Fire of Liberty: Firefighters,
Urban Voluntary Culture, and the Revolutionary Movement

Benjamin L. Carp

FOR the American colonists, fire was a nurturing tool at hand and a metaphor that inspired the mind, but it was also a menace that struck fear in their hearts. During the 1760s and 1770s, Americans expressed their political views by burning stamped paper, offensive pamphlets, effigies, tea shipments, and occasionally a house. 1 They expressed their claims to classical virtue by celebrating the "long-forgotten fire" of liberty or George Washington's "martial flame." 2 They expressed their terror that they would be "destroyed without mercy with fire and sword," as they had read in the Apocrypha. 3 And they expressed their outrage at the fiery destruction of towns such as Falmouth, Charlestown, Norfolk, and New York. 4 Americans sought to harness the fire of liberty that burned in their breasts, and they also needed protection from an element that could easily escape their control. In this way, fire played a conflicted role in the lives of the colonists. The hearth had mundane and beneficial uses for cooking and heat, and fire as a Promethean symbol evoked feelings of triumph and enlightenment. Flames also had a destructive capacity, and a long history of smoldering towns had given colonial Americans a healthy appreciation for the threat that fire posed. Major "Great Fires" ravaged Charleston, South Carolina, in 1740 and Boston in 1760, and a multitude of smaller fires had plagued colonial cities. 5

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To combat the destructive nature of fire, the largest North American cities introduced fire companies for the protection of life and property, a new and distinctly American invention. By the end of the 1780s, Philadelphia benefited from a network of eighteen private fire clubs. The first of these voluntary associations was established in 1736, and members pledged to protect their property and the property of others. New York and Boston had fostered such clubs even earlier, though the responsibility of fighting fire was principally in the hands of unpaid municipal companies organized around the city's engines (eleven in New York and ten in Boston). Boston had employed multiple engine companies since 1707, New York since 1738. Smaller cities had fewer engines or none at all; they relied either on the community at large, on town appointees, or on private fire clubs for protection. 6

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