The Whites of their Eyes

by Matt Braun

  9 A suggestive collection is Philip Foner, ed., We, the Other People: Alternative Declarations of Independence by Labor Groups, Farmers, Woman’s Rights Advocates, Socialists, and Blacks, 1829–1975 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976).

  10 “Divergent Views of Public Men,” Life, September 17, 1956, 119–20. Martin Luther King Jr., “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience (1961),” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, ed. James Melvin Washington (San Francisco: Harper-SanFrancisco, 1991), 50. Lyndon B. Johnson, Special Message to the Congress, March 15, 1965, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966), 1:281. Washington Afro-American, September 20, 1966.

  11 John E. Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Patriotism, and Commemoration in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 229. On the Bicentennial, see American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (ARBA), The Bicentennial of the United States of America: A Final Report to the People, 5 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1977). Massachusetts had formed its own bicentennial commission in 1964 (ARBA, Bicentennial of the United States of America, 1:58). On memory and the Revolution, see also David Lowenthal, “The Bicentennial Landscape: A Mirror Held Up to the Past,” Geographical Review 67 (1977): 253–67; Milton M. Klein, “Commemorating the American Revolution: The Bicentennial and Its Predecessors,” New York History 58 (1977): 257–76; Michael G. Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1978); and Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981). On history and memory, more broadly, see David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

  12 Martin Luther King Jr., “Where Do We Go from Here? (1967),” in A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson and Chris Shepherd (New York: IPM, 2001), 182.

  13 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, August 24, 1815, in Adams-Jefferson Letters, 2:455.

  14 Oliver, Origin and Progress, 9.

  15 Accounts of Boston in the 1760s and 1770s include Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1955); Gary Nash, Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); and Benjamin Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). On the fire, see William Pencak, “The Social Structure of Revolutionary Boston: Evidence from the Great Fire of 1760,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10 (Autumn 1979): 267–78. On the effects of the French and Indian War, see Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society and the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

  16 On Otis, see William Tudor, The Life of James Otis of Massachusetts (Boston, 1823). On Bernard: Colin Nicholson, The “Infamas Govener”: Francis Bernard and the Origins of the American Revolution (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000). But the best account of the conflicts among these men can be found in Bernard Bailyn’s masterful study, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).

  17 “Portraiture in the Old State House” and “Furnishings in the Old State House,” typescript, Old State House Files, Bostonian Society, Boston.

  18 John Adams to William Tudor, March 29, 1817, The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (1856; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1971), 10:247. See also James M. Farrell, “The Writs of Assistance and Public Memory: John Adams and the Legacy of James Otis,” New England Quarterly 79 (2006): 533–66.

  19 On Wheatley’s life, see William H. Robinson, Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings (New York: Garland, 1984); and Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 2001). A traveler’s account of the harbor is reprinted in Horace E. Scudder, “Life in Boston in the Provincial Period,” in The Memorial History of Boston, ed. Justin Winsor (Boston, 1882), 2:440.

  20 Robinson, Wheatley, 8.

  21 Boston Gazette, July 13, 1761; Henry Louis Gates, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2000), 17.

  22 Wheatley, “To His Excellency General Washington,” in Complete Writings, 89.

  23 Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, ed. Lester Cohen (1805; repr., Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988), 1:xliii. On Warren, see Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of the Revolution (Boston: Beacon, 2008); and Rosemarie Zagarri, A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1995). A valuable sample of Warren’s correspondence is Mercy Otis Warren, Mercy Otis Warren: Selected Letters, ed. Jeffrey H. Richards and Sharon M. Harris (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009).

  24 John Dickinson, “An Address to ‘Friends and Countrymen’ on the Stamp Act (1765),” in Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania 14 (1895): 204.

  25 On this relationship, see David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Norton, 2008).

  26 Stephen Hopkins, The Rights of the Colonies Examined (Providence, RI: William Goddard, 1764), 4.

  27 James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1764), 4, 29.

  28 Boston Gazette October 14, 1765. On the Stamp Act, see Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (New York: Collier Books, 1963). On the resistance movement, see Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1972).

  29 On the early history of newsletters, newsbooks, and newspapers, see Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), especially chap. 9. On the early history of American newspapers, see John Hench, ed., Three Hundred Years of American Newspapers (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1990); Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America, 2 vols. (Albany,1874); Clarence S. Brigham, A History and Bibliography of American Newspapers (Worcester, 1947); David A. Copeland, Colonial American Newspapers: Character and Content (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997); John Tebbel, The Compact History of the American Newspaper, rev. ed. (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969); Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); David Paul Nord, Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); and Eric Burns, Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2006).

  30 On the making of newspapers, see Lawrence Wroth, The Colonial Printer (New York: Grolier Club, 1931); and Jeffrey L. Pasley, The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).

  31 On the importance of the New-England Courant, see Perry Miller, introduction to The New-England Courant: A Selection of Certain Issues (Boston: Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1956), 5–9; Nord, Communities of Journalism, 52; and Thomas C. Leonard, The Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), chap. 1.

  32 See David Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1997); and J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), vol. 1, chap. 6. Mather is
quoted in Lemay, Life of Franklin, 1:119. New-England Courant, December 4, 1721.

  33 The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Larabee et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958–2008), 1:13, 17, 19.

  34 Lemay, Life of Franklin, 1:185.

  35 Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography: An Authoritative Text, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (New York: Norton, 1986), 14–17.

  36 Edes’s career is most fully recounted in Rollo G. Silver, “Benjamin Edes: Trumpeter of Sedition,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 47 (1953): 248–68. But see also Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America (Worcester, 1810), 1:136–39, 2:53–56; Tebbel, Compact History, 37–39; Joseph T. Buckingham, Specimens of Newspaper Literature: With Personal Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Reminiscences (Boston, 1850), 1:165–205; and Pasley, Tyranny of Printers, 37–40.

  37 John Eliot, Biographical Dictionary (Salem and Boston, 1809), 191–92; Edwin Monroe Bacon, Boston: A Guide Book. (Boston, 1903), 59. On Eliot, see Clifford K. Shipton, “Andrew Eliot,” in New England Life in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 397–428.

  38 New York Gazette, August 29, 1765.

  39 John Singleton Copley to Captain R. C. Bruce, September 10, 1765, Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739–1776 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1914), 36; Jennifer Roberts, “Copley’s Cargo: Boy with a Squirrel and the Dilemma of Transit,” American Art 21 (2007): 21–41. On Copley, see Jules Prown, John Singleton Copley, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966).

  40 Burns, Infamous Scribblers, 353.

  41 Works of John Adams, 2:219.

  42 Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride, 53.

  43 Important critiques of popular biographies of Founding Fathers include Sean Wilentz, “America Made Easy: David McCullough, John Adams, and the Decline of Popular History,” New Republic, July 2, 2001; and David Waldstreicher, “Founders’ Chic as Culture War,” Radical History Review 84 (Fall 2002): 185–94. See also Ray Raphael, Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation (New York: Free Press, 2009); Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and Gary Nash, Ray Raphael, and Alfred F. Young, eds., Revolutionary Founders (New York: Knopf, forth-coming). On the family feud between biographers and historians, see Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88 (June 2001): 129–44; and on a related feud between historians and novelists, see Jill Lepore, “Just the Facts, Ma’am,” New Yorker, March 24, 2008. On history and biography in the nineteenth century, see Scott E. Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and Gregory M. Pfitzer, Popular History and the Literary Marketplace, 1840–1920 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008).

  44 Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination, 1:3.

  45 Oliver Wendell Holmes, “A Ballad of the Boston Tea-Party,” in The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 247–48.

  46 That poll is reported in Brian Stelter, “Fox Canceled Hannity’s Attendance at Tea Party’s Tax Day Rally in Cincinnati,” New York Times, April 16, 2010.

  47 Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The Colonial Newspapers and the Stamp Act,” New England Quarterly 8 (March 1935): 63–83. See also Bernard Bailyn and John B. Hench, eds., The Press and the American Revolution (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1980).

  48 Burns, Infamous Scribblers, 137.

  49 Schlesinger, “Colonial Newspapers,” 65; Ramsay, History, 1:61–62.

  50 James Parker to Benjamin Franklin, June 14, 1765, Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 16 (1902): 198.

  51 The Declarations of the Stamp Act Congress, October 7–24, 1765, in Edmund S. Morgan, Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764–1766 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 62–63.

  52 Pennsylvania Gazette, October 31, 1765; Maryland Gazette, October 10, 1765; Connecticut Courant, July 24, 1765. Printers’ responses to the Stamp Act are also discussed in Tebbel, Compact History, 35–37; and in Jeffery A. Smith, Printers and Press Freedom: The Ideology of Early American Journalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 136–41.

  53 New-Hampshire Gazette, October 31, 1765; Connecticut Courant, July 24, 1765.

  54 Boston Gazette, November 11, 1765; Hannah Adams, Summary History of New England (Dedham, MA, 1799), 249–50.

  55 The standard account of the rise of objectivity in journalism remains Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978). Pasley, who counters Schudson, offers a summary of more recent literature in Tyranny of Printers, chap. 1.

  56 Benjamin Franklin, “Apology for Printers,” Papers of Franklin, 1:194–99. On Franklin’s printing career, see James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer (Philadelphia: Oak Knoll Press, 2006).

  57 Coverage, tallies, and predictions include USA Today’s Newspaper Death Watch, 2009; Paper Cuts, http://newspaperlayoffs.com/maps/closed/; Newspaper Death Watch, http://newspaperdeathwatch.com/; Mike Doyle, “The Newspaper Is Dead, Long Live the Newspaper,” Huffington Post, August 14, 2008; Bill Keller, “Not Dead Yet: The Newspaper in the Days of Digital Anarchy,” November 29, 2007, Guardian Weekly, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/nov/29/pressandpublishing

  .digitalmedial; and “Newspapers: Not Dead Yet?” Seattle Times, June 7, 2008, http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/dailydemocracy/

  2008/06/newspapers_not_dead_yet.html. See also Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” Columbia Journalism Review, October 19, 2009, http://www.cjr.org/reconstruction/the_reconstruction_of_american.php.

  Chapter 2: The Book of Ages

  1 John Adams to Benjamin Rush, April 4, 1790, Adams Papers, Letterbook, May 20, 1789–January 7, 1793, Massachusetts Historical Society, Reel 115.

  2 John Adams, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 1:100.

  3 John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, July 11, 1807; Adams to Warren, July 30, 1807; Adams to Warren, August 8, 1807; Warren to Adams, August 7, 1807, in John Adams and Mercy Otis Warren, Correspondence between John Adams and Mercy Warren, ed. Charles Francis Adams (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 21, 381, 429, 422–23.

  4 John Adams to Timothy Pickering, August 6, 1822, Works of John Adams, 2:514; John Adams to Benjamin Rush, June 21, 1811, in The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805–1813, ed. John A. Schultz and Douglas Adair (1966; repr., Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 197.

  5 John Adams, HBO, New York, 2008.

  6 John Adams to Elbridge Gerry, April 17, 1813, in Warren-Adams Letters (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1925), 2:380.

  7 Jane Mecom to Benjamin Franklin, December 30, 1765; Mecom to Franklin, October 21, 1784; Franklin to Mecom, July 7, 1773; Mecom to Franklin, July 21, 1786, in The Letters of Benjamin Franklin and Jane Mecom, ed. Carl Van Doren (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 86, 232, 275, 139. On Mecom, see Carl Van Doren, Jane Mecom, the Favorite Sister of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Viking, 1950); Anne Firor Scott, Making the Invisible Woman Visible (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 3–13; and Neremy A. Stern, “Jane Franklin Mecom: A Boston Woman in Revolutionary Times,” Early American Studies 4 (2006): 147–91.

  8 Anne Bradstreet, “The Prologue,” in The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Jeannine Hensley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 16; Boston Evening Post, December 10, 1744; American Magazine, or General Repository, August 1769, 243–44; E. Jennifer Monaghan, “Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial America,” A
merican Quarterly 40 (1988): 18–41; E. Jennifer Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005); Thomas Woody, A History of Women’s Education in the United States (New York: Science Press, 1924), 1:146; Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England (New York: Norton, 1974); Gloria L. Main, “An Inquiry into When and Why Women Learned to Write in Colonial New England,” Journal of Social History 24 (Spring 1991): 579–89; Joel Perlmann and Dennis Shirley, “When Did New England Women Acquire Literacy?” William and Mary Quarterly 48 (1991): 50–67.

  9 Jane Mecom, “The Book of Ages” in Letters of Franklin and Mecom, 100–101.

  10 For admission and discharge records of the almshouse, see Eric Nellis and Anne Decker Cecere, eds., The Eighteenth-Century Records of the Boston Overseers of the Poor (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2007). Edward Mecom’s troubles with creditors can be traced in the Suffolk Files of the Massachusetts Archives, Boston. See, for instance, Collson v. Mecom, January 1737, Document 45414, Reel 163; Perkins v. Mecom, July 1739, Document 49481, Reel 175; and Ruddock v. Mecom, January 1765, Document 85880, Reel 274. Jane Mecom to Deborah Franklin, September 28, 1765; Mecom to Franklin, December 30, 1765, in Letters of Franklin and Mecom, 83, 87. See also Papers of Franklin 5:67. Jane’s son Peter Franklin Mecom was the only one of her children to whom she gave a middle name.

  11 Papers of Franklin, 3:306–8.

  12 Franklin to Mecom, undated but 1748, Letters of Franklin and Mecom, 43.

  13 Franklin to Edward and Jane Mecom, November 30, 1752, Letters of Franklin and Mecom, 50.

  14 Articles of Agreement with David Hall” [January 1, 1748], Papers of Franklin 3:263–67; Franklin to Mecom, June 28, 1756, Letters of Franklin and Mecom, 53.

  15 Franklin to William Strahan, April 18, 1754, Papers of Franklin, 5:82. See also Wilberforce Eames, The Antigua Press and Benjamin Mecom, 1748–1765 (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1929).