THIS NIGHT
Will be performed at the steps bottom of
Long Wharf
A COMEDY
of stripping the
BERMUDIAN PRIVATEER.
CITIZENS. Remember there have been near three hundred of our American vessels taken by these Bermudians, and have received the most barbarous treatment from those Damn'd PIRATES!!!
Now, Americans, if you feel the spirit of resentment or revenge kindling in your hearts, let us be united in the cause.
This was enough to rouse the turbulent people of Boston to action. They well remembered the winter's night, twenty-two years before, when their harbor was the scene of the first protest against the oppression of Great Britain. Then they threw overboard the tea, and spared the ships; this time ship and cargo alike should be destroyed. When night fell, small bodies of men could be seen marching down to the wharfs, through the narrow, crooked streets of the old town. Before eight o'clock Long Wharf was crowded with an angry mob. On the deck of the threatened vessel stood the captain, arguing and pleading with the crowd, and at times pointing to the scarlet flag above his head, and threatening his assailants with the wrath of mighty England. Argument, entreaty, and threats proved unavailing; and the crowd, gaining courage with numbers, rushed upon the vessel, and ordered captain and crew ashore. Leaving the scene, the captain rushed wildly into the city in search of the British consul; and, in his absence, the mob began to search his ship. An active and careful search soon brought to light in an out-of-the-way corner of the hold two swivel-guns, two three-pounders, forty charges of shot, fifteen pounds of powder, and eight muskets. All was piled upon the deck, and pointed out to the captain on his return, amid frantic yells from the enraged populace. He solemnly protested that the ordnance was only intended for purposes of defence against the pirates that infested the Bermudas. But the case was already judged. The people laughed at the captain's declarations; and in a few minutes the "Betsy," a mass of flame, was drifting across the harbor to the Charlestown beach. There she blazed away, while the crowd watched the bonfire from the dock, until the last timbers of the ship fell with a hiss into the black waters, and all was dark again.
Popular sympathy is at best but an unstable sentiment, and so it proved with this unreasoning affection of the American people for France. Firmly the American authorities held to their policy of neutrality, refusing to be influenced in the slightest degree by the popular clamor of the people for an alliance with France. Then the French sympathizers made their fatal error. In the presidential chair of the United States sat Washington, the hero of the Revolution. Rashly the French minister and his following began an onslaught upon this great and wise man, because of his firm determination to keep the United States neutral. They accused him of being an "aristocrat;" of wishing to found an hereditary monarchy, with himself at the head. No epithet was too vile for them to apply to him: "liar" and "traitor" were terms freely applied to him whom we regard as the veritable founder of our free Republic. Such intemperate and unreasoning malice as this had a very different effect from what was intended by the French sympathizers, or Republicans as the party was then termed. The party supporting the President gained strength and influence, even while the actions of Napoleon and the French Chamber of Deputies were giving American seamen the same grounds of complaint as those which Great Britain had so long forced upon them.