Liberty & Union: “They Have a Fine Flag Now”
By William F. Hanna
“We have just received the following intelligence from Taunton, ‘that on Friday last a Liberty Pole of 112 Feet long was raised there, on which . . . a Union Flag [was] flying, with the Words LIBERTY and UNION thereon. . . . ‘“ (1). So wrote an unnamed correspondent from Taunton in the pages of the Boston Evening Post’s edition of October 24, 1774. This was the first opportunity for the world outside of Taunton to hear of the new flag, and since then it has taken its place as one of the best-known standards of the revolutionary period. We celebrate its 250th anniversary this year.
The passage of two and a half centuries obscures the stress and anger that burdened the lives of most local people in 1774. Time distorts the context of why and how they acted as they did, and that certainly affects the way history remembers them. The Liberty & Union flag’s anniversary offers us the chance to reexamine what they were thinking and why many Tauntonians believed that such a defiant gesture was necessary.
Much has been written about the events leading up to the war that began in April 1775, and which then led to independence just over a year later. With the end of the French & Indian War in 1763, colonists saw more than 140 years of self-rule threatened. In 1765, the passage of the Stamp Act ended a long period of “salutary neglect” and brought a series of revenue acts meant to refresh the mother country’s coffers and bring the colonies into closer alignment with British imperial demands. These acts were met with violent demonstrations of rage that produced a heavy-handed response from the crown. Among several other extremely unpopular moves, British troops were sent to Boston to maintain order.
Because of both the new tax laws and closer administrative scrutiny, colonists protested what they saw as the erosion of basic political rights guaranteed to them as Englishmen. For example, policies threatening the traditional American interpretation of “power of the purse,” trial by jury, as well as laws regulating the quartering of troops during peacetime all put colonists on a hard edge.
In Taunton, as in most Massachusetts towns, anger increased dramatically in the spring of 1774, with news that Parliament had acted to punish the colony in the wake of the previous December’s Boston Tea Party. Among the most onerous provisions of the five so-called Intolerable Acts was the Boston Port Bill, which on June 1 closed Boston Harbor to all shipping until restitution was made for the British East India Company’s lost tea. More outrage resulted from the Massachusetts Government Act, which revoked the colony’s 1692 charter, overhauled the colonial courts and government, and limited town meetings to just one per year.
Fury swept through towns across Massachusetts as leaders decided how to both protest and obstruct the new laws. Aided by Committees of Correspondence, something like a coordinated response was cobbled together by Patriot leaders. From July through September 1774, eight of the nine counties in Massachusetts and two of three in the Province of Maine held county conventions to coordinate resistance. Bristol County’s convention was held in Taunton over two days beginning on September 28, with Dr. David Cobb acting as secretary. Like their colleagues elsewhere, local Patriots first recognized the sovereignty of George III and then blamed Parliament for the crisis. While they promised to maintain law and order, they nevertheless refused to accept Parliament’s authority to curtail rights and privileges that had become entrenched over a century and a half. (2)
Taunton was a river port and the closure of Boston Harbor rubbed local feelings raw. The law affected not only merchants and their customers, but also threatened those who invested in ships and in the maritime industry. Someone had to suffer, and Loyalists were among the first to feel the wrath of their Patriot neighbors. Daniel Leonard, a descendant of one of Taunton’s earliest families and a longstanding legal and political mainstay in the community, was forced to flee to Boston for safety on August 22. As he left, Patriots continued their ongoing feud with Thomas Gilbert, a Freetown Tory, and he too would one day be compelled to run for his life, as would Dr. William McKinstry, a popular local physician. On September 1, 1774, the Massachusetts Spy published a letter written from Taunton on August 25, in which the writer noted that “It is more dangerous being a tory here, than at Boston, even if no troops were there.” (3)
This was the setting into which the Liberty & Union flag was introduced. It was an autumn in which “liberty poles” sprouted throughout Massachusetts. The tradition dated back to the time of the Stamp Act, when first trees and then poles were used to hoist banners and flags of protest and defiance. Several nearby towns, including Bridgewater, Middleborough and Plymouth had liberty poles placed in prominent locations during the pre-revolutionary period.
Although the Liberty & Union flag wasn’t raised until the third week of October, it may have been ready for launch more than a month before. On September 16, 1774, Eunice Paine, whose brother, Robert Treat Paine, was serving as a Massachusetts delegate to the First Continental Congress, wrote him a letter commenting on events in Taunton. Her brother had been away in Philadelphia for over a month, so there was a lot to tell him. After reassuring him that the family wasn’t at all flustered by the surrounding political uproar, she noted that “neither were we distinguisht by the flag which the people woud. have set on the house.” (4)
Robert Treat Paine, despite his membership in the Continental Congress, was no radical. As a respected Massachusetts lawyer and legislator, he took a more conservative approach toward the crisis. He wouldn’t, for example, join those calling for independence until several months into 1776, (5) and it’s safe to say that he would not have been pleased to see a flag of defiance hung on his house in the autumn of 1774.
Whether Patriots tried again is uncertain, but on October 8, three weeks after Eunice’s letter, Abigail Greenleaf, Paine’s niece and a visitor to Taunton, also wrote to comment on local conditions. After mentioning Daniel Leonard’s trouble and noting that the local court had been closed by protestors, she sounded a note of what seems like cautious relief when she told her uncle that Tauntonians had “behaved like men, with a resolution, + firmness which becomes free men. As we have the happiness to be upon the right side we have nothing to fear from the People.” Referring again to local Patriots, she reported that “They wanted to set a flag of Liberty upon your house in honor to you + were coming in to ask leave, but were Prevented by the Doctor [David Cobb, Paine’s brother-in-law] telling them; that the greatest honor they could do you would be, by their good Behavior.” (6)
What the earliest rendition of the flag looked like we have no idea, but two weeks after Abigail’s letter the Sons of Liberty raised the finished Liberty & Union flag on Taunton Green, less than a stone’s throw from the Paine house. This was a modified “union flag” of 1707, a red ensign of Great Britain but with the words LIBERTY & UNION placed across the bottom. It was raised as part of a Friday afternoon rally. Tacked to the bottom of the liberty pole was a proclamation promising to “resist even unto Blood” attempts to subvert “Their Rights as Men and as American Englishmen.” (7)
We don’t know how long that flag flew or what became of it; six months later Tauntonians were at war with England and facing an entirely different array of problems. What is certain, however, is that 250 years ago local people took great pride in the Liberty & Union flag. Two days after it was raised, and as Robert Treat Paine was preparing to return home, his sister wrote him a letter speculating on how his townsmen might welcome him. “Our Liberty Pole, I suppose, will be dresst with additional Ornaments,” she wrote. “They have a fine flag now which is hoisted at sunrise with a discharge of Our biggest Gun & taken down at sun set with a like parade.” (8)
End Notes
1 Boston Evening Post, 24 October 1774.
2 Richard Mros, Taunton, Massachusetts: The Revolutionary Years (Taunton, Mass.: Taunton Historical Commission, 1974): 25–26.
3 Massachusetts Spy [Boston], 1 September 1774. For more information on the plight of area Loyalists, see William F. Hanna, A History of Taunton, Massachusetts (Taunton, Mass.: Old Colony Historical Society, 2007): 99–107.
4 Eunice Paine to Robert Treat Paine, 16 September 1774, in Robert W. Hanson, ed., The Papers of Robert Treat Paine (Boston, Mass.: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2005), III: 5; hereinafter Paine Papers.
5 Paine Papers, III: vii.
6 Abigail Greenleaf to Robert Treat Paine, 8 October 1774, Paine Papers, III: 8–9.
7 Boston Evening Post, 24 October 1774.
8 Eunice Paine to Robert Treat Paine, 23 October 1774, Paine Papers, III: 16.
