A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

  When the drunkards in the taverns heard the church bells ringing, they put down their cups and rushed into the streets. The mob grabbed sticks, rocks, and chunks of ice and ran atop the cobblestones to King Street. There they saw young boys cursing and hurling snowballs and horse manure at a column of British soldiers who were standing guard with muskets and bayonets in front of the customshouse. The troops had been in Boston for nearly two years to protect customs officers who were being harassed, beaten, and tarred and feathered for bringing British goods into the colonies. Many of the seven hundred soldiers stationed in the city were being quartered in the homes and taverns of Bostonians, and fights broke out nearly every day over their presence in the city. But on March 5, the rowdy libertines who made up much of the city’s population were ready for a bigger fight. They called the soldiers “sons of bitches,” “bastards,” and “cunts.” The air that night on King Street, according to the historian Edmund S. Morgan, “was thick with epithets.” The heckling and pelting increased as more and more of the taverngoers arrived. When the crowd became a seething, intoxicated mob of several hundred, one man stepped forward, swung his club, and leveled one of the soldiers. Shots exploded into the crowd. Eleven men fell. Five died.

  No one will ever know what the men who became known as the martyrs of the Boston Massacre were thinking or why they confronted armed soldiers. But we do know that they came from taverns, they were white and black, and they were not gentlemen. They had been drinking, gambling, and, if they were like most taverngoers in early Boston, cavorting with prostitutes. They were unruly, foulmouthed, and thuggish. One of them, a former slave named Crispus Attucks, who had been quaffing drinks at the Royal Exchange, is widely thought to have been the one who clobbered the hapless British soldier. Textbooks like to make Attucks and the mob on King Street into allies of the Founding Fathers, and indeed, their actions led not only to the removal of the troops from Boston but also to increased militancy against the British that most historians agree was the beginning of the American Revolution. Moreover, the Boston Massacre provided much of the rationale for the Third and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, which protect us from soldiers being quartered in our homes and from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” But the greatest concern of the Founding Fathers was not the restrictions on the personal freedom of citizens—it was that such restrictions, especially in a renegade town like colonial Boston, inevitably cause social disorder. As John Adams put it shortly after the Boston Massacre, “soldiers quartered in a populous town will always occasion two mobs, where they prevent one. They are wretched conservators of the peace!”

  The Founding Fathers knew better than our textbooks. They knew that the drunks swinging clubs and slinging horseshit at the authorities that night were a problem as much for them as for the British Empire. It is little known that the lawyer who defended the British soldiers in the ensuing trial was none other than John Adams. During the trial, Adams correctly described the victims as “a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and molattoes, Irish teagues, and outlandish jack tarrs.” He also accurately characterized their actions as “shouting and hazing and threatening life … whistling, screaming, and rending an Indian yell … throwing every species of rubbish they could pick up in the street.” Adams, like the Founding Fathers generally, was greatly interested in perfecting and maintaining social order. As he later explained to a friend, “I had a good Policy, as well as sound Law on my side, when I ventured to lay open before our People the Laws against Riots, Routs, and unlawful assemblies. Mobs will never do—to govern States or command armies … To talk of Liberty in such a state of things—!”

  Most important, Adams understood that such disorder was virtually inevitable among people controlled by a standing army and external force. All the kings and queens of Europe, with all their soldiers and ships and dungeons, could not put an end to the kind of freedom that flowed through the streets of colonial America. In fact, such freedom was even greater among the European peasantry, who had flooded into London, Paris, and Amsterdam and transformed them into raging carnivals.

  Much better, the Founding Fathers learned, that the people be trained to control themselves.

  COUNTERREVOLUTION

  The men who created the United States were truly revolutionaries: they revolutionized the concept of freedom.

  The Founding Fathers were part of a transatlantic movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to replace the external controls over subjects in absolutist regimes with the internal restraints of citizens in republics. This movement began what is now called the Modern Age. The modernist movement required not just the overthrow of monarchs but also the repression of what was called “man’s animal passions.” The problem with the discipline of the gallows, the lash, and the sword, according to these revolutionaries, was that it was far less effective than individual self-discipline in keeping social order. Even though peasants, slaves, and the colonial subjects we have seen in taverns and bawdy houses held no formal political power, they were, according to this view, actually too free because they had no reason to control themselves. So the Founding Fathers redefined freedom as self-control and built a political system around it called democracy.

  To solve the lack of order they saw all around them, the fathers seized on one of the great—and often missed—ironies in world history: the only thing that could make men forsake their own freedom and still believe they were free was self-rule. A government of the people, John Adams argued, would make the people disciplined, stern, hard working, and joyless—the qualities he most admired. It would “produce Strength, Hardiness Activity, Courage, Fortitude, and Enterprise; the manly noble and Sublime Qualities in human Nature, in Abundance.” A monarchy, on the other hand, would let them have too much fun and, paradoxically, allow them too much liberty. It “would produce so much Taste and Politeness, so much Elegance in Dress, Furniture, Equipage, so much Musick and Dancing, so much Fencing and Skaiting, so much Cards and Backgammon, so much Horse Racing and Cockfighting, so many Balls and Assemblies, so many Plays and Concerts that the very imagination of them makes me feel vain, light, frivolous, and insignificant.” Adams understood that democracy forced the people to shed their pleasures and surrender their personal freedom, because they alone would shoulder the responsibility of managing society. “Under a well-regulated Commonwealth, the People must be wise virtuous and cannot be otherwise. Under a Monarchy they may be as vicious and foolish as they please, nay, they cannot but be vicious and foolish … [T]here is one Difficulty which I know not how to get over. Virtue and Simplicity of Manners are indispensably necessary in a Republic among all orders and Degrees of Men. But there is so much Rascallity, so much Venality and Corruption, so much Avarice and Ambition such a Rage for Profit and Commerce among all Ranks and Degrees of Men even in America, that I sometimes doubt whether there is public Virtue enough to Support a Republic.” The Founding Fathers understood what we now choose to ignore: democracy is the enemy of personal freedom.

  Adams was well-acquainted with the liberty spawned by monarchy. One night in 1760, at the beginning of his political career, the young lawyer met with friends at Thayer’s Tavern in Braintree, Massachusetts, where he found persons of all sorts enjoying uninhibited, integrated fun: “Negroes with a fiddle, young fellows and girls dancing in the chamber as if they would kick the floor thru … fiddling and dancing of both sexes and ages, in the lower room, singing, dancing, fiddling, drinking flip and toddy, and drams.” Adams saw this frivolity as evidence that public houses had “become the eternal Haunt, of loose disorderly People of the same Town, which renders them offensive and unfit for the Entertainment of a Traveller of the least delicacy.” The people he found at Thayer’s were “the trifling, nasty vicious Crew, that most frequent them.” Adams promptly asked the Braintree town meeting to reduce the number of taverns in order to correct “the present prevailing Depravity of Manners, through the Land in General, and in this Town in particular, and shameful neglect of Relig
ious and Civil Duties.” Though Adams was unsuccessful in 1760, the culture turned in his favor during the War of Independence. As the historians Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin put it, “The bitterest denunciation of distilled spirits came in the immediate aftermath, and as part of the zeitgeist, of the Revolution.”

  During what we call the American Revolution, a second American revolution took place: a counterrevolution against the pleasure culture of the cities. Personal freedom and sensual pleasure came under attack during the democratic revolution not because the revolutionaries were puritans but because democracy is puritanical.

  We normally think of democracy as a system of rights and freedoms: voting, speaking freely, equal treatment under the law, and so forth. But true democracy, the kind of democracy that the Founding Fathers wanted, is much more than that. John Locke, the man who, in the English world, helped invent the notion that the people should rule and who inspired all of the American democratic revolutionaries, made this brutally clear. “It seems plain to me,” he wrote in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), “that the principle of all virtue and excellency lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own desires, where reason does not authorize them.” Locke knew that managing society is a big job requiring enormous discipline. If the people were to do it, then the people would have to renounce their personal freedom. Most importantly, they would have to be taught to feel shame for their selfish desires. “Esteem and disgrace are, of all others, the most powerful incentives to the mind, when once it is brought to relish them,” Locke wrote. “If you can once get into children a love of credit, and an apprehension of shame and disgrace, you have put into ’em the true principle, which will constantly work and incline them to the right.” The kind of punishment used by monarchs and slave owners to keep the people orderly and productive—whipping, flogging, executions, and the like—only “patches up for the present, and skins it over, but reaches not to the bottom of the sore; ingenuous shame, and the apprehensions of displeasure, are the only true restraint. These alone ought to hold the reins, and keep the child in order.”

  With these ideas in mind, the Founding Fathers fought simultaneous wars against the British and the renegade impulses of Americans.

  The precipitating event of the Revolution, the Sugar Act of 1764, which effectively increased import duties on sugar, molasses, wine, coffee, and cloth and indigo used for fine clothing, was passed by Parliament in order to finance the maintenance of Britain’s many colonies around the world. It virtually halted the rum industry in the colonies and sharply limited Americans’ access to fancy garments. In response, some American colonists protested “taxation without representation,” and merchants in Boston launched a boycott of British goods. But many of the men who would lead the American Revolution were actually happy about the new taxes and the boycotts that followed. Richard Henry Lee said of the Sugar Act, “Possibly this step of the mother country, though intended to oppress and keep us low, in order to secure our dependence, may be subversive of this end. Poverty and oppression, among those whose minds are filled with ideas of British liberty, may introduce a virtuous industry, with a train of generous and manly sentiments.”

  During the Sugar Act crisis, Benjamin Franklin and other prominent Pennsylvanians repeatedly and fruitlessly petitioned the colonial government to take action against taverns and drinking. Franklin charged that “Many bills have been presented to late Governors to lessen the number, and to regulate those nurseries of idleness and debauchery, but without success, from whence it seems evident, that so long as the Proprietaries [of the Pennsylvania colony] are interested in our ruin, ruined we must be.” Charles Thomson, a Philadelphia merchant and later a secretary of the Continental Congress, backed Franklin’s campaign to reduce the number of taverns and reinforced his argument that drinking in America was tantamount to British subversion. Thomson recalled the way in which Cyrus the Great of ancient Persia, in conquering the Lydian Empire, “took to break the spirit and soften the warlike disposition of the Lydians and render them the most abject slaves by erecting bagnios [brothels] and public inns … I will not say [that this] is the design of our Great Ones. But it is true that in almost every tavern keeper, the Proprietors [of the colony] have a warm advocate, and the more effeminate and debauched the people are, the more they are fitted for an absolute and tyrannical government.”

  In 1765 Parliament passed the Stamp Act, imposing taxes on colonists for printed materials including newspapers, pamphlets, bills, legal documents, licenses, almanacs, dice, and playing cards. This was followed by the Quartering Act, requiring colonists to house British troops and supply them with food. Several of the men who would become known as the Founding Fathers petitioned Parliament and King George III, asserting that no taxes should be imposed on the colonists “but with their own consent, given personally, or by their representatives.” By the end of the year, more than two hundred merchants joined the boycott against British goods. After Benjamin Franklin warned Parliament that military enforcement of the Stamp Act might cause a revolution in the American colonies, in 1766 King George III signed a bill repealing the law. But on the same day, Parliament passed the Declaratory Act, affirming the “full power and authority” of the British government “to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America … in all cases whatsoever.” The following year, Parliament adopted the Townshend Revenue Acts, imposing new taxes on the colonists to help pay for the administration and military protection of the American colonies. The act also established a board of customs commissioners in Boston to oversee tax collecting. In October 1767, Boston merchants renewed the boycott of British luxury goods.

  Boycotts against British goods became a favorite tactic among the colonial rebels, in part because of the austerity they required. The pro-independence Boston Evening-Post scolded Americans for having been “of late years insensibly drawn into too great a degree of luxury and dissipation.” But thanks to boycotts, “by consuming less of what we are not really in want of, and by industriously cultivating and improving the natural advantages of our own country, we might save our substance, even our lands, from becoming the property of others, and we might effectually preserve our virtue and our liberty, to the latest posterity.”

  Tensions increased considerably in 1768, when several colonial assemblies endorsed Samuel Adams’s circular letter calling for no taxation without representation. Customs officers were harassed and attacked on the streets of Boston. British warships sailed into Boston Harbor, and two regiments of the British army were deployed into the city to keep order. By the following year, resolutions opposing taxation without representation and boycotts of British goods had spread across the colonies. But one pro-independence newspaper, the Virginia Gazette, actually welcomed taxation without representation for its disciplining effect. “Luxury,” Americans were told, “has taken deep root among us, and to cure a people of luxury were an Herculean task indeed; what perhaps no power on earth but a British Parliament, in the very method they are taking with us, could possibly execute.”

  As we already know, the first violence in the conflict occurred in Boston in 1770, when drunkards, ruffians, and gamblers tumbled out of taverns to curse, throw rubbish and horse manure, and assault British soldiers. Uproar over the ensuing massacre forced the British to withdraw troops from the city, repeal the Townshend Acts, eliminate all duties on imports into the colonies except for tea, and allow the Quartering Act to be discontinued. Yet a few months later, Samuel Adams still saw much more work to be done. He told a friend that “the Conspirators against our Liberties are employing all their Influence to divide the people, … introducing Levity Luxury and Indolence …” In 1772, he organized a “committee of correspondence” that proclaimed the right of the colonies to self-rule. By the end of 1773, committees of correspondence were established in Virginia, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and South Carolina. That year Parliament passed the Tea Act, ma
intaining tax on tea brought into the colonies and granting a monopoly on tea sales to the British East India Company. A group of pro-independence activists boarded cargo ships in Boston Harbor and dumped crates of tea into the water. But another pro-independence newspaper hailed taxation without representation as good for the soul. “The Americans have plentifully enjoyed the delights and comforts, as well as the necessaries of life,” said the Newport Mercury, “and it is well known that an increase of wealth and affluence paves the way to an increase of luxury, immorality and profaneness, and here kind providence interposes; and as it were, obliges them to forsake the use of one of their delights, to preserve their liberty.”

  In response to the Boston Tea Party, in 1774 Parliament passed a series of Coercive Acts that closed the port of Boston, eliminated most forms of self-rule in Massachusetts, and allowed British soldiers to be housed in colonial buildings. Shortly thereafter, Massachusetts was placed under military rule. In response, the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia with fifty-six delegates, representing every colony except Georgia. Members of the Congress included John Adams, Patrick Henry, George Washington, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock. The Congress declared that the Coercive Acts were “not to be obeyed,” called for the formation of local militia units, and established a boycott of all British imports and an embargo on all exports to Britain. The boycott was aimed not only against British goods but also against British pleasures, the delegates declared, as “We will, in our several stations, encourage frugality, economy, and industry, … and will discountenance and discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse racing, and all kinds of gaming, cock fighting, exhibitions of shews, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.” That year, a letter to the Newport Mercury, authored by “Frugality,” continued the redefinition of American freedom as self-denial: “We may talk and boast of liberty; but after all, the industrious and frugal only will be free.” And Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, while he attended the Continental Congress, “If we expect to inherit the blessings of our Fathers, we should return a little more to their primitive Simplicity of Manners, and not sink into inglorious ease … [I]n the Country you must look for that virtue, of which you find but small Glimerings in the Metropolis … As for me I will seek wool and flax and work willingly with my Hands, and indeed there is occasion for all our industry and economy.”