1. This is one of at least three accounts by
JA of this interesting episode, all differing in details that are not easily reconcilable
because the principal document in question has not been found.
The earliest account, in a letter from
JA to Elbridge Gerry, Braintree,
17 Oct. 1779 (
LbC,
Adams Papers), is doubtless the most reliable. It states that “the General Court in 1774 appointed
Mr. Bowdoin and me a Committee to state our Claim to those Lands” now called Vermont
but then usually spoken of as the New Hampshire Grants, meaning the territory between
the Connecticut River and the New York lakes north of a western projection of New
Hampshire's present southern boundary. The date of this appointment, 1 March 1774
(rather than the fall of 1773), is confirmed by copies of the votes of both houses
of the General Court among
JA's papers relating to his work for this committee that are now in the Huntington Library
(see below in this note).
JA went on to say in his letter to Gerry that after spending “most of the Winter
[i.e. spring] in rummaging” through books and documents, he “wrote a very lengthy, I cannot say
a very accurate State of the Massachusetts Claim to those Lands, a particular Examination,
and an Attempt at a Refutation of the Claim of New York, and a similar Discussion
of that of New Hampshire.—Mr. Bowdoin revised it and reported it, a few days before
Gen. Gage removed the General Court to Salem” in May 1774. At Salem (as told also
in the Autobiography) the report was lost in the shuffle. “There is no other Copy
that I know of—the first rough blotted Draught, was left in my Table drawer in my
Office in Boston, when the Regulars shut up the Town. The Table, Papers and all were
carried off, when they left the Town.”
Thus far
JA in 1779. The statement in his Autobiography that his report of 1774 reappeared and
proved useful a decade later when Massachusetts' western claims were reasserted and
eventually settled on the one hand by a cession to the United States and on the other
by a compromise with New York, seems to be clearly confirmed by a letter from Tristram
Dalton to
JA, Newburyport, 6 April 1784 (
Adams Papers). (The connection between Massachusetts' claim to Vermont and its claim to lands
“to the Westward of New York” was owing to the sea-to-sea grant in the 1629 Charter
of the Massachusetts Bay Company; see
Paullin, Atlas, pl. 42, 47E, 97A–B, and p. 26, 36, 72–73.)
Only fragments of the once voluminous record of
JA's investigation of Massachusetts' territorial claims have survived. These include
some dozen folio pages of notes and drafts among his miscellaneous papers (M/JA/17,
Adams Papers, Microfilms, Reel No. 191), one page captioned “An Examination of the Claim of New York,” a six-page
draft entitled “A State of the Title of the Massachusetts-Bay, to Lands between Connecticutt
& Hudsons Rivers, at the North West Corner of the Province,” and three pages of “Additions
to be made to the Title of the Massachusetts.” These, at least, were not carried off
by the British from
JA's Boston office. In the present century a further and very miscellaneous mass of
papers assembled by
JA during his work for the committee of 1774 came into the autograph market. They are
listed and inaccurately described in
The Library of Henry F. De Puy (Part One), Anderson Galleries, N.Y., Catalogue of Sale No. 1440, 17–18 Nov. 1919, lot 8 (now
in
CSmH). They consist of nearly 50 pages in various hands, including
JA's, but the principal paper, which is identified in the auction catalogue as
JA's “brief” for Massachusetts' claims (to Vermont), is actually, according to both
internal evidence and
JA's own endorsement there on, a copy by
JA of “Charles Phelps's State of this Case.” Phelps was “an Inhabitant of the
[New Hampshire] Grants” who favored Massachusetts' claims; see
JA to Gerry,
17 Oct. 1779, cited above. Among the other papers in
CSmH is a copy of James Bowdoin's report to the Massachusetts Council on the petition
of Charles Phelps, undated but followed immediately by copies of the votes of the
Council and House, 25, 28 Feb., 1 March 1774, appointing Bowdoin and
JA “to prepare a full and clear State of the Province's Title” (
JA's endorsement)—the action that led to
JA's undertaking his laborious researches.
Whatever the fate of
JA's elaborate but apparently irrecoverable report may have been, his interest in Massachusetts'
northern and western territorial claims remained strong, and his early investigation
of them later proved extremely useful in the struggle over the northeastern boundary
of the United States in the preliminary peace negotiations at Paris; see his Diary
entry of
10 Nov. 1782 and
note 1 there; also his letters printed in the
Boston Patriot, Oct.–Nov. 1811 (partly reprinted in
JA, Works, 1:667–668), in which he told once more the story of his defense of Massachusetts'
title to Vermont under the Charter of 1629.