by John Beckman
9. “foolish enough to spend”: Ibid.
10. a fast crowd collectively known as “Jack Tars”: Paul A. Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 3–129; Jesse Lemisch, Jack Tar vs. John Bull: The Role of New York’s Seamen in Precipitating the Revolution (New York: Garland, 1997), 28, 150.
11. “eighteenth century’s most complex machine”: Daniel Vickers with Vince Walsh, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 88. Vickers spends little time recounting the “celebrations” in so-called “sailortowns”—the “drinking to excess, feasting on fresh victuals, regaling their friends and families with stories from abroad, and renewing their acquaintanceships with women and girls” (133) that he says characterized the young mariner’s shore leave—but presents a wonderfully detailed history of the young Jack Tar’s work life and society.
12. “the antics of a wild, harebrained sailor”: Samuel Leech, Thirty Years from Home, or A Voice from the Main Deck (Boston: Charles Tappan, 1844), 24–25. Recall, too, William Bradford’s cautionary tale of the “proud & very profane younge … seaman” whom “it plased God … to smite with a greeveous disease, of which he dyed in a desperate maner.” Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 57.
13. The contagious fun: In Moby-Dick, the Pequod’s variegated crew does a jig that would have boiled Cotton Mather’s blood. The Icelandic, Maltese, and Sicilian sailors beg off for lack of female partners, to which the Long Island sailor chides these “sulkies” that “there’s plenty more for the rest of us” and the all-male crowd lights up the deck. The Azores sailor beseeches Pip on the tambourine: “Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it, bell-boy! Make fire-flies! break the jinglers!” The Chinese sailor hollers: “Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of thyself.” The French sailor, beside himself in the frenzy, suggestively shouts: “Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it! Split jibs! tear yourselves!” All the while Tashtego, the “quietly smoking” Indian, watches over the ruckus in judgment: “That’s a white man; he calls that fun: humph! I save my sweat.” Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (London: Everyman’s Library, 1993), 146–47. This romp celebrates a seafaring camaraderie that predated the Revolution and would grew all the more diverse after 1776, when, as Gilje shows, Americans ignored Britain’s Navigation Acts and welcomed crew members of all nationalities (25).
14. “a Mob, or rather body of Men,” “their Captivated Fr[ien]ds”: Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765–1780 (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 62.
15. “using Rigour instead of Mildness”: Cited in John Lax and William Pencak, “The Knowles Riot and the Crisis of the 1740s in Massachusetts,” Perspectives in American History 19 (1976): 186.
16. “rioting,” “People can experience”: Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 104.
17. “such Illegal Criminal Proceedings”: Lax and Pencak, “Knowles Riot,” 197.
18. “who despises his Neighbor’s Happiness”: Cited in John K. Alexander, Samuel Adams: America’s Revolutionary Politician (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 8. Alexander’s indispensable book was among the first in a recent surge of Samuel Adams biographies; it also remains the most incisive account of his early political life. It has since been revised, expanded, and retitled: Samuel Adams: The Life of an American Revolutionary (2011). Pauline Maier’s long biographical essay—in The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (1980; New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 3–50—is also highly recommended. Other biographies consulted for this account are Benjamin H. Irvin, Samuel Adams: Son of Liberty, Father of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Mark Puls, Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Ira Stoll, Samuel Adams: A Life (New York: Free Press, 2008).
19. “No man was more aware”: Maier, Old Revolutionaries, 40.
20. “Folly,” “Dissipation”: Ibid., 42.
21. “Cause of Liberty and Virtue”: Ibid., 36.
22. “zealous, ardent and keen in the Cause”: John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 10 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2010), 2:163.
23. “Chief Incendiary”: Alexander, Samuel Adams, 103.
24. “all serpentine cunning”: Peter Oliver, Peter Oliver’s Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View, ed. Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1961), 39.
25. “The true patriot”: Samuel Adams, The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing, 24 vols. (McLean, VA: IndyPublish.com, n.d.), 2:106.
26. “spent rather lavishly”: Clifford K. Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, vol. 10, 1736–1740 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1958), 421–22. When he returned for his master’s degree in 1743, Adams argued under his politically liberal father’s influence “that it is lawful to resist the supreme magistrate if the commonwealth cannot be otherwise preserved.”
27. “No other caucus leader”: Alexander, Samuel Adams, 14.
28. “difficulties”: Samuel Adams, Writings, 1:200.
29. “a Master of Vocal Musick,” “This genius he improved”: Oliver, Peter Oliver’s Origin, 41.
30. “had for years been complimented”: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 426.
31. Boston’s public houses, “slaves and servants”: David W. Conroy, In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 58, 59, 127.
32. “many Americans”: Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), 361; see 361–417.
33. “distinct lower-class subculture”: Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 48, 50; see 45–56.
34. “the traditional oral culture of taverns”: Conroy, In Public Houses, 244, 180n, 254. See also Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
35. “were where republican concepts gripped”: Conroy, In Public Houses, 254.
36. it was Jack Tar who hoisted: By tracing American seamen’s crowd actions (from the Knowles riots forward) to a colorful array of boat burnings, slave revolts, and other violent uprisings in the larger eighteenth-century transatlantic context, Marcus Rediker’s powerful article shows how and why Jack Tar’s multiracial revolution “could not easily be contained” by the Sons of Liberty’s conciliatory gestures. It was far more radical. After 1747, “Jack Tar took part in almost every port city conflict in England and America for the remainder of the century… [they] took to the streets in rowdy and rebellious protest on a variety of issues, seizing in practice what would later be defined as ‘rights’ by philosophers and legislators. Here, as elsewhere, rights were not granted from on high; they had to be fought for, won, and defended.” “A Motley Crew of Rebels: Sailors, Slaves, and the Coming of the American Revolution,” in The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a Social Movement, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 197, 168.
37. “body of the people”: John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, in The Selected Political Writings of John Locke, ed. Paul E. Sigmund (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 116.
38. “particularly strong collectivism”: Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 29. From the 1750s to the 1770s, new intellectual currents flowed into the colonies from Europe, loosening the Puritans’ crumbling authoritarianism with Enlightenment ideas of liberty and equality—what John Adams loosely called “all the Nonsense of these last twenty Years” (Autobiography and Diary, 3:265).
Bernard Bailyn, in his landmark history of the period, establishes how opposition writers who had been considered “Cassandras” in their luxurious, extravagant Georgian England—“doctrinaire libertarians, disaffected politicians, and religious dissenters”—“seemed particularly reasonable, particularly relevant, and … quickly became influential” in the disenfranchised colonies (The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967], 92, 52–54). Jay Fliegelman demonstrates how the widespread rhetoric of independent children provided a rallying point for colonists who experienced, like kids, both exhilaration and fear in individuating themselves from England. “A call for filial autonomy and the unimpeded emergence from nonage” became “the quintessential motif. At every opportunity Revolutionary propagandists insisted that the new nation and its people had come of age, had achieved a collective maturity that necessitated them becoming in political fact an independent and self-governing nation” (Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution and Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982], 3). Gordon S. Wood details the colonies’ rapid upheaval from monarchical hierarchy to “enlightened paternalism” to an orderly form of autonomous democracy. Wood attributes this upheaval to, among other causes, an influx of new ideas: an increased interest in civilization and civility, an emphasis on benevolence and communal happiness, and an enlightened awareness of cosmopolitanism, as well as a lightening of punishments in general and vicious practices like public shaming (The Radicalism of the American Revolution: How a Revolution Transformed a Monarchical Society into a Democratic One Unlike Any That Had Ever Existed [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992]).
39. The middle management: Conroy, In Public Houses, 256.
40. a deft little dance: Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 31–32.
41. “A goodlier sight who e’er did see?”: Alexander, Samuel Adams, 32.
42. “Many Gentlemen”: Francis Bernard, “The Stamp Act Riot, 1765,” in Documents to Accompany America’s History, Sixth Edition, ed. Melvin Yazawa (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007), 107.
43. “So much were they affected”: Boston Newsletter, August 22, 1765; Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 159–65; John Rowe, Letters and Diary of John Rowe, ed. Anne Rowe Cunningham (New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1969), 88–89.
44. “three huzzas”: Bernard, “The Stamp Act Riot,” 107.
45. “a Burnt-Offering”: Cited in Hoerder, Crowd Action, 98.
46. “some bruises”: Bernard, “The Stamp Act Riot,” 107.
47. “gave universal Satisfaction”: Samuel Adams, The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing, vol. 1, 1764–1769 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 59–60.
48. “There is,” he wrote: John Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 1:39.
49. “republican monarchist”: Richard Allen Ryerson, “John Adams, Republican Monarchist: An Inquiry into the Origins of His Constitutional Thought,” in Empire and Nation: The American Revolution and the Atlantic World, ed. Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 72–92.
50. “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law”: Boston Gazette, August 12, 1765, reprinted in John Adams, The Political Writings of John Adams: Representative Selections (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1954), 18–21. Cited in David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 61.
51. “Head”: This and subsequent quotations in this and the following paragraph are from John Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 1:341–42.
52. “parades, festivals, and shows of fireworks”: Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 431.
53. “Ears [were] ravished”: John Adams, “To William Crawford,” The Earliest Diary of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 99.
54. “higher object”: John Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 1:124.
55. “body,” “harangue,” “constantly refused”: Ibid., 3:290–91.
56. “No Mobs or Tumults”: Boston Gazette, quoted in Hoerder, Crowd Action, 151.
57. “Where are the damned boogers”: All quotations in this paragraph are from A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston, Perpetrated in the Evening of the Fifth Day of March, 1770, by Soldiers of the 29th Regiment, which with the 14th Regiment Were Then Quartered There; With Some Observations on the State of Things Prior to That Catastrophe (1770; Williamstown, MA: Corner House Publishers, 1973), 50–63.
58. “Council”: John Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 3:293.
59. “by certain busy Characters”: Ibid., 3:292.
60. “We have been entertained”: John Adams, Legal Papers of John Adams, Ser. 3, General Correspondence and Other Papers of the Adams Statesmen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 266–69. Emphasis added to “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and out landish jack tarrs.”
61. “Mean and Vile Condition”: Lax and Pencak, “Knowles Riot,” 197.
62. “Not one extravagance”: Cited in Conroy, In Public Houses, 247.
63. “so very fat”: Abigail Adams, quoted in McCullough, John Adams, 64.
64. “Roxbury, I am told”: Samuel Adams, Writings, 2:241.
65. “Stop the Progress of Tyranny”: Ibid., 2:238.
66. “spirit”: Tea Leaves: Being a collection of letters and documents relating to the shipment of tea to the American colonies in the year 1773, by the East India Tea Company. Now first printed from the original manuscript. With an introduction, notes, and biographical notices of the Boston Tea Party, by Francis S. Drake (Boston: A. O. Crane, 1884), xliv. Also consulted for this account were Wesley S. Griswold, The Night the Revolution Began: The Boston Tea Party, 1773 (Brattleboro, VT: Stephen Greene Press, 1972); Benjamin Woods Larabee, The Boston Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); and Peter D. G. Thomas, Tea Party to Independence: The Third Phase of the American Revolution, 1773–1776 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1991).
67. “the sharpest, the sharpest conflicts”: Tea Leaves, lix.
68. “he was willing to grant”: Griswold, The Night the Revolution Began, 91.
69. “Who knows how tea”: Tea Leaves, lxiii.
70. “A mob! A mob!,” “This meeting can do nothing more,”: Ibid., lxiv.
71. “Mohawk”: This and subsequent quotations in this paragraph and the next are from ibid., clxiii.
72. “Sport; high merriment”: Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, 202.
73. “countryman”: Tea Leaves, cxvi.
74. “handled pretty roughly”: Ibid., lxx.
75. “speak[ing] to the British”: Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 32.
76. playlike “practice” for a possible republic: William Pencak, “Play as Prelude to Revolution: Boston, 1765–1776,” in Riot and Revelry in Early America, ed. Matthew Dennis et al. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 149.
77. “mock ceremonies”: Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 90–91.
78. “In 1765 the rioters had hung effigies”: Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (New York: New Press, 2001), 46.
79. “blackfaced defiance of the Tea Party”: Deloria, Playing Indian, 32.
80. “the suggestion of instinct”: Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1995; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 85.
81. Such “natural” citizens: Ibid., 87, 86.
82. “embrace the occasions of mutual opposition”: Ibid., 25.
83. “national or party spirit,” “active and strenuous”: Ibid., 29.
84. “grimace of politeness”: Ibid., 43.
85. “happiness”: Ibid., 46. How important was Ferguson’s Essay to T
homas Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness”? Kevin J. Hayes recently states that Ferguson “would significantly shape Jefferson’s ideas concerning man’s responsibility to his fellow man,” but in no way does he substantiate this claim in The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 113. Garry Wills goes so far as to promote Ferguson’s Essay as one of the “obvious places” to look when parsing “the pursuit of happiness,” but then he lets the subject drop. See Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 367–68. To overlook Ferguson’s influence, as have all other of the Declaration’s major interpreters, is to overlook a compelling explanation of how something so radical as the “pursuit of happiness” could ever become an inalienable right—and why this phrase would have motivated Patriots who had struggled, often felicitously, to obtain their own society: the right to pursue communal happiness would not be a guarantee of private property (as Lockeans have always had it) but instead every citizen’s guarantee to enjoy the benefits of participatory democracy. For a strong argument for the materialist pursuits of individualist “happiness” to be found during the early revolutionary era, especially in the Chesapeake and Caribbean colonies, see Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
86. “If the individual owe every degree”: Ferguson, Essay, 59.
87. “the most magnificent Movement of all”: John Adams, Diary and Autobiography, 2:85.
88. “The people at the Cape,” “You cannot imagine the height”: Samuel Adams, Writings, 3:72.
89. “were actually a great deal of fun”: David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fêtes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 51. See also Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence and the Rights of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).
