The summer traveller who approaches Boston from the landward side is apt to notice a tall and abundant wayside plant, having a rather stiff and ungainly stem, surmounted by a flower with soft and delicate petals and of a lovely shade of blue. This is the succory (Cichorium Intybus of the botanists), described by Emerson as “succory to match the sky.” But it is not commonly known in rural New England by this brief name, being oftener called “Boston weed,” simply because it grows more and more abundant as one comes nearer to that city. When the experienced Boston traveller, returning to his home in late summer, sees this fair blossom on an ungainly stem assembled profusely by the roadside, he begins to collect his parcels and hand-bags, knowing that he approaches his journey’s end.
The original Boston, as founded by Governor John Winthrop in 1639, was established on a rocky, three-hilled peninsula, in whose thickets wolves and bears were yet harbored, and which was known variously as Shawmut and Trimountain. The settlement itself was a sort of afterthought, being taken as a substitute for Charlestown, where a temporary abode had been founded by Winthrop’s party. There had been much illness there, and so Mr. Blackstone, or Blaxtone, who had for seven years been settled on the peninsula, urged the transfer of the little colony. The whole tongue of land then comprised but 783 acres—an area a little less than that originally allotted to Central Park in New York. Boston now includes 23,661 acres—about thirty times the original extent of the peninsula. It has a population of about 500,000—the State Census of 1895 showing 496,920 inhabitants. By the United States Census of 1890
it had 448,477, and was then the sixth in population among American cities, being surpassed by New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and St. Louis; and the union of New York and Brooklyn probably making it now the fifth. In 1880 it ranked fifth, St. Louis having since outstripped it. In 1870 it was only seventh, both St. Louis and Baltimore then preceding it. As with most American cities, this growth has been partly due to the annexing of suburbs; but during the last fifteen years there has been no such annexation, showing the increase to be genuine and intrinsic. The transformation in other ways has, however, been more astonishing than the growth. Of the original three hills, one only is now noticeable by the stranger. I myself can remember Boston, in my college days, as a pear-shaped peninsula, two miles by one, attached to the mainland by a neck a mile long and only a few yards wide, sometimes actually covered by the meeting of the tide-waters from both sides. The water also almost touched Charles Street, where the Public Garden now is, and it rolled over the flats and inlets called the Back Bay, where the costliest houses of the city now stand.
The changes of population and occupation have been almost as great as of surface. The blue-jacketed sailor was then a figure as familiar in the streets as is now the Italian or the Chinese; and the long wharves, then lined with great vessels, two or three deep, and fragrant with spicy Oriental odors, are now shortened, reduced, and given over to tugs and coasters. Boston is still the second commercial port in the country; but its commerce is mainly coast-wise or European only, and the picturesque fascination of the India trade has passed away. Even on our Northwest Pacific coast the early white traders, no matter whence they came, were known by the natives as “Boston men.” The wealth of the city, now vastly greater than in those days, flows into other channels—railways, factories, and vast land investments in the far West—enterprises as useful, perhaps more lucrative, but less picturesque. It is a proof of the vigor and vitality of Boston, and partly, also, of its favorable situation, that it has held its own through such transformations. Smaller cities, once powerful, such as Salem, Newburyport, and Portsmouth, have been ruined as to business by the withdrawal of foreign trade.
Boston has certainly, in the history of the country, represented from an early time a certain quality of combined thrift and ardor which has made it to some extent an individual city. Its very cows, during its rural period, shared this attribute, from the time when they laid out its streets by their devious wanderings, to the time when “Lady Hancock”—as she was called—helped herself to milk from the herd of her fellow-citizens in order to meet a sudden descent of official visitors upon her husband, the Governor. From the time when Boston was a busy little colonial mart—the epoch best described in Hawthorne’s Province House Legends and My Kinsman Major Molineux—through the period when, as described in Mrs. Quincy’s reminiscences, the gentlemen went to King’s Chapel in scarlet cloaks,—down to the modern period of transcontinental railways and great manufacturing enterprises, the city has at least aroused a peculiar loyalty on the part of its citizens. Behind all the thunders of Wendell Phillips’s eloquence there lay always this strong local pride. “I love inexpressibly,” he said, “these streets of Boston, over which my mother held up my baby footsteps; and if God grants me time enough, I will make them too pure to be trodden by the footsteps of a slave.” He survived to see his dream fulfilled. Instead of the surrendered slave, Anthony Burns, marching in a hollow square, formed by the files of the militia, Phillips lived to see the fair-haired boy, Robert Shaw, riding at the head of his black regiment, to aid in securing the freedom of a race.
During the Revolution, Boston was the centre of those early struggles on which it is now needless to dwell. Faneuil Hall still stands—the place from which, in 1774, a letter as to grievances was ordered to be sent to the other towns in the State; the old State House is standing, where the plans suggested by the Virginia House of Burgesses were adopted; the old South Church remains, whence the disguised Indians of the Boston Tea-Party went forth, and where Dr. Warren, on March 5, 1775, defied the British officers, and when one of them held up warningly some pistol-bullets, dropped his handkerchief over them and went on. The Old North or Christ Church also remains, where the two lights were hung out as the signal for Paul Revere’s famous ride, on the eve of the battle of Lexington.
So prominent was Boston during this period that it even awakened the jealousy of other colonies; and Mr. Thomas Shirley, of Charleston, South Carolina, said to Josiah Quincy, Jr., in March, 1773: “Boston aims at nothing less than the sovereignty of this whole continent.... Take away the power and superintendence of Britain, and the colonies must submit to the next power. Boston would soon have that.”