Correspondence of William Shirley, Governor of Massachusetts and Military Commander in America, 1731-1760; Volume 1
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William Shirley was a British-American colonial administrator, governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
Background
William was born on December 2, 1694 at Preston, in Sussex, England, United Kingdom, the son of William Shirley, a London merchant, and Elizabeth, daughter of John Godman of Ote Hall, Wivelsfield, Sussex. When he was seven years old his father died, leaving him with comparatively little property but with aristocratic tastes and connections.
Education
From the Merchant Taylors' School, London, he was admitted pensioner at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and received the degree of A. B. in 1714/15.
Career
On July 3, 1720, Shirley was called to the bar. For eleven years Shirley practised law in London, gaining a substantial reputation and influential friends, but not much money. A crisis in his financial affairs decided him to emigrate to America.
With his family he landed at Boston, October 27, 1731, bearing a letter from his kinsman and lifelong patron, Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle, to Gov. Jonathan Belcher. Shirley was by nature a "prerogative man" and his earliest case in Boston of a controversial sort aligned him with that party. He was appointed judge of admiralty in 1733, a post he soon exchanged for that of advocategeneral.
He labored faithfully to enforce the Molasses Act and other measures relative to trade, while in his private capacity he became counsel for Samuel Walde, a large operator in timber lands and one of the richest capitalists of Boston. Unsympathetic toward Belcher's policy of permitting the exploitation of the King's Woods by colonial business men, Shirley sent to England by the hand of his wife a report which tended to weaken the confidence of the government in Belcher's administration. The Governor for the moment was still too strong to be displaced, but in 1740 Shirley's opportunity arose, with the necessity for raising troops in New England for the English expedition to the West Indies. Acting on Newcastle's suggestion, he was much more successful in enlisting recruits than the unpopular Belcher, and this success enabled him to supersede his rival.
He was commissioned governor of Massachusetts on May 25, 1741. One of the first difficulties he had to meet was the problem of the land bank, left to him by his predecessor. This agrarian scheme for cheap money had created much ill feeling in the colony, but Shirley handled his share in it with adroitness, winning the respect even of the defeated land bankers. On his accession to office he also found the colonial defense in a precarious condition, but eventually persuaded the General Court to make fairly liberal appropriations for the repair of Castle William and other fortifications.
By the time that war with the French, which he had foreseen, was declared in 1744, he had put the colony into a fair state of defense, and adjusted the problem of paper money. After the beginning of war, the French governor made an attack on an outpost of New England fishermen on Canso Island which, though ineffectual, aroused the ire of New England, and Shirley conceived the desire to capture Louisbourg. Undismayed by the failure to receive encouragement from the government in England, he matured his plans and laid the proposition before the General Court of Massachusetts. Shirley ably handled the negotiations with the other governments, the Court, and the English authorities. Meanwhile Newcastle in England had been more active in their behalf than the colonists knew, and Commodore Peter Warren, in command of the fleet cruising in the West Indies, had been ordered to cooperate with the colonial forces. After some delay, Shirley was able to dispatch some thirty-three hundred men from Massachusetts, who with the smaller forces sent by New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, arrived at Louisbourg a few days after the fleet had taken up its position there.
The undertaking was completely successful, and the capture of the weakly defended fortress on June 17, 1745, was the one great English victory of the war. Shirley wrote an account of it which was published in A Letter to the Duke of Newcastle: with a Journal of the Siege of Louisbourg (1746). The government rewarded his services by making him colonel of a British regiment to be raised from the New England provincial troops, and used him as a clearing house in examining the claims of the northern colonies for reimbursement of expenditures growing out of the war.
Meanwhile, in 1749, Shirley had gone to England on leave. While there he was appointed a member of the commission sitting in Paris to determine the boundary line between French North America and New England. The negotiations were spun out to interminable length and it was not until 1753 that he returned to his post in Boston.
Shirley foresaw that war must soon begin again between England and France, and as early as January 1754, writing to the authorities in England, urged the importance of uniting the colonies and the strategic significance of Crown Point. He also did what he could to establish friendly relations with the Indians.
In February 1755 he was appointed major-general and in April was one of the five governors who attended a council of war with Gen. Edward Braddock at Alexandria, Va. , to bring about concerted action. Here he argued the importance of controlling the Great Lakes, and when the council decided to move against Niagara, Crown Point, and the forks of the Ohio, Shirley was given command of the Niagara expedition. After the death of Braddock in July, he was the acknowledged commander of all the British forces on the continent and in August he was formally appointed to that position. He himself took the field with the Niagara expedition, which got no further than Oswego; confronted by a strong French force at Kingston, he left a garrison and turned back to Boston.
At the same time a number of letters from some officer in the British colonies to the French were intercepted; in England it was believed these letters might have been written by Shirley, and the home authorities suspected him of treason. He was replaced as commander in chief temporarily by James Abercromby and then by John Campbell, Earl of Loudoun.
Shirley was ordered to England early in 1756 and after unwarranted delay sailed in October, arriving as his patron's ministry fell and was followed by that of Pitt. Officials of the War Office wished to have him court-martialed, but for lack of evidence against him the matter was dropped in the fall of 1757. Meanwhile, he had been succeeded as governor of Massachusetts by Thomas Pownall. He was given the rank of lieutenant-general and was promised the post of governor of Jamaica but did not receive it; in 1761 he was made governor of the Bahama Islands.
He returned to Massachusetts and took up his residence in his mansion, "Shirley Place, " at Roxbury, where in March 1771 he died.
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Personality
As an executive he showed ability and tact.
Connections
He married Frances, daughter of Francis Barker of London. Five daughters and four sons were born to them. His first wife had died there in September 1746, and in Paris he married a young Frenchwoman, Julie, the daughter of his landlord. His eldest son, secretary to Braddock, had been killed in Pennsylvania with his chief; his second son, a captain, died of fever on the Oswego expedition. His only surviving son was Thomas.