Trade certainly changed Boston, as Winthrop’s ‘city on the hill’ slowly emerged from its Puritan chrysalis. Of course, there still existed a strict culture of public piety, and the city remained a place of religious sanctuary during the final Stuart years. ‘In about 1682,’ Josiah Franklin, a cloth dyer of Banbury, Oxfordshire, sought asylum in Boston. ‘The conventicles [having] been forbidden by law, and frequently disturbed, induced some considerable men of his acquaintance to remove to that country, and he was prevailed with to accompany them thither, where they expected to enjoy their mode of religion with freedom.’23 But within the growing city it was proving harder and harder to retain that closeted, Puritan sense of purpose and prophetic function. ‘The democratic leaven was at work,’ as one nineteenth-century history put it. ‘The ampler scope for individual energy, and the sudden accession of political rights and commercial importance, began to tell upon manners.’24 This was one of the inadvertent consequences of Calvinist theology. With worldly success regarded as a sign of God’s grace, a culture of industriousness and enterprise had gripped Boston from its earliest days. Material riches and rapid urban improvements felt like God fulfilling His side of the Covenant, and proved a source of intense spiritual satisfaction. Ever increasing numbers of the elect were drawn towards the fulfilling business of wealth creation. But for those pilgrims still inspired by Winthrop’s more ascetic vision of the acting out of God’s purpose the changing face of Boston resembled Mammon triumphant. ‘The Lord he speaks in particular to Boston,’ the influential cleric Increase Mather was informed by one angry correspondent in 1677,
and calls you to a thorough reformation in your Town, you being set up as a Beacon upon the top of a mountain … your candlesticks should give light to all the neighbour Towns and Churches round about you: But when they see your famous Town abound with drunkennesse, swearing, excesse in apparel, etc. what encouragement is there for Towns round about you to follow your example?25
These were no idle accusations. By the 1670s, New England was coming to be known as ‘the great Mart and Staple’ of the Atlantic world, and the Boston economy was expanding steadily, even beginning to rival the well-established British ports of Hull, Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow. Wealth came from the seas – in particular, the Atlantic cod caught in vast numbers off the Maine, New England and Newfoundland coasts. In 1716, some 6.5 million fish were caught and processed in New England; by 1765 that had risen to near 19 million.26 Boston prospered by exporting both cured cod to Europe (the Spanish port of Bilbao became the major Mediterranean market, Mammon overcoming any religious scruples at trade with Catholics) and lower-quality dried, salted cod to the Caribbean, as well as re-exporting the catches from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Cod became the commodity upon which a new trading economy was built as the fishing fleets sailed back into Boston harbour from their Atlantic journeys laden with fruit, wine, molasses, spices and coffee from Europe and the West Indies. To ‘the Islands of America and with Spain’, the Massachusetts merchants carried ‘flour, salt beef, salt pork, cod, staves, salt salmon, salt mackerel, onions, and oysters salted in barrels … and for their return, they bring Sugar, Cotton Wood, Molasses, Indigo, Sago’.27 A typical fortune was that made by leading Boston merchant John Erving. His grandson, Robert C. Winthrop, described this everyday tale of Massachusetts wealth creation:
A few dollars earned on a commencement day, by ferrying passengers over Charles River, when there was no bridge – shipped to Lisbon in the shape of fish, and from thence to London in the shape of fruit, and from thence brought home to be reinvested in fish, and to be re-entered upon the same triangular circuit of trade – laid the foundations of the largest fortunes of the day.28
Some merchants also started to return to Boston with slave cargoes, beginning the British colony’s traffic in human bondage and the start of the African diaspora in America. By the 1720s, Boston was host to a slave population of around 400, rising quickly to 1,400 by the 1740s – some 8.5 per cent of the city’s population.29
Boston’s merchants invested more and more of their profits from cod into the lucrative business of slaving – but also into whaling, whale oil, oysters and lobsters, potash, animal products and timber (including barrels, staves and boards). In effect, the city became the trading centre of New England and a North American hub for shipping and ship-building thanks to its rapid, eight-week sailing distance from the British Isles. As early as the 1640s Bostonians were boasting how ‘besides many boats, shallops, hoys, lighters, pinnaces, we are in a way of building ships of a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred tons. Five of them already at sea; many more in hand at this present.’30 By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the city’s waterfront had been transformed into a vast shipyard of ropemakers, shipjoiners, riggers and carpenters, teeming with tonnage ready for trade across the Atlantic. Abutting the shipyards was an expanding number of sugar refineries, for the imported molasses from the West Indies, and rum distilleries. Other industries such as flour milling, small-scale manufacturing, tanneries and taverns all helped to avoid an over-dependence on the shipping trade.
This prosperity was reflected in an improving urban fabric. ‘Their streets are many and large, paved with Pebbles; the Materials of their Houses are Brick, Stone, Lime, handsomely contrived, and when any new Houses are built, they are made conformable to our New Buildings in London since the fire [of 1666],’ noted the visiting bookseller John Dunton towards the end of the seventeenth century.31 By then Boston was growing fast, from a town of 6,000 residents in the 1680s to 16,000 by the 1740s, densely hemmed into some sixty roads and forty lanes. ‘The Town hath indeed Three Elder Sisters in this Colony, but it hath wonderfully outgrown them all; and her Mother, Old Boston, in England also,’ the Reverend Cotton Mather (son of Increase Mather) boasted in 1702. ‘Yea, within a few Years after the first Settlement it grew to be The Metropolis of the Whole English America.’32 For some, the rapid urbanization was all a little stressful. ‘Who can study in Boston streets?’ asked John Adams, the future United States president and a prickly Boston lawyer, in 1759. ‘My Eyes are so diverted with Chimney Sweeps, Carriers of Wood, Merchants, Ladies, Priests, Carts, Horses, Oxen, Coaches, Market men and Women, Soldiers, Sailors, and my Ears with the Rattle Gabble of them all that I can’t think long enough in the Street upon any one Thing to start and pursue a Thought.’33
Above street level, the skyline was transformed into a set-piece battle between God and Mammon. On the side of divinity rose the spires of the city’s sixteen churches, from the ‘Brownist’ Old Church (the faith of the earliest, Mayflower pilgrims) to the Brattle Square Presbyterian Church ministering to Scots-Irish Calvinists, to the more mainstream Old South (Congregationalist) Meeting House to those of the Anabaptists, Episcopalians and Quakers. Commerce, by contrast, planted a forest of masts in the harbour, where ships waited to unload at the 166 wharfs stretched out along the waterfront. The English historian Daniel Neal described ‘the masts of ships here’ (in 1719) as ‘a kind of Wood of Trees like that we see upon the River of Thames about Wapping and Limehouse’. The most impressive of the wharfs was the half-mile Long Wharf, whose line of warehouses was topped off with a battery and had the effect of seamlessly stretching King Street (now State Street) into the bay waters. Today, the wharf’s constrained, corporate atmosphere – with an ugly Marriott Hotel and Starbucks, an aquarium and luxury yacht offices – gives little sense of the commerce, hustle and dockside grandeur which allowed ‘Ships of the greatest burthen’ to unload ‘without the help of Boats or Lighters’.34 Here was where goods, peoples, ideas and British officialdom first landed in Boston.
The city which spread out before these arrivals had none of the orderly town-planning or civic grandeur of Philadelphia or New York. Instead, the chaotic demands of commerce and trade shaped the cityscape, making Boston a maze of narrow lanes, crooked streets, haphazard pathways and docklands. What was most obvious in the urban pattern was a clear distinction between a more n
autical, plebeian North End and a spacious, leafy South End, where large lots provided homes for the finer members of the merchant class. In the south, according to a pseudonymous ‘Mr Bennett’ of the 1740s, ‘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 tea, and indulge every little piece of gentility to the height of the mode, and neglect the affairs of their families with as good a grace as the finest ladies in London.’ The bookseller John Dunton greatly admired the ‘gardens and orchards’ of the south, and the evening promenade on Boston Common, ‘where the Gallants a little before sunset walk with their Marmalet Madams, as we do in Moorfield, etc.’.35
Yet eighteenth-century colonial Boston was also strikingly intimate: a 3-kilometre stretch of land, encircled by water, in which rich and poor, godly and ungodly, smuggler and custom official all had to rub along. Today, after centuries of land reclamation and construction has decapitated the ‘Three Hills’ and pushed the city boundaries deep into the harbour on the east and the Charles River on the west, it is difficult to reimagine the much narrower, almost stifling contours of pre-industrial Boston. Then there was no East Boston or South Boston, no dry docks, dams and mass of bridges. It was a place of coves and bays, rivers and necks which at no point was more than a kilometre from the water.
A plan of Boston in New England with its environs, by Henry Pelham (1777).
And the density of the city nursed its elevated civil society. The wealth of the ‘codfish aristocracy’ combined with the Puritan ethos of the city’s founders to produce a remarkably educated citizenry, who were kept up to date with contemporary controversies by an unrivalled range of bookshops, printing presses, journals and newspapers. ‘There are five Printing-Presses in Boston, which are generally full of Work, by which it appears that Humanity and the Knowledge of Letters flourish more here than in all the other English Plantations put together,’ said the visiting historian Daniel Neal.36 The letters of John Dunton, on his visit to Boston in the 1680s, are further testimony to the extensive literary life in the colony. Recounting his social rounds, he lists visits to the bookseller John Usher (‘He is very rich, and Merchandizes; very witty; and has got a great Estate by book-selling’); Joseph Bruning, a ‘Dutch book-seller from Holland’ (‘he valu’d a good-book, who-ever printed it’); the ‘Scotch book-seller, one Campbel’ (‘a Brisk young fellow, that dresses All-a-Mode’); Mr Andrew Thorncomb, ‘a book-seller from London’ whom Ladies adored for ‘his excellent singing and variety of Songs’; and, finally, Samuel Green the printer (‘a man of good Sense, and understanding’).37 Dunton was always delighted to visit his friends’ homes, but Boston also provided a sophisticated network of civic institutions, from Masonic lodges to shipping associations, from the townhouse (or town hall) to the Merchants’ Exchange. Then there were the coffee-houses and estimated 150 taverns – such as the Bunch of Grapes, Green Dragon, Rose & Crown, the Royal Exchange, the Two Palaverers – providing a more rough and ready setting for the political and religious controversies of the day.38 All in all, Daniel Neal felt able to conclude, ‘a Gentleman from London would almost think himself at home at Boston, when he observes the Numbers of people, their Houses, their Furniture, their Tables, their Dress and Conversation, which perhaps is as splendid and showy as that of the most considerable Tradesmen in London’.39
THY CITIES SHALL WITH COMMERCE SHINE
Just as the wealth of London and numerous English county towns, such as Bristol and Cheltenham, in the eighteenth century was part and parcel of colonialism, so Boston’s economy was dependent on that amorphous, Atlantic imperium which had begun to emerge during the 1600s. ‘TRADE, without enlarging the British Territories, has given us a kind of additional Empire,’ wrote the playwright and Spectator journalist Joseph Addison in 1711. Indeed, following the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, the phrase ‘British Empire’ – as in John Oldmixon’s book The British Empire in America (1708) – became much more regularly employed as trade fostered some sense of shared interest and political community across Britain’s congeries of territories. It was still taken to mean a mercantilist consortium of mutual commercial advantage, with the prospering colonies of America part of a broader vision of common enrichment covering Old World and New. But there was now more of a sense of growing metropolitan control over the outlying colonies. The legal axis of Addison’s ‘additional Empire’ was the Navigation Acts, a series of laws which had been first passed in the 1650s dictating that all colonial, merchant traffic be transported via British ports and British ships. So-called enumerated products – such as tobacco, sugar, cotton and rice – had first to be shipped to either England or Scotland before then passing on to their final destination, an imperial trading system designed to enrich the mother country by denying the Dutch and French any bilateral commerce with British possessions. The Navigation Acts produced a closed trading system which bound New and Old England together in a shared sense of mercantile endeavour, cultural affinity and equal citizenship. The mutual benefits of this ‘empire of goods’ was apparent to Philadelphia and Boston as well as Glasgow and Liverpool.40 The bonds of imperial loyalty, as one scholar puts it, ‘depended upon commerce, upon the free flow of goods, and not upon coercion’.41
Yet the British Empire in the eighteenth century was not unfamiliar with some external coercion. A rolling succession of conflicts, variously known as King William’s War (or the Nine Years’ War), Queen Anne’s War (War of the Spanish Succession), King George’s War (War of the Austrian Succession) and the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War), turned the Atlantic into a global theatre of conflict enveloping the British, French and Spanish Empires in a century-long battle for supremacy. ‘The Empire of the Seas is ours; we have been many ages in possession of it; we have had many sea-fights, at a vast effusion of blood, and expences of treasure, to preserve it; and preserve it we still must, at all Risks and Events, if we have a Mind to preserve ourselves,’ was the common-enough view of one patriotic publication in 1738.42
The demands of these world wars transformed the European state, leading to the expansion of the navy and army, vastly enlarged tax revenue and the exporting of conflict beyond the Continent and into the colonies. It also had a cultural impact: the war state, and the chauvinism it engineered, seeded a deeper conception of the British Empire as an enterprise involved in more than trade. With British armed forces and free-spirited merchants engaged in a global struggle against the absolutist, Catholic monarchies of France and Spain, the Empire came to be imagined as something Protestant, commercial, maritime and dedicated to liberty. This was the imperial vision of Britain which would be celebrated in James Thomson’s masque hit of 1740, ‘Rule, Britannia!’ And it was a widening conception of Empire enthusiastically embraced in eighteenth-century Boston:
To thee belongs the rural reign;
Thy cities shall with commerce shine:
All thine shall be the subject main,
And every shore it circles thine.
‘Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
‘Britons never will be slaves.’
It was exactly this notion of combined, Protestant enterprise for which Massachusetts had embraced the new monarchy of King William III in 1688. John Adams recorded in his diary on 3 April 1778 a conversation with an ‘inquisitive sensible’ Dutch merchant who claimed that Holland ‘regarded England as the Bulwark of the Protestant Religion and the most important Weight in the Ballance of Power in Europe against France’, with which Adams heartily agreed.43 And in 1763, he felt compelled to state how ‘the liberty, the unalienable, indefeasible rights of men, the honor and dignity of human nature, the grandeur and glory of the public, and the universal happiness of individuals, were never so skilfully and successfully consulted as in that most excellent monument of human art, the common law of England’.44
Such ideological conviction was only natural in a Boston that found itself on the front line in the Franco-B
ritish power struggle. In March 1744, France had joined Spain in the War of the Austrian Succession against the nation they came to call perfidious Albion. The response of the British authorities in America was to push north into Canada and try to capture the French fortress at Louisburg, on Cape Breton Island, the so-called ‘Gibraltar of the New World’. Controlling entry to the St Lawrence River – and hence access to Quebec – was regarded by the British as vital to preventing a French encirclement of its thirteen American colonies, from Canada in the north to Mississippi in the south. In June 1745 Admiral Peter Warren, heavily aided by colonial militia, captured Louisburg in a brilliant naval assault – to the delight of Boston’s political and merchant elite.
The Louisburg démarche was just a skirmish in the British Empire’s broader battle against Bourbon France, which by the mid-1700s was being played out from Canada in the north to the islands of St Lucia and St Vincent in the Caribbean south. Victory in Canada and the Americas was regarded by British military strategists as essential for supremacy over the French on the European continent. It was a zero-sum game, as one contemporary polemicist acknowledged: ‘The French … know that the source of power lies in riches, and that the source of the English riches lies in America. They know that in proportion we are weakened there, in the same proportion they are strengthened.’ And this was equally understood within the Thirteen Colonies which made up British America by the 1730s.* The Boston physician and polemicist William Clarke warned in 1755 that if Britain’s colonies were lost, the French navy ‘would increase to such a degree of superiority over that of Great Britain, as must entirely destroy her commerce, reduce her from her present state of independency to be at last nothing more than a province of France’.45 Another Bostonian, Thomas Hancock, was equally adamant that ridding America of the French ‘will be the salvation of England, for in forty years this very America will absolutely take all the manufactory of England … whoever keeps America will in the end (whether French or English) have the Kingdom of England’.46
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