The Whites of their Eyes (6 page)

The Stamp Act—the “fatal
Black-Act
,” one printer called it—was set to go into effect on November 1, 1765.
⁵⁰
In October, colonists convened a Stamp Act Congress in New Yor
k, where delegates drafted and signed a declaration, asserting, above all, “that it is inseparably essential to the Freedom of a People, and the undoubted Right of
Englishmen
, that no Taxes be imposed on them but with their own consent, given personally, or by their Representatives.”
⁵¹
On October 10, 1765, a Baltimore printer changed his newspaper’s title to the
Maryland Gazette, Expiring
. Its dread motto: “In Uncertain Hopes of a Resurrection to Life Again.” Later that month, the printer of the
Pennsylvania Journal
replaced his newspaper’s masthead with a death’s head and framed his front page with a thick
black border in the shape of a gravestone. “Adieu, Adieu!” whispered the ghastly
Journal
. On October 31, the
New-Hampshire Gazette
appeared with black mourning borders and, in a column on the front page, lamented its own demise, groaning, “I must
Die
!” Shrieked the
Connecticut Courant
, quoting the book of Samuel: “Tell it not in Gath! Publish it not in Askalon!”
⁵²
The newspaper is dead!

Or, not quite dead yet. “Before I make my
Exit
,” gasped the
New-Hampshire Gazette
, “I will recount over the many good Deeds I have done, and how useful I have been, and still may be, provided my Life should be spar’d
; or I might hereafter revive again.” The list of deeds was long and wonderful; it ran to four columns. Nothing good in the world had ever happened but that a printer set it in type. “Without this Art of communicating to the Public, how dull and melancholy must all the intelligent Part of Mankind appear?” It’s a fair question, before and since. But besides the settling over the land of a pall of melancholy and dullness, what else happens when a newspaper dies? In one allegory published during the Stamp Act crisis, a tearful
Liberty
cried to her dying brother,
Gazette
, “Unless thou
revivest quickly, I shall also perish with thee! In our Lives we were not divided; in our Deaths we shall not be separated!”
⁵³

The day the Stamp Act went into effect, Edes draped his
Gazette
in black mourning ink and Bostonians staged a Funeral for Liberty, burying a coffin six feet under the Liberty Tree. In his paper, Edes reported on similar funerals held all over the colonies. Everywhere, the story ended the same way. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, “a coffin was prepared, and neatly ornamented, on the lid of which was inscribed the word
Liberty
, in capitals, aged one hundred and forty-five years, computing the time of our ancestors landing at Plymouth.” But then, lo, a reprieve, otherworldly: the eulogy
“was scarcely ended before the corpse was taken up, it having been perceived that some remains of life were left.”
⁵⁴

The old media, or what Edward Wagner called the “liberal media,” used to be known as the mainstream media, and its notions of fairness date to the eighteenth century. The elusive pursuit of journalistic objectivity only began in the nineteenth century, but the best eighteenth-century printers
had standards, too.
⁵⁵
“The Business of Printing has chiefly to do with Men’s Opinions,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, in “An Apology for Printers,” in 1731. Printers were bound to offend, Franklin explained, but his conscience was clear so long as he published a sufficient range of opinion: “Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”
⁵⁶

In 2009, while the Tea Party was forming, the newspaper was dyi
ng, all over again. This was more than a coincidence; it was a cause. The decline of the newspaper had destabilized American politics. A website called the Newspaper Death Watch kept count, with a column titled “R.I.P.” One hundred and forty-five newspapers either stopped publishing a print edition or shut down entirely that year. Nearly six hundred newspapers laid off employees. On an average day in 2009, forty newspaper employees lost their jobs.
⁵⁷
And this time around, there was no sign of a reprieve.

“These meetings are just fun because we do everything else by e-mail,” Christen Varley told me. Varley entered politics by way of the blogosphere. “I’m from Ohio,” she said. “Massachusetts is a foreign country to me.” She moved to Massachusetts in 2004, for her husband’s job, and, although, with the exception of an internship with the Ohio Republican Party in 1992, she’d never been involved in politics before, living in Taxachusetts triggered something in her. “I started blogging in 2006, and in early 2009 I just thought we should have a Tax Day thing.” Varley’s old blog is called
GOPMom: “Mom Knows Best!” She organized Boston’s three Tea Party rallies in 2009: Tax Day, the Fourth of July, and 9/12. Her concerns included “the myth of anthropogenic global warming.”
Global warming she believed to be a conspiracy of the liberal media. She had been home raising her daughter, but in 2009 she took a job with the Coalition for Marriage and Family, a nonprofit formed to try to get a ban on same-sex marriage on the ballot. Its motto was “One Man, One Woman.” I asked her whether that didn’t amount to more government interference, but the problem, she said, was that the government had interfered so much already that it had nearly destroyed the family, and the only thing for it was to use the government to repair the damage.

All evening, people came and went and milled about. Varley stayed put. Behind her hung a huge framed print, depicting a group of patriots, drinking in this very tavern—something, stylistically, between a Currier and Ives engraving and the label on Sam Adams beer. That beer label happens to have been drawn by Jean Paul Tibbels, illustrator of the American Girl doll books. You’d figure the guy on Sam Adams beer must be Adams, who was, briefly, a brewer, but it’s not. It’s a cartoon of a portrait of Paul Revere, painted by Copley in 1768. Copley painted Revere, a silversmith, in a waistcoat and
shirtsleeves, sitting at his bench, working. A couple of years later, he painted Adams, too, but as a bewigged and learned gentleman, in a buttoned frock, standing at a desk strewn with papers, not the sort of man to sell beer.

Varley was sitting, perfectly centered, in front of and just below that picture of the Sons of Liberty, which made it seem as if they were anointing her. That’s what had drawn all those photographers and television crews. I asked her what it meant to her that patriots had plotted here. “We admire their battle,” she said. “But we’re not melting down horseshoes for musket balls.”

WHEREIN WILL BE FOUND AN ACCOUNT OF AN
EXTRAORDINARY ASSEMBLY
—
A DISPUTE BETWEEN
MR. ADAMS AND MRS. WARREN
—
THE SUFFERINGS OF
ANOTHER LADY
—
POOR RICHARD’S WAY TO WEALTH
—
A
LATE MASSACRE IN BOSTON
—
ANOTHER ILL-CONSIDERED
INVASION
—
A PLEA FOR PEACE
—
AND REFLECTIONS ON THE
FALLACY OF PRESENTISM

On March 20, 2010, the day before the U.S. House of Representatives was scheduled to vote on the health care bill, the Boston Tea Party held an Anti-Obamacare rally in front of Faneuil Hall. A few dozen people turned up. Most carried signs: “The Constitution
SPEAKS
.” Some waved flags of thirteen stars. Acolytes of Ayn Rand urged, “
READ
ATLAS SHRUGGED
.” Christen Varley told a woman who showed up with a Hitler sign to leave. The place was bustling with tourists on their way to shop at Quincy Market. Austin Hess, wearing his tricorn and a mock–Obama campaign T-shirt that read
NOPE
instead of
HOPE
, summed up his objectives for the Tea Party movement: “I want to replace the current political establishment, get all incumbents out and replace them with fiscal conservatives who will abide by the Constitution.”

Hess had moved to Massachusetts from Virginia three years before. “We’re trying to get back to what the founders
had,” he told me. “We’re trying to bring people back to Boston’s roots. Liberty above all.” A nurse from Worcester who grew up in the Midwest and was registered as an Independent explained what getting back to those eighteenth-century roots meant to her: “I don’t want the government giving money to people who don’t want to work. Government is for the post office, and to defend our country, and maybe for the roads. That’s all.”

“The history of our revolution will be one continued lye from one end to the other,” Johns Adams once predicted.
¹
He was right to worry. In every nation, as in every family, some stories are remembered, others are forgotten, and there are always some stories too painful to tell. Adams expected that the Revolution, a messy, sprawling, decades-long affair, would, over time, be shortened and simplified. In the national imagination, the Revolution is a fable. Much of what most people picture when they think about the Revolution comes from the world of juvenilia—
Johnny Tremain
, paper dolls, elemen
tary school art projects, and family vacations—which isn’t surprising, and wouldn’t be a problem, except that every history of a nation’s founding makes an argument about the nature of its government.

People would make of the Revolution what they needed, Adams knew, and what they needed would rarely agree with how he saw it, or what he thought mattered. Adams was especially worried that the nation’s story of its origins might one day leave him out altogether. (Adams had worried that history would neglect him even before he accomplished anything of which anyone might take any note. One night in 1759, when he was twenty-four and just starting out, he woke up, seized with an aching void in his chest. He picked up his quill, reached for his inkpot, and wrote in his diary, “I feel
anxious, eager, after something. What is it?” It was the same thing it always was: the pain of his insatiable ambition. “I have a dread of Contempt, a quick sense of Neglect, a strong Desire of Distinction,” Adams wrote that night.)
²
In 1807, when Adams read Mercy Otis Warren’s
History
, twelve hundred pages in three volumes that devoted a scant four pages to one John Adams, his worst fears were realized. Sputtering with rage, Adams wrote Warren ten letters—some more than twenty pages long—of petty, rambling vituperation. Warren had assailed his character: “In the 392d page of t
he third volume, you say that ‘Mr. Adams, his passions and prejudices were sometimes too strong for his sagacity and judgment.’ ” She had neglected him: “You have carefully recorded the appointment of Mr. Jay to Madrid, in page 141, Vol. II, to have been on the 27th of September, 1779, yet have taken no notice of mine, which was on the 29th of the same month.” She would not even grant him alphabetic preeminence. When Warren listed Franklin, Jay, and Adams as ambassadors, Adams complained that his name ought to have appeared first in that list, as it had in their commission. “You will say, no doubt, that this
is ‘sighing for rank,’ ” he sneered, anticipating her objection. “Very well: say so, Mrs. Warren. Make the most of it.”

Against Adams’s abuse, Warren fought back. “Were she to write her History over again, and correct her
errors
, as you seem to wish her to do,” she answered, what must she write? “She must tell the world that Mr. Adams . . . had neither ambition nor pride of talents . . . ; that his writings suppressed rebellion, quelled the insurgents, established the State and Federal Constitutions, and gave the United States all the liberty, republicanism, and independence they enjoy; that his name was always placed at the head of every public
commission; that nothing had been done, and nothing could be done, neither in Europe nor America, without his sketching and drafting the business, from the first opposition to British measures in the year 1764 to signing the treaty of peace with England in the year 1783.” Who would believe such rot? “Mr. Adams might indeed think this a very pleasant portrait, but I doubt whether the world would receive it as a better likeness than the one drawn” in her own history.
³
Ah, but give it time, Mrs. Warren.

In 2008, Adams was the subject of an Emmy Award–winning HBO miniseries, based on David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography. Independence was almost entirely Adams’s doing, HBO suggested, despite the fact that, to the American people, Thomas Paine was the most important promoter of independence; Adams’s crucial and, by all accounts, dazzling and stirring speech before the Second Continental Congress, urging independence, does not survive; and Adams didn’t write the document declaring it. (“I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular,” A
dams told Jefferson, graciously offering the task of drafting the Declaration of Independence to the Virginian. He forever regretted this. “Jefferson ran away with all the stage effect,” Adams later complained, “and all the glory.”)
⁴
None of this gave HBO pause: its Franklin was a buffoon, its Washington a sap-skull, its Jefferson distracted and, finally, deluded. Thomas Paine didn’t even have a part. HBO’s
John Adams
was animated as much by the man’s many private resentments as by the birth of the United States. It was history, with a grudge. “He United the States of America” was the miniseries’ mot
to, giving credit to Adams for . . . everything.
⁵

The history of the Revolution hasn’t been one continued lie from one end to the other, as Adams would have it, but
it’s certainly been changeable, as, in fact, it ought. History is an endlessly interesting argument where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else. That John Adams and Mercy Otis Warren didn’t see eye to eye on Adams’s contribution to American independence might not seem of any great consequence, but it’s a good illustration of how two people—even two people who lived through it—can read the same evidence differently. The telling of history is, by its very nature, controversial, contentious, and contested; it advances by debate. This doesn’t make history squishy, v
ague, and irrelevant. It makes it picky, demanding, and vital. American history, though, is beset by this paradox: historical analysis is unstable because, like all scholarship, it must be forever subject to interpretation and revision and, especially, to new evidence, new vantage points, and new avenues of investigation, but history plays a civic role too, and a nation born in revolution looks for stability, tranquility, and permanence, even in its own past. And, because of the nature of the Constitution, the founding bears a particular burden: it is a story about what binds Americans together—W
e the people, do ordain—but it also serves as the final source of political authority, the ultimate arbiter of every argument, the last court of appeal. No history can easily or always bear that weight.