45-year-old Boston, Massachusetts, merchant and insurer in 1773, Nathaniel Barber served as one of the boarding party captains during the “destruction of the tea” on December 16.
Barber was a member of the Sons of Liberty and was part of the delegation led by William Molineux to tea consignee Richard Clarke’s warehouse on November 3, 1773, seeking the resignation of the consignees prior to the arrival of the tea.
In 1772, Barber was appointed Captain of the North Battery in October and became one of the founding members of the Boston Committee of Correspondence in November. His involvement with the Sons of Liberty and the radical events of the late 1760s and early 1770s led to Barber being known as “remarkable for bullying and rioting” in a 1775 satire.
During the Revolutionary War, he became Muster Master for Suffolk County, Massachusetts, eventually serving as the Naval Officer for the port of Boston. Members of the Senate and House of Representatives attended Nathaniel’s funeral. He was clearly respected by the town so much, that his obituary read, “…friends of liberty could not but drop a tear over the grave of so known and tried a patriot…and it may be justly said, that the honest fervor which distinguished the friends of liberty in 1775, was retained by Col. Barber in its full warmth to the moment of his death.”
Nathaniel Barber died in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1787. He is buried in Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in Boston’s North End neighborhood.
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