A People's Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice

by Nicolas Lampert

  Ironically, John Adams himself would credit the mob for sparking the revolution. He later described the Boston Massacre as having laid the “foundation of American independence,” and when he penned a letter about liberty to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson in 1773, he signed it not with his own name, but with the name “Crispus Attucks.”12 This remarkable double consciousness signified that Adams and others in his class both depended upon and despised the multiracial mob. They needed the rural and urban working-class revolt to spark the revolution and to fill the front lines, yet they feared the power of the mob and did everything they could to contain it and crush it once they obtained positions of leadership and power.

  Sites of Resistance and Class Conflict

  Though missing from Revere’s famous engraving, examples of working-class resistance can be found in other items of material culture from the Revolutionary era—printed material, engravings, paintings, monuments, and mementos, to name just a few. However, the best example is a tree.

  The Liberty Tree in Boston, located at the intersection of Essex and Newbury Streets (today Essex and Washington), was an epicenter of anti-British organizing. The Liberty Tree, first known as the Great Elm or the Great Tree, was dedicated on September 11, 1765, and stood as an important site of resistance for a decade until British troops cut it down in 1775.

  For ten years the tree served as a location where Bostonians—or at least white men of all classes—could take part in civic life, regardless of whether they owned property.13 The Liberty Tree was a meeting space for assemblies, orations, street theatre, and mock trials, and often served as the starting point or stopping point for funeral processions for martyrs of the revolution.

  The tree itself was also a canvas for creative resistance. Effigies and lantern slides (painted images on thin paper that were pasted over a framework and illuminated with a candle from within) hung from its branches. Events were posted on the trunk of the tree and a liberty pole ran up the center and extended above its tallest branch.

  During the first year of the Liberty Tree, working-class artisans directed the bulk of the actions. They were led by the shoemaker Ebenezer Mackintosh, nicknamed the “Captain General of the Liberty Tree,” who had upward of three hundred men at his command. His notoriety ranged from leading peaceful parades against the Stamp Act to leading mob actions that completely dismantled Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s mansion.14

  Paul Revere, A View of the Year 1765, 1765 (American Antiquarian Society)

  Mackintosh caused a dilemma for the elite patriot leadership. The Sons of Liberty leaders could not ignore him, and neither could they reject him outright, due to his popularity. So they embraced him. They followed the strategy of Robert R. Livingston Jr., a wealthy landlord in the Hudson Valley in New York, who in response to a series of urban and rural uprisings warned that the wealthy should learn “the propriety of Swimming with the Stream which it is impossible to stem.”15 That the wealthy “should yield to the torrent if they hoped to direct its course.”16

  The Sons of Liberty followed this path. They embraced Mackintosh, won the respect of the crowd, and then they began to slowly distance themselves from him.17 Their slogans included “No Mobs—No Confusions—No Tumults” and “No Violence or You Will Hurt the Cause.”18

  This is why it is so perplexing that Paul Revere—a member of the Sons of Liberty—paid homage to the mob actions with his engraving A View of the Year 1765, a print that featured a depiction of the Liberty Tree. A View of the Year 1765 positioned Revere in solidarity with the working class (and the mob), and much like all of his images, it was directly copied from another artist. This time the source material was a British cartoon entitled “View of the Present Crisis” that was published in April of 1763 and critiqued the Excise Bill of 1763. Revere’s print had a different political agenda. It was a scathing piece of anti-British propaganda that was aimed at the Stamp Act and depicted colonists raising their swords to slay a dragon that represented the detested law. To make his point clear, Revere added text to the bottom, labeled the dragon and the figures, and erased three figures on the far right, replacing them with a scene from the Liberty Tree.19

  Revere could have simply depicted the tree, considering that all classes claimed ownership to it, yet he chose to include symbols that celebrated the events of August 14, 1765, when a mob action forced Andrew Oliver, the colony’s stamp distributor, to resign from his position.20 The events of August 14 began when organizers set up next to the Liberty Tree and did a mock stamping of goods as farmers from the countryside passed by en route to the downtown markets. As the afternoon sun began to cast its shadow, thousands gathered in front of the tree. An effigy of Oliver was hung from it. At five o’clock a mock funeral assembled and paraded through town carrying Oliver’s effigy. Next, the mob went to Oliver’s office and leveled it with a battering ram. Not content, the mob then went to Oliver’s house and demanded his resignation. Oliver was nowhere to be found, so the mob dismantled his house, stamping each piece of timber before it was thrown in a bonfire. Not surprisingly, Oliver sent word the next day announcing his resignation.

  “Stop! Stop! No: Tuesday-Morning, December 17, 1765”: Loyal Nine, broadside announcing resignation of the Stamp Act Commissioner Andrew Oliver December 1765 (Massachusetts Historical Society)

  However, Oliver’s nightmare did not end there. The Loyal Nine posted upward of 100 broadsides around Boston in the dead of night that announced that on December 17, Oliver would publicly resign in front of the Liberty Tree.21

  True to the broadsides’ advertisement, Ebenezer Mackintosh and a company of men escorted Oliver to the site, where he was forced to resign in front of a crowd of approximately two thousand people.22

  Here, public theatre merged with public humiliation, serving as a warning sign to others that they would meet the same fate if they backed the Stamp Act.23 These tactics showcased just how radical the movement was in 1765 when its leadership was in the hands of working-class people. More so, it exemplified just how important the Liberty Tree was as a site to gather, organize, and protest. The Liberty Tree allowed those who detested British rule to occupy space—a tactic that future movements would embrace, ranging from sit-down strikes in auto plants in the 1930s to campus occupations during the Vietnam War to the occupation of Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street in 2011, among others. This tactic—occupying space—allows movements to recruit more people and forces the opposition to act. In short, it serves to escalate the conflict.

  Boston’s Liberty Tree was not the only important location for organized resistance and occupying space. Another symbol of colonial revolt included liberty poles. These markers, much like the Liberty Tree, were also key locations for working-class people to congregate and to openly express their dissent toward British rule.

  Liberty poles were found throughout the colony. However, the most famous liberty pole was located in New York City in “the fields” and close to the barracks of British soldiers. This pole, first erected in 1766, was eighty-six feet tall and further topped by another twenty-two-foot-tall pole.

  Pierre Eugene du Simitiere, Raising the Liberty Pole in New York City, ca. 1770 (Library Company of Philadelphia)

  The pole itself was crowned with the number “45” to link the imprisoned patriot Alexander MacDougall (put in jail for printing an inflammatory broadside) with the imprisoned English reformer John Wilkes, who was sympathetic to the cause of the American revolt. To the British Parliament and Crown, it must have stood as a 108-foot-tall monument against their rule—a provocative middle finger that was designed to escalate tensions. British forces cut down the pole four times before colonists resorted to fortifying it with iron hoops crafted by blacksmiths. In 1770, sailors and laborers fought British soldiers in hand-to-hand combat to defend the pole in a skirmish that led to the Battle of Golden Hill, a shift that historian Alfred F. Young describes as a celebratory space segueing to a “staging place for military action.”24 This materialized in 1776 during the Rev
olutionary War, when the pole was cut down by the British Army as they occupied the city.

  Just like liberty poles and the Liberty Tree, King Street itself also became an important site for organizing and creative resistance. Following the Boston Massacre, the colonial government in Boston voted in 1770 that speeches would be held there annually on March 5, followed by various exhibitions on the street. During these celebrations, lantern slides adorned balconies overlooking the massacre site, while other lantern slides were carried in parades or hung at the Liberty Tree.25 Historian Philip Davidson writes that “the exhibition depicted the murder, the troops, and the slaughtered victims [and included the slogan] ‘The fatal effect of a standing Army, posted in a free City.’”26

  The March 5 remembrances would not last long. Annual commemorations ended in 1783 when March 5 (the Boston Massacre) was rolled into the July 4th holiday. Erased was a celebratory day to working-class revolt and revolution, and in its place was a holiday that celebrated independence and patriotism. In short, the March 5 remembrance day met the same fate as the Liberty Tree and the poles: it was cut down.

  A Need for More Liberty Poles

  Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe the Revolutionary War era in three stages: “militant origins, radical momentum, and conservative political conclusion.”27 However, the success of the conservative elites did not defuse class tensions during the War of Independence (1775–1783) or after. If anything, the tensions heightened.

  During the war, the wealthy could opt out of the draft by paying for someone to serve in their place, leaving the bulk of the fighting to the poor. To add insult to injury, many soldiers were not given the pay that was promised to them, and pensions for military service were not forthcoming for decades.

  All the while, the working class were being shut out of the conversations that established the legal framework for a new nation. The 1787 Philadelphia Convention that drafted the Constitution was a closed meeting dominated by wealthy conservatives. William Manning, a New England farmer, soldier, and author, compared the Constitution to a fiddle: a document that was “made like a Fiddle, with but few Strings, but so the ruling Majority could play any tune upon it they please.”28 He added that it was “a good one prinsapaly [sic], but I have no doubt but that the Convention who made it intended to destroy our free governments by it, or they neaver [sic] would have spent 4 Months in making such an inexpliset [sic] thing.”29 To Manning, “free governments” meant local control. He and other farmers worried about power concentrated in the hands of few, and power situated in distant urban locations.

  Manning had good reason to worry. A powerful new federal government could, among other things, quell dissent and suppress working-class movements. It could also draft repressive legislation, as exemplified when Samuel Adams helped draft the Massachusetts Riot Act of 1786, designed to disperse and to control uprisings. The weight of this act came down on Daniel Shays, a former captain in the Continental Army who had fought at Bunker Hill and who in 1786 led a rural uprising of indebted farmers in rural western Massachusetts. Several hundred farmers armed themselves and marched on the courts in Springfield and Worcester (much as farmers had done in 1774) but were driven back by an army that was paid for by wealthy Boston merchants. Outnumbered, the men took flight, and took refuge in Vermont. Many of Shays’s cohort surrendered and were put on trial; some were sentenced to death. Shays himself was pardoned in 1788.

  Shays’s discontent was shared by others. From 1798 to 1800, liberty poles were raised across the land in opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798—a draconian law passed under President John Adams that allowed for the imprisonment of anyone who criticized the government. When the poles went up this time, the federal government cut them down and used the new law to go after those who had initiated the actions.

  In Dedham, Massachusetts, David Brown rallied his community in 1798 to install a Liberty Pole that included text that read “No Stamp Act / No Sedition Act / No Alien Bills / No Land Tax / Downfall to the Tyrants of America / Peace and Retirement to the President / Long Live the Vice President.”30 For his actions, Brown was charged with sedition, fined $480, and jailed for eighteen months.

  Examples of resistance were not limited to Massachusetts: poor people challenged federal authority all across the new nation in the late eighteenth century, from the Regulators in North Carolina to the Green Mountain Rebels in Vermont, and many more. Yet what was lacking was class solidarity between the rural poor and the urban poor. Artisans did not support Shays’ Rebellion, nor did they support the tenant uprisings in rural New York in 1766.31 Working-class men did not embrace Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication for the Rights of Women” (1792), and neither did they support the slave insurrection led by Gabriel Prosser in Virginia in 1800.32 Meanwhile, free African Americans in Boston offered to “assist” Shays’ Rebellion, but they did so not by joining the side of debt-ridden farmers but by offering their assistance to the militias in putting it down.33 These tensions left working-class people divided and it left them weak. To paraphrase Alfred F. Young, it left the multiple radicalisms of the revolutionary era separate from one another.34 And it left a revolution only partially completed.

  Unidentified artist/s, Stowage of the British Slave Ship “Brookes” Under the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788, etching, ca. 1788, (LC-USZ62-44000, Library of Congress)

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  Liberation Graphics

  IN THE LATE 1700S, abolitionists in the United States and the UK harnessed the power of the print illustration. Lithographs and illustrations became the predominant medium owing to the ease of reproduction and because they could be readily disseminated to a wide audience. Illustrations were also found in the multitude of antislavery newspapers and pamphlets, which in turn were spread across the U.S. North and the South. All of these images largely focused on three distinct tactical campaigns: creating empathy for those held in slavery; celebrating heroic African individuals; and vilifying the Southern character and way of life that endorsed the institution of slavery.1

  The initial goal for the visual artists was to attempt to persuade a reluctant public to rally against an institution and ideology that had permeated and indoctrinated much of the American public for more than two centuries. This was no easy task, so abolitionists in the United States turned to another campaign for inspiration. The British abolitionist movement, which had begun in earnest as a small gathering of a dozen citizens in the 1780s, galvanized much of their country in only a few decades to rally against the slave trade in general and specifically England’s role as the leading Atlantic slave-trade merchant from the 1730s to the early 1800s. The movement had perfected the use of visual graphics in its campaign, and many of the same tactics and images would serve the American cause.

  However, the strategy for combating slavery differed in the United States. Slavery in England was more abstract, as relatively few African slaves were physically present on English soil. In the United States, slavery was part of the very fabric of life. U.S. abolitionists could expect opposition to their efforts in the South, but they also met a great deal of hostility in the North. Much of the industry of the North was explicitly tied to the Southern slave system; Northern textile mills and shipping merchants reaped tremendous profits from slave-grown cotton, which by the 1830s had become the nation’s most valuable export crop.

  “King Cotton,” as it had come to be known, helped fuel the expansion of slavery within the United States as slaveholders moved westward in search of new fields for this highly profitable crop.2 Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793 no longer limited the crop’s range to coastal regions. Southern planters relied heavily on investments from Northern businesses to help finance their expansion of cotton production. As cotton-derived industries in the North increased, so did the entire industrial sector, especially in New England. The same pattern was duplicated in England, where the textile factories were reliant on imported cotton.

  The abolitionist movement
attacked not only Southern slaveholders, but also the economic interests of the ownership class throughout the United States and abroad. Abolitionists were well aware of the inherent class issues at stake. Leading abolitionist voices, including Wendell Phillips, Henry Highland Garnet, William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Maria Child, and Frederick Douglass, thus attacked not only the slave owner, but also the propertied class that profited from slavery’s existence.

  Abolitionists placed their lives on the line by confronting slavery. The Georgia House of Representatives placed a $5,000 reward for the capture of William Lloyd Garrison, the white abolitionist and founding editor of The Liberator. In his hometown of Boston, Garrison was beaten and dragged through the streets by a mob in 1835.3 Between 1833 and 1838, the abolitionist press reported more than 160 instances of violence against antislavery groups, which included the murder of Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, a white newspaper editor from Alton, Illinois, who was shot defending his presses against a mob in 1837.4 This was the climate that abolitionists operated in when they tried to reach the public with an antislavery message.