American Fun (7 page)

According to William Bradford, and later
Jonathan Edwards, young
men who made their lives at sea were devil-spawned rascals hell-bent on converting impressionable Calvinists into whoring, fighting, drunken brigands. (As if the salts cared.) In fact, young mariners in the Age of Sail, if they hoped to pull their weight on ship, had to be highly skilled, industrious workers—acrobats who swung from mast to boom, craftsmen forever trimming sails. They also had to be orchestral teammates who could operate what the maritime historian
Daniel Vickers calls the “
eighteenth century’s most complex machine.” Jack Tar was no slouch. But for his maverick attitude and cavalier sociability, he was definitely seductive, and a serious cause for Puritan concern.
Samuel Leech, an English seaman who would turn his coat for the United States during the
War of 1812, told of his life-changing encounter with Jack Tar when he was a lad on a stagecoach headed for Bristol. He was mesmerized by “
the antics of a wild, harebrained sailor” who amused the fellow passengers by climbing out the window, scrambling monkey-like onto the roof, and dancing a hornpipe jig up there as the speeding coach bounced its way downhill. “The more I saw of this reckless, thoughtless tar, the more enamored I became with the idea of sea life.”
The contagious fun of such simple-hearted tars nibbled at the edges of Puritan severity, evoking sheer liberty and easygoing camaraderie. More dangerously, their flair for serious fun got crowds engaged in their anti-British cause.

In 1747, Jack Tar’s resentment against six years of
impressment culminated in three days of waterfront rioting. On the chilly morning of November 16, a press gang under orders from Commodore
Charles Knowles bullied its way along the docks, seizing random sailors and entire crews from the decks of Boston’s commercial ships. The practice had been common enough in recent years, but in this case the commodore’s needs were high—he had to replace a host of deserters before sailing on to the
West Indies. They had already seized forty-six civilians, many of them legally exempt from impressment, when a crowd of maybe three hundred citizens, watermen mingled with other classes, closed in on the press gang and held them hostage. One prominent witness couldn’t decide if they were “
a Mob, or rather body of Men”—criminals, that is, or righteous citizens—for it was his sense that these tars had a single intention: liberating “their Captivated Fr[ien]ds.”

In the next three exultant days, thousands of Bostonians followed
these rebels’ lead, hitting the streets, banging cookery, breaking windows, dragging British officers from the doors of their homes, and beating an interfering sheriff who, according to one eyewitness, “
using Rigour instead of Mildness … rather irritated the populace from which he was glad to get off with a Broken Head, tho’ he was in danger of losing it.” Another sheriff, locked in the stocks, “afforded” the rioters “diversion.” Their most spectacular move was to burn a royal barge in the middle of Boston Common. Showing sober foresight, however, they chose not to torch it on
Governor Shirley’s lawn, for fear of burning the neighboring houses. Also, the barge itself was a
hoax—belonging not to the king but to a member of the mob.

“Sailors,” wrote
John Sherburne Sleeper, “seemed to have no thought beyond the present moment—and they often seek for pleasure in the indulgence of the sensual appetites, at the expense of all that is moral or intellectual.” (From
Tale of the Ocean and Essays for the Forecastle: Containing Matters and Incidents Humorous, Pathetic, Romantic and Sentimental,
1847. Courtesy of Special Collections, Nimitz Library, United States Naval Academy.)

It makes sense that a historian devoted to crowd action—
Paul A. Gilje, an expert on both riots
and
Jack Tars—should say that “
rioting” like this “can be fun.” He explains its thrills like a veteran of the crowd: “People can experience a personal sense of liberty; they can scream, shout obscenities with abandon, shatter windows, and stand entranced by the consuming flames of a bonfire. Both adrenaline and alcohol add to the excitement. Rumors spread wildly, and an electric tension fills the air that can only be released, like a bolt of lightning with a great
thunderclap, as the crowd goes into action.” And as Gilje puts it, nobody had more fun than Jack Tar: “the raw material for such social explosions could always be found on the waterfront. There, sailors with too little to do and a penchant for mischief were ready for fisticuffs.” For this same reason, of course, such volatile action wasn’t fun for everyone—certainly not for the victims and innocent bystanders at its business end.

As anarchic as the Knowles riots may have appeared, Jack Tar’s knack for rousing mixed crowds—for inciting them with feelings of liberty—would fuel the early American Revolution. If they hoped to be effective, Patriots had to show restraint, but they also had to fill the sails. And Patriots hated backing down from a fight. They took great joy in the rebel throng—its energy, its conflict, its chaos, its fellowship—for there was the molten core of liberty, but they also had to steer the ship through treacherous social shoal waters. In both cases, of course, this wild work was fun. It wasn’t until the 1760s, however, that Patriots took care to develop durable tactics and ethics that prevented their festivities from crumbling into violence. These measures themselves, when perfected, were among the Patriots’ finest achievements.

The Knowles rioters achieved their objectives—the governor fled and the sailors were released. But the “riot” probably resembled, to the casual observer, the violent mob activities called “
skimmington” or “
rough music” that had plagued New England since the early 1730s, often involving sexual mutilation and shaming coats of tar and feathers. Whereas these popular carnivals of violence usually did the bidding of magistrates and preachers against outlaws, adulterers, scolds, and witches, the Knowles riots were different. They (1) flouted restraint with playful zeal, (2) turned liberty and civility into brash celebration, and (3) defied the wishes of appointed civic leaders. This kind of partying was altogether new. All the same, as effective and restrained as this upheaval was, the crucible of democracy proved too hot to handle. Boston’s leadership called a town meeting, where they denounced “
such Illegal Criminal Proceedings” as the work of “Foreign Seamen Servants Negroes and other Persons of Mean and Vile condition”—even though, as various historians have noted, not one of the rioters arrested by these officials was a servant or an African American.

It was a common enough canard, however. Keen to the growing fears
of democracy, magistrates targeted blacks and various strangers when seeking scapegoats for white Americans’ wild behavior. The practice would flourish in the decades to come, when the convenience of pinning rebellion on “primitives” mingled with the excitement of whites going native.

JOHN ADAMS’S COUSIN
Samuel found his political heart in the iffy tactics of the Knowles riots.
Samuel Adams had thirteen years on John, and while both men were pear-shaped Puritans with similarly piercing eyes, their temperaments could not have been more different. If John pinched his pennies, Samuel shot his wad. If John was a snob who feared the so-called rabble and put his stock in the rule of law, Samuel answered to the will of the people. And if John was a wallflower who scoffed at dancing, Samuel was more like ornery
Zab Hayward: his knack was for whipping up the fun-loving crowd.

At twenty-five, the same age John was when he entered
Thayer’s tavern, Samuel was already writing radical tracts to legitimize the
Sons of Neptune. He and his secret society of friends published their views in the
Independent Advertiser,
a pioneering weekly that got behind Boston’s rebels and argued for the legality of the Knowles rioters’ actions. Young Adams’s many essays exclaimed the virtues of “Liberty.” One famous essay decried any citizen “
who despises his Neighbor’s Happiness because he wears ‘
a worsted Cap
or a
Leathern Apron
’ ” or who “
struts
immeasurably above the
lower
Size of People, and pretends to adjust the rights of Men by Distinctions of Fortune.” One can’t help but see his cousin strutting in these lines.

Samuel lived like a radical democrat, but he was nobody’s Thomas Morton. To be sure, in the words of the historian
Pauline Maier, “
No man was more aware than he of the
legacy of his Puritan forebears, more proud of their achievements, more determined to perpetuate them into the future.” What he plainly admired in these ancestors, however, was not their elitism and sectarian prejudice, nor their vicious
authoritarianism—habits which he himself eschewed. Samuel Adams’s trimmed-to-fit Puritan was a figure of steely purpose who rejected the aristocrat’s
luxurious pleasures—“
Folly,” frippery, “Dissipation,” theater—and raised the “
Cause of Liberty and Virtue” above the “self.” The austerity Adams modeled for fellow Patriots dried their powder for feistier pleasures, in particular wild thrills of mass resistance conducted with noisy, good-humored civility. The discipline he urged, moreover, a respect for life and property, allowed the people—or a wide swath of them—to celebrate their freedom within generous bounds, often
too
generous for his cousin’s comfort.

John Adams, looking back on the early Revolution, recalled Samuel as being “
zealous, ardent and keen in the Cause,” things one could not always say of John himself. But while he appreciated Samuel’s sympathy for colonial freedom and even his ability to penetrate the crowd, he regretted his disregard for “the Law and Constitution” and the fact that he put, at least in John’s mind, the needs of “the Public” above himself and his family. Still, he was cautious on the topic of Samuel. John may have held back out of Adams family loyalty, or Whig affiliation, or deference to the rabble-rouser who did his dirty work, but Samuel’s opponents weren’t nearly so polite. Governor
Thomas Hutchinson called him the “
Chief Incendiary.” Chief Justice
Peter Oliver, a die-hard Tory, fumed that Samuel Adams was “
all serpentine cunning” and “could transform his self into an Angel of Light with the weak Religionist”—while even worse yet, among the “abandoned,” like those godless souls on the docks, he would “appear with his cloven Foot & in his native Blackness of Darkness.”

But Samuel Adams’s greatest threat was his virtue, not his vice. He took care to rouse the citizens’ will, not to impose his own private interests. “
The true patriot,” he wrote, “will enquire into the causes of the fears and jealousies of his countrymen.” But unlike the cynical politician, who turns such research into campaign promises, the patriot keeps “fellow citizens awake to their grievances” and doesn’t “suffer them to be at rest, till the causes of their just complaints are removed.” Acting thus for the nation, and not for himself, the true patriot will “stir up the people.” Adams’s true patriots were
risk-taking citizens who engaged the people at the level of their passions. They acted a lot, for that matter, like the jigging
Zab Hayward. Whether rallying, dancing, joking, or singing,
true patriots were citizens whose love of the crowd helped them to sustain its rhythmic power.

Samuel’s bad behavior and even worse reputation (as a member of
Harvard’s Class of 1740, he was remembered for having “
spent rather lavishly” and once was fined for “drinking prohibited Liquors”) may have made him a hit among Boston’s common folk. Early in his career he formed deep friendships with citizens below his station, and neighbors often tapped him to resolve civil differences. As the biographer
John K. Alexander notes, “
No other caucus leader rubbed shoulders with ordinary and poor Bostonians to the extent that Samuel did.” Some of his popularity owes to his casual tax collecting, which he slyly attributed in 1765 to the “
difficulties” and “Confusion” created by the
Stamp Act. The captious Justice Oliver called Adams “
a Master of Vocal Musick” and claimed he used this pernicious talent to befriend the working class: “This genius he improved, by instituting singing Societys of Mechanicks, where he presided; & embraced such Opportunities to ye inculcating Sedition, ’till it had ripened into Rebellion.”
Song may have been the rum in Samuel Adams’s punch—indeed, his and
James Otis’s political festivities typically featured dozens of toasts and rousing liberty ballads—but his best social investment was the tankards he raised in the politically neglected waterfront bars. As Adams was remembered in
Sibley’s Harvard Graduates,
dockworkers “
had for years been complimented to have a man with a ‘public education’ spend his hours drinking, however abstemiously, with them.”

It’s uncertain how much time he spent drinking in the pubs, which, with or without his help, were becoming the Revolution’s staging areas.
Boston’s public houses—alehouses, coffeehouses, grogshops, and
taverns—had come a long way since 1681, that
annus horribilis
when the Puritan-dominated General Court shut nearly half of them down. As if invigorated by this act of proto-Prohibition, pubs had come back with a vengeance: by 1696 they had already tripled in number, by 1719 they had opened their doors to “slaves and servants,” and by 1760, the year John Adams entered
Thayer’s tavern, they were turning into his dreaded “nurseries of our legislators.” For, as gathering places of lower-class communities with booming dockside populations, pubs fast became the sites of a feisty, engaged, combative, informed, and unusually open public
discourse. Throughout the northeastern cities in the mid-eighteenth century, “
many Americans,” as
Carl Bridenbaugh puts it in his classic history, “were determined to play and play hard”—gambling, drinking, dancing, cavorting, and engaging in
blood sports like cockfighting and bull-baiting, transatlantic diversions that until recent decades had been severely regulated in these colonies. In Philadelphia in particular, what
Eric Foner calls a “
distinct lower-class subculture” defied local regulations and crossed racial lines for all kinds of fun, including “revels, masques, street-fighting and the celebration of the May Day—on which parties of young men and women spent the day feasting and dancing in the woods outside the city and fishermen danced around
maypoles.” The standing institution for such sporting citizens (when they weren’t lighting out for makeshift Ma-Re Mounts) was the lively tavern culture.