Day late, dollar short

Of course, it wasn’t really over. The natives remained restless. Less than a decade later, Royal Governor John Wentworth found an angry mob at his own doorstep on Pleasant Street. He had, it seems, broken his own transparency rule, and deceived the public. It was a minor matter about secretly loaning a few carpenters to the governor of Massachusetts. But it was enough to send Wentworth and his family to Nova Scotia where he lived out his years.

And what about our boy, George? The Meserve family suffered a reversal of fortune. As the Revolution approached George Meserve found it harder and harder to stay in town, where he was a lightning rod for the growing rebellion. He sometimes slipped off to neighboring towns. Then, like Gov. Wentworth, he felt it was safer to sleep inside fort William and Mary at New Castle, or aboard the British warship anchored there. Eventually he joined the migration of homeless Loyalists to Boston, then to England and Canada -- driven into exile by former neighbors, unable to return under penalty of death.

With other Loyalists, George Meserve petitioned the Crown for his lost wages, home and 100,000 acres of land he had accumulated in the colonies, plus expenses. Yes, he had screwed up, but he wanted to get paid all the same. You might call the Compensation Act an early British "bail-out" package. George discovered, however, that collecting from the British government was as tough as collecting taxes in Portsmouth. 

George Meserve died poor in Hampstead, England in 1788. His son John joined him there, but he never saw his daughters or his wife again. His wife held onto the Portsmouth house until her death. Then, like Gov. Wentworth’s summer home in Wolfeboro, the Meserve House was taken over by the revolutionary government and sold at auction.

In the right place at the wrong time, George Meserve stamped and sealed his fate when he cashed in the family name for a juicy political appointment. It’s a sad story, unless it’s told in April, on a week when income taxes are due.

Copyright © 2009 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.