Boston, Massachusetts

What was Boston like in the early 1700s?

Boston was founded in 1630 on Massachusetts Bay. Its first town census, taken in 1722, counted 10,567 people.

Massachusetts was a British colony with a royal governor under its charter of 1691. Its wealth came from the sea: in 1700 the governor, Lord Bellomont, wrote home that Boston owned more good ships than all of Scotland and Ireland together.

What did Boston trade in the 1700s?

Boston’s merchants made their money in the Caribbean. New England ships sailed south with salt cod, timber, barrel staves and food for the sugar islands. They came home with sugar and molasses, the syrup left from making sugar.

This trade was tied closely to slavery. The sugar islands put most of their land into sugar, worked by enslaved Africans, so they bought their food and building wood from New England. The cheapest grade of salt cod, called “refuse” fish, was shipped to the islands to feed enslaved people.

In Boston, molasses was boiled and distilled into rum. The town had a licensed distiller by the 1640s and separate distilleries from the 1670s; by 1750 there were about 25.

Britain’s Navigation Acts set rules for colonial trade, including whose ships merchants could use. These laws were poorly enforced. New England merchants smuggled goods from the French, Dutch and Spanish islands, bribed officials, and could rely on local juries to let smugglers go.

What were Long Wharf and Boston Light?

In 1710 a group of merchants led by Captain Oliver Noyes began building Long Wharf, a pier stretching out from the foot of King Street (today’s State Street). Warehouses stood on it by 1711, and it was largely finished by about 1715, with work going on until about 1721. It ran about 1,586 feet, nearly half a kilometre, into the harbour, with room for around 50 ships to unload straight into the warehouses.

In September 1716 a lighthouse was first lit on Little Brewster Island, paid for by a toll on ships using the harbour. Boston Light was the first lighthouse in what became the United States. Its first keeper, George Worthylake, drowned in 1718 with his wife, his daughter and two other men when their boat overturned. British troops blew up the tower in 1776, and the one standing today was built in 1783.

What was the Boston News-Letter?

The Boston News-Letter first appeared on 24 April 1704. It was published by John Campbell, the town’s postmaster, and printed by Bartholomew Green. It came out weekly until 1776, the first newspaper in British America to keep going.

For fifteen years the News-Letter had no rival, until the Boston Gazette began in December 1719. In 1721 James Franklin, older brother of Benjamin Franklin, started the New-England Courant. Readers followed pirate captures, trials and hangings in the News-Letter’s pages.

Were pirates hanged in Boston?

Yes. In June 1704 the pirate captain John Quelch and five of his crew were hanged there.

In April 1717 the pirate Black Sam Bellamy sailed north with his ship, the Whydah. On the night of 26 April a storm wrecked it off Cape Cod. Bellamy drowned, and only two of the crew survived: the carpenter Thomas Davis and John Julian, a young Native American pilot. The same storm wrecked the Mary Anne, a wine ship Bellamy had captured. All seven pirates aboard reached shore and were jailed.

The trials were held in Boston in October 1717. Thomas Davis and Thomas South were found not guilty. Six men from the Mary Anne were convicted and hanged on 15 November 1717 near the Charlestown ferry landing. John Julian was never tried and was probably sold into slavery. The minister Cotton Mather visited the condemned men, went with them to the gallows, and published their last conversations as a warning.

Edward Low had lived in Boston for about ten years as a ship rigger and married there before he turned pirate in 1721–1722. In June 1722 he seized a fleet of Marblehead fishing boats off Nova Scotia.

On 12 July 1726 William Fly, who had led a mutiny earlier that year, was hanged at Boston with two other men. He refused to repent and told the crowd that captains should pay their sailors on time and treat them well. His body was hung in chains on Nixes Mate, a small island beside the main channel into the harbour, as a warning to passing sailors. The historian Marcus Rediker counts at least 450 pirates hanged around the Atlantic from 1716 to 1726; Fly was one of the last.

Were there Black people in colonial Boston?

Yes. Slavery was legal in Massachusetts from 1641 until court rulings ended it in 1783. The West End Museum estimates that about 12 per cent of Boston’s people around 1720 were enslaved. They worked as household servants, labourers and craftsmen, in workshops and distilleries and along the waterfront. Boston also had free Black residents, though records from these years do not tell us how many.

How did Onesimus help stop smallpox in 1721?

Onesimus was a West African man, probably Akan, from what is now Ghana. In 1706 members of Cotton Mather’s church gave him to Mather as an enslaved servant. A few years before 1721, Onesimus explained that in Africa he had been given a mild dose of smallpox through a small cut, which protected him for life, and he showed Mather the scar. This method is called inoculation.

In April 1721 a ship brought smallpox to Boston. Nearly 850 people died, about 8 per cent of the town. Dr Zabdiel Boylston began inoculating on 26 June 1721 with his own son and two enslaved people of his household. Boylston inoculated 242 people and 6 died, about 1 in 40, compared with about 1 in 7 of those who caught the disease naturally.

Many Bostonians were furious. Dr William Douglass led the attack, and in November 1721 someone threw a firebomb through Mather’s window; it failed to go off. Around the time he told Mather about inoculation, Onesimus gained partial freedom by paying toward another enslaved man to take his place. He was allowed to earn his own wages and have a home and family, but little else is known of his life, not even when he died.