[On March
5th, 1770, the events of the Boston Massacre unfolded on King’s
Street. On March 5th, 2020, the Northeast MLA convention
will begin in Boston. So for both the Massacre’s 250th anniversary
and that ongoing convention, this week I’ll highlight some historic sites and
collective memories in Boston!]
On what the
historic ship-turned-museum helpfully highlights, and what it minimizes.
At the other end
of the Freedom Trail from the
Shaw Memorial and the State House sits a very different kind of historic Boston
site: the U.S.S. Constitution, a late
18th/early 19th century naval ship turned museum (the Bunker Hill
Monument National Historical Park is also at this end). As I wrote in
Monday’s post, the experience of walking the Freedom Trail, of winding through
21st century Boston while experiencing these historical landmarks
and the events and figures to which they connect, is a unique and compelling
way to connect to both the past and its relationship to the present. That
experience shifts but is also amplified when walkers, still following the
Freedom Trail’s painted red path, cross the North Washington Street Bridge
(usually known as the Charlestown Bridge), a sizeable bridge (soon
to be replaced, it seems) that spans the Charles River and connects the
North End to the very distinct neighborhood
of Charlestown. Doing so reminds us that the Revolution and its aftermaths,
like all of the city’s and new nation’s histories, enfolded multiple spaces and
communities, and offers an important revision to any narrative of Boston or
history that would focus only on the parts of the city that might seem to be
the most “historic.”
That’s all part
of what the Charlestown Freedom Trail sites help us remember, but the Constitution site/museum in particular likewise
highlights other, more specific and equally valuable historical lessons. The US
didn’t really have a navy yet during the Revolution (that side of the war was
left to our invaluable
allies the French), but over the next few decades, including the “Quasi-War”
conflicts of the 1790s and up through the War
of 1812, many of the nation’s significant battles involved ships in a
central role. The Constitution, one
of six
frigates authorized by the ground-breaking Naval
Act of 1794 and launched in 1797, became a key part of those efforts, protecting
merchant shipping during the Quasi-War and single-handedly winning War of 1812
battles against five British warships (including a legendary triumph
over the H.M.S. Guerriere that
led to the ship’s new nickname of “Old Ironsides”). The Constitution museum is dedicated to the history of the US Navy,
particularly in those earliest decades and conflicts, and since you can’t
narrate the history of the Early Republic United States at all without those
contexts, that gives this museum a truly national significance.
The Quasi-War
and the War of 1812 both featured
complicated contexts with which Americans could certainly become more familiar,
but the U.S.S. Constitution also took
part in another Early Republic conflict that is even less well-known and even
more fraught: the First
Barbary War. Indeed, as I wrote in that hyperlinked post, the Constitution not only participated in that
war’s naval battles, but subsequently transported the Tripoli
Monument, the tribute to six American soldiers killed in the war, back
to the US after its creation in Italy. Yet compared to the Quasi-War and the
War of 1812, both of which can be framed (somewhat accurately, if again
complicatedly) through a lens of national self-defense, the First Barbary War
represents a far different type of international conflict, one in which (whatever
the war’s initial causes, which did include attacks on US merchant ships) troops
from the new US traveled across an ocean (on ships like to the Constitution) to invade another
sovereign nation. That’s a very distinct role for naval vessels and the US
military, and one which (in my experience of the museum a few years ago—I welcome
any updates and responses in comments as always!) the U.S.S. Constitution historic site and museum does not quite engage
with the depth it could.
Next site
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other sites and collective memories (in Boston or anywhere else) you’d
highlight?
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