Old Boston Days & Ways. Mary Caroline Crawford
has so warped our judgment that most of us to-day credit Hutchinson with advocacy of the Stamp Act, just as the mob who destroyed his beautiful house did. Yet, from the first, he believed and declared that the King had made a great mistake in instituting this measure in the colonies. But he was the sworn servant of the crown and he conceived it to be his sacred duty to oppose the acts of unlawfulness which were being perpetrated on all sides. In the first great " strike " of the Bostonians, — the refusal of the people to use stamped paper, — he took exactly the position that law-abiding citizens everywhere take today, i. e. he condemned, with all the strength which he possessed, outbreaks of "mob violence." As a result he was credited with " standing for" the particular measure involved, — and had to pay the price.
While feeling about the Stamp Act was at fever heat a sermon preached against violence was interpreted by a half-drunken mob, who had heard only rumors of it, as urging them to resent the Act. Whereupon they literally tore to pieces the house of Thomas Hutchinson, the outward and visible sign of Crown Authority in America. I have in a previous book quoted entire the graphic letter written by Hutchinson to Richard Jackson on October 30, 1765, immediately after this disgraceful episode, and I challenge anyone, after reading what was done on that occasion, to declare without justification Hutchinson's firm conviction that the people of Boston stood in great need of authoritative government.
What Hutchinson did not take into account, of course, was the power of such men as George Washington and Samuel Adams to inspire in the unruly individuals who swayed the turbulent mass a sense of dignity, of fair-dealing and of responsibility. It is indeed to the vitalizing influence of the man whom Hutchinson derisively termed, "the master of the puppets,"
that we of to-day owe chiefly that change of heart on the part of the Bostonians which made possible the effective resistance of the Revolution.
Adams, "the man of the town meeting," as he has come to be generally called, is a character whom one has to know well to estimate fairly. He certainly was overweeningly masterful at times and one frequently detects in him a Jesuitical tendency to justify the means by the end which it is not easy to square with one's idea of simple honesty. Moreover, his trembling hands and weak voice, — due to a certain paralytic affection, — make him not at all the imposing hero of swash-buckling romance; there is indeed absolutely nothing of glamor in his personality. If, however, we put the emphasis upon the things the man did rather than upon the way he looked, and upon the cause for which he was laboring rather than upon the sometimes unworthy means he took to accomplish his purposes, we must admire him in spite of ourselves. Nor need we make a butt of Hutchinson in order to do this. Each was sui generis and while the lieutenant-governor, who lacked faith in the folk-mote, was spending his scant leisure hours collecting material for his valuable and wonderfully judicial works on New England history, Samuel Adams was making friends with the common people, — talking with them at their work and drinking flip with them at humble taverns after their work was done.
With Samuel Adams it seems to have been scarcely a question of choice. To protest against sovereign authority, as opposed to the folk-mote, appears to have been the logical expression of the man's own nature. There had been no encroachments to stir his blood to indignant protest when, at twenty-one, he chose for the subject of his master's thesis at Harvard the question: "Whether it be lawful to resist the Supreme Magistrate, if the Commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved," and argued, in the presence of Governor Bernard and other dignitaries of the Crown, that such resistance would be the most natural thing in the world.
Adams believed in the folk-mote, as he did in a Supreme Being. To defend the one was as natural to him as to reverence the other. To understand Samuel Adams we must, therefore, understand the Town Meeting.
Gordon, a writer of the period, has this to say of the units which, at the time of the Revolution, made up Massachusetts: "Every town is an incorporated republic. The selectmen, by their own authority, or upon the application of a certain number of townsmen, issue a warrant for the calling of a town meeting. The warrant mentions the business to be engaged in and no other can be legally executed. The inhabitants are warned to attend; and they that are present, though not a quarter or a tenth of the whole, have a right to proceed. They choose a president by the name of moderator, who regulates the proceedings of the meeting. Each individual has an equal liberty of delivering his opinion, and is not liable to be silenced or browbeaten by a richer or greater townsman than himself. Every freeman or freeholder gives his vote or not, and for or against as he pleases; and each vote weighs equally, whether that of the highest or lowest inhabitant." . . All the New England towns were on the same plan in general and, at this particular time, there were in Massachusetts (which then included Maine also) more than two hundred towns containing in all 210,000 white inhabitants.
The town of towns among all these was of course Boston, which, though it had now lost the distinction of being the largest town in America, still remained the intellectual head of the country. Its common schools, in which Samuel Adams prepared for college,— and which he visited as a committeeman from 1753, —gave every child a good education; and Harvard was practically a Boston institution then as it is today. The ministry still continued to be the profession which attracted a number of the ablest intellects turned out by Harvard, and of these the best men were selected for Boston pulpits. But no minister stood out preeminent in politics now as in the time of the Mathers, for the merchants were fast coming to the fore and law was just beginning to be recognized as a profession worthy of an educated man. Samuel Adams was a maltster and, very likely, could have made a comfortable fortune for himself had he devoted to business the attention which he bestowed upon the pursuit of liberty for all men. At the bottom of the social scale, in the Boston of that day, were the negro slaves. The columns of the newspapers contain many advertisements of slaves for sale and of runaways sought by their masters. But these slaves were, most of them, family servants whose rights were carefully guarded and, soon after the Revolution, slavery became extinguished in Massachusetts. Few of the negroes were workmen at trades. Labor therefore was brought into no disrepute by their presence, and of all the classes in the community the men who worked with their hands were, in many ways, the most interesting, the most virile. The caulkers were bold politicians, and the ropewalk men were always to the fore when there was a redcoat to be harried or a gathering at the Liberty Tree to be sustained by their vigorous presence. These men it was who, by the efficient way in which they did their day's work, enabled John Hancock and his kind to flourish and amass wealth.
Copley, with his artist's insight, understood this very well, and when he painted a merchant prince, sitting in a carved chair with a chart of the distant seas spread out on the table before him, he very often gave a glimpse through the window of a busy wharf or a full-rigged ship, with its hint of sinewy men enlisted for hard, capable service. As a result of their work he seemed to say, these merchant princes can be painted in velvet breeches, silk stockings, and finely plaited linen stocks.
It was Boston's commercial prosperity which made possible the social life thus described by Bennett, an English visitor whom Scudder quotes: "Every afternoon, after drinking tea, the gentlemen and ladies walk in the Mall, and from thence adjourn to one another's houses to spend the evening, — those that are not disposed to attend the evening lectures; which they may do, if they please, six nights in seven the year round. What they call the Mall is a walk on a fine green or common adjoining to the south-west side of the town. It is near half a mile over with two rows of young trees planted opposite to each other with a fine footway between, in imitation of St. James Park; and part of the bay of the sea which encircles the town, taking its course along the north-west side of the Common, — by which it is bounded on the one side and the country on the other, — forms a beautiful canal in view of the walk.
"Their rural diversions are chiefly shooting and fishing. For the former the woods afford them plenty of game; and the rivers and ponds with which this country abounds yield them great plenty as well as variety of fine fish. The government being in the hands of dissenters they don't admit of plays or music-houses; but of late they have set up an assembly to which some of the ladies resort. But notwithstanding plays and such like diversions do not obtain here, they don't seem to be dispirited nor moped for want of them, for both the ladies and gentlemen dress and appear as gay, in common, as courtiers in England on a coronation or birthday. And the ladies here visit, drink