Suppose a Boston merchant, stopping at a public house on a certain warm August Monday evening, had picked up a copy of the Evening-Post. He might have noticed a small advertisement, among others, reading

‘Mr. Hallowell’ was Benjamin Hallowell, Esquire, and the merchant who noticed the ad would have known that. Hallowell was the most prominent shipwright on the Boston waterfront and a member of the Boston political elite. That political elite, however, was by no means politically united, and neither was the town of Boston, at the top of whose society they sat.

Boston had been through the Stamp Act riots two years earlier, and, while that crisis had passed, its citizens now knew full well what the mob – and those at the top of society who supported and used it when it suited them – could and would do to resist the enforcement of laws they did not like. That mob had sacked the home of Hallowell's own son, Benjamin III, Comptroller of Customs.3 For the most part, unpopular laws concerned themselves with maritime trade: who could sail where, carry what cargoes, and how much they would pay in Customs duties for landing those cargoes. The Navigation Acts, as they were known, were quite old by this point. They had imposed restrictions on British American trade, but they had created a privileged space for that trade as well; American shipping enjoyed the protections of sailing and trading inside the British Empire, by 1767 the largest, richest, and most powerful maritime empire the world had yet known. British American ships enjoyed the protections of imperial law and imperial warships. Yet, as trade with the enemy, France, in the late war of 1756–63 had made quite clear to anyone paying attention, some British American merchants, like their counterparts based in Britain, also took advantage of opportunities to flout those laws when it suited them and when they could get away with it.