Passionate Public 77

8/6/2019 Passionate Public 77

1/22

Philip A. Stephenson

Master of the Arts Thesis

Communications Ph.D. ProgramColumbia University School of Journalism

The Place of Passion: Mob Action asUnreasonin the Revolutionary American Public Sphere

There is no humanity without passion, emotion, illogic, and unreason, yet at the

same time there is no civilization without reason and logic. These two facts of human

collective social interaction are ubiquitous, continuous, and dynamically interactive.

These tendencies can be observed in private and family life, as well as in public or

governmental life. Given this description, which might be seen as self-evident, the

popular academic notion of Jurgen Habermas public sphere (as set forth in his 1962

publication, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, popularized in the

English speaking world by means of a 1989 translation) could, and has been criticized

time and again though, usually in terms of its omission of large swathes of non-

landowning, non-male, and non-white voices.

This paper was initially conceived as a move towards critiquing the Habermasian

framing of the public sphereespecially that sphere during the lead up to the American

movement for independence from the Britishspecifically insofar as it neglects the place

of passionate, emotional, violent, illogical, extreme, or mob-driven public mobilizations

of the day, which would be ill-characterized as the sort of reasonable, rational discourse,

associated with Habermas conception of the public sphere. Indeed, historians like David

Waldstreicher have already criticized Habermas for creating a framework that

encourages historians to think in terms of neatly-marked off centuries that position the

1


2/22

founders era as a golden age of reasoned political discourse(Brooke, 54).

However, the use of such a critique is limited. It serves little purpose to simply

castigate a body of work. Instead, we will herein examine the ways in which this

conception of a public sphere can shed light on certain constituent elements of the

American Revolution, including the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Massacre, as well

as certain contemporaneous mob actions in the colonies, including tar and featherings and

various property incursions. Such an examination, it is hoped, can provide a richer

understanding of the place such mob actions (and here, no negative connotation is meant

in the phrase mob action, it is merely descriptive) in the public life of the colonists, and

the relationship between the importance of said actions, and the implied need for a more

Habermasian public sphere. We might even venture answers to questions surrounding the

terms of reason itself. Where and under what terms does reason retain primacy in the

public sphere? Must reason be reciprocal to be sustainable? Can what we even mean by

reason change over time?

To begin, we require a definition of the public sphere as formulated by Habermas.

He wrote that by public sphere he meant first of all a domain of our social life in which

such a thing as public opinion can be formed. Additionally, such a domain should be

open in principle to all citizens. Citizens constitute this public sphere in every

conversation in which private persons come together to form a public, and as such a

public these now collectively constituted persons deal with matters of general interest

without being subject to coercion. This lack of coercion, would be the guarantee that

2


3/22

they may assemble and unite freely, and express and publicize their opinions freely.

(Habermas, 231)

With regards to the formation and function of a functional public sphere in the

colonies, the question becomes: what was the situation of the British colonists

(henceforth Americans) in the North American colonies during the 1760s and 1770s,

in the years leading up to the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution? Was there,

in fact, a state of affairs in which a Habermasian public sphere could exist? If so, what

shape did it take? If not, what operated in its stead?

Let us begin by painting a picture of the state of mind of these colonists who

would be the participants in any public sphere. It must be noted that by the 1760s the

governmental and economic relationship between England and the American colonies

were already troubled, and had been so for some time. Even as early as thirty years

previously with the institution of the Molasses Act of 1733, merchants and shippers had

become habitual circumventors of import taxes through smuggling so widespread it

might be said it was institutionalized. Smuggling, was just another way of doing

business, from the lowest level retailers secreting untaxed goods in storage to large scale

merchants like John Hancock smuggling contraband by the boatload (Carp, 35). The

Molasses Act, and the Navigation Acts at large were not direct taxes on the colonies, but

rather price-rigging measures calculated to privilege trade with the British West Indies,

over other nationstrade rivalswith Great Britain. Given that the British had no real

means enforcing such laws, ignoring them became common practice. (Griswold, 5) While

3


4/22

these means of circumvention and resistance did not rise to the level of mob action, as

they would in the 1760s and 1770s, we might note that just as mob violence represents

a rupture of the state of lawand potentially, a public embrace of what we will call

unreason, these earlier, illegal operations could well have contributed to a spirit of, if

not lawlessness and unreason, then at the very least, the continued popular sense that the

British had no right to tax Americans. Furthermore, these practices illustrate the fact that,

even decades before the crucial acts of rebellion, the default presumption on the part of

the colonists was that the laws of England were often without merit, and always to be

ignored and circumvented, if at all possible.

But there were even more profound reasons for American opposition to British

taxation. From the late 17th century, when sustainable British colonies took hold in New

England until the conclusion of the French and Indian (or Seven Years) War, the crown

had largely practiced what has been characterized as salutary neglect of the colonies. In

practice that meant that the Americans were largely left to their own devices (Griswold,

5). But at the conclusion of the war, with the debt incurred in the conflict, the crown

turned to the colonies for remunerative revenue. However, during the century of

attenuated British oversight, the colonists had evolvedor indeed devolvedtowards a

system of localized autonomous governance. The arrangement bore close resemblance to

the original British conceptualization of Parliament, wherein individual representatives,

landholders in the region they represented, maintained access to the royal courts of

Parliamentspecifically on behalf oftheir constituents at home. This access was

reciprocated by financial support of the crown on the part of these constituents. However,

4


5/22

over the same intervening century, Parliamentary practice in England had evolved in

precisely the opposite direction. Parliament as a collective was seen to represent Britain

as a unitary nation. That is, there was no connection between the specific locality from

which the representative hailed and their responsibility for advocacy in the Parliament.

Each representative was to represent the best interests of Britain as a whole. To the

colonists, the fact that they lacked representation in the British Parliament, who levied

taxes on their trade imports, meant the taxation itself was illegitimate. To the British, for

whom all subjects were legitimately represented by the Parliament as a collective, they

had every right to levy taxes on the Americans (Bailyn, 161-5). It is useful at this point to

note Habermas further definition of the relationship of a functioning political public

sphere to a system of governance. Only when the exercise of public authority has

actually been subordinated to the requirement of democratic publicness, he wrote, does

the political public sphere acquire an institutionalized influence on the government, by

way of the legislative body (Habermas, 232). That is, as things stood in the North

American colonies in the 1760s, there was an ongoing decoupling of the governmental

authority from the democratic will of the public, and this divorce was rooted in this

disagreement over the proper role of parliamentary representation and said

representations relationship to the right to tax. The Americans public sphere no longer

exercised a meaningful influence on their governance. The issue, over time, had become

less about revenue and more about this central philosophical disconnect.

Thus, things began to unravel more rapidly beginning, in part, with the Sugar Act

of 1764, but reaching a critical point in 1765 with the passage of the Stamp Act. The

5


6/22

Sugar Act meant that the Molasses Act and British taxes at large were finally to be given

teeth. No more would the Crown tolerate the widespread scofflaw smuggling practices.

The initiative met a hostile reception. The previous year, an alarm had been raised by

pamphleteer Jonathan Mayhew, in response to East Apthorps 1763 tract on the Church

of Englands Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Mayhew, like so many

Americans, had a profound fear of British interference with the exercise of religion in the

colonies. Such efforts were afoot, wrote Mayhew, and the establishment of an American

bishopric would lead to the intertwining of religion and government, and an even more

severe constriction of American freedoms at large (Bailyn, 5,96). With this outcry still

fresh in the minds of the populace, and Americans widely and fundamentally questioning

the legitimacy of British taxation altogether, the introduction of the Sugar Act was

predictably ill-received. The Sugar Act lowered the tax on molasses by half, but at the

same time introduced sweeping new enforcement measures. Customs officials who had

habitually deserted their posts in the past were ordered back and emboldened with more

authority, including immunity to prosecution for any damage incurred in the examination

and taxing of cargo. The Navys power to inspect American ships was also strengthened.

At the same time the vice-admiralty courts power to prosecute customs violations was

increased and writs of assistancesearch warrantswere more widely initiated (Wood).

Opposition to the Stamp Act preceded its passage. The colonial legislatures in

Massachusetts, Virginia, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut sent

letters of protest, resolutions, and protestations to Parliament in England. Boycotts of

British goods were initiated (Labaree, 16). Nonetheless the Act passed, in March of 1765,

6


7/22

and within months protesters had taken to the streets of New England en masse. The

boldness of the mob action at this point is particularly of note. Boston had fallen on hard

times. The city had gone from being the largest city on the continent at the turn of the

century to the third largest. The strictures of both the Molasses and the Sugar Acts had

strangled trade with the French West Indies. Rival port towns gained economic ground.

The French and Indian War had taken its toll, swelling the ranks of the widowed and

orphaned, while disturbing trade routes and leading to supply shortages (Carp, 32). The

time was ripe for a wedding between wealthier mercantilist and poorer working class

economic interests against a backdrop of philosophical and literate opposition to these

British initiatives.

On August 14th a crowd in Bostoninterestingly invoking the traditional

practices of Popes Day, normally celebrated in Novemberhung an effigy of the state

stamp distributor, Andrew Oliver from an Elm Tree in the South End. When Governor

Thomas Hutchinson threatened the removal of the effigy, the crowd defiantly stationed

guards at the tree. In time they marched the effigy to King Street, to a new building

owned by Oliver, rumored to be the intended stamping house. On arriving, they destroyed

it, continued on to Olivers home and destroyed his outhouse and gardens, raided his

liquor, threw around his furniture, and answered the Governors protestations with bricks

and stones (Griswold, 19). Oliver resigned his post the very next day. He later reneged

and that winter was summoned to the same tree by the Loyal Nine whereupon he gave up

the post (Griswold, 21).

7


8/22

By the 26th of August crowds would attack three more officials. A vice-admiralty

court judges court records were seized and burned. The comptrollers home was beset by

a mob. Finally, Governor Hutchinsons home at Garden Court was attacked. A mob

wielding axes and clubs broke into the home, tearing fixtures from the walls and shingles

from the roof. The wine cellar was raided and the residence robbed of cash, china,

furnishings, and clothing. One person was arrested. He was released after the sheriff

heard rumors of plans for further mob action in protest of the arrest. The leaders of the

mob were acting in concert with a group of high-end artisans and merchants known at

the Loyal Nine who later became part of the Sons of Liberty (Carp, 37). This is

particularly interesting because the action marked a noteworthy unification between the

lower class and disadvantaged populationwho might be expected to resort to mob

violence, lacking other meaningful outlets for their frustration and disapproval, and who

characteristically took part in raucous public actions like Popes Dayand the skilled

middle and upper class members of the Loyal Nine (and, in time, the Sons of Liberty)

many of whom were learned, or printers themselves, and thus had access to a more

genteel and long-functioning public sphere well-governed by reason. Nonetheless the

disparate groups found common interest, power, and support with one another against

their mutual enemy, the British.

The Stamp Act was repealed in 1766, though the repeal was accompanied by the

passage of the Declaratory Act, which maintained Britains right to tax the Americans.

Despite this petulant legislative caveat, the colonists could not have failed to take note of

the power of mob action and the alliance of the property owning, learned, and skilled

8


9/22

classes with the working class. Later that year, school boys came to the assistance of

merchant Daniel Malcolm, as he was accosted by customs officials. The city population

was on notice and vigilant in their mutual defense. When the Townshend Acts were

passed in 1767, the colonists reacted quickly and in organized fashion. These taxes made

no pretense of regulating trade, and dedicated portions of the revenue to be generated to

the installation of civil servants with authority in America, but not dependent upon the

purse strings of colonial legislatures.

The persistent levying and enforcement of these taxes on the colonists, effectively

divorced themfrom their governance. While the laws may have been on the books

previously, it was only with their enforcement that the functioning colonial public sphere

became effectively impotent. It continued to be a public sphere, with a reasonableness

appropriate to the time, but it was not an effective political public sphere because it

lacked institutionalized influence on the government. At this point, the public idea that

a community must be directly represented in its sovereign oversight that had evolved

independently in the century of British laissez faire administrationa sensibility which

had emerged haphazardly, incompletely, and insensibly, from the chaotic factionalism

of colonial politics (Bailyn, 162)quickly became the rallying cry of Americans across a

multitude of social and class divides. That notion cried out for expression, recognition,

and indeed power, which it gained in time, to a large extent through demonstrative,

unruly, passionate, and violent acts of unreason.

That is not to say that violent mob actions were a foregone conclusion. Certainly

9


10/22

these Americans opposed the institution of these measures on the part of the British, but

they had utilized less demonstrative, rebellious, and violent means to address these issues

in the past. Particularly during the response to the institution of the Townshend Acts in

1767, popular movements arose to produce homespun cloth instead of imported textiles

and to swear off imported finery, taxed and untaxed, that would send revenues to Britain

(Labaree, 22). These boycotts and appeals to Parliament contributed to the partial repeal

of the Townshend Acts in 1770.

Additionally, and well in keeping with the active literary life of the time,

pamphlets and pseudonymous published letters provided an ongoing outlet for pre-

Revolutionary and non-violent protestations against the exercise of British power in the

colonies. Pamphlets, in particular, owing to their affordability, portability, and flexibility

took on an important role in spreading burgeoning notions of freedom, liberty, and

righteous opposition to the improper exercise of British authority. By the 1760s, bursts

of pamphlet publication regularly announced and accompanied the major events of the

day. The Stamp Act touched off a heavy flurry of pamphleteering in which basic

American positions in constitutional theory were staked out; its repeal was celebrated by

the publication of at least eleven thanksgiving sermons, all of them crowded with

political theory; [and] the Townshend Duties led to another intense burst of

pamphleteering (Bailyn, 4). Pamphlets also served as a back-and-forth ongoing chain

developing arguments in public (of which Mayhews response to Apthorp is but one

example) and, as time went on, the publication of pamphlets would commemorate

important events including the landing of the Pilgrims and the repeal of the Stamp Act.

10


11/22

Despite the repeal of the Stamp Act and the partial repeal of the Townshend

Duties, the tax on tea remained, and the customs officials crackdown on smuggling

continued. In 1768, after John Hancock stared down a pair of customs officers intent on

investigating the cargo of his shipLydia on suspicion of smuggling, the tidewaiters (as

such officials were known) retaliated by seizing Hancocks sloop, theLiberty. In turn a

crowd of 300 Bostonians attacked customs officers. They threw bricks and rocks at the

officials, singling the local collector Joseph Harrison and his son out for particular abuse,

marching to his house and breaking all its windows. As a direct result armed redcoats

were sent in September of that year, to patrol the streets of the city, maintain order, and

protect those tasked with enforcing the British taxes (Carp, 39). Some 4,000 troops were

stationed in a town with a population of little more than 16,000 (Young, 36).

As it happened, it was just this sort of measure that the colonists had been

particularly set against. [T]o a populace steeped in the literature of eighteenth-century

English politics the presence of troops in a peaceful town had such portentous meaning

that resistance instantly stiffened. It was not so much the physical threat of the troops that

affected the attitudes of the Bostonians; it was the bearing their arrival had on the likely

tendency of events. Viewed in the perspective of Trenchards famous tracts on standing

armies and of the vast derivative literature on the subject that flowed from the English

debates of the 1690s, these were not simply soldiers assembled for police duties; they

were precisely what history had proved over and over again to be the prime movers of o

the process by which unwary nations lose [their liberty] (Bailyn, 112). It would be the

11


12/22

occupation of Boston by the redcoats which truly and firmly melded the interests of the

merchants with the will of the people at large for the duration of the Revolutionary

period. In short order, the colonists would receive another blow to any remaining public

trust that their differences with the British might be bridged with reason, communication,

and right governance. It became well known to the colonists early in 1769 that John

Wilkes, a stalwart, independent opponent of encroaching government power (Bailyn,

111) who had opposed writs of assistance, the government confiscation of private

property, and other measures also opposed by the colonists had been denied his position

in Parliament despite being elected four times successively. Legal, reasonable means of

redress seemed less and less possible.

The colonists, at this point, were not enjoying anything like a functioning political

public sphere. Though city assemblies and colonial legislatures continued to meet, and

citizens enjoyed numerous forums, both physical and published, wherein they could

come together to form public opinion, they were decidedly and continually subject

to coercion, in the form of the ever present redcoats. The public authority exercised by

the Crown was decidedly not subordinated to democratic publicness, as the decisions

that governed the lives of the colonists were made half a world away by a body which

they had no legitimate influence over. But we are not moving to simply label the situation

as falling outside of the bounds of the Habermasian public sphere. Rather, this time forms

an interstitial space wherein the inefficacy of the colonists political public sphere had the

chance to become more and more evident to more and more among them. Previously, as

the British largely ignored their day-to-day affairs, through public assembly, voting

12


13/22

bodies, pamphlets and even newspapers at the turn of the 18th century, the colonists had

enjoyed a vibrant public sphere with direct purchase upon their mechanisms of

governanceself-governance. Through the successful rollback of certain taxes and

regulations following vocal, vehement, and more than occasionally violent protests, it

became evident that the only way to reinsert their public opinion into public authority

was through abrogation of that authority. They had to compelthe British to heed their

will, and if that failed, they may well be forced to compel the British to release them

entirely. Thus, oddly, it is the very willingness to resort to unreason which relegitimated

an otherwise impotent public sphere at this crucial point in American history. To have

continued pursuing reasonable meansprotestations in printed newspapers and

pamphlets, petitions, resolves, and resolutions sent from colonial legislatures and town

meetings to the British Parliament, and boycotts of imported goodswould have been

insufficient. The events that followed illustrate this concept well.

In January of 1770, William Molineux incited a crowd to follow him to the

houses of some local importersincluding Governor Hutchinsons sonswho refused to

agree to non-importation of certain British goods. Molineux intended to compel their

compliance or abuse them for their intractability. Ultimately, despite the protestations of

more moderate voices, Samual Adams led the crowd to confront the Hutchinsons. No

violence resulted that day, but it should be noted that the crowd action was not

peremptorily quelled by the ready prospect of British military intervention. The threat of

death did not prevent the mob from formingunreason was the only voice the public

had.

13


14/22

Just the next month, on the 22nd of February a crowd of men and boys surrounded

an importers shop blocking the passage of customers. A neighbor, Ebenezer Richardson,

stepped in, arguing with some of the men, trying to knock down a protest sign they had

posted in front of the shop. When Richardson retreated, some of those assembled

followed him to his residence throwing stones and fruit. Eventually Richardson fired a

musket blast of swanshot from one of his windows into the crowd. Samuel Gore (aged

19) and Christopher Seider (aged 12) were seriously injured. Gore healed up well enough

to participate in the Tea Party three years later. Seider perished. Molineux, also present

that day, was barely able to stop them from stringing Richardson up.(Carp, 41) A week

later, at the boys funeral, 500 boys marched behind the coffin, followed by 2,000 adults.

The governor termed it the largest [funeral] perhaps ever known in America (Young,

37). Richardson was found guilty of murder. He was subsequently pardoned by the

Crown (Young, 49).

It became common for civilians and soldiers to insult and harass one another in

the streets. By March 2nd, tension had erupted in a huge (Carp, 41), bitter (Young,

37) fight between workers and soldiers at Grays ropewalk. Those resentmentssome

say the soldiers were badly beatenled to a fatal encounter two nights later. The account

given by an eyewitness, the shoemaker George Herbert Twelves Hewes, said the whole

matter was started over an unpaid barbers bill, which the barbers apprentice had sought

to collect, only to be abused by the indebted officer, which resulted in a crowd of boys

assembling in support of the apprentice (Young, 37). Other accounts indicate that he was

14


15/22

a wigmakers apprentice, who was struck by the officer in rebuke of his collection

attempt (Carp, 42). In any case, the assembled boys began pelting the soldiers with

snowballs, then bricks. Eventually, the fire alarms were rung and hundreds of clamoring

people filled the streets backing the boys up. One soldier was hit with a thrown club, fell

and fired upon regaining his feet. Others followed. Five citizens were killed, the soldiers

were subsequently removed from Boston to Castle Island in the harbor, where they

remained until 1774. Eventually six soldiers were acquitted and two found guilty of

manslaughter. The event came to be known as the Boston Massacre.

The years between 1770 and 1773 were said to be years of relative quiet, mostly

due to the end of boycotts of British goods the breakup of non-importation in the autumn

of 1770, and hesitance on the part of the British to engage in further provocation of the

colonists on the heels of the Boston Massacre (Labaree, 80). Despite this Pause in

Politics (Carp, 45) Parliament had not given up on the principle of their right to tax the

colonists and the tea tax remained in effect. During these years dissidents in and around

Boston assembled and organized. Some exercise their power in official bodies like the

House of Representatives or the council[others] voiced their arguments in open town

meetings (Carp, 44) Regular gatherings were hosted in Bostons Faneuil Hall.

The massacre had radicalized much of Bostons lower classes. After the massacre

and more and more frequently in the following years, the traditional property barsthe

requirement that citizens in attendance of town meetings in Faneuil Hall own from

twenty to forty pounds worth of property in order to participate (Young, 31,39)were

15


16/22

lowered. The lower classes were indeed being brought into the fold with their wealthier

fellow Americans for the purpose of the inchoate Revolution. Imperial governors found

the independent spirit of these meetings intolerable. Governor William Shirley wrote

that the principal cause of the Mobbish turn in this Town, is its Constitution; by which

the Management of it is devolvd upon the populace assembled in their Town Meetings

[where] the meanest Inhabitantsoutvote the Gentlemen, Merchants, Substantial Traders

and all the better part of the Inhabitants. (Carp, 44)

Finally, in 1773, a desperately cash-strapped and tea-flush East India Company

petitioned Parliament for the right to sell their surplus tea directly to the colonies without

paying import duties on the tea. The move would circumvent the customary semi-annual

tea auctions in London, cutting out the middlemen and allowing the Company to

undersell smuggled tea. The Company would then designate individually chosen

merchants to function as dedicated consignees of the direct-sold tea. But the clause

describing the exclusion of the import duties was somehow dropped from the text of the

proposal before its adoption by Parliament (Griswold, 8), to the enduring alteration of the

English-speaking world.

Thus it came to pass that as the tea was shipped to the colonies, one of the

consignees chosen by the East India Company, a Richard Clark, was roused from his bed

at one in the morning on November 2nd, 1773 by loud pounding on his front door. When

he called out to those on his threshold, asking what they wanted, they told him, We have

an important letter for youfrom the country (Griswold, 1). When his servant retrieved

16


17/22

the missive, it was revealed to be an anonymous letter (signed merely O.C.) claiming to

know from good authority that tea was consigned to him by the Company which is

destructive to the happiness of every well-wisher in the country. The letter furthermore

demanded that he appear that very day at noon at the Liberty Tree (the tree where

Oliver had been hung in effigy) to make public resignation of your commission.

(Griswold, 2; Labaree, 109) It seemed that the mob was on the move once again.

After Clarke and his fellow consignees did not deign to appear that day, they were

accosted by the mob-ility (Griswold, 34) at Clarkes counting room and warehouse.

After a protracted shouting match the crowd attempted to rush into the building, but the

consignees inside succeeded in bolting the door. The crowd then took the doors off of

their hinges, rushed inside and nearly caused the staircase to break with their weight.

After a stalemate with the cane-wielding employees of Clarke, the crowd retreated to

berate them from outside of the building (Griswold, 35). Clarkes home was attacked by a

mob after his son fired a pistol shot into the air above a group of horn-blowing protestors

outside (Griswold, 50) Numerous town meetings resulted over the intervening weeks. It

was suggested that the tea be landed without duty and kept in storage until the Parliament

and the Company could be prevailed upon to excuse it from the tax. No agreement could

be reached. The consignees were asked to return the tea to Britain, but they refused to

incur the shipping costs, or even to do so whilst sending along a formal statement of

protest against those who had obstructed them in their attempt to carry out the

Companys plan (Griswold, 58). But on Saturday, November 27 th, the first of the three

vessels bearing the tea arrived.

17


18/22

By the 13th of December, the colonists having firmly resolved at a meeting at Old

South Meeting House (Faneuil Hall couldnt hold the thousands who showed up) to

refuse the landing of the ship, and Governor Hutchinson, for his part, firmly refusing to

grant permission for the teas departure back to England, planning began for the

destruction of the tea. It was decided that the act was to be lead by young men, not much

known in town and not liable to be easily recognized, in Hewes words (Young, 43). So

it was that on the night of the 16th, between 80 and 100 men, most dressed as Indians,

others faces obscured by coal dust met at Griffins Wharf to board the ships and destroy

the tea. By Hewes account, it was an orderly proceeding and the men were split into

three groups, one for each ship. Hewes was promoted on the spot to boatswainon the

strength of this skill as a whistlerand told to demand the hatch keys from the captain as

well as a dozen candles. That done, the chests were removed, split open with tomahawks

and dumped in the harbor (Young, 44). The only glitch, apparently, was that one man

tried to steal a bit of the tea, shoving it into his coat lining.

Another of Hewes adventures around this time also sheds light on the function of

unreason as the colonists reinvented their public sphere under British boot heels. The

very next month, when traveling down Forestreet in Boston, Hewes witnessed one John

Malcolm abusing and threatening to bludgeon a boy porter bearing a sled. He interceded

on the silent boys behalf, urging that Mr. Malcolm not strike him, for as Hewes said, if

he struck him with that weapon he must have killed him out-right (Young, 46). This

Malcolm already had a bad reputation as a royalist, having traveled to North Carolina to

18


19/22

quell a farmers rebellion. He was also a known customs informer and had been subjected

to a genteel tar and feathering in the past. Theyd let him keep his clothes on. Upon his

protestation, Malcolm damned Mr. Hewes, called him a vagabond, and said he would let

him know he should not speak to a gentleman in the street (Young, 48). Hewes replied

that he was in as good credit in the town as was Malcolm. Malcolm called him a liar in

return. Hewes pointed out that hed at least never been tarred and feathered. Malcolm, in

turn viciously struck Hewes. He would bear an indentation in his skull for the rest of his

days. A warrant was sworn out for Malcolms arrest, but a crowd seized him from his

home that evening and tarred and feathered him, stripped, this time, to buff and

breeches (Young, 49), forcing him to recant his abuse of Hewes under threat of their

cutting his ears off. This anecdote is particularly illustrative of the erosion of social

separation during this period. Though Hewes was a financially unsuccessful cobbler, his

bona fides as a patriot were well superior in the eyes of his fellow citizens to the

supposedly superior status of a demonstrated loyalist and customs informant, gentleman

though he may have been.

It was through such public mob actions that an otherwise crippled political public

sphere reasserted its authority in pre-Revolutionary America. It is a peculiar characteristic

of such unreasonable acts, that in this context, they were able to reconstitute a functioning

public sphere in a manner which prefigured the establishment of novel laws and practices

in the new nation, calculated to foster and protect a functioning public sphere, and a

system of governance that maintained institutionalized channels to reflect the public will.

19


20/22

To close, it is interesting to note that this active mob-ility in turn became a

cause for concern for the founders as the colonies solidified their relationship with one

another on the national level. It would be a most important task for the founders in the

following years to find a way to put the genie of ready mob mobilization (and its

connection to being heard and represented that the colonists no doubt carried) back into

the bottleto channel the will to be heard in a more trusting arrangement between the

governing and the governed.

As respects statues of King George III which had been torn down by Americans

in the colonies, historian Trish Loughran had this to say:

As the 1780s drew to a close, post-Revolutionary elites scrambled to close the Pandoras box of a rebellion

powered by embodied mobilizations like the crowd action referenced by these statues[By this time] the

idea of the people gathered and embodiedeven locallywas no longer the solution it had been during theheyday of colonial resistance (in crowd actions like the Boston Tea Party or the toppling of King George)

By the 1780s, elites who were gathering at Annapolis and Philadelphia to rethink the structure of the

Confederation were beginning to ask questions about the possibility, the necessity, and the desirability of

those Enlightenment models of rational, embodied collectivity that had been championed by Paine and

Jeffersonand epitomized by Rousseaus sanguine fantasy of the people gathering peacefully out of doors

to see each other as they participated in celebratory festivals that would, in his ideal (small) republic, serve

as the basis for communal virtue. (Loughran, 210) Italics mine.

It is particularly resonant that Loughrans invocation of Rousseau parallels a sort

of Habermasian notion of the primacy of rationality in the public sphere. But as we have

seen, the place of rationality and reason in the public sphere has its limits. Absent any

other means of meaningful exercise of power in a polity, a civil public sphere can very

quickly become a violent sphere of revolutionary mob activity. It is not enough that a

domain exist for the formation of public opinion, for if no reasonable, legal means, of

articulating actual influence and power on the part of its constituent interests, a public can

very easily constitute itself as a mob.

20


21/22

WORK CITED:

H abe r m as , J r ge n . O n soc i e t y and po l i t i c s : a r e ade r .

21


22/22

Bos t on , M A : Be ac on P r e ss , 2 0 0 5 . P r i n t .

L o u g h r a n , T r i sh . T h e r e p u b l i c i n p r i n t : p r i n t c u l t u r e i n t h e a g e

o f U . S . n a t i o n b u i l d i n g , 1 7 7 0 - 1 8 7 0 . N e w Y o r k , N Y: C o l u m b i a

U n i v P r , 2 0 0 7 . P r i n t .

L a b a r e e , B e n j a m i n W o o d s . T h e B o s t o n T e a P a r t y . B o s t o n , M A :

N o r t h e a s t e r n U n i v P r , 1 9 7 9 . P r i n t .

Yo u n g , A l f r e d F a b i a n . T h e S h o e m a k e r a n d t h e Te a P a r t y :

M e m o r y a n d t h e A m e r i c a n R e v o l u t i o n . B o s t o n , M A : B e a c o n P r ,

2 0 0 0 . P r i n t .

G r i s w o l d , W e s l e y S . T h e n i g h t t h e R e v o l u t i o n b e g a n : t h e B o s t o n T e a P a r t y , 1 7 7 3 . B r a t t l e b o r o , V T : T h e S t e p h e n G r e e n e

P r e s s , 1 9 7 2 . P r i n t .

B a i l y n , B e r n a r d . T h e I d e o l o g i c a l O r i g i n s o f t h e A m e r i c a n R e v o l u t i o n . C a m b r i d g e , M A : B e l k n a p / H a r v a r d U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s ,1 9 6 7 . P r i n t .

W ood , G o r don S . The A m e r i c an R e v o l u t i on : a h i s t o r y .M ode r n L i b r a r y , 2 0 0 3 . P r i n t .

C a r p , B e n j a m i n L . D e f i a n c e o f t h e P a t r i o t s : T h e B o s t o n Te a

P a r t y a n d t h e M a k i n g o f A m e r i c a . N e w H a v e n , C T : Ya l e U n i v

P r , 2 0 1 0 . P r i n t .

B r o o k e , J o h n L . " R e a s o n a n d P a s s i o n i n t h e P u b l i c S p h e r e :

H a b e r m a s a n d t h e C u l t u r a l H i s t o r i a n s . " J o u r n a l o f

I n t e r d i s c i p l i n r y H i s t o r y . 2 9 . 1 ( 1 9 9 8 ) : 4 3 - 6 7 . P r i n t .

Documents

Passionate Public 77