by Matt Braun
Franklin wrote all sorts of lampoons. He once wrote a parody of a gentleman’s conduct manual, a letter advising a young man suffering from “that hard-to-be-govern’d Passion of Youth,” but unwilling to seek marriage as a remedy for what ailed him, to take only older women for mistresses because they’re wiser, better talkers, better at intrigue, and better at other things, too, “every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement”; not to mention, “They are so grateful!!” Another time, he wrote a fake chapter of the Old Testament, a parable attacking religious persecution, in pitch-perfect King James, and had it printed and bound within the pages of his own Bible so that he could read it aloud, to see who would fall for it.18
Franklin wrote “The Way to Wealth” in the voice of Richard Saunders; he told a story. He had recently stopped his horse at an auction, where one Father Abraham, “a plain clean old Man, with white Locks,” stood before a crowd. “Pray, Father Abraham, what think you of the Times?” the crowd asked the old man. “Won’t these heavy Taxes quite ruin the Country? How shall we be ever able to pay them?” Father Abraham then answered with a speech strung together from more than ninety of Poor Richard’s proverbs, endorsing thrift and hard work, including “Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise.”19 The speech’s proverbs, though, were no fair sample of Poor Richard’s wisdom, which was not mostly or even very much about money and how to get it. If Franklin hadn’t been so worried about taxes, or about his wayward nephew, he might instead have pulled together some of Poor Richard’s many proverbs about equality: “The greatest monarch on the proudest throne, is oblig’d to sit upon his own arse.” Or hypocrisy: “He that is conscious of a Stink in his Breeches, is jealous of every Wrinkle in another’s Nose.” Or religion: “Serving God is Doing good to Man, but Praying is thought an easier Service, and therefore more generally chosen.” Or, he might have chosen to collect the dozens of Poor Richard’s proverbs advising against the accumulation of wealth: “The Poor have little, Beggars none; the Rich too much, enough not one.”20 Instead, Franklin chose proverbs advising thrift. And then he sent a copy to Benjamin Mecom, in Boston, who, as Franklin must have urged him, issued Franklin’s essay as a pamphlet, becoming the first of very many printers to do so. “The Way to Wealth” was reprinted in at least 145 editions and six languages even before the eighteenth century was over.21 But Benjamin Mecom couldn’t print his way to wealth. Nothing could save him. By now, he was acting so strangely, setting type in his best dress—coat, wig, hat, gloves, and ruffles—that Boston’s printers gave him the nickname Queer Notions.22 Benjamin Mecom was going mad.
In 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. When news of the repeal reached Boston, the city was lit up with candles, an obelisk was erected in the Common, and fireworks were set off. The spirit of liberty was in the air. The next week, Boston’s Town Meeting, following Worcester’s, voted to instruct its members “for the total abolishing of slavery from among us; that you move for a law, to prohibit the importation and purchasing of slaves for the future.”23 In Cambridge, students thumbed their noses at their tutors. Undergraduates calling themselves the Sons of Harvard walked out of Commons, protesting rancid butter and declaring, in the words of Asa Dunbar (Henry David Thoreau’s grandfather), “Behold our Butter stinketh!”24 Boston merchant Nathaniel Appleton hoped to honor the Stamp Act struggle otherwise. In Considerations on Slavery, printed by Edes and Gill, he urged the passage of an antislavery bill, arguing that it would be a fitting memorial. “The years 1765 & 1766 will be ever memorable for the glorious stand which America has made for her Liberties; how much glory will it add to us if at the same time we are establishing Liberty for ourselves and children, we show the same regard to all mankind that came among us?”25 Appleton thought the time had come to end slavery. He was off by a century.
In 1767, Parliament levied the Townshend Duties, taxes on tea, paper, and other goods. “Sorrows roll upon me like the waves of the sea,” Mecom wrote to her brother that year. She recorded another death in her Book of Ages: “Died my Dear & Beloved Daughter Polly Mecom.” In her grief, she despaired:
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away oh may I never be so Rebelious as to Refuse Acquesing & & saying from my hart Blessed be the Name of the Lord.
And then she put down her pen. Those were the last words she ever wrote in her Book of Ages. God knows, there were more deaths, but she left them unchronicled.26
Bostonians set about boycotting British imports and spurning luxury of every sort just when Jane Mecom, who had also taken in boarders, was trying to rub along by making fancy bonnets to sell to merchants’ wives. “It Proves a Litle unlucky for me,” she wrote to her brother, “that our People have taken it in there Heads to be so Exsesive Frugal at this Time as you will see by the Newspapers our Blusterers must keep themselves Imployed & If they Do no wors than Perswade us to were our old cloaths over again I cant Disaprove of that in my Hart tho I should Like to have those that do bye & can afford it should bye what Litle I have to sell.” Boycotting was all well and good, but it hit the poor hardest. By now, Benjamin Mecom was in debtors’ prison in Philadelphia.27
Boycotting Bostonians proved so forbiddingly unwilling to pay the Townshend Duties and Governor Bernard so hapless at restraining their protests that the British Army arrived, to maintain order. In October of 1768, a month after Boston’s merchants signed a formal agreement to boycott British goods, two regiments of regular infantry wearing coats the color of boiled lobster disembarked from ships in the harbor, marched through the streets of the city, wheeling massive artillery, and pitched camp in Boston Common. Bernard gave the officers the keys to the Town House. Another regiment of soldiers laid siege to the Manufactory House, availing themselves of a Quartering Act passed by Parliament in 1764. Andrew Eliot despaired, “Good God! What can be worse to a people who have tasted the sweets of liberty!”28
Four days after the redcoats landed, someone stole into Harvard Hall, in Cambridge, took a knife to a three-quarter-length portrait of Bernard, painted by Copley, and cut from the canvas the shape of a heart. The culprit left behind a note explaining that this “was a most charitable attempt to deprive him of that part, which a retrospect upon his administration must have rendered exquisitely painful.” Bernard: you heartless bastard. Copley attempted a repair. “Our American limner, Mr. Copley, by the surprising art of his pencil, has actually restored as good a heart as had been taken from it,” Edes reported, “tho’ upon a near and accurate inspection, it will be found to be no other than a false one.—There may it long remain hanging, to shew posterity the true picture of the man, who during a weak and wicked Administration, was suffered to continue in the seat of Government, a sore scourge to the people, until he had happily awakened a whole continent to a thorough sense of their own interest, and thereby laid the foundation of American greatness.”29 Before the year was out, Bernard was recalled to London, and Thomas Hutchinson was named acting governor. Copley who, in 1767, had married the daughter of a prominent Tory merchant, contemplated a crossing, too. “You have nothing to Hazard in Comeing to this Place,” Benjamin West wrote to him from London.30
“The whol conversation of this Place turns upon Politics,” Jane Mecom wrote to her brother, “as you will see by the News Papers If you give yr self the Troble to Read them, But they will not Infalably Informe you of the Truth; for Every thing that any Designing Person has a mind to Propagate Is stufed into them.” Jane Mecom came from a family of printers, but she didn’t have much use for blusterers: “for my Part I wish we had Let alone strife before it was medled with & folowed things that make for Peace.”31
The arrival of the army, far from containing the crisis, exploded it. Paul Revere made an engraving, titled The Landing of the British Troops in Boston, and Phillis Wheatley, who, now about fifteen years old, had begun writing poetry, juvenilia, composed a verse: “On the Arrival of the Ships of War, and the Landing of the Troops.” (It does not survive.)32 The British placed two cannons
at the base of the Town House, facing, not toward the Long Wharf and across the ocean at invading enemies, but into the town. The legislature moved to Cambridge, to meet in Harvard Hall. Edes began preparing a daily Journal of the Times, stories, most written by Samuel Adams and not all of them true, about atrocities committed by redcoats on the people of Boston, like the one about a woman, raped by a soldier, who staggered across the Common only to die beneath the Liberty Tree. Picked up and printed in newspapers across the colonies, the syndicated Journal of the Times proved crucial to the resistance movement (and has been credited with originating the political exposé as a journalistic form). Attempting to rouse support in the southern colonies, Edes’s writers also charged British officers in Boston with attempting to incite a slave rebellion by trying “to persuade some Negro servants to ill-treat and abuse their masters, assuring them that the soldiers were come to procure their freedoms, and that with their help and assistance they should be able to drive all the Liberty Boys to the devil.”33
The specter of slave rebellion wielded massive political power in the eighteenth century. Everywhere in the colonies, slaves who murdered their owners were subject to the most atrocious punishments meted out in the English-speaking world. In Antigua, in 1736, some black men convicted of conspiracy were roasted alive, others were broken on the wheel, and some starved to death. Five years later, thirteen black men were burned at the stake in New York City, and seventeen more were hanged, for conspiring to burn the city down and murder their masters. In 1755, a black woman convicted of poisoning her owner, a merchant from Charles-town, was burned at the stake in Cambridge; her coconspirator, a man named Mark, was hanged in an iron gibbet on Boston Neck.34 Some Sons of Liberty, like Otis and Appleton, might argue for an end to slavery, but New England was by no means seized with abolitionist fervor; slave owners in Massachusetts, as everywhere, lived in fear of insurrection. In 1769, a British captain stationed in Boston was indicted by a grand jury “for stirring up, exciting, and encouraging the Negro slaves in Boston to a conspiracy against their masters.”35
The people of Boston were offended by the British Army: the soldiers swore; they were rapists, papists, blasphemers, infidels, Irish; they were inciting a slave rebellion. “The town is now a perfect garrison,” Edes’s Journal reported.
What an appearance does Boston now make! One of the first commercial towns in America, has now several regiments of soldiers quartered in the midst of it, and even the Merchants Exchange is picquetted, and made the spot where the main guard is placed and paraded, and their cannon mounted; so that instead of our merchants and trading people transacting their business, we see it filled with red coats, and have our ears dinn’d with the music of the drum and fife.36
In September of 1769, a British customs commissioner beat James Otis on the head, badly, with a cane. Even before the beating, Otis had been unstable. “His imagination flames, his passions blaze,” John Adams had written in his diary. “He is liable to great inequalities of temper.” Now he grew worse. “Mr. Speaker, the liberty of this country is gone forever! and I’ll go after it!” Otis hollered from the floor of the Assembly, and then ran out the door. “He rambles and wanders like a ship without a helm,” Adams wrote.37 Otis ran through the streets of Boston, naked, firing a musket and smashing windows, helter-skelter.38 Watching her brother’s decline, Mercy Otis Warren prayed for her own sanity:
From reason’s laws let me ne’er swerve
But calmly, mistress of my mind.39
Otis was declared incompetent, and carried, like Peter Franklin Mecom, to the countryside, bound hand and foot.40
“A series of occurrences,” the Boston Town Meeting declared in early 1770, “afford great reason to believe that a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty.” That their king had ordered British soldiers to take up arms against them only further fueled Bostonians’ fears that their liberties were being destroyed, one by one. In decrying the king’s army, Bostonians were much influenced by John Trenchard’s treatise, An Argument, Shewing, that a Standing Army Is Inconsistent with a Free Government. Trenchard wrote, “If we look through the World, we shall find in no Country, Liberty and an Army stand together; to know whether a People are Free or Slaves, it is necessary only to ask, whether there is an Army kept amongst them.” Some colonists began to suspect a vast conspiracy. Jefferson would look back at the years between 1765 and 1770 and agree that while “single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day, a series of oppressions . . . too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.” For many in the colonies, both inside and outside Boston, the arrival of the army offered the best proof, the final proof they needed, of just such a plot. “The MONSTER of a standing ARMY,” one colonist wrote, was borne of “a PLAN . . . systematically laid, and pursued by the British ministry . . . for enslaving America.”41
When the troops landed, Andrew Eliot offered a grim prediction: “there will never be that harmony between Great Britain and her colonies than there hath been; all confidence is at an end; and the moment there is any blood shed all affection will cease.”42 That moment came. “Not the battle of Lexington or Bunker Hill, not the surrender of Burgoyne or Cornwallis,” John Adams would later write, “were more important events in American history than the battle of King street on the 5th of March, 1770.”43
About nine o’clock on March 5, 1770, the bells in Boston’s churches rang out the alarm for fire. From across the city, men and boys raced to the Town House, carrying leather fire buckets and crying, “Fire, fire!” “There is no fire,” young Benjamin Davis told a ropemaker named Samuel Gray. “It is the soldiers fighting.” Gray kept on running to King Street, shouting over his shoulder, “Damn their bloods.” Thomas Marshall, a tailor, looked out the window of his shop next door to the Custom House. Through the crowd, he spied a party of British soldiers and “saw their swords and bayonets glitter in the moonlight.” Benjamin Burdick, who had left his house with his Scottish broadsword, headed toward the Town House, where a private named Hugh White stood behind seven grenadiers of the Twenty-ninth Regiment, under the command of Captain Thomas Preston. An hour earlier, White had left his sentry box to strike a young wigmaker’s apprentice in the head with his musket, after the apprentice had taunted him by insulting a British officer who had failed to pay his wigmaker’s bill. “Fire, damn you, fire!” the crowd goaded Preston. A bookseller named Henry Knox, just twenty years old, stepped forward and grabbed Preston’s coat. “For God’s sake, take care of your men,” he pleaded. “If they fire, you die.” “Are you loaded?” Burdick asked Hugh Montgomery, one of the grenadiers. Montgomery said yes. Lifting his broadsword, Burdick swung with all his might at Montgomery’s musket. Montgomery stumbled, raised himself up from the ice, pulled the butt of his gun tight to his shoulder, and fired. “From that moment,” Daniel Webster would later write, “we may date the severance of the British Empire.”44
“The man on my left hand dropped,” Burdick said, in a deposition he gave at Faneuil Hall that night. “I asked him if he was hurt, but received no answer, I then stooped down and saw him gasping and struggling with death.” Crispus Attucks, a sailor, died from two bullet wounds in his chest. Attucks was a runaway slave. He had been advertised in the Boston Gazette, twenty years before:
Ran-away from his master William Brown of Framingham on the 30th of Sept. last a Mulatto Fellow about 27 Years of Age, named Crispus, 6 Feet and 2 Inches high, short curl’d Fair, his Knees nearer together than common; and had on a light colour’d Bearskin Coat, plain brown Fustian jacket, or brown all-Wool one, new Buckskin Breeches, blue Yarn Stockings and a checked woolen Shirt. Whoever shall take up said run-away and convey him to his aforesaid Master shall have 10 pounds old Tenor Reward, and all necessary Charges paid. And all Masters of Vessels and others are hereby cautioned against concealing or carrying off said Servant on Penalty of Law.45
He was the first to die. Behind him, Samuel Gray spun and fell, his skull shattered by a bullet to the head. A bullet bounced off a wall and pierced the belly of seventeen-year-old Samuel Maverick. Two more shots felled an Irish sailor named James Caldwell. Patrick Carr, an apprentice leather worker, was hit by a musket ball that “went through his right hip & tore away part of the backbone.”
When John Coburn, hearing the bells, had grabbed his fire buckets and knocked on a neighbor’s door to rouse him, “He told me it was not a fire, it was a riot.” Benjamin Burdick’s wife, who, like Coburn’s neighbor, had an uncanny and altogether suspicious foreknowledge that the bells rang for something other than fire, also called it an “affray,” as did Phillis Wheatley, in a poem she wrote on the occasion, titled, “On the Affray in King Street.” In the eighteenth century, an “affray” was akin to a “riot” (in 1757 Edmund Burke wrote of “the suppressing of riots and affrays”), while “massacre” meant then what it means now: the indiscriminate slaughter of a large number of innocent people. Five dead men—some of them armed with clubs and swords—do not a massacre make. But “massacre” it had to be, even though massacre it patently was not. Such, at least, was the conclusion reached by Samuel Adams sometime before eleven o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, March 6, when he, along with John Hancock and five more of the Sons of Liberty, drafted a report in which they called the soldiers’ firing part of “a settled plot to massacre the inhabitants.” Adams arranged for Edes to issue a pamphlet, A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston, and commissioned a ship to carry it to London. Paul Revere, meanwhile, engraved a picture of the scene, The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated on King Street, which Edes printed. It was a copy, really, of a drawing made by Copley’s half brother, Henry Pelham. (Pelham, outraged by this act of plagiarism, wrote to Revere that it was “truly as if you had plundered me on the highway.”) Like the Horrid Massacre, the Bloody Massacre overstated both the preparedness of the soldiers and the helplessness of the crowd. Revere’s black-booted grenadiers are a well-regulated firing squad, flawlessly commanded from the rear by Preston, ordering them, with raised sword, to fire on a crowd of unarmed, middle-aged gentlemen, bewigged and bewildered. In many surviving copies, a colorist named Christian Remick has painstakingly painted the soldiers’ coats red, a vividness balanced only by the shocking abundance of red blood spilling out of the wounds of the fallen men. Over the Custom House, Revere placed a sign reading “Butchers Hall,” lest the verses that appeared below the illustration prove insufficiently explicit.
