The Tortured Life of the “Bully Drawcansir” John Malcom

(Part 1 of 2)

Born 300 years ago in May 1723 in Boston, Mass., John Malcom grew into an angry man, quick to take offense. By his own accounts, he had some success as a ship’s captain and partial owner of trade voyages, but as real success eluded him, he remained self-centered and became corrupt. Malcom’s historical visage is familiar to some today, but few know his story or his villainous connection to North Carolina. 

John Malcom married in 1750 and by 1759 had five more mouths to feed. Despite his claims of success at sea, he took a position ashore in 1769 in Newport, Rhode Island, as Surveyor of Tides, thus deserving of the courtesy title, “Esquire.” In Newport, however, his reputation for unpaid bills owed to the butcher and baker called into question his character and jeopardized his social status. So, in early 1771 at age 47, he eagerly accepted appointment as Comptroller of His Majesty’s Customs in Currituck, North Carolina. 

A stalwart lover of King and country, Malcom soon joined with other elites from Down East with North Carolina’s Royal Governor William Tryon in marching colonial militia into the backcountry to quell the rebellion arising among the Regulators. Tryon made Malcom a captain and Aide-de-Camp. Malcom later boasted of having two horses shot from under him during the Battle of Alamance, a dubious claim.  

Afterward, Malcom was busy at Currituck doing exactly what had incited the Regulators to protest—abusing the powers of his office to extort from citizens for his benefit. After a year, complaints aroused an investigation. Royal Governor Josiah Martin wrote of the matter calling Malcom “hair brained” and a “Bully Drawcansir,” referring to a century-old theatrical character—a belligerent, swaggering braggart. The governor removed Malcom from his post for “venality and corruption,” but Malcom soon gained another position back in Massachusetts along the Sheepscot River in Falmouth, now Portland, Maine. 

In late October 1773, ships carrying taxable East India Company tea were headed for four colonial American ports. Meanwhile in Falmouth, through an underhanded administrative maneuver, Malcom seized an empty brigantine at port, declared himself the commander, and viciously berated the crew. Word of Malcom’s ravings spread among other sailors at port. They gathered as a council and gave Malcom a “genteel” tarring and feathering, meaning over his clothes. They had punished the scoundrel for his behavior but not cured him of his temper.  

In January, about a month following the “destruction of the tea” on December 16 and on a day so bitterly cold that Boston Harbor froze over, Malcom was angrily berating a young boy sledding on the streets of Boston. The lad had grazed Malcom’s feet. As Malcom waived his metal-tipped cane, threatening to strike the child, George Robert Twelves Hewes, a cobbler who had helped dump tea into the harbor, interceded for the boy’s safety. Malcom called Hewes a rascal and a vagabond, chastising him for his impertinence at addressing a gentleman. After Hewes replied, “Well, at least I have never been tarred and feathered,” Malcom whacked Hewes hard on the skull nearly knocking him outunconscious. A crowd followed Malcom home that afternoon, and Malcom threatened them all, declaring that he “could split down the yankees by the dozens and receive 20 pounds per head for destroying them.”  

That evening, a larger mob gathered at Malcom’s home, climbed up ladders, broke a window to enter the home and dragged Malcom outside. The mob stripped Malcom naked and tarred and feathered him, displaying him to the jeers of the 1,200 citizens gathered as they carried him by cart to the Liberty Tree where he was bidden to denounce the King and Governor Hutchison. Malcom refused and was flogged, then carted to the gallows and bidden again with a noose around his neck. Again, he refused. But when threatened with having his ears cut off, Malcom relented to the mob’s demands. Barely surviving the bitter cold that night, and the slow, painful removal of pine tar from red his skin later, it took months for Malcom to recover enough to sail for London. (See Part 2) 

Meanwhile, through 1774, colonists began reconsidering the benefits of being a British colony subject to the whims of a distant King and disconnected Parliament.

The Chastisement of John Malcom (F. Godefroy, 1784)
with likely portrait of John Malcom (inset)