In 1713, a severe food shortage in Boston led the town selectmen to petition the Massachusetts General Assembly for aid. The “threatening scarcity of provisions … in this great and populous town,” they said, had led to such “extravagant prices that the necessities of the poor in the approaching winter must needs be very pressing,” and they asked therefore that “speedy care be … taken to prevent the exportation thereof, which we fear too many will be encouraged to do by the prospect of the great markets abroad.” On May 19, 1713, a crowd of Bostonians, angry because some of the larger merchants were exporting corn, rioted.
In response the government of the colony authorized the selectmen to appropriate grain and sell it at a fixed price. On December 10, a ship bearing 320 bushels of wheat was seized, and the ship captain was ordered “to deliver to the several bakers varying quantities of his cargo”; “the said bakers are likewise directed to bake the same into bread (and as prudently as they can) therewith to supply the necessities of the private families of this town with bread for their money.”
This brief account of the riot itself comes from Samuel Sewell’s Diary, printed in Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, Series 5, VI 384–5. See also Boston Registry Department: Records Relating to the Early History of Boston, XI, “A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, Containing the Records of the Boston Selectmen, 1701–1715,” 194–215.
Midweek, May 20. The rain hindered my return.… Got to Brother’s at Salem about 7. and lodged there. By this means I was not entangled with the riot committed that night in Boston by 200 people or more, breaking open Arthur Mason’s warehouse in the common, thinking to find corn there; wounded the Lieutenant Governor and Mr. Newton’s son.… Were provoked by Captain Belchar’s sending Indian Corn to Curacao. The select-men desired him not to send it; he told them, The hardest fend off! If they stopped his vessel, he would hinder the coming in of three times as much.