The Whites of their Eyes (10 page)

And so it went, back and forth, the battle over the Revolution. Nixon, though, was distracted. Five men had broken into the Watergate hotel on June 17, 1972. Over the next weeks and months, an FBI investigation had tied the burglars to the Committee to Re-elect the President. As the two hundredth anniversary of the dumping of the tea approached, Nixon’s Bicentennial Commission, mired in controversy, failed in every attempt to organize a national celebration. A $1.2 million plan to build a bicentennial park in all fifty states had been abandoned, as had plans for a world’s fair to be held in Ph
iladelphia. In Massachusetts, Kevin White, Boston’s mayor, and a man with presidential aspirations, was determined to make the Bicentennial a highlight of his administration; he set up his own commission, Boston 200, and searched for corporate sponsors. That’s when those three Boston businessmen bought an old Baltic schooner and had her refitted as an English brig, an undertaking funded by the makers of Salada Tea.

On the Fourth of July, 1973, the
New York Times
reported that an investigation into Nixon’s Bicentennial Commission
by the Government Accounting Office and the House Judiciary Committee had found a “startling lack of concrete ongoing programs.”
⁵
That same day, at an event sponsored by another rival to Nixon’s commission, the Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation, James Earl Jones read Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” at Douglass’s house, in Washington, DC:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing
are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
⁶

This, presumably, was just the kind of thing Nixon was talking about, this finding everything wrong with America. It wasn’t invented by the New Left in the 1960s. It was quite old, in fact. Nixon’s Bicentennial Commission wanted to offer a different history, one not only without Frederick Douglass but also at considerable variance with the best emerging scholarship, including the work of David Brion Davis, whose
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
won the National Book Award in 1976, while Edmund S. Morgan’s
American Slavery, American Freedom
was a runner-up.
⁷
But removing slavery
from American history, even from eighteenth-century Boston, takes some doing, and means misunderstanding the
Revolution, not least because, as Davis and Morgan argued, slavery made liberty possible.

Two months after the Boston Massacre, John Hancock’s uncle, the Reverend Samuel Cooke, delivered a sermon before the Massachusetts legislature, urging passage of the proposed antislavery bill: “We, the patrons of liberty . . . have dishonored the Christian name, and degraded human nature, nearly to a level with the beasts that perish. . . . Let not sordid gain, acquired by the merchandize of slaves, and the souls of men harden our hearts against her piteous moans. When God ariseth, and when he visiteth, what shall we answer!” Unfortunately, voting to end slavery threatened to undo what t
he Boston Massacre seemed, possibly, to be on the verge of accomplishing: unifying the colonies in their opposition to Parliament, and turning what looked to a lot of people to be Boston’s fight into everyone’s fight. And here, on this stark choice, everything seemed to turn. Either Boston, and Massachusetts, could join with England in the effort to abolish slavery (in 1772, England would end slavery, if vaguely, in the landmark
Somerset
case), or it could lead the colonies in the effort to resist parliamentary rule. Either the Sons of Liberty could choose to end slavery, or they c
ould choose to battle Parliament. They could not do both. In 1771, when the antislavery bill finally came up for a vote, Mercy Otis Warren’s husband, James, wrote to John Adams, “If passed into an act, it should have a bad effect on the union of the colonies.” The bill failed.
⁸

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 prese
rvation 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 Engla
nd 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 s
howed 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 it
s 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 Vanzetti 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 pres
idential 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.
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