The 1763 Franco-British Peace of Paris seemed to settle the matter: having lost Quebec to General Wolfe, the French were forced to cede control of Canada after a century of colonial dominance. As the spectre of Bourbon encirclement of Anglo-Saxon America eased, few were more delighted than one Benjamin Franklin, son of Josiah Franklin, the cloth dyer from Banbury who had sought asylum in Boston back in the 1680s. ‘No one can rejoice more sincerely than I do, on the reduction of Canada,’ the young Franklin wrote,
this not merely as I am a colonist, but as I am a Briton. I have long been of opinion, that the foundations of the future grandeur and stability of the British Empire lie in America; and though like other foundations, they are low and little seen, they are nevertheless broad and strong enough to support the greatest political structure human wisdom ever erected.47
There was good reason for the likes of Clarke, Hancock and Franklin to identify themselves as both Britons and supporters of this common, Atlantic project – for the city of Boston was doing spectacularly well out of it. The House of Hancock was, in many respects, typical. The Hancock family’s connections to Boston stretch back to Nathaniel Hancock, who landed in America in 1634 and sired a line of celebrated Congregationalist ministers. As Boston began to shed its Puritan heritage, the family moved into commerce, and by the 1730s Thomas Hancock was running the city’s most lucrative general store with annual sales in excess of £10,000. At the beginning, Hancock serviced Boston’s literary culture by trading in publishing, stationary and book-binding, before expanding into domestic wares and consumables, then commodity trading and even investment banking. His real breakthrough, however, was to make some deft political connections in London and exploit the transatlantic trading routes: he exported rum, beef, cotton and other commodities to the cut-off whaling towns of New England, before picking up whale oil and bone for England, and then returning with consumer durables from Europe (not all of it declared) for the Boston middling classes. Hancock’s enormous profits were evident for all to see in his Beacon Hill house, which stood on the edge of Boston Common on land now occupied by the Massachusetts State House. It was a three-storey Georgian mansion, renowned for its mahogany furniture, English ‘flockwork’ wallpaper, more than fifty glass windows and two-acre garden complete with peach, apricot and mulberry orchard.48
If one digs a little deeper, it quickly becomes apparent that much of Hancock’s profit was entirely dependent upon British imperial aggrandizement. For all Thomas Hancock’s peaceable commerce, from as early as the 1740s he was helping to provision the Royal Navy and British army in their various campaigns. Sudden surges in demand, limited supplies, lack of infrastructure and the need for the right type of contact – all these conditions of a war economy were ably exploited by the well-resourced Hancock. When Admiral Vernon launched his expedition against the Spanish cities of Porto Bello in Panama and Cartagena in Colombia as part of the War of the Austrian Succession, Hancock supplied them with beef and pork. When the British assault on Louisburg was being prepared, Hancock was the man to feed, transport and clothe the troops. (It made him £100,000 and the richest man in Boston.) And when Halifax and other Canadian bases needed to be supported in the early 1750s from a French counter-attack, Hancock delivered lumber and carpenters, transports and fishing vessels. At the outset of the French and Indian War in 1755, Governor Lawrence of Novia Scotia appointed Hancock sole supplier for the expedition against Fort Beausejour thanks to his ready terms of credit. He sold arms, imported wheat from Philadelphia and revealed himself to be the most fervently patriotic of colonists: ‘For God’s sake then let us Root the French blood out of America.’ And so when General James Wolfe launched his expedition up the St Lawrence to capture Quebec in 1759, the House of Hancock took care of the draught-oxen, teamsters for the artillery, provision of the fleet and other cargo logistics. By 1760, Thomas Hancock and his Boston corporation were one of the world’s leading suppliers for the British colonial project.49
It was not only Hancock who prospered in this manner. In 1754 the three wealthiest men in Boston were the three largest war contractors for the British army and navy – Thomas Hancock, the quartermaster Charles Apthorp and the Lisbon fish-exporter John Erving. And the war economy trickled down to the ship-builders, the fishermen (whose monopolies were secured), the tanners, the glove-makers, the bakers, the artisans and those businesses which simply benefited from the influx of credit brought about by the war. As the conflicts rolled on, the demand for food, clothing, transport, alcohol and armaments kept the Boston economy humming. While there were periods of retrenchment and depression following the peace treaties, and Boston’s ship-building felt increasing competition from other ports, by the mid-eighteenth century the city had established itself as a major commercial metropolis within the British Empire.
What was more, Boston’s residents were keen to show off their riches. ‘Went over the House to view the Furniture, which alone cost a thousand Pounds sterling,’ wrote John Adams after a dinner party at the house of the Boston merchant Nick Boylstone. ‘A seat it is for a noble Man, a Prince. The Turkey Carpets, the painted Hangings, the Marble Tables, the rich Beds with crimson Damask Curtains and Counterpins, the beautiful Chimney Clock, the Spacious Garden, are the most magnificent of any Thing I have ever seen.’50 Boston might have been an export economy, shipping natural resources across the Atlantic, but it was also an aggressive importer. Beginning in the 1740s the American market for imported goods – buttons, ribbons, jewels, books, toys, musical instruments, carpets and draperies – began to take off. Between 1750 and 1773 it rose 120 per cent, and in the five years 1768–72 alone American imports from England grew by 43 per cent.52 ‘A vast demand is growing for British manufactures,’ Benjamin Franklin remarked in 1751, ‘a glorious market wholly in the Power of Britain.’53
And he should know. When Josiah Franklin discovered that in Boston ‘his dying trade would not maintain his family,’ he became a tallow-chandler, producing soap and candles from a shop on Fort Street (Milk Street), round the corner from the Old South Meeting House where his fifteenth child, Benjamin, was christened. As perhaps the most famous son of a city built on the Book of Matthew, Benjamin Franklin’s first job was ‘cutting wick for candles, filling the dipping mold and the molds for cast candles, attending the shop, going on errands etc.’. Unfortunately, Franklin ‘disliked the trade, and had a strong inclination for the sea, but my father declared against it’.54 His brothers would also soon declare against him and, after falling out over a joint publishing enterprise, Benjamin Franklin fled his Boston apprenticeship for Philadelphia. But the Franklin family business was typical of Boston’s expanding consumer economy. Rather than making their own soap and candles, Bostonians were now heading to the shops for their household goods, their fashion items and their perishable foodstuffs. Milliners, hairdressers, silversmiths (such as Paul Revere), glove-makers and silk merchants were the new emblems of the Boston economy. Into the great wharfs and warehouses of the waterfront came the latest consumer accessories from England. But of all the imports introduced into America via the Navigation Acts, by far the most popular and lucrative was tea.
Europeans had been drinking tea – along with hot chocolate and coffee – from the late sixteenth century. Imported from China, both green and black tea leaves, grown on the bohea hills, gained in popularity over the ensuing centuries. The caffeine, taste and ritual of tea proved an immediate hit in Europe’s royal courts, especially when the bitter taste began to be sweetened by Caribbean sugar. Thanks to the corporate muscle of the East India Company, hurrying its precious crates from the port of Canton to the wharfs of London, the price of a cup of tea started to fall away during the 1700s, until it stopped being a beverage of the elite and became a major staple of British commercial and cultural life. In 1768 tea represented almost 50 per cent of the East India Company’s total turnover.
America drank deep on this global commodity, with the ports of Boston, Philadelphia and New York among the thi
rstiest customers for the East India Company’s cargo. Estimates put the licit and illicit imports of tea from England at over £200,000 a year by the 1770s, with each American annually drinking more than a pound of tea. It was a universal drink which was found in almost every colonial household, crossing the boundaries of social class: in the 1750s even the inmates of Philadelphia’s poor house insisted on having bohea tea. And in middle-class drawing rooms, on lacquered furniture, the custom of tea drinking became a significant component of household ritual, with its brewing, serving and sipping a litmus test of middle-class etiquette. ‘Tea became a ritual of family solidarity, sustenance and politeness.’55
Needless to say, the correct tea party demanded the right kind of consumer accessories, and in the cities of the eastern seaboard the British ceramics industry found an enticing new market. The pioneering Stoke-on-Trent potter Josiah Wedgwood was among the first to provide the American middling classes with the cups, saucers, milk-jugs, sugar pots and teapots (let alone the tea caddies, sugar tongs and spoons) they decided they needed to drink a cup of tea. In the archives of the Wedgwood Museum is a letter from Wedgwood’s Liverpool merchants, Thomas Bentley and Samuel Boardman, dated 25 September 1764, requesting over 1,600 pieces for immediate export including Cauliflower and Pineapple moulded wares, black glazed wares, tortoiseshell dishes and fifty dozen white plates. ‘Above you have a copy of a small order we have just received from Boston in New England from the very careful man who has sent in cash to pay from them,’ Boardman added, ‘and they probably send us more if they are served to his satisfaction.’ It no doubt helped future sales that Wedgwood would himself become a leading proponent of American independence. Ever the entrepreneur, he even saw good sales in it. ‘What do you think of sending Mr Pitt [Lord Chatham, defender of the colonists] on Crockery Ware to America; a quantity certainly might be sold there now, and some advantage made of the American prejudice in favour of that great man.’56
The Staffordshire pottery, the bohea tea, the sugar, silverware and delicate table-cloths all helped to bestow an Anglicized identity on the Boston middling classes. Gone was that oppositional, Puritan culture which had inspired the first founders of Boston, who developed an urban sensibility so consciously distinct from Stuart England. Instead, there now flourished on either side of the Atlantic a shared Georgian society, shaped by the literature of Addison and Pope, entertained by the witticisms of Swift and Defoe, informed by The Spectator and other fashionable journals ‘from London’. The pages of Boston’s five newspapers in the 1730s were dominated by news from the capital, Edinburgh or Dublin, with important society information on the noteworthy weddings, births and funerals of the day there. Boston’s ninety-five booksellers, libraries, myriad societies, shops and taverns – the world of John Dunton – helped to nurture an authentically colonial culture which naturally regarded itself as a component part of the British Empire. A Parisian visitor to the city thought that ‘in their whole manner of living, the Americans resemble the English. Punch, warm and cold, before dinner; excellent beef and Spanish and Bordeaux wines, cover their tables, always solidly and abundantly served’.57 Here was the ‘colonization of taste’, in which furniture, ceramics and tea managed subtly to unite Massachusetts and the other twelve colonies with their mother country across the Atlantic. It was a powerfully uniform material culture which meant that ‘on the eve of the American Revolution, Americans were more English than they had been in the past since the first years of the colonies’.58
Yet it would be a mistake to regard such English tastes as the passive product of a consumer society. Boston was also an imperial city in its ritual and public culture. It had been settled by John Winthrop in the 1630s as a consciously anti-royalist redoubt – a place of refuge for true Protestants fearful of the Catholic ambitions of the Stuart monarchy. It didn’t think twice about supporting the Roundhead cause in the 1640s or the Glorious Revolution of 1688; its Puritan faith, democratic ethos and commercial ambitions marked it as an obviously parliamentary metropolis. As we have seen, that changed in 1688 with the accession of the faithful Protestant King William III and the willingness of his Hanoverian successors to wage a global war against the Catholic empires of Spain and France. The consequence was that in the 1700s Bostonians could start to understand themselves as Britons not thanks to any parliamentary connection but rather as royal subjects. It was the Crown which connected up the British Empire; if anything, the burghers of Boston were rather hostile to the growing interference, taxation and regulation which emanated from Westminster politicians. Instead, they displayed far more affection for the Hanoverian kings than most of their indigenous British subjects. In the judgement of one recent history, the eighteenth-century political culture of Massachusetts ‘was decidedly monarchical and imperial, Protestant and virulently anti-Catholic, almost to the moment of American independence’.59
Just as the Hanoverian monarchy embedded itself through a calendar of public rites in Great Britain, so accession dates, coronations, birthdays and deaths provided a regular cycle for celebrating the Protestant succession in Boston. Along Orange Street, Marlborough Street and Hanover Street, Boston played host to some twenty-six annual events embedding the monarchy in the everyday life of Massachusetts. ‘We … do now with full Voice and Consent of Tongue and Heart, Publish and Proclaim That the High and Mighty Prince George, Prince of Wales; is now … become our only Lawful and Rightful Liege Lord GEORGE the Third … To Whom we acknowledge all Faith and constant Obedience, with all heart and humble Affection,’ was the proclamation read from the courthouse on 30 December 1760 to ‘a vast Concourse of People of all Ranks’.60 There then followed days of loyal revelry, cannonades, bell-ringing, illuminations and fireworks marking the accession of King George III – a long way from Winthrop’s more Cromwellian vision for Boston. In 1765, the city partied again, celebrating the birthday of the Prince of Wales ‘with the greatest demonstrations of joy, and with marks of unfeigned loyalty’. ‘Every apartment in town rung with pious and loyal ejaculations,’ commented the Pennsylvania Gazette, ‘“God bless our true British King” – “Long Live their Majesties” – “Heaven preserve the Prince of Wales, and all the Royal Family.”’61
By the 1760s, royalist sentiments were an everyday part of public culture. ‘The merchants made a dinner for Captain Gideon at the Coffee house and a very Genteel Entertainment it was,’ the Exeter-born Boston merchant John Rowe noted in his diary for 2 December 1766. ‘After Dinner the following toasts were Drank. 1. The King 2. The Queen and Royal Family 3.The Parliament of Great Britain 4. His Majesty’s Ministry 5. The Earl of Chatham [etc.].’62
Loyalism was not limited to the upper orders. Two years earlier, John Rowe had witnessed ‘a sorrowful accident’ take place:
The wheel of the carriage that the Pope was fixed on run over a Boy’s head and he died instantly. The Sheriff, Justices, Officers of the Militia were ordered to destroy both South and North End Popes. In the afternoon they got the North End Pope pulled to pieces. They went to the South End but could not conquer upon which the South End people brought out their pope and went in Triumph to the Northward and at the Mill Bridge a Battle begun between the people of Both Parts of the Town.63
What Rowe was describing was Pope’s Day in Boston, the annual 5 November Guy Fawkes celebrations which combined a ritual display of anti-popery with violent neighbourhood factionalism. On the one hand, the Pope’s Day public holiday gave licence to the most obvious and participative form of monarchical triumphalism, allowing a city-wide expression of anti-Catholic, anti-Stuart fervour and a celebration of Protestantism, liberty and the loyalties of Empire. It bound the Boston labouring classes – the apprentices, carpenters, sailors and tavern-keepers – to the heroic history and purpose of the British monarchy. On the other hand, it also served as a yearly vehicle for the sometimes deadly rivalry of Boston’s North End and South End. By the 1760s, this communal antagonism constituted a vast civic ritual, with floats and effigies of Hanoverian hat
e-figures (popes, Guy Fawkes, the Stuart Pretender, even Admiral Byng)* paraded through the Boston streets, before then culminating in an all-out brawl on Boston Common at day’s end. For the precious John Rowe, the ritual and carnival was all getting too much by 1766. ‘This is a Day of Confusion in Boston,’ he noted sourly, ‘occasioned by a foolish custom of Carrying about the pope and the Devill etc. on a large carriage through the streets of this Town. Indeed three very large ones made their appearance this day.’64 For all its vernacular chaos, Pope’s Day was, in fact, another component of loyal, royal Boston: testament to a colonial city contentedly embedded within the British Empire, an urban expression of the Empire’s Atlantic strengths, commercial focus and increasingly global reach.
The cultural affinity was evident in the streets and squares of Boston. After spending extensively on sewerage systems and decent streets in the 1720s and ’30s, a construction spree gripped the city. ‘The buildings in Boston are in general good,’ reported the visiting Anglican clergyman Andrew Burnaby in 1759. ‘The streets are open and spacious, and well-paved; and the whole has much the air of some of our best country towns in England.’ In addition to a growing number of Georgian mansions and domestic developments across the city (as well as in the surrounding towns of Cambridge, Dorchester and Milton), there was a more confident ‘public architecture’ in the city modelled on the designs of James Gibbs and Christopher Wren in London. The Governor’s Palace, the courthouse, the exchange and Faneuil Hall were all regarded as fine additions to the city, but the real gem was agreed to be the King’s Chapel on Tremont Street – ‘exceedingly elegant and fitted up in the Corinthian taste’, as Burnaby described the church. ‘There is also an elegant private concert-room, highly finished in the Ionic manner.’65 Indeed, such was the expansive dignity of Boston’s architecture, with its ‘lofty and regular’ edifices and ‘spires and cupolas intermixt at proper distances’, it now had as much the air of Old England as New. As the French military chaplain Abbé Robin admiringly described it in a letter to a friend in 1781, Boston ‘did not seem to us a modern settlement so much as an ancient city’.66
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