1 Henry Hulton, “Observations. In the course of sundry Tours, and voyages”, 80 [hereafter “Observations”], from the Mark and Llora Bortman Collection in the Howard Gotlieb Archival and Research Center, Boston University, with some changes to the punctuation. Hulton repeated these sentiments (with but slight variation) in his “Sketches,” 49–50, ca. 1780, William L. Clements Library Mss., University of Michigan.

2 Adams to Jefferson, [3] July 1813, apparently in response to Jefferson on June 27th, in Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 349 and 336, resp. (“apparently,” because getting a letter from Monticello to Quincy in just eight days verged on the miraculous). For Jefferson and his concern over Revolutionary era historiography, and his place in it, see Francis D. Cogliano, Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 44–73.

3 “American loyalists have suffered the fate of those who lose the contest—history has relegated them to brief paragraphs at best, or to footnotes at worst,” commented Lawrence Leder in his The Colonial Legacy: Loyalist Historians (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 1. Hulton proved the point all too well; even Leder does not mention him. For the continued status of loyalists as “marginal figures” see Keith Mason, “The American Loyalist Diaspora and the Reconfiguration of the British Atlantic World,” in Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Empire and Nation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 240–259; and also Maya Jasanoff, “The Other Side of the Revolution: Loyalists in the British Empire” William and Mary Quarterly, 3^rd series 65 (2008):205–232, who contended (on 209) that “Loyalist émigrés demand a larger, more significant narrative of their own that extends, as the refugees did, across the globe.” For a fine case study, set in historiographical context, see Colin Nicolson, “‘McIntosh, Otis & Adams are our demagogues’: Nathaniel Coffin and the Loyalist Interpretation of the Origins of the American Revolution,” Massachusetts Historical Society. Proceedings 108 (1996):72–114.

4 In writing to Jedediah Morse on 1 January 1816, where he repeated now famous lines about the Revolution being in the “minds of the people” even before Lexington and Concord, he mentioned the dispatch of troops to Boston in 1768 to protect the American Board of Customs commissioners. He forgot to include Hulton in his list of Board members. Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, 10 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1850–1856), 10:197–199.

5 Although at least one descendant, Sir Philip Charles Henry Hulton Preston, has a copy of the advice that Henry Hulton prepared for his sons and knows the basic outlines of Henry Hulton’s life quite well.

6 With the exception, that is, of John Temple, already in Boston and alienated from the other four commissioners, whose positions and presence he resented.

7 Niall Ferguson, Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 60. Also see James Horn, “British Diaspora: Emigration from Britain, 1680–1815,” in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 28–53, the second of five volumes in The Oxford History of the British Empire. For an even broader context of this outmigration and how it helped transform the world—though not always for the better, see Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

8 David B. Quinn & Alison M. Quinn, eds., Discourse of Western Planting (London: Hakluyt Society, 1993), p. 64.

9 A view of the world discussed in Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), though with no particular reference to the problems of empire.

10 Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism, 1740–1830 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Eliga Gould, Persistence of Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) offer observations about identity in the empire that ought to be contrasted with Benedict Anderson’s more general arguments in Imagined Communities, revised ed. (London: Verso, 1991).

11 The Declaration echoed the Boston Gazette and Country Journal, 16 November 1767, which complained of the “swarm of various officers”—members of the customs board included—that had descended upon the town, all of them part of a larger scheme to deprive the colonists of their rights.

12 In going to Massachusetts he did not necessarily enter a socially different world, however, despite what he might have thought; personal connections mattered there too—for which see Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 3–92. Nevertheless, any characterization of this as a “deferential” society ought to be made carefully, as the scholars who contributed to the discussion in “Deference in Early America: The Life and/or Death of an Historiographical Concept,” Early American Studies 3 (2005):227–401 emphasized. That discussion returned to issues addressed in “Deference or Defiance in Eighteenth-Century America?,” a roundtable in the Journal of American History 85 (1998):13–97. Any notion that eighteenth-century England can serve as the model of a deferential society should be qualified as well.

13 He seemed to have in view the lifestyle of the “modest gentleman” described in G. E. Mingay, English Landed Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962) who owned perhaps 1000 acres and had income from a variety of sources, not just farm produce or land rents, to lead a “genteel but restricted life” (22), with an annual income of £300 or so. For the “gentlemanly ideal” as empire-wide phenomenon see H. V. Bowen, Elites, Enterprise and the Making of the British Overseas Empire, 1688–1775 (Houndmills, England: Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1996). See too Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) for the economic downside of the country gentleman ideal. Hulton’s poetic tribute to Chester is transcribed infra, on 427–429.

14 Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (London: Francis Constable, 1622).

15 See Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) for the new notions of patriarchy and paternal authority that were gaining ground in parts of the western world at just this moment.

1 Odysseus to his son Telemachus, in Homer, The Odyssey, trans. by Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, 1996), 345 (Book 16, 232–236).

2 Hulton, “Account of Travels,” 7 [hereafter “Travels”], John Carter Brown Library, Brown University Mss.

3 Ibid., 2–3.

4 All five are entered in the Crook Street Presbyterian Church, Chester, baptismal register, The National Archives [hereafter TNA], Public Record Office [hereafter PRO] 400, Record Group 4/161 (from the Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah, film no. 20046): John (born 6 August 1720, baptized on 19 August); Samuel (born 1 March 1722, baptized 20 March); Edward (born 29 August 1724, baptized 6 September); Ann (born 26 December 1726, baptized 18 January 1727); and Henry (born 14 June 1730, baptized on 1 July). There is a genealogical table for the Hultons that begins with Henry’s great-grandfather Edward, located in volume 22 of the manuscript History of the Bennetts of the District of Chester, 49 vols., begun by J[ohn] H[enry] E[lliott] Bennett, Cheshire Record Office (Family History Library film no. 375325). It omits Henry’s brothers Samuel and Edward, inserts a sister named Mary, and puts Ann’s birth as 10 July 1730. See too the apparently more reliable source cited at 90 n. 216 infra.

5 The indenture of Edward Hulton (Henry’s father) to John Hulton (Henry’s grandfather), for 25 March/6 April 1705, from the Chester and Cheshire Archives ZM/F-ZM/AI, is listed on the National Archives website. According to a number of pedigree charts, John Hulton descended through a family line that had been in Chester for several generations at least and could be traced back further still to Hultons in Lancashire, with lands and titles dating from as early as the reign of John I.

6 Hulton wrote his will on 10 July 1730. It was proved in the archdeaconry court of Chester on 24 April 1731. Archdeaconry of Chester, Wills and Probate Records, Cheshire County Council Archives and Local Studies (Family History Library film no. 2145589).

7 Hulton, “Travels,” 10 for education, 9 for thirst.

8 Ibid., 12. There is a brief sketch of Richard Gildart in Romney Sedgwick, The House of Commons, 1715–1754, 2 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1970), 2:63. Gildart’s commercial interests involved the transatlantic slave trade as well as the Baltic.

9 John Hulton’s associate, James Gildart, is included among the merchants listed in George T. Shaw, ed., Liverpool’s First Directory (Liverpool: Henry Young & Sons, 1907), 35, which was taken from the 1766 list compiled by John Gore. Adam Lightbody and Robert Nicholson are on the list as well (at 41 and 43, resp.). All three would be included in Gore’s subsequent directories of 1767, 1769, and 1773.

10 Hulton, “Observations,” 21.

11 Hulton, “Travels,” 18.

12 Hulton, “Observations,” 44.

13 Charles Chenevix Trench, George II (London: Allen Lane, 1973) has a fair amount on the king and his mistresses, including Walmoden. See too Jeremy Black’s more expansive George II: Puppet of the Politicians? (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), and Black’s America or Europe? British Foreign Policy, 1739–1763 (London: University College of London, 1998) for Hanover’s place in the empire at this time.

14 Hulton, “Travels,” 24.

15 Hulton to Newcastle, 22 July 1752, with the apostrophe inserted, Add. Ms. 32728, fo. 254 (Newcastle Papers), British Library [hereafter BL].

16 Hulton, “Travels,” 26–27.

17 For which see Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Phoenix Mill, England: Alan Sutton, 1992).

18 Hulton, “Observations,” 24–26 for Germans, 83 for the French, 77 for being carried ashore.

19 Hulton, “Travels,” 32–35.

20 Ibid., 38.

21 Ibid., 40. Apparently Hulton did not go to Liverpool between returning to England in October 1760 and departing for Germany the following April. His brother died that August, intestate. It also appears that Samuel Hulton had died sometime before, since Ann and Henry are the only siblings mentioned in the documents arranging the payment of fees for and management of John Hulton’s worldly goods. Ann Hulton was named as administrator; she and family friends Robert Nicholson and Edward Cropper agreed to cover the costs of taking the estate out of probate. See Diocese of Chester, Wills and Administrations Proved at Chester, 1761, Cheshire Record Office (Family History Library film no. 88781).

22 Hulton, “Observations,” 109–110.

23 A close to contemporaneous picture was sketched by Bryan Edwards in The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 5^th ed., 5 vols. (London: W. B. Whitaker, 1819; orig. ed. 1793), 1:453–517 for the Leeward Islands in general, and 472–495 for Antigua in particular.

24 Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000) is incisive on such matters. See in particular 60–62 and the endnotes to the observations offered there.

25 Hulton, “Observations,” 100–105.

26 For background see Richard Pares, Yankees and Creoles (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1956), and Hulton, “Observations,” 134–135, for the Yankee preference for foreign sugar and molasses.

27 “Perhaps what human ingenuity could devise, human ingenuity could find a way to circumvent,” observed Lawrence Harper in his seminal work, The English Navigation Laws (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 97.

28 Hulton to Robert Nicholson, 10 February 1760, one of Hulton’s twenty-one letters to Nicholson from 1760–1776, in Ms. William Shepherd, vol. XVIII, Harris Manchester College, Oxford University [hereafter “Nicholson Letters”], on 3, transcribed at infra 207–208. Wallace Brown edited all but the first five letters for “An Englishman Views the American Revolution: The Letters of Henry Hulton, 1769–1776” Huntington Library Quarterly 36 (November 1972):1–26 and (February 1973):139–151.

29 Hulton, “Travels,” 67.

30 [Henry Hulton] A Poem Addressed to a Young Lady (St. John’s, n.p., 1757), which he reworked and expanded into three parts when he was living in Massachusetts, but had it printed under the same title by John Green and Joseph Russell of Boston in 1773. The friend was Major (soon to be Colonel) Melville of the 38^th regiment. They met on the voyage out and shared lodging on the island for a time. Writing the poem became an exercise that Hulton ended up putting in the “no good deed goes unpunished” category: “She cleared about twenty pounds by it. However our readiness to assist the poor woman, was imputed to a cause that did us no great honor, for it was generally insinuated that we took that method of paying her for all favors.” Hulton, “Travels,” 51. Following printer/historian Isaiah Thomas’s original view, Wilberforce Eames, “The Antigua Press and Benjamin Mecom, 1748–1765,” American Antiquarian Society. Proceedings 38 (1928):303–348 concluded that Mecom, apparently the first printer on the island, had not been the publisher of Hulton’s book because he returned to his native Boston the year before. Given Hulton’s later antipathy to Benjamin Franklin, it would have been a nice irony if Mecom—Franklin’s nephew and onetime apprentice—had indeed done the book.

31 Hulton, “Travels,” 60–61.

32 Ibid., 52–53. There are sketches of Samuel Martin and his two most famous sons (Samuel Jr. and Josiah) in Evangeline Walker Andrews, ed., Journal of a Lady of Quality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), Appendix, 259–273. There is an entry for the elder Martin in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 36:976–977. Richard Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) also has good material on Martin, and Sheridan refers readers there to two of his journal articles that have even more information. Martin was by all accounts a progressive farmer and kind master to his slaves, which Hulton no doubt noticed. But kind masters were not necessarily abolitionists in the making and for all too many slavery was part of the natural order of things in an unequal world. For Martin’s brand of paternalism and Antigua’s slave culture in general see David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).

33 Samuel Martin to his son, Samuel Martin, 18 July 1760, in the Martin Papers, vol. II, fos. 45–46. Add. Ms. 41, 347, BL.

34 There is an essay on Martin in Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, The House of Commons, 1754–1790, 3 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1964), 3:114–117. The younger Martin is most remembered, if at all now, for his 1763 duel with John Wilkes. Wilkes had ridiculed Martin as “base, selfish, mean, abject, low-lived, and dirty” in The North Briton, 3 vols. (Dublin: J. Potts, 1763), 2:174–175 in the 5 March 1763 issue (no. 40). Martin and Wilkes both sat in Commons. Martin wounded Wilkes with a pistol shot in their duel. They reconciled later in Paris. See George Nobbe, The North Briton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 245–250; and Peter D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 42, who does not pursue the suggestion made by Horace Walpole and picked up by George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 34 n.4, that Martin had been target-shooting beforehand, with plans to kill Wilkes, not simply wound him. Also see Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). For the connection to army provisioning in Germany see 37 n. 43 infra. Ann Hulton commented briefly on Wilkes, Martin, and their duel in a letter to Elizabeth Lightbody of 10 December 1763, at 212–213 infra.

35 Hulton, “Travels,” 82.

36 Hulton to Nicholson, 24 January 1761, in Hulton, “Nicholson Letters,” 15, transcribed at 208–210 infra.

37 “My health was much impaired,” he wrote in his “Observations,” 182. For context see Richard Harding, “British maritime strategy and Hanover, 1714–1763,” in Brendan Simms and Torsten Riotte, eds., The Hanoverian Dimension in British History, 1714–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 252–274.

38 From Hulton’s “Matters, relative to the Conduct of the Commissariat which attended the Allied Army in Germany, 1760, 61, 62,” on 2 and 3, resp., Franklin Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. This is Hulton’s most detailed surviving account of his time in Germany. Hulton reported to the Treasury through Martin.

39 From comments made under “Germany 1763,” which may have been in the form of a memorandum rather than from a letter to Nicholson; in Hulton, “Nicholson Letters,” 20–21, transcribed at 210–211 infra.

40 Hulton, “Conduct of the Commissariat,” 5–6.

41 Hamish Macdonald Little, “The Treasury, the Commissariat and the Supply of the Combined Army in Germany during the Seven Years War (1756–1763),” Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1981). Little utilized Hulton’s “Conduct of the Commissariat” and concluded that Hulton and Cuthbert were able commissioners, though they were perhaps too strident in their zeal to uncover corruption, presuming that those they investigated were guilty unless they could prove their innocence (see 204–208). Cuthbert joined Thomas Pownall and Charles Wolfran Cornwall as commissioners in September 1763 to investigate the claims. Hulton declined the post, offered to him before Cuthbert because his name had been first on their original commission. In The King’s Three Faces (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 220, Brendan McConville suggested that Pownall exemplified “a new type of man” that appeared in the expanded empire, “the bureaucratic adventurer.” Perhaps so—and if so, it is a characterization that could be applied to Hulton too.

42 Hulton, “Observations,” 149.

43 An excellent case in point is that of John Jacob Uckermann, who spent five years seeking £20,000 in compensation for forage that he claimed he had provided the British Army between 1761–1762, and for which he had not been paid. With allegations of fraud being leveled on both sides the government finally ruled against Uckermann in 1766, three years after Hulton had gone on to other things. Uckermann’s case can be traced in Hulton’s “Conduct of the Commissariat,” passim (see in particular Hulton’s accusation that Uckermann bilked the British, at 103–104), and Treasury papers at the TNA, PRO/T1/431 through PRO/T1/455, passim. See too Hulton and Cuthbert’s instructions on accounts dating from 1760 (including Uckermann’s) to Thomas Higgins, 1 May 1762 and 5 April 1763, in the Halsey Family Papers, DE/HL/15246 and 15291, resp., Hertfordshire Archives (Frederick and Thomas Halsey had been part of the commissary in Germany during the war). Hulton suspected that he had been moved aside, even though thanked and rewarded, for political reasons. There was much money to be made by those charged, ironically, with ferreting out graft and corruption—profiting from the attempts to control profiteering. Wilkes had alleged in his North Briton no. 40 that John Ghest (whose duties were similar to those of Hulton) had essentially been blocked in his 1761 efforts to expose corruption in the sale of oats to the army; Wilkes mentioned Uckermann in passing. See 35 n. 34 supra. Gordon E. Bannerman’s Merchants and the Military in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Chatto & Pickering, 2008) examined domestic contracts rather than those on the Continent and found little price-gouging or profiteering among British suppliers.

44 Hulton’s figures, as recorded in “Conduct of the Commissariat,” 173.

45 See Hulton and Cuthbert’s petition to Newcastle of 16 May 1766, Add. Ms. 32, 975 (Newcastle Papers), fo. 197 BL. Ever in search of recognition and compensation, they reminded Newcastle of their service and “humbly hope for your Grace[’]s favorable opinion of our conduct, and that by your Grace[’]s accommodation we may reap some benefit from our Services to the Publick.” Also see Hulton’s memorial to the Duke of Grafton of 19 November 1766 in the “Conduct of the Commissariat,” 187–193.

46 For administrative structure see Charles McLean Andrews’s classic work, “England’s Commercial and Colonial Policy,” the final volume of The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934–1938); and these more specialized studies: Dora Mae Clark, The Rise of the British Treasury (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960); Elizabeth Evelynola Hoon, The Organization of the English Customs System, 1696–1786 (New York: Appleton-Century, 1938); Arthur Herbert Basye, The Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925); and Franklin B. Wickwire, British Subministers and Colonial America, 1763–1783 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).

47 Hulton, “Conduct of the Commissariat,” 170. He made no attempt to hide his disdain for Pownall in this private reminiscence (see 89–95); publicly it is doubtful if he ever said anything critical—far too risky politically to do so. Pownall, he felt, who had also been sent over to review accounts, tried to undercut his authority once he failed to bring him within his own personal orbit. For Pownall see infra 211 n. 2.

48 Proof that London did not see colonial charters as sacrosanct, the Dominion combined all of the colonies north and east of the Delaware River into one between 1686 and 1688. Plans to do the same for the remaining colonies to the south were never formalized. The Dominion was brought down in a quasi-revolutionary coup in 1689. New Englanders of the Revolutionary era drew analogies between their situation and that of their forefathers under the Dominion, making Edward Randolph, a customs official, the arch-villain of their past. See Michael G. Hall, Edward Randolph and the American Colonies, 1676–1703 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960); Richard R. Johnson, Adjustment to Empire (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1981); and Robert M. Bliss, Revolution and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990).

49 As cited in a privy council report of 5 October 1763, printed in James Munro and Almeric C. Fitzroy, eds., Acts of the Privy Council of England. Colonial Series, 6 vols. (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1908–1912), 4:569. The customs board had registered complaints with the Board of Trade about problems within the navigation system in 1758, in the midst of war. See the Board of Trade minutes for 9 November and 5 December 1758 in the Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, 14 vols. (London: His Majesty’s Printing Office, 1920–1938), 10:424 and 433, resp. Also see the “Hints respecting the Settlement of our American Provinces,” dated 25 February 1763 and signed “G.,” with sweeping recommendations for reform, including fixing the problem of “the Independency of the Revenue Officers on the Governors; for as the Governors have no power over them, they are very little attentive to their Conduct, and the Officers knowing themselves to be accountable only to one another in America, and to the Lords of the Treasury here, they agree among themselves what liberties they shall take, without any regard to the Duties of their Offices.” Governors ought to control them more directly, with their salaries increased and paid by the crown, and fees and other perquisites being eliminated. See Add. Ms. 38335 (Liverpool Papers CXLVI), fo. 18 BL.

50 Hulton’s commission was (backdated) to take effect on 10 October 1763, the lords commissioners of the customs who issued it referring to their own report of September 28^th, which no doubt helped to trigger the Treasury recommendation to the privy council a week later. Dated 19 October 1763, in TNA, PRO/T11/27, fo. 359.

51 Expertly put into context by John Brewer in The Sinews of Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989). Alvin Rabushka’s detailed study of Taxation in Colonial America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), does not, oddly enough, draw on Brewer, but Rabushka does examine taxation in all its forms and in all of the colonies that eventually rebelled, and he attempted to do so without getting caught up in the historiographical disputes over a reciprocal empire. Even so, he concluded (on 757) that, allowing for exceptions in certain areas, the navigation system “may have been a net positive for the colonies.” For Grenville’s program in particular see John L. Bullion, A Great and Necessary Measure (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982); with the reaction by Thomas Slaughter, “The Empire Strikes Back: George Grenville and the Stamp Act,” Reviews in American History 12 (1984):204–210; and P. D. G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Also see Eliga Gould’s “Fears of War, Fantasies of Peace: British Politics and the Coming of the American Revolution,” in Gould and Onuf, eds., Empire and Nation, 19–34; and the overview in Jacob M. Price, “The Imperial Economy, 1700–1776,” in Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century, 78–104.

52 Letter of 10 December 1763, edited by E. Rhys Jones and printed as “An Eighteenth-Century Lady and Her Impressions,” Gentleman’s Magazine 297 (July–December 1904):195–202; quotation from 196, transcribed infra on 212–213.

53 See, for example, his report on ships caught smuggling between the end of the war in September 1763 and the following March. “No certain Account of Seizures in N. America can be prepared in this Office unless the Collectors of the Customs in the several provinces be duly Authorized to Receive the King[’]s share of Fines & Forfeitures,” he informed the customs board. What he learned, if he did not already know from his days on Antigua, was that customs officials did not always work well with each other, much less with provincial authorities, and even officers in the Royal Navy. Report of 22 March 1764, signed by Hulton, in Add. Ms. 38, 337, fo. 245 (Liverpool Papers) BL.

54 Andrews, “England’s Commercial and Colonial Policy,” vol. 4 of The Colonial Period of American History, on 2, though, on 425n-428n, Andrews does make a distinction between the “old colonial system” and the policies pursued after 1763.

55 See Hulton’s memorandum “Germany 1763,” among the “Nicholson Letters,” 20–26; and his letter to Nicholson of 17 December 1763 in ibid., 26–32, transcribed at infra 210–211 and 214–215, resp. Also see his petition to the Treasury of 27 June 1766—with attorney general Fletcher Norton’s supportive finding of 8 December 1764 attached—in TNA, PRO/T1/445, fos. 217–221. The petition was read before the lords of the Treasury on 2 April 1766, with consideration postponed—indefinitely, by all indications. Along the way Hulton had appealed to the Duke of Newcastle in January 1766 (see Add. Ms. 32,973, fo. 326, Newcastle Papers, BL) and through Newcastle, to the Marquess of Rockingham then, and again in July (Add. Ms. 32,972, fos. 759–761 and Add. Ms. 32, 976, fos. 15–17, Newcastle Papers, BL, resp.). Since the appeal to Rockingham is still among Newcastle’s papers, it would appear that the Duke chose not to send it along.

56 Henry Hulton, “Some Account of the Proceedings of the People in New England from the Establishment of a Board of Customs in America, to the breaking out of the Rebellion in 1775,” 2, unpublished manuscript, Andre De Coppet Collection, Princeton University Library. Transcribed infra, beginning at 107.

57 Hulton, “Travels,” 96–97, with some changes to capitalization.

58 Ibid., 101. Material was appended on 160–167, noting the marriage at St. Anne’s in London, the birth dates and places for all five boys, the death dates for Henry and Elizabeth, and their being interred at a church (St. Mary’s) in Andover. The official marriage record, for 20 September 1766, is in St. Anne’s Church (Soho, Westminster), Church of England parish registers, 1686–1931 (Family History Library, film no. 918609).

59 Hulton, “Travels,” 101. Thomas was born in London on 29 August 1767.

60 Ibid., 99. Hulton’s concerns were shared widely, though not necessarily always expressed publicly. According to William Knox the Earl of Bute told him, when contemplating imperial policy after the French and Indian War, that “we ought to set about reforming our old Colonies before we settled new ones.” See Knox’s recollections in Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections, 8 vols. (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1901–1914), 6:282. For Knox as imperial reformer see Leland J. Bellot, William Knox: The Life & Thought of an Eighteenth-Century Imperialist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), at 42–70 for Bute and Knox’s report that prompted the comment.

61 The three key elements in Townshend’s program are in Danby Pickering, ed., The Statutes at Large, 46 vols. (Cambridge: Joseph Bentham, et al., 1762–1807), 27:447–449, 7 George III c. 41 (customs commissioners) and 27:505–512, c. 46 (new duties); and 28:70–71, 8 George III c. 22 (reconfigured vice-admiralty courts), with details for the latter laid out in Munro and Fitzroy, eds., Privy Council, 5:151–153.

62 Dora Mae Clark, “The American Board of Customs,” American Historical Review 45 (1940):777–806; and idem, Rise of the Treasury, 174–184, discuss the Board’s genesis, pointing out that most contemporaries thought Townshend was the man who pushed it and that some thought Charles Paxton played some sort of behind the scenes role too.

63 See the customs commissioners report to the lords of the Treasury of 30 April 1767, recommending the American board’s creation, in TNA, PRO/T1/459, fos. 84–85.

64 Grey Cooper, who was friendly to Townshend as well as to members of the opposition in Rockingham’s camp, introduced the bill in the Commons on June 3, which passed its third reading twelve days later and went from there to the Lords. R. C. Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliament Respecting North America, 6 vols. (White Plains, N. Y.: Kraus International, 1982–), 2:510 and 512, resp.

65 P. D. G. Thomas, The Townshend Duties Crisis, 1767–1773 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) noted (on 33) that Philadelphia had been considered at one point and that the choice of Boston “proved a political blunder.” See too John Phillip Reid, In a Rebellious Spirit (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979), 6–10, on how the choice of Boston fed local fears that Whitehall and Westminster acted provocatively, in a dangerous attempt at law enforcement—a danger that Hulton understood, perhaps better than those who sent him there.

66 Published to show the public precisely what was intended, as George the Third, by the Grace of God, of Great-Britain, France and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, &c. To our trusty and well-beloved Henry Hulton, John Temple, William Burch, Charles Paxton and John Robinson, Esqs. Greeting (Boston, 1767), 2.

67 The 1772 salary schedule is included in Great Britain Commissioners of Customs in America. Customs Papers, 1764–1774, Ms. N-2091, Massachusetts Historical Society library [hereafter MHS]. A 1768 report done at the request of the new American board, signed by Joseph Harrison (collector) and Benjamin Hallowell (comptroller), laid out the structure for Boston as it had evolved to that point. It is in TNA, PRO/T1/465, fos. 179–193. George Wolkins edited it as “The Boston Customs District in 1768,” Massachusetts Historical Society. Proceedings 58 (1925):418–445.

68 Commenting on affairs in Boston that led to the dispatch of troops to the town, Moses Franks wrote to the Marquess of Rockingham on 3 October 1768: “‘Tis very certain, my Lord, that the new Board of commissioners at Boston (at best discordant) brought many of the troubles on themselves, by a conduct the reverse of conciliating in times so imbittered. But as if they studied to aggravate the ill humour of that misguided unfortunate Country, to drive them to some outrage, in order to justify measures of violence against them. They have requird of the Merchants (thro the provinces) to do, what absolutely is not in their power. They have ordered that all duties shall be paid in Silver only, Gold is rejected, & paper too. Tis repeating the Severity of the Egyptian Task Masters, make Bricks without Straw. And must operate fataly, to unite the whole in the Boston Spirit, which was generaly disaprov’d; but it will not rest there; for it will inevitably occasion a Universal system of illicit Trade, when all will Be set at deffiance.” Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments [WMM]/R1/1101, Sheffield Archives.

69 Although the Boston-Evening Post, 9 April 1770, misreported the commissioners’s salaries by adding an extra zero to each amount, boosting them to £5000 each, for a total of £25,000—an honest mistake or an attempt to fix more public attention on the customs service?

70 For Robinson as symbol of imperial policy gone awry, see Edmund S. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953).

71 “Arrived Capt. Watt from London, in whom came a most unwelcome Cargo, Vizt. Henry Hulton, Wm. Burch and Charles Paxton, three of the Commissioners appointed to receive the Duties by the late Act of Parliament imposed on the Colonies.” Entry for 6 November 1767 in “John Boyle’s Journal of Occurrences in Boston, 1759–1778,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 84 (1930):142–171, 248–272; quotation from 252. Boyle noted that they were accompanied by Samuel Venner (their secretary), John Porter (comptroller general), John Williams (inspector general), and a “number of Clerks;” and that Robinson and Temple were already in Boston.

72 For an example of these earlier contacts see Joseph Harrison’s letters from London to John Temple of 12 July and 9 August 1765 in the Bowdoin-Temple Papers, Winthrop Papers (reel 46), MHS; also printed in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 6^th series 9 (1897):65–66, 67–69. Harrison, collector for the port of Boston, had gone to see Hulton about the arrears in his pay, stretching back all the way to 1761. Hulton was kind and patient, Harrison assured Temple, and he was looking into Temple’s complaints about another matter that involved John Robinson as well as Governor Bernard.

73 Acting on a rumor that the Massachusetts council would be appointed by the crown rather than by the lower house of the assembly, Paxton importuned Viscount Townshend, Charles Townshend’s older brother, to ask the king to name him to it. See Paxton to Townshend, 22 December 1764, Ms. S-691, MHS. He was ten years premature. That change would not come until the Massachusetts Government Act of 1774—but Paxton’s request shows how widespread the talk was of making changes to tighten imperial authority. Looking back on the underlying causes of revolt, John Adams would point to Paxton as a customs officer in Boston—and James Cockle in Salem—because they were using writs of assistance as early as 1759, which in turn helped precipitate the debate over them two years later. See Adams to William Tudor, 29 March and 15 April 1817 in Adams, ed., Works, 10:244–247 and 274–277, resp.; and the discussion in M. H. Smith, The Writs of Assistance Case (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). For Paxton and the “local demonology” that developed in Boston, see Smith’s “Charles Paxton: Founding Stepfather,” Massachusetts Historical Society. Proceedings 94 (1982):15–36.

74 Hulton, “Travels,” 107.

75 James Parker to Benjamin Franklin, 21 January 1768, in Leonard Labaree, et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 39 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959–), 15:27.

76 Oliver M. Dickerson, The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951); with observations made more briefly in idem, “England’s Most Fateful Decision,” New England Quarterly 22 (1949):388–394. Not only was Dickerson overly influenced by the complaints of protesting Americans in the 18^th century, he was reacting to post-World War II protectionism that he thought was a throwback to that era and a danger to the free trade ideas that had taken hold of the Atlantic world in the 19^th century. Dickerson’s assertion that “had it not been for the unfortunate personalities of Robinson, Paxton, and Hulton there might have been no Revolution” (Navigation Acts, 210) is good drama, but not especially good history. Variations on Dickerson’s view seeped into many works, from Wickwire’s British Subministers, pp. 121–131 to Lawrence Henry Gipson’s magnum opus, The British Empire before the American Revolution, 15 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936–1970), 10:119–120, 241–242.

77 A point made persuasively in Thomas C. Barrow, Trade & Empire: The British Customs Service in Colonial America, 1660–1775 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); underscored in Thomas M. Truxes, Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

78 The views of Thomas Cushing, speaker of the Massachusetts House, expressed in a letter to Stephen Sayre of 6 November 1770, can be taken as fairly representative of this position. In response to the charge that complete repeal of the Townshend program would bring a “rise in our Demands,” that the colonists would “insist upon the Repeal of the Navigation Acts & be contented with little short, if any thing, of a state of Independency,” Cushing responded “I can assure You that is so far from the Truth; that in case the Revenue Acts were Repealed, the Board of Commissioners removed, and the Troops withdrawn & we were put in the same state we were in before the stamp act was passed that People in general would be satisfied & so far from being desirous of being Independent of Great Britain that they would dread the very thought of it.” Misc. Bound Documents, 1770–1773, MHS. Cushing was not being disingenuous, but events to come could make it appear that he was—unless, again, the fluid state of social identity and political aspiration within the empire are taken into consideration.

79 Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 46–50. “The dispute between Britain and the colonies was not over Parliament’s right to regulate this or that trade, or to tax a particular activity, or to pursue a specific policy,” McCusker and Menard concluded. “The conflict centered on the issue of power over the long haul, on the shape of things to come, on who would determine the future of the British Empire in the Americas.” (357)

80 For which see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1967).

81 Even John Adams, who prided himself on his use of logic and law, wrote a harangue for a Braintree town meeting in March 1772: “What is the Tendency of the late Innovations? The Severity, the Cruelty of the late Revenue Laws and the Terrors of the formidable Engine, contrived to execute them, the Court of Admiralty? Is not the natural and necessary Tendency of these Innovations, to introduce dark Intrigues, Insincerity, Simulation, Bribery and Perjury, among Custom house officers, Merchants, Masters, Mariners and their Servants?” L. H. Butterfield, et al., eds., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), 2:58.

82 Hulton’s letter of appointment, dated 29 June 1768, is in the TNA, PRO/Admiralty [hereafter ADM] 80/131. Hulton was still deriving income from this fund long after he had left Massachusetts and was living in relative comfort in the English countryside. The last payment to his account was on 9 October 1783, for £16:17:11 (in TNA, PRO/ADM80/132). See too Joseph Freese’s essays, “Some Observations on the American Board of Customs Commissioners,” Massachusetts Historical Society. Proceedings 81 (1969):3–30; and “Henry Hulton and the Greenwich Hospital Tax,” American Neptune 31 (1972):192–216. John Phillip Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 4 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986–1993), 2:170–171, placed the hospital tax in the context of disputes over Parliament’s authority to tax the colonies.

83 From the “Journal of the Times” for 24 October 1768; see also 16 December 1768. Items for the “Journal” were composed in Boston, sent to papers in other colonies where they were printed, and then turned around and reprinted in sympathetic Boston newspapers; gathered and edited by Oliver Morton Dickerson (and hence his eventual bias?) as Boston under Military Rule (Boston: Chapman & Grimes, 1936), on 10 and 36, resp. The allegation in the “Journal” for 22 May 1769 (on 102), condemning the “anti-commercial principles” behind the Townshend program and the “haughty[,] imperious and indelicate behaviour” of the American board would be echoed by Dickerson.

84 See Carl Ubbelohde, Vice-Admiralty Courts and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), and how military officers as well as civilian officials got caught up in enforcement in Neil R. Stout, The Royal Navy in America, 1760–1775 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1973).

85 See, for example, the fees paid to the custom house in Piscataqua, New Hampshire—a busy port, just upriver from Portsmouth—in 1765, in TNA, PRO/T1/483, fo. 239, and the case study offered by Alfred S. Martin in “The King’s Customs: Philadelphia, 1763–1774,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3^rd series 5 (1948):201–216.

86 Typescript of Carleton’s letter to the American Board of Customs, 4 July 1770, Great Britain Commissioners of Customs in America, Ms. N-1511, MHS. As a contrast, see the appeal from the collectors of Boston, Portsmouth, and Falmouth that they continue to be allowed to set their own fee schedules, undated but circa 1770, preserved in Add Ms. 38,391, fos. 155–156 (Liverpool Papers) BL.

87 Hutchinson to Richard Jackson, 9 December 1767, Thomas Hutchinson Letterbooks, Massachusetts Archives XXV:230, from the MHS typescript, 225. He had earlier described the newly arrived board members as “sensible and discreet men” to Israel Mauduit, Mass. Archives XXV:223–224, from the MHS typescript, 209. Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974), 141–147, noted that Hutchinson’s name had come up when the board was being formed. It was not a post Hutchinson wanted. “There is no Office under greater discouragement than that of the Commissioners. Some of my friends recommended me to the Ministry. I think myself very happy I am not one.” Hutchinson to _____, August 1768, Mass. Archives. XXVI:320, from the MHS typescript, 663. He feared that to take it would be political suicide in the province. He was probably right, but then he ended up committing political suicide anyway.

88 For the permutations of this affair, which pitted James Cockle, collector for Salem (see 48 n. 73 supra), against Temple as surveyor general see the folder “1764 Mr Cockles Suspension,” in Great Britain Commissioners of Customs, Letters [typescripts], 1764–1774, Ms. N-1511, MHS, fair copies in PRO/T1/441, and originals between Temple and Thomas Whately in the John Temple Papers, STG Correspondence, Box 13, folder 6, Henry E. Huntington Library, where Whately discloses that Temple was being considered for the American board back in the earliest planning stages. Temple had complained to Whately of Bernard’s “insatiable avarice” even before the Cockle affair broke—see his letter of 10 September 1764, ibid, fo. 10. Neil Stout edited most of the collection at the Huntington as “The Missing Temple-Whately Papers,” Massachusetts Historical Society. Proceedings 104 (1992):123–147. He noted that Temple has yet to have his biographer, beyond what Stout offered there and the brief essay by Charles Akers, “New Hampshire’s ‘Honorary’ Lieutenant Governor: John Temple and the American Revolution,” Historical New Hampshire 30 (1975):78–99. Stout would later write the entry for Temple in John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography [hereafter ANB], 24 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999–2004), 21:433–435. Also see Jordan D. Fiore, “The Temple-Bernard Affair,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 90 (1954):58–83.

89 Secretary Samuel Venner’s report to London on how the commissioners began their tenure at once underscores and understates the problem of separable lines of imperial authority: “Mr. Hulton, Mr. Burch, and Mr. Paxton arrived here on the 5^th instant, and on the 16^th qualified themselves together with Mr. Temple to enter upon the Execution of their Office as the Law directs, and opened their Commission that day, having previously accommodated themselves with a proper House for carrying on the Business of the Customs, in Obedience to their Lordships Commands signified to them by your Letter of the 4^th of September last.” Venner to the Treasury Lords, 21 November 1767, TNA, PRO T1/461, fo. 266. Bernard is nowhere mentioned and was apparently in no way involved.

90 The commissioners would have received a chilly reception, even under the best of circumstances. They arrived at a particularly poor time, little more than a week after the town meeting resolved to “promote industry, Oeconomy, & Manufactures among ourselves” to offset the “heavy debt incurred in the course of the late Warr” and the weight of “very burdensome Taxes.” A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, containing the Boston Town Records, 1758 to 1769 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1886), 223, from the town meeting of 28 October 1767, and the report agreed to on December 22^nd (226–230) that complained about the impact of the Townshend duties on local trade.

91 Colin Nicolson, The “Infamas Govener” (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001) sympathetically—though not uncritically—reviews Bernard’s stormy career. That town selectmen and governor had nothing but disdain for each other by the time that Bernard returned to London showed through all too clearly in an exchange of notes between them in February 1769. The selectmen implied that Bernard had misrepresented the town to London, that misrepresentation resulting in the dispatch of troops then bivouacked among them. Bernard retorted that whatever difficulties the town had, it had brought upon itself. Printed in A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, containing the Selectmen’s Minutes from 1769 through April, 1775 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1893), 6–9, along with the town’s original “address” of 16 February 1769, Bernard’s curt response two days later, the town’s rejoinder on the 22nd, and Bernard’s, even more terse, on the 24^th. Bernard had already reached an impasse with the General Court, with the lower house asking for his recall the previous July.

92 G. B. Warden, Boston, 1689–1776 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970) is incisive on Boston’s peculiar place in the imperial crisis. See too Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973); William Pencak, War, Politics, & Revolution in Massachusetts (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981); and John W. Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986).

93 As explained by Ann Hulton to Elizabeth Lightbody, 25 August 1772, in Letters of a Loyalist Lady [hereafter Loyalist Lady] (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927), 51–52, transcribed infra on 271–272. The editors, Harold Murdock and Charles Miner Thompson, only identified themselves by their initials, at the end of their introduction (on xii), not on the title page. The title page states “Ann Hulton,” the introduction “Anne Hulton,” and indeed both spellings turn up in contemporary documents. Even so, Henry used “Ann,” her name is recorded as Ann in the Chester baptismal registry (see supra 26, n. 4), and she signed her older brother John’s will “Ann Hulton” (supra 30, n. 21). Also see infra, at 340 n. 2.

94 In an earlier letter to Elizabeth Lightbody, 29 May 1770, ibid., 20, transcribed infra at 242.

95 Letter of 5 November 1771 to Robert Nicholson in Hulton, “Nicholson Letters,” 26. Hulton mentioned the apple trees and greenhouse in a letter to Nicholson of 21 November 1772, ibid., 66. Both are transcribed infra, at 261–262 and 273–274 resp.

96 According to the entries Hulton made at the end of his “Travels,” 160–162, Henry was born on 18 May 1770, Edward on 18 October 1771, and Preston on 2 October 1773.

97 Hulton left the fullest account in his “Observations,” 191–226, a variation of which was printed in the Appendix to Loyalist Lady, 100–107. He offered additional details in some of his letters, most notably those of 28 October and 3 December 1772, in “Copies of Letters & Memorials written from Boston commencing Anno 1768,” 2 vols. [hereafter “Letterbooks”], 1:52–61, Houghton Library, Harvard University, transcribed on 272–273 and 276–278 infra; and to Robert Nicholson of 21 November 1772 and 10 May 1773 in the “Nicholson Letters,” 65–67 and 62–65, resp., and transcribed on 273–274 and 278–279 infra. Also see Hulton, “Sketches,” 123–126. In May 1771, when Elizabeth was pregnant with Edward, they had taken a briefer, less arduous trip by carriage through southern Massachusetts and into Connecticut.

98 Hulton to Robert Nicholson, 10 May 1773, in Hulton, “Nicholson Letters,” 62, transcribed on 278–279 infra. As he wrote to his brother-in-law, Jacob Preston, “she behaved heroically, and never was daunted, or lost her spirits, under any difficulty. And we were sometimes in circumstances that put our fortitude to the tryal.” Letter of 28 October 1772, in “Letterbooks,” 1:53, transcription on 272–273 infra.

99 Hulton to Robert Nicholson, 10 May 1773, in Hulton, “Nicholson Letters,” 63, with a transcription infra at 278–279.

100 Hulton to Jacob Preston, 28 October 1772, in Hulton, “Letterbooks,” 1:52. Transcribed at 272–273 infra.

101 See infra 395 for the poem, from Hulton, “Observations;” 226–227; also in Loyalist Lady, Appendix, 106–107, with the usual slight differences (and 103 for the “remarkable” comment).

102 Hulton to his brother-in-law, Jacob Preston, 31 August 1771, in Hulton, “Letterbooks,” 1:38, transcription on 260–261 infra.

103 Letter of 21 April 1772, addressee unidentified, ibid.,” 1:46 and 45, resp., transcribed infra at 266–268.

104 Letter of 31 August 1771, ibid., 1:40–41, with some changes to capitalization and punctuation. For an even more sarcastic edge when Hulton talked of “foolish notions of Independence,” see his letter to Samuel _____ of 24 May 1774 in ibid., 1:88–93. They are transcribed on 260–261 and 300–302 infra, resp.

105 After he retired he wrote of his time in Germany: “When I look back on the scene of severe trial I endured, I almost tremble at the recollection, and wonder I shou’d so have combated, and prevailed. I consider this arduous service performed the most trying and important of my life.” Hulton, “Travels,” 142.

106 Hulton to Thomas Bradshaw, secretary to the Treasury lords, 29 June 1770, in Hulton, “Conduct of the Commissariat,” 239–240, with the full letter transcribed at 245–246 infra.

107 The board in general and Robinson in particular became the target of a biting series by “Candidus”—possibly Samuel Adams—in the Boston Evening-Post, 21 November, 12 and 26 December 1768, into 16 January and 13 February 1769. The more famous “Junius Americanus” series would later take swipes at the commission too, notably in ibid., 17 and 24 December 1770, and 28 January 1771.

108 Perhaps the most famous case involved John Malcom, who was tarred and feathered by a Boston mob in January 1774. See Thomas Hutchinson to the earl of Dartmouth, 28 January 1774, in TNA, PRO/CO 5/763, fo. 45 (where Hutchinson spelled the name “Malcolm”). That incident was included in the list of outrages compiled for The Report of the Lords Committees, Appointed by the House of Lords to Enquire into the several Proceedings in the Colony of Massachuset’s Bay (London: Charle Eyre and William Strahan, 1774), 33–34, and used to justify tougher policies against the colonists. For details on and documents pertaining to this affair, see Frank W. C. Hersey, “Tar and Feathers: The Adventures of Captain John Malcom,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 34 (1937–1942):429–473.

109 See the note signed by Hulton, Robinson, Burch, and Paxton requesting sanctuary on 11 June 1768, in Add. Ms. 38,340, fo. 259 (Liverpool Papers) BL. They justified their actions in a letter to the Treasury Lords of January 1769, a copy of which is in Hulton, “Conduct of the Commissariat,” 197–201. Bernard’s vindication of their withdrawing to the Castle, dated 22 December 1768, is in ibid., 202–205 (also signed by Hutchinson, Andrew Oliver, and Robert Auchmuty).

110 Hulton alludes to the Liberty affair in his “Account,” transcribed at 128 infra. Legal scholar John Phillip Reid uses it to show how local control of the law could be used to negate claims of imperial authority. See his In a Rebellious Spirit, 74–130. George Wolkins, “The Seizure of John Hancock’s Sloop ‘Liberty,’” Massachusetts Historical Society. Proceedings 55 (1921–1922):239–284 has stood up well. Thomas Hutchinson recounted the event in his The History of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1936), 3:136–140. Also see Hutchinson’s letters to Richard Jackson of 16 June and 7 July 1768 in the Hutchinson Letterbooks, Mass. Archives XXVI:310–312 and 315–316 (MHS typescripts 644–648 and 656–658, resp.); Francis Bernard to the earl of Hillsborough, 11 and 18 June 1768, in the Francis Bernard Papers, 6:311–314 and 623–624 in the Ms. Sparks 4, Houghton Library; Benjamin Hallowell’s affidavit of 11 June 1768 in Add. 38,340, fo. 251 (Liverpool Papers) BL; and Hallowell’s testimony before the Treasury lords on 21 July 1768 in TNA, PRO/T1/468, fos. 338–340.

111 The town meeting’s assertion (on 13 September 1768) of rights and condemnation of troops being sent to Boston—which also called for a convention of town delegates from throughout the province to meet (see Report of the Record Commissioners . . . Boston Town Records, 1758 to 1769, 261–264)—did not single out the commissioners for attention. Josiah Quincy would in his 1774 pamphlet (see infra 74 n. 161), an indication of how individual grievances were gradually combined into one conspiratorial whole.

112 Hulton to Robert Nicholson, 6 April 1769, Hulton, “Nicholson Letters,” 34, transcribed infra at 225–226.

113 Hulton, “Travels,” 111.

114 As Hulton reported to Robert Nicholson, 6 April 1769, in Hulton, “Nicholson Letters,” 36, transcription infra on 225–226. Perhaps it was this incident, or more likely the earlier incident in town, that a local historian referred to many years later when he stated that “an inhabitant has acknowledged that, in youth, he joined with other thoughtless boys in breaking” Hulton’s windows because he was “a tory.” John Pierce, An Address at the Opening of the Town Hall in Brookline on Tuesday, 14 October 1845 (Boston: White & Potter, 1846), 22.

115 Hutchinson, History, 3:201.

116 For Temple’s pleas to his colleagues to reconvene, see the typescript of board minutes from 8 March-1 July 1770, where Temple could not get his colleagues to meet, in Great Britain Commissioners of the Customs in America, Ms. N-1511, 42–64, MHS. His complaint to Lord North, then first lord of the Treasury and head of the ministry, on 2 July 1770, ibid., is in the folder “Mr. Temple’s Letters to Superiors in England,” 32. The standard account of developments leading up to the “massacre,” the event itself, and the aftermath remains Hiller B. Zobel, The Boston Massacre (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970). For a contrasting view see my “Rival Truths, Political Accommodaton, and the Boston ‘Massacre’,” Massachusetts Historical Review 11 (2009):57–95. Zobel has a fair amount on the American board. I do not discuss it in my essay.

117 “Mr. Hulton has long been of Opinion that one of us should go home. Mr. Burch has been obstinate against it. Paxton has been rather neuter, but inclining to Mr. Burch’s opinion. It is certain that if Government does nothing this Parliament that we cannot stand our Ground, and it will not be a small support that will enable us to make head against the Opposition.” Robinson to Thomas Hutchinson, 1 November 1769, in the Hutchinson Letterbooks, Mass. Archives XXV:335a, from the MHS typescript, 340.

118 Commissioners to Grafton, 3 April 1770, TNA, T1/476, fos. 233–237. Another copy is in Hulton, “Conduct of the Commissariat,” 209–218. In the press battle that took place between the “massacre” in March and the trials that began in October, the commissioners became a favorite target, their requests for troops and their efforts to control trade helping to precipitate a crisis. See the pointed criticism of them offered in both A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1770) and Additional Observations to a Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston (Boston, 1770). True to form, Oliver Dickerson contended that someone may well have fired shots from the custom house windows, in his “The Commissioners of Customs and the Boston ‘Massacre’,” New England Quarterly 27 (1954):307–325. The commissioners were also caught up in the controversy surrounding provincial secretary Andrew Oliver, who was accused of making public in camera proceedings of the council on the “massacre” and, more importantly, of repeating—or misrepresenting?—one councillor’s comment that there were plans in place to drive all of the soldiers and the commissioners out of town. See Royal Tyler’s supposed statement to that effect in TNA, PRO/CO 5/759, fos. 114–116, and the subsequent hearings on fos. 623–659, which were later printed as The Proceedings of His Majesty’s Council of the Massachusetts-Bay, Relative to the Deposition of Andrew Oliver, Esq. (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1770), and also included in Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, 55 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1919–1990), 47:257–289.

119 From the instructions to the town’s representatives to the General Court—one of whom was John Hancock—approved by the town meeting on 15 May 1770, printed in A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, Containing the Boston Town Records, 1770 Through 1777 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1887), 26–32; quotation on 26.

120 Ibid., 34, minutes of 13 July 1770, and their letter of that same day to Benjamin Franklin, who acted as the lower houses’s agent in London, printed in Labaree, et al., eds., Papers of Franklin, 17:186–193.

121 Hulton to Robert Nicholson, 11 May 1770, in Hulton, “Nicholson Letters,” 47, transcribed infra at 241. Also see Hulton to Lord North, 25 June 1770, and to Hutchinson four days before, in “Conduct of the Commissariat,” 229–232 and 233–235, resp., transcribed at infra, 243–245. He had gone briefly to Rhode Island almost immediately after returning home, worried that he was still not safe. Colin Nicolson, “A Plan ‘to banish all the Scotchmen’” Massachusetts Historical Review 9 (2007):55–102, connects this incident to larger tensions in the colony produced by conflicting notions of “Britishness.”

122 Hulton, “Travels,” 116–117. Hulton recorded one incident in particular in their stay at the Castle (which lasted from June into November): “In the month of October we had a violent storm of wind and we were apprehensive that our house (which was situated in the highest part of the Castle) would tumble down about our ears. About the height of the storm, at ten o-clock in the morning, it came into my Sister[’]s head, to take up the little child Henry out of his bed lest the chimney shou’d fall that hung over the room he was in. In about a quarter of an hour after he was taken up, the chimney did fall, broke thro’ thereof, and filled the bed out of which the child had been take quite over with bricks and rub[b]ish: so that had he not been providentially taken up the child must have been killed.” Ibid., 119.

123 The Governor’s Council did not accuse Hulton of staging the incident, though it did conclude that whatever happened “would not have been committed at all had he been in Boston.” In other words, he brought his troubles on himself. See the note about the Council for October 1770 in the Bowdoin-Temple Papers, Winthrop Papers (reel 47).

124 Ann Hulton repeated the rumor that Temple was involved in an undated letter written sometime in 1771, in Loyalist Lady, 39–40, transcribed infra on 255–259. She considered Temple “as diabolical” a person who ever lived.

125 Sympathetic as Hutchinson was to the board’s plight, he also recognized that it had become its own worst enemy. See his unsent letter of 16 February 1769 and an undated letter, apparently to John Pownall, in the Mass. Archives XXVI:345–347 and 417–419, MHS typescript, 725–727 and 912–915, resp.

126 Paxton to Viscount Townshend, the lord lieutenant of Ireland, 6 November 1769, in Misc. Bound Documents, 1766–1769, MHS.

127 Temple to Thomas Whately, 4 November 1768, Temple Papers, fo. 59. Temple did not actually leave for another two years, during which he decided not to discuss the board anymore with Whately, since Whately was being sent letters by Bernard, Hutchinson, and others arguing that he was in fact the problem. See Temple’s “Memorandum,” ibid., fos. 59–61, and his “memorial” of February 1772, fos. 72–73, protesting his removal and the behavior of the other board members. He found out he had been removed from the board when he arrived in London in late December 1770. Hulton considered Temple so poisonous that he attributed James Bowdoin’s turn against Bernard to Temple’s influence rather than to any significant policy differences. See Hulton’s history, 145–146 infra.

128 Temple to George Grenville, 7 November 1768, Bowdoin-Temple Papers, Winthrop Papers (reel 47). Also printed in William James Smith, ed., The Grenville Papers, 4 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1852–1853), 4:396–397. “So long as such men are continued in offices in America,” Temple wrote to Admiral Samuel Hood on 7 July 1770, “it may be expected animosities between Britain and the Colonies will continue even if all the late Revenue Laws were repealed.” Bowdoin-Temple Papers, Winthrop Papers (reel 47) MHS. Interestingly enough, Temple, whose pen could drip acid, particularly when it came to Paxton and Bernard, did not direct anything personally insulting toward Hulton.

129 See Temple’s complaint to the duke of Grafton, 14 May 1769, in “Mr. Temple’s letters to Superiors in England,” a folder in Great Britain Commissioners of Customs, Letters [typescripts] 1764–1774, 10, MHS; echoed in his letter to Newcastle, 25 October 1769, TNA, PRO/T1/469, fos. 185–189.

130 See Venner’s memorial to the Treasury of 29 October 1770, protesting his treatment by the board, in TNA, PRO/T1/476, fo. 429; also his memorial of 14 May 1771 in TNA, PRO/T1/482, fo. 192. Much of the Venner material has been transcribed, in the folder “Memorial of Samuel Venner to the Lords of the Treasury,” in Great Britain Commissioners of Customs, Letters [typescripts], 1764–1774, MHS.

131 The board’s frustrations with Sewall and Venner (because Venner allegedly informed Sewall of what the board was passing on to London) are evident in the minutes from board meetings held at Castle William, from August 1768 into January 1769, in TNA, PRO/T1/471, fos. 7–15. The board’s complaints to Treasury about Temple and Venner are in ibid., fos. 429 and 435–436, resp., dated 20 February 1769. For Sewall, the board, the Liberty affair, and divisions among imperial officials see Carol Berkin, Jonathan Sewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 45–77 and passim. This appears to be the same David Lisle who was involved in the controversial case of onetime slave Jonathan Strong, a case that caught the attention of Granville Sharp and is discussed in F. O. Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 18–23 and passim. Lisle, a barrister with the Inner Temple, had previously acted as solicitor for the Wine License Office in London. See the affidavit of Williams Adams, dated 8 September 1767, in the TNA, PRO T1/456, fo. 132 attesting to Lisle’s qualifications for the customs commission.

132 Grey Cooper, for the Treasury, to the American Board, 29 June 1769, TNA, PRO/T28/1, fos. 338–342.

133 Yet another case brought to their attention eventually would be that of inspector general John Williams. His grievances—from the board’s appointment of another man whose assignment impinged on his own, to his allegedly poor treatment by the board (Temple excepted; Temple took his side)—were expressed in a letter to the board of 13 March 1769, in Ms. S-363, Great Britain Customs, MHS, and in a letter to the Treasury of 1 March 1776, in TNA, PRO/T1/522, fos. 309–310. Williams proved he was made of stern stuff a month after the Liberty incident, facing down a mob that formed at his Boston house, demanding that he resign his post. He refused; the crowd went away. See Bernard to Hillsborough, 18 July 1768, Bernard Papers 7:7–10; and Hutchinson to ___, 21 July 1768, Mass. Archives XXVI:315–316, MHS transcript, 656–658.

134 Benjamin Hallowell, Temple’s eventual replacement, and Francis Bernard joined Robinson in testifying before the Privy Council over a two-day period, 26–27 June 1770. TNA, PRO/Privy Council [hereafter PC] 1/9/48, fo. 5.

135 Journals of the House of Commons, 32:107–108 for the resolution, which was introduced in the Lords in December and made its way through the Commons, to be approved the following February. Letters from the customs board were among the evidence presented—see ibid., 32:75, for 28 November 1768. The resolutions passed by the Massachusetts House on 29 June 1769 are printed in Speeches of the Governors of Massachusetts, From 1765 to 1775; And the Answers of the House of Representatives to the Same (Boston: Russell and Gardner, 1818), 176–180. They included: “Resolved, as the opinion of this House, that the constituting a board of commissioners of customs in America, is an unnecessary burthen upon the trade of these colonies, and that the unlimited power of the said commissioners are invested with, of making appointments, and paying the appointees what sums they please, unavoidably tends so enormously to increase the number of placemen and pensioners, as to become justly alarming, and formidable to the liberties of the people.” The House here essentially repeated allegations against the customs board first made in its circular letter of 11 February 1768. Printed in Journals of the Massachusetts House, 44:236–239 (the resolutions of 29 June 1769 are in ibid., 45:168–172). The House had already complained to Dennys DeBerdt, agent for the colony in London, that it could be argued that trade “may be easily carried on, and the acts of trade duly enforced, without this commission; and, if so, must be a very needless expense, at a time when the nation and her colonies are groaning under debts contracted in the late war, and how far distant another may be, God only knows.” Letter of 12 January 1768, printed in Speeches of Governors, 130. Also see the “letter” from the Massachusetts House to the Treasury, 17 February 1768, printed in the Boston Evening-Post, 4 April 1768, where the Board is ignored in favor of higher concerns. The “Merchants of Boston” would complain about the board in Observations on Several Acts of Parliament (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1769).

136 Proof of which can be seen in the October 1769 committee report “appointed to vindicate” the town, in Report of the Record Commissioners . . . Boston Town Records, 1758 to 1769, 303–325, and two pamphlets, all sparked by the Liberty affair and the subsequent dispatch of troops. Letters to the Ministry (Boston: Edes & Gill, 1769) reproduced letters from the commissioners, Bernard, Gage, and Hood to London, contending that mobocracy was taking hold in Boston because they had insufficient authority to act. An Appeal (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1769), published “By Order of the Town,” endeavored to counter that view, emphasizing the abuse of power committed by imperial officials—the American board of customs included, whose members were never in real danger. Their flight to the Romney and then to Castle William was farcical, staged to justify the stationing of troops among civilians. In this dispute as in the later “massacre” controversy, both sides relied on what legal historian John Phillip Reid called “forensic” evidence, where they argued their side of the case, leaving it to their opponents to argue for themselves, yet they claimed to be telling the whole truth. “Facts were shaded by the people of Boston just as they were by the commissioners of the American customs,” observed Reid, Rebellious Spirit, 51.

137 With tensions escalating the town meeting issued a statement of grievances and rights in November 1772. The customs commissioners were singled out in two of the twelve “Infringements and Violations” of those rights, printed in Report of the Record Commissioners . . . Boston Town Records, 1770 Through 1777, 94–106.

138 TNA, PRO/PC1/9/48, fo. 17. For examples of complaints from the field by harassed officials, see the board’s report to the Treasury of 12 June 1769, TNA, PRO/T1/471, fo. 371; and Arthur Savage to Thomas Hutchinson, 20 February 1770, Hutchinson Letterbooks, Mass. Archives XXV:355–360, from the MHS typescript, 363–365. Bernard had complained to Hillsborough in a letter of 9 July 1768 that “every Seizure made or attempted to be made on land at Boston, for three years past,” had been “rescued or prevented.” Letters to the Ministry, 39.

139 Bernard to Lord Barrington, 4 March 1768, Bernard Papers 6:96–99; also printed in Edward Channing and Archibald Cary Coolidge, eds., The Barrington-Bernard Correspondence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1912), 147–150.

140 Bernard’s noncommittal position was implicit in the customs board minutes for June 1768 that ended up in Add. Ms. 38340, fos. 265–285 (Liverpool Papers) BL. Bernard had made them explicit, even before the Liberty incident, in a letter of 9 May 1768, to Barrington, in Channing and Coolidge, eds., Barrington-Bernard Correspondence, 157. Also see ibid., Appendix III (264–293), and the fair copy in Bernard Papers 8:182–228, Bernard’s recapitulation of the “State of the Disorders” leading from the Liberty affair to the arrival of the troops, written probably just as he was preparing his Select Letters (see infra 95, n. 231).

141 See Bernard’s series of notes to the commissioners of October 8^th, 19^th, and 22^nd, and November 12th, in the Bernard Papers, 7:211–215. “The State of affairs in Boston is full as bad as the Reports you have received make it,” he had written to Lieut. Col. William Dalrymple in Halifax, on 2 July 1768. “All real Power is in the hands of the lowest Class; Civil Authority can do but what they will allow.” Bernard Papers, 5:266. He dared not request that Dalrymple come at the head of troops. The commissioners had already written to both Dalrymple and General Thomas Gage in New York, Dalrymple’s commander, asking for their aid. They responded that their hands were tied. See Gage to the commissioners, 21 June 1768, and Dalrymple, 23 June 1768, in TNA, PRO/T1/465, fos. 181 and 185, resp. Admiral Samuel Hood, with an independent naval command, did respond, sending two small warships down from Halifax.

142 Hulton’s second son, Henry, born in 1769. Burch was the other godfather; Ann Hulton was godmother—as she would be for Edward and Preston too. From Hulton’s “Travels,” 161–162.

143 For a taste of which see various “Journal of the Times” entries in Dickerson, ed., Boston under Military Rule, notably that of 10 October 1768; and the “Candidus” essays in the Boston Evening-Post, beginning 21 November 1768 and running intermittently through 13 February 1769. “Peter” was one of the few who came to the commissioners’ defense, in the Boston Gazette, 29 August 1768.

144 Ann Hulton to Mrs. Lightbody, on 21 December 1770, Loyalist Lady, 29, transcribed infra, on 250–251.

145 Hutchinson to Richard Jackson, in London, 18 April 1768, Hutchinson Letterbooks, Mass. Archives XXVI:300, from the MHS typescript, 624. For Hutchinson, disputes did not reach a head until January–March 1773 and his debate with the council and house over imperial authority versus colonial autonomy. The customs commissioners became part of that debate because of their role in enforcing the Navigation Acts and their salaries being paid by London. See John Phillip Reid, ed., The Briefs of the American Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1981).

146 Hulton to the Reverend _____, 8 October 1773, in Hulton, “Letterbooks,” 1:66–69, transcribed at 282–283 infra.

147 See Hulton’s “Letterbooks,” 1:106–107, from a letter of 8 September 1774 (transcription on 308–309 infra), and his “Account,” 182, 213 infra. Hallowell’s version of events is in a letter to Grey Cooper of 5 September 1774, TNA, PRO/CO5/175, fos. 52–55. On September 1^st General Thomas Gage, by then governor of Massachusetts as well as commander-in-chief of the British armed forces in North America, had sent soldiers from Boston to seize munitions stored in Medford, just outside Cambridge. Local militiamen mustered (too late), believing that his troops had taken stockpiles belonging to the people of the province rather than, as he contended, to the crown.

148 Hulton to Robert Nicholson, letter of 3 August 1771, in Hulton, “Nicholson Letters,” 52, transcribed on 253–255 infra.

149 Which is not to say that the board ever changed its tune about the need for a more effective show of imperial force—such as in the letter to the Treasury (signed by Hulton, Paxton, and Hallowell) after customs official Charles Dudley experienced difficulties in Rhode Island. “So long as People may go on undisturbed in the commission of illicit practises Things may remain quiet in this Country, but when an attempt is made to check and restrain them we shall find the same resistance and opposition as we have allready experienced; and we are firmly persuaded that our present security, and the peaceable state of this Town, is owing to the Rendezvous of His Majestys Ships in this harbour, and the apprehension that some further measures would be taken by Government.” Letter of 6 May 1771, TNA, PRO/T1/482, fo. 200.

150 Robinsons’s additional leave requests of July 1771 and August 1773, which the Treasury lords approved, are in TNA, PRO/T28/1, fo. 359.

151 Hulton to “P______ Esq.” in London, 8 December 1773, Hulton, “Letterbooks,” 1:77, transcribed infra at 308–309.

152 See Barrow, Trade & Empire, 244–245, with Barrow working directly off the records compiled for 1768–1772 by Charles Steuart, the American board’s paymaster (in TNA, PRO/AO1/844/1137). “An Account of the Gross Receipt, Payments and Net Produce of the Customs in N America” for the years 1767–1774 ranged from a low of £8235 (in 1767) to a high of £49,113 (in 1772), with a slip back down to £30,156 (in 1774). Those totals included revenue generated by seizures and confiscations as well as the routine collection of duties. Thus, £3119 of the £49,113 brought in during 1772 came from seizures and penalties, with over half of that total resulting from the actions of naval officers rather than customs officials. TNA, PRO T1/461, fos. 243–244.

153 Just as Hulton had had questions about the local tax liability with his salary as plantations clerk, he worried over whether his customs board salary could be taxed by Massachusetts. A legal opinion given to the Treasury said that it could—see the report of John Dunning and William de Grey of 13 February 1770 in TNA, PRO/T1/479, fo. 13, but the privy council determined that it should not be—see the 1771 order from the king-in-council sent to Governor Hutchinson, printed in Leonard Woods Labaree, ed., Royal Instructions to British Colonial Governors, 1670–1776, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1935), 1:375. The General Court had pressed for collection the year before, which Hulton paid. Hutchinson, following his instructions, argued for the exception; the House refused. See Speeches of the Governors, 306 (Hutchinson on 4 July 1771) and 307 (the House the next day). Earlier the House had pressed on collecting the rent it believed it was due when the commissioners took up residence at Castle William. See its resolution of 14 July 1770 in Journals of the Massachusetts House, 45:188—yet another flashpoint pitting executive against legislative authority, and imperial against provincial power.

154 Israel Williams of Hatfield to Hutchinson, 23 January 1770, Hutchinson Letterbooks, Mass. Archives XXV:352, from the MHS typescript 360.

155 For British actions in 1774 see P. D. G. Thomas, Tea Party to Independence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); and David Ammerman, In the Common Cause (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1974), for the American reaction.

156 Discussed masterfully in Benjamin Woods Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

157 Montagu to Charles Jenkinson, a vice-treasurer, 8 December 1773, Add. Ms. 38208 (Liverpool Papers), fo. 21, BL.

158 Montagu to Philip Stevens, Treasury secretary, 17 December 1773, in TNA, PRO/CO 5/247, fos. 173–174.

159 The customs commissioners to the Treasury Lords, 30 May 1774, from a copy in Hulton, “Conduct of the Commissariat,” 259–262; quotation on 260.

160 Hulton to Robert Nicholson, 22 January 1776, in Hulton, “Nicholson Letters,” 95, transcription at infra, 341–342. Pepperrell, grandson of the victor at Louisbourg, had inherited the baronetcy and the estate. He was one of the few Council members who had sided with the crown and went into exile, and a godfather (along with Admiral John Montagu) to Henry’s son Preston, born in Brookline in October 1773.

161 Josiah Quincy Jun’r, Observations on the Act of Parliament commonly called the Boston Port-Act Bill; with Thoughts on Civil Society and Standing Armies (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1774).

162 From a letter of 18 January 1774, apparently to Jacob Preston, in Hulton, “Letterbooks,” 1:82, transcribed on 292–293 infra.

163 Letter of 12 June 1775, addressee unknown, ibid., 1:131, transcription infra on 323–324.

164 See his letter of 21 April 1772, addressee unknown, ibid. 1:45, transcribed on 266–268 infra, where even that early he had an inkling that his reputation in London could soon be ruined.

165 Hulton letter of 30 November 1775 (presumably to Elizabeth Lightbody), ibid., 1:169, for Ann; letter of 30 July 1775, to Robert Nicholson, ibid., 1:142, for Elizabeth. Both have been transcribed infra, at 338 and 330–331, resp.

166 The King wanted the commissioners safely out of Boston as soon as he heard about the tea party—see Dartmouth to the Treasury lords, 1 February 1774, in TNA, PRO/CO 5/250, fos. 145–146. The Treasury lords anticipated that revenues—and supplemental salaries—would be adversely affected as a result, so they directed “the Commissioners to report” to them “how much it may be reasonable to allow such Officers respectively as a compensation for such their losses.” Treasury board minutes, 31 March 1774, enclosed with the King’s instructions to Governor Gage, 5 April 1774, in TNA, PRO/CO 5/205, fos. 462–463.

167 See the letter of 7 October 1775 signed by Hulton, Paxton and Hallowell, with a legal finding by Daniel Leonard in their support, accepted by General William Howe, stipulating that they still had authority in Boston. TNA, PRO/T1/513, fos. 287–289. By the time that Hulton sailed for home, trade between the rebellious colonies and the mother country had been statutorily cut off, beginning with New England, then all but New York, North Carolina and Georgia (when they still had a semblance of royal government), and finally all the colonies that eventually declared independence. For the sequence see Pickering, ed., Statutes, 31:4–11 (25 George III c. 10), 31:37–43 (25 George III c. 18), and 31:135–154 (26 George III c. 5). And with that the navigation “system” essentially came to an end, but, the mercantilistic thinking behind it did not necessarily disappear as well, even as formal empire in the Americas became eclipsed by informal empire. See Vincent T. Harlow, The Foundiing of the Second British Empire, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1952, 1964), 2:1–6, 254–280; and Esmond Wright, “The British Objectives, 1780–1783: ‘If Not Dominion Then Trade,’” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Peace and the Peacemakers: The Treaty of 1783 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1986), 3–29.

168 He repeated the rumors as facts in letters of 7 and 21 May 1775, addressed to Robert Nicholson and “Sam’ (possibly Samuel Horne) respectively, in Hulton, “Letterbooks,” 1:146–153 and 127–130, resp. (out of chronological order). The letters are transcribed sequentially at infra 320–323.

169 From Hulton’s “Journal at Boston,” begun on 2 December 1775 and kept through 10 April 1776, when the family found accommodations in Halifax, in Hulton, “Letterbooks,” 1:189, 190, transcribed infra at 350, with slight changes to some capitalization.

170 Ibid., 1:197–221, note for 3 April 1776, transcribed infra, on 352.

171 Hulton to Robert Nicholson, 22 August 1776, Hulton, “Nicholson Letters,” 98, transcribed at 358 infra. James H. Stark, The Loyalists of Massachusetts (Boston: James H. Stark, 1910), included (on 133) a list of those men who removed to Halifax from Boston. Hulton is shown as having twelve in his household, which meant that he, Elizabeth, and the four boys were accompanied by a half dozen servants. Which of those servants had first come out from England, whether any had joined the household in Massachusetts, and how many crossed over (or back to) England is not clear.

172 Ann Hulton to Elizabeth Lightbody, 19 August 1776, Loyalist Lady, 88–90, transcribed infra at 357. Also see Henry to Robert Nicholson, 22 August 1776, Hulton,“Nicholson Letters,” 98, with a transcription infra at 358.

173 He went from renovating the manor house that Hulton visited to building an entirely new one within a decade. See the discussion (and illustrations) of both in Richard Haslam, “Beeston Hall, Norfolk,” Country Life (February 1983), 270–274, brought to my notice by Sir Philip Preston, who gave me his copy.

174 Letter of November 1776, Hulton “Letterbooks,” 2:7–12; quotation from 9, transcription on 359–360 infra.

175 Letter of 25 August 1777 to Ann, ibid., 2:13, transcribed infra on 362.

176 Hulton, “Travels,” 126 and 134, resp. The American version of this was the yeoman farmer, which carried with it the same tensions between ideal and real, between farming as noble experiment and commercial enterprise—for which see Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).

177 Hulton, “Travels,” 127.

178 Henry to Ann, 19 September 1777, Hulton, “Letterbooks,” 2:16–18, transcription at 362–363 infra.

179 Hulton to Ann Hulton, 10 December 1777, ibid., 2:24–25, transcribed on 365–366 infra.

180 Hulton to Dr. Percival, March 1778, ibid., 2:55, transcription infra on 372–374. Cuthbert died in November 1768, Martin in March 1776. Cuthbert had left Hulton a £150 cash bequest in his will. See TNA, Prerogative Court of Canterbury [hereafter PCC] 11/943, fos. 181–182.

181 Quotation from a letter to Mrs. F. Hincks, 13 January 1779, Hulton, “Letterbooks,” 2:62, transcribed at 382 infra. Also see Hulton’s letters on the same date to Mr. Cotgreave, and Elizabeth Lightbody, Ann’s longtime friend and correspondent when she lived in Massachusetts, in ibid., 2:60–61 and 64–65, resp., transcribed infra at 381–382, 383. Hulton had commented on her illness, which may have been stomach cancer, in a letter to a Mrs. Tylston, 24 August 1778, ibid., 2:85–86, transcriptions infra at 378–379.

182 Hulton, “Travels,” 128. Ann’s burial at St. Cuthbert’s is recorded in the parish burial register, but the exact spot near the chancel, if ever marked, was lost with renovations done during the Victorian era. My thanks go to Ruth Harris, a volunteer at St. Cuthbert’s, and Sheila Jenkins, the verger there, for tracing what they could of this faint trail; thanks also to John Isherwood, for putting them on it.

183 Hulton to Robert Nicholson, 27 September 1777, in Hulton, “Letterbooks,” 2:19, transcription infra at 363–364.

184 Hulton to Dr. Percival, 1 September 1780, Hulton, “Letterbooks,” 2:101–102, transcribed on 391 infra. Hulton dealt with a fellow named Michell who had a leasehold from the earl, rather than with the earl himself.

185 Hulton dealt with a land agent, Mr. Leversuch, rather than with the actual owner. The current owners of the house and lands, Sir Christopher and Lady Jennie Bland, kindly shared with me an informal history of the Hall. There were a number of different owners in the eighteenth century and an even larger number of occupants who rented or leased the property. At one point the house was later renamed Clanville Lodge. The Blands have chosen to take it back closer to the older name. It is now Blissamore Hall.

186 Hulton, “Travels,” 129–131.

187 This figure comes from a “Survey by Farmer Winter with additions 1792, 1794, 1797 & undated survey of Weyhill,” Ms. DD Ewelme d. 50, Bodleian Library, which was transcribed and sent to me by local Andover historian John Isherwood. Leversuch, who set the amounts, was apparently not above gouging renters like Hulton who came in from outside and were not familiar with the going rate or lands in the area.

188 The Treasury’s ruling on 20 December 1776 is in TNA, PRO/T29/45, fo. 426. The commissioners’ warning that the fund was being drained dry is in TNA, PRO/T49/48, fo. 291. Hulton expressed his frustrations about the insufficient produce of his farms, and legal problems too. “During the winter of 1783 I thrashed my Crop at Blissmore Hall, and was happy to get rid of the burden of that farm in the Spring, especially as I had a very troublesome litigious man of a Landlord to deal with, who lay upon the watch to take any advantage; and actually commenced an action against me in the King’s Bench in Westminster, of which Court he was an attorney, in order to extort money from me, by dread of a Law suit; which he being an attorney cou’d carry on without expence, and I was glad to pay ten pounds extorted from me by him to get his receipt in full.” Hulton, “Travels,” 133.

189 No future provision in Hulton, “Travels,” 132. Hulton noted North’s refusal to see him, but without any bitterness, in his “Travels,” 129.

190 The recommendation for formal termination is dated 16 October 1783, in TNA, PRO/T28/2, fo.185.

191 A ruling handed down 21 May 1783, in TNA, PRO/ADM80/132. The claims commissioners put the estimated value of his confiscated Brookline estate at £1294, and his personal estate at £1200.

192 Hulton, “Travels,” 147–153.

193 Thomas Aston Coffin to Mary Coffin, 16 September 1784. Thomas Aston Coffin Papers, Box 1, Ms. N-1005, MHS. Coffin wrote that “the Whole Board of Commissioners that were at Boston have been much neglected & I believe are most of them very poor.” However, “Mr Paxton tho rather older is the same—he bows & scrapes & is the gay Man he ever was—complaining very much of his Poverty—but then those that know him say without Reason & that he has got Money.”

194 For the loyalist claims commission in general (with nothing in particular on Hulton) see John Eardley-Wilmot, Historical View of the Commission for Enquiring into the Losses, Services, and Claims, of the American Loyalists (London: J. Nichols, 1815); and Hugh Edward Egerton, ed., The Royal Commission on the Losses and Services of American Loyalists, 1783 to 1785 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1915). There were over £10 million in claims filed for lost property (real and personal) and unpaid debts. Over 3200 claims were settled, with virtually no one receiving a full amount, but nearly 2300 claimants received something—Hulton among them. The Penn family was awarded just over half of its claim—£500,000, the largest by far (of £944,817 claimed).

195 Laid out in TNA, PRO/T50/31, fo. 10. The final installment was prorated at £25:6:8, because he died during the January–April 1790 quarter. With that the installment payments ended and Elizabeth presumably received the balance at some point.

196 Proceedings of the Commissioners of American Claims, in TNA, PRO/ADM12/109, fo. 164, dated 31 March 1790—after Henry had died. He had been paid £420 by installments, so the balance to his heirs stood at £1130.

197 After Henry’s death Elizabeth tried for well over a decade to recover assets in Massachusetts through a lawyer that Henry had hired there, John Lowell of Boston. Before leaving they had entrusted some of their furniture to Mrs. George Inman. She indicated in her will that the furniture was theirs, but on her death it was sold anyway. The Hultons wanted the cash value for the furniture from that estate sale. They had left a bond with yet another party, from which partial payments were made to them in 1789 and 1791. Payment then stopped, even though Lowell had succeeded in getting the bond transferred to his own account. Elizabeth wanted the balance (total value of £888, of which £400 had been paid) in annual installments of £100, the arrangement to which she and Henry had agreed with the original bondholder. She did not receive satisfaction on either issue, despite trying with Lowell’s son after the senior Lowell died, and even after pointing out that her son Henry was a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn. See Elizabeth’s three letters to the Lowells, the first undated (but before January 1792), 14 November 1800, and 20 January 1803, in bMS. Am. 1582, fos. 267–269, Houghton Library.

198 Disarming, on May 8^th, safeguarding property, on May 3^rd, in The Journals of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts in 1774 and 1775 (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1838), 202 and 534, resp. That this eventually turned into a problem is evident from the Massachusetts house of representatives resolution 23 March 1776 to send a committee to Boston to track the “abandoned” property of the customs commissioners and other “avowed Enemies of the Rights of their Country.” The committee reported (on April 3^rd) that buildings had been occupied without permission, and property had been illicitly seized or even sold by private parties. Journals of the Massachusetts House, 51 (part III): 37 and 75, resp.

199 A Mrs. Abigail Newell of Roxbury took furniture out of the Hulton house at Brookline. She refused to return it and does not appear to have been prosecuted for her pilfering. See David Edward Maas, The Return of the Massachusetts Loyalists (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), 281.

200 An Act to prevent the Return to this State of certain Persons therein named, and others, who have left this State, or either of the United States, and joined the Enemies thereof (Boston: Benjamin Edes, 1778), passed by the Massachusetts state legislature on 16 October 1778. Thomas Hutchinson headed the list, with Francis Bernard next in line. Hulton, Burch, Hallowell, and Paxton were all there too.

201 Purchased at auction by David Cook, on 12 May 1781. See Maas, Massachusetts Loyalists, charts on 308 and 309 resp. For the value assigned to Hulton’s estate before it was put up for auction see the reports of 14 September 1779 and 26 March 1781 in TNA, PRO/AO/12/82, fos. 93 and 92, resp. Also see John T. Hassam, “Confiscated Estates of Boston Loyalists,” Massachusetts Historical Society. Proceedings 10 (1895–1896):162–185. There were 159 “estates” sold in that fashion in Suffolk County (Boston and outlying communities, Brookline included). The house and property of William Pepperrell sold for the most (£102,000), with Thomas Hutchinson’s a close second (just under £100,000).

202 Wallace Brown, The King’s Friends (Providence: Brown University Press, 1965), noted that claimants from Boston represented only 1 in 100 of the residents there, and claimants from the rest of the colony only 1 in 1000 of the total population. Roughly 90% of the claimants were native-born. “In the last analysis,” Brown concluded, “Loyalism was often a state of mind, an emotional commitment.” (40) Also see Brown’s less statistical, more discursive The Good Americans: The Loyalists in the American Revolution (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1969); and Maas, Massachusetts Loyalists. For individual portraits, Stark, Loyalists of Massachusetts, is still useful, as are Lorenzo Sabine, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1864); and E. Alfred Jones, The Loyalists of Massachusetts (London: The Saint Catherine Press, 1930). All three have information on Burch, Hallowell, and Paxton as well as Hulton.

203 The most thoughtful discussion remains William Nelson, The American Tory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).

204 Thomas Hutchinson did stay in contact with Charles Paxton, “who seemed much affected with the thought of being buried in London . . . he would give 100 guineas to be laid by his father and mother under the Chapel in Boston.” Peter Orlando Hutchinson, ed., The Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Esq., 2 vols. (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1883, 1886), 2:240–241. He also stayed in touch with Burch, who he had in fact suggested as a successor to his deceased lieutenant governor, Andrew Oliver. He had thought his exile would be temporary; it was not. See Hutchinson to Dartmouth, 29 March and 4 April 1774, in TNA, PRO/CO 5/769, fos 71–73 and 74–75, resp.

205 Mary Beth Norton, The British-Americans (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972) tracked 1440 heads of families who left the colonies for England, noting, at least in London, the clustering of some groups in some neighborhoods. Adapting to their new circumstances was taxing—“an intensely disillusioning experience” for all too many (42).

206 Although he did have enough interest in American affairs to be among the subscribers to William Gordon’s The History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment of the United States of America, 4 vols. (London: Charles Dilly, 1788), from the list at the beginning of volume 1. Curious about American society and increasingly sympathetic to colonial protests against imperial policy, Gordon had left England for Massachusetts and secured a pulpit at Roxbury in 1772—in a local congregational church, not an Anglican parish. Hulton heard him preach there and was favorably impressed—see Ann Hulton’s undated letter, ca. 1771, transcribed infra, at 255–259. Gordon returned to England in 1786, after gathering a cache of documents and interviewing leading Revolutionaries for his history.

207 In a letter from Henry to Ann, March 1778, Hulton, “Letterbooks,” 2:30, transcribed on 366–367, infra, with some changes to capitalization, and the apostrophe added. He expressed similar sentiments in other letters: to Charles Dudley, 25 March 1778, ibid., 2:39–46; to William Pepperrell, 28 March 1778, ibid., 2:36–38; and to Thomas Cotgreave, 15 April 1778, ibid. 2:57, transcription at 368–372 and 376–377 infra. Also see Hulton’s attempts to console Cotgreave upon the death of a loved one, in a letter of 18 March 1780, ibid., 2:97–98, with a transcription infra at 389–390. He emphasized the joy of the separated in life being reunited beyond the grave.

208 Noted in Hulton, “Travels,” 162.

209 Hulton to Dr. Percival, March 1778, in Hulton, “Letterbooks,” 2:48, transcribed on 372–374 infra.

210 “Sketches. With a view to fix right Principles in the minds of Children, and lead them to Just Sentiments, and a virtuous Conduct.” Manuscript copy in the Norfolk Record Office, MC 36/139, 481X1, portions of which are transcribed on 417–427 infra. As Hulton explained to Elizabeth Lightbody, his sister Ann’s longtime friend, “I have a desire that my Children should reap some advantage from my having lived; that they should be distinguished by liberal endowments, and virtuous improvements; and would flatter myself that if in future life they find advantages from the benefits of a right cultivation, they may reflect with pleasure that they owed something to the example, and precepts of their father,” Letter of 8 September 1778, Hulton, “Letterbooks,” 2:91–92, transcribed infra at 380–381.

211 Hulton, “Travels,” 151.

212 TNA, PCC 11/1190, fo. 186, dated 4 September 1789, with a codicil added 7 February 1790, just five days before he died. This will is at the TNA, but also available online now through the National Archives website, as are all of the other wills noted below. And Hulton’s last message to his sons, as expressed here? “I have only to wish they may continue by their good Conduct to deserve the affection of their surviving parent and the blessings of heaven.” Henry left Elizabeth stocks and cash (the amounts not enumerated), £750 in bank drafts, a house in Chester being rented to three doctors, the leasehold at Hippenscombe, furniture, and personal effects—essentially everything. She could dispose of any of it as she saw fit, even should she marry again, so long as “she made provision for their children.” Brief notices of Henry’s passing appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine 60 (February 1790):185, and The European Magazine, and London Review (February 1790):160. Mrs. G. M. Turner, of the Hampshire Record Office, kindly ran down the entry in St. Mary’s register for Henry’s burial (17 February 1790).

213 Jacob Preston’s will is in TNA, PCC 11/1207, fos. 193–203, dated 28 May 1774, with a codicil added 8 March 1786. Preston had named Henry Hulton and Whitley Heald, his brothers-in-law, as executors to the original will (despite Hulton’s being in Massachusetts), along with his wife, Mary. It was a considerably larger estate than Henry’s. Elizabeth Hulton’s will is in TNA, PCC 11/1140, fos. 69–73, dated 30 May 1790, with two codicils (in 1799 and 1804). The will was not proved until 28 August 1805, though she had died on April 16^th of that year. She was generous to all of her sons and to her servants in her bequests as well.

214 His will is in TNA, PCC 11/1672, fos. 183–187, drawn up 12 February 1823, opening with language that no doubt would have pleased his father: “I commit my Soul to the God of all mankind in the hope of a joyful resurrection through the merits of my blessed Saviour Jesus Christ.” The royal license authorizing Thomas Hulton to add the surname Preston was issued 22 May 1805 (from a photocopy of the warrant itself, kindly provided by Sir Philip Preston). There are at the Norfolk Record Office various examples of agreements between the Prestons and tenants on the family estate. I even found (and purchased) one through the online auction house, eBay, dated 11 October 1803, where the sisters rented 117 acres, “more or less,” at the Beeston Park Farm to Mary and John Cubitt. The annual rent was paid mostly in kind (117 bushels of wheat, 234 bushels of barley). Alice Preston Heald’s will is in TNA, PCC 11/1467, fos. 187–193. Alice died in 1807. Jane Preston’s will is in TNA, PCC 11/1756, fos. 60–63. She died in 1829, without marrying. Her grand-nephew (the grandson of Henry Hulton), Henry George Hulton of Lincoln’s Inn, was one of the witnesses to the will. The family eventually sold Beeston Hall and the lands around it.

215 See the entries for Thomas and Edward Hulton in J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922–1954), Part II, 3:483 and 484, resp. Edward Hulton’s will is in TNA, PCC 11/2010, fo. 146, written on 28 November 1816. Cambridge also awarded him the LL.D., in 1815.

216 Henry Hulton’s will, dated 19 May 1820, is in TNA, PCC 11/1629, fos. 295–298. The will of his son, Henry George Hulton, from 9 January 1845, is in TNA, PCC 11/2010, fos. 353–354. Sarah Lawrence, The Descendants of Philip Henry, M.A. (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1844) includes (on 53–55) genealogical information for Anne Henry, daughter of Philip Henry, who had married Henry Hulton’s grandfather, John, information that is carried through Henry and Elizabeth Hulton, and their five sons. According to this source, Preston Hulton, who became a cavalry officer, married but had no children, and George, also a cavalry officer, did not marry. The genealogical chart preserved among the Bennett materials in the Cheshire Record Office (see supra 26 n. 4) lists Preston as a captain in the 21^st Light Dragoons and George as a captain in the 1^st Royal Dragoons, with George dying in Spain in 1814.

217 For the inscription, transcription on 430 infra. The stone slab that covers the vault was once part of the floor in the nave of St. Mary’s. When the church was rebuilt in the 1840s a new floor was built above the old and the vault cover is now part of the floor to the crypt. There is also a plaque to Henry and Elizabeth Hulton’s memory in the west entrance to St. Mary’s, which is pictured in the guide to St. Mary’s Church Andover (Andover, England: Hearn & Scott, 2005), 14, and supra, 24. The five sons paid for the plaque, stating on it that they “survive to lament the Loss of their much respected Parents.”

218 J. Wright, ed., Sir Henry Cavendish’s Debates of the House of Commons, during the Thirteenth Parliament of Great Britain. 2 vols. (London: Longman & Co., 1841, 1842), 1:31, speech from the throne of 8 November 1768. George III—or, more correctly, the advisers who drafted his speech—missed the mark here. There had been no dramatic shift in attitudes or behavior between June and November 1768. Those wanting to “throw off” dependence were seeking some sort of governmental autonomy within the empire, not complete political independence from it.

219 Hulton to de Ruling, May 1772, Hulton, “Letterbooks,” 1:49–50, transcription on 268–269 infra, with some changes to punctuation and capitalization.

220 He claimed that he offered this advice to Townshend in 1767, before being named to the commission—not just in his “Account,” written when he was safely back in England. See his letter when he was still in the thick of it in Boston: see 21 April 1772, addressee unknown, in Hulton, “Letterbooks,” 1:42–48, transcribed infra at 266–268.

221 Hulton to de Ruling, 23 August 1768, ibid., 1:3, transcription infra on 223–224.

222 Hulton to Edward ______, 5 February 1770, ibid., 1:9, transcribed at 228–231 infra.

223 Letter of 21 April 1772, unknown addressee, Hulton, “Letterbooks,” 1:43, transcription on 266–268 infra.

224 Letter of 26 May 1768, apparently never sent, in the Hutchinson Letterbooks, Mass. Archives XXVI:307, from the MHS typescript, 639. Hutchinson found a sympathetic ear with Hulton—as he found a sympathetic reader, Hulton having read the first volume of Hutchinson’s History. Still, they did not agree on all things. Hulton would have hope for the Massachusetts Government Act in 1774; Hutchinson would not.

225 Hulton to Samuel ______, 21 May 1775, Hulton, “Letterbooks,” 1:129, transcribed at 322–323 infra. Dennys De Berdt, when agent for the Massachusetts House, had thought that Bernard was a “Tool” of Hillsborough, whose ideas would only further the earl’s “oppressive measures.” See De Berdt to House Speaker Thomas Cushing, 1 June 1769, in Albert Matthews, ed., “Letters of Dennys De Berdt, 1757–1770,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 13 (1912):375.

226 Bernard to Barrington, 15 December 1761, in Channing and Coolidge, eds. Barrington-Bernard Correspondence, 43–44. A more complete compilation of Bernard’s writings is being edited by Colin Nicolson as The Papers of Francis Bernard, 3 vols. (Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2007—). This particular letter is in 1:166–68. Also see Bernard’s letter to Charles Townshend of 18 May 1763 (ibid., 1:360), where Bernard commented that Massachusetts “alone affords an ample field for such disquisitions [on imperial reform]; but they are too delicate for any but private letters.”

227 Bernard to Barrington, 23 November 1765, ibid., 95–99, quotation from 96; original in the Bernard Papers, 5:47–55; quotation from 50.

228 Ibid.

229 As a case in point see Bernard’s letter to Lawrence Monk, 23 December 1768, Bernard Papers, 7:239–249.

230 George Chalmers, a native Scot who made a career for himself as a lawyer in Maryland and then left in the loyalist exodus, stands as a good example. See his Political Annals of the Present United Colonies from their Settlement to the Peace of 1763 (London: J. Bowen, 1780), and his more sardonic, embittered An Introduction to the History of the Revolt of the Colonies, 2 vols. (London: Baker and Galabin, 1782 for vol. 1; Boston, 1845, for vol. 2), which he recognized had too hard an edge (given his office-seeking), so he withdrew it before the second volume was released. Grace Amelia Cockcroft discusses both books in The Public Life of George Chalmers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939); Lawrence Henry Gipson reviews the first book, John A. Schutz the second, in Leder, ed., Colonial Legacy, 13–36 and 36–58, resp. Peter C. Messer, Stories of Independence (DeKalb, Il.: Northern Illinois Press, 2005), 45–69, also has insights on Chalmers. John Schutz, along with Douglass Adair, edited Peter Oliver’s Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1961). Oliver was in places even more biting and bitter than Chalmers. He barely mentioned the customs board and did not talk about Hulton at all, despite their knowing each other in Boston. Janice Potter, The Liberty We Seek (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983) discusses loyalist fears that a delusive search for equality would only bring anarchy (though with no mention of Chalmers or Hulton).

231 Bernard’s Select Letters on the Trade and Government of America (London: W. Bowyer and J. Nichols, 1774) were published on 15 February 1774, just as the debates leading to the Massachusetts Government Act were getting underway. See Pickering, ed., Statutes at Large, 24 George III c. 40 for the act itself. For Bernard as reformer see Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” 82–108; Aeilt E. Sents, “Francis Bernard and English Imperial Reconstruction” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Missouri, 1973); and Richard Koebner, Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 130–149.

232 See, for example, Bernard to the Earl of ___, 25 October 1763, in Bernard’s Select Letters, 1–4.

233 Bernard to Barrington, 23 November 1765, Bernard Papers, 5:51; printed in Channing and Coolidge, eds., Barrington-Bernard Correspondence, 93–102. He thought it prescient enough to include in his Select Letters, 29–37.

234 Bernard, Select Letters, v. As he put it, “we must admit the Execution of it would probably be attended with great difficulties, if its theory should be approved; and therefore it may be considered only as a pleasing reverie.” Bernard attached his “Principles of Law and Polity,” a sort of imperial syllogism extended through ninety-seven points to lay out his “plan” for imperial reform (71–85). There is a variation on it in Add. Ms. 38342 (Liverpool Papers, special papers, 1773–1777) BL.

235 For which see my Neither Kingdom Nor Nation: The Irish Quest for Constitutional Rights, 1698–1800 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994).

236 See my two essays: “Federalism and the Failure of Imperial Reform,” History 86 (2001):155–179; and “Thomas Crowley and Americans in Parliament, 1765–1775” Quaker History 91 (2002):1–19.

237 From Leonard’s 5^th “Massachusettensis” essay, 9 January 1775, reprinted in Bernard Mason, ed., The American Colonial Crisis (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 37. “All colonies have their date of independence,” proclaimed Isaac Barré during debates in the House of Commons on 3 February 1766. “The wisdom or folly of our conduct may make it sooner or later. If we act judiciously, this point may be reached in the life of many of the members of this House.” Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates, 2:144.

238 “Men were always only half aware of where their thought was going,” wrote Gordon S. Wood in The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 389, about the Revolutionary generation’s experiment with republicanism, a theme he developed more fully in his Radicalism of the American Revolution. Also see Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987); and Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

1 This is the case with his letters to Robert Nicholson between 1760–1776, one set of which is the John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester, the other at Harris Manchester College, Oxford University. Neither would appear to be in Hulton’s hand. Nor are they identical, but, unless the originals are ever found, it is impossible to know how the copyists altered them. The Norfolk County Record Office has one copy of the “Principles” (see 418 n. 1 infra) that Hulton composed for his sons and it too does not appear to be from his pen. It was made from the original in the possession of Hulton descendant Sir Philip Preston. The other four copies—one having been written for each of the five boys—have yet to turn up.

2 These are the two volumes at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Hints that the letterbooks were highly selective, both in the letters they included and, among those they included, which portions, can be found in Hulton’s letters to Thomas Percival of March 1778 and Elizabeth Lightbody of 13 January 1779, at 372–374 and 383 infra, resp.

3 And since it too seems to have been composed as a type of summary, with Hulton consulting letters and journals as he went, the difficulties of determining when true originals were used only multiply.

4 I am thinking here of two very fine books, whose purposes differ somewhat from mine: J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall, eds., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), with its heavily bracketed material; and Verner W. Crane, ed., Benjamin Franklin’s Letters to the Press, 1758–1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950), with its many footnotes.

5 Not only from the “Principles” (see supra 101 n. 1), but from the “Sketches” at the William L. Clements Library mss., University of Michigan.

6 Which is to say, all twenty-four that were published previously in Letters of a Loyalist Lady (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927), and one from E. Rhys Jones, ed., “An Eighteenth-Century Lady and Her Impressions,” Gentleman’s Magazine 297 (August 1904):195–198. The Reverend Jones apparently obtained these letters through the Lightbody family line. If he owned them outright, there is nothing to indicate that they were part of his estate when he died. See the will for Edward Rhys Jones, probated 3 September 1946, listed in the Principal Probate Registry index, Wills & Admons H-J, voume 4 for that particular year.

7 Pickering, ed., Statutes at Large, 16:374–379, 6 George II c. 13. It taxed rum at 9 pence per gallon, molasses at 6 pence per gallon, and sugar at 5 shillings per 100 “weight avoirdupois” (100 pounds, at 16 ounces to a pound) if brought into the British American colonies from outside the British empire, with certain exceptions. It did not affect the sugar trade between the British colonies and those of Spain and Portugal—showing that the driving concern was to control, not necessarily to exclude, foreign trade, with France the primary threat and therefore the French West Indies the primary target. Nevertheless, the statute’s emphasis on the importance of the West Indies plantations to the empire, coupled with the expressed intent to punish anyone who interfered with enforcement by the customs service, no doubt rubbed some merchants on the mainland colonies the wrong way. Equally galling was the profit incentive for those involved with enforcement, the proceeds from penalties or forfeitures to be divided, “one third part thereof for the use of his Majesty, his heirs and successors, to be applied for the support of the government of the colony or plantation where the same shall be recovered, one third part to the governor or commander in chief of the said colony or plantation, and the other third part to the informer or prosecutor who shall sue for the same.”

8 That is, pence per gallon.

9 Michael Kammen’s Empire and Interest (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott Company, 1970) gives the scholar’s stamp to the contemporary’s observation, with Kammen finding that national policy had become increasingly the creature of interest group politics.

10 The national debt had stood at roughly £75 million by the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1756 and exploded to nearly £140 million by war’s end seven years later. Annual interest on the debt was just under £5 million and annual expenses hovered around £8 million, with annual revenues at £10 million—which meant there loomed an annual revenue shortfall of £3 million or so. Grenville wanted to curtail, not end, deficit spending. It was estimated that posting troops on the North American mainland after the war and paying the expenses of an expanded customs service would run roughly £400,000 annually. Grenville knew that his entire program, both the introduction of new navigation acts and better enforcement of old laws, would not have covered even that amount. It would, however—he hoped—get the colonists used to the idea of paying higher taxes and impress on them the legitimacy of parliamentary supremacy. He knew that he had taken a calculated risk in raising financial, political, and constitutional issues simultaneously.

11 Pickering, ed., Statutes, 26:33–52, 4 George III c. 15, which stated at the outset that revenues would be raised “for defraying the expenses of defending, protecting, and securing” the North American mainland colonies. It included foreign coffee and wine as well as sugar, molasses and rum. Foreign sugar was taxed at 6 pence per 100 weight avoirdupois (see 107 n. 7 supra), foreign molasses at 3 pence per gallon and foreign rum was banned altogether. The “drawbacks”—tax rebates, in effect—allowed on certain wines, calicoes, and muslins are proof enough that the drawbacks granted to the East India Company for its tea in the Townshend duties three years later were a continuation of, not a departure from, established practice. There were also detailed provisions on enforcement, Parliament realizing that the new duties would not bring in the intended revenue if the old lackadaisical mode of collection was not changed. And yet smuggling cases could still be prosecuted in common law courts as well as before vice-admiralty judges, the question of overlapping jurisdiction never being answered to the satisfaction of provincial or imperial authorities. The act regarding Royal Navy involvement, passed separately, is in ibid., 28:70–71, 3 George III c. 22.

12 Hulton (or his scribes) did not underline or italicize such things; I made the change, here and infra.

13 See the discussions in Stout, Royal Navy, 65–68; and David S. Lovejoy, Rhode Island Politics and the American Revolution, 1760–1776 (Providence: Brown University Press, 1958), 36–37.

14 Pickering, ed., Statutes, 26:179–204, 5 George III c. 12.

15 See Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 119–158 for the rioting in Boston and elsewhere in the colonies; and also the documents that Morgan assembled and edited as Prologue to Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1959).

16 C. A. Weslager, Stamp Act Congress (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1976), 200–202, prints the resolutions of 19 October 1765 from which Hulton quoted, along with the memorials to the king, lords, and commons, on 204–214. A contemporary copy of the resolutions can be found in Proceedings of the Congress at New-York (Annapolis, Md.: Jonas Green, 1765), 15–16, with the three memorials on 17–24.

17 Hulton blurred what American patriots had kept distinct at this stage in their protests. Those who argued most forcefully for American rights—notably Daniel Dulany in response to Grenville’s program and John Dickinson in response to Townshend’s—did not advocate “independence.” Rather, they argued for some sort of legislative autonomy, but without rejecting parliamentary authority altogether. See Dulany’s Considerations on the Propriety of imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, For the Purpose of raising a Revenue, by Act of Parliament (Annapolis, 1765) and Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: David Hall and William Sellers, 1768), which brought together essays first published individually in newspapers around the colonies, beginning in December 1767. Both Dulany and Dickinson argued for rights within the empire and professed their attachment to crown and country. Even after the shooting started in 1775, Dulany rejected the notion that full independence was either necessary or desirable; Dickinson embraced it only reluctantly. Thomas Whately, adviser to George Grenville and friend to John Temple, figured in the debate with his defense of “virtual representation” in The Regulations lately Made concerning the Colonies and the Taxes Imposed upon Them considered (London: J. Wilkie, 1765).

18 Pitt was still in Commons, not yet elevated to the peerage as earl of Chatham. His speech, part of a back-and-forth debate with Grenville in the Commons on 14 January 1766, can be found in Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings, 2:88. Also see ibid., 2:135–151, Commons debates of 3 February 1766, where the three basic positions on the question of American taxation were laid out: that Parliament neither could nor should tax Americans directly (Isaac Barré, echoing his mentor, Pitt); that Parliament constitutionally could tax them but, for practical political reasons, should not (Henry Conway, in a position taken by many who followed the Marquess of Rockingham); and that Parliament had both the constitutional authority and the political and financial need to do so (Hans Stanley, in what would be the clear government position only after North formed his ministry in March 1770). Pitt had upheld Britain’s sovereignty and parliamentary supremacy in his January 14th speech, even as he denied Parliament’s authority to tax the colonists directly. He objected to the stamp act as a perversion of the navigation system, which he fully supported.

19 Pickering, ed., Statutes, 27:275–287, 6 George III c. 52 for the 1766 revision to the 1764 sugar act. Under this new act all molasses imported into the colonies was taxed at 1 pence per gallon, the British West Indies included. Here the concern for revenue took priority over the preferences of the West India lobby. Other goods were covered as well, with some being eligible for drawbacks.

20 Ibid., 27:505–512, 7 George III c. 46. Indicative of the power struggle going on beneath the surface between provincial and imperial authority, the act also provided that anyone taking an imperial official to court in a dispute over enforcement of the navigation acts would have to pay treble the court costs if the suit failed—an attempt to counter the intimidation of customs officials by local mobs. Even more important, the act (as Hulton quoted in part) provided for a civil list to free royally-appointed imperial officials from provincial legislatures by allowing “such monies to be applied, out of the produce of the duties granted by this act, as his Majesty, or his successors, shall think proper or necessary, for defraying the charges of the administration of justice, and the support of civil government, within all or any of the said colonies or plantations.”

21 Ibid., 27:19, 6 George III c. 11 for repeal of the stamp act. Note that Hulton did not call attention to the Declaratory Act (ibid., 27:19–20, 6 George III c. 12), coupled by Parliament with that repeal, which stipulated “That the said colonies and plantations in America have been, are, and of right ought to be, subordinate unto, and dependent upon the imperial crown and parliament of Great Britain; and that the King’s majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the lords spiritual and temporal, and commons of Great Britain, in parliament assembled, had, hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.” The controversial word “tax” was deliberately not used in this sly but futile attempt to assert imperial authority and yet not provoke a constitutional dispute. For context see my “William Dowdeswell and the American Crisis, 1763–1775,” History 90 (2005):507–531.

22 Repeal was actually in 1770, near the beginning of North’s ministry. Subsequent revisions to the regulation of the tea trade in the colonies between 1771 and 1773 are in Pickering, ed., Statutes, 29:4–8, 160–165, 12 George III c. 7 and c. 60, resp.; and 30:74–77, 14 George III c. 44.

23 For the navigation system as it was supposed to work see the fourth and final volume of Andrews, Colonial Period; and Barrow, Trade and Empire, for how it actually worked.

24 Robert G. Albion, Forests and Sea Power (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926) and Joseph J. Malone, Pine Trees and Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964) discuss the problems associated with regulating the use of colonial timber for the Royal Navy, with its need for masts and spars, a variation on the larger problem faced by the navigation system. The American Board of Customs was not directly involved in this aspect of trade. A surveyor-general of the woods was supposed to manage the forests.

25 In Rhode Island and Connecticut virtually all provincial posts were elective, as provided by charters approved by Charles II in 1663 and 1662, respectively. These and other colonial charters can be found, arranged alphabetically, in Francis Newton Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, 7 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909). The proprietors of Pennsylvania (the Penn family) and Maryland (the Calverts) appointed the governor and other key officials but, as in “royal” colonies like Massachusetts—where the crown appointed the governor—much power had shifted to the assembly. Leonard Woods Labaree laid out the general structure in Royal Government in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930); Jack P. Greene, The Quest for Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963) showed how, even in the supposedly more placid Southern colonies, the same divisive issues over liberty and authority, and provincial versus imperial power, arose as in New England. Also see Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968).

26 Pickering, ed., Statutes, 16:374–379, 6 George II c. 13 (the 1733 molasses act).

27 Ibid., 26:33–52, 4 George III c. 15 (the 1764 sugar act).

28 Hulton, like Bernard and other imperial officials, was convinced that opposition politics compromised national policy. They all feared that when a Camden or a Pitt (Chatham) criticized acts of Parliament, or questioned Parliament’s authority to tax the colonists, the “demagogues” among the colonists were emboldened, causing an overwrought minority to intimidate a loyal but more passive majority into silence.

29 writs of assistance.

30 Pickering, ed., Statutes, 26:33–52, 4 George III c. 15 (sugar act) and 27:505–512, 7 George III c. 46 (Townshend duties).

31 Ibid., 8 George III c. 22. When Hulton took office as plantations clerk in 1763 there were eleven vice-admiralty courts in the mainland colonies. The judges, almost all of whom were themselves colonists, were not paid salaries. They were expected to subsist off of court fees. A new court based at Halifax was added in 1764, a salaried (£800 per annum) English judge on the bench, with original as well as appellate jurisdiction over trade and revenue cases from anywhere in the colonies. The 1768 reconfiguration added another three courts—in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston—to create four distinct districts, with all four courts having both appellate and original jurisdiction. Cases heard in the other vice-admiralty courts could be heard there on appeal, as well as cases on appeal that started in common-law courts. The four judges (largely colonists) were paid £600 a year, but they were still expected to supplement their income from court fees. For the jurisdictional boundaries laid out in 1768, see Fitzroy and Munro, eds., Privy Council, 5:151–153. It was 1769 before the new system was fully in place. See Ubbelohde, Vice-Admiralty Courts, 128–147. Despite all the changes, vice-admiralty court jurisdiction was concurrent with, not separate from or superior to, that of the provincial common-law courts.

32 Pickering, ed., Statutes, 26:305–318, 5 George III c. 33, the “quartering act” that was part of Grenville’s 1765 program.

33 Hulton was most likely thinking of his frustrations with Massachusetts attorney general Jonathan Sewall in the 1768 Liberty case.

34 The New York suspending (or “restraining”) act is in Pickering, ed., Statutes, 27:609–610, 7 George III c. 59. Acting on the complaint of General Thomas Gage, Parliament instructed the New York assembly not to pass any new legislation until it had complied with the quartering act of 1765. The issue, which dragged through 1766 and into 1767, was sidestepped when the legislators eventually granted funds without specifying that they would be used for housing and provisioning the small (but growing) contingent of regulars then in New York. See Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 211–240, 334–335; and Joseph Tiedemann, Reluctant Revolutionaries (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 117–124. John Dickinson, as the “Pennsylvania Farmer,” thought Parliament’s intervention in this dispute every bit as dangerous as the revenue-raising motives behind the Townshend duties.

35 See Stout, Royal Navy, for the ill-fated Liberty, 140 and 193 n. 54, Hancock’s sloop that was confiscated and turned to customs service duty in 1768. The rules for naval involvement in the profit-sharing aspects of cargoes and ships condemned for smuggling were laid out in Pickering, ed., Statutes, 25:345–351, 3 George III c. 22. (in 1763).

36 For the crowd as mob, and the mob as political weapon, see Gordon S. Wood, “A Note on Mobs in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3^rd series 23 (1966):635–642; Pauline Maier, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America,” ibid., 3^rd series 27 (1970):3–35; Richard Maxwell Brown, “Violence and the American Revolution,” in Stephen G. Kurtz, ed., Essays on the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972); Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary America (New York: Academic Press, 1977); and Jesse Lemisch, Jack Tar vs. John Bull (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997).

37 Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 119–158, examined how Boston set “the pace” in resisting imperial authority by targeting those charged with enforcing the navigation acts, the stamp act first and foremost. Also see Barrow, Trade and Empire, 186–212, and (on 202) the September 1766 affair of Daniel Malcom, to which Hulton may have been referring (may, because it involved a search for possible seizure rather than a straightforward seizure). Benjamin Hallowell and Charles Paxton, among others, were thwarted in their desire to search Malcom’s warehouse. See too TNA, PRO/T1/446, fos. 103–133 and TNA, PRO/T1/452, fos. 205–212. When Paxton sailed to England he would use this incident as proof of the need for reforming the customs service—leading indirectly to the creation of the American board.

38 [Dickinson], Letters from a Farmer. Bernard characterized Dickinson’s Letters as an “American creed” and therefore a dangerous sign of what could follow. Bernard to John Pownall, 20 April 1768, Bernard Papers, 6:109. Bernard, like Hulton, did not see the distinction between taxation and legislation made by some members of Parliament as well as by protesting Americans, much less follow Dickinson’s argument about legislative intent as the crucial factor in separating the constitutional from the unconstitutional. By contrast, the anonymous editor of The Report of the Lords Committee, Appointed by the House of Lords to Enquire into the several Proceedings in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (London: William Bingley, 1774) saw the distinctions that Hulton, like Bernard, missed. Most American patriots at this point accepted some modicum of parliamentary authority, despite their objections to being taxed directly. Even as late as 1774 and the first Continental Congress, the delegates there were reluctant to squeeze Parliament out of the legislative picture altogether, a reluctance that explains the careful wording of their resolutions—for which see my “The First Continental Congress and Problem of American Rights,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 122 (1998):354–383. For Dickinson’s importance see Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 160–229; Robert Webking, The American Revolution and the Politics of Liberty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988, 41–60; Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1953), 326–361; and Milton Flower’s biography, John Dickinson: Conservative Revolutionary (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983).

39 Arthur Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1918) remains a basic source on merchant associations and the non-importation movement in general. J. E. Crowley, This Sheba, Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) takes a provocatively different approach. Whatever success Americans enjoyed in seeing the stamp act repealed had as much to do with opposition within Parliament and support among London merchants as it did with attempts to unify the colonies through economic warfare: non-importation of British goods, stimulation of home manufactures. They would not receive as much transatlantic support in protesting Townshend’s program, and they could not stay unified among themselves either.

40 Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” 162–163; Hutchinson, History, 3:13. The essay in question, a brief piece by “A True Patriot”—apparently Joseph Warren—actually appeared in the Boston Gazette on 7 March 1768, not February 29th. It was in reaction to a letter to Bernard from the earl of Shelburne, secretary of state for the southern department, endorsing Bernard’s blocking of some who had been selected for the Council by the House (printed as well). Shelburne emphasized that Bernard had acted properly and chided the Council for not letting Hutchinson take a seat on it, simply because he was already a holder of multiple offices. The “true patriot” condemned the notion of executive power behind Bernard’s actions as an “odious doctrine” and implied that Bernard was a “villain” for holding it. Bernard later wrote Hillsborough (on 25 January 1769) that he thought Benjamin Edes and John Gill, owners of the Boston Gazette, verged on treason—“mercenary” printers at the beck and call of “Faction.” Bernard Papers, 7:126–128.

41 The text of the House’s circular letter of 11 February 1768 is in Journals of the Massachusetts House, 44:236–239. In enumerating the “hardships” caused by Parliament’s new acts, the House included: “And also the commission of the Gentleman appointed Commissioners of the Customs to reside in America, which authorizes them to make as many appointments as they think fit, and to pay the appointees what sums they please, for whose mal-conduct they are not accountable: from whence it may happen, that officers of the Crown may be multiplied to such a degree, as to become dangerous to the Liberty of the people, by virtue of a commission which doth not appear to this House to derive any such advantages to trade as many have been led to expect.” (238) In April the King called on the House to rescind its letter. In June it refused and asked that Bernard be replaced with someone more “worthy to represent the greatest and best Monarch on Earth.” (Ibid., 45:96, 30 June 1768) See, in this same appendix (217–235), various letters written by the House in January–February 1768 to Camden, Chatham, Rockingham and others, professing loyalty to crown and parliament, and yet protesting policies championed by both. Logic would say that they would not be happy with anything short of independence. They were trying desperately to avoid pursuing that logic.

42 By the summer of 1768, Bernard had become convinced that the moment of truth had arrived. “We are now just entering into that critical Situation which I have so long ago foreseen must come sooner or later; that is, the Time of Trial, whether this Town &c will or will not submit to Great Britain when she is in earnest in requiring Submission.” Letter to John Pownall, 11 July 1768, Bernard Papers, 6:131.

43 House resolution of 29 June 1769 and petition to the crown of 27 June 1769 in Speeches of Governors, 176–180 and 188–191, resp.

44 Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” 198–210.

45 Complaining of Boston’s lawlessness, Benjamin Hallowell, then comptroller for the port, warned Lord North “as long as this spirit prevails here, every officer under the Crown who does his duty will be the object of popular resentment.” Letter of 17 December 1765, Add. Ms. 61,683, fo. 9 (Blenheim Papers) BL.

46 See 150 infra for another election day incident, five years later. The first incident in particular captured the personal element in the battle over imperial authority and local autonomy. Town selectmen—Hancock one of them—would not give permission for Faneuil Hall to be used for the election-day dinner until they were promised that the commissioners would not be invited to attend. Once the Governor’s council assured them that no invitation would be forthcoming, they approved, with Hancock underscoring “that the Hall is at their service on said Day with the restriction enjoin’d by the Town.” A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, containing the Selectmen’s Minutes from 1764 through 1768 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1889), 292, minutes of 11 May 1768.

47 See 121 n. 35 supra.

48 Hulton was right, but only in part. Neither the town nor the army looked for an excuse for a bloodletting; on the contrary, both would compromise—within limits. On September 21^st the selectmen had been emphatic: according to their understanding of the quartering act, no troops could lawfully be billeted in the town proper until the barracks at Castle William were filled. Once the troops arrived, however, the selectmen proved more flexible, after they were given an indication that they could carry their theoretical point without causing a practical conundrum. Both the 14^th and 29^th regiments went into town, not to the Castle. Some were sent to encamp on the Common. Note the significance of the word “favor” as recorded in the following, when Colonel William Dalrymple, overall commander of the newly-arrived troops, approached town authorities: “The Collo. afterwards represented to the Selectmen that he had not a sufficient number of Tents for his Troops and entreated of them as a favor the use of Faneuil Hall for one Regiment to lodge in till Monday following, promising upon his honor to quit said Hall at that time—in consequence of said request & taking into consideration the hardship of the Troops must be exposed to while remaining in the open air, the Selectmen consented thereto—”; from Report of the Record Commissioners . . . Selectmen’s Minutes from 1764 through 1768, 311. The selectmen pressed Dalrymple to move his men out once that Monday came, and resisted allowing him to use the old factory house in that odd (to an outsider, at least) combination of confrontation and avoidance that had come to typify imperial and local relations.

49 The commissioners’s complaints—dismissed as whining by their political opponents—were turned against them by being made public, such as in Letters to the Ministry (Boston: Edes & Gill, 1769), 85–86, a memorial of 16 June 1768 from the commissioners to Treasury, printed to embarrass Hulton and his colleagues.

50 From the Treasury’s response, written by Grey Cooper, 29 June 1769, TNA, PRO/T28/1, fos. 338–342.

51 The first steps toward the resolution were taken on 28 November 1768, when North presented sixty letters, memorials, and other documents to the House of Commons as proof of unrest in Massachusetts. The resolution was actually drafted in the House of Lords and revised by Commons before final approval in February 1769. Printed in the House of Commons Journal, 32:107–108, but already circulating in the colonies as it worked its way through Parliament—see the Boston Evening-Post, 20 March and 17 April 1769.

52 An Appeal to the World; Or a Vindication of the Town of Boston (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1769).

53 Samuel Venner, as secretary; David Lisle, as solicitor; John Williams and John Woolton as inspectors general. Hulton did not make it clear, here or elsewhere, which two clerks he had in mind.

54 Venner was dismissed from office in 1769—see 66–67 supra for the controversy surrounding his firing.

55 He was no doubt leaving space for Thomas Pownall, governor from 1757–1759. Though an Englishman—and, like Hulton, someone who tried to make his way up in society through government appointments—Pownall had succeeded the thoroughly unpopular William Shirley. His ability to get on well with provincial leaders meant that his time in office would be idealized by Bernard’s and Hutchinson’s critics, on the assumption that he would have done better. Perhaps so; perhaps not. Hulton had no reason to care for Pownall, who had been a rival in Germany during his investigations of the commissary there.

56 John C. Miller’s Samuel Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1936) gives us a Samuel Adams whose actions—though not his motives—echo Hulton. Pauline Maier’s essay in The Old Revolutionaries (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 3–50, presents a more complex man, noting that just because Adams predicted a war for independence as early as 1768 does not mean that he advocated it at that same moment. Likewise see William Fowler’s brief but incisive Samuel Adams (New York: Longman, 1997); and John K. Alexander, Samuel Adams (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

57 For Otis go first to Williams Pencak’s essay in ANB, 16:838–840; and Clifford K. Shipton, et al., Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 18 vols. (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1933–), 11:247–287 (class of 1743), a continuation of the series begun by John Langdon Sibley in 1873, picked up by Clifford Shipton decades later, long since published by the MHS, and now edited by Conrad Edick Wright. William Tudor’s florid The Life of James Otis (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1823) ought to be balanced with John J. Waters Jr., The Otis Family (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). For more on Mercy, Otis’s sister who was married to leading patriot James Warren, see Kate Davis’s Catharine Macaulay & Mercy Otis Warren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), and Lester H. Cohen’s introductory comments to the reissue of Warren’s History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1989; original ed., 1805). Warren’s history depicts the commissioners in just the way Warren’s brother probably saw them. Charles Akers wrote a biography of Samuel Cooper, The Divine Politician (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1982). Cooper, pastor of the Brattle Street congregational church in Boston, was one of the “black regiment” of ministers decried by Peter Oliver—see Schutz and Adair, eds., Peter Oliver Origins, 29 and 43–45, with Cooper part of a “sacerdotal Triumvirate,” along with Jonathan Mayhew and Charles Chauncy. Hulton slammed the “Independant Ministers” in his “Account,” 179 infra. The best starting place for James Bowdoin, as for his son-in-law John Temple, is in the ANB, in this case an essay by Gordon C. Kershaw (at 3:272–274), who also wrote a full-length biography, James Bowdoin II (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991). Bowdoin was in the Harvard class of 1745 (see Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 11:514–550).

58 William Fowler, The Baron of Beacon Hill (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980) is decidedly more sympathetic, as are virtually all of Hancock’s biographers.

59 Otis was struck down in the doorway of his home, in just the manner Hulton described—and as Otis himself had apparently wished—on 23 May 1783. Hulton was thus working on the “Account” at least as late as 1784, and probably beyond.

60 John Mein. William Pencak wrote a brief piece on him for the ANB 15:201–202. Revolutionary-era printer Isaiah Thomas also offered reflections on Mein in his The History of Printing in America, 2 vols. (Albany: Joel Munsell, 1874; orig. ed., 1810), 1:152–154.

61 Select Letters (see supra, 95 n. 231); Nicolson, ‘Infamas Govener’ is Bernard’s only biographer to date.

62 Nelson’s chapter on Hutchinson in The American Tory, 21–39, paved the way for Bernard Bailyn’s The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1974). John Phillip Reid took issue with parts of Bailyn’s argument in a review eventually reprinted in Hendrik Hartog, ed., Law in the American Revolution and the Revolution in the Law (New York: New York University Press, 1981), 20–45. William Pencak, America’s Burke (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1982) also questioned some of Bailyn’s characterizations, most notably the notion that Hutchinson was a prudent pragmatist, “bewildered by revolutionary change” (vi). Pencak saw a passion that drove Hutchinson to develop a martyr’s complex. Close to his extended family but aloof otherwise, it was unlikely that Hutchinson and Hulton could ever have become confreres. Also see Andrew Stephen Walmsley, Thomas Hutchinson & the Origins of the American Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1999). Neither Walmsley nor Pencak have anything on Hulton, and they deal with the customs board only in passing.

63 This is the first of several insertions that Hulton (or his scribe) made, on this page and on others that follow, marked by the “#” where a paragraph would have been inserted, had space allowed. It was instead written off to the side. I moved it into the text proper.

64 [John Mein], A State of Importations from Great-Britain into the Port of Boston (Boston, 1770). See too the one-page broadside ordered printed At a Meeting of the Merchants & Traders, at Faneuil-Hall, on the 23d January 1770 (1770) identifying and condemning those who had not complied with the non-importation stipulations, who in so doing “have in the most insolent Manner too long affronted this People, and endeavoured to undermine the Liberties of this Country, to which they owe their little Importance; and that they deserve to be driven to that Obscurity, from which they originated, and to the Hole of the Pit from whence they were digged.”

65 The Boston Gazette 12 March 1770 account was soon after coupled with Paul Revere’s engraving of the event, which depicted a massacre, pure and simple—innocent American civilians slaughtered by murderous British soldiers. Three from the crowd died that night, one the next morning, and a fifth well over a week later. Another half dozen were wounded. Zobel, Boston Massacre, remains unsurpassed on the events leading to the “massacre,” the “massacre” itself, and the subsequent trials.

66 The town produced A Short Narrative, which was countered by a rival view and different affidavits in A Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance At Boston in New England (London: B. White, 1770), which in turn prompted the town’s retort in Additional Observations.

67 Thus Ann Hulton’s snide comments about Temple (see supra 65 n. 124). If Temple was involved, there is no proof of it yet.

68 Preston’s trial ran from October 24–30; Preston was acquitted and set free. He soon after returned to England. The trial of the eight soldiers ran longer, from November 27-December 5. Six were acquitted of all charges; two were convicted of manslaughter, allowed to plead benefit of the clergy, and released after being branded on their left hands. Their regiment had been transferred to New Jersey months before. L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller Zobel brought together various sources in an attempt to reconstruct Preston’s and the soldiers’ trials in volume 3 of Legal Papers of John Adams, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965). The printed transcript for the soldiers’ trial was published from the notes by John Hodgson, The Trial of William Wemms . . . (Boston: J. Fleeming, 1770). The record as constituted there—which John Adams, one of the counsel for the defendants, found objectionable—ought to be contrasted with the version sent by Hutchinson to London, in the PRO/CO 5/759, fos. 382–402. The testimonies for Preston’s trial are in fos. 355–368. The four civilians, Manwaring included, were tried in a single day, December 12^th, with the jurors not even leaving their seats before pronouncing the men innocent. There is no surviving transcript for that trial, just brief notices in the Massachusetts Gazette, 13 December 1770; the Boston Evening-Post, 17 December 1770; and the Boston Gazette, 17 and 24 December 1770; and ibid., 18 and 25 March 1771, and 1 April 1771, for the fate of Charles Bourgatte, the “French servant.” A fragment of what is apparently Bourgatte’s testimony is in the Boston Public Library, Ch.M.1.8, 217. Manwaring, who worked for the customs service, later petitioned the Treasury for compensation, 4 August 1771, TNA, PRO/T1/486.

69 Hulton gives the impression that a formal plan had been agreed to at Whitehall to punish Massachusetts, when in fact it had not. See the discussion in Nicolson, “Infamas Govener,” 186–191.

70 There is no evidence that Temple went about poisoning people’s minds. It is interesting to note, however, that the Short Narrative included a half dozen sworn affidavits that muzzle flashes could be seen coming from the Custom House or, more vaguely, that the sound of guns firing could be heard above the heads of the soldiers on King Street. With the acquittal of Manwaring and the other three civilian defendants in the third trial the matter was dropped, although their innocence was separable from the issue of whether or not someone else was in the Custom House and indeed fired down into the street from an upstairs window. Revere’s engraving of the scene shows a gun barrel; Henry Pelham’s original version, from which Revere borrowed, did not. For more, go to Clarence Brigham, Paul Revere’s Engravings (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 52–78. As in much else about the “massacre,” this question has yet to be answered.

71 The pamphlet in question was a spoof, A Dialogue between Sir George Cornwell . . . and Mr. Flint (Boston, 1769), with Cornwell a visiting Englishman and Flint a native New Englander. Flint walked Cornwell about Boston, disparaging various “prerogative” men, including the “lieutenant governor” (Hutchinson), once an “unsuccessful smuggler” who was driven by “ambition and avarice.” (5) Temple denied that he was the author. See the discussion in Bailyn, Thomas Hutchinson, 128–130.

72 Copy of Letters (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1773). Printed there were eighteen letters written between May 1767 and October 1769, all to Thomas Whately, with six from Hutchinson, four each from Andrew Oliver and Thomas Moffat, and one each from Robert Auchmuty, Nathaniel Rogers, G[eorge] Rome, and Charles Paxton (Paxton, a single paragraph, on 20 June 1768, calling for troops). The most infuriating to local patriots was Hutchinson’s of 20 January 1769, calling for “an abridgment of what are called English liberties.” (16) The Liberty incident had prompted Hutchinson to come to the defense of the board, which also irritated his political opponents: “People have absurdly connected the duties and board of commissions, and suppose we should have had no additional duties if there had been no board to have the charge of collecting them.” (ibid. 7, letter of August 1768).

73 House resolutions of 16 June 1773 and a letter from the lower house and council to the Earl of Dartmouth, 29 June 1773, printed in Speeches of the Governors, 405–409 and 398–400 resp. Hutchinson had aggravated his political opponents with his response that the letters he sent Thomas Whately were essentially none of their business. See his message to the House of 9 June 1773 in the Journals of the Massachusetts House, 50:40–41 (the House resolutions of June 16th are on 58–61). The House request that both Hutchinson and Oliver resign passed overwhelmingly on June 23rd, 80–11 (ibid., 50:75).

74 “May 27 [1773]. Two of the Commissioners were very much abused yesterday when they came out from the Publick Dinner at Concert Hall, Mr Hulton and Mr Hallowell. Wm Mollineux, Wm Dennie, Paul Revere & several others were the Principal Actors.” Edward Lillie Pierce, ed., Letters and Diary of John Rowe (Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1903), 245.

75 Most of the dispute leading to the duel and the duel itself, which produced its own set of accusations about Temple’s behavior (did Temple stab Whately with his sword when Whately was down and defenseless?), can be found in A Faithful Account of the Whole of the Transactions relating to a late Affair of Honour between J. Temple, and W. Whately, Esqrs. (London: R. Snagg, 1774). Both men wisely walked away from the dispute after the resort to pistols and swords. Temple remained emphatic that he stole nothing from Whately—see his letter to Earl Temple, 14 December 1773, Add. Ms. 57,828, fos. 1–7 (Grenville Papers) BL. Temple and Thomas Whately, who had been very friendly through the mid-1760s—Whately having recommended Temple for the customs board when it was being formed—had developed strains in their friendship as the result of Temple’s political allegiances in Boston. See, for example, Temple to Whately, 21 January 1771, Temple Papers. Also see Benjamin Hallowell to John Pownall, 29 September 1773, in B. F. Stevens, ed., Facsimiles of Manuscripts in European Archives relating to American Affairs, 1773–1783, 25 vols. (London: G. Malby and Sons, 1889–1895), no. 2029, where Hallowell sounds very much like Hulton in his low regard for Temple, in the Whately affair and in general. Also see the Hulton letter of 15 March 1774, transcribed infra at 298–299.

76 Printed in the Faithful Account, 21; also in Labaree, et al., eds., Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 20:513–516. Also see the “Tract relative to the Affair of Hutchinson’s Letters” in ibid, 21:414–435. Bailyn, Hutchinson, 244–259 discussed the Temple-Whately affair and the “mystery” surrounding the letters. Bailyn thinks that Thomas Pownall may have given the letters to Franklin, but concedes that his conclusion is “conjectural.” (225 n. 7) Hutchinson offered his own view in his History, 3:282–298. Also see the discussion by Hutchinson’s great-grandson in Hutchinson, ed., Diary and Letters, 1:82–93, and Hutchinson’s account of a reconciliation between the two in London (ibid., 1:209–211), when Temple called on Hutchinson “alone and unexpectedly.” John Doran, editor of The Last Journals of Horace Walpole During the Reign of George III From 1771–1783, 2 vols. (London: John Lane, 1910), 1:243n. passed along the claim that Hugh Williamson got the letters for Franklin from the (as yet non-existent?) “British Foreign-Office.”

77 Hulton’s animus toward Franklin had erupted as early as the Boston siege, when he called him an “archtraitor! this most atrocious of men,” on 22 January 1776, in the “Nicholson Letters,” 93, transcribed at 341–342 infra. That Franklin could be capable of duplicity at any point in his career is clear in the tone of Cecil Currey’s Road to Revolution: Benjamin Franklin in England, 1765–1775 (New York: Anchor Books, 1968). David T. Morgan, The Devious Dr. Franklin (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996) is not as caustic. Gerald Stourzh provides a sophisticated appraisal of Franklin’s changing positions and changing loyalties in Benjamin Franklin and American Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), as has, more recently, Gordon S. Wood in an essay on Franklin in Revolutionary Characters (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 65–90, which offers a briefer version of views first expressed in The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin Press, 2004).

78 Alexander Wedderburn, the solicitor general, took an hour to verbally eviscerate Franklin in the cockpit on 29 January 1774, for which see Labaree, et al., eds., Papers of Franklin, 21:37–70. Catherine Drinker Bowen used the cockpit scene as her closing Franklin vignette in The Most Dangerous Man in America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974), 227–243.

79 See The Votes and Proceedings of the Freeholders and other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, in Town Meeting assembled, According to Law (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1772), for the proceedings beginning on October 28th and carrying through November 2nd. Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970) reviews this stage in Boston’s drift toward revolution.

80 Legal scholar John Phillip Reid edited these January–March 1773 exchanges expertly as The Briefs of the American Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1981). They were also printed, without comment, in Speeches of the Governors, 336–396.

81 Labaree, Boston Tea Party, surveys many of these developments. Francis S. Drake assembled contemporaneous documents for his Tea Leaves (Boston: A. O. Crane, 1884). Alfred F. Young’s biography of George Robert Twelves Hewes, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999) notes the differences that crept into Hewes’s supposed recollections of the event offered a half century later, but perhaps Young should have been even more skeptical of Hewes as a reliable source than he already was. Hulton’s “many hundreds” may not have numbered even one hundred actual participants on board the Beaver, Eleanor, and Dartmouth.

82 Hulton was off by a month. Hutchinson’s speech, where the Governor was “required to signify His Majesty’s Disapprobation of Committees of Correspondence,” was on January 26^th. The House committee appointed to carry on the correspondence went ahead with its business. See the Journals of the Massachusetts House, 50:102–103 and 112. The House had created the committee on May 28^th, by a vote of 109–4, in response to a plea from the Virginia House of Burgesses, made on March 12^th (ibid., 50:11–14).