What ever happened to Boston? “The pathetic old city is now feeding on its own smugness, snobbery and wilted traditions,” Elizabeth Hardwick tartly observed in a famous put-down of the “whimsical stagnation of Boston” published in Harper's magazine in 1959.
Everyone is always counting Boston out, ridiculing the city's musty pretensions to being the “Hub of the Solar System” (Oliver Wendell Holmes's epithet for the Massachusetts State House) or the “Athens of America.” Well over a century ago, the nation's center of gravity shifted to New York, or Chicago, or Los Angeles. Anywhere but Boston.
Yale University historian Mark Peterson has published an original and provocative take on this old question. The title of his ambitious, fluid and worldly “City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865” hints at his core thesis: that Boston was already history, as they say, by the end of the Civil War. His argument is even more provocative than that. Mr. Peterson writes that Boston's economic, political, social and cultural hegemony peaked in the mid-17th century, as a powerful city-state that ruled most of what we now think of as New England.
Starting with the creation of the United States in the 18th century, Mr. Peterson argues, Boston's fortunes in the new country began to decline. The primary reason, he says, is that Boston's interests became yoked to those of the slave states, such as Virginia and Georgia. Those states enjoyed a disproportionate throw-weight in national affairs because their massive slave populations—one slave equaled three-fifths of a citizen, according to the Constitution—bolstered their representation in Congress.
“It became evident that the preponderance of [the national government's power] lay in the hands of people who no longer recalled the time when the cause of Boston was the cause of all America,” Mr. Peterson writes. “The city's merchants and manufacturers, too, discovered that a new king arose over the nation's commercial life, King Cotton.”
Mr. Peterson attacks the received wisdom, created in the 19th century by Massachusetts historians such as Francis Parkman, that Boston birthed the American experiment. History books that highlight John Winthrop's stirring “city upon a hill” address—an event that Mr. Peterson suspects never occurred (“We have no evidence that Winthrop's discourse was spoken aboard the Arbella or to any other audience”)—miss the point in asserting that “the United States was New England writ large.”
It was all very well for Ronald Reagan to situate America downstream from Winthrop's honeyed words, calling the U.S. “a shining city upon a hill.” Boston was the American experiment, Mr. Peterson writes, until it was swallowed up and corrupted by its fellow colonies, barely 150 years after its founding.
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