Sarah Bradlee Fulton and the Daughters of Liberty

There have been various events related to this anniversary already, leading up to a commemoration on the afternoon and evening of the sixteenth, and the plan for that is to culminate in a reenactment of dumping the British East India Company's tea into Boston Harbor. There is an episode on the Boston Tea Party in the archive from way back in two thousand and eight, when the show was only about six months old and was just almost a completely

different podcast from what it is now. And while I definitely don't encourage people to take the name Stuff You Missed in History Class completely literally, you can't really describe the Boston Tea Party as lesser known, at least not in the United States. At the same time, I wanted to do something connected to all of this, and eventually I landed on Sarah Bradley Fulton, who is sometimes called

the mother of the Boston Tea Party. What we know about Sarah Bradley Fulton is kind of a series of anecdotes. They mostly trace back to the same sources, and those can't really be corroborated. We can't prove that they didn't happen, but we also can't prove that they did. So that is where we will start. The first written mention at least that we know of, connecting Sarah Bradley Fulton to

the Boston Tea Party is from eighteen seventy three. It was written by Eliza M. Gill for the Boston Tea Party centennial, and it was printed in the Boston Evening Traveler a day later. Gil was born in eighteen fifty one and had been a school teacher before going to work for the city of Medford, Massachusetts, and she was also active in local history. She described the content of her letter as something quote imparted to me by descendants still living of men who took part in the Boston

Tea Party. So this letter includes some of the same basic points as our main source of information on Sarah Bradley Fulton that was written by Helen T. Wilde about twenty five years later. There are a whole lot of like recently written articles about Sarah Bradley Fulton that are point for point this article. Wilde was born in Medford in eighteen sixty. She also worked as a school teacher before eventually going to work for the city, first as a clerk and then as a tax assessor. She and

Gil knew one another. Both of the held leadership roles in the Medford Historical Society, and both of them were among the founders of Medford's chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. That chapter was named for Sarah Bradley Fulton, and when that chapter was first founded, wild was its

secretary and gil was historian. Wilde's piece on Fulton was written for the eighteen ninety seven inauguration of the Sarah Bradley Fulton Chapter of the DAR and it was later printed in the Medford Historical Record and in American Monthly Magazine. And just about everything that comes up in articles about Sarah Bradley Fulton today traces back to this one piece.

Gil had not named the descendants still living that she talked to when writing her letter to the Boston Evening Traveler, other than saying that it was one of the descendants of Sarah's husband, John, and Wild doesn't name her sources in her piece either, but Fulton's grandson, also named John f had been profiled by The Boston Globe the year before,

and he told some similar stories about his grandmother. As a side note, this Boston Globe article includes a three paragraph quotation that as presented as though it is in Sarah Bradley Fulton's own voice and words. It's not totally clear whether this was something she actually said or wrote, or if this quotation was more like a literary device That passage is gonna come up again later. This article also describes John Fulton as walking quote arm in arm

with a modern analyst. So could that modern analyst have been Wild or Gill or someone else completely different who can say, we don't really know. And just to be clear, that's not analyst like someone who analyzes things. It's analyst an n al like someone who is involved in the

animal of history. Right. There are some discrepancies between what Eliza M. Gill wrote and Helen T. Wild's piece a couple of decades later, Like according to Gill's letter, Sarah Bradley and John Fulton were not married yet when the Boston Tea Party happened, but according to Wild, they were.

Wild is correct. We also don't really know the explanation for the discrepancies, like if the information came from different people, or if Wild and Gil each talked to the same person and their recollection changed over the years, or if

new documentation was unearthed, or some other possibility. Regardless, what we're talking about today was definitely part of local law in Medford and Fulton family law by the mid to late nineteenth century, but there's no direct evidence to substantiate a lot of it, and no corroborating accounts from the same time, like there were no friends of Sarah Bradley Fulton who wrote about her in their diary that we have unearthed so far to kind of back up these stories.

Although some of the Bradleys were documented as being actively involved with the Colonists uprising, there are no written mentions of Sarah Bradley Fulton or her family members in connection to the Boston Tea Party until about one hundred years

after the fact. Her grandson John was in his thirties when she died, and he did know her, but that was also decades after the Boston Tea Party happened, and then the Boston Globe profile and Wilds Peace for the dar Those are written another sixty more years or so after her death. There are also some details that seem maybe a little questionable. We will talk about them. We do know that Sarah Bradley Fulton was a real person. She was born Sarah Bradley on December twenty fourth, seventeen forty,

in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Her birth was registered with the town of Dorchester, although her last name in the registry is spelled bradleydl e Y instead of Brdlee. Allegedly, this spelling change was intentional because there were so many Bradley's that it was getting hard to keep up with who was related to who. At the time, Dorchester was its own town, but it was annexed by the City of Boston in eighteen seventy. In seventeen sixty two, so skipping ahead quite

a bit, Sarah Bradley married John Fulton. Later they moved to Medford, where they lived for the rest of their lives. They had at least ten children together, with seven or eight of them surviving to adulthood, I found slightly different names and counts among different sources. A few years after getting married, Sarah Bradley Fulton reportedly became active in the Daughters of Liberty. As with the more widely known Sons of Liberty, the origins of the Daughters of Liberty are

pretty murky. It also seems like the name Daughters of Liberty was used for established organizations as well as more broadly for women who were, in one way or another working toward the same overall goals, that is, resisting British taxation and advocating for the rights and freedoms of Britain's

colonies in North America. This is another case or we don't have specific documentation of what she was doing, but both the Sons and Daughters of Liberty started to coalesce in seventeen sixty five in response to the Stamp Act. This is a tax on legal documents and printed materials that Parliament passed in the wake of the Seven Years War as a way for Britain to bring in more revenue.

All such documents had to be stamped as proof that the tax had been paid, and a lot of people in the colonies objected to this tax, both because of the tax itself and because the colonies did not have direct representation in the Parliament that had passed it, so,

in other words, no taxation without representation. In the wake of protests and unrest and various threats against tax collectors and other British officials, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in seventeen sixty seven, while stressing that it did have the right to tax the colonies. Soon after, Parliament passed another set of acts known as the Townsend Acts. One of the towns In Acts was the Revenue Act, which established duties on various goods including lead, glass, paper, paint, and tea.

Another of the acts, the Indemnity Act, was passed a few days later and lowered the duty on the East India Company's tea imports into England and also refunded duties on tea that was then exported to the American colonies or to Ireland. This was really an effort to try

to save the East India Company from financial collapse. Smugglers were bringing a lot of Dutch East India Company tea into the colonies, which could be sold much cheaper than British East India Company tea with all its duties in place,

People were still not happy about these taxes. Though. While the Sons of Liberty were known for public and sometimes to destructive protests like hanging officials and effigy and eventually the destruction of the Tea that later became known as the Boston Tea Party, the Daughters of Liberty were not usually out in the streets demonstrating. Instead, they wrote letters and gathered signatures. They organized boycotts of British goods, and

they sought out locally made alternatives. When the Sons of Liberty organized non importation associations in which merchants would agree not to import British goods, the Daughters of Liberty worked on ways to deal with all the resulting shortages. Linen and cloth were among the goods that merchants refused to import from Britain, so the Daughters of Liberty's part in

this included a lot of spinning. Spinning bees were already a thing, but especially in the Northeast, they became a widespread act of collective resistance among colonial women, as did wearing homespun like Here's a description from the Boston Chronicle in seventeen sixty six quote on the fourth instant eighteen daughters of Liberty, young ladies of good reputation, assembled at the house of Doctor Ephraim Bowen in this town in consequence of an invitation of that gentleman who had discovered

a laudable zeal for the introducing home manufacturers. There they exhibited a fine example of industry by spinning from sunrise until dark, and displayed a spirit for saving their sinking country rarely to be found among persons of more age and experience. In the wake of all of this, the value of imports from Britain into the colonies dropped enormously between seventeen sixty seven and seventeen sixty eight, although this

drop was largely focused in the North. In terms of British imports, things didn't really change all that much in the South at all, with the exception of the tax on tea. The Towns and Acts taxes were repealed in seventeen seventy. We're going to come back to the Tea and the Boston Tea party after we have a sponsor break. While Sarah Bradley Fulton and her husband John established their home in Medford, which is northwest of Boston on the

Mystic River. Her brother, Nathaniel Bradley, continued to live in Boston. He was a carpenter and a craftsman, and according to Helen T. Wilde's account, friends and neighbors gathered at his home at the corner of Hollis and Tremont Streets for codfish suppers on Saturday nights. In her words, his carpenter shop and kitchen became quote meeting places for Boston's most

devoted patriots. And again, according to Wilde's account, the Bradley home in Boston was one of the places where men prepared for the Boston Tea Party, although that name was not coined until decades after it happened. The Boston Tea Party circled back to Britain's efforts to keep the British East India Company afloat in terms of both revenue and offloading enormous amounts of tea that were sitting in London warehouses unsold. Enormous as in about seventeen million pounds of

unsold tea. Parliament passed the t act on May tenth, seventeen seventy three, which gave the British East India Company the right to ship tea directly to the colonies, rather than having to ship it to Britain first. The company was also allowed to employ its own agents to sell tea rather than going through colonial merchants, since it was no longer having to ship tea to England and pay a duty on it there. This meant the British East India Company could start selling tea in the colonies for

less than the price of smuggled Dutch tea. But to a lot of people in the colonies, access to cheaper tea was not what mattered. It was that tax they would be paying if they bought it. Although the Townshenacts tax on tea had still been in place between seventeen seventy and seventeen seventy three, and there were still a lot of people the colonies who refused to drink tea during those years, the Tea Act really revived people's anger

and frustration over this issue. A lot of people in the colonies really doubled down on their boycott of tea, and the Daughters of Liberty promoted alternatives sometimes called Liberty Tea, including mint, raspberry leaf, and various herbs and roots. Ships arriving in American ports were met by angry mobs and forced to leave still laden with their tea. On November twenty eighth, seventeen seventy three, a ship called the Dartmouth arrived in Boston. The Eleanor arrived on December second, and

the Beaver on December fifteenth. Each of these ships carried more than one hundred chests of East India Company tea, but the ships themselves were owned by local merchants. Newspapers had started reporting on shipments of tea that were headed for the colonies in October, so the Sons of Liberty had been holding public meetings on the issue for weeks before these ships started arriving, at locations including the Liberty

Tree near Boston Common and Faniel Hall. These meetings grew after the Dartmouth arrived, with organizers moving to the Old South Meetinghouse to accommodate the larger crowd. So people like the Sons of Liberty demanded that these ships be sent back to England, but the Collector of Customs refused to let them leave the harbor without the duties being paid on the tea. Of course, the people who owned these ships did not want to pay a duty on a

product that could not be unloaded or sold. While officials in other port cities had allowed ships carrying tea to return to England, Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor Thomas Hutchinson insisted that the ships remain in the port until the tea was unloaded, and he stationed two gunships at the harbor to prevent their departure. He was not interested in de escalating the situation at all. The last of a long series of public meetings was held at the Old South

Meetinghouse on December sixteenth, seventeen seventy three. That day, the governor was once again asked if the ships could be sent back to England, and he once again refused. There's a little bit of fuzziness regarding the sequence of events from here. There's a popular story that Samuel Adams gave a pre arranged signal for the men to go down to the harbor to destroy the tea, by saying this

meeting can do nothing more to save the country. But this is another thing that didn't appear in writing until almost one hundred years after the fact. Regardless, shortly after getting this last update on the governor's refusal, a group of men boarded the dartmouth the Eleanor, and the beaver broke open the more than three hundred crates of tea they were carrying and dumped the contents into the harbor. At least some of these men were dressed in costumes

meant to resemble indigenous people. Here's an account from participant George Hughes, written in eighteen thirty four years after this event occurred. Quote. It was now evening, and I immediately dressed myself in the costume of an Indian, equipped with a small hatchet, which I and my associates denominated the tomahawk, with which and a club. After having painted my face and hands with coal dust in the shop of a blacksmith, I repaired to Griffin's Wharf, where the ships lay that

contained the tea. When I first appeared in the street after being thus disguised, I fell in with many who were dressed, equipped and painted as I was, and who fell in with me and marched in order to the place of our destination. There's really no first hand documentation about why, specifically at least some of the men were in these costumes, and it's also not clear what exactly

those costumes entailed. Some participants' first hand accounts used generic words like Indian or Indian dress, including that of Joshua Wyeth, who wrote the first published account from a participant more than fifty years later. One Boston news report from a couple of days after the event describes the men as

dressed as quote Mohawks or Indians. Well, another references Indians from Narraganset, and still other accounts mentioned that at least some of the men were not in indigenous dress at all. We also don't definitively know why the Mohawk and the Narraganset were the nations that were specifically named in various news reports and other accounts. But these are not the same indigenous nation. The Mohawk or the Kenyukinaka are one of the six nations of the Hudenashani. They're an Iroquois

speaking people. Their ancestral homeland is in what's now eastern New York State, as well as adjacent parts of Canada and Vermont. The Narraganset are an Algonquian speaking people whose ancestral homeland is in what's now Rhode Island. So these are two different nations from two different language groups whose homelands are hundreds of miles apart. Neither of them are among the nations whose homelands are near what's now Boston.

The reason for adopting this dress also is not clearly documented anywhere, but a lot of colonists, particularly colonists who were aligned with groups like the Sons of Liberty, already saw Indigenous people as something of a symbol representing ideas like autonomy, freedom, and unity. People had warned so called

Indian dress and other protests against British policies. Prior to the Boston Tea Party in New York, Broadsides signed the Mohawks had been circulating warning people against assisting with the landing of ships carrying British tea. The destruction of the tea was also a symbolic protest, and dressing as Native Americans or in clothing inspired by indigenous dress was symbolic

of the men's connection to America, not to Britain. So this may have been meant as a basic disguise or to try to deflect suspicion away from the colonists, But Indigenous imagery already had these additional layers of maning and There's obviously also some irony here. Colonists were appropriating indigenous imagery as an emblem of ideals like freedom while also waging war against indigenous nations and violating treaties and generally

viewing Indigenous peoples as savage and inferior. Also, the idea that these men were specifically dressed as Mohawk rather than more generically Indian or possibly narraganset like that doesn't seem to have really solidified until decades later. Okay, So, to get back to Sarah Bradley Fulton. According to Wilde's account, some of the men who participated in the destruction of the tea met and prepared at her brother Nathaniel Bradley's

carpenter shop. Fulton and her sister in law, who was just referred to as Missus Bradley in surviving accounts, were there to help. This is also one of the discrepancies between wild and gil Eliza m. Gill's letter says this happened at the home of Bradley's father, not her brother. The letter also says that John Fulton and four Bradley

brothers Nathaniel, Josiah, David and Thomas, were all involved. That passage from the Boston Globe that reads like a quote from her says that Sarah Bradley Fulton helped her brothers quote make a perfect disguise, And some sources describe Fulton as having been the one to come up with the whole idea that the sons of liberty should dress like

indigenous men. Is really not clear who first gave her the credit for doing that, But as we just established, so called Indian dress had already become part of the culture of protest among the colonists, especially in the Northeast, and doing this already had some layers of symbolic meetings. So even if she was the person who said, and also where this y'all should do this? Yeah, like that was something people were already doing. The accounts we have

of Sarah Bradley Fulton's involvement very a little bit. Either she stayed behind to keep the water hot so the men could remove whatever they'd put on their faces when they returned, or she went down to the harbor to watch from a distance and then left before the men did to get everything ready. And there's some suggestion that a British soldier or spy stopped by the Bradley Holme at some point during the evening, either while Fulton was there with her sister in law or after the men

had come back and removed their costumes. But this soldier or spy concluded that there was just some laundry or other housework being done, and he moved along. Wild's account describes it this way, quote, Nathaniel Bradley's principles were well known, and a spy, hoping to find some proof against him, peered in at the kitchen window, but saw these two women moving about so quietly and naturally that he passed on,

little dreaming what was really in progress there. Uh, this isn't one of the things that doesn't really make sense. Though Gill's letter and the Boston Globe profile mentioned this as well. All three of them seemed to make it sound like this guy came and looked in the window and left unnoticed. So how did anyone know they had that he had been there. This is what the Internet

would call a plot hole. Regardless of all that, toward the end of the nineteenth century, in the AARW, when Wild and Gil were writing about Sarah Bradley Fulton, the Bradley home at the corner of Tremont and Hollis became known as the Tea Party House. There were even photo postcards of it available for sale, which is what people had to content themselves with after the house was torn down in eighteen ninety eight. We will talk about Sarah Bradley Fulton's life after the Boston Tea Party, after a

sponsor break. Tensions between Britain and its colonies and the Americas had been growing for years before the Boston Tea Party, which again was not called that until much later. Those tensions escalated really dramatically and its aftermath tea protests continued in Massachusetts and other colonies. In seventeen seventy four, Parliament passed a set of laws that came to be known as the Intolerable Acts as one of several putative measures.

The Revolutionary War began with the Battles of Lexington and conquered in April of seventeen seventy five. According to Helen T. Wilde's account of Sarah Bradley Fulton's life, she was actively involved in the war, hearing Paul Revere's ride to raise the alarm as he passed through Medford on April eighteenth, he allegedly made a little pit stop for some Medford rum. On June seventeenth, the Medford militia fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill, across the Charles River from Boston and

down the Mystic River from Medford. Fulton organized local women to work as nurses in a field hospital that was set up in an open area by Wade's tavern. In Wilde's words quote, among them, the steady nerves of Sarah Fulton made her a leader. One poor fellow had a bullet in his cheek, and she removed it. She almost forgot the circumstance until years after he came to thank

her for her service. A year later, Major John Brooks of Medford needed a message delivered to General George Washington at the front and asked Fulton's husband to do it. She went herself instead, and according to a story passed down in her family as recorded by a great great great great granddaughter, Fulton concealed the message in the hem of her skirt, and then after the war, Washington came

to thank her in person for delivering that message. Again in Wilde's words quote, it is said that, according to the fashion of the day, John Fulton on this occasion brewed a potation whose chief ingredient was the far famed product of the town. The little silver mounted ladle was dipped in the steaming concoction in the first glass for Missus Fulton's new punch bowl was sipped by his excellency.

This was the proudest day of Sarah Fulton's life. The chair in which he sat and the punch bowl and ladle were always sacred and are still treasured by her descendants. That far famed product of the town mentioned in Wilde's account was that rum that was allegedly enough of a draw to entice Paul Revere to stop for some while warning people of an advancing army. Distilling rum was also a major part of the New England economy. In one

of the ways it was interconnected with slavery. The sugar that was used to make the molasses that was turned into rum in New England distilleries was grown and processed at slave labor camps on islands in the Caribbean. There's also a story about the siege of Boston. A load of firewood was expected to come through Medford, or maybe was being harvested at one of Medford's woodlots, and it

was meant for Revolutionary troops in Cambridge. Knowing that this wood would likely be confiscated by the British, Fulton sent her husband to buy it, hoping that the British soldiers would respect it is his private property. This didn't work out, and the soldiers confiscated it anyway. This is one of the things I have some questions about, like how they knew about this wood and why they thought that buying it would leave it untouched, because you know, the British

confiscating property from people was kind of a thing. In Wild's words quote, when his wife heard the story, she flung on a shawl and went in pursuit. Overtaking the party, She took the oxen by the horns and turned them around. The men threatened to shoot her, but she shouted defiantly as she started her team shoot away. Astonishment, admiration, and amusement were too much for the regulars, and they unconditionally surrendered.

It's a delightful story, even though there's some question marks. Yeah, for sure. At some point after the war, the Marquis de Lafayette reportedly visited the Fulton home and he was seated in the same chair and served from the same punch bowl as Joris, which Washington had been years before. In Wild's account, the chair, punch bowl, and ladle were always sacred. The punch bowl was donated to Mount Vernon

in Fulton's memory in two thousand and six. Some accounts described this punch bowl as silver, but the one that was donated to Mount Vernon is porcelain. After the war, the Fultons bought a house on the road that ran from Medford north to Stoneham. John Fulton died on February ninth, seventeen ninety, when Sarah was forty nine. Decades later, on November ninth, eighteen thirty five, Sarah Bradley Fulton died in her sleep at the age of ninety five, and she

was buried at Salem Street Cemetery in Medford. At the first town meeting to be held after her death, the road she had lived on was renamed Fulton Street in her honor. As we said at the top of the show, the Medford chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution was named for Sarah Bradley Fulton. When it was established, the DAR placed a marker at Fulton's burial site in nineteen hundred, made from the stone that had served as

the door stop at her Medford home. It reads Sarah Bradley Fulton seventeen forty to eighteen thirty five, Heroine of the Revolution, created by the Sarah Bradley Fulton Chapter of the DAR. Nineteen hundred, poet and playwright Grace Stett Austin wrote a play called Sarah Bradley Fulton Patriot, a Colonial drama in three acts in nineteen nineteen. Austin was born in New Hampshire, but at this time was living in Bloomington, Illinois, and she wrote this play under the auspices of the

Letitia Green Stephenson chapter of the DAR. Letitia Green Stephenson was the wife of Adelaie Stevenson, vice president under Grover Cleveland, and she was one of the founders of that Bloomington chapter. To circle back on the authors of those two sources of information on Sarah Bradley Fulton that we've been talking about, Eliza m. Gill lived in her family's home in Medford for more than sixty years before eventually moving to Waltham

message Chusetts. Toward the end of her life. She died there on February tenth, nineteen twenty three, at the age of seventy one. In addition to her work with the DAR and the Medford Historical Society, she was also a member of the New England Historical and Genealogical Society, also of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. Helen T. Wilde died in nineteen forty eight at the

age of eighty eight. In addition to her work that we've already talked about, wild was part of the Medford dar's efforts to purchase and restore a property known as Royal House. To that end, she helped establish the Royal House Association in nineteen oh six. Today, Royal House is a museum called the Royal House and Slave Quarters, which we visited Holly and I back in twenty sixteen. We talked more about this house and its history in our

episode Belinda Sutton's post Enslavement Petitions. We haven't talked very much about slavery in today's episode, but enslaved people in Massachusetts were advocating for their own lib before and during the Revolutionary War, and it was through that advocacy that the Supreme Judicial Court effectively abolished slavery in Massachusetts in seventeen eighty three, and during and after the war, Belinda Sutton, who was enslaved at Royal House, petitioned to be paid

for her years of labor while she was enslaved by the Royals. We are going to run our episode on this as our next Saturday Classic. Yeah. Uh. I also have a little bit of listener mail. All right, it is from Kristen. Kristen says, good morning, Tracy and Holly, Wow, you're Marie Lawrence. Podcast popped up on my YouTube feed this morning. Marie Lawrence is having a moment. I'm so excited that you were struck by her work when you were in Paris and that you feature her in your podcast.

I learned a lot from your research. It's curious why she didn't want Suzanne Moreau to sell her paintings or research her. I was wondering why other than the fact that she was a woman, queer and that her work was figurative and subtle in the boundaries that they pushed against. I volunteer as a docent at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, where we have the first major exhibition of Marie Lawrencen's work.

In over thirty years, our curators have put together the exhibition and catalog Marie Lawrence Sapphik Paris that explores her life and the vast output of her work paintings, poetry, illustrations, the Maison Cubiste, the Ballet le beche, and how her sexuality is a large part of twentieth century modernity. Which is a wonderful exhibition and I hope you have fine time for a visit before it closes on January twenty first, twenty twenty four. Thanks for all you do, Kristin. Kristin,

thanks so much for this email. In a real weird irony, I got this email as my spouse was returning home from a trip to Philadelphia that he took without me. I'm not this is not a criticism. I was not planning to go with him. I had other things going on, including I had other things going on on Monday while he was on the way back when we got this email.

So maybe I will make a little trip to Philadelphia sometime before we will see I mean, obviously there's a lot going on between now and January twenty first, as we are approaching the end of the year, but I sure do like the idea making a little trip down there and doing that because I did, like. I haven't re listened to that episode, but I definitely remember just being so captivated by her work and immediately like I

want to do an episode on this person. So thank you so much for letting me know about this U, And now I have let our listeners know too. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, We're at History Podcasts, adiheartradio dot com. We're all over social media at Mison History, which is where you will find us on Facebook and Instagram and the X thing, and still not any of the other ones because I don't know, I just haven't been real

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