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Massachusetts On The Brink

© Brian Tubbs

When Oxenbridge Thacher, upon hearing of Virginia's defiance of the Stamp Act, implied that Bostonians lacked boldness, he had no idea how wrong he was. Thanks to Patrick Henry, Virginia miight have made the first major political statement in the fight against the Stamp Act, but Boston was about to make the loudest statement of them all.

The climate in British North America was ripe for unrest. While Americans enjoyed the highest per-capita income of any people in the world, most of the wealth was concentrated in a small portion of the overall population. According to Thomas Fleming, author of several books on the Revolutionary War period, 10 percent of the population in the North owned 45 percent of the property. In the South, 10 percent of the population owned 75 percent of the wealth. Historian Gary Nash reports that, by the 1770s, the top 5 percent of Boston's taxpayers controlled close to half the city's wealth. When you consider the situation of the remaining 95 percent of Boston's population, you begin to understand the economic frustration the city was under during this volatile time.

Historians Gary Nash and Howard Zinn attribute the anti-tax civil unrest in Boston to the manipulations by the upper class: leaders such as John Hancock, James Otis, and Samuel Adams. According to Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States, it represented a "forecast of the long history of American politics, the mobilization of the lower class energy by upper class politicians, for their own purposes."

To be sure, there is no doubt that the Boston patriot leaders, particularly Otis and Adams, were instrumental in fueling the rage of the Boston lower classes and helping to channel it toward the British. But any implication that the lower classes were tricked or deceived into opposing the Stamp Act is simply not supported by the evidence. Zinn concedes that the work of the Boston patriot leaders was not "purely" deceptive, and that it was based upon an appeal to and "genuine recognition of lower class grievances." But he makes this admission as a way to explain how effective Otis and Adams were in engineering lower class protests against the British Crown.

A fairer and more impartial interpretation of the facts that Zinn and Nash point to is that there were, in fact, solid reasons why the Boston lower classes felt threatened by the Stamp Act. For one thing, assuming the Stamp Act did fall proportionately hardest on the upper class and on the business community, it wasn't difficult for common laborers and everyday citizens to realize that this would translate ultimately to lower wages and higher prices. Indirectly, they would suffer as much as the upper class, and arguably much more. But that is not all.

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