Table of Contents
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Epilogue
A Note on Sources
Credits
Endnotes
In Memory of Adam Myers, Middlebury (Vt.) Fire Department
November 21, 1832
The sun’s first rays were slipping between the brick buildings, and already a sizable crowd, coats pulled tight over dressing gowns, had gathered on the balconies and sidewalks to watch for the firemen. The church bells, doing their usual double-duty as fire alarms, clanged at an urgent pace. Twenty-eight-year-old Willard Sears ran ahead of the fire engine as it rounded the corner toward State Street. He and the other firemen pulled Number Eight by a long double rope, known as a drag rope, into the physical center of Boston, the heart of the city’s commercial and governmental district.
“Fire! Fire!” the men called in order to clear the way ahead, the rumble of the engine’s wheels and the men’s boots on the stone streets drowning out the warning bell dangling from the top of the machine. Turning onto State, Sears could see another fire engine ahead of them in the middle of the street, surrounded by men in long dark coats and black trousers—a mirror image of his own crew. An elaborate glittering painting of a bird adorned the side of the vehicle. This was Number Twelve, known as the Eagle Engine. But the firemen of Company Twelve were not rushing toward the blaze. Their attention was on the approaching crew. Sears realized what this was: an ambush.
Sears—a physically imposing man, square of jaw and shoulders—drew out the speaking trumpet that was holstered in his belt. He hailed the other commander: “Give me a chance to get through.”
Joseph Wheeler, Company Twelve’s foreman, stared down his counterpart from beneath the wide brim of his badge-adorned leather cap. “Go to hell!” he shouted.
Ash drifted in the late autumn air, and looking above him, Sears could finally see exactly where the thick smoke was coming from. City Hall was burning.
“I am going through there to the fire,” Sears called out.
“Go to hell!” Wheeler repeated.
“I shall run you down if you don’t give me room,” Sears warned.
“Go to hell!”
As the crowd of spectators grew, Sears considered his options. He came from a long line of fighters. One of his ancestors, an original Cape Cod settler named Richard Sears, was said to have lost an arm in a battle with Indians. Sears’s father marched more than a hundred miles to fight against the British in the American Revolution. His brother had trained recruits, again to oppose the British, in the War of 1812. When he had taken command of Company Eight a year earlier, Sears didn’t realize he was signing up for a war of his own, but it was clear now—he had found his battleground in the streets of Boston. He turned his back to the Eagle Engine and faced the forty-odd men of his company, their chests heaving for breath. He raised the speaking trumpet back to his lips and gave his command.
Four Years Earlier
The stately granite neoclassical building that housed Faneuil Hall Market was divided by an airy, arched passageway, with doors and windows opening onto the streets. All the small touches, like the delicately fluted columns and the Grecian cornice, marked the esteemed priority the new city of Boston granted its business community. The throng that surrounded the vendors’ stalls swelled with tourists who flocked to the newly finished showstopper of a building. A plaque under the cornerstone noted not only the year ground was broken, but also that it happened “in the forty-ninth year of American Independence.”
Willard Sears picked his way between the lines of people waiting for vegetables, fish, mutton, pork, poultry, beef, butter, and cheese. The noises and smells were invigorating. He was on his way through the marketplace, across Merchants’ Row, and into venerable Faneuil Hall to meet with the mayor, Josiah Quincy III.
Raised in Cape Cod to work hard and believe in a kind of personal manifest destiny, Sears had moved to Boston six years earlier, in 1822, the same year the town of Boston incorporated as a city. The rapidly growing seat of commerce now counted 50,000 inhabitants and boasted every conceivable kind of enterprise. To a born entrepreneur like Sears, Boston’s growth offered irresistible opportunities, but the influx of people also brought vice and squalor. Witnessing this side of the city, he’d later tell people, turned him into a teetotaler. He was also a blustery abolitionist, and being against slavery was no more popular in Boston than opposing consumption of alcohol. Sears sought out socially conscious churches and joined the Young Men’s Moral Association, a group dedicated to discouraging drinking, gambling, and other behavior that disrupted a city’s moral compass. As Sears prospered in his fast-growing construction business, he became stubbornly convinced that moral virtue begat success, and he spread his gospel to anyone who would listen.
Sears and Quincy had met shortly after Sears moved to Boston, and they discovered that they shared a reformer’s spirit and preference for unconventional thinking. At 56, the lanky, handsome Quincy had been in politics almost half his life, serving in the Massachusetts legislature and the U.S. Congress before he was elected mayor—Boston’s second—in 1823. He was a native Bostonian who had grown up watching the city expand, together with the challenges it faced. The image he honed was of a politician who solved problems using every means at his disposal.
When Sears and Quincy first crossed paths, the newly elected mayor had been wanting to do something about the infamous, secretive gambling dens and unlicensed dance halls that played host to thieves and prostitution rings and had been the sites of several murders. At the time, law enforcement was in its infancy; a small number of constables and watchmen patrolled the city, but Boston would not have a branch of detectives with investigation skills for another 18 years. The police superintendent told Quincy that there was nothing to be done about these criminal haunts—and that trying to shut them down would be a fool’s errand. “A man’s life would not be safe who should attempt it,” he said.
The mayor, unsatisfied, turned to Sears: Would he be willing to go undercover to gather intelligence? “There shall be at least an attempt,” Quincy said, “to execute the laws.” Twenty-year-old Sears agreed. Posing as a sailor on shore leave—a typical customer who ventured from the nearby docks—he explored the notorious establishments of West Boston and Ann Street, collecting names and details about the building layouts. Warrants were issued soon after, and Sears became the unofficial “mayor’s detective.”
Five years later, as Sears took a seat in the mayor’s office at Faneuil Hall, Quincy told him he had a new target to investigate: the Boston fire department.
At the time, firefighting already had a long history, but the techniques had barely changed since the early 17th century. Then, households had kept ladders and leather buckets on hand so that neighbors could help fight fires. The members of these “bucket brigades,” organized by fire wardens, did not have the skills or the inclination to risk their lives extinguishing complex blazes. (One fire warden was known to knock reluctant citizens on the head with a pole to compel service.) The most useful innovation came from England late in the 17th century. It was the water engine, a kind of tub on four wheels that was filled with buckets of water and then transported to a fire. Clubs of firefighting volunteers—one of the earliest of which formed in Boston when Company One, “Old North,” took charge of the city’s first imported English engine in 1678—organized regular shifts and trained on the new equipment. When a new engine was acquired, another company would form around it and take up a post in a new neighborhood.
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p; Companies had to be authorized by the city, but once formed each lived by its own rules, complete with its own constitution, and this unstable situation continued into the 19th century. The city paid for the engines, equipment, and repairs. But the men were strictly volunteers and were proud that they received no salary for their work as firemen. That did not mean money was not at stake. The city paid bounties to the first fire companies to reach a fire, and it was common for the companies—made up as they were of competitive and athletic young men—to break out into brawls when they met in the street while trying to beat each other to the blaze. There was a sense that men who engaged in fighting violent, dangerous forces would be inclined toward violent and dangerous behavior themselves. They even taunted each other in song while they worked to put out a fire:
There is an engine house not far away
Where they are last at fires three times a day.
The newest fire engines, built by top engineers in New England, had suction systems that allowed firefighters to use hand pumps instead of buckets to draw water into the tubs from municipal reservoirs or fire plugs (early versions of the hydrant). But because the engines and the hoses attached to them were not yet powerful enough to pump water back out at a great distance, engines would often have to form a chain from the water supply to the fire, pumping water from one to the next until the hoses could reach the flames. Many firemen scoffed at this kind of cooperation. Sometimes they would arrange for an ally to cover a fire plug with a barrel and sit on it, to prevent other engines from using it. Certain companies refused to accept water from particularly hated rivals, or purposely pumped too much water into the next engine in order to flood it. For desperate citizens fearing their lives could go up in smoke, it was hard to know which to worry about more, the fires or the firefighters.
Even though the term fire department was in use by the time Sears and Quincy deliberated on the subject in 1828, it was largely a misnomer. A department implies a unified operation, but these fire companies—collectively totaling about 1,000 men—were a loose collection of quasi-sovereign societies. Dealing with them proved uniquely trying for Quincy. Even after he’d replaced the old neighborhood fire wardens with a citywide chief engineer and board of engineers in charge of all the fire companies, oversight proved elusive. The companies clung to their independence, and their leaders considered any government action to regulate them to be tantamount to oppression. As the city’s reliance on them grew along with its own size and density, the firefighters became more difficult to control.
Quincy lacked leverage and knew it. The mayor would push new oversight measures through the City Council only to have them ridiculed and resisted by the firemen, who would pass out broadsides that called for the public to crush the anti-liberty “monster” that was city government. Specific firemen could be dismissed, companies could be disbanded, but finding competent substitutes was not easy. The dispute became a major test for City Hall, which was still trying to gain the trust of a populace unaccustomed to centralized authority and still unsure whether a mayor “was a four-legged beast or some other kind of animal,” as one reporter later recalled. If Sears could secure a place for himself in one of the 17 engine houses, Quincy figured, he could feed the mayor information that would allow him to craft more potent initiatives, even if the firefighters themselves might never be won over.
Sears had reasons for taking part in the scheme beyond his relationship with the mayor. He and his brother Ebenezer had become prolific builders. They put up whole neighborhoods and specialized in building churches—a holy mission for Sears, who signed his letters “your brother in Christ.” They prided themselves on quality construction, but even the best buildings of the era were firetraps. A single clogged chimney, a handful of wooden shavings left too near a hearth, or a drunk nodding off with a cigar in hand was all it took. Newly fashionable architectural features such as high ceilings and taller buildings increased risks, and with older wooden structures such as barns, stables, and outhouses crowded together throughout the city, all of Boston was a tinderbox. Fires wiped out dozens—sometimes hundreds—of homes and businesses in the city each year. Some 349 buildings had gone up in smoke in 1760, the worst year on record. The following year, Faneuil Hall itself burned down. A few years before Sears moved to Boston, the magnificent seven-story Exchange Coffee House, which took three years to build, caught fire and collapsed in a horrifying spectacle that would be remembered as the moment the city seemed to be punished for its sins. If the problems in the fire department weren’t fixed, it seemed inevitable that a fire would one day rage so far out of control that it would permanently cripple Boston. Who better than a builder like Sears to help stave off such a disaster?
Sears assured the mayor that he could win over the members of a fire company—that he could make them believe he was one of them, just as he had the criminal denizens on his earlier undercover assignment. Sears had jet black hair and a strong and stoic face that beamed with confidence, with a glimmer of slyness in his flinty, dark eyes. One local paper described him as “sturdy” and “spirited.” His combative and overconfident style could push as many people away as he inspired. Still, after years of managing construction sites, he was used to dealing with the kind of young, rowdy men who filled the rolls of the fire companies. Most valuable, perhaps, was his age: 24 was young enough to convincingly blend in with them.
One Sunday morning, Sears, while making the rounds to study all the fire companies, approached a small wooden building on Warren Street, the temporary home of Company Eight in the energetic South End of Boston. Eight, also known as Cumberland, was ranked among the worst of the worst for its misconduct and had the highest number of members under the age of 21. (Companies like Eight also had even younger followers who rooted for and assisted certain engines without joining—fire roadies, so to speak, who could get hurt or killed when they got in the way.) And a paper trail suggested some profiteering. Eight’s former engine house needed repairs, so the city built the new structure on Warren Street and paid a $130 annual lease to the property’s owner, Thomas Emmons—who happened to be a member of Company Eight.
Sears slipped through the open doors and found nearly two dozen firemen sprawled out on the sparse collection of furniture and on the floor—on the Sabbath, too, the avid churchgoer and church builder noted. The members, along with a group of young women, appeared to be recovering from a decadent night. The sight appalled the temperance fanatic, but Sears also saw an opportunity. “For when I am weak,” taught the Book of Corinthians, “then I am strong.” Sears had found the weakness he had been hunting for.
1831
Sears handed his fee to Company Eight’s treasurer and received the accessories that distinguished him as an official member: a leather cap, a number eight badge, and a personal copy of the company’s bylaws. Despite the fact that he was smuggling ulterior motives into the engine house, it would be hard for Sears not to feel a few inches taller suited up in firefighting gear. Part of a generation that felt simultaneously blessed and wronged by living in a time without a major war, the young man of action now had his uniform.
Sears had been forced to wait far longer than he had anticipated for his initiation. You couldn’t show up and expect to enroll in a fire company; most required a standing committee to accept an application for nomination and then, once there was an opening on the roll, three-fourths of the members’ votes to approve a new member. It called for the kind of glad-handing and maneuvering for which a man like Sears had little patience.
By the time Sears became a member of Eight, the engine had been moved from Thomas Emmons’s property on Warren Street to a now renovated, city-owned building known as the old Franklin Schoolhouse near neighboring Tremont Street. Sears, due to his standing as a businessman rather than any experience as a fireman, was made an assistant foreman. He might have been a spy, but he couldn’t repress his reformer’s instincts, and he was soon announcing his opposition to the men’s drinking and boisterous publ
ic behavior.
This made Sears less than popular in the engine house. The fire companies had spent years battling attempts to change their culture; back in 1825, Company Eight’s members had resigned en masse in response to Mayor Quincy’s creation of the board of supervising fire engineers. One of the company’s first slogans had been “Don’t tread on us.” When Sears’s beliefs became clear, he lost his place in Company Eight.
Sears, flustered with the quick failure, tried to join other companies, but the firemen had ways of warning each other about agitators, with names of personae non grata distributed and posted at each engine house. “We know you, you are a reformer,” Sears later remembered being told. “And we don’t want any such tomfoolery in the company.” He was refused wherever he went.
By now, Sears’s benefactor was long gone from City Hall. Boston’s 1828 mayoral election—at the time, they were held every year—was hotly contested, and the fire companies organized against Quincy, mobilizing their men, encouraging (or compelling) others to vote, and distributing broadsides throughout the city. More than 40 years later, Quincy’s family still blamed the firemen for forcing his withdrawal from the race after it became clear he could not prevail. The ousted mayor had a soft landing as president of Harvard University, but his bitterness lingered. His farewell address included a blunt reminder that, just as when he arrived in office, “the element which chiefly endangers cities is that of Fire” (with a capital F).
But by then, Quincy’s mission had become Sears’s. Perhaps Sears’s quest turned to an obsession the moment his fingers gripped the leather brim of the fire cap in one hand and the cold metal badge in the other. He would have to find his way back into an engine house.
* * *
On August 2, 1831, the members of Company Eight, fed up with the city’s meddling, voted unanimously to quit, sending a note to the city’s newly appointed chief engineer, Thomas Amory, that “we would have nothing to do with the Engine after 9 o’clock a.m. this day. Therefore the Engine will have no Company after that time.” The company surrendered their engine, their apparatus, and the keys to their engine house, and marched out.