Bunker Hill

unscripted outbreak of violence. In an attempt to clarify this potentially embarrassing situation, he issued yet another proclamation, this one disavowing any association with the incident. “Brethren and fellow citizens!” the handbill read. “This is to certify, that the modern punishment lately inflicted on the ignoble John Malcom was not done by our order—We reserve that method for bringing villains of greater consequence to a sense of guilt and infamy.”
    Over the course of the next few months, Joyce Junior posted more announcements (one of which appeared in the
Boston Gazette
over John Winthrop Junior’s advertisement for a new shipment of flour) in which Winthrop’s alter ego continued to issue threats against the tea consignees and their associates. One night in April, the painter John Singleton Copley awoke to discover that his house on Beacon Hill (just down the street from the Hancock mansion) was surrounded by a raucous mob that wanted to know if a Mr. Watson from Plymouth was staying with him. At thirty-five, Copley had long since established himself as the foremost painter not only in New England but all America. A largely self-taught genius and purposefully apolitical, Copley had painted the portraits of many loyalists and of many patriots. He had an unmatched ability when it came to creating a sense of his subject’s presence. When you looked at a Copley portrait, you felt as if the subject was
there
for all time, frozen in an eternal now. If there was anyone of whom all of Boston should have been proud, it was Copley. But as far as the patriots were concerned he could not be trusted since he was married to the daughter of a tea consignee.
    George Watson, a merchant from Plymouth, was part of the extended loyalist family into which Copley had married. Copley explained to those gathered outside his house that it was true that Watson had visited him earlier in the day, but he had long since departed. In a letter to his brother-in-law, Isaac Winslow Clarke, still marooned on Castle Island, he recounted how the mob threatened that “my blood would be on my own head if I had deceived them; [that] if I entertained him or any such villain for the future [I] must expect the resentment of Joyce.”
    Copley had long since decided that he owed it to his talent to cross the Atlantic and see for himself the masters of Europe, and by the middle of June, he would be on his way to London, never to return. The irony was that Copley privately expressed his sympathies for the patriot cause. In years to come, his paintings of the 1760s and 1770s became the visual icons with which future generations of Americans celebrated Boston’s revolutionary past. But in April 1774 Copley, a self-made artist who stared into the eyes of his subjects and somehow found a way to convey their imperishable essence, was being threatened by the thuggish minions of an overeducated trader who was the great-great-great-grandson of the colony’s Puritan founder.
    Copley wasn’t the only artist in Boston who had an uneasy relationship with the city’s patriots. Boston’s most widely known poet was a twenty-one-year-old African enslaved woman named Phillis Wheatley, whose first volume of poems had been published in England just the year before and was now being sold in the city’s many bookshops. Not only a precocious literary talent, Wheatley had used her growing fame during a recent trip to London to gain access to some of the foremost cultural and political figures of the day, including the secretary of state for the colonies, Lord Dartmouth (for whom the college in New Hampshire had been named), and Benjamin Franklin. She’d also used that fame to leverage a promise from her master, Daniel Wheatley, to grant her freedom.
    For the citizens of Boston, whose love of liberty did not prevent one in five families from owning slaves, Wheatley’s celebrity caused difficulties. In a letter that was reprinted in the Boston press that March, she wrote to the Mohegan preacher Samson Occom about the patriot cause’s inherent duplicity. “For in every human breast,” Wheatley wrote, “God has implanted a principle, which we call love of freedom; it is impatient of oppression, and pants for deliverance. . . . God grant deliverance in his own way and time, and . . . [punish] all those whose avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the calamities of their fellow creatures. This I desire not for their hurt, but to convince