Delete comment from: Boston 1775
And from the stories I was told as a child was that conner was one of the three leaders and it was his boats that were used.
This is a very significant statement, but not strong historical evidence about the Tea Party. Rather, it shows us the foundation of your understanding of that event. The family stories we grow up with have emotional importance and are hard to get around. Like all oral histories, they have some evidentiary weight. But they have to be probed and assessed like all other oral traditions, especially since they’re almost always told to make children proud of their ancestors and we naturally cling to them.
What other evidence is there that Charles Conner was a leader of the tea destruction? What evidence is there that he owned boats near Griffin's Wharf? (By then he was running an inn and livery stable.) What evidence is there that Conner was part of the core group of tea destroyers and not someone who, like Hewes, joined in spontaneously? We need good evidence of those details to corroborate any family traditions.
We also have to sift the evidence fairly. You try to make a big deal of how Hewes as a poor man had trouble with debts, trying to impeach everything he said based on that. But you dismiss the documented lawsuit against Conner by saying, “Only one claim was ever made against him where he was sued for stolen inventory where he had even greater loss.” The records from the lawsuit mentioned in the John Adams Papers have disappeared, leaving only a model writ. So what’s the basis of that description of the case? What’s the basis of saying that was the only lawsuit ever filed against Conner? Lawsuits over debts were common in eighteenth-century New England, so why should Conner be different from most other men?
I hope you get down your family’s oral histories on paper if they’re not already documented. And I hope you look for contemporaneous evidence to confirm those stories—or to refute or correct those stories as necessary. All of us—Hewes, Conner, Adams, Hichborn, you and me—are prone to tell stories that put us in a good light or satisfy our needs. All of us naturally believe the stories we hear from our families as we grow up. But studying history requires collecting and weighing the evidence behind such stories.
Jul 13, 2021, 5:00:22 PM
Posted to Capt. Charles Conner: mariner, trader, letter of horses