Free American Fun by John Beckman

and unleashed new levels of participation. Here the novel but appealing republican ideal of an alert, active citizenry might be acted out in a setting that was also traditional and familiar.” Familiar, naturally, toJack Tar in particular.
    From theKnowles riots up through theimpressment riots of the late 1760s,it was Jack Tar who hoisted the Revolution’s mainsail. Rabble-rousing played well in Jack Tar’s society—especially in taverns, where races and genders mixed freely, where passions flowed like cheap malt liquor—although it took special talent to import it to the high streets, where the middle and upper ranks had behaved well for centuries. It was commonly held in the late eighteenth century that revolution came from the “body of the people,” a willing majority who, inJohn Locke’s terms,upon suffering “a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices … endeavor to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected.” In England the “body” comprised property-owning white males with a measure of political leverage. In America, however, as the century progressed and the public embraced notions of a more complicated citizenry (ancient notions from Roman orators likeSeneca, late-breaking notions from moral-sense philosophers likeFrancis Hutcheson andAdam Ferguson), the body of the people itself began to change. More people came to recognize themselves as rightful citizens, and their body came to include whoever could cram into, say, Boston’s Faneuil Hall or Old South Meeting House—provided they weren’t female, Indian, or black. Such a body was neither legal nor illegal. In times of common crisis, it became an extralegal gathering that in the best cases justified its acts of open rebellion by practicing virtue, civility, and restraint. It helped this body’s physical fitness, moreover, asBenjamin L. Carp has shown, that the colony’s financial strength hinged on interdependence among the levels in Boston’s waterfront community—among rich merchants and shipbuilders, middle-class shop and tavern keepers, and crowds of menial sailors and dockworkers whose “particularly strong collectivism and antiauthoritarian militancy” (resulting from their “unique culture and the close, cooperative working relationship of seamen aboard ship”) kept the upper classes in check. But could the hoi polloi entice their superiors to join them in behaving badly?
    The middle management of Boston’s early revolution was a loose conspiracy of middle-class activists calling themselves the Sons of Liberty, 26 (out of 355) of whom had liquor licenses by the end of the 1760s. In 1765, the Sons manageda deft little dance that rallied a seeming majority against theStamp Act without kicking off full-scale destruction. Taking cues from liberal clergymen such asCharles Chauncey andJonathan Mayhew, the Sons ballyhooed their British loyalty, even as they directly attacked the Stamp Act as a threat to American liberty and dignity. Thus did they expand their playing field, a no-man’s-land between criminality and law where citizens could riot at their own risk.
    The Stamp Act stress-tested the Sons of Liberty’s tactics. Widespread rage throughout the thirteen colonies could have weakened intocynicism—or exploded into violence. But starting in Boston, under the influence ofSamuel Adams’s “true patriots,” it fostered a generation of citizens keen to risk everything for national freedom.
    Following a summer of welling discontent, theLoyal Nine, a group of artisans and merchants who hid their contacts with radical assemblymen like Samuel Adams, orchestrated an open citywide rebellion against the stamp master,Andrew Oliver. To encourage participation by the North and South Endgangs, two young and viciously opposing factions, the Nine tapped the services ofEbenezer McIntosh, a cobbler who had led the South End to victory in thePope’s Day parades the November