The Trials of Phillis Wheatley by Henry Louis Gates Page B

in Milton, Massachusetts.
    At Hutchinson’s side in the makeshift seminar room would have sat Andrew Oliver, the colony’s lieutenant governor (and Hutchinson’s brother-in-law through his wife’s sister). Oliver, who took the A.B. and M.A. degrees from Harvard, became—along with his brother and business partners, Peter and Thomas Hutchinson—leaders of the faction that dominated provincial Massachusetts politics until the eve of the Revolution. Oliver imprudently allowed himself to be publicly identified as a supporter of the Stamp Act of
1765, prompting angry crowds to ransack his house and uproot his garden. When in 1774, Oliver died of a stroke, commentators assumed it to have been brought on by the increasingly vituperative attacks of the antiloyalists.
    Quite a few men of the cloth were present. The Reverend Mather Byles, still another Harvard graduate, taking the A.B. degree in 1725 and his A.M. in 1728, was the first and only minister of the Hollis Street Congregational Church in Boston between 1732 and 1775. Byles was the grandson of Increase Mather and the nephew of Cotton Mather. As a young man Byles corresponded with Alexander Pope and Isaac Watts, and in 1744 he had published his own book of verse, Poems on Several Occasions . Byles was highly regarded for his wit; his sermons “praised for their sonorous language and elaborate descriptive passages,” Mary Rhinelander McCarl tells us, and “not for their probing ethical, moral, or theological content.” He was
a favorite for delivering eulogies at state funerals. Like Hutchinson and Oliver, Byles was a Tory loyalist, and he lost his pulpit when Massachusetts finally rebelled. He was sentenced to banishment, later committed to house arrest, for his loyalist views. (Ever the wit, he called the sentry stationed just outside of his home his “Observe-a-Tory.”)
    Besides Mather Byles, another poet was there that morning: Joseph Green, a well-known satirist. David Robinson calls Green “the foremost wit of his day,” and he and Byles often exchanged satiric poems and parodies. Among Green’s most well-known pieces was a lampoon of Boston’s first Masonic procession, held in 1749, and entitled Entertainment for a Winter’s Evening . The poem depicts the Masons as proceeding from church to their real destination, a tavern. A loyalist to the end, Green fled to London in 1775; he died in exile in 1880.
    The Reverend Samuel Cooper, also a poet, received his A.B. and A.M. from Harvard in
1743 and 1746, respectively. He was the only minister of the Brattle Street Church from 1747 until his death in 1783. Known as “the silver-tongued preacher,” Cooper was Minister to no less than “one-fourth of Boston’s merchants and more than half of Boston’s selectmen,” as Frederick V. Mills tells us. Mills continues: “Cooper was at the center of an inner circle consisting of James Otis, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Joseph Warren and Samuel Adams, who showed outward respect for Governor Thomas Hutchinson at the same time they kept agitation against British policy focused.” So pivotal was Cooper’s role during the Revolution in encouraging the American alliance with France in 1777 that he would receive a stipend from Louis XVI until his death.
    The august James Bowdoin was included in this circle of inquisition as well. Bowdoin was one of the principal American exemplars of the Enlightenment. A close friend of Franklin’s, he was a student of electricity and
astronomy, as well as a poet, publishing a volume titled A Paraphrase on Part of the Oeconomy of Human Life in 1759, and four poems in the volume Harvard Verses presented to George III in 1762 “in an attempt to gain royal patronage for the struggling college,” as Gordon E. Kershaw notes. His remarkable library contained 1,200 volumes, ranging in subjects from science and math to philosophy, religion, poetry and