An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  Even before the revolution, it contained men and women who understood that this was so. Whatever it lacked by way of banks and silver, Boston never suffered from a dearth of human capital and intellect. On the contrary, the town possessed them in abundance. Apart from its bookstores, it had excellent schools, the rate of literacy was higher than in England, and of course it had Harvard College just up the road. It might be argued that the revolution began in Boston, rather than anywhere else, because its citizens had to solve a chronic problem of unemployment. A town that combined the maximum of talent with the minimum of opportunity, it created far more energy than it could use and too much for the empire to accommodate. In the North End, with its men and boys in search of labor on the docks, this was very obvious, but the problem extended up the social scale.

  In every generation Boston gave birth to a surplus of talent, made up of men and women educated beyond the careers available. Many decades earlier the greatest Bostonian of all, Benjamin Franklin, had to leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. By 1772 the problem was acute, as the town failed to grow to absorb the skills its offspring had acquired. What did a boy or a young man do when he left the Boston Latin School or graduated from Harvard? Try as he might, he would find it hard to fulfill his aspirations. Careers might be available in the law, the pulpit, or medicine, but in Massachusetts people lived very long lives by European standards. Every niche was occupied by older men or by the friends and relatives of Thomas Hutchinson.

  For artisans like Paul Revere, the same kind of dead end lay in wait, however close he came to perfection in his trade. He could only make so many bowls and flagons for the chapels or for the lodges where Freemasons met. In time he would need a far larger market for a wider range of products, and so would the mechanics who lived nearby. In every stratum of society in Boston, from the very lowest to the wealthy, we can see the same phenomenon: a persistent lack of opportunity.

  Too small, too poor, and too reliant on old ways of earning its keep, Boston needed to shake itself loose and kick away the empire. Until it did so, the town could never hope to expand and prosper in the way its people deserved. Under the British colonial system, this could never occur, for two very simple reasons. While the first arose from the dismal science of economics, the second had to do with matters more subtle and more edifying.

  As for the economics, the problem was simply this: if Boston and the towns inland were to recover their prosperity, then their future had to lie in manufacturing, because that was the field where ingenuity could achieve by far the best return. It was the only viable option if the Bay Colony wished to spread the benefits of progress among the broad mass of its people, not only the poor in the slums, but also the migrants arriving each year from Europe. But so long as Massachusetts remained within the empire, it could never compete with the British textiles and hardware that flowed in by sea.

  At least for a while, the northern colonies would have to throw up a defensive wall of tariffs to protect the industries they needed to create. In the nineteenth century, the federal tariff first established in 1789 would become a source of bitter sectional conflict in America, but it is hard to see what alternative lay open to the early republic. For this reason if no other, there had to be a revolution. Under the old colonial system, tariffs of the kind were entirely forbidden. On the contrary, the British intended to keep America in thrall as a captive market for the goods that only they could make. Far away in Whitehall, Lord Hillsborough had said exactly that.

  And so for the sake of its material well-being Massachusetts had to cut itself loose from Great Britain. But in the town of Boston, an astute observer who arrived in 1772 would come across another source of frustration, cultural rather than economic. The novelist Henry James once called it “this unprevaricating city,” and so it was. The town displayed an obsession with the most fundamental ideas of right and wrong and liberty and justice. In the course of the eighteenth century, Boston had gradually discarded the Puritan orthodoxies of the past. Like Providence, Rhode Island, with its new college, its newspaper, and the circle who gathered around Judge Hopkins, Boston had created institutions, formal or informal, where free and open controversy was routine.

  In effect, debate about political philosophy had become part of the people’s way of life; and so it would have been entirely unrealistic to expect Boston to remain content forever within an empire that set rigid limits to innovation. If a visitor from England had gazed down from the top of Beacon Hill, he would have seen a building under construction in a space called Brattle Square. A symbol of autonomy and free debate, the new church rising above the square was one of the civic institutions of Boston in which the revolutionary movement was approaching maturity.

  From its origins in 1699, the congregation on Brattle Square had been a citadel of innovation. Tired of old Calvinist dogma, a small group of citizens had assembled to form what they called the Manifesto Church, committed to the principle of open baptism. In other words, anyone could join, without a painful test of morals or belief. In the decades that followed, the church grew and grew, drawing in the town’s most highly educated people as well as some of the wealthiest.

  If an English visitor in the 1770s had attended its Sunday services, he would have met Abigail and John Adams. Just across the aisle he would have seen the future hero of Bunker Hill, a physician by the name of Joseph Warren. Another member of the congregation was James Bowdoin—rebel, scientist, and friend of Benjamin Franklin’s—who drafted the first constitution of the state in which he lived. They sat at the feet of Boston’s most influential preacher, Silver-Tongued Sam, or, to give him his proper name, Samuel Cooper, whose brother William held the post of town clerk.

  As the numbers grew, the wooden meetinghouse became too small and shabby. And so, in the spring of 1772, it was demolished; in June the first stone was laid for its replacement, in October the carpenters raised the roof, and early in 1773 the pastor gave his first sermon in the new chapel. With 800,000 bricks and a bell shipped over from London, the church on Brattle Square was the largest construction project in Boston in the years just prior to the revolution. At the time of the Gaspée incident, when the future looked dark and insecure, the congregation took the risk of building, at great expense, a church committed to a very open form of Christianity.9

  In a lecture at Harvard, Samuel Cooper poured scorn on what he called “the Romish superstition.” Other than that, he made do with very little theology. “The service of Christ requires nothing of us but what is reasonable,” Cooper once said. His audience could choose to keep old Puritan ideas if they so wished or toss them in Back Bay if they preferred. In England, even in the established Anglican hierarchy, it was possible to find many clergymen as liberal as Cooper, advocates of a “practical divinity,” based on charity and good deeds, rather than on dogma, but English ministers of such a kind could not enjoy in the mother country a social status anything like as eminent as his. Cooper set the tone of faith among the radical elite in Boston.

  By the time the new church was erected, civil society in Boston had come to be composed of many institutions—political clubs, Masonic lodges, even the teams of volunteer firefighters—that had developed a habit of freethinking and dissent. Brattle Square was simply one example. All of these institutions existed in complete independence from the official hierarchy of the empire. Like the town meetings out in the countryside, it was only a matter of time before they became the building blocks for a new republic.10

  Among the worshippers at Brattle Square, there sat a genteel revolutionary called John Hancock, the owner of the granite mansion on Beacon Hill. Always free and easy with his money, he gave £1,000 to build the church, and he paid for the bell. In his career and complex personality, we meet an inverted image of Lord North. While North was typically British, Hancock was typically Bostonian. Like John Wilkes in London, he stood for everything the king and his ministers hated most.

  THE PEEVISH PATRIOT

  As we did with Lord Dart
mouth, we can approach John Hancock by way of a portrait in oils. Hanging today in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, it was painted in 1765, when Hancock was only twenty-eight. It came from the brush of John Singleton Copley, another Bostonian who had to leave for greater things. The picture shows us a pale young adult, with an unlined face, sitting at a desk on which stands a vast ledger filled with numbers. His legs are thin, his shoulders are narrow, and the book seems more substantial than the torso. His delicate wrists emerge from beneath a blue frock coat, whose fabric hangs awkwardly over his slender body.

  Copley presents John Hancock as a novice, ambitious and diligent, but perhaps unequal to the role society expects him to play. The richest man in Boston, heir to a fortune made by his uncle, he wears gold buttons and braid, but he looks like somebody for whom wealth is more a burden than a privilege. Is he happy? The set of his mouth, with lips clamped tight, may be a sign of determination, or anxiety, or both. John Adams knew him extremely well—the two played together as boys—and when he wrote down his memories of Hancock, he drew another picture of a highly strung young man.

  John Hancock in 1765, by John Singleton Copley. Bridgeman Art Library

  “Patient,” “punctual,” “steady,” and “industrious”: these words sprang to mind, but Adams also recalled John Hancock’s struggle with his own emotions. Often confined to bed by some chronic disease whose precise nature is unknown, he suffered from some kind of mental distress as well. According to Adams, Hancock displayed “a certain sensibility, a keenness of feeling, or a peevishness of temper, that sometimes disgusted and afflicted his friends.” Because the Hancock papers are scarce and fragmentary, it is hard to say exactly what this means. When he died, heavily in debt, leaving his widow Dorothy all but penniless, most of them were lost, apart from some business records and a few private letters. For his part, Adams believed that John Hancock inherited his anxious nature from his father, a clergyman, gifted but shy, who died young. It may be that as with Lord North the problem lay less with neurosis than with the scale of the challenges he faced.11

  Hancock’s path to rebellion had many twists and turns. Given his rank in society, this was bound to be the case. However sincerely he advocated liberty, he could not easily condone acts of mob rule or an outright attack on wealth and privilege. It would take a long time for John Hancock to make up his mind that the future lay with independence. And so, in 1765, he opposed the Stamp Act, only to take fright when the rioters went wild and ransacked the home of Thomas Hutchinson. In 1768, he became a hero when the customs men seized his sloop the Liberty. For a while, he became the leader of the radical party. And then, in 1769, he fell out with Samuel Adams and seemed to be making his peace with the royal authorities.

  Given this complicated career, friends and enemies alike often found him hard to read. An opponent called him “Johnny Dupe,” a conceited young man or an amateur, all too easily tricked by the likes of Samuel Adams into making political gestures that merely satisfied his vanity. Was he a man of genuine principle? Or simply a merchant and a smuggler, pursuing a selfish agenda of his own? During his lifetime these questions were often asked, and historians still disagree about the answers.12

  The most frequent charge laid against him is this: that Hancock used his wealth to buy his way to power and status. He certainly did that, with the help of his aunt Lydia. Together they spun a web of patronage by lending money to fellow Bostonians and making lavish gifts to Harvard College. They even paid for a new fire engine for the town. But from a British perspective, the career of John Hancock seems far easier to understand. He behaved as any gentleman would in England in the eighteenth century. Far from being vain or conceited, Hancock simply tried to fulfill the obligations of his rank. In the words of one biographer, “Hancock loved being the public man,” which was perfectly normal in the age in which he lived.

  In Great Britain, when a man made a fortune in trade—or, better still, if his uncle acquired it for him—first of all he would buy as much real estate as he could afford. Having done so, he went into politics, because only there, in the House of Commons, could he command the full respect of his contemporaries. If he had to spend money to succeed in public life that was not only his right but also his duty if he believed he had something to offer the nation.

  John Hancock simply wanted to do the same. Of all the Boston patriots, he had the closest ties with Britain, not only via his London partner George Hayley, but also through his connections in the port of Bristol, where his agent, Henry Cruger, served on the town council. Both Hayley and Cruger would in due course enter the British Parliament themselves. From day to day, Hancock gave the running of his business to his confidential clerk, William Palfrey, who lived on the Boston waterfront but pored over all the latest news from England. Twice Hancock sent him to London, where he dined with John Wilkes. Palfrey kept a portrait of Wilkes on his parlor wall, a present from Mrs. Hayley, and described its value as “inestimable.”13

  For Hancock and the people around him, the politics of the mother country were as compelling as those of Massachusetts. Far from thinking of himself as a provincial, Hancock fashioned his own identity as an enlightened citizen of the world, the equal of any man of rank in England. The books he presented to Harvard told the same story of good taste and generosity. Devoted to the college, his beloved alma mater, he gave it the very latest literature, some of it bordering on the scandalous. The books included not only twenty-seven volumes by Voltaire but also the works of the philosopher David Hume, a guidebook to London in six parts, and even Robert Adam’s studies of Roman architecture. The Hancock donation filled an alcove in the college library.14

  By rights, a gentleman so progressive should have taken his seat alongside Edmund Burke in the House of Commons, where Hancock would have enjoyed the public career he longed for. But this could never happen. Ever since the seizure of the Liberty, Hancock had been a marked man in London, which meant that he had no chance of high office in Massachusetts either. By the end of 1772, it was clear that however much he tried, he could never achieve within the colonial system the success that he felt was rightfully his. In business the outlook seemed equally grim.

  His uncle had possessed a genius for commerce, which the nephew did not share. Thomas Hancock had begun by selling books. He went on to create an empire of property, including Beacon Hill, fed by the money that flowed from maritime trade. Like the Browns of Providence, he had to overcome the old New England problem, the scarcity of goods to export and hence a shortage of hard currency. His solution was a form of arbitrage. If Boston and its hinterland needed tea and hardware, they could be found in London, where the English merchants would also give him credit. To settle his account, Hancock dealt in a host of different items—molasses and rum, but also flour and whale oil—and swapped them back and forth, between Boston, Newfoundland, the West Indies, and Spain. Bills of exchange, otherwise known as IOUs, passed to and fro between the parties, and Hancock used them to pay his debts in England.

  He dealt on the black market as well; in colonial America, as we saw, often there was really no alternative to smuggling, even if only as a temporary expedient. And then, in the 1740s, his lucky break arrived: a war between the British Empire and the French. During that conflict, and then the next, Thomas Hancock became a defense contractor and one of the largest bankers to the British army. When he died in 1764, all of this passed to his nephew, but by now the world was changing. The contracts from the army disappeared, the navy made a smuggler’s life far harder, and the economics of Boston remained fragile. During the next ten years, the Hancock fortune became a wasting asset, as the young man tried and failed to emulate his uncle.

  He changed the family’s business model by creating a new and larger fleet to specialize in sending potash and whale oil to Great Britain. In theory his instincts were sound, given the greedy appetite of England for commodities like these, but in practice John Hancock had little chance of success. The British had their own whaling ships, the
y could buy potash elsewhere, and Hancock could not hope to corner either market. Worse still, the town of Boston was often flooded by a glut of imports from the mother country.

  By 1772, Hancock’s business had fallen into terminal decline. With each year that went by, his debts in England increased. The financial crisis came close to ruining his firm. And so we find him close to despair, even as the new church on Brattle Square is rising to the heavens. John Hancock cannot meet his liabilities in England, because the price of whale oil has collapsed. Nobody in Boston can afford to buy the things he has to sell. “I am extremely sorry,” he tells his agents in the mother country. The times are “precarious,” he writes in November. “Goods are at present sold here so excessively low.”15

  In politics as well, the sky was darkening. Ever since the autumn of 1770, when the British appointed Thomas Hutchinson as governor, a cold war had existed between him and the colony’s elected assembly. It was a conflict that Hutchinson seemed to be winning. With the army gone from the streets, the popular party led by Samuel Adams lost the political initiative. For nearly two years, an uneasy calm fell over Massachusetts, during which Hancock distanced himself from Samuel Adams, seeking to play the peacemaker between the governor and the General Court. And then, in the autumn of 1772, as the economy began to deteriorate again, suddenly politics flared into life once more. Alarming news arrived from London and reawakened old anxieties. Although at first John Hancock hesitated, soon enough he threw his weight behind the movement led by Adams.

  THE REVOLUTION OF IDEAS

  Despite the fiasco of the Stamp Act, Lord North and his colleagues had never abandoned the idea of using taxes levied in the colonies to pay the cost of imperial administration. The threepenny Townshend duty on tea still survived, and while the revenue was only small, it should cover the salaries of the royal officials in Massachusetts. And so, when Hutchinson became governor, his stipend was quietly paid by the Crown. Rumors to this effect began to circulate in Boston, but only in the middle of 1772 did Hutchinson confirm that they were true. Far from being a technicality, the issue might have grave implications for liberty. The charter of 1691 had been a little vague on the subject, but the usual practice was to finance official salaries with the local taxes voted each year by the House of Representatives.