American Fun (8 page)

In Boston’s taverns of the 1760s, as David W. Conroy demonstrates, the “republic of letters” reached well beyond its intended bourgeois readership, and in distinction from the eighteenth-century European public sphere famously theorized by
Jürgen Habermas—a bourgeois political climate defined by print circulation—in Boston the consumption of
newspapers and pamphlets mingled with “
the traditional oral culture of taverns.” Radical patriots like Samuel Adams and
James Otis knew this environment was ripe for political action. Just as many Tory and conservative Whig politicians feared, the often raucous, nicotinean, and dipsomaniacal taverns “
were where republican concepts gripped men’s imaginations and unleashed new levels of participation. Here the novel but appealing republican ideal of an alert, active citizenry might be acted out in a setting that was also traditional and familiar.” Familiar, naturally, to
Jack Tar in particular.

From the
Knowles riots up through the
impressment riots of the late 1760s,
it was Jack Tar who hoisted the Revolution’s mainsail. Rabble-rousing played well in Jack Tar’s society—especially in taverns, where races and genders mixed freely, where passions flowed like cheap malt liquor—although it took special talent to import it to the high streets, where the middle and upper ranks had behaved well for centuries. It was commonly held in the late eighteenth century that revolution came from the “
body of the people,” a willing majority who, in
John Locke’s terms,
upon suffering “a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices … endeavor to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected.” In England the “body” comprised property-owning white males with a measure of political leverage. In America, however, as the century progressed and the public embraced notions of a more complicated citizenry (ancient notions from Roman orators like
Seneca, late-breaking notions from moral-sense philosophers like
Francis Hutcheson and
Adam Ferguson), the body of the people itself began to change. More people came to recognize themselves as rightful citizens, and their body came to include whoever could cram into, say, Boston’s Faneuil Hall or Old South Meeting House—provided they weren’t female, Indian, or black. Such a body was neither legal nor illegal. In times of common crisis, it became an extralegal gathering that in the best cases justified its acts of open rebellion by practicing virtue, civility, and restraint. It helped this body’s physical fitness, moreover, as
Benjamin L. Carp has shown, that the colony’s financial strength hinged on interdependence among the levels in Boston’s waterfront community—among rich merchants and shipbuilders, middle-class shop and tavern keepers, and crowds of menial sailors and dockworkers whose “
particularly strong collectivism and antiauthoritarian militancy” (resulting from their “unique culture and the close, cooperative working relationship of seamen aboard ship”) kept the upper classes in check. But could the hoi polloi entice their superiors to join them in behaving badly?

The middle management of Boston’s early revolution was a loose conspiracy of middle-class activists calling themselves the Sons of Liberty, 26 (out of 355) of whom had liquor licenses by the end of the 1760s. In 1765, the Sons managed
a deft little dance that rallied a seeming majority against the
Stamp Act without kicking off full-scale destruction. Taking cues from liberal clergymen such as
Charles Chauncey and
Jonathan Mayhew, the Sons ballyhooed their British loyalty, even as they directly attacked the Stamp Act as a threat to American liberty and dignity. Thus did they expand their playing field, a no-man’s-land between criminality and law where citizens could riot at their own risk.

The Stamp Act stress-tested the Sons of Liberty’s tactics. Widespread rage throughout the thirteen colonies could have weakened into
cynicism—or exploded into violence. But starting in Boston, under the influence of
Samuel Adams’s “true patriots,” it fostered a generation of citizens keen to risk everything for national freedom.

Following a summer of welling discontent, the
Loyal Nine, a group of artisans and merchants who hid their contacts with radical assemblymen like Samuel Adams, orchestrated an open citywide rebellion against the stamp master,
Andrew Oliver. To encourage participation by the North and South End
gangs, two young and viciously opposing factions, the Nine tapped the services of
Ebenezer McIntosh, a cobbler who had led the South End to victory in the
Pope’s Day parades the November before. He accepted their challenge to bury neighborhood hatchets and lead them as one against the Stamp Act.

Early on the morning of August 14, on fashionable Newbury Street, Andrew Oliver’s effigy swung from what thereafter would be the
Liberty Tree. It was adorned with a couplet of Thomas Morton–grade
satire: “
A goodlier sight who e’er did see? / A Stamp-Man hanging on a tree!” Next to Oliver was a
devil puppet, crawling out of an oversize boot (a pun on the Stamp Act’s Earl of Bute). “
Many Gentlemen,”
Governor Bernard wrote to Lord Halifax, “especially some of the Council, treated it as a boyish sport,” but Bernard suspected worse. Young toughs defended the dummies all day, even threatening the sheriff’s deputies who tried to take them down. One-third of the city’s schoolboys were given recess to witness this vision of civil disobedience. Meanwhile, as the crowds spilled over onto the Common, mock stamp stations blocked the city gates to hold up traffic in and out of Boston. By late afternoon, folks from Boston and far-flung counties—with estimates numbering up to eight thousand—had gloried in the shame of the Massachusetts colony’s third-ranking official. The
Boston Newsletter
reported, “
So much were they affected with a Sense of Liberty, that scarce any could attend to the Task of Day-Labour; but all seemed on the Wing of Freedom.” Who could work in the midst of such fun?

Late in the day the
effigies were cut down, and McIntosh paraded them, with his bumptious thousands, past the highest halls of government. They projected their message through council chamber windows, giving “
three huzzas by way of defiance,” then pressed on to the Kilby Street docks, gleefully dismantling Oliver’s half-constructed stamp office
and disporting themselves by “stamping” its bricks. This body of the people gained diversity as it went, taking on ever more respectable sorts who never would have joined a
Pope’s Day parade, or even raised their voices in public. Tradesmen and merchants suddenly had reason to take to the streets and cheer and wave banners and act like ruffians; even some gentlemen, disguising themselves as laborers, betrayed their class and joined the fun. Arriving after nightfall on nearby Fort Hill, the leaders built a bonfire and cremated the effigies—as “
a Burnt-Offering … for those Sins of the People which had caused such heavy Judgements as the STAMP ACT etc. to be laid upon them.” Apart from the pointed demolition of Andrew Oliver’s home (and another building he had under construction), no further property was damaged, and other than the chief justice and sheriff—who received “
some bruises”—not a soul was injured.

The complex prank was a roaring success. It caused Andrew Oliver’s resignation, which, as
Samuel Adams wrote, “
gave universal Satisfaction throughout the Country.” He acknowledged that the event followed a ragged discipline, but said it was “justifyd” all the same—as “legal steps” had failed.

While Samuel Adams flitted from one sphere to another, inquiring into his countrymen’s “fears and jealousies,” listening to all levels of his highly striated Boston,
John Adams stayed committed to the
Great Chain of Being. “
There is,” he wrote, “from the highest Species of animals upon this Globe which is generally thought to be Man, a regular and uniform Subordination of one Tribe to another down to the apparently insignificant animalcules in pepper Water.” In this stratified worldview the working classes, it often seems, weren’t far above the animalcules. It stands to reason that, as
Richard Allen Ryerson argues, John Adams’s most comfortable political position may have been, in his own fanciful terms, “
republican monarchist.”

Samuel didn’t join his friends, the
Loyal Nine, in stirring mobs against the Stamp Act. (He supported a British boycott, which would have been legal in any case.) John Adams, who disapproved of illegal crowd actions, took a subtler, even safer tack: he published “
A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law” in the
Boston Gazette
. This long
and carefully measured screed, which only hints at the crisis of the day, “dare[s]” the people “to read, think, speak, and write.” Its wildest move is to encourage deep reflection—particularly at “the pulpit” and at “the bar.” As if in defiance of the noise in the streets, the “Dissertation” posits a defanged revolution that better suited his retiring nature—a thoughtful and calm revolution, apparently involving only the literate classes. In this utopian upheaval, “Colleges join their harmony in the same delightful concert,” “Public disputations become researches into the … ends of government,” and “Every sluice of knowledge [is] opened and set aflowing.” His argument was praised by Boston’s senior pastor, who applauded Adams for being old beyond his years (“The author is a young man, not above 33 or 34, but of incomparable sense”), but it was awkwardly out of step with his volatile, rebellious,
youthful
times.

NINE YEARS LATER
, John Adams attended a plein-air dinner in a hummocky field outside Dorchester’s
Sign of the Liberty Tree Tavern. The event commemorated the
Stamp Act repeal. Three hundred fifty Sons of Liberty were present, and the lot of them dined under a sailcloth awning hoisted to keep out the pattering rain. John looked rather twitchily around, privately concerned by his place in the crowd. It pleased him that the lawyers were seated at the “
Head,” but his eye was distracted by the secretary of New Jersey, who had been “cool, reserved, and guarded all day.” He joined the throng in a series of toasts and noted, archly, “to the Honour of the Sons,” that he “did not see one Person intoxicated, or near it.”

It isn’t clear how much fun John Adams had. Their host, a farmer, started the
“Liberty
Song,” and everyone present joined in for the chorus. Adams, too, may have raised his voice, singing, to the tune of “Heart of Oak”:

He may have been feeling it that wet summer’s eve as hundreds of voices rang out to the clouds, but he kept enough distance, between huzzahs, to admire such songs for “Cultivating,” as he put it, “Sensations of Freedom.” For John such sensations weren’t a good in themselves, not playful romps in
Thayer’s tavern. For him, they represented a political resource that had to be harnessed and properly packaged: “[James] Otis and [Samuel] Adams are politick in promoting these festivals, for they tinge the minds of the people, they impregnate them with sentiments of Liberty. They render people fond of their leaders in the Cause, and averse and bitter against all opposers.”

Clearly he missed his cousin’s point. “Politick” though
Samuel Adams may have been—organizing “
parades, festivals, and shows of fireworks to celebrate such happy anniversaries”—he knew that power had to rise from the people. The people had to be “fond”
of themselves,
and their leaders could only urge this along. Such sensations didn’t advertise an upcoming republic. In the spirit of radical
patriotism, they kept “fellow citizens awake to their grievances” while letting them experience their democracy firsthand. During this tempestuous period, patriotism itself was cause for celebration—rude, native, exuberant enjoyment—but enjoyment that still made John Adams suspicious.

The law was his refuge from the tumult of the streets. As early as 1758, returning to Boston from sleepy Braintree, he resented how his “
Ears [were] ravished with every actual or imaginable sound.” The country lawyer shuddered at “the Hurley burley upon Change,” shrank from the “Rattling and Grumbling of Coaches and Carts,” and with biting irony he drew sharp contrast between the urban “Pleasure” that “roused in [his] Imagination, scenes of still greater tumult, Discord, Deformity, and filthy” and the serene and purely intellectual “Pleasure” of listening to “the greatest Lawyers, orators, in short the greatest men, in America, haranguing at the Bar, and on the Bench.” So convinced was young Adams of the law’s rectitude that he challenged a friend to imagine a “
higher object” or “greater character” or more superior aspiration than “to be possessed” (as Adams felt he was) “of all this [legal] knowledge.”

Naturally the Tories stood firm by the law and feared the “body of the people”—whose will often ran contrary to the king’s. But even cautious
Whigs, those of John Adams’s particular stripe, believed American liberties were best preserved within the limits of parliamentary law, certainly without provoking some rabble “
body” whose every intention seemed to be to upend the system. By his own admission, he was often asked to “harangue” at town meetings, but he proudly claimed to have “constantly refused.” He would only harangue at the
legitimate
bar.

The tension between Adams’s faith in law, his fear of crowds, and his avowed love of American liberty came to a crisis in the spring of 1770. Having seethed for two years under the
Revenue Act, which levied new British taxes to pay for colonial government and defense and which Patriots met with boycotts (“
No Mobs or Tumults”), local Americans and British had been raring for a fight—particularly along the Hutchinson Street ropewalks, where in recent days a series of fistfights had broken out between working-class rebels and underpaid Redcoats. On March 5 all hell broke loose. That morning, on King Street, a British sentry, pushed to his limit by insults and snowballs, rammed the head of a mouthy wigmaker’s apprentice with the butt of his flintlock rifle. Word spread fast among Bostonians, and by evening a crowd four hundred strong—ropeworkers, sailors, excited apprentices—surged around the empty sentinel box. The violence erupted when
Captain Preston sent his soldiers to reclaim the post.