ABSTRACT
The clocks in the Boston belfries strike twelve as this chapter opens, and in doing so they announce more than the beginning of the British blockade of Boston harbour in June 1774. They also mark a stage in the inexorable movement towards American independence that George Bancroft's history dramatizes. This chapter explores three distinct categories of employment and by normal reckoning, at least two social classes, but Bancroft's technique here is to stress their common interests and to disregard any potential or actual social divisions among his Bostonians. In Bancroft's prose the blockaded harbour is an image of idleness and want, with the moral guilt for these evils belonging, not to the American men who are workless, but to their British rulers who have robbed them of their legitimate occupations. In Bancroft's account of Boston society there are three main divisions, ministers, merchants and mechanics, but all are united in their bold speculation on political matters.
