Bunker Hill

English subjects had dared to do the unthinkable: overthrow and execute their king.
    In a handbill that appeared in “the most public spaces” of Boston that Saturday, Joyce Junior vowed to punish any of the tea consignees who tried to leave Castle Island, exhorting his “Brethren and Fellow Citizens” to help him give the consignees “such a reception as such vile ingrates deserve.” What that reception might entail was suggested by the title Joyce Junior ascribed to himself at the bottom of the handbill: “Chairman of the Committee for Tarring and Feathering.”
    The appearance of this particular character was a recent phenomenon, but the persona—that of a shadowy enforcer—was nothing new to Boston. Some version of the upstart regicide had been part of the annual celebration known as Pope Night. Every November 5, two rival gangs of boys and apprentices from the city’s North and South Ends (divided by the creek that flowed from Mill Pond to the harbor) marched behind carts that displayed the figures of the pope and the devil. The ultimate object of Pope Night was to seize the opponent’s cart, and the inevitable battle resulted in untold broken bones and in 1764 even a boy’s death. Based on the British tradition of Guy Fawkes Day, which celebrated the foiling of a 1605 plot to blow up Parliament and the king, Pope Night emphasized not the miraculous salvation of royal government but Congregational New England’s long-standing hatred of the Catholic Church. Presiding over the bare-knuckled tumult of Pope Night appears to have been a Joyce Junior–like figure wearing a white wig, red cloak, large boots, a sword, and what was described as a “horrible” mask.
    Yet another version of Joyce Junior was spotted during the uproar that preceded the Boston Massacre in 1770. A “tall man in a red cloak and white wig” was seen haranguing the crowd at Dock Square before the townspeople headed toward the center of town for the final encounter with the British soldiers. This may have been the same shadowy figure that at least one witness claimed was standing behind the beleaguered regulars, exhorting them to fire.
    Although Joyce Junior wore a mask, many in Boston undoubtedly knew the identity of the man who claimed to be the chairman of the committee of tarring and feathering. He threatened and boasted like a seasoned sailor from the rough-and-tumble world of the Boston waterfront, but Joyce Junior was in actuality the twenty-six-year-old son of Harvard professor John Winthrop, whose great-great-grandfather of the same name had been a founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Professor Winthrop’s son (also named John, and thus a junior on two accounts) had been publicly admonished while an undergraduate at Harvard “for making indecent tumultuous noises in the college.” By 1773 he was a merchant with a general store on Treat’s Wharf. Just before the Tea Party, he was part of a group charged with preventing the East India tea from being landed from the ships. Now he was doing everything in his power to make sure the streets were free of tea consignees and other “traitors to their country.”
    The appearance of Joyce Junior in January 1774 appears to have been part of an effort by patriot leaders to control the aftermath of the Tea Party. Unwieldy mob eruptions such as the one that provoked the Boston Massacre inevitably made for bad publicity in both America and England. In an effort to depict the destruction of East India tea as an act of principle rather than of rage, the Tea Party had been minutely choreographed from the start. Joyce Junior was continuing this attempt to channel if not contain the violence. But as all of Boston was about to learn, there were some aspects of this growing insistence on liberty that no one controlled.
    —

    Boston had always been a town on tiptoe. Just a square mile in area, with a mere sliver of land connecting it to the mainland to the south, this tadpole-shaped island was dominated by three towering, lightly settled hills and a forest of steeples. From Boston’s highest perch, the 138-foot Beacon Hill, it was possible to see that the town was just one in a huge amphitheater of humped and jagged islands that extended more than eight and a half miles to Point Allerton to the southeast. To the west, the Charles River reached into the interior from the shallows of the Back Bay, linking Boston to nearby Cambridge and Watertown. To the north the Mystic River provided