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OCCUPIED

Like Boston’s Fort William, the public park known as the Boston Common dates to 1634. Several years ago I found myself in the Common to support my best friend I’ve known since birth, who was running the Boston Marathon. The park was buzzing with activity in preparation for the race, held annually on Patriots’ Day. I had a hard time imagining Boston Common occupied not by runners and race spectators but by foreign soldiers, as it was in the fall of 1768.

On the first day of October 1768, it was supposed to be peacetime. Seven hundred British Redcoats came ashore with bayonet-tipped muskets charged and ready and a train of artillery in tow. Behind them fourteen British warships were anchored in Boston Harbor near Fort William. The warships’ cannons were pointed at the city.

Shocked Bostonians, unaccustomed to the presence of an occupying army in their midst, watched as the soldiers encamped on Boston Common. Hours after their arrival a British officer stood in front of the municipal building at the corner of Tremont and Winter Streets and requested quarters for two of his regiments. The building’s tenants responded by barring and bolting the doors. The troops withdrew, but when the British colonel waved a demand for quarters at city selectmen, Boston’s leaders complied. By nine that night Redcoats were marching into Faneuil Hall, the city’s famous market.

“We now behold the Representatives’ Chamber, Court-House, and Faneuil-Hall, those seats of freedom and justice, occupied with troops, and guards placed at the doors; the Common covered with tents, and alive with soldiers, marching and countermarching,” observers reported two days later. “In short, the town is now a perfect garrison.”1

The garrisoning of troops in Boston was set in motion by King George’s Quartering Act of 1765. The royal act required the colonies “to billet and quarter” British troops in “barracks provided by the colonies.” If there wasn’t enough room in the barracks, the colonies were required to provide quarters “in inns, livery stables, ale-houses, victualling-houses,” and other shops. If there still wasn’t enough room, the colonies were forced to lodge the troops in “uninhabited houses, outhouses, barns, or other buildings.”²

Incensed by the military occupation, a group of anonymous authors smuggled regular reports out of Boston about the British presence and “the riots, outrages, robberies, etc. that are daily perpetrated among us.” Although no one ever established the authors’ identities, some think they may have included prominent revolutionaries like Samuel Adams and his cousin and future president, John Adams.³

A week after Boston received the quartering demands, the mysterious authors reported that British troops had seized private lands to build a new military post at the entrance to the city. Their reports soon read like a crime blotter:

October 29: The inhabitants of this town have been of late greatly insulted and abused by some of the officers and soldiers, [and] several have been assaulted.

December 29: A number of robberies have been lately committed by the soldiers.

January 22: The common soldiers continue their robberies and violences.

March 18: A woman of this town was struck down the other evening . . . and much abused and wounded by a soldier; another woman . . . was served in the same brutal manner, and then robb’d of a bundle of linen . . . as was also a peddler coming into town, from whom they took about forty dollars.4

Throughout 1769, reports of assaults, robbery, harassment, and rape by soldiers were commonplace.

On a Tuesday morning in June, Sarah Johnson collapsed while walking to Boston’s South Market to go shopping. Sarah was from Bridgewater, a small town twenty-five miles south of Boston, founded thirty years after the Mayflower landed in Plymouth. She started feeling faint when she was just steps from the elm that would soon become known as the “Liberty Tree” for its role as a center of revolutionary organizing. People at Chase and Speakman’s Distillery, near the corner of Essex and Washington Streets, saw Sarah in distress and quickly rushed to her aid. They brought her water and had her sit down. When they helped Sarah to her feet, she collapsed a second time. She would not get up again. She died before their eyes. A coroner and a team of physicians conducted an autopsy and an inquest into Sarah’s death. From the collected evidence and marks on her body, they concluded that Sarah had been violently raped by three unknown British soldiers and that it “probably was the cause of her death.”⁵

The anger provoked by such crimes and by troops in Boston and other coastal cities built for months. On March 5, 1770, British soldiers fired on a crowd, taunting them in front of Boston’s Customs House. Five locals were killed in what became known as the Boston Massacre. The killings were another spark leading toward revolution. The movement toward armed revolt in the colonies gained more momentum in 1774, when King George III enacted a new Quartering Act, allowing his colonial governors to seize privately owned homes and buildings for use by British troops. In 1775 Redcoats based in Boston clashed with American militias at Lexington and Concord. Almost 125 were dead. The revolution that would give birth to the United States had begun. The British retreated to Castle Island and Fort William to try to maintain hold of their thirteen rebellious colonies.

On July 4, 1776, the signers of the Declaration of Independence proclaimed, “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures” and “quarter[ed] large bodies of armed troops among us.” These were among the “long train of abuses and usurpations” committed by King George III, which the Declaration listed as cause for declaring the independence of the thirteen colonies. When thinking about the Declaration today, many forget that several of the “long train of abuses and usurpations” focused on the king’s imposition of an undemocratic, violent foreign military presence. When the signers declared the colonies’ intention to separate from Britain, they had in mind soldiers’ crimes against Sarah Johnson and others in and beyond Boston. King George, the signers declared, had “protected [soldiers], by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.” The Declaration of Independence’s list of the king’s abuses continued:

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to comple[te] the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

Patrick Henry, famous for helping inspire the U.S. revolution with his “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech to the Virginia legislature, called the basing of foreign troops in the thirteen colonies “one of the principal reasons for dissolving the connection with Great Britain.”6 So powerful were sentiments against the imposition of military forces on civilian populations that they were enshrined in the oft-forgotten Third Amendment to the Constitution: “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”

Following the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775, British troops retreated from their quarters around Boston to the safety of Castle Island’s Fort William. Gen. George Washington marched his newly organized army to lay siege on the fort and evict the British from the city. After eleven months the Redcoats retreated, destroying the fort as they left Boston Harbor.7 The reconstruction and occupation of the fort by U.S. troops under Lt. Col. Paul Revere marked a turning point in the war and in the history of North America. English troops built the first fort on Castle Island to protect shipping lanes into Boston in 1634. A century and a half later, their occupation of the city was no more. Over the next seven hard, deadly years of war, the revolutionaries—with crucial military aid from the government of France and some of Britain’s other European enemies—would slowly push the British military from the thirteen newly independent states. (British soldiers continued to occupy thirteen forts on the U.S. side of the Canadian border, creating a source of tension for several years after the Treaty of Paris formally ended the war.) Estimates of the revolution’s death toll from combat, disease, and other causes for combatants and civilians vary widely, with low estimates around 50,000 and high estimates up to around 160,000.⁸

British troops would return to U.S.-claimed soil after the new nation instigated a war with its former colonial ruler in 1812. Since that war it’s been two centuries since an enemy power quartered soldiers or controlled a military base on U.S. soil. The one exception was Japan’s World War II occupation of the U.S. colonies of Guam, the Philippines, parts of Alaska, and Wake Island.

The independence of the United States marked the beginning of an imperial transition from the British Empire to what would soon be a rapidly expanding U.S. Empire. Just as Redcoats occupied Boston with the help of Fort William, U.S. troops would use a growing number of forts and other bases on the edges of and beyond U.S. borders to occupy lands and peoples across the continent and, eventually, beyond. These bases would play a critical role in expanding U.S. borders and launching the long succession of wars that continues to this day.

The invasion of foreign lands and the occupation of bases on foreign soil began almost immediately after the colonies declared their independence. The invasions would target not just Native American peoples’ lands. The invasions would target Canada as well. Mexico would follow. In the wake of the Revolutionary War, concerns about foreign military occupation disappeared for many of the leaders of the newly independent United States. The U.S. government and U.S. troops were soon committing “abuses and usurpations” similar to those listed by the signers of the Declaration of Independence as having been inflicted by King George and his troops.

Few thought to extend to others the democratic principles of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, including its Third Amendment barring the quartering of a soldier “without the consent of the Owner” except “in a manner to be prescribed by law.” Ideas about white supremacy and about the superiority of Christianity and the United States as a chosen nation helped male leaders sustain these contradictions and overlook the hypocrisy involved when occupying lands that, with a brief exception in Canada, were inhabited by peoples who, in the minds of most U.S. leaders, were considered “racially inferior.”

Such contradictions are still embedded in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The Declaration’s signers called their neighbors “merciless Indian Savages.” The Constitution embraced slavery, the idea that enslaved African Americans counted for three-fifths of a person, and the restriction of full citizenship rights to white, Euro-American, property-owning men. These contradictions, embedded in the political-economic, legal, and social foundations of the United States, would play important roles in shaping wars to come.