Informed Discussion of Peter Faneuil and His Legacy

This month the Boston Globe published Brian MacQuarrie’s article, many months in the making, about Peter Faneuil, the Atlantic slave economy, and what that might mean for Boston’s Faneuil Hall.

It’s a long and thoughtful article, presenting recent primary-source research and including many voices. The web version includes animated maps.

I hadn’t known this:

A 2021 survey suggested that Bostonians support renaming the hall, with 51 percent in favor, 36 percent opposed, and 12 percent undecided or declining to answer, according to the MassINC Polling Group. Black voters overwhelmingly backed the change, while white voters were nearly evenly split.

Of course, support for renaming would probably divide if people were asked about different possibilities instead of a generic change. But the minority strongly opposed to renaming are certainly overrepresented in this article’s comments section.

I wrote a series of postings about the name of Faneuil Hall back in 2020 (starting here), and in June reported on the site’s exhibit about slavery in Revolutionary Boston. My thinking, including the value of visible iconoclasm and highighting the many people involved in the building, hasn’t changed.

Renaming landmarks is something all societies do, of course. Revolutionary Boston included King Street, Queen Street, Hutchinson Street—all changed for political reasons in the new republic. For a while King’s Chapel was called the Stone Chapel. Prolonged public discussion of such issues highlights divisions in society, but being able to resolve those questions collectively should be a sign of health.

The Return of Peter Faneuil’s Grasshopper?

On 23 January, Sotheby’s will auction off what it says is the grasshopper weathervane that Shem Drowne crafted for Peter Faneuil’s summerhouse before 1743, as discussed yesterday.

The auction house’s announcement goes into detail about Drowne’s other, long-documented weathervanes and the short paper trail of the summerhouse grasshopper.

It also says the summerhouse weathervane “disappeared into obscurity” after the demolition of the Faneuil mansion in the 1830s. Which is one way to acknowledge there’s no provenance at all for the object on sale before the twentieth century.

The record begins:

It was acquired in Massachusetts circa 1900 by Captain Lucius Bradford (1864-1939) of Newport, New Jersey who was told that it had been on top of a New Hampshire barn. He stored it inside as a decoration, and it was inherited by his son Leslie Bradford (1895-1987). It continued to be passed down through successive generations of the family until purchased by the current owner.

As I read that webpage, whoever sold the weathervane to Lucius E. Bradford didn’t claim that it had spent time over Boston. Someone—either the “current owner” or an appraiser or Sotheby’s own experts—recently hypothesized this was the weathervane from the Faneuil house.

The silhouette of this grasshopper does match the one on top of Faneuil Hall (and not all sculptors shape grasshoppers that way). They’re about the same size. Both creatures have copper bodies and glass eyes.

The one on Faneuil Hall has been regilded multiple times over the years. The one now offered for sale is mostly green, but Sotheby’s says it shows “traces of gilding,” which I presume would be unusual for a weathervane made for a barn.

Then again, it’s conceivable that some metalworker in the Colonial Revival period fashioned a version of Shem Drowne’s famous grasshopper for customers who liked historic American style.

Sotheby’s estimated price for this weathervane is $300,000–500,000.

Boston’s Other Gilded Grasshopper

In 1743, William Price published a view of Boston from the harbor, showing the town’s many wharves and steeples.

We can see a digital copy of the Boston Public Library’s copy of Price’s print through Digital Commonwealth.

Harvard offers a crisper and more zoomable image scanned from a facsimile of the print published in the mid-1800s. That’s the source of the detail shown here.

This edifice with a weathervane wasn’t a church or civic building. It was the airy summerhouse in the back yard of merchant Peter Faneuil on Pemberton Hill, across the street from the burying ground beside King’s Chapel.

Eliza S. M. Quincy recalled the form of the weathervane in her memoir:

The crest of the former owner,—a grasshopper,—similar to the vane of Faneuil Hall, yet glittered on a summer-house in the garden, which commanded a view only inferior to that from Beacon Hill.

A few years before Quincy’s memoir was published posthumously, Lucius M. Sargent made a preemptive correction:

A grasshopper was not the crest of Peter Faneuil’s arms. I formerly supposed it was; for a gilded grasshopper, as half the world knows, is the vane upon the cupola of Faneuil Hall; and a gilded grasshopper, as many of us well remember, whirled about, of yore, upon the little spire, that rose above the summer house, appurtenant to the mansion, where Peter Faneuil lived, and died. . . .

The selection of a grasshopper, for a vane, was made, in imitation of…the very same thing, upon the pinnacle of the Royal Exchange, in London.

Nobody seems sure about whether the grasshopper weathervane on the Faneuils’ summerhouse came before or after the one on top of Faneuil Hall. But it’s clear there were two. 

The Faneuil Hall grasshopper, made by metalworker Shem Drowne, is still up there, having survived storms, remodeling, thefts, and other indignities.

As for the Faneuil mansion and summerhouse, they were torn down in the 1830s as the area was redeveloped into Pemberton Square. (George Loring Brown painted the house at that time, but that image doesn’t include the summerhouse.) That neighborhood is now largely covered by the Center Plaza building across from Government Center.

The summerhouse weathervane disappeared with the buildings. But has it just hopped back into sight?

TOMORROW: Grasshopper for sale.

Meeting the Clerks of Faneuil Hall Marketplace

Just to make matters confusing, the twelve men elected by the Boston town meeting to be clerks of the market for one year weren’t the only people in town with that title in the eighteenth century.

The town also chose one full-time clerk for each market. This man was in charge of assigning stalls to different provisioners, collecting rents, enforcing rules, and maintaining the infrastructure.

In the early eighteenth century Boston had three marketplaces, each with its own full-time clerk. After some argument, in 1742 the town consolidated those commercial spaces into one near the center of town. Thus, we need context to know what “Clerk of the Market” referred to.

In September 1742, the merchant Thomas Jackson was announced as “Clerk of the Market on Dock-Square.” According to Abram Brown’s Faneuil Hall and Faneuil Hall Market or, Peter Faneuil and His Gift (1901), the town gave Peter Faneuil the honor of naming the superintendent since he’d paid for the building. Jackson in turn hired Joseph Grey as assistant in charge of sweeping. When Faneuil died the next March, the market was named after him.

By 1749, Abijah Adams was the full-time clerk of Faneuil Hall Market, and Samuel Adams was an elected clerk of the market, starting his political career. There was a bad fire in 1761, and Abijah Adams rescued valuable goods and papers from the building, only to have to wait for the town to rebuild and repair it.

Abram Brown erred in writing that Adams was succeeded by Benjamin Clark as the pre-Revolutionary turmoil heated up; Clark was one of the elected clerks. The published selectmen’s records show how they chose a man to replace Adams in 1767 and what the daily duties of the clerk of Faneuil Hall Marketplace were:

The Selectmen having appointed Capt. James Clemmens to be Clerk of Faneuil Hall Market in the room of Mr. Abijah Adams who is in a declining state and as it is feared not like to appear abroad again, the following Orders were given said Clemmens, which bears date the Day on which he entred upon duty—vizt.—

Boston August 13. 1767
Capt. James Clemmens
Sir

You being by the Selectmen of Boston chosen to act as Clerk of Faneuil Hall Market it is our directions That you observe that the Butchers who hire the Stalls do conform to their Leases. Vizt.—

That they bring into the Market all the Hydes Skins and Tallow of all such Creatures as they kill; that they keep their respective Stalls clear, and at the shutting up of the Market at One O’Clock carry out all the Hydes Skins and Tallow and also all the Beef that shall be cut up that is less than a Quarter and all other sorts of Meal of what kind so ever—

that those Butchers who occupy the Stalls do not bring into the Market any kind of Poultry other than of their own raising to sell—

You’l Observe that every Person who erects a Stall or puts their Panyers or Carts, within the limits of the Market do pay for the same as follows—Vizt.—

• For every Stand or Stall from the middle West Door on each side down to the Street Eight Shillings p. Month or eight Coppers p. Day,
• for each Stand or Stall on the other parts of the West end of the Market Six Coppers p. Day—
• For each Cart with Beef or Sauce or any other Article for Sale that stands in any other place within the Limmits of the Market four Coppers p. Day—
• For each pair of Panyers two Coppers p. Day.

By Order of the Selectmen
WILLIAM COOPER Town Clerk.

Abijah Adams died a few months later in February 1768, aged 66 years.

James Clemens had been a sea captain, then a seller of spermaceti candles. In 1763 he announced he had become a licensed gauger, checking weights and measures, so people had come to trust him. Capt. Clemens died inside besieged Boston in February 1776, and in June the town chose George Lindsay Wallace to take his place.

“Revolutionary Harbor” Discussion, 17 Feb.

On Wednesday, 17 February, the National Parks of Boston and Boston Harbor Now will host an online discussion on “Revolutionary Harbor: The Transatlantic World of Peter Faneuil,” about the role of slavery in shaping Boston’s eighteenth-century economy.

Peter Faneuil was one of the town’s richest merchants in the first half of that century, honored for giving money that went to building the earliest version of Faneuil Hall.

Much of Faneuil’s inheritance and business was rooted in chattel slavery, either from supplying the sugar-producing slave-labor camps of the Caribbean or from bringing more kidnapped African people to the New World. In that, he wasn’t unusual among leading New England merchants; his family was simply wealthier than most.

Last October, the National Parks of Boston, the city of Boston, the Museum of African American History, and the Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project installed a marker at the end of Long Wharf recognizing Boston’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade.

One side, headed “Coming from the Sea,” describes the trade in people in and out of Boston harbor. The other side, which one sees while facing the city, spotlights Crispus Attucks, Phillis Wheatley, Prince Hall, and Paul Cuffee as notable New Englanders of African descent.

It doesn’t look like Peter Faneuil’s name is on that marker, nor the name of any other individual slave trader or slave-camp supplier. Ironically, then, those merchants appear as a faceless mass—precisely what slavery and many decades of historiography reduced the captive Africans to. But in this case, anonymity might erase those men’s individual choices to participate in that trade.

Faneuil’s name remains, of course, on Faneuil Hall, nicknamed the “Cradle of Liberty,” which some people a paradox. I discussed the  potentials of renaming that building last September.

This discussion diving deeper into Peter Faneuil’s mercantile world is due to start on Wednesday at 7:00 P.M. and to run until 8:15. Register in advance here.

Peter Faneuil’s Disability and What It Might Mean

In my recent discussion of Peter Faneuil and the meeting hall still named after him, I referred to him as disabled. That produced some questions. So here’s more on what Faneuil’s contemporaries wrote about his body.

On 3 Mar 1743, Benjamin Walker put in his journal:

Peter Faneuil Esqr, between 2 & 3 o’clock in ye afternoon dyed of a dropsical complyca[tion], he was a fat, squat, Lame, hip short, went with high heeled shoe (In my opinion a great loss too This Town, aged 42, 8m.) & I think by what I have heard has done more charitable deeds than any man yt, ever liv’d in this Town & for whom I am very sorry.

A week later, William Nadir wrote in his almanac:

Thursday 10 [March], buried Peter Faneuil, Esqr., in 43th. year of age, a fatt, corpulent, brown, squat man, hip short, lame from childhood, a very large funeral went round ye Town house; gave no gloves at ye funeral, but sent ye gloves on ye II day, his Cofin cover with black velvet, & plated with yellow plates.

These quotations appear in Abram English Brown’s Faneuil Hall and Faneuil Hall Market, or, Peter Faneuil and His Gift, published in 1900. [I took it upon myself to edit “gave us gloves” to “gave no gloves” because that makes more sense in context.]

I couldn’t find the term “hip short” anywhere else, but it must be the Boston spelling of the eighteenth-century term “hipshot,” defined in different dictionaries as:

• “is said of a Horse, when he had a wrung or sprain’d his Haunch or Hip, so as to relax the Ligaments that keep the Bone in its due Place.” 
• “when the hip bone of a horse is moved out of its right place.” 
• “Sprained or dislocated in the hip.”

The last definition comes from Samuel Johnson’s dictionary and is the only one not explicitly equine.

Thus, putting together the two diary entries (and assuming those men knew what they were writing about), Peter Faneuil was born with one leg shorter than the other. His family was wealthy enough to have shoes made for him with a higher heel for the shorter leg, and for him to go into an office job rather than one that required physical labor. 

Brown and other nineteenth-century authors suggested that Faneuil remained unmarried into his forties because he was “lame,” as well as squat and swarthy (an interpretation of “brown”). There’s also a story that his uncle Andrew Faneuil insisted that his two nephews and heirs remain unmarried. Peter’s brother Benjamin Faneuil definitely married around 1730, and Uncle Andrew definitely left Benjamin all of five shillings in his will. But that story didn’t appear in print until a century and a half after Peter Faneuil’s death as authors tried to arrange the known facts into a meaningful narrative.

It’s quite possible that Peter Faneuil didn’t marry because he just wasn’t interested in marrying. His uncle died in 1738, and he quickly started spending money on himself (wine, chariot, latest London cookbook) and his community (the market building, unspecified other charitable giving). At that point he was one of the richest men in North America. But he was still a bachelor five years later when he died. 

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.

A Call for the Cradle of Liberty

Having laid out the history of the name “Faneuil Hall” and my principles for changing historic memorials, I’m going to share my thoughts on whether to rename that building because of Peter Faneuil’s slave-dealing.

First off, I think naming the whole complex “Faneuil Hall Marketplace” gives the man too much credit. I was actually surprised to find that was the official name and that “Quincy Market” applied to only the central 1820s building. Mayor Josiah Quincy did a lot more to develop Boston than Peter Faneuil did.

But what about the original building that Faneuil paid for? (Or, rather, the much expanded successor to that building, as shown in this photo from Archipedia New England.)

If the community decides to rename that building, I feel strongly that the Faneuil Hall name shouldn’t completely disappear. And not just because so many history books and tourist guides have used it. If we New Englanders really cared about tourists knowing where they are, we’d put up more street signs.

Rather, the change should remain visible for the reasons I listed back here: the overlap of old and new names would more clearly communicate the change, the reasons behind it, and the process of historical change, hopefully for the better. To answer Mayor Marty Walsh’s 2018 objection to renaming the site, people would know why the city did it.

And let’s face it—even with a new official name we’ll still call the site “Faneuil Hall” a lot of the time until we die. We’re not good at giving up names here. Just look at “Bell Circle” in Revere; that local name endured for decades after the eponymic tire dealership nearby closed, despite not appearing on any signs or maps. Eventually it lasted so long a new development adopted it, and Bell Circle became official.

For another example, here’s a 2012 article providing directions to the Massachusetts Historical Society via the “Auditorium Stop,” which had been officially renamed twenty-two years earlier. In five years naming rights for the T.D. Garden, formerly FleetCenter, will be up for bid again, but we’re all going to keep calling it “the Garden,” right?

What should the new name be? To gather proposals, I looked at news articles about the renaming campaign and even took the risk of reading the comments.

Kevin Peterson, an early advocate of the change, has suggested renaming the hall after Crispus Attucks, killed in the Boston Massacre. Attucks’s body, along with James Caldwell’s, lay in Faneuil Hall before their funeral in March 1770. Attucks is far from forgotten in Boston, however. There’s a large monument to the victims of the Massacre on Boston Common, a prominent stone in the Granary Burying-Ground, and a wide marker in the sidewalk near the Old State House. Of the five or six people killed, Attucks is the one whose name is most familiar to Americans today.

Another suggestion that I’ve seen is “Douglass Hall,” after Frederick Douglass. He indeed spoke against slavery in the meeting hall several times. But Douglass spoke a lot of places—he spent years as a professional orator. Douglass lived in New Bedford; Lynn; Rochester, New York; and Washington, D.C., but never in Boston. To me seizing on his name looks too much like an attempt to claim a celebrity just when he’s getting recognized more and more. There are abolitionists with stronger ties to Boston.

I saw one suggestion coming from multiple people: “The Cradle of Liberty.” Authors have applied that sobriquet to the building since 1835 at least. (Previous to that, as I traced in this posting, the term was used to mean Boston, Massachusetts, and even Great Britain.) “The Cradle of Liberty” is boastful, to be sure, but historic and recognizable. It also highlights the question of freedom at the heart of the famous debates within Faneuil Hall and this debate about its name. So far that strikes me as the best possibility.

So my starting point is “The Cradle of Liberty (formerly Faneuil Hall).” But I wouldn’t stop there. I think the building offers the chance to recognize more people and more history.

TOMORROW: Doorways into the past.

The Long History of the Faneuil Hall Name

Boston’s Faneuil Hall is different from most other landmarks and monuments bearing slaveholders’ names because in most cases those sites arose from a later generation choosing to honor a person.

Sometimes that act is meant to elevate a local hero, as in Albany’s statue of Gen. Philip Schuyler. Sometimes it’s a way for a locality to bask in the celebrity of an established hero, as in George Washington High School in San Francisco. And sometimes it’s an attempt to vindicate a particular ideology, as in the big statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, erected in 1890.

But none of those approaches apply to Faneuil Hall. Peter Faneuil was a wealthy Boston merchant with no wife or children who in 1740 offered to pay for a new marketplace and meeting hall. Since a crowd of protesters had destroyed the market building at Dock Square only three years before, that offer required some discussion. The space for town meetings was obviously an attempt to make the market stalls acceptable. Bostonians barely voted to accept Faneuil’s money.

The new building opened at the old space in September 1742. By this time the town meeting was happy to have it. Future governor Thomas Hutchinson moved that the hall be named after its donor, “at all times hereafter.” The town approved that proposal, also commissioning a portrait by John Smibert and a Faneuil coat of arms to hang inside.

Peter Faneuil died unexpectedly the following year. He was a major player in Boston’s business community in the 1730s, and at his death people said he had been charitable. But he played no role in the local historical developments that get the most attention: not the Puritan settlement, not the Revolution, not even the witchcraft trials or first smallpox inoculations. Most Faneuil family members became Loyalists.

Aside from funding the hall, I don’t see evidence of Peter Faneuil doing anything else of importance. The Faneuil Hall name is thus more like how Gillette Stadium hypes the highest corporate bidder than like how the Washington Monument honors the first President.

That name might even give Peter Faneuil too much credit. In January 1761 the building burned. (This was less than a year after the great fire that started at the Sign of the Brazen Head.) The town decided to rebuild within the surviving walls, this time adding a slate roof. For funds, the province authorized a lottery; advertisements for the periodic ticket sales and prize drawings appear throughout the Revolutionary period. But the building was still called Faneuil Hall.

In 1806, that meeting hall was greatly expanded from the 1761 design shown above to its present dimensions, growing both up and out. But the building was still called Faneuil Hall.

In the 1820s the first Mayor Josiah Quincy pushed for Boston—now a city—to build new stone buildings to the east of the hall, creating much more market space. The central domed building is called Quincy Market. But the whole collection of buildings is called Faneuil Hall Marketplace.

In sum, Peter Faneuil funded the first version of one corner of the smallest of four buildings in the complex, but his name is on the whole thing.

Or is it? We probably don’t remember his name accurately. The Faneuil originally pronounced their name with French vowels. The British, or more particularly Yankee British, changed that, as I discussed back here. Smibert, Robert Love, and other Boston contemporaries wrote it out as “Funnel.” In the nineteenth century people rediscovered some version of the French original, but its spelling and pronunciation remain a special challenge.

We thus use the Faneuil Hall name not out of admiration for Peter Faneuil and all he was—native New Yorker, child of Huguenot refugees, disabled bachelor, Anglican convert, merchant trading with the Caribbean, slave trader. We use the name simply because that’s what we all grow up calling that building. And the building has become much more famous than its namesake.

Since important Revolutionary events occurred inside that space, the name of Faneuil Hall is in American history books. The site is on the Freedom Trail. It’s an anchor of Boston National Historical Park. And the civic building continues to fulfill its original purpose—drawing customers to the nearby shops.

TOMORROW: So what can we call it?

The Good and Bad of Historic Monuments

Yesterday I remarked on/in the community discussion of whether to rename Faneuil Hall by saying there was wisdom to be found in Mayor Marty Walsh’s statement that “If we were to change the name of Faneuil Hall today, 30 years from now, no one would know why we did it.”

Walsh went on to tell the New York Times (in June 2018, showing how this isn’t a new proposal), “What we should do instead is figure out a way to acknowledge the history so people understand it. We can’t erase history, but we can learn from it.”

Acknowledging and learning from history is, I hope we all agree, a Good Thing. So what’s the best way to accomplish that?

Having a large public building named after certain people, or prominent statues or monuments honoring them, strikes me as communicating one of two messages. The simplistic takeaway is “These people were important and admirable in every significant way.” Historians and most laypeople agree that no one’s perfect. Conveying that would be a Bad Thing.

The more nuanced message that most adults understand is, “What these people did was important and beneficial enough to outweigh their flaws and mistakes.” But of course, that’s a value judgment reflecting the social power structure of the society that confers those honors. It reflects who benefited from those people’s actions and whose suffering the society deemed to be of less weight.

Retaining such honors for particular people after a public discussion about their place in history suggests that the present society has reached the same conclusion about the balance of their activities as the society that conferred those honors in the first place. Perhaps we’ve come to recognize more of the honorees’ flaws or how their activity didn’t benefit everyone equally. But the final judgment is the same.

It can therefore be hard to see a difference between those assessments. A statue of Columbus that says, “We honor this man because of how he helped Europeans take over the Americas,” can look a lot like a statue of Columbus that says, “We honor this man despite how he helped Europeans take over the Americas.” Declaring that it’s a shame historical figures kept hundreds of people enslaved, but not enough to outweigh the benefits they delivered to other wealthy white men, can’t help but carry the message that some people still don’t matter as much. And that’s the Bad Thing these reconsiderations are supposed to halt.

Then comes the possibility of renaming landmarks, removing statues, or otherwise changing monuments. That certainly avoids lionizing those historical figures, the first Bad Thing above. It also leaves no doubt about the change in society’s values, recognizing people who were once dehumanized, demeaned, or overlooked. Generally that’s a Good Thing.

But simply removing a problematic honor by renaming places or removing monuments has some drawbacks as well. It can suggest that the problem reflected in the choice to honor those people has been eliminated—but if the problem or its legacies remain, ignoring those would be a Bad Thing.

This is why I think Mayor Walsh was onto something when he spoke of the importance of retaining a public memory of when and why society changed how it honored certain people. I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusion about not renaming Faneuil Hall, but I do think the community would have to find a way to visibly preserve how the building was once named Faneuil Hall. That would have three benefits:

• A new name would demonstrate that our society no longer overlooks the enslaved people who suffered for Peter Faneuil’s wealth and Boston’s good fortune.
• Maintaining the memory of the old name would make it impossible to miss how our society once ignored that wrong but has since tried to recognize and correct it.
• Juxtaposing old and new names would demonstrate historical change and the possibility of change in the future.

All of those would be Good Things, acknowledging and learning from history.

So what’s the right approach? I’ve written about it before.

TOMORROW: Planned iconoclasm.

A Community Discussion about Faneuil Hall

Last month Martin Blatt and David J. Harris wrote an essay in Commonwealth Magazine inviting a public discussion of whether to rename Faneuil Hall. They said:

We call upon the city to engage in an expansive community process to decide two issues in sequence—first, whether or not the hall should be renamed and, second, if so, what name should replace Faneuil. We believe that a robust public discussion will be a critical part of our reckoning whether or not the conclusion is to change the name.

Marty Blatt is Affiliate Professor of Public History and former Director of the Public History Program at Northeastern University. I met him when he was historian for the National Park Service in Boston and Lowell. David Harris is the managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute at Harvard University and previously founding executive director of the Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston.

To move along the public conversation Blatt and Harris propose, Mass Humanities sponsored an online panel discussing Faneuil Hall with them and Prof. Jared Ross Hardesty, author of Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston and Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England. Here’s the video of that discussion.

Hardesty reviewed the evidence that Peter Faneuil, the early-18th-century merchant who left money to build Faneuil Hall, invested in the transatlantic slave trade. That documentation, he noted, came from a lawsuit about a voyage that ended badly. He may have put money into other slaving ships that simply didn’t end up in court. I suspect that if slave-trading was Faneuil’s main business, we would see a lot more lawsuits, but that doesn’t absolve him from being involved.

We already know that Faneuil was a major player in the Boston economy and prospered largely by supplying the slave-labor plantations in the Caribbean, which were death camps with sugar on top. The town meeting hall and marketplace he funded was meant to reflect the beneficence of the merchant class while benefiting the town’s businessmen.

The panelists all note that most of the people—both tourists and locals—who come to Faneuil Hall now for clam chowder, buskers, or a look at the great hall know little of that history. They also don’t find it at the site, at least not prominently. We can’t be surprised that most of the stories told at this city property are about Faneuil Hall’s role in the Revolution, abolition, and other Good Things.

Would taking Peter Faneuil’s name off Faneuil Hall really erase his place in history if most people visiting the place never know that history in the first place? Or is that name one of the few channels the site’s interpreters have to take visitors back to the realities of pre-Revolutionary Boston?

I’d say the charge that people seeking to change site names or remove statues want to “erase history” is a canard. Advocates for removing Confederate statues, to take one visible example, are also the last people who want their fellow Americans to forget the true history of the Confederacy. Critics of those folks are often the first to complain about hearing too much about slavery.

That said, there’s a downside to papering over history instead of erasing it, and a new name could end up having that effect. I think the panelists are too quick to dismiss something that Boston mayor Marty Walsh said back in June 2018 to the New York Times: “If we were to change the name of Faneuil Hall today, 30 years from now, no one would know why we did it.”

TOMORROW: What’s in a name?

Update on the Slave Auction Memorial at Faneuil Hall

Earlier this month I wrote about the Slave Auction Block memorial that artist Steve Locke had proposed for installation outside Faneuil Hall.

Locke’s Kickstarter campaign was successful in surpassing its goal for initial fundraising with a couple of days still left to go. However, last week Locke announced, “I am afraid that I am not going to be able to go on as proposed with the Auction Block Memorial being placed at Faneuil Hall.” The Boston branch of the N.A.A.C.P. had come out against the project, prompting Mayor Marty Walsh’s office to pull back support until all constituencies support it.

Early in the month Kevin C. Peterson of the New Democracy Coalition of Massachusetts editorialized against the memorial, declaring (without evidence) that it was a project of Mayor Walsh, not Locke. In 2017 that organization advocated for changing the name of Faneuil Hall because it still bears the name of donor Peter Faneuil, a slave owner and trader. Last year it reenacted an auction of enslaved people outside the building to call attention to that history.

That protest action left me confused about Peterson’s first objection this year to Locke’s memorial:

Walsh’s memorial to the enslaved has been proposed for the grounds at Faneuil Hall, but no historical record of “slaves for sale” exist on the site. This raises critical questions about the relevance of the memorial on the ground of the internationally known ediface.

If reenacting a slave auction at Faneuil Hall helps to raise awareness of its link to the slave trade, then a permanent memorial should logically do the same.

Furthermore, there’s solid documentation for slave sales in that part of Boston. On 27 Nov 1727 the Boston Gazette ran an advertisement stating:

ON Thursday the 30 Currant will be Sold by Publick Vendue, at the Sun Tavern on Dock Square at Five a Clock P. M. For likely Negros, and Sundry sort of Merchandize, all to be seen at the Place of Sale from two of the Clock till the Sale begins.

Seven years later the town opened a “market-house at Dock Square.” Many citizens feared that centralized marketplaces like this would allow sellers to manipulate prices, and in 1737 a mob disguised as clergymen tore down the structure. The map of the area above dates from 1738.

Peter Faneuil offered to pay for a replacement market building, sweetening the offer with a large upper-story hall for town meetings. The new building was finished in 1742 and named after Faneuil the next year when he died. Even now, the north side of Faneuil Hall is called Dock Square.

The Faneuil Hall neighborhood continued to see occasional sales of people, as shown in the 7 Aug 1758 Boston Gazette:

To Be Sold
By AUCTION, by
JOHN GERRISH,
On WEDNESDAY next,
At Major Deshon’s Vendue-Room in Dock-Square.
Sundry very likely, healthy, young NEGROES,
some of the likeliest of the late imported Cargo,
and all that remains unsold: The Sale to begin at Eleven o’Clock in the Forenoon.

A different sort of marketplace was announced nearby in the 5 Aug 1771 Boston Gazette:

The Intelligence-Office is removed from the Store opposite to the Golden Ball to a Store on the South Side of the Town-Dock, just above the Swing-Bridge, where it is now kept by
Grant Webster,
Who has for Sale, West-India and New-England Rum, Madeira and other Wines, Flour, Rice, Indigo, &c. Vessels of several Sorts, several good Farms, Male and Female Negroes, new and second hand Chaises, two convenient Houses near the Center of the Town, and sundry other Articles cheap for Cash. …

As an “intelligence office,” Webster was functioning like Craig’s List or the want ads. He didn’t actually have all that property in his office, but he could connect buyers and sellers.

Peterson’s second objection was that Locke had developed the memorial “with little public involvement from the greater Boston community.” That surprised me. Locke was Boston’s artist-in-residence when he conceived of the design. I read about his proposed design last year. He assembled an advisory board that included prominent officials from local universities, museums, and government. Kickstarter itself is a form of public involvement.

The New Democracy Coalition editorial treats the memorial as “an apparent political response to protesters pushing for the Faneuil Hall name change” which “does little to adding to the deep conversation on race that the city needs to undertake.” For Locke, of course, the purpose of the public artwork was to prompt just that sort of conversation and reflection. I think for that purpose it would be more effective, and was closer to actually happening, than the name change Peterson has advocated.

As for the Boston N.A.A.C.P., it has taken no position on the name of Faneuil Hall. On the slave auction memorial, it appears the local leadership wanted to be consulted earlier in the process. Chapter president Tanisha Sullivan stated, “Our primary concern at this point is the lack of inclusion, especially inclusion of the Black American community whose ancestors any memorial of this type seeks to honor.”

Locke has considered himself part of that community. He’s African-American, graduated from Boston University and the Massachusetts College of Art, and has been working in greater Boston at least since 1998. He has stated that he reached out to the N.A.A.C.P. office at the start of his tenure as artist-in-residence, before conceiving of the memorial, and never heard back.

At the first news of objections, Mayor Walsh said he “hoped Locke would have the chance to explain his vision during upcoming public meetings.” But a scheduled Boston City Council hearing was canceled after the artist announced that he had to give up on the project in Boston.

Locke is taking a position at the Pratt Institute in New York this fall and looking at adapting the slave auction memorial design for another northeastern port city.

A Chance to Build the Auction Block Memorial

Steve Locke, a Boston-based artist, is running a Kickstarter campaign to create and install a memorial just outside Faneuil Hall to the people who suffered from the transatlantic slave trade.

Locke was Boston’s Artist-in-Residence in 2018, and the advisory board for this project includes Mayor Marty Walsh and other officials and leaders of local non-profit organizations. The campaign has attracted enough subscribers to reach its first fundraising level and is now aiming for a “stretch goal.”

This site was chosen because Peter Faneuil, the merchant who gave Boston the initial money for a town meeting-hall, gained some of his wealth from slaving voyages between Africa and the Caribbean. And more for shipping supplies from New England to the Caribbean. In addition, the building stands near what was once the Town Dock, site of occasional auctions of newly arrived Africans during the colonial period.

There is of course great irony in the building long called “the cradle of liberty” having those links to slavery. We Bostonians prefer to remember the abolitionist orators who spoke inside during the mid-1800s. But the mercantile economy of Boston was built largely on supplying the deadly work camps of the West Indies. Acknowledging that history in a moving way tells more of the region’s history.

Locke describes his memorial design this way:

The memorial consists of the footprint of an auction block—the site that transforms humans into property. In order to converse visually with an existing memorial sculpture in the area, the work will be bronze with a brown patina. The bronze plate will be approximately 10x16 feet overall and will contain the raised text and image of the routes and supplies of the Triangular Trade. Ideally, it will outline the shipping route of the [ship] Desire.

The memorial will have two sections, a site of the auctioneer (the smaller rectangular section at right) and a larger area for those being sold into slavery. The larger area will have the map of the Triangular Trade route that created the wealth of the Faneuil family and lead to the creation of the marketplace area. Because it is symbolic (and not an actual auction block), the bronze plate will be set into the existing bricks (or hardscape). It will be at grade, not a platform or a riser, on the same level as the street. It is not meant to intrude vertically in any way on the existing site. Instead, it is meant to be a plan on the ground, a metaphorical basis and model for how wealth traveled through enslavement.

The measurements of the block are taken from analysis of slaving manifests that dictate the amount of space available for "loose-pack" cargo of slaves. Humans were allotted a space of 3x5 feet. The block will be cast in sections this size to reflect this organizational structure. Also, the historic images of "slave packing" will be included on the smaller section of the block.

In order to evoke the presence of those Africans and African-Americans who came into chattel slavery through Boston, the bronze plate will be heated to a constant 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, similar to Horst Hoheisel’s Monument to a Monument in Buchenwald, Germany. This will make touching the work an immediately intimate and reverent experience, as if you are touching a living person. This will also keep the memorial free from snow in the winter. Even in a Boston winter, the auction block will be visible.

The funds will cover additional work on both the details and logistics of the memorial. The Auction Block Memorial fundraising campaign closes on 24 July.

Another Mystery of Nero Faneuil

The likelihood that George Washington’s cook Hercules took his first owner’s surname and went by Hercules Posey in New York brought back thoughts about how another black man might have negotiated slavery and freedom in the early republic.

Last month I highlighted the name of “Nero Funels” on a 1777 Massachusetts anti-slavery petition. I posited that this was a phonetic spelling of Faneuil, and that the same man as Nero Faneuil was involved in two Boston burglaries in 1784.

One of the witnesses in those trials was Nero Faneuil’s wife Flora. Two other witnesses were surnamed Hitchborn (or a variation on that name):

• Prince Hitchborn, almost certainly given that first name as an enslaved child, was at Nero and Flora Faneuil’s house in November 1784.
• Elite young lawyer Benjamin Hichborn testified to Nero’s character.

That suggests some link between the Nero Faneuil and the Hitchborn household in the North End.

Boston town records state that on 20 Apr 1780 Nero Williams of Roxbury and Flora Hitchburne, “free negroes,” were married. I haven’t found any record of the marriage of Nero and Flora Faneuil. Nor have I found any other mention of Nero Williams. To be sure, there were other black men named Nero and other black women named Flora, but I haven’t found any other married couples with those names.

So here’s one possible reconstruction of Nero Faneuil’s life. He was either born into slavery or enslaved by a member of the Faneuil family, and used that family’s surname when signing the anti-slavery petition in 1777.

The Revolution sent different members of the white mercantile Faneuil family in different directions:

• Benjamin Faneuil, Sr., had become blind and lived in retirement with his daughter and son-in-law, Mary and George Bethune, in the part of Cambridge that became Brighton.
• That man’s sons Benjamin, Jr., and Peter were Loyalists, moving to Canada and elsewhere during the war and thus at risk of losing their Massachusetts property.
• Pierre Benjamin Faneuil, a francophone cousin, came to Boston from Saint-Domingue with the hope of raising a regiment of French Canadians to support the Continental cause, but died of illness in 1777 before accomplishing anything.

Nero Faneuil might have belonged to any of those households in 1777 and then been sold to someone named Williams in Roxbury by 1780. Joseph Williams was a big farmer in that town, for example. If so, town authorities might have listed Nero with the surname Williams in 1780 in the record of his marriage to Flora Hitchburne.

In 1783, Massachusetts’s high court ruled slavery unenforceable. By the following year Nero Faneuil was a free man in Boston married to a woman named Flora. Was he also Nero Williams, having reverted to using the Faneuil surname?

The Marketplace of Ideas about Faneuil Hall

Earlier this month, Boston mayor Marty Walsh and the city’s Community Preservation Committee proposed spending projects under the state’s Community Preservation Act, including two focused on Revolutionary sites in downtown Boston:

• $350,000 to help with major repairs to HVAC and other systems at the Old State House, one of the oldest and most visited sites on the Freedom Trail.
• $315,000 to restore 17th and 18th century artifacts from beneath Faneuil Hall showing Boston's role in the transAtlantic slave trade, works of local artisans, and an emerging global marketplace.

Though these are relatively small grants on the list, which includes restoring entire buildings, the results would be very visible because of the number of visitors to those sites.

People are presuming that the restored archeological artifacts would be displayed at the city-owned Faneuil Hall as part of or in conjunction with a memorial to slavery, an idea Walsh has also endorsed. Such a memorial would acknowledge how that form of human exploitation was embedded in Boston’s economy for over two centuries. The town dock, which was near Faneuil Hall before landfills, is known to have been one site where slavers sold people.

Last year Steve Locke, one of the city’s artists in residence and a teacher at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, proposed a memorial design. It too would require approval by a specialized board and the city council.

The Boston Globe reported that Locke’s “Auction Block Memorial”

will include two bronze plates embedded in the brick of the plaza, one representing the auctioneer, the other the people being sold into slavery. A map will illustrate the Triangular Trade route of goods and human chattel. The bronze representing slaves will be heated to a constant 98.6 F in order, says Locke’s proposal, to make “touching the work an intimate and reverent experience as if you are touching a living person.”

I think the design might be tweaked to be more closely tied to Boston; it currently illustrates the “Triangular Trade” with a map of one voyage of one Newport ship, and Boston’s trade of cod, firewood, and molasses with the Caribbean seems more pertinent. But the concept of the embedded, heated brass plate is striking.

The merchant who bequeathed Boston the money to build Faneuil Hall, Peter Faneuil, was a slave owner and an investor in slaving voyages. Like all Boston merchants, he participated in an economy that depended on supplying the deadly slave-labor plantations of the West Indies. That has prompted some people to call for Faneuil’s name to be removed from Faneuil Hall.

I don’t think renaming would produce the most powerful statement about slavery. Faneuil Hall is famous in American culture, particularly as a “cradle of liberty” because the building hosted town meetings and other public gatherings, including orations by abolitionists. In contrast, the honor still accruing to Peter Faneuil is very faint.

Showing people that “Faneuil Hall,” a historic landmark they’ve learned to revere, was closely linked to the buying and selling of humans seems like a powerful way to make people recognize the long history of slavery in America. In effect, it would make the famous Faneuil Hall itself in part a memorial to American slavery.

The First Fatal Duel on Boston Common

In 1719 Massachusetts enacted a law against dueling, establishing the punishment as a fine of up to £100, imprisonment for up to six months, and/or corporal punishment “not extending to member or pillory.” (I think “member” refers to cutting off body parts, such as ears.)

Given all the things that the Puritans forbade, it may seem odd that they never took a stand against dueling. The fathers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony probably had more important things on their mind. Only after 1692 when Massachusetts became a province with a royally appointed governor, bringing other Anglican aristocrats and merchant adventurers, did the practice of dueling become a concern.

At the Old North Church’s blog, Mark Hurwitz just told the story of the province’s first fatal duel, nine years after this law went onto the books.

In July of 1728, Henry [Phillips] and Benjamin Woodbridge drank and played cards at the Royal Exchange Tavern on the corner of State and Exchange Street. The card game turned into an argument, which led to a challenge to a duel with swords at Boston Common that same night. According to Henry, troubles between the two had been growing for some time and according to him, a friend of Woodbridge’s encouraged him to challenge Henry to a duel with swords.

Henry suffered minor wounds to his abdomen and fled Boston Common after wounding Woodbridge in the chest. Henry sought out the medical attention of Dr. [George] Pemberton who dressed his wounds. As he was being treated for his wounds, he confessed to participating in an illegal duel and wounding Woodbridge. He brought Dr. Pemberton to Boston Common and the both of them were unable to locate Woodbridge. He was found dead the next day. It is believed that Woodbridge had sought shelter several yards away under a tree when it began to rain, and thus he expired there.

Because dueling was illegal in Massachusetts, Henry’s friends and family helped to smuggle him out of town aboard a ship departing for England that evening. Several weeks later, Henry reached London and went on to La Rochelle, France where his brother’s brother-in-law, Peter Faneuil, had family, and they agreed to take him in.

Woodbridge was a “pretty young man,” according to a diarist. Only nineteen years old, thus below the age of majority, he was nonetheless a “young gentleman-merchant,” according to the New-England Weekly Journal. His father was an Admiralty court judge in Barbados.

Phillips was also fairly young, twenty-three years old. A Harvard graduate, he had joined his older brother’s bookselling and mercantile business. They were Anglicans, but also Boston natives.

Reportedly Phillips and Woodbridge were friends before their duel. Some contemporaries blamed another man for pitting them against each other. Traditionalists blamed the new bad habits coming from England.

The Massachusetts General Court passed a new law that increased the punishments for dueling. Among the new provisions, anyone killed in a duel or convicted of killing another was denied church burial.

Early American History Schedules at the M.H.S.

The Massachusetts Historical Society has announced its schedule of seminars for the upcoming academic year. These come in four series: on early America, environmental history, urban history, and the history of women and gender.

I’ve picked out those that relate to colonial and federal America. Except for the one noted otherwise, every session starts at 5:15 P.M. at the society’s building on Boylston Street in Boston.

Tuesday, 6 October
Jane Kamensky, Harvard University, “Copley’s Cato or, The Art of Slavery in the Age of British Liberty”
Comment: David L. Waldstreicher, Graduate Center, C.U.N.Y.

Thursday, 8 October
Jen Manion, Connecticut College, “Capitalism, Carceral Culture, and the Domestication of Working Women in the Early American City”
Comment: Cornelia Dayton, University of Connecticut
This session takes place at the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge starting at 5:30 P.M.

Tuesday, 3 November
Owen Stanwood, Boston College, “Peter Faneuil’s World: The Huguenot International and New England, 1682-1742”
Comment: Wim Klooster, Clark University

Tuesday, 10 November
Elizabeth Hyde, Kean University, “André Michaux and the Many Politics of Trees in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World”
Comment: Joseph F. Cullon, W.P.I./M.I.T.

Tuesday, 1 December
Rachel Walker, University of Maryland, “Faces, Beauty, and Brains: Physiognomy and Female Education in Post-Revolutionary America”
Comment: Robert A. Gross, University of Connecticut

Tuesday, 19 Jan 2016
Sara Georgini, Adams Papers, “The Providence of John and Abigail Adams”
Comment: Chris Beneke, Bentley University

Tuesday, 2 February
Wendy Roberts, University at Albany, S.U.N.Y., “Sound Believers: Rhyme and Right Belief”
Comment: Stephen A. Marini, Wellesley College

Tuesday, 1 March
Abigail Chandler, University of Massachusetts–Lowell, “‘Unawed by the Laws of Their Country’: The Role of English Law in North Carolina’s Regulator Rebellion”
Comment: Hon. Hiller Zobel, Massachusetts Superior Court

Tuesday, 5 April
Jared Hardesty, Western Washington University, “Constructing Castle William: An Intimate History of Labor and Empire in Provincial America”
Comment: Eliga H. Gould, University of New Hampshire

Tuesday, 3 May
Joanne Jahnke-Wegner, University of Minnesota, “‘They bid me speak what I thought he would give’: The Commodification of Captive Peoples during King Philip’s War”
Comment: Kate Grandjean, Wellesley College

In these seminars, the author of the paper doesn’t read it aloud. Instead, subscribers are invited to download that paper in advance. Discussions begin with comments by the author and commenter, and then any other attendees who have questions can join in. A subscription to three of the four series can be purchased for $25 through this site. (That doesn’t include the 8 October session, in the women’s history series.)

The New Chronicles of Old Boston

Yesterday I shared the first half of an interview with Charles Bahne, long-time chronicler of Boston and author of The Complete Guide to Boston’s Freedom Trail. Charlie has a new book this spring, published by Museyon Guides, so our conversation turned to that.

In brief, what are the eighteenth-century stories in Chronicles of Old Boston?

My editor and I strove for a mix of famous and obscure, Patriot and Loyalist. And my editor, Heather Corcoran, was really big on scandal and intrigue, sex and crime.

Paul Revere’s ride and the Tea Party were obvious choices. But I put a twist on the story of the Tea Party by making Governor Thomas Hutchinson the most important personage in that chapter. His intransigence was a major reason why the tea was dumped. And I think one reason for his stubbornness was that his family had a significant financial stake in the landing of the tea.

The case of Dr. Benjamin Church was perfect for the scandal, intrigue, and sex angle. And I included John Hancock because he’s been neglected by recent historians. We all know about his big signature on the Declaration of Independence, but not much else about him has been in the popular media recently.

Henry Knox and Dorchester Heights is an important story that’s been largely forgotten in recent years. Likewise, everyone in Boston (and every visitor) now knows about Faneuil Hall, but few know who Peter Faneuil was. Lastly, the story of the Boston Massacre is another one that’s widely mentioned, but whose details are largely unknown.

So that’s seven chapters—nearly a quarter of the book—dealing with the eighteenth century: Peter Faneuil, John Hancock, the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party, Paul Revere, Benjamin Church, and Henry Knox.

Chronicles of Old Boston talks about considerably more than the Revolution. What’s the full scope of the book? How did you decide what stories to include?

The book begins with John Winthrop and ends with John F. Kennedy, that is, 1630 to 1960. I ended the text with JFK’s famous speech quoting Governor Winthrop, when Kennedy was departing Boston to be sworn in as President. I thought that closing the circle in that manner was a nice concluding touch.

Thirteen chapters are devoted to the nineteenth century, which is appropriate because that was the city’s biggest era of expansion. There are two chapters on the seventeenth century, and seven on the twentieth century.

It was very easy to come up with my first list of potential chapters; many of them were subjects that I’d done research on already, or that I’d been intrigued by in the past. The hard part was winnowing that list down to something that would fit in the book. Those decisions were made jointly by Heather and myself. Sometimes the decision was made for us because I couldn’t find good sources of material to write about. Others got left on the cutting room floor due to lack of space.

Imagine that you’re preparing a revised edition of Chronicles of Old Boston twenty years from now. What Boston saga from your own lifetime would you include with the rest?

As I noted earlier, my editor wanted to include a lot of crime and scandal. She was pushing hard to include a chapter on Whitey Bulger. I’m glad I said no on that one because—as we know now—the material would have been outdated before the book could have been published. But in 20 or 25 years, Whitey would definitely be my first choice of chapters to add.

And by then the crimefighters may have solved the mystery of the Gardner Museum theft. Who knows? Maybe that involves Whitey, too.

Before I conclude, John, I want to offer my thanks to you, both for this interview (and for the opportunity to plug the book) and for making the book possible in the first place. If you recall, you’d provided my name to the publisher when they were looking for a possible author. I really appreciate that.

I also want to thank Heather Corcoran, my editor. It really was a joy to work with her. She’s taken my rough manuscript and turned it into a really wonderful book. And she was responsible for overseeing all the photos, maps, and other layout aspects.

And thank you, Charlie!

Chronicles of Old Boston will be launched at a free event at Old South Meeting House on Wednesday, 13 June, at 6:00. Here’s your chance to meet Charlie, ask your Boston history questions, and pick up an autographed copy of his book!

The Grasshopper on Faneuil Hall

Click on the thumbnail at the right to see a nice photograph of the grasshopper-shaped weathervane atop Faneuil Hall, taken by Steve Borichevsky.

That grasshopper was the work of Boston metalworker Shem Drowne (1683-1774), who also created a rooster weathervane for the New Brick Meeting in the North End, a wavy banner for Christ (Old North) Church, and an Indian figure for the Province House. (Drowne himself was a member of the First Baptist Meeting.)

An Indian appeared on the Massachusetts provincial seal, and therefore an appropriate figure to top the governor’s mansion. A rooster was an old Christian symbol. But what did a grasshopper mean in Boston?

Apparently what mattered was what a grasshopper meant in London. A weathervane in that shape topped the Royal Exchange built by Sir Thomas Gresham in 1571. The insect thus became a symbol of worldwide British commerce.

According to Lucius Manlius Sargent, the mercantile Faneuil family brought that symbol to Boston:

…a gilded grasshopper, as many of us well remember, whirled about, of yore, upon the little spire, that rose above the summerhouse, appurtenant to the mansion, where Peter Faneuil lived, and died. That house was built, and occupied, by his uncle, Andrew; and he had some seven acres, for his garden thereabouts. It was upon the westerly side of old Treamount Street. . . . The selection of a grasshopper, for a vane, was made, in imitation of their example, who placed the very same thing, upon the pinnacle of the Royal Exchange, in London.

Thus, Boston probably commissioned Drowne to make a big grasshopper weathervane for Faneuil Hall to honor Peter Faneuil for funding its construction and to signal arrivals from London that Boston was a commercial center, too.

Peter Faneuil’s Tombstone

On Monday, Boston 1775 reader Daud Alzayer asked me about how Peter Faneuil’s name appeared on his tomb. That turns out to be a rather hard question to answer.

In a Boston Transcript essay published before 1852 and collected in 1856 in Dealings with the Dead, the Boston antiquarian, temperance advocate, and slavery apologist Lucius Manlius Sargent wrote about Peter Faneuil’s tomb in the Granary Burying-Ground:

The remains of this noble-spirited descendant of the Huguenots of Rochelle were deposited, in the Faneuil tomb, in the westerly corner of the Granary Ground. This tomb is of dark freestone, with a freestone slab. Upon the easterly end of the tomb, there is a tablet of slate, upon which are sculptured, with manifest care and skill, the family arms; while, upon the freestone slab, are inscribed, at the top, M. M.—memento mori, of course,—and, at the bottom of the slab—a cruel apology for the old Huguenot patronymic—“Peter Funel. 1742,” and nothing more.

But a few paragraphs later, Sargent wrote that the inscription was “P. Funel,” nothing more. In 1856 Thomas Bridgman’s The Pilgrims of Boston and Their Descendants listed the burial site this way: “TOMB OF P. FUNEL, 1742” over a coat of arms. I don’t know of any drawing or photograph of the tomb from this period to nail down that text and how formal it looked.

Sargent imagined that Andrew Faneuil, Peter’s uncle, originally commissioned the tomb with his own coat of arms, and that years after Peter was interred there Bostonians began to wonder. “Whereabouts was it, that Peter Faneuil was buried?” Sargent’s imagination continued:

Some worthy old citizen—God bless him—who knew rather more of this matter than his neighbors, and was well aware, that the arms would be but a dead letter to posterity, resolved to serve the public, and remedy the defect. Up he goes into the Granary Ground, in the very spirit of Old Mortality, and, with all his orthography in his ear, inscribes P. Funel upon the tablet!

When might that have happened? The Old Style date “1742” suggests the carver worked before the British Empire shifted to the Gregorian calendar in 1752. But Peter Faneuil’s brother Benjamin lived in Boston and Cambridge until 1784, and his sons were prominent Loyalist merchants. Other members of the family remained in Massachusetts in the 1800s. Would a “worthy old citizen” really have done some unauthorized carving on their family tomb? Despite such unanswered questions, lots of people accepted Sargent’s guesses.

By the late twentieth century, however, authors were positing that the real reason for a “P. Funel” inscription was that a stonecutter had scratched that name on the slab in order to identify the customer it was meant for. Which would mean Andrew hadn’t commissioned that tomb; Peter had. So that theory also raises questions.

By then the mysterious inscription was long gone. In 1900, Abram English Brown reported that the top of the Faneuil tomb had been carved with Peter Faneuil’s full name, in the standard spelling, and the New Style date “March 3, 1743,” as well as the surnames of some family members who died later. That’s the way it appears today, as shown above courtesy of Find a Grave or in this Flickr image.