1775 (26 page)

Back in 1700 or 1710, the four cities had been less distinguishable from their hinterlands. Boston, then the largest with 8,000 residents, was strongly Puritan and English-sprung, just like the adjacent shores of Massachusetts Bay. Among New York’s population of 5,000, roughly half still spoke Dutch, as did many farmers and burghers nearby. Philadelphia was small—less than two decades old in 1700—and soberly Quaker like its trim environs. Charleston held 2,000 people, but its vulnerability to Spanish and French attackers still weighed on its growth.

Urban Political Crucibles

By 1765, the French and Indian War had brought tens of thousands of British soldiers, swollen payrolls, lucrative supply contracts, and much new building. Philadelphia, now boasting 18,000 inhabitants, had vaulted ahead, while Boston (15,000) was still in doldrums that dated back to the 1740s. Too many Boston men had been killed in the various wars, and part of its shipbuilding, cod fishing, and trading had migrated to other, smaller Massachusetts ports. In New York, most of a population enlarged to 15,000 now spoke English, reflecting wartime enrichment and the city’s new eminence as the administrative and military center of British North America. Charleston, enlarged from 2,000 people to almost 11,000, was no longer a mainland offshoot of England’s Caribbean sugar islands. It had become the maritime and commercial hub of a British lower Atlantic coast that stretched from North Carolina through Georgia to the former Spanish tropical fortress of St. Augustine and the Florida keys.

Not all was well. The wartime boom gave way to a postwar slump in the 1760s, and currency shrinkage imperiled several provincial economies. However, the population increase continued. As the following table shows, Boston lagged. But as 1775 approached, the other three cities were completing eras of geographic and residential expansion.

The Four Major American Cities: Populations 1750–1775
¹

Broad forces drove population growth. As the overall thirteen-colony population soared from 500,000 in 1700 to almost 3 million in 1775, the urban centers did no more than keep pace. In fact, their combined growth during that period—from 30,000 to 90,000—represented a
slower
expansion. Many rural districts, especially in the backcountry, were filling in more rapidly.

Immigration directly from Europe also swelled the cities, especially Philadelphia, the center of German and Irish disembarkation. British trade was booming, especially that with North America. Between 1700 and 1774, exports from the thirteen to Britain increased from roughly £300,000 to £1,845,000 while exports from Britain to North America soared from roughly £200,000 to £2,843,000.
²
North America’s principal seaports profited handsomely.

At the seat of empire, population growth in England and Wales was much slower—from 5 million in 1700 to perhaps 6.5 million in 1760 and not quite 8 million in 1775. Seaports and manufacturing centers led the British advance. In later centuries, Americans would contend that by 1775 Philadelphia, supposedly home to 35,000, had become the “Second City” of the British Empire behind London. That was an exaggeration; Philadelphia was not second.
³
In Scotland, Edinburgh was larger, and probably Glasgow. In the England of the mid-to-late 1770s, a period of rapid urban growth, Bristol’s population had climbed above 50,000; Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool were all in the 30,000-to-40,000 range.
⁴
Outpacing the leading American cities, Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool had all trebled or quadrupled their head count during the eighteenth century.

Their upsurge displayed the fullest benefit of Britain’s Atlantic empire and its booming trade and manufacturing. Meanwhile, another similarity
deserves note—the emergence of British and American urban centers as seedbeds of political, economic, and legal reform.

On both sides of the Atlantic, burgeoning English-speaking cities rode a cultural and economic wave that concentrated its rewards principally among exemplars of the imperial system—great landowners, capitalists, merchants, manufacturers and importers of favored commodities, those in the professions, government officials, and military officers. Tensions rose accordingly. As overall wealth mushroomed, the share enjoyed by tenant farmers, laborers, seamen, spinners, journeymen, and artisans declined, sometimes sharply. The distributions of wealth circa 1775 identified by economic historians for Philadelphia, New York, and Boston were not too divergent from those in London, Bristol, and Liverpool. Moreover, as we will see in
Chapter 16
, major English urban areas where middle-class voters enjoyed the franchise in 1774–1775 were often those most sympathetic to the angry colonies. Bristol, the great seaport, sent the pro-American Edmund Burke to Parliament. Middlesex, the populous county abutting London, sent the radical John Wilkes, who was generally pro-American. In Norwich, until midcentury England’s third city, the pro-American element of the Whig party wore blue and buff—the uniform of the American Continental Line—as local colors.
⁵

The English word
radical
took on a new connotation during the nineteenth century that departed from its tamer eighteenth-century association with parliamentary reform. Use of the bolder meanings to characterize the American Revolution can be confusing. To one historian of American radicalism, the impact of English “plebeian culture”—the customs, traditions, and rituals of the laboring populations—was discernible in the American Revolution, for example, in the practice of tarring and feathering. But it was not a source of political radicalism in the future sense.
⁶

As for the touchy theme of
class,
Gary Nash, a chronicler of colonial America, allowed that “eighteenth-century society, to be sure, had not yet reached the historical stage of a mature class formation.” However, because simply ignoring class would create a different problem, he emphasized new horizontal differentiations rather than vertical divisions in urban society.
⁷
Differently put, pre-Revolutionary America had many social and economic strains, divisions, and grudges worth attention, even if the use of class terminology is premature.

In discussing what behavior is urban and what is not, this chapter’s premise is uncomplicated. Seamen, mariners, artisans, and mechanics were
disproportionately concentrated in the major cities. The principal 1774–1775 strategic importance of the militia was Boston centered, and the greatest radicalization of militiamen, marked by proliferation of committees, came in Philadelphia.

The Sons of Neptune

Nothing better confirms the early and provocative participation in the American Revolution by seamen, ex-privateer captains, smugglers, and waterfront mobs than its impact on everyday parlance—the salt-sprayed antecedents of so many important 1774–1776 terms and practices. The gamut runs from hot tar Liberty Jackets to Liberty Poles and briny Tea Parties. Boston was indeed the epicenter. However, “Jack Tar” also left a trail of conflict in New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and scores of lesser seaports like Falmouth, Salem, Gloucester, Newburyport, Marblehead, Newport, Providence, New Haven, New London, Annapolis, Norfolk, Wilmington, and New Bern.
⁸

Tarring and feathering, to begin with, had earlier English origins. King Richard I, bound for the Holy Land in 1189, declared that anyone committing a crime on the ship would be tarred, feathered, and put ashore. Mentions of tarring and feathering are found in
Hakluyt’s Voyages
(1589) and
Holinshed’s Chronicles
(1587).
⁹
The practice in America reached its peak of notoriety in the New England colonies between 1768 and 1770 as a communal punishment, then spread elsewhere. A biographer of Samuel Adams vividly evoked the skin-shredding and blistering process: “Pine tar was a familiar commodity in colonial America; it was used to waterproof ships, sails and rigging. A thick, acrid dark brown or black liquid, tar was obtained by roasting mature pine trees over an open-pit fire and distilling the bituminous substance that boiled out. Some victims were fortunate enough to be tarred over their clothes or protected by a frock or sheet. Others were stripped, and the tar was brushed, poured or ‘bedawbed’ over their bare skin. When heated, tar would blister the skin…After the tar came the feathers, also a familiar commodity in British North America.”
¹⁰

To add insult to sometimes crippling injury, a victim was often carted through a principal street of his town—very few were women—and subjected to raucous jeering and mockery. Middle-class Whigs found tarring and feathering objectionable, but sailors, in particular, found it appropriate. When Boston customs official John Malcolm was given a Liberty Jacket in
1774 by a crowd “heavy with sailors,” they cited not only his brutality and injustice but his “having seized vessels on account of sailors having a bottle or two of [smuggled Dutch] gin on board.”
¹¹
Rough payback they counted as fair play.

Liberty Trees or Liberty Poles also had maritime origins, often having been ships’ masts. Boston led in 1765 with a famous Liberty Tree, a large 120-year-old elm, identified for the populace by a plaque secured with the large deck nails used by shipyards. It became a favorite rendezvous.
¹²
Charleston also had a Liberty Tree that served as a meeting place—a giant live oak, the iron-wooded pride of low-country shipbuilders. New York, however, had a succession of Liberty Poles, generally put up by seamen and torn down by British soldiers, rivals with little use for each other. The city’s fourth Liberty Pole (58 feet high), erected by seamen in 1767, survived until January 13, 1770. On that date, British regulars from the Sixteenth Regiment split the pole with explosives, brought it down, and sawed it into pieces.
¹³
This led to what New York historians recall as “the Battle of Golden Hill.”

On January 19, atop the crest of nearby John Street, cutlass-wielding and club-carrying seamen and workers, led by Isaac Sears, the former privateer captain who ran the local Sons of Liberty, met bayonet-armed redcoats of the Sixteenth. By one account, “the ensuing battle of Golden Hill—perhaps the first head-on clash between colonists and redcoats of the Revolution—resulted in numerous injuries and one fatality, a seaman who was run through with a bayonet.” A second eruption came the next day on Nassau Street, “when a large party of seamen, fed up with the loss of jobs to military personnel and vowing to revenge the death of a fellow Jack Tar the day before, came to blows with some soldiers.”
¹⁴

A month later Sears and the Sons of Liberty put up a fifth pole, another great mast (some 80 feet) carried down from an East River shipyard. Well sunk and ironclad at its base, this one survived until October 1776, cut down only after British forces regained Manhattan. Other towns with poles included dozens in Massachusetts, along with seaports like Newport and Savannah. Providence, Rhode Island, like Boston and Charleston, preferred a Liberty Tree.

New York’s battle on Golden Hill was followed just weeks later by the Boston Massacre of March 1770. This, too, reflected the growing animosities between British regulars and the waterfront mobs. Part of the ill will involved job competition—how off-duty soldiers took work at rates that
undercut local wages, sometimes by as much as 50 percent. Before the Golden Hill fight, seamen had gone around the area, driving away soldiers with clubs and warning employers against rehiring them. John Adams called their mutual animosity such that “they fight as naturally when they meet, as the elephant and Rhinoceros.”
¹⁵
Revealingly, the “massacre” in Boston, which left five civilians dead, took place just a block from the Customs House and involved another provocative waterfront crowd. Of the five men slain, three had maritime occupations: seaman, ropewalk employee, and caulker.
¹⁶
Engravers on the Patriot side preparing propaganda—Paul Revere, for one—drew the redcoats’ victims in middle-class clothes and postures. Waterfront mob fatalities commanded less sympathy.

The orchestration of seaport mobs—where they came from and who led them—deserves mention. Well-heeled privateer captains, mostly from the 1756–1763 French and Spanish war like New York’s Isaac Sears and Alexander McDougall, could call on old crews and enjoyed credibility with seamen. Tavern owners like Jasper Drake (Isaac Sears’s father-in-law) were also influential, because their waterfront premises were both maritime information centers and popular venues where illegally obtained goods changed hands. Men who owned shipyards or had a number of vessels under their control—Boston’s John Hancock, for example—were also able to turn out crowds and provide suitable refreshment.

Other mob breeding grounds included ropewalks—sheds sometimes a quarter-mile long and employing dozens or scores of men. In them, spinners “walked” yarns of hemp from wheels and wove them together in the correct manner to make a heavy rope. A close-knit group, spinners worked six twelve-to-fourteen-hour days a week and were paid better than seamen but less than artisans. With each of the large seaports having at least three or four ropewalks, they were a prime source of violence. Rope makers in Boston later prided themselves on having provoked British redcoats into the Boston Massacre.
¹⁷