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Abigail Adams remarked upon the cheering crowds in a locked-down Boston.
Benjamin Blyth via Wikimedia Commons
Abigail Adams was among the “Multitude” who attended the reading. As Crafts finished the Declaration of Independence and shouted, “God Save our American States,” Adams reported, “the Bells rang … the cannon were discharged, the platoons followed and every face appeard joyfull.”
As late as August 26, Boston leaders were still trying to stamp out vestiges of the smallpox virus, but their bold action had prevented an epidemic. Nearly 5,000 people had been inoculated. That was equivalent to a third of Boston’s population, though about half of the inoculees were actually out-of-towners like the Adams family.
Conflicting notions of freedom
At the time, Boston had five newspapers, but no one used their pages to complain about the lockdown and other enforcement measures.
Some people took their belief in the individual’s responsibility to the community to extremes. The claim that “Every man in a republic is public property” came not from some crazed utopian but from Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. And Benjamin Franklin, in a Christmas 1783 letter advocating federal taxes to pay off the Revolutionary War debt, conceded that citizens have the right to retain enough property for their survival and for “the Propagation of the Species.” But he added: “all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick.”
Few Americans today would go as far as Rush and Franklin, but their comments, like Boston’s July 1776 decision to turn itself into one giant immunization site, remind us of the American Revolutionaries’ provocative conviction that communities have rights, too.
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Woody Holton, Professor of History, University of South Carolina
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
