Desperate Sons Read online

  Finally, in mid-May, the Romney, a fifty-gun British warship, was dispatched from Halifax to Boston harbor, under the command of Captain Corner, who found it necessary to bolster his crew by impressing a few colonial seamen from ships he passed along the way. Impressment had been an issue of contention in the colonies for some time, but never had the issue been more inflammatory. The moment the Romney dropped anchor, a group of citizens confronted Corner, demanding the release of their fellow citizens. Corner denied having forced any colonist into service and dismissed the men, who promptly went to Samuel Adams for help. Adams drafted a request from the assembly to the governor, requesting his intervention in the matter, but he might have saved himself the trouble.

  At that point the distressed citizens rowed out to the Romney under cover of darkness and managed to spirit one of the impressed seamen away. That action heightened security on the warship, however, preventing any further rescue operations. The committee of citizens then tried negotiating with Corner, offering to place a willing seaman on board in exchange for one of their friends who was desperate to return to his rightful place.

  The captain’s response was not calculated to win the hearts and minds of the local populace. “No man,” he told them, “shall go out of this vessel. The town is a blackguard town, ruled by mobs: they have begun with me by rescuing a man whom I pressed this morning; and, by the eternal God, I will make their hearts ache before I leave it.”

  The incident only hardened the lines between customs officials and local traders, including John Hancock, one of the city’s most prominent. From the day that word arrived of the passage of the Townshend Acts, Hancock vowed that he would never allow a British customs officer to board one of his ships, and he was steadfast in his criticism and social ostracism of the newly arrived customs officials.

  As it happened, one of Hancock’s ships, the Liberty, arrived in Boston harbor from Madeira on May 9, carrying a cargo of twenty-five casks of wine, for which the appropriate duties were paid. The vessel remained at Hancock’s wharf for the next month, gradually being loaded with cargo for a return trip to London. By June 10, two hundred barrels of whale oil and twenty barrels of tar were in the Liberty’s hold when agents of the Board of Customs Commissioners arrived, searched the ship to discover this cargo, and ordered the ship promptly seized. The Liberty was towed from the docks and out into the harbor, where she was anchored alongside Captain Corner’s Romney.

  The issue was a technical one, stemming from the provisions of the 1764 Sugar Act: the ship’s captain had not filed for a formal permit to transport the items before loading its cargo. It was a common practice for shipowners to file for such permits after the fact simply to expedite the flow of paperwork. But the letter of the law was quite clear, and John Hancock was now paying the price for his disrespect and his ties to Samuel Adams, James Otis, and the Sons of Liberty. If the seizure were upheld, one-third of the value of the ship and its goods would go to the governor, one-third would go to the informant who had alerted officials to the illegal loading (a longshoreman in the pay of the governor), and one-third would go to the Crown, through the hands of the customs commissioners.

  There is speculation that the seizure of the Liberty was actually planned to take place upon her arrival in early May, based upon the fact that the twenty-five casks of wine for which Hancock had paid duties constituted only about one-quarter of the ship’s capacity. Lacking any evidence that additional goods had been off-loaded under cover of darkness, however, Governor Bernard and the commissioners, it is theorized, waited for a chance to sting Hancock and finally hit upon the technicality to seize both his ship and the valuable cargo.

  The response of the local citizenry to the seizure of the Liberty was perhaps the most significant aspect of the affair. As marines nailed up the broad arrow on the ship’s mast to mark her as an impounded ship and others began to cut the lines in preparation for her towing, word spread quickly about the docks. Within minutes, a crowd of some five hundred gathered and began pelting the marines with rocks and paving stones.

  When the marines pulled the Liberty out of range, the crowd turned its anger upon the customs agents who had led the raid. The pair were dragged through the streets, spat upon, and stoned, and the windows of their homes were smashed with rocks. Men hauled a small boat belonging to the commissioners out of the water, dragged it to the common, and set it on fire.

  Well aware of what had happened in Boston and elsewhere in the lee of the Stamp Act, the customs commissioners quickly gathered up their documents and cash on hand and fled their offices, stopping only to snatch their families from their homes before making their way out to the safety of the Romney and, eventually, Castle William, the fortification that guarded the entrance to Boston harbor. Governor Bernard, fearful that this would be the riot that would end him, hastily sent a message to General Gage, begging for reinforcements; in response, Gage sent a pair of regiments on the march to Boston.

  Adams took the opportunity to address the restless populace beneath the liberty tree on the common. “We will support our liberties, depending upon the strength of our own arms and God,” he assured the crowd. Handbills went up about the town calling upon all Sons of Liberty to meet again the next day on the common, but rain sent them first to the 1,200-seat Faneuil Hall and then—when that proved too small—to the Old South Church meeting hall, where James Otis was welcomed with an ovation from some two thousand Sons and their supporters.

  Otis, who could be red hot one moment and exceedingly deliberate the next, called on this occasion for moderation and order, affirming his belief that their grievances would be addressed. “If not,” he said, “and we are called on to defend our liberties and privileges, I hope and believe we shall, one and all, resist even unto blood; but I pray God Almighty this may never so happen.”

  John Hancock, meantime, viewed the matter more from a businessman’s perspective. The day following the seizure, he sent representatives to the commissioners, offering to post bond for the value of his ship and his cargo so that he could send the Liberty on to England while the courts deliberated the case. The commissioners, taken aback by the ferocity of the demonstrations, agreed, though as part of the deal, they wanted Hancock to make a written promise to restrain the mob from any further interference with the activities of the commissioners or their agents.

  The historian O. M. Dickerson, who describes the actions of the commissioners at the time as little less than “customs racketeering,” says that the arrangement fell apart because Hancock was intelligent enough to know that signing such a pledge, even if he had the power to sway the mob, would amount to an admission that he had incited them to violence in the first place and would be used against him in subsequent court proceedings. Others, such as Hancock’s biographer Harlow Unger, say that Hancock would have gone along with the plan had it not been for James Otis and Samuel Adams, who rushed to his home when they got wind of the proposition. It would be seen as nothing less than treason against the Sons of Liberty were Hancock to relent on any pretext—a vindication of the governor’s position, the activities of the customs commissioners, and the Townshend Acts themselves.

  Whether it was pressure from the increasingly militant Adams and Otis or distrust of the commissioners’ motives is uncertain, but Hancock did decline the deal, and, on August 1, the admiralty courts dosed him with his medicine: the Liberty and her contents were bound over and divided by the Crown.

  Commissioners also sought to press smuggling charges against Hancock, but the case eventually fell apart because of lack of evidence. Meantime, the merchants of Boston retaliated by signing a nonimportation agreement, to begin on January 1, 1769, banning the importation of glass, painters’ colors, tea, and paper until the new duties on those items were rescinded. In addition, the importation of all other products from Great Britain was forbidden for a year’s period, except for a few things deemed impossible to live without: buckshot, duck, hemp, fish- hooks and fishing lines, and salt.
/>   Over the ensuing year, groups in New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, and elsewhere issued similar decrees, and in Virginia, the plantation owner George Washington wrote on April 5, 1769, to his neighbor George Mason in support of the notion. “Something should be done to avert the stroke and maintain the free that we have derived from our Ancestors,” he said. “How far then their attention to our rights and priviledges is to be awakened or alarmed by Starving their Treade and manufactures remains to be tried.”

  However, merchants loyal to the king continued to stock their own warehouses, key cities such as Philadelphia did not exhibit their solidarity with the bans, and trade essentially continued. Even more distressing to the populace of Boston was the prospect of the arrival of troops meant to stamp out the incipient flames of treason that Governor Bernard insisted to his superiors had been lit by Adams, Otis, and others.

  In September, word came from Bernard that troops were on the way to Boston. The news provoked a town meeting where Adams oversaw the issuance of a number of resolutions, including the insistence that the stationing of an army in Boston without the people’s assent violated the terms of the British Constitution. Bernard’s response was to point out that the colony had in effect disbanded its own assembly by defying the king’s decree to retract the circular letter—thus it had no business complaining that it enjoyed no conduit into its governance.

  Adams then called for a convention of representatives from all Massachusetts towns and districts to consider the grave situation, with the results of its deliberations and decisions to be sent to every newspaper in the colonies. Though more than a hundred communities representing virtually all of Massachusetts did send representatives to the conference, the results fell short of what Adams might have wished for. As its first order of business, the body petitioned the governor to reconstitute the assembly, but Bernard refused, calling the convention “illegal” and directing the delegates to disperse. “The King is determined to maintain his entire sovereignty over this Province,” Bernard said in his reply to the impromptu convention, “and whoever shall persist in usurping any of the rights of it shall repent his rashness.”

  It was just the sort of response that Adams and others might have hoped for. At the first town meeting called to consider the prospect of the stationing of troops, Otis and Adams spoke before a display where four hundred muskets were arrayed. The implication was obvious: colonists might well have to shoulder arms to fend off an occupying force.

  But if Adams and Otis expected a call to arms from the present body, they would be disappointed. After a week of debate and discussion the convention agreed on little more than an affirmation of the now-dissolved assembly’s actions and the lament that their constitutional rights had been maligned. “We hold that the sovereignty of King George the Third is entire in all parts of the British empire. God forbid that we should ever act or wish anything in repugnation of the same,” the delegates resolved. It was a tame response that would have had Bernard gloating. On the same day that the convention disbanded, there arrived in Boston harbor eight warships and four armed schooners bearing two battle-hardened regiments sent down from Halifax. No musket fire opposed them.

  Though Bernard boasted in letters to Hutchinson that it was he who had put the fear of God into the colonists, it is just as likely that the absence of James Otis until halfway through the proceedings accounted for that body’s indecisiveness. Though Otis’s absence was never explained, it points to a growing rift between the more restrained Otis and the always outspoken Adams.

  It also affirms the notion that for most colonists, the prospect of an armed insurrection was simply inconceivable. They were in large part farmers, merchants, blacksmiths, and journeymen who had enough of a struggle just making ends meet in the rawboned wilderness. They wanted their concerns heard and their burdens relieved, but they were certainly not thinking of shooting someone to achieve those aims. It might be one thing for a group of their rowdy city-boy cousins to smash a few windows and scare the daylights out of some foppish, wig-wearing Tories, but—just as there would be a long wait for Huey Newton or Stokely Carmichael to gain credibility during the civil rights struggle—relatively few colonists in 1769 were ready to take marching orders from the likes of Samuel Adams.

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  The Road to Massacre

  On the afternoon of October 1, 1769, while marines stood by their cannon, ready to provide covering fire if it should come to that, the first troops of the 14th and 29th Regiments began to leave their ships for the Boston docks. Once ashore, and seven hundred strong, they marched through the streets to Boston Common, bayonets fixed, accompanied by an artillery company towing two cannon. Boston was now officially an occupied city, and for some commentators, it marked the point at which Samuel Adams, and by extension the Sons of Liberty everywhere, abandoned forever the illusion that the colonies could exist as a dependency of Great Britain.

  Though Adams issued no proclamation and penned no private wish for “an independency” on that day, a number of his close acquaintances would write that the sight of an occupying army marching through the streets of his city must have signaled that he could no longer harbor any thoughts of compromise. As resolute as Adams and others had been in defending the constitutional principles of liberty, it now seemed that the British were equally determined to demonstrate their dominion.

  Benjamin Rush, who would serve with Samuel Adams in the Continental Congress, said that Adams had told him that “the first wish of his heart” was independence, “seven years before the war.” And when he was asked to comment on Rush’s statement, John Adams agreed that it was probably at the time of the British occupation that his cousin had reset his course. From that point on, Adams undertook a prodigious counteroffensive, not with a musket or a sword but with a pen.

  Just a few weeks previously, the Sons of Liberty had held a grand outdoor dinner near the Liberty Tree Tavern in Dorchester to commemorate the repeal of the Stamp Act. First on the list of names of the 350 in attendance was “Adams, Samuel,” and next was “Adams, John.” Also in attendance were James Otis, a young silversmith named Paul Revere, and many others who would become well known to patriots. Cannon were fired and multiple toasts were drunk, including toasts to the cause of liberty and “the speedy removal” of oppressors.

  In a subsequent diary entry, John Adams noted the value of such gatherings in cementing the resolve of those present. “They render the People fond of their Leaders in the Cause, and averse and bitter against all opposers,” he said, adding that despite the multitude of toasts, he had not seen a single person intoxicated. But he might also have added the impact of such gatherings on the leaders themselves and, in particular, upon the passions of his cousin Samuel.

  Samuel Adams was a true believer. But his passion for this cause was rooted in his certainty that he was simply the messenger for the will of his fellow, ordinary citizens. It would be a pity, he once wrote, for anyone “to despise their neighbor’s happiness, because he wears a worsted cap or leathern apron”; and, to his latest days, his sympathies were with the craftsman, the laborer, and the poor.

  The importance of the information shared by the various Committees of Correspondence in combating the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts was not lost on Adams, nor did he mistake the impact of the various colonial newspapers in reprinting letters and proclamations issued far and wide. The writings of “Farmer” Dickinson impressed Adams, but he was also well aware that the widespread dissemination of those essays was key. In the months that followed the occupation of Boston, Adams undertook a series of essays intended for publication in newspapers and focused specifically upon the irrationality of maintaining a standing army in a peaceful town.

  Put the soldiers on the unsettled frontier where they might be useful, perhaps, he said, but keeping them in Boston to enforce the unconstitutional acts of Parliament was simply a mark of that body’s intention to subjugate the colonists and deprive them of their rights. And because
soldiers behaved differently from ordinary citizens, he argued, especially in being willing to obey any order without reasoning whether it was lawful or otherwise, the very notion of a constitutional government was threatened. Easily enough, Boston could find itself effectually governed by a military junta.

  One of the more compelling visions of the passionate Adams is passed along by his early biographer William Wells: shortly after Adams’s death, his wife spoke of the many nights she had awakened to find herself alone in bed, lamplight from the adjoining study leaking through a cracked door, the incessant whisper of her husband’s pen the only sound in the house. Wells also quotes Joseph Pierce, an acquaintance of Adams, as having often passed by the house well past midnight to see the study lamp burning. It meant only one thing to Pierce: “Sam Adams was [in there] hard at work, writing against the Tories.”

  At that time, Adams, along with Boston’s town clerk, William Cooper, came up with an idea for efficiently transmitting word of what was going on in Boston to newspapers in the other colonies, a practice that transformed the very nature of the medium in the process. They would compile a weekly summary of events that took place in Boston, along with commentary, and distribute the accounts, a “Journal of the Times,” to other papers, urging them to reprint the material in the interest of the general welfare.

  Up until that point, newspapers were for the most part compilations of letters, essays, appeals, and harangues by publishers and their associates; advertisements; public notices; reprints of governmental reports and edicts; and the like. There were no “reporters” as such, and “news” of the day was passed along in the form of what a “gentleman of Philadelphia” or “a traveler recently arrived from Charleston” might have written in a letter or shared in conversation with “a prominent citizen of this town” at the coffeehouse or tavern.