“The house of Francis Shaw was assigned for quarters”?
People sometimes point to the Shaw family as an example of colonists forced to host the king’s soldiers in their home under the Quartering Acts of 1765 and 1774.
Author Josiah Quincy’s language, especially the use of the passive voice, pushed that reading:
…the officers of the army were billeted on the inhabitants. The house of Francis Shaw was assigned for quarters to Major [John] Pitcairn and Lieutenant [John] Wragg.But that’s not the way Britain’s Quartering Acts worked. Those laws required communities to provide barracks and firewood for regiments stationed in their cities and towns. They empowered the army to use uninhabited buildings if necessary, eventually with the help of royally appointed magistrates. Military commanders didn’t actually want to disperse their soldiers into different households; that was a recipe for desertion.
Furthermore, the Shaw family hosted officers, and officers didn’t live in barracks. As gentlemen, they made individual arrangements with homeowners to rent rooms. And as gentlemen, paying in hard currency, they were desirable tenants, especially when the local economy had been stifled by the Boston Port Bill.
Quincy’s word “assigned” suggests there was some formal process for matching officers with homes. Any bureaucracy produces paperwork, but there’s no evidence of such assignments. Nor were there complaints in the newspapers, and Boston’s newspapers ran lots of complaints. Instead, military officers asked around about rooming possibilities and reached deals with willing homeowners.
But didn’t Bostonians have political objections to hosting army and marine officers? Some surely did. We have no anecdotes about Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and other activists agreeing to rent rooms to military men—nor of them being forced to do so.
(After the war began, many of those politicians had moved out of Boston and more troops arrived. During the siege, officers did move into empty private homes. But neither the Quartering Act nor the Third Amendment apply in wartime.)
TOMORROW: Shaw family politics.
2 comments:
It is a HUGE myth in America that the British forced private homeowners to feed, clothe and house British soldiers. It's a myth that dies hard, even when you show people the illogic of that idea.
Because that myth is so widespread, and repeated in some apparently authoritative places, it’s hard to blame people for believing it.
John McCurdy’s book Quarters does a good job of explaining the historical reality. He says the Quartering Act was more like another tax, in kind instead of in money. Another modern lens for understanding the law is as an unfunded mandate forcing communities to pay for something they might or might not want.
The modern misunderstanding of the Quartering Act fits a pattern of how we’ve come to understand “liberty” in individual terms more than as the freedom of the community. For example, we think of a trial by jury as a defendant’s right, but the Revolutionary generation also saw the power of a local jury to decide cases (including going against judicial instructions) as a community right.
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