We’ll start this off in a logical fashion: by discussing two elm trees that no longer exist.
Actually, let’s back up a bit. When I last left you, I had been forced to abandon my trip to Boston in the summer of 2024 due to a mild case of passing out on a departing airliner, which was due in turn to a less-than-mild case of influenza (which I swear I had no idea I had). We got as far east from California as Gate B43 at Denver International Airport.
Since then, I got vaxxed to the gills for both COVID and flu. I always dutifully got my COVID vaccine since it was introduced because I am a good citizen and a believer in basic science, and also pretty dubious about the efficacy of location-tracking nanobots being injected into my bloodstream. My flu vaccination was always a little more hit or miss (mostly miss) because — as I figured it — “I never get the flu.” Well, lesson learned. It’s the double jab for me every autumn from now on.
And now, here I was, striding across Boston Common on an overcast morning the following summer, eager to see a couple of vanished elms. Thus began my week of, as my wife put it, “taking pictures of plaques.”
The first place I was looking for was at the corner of Washington and Boylston, right where Boylston turns into Essex, on the northern edge of modern Boston’s Chinatown. There was, naturally, a Dunkin’ Donuts on the opposite corner. (What you’ve heard is true. Boston is positively infested with Dunkin’ Donuts. The next nearest one was literally 300 paces away.)
As I approached, I tried to picture what this intersection must have looked like 260 years ago. Three dirt roads known as “Frog Lane,” “Essex Street,” and “Orange Street” converged into an open space known as Hanover Square. The Chase and Speakman distillery was nearby. This was the old “South End” neighborhood, respectably middle-class. There would certainly be no Dunkin’ Donuts. Hanover Square was the site of several large elms, said to have been planted in 1646. The elms were so distinctive they were used as a landmark by people guiding newcomers into the city (eg., “turn right at the big elm trees”).
One elm, a little bigger and taller than the rest, grew in the front yard of bookbinder and church deacon John Elliott (1692-1771), who owned the house directly across the street from the distillery…
Nowadays, the streets are very paved and very busy. Orange Street eventually became Washington Street, and Frog Lane became Boylston Street. The house and distillery vanished around two centuries ago, the modern South End moved further south, and now you’re only a few yards in multiple directions from a half-decent donut and incredibly shitty coffee. It was right here that the Liberty Tree once stood, and where the first quiet rumblings of what grew into the American Revolution were heard.
1765. The British treasury had been running on fumes since the end of the Seven Years’ War (yet another installment of the British National Pastime — going to war with France) two years prior. Since a big chunk of that war was to protect their colonial holdings in North America (and by implication, the colonists themselves) from the predations of the French army and their “savage” Native American allies, King George III and his Parliament thought it only fair that the American colonists pay their fair share for their own protection, which included a force of 10,000 British soldiers stationed on American soil from Georgia to New Hampshire. So they passed the Stamp Act in March of 1765, which imposed a small tax on paper goods sold in the colonies. The proof of payment of said tax would be an inked revenue stamp. It would go into effect that November.
The colonists and the royal government did not see eye-to-eye on this matter, to say the least. The Americans couldn’t give a toss about a handful of French soldiers in ramshackle little forts hundreds of miles over the Appalachians in the Ohio River valley. No, the colonists saw this as the Parliament picking their pockets to gain funds to keep an unwelcome military force in their midst, and to do god-knows-what else across their expanding global empire. It was pointed out to them that folks in Britain had been paying the exact same tax at a much higher rate for over fifty years. The colonists retorted (in the form of letters and petitions) that at least people living in Britain had some nominal say in how the revenue was spent, via their representatives in Parliament. American colonists had no such representation. They paid the necessary taxes raised by their colonial assemblies, who saw to it that the revenue was re-invested in, and served the needs of, that colony and that colony only.
As petty and stubborn as the American response to the first direct tax levied on them by their distant parent government was (it was only a few cents, after all, and the colonists did benefit indirectly from the British victory in the Seven Years’ War), it was definitely a principled response. And people started getting riled up. In Boston, especially.
Knowing myself as not much of a boat-rocker, nor a holder of many strong opinions that don’t involve classic rock, it pains me to acknowledge that I probably would have been one of those colonists saying “C’mon, guys, let’s just pay the damn tax and get on with our lives.”
A small group of Boston businessmen – “the Loyal Nine*” — began meeting clandestinely at the office of the Boston Gazette, and more notably, at the Chase and Speakman distillery, owned or co-owned by Loyal Nine members Benjamin Edes and Thomas Chase, respectively. The goal of the Loyal Nine was to prevent the Stamp Act from taking effect. They first plastered the streets of Boston with pamphlets and handbills, then decided to take it a step further.
On the morning of August 14, 1765, local passersby noticed several effigies hanging from one of the limbs of Deacon Elliott’s huge tree, the most prominent of which was emblazoned with the initials “A.O.” This was clearly meant to represent Andrew Oliver, the official stamp tax collector of Boston. Word spread. A crowd gathered. Speeches were made. Passions were stoked. The crowd was an angry mob by sundown (possibly fueled by rum punch provided by the distillery), and marched off to ransack both Oliver’s home and office. The first protest by Americans against British “tyranny” ended with Oliver barely escaping with his life. Three days later, Oliver was practically frog-marched to the suddenly-signifigant tree in Hanover Square, and forced to publicly resign his position in front of a cheering crowd.
The elm was referred to as the “Tree of Liberty” in a Boston newspaper the following month, and went by variations of that name for the next decade. It was the staging area for all Boston protests for the duration of the Stamp Act crisis. It was frequently covered with notes, flags, and streamers. A flagpole was installed next to it to summon meetings of the Sons of Liberty. How complicit the elderly Deacon Elliott was with the use of his tree for these purposes is unknown. He has no known association with the Loyal Nine or the later Sons of Liberty. Some of its massive branches may have simply overhung a public pathway. But the fact that it was used as a meeting place so frequently, and was often heavily decorated (and Elliott was known to rub shoulders publicly with local anti-royalists — “whigs**”), serve as indicators that Elliott probably sympathized with the cause.
By the start of 1766, the Loyal Nine were folded into the much larger and better organized colonial protest group called the Sons of Liberty, and the term “loyal” was co-opted by supporters of the crown (“Loyalists”). The Sons of Liberty originated in New York, but soon had chapters throughout the colonies. The Boston chapter was established mainly by a newly-elected member of the Massachusetts colonial assembly, Samuel Adams. Adams had left a string of failed businesses in his wake, including the brewery that would (much) later be revived under his name. In the mid-1760s, he finally discovered his true talent: political agitation. Adams was a first-class pot-stirrer, and quite good at getting people on his side. A close associate of the Loyal Nine, but never an official member, it has been widely theorized that Adams was the mastermind behind all of their actions. There is no credible proof of this, other than the fact that the Loyal Nine were often viewed by later historians as run-of-the-mill merchants and artisans (and one ship captain) with little imagination, no previously demonstrated flair for inflammatory writing, nor any real skill at political organization. Still, never underestimate wealthy businessmen pissed off about paying taxes.
Under pressure from British merchants who were feeling the pinch from colonial boycotts of their goods, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in February of 1766. It had never really been enforced. The Sons of Liberty called it a major victory, but before long there was more to be pissed off about (Townshend Acts, etc.), and meetings under the Liberty Tree continued.
Lots of stuff happened in Boston and around the Liberty Tree between 1766 and 1775, much of it none too pretty. The Quartering Act, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party and subsequent Intolerable Acts all served to further alienate the colonists from the mother country. In January 1774, an angry mob pulled a customs officer, John Malcolm, from his home in Boston’s North End. He was beaten with sticks, stripped of his clothes, and tarred and feathered. Tarring and feathering was the painfully humiliating ritual of coating a victim’s bare flesh with hot tar (causing second- or third-degree burns), then dumping chicken feathers over the sticky surface. It was a punishment more talked about than actually performed, but it did happen from time to time, perhaps no instance more horrific than this one. Malcolm was paraded in a cart to the Liberty Tree, forced to denounce the royal governor (which he refused to do), then had tea dumped down his throat in a lengthy series of sardonic “toasts” to every British politician the mob leaders could think of. Severely beaten, burned, hypothermic (Boston Harbor had completely frozen solid that week), probably vomiting tea and blood, Malcolm was paraded for several more laps around the city before he broke down and denounced the British government. At which point, he was dumped in front of his house, barely alive, with a long recovery ahead of him. (To be fair, Malcolm was well-known as the North End’s resident asshole — every neighborhood seems to have one — and this whole incident stemmed from him loudly threatening to beat a child sledding in front of his house with his walking stick, but still…) (And who brought all the tea? It reminds me of the hood scene in Django Unchained. Someone’s wife spent a whole afternoon brewing up gallons of tea for this awful purpose.)
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