Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Impressions
Tonight I appear for the first time before a Boston audience—4,000 critics.
—Mark Twain, 1869
legacy survives to this day. A concrete
reminder is Harvard College's original
(1636) mission: preparing young men to
be ministers. In 1659, the town fathers
officially banned Christmas (the town chil-
dren apparently had second thoughts—
records show that the holiday was back in
favor by the 1680s). Another early exam-
ple of Puritanical stuffiness was recorded
in 1673. One Captain Kemble was sen-
tenced to confinement in the stocks for 2
hours because he kissed his wife on their
front steps—on a Sunday. He had been
away for 3 years.
THE ROAD TO REVOLUTION
The Crown began exerting tighter con-
trol over the colonies as early as the
1680s. Over the years, laws increasing
taxes and restricting trading activities led
to trouble. The situation came to a head
after the French and Indian War (known
in Europe as the Seven Years' War) ended
in 1763.
Having helped fight for the British, the
independent-minded colonists were out-
raged when the Crown expected them to
help pay off the war debt. The Sugar Act
of 1764 imposed tariffs on sugar, wine,
and coffee, mostly affecting those
engaged in trade; the 1765 Stamp Act
taxed everything printed, from legal docu-
ments to playing cards, affecting virtually
everyone. Boycotts, demonstrations, and
riots ensued. The repeal of the Stamp Act
in 1766 was too little, too late—the revo-
lutionary slogan “No taxation without
representation” had already helped rouse
the colonists to action.
The Townshend Acts of 1767 imposed
taxes on paper, glass, and tea, sparking more
unrest. The following year, British troops
occupied Boston. Perhaps inevitably,
tension led to violence. In the Boston
Massacre of 1770, five colonists were
killed in a scuffle with the redcoats. The
first to die was a former slave named Cris-
pus Attucks; another was 17-year-old
Samuel Maverick. The site, represented
by a circle of cobblestones, sits on what is
now State Street, and the colonists' graves
are nearby, in the Old Granary Burying
Ground on Tremont Street.
HELP YOURSELVES TO TEA
Parliament repealed the Townshend Acts
but kept the tea tax and, in 1773, granted
the nearly bankrupt East India Company
a monopoly on the tea trade with the
colonies. The idea was to undercut the
price of smuggled tea, but the colonists
weren't swayed. In December, three
British ships sat at anchor in Boston Har-
bor (roughly where present-day Atlantic
Avenue meets the Evelyn Moakley
Bridge), waiting for their cargo of tea to
be unloaded. Before that could happen,
the rabble-rousing Sons of Liberty, stirred
up after a spirited public meeting at the
Old South Meeting House, boarded the
ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into
the harbor. The “Boston Tea Party”
became a rallying point for both sides,
and the meeting house stages a re-cre-
ation of the inflammatory rally every
December.
The British responded by closing the
port until the tea was paid for and forcing
Bostonians to house the soldiers who
began to flood the community. They
soon numbered 4,000 in a town of
16,000. Mutual distrust ran high—Paul
Revere wrote of helping form “a commit-
tee for the purpose of watching the move-
ments of the British troops.” When the
royal commander in Boston, General
