An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  And as so often in the northern colonies, men and women feared that religion was in danger. No one in Massachusetts could forget that their colony was founded on the Protestant faith, a form of piety that depended, they believed, on the maintenance of free and equal congregations, without a bishop or a pope to stain the purity of doctrine. Here was another principle to which the British seemed to be indifferent. In America, it was thought that Lord Dartmouth held Christian beliefs closely akin to theirs, but his colleagues were another matter. If they were men of immorality like Lord Sandwich and Lord Rochford, what did they care for religion? It was common knowledge that in the West Indies the cabinet had offered a place in the government to Roman Catholics, simply as a way to keep the peace. Might the British do the same in North America and give the Vatican a bridgehead in the colonies? If such a thing came to pass, it would leave Americans with no option but independence.

  As 1772 drew toward its close, opinions like these were expressed in New England with the fervor that precedes a revolution. However unreasonable some of these views might have been, they steadily gained more support. And yet, however much people dislike the system under which they live, it requires more than resentment to turn them into rebels. At least two other preconditions usually have to be fulfilled.

  First, they must have a medium of protest. In other words, they need a set of institutions within which they can develop their critique of the old order and create an alternative to take its place. One of the reasons that the revolutions of 1989 in central Europe were so long delayed was just this: that in the late 1940s, the Soviet-sponsored regimes had systematically done away with all the institutions of civil society that might compete with them for power. Second, there has to be a flash point, or rather a series of them: a chain of events that provokes an insurrection, peaceful or otherwise. Both preconditions were satisfied in Massachusetts.

  Apart from Rhode Island, it would be hard to think of any corner of the British Empire better educated for self-government. In Massachusetts at least two-thirds of all adult males could vote in the elections to the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the colony’s assembly. In its turn the House chose the upper chamber, the Governor’s Council. At a local level, every town held open meetings to run its own affairs. Each one had a militia, more or less well trained. Men and women were used to creating their own enclaves of semi-independence, because that was the way the colony had grown.4

  By the end of the seventeenth century, the province already had more than eighty towns, each with its own constitution. As the people spilled westward, the number grew to reach nearly two hundred by the time of the revolution. Each new one repeated the process of self-creation, either by staking out virgin soil or by splitting a big old township into smaller units. They fell under some central jurisdiction via the county courts, where the judges sat. The judges were appointed by the governor, who was appointed by the king. And so, in theory, the long arm of the empire reached into the deepest recesses of the countryside. But apart from the judges, it was very hard to find a royal bureaucrat. Although the customs officers policed the waterfront, they did not venture inland. In most parts of the province power lay with the inhabitants, whether sitting on a jury or running a town meeting.

  Without their consent, the empire could not function. The revolution took place in the autumn of 1774 when a majority of the people of Massachusetts withdrew their support from the royal authorities. They turned instead to the new Provincial Congress: an institution built from democratic elements—the town meeting and the House of Representatives—that already existed. But this moment of high drama occurred only as the climax of two years of escalation on both sides. Sometimes without intending to do so, British politicians and the people of New England took turns insulting each other until their estrangement was complete. In the end divorce became the only option.

  From the British perspective, the Gaspée raid was the first step along the road to war. It poisoned the official mind in London. From that moment forth, Lord Sandwich and his closest allies believed they were dealing with rebellion, and eventually Lord North and Lord Dartmouth came to agree as well. But the blame for the next few acts of escalation must lie fairly and squarely in Whitehall. Using his powers at the Treasury, North behaved in a manner that seemed to vindicate all the anxieties that the northern colonies had come to feel. And if he made a terrible error by sending the tea, Dartmouth was equally at fault in another way. Even before the tea had sailed, he permitted Thomas Hutchinson to raise a storm in Boston, a place already scarred by memories of the occupation and the massacre.

  When the soldiers withdrew, leaving a small force to hold Castle William, they left behind them an embittered town where the benefits of loyalty to the Crown seemed all but invisible. By the autumn of 1772, seven years had passed since the slump in the middle of the previous decade, but prosperity was still elusive. For many citizens of Boston, life was very hard indeed, and even the wealthy had grounds for discontent.

  THE LEIPZIG OF AMERICA

  In the eyes of an English visitor, Boston might have seemed familiar, despite its modest proportions. With fewer than seventeen thousand inhabitants, it fell far behind Liverpool or Bristol, which were roughly twice as large, while nearly a million lived in London. But they all had the same winding streets, and they had steeples, wharves, and taverns that looked very similar. Even the Boston slums resembled those of a seaport in England. As he approached the town by sea, a new arrival would initially feel quite at home. But only very briefly: as soon as he stepped ashore, he would start to discover that the town had a culture quite unlike his own.

  The British found Boston strange and exasperating. Since the Puritan era when the Bay Colony came into being, their way of life had moved on, as Britain became a nation thoroughly commercial in its values. Old issues of faith and politics that remained alive in Massachusetts had either ceased to fascinate the British, or the debate about them in the mother country had developed in a very different way. Meanwhile, Boston had evolved as well, steering its own distinctive path, until by the 1770s it was almost a foreign town, becoming more un-English with each passing year.

  Sadly, the British rarely recorded their physical impressions of the place. Far better accounts were written in the 1780s by French military officers who saw the region with a more friendly eye. In the letters home from Admiral Montagu and other Britons, all we find are complaints: about the locals, about the lack of money and supplies, or about the sorry state of Castle William. As the empire fell to pieces, they had no time for the niceties of observation. But in a happier period ten years earlier a young naval officer came to Boston and painted some fine watercolors. He was Lieutenant Richard Byron, the poet’s great-uncle. From his pictures, and from the archives that remain, we can re-create the town and its culture as they would have appeared to a fair-minded Briton just before the war.

  The setting was attractive, even beautiful: a blend of the urban and the rural, with meadows, gardens, and orchards reaching deep into the heart of the built-up area. Nature had given Boston the undulating terrain the Georgians loved so much and recorded in their paintings. So Byron produced a study in the picturesque. The town sat on a peninsula, between the harbor and the mudflats of Back Bay, in a basin surrounded by green hills. In 1764, the lieutenant climbed to the top and drew the town from many different viewpoints. A gifted amateur, by luck or by judgment he chose to highlight landmarks that the revolution would make famous.

  View of the Long Wharf and Boston Harbor in 1764, by Richard Byron. The Bostonian Society

  From the heights at Dorchester, he drew the anchorage, crowded with sails. Behind it, Byron showed the curve of the waterfront, two miles long, with its eighty wharves. Somewhere lost among them was Griffin’s Wharf, where the tea would be destroyed. Along the water’s edge, he added an array of wooden buildings. Behind them, in the middle distance, he cheated a little. The town had seventeen churches—even the navy understood that Boston was d
evout—and Byron chose to emphasize the point by drawing them taller than they really were. He made the most of three tall steeples, poking up above the roofs and gables. One was the Old North Church, where on the night before Lexington Paul Revere and his comrades hung up the lanterns to say that the redcoats were on the march; another was the Old South Meeting House, where the Tea Party began. Far away behind them, across the Charles River, the lieutenant carefully outlined the slopes of Bunker Hill.

  So much for the landscape. Let us imagine that another English visitor arrived in the autumn of 1772, as events began to converge toward the revolution. From the moment he passed the admiral’s flagship and landed at the Long Wharf, he would begin to feel slightly out of place in a town that looked familiar but whose way of life was alien.5

  Because the water was shallow, the wharf was really a pier, stretching a third of a mile out into the harbor. Here, as in Providence or London, he would find the usual smells from ropewalks, distilleries, factories for soap, and scattered heaps of sewage on the mud. Once on dry land, he would see before him a spacious avenue, lined with tall buildings painted white and cream, with signs above their doors that spoke of loyalty. On the right, there was a place to drink coffee called the Crown, and then another, the British Coffee House, further up the avenue. Known as King Street, it sloped up from the waterfront toward the seat of government. Built of red brick, with the royal coat of arms above the door, the old Boston State House might have come from any harbor town in eastern England.

  Behind it was a prison, newly built of stone, next to the workhouse: similar to those our visitor knew at home. Around a corner, he would see a church that looked as though it had just flown in from Westminster. When the Bostonians built the Old South, they copied the design from plates in a book by the British architect James Gibbs showing towers and steeples in the empire’s capital. Even the layout of the streets resembled London’s. Neither place bothered with a neat, rectangular grid, like the one at Philadelphia. Instead, they clung to an old-fashioned model, spilling out on either side of long avenues parallel to the water’s edge, with narrow lanes leading down to the harbor and a host of tiny courtyards at the end of alleyways.

  Just like London, the town had dense little wards, especially in the North End, filled with artisans and sailors and immigrants and the destitute, like an American version of Limehouse or Wapping. Far into the nineteenth century, Boston still had a few old colonial tenements, spared by the frequent fires that swept away the old waterfront. Photographs survive to show us their appearance. Used as sailors’ homes, they looked exactly like old wooden houses by the London docks that served an identical purpose until the Blitz of 1941.

  To his relief, the visitor would soon emerge from the labyrinth. A few minutes’ walk from the squalor of the North End, he would climb up a steep, grassy slope and find a suburban idyll. There he might pause amid the grazing cows beside a mansion built of granite. It was one of only four stone houses in the town. From the top of Beacon Hill, he could gaze down across the open space of the Common and think about what he had seen. Although Boston had features that he recognized, many things were strangely absent, and the customs of the town seemed very strange.

  For example, there was nowhere on the street to cash a check. Boston had not a single bank. In the shops, he saw people buying the latest goods from England, but there was something queer about this as well: they rarely paid the bill with silver coins. It was easy to find a drink—the town had ninety taverns, more or less—but ask for wine and you might be disappointed. Everyone seemed to prefer hard liquor or a pint of ale. In a grocer’s store you might find a keg of Madeira, but for some odd colonial reason the price was chalked up not in shillings and pence but by the weight of barley that the merchant wanted in exchange.

  All this was bizarre enough, but the newspapers were even more peculiar. The town had no fewer than five, which was strange in itself: an English seaport of the same size would have only one. If he picked up a copy of the Gazette, the Evening-Post, or the Massachusetts Spy, our visitor from England would wonder what eccentric world he had entered. Every London paper filled its front page with advertisements, chiefly of three kinds. They invited the reader to plays, the opera, public balls, or displays of fireworks; they offered him houses for sale or rent; or they listed a regiment of butlers, cooks, and footmen, all of them eager to serve. In Boston, the editors devoted their front page to politics and almost nothing else, bar an occasional sermon. While the British press closely followed the doings of Lord North and his colleagues, often they treated the affairs of state merely as comic relief. The Americans were always deadly serious. Their advertisements were very different too. At the back of a Boston paper you would find “a Negro wench” available for purchase—as much as 10 percent of the inhabitants were black—but you would look in vain for a majordomo or a trained lady’s maid. Houses seemed very hard to get as well. The streets were filled with able-bodied men, but no one seemed to be building anything. There was one construction site—a new church, not far from the bourse and assembly room at Faneuil Hall—but apart from that the bricklayers had little work to do.

  Everywhere, our visitor would see bookstores, one of them stocked with ten thousand books, but he would look in vain for public amusement. This was a town where a man could be mobbed for playing a flute on a Sunday. Boston had only a single concert hall, in a room above a shop, but the clientele were mostly British naval officers and their friends, there to listen to Haydn and Bach or to throw a party on the queen’s birthday. The town would not have a theater for another twenty years.

  A visitor from England might simply dismiss the place as a provincial backwater, but if he asked questions, listened to conversations in the street, and kept his eyes open, he would soon find explanations for Boston’s peculiarities. Since the historian Cotton Mather coined the phrase in 1702, the people of the town had taken pride in living in what he called “the metropolis of the whole English America.” Seventy years later this had begun to sound like empty bravado, and Boston was increasingly frustrated and unhappy.6

  Like every port in the colonies, the town did well for most of 1772 as a consequence of the economic boom that ended so badly in London. Superficially, Boston appeared to be a busy place, but a glance at the official figures would display a deeper picture of stagnation and decline. Overtaken by other places, chiefly Philadelphia, it was gradually fading into the second tier of colonial harbor towns. Its wharves still saw more traffic than other seaports in America, but much of it was small, coastal stuff. Increasingly, the bigger ships chose to sail elsewhere, to the Hudson, the Delaware, or points further south, where the slave economy was thriving.7

  Although Boston still made rope and rum and barrels, the trade in cod had moved away to Salem and Plymouth. Very few ships were built. A handful of craftsmen made coaches in the English style; Paul Revere and others did some splendid work with the small quantities of silver available; the town had excellent potters too; and not far inland, there were foundries where iron was produced. Apart from that, Boston manufactured scarcely anything at all. For thirty years, the population had barely grown, despite a constant stream of migrants from outside. Most lingered only briefly until they lost hope of finding a job. Many of the rich had left for bigger houses in the country, and so each year the town became a poorer place. Seven percent of the population was receiving welfare, but many more—perhaps as many people as two in every five—could scarcely pay the rent and keep their heads above water.

  With little or nothing to sell to the outside world—certainly no sugar, rice, or tobacco—the townspeople had to struggle all the time. Because the balance of trade was against them, their currency was weak against the British pound, and this was why they had so little silver money. It could only be acquired from overseas, and Boston had little to offer in exchange. A few citizens had some capital, but not enough to put at risk in building factories or digging canals: all of that would have to wait until long after Lexi
ngton.

  Inland the countryside was comfortable but hardly affluent. If he rode out to Concord or Natick, an English visitor would see how full it was of younger sons and daughters with too little work to do. Within a radius of forty miles or so from Boston, land was in short supply. Try as they might, the farmers could not make their acres grow more corn—their yields had reached a peak some thirty years earlier—and so their incomes did not rise from year to year. Men and women looking for a future on the land were turning away from this part of New England and toward the frontier, far beyond the Connecticut valley, while those who remained had little to spend on goods that Boston might have produced.8

  The town still had its ships, but so did every other port, from Nova Scotia down to Charleston, not to mention the British themselves, with their large mercantile marine. At sea, competition was fierce for the carrying trade, and Boston no longer had an edge. It was stuck in a groove, economically speaking, something that could never satisfy a man as lively as Paul Revere. To put it bluntly, here was a town that the rest of America was rapidly leaving behind. It was in the wrong place: too remote from the dynamism of Pennsylvania, and too far from the passes over the hills to the west. The town of Boston needed to reinvent itself as the great industrial city it would eventually become after the War of 1812.