Delete comment from: Boston 1775
You’re obviously protective of your ancestor Charles Conner’s reputation, but making false statements is a poor defense.
There was no “British spy” in this story. John Adams never owned slaves. George R. T. Hewes was not a coward. Both Hewes and Conner left Boston during the siege. Paul Revere obtained the horse for his famous ride from Deacon John Larkin of Charlestown.
It’s important to recognize that Hewes’s 1830s memoirs aren’t our earliest source about Conner taking tea in 1773. The Boston merchant John Andrews identified Conner by name in a letter written immediately after the event, relaying to a relative what Bostonians were talking about, and published in the 1860s. Those two sources are independent and corroborate each other.
The Boston Whigs would have preferred for none of the men who went on board the tea ships to take any for himself. Once a man was detected doing so, however, they made an example of him for local society to underscore the idea that the tea destruction was a purely public-minded act. I’m sure Conner didn’t like the experience, but in that respect he served the Whig cause.
What I find interesting about Conner, and the reason I assembled so much research about him, is that he was well established in Boston both before and after the Tea Party. The December crowd punished him that night, but Conner wasn’t ostracized and driven to the Loyalist side as happened to some men who did other unpopular things. People must have seen Conner’s action as a momentary lapse in judgment, given how they continued doing business with him.
Conner’s Irish roots were significant in his professional and social network, and Andrews made a point of them in his letter. It’s possible Hewes remembering the man’s name as “O’Connor” also revealed some prejudice. But Conner wasn’t the only Irish business and property owner in Boston. There was a whole mutual-aid society, as I described. Hector MacNeill, the captain whom Conner sailed under as a young man, described how prejudice against people from Ireland lessened over his lifetime.
If there’s evidence of Charles Conner being “open outspoken abolitionists,” I’m interested in seeing it. I don’t see how Daniel Conner could relocate to Georgia around 1800 and be surprised to find the economy there depended on slavery, but he could indeed have found that society more distasteful than he’d imagined.
It’s important to examine family history, like all other history, through hard evidence, consideration of all possibilities, and sympathetic understanding of the range of human behavior.
Jul 12, 2021, 11:48:22 PM
Posted to Capt. Charles Conner: mariner, trader, letter of horses