Now, if all dealers in dates, of the olden time, would discriminate, between the old style and the new, we should be spared a vast deal of vexation; and the good people of Boston, notional as they proverbially are, would not appear, in their creditable zeal to do honor to a public benefactor, to have given him a funeral oration, a twelve month before he was dead. If the year be taken to begin, on the first of January, then Dr. Allen is right; and Peter Faneuil died March 3, 1743. But if it did not begin, till the twenty-fifth of March, and, legally, it certainly did not, before 1752, when the new style was adopted, in Great Britain, and the Provinces, then Eliot, and Pemberton, and the title page of the oration, and the records of the court, and the mourning ring are right, and Peter Faneuil died, in 1742.
An illustration of this principle may be found, on the title page of the oration itself. It is stated to have been delivered, March 14, 1742, and printed in 1743. Having been delivered near the close of the year 1742, it was printed, doubtless, soon after March 25, which was New Year’s day for 1743.
The public journals, nevertheless, seem to have adopted, and adhered to the idea, that January 1, was the first day of the historical year, long before the style was altered; and thus, in the Weekly News Letter, published in Boston, Faneuil is stated to have died, in 1743. This journal contains an obituary notice. A few imperfect numbers of this paper are all that remain, and its extreme rarity leads me to copy the obituary here:—
“Thursday, March 10, 1743. On Thursday last, dyed at his seat in this Town, Peter Faneuil, Esq., whose remains, we hear, are to be enterred this afternoon; a gentleman, possessed of a very ample fortune, and a most generous spirit, whose noble benefaction to this town, and constant employment of a great number of tradesmen, artificers and labourers, to whom he was a liberal paymaster; whose hospitality to all, and secret unbounded chirity to the poor—made his life a public blessing, and his death a general loss to, and universally regretted by, the inhabitants; who had been so sensible of their obligations to him, for the sumptuous edifice, which he raised at his private expence, for their Market house and Town Hall, that, at a general town meeting, as a testimony of their gratitude, they voted, that the place of their future consultations should be called by his name forever: in doing which they perpetuated their own honor as much as his memory; for, by this record posterity will know the most publick spirited man, in all regards, that ever yet appeared on the Northern continent of America, was a member of their community.”
In the Boston Evening Post of March 7, 1743, in a brief notice of Peter Faneuil’s death, the disease of which he died is said to have been “dropsey.”
Now that we have established the period of Peter’s death, it may be well, to establish the period of his birth; and this we can do, with certainty, even to an hour, from authentic documents. In addition to other means, for ascertaining dates, and various particulars, respecting Peter Faneuil, and the members of his family—through the kindness of the Genealogical Society, I have, before me, a folio volume of his commercial correspondence: mutilated, indeed it is, by some thoughtless hand, but furnishes some curious and interesting matter. Many of his letters are written in French; and those, which are in English, are well composed. I have found but a single instance, in which he writes our language, like a Frenchman. Upon that occasion, he was in a passion with a certain judge of the admiralty, complained of his ill usage, and charged him with “capporice.”
No. CXXIV.
I am indebted to Mr. Charles Faneuil Jones, a grandson of Mary Ann Jones, Peter Faneuil’s sister, for the use of some ancient papers, and family relics; and to George Bethune, Esquire, of Boston, the grandson of Benjamin Faneuil, Peter’s brother, for the loan of a venerable document—time worn, torn, and sallow—the record of the birth of Peter Faneuil, and of his brothers and sisters. This document, from its manifest antiquity, the masculine character of the hand writing, and the constant use of the parental expressions—notre fils—notre fille—I, at first, supposed to be the original autograph of Benjamin, the father of Peter. This conjecture was, of course, demolished, by the last entry, on the record, which is of old Benjamin’s decease, but in the same peculiar hand.
The document is in French; and, after a careful comparison—literatim—with the volume of Peter’s commercial correspondence, now in my possession—I have very little doubt, that this record was copied, by Peter, from the paternal original, with the additional entry, by himself, of the date of his father’s death. At the bottom, and beneath a line of separation, and by another hand, with a fresher ink, is the following entry—“Le 6 D’Aout 1725, M. Gillam Phillips de Boston a epousee ma Fille Marie Faneuil agée de dix sept et quatre mois.” The 6th of August, 1725, Mr. Gillam Phillips, of Boston, married my daughter, Marie, aged seventeen and four months. The expression ma file, shows this entry to have been made by Peter’s mother, then the widow of Benjamin, who appears, by this record, to have died, at New York, March 31, 1718-9, aged 50 years and 8 months.