The Gardiners of Massachusetts: Provincial Ambition and the British-American Career

Abstract

The three Gardiners, grandfather, father, and son, considered in T. A. Milford's The Gardiners of Massachusetts, were members of a new provincial professional class, “the most learned and articulate of Americans … familiar and comfortable with the progressive literature of political economy generated within the British Empire” (p. 5). These successful “merchants, lawyers, doctors, master craftsmen, and their literary sons and brothers became important molders of opinion and taste. Their rise was … stymied somewhat by the new challenges facing the British state after the American Revolution” (p. 4). According to Milford, the Gardiners were among “the frustrated fortunate” who disseminated English liberalism, “the natural ideology of able and prosperous climbers” (p. 5). All three also shared a “memory of provincial aspiration and insecurity” that “rose to the demands of a republican polity” (p. 221). Rhode Island-born Silvester Gardiner, an ardent Anglican who trained in Great Britain as a physician, set up a successful practice in Boston, supplementing his income by speculating in land and selling European drugs. When the war broke out, Silvester could not accept the new order and fled to England. Silvester's son, John, was a sophisticated attorney, successful businessman, and poor politician. Born in Boston in 1737 and educated at the University of Glasgow, John was a “superprovincial, a citizen of the Anglophone world ruled from London” (p. 71). John made a fortune as a sugar merchant, assisted in the legal defense of John Wilkes, and supported parliamentary supremacy in the West Indies. John returned to America in 1783 because his Loyalist father's land was to be auctioned by the state. To save the estate, “he ‘cursed’ father, king, and church ‘in order to ingratiate himself with the ruling party’” (p. 101). John's son, John Sylvester John, born in 1765 in Wales, was educated in England. Law, medicine, and trade held no appeal for him, but he was attracted to the Episcopal Church. Ordained in New York in 1791, he became rector of Trinity Church in Boston in 1805 and remained at that post until he returned to England in 1830.