Many Headed Hydra

THE MANY HEADED HYDRA

Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class
in the Eighteenth Century
Peter Linebaugh
Marcus Rediker
Introduction
Through the harsh winter of 1740-41, as food riots broke out all over Europe, a
motley crew of workers met at John Hughsons waterside tavern in the city of
New York to plan a rising for St. Patricks Day. The conspirators included
Irish, English, Hispanic, African, and Native American men and women; they
spoke Gaelic, English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Latin, Greek, and undoubtedly
several African and Indian languages. They were a mixture of mostly slaves
and wage laborers, especially soldiers, sailors, and journeymen. During their
deliberations, David Johnson, a journeyman hatter of British background,
swore that he would help to burn the town, and kill as many white people as
he could. John Corry, an Irish dancing-master, promised the same, as,
apparently, did John Hughson himself and many others, a large number of
African-Americans among them.
Eventually they put at least part of their plan into action, burning down Fort
George, the Governors mansion, and the imperial armory, the symbols of
Royal Majesty and civil authority, the havens and instruments of ruling-class
power in New York. They did not succeed, as evidenced by the 13 burned at
the stake, the 21 hanged, and the 77 transported out of the colony as slaves or
servants. The corpses of two of the hanged dangled in an iron gibbet on the
waterfront as a lesson to others. As the bodies decayed in the open air,
observers noted a gruesome, yet instructive, transformation. The corpse of an
Irishman turned black and his hair curly while the corpse of Caesar, the
African, bleached white. It was accounted a wondrous phemenonon.1 One of
the many remarkable things about this upheaval is the way in which it
confounds much of contemporary historical understanding. Here we have a
polyglot community of workers who by current wisdom should never have
been able to conceive, much less execute, a joint rebellion. Here we have
white Europeans pledging themselves to the destruction of the white
people of New York, by which they obviously meant the rich people. Here we
have, not a slave revolt or a great Negro Plot (as it has long been called), not
a mutiny by soldiers and sailors nor a strike by wage laborers, but rather a
many-sided rising by a diverse urban proletariat-red, white, and black, of many
nations, races, ethnicities, and degrees of freedom.2
The events of 1741 were part of a broader history of the Atlantic working class
in the eighteenth century, a class that suffered not only the violence of the
stake, the gallows, and the shackles of a ships dark hold, but now the violence
of abstraction in the writing of history. For concepts such as nationality,
race, and ethnicity have obscured essential features of the history of the
working class in the early modern era. Historians who consciously or
unconsciously posit static and immutable differences between workers black
and white, Irish and English, slave and free in the early modern era, have
frequently failed to study the actual points of contact, overlap, and cooperation

Space for Notes

Many Headed Hydra

between their idealized types. Without such cooperation, of course, the

economy of the transatlantic world could never have functioned.
Our study starts from the material organization of many thousands of workers
into transatlantic circuits of commodity exchange and capital accumulation and
then proceeds to look at the ways in which they translated their cooperation
into anti-capitalist projects of their own, as did those who gathered and
whispered `round the fire at Hughsons tavern in New York. It is thus a study
of connections within the working class-connections that have been denied,
ignored, or simply never seen by most historians. It is also an effort to
remember, literally to re-member, to reconnect as a way of overcoming some
of the violence, some of the dismembering, the Atlantic working class has
undergone. Our effort to remember begins with a myth about dismemberment.
The Myth of the Many-headed Hydra
The slaying of the hydra was the second of the twelve labors of Hercules. A
Greek version of the story is perhaps best known. Confronted with the
monstrous, many-headed Hydra, a water snake with nine to a hundred heads,
Hercules found that as soon as he cut off one head, two grew in its place. With
the help of his nephew Iolaus, he learned to use a firebrand to cauterize the
stump of the beasts neck. Thus they killed the Hydra. Hercules dipped his
arrows in the blood of the slain beast, whose venom thus gave to his arrows
their fatal power.
Allusions to the story appear often in the annals of European conquest in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For instance, in 1751, a former governor
of Surinam returned to Holland, where he wrote poetic memoirs recollecting
his defeat at the hands of the Saramaka, the victorious maroons:
There you must fight blindly an invisible enemy
Who shoots you down like ducks in the swamps.
Even if an army of ten thousand men were gathered, with
The courage and strategy of Caesar and Eugene,
Theyd find their work cut out for them, destroying a
Hydras growth
Which even Alcides would try to avoid.

Mauricius was a European conqueror writing to and for other Europeans

assumed to be sympathetic with the project of conquest. They likened their
labor to that of Hercules, here called Alcides. Hydra is identified with the
former slaves who had freed themselves, and who in subsequent war assured
their freedom-a first permanent victory over European masters in the New
World, preceding by a generation the victory of the Haitian people.3
The Hydra comparison came easily to the pens of slaveholders worried about
rebellion. Thus, in the aftermath of Bussas Rebellion (Barbados, 1816) a
planter wrote that Wilberforce and the African Institute have pierced the
inmost recesses of our island, inflicted deep and deadly words in the minds of
the black population, and engendered the Hydra, Rebellion, which had well
nigh deluged our fields with blood.4
The Hydra analogy was restricted, however, neither to the West Indies, nor
only to Afro-American slaves. In 1702 when Cotton Mather published his
history of Christianity in America (Magnalia Christi Americana) he entitled
his second chapter on the sectarian opposition to the New England Puritans,
Hydra Decapita. The church of God had not long been in this wilderness,

Many Headed Hydra

before the dragon cast forth several floods to devour it, he wrote of the
antinomian controversy of the 1630s. The theological struggle of works
against grace subverted all peaceable order. It prevented an expedition
against the Pequot Indians; it raised suspicions against the magistrates; it
confused the drawing of town lots; and it made particular appeals to women.
To Cotton Mather, therefore, the Hydra challenged legal authority, the
demarcations of private property, the subordination of women, and the
authority of ministers who refused to permit open discussions of sermons. The
antinomians of America had begun to call the King of England the King of
Babylon. The struggle in Massachusetts was then a theological dress-rehearsal
for the English Revolution of the 1640s.
Thus, in many different contexts did various ruling classes use the ancient
myth of the many-headed Hydra to understand their metropolitan and colonial
problems, usually referring to the proletariat whom European powers were
either conquering or disciplining to the life of plantation, regiment, estate,
workshop, and factory. In this sense, the capitalists of London, Paris, and the
Hague thus cast themselves as Hercules. Why did they do so? One might
consider the question unimportant, since after all was not this a Classical
Age in European history when allusion to classical myth was commonplace?
Yet this begs the question, for why was it a Classical Age? Part of the
answer lies in a project common to Roman and European ruling classes, both
of which sought by conquest and tribute to control the rest of the world.
Part of the answer lies too in the fact that the European bourgeoisie of the early
modern era was only beginning to develop an understanding of its time and
place in the world, and-aside from Christianity and its myths-the only tools
available to them for understanding social development were those classic texts
rediscovered and made available during the Renaissance, which on the one
hand assisted the scientific revolution through the revival of neoPlatonism
and other hermetic traditions, and on the other provided examples and models
of social formations, or modes of production, which supported the doctrine of
European progress in social development.5
Hercules could be seen as revolutionary. It is not just that his labors were
immense, gigantic, and inter-continental; they seemed to summarize, as myths
often do, an enormous transition in human history. Indeed, taking the Neolithic
Revolution as the beginning of history, Hercules belonged, as the oldest of the
deities in the Greek pantheon, to the dawn of the ages. Thus, by the end of the
nineteenth century, the generally accepted interpretation of the myth was that it
expressed the transition to agrarian civilization. A myth that summarized the
neolithic revolution might well be used to summarize the revolutionary rise of
capitalism.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century the geographic zones of this latter
Herculean struggle were the four corners of the North Atlantic, or the coast of
West Africa, the Caribbean islands, the North American colonies, and the
maritime powers of northwestern Europe. Within these zones the experience of
human labor was organized in seven basic ways. First, there were those who
hunted and gathered their subsistence, like some of the Indians and European
hunters of North America and the poor commoners and scavengers of
countryside and city in England and Ireland. Second, the women, servants, and
children whose work was consigned to domestic settings of kitchen and cabin.
Third, the unwaged but independent farmers who themselves presented a
variety of types, from the poor tenants and klachan farmers of Ireland, to the
villages of west Africa, to the communal cultivators among the Iroquois and

Many Headed Hydra

the small-holders of America. Fourth, the unfree indentured servants who had
been compelled to leave their vagabonding ways to be transported to the west
Atlantic. Fifth, the artisanal craftworkers of town and plantation who have been
so carefully studied in recent historiography. Sixth, the sailors and navies of
the mercantile powers who formed the mass of eighteenth-century wage labor.
And, seventh, the unfree, unwaged slaves whose mass, cooperative labor
cleared the forests, drained the swamps, built the infrastructure of roads and
ports, and labored in the plantations of sugar, tobacco, coffee, and cotton. Our
remarks here are restricted to two zones-Europe and the North American
colonies-and to two kinds of workers-wage laborers (especially sailors) and
slaves.6
We will look at four moments in the history of the many-headed hydra in the
eighteenth century: 1747, when, in the Knowles Riot in Boston, sailors and
slaves fought the Kings press gangs and in so doing created one of the central
ideas of the Age of Revolution; 1768, when, in the London port strike,
sailors, Irish coalheavers, and others pioneered one of the central ideas and
activities of the modern working-class movement, the strike; 1776, when, in
the American Revolution, sailors and slaves helped to instigate and then to win
the worlds first colonial war for liberation; and 1780, when, in the Gordon
Riots, the polyglot working class of London liberated the prisons amid the
greatest municipal insurrection of the eighteenth century. All of these moments
were in crucial ways the work of a motley crew- a multi-racial, multi-ethnic,
transatlantic working class, whose presence, much less agency, is rarely, if
ever, acknowledged in the historiographies of these crucial events.
1747: Seamen, Slaves and the Origins
of Revolutionary Ideology
Free wage laborers, mostly seamen and others who congregated in urban areas,
and unfree unwaged laborers, slaves who lived in city and countryside, were
two of the rowdiest heads of the Hydra in Britains North American colonies.
Their numerous revolts were not only connected in important ways, they were,
taken together, much more crucial to the genesis, process, and outcome of the
American Revolution than is generally appreciated.
Jesse Lemisch made it clear years ago that seamen were one of the prime
movers in the American Revolution. They played a major part in a great many
of the patriot victories between 1765 and 1776. Seamen led a series of militant
riots against impressment between 1741 and 1776, and indeed their agency was
acknowledged by both Tom Paine (in Common Sense) and Tom Jefferson (in
the Declaration of Independence), both of whom listed impressment as a major
grievance and spur to colonial liberation.7
What has been less fully appreciated is how the sailors involvement in
revolutionary politics was part of a broader, international cycle of rebellion that
spanned the better part of the eighteenth century. Merchant seamen entered the
revolutionary era with a powerful tradition of militancy well in place. They had
already learned to use portside riots, mutiny, piracy, work stoppage, and
desertion to assert their own ends over and against those mandated from above
by merchants, captains, and colonial and royal officials. They would soon learn
new tactics.
After the declaration of war against Spain in 1739, struggles against
impressment took on a new intensity as seamen fought pitched battles against
press gangs all around the Atlantic. Seamen rioted in Boston twice in 1741,

Many Headed Hydra

once when a mob beat a Suffolk County Sheriff and a Justice of the Peace for
their assistance to the press gang of H.M.S. Portland and again when 300
seamen armed with axes, clubs, and cutlasses attacked the commanding
officer of the Astrea. They rose twice more in 1745, first roughing up another
Suffolk County Sheriff and the commander of H.M.S. Shirley, then, seven
months later, engaging Captain Forest and H.M.S. Wager in an action that
resulted in two seamen being hacked to death by the press gangs cutlasses.
Seamen also animated crowds that attacked the Royal Navy and its minions in
Antigua, St. Kitts, Barbados, and Jamaica throughout the 1740s.8
The most important early development in the seamans cycle of rebellion took
place in Boston in 1747, when Commander Charles Knowles of H.M.S. Lark
commenced a hot press in Boston. A mob, initially consisting of 300 seamen
but ballooning to several thousand people, quickly seized some officers of
the Lark as hostages, beat a deputy sheriff and slapped him into the towns
stocks, surrounded and attacked the Provincial Council Chamber, and posted
squads at all piers to keep naval officers from escaping back to their ship. The
mob was led by laborers and seamen, black and white, armed with clubs,
swords, and cutlasses. The lower class, observed Thomas Hutchinson,
were beyond measure enraged. The sailors originally assembled for
self-defense, but there was a positive element to their protest as well. As
Knowles remarked:
The Act [of 1746] against pressing in the Sugar Islands, filled the Minds of the
Common People. ashore as well as Sailors in all the Northern Colonies (but more
especially in New England with not only a hatred for the Kings Service but [also] a
Spirit of Rebellion each Claiming a Right to the same Indulgence as the Sugar Colonies
and declaring they will maintain themselves in it.

Maintain themselves in it they did: sailors defended their liberty and justified
their resistance in terms of right.9
This was the essential idea embodied in the seamens practical activity, in their
resistance to unjust authority. Sam Adams, who watched as the maritime
working class defended itself, began to translate its Spirit of Rebellion into
political discourse. According to historians John Lax and William Pencak,
Adams used the Knowles Riot to formulate a new ideology of resistance, in
which the natural rights of man were used for the first time to justify mob
activity. Adams saw that the mob embodied the fundamental rights of man
against which government itself could be judged. But the self-activity of some
common tars, zealous abetters of liberty, came first. Their militant resistance
produced a major breakthrough in libertarian thought that would ultimately
lead to revolution. 10
This was only the beginning, for both the cycle of seamens rebellion and for
the articulation of a revolutionary ideology in the Atlantic world. In the
aftermath of the 1740s, Jack Tar proceeded to take part in almost every
port-city riot in England and America for the remainder of the century.
Whether in Newport, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, London,
Liverpool, Bristol, or in the Caribbean, tars took to the streets in rowdy and
rebellious protest on a variety of issues, seizing in practice what would later be
established as right by law. 11
The years leading up to the Knowles Riot were ones in which the winds of
rebellion also slashed through many of the slave societies of the New World.
The struggles included the First Maroon War of Jamaica (1730-1740), slave
rebellions on St. John in the Danish Virgin Islands and in Dutch Guyana

Many Headed Hydra

(1733), a plot in the Bahama Islands (1734), a slave conspiracy in Antigua

(1735-36), a rebellion in Guadeloupe (1736-38), the Stono Rebellion (1739),
the St. Patricks Day rising in New York (1741), and a series of disturbances in
Jamaica (early 1740s). The connections among these events are not always
easy to discover, but the life of a slave named Will, who took part in the
rebellion of St. John, then the conspiracy of Antigua, and finally the plot of
New York, suggests something important about the movement and exchange of
subversive experience among slaves. Another Antigua conspirator, banished
from his own island, turned up as a leader of a plot on the Danish Island of St.
Croix in 1759.12
The movement toward rebellion among African-Americans accelerated after
1765, as demonstrated in some important recent work by Peter Wood, who has
argued that black freedom struggles on the eve of white independence
intensified as slaves seized the new opportunities offered by splits between
imperial and colonial ruling classes. Running away increased at a rate that
alarmed slaveholders everywhere, and by the mid-1770s, a rash of slave plots
and revolts sent the fears of their masters soaring. Slaves organized risings in
Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in 1772; in St. Andrews Parish, South Carolina; and
in a joint African-Irish effort in Boston, in 1774; in Ulster County, New York;
Dorchester County, Maryland; Norfolk, Virginia; and the Tar River region of
North Carolina, in 1775. In the last of these, a slave named Merrick plotted
with a white seafarer to get the arms that would make the intended revolt
possible. 13
Such conspiracy and exchange was facilitated by the strategic position that
many urban slaves or free blacks occupied in the social division of labor in the
port towns, as day laborers, dockworkers, seamen, and river pilots. Northern
ports, with their promise of anonymity and an impersonal wage in the maritime
sector, served as a magnet to runaway slaves and free blacks throughout the
colonial period and well into the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries.
Many found work as laborers and seamen. Slaves too were employed in the
maritime sector, some with ship masters as owners, others hired out for a given
time. By the middle of the eighteenth century, slaves dominated Charlestons
maritime and riverine traffic, in which some 20 percent of the citys adult male
slaves labored. The freedom of Charlestons Boat Negroes had long upset
Charlestons rulers, at no time more than when they involved themselves in
subversive activities, as alleged against Thomas Jeremiah, a river pilot, in
1775. Jeremiah was accused of stockpiling guns as he awaited the imperial war
that would help the poor Negroes. Jeffrey J. Crow has noted that black pilots
were a rebellious lot, particularly resistant to white control.14
Peter Wood concludes that between 1765 and 1776 North American slaves
generated a wave of struggle that became a major factor in the turmoil
leading up to the Revolution: It touched upon every major slave colony, and
it was closely related to-even influential upon-the political unrest gripping
many white subjects in these years. Woods treatment of this cycle of
rebellion as a significant chapter in the story of worker and artisan political
unrest invites us to link it to the revolutionary struggles of other workers.15
1776: The Mob and the Many-headed Power in America
Revolutionary crowds, rowdy gatherings of thousands of men and women,
began in 1765 to create an imperial crisis of unprecedented dimensions. Mobs
were crucial to the effective protests against the Stamp Act, the Townshend
Revenue Act, the increased power of the British customs service, the

Many Headed Hydra

Quartering Act, the Tea Act, the Intolerable Acts, and therefore in the
revolutionary rupture itself. All of this we can now appreciate because of
important recent scholarship.16
What has not been appreciated is that most of these mobs were interracial in
character, and that these potent if temporary unions of free waged and unfree
unwaged laborers were instrumental in winning many of the victories of the
revolutionary movement. The Sons of Neptune (themselves both black and
white), other free blacks, and slaves were probably most united and most
effective in their battles against impressment. The crucial Knowles Riot of
1747, which witnessed the birth of the revolutions language of liberation, was
led by armed Seamen, Servants, Negroes, and others. Later, as the
revolutionary movement began in 1765, some 500 seamen, boys, and
Negroes rioted against impressment in Newport, Rhode Island, and in 1767 a
mob of armed whites and blacks attacked Captain Jeremiah Morgan in a press
riot in Norfolk. Lemisch noted that after 1763, Armed mobs of whites and
Negroes repeatedly manhandled captains, officers, and crews, threatened their
lives, and held them hostage for the men they pressed.17
Workers, white and black, also participated in the popular upsurges against the
Stamp Act, whose successful repeal was perhaps the key moment in the
development of a revolutionary movement. In 1765 disorderly negroes, and
more disorderly sailors rioted against the Stamp Act in Charleston. A few
months later, Charleston slaves (some of whom may have taken part in the
earlier action with seamen) assembled and cried for liberty, which moved
city elders to keep the city under armed guard for ten days to two weeks. One
protest led to another in which the slogan took on a different, more radical
meaning.18
Seamen, again assisted by African-Americans, also led the militant opposition
to the renewed power of the British customs service in the late 1760s and early
1770s. As Alfred F Young has shown, seamen even drew upon the custom of
the sea to forge a new weapon in the arsenal of revolutionary justice, the
tarring and feathering that intimidated a great many British officials in the
colonies. We can hear the clunk of the brush in the tar bucket behind Thomas
Gages observation in 1769 that the Officers of the Crown grow more timid,
and more fearfull of doing their Duty every Day.19
Seamen also led both the Golden Hill and Nassau Street Riots of New York
and the King Street Riot, better remembered as the Boston Massacre. In both
instances, sailors and other workers resented the ways in which British soldiers
labored for less than customary wages along the waterfront. In New York they
also resented the soldiers efforts to destroy their 58-foot liberty pole, which,
not surprisingly, resembled nothing so much as a ships mast. Rioting and
street fighting ensued. Thomas Hutchinson and John Adams, among others,
believed that the actions in New York led directly to the Fatal Fifth of March
in Boston. Adams, who defended Captain Preston and his soldiers in trial,
called the mob that assembled on King Street nothing but a motley rabble of
saucy boys, negroes and molattoes, Irish teagues, and outlandish Jack Tarrs.
Seamen also took part in the Tea Party, provoking Britain to a show of naked
force in the Intolerable Acts, and an eventual confrontation that proved
irreconcilable. During the revolution itself, tars took part in mobs that
harrassed Tories and rendered their efforts less effective.20
Occasionally we get a glimpse of radical ideas and practices in transit, how the
oppositional ideas of these most dangerous people actually spread from one

Many Headed Hydra

port to another during the imperial crisis. Governor William Bull of South
Carolina, facing Stamp Act protests in Charleston, found that the Minds of
Men here were universally poisoned with the Principles which were imbibed
and propagated from Boston and Rhode Island. Soon, after their example the
People of this Town resolved to seize and destroy the Stamp Papers. In
explaining this development, Bull noted that at this time of Year, Vessels very
frequently arrive from Boston and Newport, where seamen and slaves had
helped to protest the Stamp Act, just as they would do in Charleston.
Principles as well as commodities were transported on those ships!21
Those Adams called boys (apprentices), negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues,
and outlandish Jack Tars made up a huge portion of the urban population that
was linked by tenacious cultural ties. A subculture of apprentices, servants,
slaves, and perhaps some journeymen, laborers, and sailors, revolved around
common work experiences and a common cultural life of revels, masques,
fairs, May-day celebrations, street parties, taverns, and disorderly houses.
Apprentices, servants, and even negroes drank together in Hell Town in
Philadelphia, just as seamen and Negroes caroused at unseasonable hours
in Charleston, and workers black and white congregated at Hughsons tavern in
New York. Magistrate Daniel Horsmanden suggested that such taverns
provided
opportunities for the most loose, debased, and abandoned wretches amongst us to cabal
and confederate together and ripen themselves into these schools of mischief, for the
execution of the most daring and detestable enterprizes. I fear there are yet many of
these houses amongst us, and they are the bane and pest of the city. It was such that
gave the opportunity of breeding this most horrid and execrable conspiracy.

Grogshops, tippling houses, and dancing cellars existed in every Atlantic port,
much to the despair of colonial ruling classes, who sought to criminalize and
otherwise discourage contact between the free and unfree workers who used
such settings to hatch conspiracies and even form a maritime underground
railroad through which many escaped to freedom. There was, therefore, a
history of interracial cooperation that underlay the joint protests of sailors and
slaves against impressment and other measures during the revolutionary era.22
Seamen and slaves thus expressed a militant mood summed up by Peter
Timothy when he spoke of Charleston, South Carolina, in the summer of 1775:
In regard to War & Peace, I can only tell you that the Plebeians are still for
War-but the noblesse [are] perfectly pacific. Seamen in particular and wage
workers in general were foremost among the most radical parts of the colonial
population, who pushed the revolutionary vanguard to more extreme positions
and eventually to independence itself. Contrary to the recent argument of
scholars who claim that sailors, laborers, slaves, and other poor workingmen
were in no position to shape the revolutionary process, it is clear that these
groups provided much of the spark, volatility, momentum, and the sustained
militance for the attack on British policy after 1765. In the process they
provided an image of interracial cooperation that should cause us to wonder
whether racism was as monolithic in white society as is often assumed.23
Paul Reveres famous but falsified account of the Boston Massacre quickly
tried to make the motley rabble respectable by leaving black faces out of the
crowd and putting into it entirely too many fancy waistcoats. It is not,
therefore, surprising that well-to-do colonists often fearfully called the mob a
Hydra, a many-headed monster, a reptile, and, more sympathetically, a
many-headed power, using the same mythic terms that other parts of the
Atlantic bourgeoisie had long used to describe and interpret their struggle

Many Headed Hydra

against a diverse Atlantic working class.24

Such fears are understandable, for the politicized mob was one of the three
most important mass organizations (along with the militia and the army) in
the revolutionary movement, and it was probably the hardest of these to
control. Moreover, it was in most instances quintessentially democratic-not
only could anyone join, but workingmen could even rise to positions of
momentary or long-term leadership. Given these facts, and the way in which
such mobs were absolutely crucial to the making of the revolution, their
subsequent suppression by former revolutionaries can be seen as part of an
American Thermidor, their condemnation by big landowners, merchants, and
even artisans as part of a literal enclosure movement designed to move
politics from out of doors to legislative chambers. When Sam Adams, who
helped to draw up Massachusettss Riot Act of 1786, ceased to believe that the
mob embodied the fundamental rights of man against which government itself
could be judged, he cut himself off from an important source of democratic
creativity and expression, the force that years ago had given him the best idea
of his life.25
Of the five workingmen killed in the Boston Massacre in 1770, John Adams
said: the blood of the martyrs, right or wrong, proved to be the seed of the
congregation. Adams thus made clear the workingclass origins of the
revolution and the new nation, for the blood of the martyrs, as everyone knew,
was the blood of a journeyman, an apprentice, and three wage laborers: a
ropewalker and two seamen, one of whom was a half-black, half-Indian
runaway slave who lived in the Bahama Islands. His name was Crispus
Attucks. Of this martyr John Adams had said earlier, his very looks would be
enough to terrify any person, or at least any person like Adams himself. He
might well have said the same about the motley rabble Attucks had led into
battle, thereby speaking the fearful mind of the moderate leadership of the
revolutionary movement. It would not be long before working men and women
all over America would be marching against the British under flags that
featured a serpent and the motto, Dont Tread on Me.26
1768: From Ireland to London,
Where the Serpent Learns to Srike
Patrick Carr, another Boston workers who was to be a martyr of the coming
revolution, represented that part of the Atlantic working class that hailed from
Ireland. Carr, like many others, left Ireland in the 1760s well-experienced in
the ways of mobs and their confrontations with British military power. Many
of his compatriots went to London, where they helped to make the London port
strike of 1768.27
Indeed, the strike in London cannot be understood apart from Ireland, where
the hangmans noose and the woodsmans axe had centuries before been the
principle tools of the English Ascendency. Following the Williamite
confiscations of the 1690s, the forests, and the human culture dependent upon
them, were largely destroyed; the agrarian policy subsequently introduced into
Ireland promoted pasturage for the export of cattle rather than an arable
farming that could feed the population. As a result, a large population, having
neither forests nor lands to subsist upon, either left the land altogether or
submitted to a standard of subsistence so utterly mean that it beggared the
powers of description of independent observers and caused even the rulers to
wonder at how an oppressed population could tolerate such conditions. The
Irish language was banished from the castle of the chieftain to the cottage of

Many Headed Hydra

the vassal, from whence in hard times it migrated to the boozing kens of
London and the low tippling houses of American and Caribbean ports. The
Hidden Ireland-its conspiratorial tradition and willingness to act outside the
law-was carried along in the diaspora within people like Patrick Carr.28
The Whiteboy Outrages, the name given to the largest and longest of
agrarian rebellions in Ireland (1761-1765, with sporadic outbursts through
1788), was a major part of the subversive experience of the mobile Irish. These
protests took place in a period of increased expropriation and accumulation,
intensified by the demands of two world wars. With the outbreak of cattle
disease, the murrain, in continental Europe, and the passage in 1759 of the
Cattle Exportation Act, the value of Irish land increased greatly. The poorest of
the cottiers who had a potato patch or a cow kept on the common land,
suddenly found that even these were to be denied, as landlords, their agents,
and bailiffs evicted them in search of new grazing lands, taking over whole
baronies, and erecting walls, hedges, and fences to keep their herds in and the
former tenants out. Against this, the Irish cottier and laborer reacted with what
Lecky called an insurrection of despair.29
In October, 1761, nocturnal bands of 200-400 people, dressed in flowing white
frocks and white cockades, threw down fences enclosing lands in Tipperary.
The movement quickly expanded to new areas in Cork, Kilkenny, Limerick,
and Waterford, and to actions designed to redress other grievances, such as the
manifold tithes (of potatoes, agistment, turf, or furze) imposed by an alien
religious establishment. Sounding horns, carrying torches, and riding
commandeered horses, the Whiteboys opened gaols, rescued prisoners,
attacked garrisons, stole arms, released `prentices, maimed cattle, ploughed
wasteland, prevented export of provisions, burned houses, reduced prices, and
everywhere tore down walls, fences, hedges, and ditches. These rebels were
originally known as, and often called, the Levellers.
The overall strength of the Whiteboys remains unknown, though it was
reported that 14,000 insurgents lived in Tipperary in 1763. Their largest
gatherings, 500-700 strong, took place in 1762 in Cork and Waterford. Using
military techniques, the poorest cottiers and laborers (many of them spalpeens,
or migratory laborers) formed themselves into an autonomous organization
quite separate from the middling and upper classes. Indeed, the proletarian
experience of the hundreds of thousands of Irishmen who had soldiered in the
French army since 1691 lay behind the Whiteboy movement.30
Of necessity much of their movement was anonymous and mysterious. It was
conducted under the sanction of being fairies, it was said in 1762, and led by
mythological figures such as Queen Sieve who wrote,
We, levellers and avengers for the wrongs done to the poor, have unanimously
assembled to raze walls and ditches that have been made to inclose the commons.
Gentlemen now of late have learned to grind the face of the poor so that it is impossible
for them to live. They cannot even keep a pig or a hen at their doors. We warn them not
to raise again either walls or ditches in the place of those we destroy, nor even to
inquire about the destroyers of them. If they do, their cattle shall be houghed and their
sheep laid open in the fields.

Whiteboy captains who would carry out these threats called themselves
Slasher, Lightfoot, Fearnot, and Madcap Setfire.31
Theirs was a movement inspired by strong notions of justice. The High Sheriff
of Waterford, for instance, could find no person willing to whip a convicted

10

Many Headed Hydra

Whiteboy, though he offered 20 Guineas and though a large body of troops

was present for the occasion. When English law was enforced, as in the
hanging of Father Sheehy in 1766, the people undermined its effect. The earth
over his grave was treated as holy ground; a Sheehy Jury became proverbial
for partiality. Four years later his executioner was stoned to death and ten years
later his prosecutor killed, by people who refused to forget.32
The Whiteboy movement attacked tithes and alarmed many Protestants, but it
ought not be interpreted as a sectarian phenomenon, since both Catholics and
Protestants were present among both the Whiteboys and their victims, and
since wealthy Catholics and Protestants cooperated to stop the risings.33 And
although it began in rural settings against enclosures, the movement ought not
be interpreted exclusively as agrarian unrest. Just as the creation of a landless
proletariat is a necessary corollary to the expropriation of land, so the forms
and experience of that struggle will move with the wandering, roving
proletariat thus created. An historian of the transported convicts to Australia
wrote, The Whiteboy Associations were, in a sense, a vast trades union.
Whiteboy sabotage, according to Constantia Maxwell, was taken up by Dublin
journeymen. The Friendly Society of Philadelphias ship carpenters, its
historian avers, was also associated with the Whiteboys. Therefore, when in the
late 1760s, the terms of exchange between England and Ireland included one
and a half million pounds in remittances to absentee landlords, three million
pounds worth of exports, and thousands of hungry laboring people, we need to
add to such material commerce, a cultural exchange that is broader than
choleric playwrights and sad balladeers, and which includes the rebellious
organizations of hidden Ireland, because these surfaced in London in 1768
with great effect.34
Proletarian labors in London were characterized by high turnover, by absence
of guild fellowships, by ethnic heterogeneity, and by working conditions that
were seasonal, dangerous, and subject to harsh discipline. The productive
power of such social labor arose from the assembly of many people in one
place at one time. Harvesting and road-making, canal-digging and soldiering
required such labor, as did the loading, sailing, and unloading of ships. The
Irish concentrated in the mass labor of coalheaving, a hot, filthy, back-breaking
line of work, but crucial to the energizing of Englands greatest city.
Individually weak and pitiful, as a collective mass such wage laborers had
power and posed danger. A body of men working in concert has hands and
eyes both before and behind, and is, to a certain degree, omnipresent, wrote
Karl Marx.35
In the 1760s it took more money to eat, and the hungry people of London
began to act directly against price increases. River workers led the groups who
stole fresh vegetables, forced vendors to sell their wares at popular prices, and
intimidated merchants into both closing down their shops/exchanges and
burying their plate. On 11 May a group of sailors assembled at the Stock
Exchange and would not suffer any Person except their own Body to enter it.
These actions were not peaceful: murder was a frequent occurrence during the
spring and summer. Thomas Davis, for instance, said he did not care who they
killed, rather than his family should starve. When a Gentleman asked a
young man whether it was foolish for people to risk their lives, he was
answered: Master, Provisions are high and Trade is dead, that we are half
starving and it is as well to die at once, as die by Inches.36
Otherwise, the hungry took indirect actions to increase their wages. The sailors
petitioned and marched upon Parliament to increase their wage payments. The

11

Many Headed Hydra

12

shoemakers met often in mass meeting in Moorfields as part of their attempts

to get greater wages. The bargemen struck for more money. The sawyers were
threatened by the recent introduction of a steam-powered engine installed in
Limehouse. They destroyed it. A thousand glass grinders petitioned for higher
wages; thousands of London tailors did the same. Leaders were sent to prison,
like the three tailors sent to Bridewell for irritating their Bretheren to
Insurrection, abusing their Masters, and refusing to work at the stated prices.37
In many ways, the riots of the spring and early summer of 1768 appear to be
classic instances of the eighteenth-century plebeian mob in action: the forms
(petitioning, marching, illuminations, smashing of windows), the heterogeneity
of the trades (tailors, shoemakers, carpenters), and, generally, the
subordination of its demands and actions to the middle-class reform movement
led by John Wilkes. Yet the activities of that year need to be seen not only as
the licensed outrages of the plebeian mob, but as something new, unlicensed,
insurrectionary, and proletarian. The Extremities to which the Cry of Liberty
is carried, seem to threaten the Destruction of all Civil Society, as one
newspaper put it. Wilkes and his men could not control the protests of 1768, as
demonstrated when some sailors chanted, No Wilkes, No King. Nor did
artisans lead these events. The river workers led them, closing river shipping
for a time, and almost causing a general strike. In July A Spectator observed
the pattern of recent months: Thus Sailors, Taylors, Coopers, Lightermen,
Watermen, &c. follow one another, the adventurous Coalheavers leading the
Van.38
The leaders of the coalheavers, many knew, were of the Gang of q5 White
Boys in Ireland, driven out from thence for the most Enormous Crimes, as
they have braggd and given it out themselves, to quote the Solicitor-General
of England. The involvement of Whiteboys among the coalheavers was
reported by several newspapers and assumed by Samuel Foote, who wrote The
Tailors; A Tragedy for Warm Weather about the strikes of `68-69. Horace
Walpole, the Earl of Orford, noted that the coalheavers are all Irish
Whiteboys; his certainty of this fact allowed him to use the terms coalheavers
and Whiteboys interchangeably. Thus the hydra-head slain by the noose and
the axe in Ireland re-appeared with doubled force in London, as insurgent Irish
wage labor. It may have been little enough solace to John Brennans wife, who
had carried the severed Whiteboys head through the streets and shops of
Kilkenny collecting money from the populace after his execution. But the
inescapable truth remained, as recognized by the Chief Baron of Irelands
Exchequer: in Ireland, England has sown her laws like dragons teeth, and
they have sprung up, armed men.39
The working men and women of riverside London came out of 1768 armed in
a new way. The sailors, who collectively decided to strike the sails of their
vessels and thereby halt the commerce and international accumulation of
capital in the empires leading city, had in conjunction with Irish coalheavers
and others made a major addition to the political language and activity of the
working-class movement: the strike.40
1780: Insurrectionary London
As several heads of the Hydra fought for Independence beneath the symbol
of the serpent in America, several others a motley crew, and of every colorstruck against British power in the Gordon Riots, the most serious municipal
insurrection of the eighteenth century. The riots of 6 June 1780 were named
after Lord George Gordon, a Scottish peer who led the Protestant Association,

Many Headed Hydra

a mass organization dedicated to the repeal of an Act passed two years earlier
for the Relief of Roman Catholics. Parliament and the Bank of England were
attacked; aristocrats found their houses demolished and their persons besieged.
London parks became military encampments; strategic points were defended
by artillery; the municipal bourgeoisie armed itself. Between four and five
hundred people were killed. To the London working class the 6th of June 1780
was a glorious day because the prisoners of Newgate were liberated.41
Exact estimates of the number of prisoners freed on the night of 67 June 1780
must vary because of the disorders of the night and because of the many
different prisons, jails, and other places of confinement that were opened. More
than twenty crimping houses (where impressed sailors were confined prior to
embarkation) and spunging houses (where debtors were held at the pleasure of
their creditors) were forcibly opened in Southwark. The prisoners of Newgate,
the largest and most terrible dungeon, were liberated amid such fire and
destruction that one spectator felt as if not only the whole metropolis was
burning, but all nations yielding to the final consummation of all things.42
The prisoners delivered from the Gaol of Newgate were of several
ethnicities-English, Irish, African-American, but also Italian, German, and
Jewish. Of those liberated whose original cases can be found, five had been
charged with crimes against the person (a rapist, a bigamist, an anonymous
letter writer, and two murderers), two charged with perjury; the overwhelming
majority were imprisoned for crimes against property: two counterfeiters, six
burglars, ten highway robbers, and fifty larcenists escaped; most were
propertyless. Several inside Newgate had American connections; they, like
others both inside and outside the prison walls, had been affected by the
revolutionary war under way for independence and the pursuit of happiness.
Continuing the struggles sailors had waged over the previous forty years
against impressment, the rioters fought for freedom against confinement. They
did so in a Republican Phrenzy and a levelling spirit.43
In fact, sailors themselves were prominent among the rioters, as indicated by
the frequent mention of cutlasses and marlin spikes as principle weapons in the
armory of the crowd. It had been a terrible year for sailors-the winter was cold,
the war had been a fatigue, and the press gangs marauded the streets. The
incidence of mutiny in the Royal Navy had begun to increase soon after the
American Revolution broke out. A seaman by the name of Richard Hyde was
tried for the liberation, or delivery, of the Newgate prisoners. One of the
Newgate turnkeys insisted that Hyde had insulted him, calling him one of
Akermans Thieves, and threatened him by saying he would cut his Throat
and kill his Master. Other sailors broke into prison-keeper Akermans house,
where they obtained the keys to the gaols main gate.44
Two other deliverers of Newgate, not having the Fear of God before their
Eyes but being moved and seduced by the Instigation of the Devil, to use the
language of the indictments against them, were named John Glover and
Benjamin Bowsey. They were African Americans, and former slaves. Their
activities at Newgate were decisive, and for that reason their importance to the
subsequent history of Atlantic working people can be likened to the more
well-known leaders of the Afro-London population, Ottobah Cugoano and
Olaudah Equiano, whose fame partly arises because they were writers. Glover
and Bowsey were activists.45
John Glover lived in Westminster where he was reputed to be a quiet, sober,
honest man. He worked as a servant to one Philips, Esq., who was evidently

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Many Headed Hydra

an attorney, for during the afternoon of 6 June he sent Glover to his chambers
in Lincolns Inn to fetch some papers. The streets were full of people and
news: the day before the Mobbing of the Lords had taken place, petitioners
were returning from Parliament, the ballad singers were exhausting their
talents, the clerks and law men of the Inns of Court had begun to arm
themselves to do duty against the mob. Ignatius Sancho, a well-to-do African
grocer, wrote from Westminster that evening observing at least a hundred
thousand poor, miserable, ragged rabble ...besides half as many women and
children, all parading the streets-the bridge-the Parkready for any and every
mischief. The day was a moment of truth when none could avoid taking sides.
Glover did not gather the law papers, but instead joined one of the columns
forming toward Newgate whose approach filled him with determination, for on
Snow Hill he was seen striking the cobblestones with a gun barrel and shouting
Now Newgate! He was one of the first persons who showed his face at the
chequers of the gate whose keeper was addressed by him as follows, Damn
you, Open the Gate or we will Burn you down and have Everybody out, a
threat he made good, for he was later observed to be the most active Person
Particularly in piling up combustible matters against the Door and putting fire
thereto.46
The London Black community (10,000-20,000 people) was active during the
week of 6 June. Later, Ottobah Cuguoano spoke from, of, and for this
community when he said the voice of our complaint implies a vengeance.
Such voices were the voices of 6 June. While Glover and others were busy at
Newgate, Charlotte Gardiner, a negro, marched with a mob (among whom
were two men with bells, and another with frying pan and tongs) to the house
of Mr. Levarty, a publican, in St. Katherines Lane, near Tower Hill. Charlotte
Gardiner was a leader of this march, shouting encouragements (Huzza, well
done, my boys-knock it down, down with it), and directions (Bring more
wood to the fire), as well as taking. two brass candle sticks from the dining
room. She did not even attempt to defend herself at the Old Bailey, and on 4
July she was found guilty and sentenced to die. The following Tuesday she was
hanged.47
John Glover was identified well enough at the Old Bailey for purpose of
hanging. But for historical purposes, his identification, like that of the nameless
millions of the African diaspora, is much more difficult. Yet there is evidence
to suggest that he took his name from an early member of the Committee of
Correspondence of Marblehead, Massachusetts, a General John Glover who
raised an American military regiment in 1775 among the multi-ethnic mariners
and fishermen of this important Atlantic port. The John Glover who helped to
deliver Newgate was probably a captured prisoner from General Glovers
regiment.48
The problem of identification arises again when we consider a second
African-American, Benjamin Bowsey, a man who came as close as any to
being the leader of the 6 June delivery. His voice was apparently exciting,
encouraging, and capable of arousing indignation. He was among the group of
thirty who first approached the prison, marching three abreast, armed with
spokes, crows, and paving mattocks. Later, he was indicted on three bills, one
for riot, one for pulling down Akermans house, and one for breaking, entering,
and stealing. Bowsey had been in England for six years, and had probably been
a slave in Virginia.
Men like Glover and Bowsey and women like Gardiner arrived in growing
numbers in London, where they found work as fiddlers, lovemakers, cooks,

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Many Headed Hydra

15

boxers, writers, and especially domestic servants, day laborers, and seamen.
The overall coherence (learned on plantation and shipboard) of the African
population posed a police problem in London where it was expressed in clubs
for dance, music, eating, and drinking, or in knots of American runaways and
London servants. John Fielding, the Chairman of the Westminster Quarter
Sessions whose office was attacked during the riots, was some years earlier
already alarmed at the growing immigration of this population. The
plantocrats, he said, bring them to England as cheap servants having no right to
wages; they no sooner arrive here than they put themselves on a footing with
other servants, become intoxicated with liberty, grow refractory, and either by
persuasion of others or from their own inclinations, begin to expect wages
according to their own opinion of their merits; and as there are already a great
number of black men and women who made themselves troublesome and
dangerous to the fami lies who have brought them over as to get themselves
discharged, these enter into societies and make it their business to corrupt and
dissatisfy the mind of every black servant that comes to England.
The Afro-London community by the 1770s had began to fight for the freedom
of a proletarian-mobility and money.49 They continued the fight in attacking
Newgate, one of the chief symbols of state power and repression, amid a war
across the Atlantic that continued a discussion of popular rights inaugurated
generations earlier by the Levellers and other radicals of the English
Revolution.
Conclusion
By looking at the revolts of the many-headed Hydra - laborers black and white,
Irish and English, free and enslaved, waged and unwaged-we can begin to see
how the events of 1747, 1768, 1776, and 1780 were part of a broad cycle of
rebellion in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, in which continuities and
connections informed a huge number and variety of popular struggles. A central theme in this cycle was the many-sided struggle against confinement - on
ships, in workshops, in prisons, or even in empires - and, the simultaneous
search for autonomy. The circulation of working class experience, especially
certain forms of struggle, emerges as another theme, linking urban mobs, slave
revolts, shipboard mutinies, agrarian risings, strikes, and prison riots, and the
many different kinds of workers who made them-sailors, slaves, spalpeens,
coalheavers, dockworkers, and others, many of whom occupied positions of
strategic importance in the international division of labor. That much of this
working-class experience circulated to the eastward, from American slave
plantations, Irish commons, and Atlantic vessels, back to the streets of the
metropolis, London, cannot be overemphasized This interchange within a
predominantly urban, portside proletariat took place over, around, beneath, and
frequently against the artisans and craftsmen who are generally credited with
creating the early working-class movement.
What consciousness pertained to this motley proletariat? We do not have a
complete or definite answer to this question, although it is important that some
points be raised despite the fact that we have in this segment of our longer
study only concerned ourselves with slaves and maritime wage-workers. First,
we need to emphasize that consciousness arose from experience. The struggle
against confinement led to a consciousness of freedom, which was in turn
transformed into the revolutionary discussion of human rights. The experience
of cooperation on plantation, ship, and waterfront led to a consciousness of
interdependence and produced perforce new means of communication in
language, music, and sign. Second, the various workers we have considered

Many Headed Hydra

16

here brought with them the traditions of their own histories, which were
preserved and amplified within the Atlantic world of the eighteenth century.
Thus, pan-Africanism originated in Africa, not on the slavers, and became a
potent Atlantic force by the 1780s. The antinomian and anti-authoritarian
traditions of self-government, a heritage of the English Revolution of the
1640s, was preserved and expanded in North America. Finally, a third point
arises from our investigation. At its most dynamic the eighteenth-century
proletariat was often ahead of any fixed consciousness. The changes of
geography, language, climate, and relations of family and production were so
volatile and sudden that consciousness had to be characterized by a celerity of
thought that may be difficult to comprehend to those whose experience has
been steadier.
We hope our conclusions will be of interest to all those who think that a
working class did not exist in the eighteenth century (before the rise of the
factory system), and to all those whose conceptions of nation, race, and
ethnicity have obscured both a field of force in which all history unfolds and a
popular world of vital cooperation and accomplishment. The many heads of the
transatlantic hydra may be likened to a popular drink of the eighteenth century
called All Nations, a compound of all the different spirits sold in a dram
shop, collected in a single vessel into which the dregs and drainings of all the
bottles and pots had been emptied.5o We shall have to study-l1 nations to
understand the beast who has called forth such great violence, physical and
conceptual, down through the ages.
References
1 Quotation in Daniel Horsmanden, The New York Conspiracy ed. Thomas J. Davis (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1971), 309. See Peter Linebaugh, A Letter to Bostons `Radical Americans from a
Loose and Disorderly New Yorker, Autumn 1770, Midnight Notes, 4 (1983) and T.J. Davis,
Rumor of Revolt: The Great Negro Plot in Colonial New York (New York: Free Press, 1985).
2 Davis, Rumor of Revolt, 194.
3 This article, which represents work-in-progress, is a continuation of themes we first struck in
Marcus Rediker, Good Hands, Stout Heart, and Fast Feet: The History and Culture of Working
People in Early America, and Peter Linebaugh, All the Atlantic Mountains Shook, both in
Geoff Eley and William Hunt (eds.), Reviving the English Revolution.: Reflections and
Elaborations on the Work of Christopher Hill (London: Verso, 1988). Richard Price, To Slay the
Hydra: Dutch Colonial Perspectives on the Saramaka Wars (Ann Arbor: Karoma, 1983), 15,
quotes Mauricius. Our work has received much encouragement from Christopher Hill, whose
essay, The Many-Headed Monster, in Change and Continuity in 17thCentury England
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), we particularly value.
4 Quoted in Hilary Beckles, Black Rebellion in Barbadoes: The Struggle Against Slavery,
1627-1838 (Bridgetown, Barbados: Antilles Publications, 1984), p. 107.
5 The ideological fabrication and the essentially racist project represented by the Classical Age is
elaborated in wonderfully exact scholarly thoroughness by Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The
Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece
1785-1985 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
6 These paragraphs, as well as those that follow, owe much to our previous work, viz., Marcus
Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the
Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and
Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the 18th Century; Or, History
By the Neck (London: Penguin, 1991). The discussions in these books of the class relations of
work, among seamen, coalheavers, and many others, are indispensable background to all that
follows in this article.
7 Peter H. Wood, `Taking Care of Business in Revolutionary South Carolina: Republicanism and
the Slave Society, in Jeffrey J. Crow and Larry E. Tise (eds.), The Southern Experience in the
American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 276. Jesse Lemisch,

Many Headed Hydra

Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America, William and
Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 25 (1968), 371-407.
8 Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of
the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 221, 222; John Lax
and William Pencak, The Knowles Riot and the Crisis of the 1740s in Massachusetts,
Perspectives in American History 19 (1976), 166-167; Dora Mae Clark, The Impressment of
Seamen in the American Colonies, Essays in Colonial History Presented to Charles McLean
Andrews by his Students (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931), 217; Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities
in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743-1776 (New York: Capricorn Books, 1955), 115; Richard
Pares, The Manning of the Navy in the West Indies, 1702-1763, Royal Historical Society
Transactions 20 (1937), 48-49).
9 Knowles quoted in Lax and Pencak, Knowles Riot, 182, 186; emphasis added. On the
relationship between liberty and right, see Lemisch, Jack Tar in the Streets, 400.
10 See Lax and Pencak, Knowles Riot, 205, 214; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue
Sea, 251-253. The interpretation offered here, stressing the ways in which the seamens actions
generated revolutionary ideology, is exactly the opposite of that proposed by Bernard Bailyn, who
sees the ideas of revolutionary movement as giving meaning to the seamens diffuse and
indeliberate anti-authoritarianism. See his Pamphlets of the American Revolution (Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 583.
11 Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, ch. 5.
12 David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua, with
Implications for Colonial British America (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1985)
37, 210; Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 335-339; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in
Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Norton, 1974);
Davis, Rumor of Revolt, 158.
13 See Wood, Taking Care of Business, 276, and his more recent The Dream Deferred: Black
Freedom Struggles on the Eve of White Independence, in Gary Y. Okihiro, ed., In Resistance:
Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American History (Amherst, Mass.: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1986), 170, 172-173, 174-175; Jeffrey J. Crow, Slave Rebelliousness and
Social Conflict in North Carolina, 1775 to 1802, WMQ 3rd ser. 37(1980), 85-86; Herbert
Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 87,
200-202.
14 Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphias Black Community,
1720-1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 72; Benjamin Quarles, The Negro
in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 84; Lemisch,
Jack Tar in the Streets, 375. For the percentages of black workers in the maritime sector in the
early nineteenth century see Shane White, We Dwell in Safety and Pursue Our Honest Callings:
Free Blacks in New York City, 1783-1810, Journal of American History 75 (1988), 453-454; Ira
Dye, Early American Merchant Seafarers, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
120 (1976), 358. On South Carolina, see Philip D. Morgan, Black Life in Eighteenth-Century
Charleston, Perspectives in American History New ser., 1 (1984), 200; Wood, Taking Care of
Business, 276; Crow, Slave Rebelliousness, 85. On the black seamen in the West Indies, see
Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels, 109-111.
15 Wood, The Dream Deferred, 168, 181. Wood argues that the cycle entered a new phase (to
last until 1783) when Lord Dunmore made his famous proclamation (November 15, 1775) that
offered freedom to any slave who would fight in the kings army (177).
16 It is important to note that early American mobs acted within relatively undeveloped civil
societies that lacked police forces and usually lacked standing armies; local militias could not
easily be mobilized against them, because militiamen were often part of the crowds. Urban mobs
thus created enormous disequilibrium because there were so few other institutions or corporate
groups to counterbalance them and guarantee social stability. Local authorities were too close to
the action at hand, imperial authorities too far away. Crowds were, therefore, extremely powerful.
They often succeeded in achieving their aims and usually managed to protect their own, which
meant that individual members of the crowd were rarely arrested and prosecuted. Crowd activity
itself was thus infrequently criminalized (even when it was condemned), a singular fact that makes
it difficult for the historian to establish the precise social composition of early American crowds,
as, for example, George Rude has done for crowds in England and France in the eighteenth
century. (See, for example, his Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763-1774 [Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1962].) But such difficulties do not make it impossible to understand the role of
sailors and slaves, for the power of the crowd insured that it would be the object of extensive

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Many Headed Hydra

commentary, if not the kind of direct legal analysis that would have come in the wake of
repression.
17 Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay ed.
Lawrence Mayo Shaw (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), vol. II, 332; Lemisch, Jack
Tar in the Streets, 386, 391; Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, 309. For specific accounts of the riots,
see Newport Mercury July 16, 1974 and June 10, 1765; New York Gazette, Weekly Post-Boy, July
12, 1764 and July 18, 1765; Weymans New York Gazette, July 18, 1765.
18 Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Political Mobs and the American Revolution, Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society 99(1955), 244; Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, 313-314; Morgan,
Black Life, 233; Pauline Maier, The Charleston Mob and the Evolution of Popular Politics in
Revolutionary South Carolina, 1765-1784, Perspectives in American History 4 (1970), 176;
Wood, Taking Care of Business, 277.
19 Alfred F. Young, English Plebeian Culture and Eighteenth-Century American Radicalism, in
Margaret Jacob and James Jacob, eds., The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism (London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 193-194. See also Steven Rosswurm, Arms, Country, and Class:
The Philadelphia Militia and the Lower Sort during the American Revolution (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1987), 32-33; Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary
Massachusetts, 1765-1780 (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 241. Gage quoted in Schlesinger,
Political Mobs, 246.
20 Lee R. Boyer, Lobster Backs, Liberty Boys; and Laborers in the Streets: New Yorks Golden
Hill and Nassau Street Riots, New York Historical Society Quarterly 57 (1973), 289-308; Hiller
B. Zobel, The Boston Massacre (New York: Norton, 1970); L. Kinvin Wroth and Hiller B. Zobel,
eds., Legal Papers of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1965), vol. 111, 266; Hoerder, Crowd Action, ch. 13; Rosswurm, Arms, Country, and Class, 46-48.
21 Bull quoted in Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, 313-314; see also 114-115; Eric Foner, Tom Paine
and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 54. Lemisch, Jack Tar in
the Streets, 391, Nash, Forging Freedom, 38-39, and Philip S. Foner, Blacks in the American
Revolution (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975), 37- 38, are among the few historians who
have noted the presence of African-Americans in revolutionary crowds. Others have not, perhaps
because they distrusted some of these descriptions of boys, sailors, and negroes in colonial
crowds, seeing them as self-serving efforts to protect well-to-do citizens who participated in mobs
or as means to criticize mob activity by blaming it on the poorer parts of urban society. This seems
to be the position of Dirk Hoerder, who admits that seamen and boys were common members of
Boston crowds but argues that the presence of blacks was negligible (Crowd Action, 374).
Sometimes the descriptions of crowds cannot be taken at face value, as when the Boston town
meeting sought in 1747 to lay all blame upon Foreign seamen, Servants, Negroes, and other
Persons of Mean and Vile Condition for the Knowles Riot, when in fact these groups could not
have made up the several thousand who took part in the protest (even if these Persons of Mean
and Vile Condition did in fact lead the riot, especially in its early stages). See the resolution of the
Boston Town Meeting in Boston News-Letter, Dec. 17, 1747. Something similar was going on in
John Adamss famous characterization of the mob involved in the Boston Massacre in 1770 quoted
above. And yet other sources, written with less tendentious purposes, make it clear that such
descriptions of various colonial crowds contained a strong element of truth.
22 Gary B. Nash, Billy G. Smith, and Dirk Hoerder, Laboring Americans and the American
Revolution, Labor History 24 (1983), 418, 435. (Nash, Smith, and Hoerder note that social
structure varied by city as they delineate common occupational patterns.) See also Nash, Urban
Crucible, 260, 320-321, and Sharon V. Salinger, To Serve Well and Faithfully: Labor and
Indentured Servitude in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800 (Cambridge: . Cambridge University Press,
1987), 101-102, epilogue; Foner, Tom Paine, 48-50; Rosswurm, Arms, Country, and Class, 37;
Morgan, Black Life, 206-207, 219; Davis, Rumor of Revolt, 81, 194, 248 (quotation of
Horsmanden); Linebaugh, A Letter to Bostons Radical Americans; Gaspar, Bondmen and
Rebels, 138, 204; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, ch. 1; N.A.T. Hall,
Maritime Maroons: Grand Marronage from the Danish West Indies, WMQ 3rd ser. 42(1985),
491492; Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, paper presented to the American
Studies Association, 1988, 22.
23 Hermann Wellenreuther, Rejoinder to Nash, Smith, and Hoerder in Labor in the Era of the
American Revolution: An Exchange, Labor History 24 (1983), 442. Timothy quoted in Maier,
Charleston Mob, 181; Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution
and Political Society in New York, 1760-1790 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981),
37, 45 (quotation).
24 Linebaugh, A Letter to Bostons `Radical Americans ; William Godard quoted in Charles G.
Steffen, The Mechanics of Baltimore: Workers and Politics in the Age of Revolution, 1763-1812

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Many Headed Hydra

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 73; Gouverneur Morris to Mr. Penn, May 20, 1774, in
Peter Force, ed., American Archives 4th ser. (Washington, D.C., 1837), vol. I, 343; Governor
William Bull of South Carolina, quoted in Maier, Charleston Mob, 185; Poor Richard, 1747 in
Leonard W. Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1961), vol. 111 (1745-1750), 106.
25 Maier, Charleston Mob, 181, 186, 188, and idem, Popular Uprising and Civil Authority in
Eighteenth-Century America, William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 27(1970), 33-35; Hoerder,
Crowd Action, 378-388. Gordon Wood notes that once-fervent Whig leaders began to sound like
the Tories of 1775 when confronted by the mobs, popular committees, and People
Out-of-Doors in the 1780s. See his The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1969), 319-328, 326 (quotation).
26 Wroth and Zobel (eds.), Legal Papers of John Adams, vol. III, 269, and Kaplan, The Black
Presence in the Era of the American Revolution (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 8;
Edward H. Richardson, Standards and Colors of the American Revolution (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).
27 Zobel, The Boston Massacre, 192, 199.
28 This section depends on chapter nine of The London Hanged, If You Plead for Your Life,
Plead in Irish. W.E.H. Lecky, A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1893) is
the best traditional account, but it should be checked against modern scholarship summarized in
Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985). This section is indebted to Daniel Corkery, The Hidden
Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the 18th Century, (Dublin, 1925), which describes what we
think is unique, viz., aristocratic verse forms applied to a proletarian experience whose consequent
feeling-nostalgia-has been so successfully exploited by bourgeois nationalism on both sides of the
water.
29 Lecky, History of Ireland, vol. II, 226. Richard Musgrave writes that the Whiteboy movement
began around 1759; see his Memoirs of the Diferent Rebellions in Ireland (Dublin, 1802, 3rd ed.),
vol. 1, 36-54. But most modern historians agree that the Whiteboys first appeared in 1761.
Although their movement waned by 1765, their name lived on to describe a variety of agrarian
movements throughout the 1780s and well into the nineteenth century. The best modern studies are
Maurine Wall, The Whiteboys, in Desmond T. Williams, ed., Secret Societies in Ireland (Gill
and Macmillan: Dublin, 1973), 13-25 and especially James S. Donnelly, Jr., The Whiteboy
Movement, 1761-5, Irish Historical Studies 21 (1978-9), 21-54. Leckys pages on the Whiteboys
are especially valuable because they preceded the destruction of the Castle archives in 1916; see
also Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 61-67. M.R. Beames, Peasants and Power: Whiteboy
Movements and their Control in Pre-Famine Ireland (New York, 1983), provides a useful study of
the Whiteboy movements of the nineteenth century. Elsewhere we have discussed the Irish-African
connection as it appeared in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. That experience only grew with
the momentus migrations of the eighteenth century, and it spread to as yet unstudied areas in
Ireland and in West Africa. We think that it was a major development as the two societies had
much in common-a pastoral economy, the relative absence of a commercial sector, the
predominance of large kinship groupings as the social basis of production, the absence of
individualism, and the emphasis upon collective mores, identities, music, and culture. These
commonalities represented a basis for exchange when these two peoples found themselves
occupying the most cooperative forms of eighteenth-century work-gang labor. See Linebaugh and
Rediker, ManyHeaded Hydra.
30 Donnelly, Whiteboy Movement, 26, 24, 34-35, 37-38, 39, 41-43; Beames, Peasants and
Power, 33-34; A Succinct Account of a Set of Miscreants in the Counties of Waterford, Cork,
Limerick, and Tipperary, called Bougheleen Bawins (i.e. White Boys), The Gentlemans
Magazine 32 (1762), 182-183, in which is noted the capture of a man who has been some time in
the French service. Many thousands of Irishmen served in French armies in the century after
1691; see Linebaugh, The London Hanged, ch. 9.
31 T.W. Moody, et al., A New History of Ireland vol. VIII: A Chronology of Irish History to 1976
(1982); J.A. Froude, The English in Ireland in the 18th Century (New York, 1874), vol. II, 25;
Wall, The Whiteboys, 16; Donnelly, Whiteboy Movement, 28.
32 Lecky, History of Ireland, vol. II, 41-45; Wall, Whiteboys, 19, 20. It is worth noting that
Sheehy was the only priest known to have been involved with the Whiteboys. The overwhelming
majority of priests were strongly opposed, which, according to Maurine Wall, helps to explain the
increasing popular intimidation of priests in the 1770s.
33 Wall, Whiteboys, 18; James Connolly, Labour in Irish History (London: Bookmarks, 1987),
43. Richard Aston, chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas in Ireland, noted that papist and

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Many Headed Hydra

protestant were promiscuously concerned in the Whiteboy movement; see Donnelly, Whiteboy
Movement, 46.
34 Constantia Maxwell, Dublin under the Georges, 1714-1830 (1936), 270; A.G.L. Shaw,
Convicts and Colonies: A Study of Penal Transportation from Great Britain to Australia and Other
Parts of the British Empire (1966), 173; James H. Huston, An Investigation of the Inarticulate:
Philadelphias White Oaks, William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 18 (1971); Thomas Prior, A List
of Absentees in Ireland (Dublin, 1769), 3rd ed. The drought of 1765 and ensuing starvation in
Ireland forced many to migrate to London and to America. See Donnelly, Whiteboy Movement,
52-53.
35 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy ed. Dona Torr (London, 1972), 315. T.S.
Ashton, and Joseph Sykes, The Coal Industry in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, 1964), 2nd
edition.
36 T.S. Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England, 1700-1800 (1959), 181; William Beveridge, et
al., Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century, vol. I, Price Tables:
Mercantile Era (1939), 292; Berrows Worcester Journal, 19 May 1768; The Westminster Journal,
14 May 1768; Public Advertiser, 14 May 1768.
37 The Information of James Brown, Sessions Papers, Corporation of London Record Office,
London, Bundle 1768.
38 Berrows Worcester Journal, 12 May 1768; The Public Advertiser, 21 July 1768; Memorials
of a Dialogue betwixt several Seamen a certain Victualler & a S-1 Master in the Late Riot,
Shelburne Papers, vol. XCXXX, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.
39 The Westminster Journal, 16 July, 1768; Berrows Worcester Journal, 23 June 1768, 14 July
1768; T.S. 11/818/2696, Public Record Office, London; Foote, The Tailors; A Tragedy for Warm
Weather (1778), 31; Horace Walpole to Strafford, June 25 1768, in W.S. Lewis, et al., eds.,
Horace Walpoles Correspondence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), vol. 35, 324; see
also vol. 23, 33; Donnelly, Whiteboy Movement, 50.
40 It may be true, as John Rule has recently pointed out, that the verb to strike was already in
circulation among the working class of London by 1765. This would not alter the accepted
etymology of the term, its origins among the labors of seamen, nor would it lessen the importance
of the events of 1768, which represented the greatest strike then known in Britain. See the Oxford
English Dictionary, s.v. strike, and the Bulletin for the Society for the Study of Labour History
54 (1989), 103.
41 J. Paul de Castro, The Gordon Riots (1926), and Christopher Hibbert, King Mob: The Story of
Lord George Gordon and the Riots of 1780 (1958) are two good monographical introductions.
They may be supplemented by the materials in John Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England,
1700-1870 (1979), Tony Hayter, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian London (1978), and
George Rude, The Gordon Riots: A Study of Rioters and their Victims, in his Paris and London
in the Eighteenth century (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 268-292. The story as presented here
draws upon the fuller treatment and the sources presented in Linebaugh, The London Hanged.
42 The Morning Post, 9 June 1780.
43 London Prisoners, Sessions Papers, 1780, Corporation of London Record Office, London;
The Proceedings ...of the Old Bailey, 8 December 1779 and 14 April 1779; The London Chronicle,
6-8 June 1780.
44 On the incidence of mutiny, see Arthur N. Gilbert, The Nature of Mutiny in the British Navy
in the Eighteenth Century; in Daniel M. Masterson, ed., Naval History: The Sixth Symposium of
the U.S. Naval Academy (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1987), 111-121.
45 The Proceedings, 28 June 1780; Indictment Bills, Gaol Book, Sessions Files, vol. 28, June
1780, Corporation of London Record Office. See also Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments
on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787), and
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa,
the African, Written by Himself (1789), both edited and republished in Francis D. Adams and Barry
Sanders (eds.), Three Black Writers in Eighteenth Century England (Belmont, California, 1971). It
should be noted that Glover, Bowsey, and Hyde (the sailor) represented half of those tried,
presumed by the state to have been the ringleaders, for the attack on Newgate.
46 Ignatius Sancho Letters (1782), republished in Adams and Sanders, Three Black Writers
(Belmont, Ca., 1971).

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Many Headed Hydra

47 Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments, in Sanders, Three Black Writers, 106; Gradiners activities
reported in The London Chronicle, 4-8 July 1780. Discussions of the size of the London Black
population may be found in Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain
(London: Pluto Press, 1984); James Walvin, The Black Presence: A Documentary History of the
Negro in England, 1555-1860 (New York, 1971); F.O. Shyllon, Black People in Britain (1977),
and by the same author, Black Slaves in Britain (1974).
48 In A list of Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors in the War of the Revolution several John or
Jonathan Glovers are listed as deserting or captured before 1780, and some are described as of
dark complexion. For a fuller discussion of Glovers identity, and of Bowseys, discussed below,
see Linebaugh, The London Hanged, ch. 10.
49 Fryer, Staying Power, ch. 4; John Fielding, Extracts from the Criminal Law (1768); Frank
Lorimer, Black Slaves and English Liberty: a Reexamination of Racial Slavery in England,
paper presented to the International Conference on the history of Blacks in Britain (1981),
quoted in Fryer, Staying Power, 203, 541. so Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the
Vulgar Tongue (London, 1785).

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