Why Faneuil Hall Is the Perfect Metaphor for the American Revolution’s Complicated Definition of Liberty

In 1740, when Boston was a colonial outpost of 16,500 people, an extravagantly wealthy merchant named Peter Faneuil offered his city a gift. To replace the informal scrum of vendors gathered at the city’s docks, Faneuil proposed a modern marketplace to suit the ambitions of a growing city that, in just a few decades, would find itself hurtling toward Revolution. The project had its share of detractors, so to get it built, Faneuil and his cohort of rich merchants had to steamroll smaller traders. It was an ironic beginning for a building that, over the next 284 years, would serve as a forum for practically every significant debate in American society—and even as a symbol for the tradition of public debate itself.

Born in New York to a French family, Faneuil moved to Boston as a young man to apprentice with his uncle. Soon, Faneuil was expanding his family’s fortune by trading high-quality New England cod for European luxury goods; he sent so-called refuse-grade fish to the Caribbean, to feed the enslaved laborers who produced the molasses, sugar and rum that returned to Boston on Faneuil’s vessels. In 1742, the same year his hall was inaugurated, one of his ships, the Jolly Batchelor, sailed from Boston to Sierra Leone, returning with 20 kidnapped Africans. Faneuil lived just long enough to see his market completed: a squat, red-brick building, its ground floor dedicated to commerce with a public meeting hall upstairs and a golden dome on top. When Faneuil died a year later, the city hosted a lavish funeral in the new hall that bore his name. At the time, he held five enslaved people on his Boston estate.  

The hall hosted many defining moments of the Colonial and Revolutionary eras. Throughout the 1760s, patriots met there to protest royal taxes, and in 1773, Samuel Adams initiated the Boston Tea Party from the hall’s lectern. Four years later, in the same room, George Washington made a toast to mark the one-year anniversary of the fateful shots that had launched the Revolutionary War. In the early 19th century, the city expanded the hall with a third floor and a Greek Revival-style market building next door, named for Mayor Josiah Quincy, built to contain the overflow of merchants. 

By then, Faneuil Hall was “a fixture of American mythology and identity,” says Eric Hanson Plass, a public historian and National Park Service ranger who ran the Faneuil Hall historic site from 2018 to 2021. Figures from every corner of politics have used the hall for events and rallies, amplifying the legend “that this is where the idea of American liberty is born.” Frederick Douglass argued here before packed houses of abolitionists in 1849 and 1858. That same year, Jefferson Davis, future leader of the Confederacy, gave a speech in what he called “this sacred temple” and invoked Samuel Adams himself in a dubious defense of Southern states’ rights to conserve their slave economies. Suffragists and their opponents rallied here, as did protesters during the war in Vietnam. Segregationist George Wallace made a campaign stop here in 1972, and the following decade, LGBTQ activists held town halls to address the AIDS crisis in a heavily Catholic city.

The building’s commercial activity went into steep decline starting in the 1960s. Mayor Kevin White, who ran the city from 1968 through 1983, once described the view from his office in City Hall as “a largely vacant and rodent-infested old public marketplace behind historic Faneuil Hall.” The following decade, White partnered with commercial developers to transform the area into a leading example of the “festival marketplace” model, which privatized spaces in cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. The Reverend John Gibbons, a Unitarian minister and activist who moved to Boston for college in the late 1960s, notes that as the neighborhood “was sanitized,” he says, “the history was sanitized, too.” The Faneuil of slave ships was replaced with the patriotic image of the man who founded the “Cradle of Liberty”—the moniker by which the market hall is still widely known. Faneuil Hall has since become one of the world’s most visited tourist destinations, attracting as many as 18 million people each year. 

Today, in light of a national reckoning with the legacy of slavery and its ongoing implications for Black Americans, Gibbons has joined forces with clergy and activists to change the building’s name entirely. For the Reverend Kevin Peterson, the Boston-born public theologian and Baptist minister who began the renaming campaign in 2018, Faneuil Hall serves as “a metaphor,” he says, “a way to talk about race” in a city whose deep historical ties to the slave trade have often been obscured by sunnier associations with the fight for independence. 

For all the arguments that renaming campaigns serve merely to “whitewash” history, activism has led to deeper inquiries into both Faneuil’s and Boston’s historical ties to the slave trade. Hanson Plass, the park ranger, began research in 2020 to uncover archival documents that corroborate Faneuil’s participation in the slave trade. In June 2022, the City of Boston issued a formal apology for its role as a major port for enslaved Africans and singled out Peter Faneuil as “a member of an oligarchical merchant class who bought and sold slaves as a matter of wealth building.” At the end of that year, the City Council established a Task Force on Reparations to advise the mayor’s office on social justice policy. The next year, an overwhelming majority of the City Council voted in favor of renaming the building. 

“It is not by mistake that we moved from symbolically changing a name to ‘We’re going to apologize for centuries of slavery,’ to the mayor naming a reparations task force,” Peterson says. Boston’s great public hall has yet to receive its new name—the machinery of democratic bureaucracy runs slowly—but once more it is playing a central role in the politics of its era. “Public buildings are not neutral,” as Gibbons says. “They speak of our values.” They speak most eloquently, perhaps, when those values change. 

Michael Snyder | READ MORE

Michael Snyder is a Mexico City-based journalist specializing in architecture and culture.