The Handy Boston Answer Book. Samuel Willard Crompton

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      What does “Yankee” mean?

      The derivation of this word is uncertain. Some historians believe that the word was given to the colonists by the Native Americans, some of whom used “Yen-geez” to describe someone who did not speak very much. Others assert that Yankee is a word developed in New England, and its appearance indicated a difference between the Bostonians of around 1770 and those from a century earlier. What can be said with confidence is that the word Yankee has come to mean a New Englander who is tight with his money.

      Later, during the Civil War, Yankee became a derogatory term, meaning a Northerner who came south to disturb and disrupt the lives of the Confederates. Sometime during the nineteenth century, Yankee also became the term used by many foreigners, English men and women especially, to describe the Americans as a whole.

      What did Boston look like in or around the year 1770?

      The topography and landscape were much the same as a century earlier, but the town was beginning to acquire a look of sophistication. In the decade prior to the American Revolution, Boston was divided between a small upper class of perhaps ten percent, and a struggling working class of perhaps fifty percent. In between these two were all sorts of middle-class folk, few of whom enjoyed much economic security. For that upper ten percent, however, life was fine indeed.

      Coaches had appeared in Boston as early as 1720, but the really sumptuous ones—those that echoed of wealth and status—came in the 1760s. The two-story house continued to be the staple, but one could imagine the time when the three-story mansion would come into its own. Upper-class Bostonians could be identified (by their poorer counterparts) half a mile away based on their dress, manner, and attitude. But one of the most telling commentaries was the extent to which the person partook of tea.

      One often hears of the Boston Tea Party. Is it true that most Bostonians were tea drinkers?

      For the lower class it’s difficult to say because few of them left diaries. For the upper class, it’s apparent that the drinking of tea was one of the signs of a sophisticated and cultured person. Tea and the vessels in which it was served appear in many portraits and paintings from the period. And while we’re on the subject of painting and tea, it’s impossible to refrain from saying something about John Singleton Copley.

      Was Copley the genius that his friends and neighbors believed him to be?

      Copley—after whom one of the most important squares in Boston is named—was an American painter of undeniable genius. His great skill lay in depicting the wealthy and well-to-do of Boston, and he achieved this with great flair. From Copley’s pencil, and then ink, we see the Bostonians of the 1760s and 1770s. The men tend to be handsome with just a touch of rural ruggedness; the ladies seem more at ease and urbane. Copley had special skill in the painting of faces, and we therefore know what a good many of the prominent Bostonians looked like.

      Thomas Hutchinson—the unfortunate last Loyalist governor of Massachusetts—was tall and thin with a youthful arrogance that evolved over time into a sad resignation. Samuel Adams, perhaps the best-known Bostonian of that remarkable time, comes across as strong, uncompromising, and perhaps too heavy-handed. Of all the many portraits Copley painted, his of Paul Revere may be the most remarkable. Revere comes to us as the serene, hard-working artisan, a person who knows he has done his best, and is willing to leave the rest to Providence. But perhaps the most important of all the Copley portraits—for our purpose—is the one of his own extended family.

      Did John Copley become a patriot? Or was he a Loyalist?

      One senses that Copley didn’t really want to make the choice: that he could have remained on the fence a very long time. But this was not true of the family he married into: the Clarkes were among the most notorious of Boston Loyalists. Copley’s portrait of the Clarke family shows a clan intensely devoted to family, duty, and the British crown. With Richard Clarke at center, these people are Anglo-Americans with the emphasis on the first half of the word: not for them the revolutionary antics that will follow.

      Upper-class Bostonians such as those Copley painted tended to love their town, СКАЧАТЬ