The Whites of their Eyes

by Matt Braun

  By now, James Otis was utterly lost. His mind, his sister wrote, was “clouded, shattered, and broken.”9 “British America will never prove undutiful till driven to it as the last fatal resort against an oppression that will make the weakest strong and the wisest mad,” Otis had written, years before. This turned out to have been something of a prophecy. In 1771, Pelham wrote Copley about Otis, “At some times he is raving, at all times he is so bewildered as to have no dependence placed upon him.”10 A friend wrote to Mercy Otis Warren, “Perhaps Light may arise out of darkness, & he yet come forth as gold.”11 But Otis’s sanity never returned. He spent most of the rest of his life locked up—his tortured, brief periods of lucidity even more painful than his madness. In these straits, Warren began answering her brother’s letters. She felt that she had to do this, had to enter public life, even as a woman, because her brother had left it, with his work unfinished. She began allowing her writing to be published, anonymously. In 1772, she published a play called The Adulateur, which features a thinly disguised Thomas Hutchinson as a character named Rapatio. The next year, she published The Defeat, another political satire, in Edes’s Gazette.12

  Meanwhile, Boston’s blacks looked to their own means to secure their freedom. In January of 1773, Felix, writing on behalf “of many Slaves, living in the Town of Boston, and other Towns in the Province,” and probably with the support of members of the legislature, sent a letter to Hutchinson, begging for relief from bondage, which relief “to us will be as Life from the dead.” In April, four black men from Boston submitted a petition for emancipation: “We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow-men to enslave them.”13 Phillis Wheatley, though, looked to England for her liberation. Preparing to cross the Atlantic, she had her portrait painted by Scipio Moorhead, a black painter who lived near the Town House. She secured a letter of reference, signed by gentlemen of Boston, including Thomas Hutchinson, John Hancock, and Andrew Eliot: “We whose names are under-written, do assure the World, that the Poems specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by PHILLIS, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few years since, brought an uncultivated barbarian from Africa.” She sailed for London in May: “For thee Britannia, I resign / New-England’s smiling fields.” In July, the question at Harvard’s graduation debate was “the Legality of Enslaving the Africans.”14 In an essay published that summer, Caesar Sartor, a former slave from Newburyport, pleaded: “Would you desire the preservation of your own liberty? As the first step let the oppressed Africans be liberated; then, and not till then, may you with confidence and consistency of conduct, look to Heaven for a blessing on your endeavours to knock the shackles . . . from your own feet.”15 In London, Wheatley met Benjamin Franklin. When Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was printed, not long after, she told this tale,

  . . . I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate

  Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat;

  What pangs excrutiating must molest,

  What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?

  Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d

  That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:

  Such, such my case. And can I then but pray

  Others may never feel tyrannic sway?15

  Reviewing Wheatley’s book, one English critic wrote, “We are much concerned to find that this ingenious young woman is yet a slave. The people of Boston boast themselves chiefly on their principles of liberty. One such act as the purchase of her freedom would, in our opinion, have done more honour than hanging a thousand trees with ribbons and emblems.”17

  By then, though, everyone was quite concerned about tea. Parliament had repealed the Townshend Acts in 1770—all but the tax on tea. That year, three hundred wealthy Boston women had signed a pledge to stop drinking tea.18 (Jane Mecom couldn’t have afforded tea, anyway. She waxed philosophical. “I am convinced Poverty is Intailed on my Famely,” she wrote that summer.)19 In May of 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act to bail out the East India Company, which, with a surplus of tea and stiff competition from smugglers, was facing bankruptcy. By eliminating duties on tea in England and lowering the import tax to just three pence, the Tea Act actually reduced the price of tea in the colonies, but it offended colonists, gravely, by its forceful assertion of Parliament’s right to tax the colonies, and by its protection of a politically connected corporate monopoly. It wasn’t the price; it was the principle. In June, letters written by Hutchinson, which Benjamin Franklin had acquired in London and leaked to friends in Boston, were published in Edes’s Gazette. The Sons of Liberty began calling for Hutchinson’s impeachment.

  That summer, ships loaded with East India Company tea were sent to four cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. When Wheatley returned to Boston, in October of 1773, her owner granted her freedom. “I am now on my own footing,” she wrote.20 In November and December 1773, three tea ships, the Beaver, the Eleanor, and the Dartmouth, sailed into Boston Harbor (a fourth ship ran aground off Cape Cod). By law, they had twenty days to unload their cargo. The Dartmouth’s twenty days were set to expire at midnight on December 16. At ten o’clock that morning, seven thousand people showed up at Old South Meeting House to decide what to do. (Town meetings were usually held at Faneuil Hall, but Old South was bigger, the biggest building in the city.) They debated for hours.

  “The Boston Tea Party STARTED HERE” read a sign in Emily Curran’s office. Curran, who resembled Emily Dickinson, was the director of Old South Meeting House. She grew up in Lexington. She was in high school in 1971 when half the town joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War on the Battle Green and was hauled away in handcuffs. Curran had thought a lot about how to teach kids about stuff that happened in Boston in 1773, in a world very different, fundamentally different, from our own. The debate held in Old South on December 16, 1773, was restaged, most weekdays, by kids from the city’s public schools. In the thoughtful program that Curran and her staff designed, the kids play parts.21 “We don’t have characters who wouldn’t have been here,” Curran told me. “So we have no women. Once I asked the kids, ‘Why do you think all the roles you’re playing today are men?’ One girl raised her hand and said, confidently, ‘Because there were no women back then.’ ” That, Curran said, was a good reminder of the work her staff has got cut out for it—measuring and marking out the distance between past and present.

  Old South, a site on the Freedom Trail, only became a monument to the tea party in the 1870s. “Its primary claim to fame in the early 1800s wasn’t the tea party,” Curran said. “The Boston Massacre protest meetings were really a bigger and better remembered piece of the history of this building.” During the hundredth anniversary of the dumping of the tea, in 1873, Ralph Waldo Emerson read his poem, “Boston,” in Faneuil Hall:

  The cargo came! and who could blame

  If Indians seized the tea,

  And, chest by chest, let down the same

  Into the laughing sea?22

  During those same festivities, though, Boston’s mayor, Josiah Quincy, the grandson of a Son of Liberty, came close to disowning the entire affair. “We are not here today I think to glory over a mere act of violence, or a merely successful destruction of property . . . we know not exactly . . . whether any of the patriot leaders of the day had a hand in the act.”23 What saved Old South, Curran explained, wasn’t the memory of the dumping of the tea but the demolition of John Hancock’s mansion, in 1863, which occasioned outcry that the city was in danger of losing its history. In 1876, when Old South was scheduled to be torn down, a group of Bostonians got together to save the building, in New England’s first ever effort at historic preservation. Old South was saved, not as an “idle shrine,” its preservers insisted, but as a living site, for the working of democracy: free speech. Anyone could hold a meeting at Old South; in the last century, its board had granted permission to everyone from Sacco and Vanzet
ti supporters to neo-Nazis. In the 1920s, when dozens of books were “banned in Boston,” Old South opened its doors to hold readings. Supporters of presidential aspirant Ron Paul once turned up in force. “I’ve been waiting for these Tea Party people to come,” Curran told me, “but they haven’t yet.” She wasn’t surprised by their interest in the Revolution, though. “Every group, it seems, can find a way to use the tea party for whatever cause they want.”

  One Wednesday in March of 2010, I watched a class of feisty fifth graders from the Marshall School in Dorchester duke it out at Old South. When the Marshall School opened in 1971, it enrolled seven hundred white and three hundred black students, and was, for its time and place, one of the most racially integrated schools in the district. In 1974, a federal circuit court mandated forced busing, to integrate Boston’s public schools, which led first, to riots and then, to white flight. By 2008, the Marshall School was 58 percent black, 37 percent Hispanic, 2 percent white, and 1 percent Asian.24

  “You are thirty-seven kids, and you need to sound like seven thousand people!” Zerah Jakub, of Old South’s education program, told that class of fifth graders. “Mr. Samuel Adams, where are you?” she called. Up to the front stepped a tall, dark-skinned boy with glasses, to renounce the Tea Act. A tiny, willful girl played a shoemaker named George Robert Twelves Hewes: “Gentlemen, we cannot let the king and Parliament treat us like this.” “Fie!” cried the little Loyalists. “King George treats us well . . . ,” one girl whispered, from behind long brown bangs. “Don’t we owe England our respect and support?” asked a girl with glasses, playing Peter Oliver. “But we did not get to vote on it,” a kid with dimples pointed out. “Huzzah!” cried her side of the aisle. “What’s stopping the king from raising it to four pence? Four pounds? Ten pounds?” asked Benjamin Edes. One of the teachers played Copley; he said he was “caught in the middle.” After everyone had a turn, Jakub gave one of the kids a tricorn and a lantern and told him to go find the governor, because the people at Old South sent an emissary to Hutchinson, asking him to let the ships return to England without unloading the tea. When word came that Hutchinson had refused, the tall kid with glasses who was playing Samuel Adams shouted, “This meeting can do nothing more to save our country!” Thirty-seven fifth graders nearly blew the roof off: “Huzzah!”

  Adams’s shout may have been the signal for three groups of men, about fifty altogether, to head to the Green Dragon, the print shop of Edes’s Boston Gazette, and a carpenter’s house, where they disguised themselves as Mohawks, smearing their faces with soot. Then they marched to Griffin’s Wharf, boarded the three ships, and dumped into the laughing sea three hundred chests of tea. More details about what happened that day and night are hard to come by. The night of the Boston Massacre, nearly one hundred people gave depositions; the Sons of Liberty were preparing a legal case, in order to charge Preston and his soldiers with murder. But the dumping the tea was, of course, a crime; the participants therefore pledged themselves to secrecy. Later—much later—people told stories about what happened and wrote memoirs. Some people kept souvenirs. When Thomas Melvill got home that night, he found some tea in his shoes and saved it. The next morning, an empty tea chest washed up on shore. Someone took it home.25

  The Salada Beaver sailed from Denmark in May of 1973, just as the Watergate hearings got under way. In July, a witness revealed that Nixon had made tapes of conversations in the Oval Office. Archibald Cox, who headed the investigation, subpoenaed the tapes; Nixon refused to hand them over. The Beaver reached Massachusetts in October.26 Nixon committed what the press called his “Saturday Night Massacre” on October 20, ordering first his attorney general, and next the deputy attorney general, to fire Cox. Both men refused, and resigned. Nixon then ordered his solicitor general, Robert Bork, to do the firing. Bork complied. “I’m not a crook,” Nixon told reporters on November 17. On December 10, the Boston Globe covered its front page with an illustrated editorial titled “The Boston Tea Party . . . and this Generation”:

  Are we again today not made indignant by the abuse of power, violations of oaths of office, indifference to the public good, undermining of the people’s confidence? Mishandling of problems, shortages, we all try to understand; none of us is perfect and great leaders are not always in abundant supply. But are we to tolerate longer publicly elected officeholders who do not belong exclusively to the entire public? It is not just the 18th century that tried men’s souls. Our generation, too, has to act on democratic—and constitutional—principles in the face of arrogant use of power.27

  Meanwhile, the city braced for Boston’s “Tea Party Weekend,” intended to be the kickoff of the Bicentennial, not just for Boston but for the whole country. It included a brunch, tea parties, a ball, and a great deal of gimcrackery: “Tea Party plates, tea boxes, Boston 200 brooch and teaspoon, Tea Party posters, silver and pewter Tea Party medallions, and Tea Party stamp cachets.”28 On the morning of December 16, twenty-five hundred people gathered at Faneuil Hall for a meeting held by the Peoples Bicentennial Commission, where Thomas Boylston Adams, a descendant of John Adams and president of the Massachusetts Historical Society, grieved for the state of the nation: “This should not be a day of commemoration but a day of mourning and prayer. We are faced today with the corruption, rot, arrogance and venality that our forefathers protested.” Then everyone in the hall marched to the waterfront.29 By noon, as falling snow turned to rain, forty thousand people gathered on Boston’s bridges and wharves to watch the action on board the Beaver. “Dump Nixon, not tea” read one sign in the crowd. The National Organization for Women was there, picketing: “Taxation without Equal Rights Is Tyranny.” Another banner read “Gay American Revolution.” Rock music blared from loudspeakers. The ceremonies began at two o’clock when about thirty men wearing tricorns and knee breeches boarded the Beaver. They were from the Charlestown Militia, a reenactment group founded by an Irish American longshoreman named Jim O’Neil in 1967.30 They dumped crates of tea into the harbor. Minutes later, six protesters from the Peoples Bicentennial Commission boarded the ship and unfurled a flag reading “IMPEACH NIXON.” (This, too, had been preap-proved. “The bicentennial belongs to everyone,” the people at Boston 200 had always insisted.)31 Then, as the Associated Press reported,

  A member of the group, wearing a huge mask resembling President Nixon’s face, circled the brig in a rowboat and waved his hands high in Nixon’s familiar “V” style. That group also tarred and feathered a dummy of Nixon and hanged him in effigy. Members of the Disabled American Veterans, dressed as Indians, then boarded. . . . Genuine Indians, however, members of the Boston Indian Council, complained about the fakes.32

  What happened in Boston that day made front-page news across the country; it was reported in over two thousand newspapers and magazines.33 The coverage wasn’t the kind Kevin White wanted. “The first anguished attempt to make something—anything” out of the Bicentennial, according to an editorial in the Washington Post, was “distinguished by commercial and ideological hucksterism.” The whole thing, including the protests, was “strained, self-conscious, artificially contrived” and “concocted.”34 Watergate made everything look bogus.

  On March 21, 2010, the day of the House vote on the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, Boston Tea Partiers held a vigil at the Green Dragon “to watch enemy troop movements on C-SPAN,” as Hess put it. “Seventeen seventy-three was all about taxation without representation,” he had told me. This was only different because it was worse. “Can you imagine if the British said not only do you have to pay a tax on the tea, but you have to buy the tea and you have to buy tea for your neighbor?”

  In the 1970s, Jeremy Rifkin’s Peoples Bicentennial Commission started a tax-agitating Tea Party, too. The Peoples Bicentennial Commission published America’s Birthday: A Planning and Activity Guide for Citizens’ Participation During the Bicentennial Years. It called on ordinary Americans to form TEA Parties (the acronym stood for Tax Equity for Americans), bec
ause the country needed “a new party, a movement that will treat tax reform as one aspect of a fight for genuine equality of property and power and against taxation without representation.” It urged TEA Party organizers to use the slogan “Don’t Tread on Me.” The book included step-by-step instructions:

  You might also consider staging your own events in places with captive audiences. How about a “King George Exhibit” of tax avoiders in some public park, with pictures and charts of the loopholes they use? How about forums on Tax Day, or on the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party—in front of IRS or H.&R. Block?35

  “This is America in the ’70s,” Rifkin’s favorite tagline went: “The 1770s and the 1970s.”36 Jeremy Rifkin wrote the Tea Party’s playbook.