Free Short Story
of the American Revolution
Nobody Knows Who He Was
Boston, 1764. A boy dies under a wagon wheel before noon. By dark, the mob owns the streets.
A prequel to Rising Sons. Fifteen minutes to read. Free.
Ebenezer Mackintosh, a shoemaker. A wooden mask. And the night Boston belonged to the mob.
By Joe Wearmouth, former federal prosecutor and author of Rising Sons, a novel of Boston before the Revolution.
Was he real?
In January 1774, handbills went up overnight in the most public places in Boston. They threatened the tea consignees with "such a Reception, as such vile Ingrates deserve." They were signed Joyce, Junior, Chairman of the Committee for Tarring and Feathering.
The name was most likely a threat. Cornet George Joyce was the junior officer who took Charles the First prisoner in 1647. Two years later the king was beheaded. Whoever chose the name was reminding Boston that Englishmen had killed a king once already.
In April 1777, Abigail Adams watched him drive five men out of town in a cart. Red coat, white wig, a drawn sword, drum and fife, five hundred people following.
Fifty years later, an anonymous writer in a Boston paper remembered him at the head of the Pope Night mobs, his face behind a horrible mask.
Nobody knows who he was. Nobody writing at the time ever mentioned the mask at all.
That is a hole in the record. I filled it.
