The Cradle of Liberty’s Doorways into the Past

In the early designs of Faneuil Hall, I believe, the bottom level of the building was surrounded by a series of arches open to the air. In the 1800s some of those arches were turned into windows, others into doors.

I once heard Massachusetts Historical Society president Bill Fowler say to members on a tour of the fire-suppression system, “Each of these tanks represents a naming opportunity.” In the same way, I propose, each of those doors is a chance to honor more Bostonians who contributed to the Cradle of Liberty and to tell the public more about its history.

Now here’s where not being able to visit the hall easily these days gets in my way. I’m not sure how many doors there are and which offer public access. Photographs indicate there are three doors on the west side (facing Congress Street) and five on the east side (facing Quincy Market), plus a ramp to a door on the north for people with limited mobility. There are probably other doors on the north and south sides, but perhaps not for the public.

So here’s a proposal on designating those doors in the Hall Formerly Known as Faneuil.

We can name the three central entrances on the east side “The Freeholders’ Entrance,” “The People’s Entrance,” and “The Inhabitants’ Entrance.” That would reflect the three types of meetings that took place in Faneuil Hall when it was the seat of Boston’s government:

• ordinary town meetings, described in official records as “a Meeting of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, at Faneuil Hall,…”
• meetings of inhabitants meeting a higher property requirement (“freeholders”) to elect Boston’s representatives to the Massachusetts General Court.
• meetings of “the Body of the People” with no legal authority but expressing popular sentiment on non-importation, tea, slavery, and other issues. 

For visitors, the different designations on those doors could spur questions about who had a voice in Boston’s government.

The remaining two doors on the east side could be named to honor the selectmen and the town clerk (and other employees) who kept Boston’s government running. Ideally, those portals would be close to the selectmen’s and clerk’s chambers, but I don’t know if that’s possible. I’m tempted to name the entrances in specific honor of:

• William Cooper, town clerk from 1761 to 1809, or more than half the time Faneuil Hall was the seat of Boston’s government.
• Harbottle Dorr as representative of all the selectmen in that period, if only so we could refer to “the Dorr Door.”

Over on the west side, I propose to call the central door, right behind the statue of Samuel Adams, the Adams Entrance. The Boston town meeting was Adams’s main base of support. Of course, his surname prompts thoughts of his relatives from Braintree, but they had much less to do with Faneuil Hall.

Another west door would become the Nell Entrance in honor of William Cooper Nell, Boston historian and civil rights activist. In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, Nell organized a commemoration of the Boston Massacre inside the hall in 1858, one of many protests he led in the ante-bellum period. Nell also wrote two books about African-American soldiers in the Revolutionary War, arguing that black men had always contributed to the nation and deserved equal rights within it.

The third door on the west side would be the Stone Entrance in honor of Lucy Stone, advocate not only for racial equality but for extending the vote to the half of the population who are women. She organized and spoke at the New England Women’s Tea Party held in Faneuil Hall on 15 Dec 1873, timing the event to the centenary of the most famous Boston Tea Party. Like Nell, Stone used the building’s Revolutionary fame to advance rights for more Americans.

Along the sides, I’d call one door the Peter Faneuil Entrance (or Exit), acknowledging his original gift to Boston. This could be in the portion of the building that he originally funded. That designation would allow signage to discuss both his gift to Boston and the businesses that money came from.

I’d name another side doorway as the Bulfinch Entrance, recognizing Charles Bulfinch, the local architect who expanded the hall to its present dimensions in 1806.

If there are more side doors, there are other historic figures associated with the Cradle of Liberty. James Otis, Jr., was very active at Boston town meetings during the 1760s, and the city may lack monuments that reflect his importance. Wendell Phillips came to prominence with anti-slavery speeches in Faneuil Hall. Boston politics owes a lot to Elisha Cooke, Sr., and Elisha Cooke, Jr., organizers of the town’s first political machine, though neither lived to see Faneuil Hall.

And there may well be other figures I haven’t thought of. There may be convincing arguments besides historical inertia for retaining the building’s original name and set-up. This proposal is just my attempt to communicate through public memorials at a prominent civic site how:

• Our society no longer overlooks the enslaved people who suffered for Peter Faneuil’s wealth.
• We maintain the memory of local slavery and the efforts it took to correct it.
• We recognize historical change and the possibility of change in the future.

“The birthday of our beloved President John Adams”

After the controversy over celebrating George Washington’s birthday in February 1798, President John Adams reconciled himself to such ceremonies. Indeed, we’re still celebrating the first President’s birthday today, in a way.

But Adams’s Federalist supporters also appear to have stepped up their efforts to celebrate his own birthday, so long as he was in office. (This whole series of postings started with me wondering whether the U.S. of A. celebrated President Adams’s birthday the way it celebrated President Washington’s, and before him King George’s. And the answer is yes, in a way.)

Balls and banquets weren’t to Adams’s taste, of course. The preferred method of honoring him, particularly during the Quasi-War of the late 1790s, became a militia parade. The Columbian Mirror and Alexandria Gazette reported on a ceremony in Alexandria, Virginia, on 30 Oct 1798:

Tuesday last, being the anniversary of the birthday of our beloved President John Adams, was observed in this town with military honors. The uniform companies of Militia, and the company of Silver Grays, went through a variety of maneuvers and evolutions, under the command of George Deneale. After firing several rounds in evidence of their attachment to this good man, as well as to shew that they approbated his conduct towards the insidious French Directory, they retired in the evening with the utmost decorum and harmony.

Even then, however, Adams’s predecessor hovered over the ceremony. Martha Washington presented a banner (regrettably incomplete) to the company. On it, “The Golden Eagle of America has a portrait of General Washington suspended from its beak.”

And of course Washington’s birthday balls continued. On 20 February 1799, Abigail Adams wrote from Quincy:

I have received an invitation to the Ball in honour of Gen’ll. Washington but my health is so precarious, and sufferd such a Shock last Summer, that I am obliged to be very circumspect and cautious in all my movements. Thomas will go, and that will be sufficient.

Thomas was the couple’s son Thomas Boylston Adams. He liked balls. In fact, one day after he had arrived in Philadelphia following years in Europe, the President reported to his wife, “This Evening he goes with me to the Ball. I had rather spend it with him at home.”

But now President Adams knew what he had to do to maintain party unity. On 22 Feb 1799, Washington’s birthday, he wrote home to Abigail:

To night I must go to the Ball: where I Suppose I shall get a cold, and have to eat Gruel for Breakfast for a Week afterwards. This will be no Punishment.

Adams enjoyed gruel more than balls, it seems.

The picture above shows Boston’s celebration of the President’s birthday in October 1799: “The Boston troops, as reviewed on President Adams’s birth day on the Common by his Honr. Lieut. Governor [Moses] Gill & Major Genl. [Simon] Elliot, under the command of Brigadier Genl. [John] Winslow. Also a view of the new State House.” In fact, this is said to be the earliest printed picture of the new Massachusetts State House designed by Charles Bulfinch.

TOMORROW: Mrs. Rowson’s reprise.

Schoolboy Views of President Washington in 1789

When President George Washington finally reached Boston on 24 Oct 1789, he found that the town had planned a huge celebration for him. Huge.

The young architect Charles Bulfinch had designed a triumphal arch, shown above. (For more about that structure, see the Massachusetts Historical Society’s recent posting about it.) Townsfolk turned out in a big parade, organized by their professions.

Among those groups were Boston’s schoolboys. The town was in the midst of reorganizing its public school system to allow girls to attend as well (for half the year), but boys were still considered the model scholars.

William H. Sumner was one of those boys, and his recollections of the day appeared in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register in 1860:

I, then a boy of between nine and ten years of age, was a pupil at Master [Oliver Willington] Lane’s West Boston writing-school. Washington entered Boston on Saturday, the 24th of October, 1789. The children of the schools were all paraded in the main street, and stood in the gutters in front of the long rows of men whose strength was required and exerted to protect them from the crowd on the side-walks as the procession passed along the street. The General rode on a noble white charger with characteristic erectness and dignity. Colonel [Tobias] Lear and Major [William] Jackson accompanied him as his aids. Washington was in uniform, and as he rode, his head uncovered, he inclined his body first on one side and then on the other, without distinctly bowing, but so as to observe the multitude in the streets, and the ladies in the windows and on the tops of the houses, who saluted him as he passed.

Master Lane’s boys were placed in front of Mr. Jonathan Mason’s hard-ware store, near the bend in Washington Street (then Cornhill) opposite Williams Court. I well remember the laugh which our salute created, when, as the General passed us, we rolled in our hands our quills with the longest feathers we could get.

Mr. N. R. Sturgis, who was at school with me at that time, remembers this circumstance. From our position at the angle of the street, we had a fair view of the procession as it approached and after it passed us. A select choir of singers, led by [Daniel] Rhea, the chorister of Brattle Street Church, was placed on the triumphal arch under which the procession was to pass, and which extended from the Old State House to the stores of Joseph Pierce and others at the opposite side of Cornhill. The arch was decorated with flags, flowers and evergreen, so that the musicians were not seen until they rose up and sang the loud paean, commencing as Washington first came in sight at the angle where we stood, swelling in heavy chorus until he passed from our sight under the triumphal arch and took his station upon it.

And Edward G. Porter’s Rambles in Old Boston (1887) reported:

Isaac Harris…was born in 1779, one of ten children of Samuel Harris, mast-maker. . . . At the reception of President Washington, in 1789, Samuel Harris was chosen to carry the mast-makers’ flag, which is still preserved in the family. On the same occasion the young Isaac participated with the boys of the public schools in doing honor to the distinguished visitor. They were ranged in two lines on the mall through which Washington passed on horseback. Each boy held a quill pen in his left hand, and was to take off his cap with the other when the President approached. Harris agreed with the boy next him that, as soon as they had made their bow, they would stroke their pens across the President’s boot. They did it successfully, and kept the pens as mementos of a famous event.

Anne Haven Thwing reports, “Harris was one of the six boys to receive the first Franklin medal in 1792,” endowed by Benjamin Franklin and still given to top scholars today. In 1810 he helped to save the Old South Meeting-House from a fire, receiving a silver cup from the congregation as thanks.

Under the Cornerstone of the State House

The big Boston historical news this week was the discovery of a time capsule sealed in the cornerstone of the State House, laid in 1795. Or rather, the rediscovery of the eighteenth-century artifacts inside that capsule because they were previously found in 1855.

But let’s start at the beginning. The first news reports, such as this C.N.N. dispatch referred to “a time capsule believed buried by Samuel Adams and Paul Revere.” My first guess was that a whole bunch of prominent Bostonians had attended the cornerstone-laying in 1795 and journalists scanning the list of attendees simply pulled out the two men who had become brand names.

But no, Adams and Revere really were the two most prominent dignitaries at the event on Independence Day in 1795. Adams was seventy-two years old and the governor of Massachusetts, having succeeded John Hancock two years earlier. Revere, for his part, had recently become Grand Master of Massachusetts’s Freemasons. Even though few of those Masons were really masons, they participated in a lot of stone-laying then.

Other notables at the event included the Rev. Peter Thacher, chaplain of the state senate; architect Charles Bulfinch; and builder/politician Thomas Dawes. Fifteen white horses, representing the fifteen states then in the U.S. of A., drew the cornerstone through the streets and up to Beacon Hill.

The 8 July 1795 Columbian Centinel reported that Adams and Revere placed a silver plate under the stone which said:

This Corner Stone of a Building, intended for the use of the Legislature, and Executive Branches of Government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, was laid by his Excellency Samuel Adams, Esq., Governor of said Commonwealth.

Assisted by the Most Worshipful Paul Revere, Gr. Master, And Right Worshipful William Scollay, Dp. G. Master, The Grand Wardens and Brethren of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts.

On the 4th day of July, AN. DOM., 1795. A. L. 5795.

Being the XXth Anniversary of American Independence.

Note that the twentieth anniversary of independence would actually come a year later.

The main speaker that day was a young lawyer named George Blake (1769-1841), whose speech was printed and sold by Benjamin Edes. A Jeffersonian, Blake spoke about how Royal Navy ships were once again preying on American crews. He went on to serve in both houses of the Massachusetts legislature and as U.S. Attorney for the district from 1802 to 1829.

Gov. Adams’s brief remarks on the new building included:

May the superstructure be raised even to the top stone without any untoward accident and remain permanent as the everlasting mountains. May the principles of our excellent Constitution founded in nature and in the rights of man, be ably defended here. And may the same principles be deeply engraven on the hearts of all citizens and there be fixed unimpaired and in full vigor till time shall be no more.

I think the constitution Adams referred to was the state’s, not the federal; the state’s was more explicit about natural rights. As to “permanent as the everlasting mountains,” less than two decades later developers began to cut down the crest of Beacon Hill, as shown above. And then in August 1855 a construction crew dug up that corner of the State House to repair the foundation.

They discovered the silver plate set between two sheets of lead—along with some other objects that the 1795 newspaper hadn’t mentioned.

TOMORROW: An expanded time capsule.

Boston National Historical Park’s New Location

This is a big week for Boston National Historical Park. Today the park is scheduled to close its visitor center at 15 State Street, across the cobblestones from the Old State House, and by the end of the week its new visitor center will open in Faneuil Hall.

Here’s how Faneuil Hall looked in the late 1700s (courtesy of Boston College).

In 1806 the architect Charles Bulfinch oversaw its expansion to its current dimensions. That produced more space for town meetings on the second floor, and more space for merchants on the ground level—where the visitor center will be.

TOMORROW: How did eighteenth-century Bostonians pronounce “Faneuil Hall”?