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ROBERT FANUZZI Everybody's Faneuil Hall: The Imaginary Institution of Democracy The case of boston's faneuil hall suggests that a politically conscious citizenry of the post-revolutionary era did not lack in imagination when it came to conceiving its public space. From its inception in 1 742, the building had suffered through an abortive career as a city-run marketplace and been widely reviled, but during the Revolutionary War, Faneuil Hall served as the historic site of the Stamp Act protest, the tea tax protest, and the Boston Massacre commemoration. In the aftermath, a civic monument to Boston's tradition of public assemblies was born, as was a figurative expression: the "Cradle of liberty ," synonymous with the name of Faneuil Hall, and signifying the popular sovereignty of free speech. By the early nineteenth century, this trope and its historic associations had gained such purchase on the civic life of Bostonians that the building's previous incarnation was forgotten . In keeping with its standing as the "Cradle of liberty," Faneuil Hall was recreated as the birthplace of democracy, the place where colonial subjects grasped their right of free speech and became "the people." Dignitaries and public officials of the new republic gathered in the building to toast its name, while civic architect Charles Bulfinch was commissioned in 1805 to adorn the old marketplace with republican ornamentation suitable to its figurative appellation. Indeed, the trope for Faneuil Hall seemed to authorize not only the form and function of the public space but the exercise of free speech, which was said to pay tribute to Faneuil Hall. An 1826 pamphlet offered an appropriArizona Quarterly Volume 54, Number 2, Summer iç Copyright © 1998 by Arizona Board ofRegents ISSN 0004- 16 10 Robert Fanuzzi ate memorial to the "Cradle ofliberty" when it declared, "The language which made a monarch tremble upon his throne for safety had its origins in Faneuil Hall" (qtd. Brown 163). In its figurative form, Faneuil Hall belonged to a civic discourse which interpellated post-revolutionary generations of Bostonians as citizens of a free republic and more particularly, as putative participants in the city's public sphere. This held true for New England abolitionists , who negotiated their way into Boston's urban scene in the early 1830s without any support from the city's political and religious establishment but with perfect fluency in its discourse of citizenship. At the first meeting of the abolition society later to be called the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (mass), William Lloyd Garrison sought to borrow for the fledgling movement the symbolism of the "Cradle of liberty ," if not the building itself. Speaking from the African Meeting House in 1832, he promised, "Faneuil Hall shall ere long echo with the principles we have here set forth" (qtd. Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison 55). In 1837, the mass again saw its chance to echo its name with that of Faneuil Hall when Elijah Lovejoy, the abolitionist editor, was murdered in Alton, Illinois. Defending his printing office from a mob, Lovejoy was martyred to the right offree speech for which Faneuil Hall stood. A mass petition headed by William Channing proposed a "spontaneous public meeting" be held in Faneuil Hall, the "old 'Cradle of liberty,'" as Garrison fondly called it, and therefore the most "suitable building" to demonstrate Bostonians' support for their civil liberty (Annual Report 34). The flaws in the abolitionists' conception of "the Cradle of liberty," or perhaps the contradictions of Boston's civic discourse were exposed when Boston's Board of Alderman summarily turned down the mass petition, and then, having relented, allowed an assembly which featured these words from the Attorney General of Massachusetts, James Austin: We have a menagerie here, with lions, tigers, hyenas, an elephant , a jackass or two, and monkeys in plenty. Suppose now, some new cosmopolitite, some man of philanthropic feelings, not only towards man but animals, who believe [sic] that all are entitled to freedom as an inalienable right, should engage in the humane task of giving freedom to those wild beasts of Everybody's Faneuil Hall the forest, some ofwhom are nobler than their keepers; or having discovered some new mode to reach their understanding, should try to induce...

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