American Fun (55 page)

46.
“
and other fitting instruments
”: Morton,
New English Canaan,
132.

47.
“
the good liquor
”: Ibid., 134.

48.
“Make greene garlons,” “
Drinke and be merry
”: Ibid.

49.
“
drinking and dancing aboute it
”: Bradford,
Of Plymouth Plantation,
141.

50.
“
Sport; high merriment; frolicksome delight
”:
Samuel Johnson’s
Dictionary,
Selections from the
1755 Work That Defined the English Language,
ed. Jack Lynch (Delray Beach, FL: Levenger Press, 2002), 202.

51.
competing social systems weren’t held in check
: William Heath, who gives the liveliest and most detailed account of Merry Mount in recent years, reads Morton’s colony as a rude intrusion of Renaissance England into a would-be
Calvinist paradise: “As an Anglican cavalier with literary pretensions and a hedonistic bent, Morton epitomized the ‘eat-drink-and-be-merry’ England the Puritans hoped to leave
behind. His maypole festivities smacked of folk superstitions, pagan practices, Old Testament precedents, and King James I’s
Book of Sports;
his consorting with Indian women violated their sexual and racial taboos” (153–54). The pleasure of this multiplex transgression, however, left England far behind; for all of its culturally British antecedents, the fun of Merry Mount crushed all the old aristocratic molds and experienced an audacious (if short-lived) civil society that was properly North American, a
New
English Canaan. “Thomas Morton: From Merry Old England to New England,”
Journal of American Studies
41, no. 1 (2007): 135–68.

52.
“
harmles mirth
”: Morton,
New English Canaan,
135.

53.
“
over armed with drinke
”: Bradford,
Of Plymouth Plantation,
144.

54.
“
the effusion of so much noble blood
”: Morton,
New English Canaan,
142.

55.
“
We must be knit together
”: John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume A,
ed. Nina Baym (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 176–77.

56.
The American Self was menaced
: Did the Puritans have fun? Bruce C. Daniel argues that they did. But what he spools out in a blurry list as their “quiet fun,
spiritual fun, family fun, [and] civic fun” turns out to be, upon closer inspection, a catalogue of generally sanctioned activities that Puritans engaged in as a matter of course and therefore—according to an apparently Lockean idea of “pleasure” that arises merely from following laws—possibly enjoyed. Take, for instance, this business of “spiritual fun,” much of which took place on the so-called
Day of Joy, when “custom proscribed sexual intercourse, unnecessary traveling, and any type of frivolity.” Even though the jacket copy on
Puritans at Play
promises a “reapprais[al]” of the old assumption that Puritans were “dour, joyless, and repressed,” the author comes clean and lets us know that “brandings and mutilations for crimes committed on the Sabbath were not unusual, and a few ministers and civil leaders believed the death penalty appropriate for Sabbath breaking.” If a Puritan could be mutilated or killed for frivolity on Sunday, what room was left for “spiritual fun”? The entire day was spent in church, in “rigid segregation by gender, class, age, and race characterized by physical arrangements.” Daniels sets the stage with daring honesty:

So where was the fun? Even if we
were
to assume, along with Daniels, that Tom Sawyer–like fun was not only anachronistic but constitutionally undesirable for the Puritans—which is also to assume that the likes of Hawthorne’s Edith and Edgar in “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” sowed no seeds of mirth at Plymouth—we would still have to distort “fun” beyond all recognition to agree with his claim, in the following paragraph, that “the entire milieu of the services” (drearily described above) “had entertainment value.” A captive audience who is subjected to sermons that detailed the people’s depravity and eternal perdition (per
Calvinist doctrine) was neither having “fun” nor being “entertained.” The sense one gets from
Puritans at Play,
as from most histories of early New England, is that what Daniels calls “boisterous”
and “deviant fun” happened, like
Thomas Morton’s, in spite of Puritanism, and usually at a considerable remove. Bruce C. Daniels,
Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England
(New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995), xiii, 77.

57.
“
praying towns
”: Alan Taylor,
American Colonies
(New York: Viking, 2001), 201.

58.
“
sharply against Health-drinking
”: Samuel Sewall,
The Diary of Samuel Sewall,
ed. Harvey Wish (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967), 48–50.

1.
“
trifling, nasty vicious Crew
,” “
to Prisons and the Gallows
”: John Adams,
Diary and Autobiography of John Adams,
ed. L. H. Butterfield, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), 1:129.

2.
“
the nurseries of our legislators
”: Ibid., 2:85.

3.
Adams had not been bred for taverns
: See ibid., 1:128, 257–69; 3:98–99, 257, 260, 261, 260.

4.
“
Let no trifling diversion
”: Ibid., 2:59.

5.
“
fond
”: Ibid., 2:47; dated July 22, 1771.

6.
“
The Rabble
”: All quotations in this and the following two paragraphs are from ibid., 1:172–73.

7.
“
rhythmic crowd
”: Elias Canetti,
Crowds and Power
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1960), 30.

8.
“
Fiddling and dancing
”: Adams,
Diary and Autobiography,
1:172–73.

9.
“
foolish enough to spend
”: Ibid.

10.
a fast crowd collectively known as “
Jack Tars”
: Paul A. Gilje,
Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 3–129; Jesse Lemisch,
Jack Tar vs. John Bull: The Role of New York’s Seamen in Precipitating the Revolution
(New York: Garland, 1997), 28, 150.

11.
“
eighteenth century’s most complex machine
”: Daniel Vickers with Vince Walsh,
Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 88. Vickers spends little time recounting the “celebrations” in so-called “sailortowns”—the “drinking to excess, feasting on fresh victuals, regaling their friends and families with stories from abroad, and renewing their acquaintanceships with women and girls” (133) that he says characterized the young mariner’s shore leave—but presents a wonderfully detailed history of the young Jack Tar’s work life and society.

12.
“
the antics of a wild, harebrained sailor
”: Samuel Leech,
Thirty Years from Home, or A Voice from the Main Deck
(Boston: Charles Tappan, 1844), 24–25. Recall, too, William Bradford’s cautionary tale of the “proud & very profane younge … seaman” whom “it plased God … to smite with a greeveous disease, of which he dyed in a desperate maner.” Bradford,
Of Plymouth Plantation,
57.

13.
The contagious fun
: In
Moby-Dick,
the
Pequod
’s variegated crew does a jig that would have boiled
Cotton Mather’s blood. The Icelandic, Maltese, and Sicilian sailors beg off for lack of female partners, to which the Long Island sailor chides these “sulkies” that “there’s plenty more for the rest of us” and the all-male crowd lights up the deck. The Azores sailor beseeches Pip on the tambourine: “Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it, bell-boy! Make fire-flies! break the jinglers!” The Chinese sailor hollers: “Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of thyself.” The French sailor, beside himself in the frenzy, suggestively shouts: “Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it! Split jibs! tear yourselves!” All the while Tashtego, the “quietly smoking” Indian, watches over the ruckus in judgment:
“That’s a white man; he calls that fun: humph! I save my sweat.” Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick
(London: Everyman’s Library, 1993), 146–47. This romp celebrates a seafaring camaraderie that predated the Revolution and would grew all the more diverse after 1776, when, as Gilje shows, Americans ignored Britain’s Navigation Acts and welcomed crew members of all nationalities (25).

14.
“
a Mob, or rather body of Men
,” “
their Captivated Fr[ien]ds
”: Dirk Hoerder,
Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts,
1765–1780
(New York: Academic Press, 1977), 62.

15.
“
using Rigour instead of Mildness
”: Cited in John Lax and William Pencak, “The Knowles Riot and the Crisis of the 1740s in Massachusetts,”
Perspectives in American History
19 (1976): 186.

16.
“
rioting
,” “
People can experience
”: Gilje,
Liberty on the Waterfront,
104.

17.
“
such Illegal Criminal Proceedings
”: Lax and Pencak, “Knowles Riot,” 197.

18.
“
who despises his Neighbor’s Happiness
”: Cited in John K. Alexander,
Samuel Adams: America’s Revolutionary Politician
(New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 8. Alexander’s indispensable book was among the first in a recent surge of Samuel Adams biographies; it also remains the most incisive account of his early political life. It has since been revised, expanded, and retitled:
Samuel Adams: The Life of an American Revolutionary
(2011). Pauline Maier’s long biographical essay—in
The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams
(1980; New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 3–50—is also highly recommended. Other biographies consulted for this account are Benjamin H. Irvin,
Samuel Adams: Son of Liberty, Father of Revolution
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Mark Puls,
Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Ira Stoll,
Samuel Adams: A Life
(New York: Free Press, 2008).

19.
“
No man was more aware
”: Maier,
Old Revolutionaries,
40.

20.
“
Folly
,” “
Dissipation
”: Ibid., 42.

21.
“
Cause of Liberty and Virtue
”: Ibid., 36.

22.
“
zealous, ardent and keen in the Cause
”: John Adams,
The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States,
ed. Charles Francis Adams, 10 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2010), 2:163.

23.
“
Chief Incendiary
”: Alexander,
Samuel Adams,
103.

24.
“
all serpentine cunning
”: Peter Oliver,
Peter Oliver’s Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View,
ed. Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1961), 39.

25.
“
The true patriot
”: Samuel Adams,
The Writings of Samuel Adams,
ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing, 24 vols. (McLean, VA:
IndyPublish.com
, n.d.), 2:106.

26.
“
spent rather lavishly
”: Clifford K. Shipton,
Sibley’s Harvard Graduates,
vol. 10, 1736–1740 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1958), 421–22. When he returned for his master’s degree in 1743, Adams argued under his politically liberal father’s influence “that it is lawful to resist the supreme magistrate if the commonwealth cannot be otherwise preserved.”

27.
“
No other caucus leader
”: Alexander,
Samuel Adams,
14.

28.
“
difficulties
”: Samuel Adams,
Writings,
1:200.

29.
“
a Master of Vocal Musick
,” “
This genius he improved
”: Oliver,
Peter Oliver’s Origin,
41.

30.
“
had for years been complimented
”: Shipton,
Sibley’s Harvard Graduates,
426.

31.
Boston’s public houses
, “
slaves and servants
”: David W. Conroy,
In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 58, 59, 127.

32.
“
many Americans
”: Carl Bridenbaugh,
Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America,
1743
–
1776
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), 361; see 361–417.

33.
“
distinct lower-class subculture
”: Eric Foner,
Tom Paine and Revolutionary America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 48, 50; see 45–56.

34.
“
the traditional oral culture of taverns
”: Conroy,
In Public Houses,
244, 180
n,
254. See also Jürgen Habermas,
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society,
trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

35.
“
were where republican concepts gripped
”: Conroy,
In Public Houses,
254.

36.
it was
Jack Tar who hoisted:
By tracing American seamen’s crowd actions (from the
Knowles
riots forward) to a colorful array of boat burnings, slave revolts, and other violent uprisings in the larger eighteenth-century transatlantic context, Marcus Rediker’s powerful article shows how and why Jack Tar’s multiracial revolution “could not easily be contained” by the Sons of Liberty’s conciliatory gestures. It was far more radical. After 1747, “Jack Tar took part in almost every port city conflict in England and America for the remainder of the century… [they] took to the streets in rowdy and rebellious protest on a variety of issues, seizing in practice what would later be defined as ‘rights’ by philosophers and legislators. Here, as elsewhere, rights were not granted from on high; they had to be fought for, won, and defended.” “A Motley Crew of Rebels: Sailors, Slaves, and the Coming of the American Revolution,” in
The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a Social Movement,
ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 197, 168.

37.
“
body of the people
”: John Locke,
The Second Treatise of Government,
in
The Selected Political Writings of John Locke,
ed. Paul E. Sigmund (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 116.

38.
“
particularly strong collectivism
”: Benjamin L. Carp,
Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 29. From the 1750s to the 1770s, new intellectual currents flowed into the colonies from Europe, loosening the Puritans’ crumbling
authoritarianism with Enlightenment ideas of liberty and equality—what
John Adams loosely called “all the Nonsense of these last twenty Years” (
Autobiography and Diary,
3:265). Bernard Bailyn, in his landmark history of the period, establishes how opposition writers who had been considered “Cassandras” in their luxurious, extravagant Georgian England—“doctrinaire libertarians, disaffected politicians, and religious dissenters”—“seemed particularly reasonable, particularly relevant, and … quickly became influential” in the disenfranchised colonies (
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
[Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967], 92, 52–54). Jay Fliegelman demonstrates how the widespread rhetoric of independent children provided a rallying point for colonists who experienced, like kids, both exhilaration and fear in individuating themselves from England. “A call for filial autonomy and the unimpeded emergence from nonage” became “the quintessential motif. At every opportunity Revolutionary propagandists insisted that the new nation and its people had come of age, had achieved a collective maturity that necessitated them becoming in political fact an independent and self-governing nation” (
Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution and Patriarchal Authority,
1750–1800
[New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982], 3). Gordon S. Wood details the colonies’ rapid upheaval from monarchical hierarchy to “
enlightened paternalism” to an orderly form of autonomous democracy. Wood attributes this upheaval to, among other causes, an influx of new ideas: an increased interest in civilization and civility, an emphasis on benevolence and communal happiness, and an enlightened awareness of cosmopolitanism, as well as a lightening of punishments in general and vicious practices like public shaming (
The Radicalism of the American Revolution: How a Revolution Transformed a Monarchical Society into
a Democratic One Unlike Any That Had Ever Existed
[New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992]).

39.
The middle management
: Conroy,
In Public Houses,
256.

40.
a deft little dance
: Pauline Maier,
From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain,
1765–1776
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 31–32.

41.
“
A goodlier sight who e’er did see?
”: Alexander,
Samuel Adams,
32.

42.
“
Many Gentlemen
”: Francis Bernard, “The Stamp Act Riot, 1765,” in
Documents to Accompany America’s History, Sixth Edition,
ed. Melvin Yazawa (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007), 107.

43.
“
So much were they affected
”:
Boston Newsletter,
August 22, 1765; Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan,
The Stamp Act Crisis
(New York: Collier Books, 1963), 159–65; John Rowe,
Letters and Diary of John Rowe,
ed. Anne Rowe Cunningham (New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1969), 88–89.

44.
“
three huzzas
”: Bernard, “The Stamp Act Riot,” 107.

45.
“
a Burnt-Offering
”: Cited in Hoerder,
Crowd Action,
98.

46.
“
some bruises
”: Bernard, “The Stamp Act Riot,” 107.