Hudson's travails

When one encyclopedia called Hudson Leverett "disreputable," I actually got kind of mad. I knew that he had fallen out with the Puritan church, had refused to join, had moved way off into the city where he was hard to find, with his second wife, step-daughter, and his own son and daughter, one by his new wife. There were things about him that people didn't like: that he wasn't an upstanding member of the church or the downtown community. But "disreputable?" I hadn't found anything that would cause that.

I've been wading through the legal records of County Court in Boston, and he appears in there a lot. He actually was a practicing lawyer, although it's been said by many that law was not a legitimate trade in this era and that one could hardly make a living practicing it. OK, so I understand that he had a rough time bringing up his three children (not counting John, who was in Harvard by the 1670s, almost fully grown) while practicing law, and at the same time being completely overshadowed by his father's rising star; his father was elected Vice Governor in 1672 and then Governor in 1674.

But around that time, Hudson's own life began to fall apart. His wife gave birth in 1674, but the child wasn't recorded until later, and even then, without a name, and the note: Here begins to fayle the record. Somebody was no longer keeping track, as if his wife was sick now, and he refused to deal with the church (the best record-keeper) and even tell them who the child was. I suspect this was Mary, not Thomas; by 1679, his first wife Sarah was dead, he'd remarried Elizabeth and taken on her daughter, and soon he was out in Roxbury with Elizabeth, her daughter, Mary, and Thomas. Thomas could have been born before he married (which would explain why it wasn't recorded), and Sarah could have died before 1679; both possibilities have come up.

But here's the clue I found. In 1674 (the year his father became governor), he was sued by Henry Bull for "non-payment of 2,101 pound of Virginia Tobacco remaining due on a bill or specialty under the hand of saide Hudson Leverett bearing the date of 14th December 1669...." It appears that, back when John was seven, Hudson had bought this tobacco and never paid for it. It appears from the above that the 2,101 pounds is money, not pounds of tobacco, but I can't be sure of that. It appears that the 2,101 pounds is what's left of the bill, still unpaid, that this Henry Bull has to sue him for, because it appears he never will pay it if he's not forced to by the court.

Wow, take a few deep breaths.

You have a guy who refused to join the church in a small, righteous puritan town. I know how these small towns work. If you're on the wrong side, you stay on the wrong side, and it gets worse, until you're involved in pretty much every anti-establishement activity known to the town. In other words, trouble finds you. Now I have no idea about the nature of tobacco dealing in Boston in 1669, but Hudson was apparently right in the center of it. He couldn't have bought all this tobacco for personal consumption (could he?)...but must rather have been dealing it much as one would deal other smokable things in the modern world.

And yet, he fell behind on his bills, and five years later he still hadn't paid this one.

My new working theories are the following: his money problems started well before 1674. In 1674 his father was being elected governor, but his wife was having a baby, not recording it, and falling into a sickness from which she would not recover. His salary as a lawyer was not covering his bills and his tobacco-dealing side-hustle didn't prove to be lucrative, as either he'd traded a lot of tobacco for alcohol, or he'd simply lost the money, and it was beginning to catch up to him. There is general evidence of an alcohol problem (he would later be sued by an old friend, a barkeeper, presumably for unpaid tab. I have to finish going through these records and put them in time order; I'm not sure what else I'll find.

I'm beginning to get a sense of "disreputable;" not paying a two-thousand pound bill for tobacco begins to qualify.

Colonial Society of Massachusetts. (2017). Vol. 29, Records of the Suffolk County Court 1671-1680, Part 1. https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/694#ch16.