[Rarebooks] Fascinating Letter to Jonathan Belcher, Governor of Massachusetts: "... solemnly vowed to beat him a most vile and barbarous manner, and do that to him which he should never be able to get over, ..."

[Ezra Tishman]

Here offered is a 1 1/2 page letter dated January 1737, entitled “The Memorial (as in Memorandum, a written statement of facts” ) from one James Smith of Boston, whom I’m going to assume, for now, to be the petitioner/writer of the letter.

Letter to the Governor asking him for personal protection and perhaps punishment of his (threatened) tormentors. Due to its subject matter, it rises well above the quotidian dealings of the government, and presents a brief glimpse of threatened vigilante mob action against someone who has violated the code.
																               $350


The letter is one and a half pages, penned on a single sheet, labeled on the outside James (abbreviated as Jas.) Smith’s Memorial) and addressed to “his Excellency Jonathan Belcher, Esq. Capt. Genl & Gov. in Chief and Council" 

Belcher, was the headstrong governor of Massachusetts and New Hampshire between 1730 and 1741, and then the Governor of New Jersey, between the years 1747 and 1757. He was born into wealth, educated at Harvard, and as both a powerbroker behind the scenes and as governor, gained the reputation of being
headstrong and often divisive, and made no small number of enemies, on both sides.

The writer, James Smith is petitioning the governor and urging him to act to punish whomever has just sent him (the writer) an anonymous letter, threatening him with serious bodily harm or even “murther”,, writing “that ten or twelve men had combined and solemnly vowed to beat him a most vile and barbarous manner,and do that to him which he should never be able to get over, if he were not killed out right: and thereupon advised him to move out of town for some short time, or be very careful and keep close, especially in the night, perforce, be careful where he went in the night, and be sure to go armed and well prepared…”

And in the close the author of that letter assures him; he was present at that combination, refused to join with them, and promised them to say nothing to you…”

Judging from my non-historian perspective but as a student of language, it seems possible that James Smith
was threatened by a mob with, well, with castration (the language reads “do that to him which he should never be able to get over”, or perhaps nothing so romantic as that, and only a permanent maiming.

Further they’d like him to “move out of town for some short time” and if he should dare to go out and about at night, to only do so well armed, packing a firearm.

What could he have done, one might ask to garner such mob enmity? My own imagination tries to read behind the language, and runs with the distinct possibility that
Mr. Smith perhaps was, umm, improper, with someone’s daughter or even wife, and that townsfolk got wind of it, gathered up some of  town father/vigilante friends, and assigned one of them to send Mr. Smith a “git outta town or else” letter.

A very volatile little community moment in colonial Massachusetts. “...Though the population was only about fifteen thousand, Boston was the largest city in British America at that time. And those fifteen thousand inhabitants were densely crowded onto a 1.2 square-mile peninsula jutting into Boston Harbor. In the mid-eighteenth century, Bostonians were increasingly divided by social and economic class, yet their individual lives were intertwined—in personal relationships, but also in the milieu of local public life...” (The News Media and the Making of America 1730-1865, a project sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society)


Photo of Page 1 of this letter:    
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/53ic0rljdvs53a8/AADIhNI9ZIkFVVGSRkt3twTXa?dl=0




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