A single sermon defused a working-class Boston rebellion that the elite had sparked

Evidence

The next morning, conspirators seized the warship captain as planned. News of the seizure initiated rebellious seizures all over Boston, as the elite plotters feared would occur. A convulsed working-class crowd gathered at the Town House in the center of town, “driving and furious,” avid for royal blood and independence. Mather rushed to the Town House. At noon, he probably read from the gallery a Declaration of Gentleman and Merchants to the revolutionaries. Mather’s calm, assuring, ministerial voice “reasoned down the Passions of the Populace,” according to family lore. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 146

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the 1689 Boston uprising as a test of how rhetorical ‘declarations’ function as elite containment — anticipating the later Declaration of Independence’s uses.
• QUESTION: Does Kendi carry this ‘Declaration as pacification’ thread forward into how revolutionary rhetoric about liberty coexisted with slaveholding?