Faneuil Hall: The Cradle of Liberty

Why is it significant?

Look up at the golden grasshopper weather vane perched high on the cupola of Faneuil Hall, gleaming against the New England sky. This hall is known across the world as the Cradle of Liberty, but its origins are tangled in the uncomfortable contradictions of early America.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Look up at the golden grasshopper weather vane perched high on the cupola of Faneuil Hall, gleaming against the New England sky. This hall is known across the world as the Cradle of Liberty, but its origins are tangled in the uncomfortable contradictions of early America.

In seventeen forty-two, a wealthy merchant named Peter Faneuil offered to build a grand market house for the town at his own personal expense. The townspeople were so suspicious of public markets that they approved the gift by a razor-thin vote of three hundred and sixty-seven to three hundred and sixty. Furthermore, Faneuil had built his immense wealth trading Caribbean rum, molasses, and enslaved human beings—a tragic irony for a building that would become the epicenter of human rights advocacy.

In the second-floor meeting room, orator James Otis gave the rallying cry against British writs of assistance, shouting that taxation without representation is tyranny. Samuel Adams organized the revolutionary committees of correspondence from this podium. In seventeen sixty-eight, when British troops landed in Boston, townspeople packed the hall to refuse quarters to the soldiers.

In the nineteenth century, the hall became the beating heart of the abolitionist movement. Frederick Douglass took the stage here in eighteen forty-seven to denounce slavery, and William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips made fiery speeches that swayed public opinion against human bondage. Later, Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone demanded the right to vote for women under these very arches.

What about that famous copper grasshopper vane up top? Master craftsman Shem Drowne hammered it from sheet copper in seventeen forty-two, modeling it after the Royal Exchange in London. During the War of eighteen twelve, port authorities used the grasshopper as a secret password test: anyone suspected of being a British spy was asked what kind of creature sat atop Faneuil Hall. Real Bostonians knew instantly; unmasked spies stammered and were promptly marched off to jail!