1
Boston
'A City upon a Hill'
As evening fell on 16 December 1773, with thousands pressed into the square pew boxes and overflowing balconies of the whitewashed Old South Meeting House, brewer and politician Samuel Adams stepped forward to announce that 'he could think of nothing further to be done - that they had now done all they could for the Salvation of the Country'. The wealthy Boston merchant John Hancock agreed, erupting in frustration: 'Let every man do what is right in his own eyes!' Fifteen minutes later, the war whoops began.
It was the signal the 'patriots' had been waiting for. Secreted across Boston - in living rooms and parlours, workshops and shipyards - men had covered their faces, donned disguises and readied their weapons. Men like James Brewer, a pump- and blockmaker, whose wife had blackened his face with burnt cork; the blacksmith's apprentice Joshua Wyeth; the carpenter Amos Lincoln; the boat builder Samuel Nowell; and the lemon importer Edward Proctor. Anxious about what the ensuing hours might bring, these 'Sons of Liberty' steeled themselves for a potentially deadly clash with British troops.
Dressed as Mohawk Indians, they gathered together a hundred strong outside the Meeting House, then surged south-east through the narrow Boston lanes, shouting like Indians and whistling like boatswains, along Milk Street and Hutchinsons Street, and down to the docks, where the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver sat at anchor alongside Griffin's Wharf. The crowds followed in a torchlit procession, before coming to a stop at the waterfront, silent as they watched the 'Mohawks' board the ships, brush past the crews and uncover their cargo.
The night's quiet was shattered by the sound of axes heaving into wooden crates, the fixing of tackle and hauling of chests - and then the splash of tons of tea leaves cascading into the waters of Boston harbour. For hour after hour - within sight of the 64th Regiment stationed at Fort William, and in easy range of the guns of Admiral John Montagu's flagship, HMS Captain - the Mohawk stevedores unloaded the valuable cases of black and green Bohea, Singlo, Hyson and Congou tea. 'We were merry in an under tone,' Joshua Wyeth recalled, 'at the idea of making so large a cup of tea for the fishes.' Over 340 chests, containing over 46 tons of tea priced at almost £10,000, were dumped into Boston harbour.
As they fell, the splintered crates and sodden tea leaves formed an eighteenth-century oil-slick rising and falling with the Boston tides, lapping the Dorchester coastline all the way down to the British soldiers stationed at Fort William. The Atlantic currents never took the tea leaves back to Britain, but they had no need to. News of the 1773 'Boston Tea-Party' soon reached London - and Westminster's response to this audacious assault on British property would set in train the events of the American Revolution.1
Today, over 230 years later, Boston, Massachusetts is still defined by that revolutionary moment. It is the city of the 'Freedom Trail' where, beginning at Boston Common under the golden dome of the State House and snaking all the way up to the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, you can walk the story of liberation, pursued by historical re-enactors. And be it Paul Revere House, Old North Church or USS Constitution - 'Old Ironsides' - the urban narrative is powerfully consistent: here was a city which stoically laboured under the heel of British colonialism until the greed and arrogance of the occupiers finally forced the citizens to turn freedom-fighters.
The reupholstered Faneuil Hall is branded 'Cradle to Liberty'; the Boston Historical Society exhibition at the Old State House is a Whiggish tale entitled 'From Colony to Commonwealth'. At the Museum of Fine Arts, that heritage of freedom is reaffirmed with its magnificent collection of John Singleton Copley portraits, depicting the likes of Paul Revere, Samuel Adams and John Hancock in suitably heroic poses. Adams, caught in the aftermath of the 1770 'Boston Massacre' (the fatal shooting of five Bostonians by British soldiers),* is especially striking, as he points melodramatically to the 1691 Massachusetts charter, every inch the wronged constitutionalist.
Implicit within the history is a residual anti-British sentiment which has become an important facet of modern Boston's identity. Mass Irish immigration to Massachusetts in the aftermath of the mid-nineteenth-century Great Famine helped to cement an implicit antagonism towards the redcoats and lobsterbacks across the pond. It certainly did no harm for city politicians to play to anti-British populism, and few managed it more successfully than the Kennedy clan. Even as US ambassador to Great Britain, stationed in London in the run-up to the Second World War, Joseph P. Kennedy, the grandson of Irish emigrants, could barely suppress his distaste for the UK. Much of that prejudice cascaded down the generations, and Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy's support for Sinn Fein always worked well with his Irish-Catholic Boston base. In less salubrious parts of South Boston there were often nickels and dimes to be found in pub collection tins for NORAID and 'the cause'.
But turn east from the Old South Meeting House, under the dreary skyscrapers of modern 'Washington Street' towards the Old State House and a different Boston peeks out of the past. There, either side of the eighteenth-century balcony from which the Declaration of Independence was read in July 1776, stands a glistening, golden lion and a rearing, silver unicorn. The coat of arms of the British royal family was ripped down in the aftermath of Independence but replaced in 1882, and it is that crest which highlights the hidden history of imperial Boston. For this city, right up to the moment of revolution, was renowned as one of the most ardently British and comfortably colonial of imperial satellites. Its birth and growth signalled the coming of the British urban footprint across the globe, whilst its unexpected rebellion in 1773 marked the first great rupture in the imperial story. There is no stop along the Freedom Trail for the less straightforward elements of this history of colonialism: before it became the revolutionary citadel of 1773, Boston was a fiercely royal city, a true Protestant redoubt. You would not know it from the John Hancock Tower, Franklin Street or Congress Street, but in the bones of Boston can be found some of the earliest traces of a British imperial identity.
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD
Modern Boston's origins do not begin with its namesake in Lincolnshire, but rather in the Stour valley, that Arcadian stretch of 'Constable country' running through Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Essex. In the early 1600s, this was a place of piety and godliness, of strict worship and careful magistracy, where drink and 'rough sports' were banned and preaching and prayer encouraged. Among the governing East Anglian merchant, legal and landowning classes, the call to Reformation had been answered most purposefully. They would come to be known as the Puritans - Protestants who focused on the pure word of Christian faith drawn from the pages of scripture, considered themselves in a much more personal relationship with God and eschewed what they regarded as the rituals, hierarchies and idolatry of the Church of England. Their mission was to lead England out of the lingering, crypto-Catholic darkness which had corrupted the Anglican church since the Reformation of 1534. Among the islands of godliness lining the Stour valley was, for example, Colchester in Essex - described by one admirer in the late 1590s as a 'town [which], for the earnest profession of the gospel, [was] like unto the city upon a hill; and as a candle upon a candlestick'.2
This was the stern spiritual environment in which the future governor of Massachusetts John Winthrop was brought up. His father, Adam Winthrop, had been a small-holder, lawyer and squire of Groton Manor, Suffolk - as well as a committed supporter of the Puritan cause. His son proved equally strict in his piety, as a barrister at Gray's Inn, and then a middling landowner and magistrate. Yet all around him, from the 1610s, Winthrop spied evidence of God's displeasure at work. The dual curse of erastianism (state interference in ecclesiastical matters) and Arminianism (which rejected strict Protestant doctrines of predestination) was undermining the true church, whilst the authorities appeared ever more indulgent to the unChristian pastimes of the 'rude sort'. On the European Continent, a great struggle between true religion and popery, the forces of light and dark, had opened in 1618 with the start of the Thirty Years' War, but Britain, under King James I and VI, was reluctant to intervene. The godly saw ahead of them a fearful Counter-Reformation, coordinated by the Catholic Spanish empire, threatening the very survival of Protestant England, and yet few in the Stuart court seemed to appreciate the eschatological immediacy.
By 1628, in his pamphlet Reasons for the Plantation in New England, Winthrop was dismissing England as 'this sinful land' which was growing 'weary of her inhabitants, so as man which is the most precious of all Creatures, is here more vile and base, than the earthe they tread upon'.3 With his family's personal salvation at risk, Winthrop started to contemplate an Exodus. He need not have chosen America. Plantations had already emerged by the late 1500s as far afield as Ulster and Bermuda, with the dual ambition of profit and Protestantism. Land was carved out from the wilderness or expropriated from indigenous residents, handed over to enterprising colonial settlers, who then 'planted' labourers on to the fields and farmed it for profit. It was an early form of colonialism usefully combining systems of patronage with the informal extension of state power. Winthrop himself had numerous family ties to Ireland and, in the early 1620s, was considering emigrating to his brother-in-law's plantation at Montrath, in County Laois, in the middle of Ireland. At the time, the main possibility across the Atlantic was Jamestown, Virginia, settled in 1607 (christened in honour of Queen Elizabeth I, the 'Virgin Queen'), and, after its conversion to a royal colony in 1624, a model of loyal Anglicanism. Alternatively, there was the struggling colony of Plymouth, founded in 1620 by the 'Pilgrim Fathers', who had fled religious persecution in England first to the Netherlands and then to America, determined to separate themselves from the corrupt, decaying Old World. These struggling outposts formed part of a broader, incremental 'New England' society of European colonists encompassing Cape Ann, Rhode Island, parts of Connecticut and New Haven.
It was this wooded, storm-battered littoral of the eastern seaboard of America, with its promise of religious freedom and personal salvation, that offered the greatest hope for England's Puritans during the anxious Stuart years. In 1623 a 'Council for New England' had been established to promote the creation of further colonies, and, as one of the first histories of Boston recounts it,
On the 19th of March, 1627-8, Sir Henry Rosewell and Sir John Young [Puritan landowners and colonists], with their associates near Dorchester, in England, purchased of the Council for New England a patent for that part of the country situated between three miles to the northward of the Merrimac River and three miles to the southward of the Charles River, and in length from the Atlantic Ocean to the South Sea. Under this charter, 'the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England' commenced the settlement of the Massachusetts* colony.4
Like the Virginia Company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, formed in 1629, was a joint-stock corporation which received its rights to settle and trade in America from the Crown. But the vital difference was that the Massachusetts Bay leaders moved the location of their patent from London to New England, allowing them to build a self-governing commonwealth, over the sea, free from day-to-day royal interference. For the Council for New England was composed of a well-connected network of Puritan merchants and divines, who were keen to exploit Atlantic fishing opportunities but also to promote colonialism as a safe haven for true religion. In time, it was hoped the exercise of pure Protestantism in America would inspire and rescue the English church from its present woes. God's will had revealed itself: here was the perfect vehicle for Winthrop to escape Old England for New. He invested heavily in the Massachusetts Bay Company before, in October 1629, being elected its governor.
As his ship Arbella set sail out of Southampton for Cape Ann harbour in the spring of 1630, Winthrop took the opportunity to preach a lay sermon, 'The model of Christian charity', to his fellow passengers. He took as his text the Book of Matthew, 5:14-16:
Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.
Aboard the ship's deck, the governor set out his ambitions for the colony and its elect membership, 'a company professing ourselves fellow members of Christ'. Central to Winthrop's vision of his prosperous, godly commonwealth was the seventeenth-century notion of a Covenant with God: 'We are entered into a covenant with Him for this work.' As a body of pilgrims dependent upon God's grace for their survival, they had to agree to work together, live together and worship the same God together. The colony, as an exemplary Christian community, was the corpus through which God could be most perfectly served. If the Lord 'shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then he hath ratified this Covenant ... and will expect a strict performance of the articles'.5 If they achieved the purpose for which God had planned, 'We must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill; the eyes of all people are upon us.' Long before any notion of America's manifest destiny, the city of Boston had been marked out for special purposes. 'This Year [1630] it pleased God of his rich grace to Transport over into the Bay of the Massachusets divers honourable Personages, and many worthy Christians,' recalled Nathaniel Morton, the secretary of the Colony of Plymouth, 'whereby the Lord began in a manifest manner and way to make known the great thoughts which he had of Planting the Gospel in this remote and barbarous Wilderness.'6
Unfortunately, the Protestant Wind was not as benign as they had hoped, and it initially deposited the Arbella in Salem, which, according to the deputy governor Thomas Dudley, 'pleased us not'. They found the colony there in a 'sad and unexpected condition', with its dwindling residents barely able to make it through the winter.7 So they moved from Salem to another settlement at Charles Town and then, searching for a decent water supply, crossed the Charles River to join the reclusive Puritan William Blaxton (or Blackstone) in the Indian settlement of Shawmutt on the land known as Trimontaine, because of its three peaks. In September 1630, this settlement upon three hills was renamed Boston in honour of their brother and fellow pilgrim Isaac Johnson of Boston, in the county of Lincolnshire, who had died in Salem.
The advantages of the place were immediately apparent. 'His situation is very pleasant, being a Peninsula, hemmed in on the South-side with the Bay of Roxberry, on the north side with Charles-River, the Marshes on the back side being not half a quarter of a mile over; so that a little fencing will secure their cattle from the wolves,' was how William Wood described it in an early brochure, New England's Prospect.
This neck of land is not above four miles in compass; in form almost square, having on the south-side, at one corner, a great broad hill, whereon is planted a fort, which can command any ship as she sails into any harbour within the still Bay. On the north side is another hill, equal in bigness, whereon stands a Windmill. To the north-west is a high mountain with three little rising hills on the top of it, wherefore it is called the Tramount.8
Winthrop set to work on his Garden of Eden, keen to find God's favour in the enterprise. 'Plantations in their beginnings have work enough...' he wrote in a letter, 'there being buildings, fencings, clearing and breaking up of ground, lands to be attended, orchards to be planted, highways and bridges and fortifications to be made, and all things to do, as in the beginning of the world.'9 The Genesis analogy seemed apposite since, by the time Winthrop began tilling the soil, Massachusetts must have felt like a virgin landscape thanks to the decimation of the native Indian population. Indeed, he predicted as much in his 1629 Plantation pamphlet: 'God hath consumed the natives with a great plague in those parts, so as there be few inhabitants left.' The arrival of European settlers had indeed sparked an epidemic of smallpox, measles and influenza among the coastal Algonquian societies against which they lacked any immunity. By 1633 settlers already outnumbered Indians in the Massachusetts Bay area, and by 1700 the native population was reduced to about 10 per cent of what it had been before European contact.10 'So if we leave them sufficient for their own use, we may lawfully take the rest, there being more than enough for them and for us,' concluded Winthrop.11
With minimal Native American resistance to Winthrop's initial plans, the first identifiable outlines of Boston came into being. The lands and islands of the outer and inner harbours became populated with grazing cattle and sheep, with farmlands and orchards. It was hard, dangerous work. In December 1638 there was 'so great a tempest of wind and snow all the night and the next day, as had not been since our time'. As a result,
Five men and youths perished between Mattapan and Dorchester ... Anthony Dick, in a bark of thirty tons, cast away upon the head of Cape Cod. Three were starved to death with the cold; the other two got some fire and so lived there, by such food as they saved, seven weeks, till an Indian found them, etc.12
The Boston magistrate and keen diarist Samuel Sewall similarly noted the 'extream cold' of January 1686, 'so that the Harbour frozen up, and to the Castle. This day so cold that the Sacramental Bread is frozen pretty hard, and rattles sadly as broken into the Plates.'13
In the Boston promontory, the narrow 'neck' of which was regularly flooded by tidal surges, cutting the growing town off from the mainland, a windmill soon appeared atop the north hill (Copp's Hill or Mill Hill), 'grinding out the rich yellow corn of Indian origin, raised on nearly every garden lot on the peninsula'. A fire-pot suspended on a beacon was planted on Treamount or Tramount hill, to warn of impending dangers, and on the third hill, a wooden fort. These were the sites that greeted the growing number of Puritan migrants, fleeing the persecution of King Charles I's Archbishop Laud for the promised land of New England. In 1634, some seventeen emigrant ships arrived in Boston; thirty-two in 1635; and another twenty in 1638, landing a total of nearly 21,000 new settlers across the colony. They set to work constructing the first forms of a conurbation: market squares, a public park (the origin of today's Boston Common), roads, docks, meeting-houses and churches. Education and literacy were so elemental to the Puritan ethos that quite quickly the Boston Grammar School was established, and, in 1636, the Massachusetts Bay Company allocated £400 (more than half of the entire colony tax levy for 1635) to the establishment of Harvard College, named after the Puritan minister John Harvard, who on his deathbed donated £780 and his own library to the new institution. The college was located nearby at Newtown (later renamed Cambridge) on a 'spacious plain' at the edge of salt marshes and designed to be as close a copy of a Cambridge University college as possible.14 Harvard's purpose was to supply Massachusetts with a home-grown crop of Christian ministers and make it unnecessary to call upon unreliable Anglicans from England. In ensuing decades, Boston would add to its infrastructure with a bridge across the Charles River, a 670-metre defensive barricade in the harbour, town houses, pebbled streets, wharfs and more meeting-houses. For Winthrop's companions, such progress was all a sign of divine grace: nature was being tamed and a godly citadel erected. As Captain Edward Johnson put it in his celebrated tract of 1654, Wonder-Working Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England,
The chiefe Edifice of this City-like Towne is crowded on the Sea-bankes, and wharfed out with great industry and cost, the buildings beautifull and large, some fairly set forth with Brick, Tile, Stone and Slate, and orderly placed with comly streets, whose continuall inlargement presages some sumptuous City. The wonder of this moderne Age, that a few yeares should bring forth such great matters by so meane a handfull ... But now behold the admirable Acts of Christ; at this his peoples landing, the hideous Thickets in this place were such that Wolfes and Beares nurst up their young from the eyes of all beholders, in those very places where the streets are full of Girles and Boys sporting up and downe, with a continued concourse of people.15
Such earthly success was a reflection of true Christian sentiment, but it had to be worked at continuously. Around every corner, Winthrop saw the Devil's hand at work, as one of his journal entries from July 1632 describes:
At waterton there was ... a great combate betweene a mouse & a snake, & after a longe fight, the mouse prevayled & killed the snake; the Paster of Boston mr willson a verye sincere holy man hearinge of it, gave this Interpretation, that, the snake was the devill, the mouse was a poore contemptible people which God had brought hether, which should overcome Sathan heere & disposesse him of his kingdome.16
To assist salvation, Massachusetts's early government was almost theocratic. The franchise for the colony's assembly was not property holding, as in England, but church membership, and to join one of the many churches an individual had to evince positive signs of grace. It was compulsory for everyone to attend their parish church, and the power of ministers seamlessly extended from the ecclesiastical to the civil, the clapboard meeting-houses the setting for both religious devotion and legal transactions. The Stour valley's pious magistracy was now transposed to New England as a sharp culture of discipline cracked down on cards, dice, music, sports, saints' days and slander (especially against the church). In 1633 the Massachusetts Bay Company enacted a law stating 'that no person, householder or other, shall spend his time idly or unprofitably, under pain of such punishment as the Court shall think meet to inflict'.17 In 1634 tobacco-taking in taverns was banned; in 1647 shovel-board in 'houses of common entertainment' was outlawed; and in 1664 'rude singing' was declared illegal. Unsurprisingly, most visitors found Boston's public culture grimly Puritanical. In 1699, the Englishman Edward Ward thought the Bostonians 'very busie in detecting one another's failings; and he is accounted, by their Church Governors, a Meritorious Christian, that betrays his Neighbour to a Whipping-post'.18 This religio-civic theocracy was also highly antagonistic toward any sign of religious disharmony. For all their demands for toleration in England, when the heterodox views of religious radicals such as the Separatist Roger Williams and antinomian Anne Hutchinson threatened to disrupt Boston's stability, they were swiftly drummed out of the Bay Colony. It was never a wise decision to flout such punishments either: between 1659 and 1661 four Quakers were hanged for returning after banishment. There was a Covenant to be upheld, and political pluralism played no part in it.
In the light of these saints' attempt to erect a godly commonwealth, Boston's rapidity in backing the parliamentary cause during the English Civil War is unsurprising. The dynastic, business and religious connections between the American colonists and the English Roundheads ran deep and, in May 1643, reference to King Charles I was dropped altogether from the colony's oath of allegiance. According to Winthrop, the king 'had violated the privileges of parliament, and made war upon them, and thereby lost much of his kingdom and many of his subjects; whereupon it was thought fit to omit that part of it for the present'.19
Winthrop passed away in 1649, when the outcome of the English Revolution was unclear, but he bequeathed to the public culture of Boston a deep hostility towards Roman Catholicism, monarchical absolutism and all the other misdemeanours of the Stuart monarchy. Attempts by the Stuart Crown in the late 1670s to impose a new charter on the colony, abolish the Massachusetts Bay Company and establish a Dominion of New England under direct royal rule had led to violent clashes across Boston as Puritan ministers whipped up fears of another Popish plot led by untrustworthy London courtiers. It was small wonder that, in London, Massachusetts in general and Boston in particular were fast gaining a reputation as a haven for radical dissenters. A British customs agent, William Dyre, described New Englanders in the 1680s as 'raging furious fanatic Whigs ... Rebellious and unnatural hators and warriors Against the true mother church'.20 Indeed, the very crowning of the crypto-Catholic King James II had been greeted with signs of foreboding in Boston. 'The King is Proclaimed; 8 Companies, the Troop, and several Gentlemen on horseback assisted,' Samuel Sewall wrote on 20 April 1685. 'This day a child falls upon a Knife which runs through its cheek to the Throat, of which inward Wound it dies, and is buried on Wednesday.'21
So relief at the fall of King James and the triumph of the Dutch Protestant William of Orange in 1688 was overwhelming. As soon as news of the Glorious Revolution arrived in New England, Boston led the way with a band of rebels seizing the royal governor and dissolving the hated Dominion. Yet at the same time as the colony revived its old forms of self-government, Boston developed a novel sense of fealty towards the Crown after all those decades of hostility towards the Stuarts. With King William III on the throne, Boston's Puritans finally felt there was a godly monarch culturally attuned to New England's religious and political ethos. That sense of divergence from England, which had marked out the foundation of Massachusetts in the 1630s, began to ebb as the spiritual and political interests of Crown and colony aligned. Increasingly, the evangelical leaders of late seventeenth-century Boston could see themselves as part of a shared, global endeavour to resist popery, protect true religion and promote English liberty alongside their Protestant monarch. In reality, William III would continue with much of the Stuarts' policy of centralizing control over the American colonies: the rewritten Massachusetts charter of 1691 shifted the franchise qualification from church membership to property holding and kept the governorship a Crown appointment. Inevitably, this created the risk of a clash between the royal prerogative of the governor (usually, a former British army officer) and the autonomy of the Massachusetts House of Representatives (elected by male colonists since 1629), but at the turn of the eighteenth century such tensions were non-existent. The remarkable, natural sympathy which sprang up between elites in Massachusetts and the mother country - shared beliefs in the liberties of Magna Carta, the terrifying spectre of French and Spanish Catholicism, the wretchedness of the Stuarts and the virtues of the 1688 constitutional settlement - overshadowed any theoretical constitutional incompatibility. For now, Boston was delighted to be a part of Britain's emergent, Atlantic empire.22
THE GREAT MART AND STAPLE
What did that 'empire' look like in the late seventeenth century? The word itself was a translation from the Latinimperium and was taken to mean control over trade and sea as much as land. Indeed, a sea-based empire was looked on more favourably by colonial advocates: in contrast to the military dictatorship of the land empire of Rome or the corruption visited upon Spain by its possessions in the Americas, an empire of the seas brought more benign and flexible connotations. For merchants and courtiers in London thinking about England's imperiumabroad, the contours of influence would have entailed the Caribbean plantations of Jamaica and Barbados (see Chapter 2), Ireland (see Chapter 3), the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia, outposts in Newfoundland and in Hudson Bay, the coming towns of Philadelphia, New York and Charlestown, and then the New England settlements. It was a disparate, inchoate, Atlantic empire. For whilst colonies shared an unified imperial authority in the form of the British monarch, judgements over who was in practical charge - who exercised 'dominium' or territorial control - were more opaque. In different corners of this empire, the running of the colonies varied from joint-stock corporations to royal governors to local assemblies to individual patentees. Taken together, the beginnings of the British Empire were an unruly mix of tobacco plantations, whaling stations, fishing ports, cane fields, forts and cities. Beyond their loyalty to the Crown, the only effective source of imperial unity was the quickening pace of transatlantic commerce.
Trade certainly changed Boston, as Winthrop's 'city on the hill' slowly emerged from its Puritan chrysalis. Of course, there still existed a strict culture of public piety, and the city remained a place of religious sanctuary during the final Stuart years. 'In about 1682,' Josiah Franklin, a cloth dyer of Banbury, Oxfordshire, sought asylum in Boston. 'The conventicles [having] been forbidden by law, and frequently disturbed, induced some considerable men of his acquaintance to remove to that country, and he was prevailed with to accompany them thither, where they expected to enjoy their mode of religion with freedom.'23 But within the growing city it was proving harder and harder to retain that closeted, Puritan sense of purpose and prophetic function. 'The democratic leaven was at work,' as one nineteenth-century history put it. 'The ampler scope for individual energy, and the sudden accession of political rights and commercial importance, began to tell upon manners.'24 This was one of the inadvertent consequences of Calvinist theology. With worldly success regarded as a sign of God's grace, a culture of industriousness and enterprise had gripped Boston from its earliest days. Material riches and rapid urban improvements felt like God fulfilling His side of the Covenant, and proved a source of intense spiritual satisfaction. Ever increasing numbers of the elect were drawn towards the fulfilling business of wealth creation. But for those pilgrims still inspired by Winthrop's more ascetic vision of the acting out of God's purpose the changing face of Boston resembled Mammon triumphant. 'The Lord he speaks in particular to Boston,' the influential cleric Increase Mather was informed by one angry correspondent in 1677,
and calls you to a thorough reformation in your Town, you being set up as a Beacon upon the top of a mountain ... your candlesticks should give light to all the neighbour Towns and Churches round about you: But when they see your famous Town abound with drunkennesse, swearing, excesse in apparel, etc. what encouragement is there for Towns round about you to follow your example?25
These were no idle accusations. By the 1670s, New England was coming to be known as 'the great Mart and Staple' of the Atlantic world, and the Boston economy was expanding steadily, even beginning to rival the well-established British ports of Hull, Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow. Wealth came from the seas - in particular, the Atlantic cod caught in vast numbers off the Maine, New England and Newfoundland coasts. In 1716, some 6.5 million fish were caught and processed in New England; by 1765 that had risen to near 19 million.26 Boston prospered by exporting both cured cod to Europe (the Spanish port of Bilbao became the major Mediterranean market, Mammon overcoming any religious scruples at trade with Catholics) and lower-quality dried, salted cod to the Caribbean, as well as re-exporting the catches from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Cod became the commodity upon which a new trading economy was built as the fishing fleets sailed back into Boston harbour from their Atlantic journeys laden with fruit, wine, molasses, spices and coffee from Europe and the West Indies. To 'the Islands of America and with Spain', the Massachusetts merchants carried 'flour, salt beef, salt pork, cod, staves, salt salmon, salt mackerel, onions, and oysters salted in barrels ... and for their return, they bring Sugar, Cotton Wood, Molasses, Indigo, Sago'.27 A typical fortune was that made by leading Boston merchant John Erving. His grandson, Robert C. Winthrop, described this everyday tale of Massachusetts wealth creation:
A few dollars earned on a commencement day, by ferrying passengers over Charles River, when there was no bridge - shipped to Lisbon in the shape of fish, and from thence to London in the shape of fruit, and from thence brought home to be reinvested in fish, and to be re-entered upon the same triangular circuit of trade - laid the foundations of the largest fortunes of the day.28
Some merchants also started to return to Boston with slave cargoes, beginning the British colony's traffic in human bondage and the start of the African diaspora in America. By the 1720s, Boston was host to a slave population of around 400, rising quickly to 1,400 by the 1740s - some 8.5 per cent of the city's population.29
Boston's merchants invested more and more of their profits from cod into the lucrative business of slaving - but also into whaling, whale oil, oysters and lobsters, potash, animal products and timber (including barrels, staves and boards). In effect, the city became the trading centre of New England and a North American hub for shipping and ship-building thanks to its rapid, eight-week sailing distance from the British Isles. As early as the 1640s Bostonians were boasting how 'besides many boats, shallops, hoys, lighters, pinnaces, we are in a way of building ships of a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred tons. Five of them already at sea; many more in hand at this present.'30 By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the city's waterfront had been transformed into a vast shipyard of ropemakers, shipjoiners, riggers and carpenters, teeming with tonnage ready for trade across the Atlantic. Abutting the shipyards was an expanding number of sugar refineries, for the imported molasses from the West Indies, and rum distilleries. Other industries such as flour milling, small-scale manufacturing, tanneries and taverns all helped to avoid an over-dependence on the shipping trade.
This prosperity was reflected in an improving urban fabric. 'Their streets are many and large, paved with Pebbles; the Materials of their Houses are Brick, Stone, Lime, handsomely contrived, and when any new Houses are built, they are made conformable to our New Buildings in London since the fire [of 1666],' noted the visiting bookseller John Dunton towards the end of the seventeenth century.31 By then Boston was growing fast, from a town of 6,000 residents in the 1680s to 16,000 by the 1740s, densely hemmed into some sixty roads and forty lanes. 'The Town hath indeed Three Elder Sisters in this Colony, but it hath wonderfully outgrown them all; and her Mother, Old Boston, in England also,' the Reverend Cotton Mather (son of Increase Mather) boasted in 1702. 'Yea, within a few Years after the first Settlement it grew to be The Metropolis of the Whole English America.'32 For some, the rapid urbanization was all a little stressful. 'Who can study in Boston streets?' asked John Adams, the future United States president and a prickly Boston lawyer, in 1759. 'My Eyes are so diverted with Chimney Sweeps, Carriers of Wood, Merchants, Ladies, Priests, Carts, Horses, Oxen, Coaches, Market men and Women, Soldiers, Sailors, and my Ears with the Rattle Gabble of them all that I can't think long enough in the Street upon any one Thing to start and pursue a Thought.'33
Above street level, the skyline was transformed into a set-piece battle between God and Mammon. On the side of divinity rose the spires of the city's sixteen churches, from the 'Brownist' Old Church (the faith of the earliest,Mayflower pilgrims) to the Brattle Square Presbyterian Church ministering to Scots-Irish Calvinists, to the more mainstream Old South (Congregationalist) Meeting House to those of the Anabaptists, Episcopalians and Quakers. Commerce, by contrast, planted a forest of masts in the harbour, where ships waited to unload at the 166 wharfs stretched out along the waterfront. The English historian Daniel Neal described 'the masts of ships here' (in 1719) as 'a kind of Wood of Trees like that we see upon the River of Thames about Wapping and Limehouse'. The most impressive of the wharfs was the half-mile Long Wharf, whose line of warehouses was topped off with a battery and had the effect of seamlessly stretching King Street (now State Street) into the bay waters. Today, the wharf's constrained, corporate atmosphere - with an ugly Marriott Hotel and Starbucks, an aquarium and luxury yacht offices - gives little sense of the commerce, hustle and dockside grandeur which allowed 'Ships of the greatest burthen' to unload 'without the help of Boats or Lighters'.34 Here was where goods, peoples, ideas and British officialdom first landed in Boston.
The city which spread out before these arrivals had none of the orderly town-planning or civic grandeur of Philadelphia or New York. Instead, the chaotic demands of commerce and trade shaped the cityscape, making Boston a maze of narrow lanes, crooked streets, haphazard pathways and docklands. What was most obvious in the urban pattern was a clear distinction between a more nautical, plebeian North End and a spacious, leafy South End, where large lots provided homes for the finer members of the merchant class. In the south, according to a pseudonymous 'Mr Bennett' of the 1740s, 'both the ladies and gentlemen dress and appear as gay, in common, as courtiers in England on a coronation or birthday. And the ladies here visit, drink tea, and indulge every little piece of gentility to the height of the mode, and neglect the affairs of their families with as good a grace as the finest ladies in London.' The bookseller John Dunton greatly admired the 'gardens and orchards' of the south, and the evening promenade on Boston Common, 'where the Gallants a little before sunset walk with their Marmalet Madams, as we do in Moorfield, etc.'.35
Yet eighteenth-century colonial Boston was also strikingly intimate: a 3-kilometre stretch of land, encircled by water, in which rich and poor, godly and ungodly, smuggler and custom official all had to rub along. Today, after centuries of land reclamation and construction has decapitated the 'Three Hills' and pushed the city boundaries deep into the harbour on the east and the Charles River on the west, it is difficult to reimagine the much narrower, almost stifling contours of pre-industrial Boston. Then there was no East Boston or South Boston, no dry docks, dams and mass of bridges. It was a place of coves and bays, rivers and necks which at no point was more than a kilometre from the water.
And the density of the city nursed its elevated civil society. The wealth of the 'codfish aristocracy' combined with the Puritan ethos of the city's founders to produce a remarkably educated citizenry, who were kept up to date with contemporary controversies by an unrivalled range of bookshops, printing presses, journals and newspapers. 'There are five Printing-Presses in Boston, which are generally full of Work, by which it appears that Humanity and the Knowledge of Letters flourish more here than in all the other English Plantations put together,' said the visiting historian Daniel Neal.36 The letters of John Dunton, on his visit to Boston in the 1680s, are further testimony to the extensive literary life in the colony. Recounting his social rounds, he lists visits to the bookseller John Usher ('He is very rich, and Merchandizes; very witty; and has got a great Estate by book-selling'); Joseph Bruning, a 'Dutch book-seller from Holland' ('he valu'd a good-book, who-ever printed it'); the 'Scotch book-seller, one Campbel' ('a Brisk young fellow, that dresses All-a-Mode'); Mr Andrew Thorncomb, 'a book-seller from London' whom Ladies adored for 'his excellent singing and variety of Songs'; and, finally, Samuel Green the printer ('a man of good Sense, and understanding').37 Dunton was always delighted to visit his friends' homes, but Boston also provided a sophisticated network of civic institutions, from Masonic lodges to shipping associations, from the townhouse (or town hall) to the Merchants' Exchange. Then there were the coffee-houses and estimated 150 taverns - such as the Bunch of Grapes, Green Dragon, Rose & Crown, the Royal Exchange, the Two Palaverers - providing a more rough and ready setting for the political and religious controversies of the day.38 All in all, Daniel Neal felt able to conclude, 'a Gentleman from London would almost think himself at home at Boston, when he observes the Numbers of people, their Houses, their Furniture, their Tables, their Dress and Conversation, which perhaps is as splendid and showy as that of the most considerable Tradesmen in London'.39
THY CITIES SHALL WITH COMMERCE SHINE
Just as the wealth of London and numerous English county towns, such as Bristol and Cheltenham, in the eighteenth century was part and parcel of colonialism, so Boston's economy was dependent on that amorphous, Atlantic imperium which had begun to emerge during the 1600s. 'TRADE, without enlarging the British Territories, has given us a kind of additional Empire,' wrote the playwright and Spectator journalist Joseph Addison in 1711. Indeed, following the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, the phrase 'British Empire' - as in John Oldmixon's book The British Empire in America (1708) - became much more regularly employed as trade fostered some sense of shared interest and political community across Britain's congeries of territories. It was still taken to mean a mercantilist consortium of mutual commercial advantage, with the prospering colonies of America part of a broader vision of common enrichment covering Old World and New. But there was now more of a sense of growing metropolitan control over the outlying colonies. The legal axis of Addison's 'additional Empire' was the Navigation Acts, a series of laws which had been first passed in the 1650s dictating that all colonial, merchant traffic be transported via British ports and British ships. So-called enumerated products - such as tobacco, sugar, cotton and rice - had first to be shipped to either England or Scotland before then passing on to their final destination, an imperial trading system designed to enrich the mother country by denying the Dutch and French any bilateral commerce with British possessions. The Navigation Acts produced a closed trading system which bound New and Old England together in a shared sense of mercantile endeavour, cultural affinity and equal citizenship. The mutual benefits of this 'empire of goods' was apparent to Philadelphia and Boston as well as Glasgow and Liverpool.40 The bonds of imperial loyalty, as one scholar puts it, 'depended upon commerce, upon the free flow of goods, and not upon coercion'.41
Yet the British Empire in the eighteenth century was not unfamiliar with some external coercion. A rolling succession of conflicts, variously known as King William's War (or the Nine Years' War), Queen Anne's War (War of the Spanish Succession), King George's War (War of the Austrian Succession) and the French and Indian War (Seven Years' War), turned the Atlantic into a global theatre of conflict enveloping the British, French and Spanish Empires in a century-long battle for supremacy. 'The Empire of the Seas is ours; we have been many ages in possession of it; we have had many sea-fights, at a vast effusion of blood, and expences of treasure, to preserve it; and preserve it we still must, at all Risks and Events, if we have a Mind to preserve ourselves,' was the common-enough view of one patriotic publication in 1738.42
The demands of these world wars transformed the European state, leading to the expansion of the navy and army, vastly enlarged tax revenue and the exporting of conflict beyond the Continent and into the colonies. It also had a cultural impact: the war state, and the chauvinism it engineered, seeded a deeper conception of the British Empire as an enterprise involved in more than trade. With British armed forces and free-spirited merchants engaged in a global struggle against the absolutist, Catholic monarchies of France and Spain, the Empire came to be imagined as something Protestant, commercial, maritime and dedicated to liberty. This was the imperial vision of Britain which would be celebrated in James Thomson's masque hit of 1740, 'Rule, Britannia!' And it was a widening conception of Empire enthusiastically embraced in eighteenth-century Boston:
To thee belongs the rural reign;
Thy cities shall with commerce shine:
All thine shall be the subject main,
And every shore it circles thine.
'Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
'Britons never will be slaves.'
It was exactly this notion of combined, Protestant enterprise for which Massachusetts had embraced the new monarchy of King William III in 1688. John Adams recorded in his diary on 3 April 1778 a conversation with an 'inquisitive sensible' Dutch merchant who claimed that Holland 'regarded England as the Bulwark of the Protestant Religion and the most important Weight in the Ballance of Power in Europe against France', with which Adams heartily agreed.43 And in 1763, he felt compelled to state how 'the liberty, the unalienable, indefeasible rights of men, the honor and dignity of human nature, the grandeur and glory of the public, and the universal happiness of individuals, were never so skilfully and successfully consulted as in that most excellent monument of human art, the common law of England'.44
Such ideological conviction was only natural in a Boston that found itself on the front line in the Franco-British power struggle. In March 1744, France had joined Spain in the War of the Austrian Succession against the nation they came to call perfidious Albion. The response of the British authorities in America was to push north into Canada and try to capture the French fortress at Louisburg, on Cape Breton Island, the so-called 'Gibraltar of the New World'. Controlling entry to the St Lawrence River - and hence access to Quebec - was regarded by the British as vital to preventing a French encirclement of its thirteen American colonies, from Canada in the north to Mississippi in the south. In June 1745 Admiral Peter Warren, heavily aided by colonial militia, captured Louisburg in a brilliant naval assault - to the delight of Boston's political and merchant elite.
The Louisburg démarche was just a skirmish in the British Empire's broader battle against Bourbon France, which by the mid-1700s was being played out from Canada in the north to the islands of St Lucia and St Vincent in the Caribbean south. Victory in Canada and the Americas was regarded by British military strategists as essential for supremacy over the French on the European continent. It was a zero-sum game, as one contemporary polemicist acknowledged: 'The French ... know that the source of power lies in riches, and that the source of the English riches lies in America. They know that in proportion we are weakened there, in the same proportion they are strengthened.' And this was equally understood within the Thirteen Colonies which made up British America by the 1730s.* The Boston physician and polemicist William Clarke warned in 1755 that if Britain's colonies were lost, the French navy 'would increase to such a degree of superiority over that of Great Britain, as must entirely destroy her commerce, reduce her from her present state of independency to be at last nothing more than a province of France'.45 Another Bostonian, Thomas Hancock, was equally adamant that ridding America of the French 'will be the salvation of England, for in forty years this very America will absolutely take all the manufactory of England ... whoever keeps America will in the end (whether French or English) have the Kingdom of England'.46
The 1763 Franco-British Peace of Paris seemed to settle the matter: having lost Quebec to General Wolfe, the French were forced to cede control of Canada after a century of colonial dominance. As the spectre of Bourbon encirclement of Anglo-Saxon America eased, few were more delighted than one Benjamin Franklin, son of Josiah Franklin, the cloth dyer from Banbury who had sought asylum in Boston back in the 1680s. 'No one can rejoice more sincerely than I do, on the reduction of Canada,' the young Franklin wrote,
this not merely as I am a colonist, but as I am a Briton. I have long been of opinion, that the foundations of the future grandeur and stability of the British Empire lie in America; and though like other foundations, they are low and little seen, they are nevertheless broad and strong enough to support the greatest political structure human wisdom ever erected.47
There was good reason for the likes of Clarke, Hancock and Franklin to identify themselves as both Britons and supporters of this common, Atlantic project - for the city of Boston was doing spectacularly well out of it. The House of Hancock was, in many respects, typical. The Hancock family's connections to Boston stretch back to Nathaniel Hancock, who landed in America in 1634 and sired a line of celebrated Congregationalist ministers. As Boston began to shed its Puritan heritage, the family moved into commerce, and by the 1730s Thomas Hancock was running the city's most lucrative general store with annual sales in excess of £10,000. At the beginning, Hancock serviced Boston's literary culture by trading in publishing, stationary and book-binding, before expanding into domestic wares and consumables, then commodity trading and even investment banking. His real breakthrough, however, was to make some deft political connections in London and exploit the transatlantic trading routes: he exported rum, beef, cotton and other commodities to the cut-off whaling towns of New England, before picking up whale oil and bone for England, and then returning with consumer durables from Europe (not all of it declared) for the Boston middling classes. Hancock's enormous profits were evident for all to see in his Beacon Hill house, which stood on the edge of Boston Common on land now occupied by the Massachusetts State House. It was a three-storey Georgian mansion, renowned for its mahogany furniture, English 'flockwork' wallpaper, more than fifty glass windows and two-acre garden complete with peach, apricot and mulberry orchard.48
If one digs a little deeper, it quickly becomes apparent that much of Hancock's profit was entirely dependent upon British imperial aggrandizement. For all Thomas Hancock's peaceable commerce, from as early as the 1740s he was helping to provision the Royal Navy and British army in their various campaigns. Sudden surges in demand, limited supplies, lack of infrastructure and the need for the right type of contact - all these conditions of a war economy were ably exploited by the well-resourced Hancock. When Admiral Vernon launched his expedition against the Spanish cities of Porto Bello in Panama and Cartagena in Colombia as part of the War of the Austrian Succession, Hancock supplied them with beef and pork. When the British assault on Louisburg was being prepared, Hancock was the man to feed, transport and clothe the troops. (It made him £100,000 and the richest man in Boston.) And when Halifax and other Canadian bases needed to be supported in the early 1750s from a French counter-attack, Hancock delivered lumber and carpenters, transports and fishing vessels. At the outset of the French and Indian War in 1755, Governor Lawrence of Novia Scotia appointed Hancock sole supplier for the expedition against Fort Beausejour thanks to his ready terms of credit. He sold arms, imported wheat from Philadelphia and revealed himself to be the most fervently patriotic of colonists: 'For God's sake then let us Root the French blood out of America.' And so when General James Wolfe launched his expedition up the St Lawrence to capture Quebec in 1759, the House of Hancock took care of the draught-oxen, teamsters for the artillery, provision of the fleet and other cargo logistics. By 1760, Thomas Hancock and his Boston corporation were one of the world's leading suppliers for the British colonial project.49
It was not only Hancock who prospered in this manner. In 1754 the three wealthiest men in Boston were the three largest war contractors for the British army and navy - Thomas Hancock, the quartermaster Charles Apthorp and the Lisbon fish-exporter John Erving. And the war economy trickled down to the ship-builders, the fishermen (whose monopolies were secured), the tanners, the glove-makers, the bakers, the artisans and those businesses which simply benefited from the influx of credit brought about by the war. As the conflicts rolled on, the demand for food, clothing, transport, alcohol and armaments kept the Boston economy humming. While there were periods of retrenchment and depression following the peace treaties, and Boston's ship-building felt increasing competition from other ports, by the mid-eighteenth century the city had established itself as a major commercial metropolis within the British Empire.
What was more, Boston's residents were keen to show off their riches. 'Went over the House to view the Furniture, which alone cost a thousand Pounds sterling,' wrote John Adams after a dinner party at the house of the Boston merchant Nick Boylstone. 'A seat it is for a noble Man, a Prince. The Turkey Carpets, the painted Hangings, the Marble Tables, the rich Beds with crimson Damask Curtains and Counterpins, the beautiful Chimney Clock, the Spacious Garden, are the most magnificent of any Thing I have ever seen.'50 Boston might have been an export economy, shipping natural resources across the Atlantic, but it was also an aggressive importer. Beginning in the 1740s the American market for imported goods - buttons, ribbons, jewels, books, toys, musical instruments, carpets and draperies - began to take off. Between 1750 and 1773 it rose 120 per cent, and in the five years 1768-72 alone American imports from England grew by 43 per cent.52 'A vast demand is growing for British manufactures,' Benjamin Franklin remarked in 1751, 'a glorious market wholly in the Power of Britain.'53
And he should know. When Josiah Franklin discovered that in Boston 'his dying trade would not maintain his family,' he became a tallow-chandler, producing soap and candles from a shop on Fort Street (Milk Street), round the corner from the Old South Meeting House where his fifteenth child, Benjamin, was christened. As perhaps the most famous son of a city built on the Book of Matthew, Benjamin Franklin's first job was 'cutting wick for candles, filling the dipping mold and the molds for cast candles, attending the shop, going on errands etc.'. Unfortunately, Franklin 'disliked the trade, and had a strong inclination for the sea, but my father declared against it'.54 His brothers would also soon declare against him and, after falling out over a joint publishing enterprise, Benjamin Franklin fled his Boston apprenticeship for Philadelphia. But the Franklin family business was typical of Boston's expanding consumer economy. Rather than making their own soap and candles, Bostonians were now heading to the shops for their household goods, their fashion items and their perishable foodstuffs. Milliners, hairdressers, silversmiths (such as Paul Revere), glove-makers and silk merchants were the new emblems of the Boston economy. Into the great wharfs and warehouses of the waterfront came the latest consumer accessories from England. But of all the imports introduced into America via the Navigation Acts, by far the most popular and lucrative was tea.
Europeans had been drinking tea - along with hot chocolate and coffee - from the late sixteenth century. Imported from China, both green and black tea leaves, grown on the bohea hills, gained in popularity over the ensuing centuries. The caffeine, taste and ritual of tea proved an immediate hit in Europe's royal courts, especially when the bitter taste began to be sweetened by Caribbean sugar. Thanks to the corporate muscle of the East India Company, hurrying its precious crates from the port of Canton to the wharfs of London, the price of a cup of tea started to fall away during the 1700s, until it stopped being a beverage of the elite and became a major staple of British commercial and cultural life. In 1768 tea represented almost 50 per cent of the East India Company's total turnover.
America drank deep on this global commodity, with the ports of Boston, Philadelphia and New York among the thirstiest customers for the East India Company's cargo. Estimates put the licit and illicit imports of tea from England at over £200,000 a year by the 1770s, with each American annually drinking more than a pound of tea. It was a universal drink which was found in almost every colonial household, crossing the boundaries of social class: in the 1750s even the inmates of Philadelphia's poor house insisted on having bohea tea. And in middle-class drawing rooms, on lacquered furniture, the custom of tea drinking became a significant component of household ritual, with its brewing, serving and sipping a litmus test of middle-class etiquette. 'Tea became a ritual of family solidarity, sustenance and politeness.'55
Needless to say, the correct tea party demanded the right kind of consumer accessories, and in the cities of the eastern seaboard the British ceramics industry found an enticing new market. The pioneering Stoke-on-Trent potter Josiah Wedgwood was among the first to provide the American middling classes with the cups, saucers, milk-jugs, sugar pots and teapots (let alone the tea caddies, sugar tongs and spoons) they decided they needed to drink a cup of tea. In the archives of the Wedgwood Museum is a letter from Wedgwood's Liverpool merchants, Thomas Bentley and Samuel Boardman, dated 25 September 1764, requesting over 1,600 pieces for immediate export including Cauliflower and Pineapple moulded wares, black glazed wares, tortoiseshell dishes and fifty dozen white plates. 'Above you have a copy of a small order we have just received from Boston in New England from the very careful man who has sent in cash to pay from them,' Boardman added, 'and they probably send us more if they are served to his satisfaction.' It no doubt helped future sales that Wedgwood would himself become a leading proponent of American independence. Ever the entrepreneur, he even saw good sales in it. 'What do you think of sending Mr Pitt [Lord Chatham, defender of the colonists] on Crockery Ware to America; a quantity certainly might be sold there now, and some advantage made of the American prejudice in favour of that great man.'56
The Staffordshire pottery, the bohea tea, the sugar, silverware and delicate table-cloths all helped to bestow an Anglicized identity on the Boston middling classes. Gone was that oppositional, Puritan culture which had inspired the first founders of Boston, who developed an urban sensibility so consciously distinct from Stuart England. Instead, there now flourished on either side of the Atlantic a shared Georgian society, shaped by the literature of Addison and Pope, entertained by the witticisms of Swift and Defoe, informed by The Spectator and other fashionable journals 'from London'. The pages of Boston's five newspapers in the 1730s were dominated by news from the capital, Edinburgh or Dublin, with important society information on the noteworthy weddings, births and funerals of the day there. Boston's ninety-five booksellers, libraries, myriad societies, shops and taverns - the world of John Dunton - helped to nurture an authentically colonial culture which naturally regarded itself as a component part of the British Empire. A Parisian visitor to the city thought that 'in their whole manner of living, the Americans resemble the English. Punch, warm and cold, before dinner; excellent beef and Spanish and Bordeaux wines, cover their tables, always solidly and abundantly served'.57 Here was the 'colonization of taste', in which furniture, ceramics and tea managed subtly to unite Massachusetts and the other twelve colonies with their mother country across the Atlantic. It was a powerfully uniform material culture which meant that 'on the eve of the American Revolution, Americans were more English than they had been in the past since the first years of the colonies'.58
Yet it would be a mistake to regard such English tastes as the passive product of a consumer society. Boston was also an imperial city in its ritual and public culture. It had been settled by John Winthrop in the 1630s as a consciously anti-royalist redoubt - a place of refuge for true Protestants fearful of the Catholic ambitions of the Stuart monarchy. It didn't think twice about supporting the Roundhead cause in the 1640s or the Glorious Revolution of 1688; its Puritan faith, democratic ethos and commercial ambitions marked it as an obviously parliamentary metropolis. As we have seen, that changed in 1688 with the accession of the faithful Protestant King William III and the willingness of his Hanoverian successors to wage a global war against the Catholic empires of Spain and France. The consequence was that in the 1700s Bostonians could start to understand themselves as Britons not thanks to any parliamentary connection but rather as royal subjects. It was the Crown which connected up the British Empire; if anything, the burghers of Boston were rather hostile to the growing interference, taxation and regulation which emanated from Westminster politicians. Instead, they displayed far more affection for the Hanoverian kings than most of their indigenous British subjects. In the judgement of one recent history, the eighteenth-century political culture of Massachusetts 'was decidedly monarchical and imperial, Protestant and virulently anti-Catholic, almost to the moment of American independence'.59
Just as the Hanoverian monarchy embedded itself through a calendar of public rites in Great Britain, so accession dates, coronations, birthdays and deaths provided a regular cycle for celebrating the Protestant succession in Boston. Along Orange Street, Marlborough Street and Hanover Street, Boston played host to some twenty-six annual events embedding the monarchy in the everyday life of Massachusetts. 'We ... do now with full Voice and Consent of Tongue and Heart, Publish and Proclaim That the High and Mighty Prince George, Prince of Wales; is now ... become our only Lawful and Rightful Liege Lord GEORGE the Third ... To Whom we acknowledge all Faith and constant Obedience, with all heart and humble Affection,' was the proclamation read from the courthouse on 30 December 1760 to 'a vast Concourse of People of all Ranks'.60 There then followed days of loyal revelry, cannonades, bell-ringing, illuminations and fireworks marking the accession of King George III - a long way from Winthrop's more Cromwellian vision for Boston. In 1765, the city partied again, celebrating the birthday of the Prince of Wales 'with the greatest demonstrations of joy, and with marks of unfeigned loyalty'. 'Every apartment in town rung with pious and loyal ejaculations,' commented the Pennsylvania Gazette, '"God bless our true British King" - "Long Live their Majesties" - "Heaven preserve the Prince of Wales, and all the Royal Family."'61
By the 1760s, royalist sentiments were an everyday part of public culture. 'The merchants made a dinner for Captain Gideon at the Coffee house and a very Genteel Entertainment it was,' the Exeter-born Boston merchant John Rowe noted in his diary for 2 December 1766. 'After Dinner the following toasts were Drank. 1. The King 2. The Queen and Royal Family 3.The Parliament of Great Britain 4. His Majesty's Ministry 5. The Earl of Chatham [etc.].'62
Loyalism was not limited to the upper orders. Two years earlier, John Rowe had witnessed 'a sorrowful accident' take place:
The wheel of the carriage that the Pope was fixed on run over a Boy's head and he died instantly. The Sheriff, Justices, Officers of the Militia were ordered to destroy both South and North End Popes. In the afternoon they got the North End Pope pulled to pieces. They went to the South End but could not conquer upon which the South End people brought out their pope and went in Triumph to the Northward and at the Mill Bridge a Battle begun between the people of Both Parts of the Town.63
What Rowe was describing was Pope's Day in Boston, the annual 5 November Guy Fawkes celebrations which combined a ritual display of anti-popery with violent neighbourhood factionalism. On the one hand, the Pope's Day public holiday gave licence to the most obvious and participative form of monarchical triumphalism, allowing a city-wide expression of anti-Catholic, anti-Stuart fervour and a celebration of Protestantism, liberty and the loyalties of Empire. It bound the Boston labouring classes - the apprentices, carpenters, sailors and tavern-keepers - to the heroic history and purpose of the British monarchy. On the other hand, it also served as a yearly vehicle for the sometimes deadly rivalry of Boston's North End and South End. By the 1760s, this communal antagonism constituted a vast civic ritual, with floats and effigies of Hanoverian hate-figures (popes, Guy Fawkes, the Stuart Pretender, even Admiral Byng)* paraded through the Boston streets, before then culminating in an all-out brawl on Boston Common at day's end. For the precious John Rowe, the ritual and carnival was all getting too much by 1766. 'This is a Day of Confusion in Boston,' he noted sourly, 'occasioned by a foolish custom of Carrying about the pope and the Devill etc. on a large carriage through the streets of this Town. Indeed three very large ones made their appearance this day.'64 For all its vernacular chaos, Pope's Day was, in fact, another component of loyal, royal Boston: testament to a colonial city contentedly embedded within the British Empire, an urban expression of the Empire's Atlantic strengths, commercial focus and increasingly global reach.
The cultural affinity was evident in the streets and squares of Boston. After spending extensively on sewerage systems and decent streets in the 1720s and '30s, a construction spree gripped the city. 'The buildings in Boston are in general good,' reported the visiting Anglican clergyman Andrew Burnaby in 1759. 'The streets are open and spacious, and well-paved; and the whole has much the air of some of our best country towns in England.' In addition to a growing number of Georgian mansions and domestic developments across the city (as well as in the surrounding towns of Cambridge, Dorchester and Milton), there was a more confident 'public architecture' in the city modelled on the designs of James Gibbs and Christopher Wren in London. The Governor's Palace, the courthouse, the exchange and Faneuil Hall were all regarded as fine additions to the city, but the real gem was agreed to be the King's Chapel on Tremont Street - 'exceedingly elegant and fitted up in the Corinthian taste', as Burnaby described the church. 'There is also an elegant private concert-room, highly finished in the Ionic manner.'65 Indeed, such was the expansive dignity of Boston's architecture, with its 'lofty and regular' edifices and 'spires and cupolas intermixt at proper distances', it now had as much the air of Old England as New. As the French military chaplain Abbé Robin admiringly described it in a letter to a friend in 1781, Boston 'did not seem to us a modern settlement so much as an ancient city'.66
AMERICA IS JOSEPH
Yet in Old England itself, Members of Parliament were beginning to fret about the exact place of America withintheir understanding of Empire. The autonomous confidence of the Thirteen Colonies seemed to grate with Britishamour propre. In 1764 the British bureaucrat and American imperialist Thomas Pownall suggested his colleagues understand 'that our kingdom may be no more considered as the mere kingdom of this isle, with many appendages of provinces, colonies, settlements, and other extraneous parts'. Instead, it was now 'a grand marine dominion' and, as such, needed a new political structure 'consisting of our possessions in the Atlantic and in America united into a one interest, in a one centre where the seat of government is'.67 The 1766 Declaratory Act had granted the British parliament the power 'to bind the Colonies and People of America, Subjects of the Crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever', and the role of the royal governor was now recast as enforcing the writ of parliament rather than co-existing with colonial legislatures. That was not how they saw it in Boston: a city with its own Parliamentary Charter of 1691, its own House of Representatives, its annual 'Town Meetings' (held in Faneuil Hall), vibrant meeting-houses and a democratic political culture which stretched back to its covenanting past. For all their loyal toasts to the king and queen, the citizens of Boston and settlers of Massachusetts were also adamant that their political freedoms rested in the chambers of their self-governing assemblies, not upon the whim of royal governors.68
When Britain and America were in harmony, such competing ideas mattered little, but in fractious times they were engines of misunderstanding. After the capture of Quebec, the 1763 Peace of Paris and the end of Franco-British hostilities, the misunderstandings multiplied. The expansion of British imperial power and a growing military infrastructure needed to service multiple wars produced a doubling of the national debt and demanded new sources of revenue. Many in London - not least the new prime minister, George Grenville - felt that the merchants and financiers of the American east coast had done well out of British imperial power and could now look forward to a stable trading future. So they should pay for it. To keep the French at bay, military numbers were to be expanded in America from 4,000 to 10,000 regular troops, and it was only right that the colonists should help foot the bill - just as George III's other subjects in England, Wales and Scotland did so. After years of gentle subsidy which had allowed Boston, New York and Philadelphia to grow fat on colonial commerce, America needed to contribute to its own defence. The logic of the case seemed entirely sensible to Benjamin Franklin, who, then acting as the Pennsylvanian Assembly's agent in London, accepted that the Crown might need 'to keep troops in America henceforward, to maintain its conquests, and defend the colonies; and that the Parliament may establish some revenue arising out of the American trade, to be applied supporting these troops'.69 Advocates of this course suggested it was best to regard the colonies as analogous to English 'counties palatinate' - jurisdictions without parliamentary representation but integral members of the English body politic.70
But for the business interests of Bostonians, parliament's grounds for taxation could not have been more unfortunately chosen. They began with the 1764 Sugar Act, which actually dropped the duty on imported molasses but raised it on sugar and legislated for a more effective tax collection system in the hope of countering the smuggler economy. Boston's distillers were hit hard. 'There was not a man on the continent of America who does not consider the Sugar Act, as far as it regards molasses, as a sacrifice made of the northern colonies to the superior interest in Parliament of the West Indies,' grumbled John Adams.71 Then came the 1765 Stamp Act, which slapped extra taxes on pretty much all printed material - every newspaper, journal, pamphlet, almanac (such as those published by Benjamin Franklin's brother), diploma and legal document - even on packs of playing cards. For such a fiercely literary city as Boston, this meant a substantial new expense imposed in the midst of a postwar slump. The response was, as John Rowe recalled, swift and violent. On 14 August 1765,
a great number of people assembled at Deacon Elliot's Corner this morning to see the Stamp Officer hung in Effigy with a Libel on the Breast, on Deacon Elliot's tree and along side him a Boot stuffed with representation ... this stamp officer hung up all Day - at night they cut him down, layd him out and carried in Triumph amidst the acclamations of many thousands who were gathered together on that occasion. They proceeded from the South End down the Main Street, through the Town House and Round by Oliver's Dock - they pull'd down a New Building which some people thought was building for a Stamp Office and did some Mischief to Mr Andrew Oliver's house.72
After hanging effigies at the 'Liberty Tree' (an elm tree in the South End) and ransacking the stamp master Andrew Oliver's house, the mob came for his brother-in-law and chief justice of the Massachusetts superior court, Thomas Hutchinson. His elegant North End mansion was gutted - every expensive window smashed; the crockery, drapes and furniture looted - and his life almost taken. In many ways, this sudden urban violence was no different to the kind of 'moral economy' bread riots which many British cities experienced during the course of the eighteenth century: a popular outburst to 'unfair' price rises or taxes.73 Oliver, Hutchinson and the loyalist community within Boston - now identified as 'enemies of liberty' - saw a more sinister force at play.
'Spent this evening with Mr. Samuel Adams at his House,' recorded John Adams in his diary on 30 December 1772.
He affects to despize Riches, and not to dread Poverty. But no Man is more ambitious of entertaining his Friends handsomely, or of making a decent, an elegant Appearance than he. He has lately new covered and glased his House and painted it, very neatly, and has new papered, painted and furnished his Rooms. So that you visit at a very genteel House and are very politely received and entertained.74
This urbane host, up to date with all the London fashions, was the man behind the 'Boston Caucus', the long-standing political wing of the city's labouring classes, which was now blamed for running the mobs attacking Oliver and Hutchinson. Samuel Adams had been baptized at the New South Congregational Church (in 1722) and was the son of an equally devout nonconformist father, 'Deacon' Samuel Adams Senior. But politics, as well as religion, featured prominently in the Adams household thanks to a failed investment in a land bank followed by punitive law suits, all of which the family blamed on arbitrary interventions by Crown authorities. In 1729 Samuel Adams Senior was elected a member of the Boston Town Meeting as part of the Boston Caucus, and in the 1750s, after Boston Latin School and Harvard College, his son took on a sinecure as a tax collector for the Town Meeting and then followed his father into the Caucus. His previous profession as lawyer, accountant, businessman and brewer had not worked out. Even as a tax collector he ended up owing the town of Boston £8,000 in back payments.
Over time, Samuel Adams Senior and Junior worked their personal animus towards British officialdom into a broader critique of colonial rule. Writing as 'A Puritan' in the Boston newspaper, Independent Advertiser, Samuel Adams Junior played on a growing sense of economic insecurity among the labouring classes and sought to connect that anxiety to London's oppressive taxation policies. In doing so, he drew upon the Bostonian self-identity as 'free-born Englishman' with the rights of Magna Carta and liberty under the law. From its origins in the 1630s theirs was a colony of settlement, not exploitation; a joint endeavour across the ocean. But the Westminster parliament, with its growing demands for colonial taxation, was both undermining a Boston economy already laden with war debts and striking at the heart of the legal and political privileges which flowed from the colonies' founding Charters. At root, Massachusetts was being taxed without being represented in the legislative assembly which was imposing the levies - and this was surely contrary to the British constitution, mystically unwritten though it was. 'If taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid,' Adams asked in 1764, 'are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves?'75 Adams was far more than a gifted polemicist - he was also a first-rate politician able to marshal public opinion, manage mob dynamics and secure election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. In the midst of an economic downturn, in a city with a tradition of voluble street politics and a merchant elite ever more hostile to the demands of parliament (but not king), the Boston Caucus came to pose a powerful challenge to the imperial settlement.
At this point, uncharacteristically, British politicians opted for peaceable compromise. On 16 May 1766 the brigantine Harrison docked at Boston harbour with copies of the repeal of the Stamp Act. The relief across the city was tangible. After the effigy burning, house looting and politicking of recent months, Boston could resume its natural role as a loyal, royal city. 'This day is the Joyfull Day indeed for all America and all the people are to Rejoice,' recorded John Rowe in his diary on 19 May 1766. 'Dined at Colo Ingersoll's with 28 Gentlemen - we drank fifteen Toasts and very Loyal they were and suited to the Occasion. In the evening there were very grand Illuminations all over the Town. In the Common there was an Obelisk very beautifully decorated and very grand fireworks were displayed.'76 Indeed, the repeal allowed for another outburst of monarchical fervour with huge 'Figures of their Majesties' erected on Boston Common for all to celebrate. Two months later, there was even a thanksgiving service for the repeal of the Stamp Act. John Adams was in the congregation.
Mr Wibirt's [text] was Genesis 50th. 20th. - 'But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but god meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this Day, to save much People alive.' - America is Joseph, the King Lords and Commons - Josephs Father and Brothers. Our Forefathers sold into Egypt, i.e. Persecuted into America, etc. Wibirt shone, they say.77
But the repeal of the Stamp Act and the loss of income to the Exchequer only intensified the problem of funding the colonies, containing the French and supporting both a military infrastructure and legal system (of customs officials, judges and governors) needed to underpin parliamentary sovereignty. The young chancellor of the exchequer, Charles Townshend, supported by Prime Minister Grenville, came up with an alternative solution in the form of the 1767 Revenue Act. The so-called 'Townshend duties' imposed an import tax (rather than the Stamp Tax's direct tax on indigenous produce) on all glass, paper, lead, paint and tea shipped into the American colonies. And these new taxes came with a Board of Customs Commissioners designed to end Boston's dockside grey economy and finally put the imperial finances on a stable footing. Needless to say, the duties were met with an indignant response. Because for all of Samuel Adams's protestations of constitutional propriety and lawfulness, the Boston economy was in fact heavily dependent upon illegal smuggling and the avoidance of duties. 'We have been so long habituated to illicit trade that people in general see no evil in it,' Thomas Hutchinson censoriously commented.78 He estimated that some three-quarters of the consumer goods brought into America were done so illegally. And the high-yielding crates of Chinese tea were amongst the most regularly smuggled goods.
In Boston, the imposition of new taxes on established imports instantly politicized the waterfront and, with it, Boston's relationship with the mother country. Within a matter of weeks, the customs officials, the Royal Navy and the tax collectors who patrolled the wharfs and jetties metamorphosed from an irksome but necessary bureaucracy to the aggressive arm of a foreign government. The British Empire imperceptibly shifted from an enterprise of which Boston was a part to something approaching an oppressive, occupying force. On a more psychological level, the taxing of those consumer goods which had connected Boston with Britain, which had made Massachusetts part of the Georgian world, also undermined an important component of their imperial identity as Britons. That consumer bond across the Atlantic - drinking from the same ceramics, wearing the same silks, reading the same novels - was under fiscal assault by the British government. And the response of Boston was to strike back at precisely that 'empire of goods' which had so Anglicized their city.
The Townshend duties sparked a wave of non-consumption and 'non-importation' activism which stressed frugality and asceticism as the only means to make London mend its ways. Lists were drawn up of superfluous consumer goods - ceramics, furniture, clocks, draperies and finery - which any righteous Boston citizen should have the moral purpose to resist. With smart political acumen, Samuel Adams called upon Boston's Puritan heritage to encourage his compatriots to deny themselves the 'baubles of Britain'. The language of commerce was shifting: what had once connected the Americans with the greatest trading nation of the world, in peaceable and prosperous union, was now regarded as a luxurious, corrupting self-indulgence. Even the House of Hancock, the leading trading family of North America, was forced into backing the boycott. After the death of Thomas Hancock in 1764 the business had passed into the hands of his nephew, the raffish but shrewd John Hancock, who wisely thought it best to ally himself with Samuel Adams and the Boston Caucus rather than suffer the fate of a Thomas Hutchinson. 'It is surprising to me that so many attempts are made on your side to Cramp our Trade, new Duties every day increasing,' he wrote in ostentatious protest to his London associate in 1767. 'In short we are in a fair way of being Ruin'd. We have nothing to do but unite and come under a Solemn agreement to stop importing any goods from England.'79
In 1767, public virtue not private consumption became the touchstone of patriotism. In December the Boston Town Meeting instructed its representatives in the general assembly to acknowledge its fears over 'the distressed Circumstances of this Town, by means of the amazing growth of Luxury, and the Embarrassments of our Trade; and having also the strongest apprehensions that our invaluable Rights and Liberties as Men and British Subjects, are greatly affected by a late Act of the British Parliament'; they urged their representatives 'to encourage a spirit of Industry and Frugality among the People'.80 Above all, that meant an end to tea. The drink that had defined a shared British sensibility and became a template for manners was now demonized as a symbol of enslavement and luxury. The students of Harvard College vowed to abstain; the coffee-houses served up all sorts of new, revolting non-tea concoctions. But it was the women of Boston, having once brewed the pot, sieved the tea and poured the milk, who placed themselves at the forefront of this consumer boycott. They wrote to the newspapers, created trouble in shops selling tea, circulated lists of importing merchants, and urged the city's menfolk to show the same kind of reserve in the tavern that they themselves were exhibiting at the tea table.81
The response of the British authorities to such commercial disobedience was not subtle. 'On Friday, September 30th, 1768, the ships of WAR, armed Schooners, Transports, etc. Came up the Harbour and Anchored round the TOWN: their Cannon loaded, a Spring on their Cables, as for a regular Siege,' recounted the North End silversmith Paul Revere. 'At noon on Saturday, October the 1st the fourteenth and twenty-ninth Regiments, a detachment from the 59th Regiment and Train of Artillery, with two pieces of Cannon, landed on the Long Wharf; then Formed and Marched with insolent Parade, Drums beating, Fifes playing, and Colours flying, up King Street.'82 Revere went on to craft a very precise little silver engraving depicting the troops processing up the Long Wharf, the warships bobbing in the harbour and 'the city on the hill' looking every inch the godly bastion under attack from a tyrannical empire.
With the fifty-gun warship HMS Romney sitting at anchor, 700 British grenadiers encamped on the Common and customs officials boarding ships and raiding wharfs at whim, Boston came to feel like a city under siege. It was only a matter of time before violence erupted. The capture of John Hancock's sloop Liberty on the charge of smuggling Madeira, followed by the arrest of Hancock and the requisition of Liberty, could have sparked off a wave of attacks on customs commissioners. But Hancock himself was wealthy and smart enough to swallow the losses. Instead, the spark came in March 1770 with a fight outside the customs house on King Street, when a wigmaker's apprentice taunted Captain-Lieutenant John Goldfinch over an unpaid bill. Months of escalating brawling and abuse between bored soldiers and the Boston mob culminated in a confused fire-fight which resulted in five fatal shootings. Among the dead were the sixteen-year-old shipwright's apprentice Christopher 'Kit' Monk, the mixed-race mariner Crispus Attucks and the Irish leatherworker Patrick Carr.
As the crack of gunshot ricocheted into the March air, the tight, tiny city of Boston erupted: bells rung and the streets swarmed as if a fire had engulfed it. Even the placid, trimming John Rowe was perturbed by such incendiary violence.
This night the 29th Regiment on Duty. A Quarrel between the soldiers and Inhabitants. A Great Number Assembled in King Street. A Party of the 29th under the Command of Captain Preston fired on the People - they killed five - wounded several others, particularly Mr Edward Payne in his Right Arm. Captain Preston bears a good Character - he was taken in the night and Committed also seven more of the 29th - the inhabitants are greatly enraged and not without Reason.83
John Adams rushed from a dining club in the South End when he heard the news.
In the Street we were informed that the British Soldiers had fired on the Inhabitants, killed some and wounded others near the Town house ... I walked down Boylstons Alley into Brattle Square, where a Company or two of regular soldiers were drawn up in Front of Dr. Coopers old Church with their Musquets all shouldered and their Bayonetts all fixed.84
Today, all that marks the site of the 'Boston Massacre', as it was quickly inscribed, is a slightly grubby circle of stones underneath a traffic light on a busy junction at the top of State Street (no longer King Street). But in the immediate aftermath of 5 March 1770, it became a place of pilgrimage and commemoration. Paul Revere produced another engraving depicting the execution of the innocents, while the British soldiers themselves were quickly escorted off the Boston peninsula (to Fort William on Castle Island) for their own safety. Three days later, John Rowe 'attended the funeral of the unhappy people that were killed on Monday last. Such a Concourse of people I never saw before - I believe ten or twelve thousand.'85
AN EPOCH IN HISTORY
After the fury of the 'Massacre' came another period of retreat and reflection. The trigger-happy soldiers were placed on trial (with John Adams and Josiah Quincy conducting the defence), parliament overturned the Townshend duties in April 1770, and Boston, in response, ended its non-consumption boycott. On the surface, Anglo-American relations returned to an even keel. But there lurked one unresolved issue: the price of a cup of tea. Townshend had grudgingly removed duties on glass, paint, paper and the rest, but he refused to rescind the tax on tea. First, because the finances of the East India Company - the major tea exporter to America - were in difficulties, and a tea tax would help subsidize this government-backed business. And, second, because the British parliament was adamant that it had the right to tax the colonies: to abandon every levy was to jettison a principle of imperial finance which had increasingly global ramifications. This was the thinking behind the 1773 Tea Act, which provided a tax rebate to the East India Company on tea shipped to America, reducing the cost of tea but retaining both the principle of taxation and a solid income for the Exchequer. The new prime minister, Lord North, regarded it as an ideal compromise - the rebate cut the price of tea for the caffeine-loving colonists, but also kept the East India Company afloat, and the 'empire of goods' ticking over.
Samuel Adams saw it differently. The Tea Act not only threatened to undercut Boston's lucrative tea-smuggling industry (by allowing the East India Company to supply its cargo at much lower rates), it also cemented the principle of colonial taxation. And out of that taxation would be funded a growing army of customs commissioners, soldiers, lawyers and governors all intent on undermining Magna Carta rights in the Thirteen Colonies. Tea was just the first sip; if it was swallowed then the Townshend duties would be back and the principle of no taxation without representation lost for ever. Boston would become a subject of, rather than partner in, Empire. 'The Monopoly of Tea, is, I dare say, but a small Part of the Plan they have formed to strip us of our Property,' was how the Pennsylvanian lawyer John Dickinson saw it, exposing the tensions of his Atlantic identity. 'But thank GOD, we are not Sea Poys, nor Marattas, but British Subjects, who are born to Liberty, who know its Worth, and who prize it high.'86 'We won't be their Negroes,' agreed John Adams (with no hint of irony). 'I say we are as handsome as old England folks, and so should be as free.'87 But Lord North was equally resolute that there must be no retreat on tea. After the repeal of the Stamp Act and the Townshend duties, Westminster had to show its imperial resolve and stop surrendering to the threats of Boston. On each side of the Atlantic, the positions on the Tea Act became entrenched - and sailing across the ocean came 'the accursed dutiable' cargo.
'This morning Captain Scot arrived from London,' John Rowe noted on 17 November 1773. 'He brings advice that Hall, Loring, Coffin and Bruce are to Bring the Tea from the East India Company - this a measure that is Generally disapproved and will Remain a Great Occasion of Disagreement between England and America.'88 Eleven days later, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver docked at Griffin's Wharf with their 46 tons of East India Company tea. As a part owner of the Eleanor, Rowe had extra reason to be worried. Immediately, the fly-posters went up.
Friends, Brethren, Countrymen! That worst of Plagues The Detestable Tea, ship'd for this Port by the East India Company is now arriv'd in this harbour, the Hour of Destruction or manly Opposition to the Machinations of Tyranny Stares you in the Face: every Friend to his Country to himself and to Posterity is now called upon to meet at Fanewill Hall at nine of Clock this Day (at which time the Bells will begin to Ring) to make a United and Successful Resistance to this last worst and most Destructive Measure of Administration.
Under Boston port authority rules, the owners of the vessels had twenty days (until 17 December) to pay their customs dues or have the entire cargo seized - spelling instant bankruptcy for the unfortunate merchants. By contrast, Samuel Adams and his Boston Caucus, now operating under the soubriquet 'Sons of Liberty', were equally adamant that the tea should not be unloaded and hence become subject to the tax. They wanted the tea returned to London on the very same vessels, devoid of all duties. 'To let it be landed, would be giving up the Principle of Taxation by Parliamentary Authority, against which the Continent have struggled for ten years,' agreed John Adams, 'and subjecting ourselves and our Posterity forever to Egyptian Taskmasters - to Burthens, Indignities, to Ignominy, Reproach and Contempt, to Desolation and Oppression, to Poverty and Servitude.'89
Once again, Boston's heritage of biblical liberation was revived. Samuel Adams summoned the Winthrop legacy by urging a 'Solemn League and Covenant' against the forces of British oppression. The spirit of liberty which had swept the Arbella into Massachusetts and bound Boston's founder into a sacred covenant was called forth to do God's bidding and fight tyranny. If Boston was to remain free, the tea could not be landed.
Poor Thomas Hutchinson, promoted from chief justice to royal governor in 1771, was ill-equipped to manage such a quickening political crisis. In the past, he had quietly criticized the Stamp Act and other clumsy interventions from Westminster; he believed in the traditional, cordial, informal agreement which had co-existed between the legislatures in Britain and Boston. But he also believed in the rule of law and he would not allow the Dartmouth,Eleanor and Beaver to slink back to England without having been cleared by the customs house. Located at a safe distance from disorderly Boston in a house on Unquity Hill in upstate Milton, Massachusetts, Hutchinson had little idea of just how incendiary his refusal would be on the streets of his agitated, angry, fearful city. When, on the freezing evening of 16 December 1773 - the night before the deadline for paying the customs duties - Hutchinson's decision that the cargo be unloaded was relayed to the thousands pressed into the pews of the Old South Meeting House, the cry went up 'Boston Harbor a tea-pot this night!' It was then that the war whoops began, the 'Mohawks' appeared, and British suzerainty of Boston was effectively lost.
The morning after, John Adams thought the Tea-Party a stunning, signal affair. 'This is the most magnificent Movement of all', he wrote.
There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly admire. The people should never rise, without doing something to be remembered - something notable. And striking. This Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important Consequences, and so lasting, that I can't but consider it as an Epocha in History.90
He had rarely written a truer word. Within two years Britain and its colonies were at war. In one of his final diary entries, John Rowe caught the moment - on 19 April 1775 - with chronological clarity. 'Last night the Grenadiers and Light Companies belonging to the several Regiments in this Town were ferry'd over Charles River and landed on Phipps Farm in Cambridge from whence they Proceeded on their way to Concord, where they arrived early this day. On their march they had a Skirmish with some Country People at Lexington.'91 The shot that was 'heard around the world' (as Ralph Waldo Emerson first described it) had been fired, and Boston was behind the trigger. The cack-handed British response to the Tea-Party - an escalating series of Coercive Acts designed to emasculate Boston's democracy and isolate its economy - had pushed the city into open rebellion. The city upon a hill, the great mart and staple, the finest English country town outside England had become in the words of Lord North 'the ringleader of all violence and opposition to the execution of the laws of this country'.92
The imperial city transformed itself into a revolutionary citadel, with devastating consequences for the emergent British Empire. Those loyal Bostonians, who had once counted themselves the most fervent subjects of the British Crown, the keenest promoters of British imperium, now recast themselves as anti-colonial freedom-fighters. Boston, that candle upon a candle-stick, was now a light to the world for a very different vision of liberty. The First Empire, the Thirteen Colonies, was about to be lost. In London, the diplomat and politician the Duke of Manchester instantly realized the significance of events in Boston, Concord and Lexington. He mournfully informed the House of Lords that, 'the page of future history will tell how Britain planted, nourished, and for two centuries preserved' a British empire across the Atlantic. And how,
strengthened by her sons, she rose to such a pitch of power, that this little island proved too mighty for the greatest efforts of the greatest nations ... Historic truth must likewise relate, within the same little space of time, how Britain fell to half her greatness; how strangely lost, by misjudging ministers, by rash-advised councils, our gracious sovereign, George III, saw more than half his empire crumble beneath his sceptre.93
Copyright © 2014 by Tristram Hunt
