American Fun Read online

To judge from the dozens of sympathetic testimonies, published in a book the following week, the crowd may have adopted some of the Sons of Liberty’s self-restraint—at least that is the message the pamphlet seems to send. Most of the affidavits blame the dozen or so soldiers who appeared in and around the watch house, their daggers and bayonets and cutlasses drawn. According to one William Le Baron, soldiers shouted into the crowd, “Where are the damned boogers, cowards, where are your Liberty boys,” one of them pursuing him with a bare bayonet. Robert Polly testified to similar aggression: soldiers menacing the crowd with bayonets and people pressing back “without offering any insult.” Fewer eyewitnesses blamed the civilians, but these less flattering testimonies were published with the rest. William Tant saw between thirty and forty roustabouts, “mostly boys and youngsters,” send up three cheers and crowd around the sentry, bidding him “fire and be damned,” at which point greater numbers rushed into the street, pelting the soldiers with snowballs and taunting, “Fire, fire, and be damned.” Taken altogether, this fiery clash of wills—between civilians and soldiers, between patriots and loyalists, between rebellious youths and their authority figures—pushed the thrill of radical democracy to the brink, well past the point of viability. The fracas may have been buoying—exhilarating—but the fun was over when the soldiers opened fire, killing five of the taunting civilians, wounding eleven others.

  Several lawyers were approached to defend Preston, who had been indicted on murder charges, but only John Adams would take on the case. “Council,” he said, “ought to be the very last thing that an accused Person should want in a free country.” (He declined, however, to defend the soldiers.) He supported Preston’s rights at great personal risk, for he also sympathized with Preston’s case. John and his wife, Abigail, fretting in bed on the night of the massacre, distrusted recent crowd actions, which had been incited, he believed, “by certain busy Characters” who wished to pit soldiers against the “Lower Classes” and “inkindle an immortal hatred between them”—much of which had been expressed by young boys wielding posters and chucking snowballs. One of them, Christopher Seider, the eleven-year-old son of German immigrants, had been killed for such actions only ten days before.

  Defending Preston before a half-drunk jury, John Adams made a case against the lowest classes, whose hopeless ignobility, he argued, made them behave so brutally. He told the court:

  We have been entertained with a great variety of phrases, to avoid calling this sort of people a mob.—Some call them shavers, some call them genius’s.—The plain English is gentlemen, most probably a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and out landish jack tarrs.—And why we should scruple to call such a set of people a mob, I can’t conceive, unless the name is too respectable for them.

  He turned lyrical in describing this “mob’s” frenzy (much as he had in describing Thayer’s tavern) and actually made the events leading up to the massacre sound like crazy fun: “the multitude was shouting and huzzaing, and threatning life, the bells all ringing, the mob whistle screaming and rending like an Indian yell.” He reserved special disgust for Christopher (“Crispus”) Attucks, whom he tagged the “hero of the night,” repeatedly referred to as “the Molatto,” and painted as a brutish figure of violence: “now to have this reinforcement coming down under the command of a stout Molatto fellow, whose very looks, was enough to terrify any person, what had not the soldiers then to fear?” Exacerbating the threat—and thrill—of Attucks’s race were the facts that he hailed “from Framingham,” that his compatriot Carr hailed “from Ireland,” and that these out-of-towners, “at the head of such a rabble of Negroes, &c. as they [could] collect together,” should then “ascribe all their doings to the good people” of Boston, a city whose reputation Adams had reason to defend.

  The argument worked. Preston was acquitted. But it also sent a warning. Like the city’s official documents, twenty-three years before, that blamed the Knowles riots on folks of “Mean and Vile Condition,” it warned of the kind of social mixing that could arise under a post-monarchical system. So long as democracy remained an abstraction (as in his vision of “the whole People rising in their Majesty”), even snobbish authoritarians like John Adams could sign their names to an American republic. But only such a thoroughgoing elitist, out of touch with his topsy-turvy times, could imagine America as a society of gentlemen. For in truth, in the New World, the “body of the people” was spilling from the halls and expanding to include a colorful majority—Indians, blacks, “out landish jack tarrs,” women—a majority whom Adams reduced to a mob. As we know from history, when the People eventually did rise in their Majesty, it was this same mob that would lead the charge.

  AS THINGS COOLED DOWN in the early 1770s (the economy was improving, impressment officers were backing off), the colonists relaxed their rallying spirit. Merchants cashed in on more peaceable trade relations with England. Townshend Act activists all but silenced their clanging pots and pans. A Puritan named Americanus, writing frequently for the Boston Gazette, reflected a rising movement for tavern reform: “Not one extravagance, among the numerous follies we have been guilty of, has been more destructive to our interests than tavern haunting, and gratifying our appetites with intoxicating liquors.” And John Adams, now Boston’s busiest lawyer, had bought his family’s fifty-three-acre estate (ironically, on the site of Merry Mount) and had gotten, in the words of his wife, Abigail, “so very fat that [she herself looked] lean as a rail.” This general complacency troubled Samuel Adams, whose zeal in turn troubled his Whiggish peers. His strategy in 1772, and in the years immediately following, was to rustle up radicals from the sleeping population (“Roxbury, I am told, is thoroughly awake”) and, in his words, “to arouse the continent.” That October, writing as Valerius Poplicola in the Boston Gazette, Adams concluded a plea to “Stop the Progress of Tyranny” with a piece of truly incendiary verse:

  The Country claims our active Aid.

  That let us roam; & where we find a Spark

  Of public Virtue, blow it into Flame.

  During those months it may have seemed to Adams as if he were howling in the wilderness—singing “Tantarara, burn all, burn all!” with his rebel Society of Mechanicks—but in the summer of 1773 the quiet passage of Lord North’s Tea Act through Parliament, combined with increased hatred of Governor Hutchinson, finally bellowed public virtue into flame.

  In the fall of that year, after the East India Company had named its North American tea consignees (among them two sons of Governor Hutchinson), first the Boston Gazette (to which Samuel Adams was the principal contributor), and then large groups of the people themselves launched a series of pointed attacks—two of which resulted in aggressive mob action at the workplaces and homes of the consignees. By late November and early December, crowds of up to six thousand people were converging on the colony’s public halls. Hutchinson, observing the November 29 meeting, was taken aback by the people’s collective power, finding their “spirit” was more “determined” and “conspicuous” than in any previous gathering. What is more, members from all “ranks and orders”—the lowest of them showing in “great proportion”—were allowed to speak with “an equal voice.” These meetings declared themselves the body of the people and demanded that the owners of three British tea vessels remove their cargo from Boston Harbor. Ultimately, on December 16, the custom-house deadline for seizing the Dartmouth’s payload, up to seven thousand citizens from as far away as Maine gathered in Boston to defend their nation.

  That morning Samuel Adams’s patriotic committee sent Francis Rotch, the Dartmouth’s twenty-three-year-old owner, on a mission to the governor’s mansion in Milton: he was to ask permission, for a second time, to remove his ship without paying the tea tax. At three o’clock that afternoon, while Rotch made the twenty-mile journey on horseback, bells pealed at the corner of Cornhill and Milk streets, from the tower of the Old South Meeting House, calling the body of the people to order. Housewrights, doctors,
barbers, farmers, actors, coopers, distillers, lawyers, coachmakers, glassworkers, tanners, mechanics, shipwrights, shoemakers, painters, and sailors—fathers and sons, brothers and neighbors and out-of-towners—men of all ages and social classes packed every free inch in the stately Puritan church, from the labyrinth of white wooden slip and box pews to the two lofty tiers of balustraded balconies. The mood was urgent, agitated, edgy, but the manner was regular and orderly: in the months that they had been blasting the “baleful weed,” they had also been calling for disciplined resistance.

  A vote was taken, declaring the use of levied tea “improper and pernicious.” As the deadline approached, one rebel after another, each more famous than the last, rose to the high, white, ornamented pulpit. A scrap of Josiah Quincy Jr.’s speech is the only text that survives from the meeting. In it he calls for moderation, but he also predicts “the sharpest, the sharpest conflicts” to follow: “The exertions of this day will call forth the events which will make a very different spirit necessary for our salvation. Whoever supposes that shouts and hosannas will terminate the trials of the day, entertains a childish fancy.” This very different spirit was of course mortal risk, a thrilling prospect on that do-or-die day.

  Six o’clock came and went. Rain rattled the rows of high arched windows. Candles glimmered throughout the crowd. When Rotch finally arrived with Hutchinson’s rebuff that “he was willing to grant anything consistent with the laws and his duty to the King,” electricity passed throughout the house. An important merchant inquired from the balcony: “Who knows how tea will mingle with salt water?” Cheers rose from the gallery—as did cries for “A mob! A mob!” Once again they were called to order, and Dr. Thomas Young spoke in Rotch’s defense, beseeching them to protect his person and property. But when Rotch confessed, under further questioning, that he could not risk returning his ship to England, Samuel Adams delivered the phrase that may or may not have functioned as a signal to the Sons of Liberty: “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.” To be sure, the meeting couldn’t.

  “Mohawk” war whoops shivered in from the street, causing men to rush the doors. Samuel Adams asked the crowd to stay put, suggesting that these Mohawks were their opponents’ decoys, but war whoops resounded throughout the house. The leather dresser Adam Collson shouted: “Boston harbor a tea-pot to-night!” Another: “Hurrah for Griffin’s wharf!” Most of the thousands poured into the streets, dropping from windows or piling through doors, but Adams and his associates stayed conspicuously behind, to distance their meeting from the illegalities to follow. Later, at their leisure, they took a stroll down by the docks.

  The authors of this festive rebellion had been assembling in secret rooms all around town. The principals formed ranks at various semiofficial venues, such as the basement of the Freemasons’ Green Dragon Tavern, or the “Long Room” above Benjamin Edes’s Gazette, where grown men fashioned Indian disguises and Edes’s son Peter refilled the rum punch. Countless participants, many of them young, got ready in private or not at all. Nineteen-year-old Samuel Sprague, a mason’s apprentice, was on his way elsewhere—to a date—when he met a pack of boys rushing down to Griffin’s Wharf. He loved what he saw, but his motive in joining them seems hardly principled: “Wishing to have my share of the fun,” he said, “I looked about for some means of disguising myself.” He clambered onto a roof, swiped ash from a chimney, and darkened his face like the rest of the rebels. Down among the crowd, he wasted no time in getting “busy with the tea chests.” “Fun,” in this case, was more than inspiration. “Fun” was political action proper.

  The Tea Party was fun—bold, risky, lawless pleasure. Once again, it was Samuel Johnson’s “Sport; high merriment; frolicksome delight.” Boisterous participants wielding hatchets and tomahawks coursed toward the wharf from all directions, war-whooping, play-acting, hollering gibberish, and when they reached it, often in ranks, they worked in vigorous, disciplined silence that could have only heightened the pleasure. Eventually the moon broke through the clouds and lit a scene of outrageous proportions. Between two and three thousand wharfside supporters stood sentinel as “Mohawks” manned the tea ships. Apprentices worked with anonymous masters, hatcheting seals, hauling 360-pound crates, pitchforking such quantities of tea into the harbor that it spilled like hay back onto the decks. Several apprentices trounced a “countryman” loading tea into his canoe. Captain Connor, an Irishman, was “handled pretty roughly” for stuffing the lining of his coat. But otherwise the event was tightly focused on destroying the obnoxious tea.

  The Tea Party was fun, pure American fun. Spiking the fun were the Mohawk disguises. As Philip J. Deloria has brilliantly observed, the patriots, by dressing as Native Americans, enjoyed “speak[ing] to the British from a quintessentially American position” and adding a whoop of national identity. Perhaps more important, in the gone-native spirit of Thomas Morton’s Merry Mount, “[b]y being both Indian and not-Indian, repulsive savage and object of colonial desire, representation of social order and disorder, the Tea Party Indians revealed the contingency of social order itself and thus opened the door to the creation of the new.” Dressing as Indians, flaunting their rude native identity in the face of colonial power (while perverting the fears of their Puritan forefathers), they reveled in the novelty of their New World democracy. In this moment they were experiencing their democracy firsthand, perhaps more purely than they ever had or would again.

  The Tea Party, at bottom, was revolutionary fun, a pleasure unique to this New World event. Unlike the upcoming French variety, when revolution was celebrated with heads on pikes and waves of sadism consumed the people, here the reigning spirit was civility and brazen displays of participation. Josiah Quincy Jr. had warned the Tea Partiers that such rebellion was preliminary to war, and so it was, but the tone it set and the sensations it created defined the kind of nation they would give their lives for. Its strange admixture of Puritan restraint, Enlightenment ideals, and dangerous jolts of social upheaval would resonate with Americans for centuries to come.

  The enduring potency of such revolutionary fun, as opposed to Merry Mount’s fading dream, makes it all the more remarkable that our best historians have diminished its social force. William Pencak argues that such patriotic acts were playlike “practice” for a possible republic to come, as though just because they spoke wittily, acted riskily, and dressed in glittery native garb their pranks were not legitimate acts of citizenship. Gordon S. Wood concludes that these risky acts of self- and public assertion were just “mock ceremonies,” which “were, like all parodies, backhanded tributes to what was being ridiculed.” Even Ray Raphael, who deeply understands these nonviolent crowd actions, downplays their force: “In 1765 the rioters had hung effigies and conducted mock funerals; by 1774 ordinary farmers were forcing high-ranking government officials to resign. By intimidating real people rather than toying with dummies, rank-and-file rebels effectively derailed all opposition.” Had the “rioters” of 1765 not jubilantly mocked the Stamp Act, but instead rebelled only violently (“by intimidating real people”)—or much worse, had they followed John Adams’s wishes and only rebelled in the safety of their minds—then a different sort of citizenry most certainly would have formed, maybe a factional one, maybe a pathetically obedient one, maybe an untenably anarchic one that necessitated new forms of despotic control. Precisely by “toying with dummies,” however, and by having fun at England’s expense, the people of Massachusetts sparked a national felicity that throve on democratic virtues.

  Philip J. Deloria contends that the early Revolution in general, and the “blackfaced defiance of the Tea Party” in particular, signaled “period[s] of emptiness during which [participants] are neither one thing or the other.” By reading the Revolution in this purely structural way, by reading it, that is, as a negative space between two ideological eras, he overlooks the Tea Party’s essential positivity—that it was not preparation for a possible republic but rather was the vivacity of democracy in action
. The participants were not “empty” of identity, of politics. On the contrary, even as shapeshifting, masquerading youth—especially as shapeshifting, masquerading youth, who took their rude civility to the streets—these citizens experienced a political plenitude that many Americans have yearned for ever since.

  By design, Boston’s crowd actions of the 1760s and 1770s were guided by the era’s “moral-sense” philosophy. This school of thought (whose adherents were as varied as Adam Smith, David Hume, Lord Kames, Francis Hutcheson, and Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui) could be traced back two generations to the Earl of Shaftesbury, for whom social behavior was motivated by a sensus communis—an instinctual concern for one another’s happiness and well-being. Just so, the Sons of Liberty’s call to patriotism—in speeches, broadsides, and the actions themselves—was predicated upon the assumption that “liberty” and “happiness” were communal virtues, not just individual values. For Shaftesbury and others, political life wasn’t governed by niceties and manners. It required citizens to dust it up. But in a moral-sense world, citizens fight in good faith, trusting that everyone is acting in the community’s best interest.

  The philosopher Adam Ferguson, a Scot, gives us the best moral-sense picture of a rowdy citizenry’s fun. Writing in 1767, but sounding at times like Thomas Morton in the 1630s, Ferguson praised Spartans, Native Americans, and other “rude” nations for following “the suggestion of instinct” more “than the invention of reason.” Social instinct works better than government, he asserted, because it springs from the citizens’ natural inclinations: “Without police or compulsory laws, their domestic society is conducted with order, and the absence of vicious dispositions, is a better security than any public establishment for the suppression of crimes.” Such “natural” citizens, he observed, take “delight” in pure action “without regard to its consequences.” Speaking more generally of “mankind,” he finds their affections are given freely, but they also relish risky engagement. People everywhere “embrace the occasions of mutual opposition, with alacrity and pleasure”; as members of civil society, a pervading sense of “national or party spirit” fortifies them against their enemies. Accordingly, the most “active and strenuous” citizens serve as the rude nation’s “guardians,” and the general tenor is boisterous and coarse. Indeed, for Ferguson, if fattened nations keep commerce and politics lubricated by maintaining a “grimace of politeness,” rude, young nations enjoy “real sentiments of humanity and candour.” The latter are civil in the radical sense. By extension, then, they don’t view “happiness” as the “state of repose” or vicious “languor” that comes with material wealth; their happiness “arises more from the pursuit than from the attainment of any end whatever.” For them, the pursuit of happiness—striving, grappling, thrashing, competing—is happiness itself.