The Whites of their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History

by Jill Lepore

  “—for all.”

  “Isn’t this sweet?” said a woman standing next to me, smiling. She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m here to see Sarah. She’s so adorable.”

  I took out my notebook. She frowned.

  “Are you a liberal?” she asked, her voice rising.

  “I’m a hist—”

  “—because give me fifty bucks.” She grabbed my jacket and yanked, hard. “Give me fifty bucks!”

  “Fifty bucks?”

  “If you’re a liberal. Because you people, you want to give money to anyone who asks you.”

  In the winter of 1776, John Adams read Common Sense, an anonymous, radical, and brilliant forty-six-page pamphlet that would convince the American people of what more than a decade of taxes and nearly a year of war had not: that this battle wasn’t just Boston’s fight, and what’s more, it wasn’t even only America’s fight. “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” was Common Sense’s astonishing and inspiring claim about the fate of thirteen infant colonies on the edge of the world. “The sun never shone on a cause of greater worth. ’Tis not the affair of a city, a county, a province, or a kingdom; but of a continent—of at least one-eighth part of the habitable globe. ’Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time, by the proceedings now.”2 Everyone wondered: who could have written such stirring stuff? “People Speak of it in rapturous praise,” a friend wrote Adams. “Some make Dr. Franklin the Author,” hinted another. “I think I see strong marks of your pen in it,” speculated a third. More miffed than flattered, Adams admitted to his wife, Abigail, “I could not have written any Thing in so manly and striking a style.” Who, then? Adams found out: “His Name is Paine.”3

  “I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Paine wrote, but this was coyness itself: Common Sense stood every argument against American independence on its head. “There is something absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island,” he insisted. He wanted Americans to grow up. As to the colonies’ dependence on England, “We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat.”4 “He is a keen Writer,” Adams allowed, but he had written only “a tolerable summary of the argument which I had been repeating again and again in Congress for nine months.”5

  George Washington, meanwhile, remained at his headquarters in Cambridge. (He lived in a house that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would one day occupy.) Phillis Wheatley wrote to Washington that October, sending him a poem she had written about him, and signing off, “Wishing your Excellency all possible success in the great cause you are so generously engaged in.” (Washington wrote back, graciously thanking her for the poem and inviting her to visit: “If you should ever come to Cambridge, or near headquarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favored by the Muses.”)6 The British and the Americans had been in a stalemate for months, but in November of 1775, Washington sent Knox, who had left bookselling behind in Boston, to bring back artillery captured from the British at Ticonderoga. When Knox turned up with sixty tons of artillery, in February of 1776, the Continentals fortified Dorchester Heights and, on March 2, began bombing the city. Two months after Common Sense was published, the Continental army blasted the British out of Boston and ended the siege. On March 17, the British evacuated. Eleven thousand people, more than nine thousand of them soldiers, sailed out of Boston Harbor. (The seventeenth of March, Evacuation Day, is a somewhat woe-begotten public holiday in Boston; most people think schools and offices are closed, that day, because it happens, also, to be St. Patrick’s Day.)

  The city was in ruins. Before the British left, they took what they could and destroyed what they couldn’t carry. Soldiers broke into Jane Mecom’s house and plundered its contents.7 “Such conduct would disgrace barbarians,” Andrew Eliot wrote. “I am quite sick of Armies.” But taking Boston back, Eliot thought, had changed the colonists’ point of view entirely. “They look upon it as a complete victory.” It had even changed Eliot’s position. “I dare now to say what I did not dare to say before this—I have long thought it—that Great Britain cannot subjugate the colonies. Independence, a year ago, could not have been publicly mentioned with impunity. Nothing else is now talked of, and I know not what can be done by Great Britain to prevent it.”8

  In Philadelphia, the Continental Congress set about declaring independence. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman served on a committee charged with drafting a declaration. At the time, Franklin had, as usual, much other business to attend to. Among other things, he was trying to find a place for his now violently deranged nephew, Benjamin Mecom, in Pennsylvania Hospital, America’s first hospital, which Franklin had helped to found, in 1751, “to care for the sick poor of the Province and for the reception and care of lunaticks.” There wasn’t any room. In haste, Franklin arranged for Mecom to be confined in Burlington, New Jersey.9

  Jefferson drafted the declaration. “When in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.” Most of the declaration is a list of grievances, evidence of the British government’s conspiracy against American liberties: “a long Train of Abuses and Usur-pations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism.” (Independence—rebellion—was extraordinary, a last resort. It required an elaborate justification, abuses compiled, compounded, over years and years.) Last on Jefferson’s list, in his original draft, was slavery. In a breathless paragraph, his longest and angriest grievance against the king, Jefferson blamed George III for slavery (“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery”), for colonists’ failure to abolish the slave trade (“determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce”), and for Dunmore’s Proclamation (“he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another”). Jefferson’s fellow delegates could not abide it. To some, it went too far; to others, it didn’t go half far enough. And as everyone knew, it was they, and not the British, who were most vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. They struck it out almost entirely; all that’s left is “he has excited domestic insurrections among us” (which Franklin wrote). Abigail Adams complained to John: “I cannot but feel sorry that some of the most manly sentiments in the declaration are expunged.”10

  On July 14, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was read aloud in Boston, from the second floor balcony of the Town House. “A great Concourse of People assembled for the Occasion,” a newspaper reported. The reading “was received with great Joy, expressed by three Huzzas.” Canons were fired from forts surrounding the city. Church bells were rung. And then, later that night: “The King’s Arms, and every sign with any Resemblance of it, whether Lion and Crown, Pestle and Mortar and Crown, Heart, and Crown &c. together with every Sign that belonged to a Tory was taken down, and the latter made a general Conflagration in King-Street.” Inside the Council Chamber where James Otis had once argued the writs of assistance case, toasts were given, including one to “the downfall of Tyrants and Tyranny” and another to “the universal Prevalence of Civil and R
eligious Liberty.”11 That summer, Harry Washington, one of George Washington’s slaves, left Mount Vernon and declared his own independence by running away to fight with Dunmore’s “Ethiopian Regiment,” wearing, some said, a uniform bearing the motto “Liberty to Slaves.”12

  “Everybody talked about the Bicentennial,” Russell Baker wrote in the New York Times on New Year’s Day 1976, “but nobody did anything about it.” Irked, John Warner, former secretary of the navy and the chairman of the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, wrote a reply. The Bicentennial, he explained, was to “honor the great men who forged and then steered a nation so strong and so flexible that one revolution has proved enough.”13 Nevertheless, the Bicentennial was beleaguered. On March 17, 1976, the two hundredth anniversary of the evacuation of Boston, a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee convened hearings into “The Attempt to Steal the Bicentennial” by the Peoples Bicentennial Commission. Mississippi senator James Eastland chaired the investigation. Eastland had been one of the South’s most ardent segregationists. Commenting on Brown v. Board of Education, he had said, “On May 17, 1954, the Constitution of the United States was destroyed because of the Supreme Court’s decision,” and had told his constituents, “There is no law that a free people must submit to a flagrant invasion of their personal liberty.”14 In 1964, when three civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi, Eastland told Lyndon Johnson, “I believe it was a publicity stunt.” (“Jim Eastland could be standing right in the middle of the worst Mississippi flood ever known,” Johnson once said, “and he’d say the niggers caused it, helped out by the communists.”)15 Eastland’s committee heard testimony that Rifkin’s commission had managed to get more and better press coverage than the federal government’s own commission. Eastland said he wanted to “peel back the patriotic veneer” of the Peoples Bicentennial Commission. But the hearings ended, inconclusively, after only two days.16

  Ford, meanwhile, was taking a different approach to the Bicentennial than Nixon had. His appointments to the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration included Alex Haley, Malcolm X’s ghostwriter, and Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow. The highlight of the Bicentennial, across the nation, came on July 4, 1976, the nation’s birthday. Everywhere there were fireworks, parades, concerts. There was a seventy-six-hour vigil at the National Archives. Walter Cronkite called it “the greatest, most colossal birthday party in 200 years.” An editorial in the Washington Post spoke of a national reconciliation, a renewed patriotism: “Now the flag is common property again, to be stapled onto parade floats, stuck in hats and hung from front porches.”17 Boston celebrated with a concert on the Charles, attended by four hundred thousand people, and fireworks that night. Still, it was hard to get past the coincidence of the city’s antibusing riots and its bid for national attention during the Bicentennial. And what most people remember about that coincidence is a single picture, taken on April 5, 1976, at an antibusing demonstration outside Government Center, just across from Faneuil Hall, and printed on the front page of newspapers across the country: a Pulitzer Prize–winning black-and-white photograph of a white teenager attempting to impale a black man with the American flag.18

  “Look, a BLACK Tea Partier,” read the sign Kat Malone was carrying the day Sarah Palin came to Boston. Boston Common is either decorated with the city’s history or scarred with it, depending on how you look at it. A memorial to Crispus Attucks was erected on Boston Common in 1888. Nine years later, farther up toward the State House, there followed a memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Fifty-fourth Regiment of Foot, the African American battalion Shaw commanded during the Civil War. Robert Lowell wrote a poem about it in 1960: “Their monument sticks like a fishbone / in the city’s throat.”19 Now, steps from those monuments, Tea Partiers wore T-shirts that said

  AMERICAN

  NOT

  RACIST

  The flags waved. The speeches began. “Mr. Obama, we want the southern border shut down so tight a rattlesnake couldn’t cross it,” said John Philip Sousa IV, of the Tea Party Express. National talk-radio host and Tea Party Express chairman, Mark Williams, took the stage. “I’m home!” Williams shouted. “I am here to reclaim my hometown for America. The hippies have had it long enough.” He attacked the lamestream media: “The Globe will read about this tomorrow in the Herald.” He called for Barney Frank’s resignation. He lambasted Harvard, communists in Cambridge, and communists in the White House. “Political correctness led to 9/11. Political correctness led to Barack Hussein Obama.” The next time he mentioned the president, Williams didn’t bother with his last name and called him, simply, “Barack Hussein.” To some people in the Tea Party, Obama’s administration, his very presidency, was unconstitutional; the man wasn’t even an American.

  Debbie Lee, whose son was the first Navy Seal to die in Iraq, told the story of her son’s life and death. Our troops are fighting this war abroad, she said, and we are fighting it here on the home front. Taps was played. Standing where, in 1971, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, dressed in battle fatigues and carrying babies in backpacks, had listened to Eugene McCarthy tell them they were bearing witness to life and peace, the Tea Partiers grew hushed, and found redemption, in death and war.

  Palin’s warm-up, a musician named Lloyd Marcus, took the stage. “I am not an African American,” he shouted. “I am Lloyd Marcus, an AMERICAN.” He sang the “National Tea Party Anthem”: “When they call you a racist because you disagree, that’s another one of their nasty tricks.” Then he broke out into revival-style call-and-response. “Are y’all racists?” he hollered out to the crowd. “No!” Here, at last, was absolution.

  Austin Hess spent much of his time working hard to make sure clusters of protesters and counterprotesters didn’t break out into fisticuffs. “Moonbats Go Back to Harvard” read one sign. (Howie Carr, a columnist for the Boston Herald, regularly calls liberals moonbats.) Caleb Waugh, a graduate student from MIT, was carrying a sign that read “Nucular Engineers for Palin!!1!” He said he was going for “a Steven Colbert approach.” Nearby, a man from Beacon Hill carried a sign reading “Our Tea Party IS NOT Yours.” Next to him, a Tea Partier waved a warning: “Moonbat .”

  The former governor of Alaska arrived. She grabbed hold of the microphone. “I love Boston,” she said. It’s “the town that the Sons of Liberty called home.” She spoke of the city’s history: “You’re sounding the warning bell just like what happened in that midnight run and just like with that original tea party back in 1773.” She talked about life in the United States: “Is that what Barack Obama meant, when he promised the nation that they would fundamentally transform America?” she asked. “Is this what their ‘change’ is all about? I want to tell him, ‘Nah, you know, we, we’ll keep clinging to our Constitution, and our guns, and religion, and you can keep the change.’ ”

  In the far right, where originalism has slipped into fundamentalism, where historical scholarship is taken for a conspiracy and the founding of the United States has become a religion, it’s not the past that’s a foreign country. It’s the present.

  “These are the times that try men’s souls,” Thomas Paine wrote in December 1776, by the light of a campfire during Washington’s desperate retreat across New Jersey. Paine donated his share of the profits from Common Sense to buy supplies for the Continental army, in which he also served, but his chief contribution to the war was a series of essays known as the American Crisis. Making ready to cross the frozen Delaware River—at night, in a blizzard—to launch a surprise attack on Trenton, Washington ordered Paine’s words read to his exhausted, frostbitten troops: “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”20 The next morning, the Continentals fought to a stunning victory.

  While the war
lasted, Benjamin Edes paid a fine for failing to serve in the army in order to print his Gazette. After the British evacuated Boston, Edes moved his printing press back to the city. Andrew Eliot, though, made plans to move to Concord, in case Boston should fall to the British once again. Eliot died in 1778; at his death, Edes’s Gazette lamented that the reverend had gone “off the Stage of Action entirely unnoticed.”21 Benjamin Mecom escaped from the house in New Jersey where Benjamin Franklin had arranged for him to be confined. He disappeared during the Battle of Trenton and, as Jane Mecom wrote to her brother, had “never been heard of since.”22 The farmer’s wife who was taking care of Jane Mecom’s other mad son, Peter, asked for more money, five dollars a week, threatening that if she didn’t get it, “she would send him to boston.” This terrified Jane Mecom, who tried “to git Him Put in to the Alms house” but was told “there is no provision for such persons there.” Peter Franklin Mecom died not long after, deprived of reason, deprived, even, of speech. As his mother wrote, he “sunk in to Eternity without a Groan.”23 Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grandfather, William Emerson, enlisted in the Continental army, as a chaplain, but fell sick on the march to Ticonderoga and died in 1778.24 That year, Phillis Wheatley returned to Boston, married a black shopkeeper named John Peters, and announced her plan to publish a second book of poems, to be dedicated to Benjamin Franklin. It was never published. Instead, she gave birth to three children in the space of five years. Her husband went to debtors’ prison. Her first two children were dead by the time she gave birth to her third. She died, at the age of thirty-one, of childbed fever, along with the baby at her breast. “The world is a severe schoolmaster,” Wheatley once wrote. She was buried, with her infant daughter, in an unmarked grave on Copp’s Hill.25

  During the war, tens of thousands of slaves left their homes, escaping from slavery to the freedom promised by the British, and betting on British victory. They lost that bet. They died in battle, they died of disease, they ended up some-place else, they ended up back where they started, and worse off. (A fifteen-year-old girl captured while heading for Dunmore’s regiment was greeted by her master with a whipping of eighty lashes, after which he poured hot embers into her wounds.) When the British evacuated, thousands of blacks went with them, in port after port. In Charleston, after all the ships were full, British soldiers patrolled the wharves to keep back the flocks of black men, women, and children frantic to leave the United States rather than be taken back up into slavery. A handful managed to duck under the redcoats’ raised bayonets, jump off the docks, and swim out to the last longboats ferrying passengers to the British fleet—whose crowded ships included the aptly named Free Briton. Clinging to the sides of the longboats, they were not allowed on board, but neither would they let go; in the end, their fingers were chopped off.26