The Political History behind Blindspot

Blindspot is a love story and a murder mystery, but behind both those plots is the narrative that’s usually at the foreground of American history: the origins of the American Revolution. We kept the Revolution in the background because, at least in 1764, that’s where it was for most Bostonians, for most colonists, even. The story of the Sons of Liberty is stirring stuff, but it’s a twice-told tale. We wanted to tell the story of ordinary people. Their struggle, against arbitrary authority, against Parliament and, for many, against African slavery, seized Boston in the 1760s.

The Sugar, Currency, and Stamp Acts
The colonial response to Parliament’s passage of the 1764 Sugar and Currency Acts—the origins of the American Revolution—is the best-known piece of the history Blindspot relates. We have reproduced, with minor changes, some of the text of those laws, and of the colonists’ protests against them. Much use has been made of the actual Boston Gazette, the instrument of the resistance movement. It was printed, once a week, by Thomas Gill and Benjamin Edes at their printing office on Queen Street. Our Edes, along with a few other real people whose names we have borrowed, including Edward Holyoke, Francis Bernard, and Joshua Reynolds, is a fiction, although we have leaned heavily on the writings of each of these people in our portrayals of them.

We have in some cases tinkered with time and place. The Sugar and Currency Acts actually went into effect on September 24, 1764—known as The Black Day—not, as in our novel, on October 8 of that year. More importantly, Bernard didn’t call in troops until 1768 (when they not only occupied the Town House and pitched camp on the Common but besieged the Manufactory House). And, while someone really did cut a hole in the shape of a heart out of a portrait of Bernard (painted, of course, not by the fictional Stewart Jameson but by the Boston artist John Singleton Copley), that happened in 1769, and not at the Town House, but in Harvard Hall, in Cambridge. Nearly all the discussion of this event, including our remarks about it in the Boston Gazette, is taken from items written by the actual Benjamin Edes, who was known as the “trumpeter of sedition” for his zealous advocacy of the patriot cause. Many of Edes’s acerbic attacks on Bernard we took from the newspaper. For instance, it was Edes who wrote, “The printer has been informed an astonishing feat of Nature: an ewe in Roxbury gave birth last week to four lambs. As an increase in our sheep will prevent our importing British wool, we may query whether Governor Bernard will not inform the King of this instance of fecundity, and earnestly recommend another regiment of soldiers being sent, in order to have our rams castrated.”

The Red Hens and the Friends of Liberty
The Sons of Liberty formed in 1765, in response to Parliament’s passage of the Stamp Act (not, as in our novel, a year before). We invented the Red Hens, but similar gentlemen’s clubs were a familiar feature of eighteenth-century life, in Boston as much as anywhere—London’s Kit-Cat Club did exist—and most involved secret rites and ceremonies, including toasts, merriment, parades, mock trials, casual sexual banter, pranks that often went too far (one initiation ceremony in Philadelphia famously led to an apprentice’s accidental death by burning), and lots and lots of drinking, as is most hilariously chronicled in Alexander Hamilton’s History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club, written in 1745. As the colonial resistance intensified, some of these clubs became political organizations.

Slavery and Race
Slavery was much on the mind of Bostonians in the 1760s. Not only did they complain that Parliament, by taxing them, had made them “slaves,” they were also debating, avidly, whether to abolish slavery themselves. That American revolutionaries failed to abolish slavery historians like Edmund Morgan have called “the central paradox of American history.”

In 1765 a town meeting in nearby Worcester instructed its delegates to the legislature to propose a law prohibiting the importation and purchase of slaves by any Massachusetts citizen. On May 26, 1766, just one week after news of Parliament’s repeal of Stamp Act arrived, Boston’s Town Meeting urged its members to consider voting “for the total abolishing of slavery from among us.” In 1767, Boston merchant Nathaniel Appleton argued in Considerations on Slavery, “The years 1765 and 1766 will be ever memorable for the glorious stand which America has made for her liberties; how much glory will it add ... if at the same time we are establishing Liberty for ourselves and children, we show the same regard to all mankind that came among us?”

Samuel Bradstreet and James Otis, Jr.
Our murder victim, Samuel Bradstreet, was inspired by the leader of the colonial opposition, the brilliant Boston lawyer and orator, James Otis, Jr. (1725-1783), called, by John Adams, “The Flame of Liberty.” Otis, who wrote, “Taxation without representation is tyranny,” also argued eloquently for an end to the slave trade, a proposal that was the subject of vigorous debate in Boston in the 1760s, though it wasn’t brought before the legislature until 1771 (when it was voted down). In spring of 1770, in the days and weeks following the Boston Massacre, the Massachusetts legislature again debated abolishing the slave trade. In a sermon delivered before the legislature in May, the Reverend Samuel Cooke, John Hancock’s uncle, warned legislators, “Let not sordid gain, acquired by the merchandize of slaves, and the souls of men harden our hearts against her piteous moans. When God ariseth, and when he visiteth, what shall we answer!” Otis was not murdered, but he did go mad in 1770. After thirteen years of lunacy, he died in 1783 when he was struck by lightning. Bradstreet’s Rights of the British Colonies Demonstrated is a lightly edited version of James Otis’ stunning 1764 treatise, Rights of the British Colonies Asserted. Edward Easton’s political writings are a composite of Tory sentiment; his letter in the Boston Gazette, under the pseudonym “Mast of Fidelity,” using Romans 13: 7 (“Render therefore to all their dues; tribute to whom tribute …”), turns upside down a sermon actually preached by the Bostonian, Jonathan Mayhew, in 1750, “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission.”

Ignatius Alexander
Ignatius Alexander may strike some readers as the most implausible character in the book—surely he is too educated, too refined, too modern—but our portrayal of him is very closely based in fact. Several Africans in Europe and America joined the literary and scientific circles of their day. Alexander, had he lived, would have known the African-born poet, Phyllis Wheatley (1753-1784), who was brought to Boston as a slave in 1761 and began publishing poems six years later; she eventually became an international celebrity. Yet he is more specifically inspired by two black protegés of the Duke of Montague: Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780), an African writer and composer who was raised in England, and painted by Gainsborough and Francis Williams (1702-1770), a Jamaican-born poet and mathematician who was educated in England, and eventually returned to Jamaica, where he was painted by a local artist.(Montague had these men educated as part of his enlightenment experiments on racial difference.) Sancho’s letters, including his correspondence with Laurence Sterne, were published in 1782 as The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African. Sancho’s portrait is owned by The National Gallery of Canada; Williams’ hangs in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Trial of Cicero and Hannah and Mark and Phillis
The events surrounding the trial of Cicero and Hannah were inspired by the real-life trial of Mark and Phillis, two slaves who were convicted in 1755 of poisoning their master, Captain John Codman, of Charlestown, Massachusetts, with arsenic. Both Mark and Phillis were found guilty, after which Mark was hanged and gibbeted and Phillis was burned at the stake, in Cambridge. Some of the trial testimony in our Trial of Cicero and Hannah borrows from the Trial of Mark and Phillis, while parts of it were inspired by the abundant trial testimony in the 1741 investigation of the “Great Negro Plot” in New York City, in which that city’s slaves allegedly conspired to burn the town and kill their masters. The sermon given by the fictional Jabez Appleton at Cicero’s execution is based on Cotton Mather’s Tremenda, which he delivered on the occasion of another execution of a slave convicted of murder, and which was published in Boston in 1721.

Harvard and Cambridge
Harvard students and faculty were caught up in the early stirrings of the Revolution, too. In 1759, the question during the commencement debate really was (as it is in Blindspot, in 1764), “Is an Absolute and Arbitrary Monarchy Contrary to Right Reason?” In 1764, Harvard Hall burned down, and the college’s president, Edward Holyoke, raised money to rebuild by taking out an ad in the Boston Gazette. Governor Francis Bernard really did design the new Harvard Hall, although he did not live in Cambridge. (Alexander, while in Cambridge, meets Titus who, in our novel is Holyoke’s slave. Titus was actually the name of a slave owned by President Benjamin Wadsworth. John Hancock, while a student at Harvard in the 1750s, had been involved in “being most remarkably active in making drunk” another black man “to Such a Degree as greatly indanger’d his Life.”) In 1765, Eldbridge Gerry argued the affirmative in the commencement debate, “Can the new Prohibitary Duties, which make it useless for People to engage in Commerce, be evaded by them as Faithful Subjects?” In 1766, Harvard students staged the famous Butter Rebellion—protesting rancid butter served at commons—in imitation of the Stamp Act protests. In 1773 the Harvard Speaking Club held a debate, “On the Legality of Enslaving the Africans.”

Legal and Other Documents
The legal and public records that appear between Jameson’s chapters and Fanny’s letters are, in most cases, adapted versions of actual historical documents (generally taken from Boston in the 1760s, and involving, of course, real people, whose names we’ve changed). This includes, for instance, the indenture agreement, runaway ads, the coroner’s report, arrest warrants, and the notice of the auction of Bradstreet’s goods.