Born in New York to a French family, Faneuil moved to Boston as a young man to apprentice with his uncle. Soon, Faneuil was expanding his family’s fortune by trading high-quality New England cod for European luxury goods; he sent so-called refuse-grade fish to the Caribbean, to feed the enslaved laborers who produced the molasses, sugar and rum that returned to Boston on Faneuil’s vessels. In 1742, the same year his hall was inaugurated, one of his ships, the Jolly Batchelor, sailed from Boston to Sierra Leone, returning with 20 kidnapped Africans. Faneuil lived just long enough to see his market completed: a squat, red-brick building, its ground floor dedicated to commerce with a public meeting hall upstairs and a golden dome on top. When Faneuil died a year later, the city hosted a lavish funeral in the new hall that bore his name. At the time, he held five enslaved people on his Boston estate.
The hall hosted many defining moments of the Colonial and Revolutionary eras. Throughout the 1760s, patriots met there to protest royal taxes, and in 1773, Samuel Adams initiated the Boston Tea Party from the hall’s lectern. Four years later, in the same room, George Washington made a toast to mark the one-year anniversary of the fateful shots that had launched the Revolutionary War. In the early 19th century, the city expanded the hall with a third floor and a Greek Revival-style market building next door, named for Mayor Josiah Quincy, built to contain the overflow of merchants.
By then, Faneuil Hall was “a fixture of American mythology and identity,” says Eric Hanson Plass, a public historian and National Park Service ranger who ran the Faneuil Hall historic site from 2018 to 2021. Figures from every corner of politics have used the hall for events and rallies, amplifying the legend “that this is where the idea of American liberty is born.” Frederick Douglass argued here before packed houses of abolitionists in 1849 and 1858. That same year, Jefferson Davis, future leader of the Confederacy, gave a speech in what he called “this sacred temple” and invoked Samuel Adams himself in a dubious defense of Southern states’ rights to conserve their slave economies. Suffragists and their opponents rallied here, as did protesters during the war in Vietnam. Segregationist George Wallace made a campaign stop here in 1972, and the following decade, LGBTQ activists held town halls to address the AIDS crisis in a heavily Catholic city.