Old South Meeting House highlights local shoemaker's role in fomenting Revolution

WBUR podcast, Boston. This is up next. I'm Sharon Brody. Much of written history revolves around famous names, think Paul Revere. Now a Boston museum is highlighting how ordinary folks shaped history and how their stories help us understand the revolutionary war. Nat Shidley is president of revolutionary spaces, the nonprofit that runs Boston's Old South Meeting House. This month, they're shining the spotlight on artifacts from the life of George Robert 12's Hughes. He was a ordinary shoemaker born in Boston in 1742. When the events that led to the revolution took place, he was a bystander at the beginning and then became a participant. So he was there on the night of the Boston massacre. He was a participant in the Boston Tea Party. And he became near the end of his life when he was in his 90s, something of a celebrity, when he came back to Boston and was fated as the oldest surviving participant in the Boston Tea Party. Now, about the Boston Tea Party, can you let us know more about what his recorded memories are from December 16th, 1773 and why they're important for how we understand that event? He remembers himself as being sort of a compatriot of John Hancock rowing over to the ships and serving as the botson, the person who was sort of in charge of making sure that everybody did their job. And he's probably either himself exaggerating his memory of the role or one of his biographers is exaggerating that. So. Whether or not that's accurate, what it's telling us is that he remembers the revolution as a moment where an ordinary person like him had an important role to play and was at the center of civic life. After the war, he's moved to New York and lived in relative obscurity until biographers or journalists find him write about his life. And then he becomes somewhat of a celebrity. Can you tell us more about how that stardom got sparked? Around the late 1820s and 1830s, Congress enacts an act that allows for pensions to be paid to veterans of the Revolutionary War, but people have to come forward and tell stories or explain their service. And so now people are talking about who the veterans are in their communities. And probably it's through that act that people begin to talk locally about Hughes. And then a writer out of New York City discovers that this is an

a really interesting story. And he goes and interviews Hughes and writes a book about Hughes and his interesting journey through the revolution. It was not widely read in New York City, but it gets a wide audience in Boston. And now he's invited to come to Boston and participate in the city's commemoration of the 4th of July. So it's a moment for him as a person to mark the passage of time, but it's also a moment for Bostonians to think about how far the city had traveled and how far the young country had traveled since independence in 1776. Before Hughes gets discovered, if you will, he was, you know, just a regular guy, one of thousands of people who took part in history without name recognition. What would you say that his participation reveals about the role that ordinary Bostonians played in securing independence? There would have been no independence if it wasn't for the involvement of ordinary people. Without their involvement in actions like the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor in December of 1773, the British Army wouldn't have been sent to Boston. You wouldn't have had the first battles that sparked the war and that force folks throughout the colonies to make a decision about which side they're going to be on. Does the story of this... Regular civilian who's sort of marinated in what turned out to be these major historical developments. Tell us anything about current times and whose stories matter. Well, I think it's helpful for us to remember that the revolution really begins as a question about how people are represented. You know, it's very palpable in our present moment that that's the argument we are still having today. Hopefully, we can be inspired by folks like George Robert 12th Hughes to lean in and do our part. All of us have to participate in this conversation for democracy to work. That was Nat Shidley with the Old South Meeting House in Boston.