As we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, we often overlook the significance of a place central to our ongoing struggle for liberty and justice. That place, the Boston Common, has been revolutionary since its establishment nearly 400 years ago. The Common, which our predecessors came to see as “sacred,” was then and is now inextricably tied to our efforts to make the phrase “We the People” apply not just to some of the people of our community, but rather all of the people who live, work, study, pray and play in our historic region in accord with the Commonwealth’s laws and traditions.
A Landmark Innovation
The Common’s revolutionary status is most importantly defined by the way in which it was created. This 50-acre parcel is the first public park in the English-speaking world. It was a creation of the people who, in 1634, had built homes in Boston — that is, the Puritan freemen and their elected magistrates, later known as “select men,” under the leadership of their elected Governor, John Winthrop. The Common was financed by the people, who agreed to self-taxation for conservation — six shillings or more per household raised to buy the land from another Englishman, the Reverend William Blackstone. And it was created as an open space for the people’s benefit, initially providing pasture for grazing cattle that provided milk and meat to private households, and providing a training ground for a militia formed to protect the community from attack by the French or by Native Americans. While other commons had existed in England for hundreds of years before the 1600s, they had feudal rather than democratic origins, being established by the decree of the King, a Lord, or a favored Guild.
Today, public parks and open spaces, following the precedent set by Boston’s Common, have been replicated to a remarkable extent. In 21st-century America, public parks are nearly ubiquitous, being found in virtually every town, city, county and state in the United States and far beyond.
The Commons’ use as a recreational and civic resource became apparent within several decades of its creation. It was a place, for example, where: the young “gallants” strolled in the evenings with their “Marmalet-Madams” (that is, their sweethearts); young rowdies gathered for Pope Days during which they burned the Pope in effigy; townspeople celebrated victories over restive Natives, who were in 1675 banned from the town unless accompanied by an armed guard; and heretics were hung until death.
In effect, the Common, in its first century, was a fairly exclusive enclave. You were welcome if you were an Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Native Americans were banned, Blacks were chased away with stones and bricks, and Irish Catholics, generally of lower economic classes, were unwelcome.
A Key Role in the American Revolution
Before, during and after the American Revolution, the barriers to broader inclusion on the Common gradually diminished. And the Common — by the 1760s one of the town’s oldest artifacts of colonization — became a center of protest, occupation, military action, Patriot celebration and, just before the turn of the nineteenth century, very early environmental activism in the history of the United States.
Protest was episodic. For instance, in opposition to a bevy of taxes levied by the King, the Sons of Liberty in 1768 hauled a tax collector’s pleasure boat up onto the Common, to a spot right in front of John Hancock’s mansion at the head of Beacon Hill. They burned the boat to the ground and proceeded to stone the collector’s home, driving him to seek shelter in a fort in the harbor.
In response to the growing unrest, the King’s representative in Boston pleaded with His Majesty’s Government to send in substantial numbers of uniformed troops, colloquially known as the Redcoats. Most Boston residents refused to house them, so the troops went ahead and erected their tents in several locations, including the Town’s most prominent open space — the Common. This occupying force eventually launched an expedition from the Common to the villages of Lexington and Concord, where they met armed Patriot resistance and the Shot Heard Round the World. The Redcoats were bloodied badly on their return to the Common, where they hunkered down during the winter of 1775-1776 in what became known as the Siege of Boston. The Siege was directed by General George Washington, the newly arrived commander of the Patriot army.
In November of 1775, Washington chose his newfound compatriot, Henry Knox, a young bookseller of Irish descent, to bring to Boston some 58 cannons captured mainly at Fort Ticonderoga in northern New York. Miraculously, Knox’s epic journey was a success. Once the cannons, in a masterly surprise maneuver, were hauled up to Dorchester Heights and aimed at the British troops on Common, in the rest of the town and on ships in the harbor below, the British hurriedly decided to retreat by sea. On March 17 — Saint Patrick’s Day — some 11,000 British troops and their dependents, as well as more than 1,000 loyalists, evacuated Boston for good. Washington, noting the valor of Irish-American Patriots such as Knox, used the term “St. Patrick” as the password to be used to safely re-enter Boston — an early step in the positive recognition of Boston’s small but growing Irish population. In 1781, after news arrived in Boston that Lord Cornwallis had surrendered to Washington’s forces in Yorktown, Virginia, a large and high-spirited crowd gathered on the Boston Common to light an enormous bonfire, a joyful indication that the Revolution was coming to a successful conclusion. Later, when Washington made a triumphal tour of New England, Bostonians on the Common and around the old State House loudly cheered him and literally sang his praises.
Black residents of Boston also served the Patriot effort, forming an informal militia to protect homes in Boston during the War. As pioneering Black historian William Cooper Nell reported in 1855, “at the close of the Revolutionary War, John Hancock presented the colored company, called ‘the Bucks of America,’ with an appropriate banner, bearing his initials, as a tribute to their courage and devotion throughout the struggle. The ‘Bucks,’ under the command of Colonel George Middleton, were invited to a collation in a neighboring town, and, en route, were requested to halt in front of the Hancock Mansion, on Beacon Street, where the Governor and his son united in the above presentation.” Hancock’s gesture in presenting the “Bucks of America,” flag to the Black militiamen was only a modest early step in fully engaging and enfranchising Black citizens in the life of Boston.
AFTER THE REVOLUTION
Following the war, Boston started growing rapidly from a small town into an urban hub. In 1798, construction was completed on the new State House, located on and adjacent to John Hancock’s estate, at the head of the Common. The gold-domed edifice became the home of the Massachusetts Constitution, principally authored by John Adams. That document served as the model for the U.S. Constitution and continues to this day to serve today as the world’s longest-lived written democratic constitution. The Common, in effect, became democracy’s front yard and was more treasured than ever by its leading citizens.
In one of the first environmental protests in American history, a group of lucid and literate Bostonians in 1799 organized their fellow citizens to block plans to construct a gun house on the Common. A broadside they printed, now stored in collections in the Old State House, declares that the Common serves as a “Palladium of the People” — that is, an object of veneration that is a protector of the people’s “safety and health.”
The authors considered the Common to be a “Spot..open to the summer breezes necessary [to relieve] the heat of a sultry Summer, to be forever held sacred… If the slightest Encroachment is suffered, if the slightest Edifice is built, and permitted to remain upon it, you may bid Adieu to all of the [in]calculable Benefits derived from it, as you may expect soon to see it covered with as many buildings as can stand thereon.”
The proto-environmentalists won the battle. No gun house was permanently located on the Common. And, after many further battles, the green space in the middle of Boston largely remains open space that graces Boston’s core today.
The 1799 broadside, however, also evidenced an ongoing urge to exclude the less favored. It called on Boston citizens “whose Blood is pure from foreign mixture” and the descendants “of our wise and Patriotic ancestors” to stand against anyone who might “barter away this glorious Privilege.” Just as the United States has struggled to make its bounty available to everyone throughout its 250 year history, it took Bostonians: another sixty-four years after 1799 to allow uniformed Black soldiers to march on the Common as the 54th Massachusetts Regiment; more than 150 years to see Martin Luther King march onto the Common to preach for racial justice and equality; and more than 200 years to see the archaic law repealed that banned Native American from the Common without an armed guard.
Maybe — just maybe — we have turned a corner. Maybe we can see the first light of a new day. With the erection of the superlative The Embrace sculpture on the Boston Common in 2024, and with the re-election of Mayor Michelle Wu, a passionate advocate of Chinese-American heritage who wants to see Boston as a place that “everyone can feel at home,” we can make lasting progress. With some vision, we can meaningfully enhance, for many generations to come, the environmental and human qualities of the Common and its siblings, the Boston Public Garden and the Commonwealth Avenue Mall — places that can truly welcome all of the people of our great and beautiful city.
Jim Levitt is a senior advisor to land conservation practitioners and innovators working on seven continents. He is a co-founder and the former director of the International Land Conservation Network (ILCN) (www.landconservationnetwork.org) at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. In a prior position, he directed the Program on Conservation Innovation at the Harvard Forest, Harvard University. He has also served as a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Highstead Foundation.