Company Eight

by Matthew Pearl

  Veazie, likewise, saw a vision of his future in the successful and enterprising Sears. If he had stayed in Quincy, he would have had to bide his time behind his uncle, an established carpenter—now in the midst of renovating former President John Quincy Adams’s house—who, like Sears, preached integrity and industriousness. Boston, on the other hand, presented a wealth of opportunities for a young man to earn respect and money, just as Sears had done ten years earlier. And joining a volunteer fire company in the city was a networking opportunity; it offered a rare chance to socialize with people from every rung on the social and professional ladder, from day laborers to wealthy engineers, cabinetmakers to bookkeepers.

  But in the summer of 1832, there was little time for conversation in the engine house. Just three days after the Fourth of July fire, Boston suffered one of its worst blazes in years. An arsonist set a carpenter’s shop on fire in Merrimac Street, near the Charles River. The flames spread to a three-story brick stable—which collapsed into the street shortly after all 90 horses were safely outside—and then to several adjacent buildings before consuming the Warren Hotel. In a throwback to the bucket brigades of the colonial era, citizens were sent to nearby roofs with pails of water in case burning cinders were taken by the northeast wind. To make matters worse, the wells near the hotel were nearly dry because of drought and overuse by a cluster of nearby distillers—especially maddening to Sears and the true believers, like the temperate grocer Fisk, in his reformers’ squad.

  That fire was massive enough that, according to a reporter for the Transcript, in the dark of night you were able to read a newspaper by the light of the flames in any street of the city. As people crowded around at a distance to watch the spectacular inferno, petty criminals saw a chance. A wallet and a gold watch were reported stolen. Another man was nabbed by two thieves and thrown to the ground before a bystander intervened. Thieves were known to set additional, smaller fires during a big blaze to add to the distraction. It was a perfect example of why men like Sears and Quincy saw fire not just as a destructive power in its own right but as a portal to moral disorder.

  Companies from around the city rotated shifts on the July 7 fire for more than 12 hours before it was fully extinguished. Just a week later, another arsonist—or perhaps the same one—struck, burning down a stable and killing five horses on Leverett Street. Sears’s company answered the alarm for two other arson fires in Dedham on October 30 and in Dorchester a few days later—fires that together killed 60 horses and a Revolutionary War veteran who had been asleep in the Dedham stable’s loft. Sears continued to risk fines by venturing beyond the city limits with his squad. Company Eight was beginning to have the impact he had envisioned.

  Sears refused to play games with lives on the line, ordering his men to take no part in the competitiveness among companies that was often on display at the scene of a fire. But the refusal was not mutual. Other companies often tried to block Eight’s routes to fires. Racing to respond to the Dedham blaze that October, Eight found itself neck and neck with Company Twelve and Company One. The scramble got out of hand, and a member of One broke his leg in two places when it was crushed under the company’s engine. The infighting came at great cost; before any of the engines made it to Dedham, the fire had already done its damage.

  On the night of November 3, as the men recovered from their exertions at the Dorchester fire the day before, Sears noticed something amiss at Eight’s engine house: George Veazie was nowhere to be found. Perhaps something had come up with the 23-year-old’s new wife, Julia.

  When there was still no trace of the foreman later, Sears could take his pick of what to worry about. Company Twelve, their most aggressive competitor, could have committed some mischief against the young man, or he could have fallen into the hands of a revenge squad of Eight’s own ex-members. They considered Veazie a traitor, a friend whom they had helped train upon his arrival in Boston, only to watch him become an interloper’s right-hand man.

  Then Sears heard the news. Veazie had been arrested.

  November 21, 1832

  Charged with passing counterfeit currency, Veazie swore innocence. The whole thing, he insisted, stemmed from a misunderstanding when he’d paid for new boots with a fraudulent bank note that someone had given to him. But even if Veazie wasn’t guilty, for the moment he was stuck in jail. Sears would have to pick up his duties as the coordinator of Company Eight’s day-to-day firefighting activities—at a time when Eight was under mounting scrutiny.

  Charles Wells, Boston’s mayor at the time, was a former builder, which might have given him and Sears some common ground. But the two men were near opposites. In contrast to his reform-minded predecessors, Wells prided himself on his lack of civic ambition. He was out to cut costs. A former member of the city council, he was more interested in protecting the status quo than he was in innovative ideas. The other fire companies complained to Wells about Number Eight. “If Sears and his men weren’t such reformers, if they would only take a little with the rest of the boys and be one with us, we wouldn’t find any fault,” other firefighters told the mayor.

  Things came to a head on November 21, 1832. It was about four in the morning when a young man, a newspaper deliverer, was on his way through the city to deliver the Advertiser to Roxbury. While still in Boston, he noticed light reflected onto the wall of the Second United States Bank; flames were bursting from the windows of the first and second floors of a brick building on State Street. The young man and others who were passing heard a dog’s howl. Some went to find a watchman to raise an alarm while others worked on breaking a window to free the terrified animal.

  Company Five—which had recently been reconstituted after a fracas with the board of engineers led to its dissolution—was based close by in an engine house at Dock Square. The men fought the flames for hours, unaware that a canister in one of the ground-floor offices contained four pounds of gunpowder—more than regulations permitted to be on the premises. When the fire reached the canister, a massive explosion shattered windows in adjoining buildings and hurled the firemen to the ground. Ten members of Company Five were injured in the blast, two of them severely.

  When the fire on State Street was finally extinguished, the city fire engineer dismissed the companies from the scene. Only upon closer inspection did the engineer notice that the blaze wasn’t actually out. The flames had spread to the roof of the building opposite the offices: the Old State House, which for the past two years had been used as City Hall. Cinders drifted into the attic through the cupola, and soon the building was aflame.

  The church bells sounded again. Sears and Engine Eight were trying to chase down the location of the fire, following the shouts of bystanders and watching the sky for smoke, when they came upon the engine of Company Twelve—the same squad that shadowed their movements at consecutive fires the previous month—blocking the way in the middle of the street.

  Company Twelve, led by a candlemaker named Joseph Wheeler, had one of the closest engine houses to Eight’s, based a few blocks south on Washington Street—and in the Boston fire department, proximity usually begot rivalry. What was more, seven members of the earlier incarnation of Company Eight, men who had quit before Sears took the reins, were now part of Twelve, including Alfred Dow, William Willet’s former assistant foreman. Twelve’s members had designs on the old Franklin Schoolhouse—Eight’s station house—which, while cramped, provided access to both Tremont and Washington Streets, two main thoroughfares that could be used to travel rapidly north and south, almost the entire length of the city, and beat other companies to a fire.

  But if Sears was about to meet his match, it might not have been in Wheeler but in one of the men who flanked him. Company Twelve’s assistant foreman, 24-year-old Joseph Drew, was a goldsmith by trade, and like Sears he proudly traced his ancestors to the founding of the American colonies. Like Sears, Drew wanted to command his own fire company. He had no interest in reforming the department, but sought to place himself in a position
of power to help fulfill his political aspirations.

  With Twelve’s squadron standing in his way, Sears had a choice to make. If he recharted his own company’s course—not an easy thing, with the bulky engine—he risked overexerting his men before they reached the fire and giving the flames more time to spread. If he sent his men to challenge the blockade, it could lead to a violent confrontation—the sort of disorder that had created a need for a reform company in the first place.

  The dense black smoke on the horizon came from the gilded cupola that capped the Old State House’s tower and at one point had made it the tallest building in the city. Below the tower, the building stood three stories tall, and at 110 feet long it was more spacious than it first appeared. The offices of the mayor, the city council, and the board of fire engineers were inside the building. Sears knew this was his chance to show Eight’s worth to the city authorities in the most dramatic fashion possible. He could demonstrate once and for all that the old guard of firefighters were no longer in charge.

  “Forward, men!” Sears cried into his speaking trumpet. Eight’s crew took their places around the engine, checking their grips on the drag ropes. “Close up, run them down, smash their crane’s neck, and never mind breaking legs.”

  Company Eight charged. The Eagle’s men leaped out of the way, and Eight rammed the front of their engine. The base of Eagle’s engine snapped. Wheeler’s enraged men, threatening to “clean out” their enemies, chased after Sears’s squad as Eight continued its course to the fire. “Fire out!” shouted men from other companies who were aligned with Twelve, hoping to confuse Eight’s firefighters. When Eight stopped in front of the burning City Hall, Wheeler’s men, unencumbered by their engine, had them surrounded.

  Fights between fire companies could be brutal. Clubs, wrenches, and axes were popular weapons, along with whatever else was handy. Mose Humphreys, a printer in New York who spawned Paul Bunyan–like folk legends about his time as a fireman, was said to have his shoes fitted with spikes for such occasions. Sears might have abhorred the foolish feuding between fire companies, but as the saying went, he wasn’t brought up in the woods to be scared of an owl. Once, when he’d rented the only hall in Boston that would allow the English abolitionist George Thompson to lecture against slavery (with a more than $1,000 deposit out of Sears’s own pocket), he personally stood guard outside the door in the face of an angry mob.

  Now Sears counted 18 firemen from the rival company who had made it as far as City Hall—but those men were struggling to catch their breath, while Sears’s better-conditioned firefighters, 40 in number, remained ready for anything. Of course, Eben would be at his side, as usual, but so too would this other kind of family that had formed around the engine and its charismatic, unwavering captain. Sears ordered them to hold their position. Wheeler and Drew, seeing that they were outmatched—and knowing that the political ramifications of a burned City Hall would be too far-reaching for any fire company to contain—finally called off their men.

  Fire crews were arriving from around the city, and Company Eight jumped into the precarious state of affairs. The men had to tie ladders together to reach the upper windows and clamber on top of the building. Scaling City Hall, they surrounded the cupola and lowered themselves into the attic, where the worst of the fire was concentrated. After a three-hour struggle, the flames were successfully confined to the attic floor, which was destroyed. The rest of the building was “saved almost by a miracle,” as the Boston Statesman put it three days later. An engraving by British painter Robert Salmon of the fire companies battling the blaze was adopted a few months later as the background for certificates of service given by the city to firemen.

  * * *

  The year after Josiah Quincy had left the mayor’s office, fire companies negotiated an exemption from serving on juries and in the military after seven years of firefighting. Had there been a war going on, Sears surely would have volunteered regardless of how long he had been a fireman; even when he was nine years old, watching Eben suit up to fight in the War of 1812, he and other boys of Brewster formed a guard patrol along the shore to watch for British ships. If some firemen saw the benefit of their roles primarily in replacing other civic duties, for Sears it was civic duty.

  But Sears knew enough about the current administration not to expect commendations for his dedication. Interrupting the elation that followed the extinguishing of the City Hall fire, Mayor Wells called Sears in for a meeting, which quickly became an interrogation about the incident with Company Twelve.

  “Why did you run into Number Twelve?” Wells demanded.

  “Because they obstructed our way to the fire,” Sears replied.

  Damaging another company’s engine was as serious a charge as there was among firemen. Wells threatened to discharge Sears and disband Company Eight altogether. “You broke their machine,” he said.

  Sears was incredulous. “We did,” he said, “and the next time they purposely get in our way, we will smash their machine into pieces.”

  “You might have broken their legs.”

  “We don’t want to break any legs, but we may next time. What is the fire ordinance? What are our orders?” Sears wondered if this mayor—unlike Quincy—even knew the answer. “‘You will proceed at once to the fire, and break down all obstructions.’ There, Mr. Mayor, is the law, and we only obeyed it.”

  The irony was thick as smoke: Here they were, sitting in the very building that could have burned to the ground, which had already happened once since it was rebuilt in 1713 after a fire. “And now I will resign and you can have the engine,” Sears said. “I will have nothing more to do with it.”

  December 1832

  Mayor Wells might not have liked Sears, but he was pragmatic. He knew that Sears had turned Company Eight into a powerful model of efficiency. Losing one of the best fire companies in Boston could lead to hikes in fire-insurance rates, which wasn’t good for Wells’s political position. Besides, the mayor had enough problems to deal with as it was. The city struggled with debt—caused by dreamers like Quincy with big projects like the Faneuil Hall Market (also known as Quincy Market)—and was in the midst of a serious cholera outbreak. He walked back his reprimand. But Sears was too proud a man to forgive easily, and before he finally agreed to stay on Wells practically had to beg.

  Sears now had some leverage over the mayor. But internal problems were multiplying at the South End engine house. George Veazie, it turned out, was being accused of more than accidentally using a fraudulent bank note. He was being charged with intentionally passing counterfeit bills to multiple businesses—and records indicated that he had tried to do the same thing on a visit to New York earlier that year.

  His case went to trial in December. Veazie, prosecutors claimed, went into three stores trying to pass two $10 notes—promissory documents from the Suffolk Bank—in exchange for boots and a few dollars’ change in bills. One of the storekeepers was suspicious of the bank note Veazie showed him and left to warn the neighboring stores and fetch a constable. Veazie was cornered. Although he pleaded not guilty, he had already admitted to the arresting constable that the bank notes were counterfeit, a fact the bank officers confirmed at trial (while also marveling at the counterfeit notes’ high quality).

  Even the prosecutors seemed to accept Veazie’s explanation that he received the counterfeit notes from his father-in-law, who promptly disappeared and apparently was never found by the authorities. But Veazie’s family members never disputed that he knowingly committed the crime. His family and friends in Quincy assured the court that Veazie was honest and hardworking but acknowledged that living in Boston may have changed him; he had thrown himself wholeheartedly into his role as foreman of Sears’s groundbreaking company, but time spent in the engine house and at fires naturally took away from his work and steady income as a carpenter. In the end, Veazie was sentenced to four years imprisonment with hard labor. “Look out! Look out!” ran the headline in the Transcript, warning Bostonians
of the criminal in their midst.

  Veazie was taken to the State Prison in Charlestown—a structure that Sears had worked on as a builder—on December 22, 1832 to serve his sentence. Sears had lost a foreman, a firefighting mentor, and a potential protégé for his construction business. At the next monthly meeting of Eight, Sears and his men reluctantly voted to give Veazie a dishonorable discharge—the first and only time that would happen on Sears’s watch. The incident was enough to make Sears question his own famously decisive judgment, especially in an endeavor where faith in one’s comrades was a matter of life and death. It also shattered the naive idea that he had created a shining city—or at least a shining engine house—that would be a bulwark against moral weakness. Perhaps the young men Sears had judged harshly from afar, rather than being deficient in character, were overwhelmed by a system that not only tolerated rash, impulsive action but counted on it to keep the men primed for their death-defying duties. Sears had been set on fixing the failures of the men to protect the public, while in fact the young men needed protection from a system lacking any stability.

  Sears’s enemies took advantage of his distraction. With Veazie’s case going to trial, a faction of discontented members of Eight held a secret meeting to enroll a new contingent of 26 men as members of the company—which would provide them with enough votes to force Sears out. The new recruits included eight embittered ex-members whom Sears had replaced, among them William Weston, John Anderson, Thomas Emmons, and Company Twelve’s Alfred Dow. (It was now clear that the malcontents had been feeding intelligence on Eight’s whereabouts to Twelve—probably through Dow—which had allowed the rival company to shadow its movements.)