Revisiting Enlightenment Political Theory: Barbauld and the “Things Indifferent”

Among the letters sent to Smellie that his biographer Robert Kerr reproduces in his Memoirs of Smellie (1811) is this one. William Auld, one of Smellie’s partners in periodical ventures, had been out of town at the time of the event described, and his eagerness to get the real story is evident. Writing over forty years later from what he claims is an entirely different Edinburgh, Kerr provides the necessary context. Joseph Smith, known as “Bowed Joseph,” was an Edinburgh cobbler and mob leader, whose role in exercising popular justice, Kerr asserts, could not have been imaginable in “our more modern days of various improvement.” From avenging the death of an indebted tenant driven to suicide by his landlord’s cruel eviction of his family to the sacking of granaries of forestalling meal producers and merchants, Bowed Joseph had successfully led multiple popular demonstrations in the Scottish capital. Kerr also honors Smith’s role as a moderator in the riots: Following the attainment of the mob’s object—which would sometimes entail Smith’s direct negotiation with the Town Council—“Bowed” Joseph would command his followers to disperse, often rewarding them with state-sponsored “hogsheads of ale.”