Lydia Dyar: NOT an Enemy to Her Country

Boston Gazette and Country Journal, 28 March 1774 via America's Historical Newspapers

Lydia Dyar, whose flamboyantly patriotic gravestone in Billerica is the subject of the essay I am working on at the moment, was a small-scale merchant. Nearly every spring between 1760 and 1774, she advertised in the Boston newspapers, touting her new stock of imported garden seeds. At her shop in the North End of Boston, customers could find a variety of vegetable seeds — cabbage, spinach, carrot, turnip, lettuce, cucumber, squash, cauliflower, pea — along with beans, herbs, and flowers.

Even during the height of the nonimportation crisis, the Widow Dyar continued to buy seeds from London and Messrs. Edes and Gill of the Gazette, strong Whigs both, continued to run her ads. Unlike the unfortunate Cummings sisters, whose business activities attracted the ire of a tar-and-feather-wielding mob in October of 1769, Lydia Dyar and the other seed sellers of Boston went unmolested. The March 6, 1769 issue of the Boston Gazette carried five seed sellers (Lydia Dyar, Abigail Davidson, Elizabeth Greenleaf, Bethiah Oliver, and Susanna Renken), all of whom advertised their wares as imports. A year later, when tempers were running high over the Boston Massacre, Dyar omitted the word "imported" from her ad, though two other sellers (Davidson and Renkin) still advertised their seeds as "Imported in the last ship from London" (Boston Gazette, 9 April 1770).

Guest Post: Jack-Boots and Broken Windows

Over the next few days, I will be featuring the work of several talented undergraduates who have agreed to have their research projects featured as guest posts. The papers are longer than normal posts, but I thought that readers of this blog might be interested in reading more about Revolutionary-era Boston. All formatting errors are mine — I lost some details (such as italics) in the transfer from Word to Blogger.


Today's guest poster is Allan Bradley, who used John Boyle's journal to examine popular resistance to the Stamp Act.

On the night of November 5th, 1764, rough Boston maritime workers divided into two mobs, the North End and the South End, and each built a cart carrying an effigy of the Pope. After darkness fell, they engaged in a violent battle, each side attempting to steal the other’s cart and effigy.  After half an hour of combat with clubs, staves, and brick-bats, the South End captured the North End’s effigy and burned both on Boston Neck.  It was a yearly ritual; each November 5th, the Pope met the same fiery fate at the hands of the working men of Boston, who fought for the privilege of burning the effigy of that hated enemy to English liberty.  Pope’s Day of 1764 was particularly violent, and a young printer’s apprentice named John Boyle recorded in his journal: “A Child of Mr. Brown’s at the North-End run over by one of the Wheels of the North-End Pope and killed on the Spot.  Many others were wounded in the evening.” [1]

Enemies to Their Country*

As dusk fell on October 28, 1769, Misses Ame and Betsy Cuming hurried to lock their modest house against the gathering darkness, hoping that doors and shutters would keep them safe until morning. Alone in their flimsy fortress, the sisters huddled together, “trimbling lick Co[wa]rds,” straining to hear beyond the ordinary sounds of night. They did not wait long. The click of hobnails on cobblestones, the rattle of a cart, and groans of agony announced the arrival of unwelcome visitors. Peering through a darkened window, Betsy beheld a ghastly tableau: a sea of twinkling candles illuminated a moaning man who lay on her doorstep “in a Gore of Blood,” surrounded by a thousand men and boys. As Betsy watched, the crowd “aranged themselves befor [her] door” and positioned the broken body under her window, where they doused it with steaming tar and a flurry of feathers. Betsy did not recognize the sufferer, but feared for her friends and their families. As the armed men melted back into the night, they called “to all the inhabitance to put Candles in their Windows” to show their support for the mob. Betsy watched, helpless, as her neighbors’ windows flashed with blazing assent.

"Safe From British Bullets"

Many of Boston's revolutionary-era Whigs —John Hancock, Sam Adams, John Adams — are household names today. Others, like Joseph Warren and James Otis, Jr., are not national heroes, but are still well-known. Then, there is a third tier of patriots who were famous in the 1760s, but are largely forgotten by non-specialists today: William Molineux, Ebenezer Macintosh, etc.

One of those who has seen his fame diminish over time is Captain Daniel Malcom/Malcolm. In the 1760s, Malcolm was known as a rabble-rousing merchant who repeatedly defied customs officials.

In September of 1766, two officials, William Sheafe and Benjamin Hallowell, got an anonymous tip that Malcom had several casks of smuggled alcohol hidden in his cellar in Boston's North End. When Sheafe and Hallowell arrived to search the premises and confiscate the liquor, Malcom refused to unlock the cellar, saying that "if any Man attempted it, he would blow his Brains out." The customs officials retreated. When they came back with a search warrant, their access was blocked by several hundred of Malcom's closest friends. Read a more complete account of the incident here.