Who was the First Sheriff of Philadelphia:
John Test or John Tost?
Variant Spellings
of
John
Test’s Name Test / Teast / Tost
Given the materials I have seen, everyone in the family who has written on John Test agrees he was the first sheriff of Philadelphia. But the record shows that the name of the first sheriff was John Tost.
See the Journal of the Provincial Council Meeting of 10th day, first Month, 1682–3. (= March 20, 1683 by the modern calendar)
Should we treat this as merely a typographical mistake and pay no further attention to it? We could. There are many mistakes in these transcribed records. Frank B. Evans writing in The American Archivist warns “the unwary researcher against accepting the contents of these volumes (of The Pennsylvania Archives) at face value”.† A typographical mistake was originally an error in manual type–setting. The current usage of the term includes spelling errors. Is this a spelling error? It could be. But we cannot logically infer from x is possible to x is probable or that x actually is the case.
There are two reasons to look further into the record.
(1) The name John Tost appears four times in first month of meetings of the Provincial Council in March of 1683. This indicates to me that the typesetter or typesetters were not merely grabbing the wrong type face or glyph. This is not merely a typographical mistake. The original handwritten document probably contains the name John Tost and not John Test or at least a name that very much looks like John Tost.
(2) We should notice that several books on the history of Philadelphia indicate that the name of the first sheriff of Philadelphia was John Tost. These volumes do not treat it as an error.
Other books have the name of the first sheriff of Philadelphia as John Test.
My goal is firmly establish that John Test was the first sheriff of Philadelphia. Mistakes are easily perpetuated.
Laura G. Fryburg begins her monograph on John Test with this sentence:
The name of Test, spelled Test or Teast, is not a common name in England....
Our attention is directed to the idea of variant spellings of the name Test. The name Test might be spelled Test or Teast. They are the same name – Just different spellings. We are led to infer that these are not different names but the same name spelled differently. I believe that if we accept this inference we should carefully and critically think about it first. I am not certain that the name Test = the name Teast. Certainly variant spellings must be considered. But it cannot be assumed by default that differently spelled names are identical.
Reasonable people can believe John Tost is a misspelling of John Test’s name. It might be that the clerk spelled the name phonetically and he heard it as Tost. The clerk recording these minutes may have only recently arrived in the colony and was not yet familiar with all the names he was recording. We do not know the clerk’s name. But we can be fairly certain it was not Thomas Revell. Revell had recorded these same names many times when he was the clerk at the Court at Chester.
It could be that the original handwritten record of the name was misread because the e looked like an o. But there are other names misspelled that cannot be explained as a misreading of a letter or two.
I am not certain the handwritten records are available. In many cases, we know that the early Pennsylvania records have been lost or destroyed. No care was taken to preserve these records until very recently.
We are restricted to the evidence on hand to support or validate the inference that John Test was the first sheriff of Philadelphia and that the name Tost is merely a misspelling, a variant spelling, or a transcription error caused by a misreading of the handwritten minutes of the Council.
Those who have written about John Test have certainly looked at the evidence and were comfortable with their conclusion that John Tost = John Test. The goal here is to make the inference clear and to show that the inference is warranted by the evidence.
The ideal, second to obtaining the original handwritten records, would be that in the minutes of the Council occurring within the next couple of months after the mention of John Tost as the sheriff, John Test is mentioned as the sheriff. Unfortunately there is no mention of John Test – spelled T e s t – as the sheriff.
We have other evidence to consider:
1. John Test is well–documented in the colonial records. John Tost is not.
2. John Test Served as Prosecutor and Sheriffs were Prosecutors.
3. John Test filed Complaints against Griffith Jones.
John Tost is mentioned four times in the Colonial Records of the Provincial Council and then his name never appears again in the minutes or any other record. Other than these four records, there is no evidence that someone named John Tost ever held an office, took part in civic affairs, or even existed.
On the other hand, John Test’s name appeared frequently in the record after his arrival at Upland in 1675. Before that, we have documentation of him and his parents in London. We have records of his participation in London in the orgainization of the Fenwick colony and that he came to America with this group in 1675. We know he settled at Upland and that in 1681 when Penn tasked his cousin William Markham to proceed to America and serve as acting Governor until Penn arrived, Markham appointed John Test sheriff of Upland — the main settlement along the banks of the Delaware. This put John Test firmly in position to move on to sheriff of Philadelphia when William Penn arrived.
John Tost has no history. The name appears for the first time in these four mentions in the Minutes of the Provincial Council.
On November 21, 1683 John Test is mentioned as the prosecutor in The Case of the Alexander of Inverness. We may infer from this that John Test was the sheriff.
In the early Pennsylvania colonial era sheriffs served as the arresting officer and the prosecuting officer. It was part of the job.
The practice originated with the Dutch:
...the principal prosecuting officer of the district was the Schout whose duties combined those of a sheriff and district attorney (William Loyd, Jr., The Courts of Pennsylvania Prior to 1701 The American Law Register vol. 55, No. 9, Vol 46 new series p. 532).
In 1664 England acquired New Netherland from the Dutch and Charles II gave the area, including what would later be known as New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania, to his brother the Duke of York. Under the Duke of York and later under William Penn the legal system established by the Dutch was slowly transformed into corresponding English practice.
The title of schout disappeared, but the dual duty nature of the sheriff continued. The Governor's council directed “that the sheriff was to put the law in execution, apprehend and prosecute violators” (W. Scott Van Alstyne, The District Attorney – A Historical Puzzle, p. 137 Quoted by Joan E.Jacoby, The American Prosecutor in Historical Context).
This practice of the sheriff serving as prosecutor is evidenced by the April 1, 1686 meeting of the Council when Samuel Hersent is recognized as the sheriff and the prosecutor for the county of Philadelphia.
The fourth mention of John Tost in the Council Records refers to a dispute with Griffith Jones.
The Minutes of the Provincial Council of 24th of 1st month 1683 (Old Style or Julian Calendar) has this entry:
This is a dispute between John Tost or John Test and Griffith Jones. We have good reason for concluding that the dispute was between John Test and Griffith Jones.
Apparently John Test’s petition to the Council did not result in the solution that he wanted.
A month after this petition was filed, John Test took the dispute to the
Arch Street Quaker Monthly Meeting. On the 3rd day of the 2nd month 1683 (Old Style or Julian Calendar) we find this entry in the minutes of the meeting.
Here is a transcipt:
John Test desired of the Meeting, Right against Griffith Jones upon the Account of a Contract for a Plantation because the said Griffith Jones having given ( unknown word) Earnest in order to purchase the same did notwithstanding unjustly deny to perform the Bargain.
(This transcription is essentially by Dorothy Hardin Massey and Clifford M. Hardin. Their piece on John Test brought this item to my attention.)
For our purposes we are only interested in the name: John Test. This is clearly John Test who has the dispute with Griffith Jones. The attribution of the dispute to John Tost is without foundation.
Click here
to view the complete page of this record to examine how the person who wrote out these minutes wrote the letters e and o. The record of the dispute is toward the top of the right–hand page.
John Test was not satisfied with the outcome of his complaint to the Arch Street Monthly Meeting either. Two months later he took the matter to a higher body, viz., the Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting.
A Difference depending betwixt John Test & Griffith Jones, Griffith Jones stood up in this Meeting & Requested that some ffriends might be Appointed to meet in order to judge of ?? the said difference betwixt them.
Agreed that Thomas Wynnd, Christopher Taylor, Benj. Chambers, John Songhurst, ?, & Thomas Holme be appointed for the ? of the aforsaid Difference
Here again our interest is in the name John Test. It almost looks like John Tost given the way the loop of the e is elevated above the preceding curl portion of the letter.
To see the complete page of these minutes click here. The relevant entry is on the upper part of the left–hand page.
It is abundantly clear given an examination of the handwriting in the surrounding text that the name here is John Test and not John Tost. The evidence here is overwhelming. John Test had the dispute with Griffth Jones. John Test was identified as John Tost in the Council Records.
There were not two disputes: one with John Tost and Griffith Jones and one with John Test and Griffith Jones. John Test was misidentified in the Council Records as John Tost.
Our conclusion is based, in part, on peculiarities of handwriting. These two records of the Quaker Meetings clearly indicate that John Test is filing a complaint. The Council Records show only one person has filed a complaint against Griffth Jones. It is extremely improbable that two people with almost identical names filed a complaint against the same person at the same time. Moreover the Record of the Council Meetings indicates that only one person filed a complaint. It is reasonable to conclude that John Test was misidentified as John Tost in the record of the dispute and in the earlier entry citing John Tost as the sheriff.
John Test is a well-documented participant in the events of early Colonial Pennsylvania and New Jersey. He was the first sheriff to serve at Chester when William Penn sent his nephew to serve as governor of the new colony. He was the prosecutor in the case of the Alexander of Inverness, a position that would go to the sheriff. The probability is that his name was misread by the typesetters or misspelled by the recording clerk of the early Council meetings.
All of this lends overwhelming credence to the proposition that John Test was the first sheriff of Philadelphia. It is extremely difficult to quantify degrees of probability concerning historical events but the evidence is sufficient for us to be warranted to claim inductive proof that John Test was the first sheriff of Philadelphia.
† See Frank B. Evans’ warning to “the unwary researcher against accepting the contents of these volumes (of The Pennsylvania Archives) at face value” ( Evans, Frank B. (1964). The Many Faces of the Pennsylvania Archives. The American Archivist, 27(2), 269-283. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40290366)
Greenwich MM Wm P Test clerk
Horsham Preservation and Historical Association manuscript collection 1684 – 1975
Call No: 02
Finding Aid's Permanent URL a href="http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017/d/pacscl/HSP_HPHA02
Horsham Preservation and Historical Association
The Future of Horsham's Past
900 Governors Rd | Horsham, PA USA 19044
Email | 215-343-0659
June 2016
Post Script
I will attempt to get a copy of this document. If it is an original handwritten document it should be very interesting to see if any of it is in the handwriting of John Test. Here is the transcription of the document. The transcription refers to John Test not to John Tost.
A simple Ancestry.com search for John Tost or Jno. Tost in Philadelphia or in Pennsylvania for the this period comes up with nothing.
