Robert Love's Warnings by Dayton Cornelia H.; Salinger Sharon V.;

Author:Dayton, Cornelia H.; Salinger, Sharon V.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2014-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Warning in the Midst of Imperial Crises

Robert Love warned strangers during extraordinary times. Throughout the British Atlantic, people’s lives were changed in the fulcrum of post-Seven Years War reverberations and mounting political protest. Bostonians gained the reputation as the most troublesome of colonial complainants. In summer 1765, townspeople poured into the streets to protest the impending imposition of the Stamp Act. The following May, joyful celebrations accompanied the measure’s repeal. Local activists, such as the Sons of Liberty, geared up again when Parliament passed the objectionable Townshend duties and custom officials cracked down on Boston merchants. Town meetings at Faneuil Hall were packed as never before. Merchants who defied the town’s orders to cease importing British manufactured goods might be “warned” and threatened with physical removal by vigilantes. To imperial officials, by summer 1768 the Massachusetts capital appeared so frighteningly close to insurrection that they sent four regiments to act as police. On October 1, hundreds of British redcoats disembarked on Long Wharf, and, for the next seventeen months, Boston was an occupied town. Tensions between the military and the citizenry exploded in March 1770 at the event that came to be known as the Boston Massacre—five men were shot dead by the redcoats. As a result, British troops were hastily removed from the city and housed on a harbor island, thereby reducing some of the friction. However, Bostonians continued to take to the streets to express their grievances with imperial policy—up to and beyond Love’s death in April 1774.

At first glance, Love’s warning activity seems far removed from the political dramas roiling the port town. He used the same formula for entries about strangers over and over. He chose not to punctuate his logs with announcements of the crowd actions, the bonfires, the frightening house assaults, or the dumping of tea. Yet the repercussions of the Seven Years War and the turmoil over parliamentary policies affected how Love did his job and whom he met. As they do our understanding of landlords, middling sojourners, and travelers in need who populated Boston in these years, Love’s observations expand our understanding of the imperial crises that afflicted the town before residents could even imagine an independence movement. Love’s encounters with those who were on the move because of imperial policy generated what are sometimes the only surviving traces of these individuals’ presence in Boston and the shape of their North American journeying. Disabled veterans down on their luck, exiled Acadians determined to return to French communities, women and children left behind by occupying troops, and soldiers jailed for firing into the crowd at the massacre deserve to be included in the stories we tell about pre-revolutionary Boston.

During the Seven Years War, sixty thousand redcoats had been shipped from the British Isles and imperial outposts to fight the French and their Indian allies in the campaigns that led France to cede Canada and much of the North American interior. They were joined by thousands of provincial soldiers, a disproportionate number of

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