The Whites of their Eyes

by Matt Braun

  16 These transactions are recounted in notes and correspondence in Letters of Franklin and Mecom, 57–64.

  17 Papers of Franklin, 1:311; 2:300–301; Lemay, Life of Franklin, 2:172.

  18 Papers of Franklin, 3:30–31; 6:123.

  19 Papers of Franklin, 7:326–50.

  20 Poor Richard’s almanacs for 1737, 1751, 1753, 1740.

  21 Papers of Franklin, 7:328–29.

  22 Thomas, History of Printing, 2:142–44.

  23 Gary Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Viking, 2005), 62–63.

  24 On the Butter Rebellion, see Clement Weeks, Commonplace Book containing “The Book of Harvard,” c. 1772, Harvard University Archives; “Meeting of the President and Tutors,” September 23, 1766, Harvard University Archives, Faculty Records III, resolution 6, 4; Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636–1936 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 117–18; William Coolidge Lane, The Rebellion of 1766 in Harvard College (Cambridge, MA: J. Wilson, 1906).

  25 Nathaniel Appleton, Considerations on Slavery (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1767), 19.

  26 Mecom to Franklin, October 23, 1767, Letters of Franklin and Mecom, 98; Mecom, “The Book of Ages.”

  27 Mecom to Franklin, December 1, 1767, Letters of Franklin and Mecom, 99; Van Doren, Jane Mecom, 90–91.

  28 Andrew Eliot to Thomas Hollis, September 27, 1768, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th ser., 4 (1858): 428.

  29 Oliver Morton Dickerson, compiler, Boston Under Military Rule, As Revealed in a Journal of the Times (1936; repr., New York: Da Capo, 1970), 78.

  30 Benjamin West to Copley, September 10, 1768, in Letters of Copley and Pelham, 72.

  31 Mecom to Franklin, November 7, 1768, in Letters of Franklin and Mecom, 106–7.

  32 Robinson, Wheatley, 17.

  33 Dickerson, Boston Under Military Rule, 15–17.

  34 Abner Cheney Goodell, The Trial and Execution, for Petit Treason, of Mark and Phillis (Cambridge, 1883). On slave rebellion and the politics of fear, see Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Knopf, 2005); Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); and Trevor G. Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

  35 Dickerson, Boston Under Military Rule, 84.

  36 Ibid., 2, 21.

  37 Works of John Adams, 2:163, 2:226.

  38 E.g., March 16, 1770: “Mr. Otis got into a mad Freak to night & broke a great many windows in the Town House.” John Rowe, The Letters and Diary of John Rowe (Boston, 1903), 199.

  39 Mercy Otis Warren, “A Thought on the Inestimable Blessing of Reason,” in Edmund M. Hayes, “The Private Poems of Mercy Otis Warren,” New England Quarterly 54 (1981): 213–14.

  40 Zagarri, A Woman’s Dilemma, 52.

  41 John Trenchard, An Argument, Shewing, that a Standing Army Is Inconsistent with a Free Government (London, 1698), 14; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 119–20.

  42 Andrew Eliot to Thomas Hollis, September 27, 1768.

  43 Works of John Adams, 10:203.

  44 My account of the massacre is taken from the depositions reproduced in Frederic Kidder, History of the Boston Massacre (Albany, 1870). See also Hiller B. Zobel, The Boston Massacre (New York: Norton, 1970).

  45 Boston Gazette, October 2, 1750.

  46 For Wheatley, “On the Affray in King Street,” see Gates, Trials of Phillis Wheatley, 20–21; A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1770); Paul Revere, The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated on King Street (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1770); Henry Pelham to Paul Revere, March 29, 1770, in Letters of Copley and Pelham, 83.

  47 Later, Hess e-mailed me, “I work for the Government, serving the country that I love by helping it carry out its constitutionally mandated defensive functions.” Austin Hess, e-mail message to the author, March 25, 2010.

  48 The Glenn Beck Show, Fox News, New York, May 7, 2010.

  49 Paul J. C. Friedlander, “Bicentennial Reports: Bits and Pieces,” New York Times, November 4, 1973; Donald Bremner, “Picking up the Bicentennial Pieces,” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1973; J. Anthony Lukas, “Schools Turn to Negro Role in U.S.,” New York Times, July 8, 1968; Robert Sherrill, “The Dispirit of ’76: A Bicentennial Divided Against Itself,” New York Times, March 23, 1975; John H. Fenton, “Voice of Boston’s Negroes Growing Louder,” New York Times, December 26, 1963; Malcom X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), 219; Bodnar, Remaking America, 231–32. Even the ARBA asked, reflecting on the mood in the country during the bicentennial, “what was there left to celebrate?” (ARBA, Bicentennial of the United States of America, 1:7). Peoples Bicentennial Commission, America’s Birthday: A Planning and Activity Guide for Citizens’ Participation During the Bicentennial Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 9–10. On the Peoples Bicentennial Commission, see also The Great Bicentennial Debate: History as a Political Weapon; A Record of the debate between Jeremy Rifkin and Jeffrey St. John (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, 1976); Jeremy Rifkin and John Rossen, How to Commit Revolution American Style (Seacaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1973); Peoples Bicentennial Commission, Voices of the Revolution (New York: Bantam, 1974); Peoples Bicentennial Commission, Common Sense II: The Case Against Corporate Tyranny (New York: Bantam, 1975).

  50 Kent State posters of Revere’s engraving are mentioned in Jesse Lemisch, “Radical Plot in Boston (1770): A Study in the Use of Evidence,” Harvard Law Review 84 (1970): 504.

  51 “The View from Kent State: 11 Speak Out,” New York Times, May 11, 1970.

  52 Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 142.

  53 Lucille Longview, interview conducted by Lenore Fenn, “Democracy and Dissent,” Lexington Oral History Projects, Inc., November 18, 1992, http://www.lexingtonbattlegreen1971.com/.

  54 On the Lexington protest, see also Edward Tabor Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 40–41; “Antiwar Vets Weigh Defy of Camp Ban,” Boston Globe, May 28, 1971; William J. Cardoso, “Antiwar Vets Camp at Concord Bridge,” Boston Globe, May 29, 1971; Bruce McCabe, “500 Antiwar Vets Arrested on Lexington Green,” Boston Globe, May 30, 1971; John Wood, “Antiwar Veterans March on Bunker Hill,” and Joan Mahoney, “Citizens and Veterans Share Cold Night Vigil,” Boston Globe, May 31, 1971; and “Tradition and Protests Mark Memorial Day 1971,” Spartanburg (North Carolina) Herald, June 1, 1971.

  55 “The Spirit of ’70: Six Historians Reflect on What Ails the American Spirit,” Newsweek, July 6, 1970.

  56 On Hofstadter avoiding an appointment in Johnson’s administration, see David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 127–28; and Richard Hofstadter to Christopher Lasch, October 9, 1964, Richard Hofstadter Papers, Columbia University, Box 6. See also Eric Foner, “The Education of Richard Hofstadter,” in Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 25–46. Hofstadter remarked of Schlesinger, “He picks up all the troubled currents of our time and exploits them, but it is very hard to believe that he feels them, or that he feels anything very strongly but a desire to be influential and powerful.” Richard Hofstadter to Daniel Aaron, undated, but probably c. 1955, Daniel Aaron Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Box 17. My thanks to Daniel Aaron for permission to read these papers.

  57 Schlesinger’s remarks were occasioned, in 1978, by reading the third volume of Alfred Kazin’s memoirs, where this distinction was drawn. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Journals, 1952–2000, ed. Andrew Schlesinger and Ste
phen Schlesinger (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), 447; Richard Hofstadter to Daniel Aaron, April 29, 1948; Daniel Aaron Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Box 17.

  58 Discussions of bicentennial schlock include Jesse Lemisch, “Bicentennial Schlock,” New York Times, October 15, 1976; and Lowenthall, “Bicentennial Landscape.”

  Chapter 3: How to Commit Revolution

  1 Company Overview, Historic Tours of America, courtesy of Historic Tours of America; “Boston’s Best Free Map and Best Sightseeing Tour,” Historic Tours of America flyer; “See the Best First! We Make Vacations Better!” Historic Tours of America flyer; “Sons and Daughters of Liberty: The Road to the American Revolution,” Old Town Trolley Tours of Boston flyer, undated.

  2 The Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum: The Story (Key West, FL: Historic Tours of America, undated), DVD.

  3 Richard Nixon, “Second Inaugural Address: Saturday, January 20, 1973,” in Fellow Citizens, 411.

  4 Jeremy Rifkin, “The Red, White, and Blue Left,” in How to Commit Revolution American Style: An Anthology, ed. Jeremy Rifkin and John Rossen (Secaucus, NJ: L. Stuart, 1973), 135–36.

  5 “ ’76 Bicentennial Plans Cut Back as Mood Shifts,” New York Times, July 4, 1973.

  6 Frederick Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 196–97. Invitation to the Frederick Douglass reading, American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, Boston Regional Office, National Archives, Record Group 452, General Correspondence, Box 1.

  7 Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975). See also Patricia Bradley, Slavery, Propaganda and the American Revolution (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966); Peter A. Dorsey, “To ‘Corroborate Our Own Claims’: Public Positioning and the Slavery Metaphor in Revolutionary America,” American Quarterly 55 (September 2003): 353–86; François Furstenberg, “Beyond Freedom and Slavery: Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse,” Journal of American History 89 (March 2003): 1295–1330; F. Nwabueze Okoye, “Chattel Slavery as the Nightmare of the American Revolutionaries,” William and Mary Quarterly 37 (January 1980): 3–28.

  8 Nash, Unknown American Revolution, 119–21. On the end of slavery in England, see Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).

  9 Mercy Otis Warren to Sarah Walter Hesilrige, c. December 1773 or March 1774, in Selected Letters of Mercy Otis Warren, 21–22.

  10 Henry Pelham to Copley, September 2, 1771, in Letters of Copley and Pelham, 150–51.

  11 Hannah Winthrop to Mercy Otis Warren, January 1, 1772, Correspondence with Mercy Otis Warren, Massachusetts Historical Society, one box.

  12 The best available collection is The Plays and Poems of Mercy Otis Warren, compiled by Benjamin Franklin V (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1980).

  13 Felix to Thomas Hutchinson, January 6, 1773, and Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, Felix Holbrook, and Chester Joie to the Representative of the Town of Thompson, April 20, 1773, in Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990), 171–74.

  14 On the portrait, see Robinson, Wheatley, 31–32. “To the PUBLICK,” in Wheatley, Complete Writings, 8; Wheatley, “Farewell to America,” in Complete Writings, 62–64; A Forensic Dispute on the Legality of Enslaving the Africans (Boston: John Boyle, 1773).

  15 Caesar Sartor, “Essay on Slavery,” Essex Journal and Merrimack Packet, August 17, 1773.

  16 Wheatley, “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth,” in Complete Writings, 39–40.

  17 Robinson, Wheatley, 39–40.

  18 Francis S. Drake, Tea Leaves: Being a Collection of Letters and Documents (Boston, 1884), ix.

  19 Mecom to Deborah Franklin, August 1770, in Letters of Franklin and Mecom, 114.

  20 Phillis Wheatley to David Worcester, October 18, 1773, in Complete Writings, 146–47.

  21 “Tea Is Brewing: A Guide for Teachers” (Boston: Old South Meeting House, 2009).

  22 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Boston,” in Complete Works, 9:215.

  23 Young, Shoemaker, 187.

  24 Ronald P. Formisiano, Boston Against Busing: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 281 n. 19; Boston Public Schools Report on Teaching and Learning, 2008, http://www.bostonpublicschools.org/files/reportcards/SCH4340.pdf.

  25 In 2010, the tea Melvill found in his shoes remained on display at the Old State House. The chest was purchased by Historic Tours of America in 2005. “Historic Tours of America Acquires Rare Tea Chest from Boston Tea Party,” press release, January 5, 2005, http://www.bostonteapartyship.com/pressrelease.asp.

  26 Paul J. C. Friedlander, “Bicentennial Reports: Bits and Pieces,” New York Times, November 4, 1973; Donald Bremner, “Picking up the Bicentennial Pieces,” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1973.

  27 “An Editorial: The Boston Tea Party . . . and this Generation,” Boston Globe, December 10, 1973. The next day, Nixon signed a bill creating the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, granting it far greater powers than the defunct commission.

  28 Georgia Ireland to Lewis A. Carter, February 13, 1974, American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, Boston Regional Office, National Archives, Record Group 452, Box 1.

  29 Peter Anderson, “Faneuil Hall Rally Urged to Demand Impeachment,” December 17, 1973; [Sarasota Florida] Herald Tribune, December 17, 1973.

  30 J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Life of Three American Families (New York: Knopf, 1985), 316.

  31 Lewis A. Carter Jr. to Georgia Ireland, January 25, 1974, American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, Boston Regional Office, National Archives, Record Group 452, Box 1.

  32 “ ‘Tea Party’ Won’t Be Forgotten Soon,” Atlanta Journal, December 17, 1973; Joseph Rosenbloom and David Richwine, “Rebels Steal Tea Party Show, ‘Dump’ Oil,” Boston Globe, December 17, 1973.

  33 Lewis A. Carter Jr. to Georgia Ireland, January 25, 1974. Photographs of the reenactment and the protest are reproduced in ARBA, Bicentennial of the United States of America, 1:106–9.

  34 Stephen Isaacs, “Boston Tea Party Restaged,” Washington Post, December 17, 1973.

  35 Peoples Bicentennial Commission, America’s Birthday, chap. 3.

  36 Peoples Bicentennial Commission, Common Sense II, front matter.

  37 “Boston Just Say No Party,” Boston Globe, July 16, 1988; Bruce Butterfield, “Labor Has Its Day,” Boston Globe, September 8, 1992; Dolores Kong, “Doctors and Nurses Plan to Protest at Tea Party Ship,” Boston Globe, December 1, 1997; Aaron Zitner, “Tax Code Foes Find Nation Indifferent,” Boston Globe, April 16, 1998; April Simpson, “Legislators Dump U.S. Mandates,” Boston Globe, August 6, 2007.

  38 Works of John Adams, 3:323; 9:335; Mercy Otis Warren, “The Squabble of the Sea Nymphs,” in Plays and Poems, 202–5.

  39 John Hancock, An Oration Delivered March 5, 1774 (Newport, 1774), 9.

  40 Young, Shoemaker, part 2.

  41 Daniel Webster, “The Bunker Hill Monument, An Address delivered . . . on the Seventeenth of June, 1825,” in Daniel Webster’s First Bunker Hill Oration, ed. Fred Newton Scott (New York, 1902), 25.

  42 Holmes, “The Last Leaf,” in Complete Poetical Works, 1–2.

  43 Herman Melville, Israel Potter (New York, 1855), 51, 272–76.

  44 Young, Shoemaker, 121–79.

  45 A Citizen of New York [James Hawkes], A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party: With a Memoir of George R. T. Hewes (New York, 1834); Young, Shoemaker, 3–6. See also A Bostonian [Benjamin Bussey Thatcher], Traits of the Tea
Party: Being a Memoir of George R. T. Hewes (New York, 1835).

  46 Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride, 51.

  47 John Morgan to Isaac Jamieux, November 24, 1773, in Letters of Copley and Pelham, 210.

  48 Works of Adams, 2:367.

  49 Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (New York: Viking, 2006), 49.

  50 Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination, 1:87.

  51 Josiah Quincy, Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy Jun. (Boston, 1875), 363.

  52 Nathaniel Niles, Two Discourses on Liberty (Newburyport, 1774), 38.

  53 Petition from “a Grate Number of Blackes” to Thomas Gage, May 25, 1774, Jeremy Belknap Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Box 3.

  54 Abigail Adams to John Adams, September 22, 1774, Adams Family Correspondence, ed. L. H. Butterfield et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963–93), 1:161–62.

  55 Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny (London, 1775), 89.

  56 Phillis Wheatley to Samson Occom, February 11, 1774, in Complete Writings, 152–53.

  57 Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 8. See also Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006); and Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

  58 Austin Hess, e-mail message to the author, April 26, 2010.

  59 Polls were conducted in 2010 by CBS News / New York Times, Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, the Pew Research Center, and USA Today. “The Tea Party Movement: What They Think,” CBS News and the New York Times, poll, April 5–12, 2010; “Quinnipiac University Poll,” Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, poll, March 24, 2010; “The People and Their Government: Distrust, Discontent, Anger and Partisan Rancor,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, poll, April 18, 2010, http://www.gallup.com/poll/127181/tea-partiers-fairly-mainstream-demographics.aspx.