The Sons of Liberty Bowl

On 11 February 1768 the Massachusetts House of Representatives sent a document to the legislatures of the other colonies, since known as the Circular Letter, arguing against the Acts of Parliament that taxed the colonies. By early summer Governor Francis Bernard had been instructed to require the House to rescind it, and to dissolve the General Court if it refused.

The House voted on 30 June 1768. Ninety-two voted not to rescind and seventeen voted with the governor. The ninety-two became a slogan within days. The seventeen became the Rescinders, and Revere published an engraving, A Warm Place - Hell, in which a devil drives seventeen men into the burning jaws of a monster while a demon overhead cries 'push on Tim' at Timothy Ruggles, one of the active Loyalists.

The bowl was finished within five weeks of the vote. That is the thing to hold on to: it is not a commemorative piece made at a safe distance, it is a piece of political publishing made while the quarrel was live and while the governor was treating the vote as insubordination.

The bowl was made from forty-five ounces of silver and made to hold forty-five gills of rum punch. Neither figure is an accident of what was in the shop.

In issue 45 of The North Briton the English radical John Wilkes attacked the ministry and the peace of 1763. He was arrested, his house was searched without a specific warrant, his papers were seized, and he beat the charge by proving the search illegal. General warrants and the number forty-five became shorthand across the English-speaking world for the argument that a subject has rights a government cannot search its way past.

Boston took the point literally. On 23 June 1768, a week before the vote, the Sons and Daughters of Liberty met at Roxbury, drove in a train of carriages past the governor's house and drank forty-five toasts. The first were to the King, the Queen and the royal family, in the traditional order; the fifth was to a perpetual union of Great Britain and her colonies on the immutable principles of justice and equity, which is not the language of men who have decided on independence. Thomas Hutchinson, writing to Thomas Pownall that same month, reported that Nathaniel Barber, who kept the insurance office where the bowl would live, had christened one of his children John Wilkes and had the figure 45 marked on the child's breast.

So the bowl is one object inside a whole vocabulary of forty-fives, and it is the only one of them that still exists.

One side carries a cartouche topped by a liberty cap and flanked by two flags, one lettered Magna Charta and the other Bill of Rights. At its centre, over a torn page labelled Generall Warrants, is 'No 45. Wilkes and Liberty'.

The other side carries the dedication: 'To the Memory of the glorious NINETY-TWO: Members of the Honbl House of Representatives of the Massachusetts-Bay, who, undaunted by the insolent Menaces of Villains in Power, from a Strict Regard to Conscience, and the LIBERTIES of their Constituents, on the 30th of June 1768, Voted NOT TO RESCIND.'

Round the rim are the names of the fifteen men who paid for it, engraved as a round robin so that no name stands first: Caleb Hopkins, Nathaniel Barber, John White, William Mackay, Daniel Malcolm, Benjamin Goodwin, John Welsh, Fortescue Vernon, Daniel Parker, John Marston, Ichabod Jones, John Homer, William Bowes, Peter Boyer, Benjamin Cobb. A round robin is a device for signing a petition without identifying a ringleader. On a treasonable object in 1768 that is not a decorative choice.

The dedication is not Revere's composition. Jonathan Fairbanks noticed that its style, and its emphatic capitalisation of key words, match a series of pieces published in the Boston Gazette under the pseudonym A True Patriot, one of them on 29 February 1768.

Identifying the pseudonym was possible because of one man's filing habit. Harbottle Dorr, a Son of Liberty who sold grindstones in Union Street, kept the newspapers and wrote on each one who had actually written the anonymous articles. Anne E. Bentley, curator at the Massachusetts Historical Society, directed Fairbanks to the Dorr papers. A True Patriot was Dr Joseph Warren, who was killed at Bunker Hill in 1775.

Fairbanks is careful and this record follows him: he writes that the lines still resist completely reliable attribution. The resemblance is a strong argument, not a signature. What is established is that the question can be answered at all, and that the route to answering it is a marked-up newspaper file kept by a man who was in the room.

Revere kept wastebooks. The Massachusetts Historical Society holds them and has digitised them, the digitisation paid for by the Paul Revere Memorial Association. Volume 1 is a wastebook and memoranda for Boston running 3 January 1761 to 10 October 1783. Volume 2 runs 2 August 1783 to 7 August 1797.

So 1768 is covered. The society records only one break in volume 1, between 2 April 1775 and 18 December 1778, a period when Revere was working as a courier and serving as an artillery officer in the Massachusetts militia. Nothing is missing around 1768.

The society also describes what a commission entry in that volume normally contains: the cost of the metal, the workmanship and the engraving. That is precisely the entry the Sons of Liberty Bowl would have generated, itemised in the three ways that would have priced it.

There is no such entry. The bowl appears nowhere in the wastebooks and nowhere in the Revere family papers. Fairbanks reads the absence as deliberate, on the ground that business papers could be seized and that an object engraved with Wilkes slogans and a public tribute to men who had defied a royal order was, on a bad day, treasonable.

One qualification belongs here, and the source that supplies the daybooks also supplies it. The society states that in the early years of his business Revere kept inconsistent daily records in the wastebooks before transferring entries into ledgers. Inconsistent record-keeping is an innocent explanation for a missing entry, and it has to be weighed against the argument from concealment rather than ignored. What is certain either way is the consequence: there is no ledger entry, therefore no recorded charge, and any figure quoted as what the fifteen paid Revere would be an invention.

The form was almost certainly taken from the Delft punch bowls that colonial households knew, which themselves copy Chinese export porcelain. The profile is a shallow S rising to a slightly flared lip; the foot is splayed and shaped with convex and concave mouldings.

Fairbanks describes the labour rather than the technique: forming a bowl of this size would have taken hundreds of hours of hammering on a polished anvil and stakes before any engraving began, and doing it in five weeks was a feat. No source consulted for this record states whether the body is raised from a single sheet or seamed, and this record does not assert it.

The present weight is 43 troy ounces and 16 1/2 pennyweight, against the forty-five ounces of metal it was made from. The difference is metal lost to finishing and, over two centuries, to polishing. Polishing has also cut through to the fire scale, the oxide left below the surface by repeated annealing, so the bowl reads slightly cloudy and looks as though it wants cleaning. It does not. Cleaning it further would remove more of it, and the cloudiness is the record of how often it has been cleaned already.

It was kept at Nathaniel Barber's insurance office in the North End and carried out for the meetings of the group at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern and the Green Dragon Tavern.

The fifteen were not the leadership of the colony. Fairbanks describes them as merchants of the middling sort: small traders, tradesmen, tavernkeepers, a mariner, a distiller, a woodcarver, most with their livelihoods tied to the wharves and the marketplace, and most of them later on London's list of enemies. Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren belonged to the movement but are not on the bowl. That is the object's argument about itself, and it is why the round robin matters.

One of the fifteen can stand for the rest. Daniel Malcolm was a merchant whose wine was assumed to be smuggled; when customs officers came for his goods they were kept out of the warehouse for want of a warrant, and by the time they had one the wine was gone. He died on 23 October 1769. His gravestone on Copp's Hill was cut by John Homer, another of the fifteen, and calls him a true Son of Liberty and an enemy of oppression; it records that he lies in a vault ten feet deep, and it is pocked with what appears to be musket damage.

Stevens, writing in 1895, checked the fifteen against the first Boston Directory of 1789 and found six of them still listed: William Mackay, gentleman, of Fish Street; Benjamin Cobb, distiller, Long Wharf; John Homer, stonecutter, Fish Street; John Welsh, ironmonger, Union Street; John White, of Scarlet's Wharf; and Peter Boyer, town treasurer, Sudbury Street. The other nine were dead. That single check is the best surviving measure of who these men actually were.

The bowl began as joint property. Stevens states that William Mackay, one of the fifteen and a merchant, bought the right of ownership from the other Sons of Liberty, and that the bowl thereafter belonged to his descendants. Writing in January 1895, Stevens added that it would always continue in the possession of the oldest male descendant. That prediction failed within seven years.

Fairbanks gives the descent: in 1832 the bowl became the property of William Mackay of New York City, and it passed subsequently to his brother, Robert C. Mackay of Boston. In 1902 Robert C. Mackay passed it to Marian Lincoln Perry of Providence, Rhode Island, who was herself a descendant of one of the fifteen original associates.

That last point is worth stating plainly, because it is easy to read the 1902 transfer as the moment the object left the founding families. It did not. It moved from the descendants of one subscriber to the descendants of another. Which of the fifteen Marian Lincoln Perry descended from is not stated in the sources read for this record, and this record does not guess.

In 1874 the bowl was taken to the rooms of the Massachusetts Historical Society by the Rev Dr George E. Ellis, and Stevens records that the proceedings of that occasion were minuted in the society's archives. It was then returned to the Mackay family. That is the only public showing before 1949 that any source read for this record mentions.

How it surfaced again in 1895 is the kind of thing that normally never gets written down. John Marston of Philadelphia, a great-grandson of the John Marston on the rim, wrote to Benjamin Franklin Stevens asking him to find out whether a Revere punch bowl carrying his ancestor's name still existed somewhere near Boston.

Stevens read the letter aloud in the office of the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company in Milk Street. A clerk stepped forward and said that the owner of the bowl was a direct descendant of William Mackay and was a clerk in that same office. The bowl arrived the same day.

Stevens then had it photographed, specially for his pamphlet, by A. H. Folsom of 48 Alleghany Street, Roxbury. That 1895 campaign is the earliest photography of the object named in any source read here, and those plates are long out of copyright, which makes their absence from any free-licence collection the single most frustrating fact in this record's image note.

In 1949 Mrs J. Marsden Perry offered the bowl to the Museum of Fine Arts. The asking price was 56,000 dollars and the museum did not have it.

The museum authorised a fundraising committee under Mark Bortman to solicit subscriptions. Donors included schoolchildren. On 15 February 1949 Governor Paul A. Dever transmitted the bowl from Bortman to Edward Jackson Holmes, the museum's president. The credit line records the mechanism exactly: gift by subscription and the Francis Bartlett Fund. It was accessioned 49.45.

Two figures have to be kept apart. 56,000 dollars is the ASKING PRICE recorded by Fairbanks. The sum actually paid is not stated in any source read for this record, and neither is the split between money raised by subscription and money drawn from the Bartlett endowment. No price paid is printed here, because none has been found.

Mark Bortman is worth following past 1949. The Massachusetts Historical Society records that the Paul J. Revere papers came to it as his gift in 1967. The man who raised the money to keep the bowl in Boston spent the following two decades placing Revere material in public collections.

The museum put the bowl in the upper rotunda with portraits of colonial notables, and it has been on view ever since, moving around the building as displays have changed.

The Museum of Fine Arts also owns John Singleton Copley's portrait of Paul Revere, accession 30.781, given in 1930 by three of the silversmith's descendants. For generations it was dated to about 1770.

In 1995, preparing a Copley exhibition, Jim Wright, head of paintings conservation, and Jean Woodward, associate paintings conservator, cleaned the picture and found Copley's initials and the date 1768 inscribed in miniature at the lower right edge.

A redating of two years changes what the picture is. Painted in 1768 it is contemporary with the bowl, made by two friends in the same town in the year that town turned, and the objects in it stop being studio props. Revere holds a pear-shaped teapot, which in 1768 is a Tory object in a town boycotting tea, and wears a conspicuous white linen shirt in the year the Boston Gazette reported some sixty young women of Roxbury spinning over a hundred score of linen yarn in a single morning to prove the colonies could clothe themselves. Fairbanks reads the composition as a man balanced between the two.

Copley married into a Loyalist family the following year. The two men were separated by the war and never met again.

The bowl is routinely described as one of the most important objects in American history, ranked with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. That claim is repeated widely and no source read for this record attributes it to a named author in a citable place, so this record does not print it as a judgement of its own.

What can be said precisely is narrower and stronger. It is an object made by a named craftsman, for fifteen named men, about a dated vote, in a town under military occupation within three months, and it carries the argument on its own surface in words that were probably written by a man who was killed seven years later. It was never sold at auction. It has been publicly owned since 1949 and publicly displayed ever since.

Everything offered in the salerooms under the title Sons of Liberty Bowl is a reproduction. There is one of these.