Cradle of Violence: How Boston's Waterfront Mobs Ignited the American Revolution
Before John Adams and John Hancock, beforethe Sons of Liberty and the Committees of Correspondence, before Paul Revere's midnight ride, there were the rebellious maritime poor of Boston. Although these fishermenand merchant seamen had sweated and died to produce the vast wealth of America's preeminent port, they were cut off from its benefits. Impressed by the Royal Navy and slaughtered in Great Britain's imperial wars, they were the first to feel the pain and privation of the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, and other measures imposed by Parliament and King George III. And they were the first to take violent action against them.Cradle of Violence tells the story of these sailors and their families and the rest of the oppressed maritime populace: the exploited apprentices and runaway slaves, the career smugglers and sometime pirates, the laid-off dockworkers and seasonal ropewalk spinners. Casually dismissed by political leaders, but with a salty heritage of crewing and fighting together against all challengers, they were the ones with the down and dirty strength to gather in the streets of Boston and resist the authority of the British Empire.Bourne demonstrates that galvanizing events such as the destructive Stamp Act riots, theBoston Massacre, and the Boston Tea Party could not have happened anywhere else in America. He shows how independent-minded merchants and ambitious craftsmen like Samuel Adams and Paul Revere made common cause with waterfront workers like cordwainer Ebenezer Mackintosh and Captain Henry Smith. In a communal rage, they started a sea swell of opposition to Great Britain that ultimately engulfed the land, resulting in the "shot heard 'round the world" of 1775.The names of those rioters from Boston's North and South Ends don't appear on the Declaration of Independence or in the roll of delegates to the Continental Congress. These working-class rebels are more likely to show up on the list of seamen liberated from the town's jails at the time of the waterfront uprisings—on the rosters of those who died in the Boston Massacre—or in the pages of Cradle of Violence.