Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/591

 Earle : Stagc-CoacJi and Tavern Days 581 the collateral aids of pencil and camera, the slow-moving life of the colonies is set forth and brought along into the bustling times of the nine- teenth century. In New England, the Puritan "ordinary" became at once an im- portant function in the activities of the rising communities. As indicated (p. 20) every person as well as all material substance was economized and used then. Widows served well in caring for travellers and thus re- leased male citizens for other work, where petticoats would have been a greater hindrance. By the close of the seventeenth century (p. 30) this word " ordinary ' ' was dropped and tavern became the name of the social centres in the colonies. It is assumed generally that inn was the English denomination of this place and social function, as against tavern in trans- Atlantic use. But Shakspere, if we exclude inns in the legal sense, uses the word tavern nearly twice as often as he uses inn. The book shows clearly — what impresses every reader of our early his- tory — that the tavern was the main spring of our early social life, wherever it ran outside the churches, and the landlord was the protagonist. The modern club, exchange, auction room, board of trade, or journalistic centre — all these had their germs in the tap-room of the Blue Anchor, Green Dragon, or Merchant's Coffee House of olden time. Ships' car- goes, lands, houses, negroes, merchandise of all sorts were negotiated, traded, or vendued in these cheery old taverns. The captain of these in- dustries, the lord of this unsurveyed and unmeasured land was " if not the greatest man in town certainly the best known and ever the most pic- turesiiue and cheerful figure" (p. 62). John Dunton hardly exaggerated when he sketched the delightful portrait of George Monk, presiding host at the Blue Anchor, Boston, 1686. John Adams gives a most significant picture of tavern life (p. 172) in 1772. Unknown, he sat by a bar-room fire in Shrewsbury. "There presently came in, one after another, half a dozen, or half a score substantial yeomen of the neighborhood, who sitting down to the fire after lighting their pipes, began a lively conversa- tion on politics." He reports the substance of their talk, which em- bodied the issues of the coming revolution as well as John or Samuel Adams could do it. Farmers like these, soon " embattled " at Concord and Lexington, spoke their opinions through the old muskets of the French and Indian wars. The attack on the British cruiser Gaspee in Narragansett Bay — the first overt act of the American Revolution — was planned by John Brown and his confreres in a Providence tavern on South Main Street. If we would see how they were used in the opposite direction by royal agents and press-gangs, read the accounts (p. 191) of a Norfolk tavern. On the walls of these old tap-rooms were spread couplets conveying many homely truths (p. 45) : " I've trusted many to my sorrow. In 1824 Lafayette's companions found fifty taverns as good as Bispham's at Trenton, N. J. (p. 83). The accommodation was as good