This issue of The Connecticut Journal contains a report from Boston that includes the text of a handbill distributed and posted there over the pseudonym “Joyce Junior.” In their choice of persona, the Boston Sons of Liberty paid tribute to Cornet George Joyce, an officer of the parliamentary New Model Army of the seventeenth century. Joyce was credited with having captured King Charles I in June 1647. The regicide “Joyce Junior” had made earlier appearances in Boston, including at the annual “Pope Night” in November when rival gangs of boys seek to capture one another’s carts displaying figures of the pope and the devil. Another version appeared during the controversies that preceded the Boston Massacre in 1770.
In 1774, “Joyce Junior” was John Winthrop Jr. (1747-1800), the son of Harvard professor John Wainwright Winthrop (1714-1779) and the great-great-great-grandson of Massachusetts Bay founder John Winthrop (1588-1649). More handbills appeared from “Joyce Junior” over the coming months, including one disavowing the tarring and feathering of John Malcom in Boston. In general, the “Joyce Junior” handbills tried to portray the Boston Tea Party and its aftermath as the result of principled resistance and not mob action.
