Conway Historical Society to explore ‘forgotten Founding Father’ Joseph Hawley

Names like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin all evoke the image of the United States’ Founding Fathers, but have you ever heard of Major Joseph Hawley?

A Northampton resident, Hawley, the namesake of the Franklin County community, was a contemporary of America’s founders with his roots right here in the Pioneer Valley and a new presentation hosted by the Conway Historical Society will explore the man’s life, as well as how the “forgotten Founding Father” worked closely with those in the history books.

Conway resident Philip Kantor will deliver the presentation at the Conway Historical Society, 50 Main St., on Thursday, May 8, at 7 p.m. The event is free, although donations are welcome, and refreshments will be served.

“He basically is never talked about as a Founding Father. His contemporaries very much considered him one,” Kantor said. “He encouraged people to resolve their differences with the ballot box instead of the cartridge box.”

Kantor’s presentation will kick off with Ely’s Insurrection of 1782, named after Conway resident Samuel Ely, who led an angry mob of rioters to Northampton to protest the Massachusetts Constitution. The state Constitution, Ely and others claimed, was undemocratic to the point that he said he would “rather fight against this authority than against the king of Great Britain, according to “Samuel Ely: Forerunner of Shays [Rebellion],” an article in the January 1932 edition of the New England Quarterly journal.

On April 12, 1782, Ely rallied a mob of rioters to the Northampton courthouse, where he was arrested and charged with treason and sedition. On June 13, 1782, a group of 130 men traveled to Springfield intending to break Ely out of jail. Ely was freed from jail and then was able to escape from the state militia during a skirmish with Ely’s rescuers.

Kantor will use Hawley’s eyewitness correspondence to talk about the events and how his, as well as others’ beliefs of natural rights, treason and due process are still relevant today. In one example of Hawley’s letters, he said discontent even began to spread within the state’s militia.

“Our taxes are very heavy,” Hawley wrote in a June 7, 1782 letter, “especially on the middling people they are much more distressed, than the real poor.”

Kantor said this event, as well as the exploration of the rest of Hawley’s life, which was marred by extreme bouts of depression that left him homebound, is a fascinating local story often left untold. As part of the tumultuous events of Ely’s Insurrection, Samuel Adams was sent to the region, where he chaired Conway’s 1782 annual Town Meeting.

“It’s the best part of Conway history and western Mass. history,” Kantor said. “[Hawley] was an amazing man that people don’t know about.”

Other events Kantor will cover include the 1767-1768 “Berkshire Affair,” which grew out of the Stamp Act and eventually boiled over in Lanesborough, where several men violently interfered in the arrest of two men for non-payment of debt. Hawley undertook the appeal of one of the men, Seth Warren, and published scathing criticisms of the court in the Boston Evening post, according to Kantor and the New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives division.

In his biggest claim to fame, Hawley wrote the 1774 “Broken Hints” letter to John Adams, which laid out the roadmap to independence from Great Britain. Adams, the second president of the U.S., claimed “Broken Hints” one of his most valuable letters, requesting Hezekiah Niles send the original copy back, as he “would not exchange this original for the show book of Harvard college,” according to the National Archives.

“Broken Hints” was intended to be communicated to the Committee of Congress for Massachusetts and asserted that it was “now or never, that we must assert our liberty.”

“We must fight, if we can’t otherwise rid ourselves of British taxation, all revenues, and the constitution or form of government enacted for us by the British parliament,” Hawley’s letter to Adams reads. “It is evil against right — utterly intolerable to every man who has any idea or feeling of right or liberty.”

While Hawley lived long before the age of photography, the desk on which he wrote many of these influential letters is still here in western Massachusetts. His writing desk is available to be viewed at the Forbes Library.

For more information about future Conway Historical Society events, visit conwaymasshistory.org.

Chris Larabee can be reached at [email protected].