For the past few weeks, I’ve been looking at the dispute between Annapolis merchants Williams and Company and the local Committee of Inspection that played out on the pages of the Maryland Gazette in the summer of 1770. In the August 16 issue of the paper, Thomas Williams focused his ire on five members of the Committee, with one man—William Paca—singled out for his coarse words and actions.
Responding to the previous week’s letter signed by ten Committee men, Williams wrote that he had “the Charity to believe, some of those worthy Gentlemen have been incautiously drawn in to set their Names to it, without being acquainted with all the minute Circumstances in this Controversy, and had their Information of it only from the others.” He was willing to go easy on these peripheral figures, but not the ringleaders who had it in for him and his company.
Williams explained why his business charged 10 shillings a pound for tea and, more importantly, why that fact shouldn’t even be an issue of concern for the Committee. He and his partners easily could have satisfied the five inspectors who suddenly showed up at their store one day in July, but “the abrupt imperious Manner of the first Star-Chamber Demand, to know the first Cost of it [the tea], was a sufficient Antidote to a candid Answer at that Time.” The Williamses refused to submit to an impromptu inquisition by “that Junto of a Committee, Five out of Ten or Twelve,” who then proceeded “to judge, condemn, and execute our Characters in Publick” a mere two days after the confrontation without proving them guilty of a breach of the nonimportation agreement or allowing them a fair hearing before the full Committee. These five rotten inspectors then poisoned the others against Williams and Company.
Thomas Williams launched into the worst instigator of the bunch, asking his readers to “consider the beautiful, or rather the Bear-garden Language of the first Publication of the Five Men our Accusers, together with that * Penman’s (* Mr. Paca) Language, in his short Notes to Thomas Williams, after his reading our Piece in the Gazette, where, in the overflowing of his warm Zeal in the Cause of Liberty, he made use of the Words Scoundrel and Convict, with the most dreadful threatening of his Cane at the first Meeting with the Penman of our Address, which he knew was Thomas Williams; as though the Cause of Liberty was to be decided by Club Law.”
"Here’s a silk-pants patriot with a bit of fire and fight in him, speaking loudly and carrying a big stick!"
When I think of William Paca, signer of the Declaration of Independence and third Governor of the State of Maryland, his 1772 portrait by Charles Willson Peale is the picture that to mind. Peale shows Paca as calm, cool, and collected, the very epitome of a confident young man who clearly has his act together. Thomas Williams’s description of William Paca contrasts sharply with that carefully crafted image. This Paca calls guys “scoundrel” and “convict,” resorts to even rougher language shouted ringside at bear-baiting fights, and brandishes his genteel cane as a potential club. Here’s a silk-pants patriot with a bit of fire and fight in him, speaking loudly and carrying a big stick!
Thomas Williams revisited the accusations of hypocrisy he brought against members of the Committee, shooting down the explanations and excuses offered a week before by the inspectors. Let’s remember, he wrote, that Samuel Chase’s imported sofa really was put ashore after dark at a private landing at the back of town. The package was opened and the sofa put to use without any pretense of delay so the matter could be looked into properly. And contrary to the Committee’s last letter, there was a second, smaller package for Mr. Chase, which was personally delivered by the master of the vessel. Although innocently “marked Garden Seeds, but it may contain many rich Goods, for what the Publick know to the contrary.” As for the complaint against Committee members Thomas Harwood and John Brice, Williams didn’t doubt they had asked for an examination of their goods before selling them (other merchants did the same; that wasn’t the issue), but they hadn’t received approval before offering the items to customers.
Considering next the charges previously leveled against Williams and Company by the Committee, Thomas Williams wrote that the Rhode Islander from whom his business had bought molasses in the spring wasn’t the same person turned away from Philadelphia as a suspected violator of the nonimportation Association.
The names of the ships and the skippers didn’t match, and the timing simply didn’t work out. The Williamses’ “constant intercourse of Letters from the Northward” concerned the “long and tedious Sale” of imported goods which they had voluntarily turned over to Philadelphia inspectors, not some imagined “Correspondence with the Northward Enemies to Liberty.” The Annapolis Committee’s attacks “spring from no other Fountain than their own malignant Spirits, which, like the Mountains of Aetna and Vesuvius, are frequently vomiting out their liquid Flames, to the great Annoyance of all the peaceable Inhabitants near them.”
Thomas Williams closed with the 18th-century equivalent of a mic-drop: “We flatter ourselves the above Facts will be sufficient to satisfy the Publick, in regard to our past Conduct in this whole Affair; should any more of their Scurrility appear against us in Publick, [we] shall utterly despise it by our silent Disregard thereto.”
Read the August 16, 1770 issue of the Maryland Gazette starting here: https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc4800/sc4872/001281/html/m1281-1096.html
Glenn E. Campbell
HA Senior Historian
