landscape.
[1] See multiple entries for Hannah Rowe in “A Report of the Record of Commissioners of the City of Boston, containing the . . . Direct Tax of 1798” (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1820).
[4] Deed between Hannah Rowe and Perez Morton, May 12, 1787, SD 160:115; Deed between Hannah Rowe and Isaiah Doane, May 12, 1787, SD 160:118; Deed between Hannah Rowe and Thomas Bulfinch, August 2, 1788, SD 163:115; Deed between Hannah Rowe and Samuel Cookson, July 11, 1788, SD 163:133; Deed between Hannah Rowe and Ezra Whitney, August 24, 194, SD 181:91, Thwing Database.
[5] Hannah Singleton to Francis Cabot Lowell, September 14, 1805, Francis Cabot Lowell Papers, Ms. N-1603, MHS.
A couple of years ago, I worked with a group of researchers to digitize a post office account book from Revolutionary-era Newport, Rhode Island. The book is a dataset in manuscript: it accounts for every piece of mail delivered to Newport residents by the colonial postal system between 1771 and 1774. This account book contains a wealth of information about life in colonial British North America in the years leading up to the American Revolution: about trade patterns, the dissemination of information, postal demographics. As a literary scholar, I had hoped that this dataset would shed light on the reading habits of Newport Residents during a moment of political upheaval. Did Newport’s postal users read more or differently in these final years of British colonial rule? What can we learn from these communication trends?
I put together a transcription team—(Thank you, Katie Reimer, Taylor & Katie Galusha, Melissa Lawson, and Sam Phippen!!)—to translate this book-based accounting system into a twenty-first century dataset. The work entailed entering the date of arrival, name of recipients, along with postage into columns of a spreadsheet. Such transcription requires a squint—eyestrain to make out the eighteenth-century handwriting. Once in a rhythm with transcription, there’s room for your mind to wander, to notice patterns in the text, and to speculate on the circumstances of postal use. It didn’t take long for our team to identify Newport’s postal “super-users”—George Rome, Aaron Lopez, and Simon Pease—men who received multiple pieces of mail every week. As we typed their names, we imagined their lives: were these men printers or preachers? Merchants, farmers, or teachers? Did they use the mail to incite Revolutionary fervor? Were they corresponding with friends or family at a distance? We wondered: how and why were these men using the mail every day?
The names we learned best—Rome, Lopez, Pease, and roughly 20 others—were all merchants, men with ships in a port city, sending banknotes and receipts through the mail. Roughly half of the mail that arrived at the Newport Post Office was addressed to the same top twenty-five postal users. These “super-users” were all men, and most built their wealth to some degree through the slave trade. They used the colonial postal system because it was the safest way to send large sums of money over long distances. In aggregate, the account book tells a simple truth: the colonial postal system largely abetted the economic interests of elite colonial subjects, fueled the slave trade, and only sometimes worked in the service of everyday Americans. This data-driven picture of the postal system appears much less democratic, and far from Revolutionary. The postal system was a tool for and network of the wealthy and powerful in early America.
When I started this project, I had hoped to find evidence of Obour Tanner in the pages of the Newport post office book. Tanner, a Newport resident, was the friend and lifelong correspondent of Phillis Wheatly (Peters). Tara Bynum, whose scholarly work introduced me to Tanner, describes the women’s letters as a source of joy, profound connection, and pleasure (see Reading Pleasures for more on their correspondence and networks—it’s an enlivening and important book). Though Tanner and Wheatley were enslaved at the time of their correspondence, both women found ways to bridge the gap between Newport and Boston through the exchange of letters.
And yet, they did not exchange their letters through the colonial mail. The Newport Post Office accounts contain no relevant entries for their letters during the period of their known correspondence. Few women appear in these pages at all (out of the over 8,500 pieces of mail that came into the office, only 125 items were addressed to women), and most of these women were white widows. No one in Tanner’s orbit received any mail by colonial post in the months of Wheatley (Peters)’s letters to Tanner. Instead, as usual, the colonial mailbag into Newport was largely filled with banknotes, receipts, and newspapers addressed to local merchants.
Meanwhile, outside of the colonial postal system, Obour Tanner and Phillis Wheatley (Peters) relied on their networks of friends and allies for the transmission of their letters. When she asks Tanner to send a reply to Mr. Whitwell’s, or to John Peter’s home, or by way of Rev. Samuel Hopkins, she “contextualizes and places herself as a friend, servant, slave, and woman in New England and the greater Atlantic world” according to Tara Bynum’s Reading Pleasures. When we read Wheatley’s letters for their postal systems, we see her integrated within a broader community of mutual aid: friends and allies who carried letters for one another.
A letter from October 30, 1773 offers special insight into Wheatley (Peters)’s approach to long distance correspondence. The letter’s cover is spare—addressed simply “To—Obour Tanner in Newport,” folded, and sealed with red wax. As this letter was not sent through official postal channels, there is no postage denoted on the cover (and this letter long pre-dates envelopes, postage stamps, standardized cancellations, and other recognizably postal features).
Wheatley (Peters)’s closing note to Tanner offers a glimpse into its delivery. She writes: “the young man by whom this is handed you seems to me to be a very clever man knows you very well & is very Complaisant and agreeable. – P.W.” The letter was delivered by a friend, a man they mutually respected and admired for his intelligence, kindness, and demeanor. Phillis Wheatley (Peters)’s note on the letter’s delivery works to fortify and celebrate their friendship and mutual esteem. Was the clever letter-carrier close at hand when the poet finished her letter to Tanner? Did she read the line aloud to him with a smile and a wink—before folding and sealing the letter? Did this near-flirtation and unequivocal praise from a celebrated poet cause the man to blush? Or beam with pride? A letter delivered under these terms—directed through a statement of friendship and admiration—enlivened and encouraged community. Honoree Jeffers’ extraordinary scholarly and creative work in The Age of Phillis wonders whether this letter carrier might be John Peters, the man Phillis Wheatley would later marry. These letters testify to and were carried by people who cared for one another.
Phillis Wheatley to Obour Tanner, October 30, 1773
The colonial post office never delivered for Phillis Wheatley (Peters); but her friends did. First, during her lifetime, by establishing their own postal networks in which travelling friends and allies carried letters for one another. Then, Obour Tanner delivered Wheatley’s letters a second time—when she archived them with the Massachusetts Historical Society—thereby forwarding them to generations of readers and researchers.
When I started my fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society, I was motivated by Wheatley (Peters)’s long distance correspondence tactics, Tanner’s archival efforts, and I was skeptical of overly celebratory narratives of postal history. While my book-in-progress studies the United States Post Office Department rather than the colonial-era system, the mailbag’s mercantile allegiance endured throughout the nineteenth-century, as did the mail’s race and gender-based exclusions.
In the archive of the Massachusetts Historical Society, I encountered historical materials that further attuned my thinking about the allegiances and exclusions of the US Post Office Department. When I read the enormous 4-page broadside “Proposals for Carrying Mails in the United States” I was first struck by the sheer size of postal operations in 1824. The Postmaster General advertised contracts for mail carriers on nearly 400 routes throughout the country—each printed in small font covering every inch of the oversized pages. Each route paid a sizable sum: an amount the USPOD presumed would cover the operating expenses for a stagecoach line (which contractors would then supplement by selling passenger tickets and by carrying small freight). Each contract was an avenue into middle class life, geographically distributed throughout the length and breadth of the country. And yet, “no other than a free white person shall be employed to carry the mail,” the broadside advertises. Not only were these nearly 400 lucrative contracts awarded on a whites-only basis, the lower paid postrider and mailcoach driver positions were likewise closed off to Black Americans. The formal exclusion of Black labor from the postal system further extended to local postmasterships and clerkships. This racial exclusion existed until the end of the Civil War, and had a profound influence on the distribution of wealth along racial lines in the nineteenth century. In this period, the US Post Office Department was the largest employer in the country, and it only handed out jobs to white people. I was left with enduring questions about the broader social effects of this policy—would white postmasters serve Black correspondents? In what ways would a postmaster’s surveillance curtail textual expression, connection, and circulation?
Proposals for Carrying Mails in the United States, broadside, 1824
Later, when scouring every detail of the photo “Country Post Office,” I wondered about the locks and the highly-specialized leather portmanteau hanging on the wall behind the women reading their letters. The Post Office Department commissioned state-of-the-art locks and distributed the keys only to local postmasters. The leather portmanteaus worked in tandem with the locks to secure the mail and protect the contents from water. When read in tandem with the photo’s more central figures—the reading women—I’m reminded of the ways the post office in the nineteenth century worked on behalf of some Americans and worked to lock-out others. The post office delivered for these women—it offered a place of respite where they could read, warm themselves after their walk to the local office. At the same time, the locks are testaments to the exclusionary nature of the postal system in the nineteenth century—a network that both shaped and constrained communication.
Country Post Office, photograph by the Kilburn Brothers
These archival encounters helped me reframe my longstanding postal research to be better attuned to both the possibilities and prohibitions of the mail. Postal Hackers—the project’s new title—tells the stories of the nineteenth-century outsiders who laid claim to postal resources and sometimes broke the system that structured their exclusion. The project is motivated by the ingenuity of hackers like Henry “Box” Brown who used a private express company to mail himself out of enslavement; and by Harriet Jacobs whose letters conveyed by hand from a tiny attic crawlspace and put in the mail in Northern cities (thereby receiving location-based cancellation stamps) convinced her enslaver to seek her out in the North. Brown and Jacobs’s strategic use of the postal system allow them to find spaces of freedom and safety on their own terms. My book project also highlights the petition of Mary Katherine Goddard—Baltimore’s revolutionary era postmistress, who was fired for being a woman in 1790. Though she never got her job back, Goddard’s textual campaign—a petition signed by 250 men from Baltimore, a letter of support from George Washington, and her own newspaper writing on the matter—measure important changes in postal power in the early national period. Taken together, these stories help measure the particular nature of postal authority; the economic allegiances of the Post Office Department, as well as the social and literary effects of postal incorporation.
Thinking through the collections at the Massachusetts Historical Society was integral to this project. The collections helped refine and clarify my understanding of the nineteenth-century postal context. Just as powerful was the effect of drafting Postal Hackers from the same building that houses Phillis Wheatley’s writing desk and her unstamped, community-building letters. These materials testify to the limits of state postal systems—as well as the fortitude and creativity of Black letter writers who relied on their own networks for the exchange of letters.
Further Reading:
Bynum, Tara. Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America. University of Illinois Press, 2023.
Bynum, Tara, Brigitte Fielder, Cassander L. Smith, eds. Special Issue “Dear Sister: Phillis Wheatley’s Futures,” Early American Literature 57.3 (2022).
Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne. The Age of Phillis. Wesleyan University Press, 2022.
Between November 1789 and January 1790, the two American ships Columbia Rediviva and Lady Washington arrived in the Pearl River Delta, ready to sell their precious cargo. Captained by John Kendrick and Robert Gray, the two ships had set out from Boston in 1787 to sail to the Pacific Northwest, where they were to acquire sea otter furs furnished by Indigenous traders and hunters. These furs promised to generate significant profits, if Kendrick and Gray managed to bring them to Canton (Guangzhou) unspoilt, and if they succeeded in navigating the ins and outs of the complicated Canton market.
The Canton system was closely regulated by the Emperor, and Kendrick and Gray likely relied on reports from Samuel Shaw, a Boston man who had served as supercargo on the first American trading vessel in Canton for insights on how to deal with the Chinese authorities. Shaw had noted how each foreign trader could only sell his cargo if he enlisted the services of a set of government-licensed Chinese agents: The first was a “fiador” or security, who was in charge of collecting port fees once a ship entered Cantonese waters, the second was a “comprador,” who supplied each foreign vessel with provisions and other necessaries, and the third was a “linguist” through whom all foreign trade had to be conducted (Shaw 346-349).
I came to the MHS specifically to learn more about Kendrick and Gray’s endeavor to sell their sea otter skins in Canton, and about the early transoceanic trade between the United States and China more generally. Like Kendrick and Gray, I was initially quite overwhelmed with what I found. The MHS houses one of the largest collections on the early US-China trade in the United States, and even though I had as a guide Katherine H. Griffin and Peter Drummey’s article on the MHS’s China trade holdings, it took me months to fully grasp the wealth of the collections. As I read my way through journals, correspondence, notebooks, accounts, and shipping papers, I became increasingly fascinated with the Canton linguists and their crucial role in all trading activities.
The linguists served as the official mediators of all exchanges between foreign traders and the Chinese authorities. In Kendrick and Gray’s case this meant that they examined the sea otter skins to assess their quality, determined if an offer should be made and at what price, and managed payment (Howay 133-135). They were also in charge of procuring the necessary paperwork and customs seals and they acted as translators. Intriguingly, however, the linguists did not actually speak English or any other foreign language well. Linguists were in fact discouraged from becoming too fluent in any foreign language because fluency indicated that a linguist had become too sympathetic to foreign concerns (Van Dyke 290). How, then, was this trade conducted when Europeans and Americans did not speak Cantonese and Chinese linguists only knew “broken” English? How did linguists and traders navigate language and cultural barriers? And to what extend did misunderstandings, mistranslations, and communication gaps affect the trading activities?
I do not have the answers to these questions yet, but I suspect coming closer to them may involve the notebooks of American trader William P. Elting and the Chinese merchant Houqua, as well as a closer look at the emergence of Cantonese Pidgin English (CPE), an English jargon that linguists and traders alike began to resort to to negotiate their exchanges. Although Kendrick, Gray, and the linguist assigned to them likely already communicated in CPE, they only managed to sell their 700 sea skins with “the greatest trouble and difficulty” (Howay 133). The prices they fetched were underwhelming. Gray returned to the United States in 1790, only bringing back cheap bohea tea, and none of the luxury items and Chinoiserie he and Kendrick had hoped for. He could console himself with being the first American to circumnavigate the globe.
Sources:
Columbia Papers, 1787-1817. Massachusetts Historical Society. Special Colls. Columbia.
William P. Elting Notebook, 1797-1803. Massachusetts Historical Society. Ms. N-49.19
Katherine H. Griffin and Peter Drummey, “Manuscripts on the American China Trade at the Massachusetts Historical Society.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society Vol. 100 (1988): 128-139.
Frederic W. Howay, ed. Voyages of the “Columbia” to the Northwest Coast, 1781-1790 and 1790-1793. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1941.
Samuel Shaw and Josiah Quincy. The Journals of Major Samuel Shaw, the First American Consul at Canton, with A Life of the Author, by Josiah Quincy. Boston: Crosby and Nichols, 1847.
Samuel Shaw Papers, 1775-1887. Massachusetts Historical Society. Ms. N-49.47.
Paul Arthur Van Dyke, “Port Canton and the Pearl River Delta, 1690-1845.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Southern California, 2002.
Image:
Robert Haswell. Voyage Round the World on Board the Ship Columbia Rediviva and Sloop Lady Washington, 1787-1789. Massachusetts Historical Society. Special Colls. Haswell.
By Daniel Bottino, Rutgers University and MHS Society of Colonial Wars in Massachusetts fellow
Read an earlier post about the Secrets of the Seals at the MHS.
A notice printed in the Boston Gazette dated December 13, 1736, reads, “Lost a silver seal from a man’s watch, coat of arms on one side, CMH cypher and sloop cut into other side.”[1] Perhaps it slipped from its attachment to a watch chain during a walk or horseback ride through the city streets. We do not know if this small item was ever located or returned to its owner—it may be that it still lies where it was lost, waiting for a future archeologist to unearth it and return it to public sight.
This misplaced item, referred to as a “silver seal,” is a stamping instrument or “seal matrix” used to create an impression in wax or paper. Although thousands of colonial era New England seal impressions, usually in wax, have survived to the present day, surviving colonial seal matrices are much rarer. This makes sense, for one matrix could produce hundreds of seal impressions. Furthermore, wax seals are attached to documents—legal papers and letters—which have often been preserved for their written content. Conversely, personal seal matrices are small, as they were meant to be used by hand, and thus easily lost or destroyed over the passage of centuries. As the practice of sealing began to fall out of fashion in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is possible that many of these colonial era matrices, once carefully passed down through the generations, were discarded as useless relics of a bygone era.
Yet, to gain a full understanding of the material history of sealing in colonial New England, matrices must be studied as well as seal impressions. The collections of the MHS hold many surviving matrices—illustrated below is a matrix bearing the arms of Cotton Mather, certainly an illustrious resident of Boston. Yet this particular seal was made by silversmith Nathaniel Hurd (1730-1777) who was born after Mather’s death in 1728. Perhaps this seal was fashioned by Hurd for one of Mather’s relatives. Like the seal in the lost notice, this seal is a fine and valuable piece of jewelry, its handle made of ivory and its design carved in silver. Besides serving its basic purpose in creating seal impressions, such a precious object was likely also a status symbol and marker of wealth. After its owner’s death, a seal made skillfully of silver or gold stood a good chance of preservation as a family heirloom before, perhaps, an eventual donation to an archive or museum.
Matrix bearing the arms of Cotton MatherSeal matrix
On the other hand, most colonists in New England clearly could not afford to purchase precious seals made by prominent artisans. Their humbler matrices likely were made of more common metals such as brass, their handles perhaps made of wood rather than ivory. I have not found any of these more “ordinary” seals during my research at the MHS thus far—it is likely that few, if any, have survived through the centuries, although I remain hopeful.
For those colonists who desired a cheaper option, their own fingers could serve as matrices. While prominent New Englanders such as Cotton Mather and John Adams almost certainly would not have wanted to forgo their finely made matrices and instead press a finger into hot wax, I have nevertheless discovered many wax fingerprint impressions in the MHS’s collections. All of these “fingerprint seals” date to the 18th century. I believe it likely that most employers of fingerprint seals were of lower social status than those sealers who used metal matrices. Confirmation of this hypothesis will require research into the identities of the hundreds of individual sealers in the documents I have encountered—I hope to complete this project in the coming months.
Fingerprint seals
There is no evidence that the legal authority of fingerprint seals was ever looked down upon by colonial society. Indeed, as a seal’s primary purpose was to serve as a unique symbolic representation of its possessor, the fingerprint seal can be seen as the perfect seal. As was undoubtably understood by colonists, each person’s fingerprints are unique. Accordingly, when used as a matrix, a sealer’s finger produced an impression unique to the sealer, created not by a skilled engraver but rather by their own body. Ultimately, no matter what form they took, matrices were an integral part of the ritual of sealing in colonial New England, and a close consideration of their materiality will prove to be of great value in the historical study of colonial New England society.
[1] My thanks to James Kences for finding this notice.
By Nathan Braccio, Assistant Professor, Lesley University
“A pound of Tobacco yearly to be paid.” Starting in 1657, for the next one-hundred years, this is what Richard Thayer and his heirs owed the Massachusetts sachem, Josiah Wompatuck. The payment was due on “the first or second day of the first month.”
JosiahWompatuck, Thomas Thayer, [Lease of Land to Richard Thayer], 1657, A.E. Roth Collection, MHS. The deed was likely written by Thomas Thayer or John Niles, who signed it.
These lines were neatly written within a 1657 “deed,” now part of the A.E. Roth Collection of the MHS. Strikingly, Wompatuck was not selling land, but leasing it to Thayer with a number of stipulations. While stories, many true, often present manipulative colonists as cheating Indigenous people out of their land, Wompatuck was no naive negotiator and this was not his first land deal.
JosiahWompatuck, Thomas Thayer, [Lease of Land to Richard Thayer], 1657, A.E. Roth Collection, MHS. While this is a clerical copy of the original deed, it contains reference to some of the history of the document. This includes a “confirmation of this my lease” by Wompatuck and his “wise men.”
Josiah Wompatuck was a sachem (leader) of the Massachusetts people. Like his predecessor Chickabut, he was an ally of the colonists and over his life gradually sold settlement rights to colonists in the area that today makes up metropolitan Boston. Today, a state park in Hingham bears his name. A man who lived within twenty miles of the heart of the English colony of Massachusetts Bay for the majority of his life and regularly negotiated with the settlers was not likely to be duped by their machinations to seize land.
Instead, in this deed and others, Wompatuck carefully worked to ensure that the document reflected a negotiation between aggressive colonial demands and the interests of his community and himself. Here, while Wompatuck did ultimately provide the colonists the land they sought for farming and settlement, he ensured that Richard Thayer produced a document acknowledging Wompatuck as his “land lord.” If Thayer, or his heirs, ever failed to pay, the lease would be “void and of none Effect.” This document, combined with the payment, created an unambiguous record of Wompatuck’s retention of political authority over the land. Sachems in New England had an established practice of collecting tribute from their people in exchange for rights to farm or hunt on land. The tribute was generally paid annually, and often in deer skins. This established a reciprocal relationship between sachem and subject, reflecting the authority of the sachem. While not paying in deer skins, Thayer’s payment of tobacco fits into this Algonquian practice of tribute. Ultimately then, Thayer in this “deed” became a subject of the sachem Wompatuck and his heirs. In Algonquain political culture, Thayer’s ability to occupy the land relied on the continuation of Wompatuck’s sovereignty.
This is not to say that Wompatuck, like so many other skilled New England Indigenous leaders, was not a victim of colonial chicanery. Both during and after his life, colonists over decades slowly and steadily took land, reneging on agreements across New England when it suited them. Still, Wompatuck and other sachems creatively resisted and found ways to navigate a rapidly changing world. Wompatuck not only convinced colonists to acknowledge his rights in English documents, he made agreements with the English that benefited his community. For example, in the 1630s, he and his predecessors established an alliance with Massachusetts Bay in a long-running struggle with Narragansett sachems. Wompatuck’s deed stands as a testament to the persistent authority and importance of Indigenous leadership in 17th century New England.
By Daniel Bottino, Rutgers University and MHS Society of Colonial Wars in Massachusetts fellow
The MHS’s numerous collections of family papers contain folder after folder of 17th- and 18th-century legal documents, often described in collection guides as “estate papers”, “financial papers,” or “deeds etc.” Preserved here are the details of thousands of long-ago business transactions. In comparison with some of the MHS’s high-profile manuscripts—the letters of John and Abigail Adams, the journal of John Winthrop, the papers of Thomas Jefferson—these prosaic documents may seem at first glance to be of little historical value and, frankly, boring.
The seals of multiples grantors on an early eighteenth-century deed. William Hickling Prescott Papers, Box 22, Folder 14. Deed of 1729
My recent research at the MHS has approached these documents from a new perspective: their wax seals. Throughout the entire colonial era and into the beginning of the nineteenth century, legal records required the imprinting of personal seals for validity. In theory, the imagery of every seal was unique, providing a foolproof verification of identity. This colonial practice of sealing possessed a long historical pedigree—a quick trip down the street to the Museum of Fine Arts reveals examples of ancient Mesopotamian seals more than three thousand years old imprinted into clay. A sealer in colonial New England possessed a stamping instrument or “matrix” into which the image of their seal was carved. In the process of sealing, this matrix would be pressed by hand into hot wax onto the paper, usually next to the sealer’s signature or mark. Matrices could be elaborate pieces of jewelry, carved of gold or silver and adorned with precious gems, carried attached to a watch or as a ring. Or, for people of more modest means, the simplest matrix was free—their own fingerprints.
A seal made in the form of a fingerprint. William Hickling Prescott Papers, Box 22, Folder 15. Deed of 1734.
Why have I chosen to study these seals, finding and photographing as many as I possibly can? Looking through hundreds of folders of legal records has revealed how integral the practice of sealing was to colonial legal culture, and by extension, colonial society as a whole. The ephemera of sealing culture is ubiquitous in the manuscripts I examine—pieces of broken and decayed seals often fall out when I open a folder, and stray splashes of sealing wax sometimes mark documents, evidence that a sealer’s matrix was impressed with force on an adjacent paper centuries ago. Seals are, of course, an inherently visual medium, their symbology capable of being interpreted even by illiterate colonists unable to read the text of legal documents. Their usage testifies to an often-overlooked element of New England colonial society—the fact that, into the 18th century, especially in rural areas, illiteracy was widespread. In such a society, very different from our own hyper-literate world, visual imagery, the materiality of objects, and ritually spoken words all played vital roles in legal transactions. Paying attention to how seals were used will enrich our understanding of this pre-modern society.
The seal of Rebecca Winsor of Boston. Barker-Edes-Noyes Family Papers, Box 1, Folder 1. Deed of 1679.
I am also intrigued by what seals can tell us on a more personal level. The design of each seal was specifically chosen by its owner to represent him or herself. What can these choices reveal about how colonial New Englanders understood their identities? Early in my research, I was struck by the imagery of Rebecca Winsor’s firmly impressed seal on a 1679 deed. At first, I was puzzled by what this strange looking bird could represent. But I am now confident that this seal portrays a mother pelican piercing her breast to shed blood for the nourishment of her offspring. This mythical behavior of the pelican is an ancient Christian symbolic representation of the sacrificial nature of motherhood. Rebecca Winsor was a mother of eight children whose husband had died shortly before this deed, in which she sold property to one of her sons. The symbolism of the sacrificial pelican is quite fitting for her life experience and was likely chosen by Mrs. Winsor herself. The seal’s black wax, rather than the normal red, is another touching piece of symbolism, for I believe it represents Mrs. Winsor’s mourning of her husband.
This seal is one of thousands in the MHS’s collections, hundreds of which I have photographed so far. Every seal has a story to tell, and if these stories can be unlocked, we will open a valuable window into a rich world of symbolism, ritual, and beliefs previously hidden from view.
Historical Cases of Melancholia and Their Relationship to American’s Literary Beginnings
My dissertation project, entitled “A Young, Sad Country: Melancholia in Colonial New England and Its Impact on Early American Literature” investigates the relationship between historical cases of melancholia, an early name for depression, and the creation of an American literary tradition. I chose this topic because I noticed that in early American scholarship there was less focus on mental afflictions than those affecting the body, and that the general tone of many works of early American literature was very sad in nature, featuring either melancholic characters or tragic plotlines. For this project, I felt it was extremely important to link literary works with archival documents in order to demonstrate how context from the world an author lives in can shape the fiction they write.
I am very grateful to have received the NERFC fellowship, as it gave me access to a treasure trove of archival documents related to the eighteenth-century understanding, treatment, and experience of living with mental illness. The method I use to organize my dissertation anchors works of early American literature to their real-life counterparts through close-reading and comparative analysis, using eighteenth century medical and religious documents to help typify early American literature as narratives exemplifying love and/or religious melancholia1. The Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) was particularly useful because it provided sources that relate directly to the literary works I am examining.
One work I explore is Hawthorne’s short story “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1836), the main character of which is based on Reverend Joseph “Handkerchief” Moody of York, Maine. Moody was a minister prone to bouts of melancholy and Hawthorne effectively captures in language the darkness that surrounded Moody, basing his story on a period where Moody wore a handkerchief over his face, an act that concerned and confused his parishioners. At the MHS, I read Philip McIntire Woodwell’s Handkerchief Moody: The Diary & The Man, which provided effective biographical insight and allowed me to read Moody’s diary in his own words. It is clear from Moody’s diary that religious melancholy pervaded his life, causing him to doubt his self-worth, mental stability, and most importantly, the state of his soul. Moody uses negative language to describe himself, saying he is “of a very inconstant mind2”, feels as though “all my religion has very nearly vanished3” and that his soul is “So deeply insensible4” and “wretched5.” Interestingly, Moody’s language and choice of imagery echoes other historical cases of religious melancholia I’ve encountered, notably Benjamin Lyon of Connecticut and the Reverend Edward Taylor of Westfield, MA, whose diaries and sermons help corroborate my theory of melancholia being a prevalent affliction in early America.
In my dissertation, I also analyze William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789), a dramatization of the scandalous affair between politician Perez Morton and Boston heiress Francis “Fanny” Theodora Apthorp6, and Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1794), which are both examples of seduction novels. Each major historical case I look at shares a fictionalization in early American literature that adds to the mythos passed down through the American media and word of mouth, perpetuating melancholia as a key theme in our earliest works. Additionally, I argue, the subject matter of each narrative also points us towards the need for a closer examination of melancholia as a prevalent affliction across all demographics in multiple colonies—an important context I scrutinize using evidence from medical practitioners’ account books and diaries and religious authorities’ sermons and journals across New England. There is still much more material to sift through and many ideas left to develop, but I am confident, thanks to my time at the MHS and the other NERFC member institutions I visited, that my project will demonstrate the high prevalence of melancholia in New England and its influence on the creation of our nation’s earliest literature.
Notes
1. The types of melancholy used in this dissertation, as well as their definitions, come from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).
2. Moody, Joseph. Handkerchief Moody: The Diary & The Man, edited byPhilip McIntire Woodwell. 3 Apr. 1721. Massachusetts Historical Society.
3. ——————. Handkerchief Moody: The Diary & The Man, edited byPhilip McIntire Woodwell. 14 Apr. 1721. Massachusetts Historical Society.
4-5. ——————. Handkerchief Moody: The Diary & The Man, edited byPhilip McIntire Woodwell. 6 Apr. 1723. Massachusetts Historical Society.
6. Morton and Apthorp were brother and sister-in-law and their affair rocked Boston in 1788. The affair resulted in an illegitimate child and led to Apthorp’s suicide. Fanny Apthorp’s suicide note to Perez Morton is available at the MHS and I was able to read it during my time there in August 2022.
By Dr. Jaimie Crumley, 2022-2023 Research Fellow at Old North Illuminated, University of Utah
The Massachusetts Historical Society maintains and preserves the extensive records of Christ Church in the City of Boston, an active Protestant Episcopal Church. [1] Christ Church, founded in 1723, is known as the Old North Church. Located in Boston’s North End, Old North is the city’s oldest standing church building. In the colonial period, Old North received moral and financial support from members of King’s Chapel, New England’s first Anglican parish,[2] and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). The SPG was a London-based group founded by the Church of England to proselytize the Atlantic World.[3]
In addition to being home to an active congregation, Old North is a bustling historic site on Boston’s freedom trail. Old North joins other historic sites in Massachusetts and beyond that have turned to archival records to remember and confront their complicated past. Many of Old North’s visitors come to learn more about Paul Revere’s 1775 midnight ride. In April of 1775, Revere asked his friends, Old North’s sexton Robert Newman and vestryman Captain John Pulling, to hang signal lanterns in the church’s steeple. Through the lantern signals, they alerted their neighbors that the British troops were approaching “by sea” (across the Charles River) and not by land.[4] Revere’s midnight ride and Old North’s role in it inspire our imaginations. However, a laser focus on that night often leads us to overlook the church’s contributions to histories of race, slavery, sexuality, economics, and religious life throughout the Atlantic World.
Old North’s storied past includes Indigenous Americans and people of African descent in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the Atlantic World. Without their displacement and unpaid labor, the church building would not exist. For example, the church’s wardens and vestry gifted the “Bay Pew” to a group of logwood merchants from Honduras for their exclusive use whenever they attended Old North. The pew signaled the church’s gratitude for the merchants’ generous gifts to the church. By accepting the logwood for decades, Old North entangled itself with the crises of unfree labor and colonial violence that plague(d) the Atlantic World. [5]
Pew ownership was commonplace in 18th and 19th-century churches. So long as they paid their pew taxes, proprietors and their families had exclusive use of their pew(s). Not everyone who held a pew deed at Old North attended the church, but their proprietorship allowed them to hold leadership roles and participate in church governance.[6] Like other colonial churches in New England, Old North was racially integrated, but seating was segregated by race, age, and social class. Thus, pew ownership in New England often mirrored each town’s geography of unfreedom and entrenched that social geography as both natural and godly.[7]
Capt. Newark Jackson pew deed, Old North Church Records, 1739.
However, pews were likely a minor concern for Old North’s Black and Indigenous parishioners. In Box 20, Folder 24, of the Old North Church records, there is a historical record that was typed in 1933. The brief index covers topics including how the church attained its bells, the gifts King George II gave the church, and how the congregation formed its Sunday School.[8] One line of the index states, “SLAVES: In 1727, there were 32 slaves in the parish.”[9] The typist gleaned this information from a 1727 letter that Timothy Cutler, Old North’s first minister, wrote to the SPG’s secretary. Among other information about Old North, Cutler reported that “Negro & Indian Slaves belonging to my parish are about 32.”[10] What were the experiences of those 32 souls whom Cutler called “slaves?”
The Historical Index of Christ Church in Boston, Old North Church Records, typed in 1933.
Cutler’s use of the word “slaves” as a general descriptor for his Black and Indigenous parishioners offers a stark reminder of Boston’s role in slavery and settler colonialism in the United States and throughout the Atlantic World. His word choice in a letter to the SPG secretary indicates that the British Empire believed that Black and Indigenous people naturally constituted a social and economic underclass. The growth of the Anglican Church in the Americas depended upon racial capitalism.
Old North Church celebrates its 300th anniversary in 2023. Old North’s story parallels that of the American nation-state. In 1775, lantern signals shown from Old North’s steeple lit the way for a people longing for freedom from what they called British tyranny. The story of the lantern signals offers hope to a nation and world that has experienced many dark moments. However, Old North has also participated in settler colonialism, slavery, and racism. Nearly 250 years after the signal lanterns shone from the church steeple, we turn those lights within to examine our history anew.
As Old North’s Research Fellow, my work attends to the lives of the Black and Indigenous peoples who have connected by choice or by force to the church during its 300-year history. Centering Black and Indigenous people’s stories in the history of the British Atlantic World does not undo past harm. However, their stories remind us of our shared humanity and the urgency of making historical memory more inclusive. By cultivating an inclusive approach to historical memory, we create the building blocks of safer futures for Black and Indigenous peoples.
[1] According to the collection description, these holdings consist of 52 boxes, 75 cased volumes, 6 oversize boxes, and 12 record cartons. The records span the years from 1685-1997.
[2] See “Laus Deo Boston, New England, The 2nd September 1722.,” September 2, 1722, Old North Church Records, Box 1, Folder 7, Massachusetts Historical Society. The records of King’s Chapel are here. A list of other collections of King’s Chapel records is in the “Related Materials” section.
[3] In 1754, Old North’s first rector, Timothy Cutler, preached at an SPG gathering. His sermon is in Box 24, Folder 27.
[4] One of Paul Revere’s written accounts of his April 18, 1775 ride is in Box 46, Folder 1.
[5] Ross A. Newton, “‘Good and Kind Benefactors’: British Logwood Merchants and Boston’s Christ Church,” Early American Studies 11, no. 1 (2013): 15–36.
[6] The so-called “Smithett Controversy” in 1854 and the church conflict of 1882 revealed the pitfalls of connecting authority in the church to pew ownership. See Boxes 23 and 24 of the Old North Church records.
[7] See the pew deeds from 1724-1945 in Box 19 and Volumes 41, 42, 43, and 44 of the Old North Church records.
[8] Old North’s Sunday School was established in 1815. It was the first to be established in the region. Although the church was facing financial challenges in the nineteenth century, its members maintained a commitment to being charitable by providing education and clothing to the neighborhood’s children.
[9] “Clerk’s Book/List of Pew Owners, 1933,” Old North Church Records, Box 20, Folder 24, Massachusetts Historical Society.
[10] Francis Lister Hawks and William Stevens Perry, eds., “Dr. Cutler to the Secretary,” in Historical Collections Relating to the American Colonial Church, vol. 3, 1727.
By Kristina Benham, Ph.D. Candidate at Baylor University
With the 250th celebration of American Independence coming up in just a couple of years, scholars and teachers are thinking about how to contribute to reflection on the U.S. national origin story. In this spirit, the Massachusetts Historical Society hosted a joint conference in July 2022 on underrepresented voices in the American Revolution.
The Revolution is no small topic in historical scholarship past and present, nor in the collections of archives, especially in New England. This conference, however, revisited what historians started at the 200th Independence celebration: examining the American origin story as a multitude of stories. The specific focus on continuing to uncover underrepresented voices from the era also lent a timely conviction on current American society. As a junior scholar in the field, seeing a range from graduate students to long-established historians discussing these topics was truly a delight and inspiration. The K-12 Teachers Workshop in connection with the conference was equally rewarding, as all levels of education contribute to our understanding of this celebration.
The first day of the conference took place in the MHS building. The opening panel demonstrated how archives are involved in obscuring underrepresented voices from the past. Then, the keynote panel—featuring Colin Calloway, Kathleen DuVal, and Chernoh Sesay—set the tone for the conference, reflecting on the state of the field of the American Revolution and its implications for teaching, public history, and American society.
The second full day of panels, held on the campus of Suffolk University, presented an array of topics: loyalists in a new light, animals, gendered dynamics, borderlands, southern Black involvement in the Revolution, religion in the era for Jews and African Americans, Native American perspectives, and untold stories in the much-studied New England. Of course, I could only attend some of these opportunities.
The panel on loyalists was of particular interest to me, and I was not disappointed. This is a topic within the American Revolution that my students at Baylor University find surprising and intriguing. Panelists Alexi Garrett, Patrick O’Brien, and MaryKate Smolenski made compelling arguments for continued need for this research. Whether it was the fate of enslaved people and white, loyalist women making property claims (Garrett), the obscured life story of a slave returned to free Massachusetts through a loyalist family (O’Brien), or the hints of a loyalist woman’s life left behind in material culture and merchants’ papers (Smolenski), these presentations showed how complex the terms Loyalism and slavery could be.
The panel on British Imperial borderlands also led to discussion on defining or redefining the edges of the Revolution. Panelists Kristin Lee, Darcy Stevens, and Jaqueline Reynoso challenged assumptions about what is important to history of the Revolution. Lee’s presentation on Captain James Willing’s raid on western British forts with the cooperation of Spanish authorities and his seizure of enslaved people challenged assumptions about the story of the American Revolution as being Anglo-American and always involving full agency. Stevens’s presentation on the fluidity of allegiances in the far northeast raised questions about the binary assumptions of Loyalist vs. Patriot. And Reynoso’s presentation on resistance to local martial law in Quebec demonstrated that parallels to the center of the Revolution, so to speak, are important to the story as well.
I was glad and honored to also attend the workshop for K-12 teachers held in conjunction with the scholarly conference. A couple of scholars remained for this portion, including a presentation by Churnoh Sesay on Prince Hall in Boston. The MHS planned this conjunction of events in order to bring together scholars and teachers on how to engage students of various ages with primary sources from the MHS holdings. Since I have had the great opportunity to teach for the last few years at the college level while finishing my PhD, I found it refreshing to hear about the challenges and creative approaches of teachers at work in regional school systems. Small group discussion over lesson planning brought a much-needed practicality to the examination of underrepresented voices at the conference.
This event was a great personal and professional experience for me. I could not list all the names of the contacts I met who each showed professional generosity and shared enthusiasm for the era of the Revolution. I made my own foray into a topic related to my overall project: Protestantism and the English-speaking Black Atlantic. And the advice and feedback I received was invaluable and representative of the general, kind encouragement at the conference to pursue these topics further. I am grateful the MHS hosted this conference and workshop together, and I look forward to the continued discussion and teaching to come as we approach the celebrations in 2025 and 2026.
By Brian Maxson, Professor of History and Editor of Renaissance Quarterly
The little-studied 19th-century benefactors Robert Cassie (1812-1893) and Anna Waterston (1812-1899) bequeathed dozens of unpublished European manuscripts, rare incunabula, and early printed books to the MHS around the turn of the 20th century. Although each of these texts holds its own fascinating history for scholars of medieval, Renaissance, and early modern Europe, these dust-covered relics of the Waterston bibliophiles also hold the keys to an untold story in American identity, race, and history. It is a story with far-reaching implications even to this day.
During the late 1800s and 1900s historians in the United States created a narrative about the history of their country. The United States, in the narrative, became a key part of the triumph of “the West.” The story went that, after the fall of Rome, centuries of despair wracked Europe. Then, the Italian Renaissance revived all that was good about Ancient Societies. Italians passed those ideas onto English Protestants who then carried them over to the original thirteen American colonies. For decades historians of Renaissance Italy have problematized those conceptions of their period while American historians have sought to create more inclusive narratives of the American past. Nevertheless, most people, including specialists, take for granted that the Italian Renaissance played some role in American history.
Yet, that idea only dates to the later part of the 1800s. In the decades before that, most American writers possessed too many Catholic and Italian prejudices to see them as key parts in a western macro narrative. Instead, some historians explicitly stated that history began during the Protestant Reformations. Some thinkers acknowledged that Protestant writers drew upon earlier Italian examples, but they did so with as little emphasis as possible. Before the establishment of the narrative of Western Civilization, Italy was deeply problematic: The art and influence could be prized, but at the same time it was a Catholic, Mediterranean country.
Cover verso of Biondo Flavio, Italy Illustrated, 1482, writing in the hand of Robert Cassie Waterston ca. 1866
It was in that context that Anna and Robert Waterston were buying texts created or about Italian and European history prior to 1600. The Waterstons were well-connected members of New England’s educated elite. In many of their collectibles the Waterstons filled the inside covers with short essays. These essays pertained to the antiquity of the item rather than its actual contents. For example, the Waterstons’ owned a copy of Italy Illustrated¸ a work written by the fifteenth-century Italian Biondo Flavio, published in 1482. In that case, Robert covered part of the inside cover with a history of printing in the late 15th century. He noted that his book, like all printed books of the time, lacked a title page, page numbers or many paragraph indentations. Robert then turned the essay to the book’s context in 1482. After a short list of famous figures and their ages in that year (“Titian was 4 years old.”, “Copernicus was 9 years of age.” etc.), Waterston resituated his entirely Italian book into a new context: “In England, Richard III was in power as the age of 32. The year following (83) the Duke of Gloucester was appointed Protector. In 85 came the Battle of Bosworth field, in which he was killed.” Only the Italian Lorenzo de’ Medici (“the Magnificent”) warranted a mention amidst so many other historical figures. Next, Waterston penned a half page biography of Biondo Flavio before again returning to Lorenzo de’ Medici and Lorenzo’s supposed whole-hearted embrace of print. The page concluded, however, again by returning to the English context: “William Caxton who introduced the Art of Printing into England had been at work there for 8 years…”
Through repeated short essays like these the Waterstons addressed the tension between period perceptions of Italy. Their texts left the Italian context for fanciful, fictional connections with Protestant and English heroes. Eventually, Americans solved the Italian problem by arguing for the pivotal role of the Italian Renaissance as transmitter of Antiquity to the modern age. Before that, the Waterstons tended to think about their Italian books in other, usually English contexts. Through that action the books became artifacts of a time before history: Not parts of a grand narrative, but curiosities from before the narrative began.
