Part 2 — EBENEZER RICHARDSON.
Reading edition
The Richardson family were the earliest settlers of Woburn, Massachusetts. Ezekiel, Samuel and Thomas Richardson, three brothers, with four other persons, laid the foundations of the town, in 1641. In 1642 it was incorporated under the name of Woburn, the name of a town in Herefordshire.
Samuel Richardson, the ancestor of Ebenezer Richardson, came to Charlestown, about 1636, as his name appears on the records of July 1 of that date as one of a committee to "lay out lots of land for hay." When the three brothers settled at Woburn, they lived near each other on the same street, which was laid out in 1647, as Richardson's Row, by which name it has ever since been known. It runs almost due north and south, in the N. E. part of the present town of Winchester.
Lieut. John Richardson, eldest son of Samuel, was born Nov. 12, 1639, was a yeoman, and soldier in King Philip's war, and passed his life in Woburn, and died there in 1696. John Richardson, son of Lieut. John was a carpenter, and lived in Woburn. He died March 18, 1715.
Timothy Richardson, son of John, was born in Woburn, 1687, was badly wounded in Lovewell's Indian fight at Pigwacket. The colony having offered one hundred pounds for Indian scalps, Captain Lovewell went with forty-six men on a scalp hunt into Maine. Captain Lovewell was the first one killed. The fight lasted ten hours, those who left the fatal battle ground, were twenty in number, of whom eleven were badly wounded, among whom was Timothy Richardson, who lived for ten years afterwards, but in great suffering he died in Woburn in 1735.
Ebenezer Richardson, eldest son of Timothy, and Abigail Johnson, was born in Woburn, March 31, 1718, and married Rebecca (Fowle) Richardson, daughter of Captain John and Elizabeth (Prescott) Fowle, of Woburn, and widow of Phineas Richardson. His father's farm was bounded easterly by the Woburn and Stoneham line, it was here probably that Ebenezer was born.[248]
Ebenezer Richardson was an officer of the Customs in Boston. On the 22 Feb., 1770, he was assailed by a mob who chased him to his home, bricks and stones were thrown at the windows. Richardson, provoked, fired at random into the mob, dangerously wounding one of them, Samuel Gore, and mortally wounding another, Christopher Snider, a poor German boy, who died the next morning.
The excitement was intense, the funeral of the boy was attended by the revolutionists, and the event taken advantage of to fire the passions of the people. On the 20th of April, Richardson was tried for his life and brought in guilty of murder. Chief Justice Hutchinson viewed the guilt of Richardson, as everybody would now, a clear case of justifiable homicide, and consequently refused to sign a warrant for his execution, and after lying in prison two years, was, on application to the King, pardoned and set at liberty.[249] To reward Richardson for what he had suffered, he was appointed in 1773 as an officer of the Customs of Philadelphia.
Historians have treated Richardson very unfairly, and caused his memory to be execrated. He was a Custom House officer, and the duties of his office caused him to seize smuggled goods, as any custom house officer would at the present time, previous to that he belonged to the secret service division for the detection of illicit traders, on this account he has always been contemptuously called an "informer". He was not any worse than hundreds of secret service agents employed at the present time by the United States Government, to detect law-breakers. They are of course detested by the criminal classes, and the mountaineer moonshiners of Kentucky consider it no crime to kill them, when the opportunity offers. After Richardson's release, he went to Philadelphia to reside, so as to escape mob violence; the malignity of the revolutionists, however, followed him, and a scurrilous effusion was published there entitled "The Life and Humble Confession of Richardson the Informer."
The broadside was embellished with a rude wood cut of Richardson firing into the mob, and the killing of the boy Snider. The same has been recently republished, and the author states "Whatever facts it may contain, are doubtless expanded beyond the limits of the actual truth."[250]