Bunker Hill

Benjamin Irvin’s “Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768–1776” and Walter Watkins’s “Tarring and Feathering in Boston in 1770.” In old age, George Hewes provided two accounts of his encounter with John Malcom, first in James Hawkes,
A Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party
, pp. 33–35, and then in Benjamin Thatcher,
Traits of the Tea Party
, pp. 127–34. See also Alfred Young’s
The Shoemaker and the Tea Party
, pp. 46–51.
    Benjamin Carp writes about the relationship between colonial firefighters and the patriot cause in “Fire of Liberty: Firefighters, Urban Voluntary Culture and the Revolutionary Movement,” pp. 781–818. On January 20, 1766, John Adams recorded in his diary Daniel Leonard’s comments on the destruction of Thomas Hutchinson’s house: “Thought Hutchinson’s History did not shine. Said his house was pulled down, to prevent his writing any more by destroying his materials” (1:300). According to Pauline Maier in “Revolutionary Violence and the Relevance of History,” “Mobs were too easily transformed into corporate organs of their communities to be considered explosive repositories of dissent. The rioters of one night might serve the next evening as posse, military company or . . . fire company” (p. 131). See also Maier’s “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth Century America” and her seminal
From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776
. On William Russell, see Francis Drake,
Tea Leaves
, p. 159. According to an account that received wide distribution in England in the fall of 1774, Malcom was forced by the crowd to toast the king and his family and drink a large amount of tea, which was ultimately forced down his throat with a funnel—an anecdote that inspired a well-known engraving. However, none of the Boston newspapers makes any mention of the tea-drinking episode, and even more significantly, Malcom himself never refers to it in his own detailed account of his sufferings, in which he is careful to enumerate all the outrages committed by the Bostonians. I have, therefore, chosen not to include the tea-drinking episode in my account of Malcom’s tarring and feathering. See R. T. H. Halsey,
The Boston Port Bill as Pictured by a Contemporary London Cartoonist
, pp. 82–86, 93, for both the engraving and the newspaper accounts. The story of John Malcom’s patriot brother Daniel is told in George Wolkins’s “Daniel Malcom and Writs of Assistance.” In a January 31, 1774, letter, the loyalist Ann Hulton writes in detail about the tarring and feathering of John Malcom and reports, “The doctors say that it is impossible this poor creature can live. They say his flesh comes off his back in steaks.”
Letters of a Loyalist Lady
, p. 71.
    John Singleton Copley’s April 26, 1774, letter to Isaac Clarke telling of how he was threatened with a visit from Joyce Junior is in
Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham
, p. 218. Jules David Prown in
John Singleton Copley in American Art
writes of the “stunning immediacy” of Copley’s portraits and the “sense of presence, of the physical entity and personality of the sitter, which is conveyed across the span of 200 years. The subject of the portrait appears as a distinct, knowable human being” (p. 53). The statistic that one in five Boston families owned slaves in the second quarter of the eighteenth century comes from Gordon Wood,
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
, p. 51. An advertisement for Phillis Wheatley’s new book of poems appears in the January 24, 1774, issue of the
Boston Gazette
. On Wheatley and how she had become a “political hot potato,” see David Waldstreicher, “The Wheatleyan Moment,” pp. 540–41. Her February 11, 1774, letter to Samson Occom is reprinted in William H. Robinson’s
Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings
, p. 332. See also Vincent Carretta’s
Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage
, pp. 159–60. Abner Goodell writes about the execution and gibbeting of Mark in “The Trial and Execution . . . of Mark and Phillis,” pp. 28–30. In his account of his famous ride, Paul Revere refers to the place “where Mark was hung in chains,” in “A Letter from Col. Paul Revere to the Corresponding Secretary,” p. 107. On the advertisements for slaves in Boston newspapers, see Robert Desrochers Jr.’s “Slave-for-Sale