July 4th Reading: Bunker Hill by Nathaniel Philbrick

If you’re looking for some beach reading on July 4, I recommend Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution, by one of our most readable historians, Nathaniel Philbrick. I’m still working on the background section, but it is interesting to see how Massachusetts political sentiments have changed in the past couple of centuries and also how the professional historian’s view differs from what we learned in K-12 American history.

Here are some quotes from the book:

For most of the early eighteenth century the American colonies had enjoyed the benefits of a policy later known as “salutary neglect.” Left to do pretty much as they pleased, the colonies had been free to pursue economic growth unhindered by the onerous taxes paid by most British subjects. But by the end of the French and Indian War in 1763—a war fought, in large part, on the colonies’ behalf that had saddled Great Britain with a debt of about $22.4 billion in today’s U.S. currency—the ministry determined that it was time the colonies began to help pay for their imperial support.

Rather than propose a means of raising revenue that they deemed fair, the colonials were more than happy to direct their considerable energies toward opposing whatever plan the British ministry put forward.

The British ministry had a problem. The crown-chartered East India Company was burdened with too much tea. To eliminate that surplus, it was decided to offer the tea to the American colonies at the drastically reduced price of two shillings per pound—a third less than the original price. Unfortunately and unwisely, Parliament included in the reduced price a tiny tax of three pence per pound. This gave the patriots ideological grounds on which to object to an act that might otherwise have been viewed as a windfall for the colonial consumer.

Other, less noble reasons motivated the patriots. Many Boston merchants sold illegal Dutch tea procured from the Caribbean island of St. Eustatius (known today simply as Statia). Since the low-priced East India tea would undersell the smuggled Dutch tea, the merchants stood to lose significant income.

Boston’s most widely known poet was a twenty-one-year-old African enslaved woman named Phillis Wheatley, … She’d also used that fame to leverage a promise from her master, Daniel Wheatley, to grant her freedom. For the citizens of Boston, whose love of liberty did not prevent one in five families from owning slaves, … [she wrote] “How well the cry for liberty, and the reverse disposition for the exercise of oppressive power over others agree I humbly think it does not require the penetration of a philosopher to determine.”

Gage [a British official] left the king with the impression that he was ready “at a day’s notice” to return to America and implement whatever “coercive measures” were required. In actuality, he had deep reservations about returning to the colonies, particularly when it came to Massachusetts. “America is a mere bully,” he’d written back in 1770, “from one end to the other, and the Bostonians by far the greatest bullies.”

Boston was known for its love of liberty, its piety, and its prostitutes. In the town’s hilly northwestern corner was a lightly settled neighborhood that the soldiers dubbed Mount Whoredom. One afternoon at the end of July at an establishment known as “Miss Erskine’s,” fifteen British officers “committed,” John Andrews wrote, “all manner of enormous indecencies by exposing their anteriors, as well as their posteriors, at the open windows and doors, to the full view of the people . .

Instead of the selfless patriots we were taught about, Philbrick finds tax-dodging slave-owning patrons of prostitutes.

Separately, taxing the middle class to fund public works stimulus projects is apparently not a new idea:

The Bostonians had objected to paying a tax on British tea, but they were more than willing to fund an expensive public works project if it helped the town get through the crisis [the British Navy sealing off Boston Harbor]. Under the direction of the town’s selectmen, municipal funds were used to hire jobless mechanics, artisans, and dockworkers to build ships, clean up the wharves, and repair roads. John Andrews complained that while the poor had the town to relieve them and the rich had their savings and rents, small merchants such as himself had nothing. “[The] burden falls heaviest, if not entirely, upon the middle people among us,” he wrote.

If you liked In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (highly recommended!) you’ll probably like this book.

Happy 4th of July to all readers!