This night the 29th Regiment on Duty. A Quarrel between the soldiers and Inhabitants. A Great Number Assembled in King Street. A Party of the 29th under the Command of Captain Preston fired on the People – they killed five – wounded several others, particularly Mr Edward Payne in his Right Arm. Captain Preston bears a good Character – he was taken in the night and Committed also seven more of the 29th – the inhabitants are greatly enraged and not without Reason.83
John Adams rushed from a dining club in the South End when he heard the news.
In the Street we were informed that the British Soldiers had fired on the Inhabitants, killed some and wounded others near the Town house … I walked down Boylstons Alley into Brattle Square, where a Company or two of regular soldiers were drawn up in Front of Dr. Coopers old Church with their Musquets all shouldered and their Bayonetts all fixed.84
Today, all that marks the site of the ‘Boston Massacre’, as it was quickly inscribed, is a slightly grubby circle of stones underneath a traffic light on a busy junction at the top of State Street (no longer King Street). But in the immediate aftermath of 5 March 1770, it became a place of pilgrimage and commemoration. Paul Revere produced another engraving depicting the execution of the innocents, while the British soldiers themselves were quickly escorted off the Boston peninsula (to Fort William on Castle Island) for their own safety. Three days later, John Rowe ‘attended the funeral of the unhappy people that were killed on Monday last. Such a Concourse of people I never saw before – I believe ten or twelve thousand.’85
AN EPOCH IN HISTORY
After the fury of the ‘Massacre’ came another period of retreat and reflection. The trigger-happy soldiers were placed on trial (with John Adams and Josiah Quincy conducting the defence), parliament overturned the Townshend duties in April 1770, and Boston, in response, ended its non-consumption boycott. On the surface, Anglo-American relations returned to an even keel. But there lurked one unresolved issue: the price of a cup of tea. Townshend had grudgingly removed duties on glass, paint, paper and the rest, but he refused to rescind the tax on tea. First, because the finances of the East India Company – the major tea exporter to America – were in difficulties, and a tea tax would help subsidize this government-backed business. And, second, because the British parliament was adamant that it had the right to tax the colonies: to abandon every levy was to jettison a principle of imperial finance which had increasingly global ramifications. This was the thinking behind the 1773 Tea Act, which provided a tax rebate to the East India Company on tea shipped to America, reducing the cost of tea but retaining both the principle of taxation and a solid income for the Exchequer. The new prime minister, Lord North, regarded it as an ideal compromise – the rebate cut the price of tea for the caffeine-loving colonists, but also kept the East India Company afloat, and the ‘empire of goods’ ticking over.
Samuel Adams saw it differently. The Tea Act not only threatened to undercut Boston’s lucrative tea-smuggling industry (by allowing the East India Company to supply its cargo at much lower rates), it also cemented the principle of colonial taxation. And out of that taxation would be funded a growing army of customs commissioners, soldiers, lawyers and governors all intent on undermining Magna Carta rights in the Thirteen Colonies. Tea was just the first sip; if it was swallowed then the Townshend duties would be back and the principle of no taxation without representation lost for ever. Boston would become a subject of, rather than partner in, Empire. ‘The Monopoly of Tea, is, I dare say, but a small Part of the Plan they have formed to strip us of our Property,’ was how the Pennsylvanian lawyer John Dickinson saw it, exposing the tensions of his Atlantic identity. ‘But thank GOD, we are not Sea Poys, nor Marattas, but British Subjects, who are born to Liberty, who know its Worth, and who prize it high.’86 ‘We won’t be their Negroes,’ agreed John Adams (with no hint of irony). ‘I say we are as handsome as old England folks, and so should be as free.’87 But Lord North was equally resolute that there must be no retreat on tea. After the repeal of the Stamp Act and the Townshend duties, Westminster had to show its imperial resolve and stop surrendering to the threats of Boston. On each side of the Atlantic, the positions on the Tea Act became entrenched – and sailing across the ocean came ‘the accursed dutiable’ cargo.
‘This morning Captain Scot arrived from London,’ John Rowe noted on 17 November 1773. ‘He brings advice that Hall, Loring, Coffin and Bruce are to Bring the Tea from the East India Company – this a measure that is Generally disapproved and will Remain a Great Occasion of Disagreement between England and America.’88 Eleven days later, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver docked at Griffin’s Wharf with their 46 tons of East India Company tea. As a part owner of the Eleanor, Rowe had extra reason to be worried. Immediately, the fly-posters went up.
Friends, Brethren, Countrymen! That worst of Plagues The Detestable Tea, ship’d for this Port by the East India Company is now arriv’d in this harbour, the Hour of Destruction or manly Opposition to the Machinations of Tyranny Stares you in the Face: every Friend to his Country to himself and to Posterity is now called upon to meet at Fanewill Hall at nine of Clock this Day (at which time the Bells will begin to Ring) to make a United and Successful Resistance to this last worst and most Destructive Measure of Administration.
Under Boston port authority rules, the owners of the vessels had twenty days (until 17 December) to pay their customs dues or have the entire cargo seized – spelling instant bankruptcy for the unfortunate merchants. By contrast, Samuel Adams and his Boston Caucus, now operating under the soubriquet ‘Sons of Liberty’, were equally adamant that the tea should not be unloaded and hence become subject to the tax. They wanted the tea returned to London on the very same vessels, devoid of all duties. ‘To let it be landed, would be giving up the Principle of Taxation by Parliamentary Authority, against which the Continent have struggled for ten years,’ agreed John Adams, ‘and subjecting ourselves and our Posterity forever to Egyptian Taskmasters – to Burthens, Indignities, to Ignominy, Reproach and Contempt, to Desolation and Oppression, to Poverty and Servitude.’89
Once again, Boston’s heritage of biblical liberation was revived. Samuel Adams summoned the Winthrop legacy by urging a ‘Solemn League and Covenant’ against the forces of British oppression. The spirit of liberty which had swept the Arbella into Massachusetts and bound Boston’s founder into a sacred covenant was called forth to do God’s bidding and fight tyranny. If Boston was to remain free, the tea could not be landed.
Poor Thomas Hutchinson, promoted from chief justice to royal governor in 1771, was ill-equipped to manage such a quickening political crisis. In the past, he had quietly criticized the Stamp Act and other clumsy interventions from Westminster; he believed in the traditional, cordial, informal agreement which had co-existed between the legislatures in Britain and Boston. But he also believed in the rule of law and he would not allow the Dartmouth, Eleanor and Beaver to slink back to England without having been cleared by the customs house. Located at a safe distance from disorderly Boston in a house on Unquity Hill in upstate Milton, Massachusetts, Hutchinson had little idea of just how incendiary his refusal would be on the streets of his agitated, angry, fearful city. When, on the freezing evening of 16 December 1773 – the night before the deadline for paying the customs duties – Hutchinson’s decision that the cargo be unloaded was relayed to the thousands pressed into the pews of the Old South Meeting House, the cry went up ‘Boston Harbor a tea-pot this night!’ It was then that the war whoops began, the ‘Mohawks’ appeared, and British suzerainty of Boston was effectively lost.
The morning after, John Adams thought the Tea-Party a stunning, signal affair. ‘This is the most magnificent Movement of all’, he wrote.
There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly admire. The people should never rise, without doing something to be remembered – something notable. And striking. This Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid an
d inflexible, and it must have so important Consequences, and so lasting, that I can’t but consider it as an Epocha in History.90
He had rarely written a truer word. Within two years Britain and its colonies were at war. In one of his final diary entries, John Rowe caught the moment – on 19 April 1775 – with chronological clarity. ‘Last night the Grenadiers and Light Companies belonging to the several Regiments in this Town were ferry’d over Charles River and landed on Phipps Farm in Cambridge from whence they Proceeded on their way to Concord, where they arrived early this day. On their march they had a Skirmish with some Country People at Lexington.’91 The shot that was ‘heard around the world’ (as Ralph Waldo Emerson first described it) had been fired, and Boston was behind the trigger. The cack-handed British response to the Tea-Party – an escalating series of Coercive Acts designed to emasculate Boston’s democracy and isolate its economy – had pushed the city into open rebellion. The city upon a hill, the great mart and staple, the finest English country town outside England had become in the words of Lord North ‘the ringleader of all violence and opposition to the execution of the laws of this country’.92
The imperial city transformed itself into a revolutionary citadel, with devastating consequences for the emergent British Empire. Those loyal Bostonians, who had once counted themselves the most fervent subjects of the British Crown, the keenest promoters of British imperium, now recast themselves as anti-colonial freedom-fighters. Boston, that candle upon a candle-stick, was now a light to the world for a very different vision of liberty. The First Empire, the Thirteen Colonies, was about to be lost. In London, the diplomat and politician the Duke of Manchester instantly realized the significance of events in Boston, Concord and Lexington. He mournfully informed the House of Lords that, ‘the page of future history will tell how Britain planted, nourished, and for two centuries preserved’ a British empire across the Atlantic. And how,
strengthened by her sons, she rose to such a pitch of power, that this little island proved too mighty for the greatest efforts of the greatest nations … Historic truth must likewise relate, within the same little space of time, how Britain fell to half her greatness; how strangely lost, by misjudging ministers, by rash-advised councils, our gracious sovereign, George III, saw more than half his empire crumble beneath his sceptre.93
2
Bridgetown
‘A sweet Spot of Earth’
In the year 1773, some months after my arrival in Barbados, I, one morning, saw the body of a negro man, who had been run through, the foregoing night, it was said, with a spit … The naked body of a murdered man lying neglected, or treated, in all respects, like a dead dog, must needs be a new and a shocking spectacle to any European youth, especially to a country youth from Britain, on his first arrival in a land of slavery.
This was just a taste of Barbadian brutality.
Among many other negroes, who bore more or less the marks of ill treatment, one of the first objects who presented himself to my view was a negro man whose whole body, his face not wholly excepted, was covered with scars … One of his legs was loaded with an iron ring or boot, at least half an inch thick, and upwards of two inches broad … I asked by what authority his owner thus treated him, and was answered, that he was his owner’s property, who had a right to treat him as he pleased.1
As private secretary to the governor of Barbados, the young William Dickson was to bear witness to the full, sadistic reality of the British Empire’s slave economy. As he recounted in horrified page after page of his abolitionist polemic of 1789, Letters on Slavery, the practice was fundamental to the running of the tiny colony known as ‘the civilised island, Barbados’. And whilst the most heinous abuses took place amid the cane fields and boiling rooms of the sugar plantations hidden from polite gaze, the cities of the British Caribbean were not wholly immune to the human suffering underpinning their prosperity.
Indeed, at the pinnacle of upper Broad Street, in the commercial heart of the Barbadian capital Bridgetown, stood the Cage. Originally built in the 1650s as a temporary prison for indentured white servants or drunken sailors, it had by the late 1700s become a wood and wire holding pen for runaway slaves and black offenders awaiting punishment. Any slave caught outside their plantation or on the streets of Bridgetown without a good excuse between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. would be imprisoned in the Cage and then brought before magistrates (the rule of law being such a defining feature of the Empire) and whipped if they ‘deserved’ it. The owner of the slave was required to pay fifteen shillings to have his slave released from the Cage, and another fifteen shillings for the expenses incurred by the whipping.
Conditions inside were not pleasant. ‘Such are the situation, construction, and want of ventilation of the Cage, as to render it unfit for permanent confinement of one single human creature, and if it were properly constructed and ventilated, not more than twelve ought to be confined there,’ declared a report from the Speaker of the Barbados House of Assembly. ‘In this wretched and miserable hole, shocking to relate eighty five persons have been confined at one time. If they lay down at all, they must have been lain tier upon tier, at least four deep.’ The solution, of course, was not to close the Cage, but to move it from ‘their most populous street’, where the stench and noise was off-putting, to ‘some other and more convenient part of Bridgetown’. Removed to the Pier Head, the depredations of slavery could safely be placed out of sight and out of mind.2
Yet, the Cage’s position at the centre of Bridgetown – the site is now a ‘Chefette’s’ fast-food outlet, its history commemorated by a ‘Slave Route’ plaque – was entirely appropriate since it so graphically conveyed the economic basis of Barbados. The city of Boston and the Thirteen Colonies of America had left the British Empire on the question of tea, while Bridgetown and the British Caribbean had bound themselves ever tighter to Britain thanks to tea’s sweet accompaniment, sugar. As America edged away from Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century, the West Indies nestled closer. In the words of the Marxist scholar and one-time prime minister of Trinidad, Eric Williams, the Caribbean would take the place of New England as ‘the hub of Empire’. The great economist Adam Smith was even clearer, declaring in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that ‘the profits of a sugar plantation in any of our West Indian colonies are generally much greater than those of any other cultivation that is known either in Europe or America’.3 There was a growing appreciation, on both sides of the Atlantic, that West Indian wealth creation offered a new model for imperial hegemony built around aggressive exploitation and the monopolization of trade. ‘If then this small colony is so useful to Great Britain, as from hence it appears to be, of how much more consequence must all her colonies together be found?’ asked Henry Frere, a member of the council of Barbados in 1768. ‘From their resources the colonies claim a share of the merit of having raised Great Britain to be one of the first kingdoms in Europe for power and opulence, as she is undoubtedly the first country in the world for affording every convenience and blessing of life.’4
The doomed future prophesied by the Duke of Manchester after the loss of Boston, of the Empire crumbling beneath the sceptre of King George III, did not take place following American independence. Instead, the British Empire grew, diversified and prospered. And whereas the residents of the Thirteen Colonies had come to identify themselves as an increasingly separate ‘American’ people, the planters and settlers of Barbados were happy to continue to count themselves as citizens of the British Empire. ‘It is to Great Britain alone that our West Indian planters consider themselves as belonging,’ was how the planters’ ally Bryan Edwards described their stance in the 1760s. He added, ‘even such of them as have resided in the West Indies from their birth, look on the islands as their temporary abode only, and the fond notion of being able to go home (as they emphatically term a visit to England) year after year animates their industry and alleviates their misfortune’.5
Barbados was called by settlers and colonial officials alike
‘little England’. The most easterly of the Caribbean islands, it was among the first to be colonized and long held its own as an imperial pace-setter. It was ‘the mother colony, the centre to which newly-formed colonies looked for labour, experienced planters, capital, and leadership in matters of imperial politics and trade’.6 The Englishness of the island – its cathedrals, parliament, parishes, cricket pitches, garrisons and gardens – would become a source of intense pride. ‘On no one of our foreign possessions is the print of England’s foot more strongly impressed than on Barbados,’ wrote the nineteenth-century historian J. A. Froude. ‘It has been ours for two centuries and three-quarters, and was organized from the first on English traditional lines, with its constitution, its parishes and parish churches and churchwardens, and schools and parsons, all on the old model; which the unprogressive inhabitants have been wise enough to leave undisturbed.’7
Well might the Victorians look back on the settlement of Barbados with admiration. For the wealth and riches which flowed from sugar and slavery played an essential role in Britain’s rise to global pre-eminence. The port cities of the Caribbean – led by Bridgetown, Barbados, Kingston, Jamaica and, for the French, Port-au-Prince, Haiti – were the conduits for funnelling back profits from plantations and human trafficking. This was where the prices were set, the goods off-loaded, and the harvests from the rural hinterland expropriated to Europe. The ‘seaport towns,’ as one army engineer put it in 1698, ‘[were] the very doors of the islands’.8 And the staggering returns from the West Indies colonies funded the acceleration of the British Empire, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of the Royal Navy. Like Boston before her, eighteenth-century Bridgetown assumed an entrepôt role in Britain’s Atlantic empire of trade and of the emergent global struggle against the rival imperial forces of France, Spain and the Netherlands. In many ways, it was just as intimate an extension of England as Georgian Boston – but, unlike Massachusetts, Barbados remained loyal to Empire to the very end.
Cities of Empire Page 8