Why Boston was such a tinderbox in the 1770s

Boston Globe

03-04-2025

A group of artists working under the pseudonym "Silence Dogood" — the same pen name used by Benjamin Franklin — projected several messages onto the facade of the Old State House on Tuesday.
Diane Dwyer
The hat tip, new #rebels saluting the OGs, captured some of the come-and-get-us fury of Boston in the aftermath of the deadly 1770 riot on King Street, which Paul Revere branded a massacre. In time, the Massacre begat the Tea Party, the reaction to which propelled the Shot Heard Round the World, fired a quarter-millennium ago this month. But Boston's revolutionary ethos is far older than 1775, or 1770. And leveraging anniversaries was always part of it.
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Founded by British emigrants in 1630, the town that rose on a slender peninsula jutting into Massachusetts Bay was singular from the outset. Its leaders were Protestant reformers, denigrated as 'Puritans' by their enemies. They left an England on the verge of civil war, crossing a vast and furious ocean to plant a more perfect society. John Winthrop, the lawyer who became the colony's first governor, drew on the Gospel of Matthew
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Historians have long and correctly insisted that we ought not overstate the degree to which the culture of Revolutionary or even Colonial Boston remained 'Puritan.' Yet the legacy of Boston's founding continued to matter in an increasingly commercial and cosmopolitan world.
It mattered demographically: Massachusetts was from the outset a family enterprise, with nearly equal numbers of men and women, who produced large broods of children, who married and multiplied across the stony soils of New England. The population grew quickly and remained disproportionately youthful, as in so many other developing economies then and since.
The trading economy they created was modest but vibrant. Bostonians imported more than they sold abroad, which would matter when the taxes hit. But their prosperity, such as it was, was shared widely. They were a middling people, the rich less rich and the poor less poor than in the land they'd left behind.
The Puritan 'Great Migration' to New England died in 1649, when the English Civil War ended, which meant that the generations rising thereafter did so within a relatively homogeneous society. There were blips of immigration — French Huguenots in the 1690s, Protestant Irish in the 1710s and again in the 1730s.
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The streets of Boston teemed with people, for the most part, of common stock and common values. Ordinary men participated vigorously in public life, through a relatively broad electoral franchise. They imagined politics as a local affair. Elected officials at the town and Colony level knew themselves to be directly accountable to the people around them, especially on matters of the purse.
At first, the Old Testament shaped Boston's laws as well as its culture: a city of steeples and jails. The colonists' reputation as a coven of killjoys was lampooned in print as early as 1637 by a freethinking lawyer expelled from the godly Commonwealth for erecting a Maypole. This perception only increased after the deadly witch trials in Salem in 1692.
Yet if Puritanism bred a righteous stringency, it also nourished the skills of a self-governing people. The New England way of worship, called Congregationalism, insisted upon a direct relationship between the faithful and their God. Which meant reading the Bible, in English, at home, intensively. Literacy was a godly duty, and Massachusetts boasted some of the highest rates of it in the Western world. Mothers read the Word aloud to their sons, making the home a 'little commonwealth,' and women were people of ideas from the outset. Some of those sons went on to
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Congregationalism bred printers as well as readers: The first press in British America — its type and hardware and even its paper imported — was set up in Cambridge shortly after the college was established.
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A sculpture of Phillis Wheatley on The Commonwealth Avenue Mall in Boston.
David L. Ryan/Globe Staff
At midcentury, Bostonians were enormously proud of their Britishness. They fought and died in the Crown's great global war, now known as the
Few needed the reminder. When, 13 months later, the old king died and his grandson ascended the throne as George III, the patriotic men of Harvard used their printing press to send him an unctuous congratulatory ode in schoolboy Latin. And in 1763, when the war officially ended, Boston's James Otis, Harvard class of 1743 and a prominent lawyer, told the Boston Town Meeting, 'The true interests of Great Britain and her plantations are mutual, and what God in his providence has united, let no man dare attempt to pull asunder.'
Within a year, Otis would trade his hymn of praise for a protest song. The Crown's postwar tax levies punctured Bostonians' pride well before they pinched their pocketbooks. To a people used to local authority, who thought themselves exemplary Britons, the distant edicts rankled. Were these literate, liberty-loving Britons somehow lesser subjects? Their patriotism curdled, a sense of wrong feeding a culture of rights. 'A plantation or colony, is a settlement of subjects in a territory
disjoined
or
remote
from the mother country,' Otis wrote, in 1764, when the Sugar Act came into being. In the first pamphlet asserting Colonial prerogatives, he articulated a principle that would overspread the Eastern Seaboard: 'Colonists are entitled to as
ample
rights, liberties, and privileges as the subjects of the mother country are, and in some respects, to
more
.'
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Benjamin Edes and John Gil, publishers of the Boston Gazette, printed Otis's pamphlet, which quickly spawned rejoinders from Caribbean writers whom the Sugar Act protected. The city's newspapers, long an engine of British patriotism, became a seedbed of American outrage. Through the Stamp Act crisis in 1765 and the military occupation of 1768 and the Massacre of 1770 and the dumping of the tea in 1773, Boston's presses kept the tide of outrage high, even when actual outrages ebbed. 'The Newspapers teemed with everything that could inflame the Passions,' complained the customs commissioner, Henry Hulton, stationed, for his sins, in Boston.
The passion was the point. And by the time a Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia in the fall of 1774, pamphleteers like Otis and pressmen like Edes and Gil had done a great deal to make the plight of Boston a matter of urgent continent-wide concern. 'Every Scrap of Letter or Newspaper from Boston is read here,'
The delegates were right to worry. For as the 2025 artists' collective said — artists who called themselves Silence Dogood — hell had been waiting here all along.