Almost everyone has heard about Paul Revere’s ride and the shot heard round the world in the April 1775 battles of Lexington and Concord, but almost nobody realizes that the British had effectively lost control of the Massachusetts Bay Colony almost eight months earlier, in the summer of 1774. On 6 September 1774, 4622 militiamen from 37 towns in Worcester County marched to Worcester and shut down the county courthouse. That act of defiance effectively terminated British rule in Massachusetts, except in Boston where the royal appointees were protected by British troops, and set the stage for the official declaration of independence from Great Britain two years later, in July 1776. For 240 years, this dramatic confrontation has been a largely untold story. But a consortium of historical and cultural organizations from throughout Worcester County set out to change that. By publicizing the event they called the “Worcester Revolution of 1774,” the group intended to develop a sense of community pride in the role our region played in the founding of the American nation.
As part of the program, Ray Raphael’s The First American Revolution: Beyond Lexington and Concord was chosen as the book for a “County-Wide Read.” I’m pleased to report that our library reading group participated in the reading program and discussed the book at our August meeting. I found the book fascinating and was especially intrigued by the excerpts from original documents which the author dug up from various archives and included in the book. Those farmers and other small-town folk really did not appreciate their 1692 charter being revoked and the British Crown meddling in their ordinary affairs. So what happened exactly, and why was the “closing of the courts” so important?
The Massachusetts Government Act, passed by Parliament in spring of 1774, gave the royally-appointed governor wide-ranging powers. For example, towns could not call town meetings without consent of the governor. With respect to the courts, the royal governor now had the power to nominate and appoint all judges of the inferior courts of common pleas, the attorney general, provosts, marshals, justices of the peace, and other officers including the sheriffs. You can see why this “Mandamus Council” did not sit well with the colonists and why they would want to shut down such a body. Still, I think it took a lot of courage to stand up to both wealthy commercial interests and a powerful political empire with a strong military presence. I am not sure how it happened: what would it take to transform one’s identity from a loyal Englishman to that of a treasonous rebel? Surely a change of hearts and minds.
The commemoration of Worcester’s part in the American Revolution culminated in a day-long celebration of the closing of the courts, held today in and around downtown. I carefully perused the schedule online and picked four events to attend, each scheduled for a hour, beginning at 11 am and ending at 3. These were:
- Rum and Revolution, comedy and music by Sir Jeremy Bell & Larry Young, Tuckerman Hall
- Breakdown of Royal Rule in Massachusetts, September 1774, by J L Bell, Salisbury Mansion
- Chains of Liberty, an original play by James David Moran, Worcester Area Mission Society
- Liberty, Equality, and History: A Public Discussion, Worcester Area Mission Society
It was a beautiful, sunny, late summer day, but all the events I attended were inside, so I didn’t take a lot of photos (and I haven’t had a camera since May, so it may be that I got used to not taking them). I took copious notes at each event, but I don’t think I could do justice to what I learned, even with an extensive summary. So what follows is more of a very brief recap of each event.
Sir Jeremy Bell and Larry Young’s music and comedy routines were highly entertaining, but they also presented a lot of information about eighteenth century music and drink. For example, rum was the beverage of choice in the colonies (think of the impact of the Molasses Act of 1733), and Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers, invented the glass harmonica. Jeremy Bell is at right:
Tuckerman Hall is a spectacular setting for this type of performance:
J L Bell maintains a website about the Revolutionary War, with an emphasis on the Boston area. He reviewed the events of 1774 for us and laid out a clear timeline, as well as an interpretation of each event’s significance in the overall picture. He said that because of the town meeting tradition, the colonists were used to governing themselves. When the royal government tried to assert top-down authority, the people resisted by various means, such as riots, boycotts, and smuggling. Towns also kept in touch with other towns by means of committees of correspondence; in fact, the closing of the Worcester courts on September 6th was preceded by the closing of the Berkshire and Hampshire County courts.
James David Moran’s play was commissioned for this 1774 commemoration; the performance I attended was probably the world premiere. I thought it was excellent — amusing in parts but also very dramatic and moving. Kudos to the playwright, the director, and the cast. There was audience participation: we were instructed to shout either “Huzzah” or “Fie” to signal agreement or disagreement at various points, and audience members were chosen to read the “Resolves.” In the program notes, the playwright says that “the characters are based upon actual people,” though he “invented details and characteristics of their personalities where the historical record is incomplete.”
The public discussion scheduled for 2-3 pm was actually a discussion of the play (that wasn’t clear to me beforehand). There were four panelists who spoke and who also answered questions from the audience. District Court Justice Margaret R Guzman, one of the panelists, reminded us that the issues the colonists grappled with are also contemporary issues, such as citizen participation in elections and judicial independence.
On my way home, I drove by the Rural Cemetery on Grove Street, but I quickly realized that it covers a lot of ground, and I could not, on my own, find the graves of the revolutionary soldiers, both British and Patriot, who are buried there.