by Nathan Allen
Obviously a jailed customs officer would find no one in Taunton to post bail, so Robinson sent a letter to the Surveyor General of Customs John Temple, and two days later, bail arrived. Meanwhile, Robinson was told that the ship’s owner was willing to come to an “accommodation,” meaning the lawsuit would be dropped if Robinson dropped his smuggling charges. Robinson would have none of it, called the owner a “Wretch” and said he would be “Inflexible” in applying the law. And so he sat in jail for two days, likely ridiculed the entire time. And while Robinson sat in jail, the illicit casks of molasses disappeared into the mercantile network of New England. Meanwhile, the famous Boston rebel Jemmy Otis was defending men who murdered customs officers, decrying the customs regime as tyranny, and comparing the writs of assistance to enslavement. Otis had and would continue to publish attacks against Robinson’s friends and colleagues in Newport, calling them a “little, dirty, drinking, drabbing, contaminated knot of thieves” from whom proceeded “every evil work that can enter into the heart of man.” And when Robinson’s friends were hung in effigy in Newport, it was often Otis’s words that were pinned to their burning bodies.
Robinson spent the next three years battling smugglers, pirates and mobs in Newport, often living on a boat offshore because he feared the Newport mob. In 1768, he was made Commissioner of Customs in Boston, and Otis and the Sons of Liberty made him a target. It was under Robinson’s watch that Otis and John Adams successfully defended Mike Corbet, the smuggler who murdered a Royal Navy lieutenant. The Boston propaganda machine accused Robinson of being a fortune hunter and bribe taker and intimated that he was a rapist; it’s unlikely that all the charges were true and yet equally unlikely they were all false. And it was under Robinson’s watch that Otis and Sam Adams took “full possession of the government.” The new customs board of which Robinson and Paxton were members had quickly targeted the rebels’s banker John Hancock, only to utterly and publically humiliate themselves. Hancock’s ship Liberty entered Boston harbor on May 10, 1768, paid duties on 25 casks of Madeira wine, and docked at Hancock’s wharf. Hancock was certainly a smuggler, and the rather large Liberty certainly held more than 25 casks, so the Customs Board seized the ship on June 10. But they were so blinded by the overwhelming evidence of Hancock’s overt smuggling that they failed to collect any evidence specific to the Liberty’s May 10 cargo. By the first week of June, the ship had been fully unloaded of wine and reloaded with whale oil and tar. The mobs promptly rioted, causing the customs commissioners to flee Boston for the HMS Romney, the naval ship under the guns of which Hancock’s Liberty was now anchored. The mob then sacked the homes of two of the commissioners and carried a private boat of a third commissioner all the way to Boston Common and put it to the match. A few days later, the mob gathered again under the Liberty Tree and was persuaded to join a meeting at Faneuil Hall. The Hall proved too small for the enormous gathering, so they reconvened to Old South Church, the same church that Jemmy and Ruth officially joined in February 1756. At the meeting, Otis was chosen moderator and took to the pulpit and, according to Hutchinson, “harangued” the crowd with a classic Puritan jeremiad, and then convinced the Bostonians in attendance to approve a petition – believed to have been composed by Otis – that insisted that “no man shall be govern’d nor taxed but by himself or Representative” and continued to assert that Bostonians had been burdened with “Laws and Taxes” without their consent. The petition concluded that the town nearly felt “as if War was formally declared against it,” and though war was “a most shocking and dreadful Extremity,” surrender was unimaginable. Otis was then chosen as chairman of a committee of 21 to present the acerbic petition to Bernard, who was pleasantly surprised to be approached with a petition and not a dagger. Bernard stated that he appreciated the petition but had no authority over a ship of war and thus could to nothing about the 50-gun HMS Romney.
The fearful commissioners graciously agreed to return the Liberty as long as Hancock provided a bond and then would await trial. Hancock agreed, but his advisors – Jemmy and Sam Adams – convinced Hancock to leverage the issue for maximum political effect; Otis and Adams had limitations, but they were matchless in the art of crafting pandemic political crisis out of bureaucratic bumbling. So then Hancock refused the deal, the British unloaded the whale oil and tar and condemned the Liberty, which was promptly converted to a British customs enforcement vessel. A monumental problem confronted the customs board: it had no evidence and now Otis and Adams had escalated the Liberty case into a cause célèbre. The talented and seasoned lawyer Otis probably knew the case was weak, but he could not have known that it would weaken the entire customs structure. At trial, the Customs Board offered a primary witness who, it was apparent to everyone, had perjured himself. A Suffolk county grand jury indicted the witness for perjury without delay, but he was given a customs job and secreted away, therefore dodging the charge. The trial then ended curiously; Judge Auchmuty opened court on March 26, 1769 by reading his commission as judge for one of the new vice-admiralty courts – a customs job – thereby ending his tenure as judge of the Liberty trial. The attorney general, Jonathan Sewall, was likewise awarded a judgeship in one of the new vice-admiralty courts. Without a judge or attorney general, the case was dropped. Had the Customs Board limited the price of prosecuting a weak case to three customs jobs, they probably would have considered the situation a minor bump on the road to an effective customs administration. Of course, the rebels would be sure that the Customs Board was hoist by its own petard. The Board was publically ridiculed and lost whatever credibility it had. The House demanded rent for the ten weeks that the Board had spent sequestered at Castle William while the mobs rioted in protest of the seizure of the beloved Hancock’s sloop. The officers were sued for charging fees higher than Massachusetts law permitted, and then the Board members were charged an “income tax” on their salaries. By the end of the year, a Suffolk county grand jury ordered the attorney general to indict the recently departed Governor Bernard, the entire Customs Board, and a variety of customs officials for slandering the residents of Boston. The following year Hancock’s Liberty, while patrolling Rhode Island waters for the Customs Board, was seized and set afire by a mob.
The Customs Board was thoroughly discredited, and yet more damage was to be done. In August, a ship from London delivered purloined copies of letters and memorials written between February and July 1768 by Customs Board officials and sent to various ministry officials and Parliament members. The letters were sent to the rebels from London by none other than William Bollan, previously the bête noir of the Popular Party. Fueled by rumor and subsequent events, Bollan had grown suspicious of the Court Party. He knew Pownall and Bernard disliked and distrusted him, but he also witnessed how the Popular Party flatly rejected Bernard’s lobbyist choice and selected Mauduit, and then when Mauduit proved ineffectual, they selected Jackson and later added De Berdt as a special agent. It appeared to Bollan that the Court Party made no particular effort to get him reappointed to any position and that Hutchinson was treacherous, only Bollan’s friend when Bollan could be useful, as he was in affirming the use of writs of assistance in England. Jemmy’s term limit proposal that cemented the election of Richard Jackson resulted in the Court Party to appear selfish and scheming, and certainly no friend of William Bollan.
The letters Bollan sent directly accused Jemmy Otis and his accomplices of leading a rebellion and provided evidence to encourage and enable the ministry to arrest and indict Jemmy for treason. Of course, copies of the letter were promptly made and distributed among the Popular Party, and the entire Customs Board fiasco fueled the theories that the Ministry and customs establishment was actively conspiring to impugn the rebels’s reputations, confiscate their property and imprison their leaders. The Gazette had been warning of precisely these dangers for years, and such speculation proved shockingly accurate. A few months later, the Town Meeting issued a formal examination and condemnation of the letters. The Town Meeting sp
ent much time addressing Bernard’s inconsistencies, as when he blamed the rebels for the riots but “The Governor himself owns that ‘the Selectmen of the Town’ and ‘some others’ and even the Gentlemen who dined at two Taverns near the Townhouse upon the occasion of the day ‘took great pains that the festivity should not produce a Riot.’” The town meeting questions Bernard’s credibility when he asserts that the same people who promoted the riots, in this instance the riots that exploded after the seizing of Hancock’s Liberty, also stopped the riots. Regarding the Liberty, the town further asserted that “opposition was made, not at all to the seizing of the Vessel by the Officers of the Customs but wholly to the manner in which it was secured.” The Liberty was not seized through legal channels but rather by a ship of war; for the colonists, this represented an act of war, not an act of customs enforcement. The town observed that “The Commissioners say in plain terms that ‘there had been a long and extensive plan of resistance to the authority of Great Britain,’” which, of course, they denied, though the observation was entirely accurate. The town’s issue with the statement was that there was simply no direct evidence of this, and such an accusation lodged without evidence “shows the Combination, and the settled design, of the Governor and the Commissioners to blacken the character of the Town.” The assertion – “Combination” and “settled design” – were intended to demonstrate that the conspiracy was entirely concocted by the oligarchy to target the townspeople. The town meeting again eviscerated Bernard’s credibility, quoting his statement that a Sons of Liberty meeting placard read “an invitation of the Sons of liberty to meet at six O’Clock to clear the land of the vermin which were come to devour them,” when in fact it read:
Boston June 13 1768 The Sons of liberty request all those who in this time of oppression and distraction wish well to and would promote the peace, good order and security of the Town and Province, to assemble at Liberty Hall under Liberty Tree on Tuesday the 14 Instant, at 10 O’Clock precisely.
The actual placard showed a group interested in “peace” and “security.” The town then corrected Bernard’s account of a mob descending on Commissioner Robinson’s house to harass and perhaps injure him; in fact, what had occurred amounted to no more than a group of drunken boys eating Robinson’s fruit from his trees. At the time, Robinson was hiding in Castle William, and everyone knew he wasn’t at his home in Roxbury. The town chided Bernard for noting that everything at the town meetings seemed “to have been preconcerted” by “the Chiefs of the Faction, and no one else followed in such order & method.” The town mocked Bernard for mistaking a united town for a town under the strict control of a few.
The town also cited a letter Bernard had sent to Lord Hillsborough that recounted an episode at the Town House during which the Selectmen ordered the town arms be brought to the townhouse, cleaned and openly displayed, and only then “were deposited in Chests, and laid upon the floor of the Town Hall to remind the People of the use of them.” The town meeting didn’t deny that this event had occurred; they simply observed that they did not think it incredibly remarkable, as cleaning and displaying the town’s arms had been done previously, though not for a nearly a decade. The town meeting concluded that the letters were a “Monument of disgrace” to Bernard and others.
But Otis and Adams would not wait for the town meeting’s formal rebuke; they demanded a public meeting with the Customs Board members at the British Coffee House. Henry Hulton and Charles Paxton sensed a trap and wisely declined the invitation, but John Robinson could not resist. He met with the rebels, exchanged invectives and resolved nothing.
And so Sunday September 3, 1769 was a busy day for Ben Edes and John Gill; the Gazette was due to be distributed Monday morning, as usual. John Adams, his cousin Sam and Jemmy had dinner with John Gill at the Gazette offices in the townhouse two doors down from the Court House on Court Street. Then they watched as Gill rushed to prepare the presses that Sunday night – “working the political Engine,” as John Adams would write. As Adams reported it, the night seemed ordinary. But the Gazette edition that was going to press to be distributed the next day printed excerpts from the Customs Board letters for all to see, including the Board’s accusation that Jemmy led a “Confederacy” that sought to conquer the customs system and that he was given to “talk with great disrespect of, and threats against the GOVERNMENT.” In that same issue, Jemmy printed a few choice words directed at the customs commissioners:
Whereas I have full evidence, that Henry Hutton, Charles Paxton, William Burch, and John Robinson, Esquires, have frequently and lately, treated the characters of all true North Americans in a manner that is not to be endured, by privately and publicly representing them as traitors and rebels, and in a general combination to revolt from Great Britain; and whereas the said Henry, Charles, William and John, without the least provocation or colour, have represented me by name, as inimical to the rights of the crown, and disaffected to his majesty, to whom I annually swear, and am determined at all events to bear true, and faithful allegiance: for all which general, as well as personal abuse and insult, satisfaction has been personally demanded, due warning given, but no sufficient answer obtained ….
The day after Boston’s uneasy population read that edition of the Gazette, Tuesday, September 5, 1769, John Robinson was socializing after work at the British Coffee House on King Street – the same Coffee House in which Benjamin Barons and Boston merchants had met with Jemmy Otis to devise the first attack on the customs establishment nine years earlier. That Tuesday night, Robinson was surrounded by customs colleagues, all subordinates, and some military personnel. The Coffee House was crowded and lively. Despite the reports and the testimony that followed, no one could be certain why John Robinson did what he next did. Perhaps it was those two nights in the Taunton jail. Perhaps it was all those nights he had to sleep aboard a customs ship because he feared the mobs of Newport. Perhaps he was angry that he needed to arm himself in Boston for fear of attack. Perhaps he was angry that Jemmy Otis defended men who murdered customs officers or at Jemmy’s role in embarrassing the Custom Board. Or perhaps it was being surrounded by a group of subordinates who looked up to him and who followed his example. Perhaps he felt he had something to prove. Whatever the reason, when Jemmy Otis walked into the British Coffee House at about 7:30 that evening, “John Robinson … insulted and fell upon him … with the assistance of half a dozen or more such scoundrels as himself [and] nearly murdered him before he escaped their hands.” Otis was left crumpled on the floor with a bloody head, which was believed to have been hit with a metal object, though debate raged whether it was a cane or a sword. Robinson and the witnesses, nearly all Robinson’s friends and colleagues, described it as a defensive “drubbing.” Jemmy’s friends and relatives described it as an assassination; the Gazette argued that a fully orchestrated murder plot was afoot. Even Hutchinson seemed to believe that it was an “attack,” though he suggested that Otis had provoked it with his newspaper articles. Curiously, the Court Party’s Evening Post published an account almost identical to the Gazette’s. According to these accounts, several men held Otis, and others chanted “Kill him! Kill him!” while he was being struck with canes and swords. John Gridley, Jeremy’s nephew, was the only other Popular Party man at the fight, and he left with a broken arm. Once the crowds from outside swarmed into the coffee house, Robinson and his men fled. Two Boston surgeons later testified that the cut on Jemmy’s head was so deep that it must have been made by a sharp object, and other testimony described a number of bludgeons and a scabbard found on the Coffee House floor after the assailants had escaped, thereby drawing a picture of a premeditated assault. Some measure of the varying accounts was a confection of propaganda and wishful thinking, but the Liberty fiasco and the letters to England accusing Jemmy of treason had painted the Customs Board members as lying, vindictive conspirators and, as such, highly vulnerable to any accusation. One man was arrested, and the loyalist working in his office above the Coffee House,
John Mein, put up the arrested man’s bond. The mob tired of Mein’s antics and attacked his office the following month and Mein, fearing for his life, took to a ship in Boston harbor and sailed for England.
If it was an assassination, it was thoroughly effective because John Robinson accomplished in a few minutes what the British Empire failed to accomplish in a decade. Though Jemmy would physically survive, he was now what the Court Party had previously tried in vain to brand him: insane. He wrote to Lord Hillsborough, the Colonial Secretary, urging him to read the Bible. He smashed the windows of the Town House. He delivered the address at the Boston Massacre victims’s public funeral in a toga. He fired off his guns on Sundays. His family confiscated his guns, and the court judged him insane in November 1771. Samuel Allyne was appointed Jemmy’s legal guardian and tried to care for him in Boston, but Jemmy faded in and out of insanity, occasionally appearing lucid and other times needing to be transported against his will, bound hand and food. He was clearly so insane and potentially dangerous that his family decided to confine him, first to the Otis’s Barnstable compound and then to a friend’s farm in the small rural town of Andover. In a June 18, 1775 letter, James Warren wrote to his wife and Jemmy’s sister Mercy, “Your brother Jem dined with us yesterday, behaved well till dinner, was almost done and then in the old way got up went off where I know not.” Though Jemmy was 50 years old, “behaved well till dinner” suggests they were dealing with a little boy. And “then in the old way” suggests that perhaps over the course of the year he had appeared more sane, and perhaps they were optimistic that he could recover his sanity, but in mid 1775 he seemed to be “in the old way” – not well behaved, wandering off in the middle of dinner. And concurrent with the Declaration of Independence, in July 1776, Jemmy seemed to have forgotten how to spell his name, signing official forms “James Oates.” It’s impossible to determine whether such misspelling was wholly involuntary, but in the same month that the colonies found their identity as the United States of America, Jemmy had thoroughly lost his.