[Larger Image]

Another old inn of assured celebrity was the Cromwell’s Head, in School Street. This was a two-story wooden building of venerable appearance, conspicuously displaying over the footway a grim likeness of the Lord Protector, it is said much to the disgust of the ultra royalists, who, rather than pass underneath it, habitually took the other side of the way. Indeed, some of the hot-headed Tories were for serving Cromwell’s Head as that man of might had served their martyr king’s. So, when the town came under martial law, mine host Brackett, whose family kept the house for half a century or more, had to take down his sign, and conceal it until such time as the “British hirelings” should have made their inglorious exit from the town.

After Braddock’s crushing defeat in the West, a young Virginian colonel, named George Washington, was sent by Governor Dinwiddie to confer with Governor Shirley, who was the great war governor of his day, as Andrew was of our own, with the difference that Shirley then had the general direction of military affairs, from the Ohio to the St. Lawrence, pretty much in his own hands. Colonel Washington took up his quarters at Brackett’s, little imagining, perhaps, that twenty years later he would enter Boston at the head of a victorious republican army, after having quartered his troops in Governor Shirley’s splendid mansion.

Major-General the Marquis Chastellux, of Rochambeau’s auxiliary army, also lodged at the Cromwell’s Head when he was in Boston in 1782. He met there the renowned Paul Jones, whose excessive vanity led him to read to the company in the coffee-room some verses composed in his own honor, it is said, by Lady Craven.

From the tavern of the gentry we pass on to the tavern of the mechanics, and of the class which Abraham Lincoln has forever distinguished by the title of the common people.

Among such houses the Salutation, which stood at the junction of Salutation with North Street, is deserving of a conspicuous place. Its vicinity to the shipyards secured for it the custom of the sturdy North End shipwrights, caulkers, gravers, sparmakers, and the like,—a numerous body, who, while patriots to the backbone, were also quite clannish and independent in their feelings and views, and consequently had to be managed with due regard to their class prejudices, as in politics they always went in a body. Shrewd politicians, like Samuel Adams, understood this. Governor Phips owed his elevation to it. As a body, therefore, these mechanics were extremely formidable, whether at the polls or in carrying out the plans of their leaders. To their meetings the origin of the word caucus is usually referred, the word itself undoubtedly having come into familiar use as a short way of saying caulkers’ meetings.

The Salutation became the point of fusion between leading Whig politicians and the shipwrights. More than sixty influential mechanics attended the first meeting, called in 1772, at which Dr. Warren drew up a code of by-laws. Some leading mechanic, however, was always chosen to be the moderator. The “caucus,” as it began to be called, continued to meet in this place until after the destruction of the tea, when, for greater secrecy, it became advisable to transfer the sittings to another place, and then the Green Dragon, in Union Street, was selected.

The Salutation had a sign of the sort that is said to tickle the popular fancy for what is quaint or humorous. It represented two citizens, with hands extended, bowing and scraping to each other in the most approved fashion. So the North-Enders nicknamed it “The Two Palaverers,” by which name it was most commonly known. This house, also, was a reminiscence of the Salutation in Newgate Street, London, which was the favorite haunt of Lamb and Coleridge.

The Green Dragon will probably outlive all its contemporaries in the popular estimation. In the first place a mural tablet, with a dragon sculptured in relief, has been set in the wall of the building that now stands upon some part of the old tavern site. It is the only one of the old inns to be so distinguished. Its sign was the fabled dragon, in hammered metal, projecting out above the door, and was probably the counterpart of the Green Dragon in Bishopsgate Street, London.