Desperate Sons Read online

  A magistrate ordered the soldiers to desist and return to their barracks, and the mayor came to the door to repeat the edict. The two captives, meanwhile, took one look at the volatile scene developing outside and decided they’d take their chances with Sears and the mayor. With that rebuff from their own comrades, the redcoats began a retreat, followed by the crowd of citizens who’d gathered to watch the spectacle.

  The procession made its way—with insults flying back and forth—to the summit of Golden Hill, a field near the intersection of modern-day Fulton and Cliff Streets and just a few blocks southeast of the common, where a second party of soldiers happened upon their beleaguered comrades. Emboldened by the reinforcements, the soldiers who’d been driven from the mayor’s house turned to face the crowd members who were pressing in on them, brandishing clubs and hurling catcalls.

  There was a moment when the matter might have passed, the British retreated back to their barracks, the crowd returned to the wharves and the market—but then one of the British party, noticeable for the expensive silk stockings and buckskin breeches he wore, called out an order. “Soldiers, draw your bayonets,” he barked, “and cut your way through them!”

  The crowd members, none of whom was armed with more than a cudgel or a barrel stave, surged backward, pushing through a narrow passage between buildings for escape. “Where are your Sons of Liberty now?” one of the soldiers cried, lunging toward a townsman with his bayonet. A nearby townsman swung at the soldier, who parried the blow with his rifle. The townsman’s club flew from his hands, and the next moment, the pair were fleeing down the alleyway, pursued by enraged soldiers.

  As the two rounded a corner and sped toward the safety of the nearby wharves, Francis Field, an unsuspecting resident identified by the Gazette as “one of the people called Quakers,” stepped from the doorway of his home to see what the commotion was about. At that same moment, one of the soldiers rounded the corner to see Field emerging from the doorway. Assuming that he was under attack, the soldier swung his cutlass at the astonished Field. The hilt of the blade caught Field across the cheek, spraying blood over them both. The blow would probably have killed Field, but as he staggered back, the tip of the blade struck the door frame and lodged there, saving him from its full force. With Field down and clutching his bleeding cheek, the soldier ran on with his mates after the fleeing crowd.

  Residents carrying out their normal business gaped as citizens galloped through their ranks, screaming, “Murder!” and pursued by red-faced troops fueled by months of pent-up fury. A tea cart vendor who stepped unknowingly into the path of a frenzied soldier took a blade across the shoulder, and a fisherman on his way to the docks nearly lost a finger when he held up a hand to stop an onrushing redcoat.

  Back on the hill, where a few stalwart citizens stood their ground, the fighting was intense. One man took a thrust with a bayonet that threatened his life. The magistrate who had ordered the troops from the mayor’s home found himself with only a long stick in his hands, up against two soldiers armed with swords. They backed him into a corner and were advancing with murderous expressions when a neighbor rushed out with a halberd in hand and tossed it to the cornered magistrate. Suddenly the confrontation took on a new character.

  Two men with cutlasses now found themselves facing a desperate law officer brandishing a six-foot steel-tipped pike, a glistening ax blade affixed near its head for good measure. It was the same weapon, wielded by a Swiss infantryman, that is said to have split the skull of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, thus ending the Burgundian Wars. The soldiers had probably not read of such events, but they did not need to; their quarrel with the magistrate was over.

  As word of the riot spread, officers from the barracks arrived to call the soldiers off. The injured—none of whom would die—were carried off and tended to, but the deeper wounds would remain unhealed. Some commentators have called the blood spilled on Golden Hill the first to be shed in the Revolution, but there were far worse actions to come.

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  Affray in King Street

  Surprisingly enough, the Battle of Golden Hill did not escalate into a full-scale uprising. That evening there were minor incidents—one lamplighter was assaulted by soldiers; another had his ladder pulled out from under him while carrying out his duties—and the following day there was a scuffle on Nassau Street that ended with one soldier slashed across the shoulder and a citizen losing two teeth to the butt of a bayonet, but the city somehow receded into calm.

  When the city government itself declared that under no conditions would a replacement liberty pole be allowed to rise on the common, Isaac Sears did not quarrel. Instead, he purchased a lot nearby and arranged for the city’s fifth liberty pole to be erected there. It was the largest, most elaborate yet, a forty-six-foot ship’s mast topped by a twenty-two-foot metal flagstaff and a gilded weather vane spelling out “Liberty.” The pole was hauled from the wharves through the streets by six garland-draped horses and accompanied by a crowd of thousands. As a brass band played, the pole, its base protected by iron strips and bands, was planted in a twelve-foot-deep hole reinforced with timbers and boulders. If Sears had learned anything in his years of struggle, it was the enduring strength that this symbol lent to his cause. It was “just a piece of wood,” but that was like calling a nation’s flag “just a piece of cloth.” Sears was certain of one thing: so long as there was a fight, there would be a liberty pole for his side to rally by.

  In occupied Boston, meantime, tensions persisted as well, and Samuel Adams was forced to carry on the struggle to keep the merchants united behind the nonimportation agreement without the aid of his compatriot James Otis. Though Adams’s stridency could alarm the more conservative of their constituency, Otis could be counted on as the calming influence: “Don’t worry, now, that’s just Sam.”

  But Otis was not immune to the occasional fit of temper, and for some time in 1769, he was chafing at the rumor that the customs commissioners had written home calling Otis an enemy of the king. There were in fact attempts by some in Parliament to have the leaders of the Sons of Liberty arrested and brought to England to be tried as traitors, but nothing came of them. Still, the possibility of being shanghaied and tried on capital charges was not a trifle. When a friend produced copies of some of the damning private correspondence sent by Governor Bernard and the commissioners during the summer, Otis blew up.

  In the September 4 issue of the Boston Gazette, he placed a public notice stating that he possessed “full evidence” that the four customs commissioners, including one John Robinson, had defamed him “in a manner that is not to be endured” as a traitor and part of “a general combination to revolt from Great Britain.” Nothing could be further from the truth, Otis declared. He was a faithful subject of the king, and, furthermore, he was demanding personal satisfaction from those named. In other words, Otis was challenging the four commissioners to a duel. He had not yet received an answer, he said in his notice, but meantime he begged that no one in England give any credence to the abusive representations made by the commissioners, for their word was of no more merit than that of Francis Bernard, the governor.

  It was quite a proclamation, particularly since Otis printed the notice under his own name. One could only imagine the gossip that flew about the city that day, as well as the collective intake of breath that must have silenced the British Coffee House when Otis walked in at seven the following night. At one table in the establishment sat Commissioner John Robinson, along with a number of his customs agents and some officers of the British army and navy.

  Words, as the saying goes, were exchanged. Robinson swung his cane, striking Otis, and Otis returned the favor. As one of Otis’s early biographers stated, “Great confusion then ensued.”

  The lights went out, and Otis, who had imprudently gone to the coffeehouse alone, found himself surrounded. A young man named Gridley who was passing by in the streets heard Otis’s cries and rushed in to help, but he was quickly beaten and to
ssed out. When the lights came back on, Robinson was gone, out a back door, and Otis was on the floor, bleeding from a head wound. Several billy clubs and an empty sword scabbard lay nearby.

  Otis was taken home and treated for his wounds, while Samuel Adams took to the press, decrying the incident as a cabal arranged by Robinson to assassinate Otis. Though it was something of an overstatement on Adams’s part (Robinson would ultimately agree to pay Otis £2,000 in settlement of a resulting civil suit), the affair did have something of a terminal influence. Otis would eventually recover from the physical effects of the beating, but the psychological impact proved more significant. Though he had always been mercurial, his periods of highs and lows intensified, and he gradually withdrew from public life; he would never again regain his place as the placating complement to Adams.

  Adams, however, continued his efforts to keep the town’s merchants solidly behind the nonimportation movement. In October, he was successful in convincing the merchants’ committee and the town council to agree to continue the nonimportation agreement past the scheduled expiration date of December 31 to such time as Parliament agreed to rescind all duties in effect upon the colonies.

  It is safe to assume that the incident of Otis’s beating aided Adams in his efforts, but townspeople were still disturbed by the daily sight of redcoats patrolling their city and irked by the constant presence of customs men lurking in the harbor and at the docks. On the evening of October 28, a man named George Gailer, suspected to be a customs informant, encountered a group determined to instruct him concerning the error of his ways. The men snatched up the quarrelsome Gailer, tarred and feathered him, then paraded him through the city streets. When a soldier tried to put a stop to the spectacle, the men offered to decorate him similarly and put him into the cart with Gailer.

  Gailer the informant would survive his treatment, but it is worth noting that although the practice of tarring and feathering may sound quaint to the modern ear and although it was based in the intent to ridicule, it was no laughing matter to the recipient. In a study of this practice, which enjoyed a resurgence during colonial times, the scholar Benjamin Irvin notes that the concept derived from the medieval period, dating back at least as far as an 1189 proclamation by King Richard I of England, in which he decreed that any of his crusaders who stooped to thievery during their noble missions “were to have their heads shaved, to have boiling Pitch dropped upon their Crowns; and after having Cushion-Feathers stuck upon the Pitch, they were to be set on shore, in that figure, at the first place they came to.”

  Certainly, the image of a hapless crusader wandering about a forlorn promontory with eyes peering out of a blanket of black tar and bristling feathers (one observer said victims looked as if they’d been stuck by thousands of darts) might be construed as demeaning, even ludicrous, but there would be little funny about it for the victim. Though the practice was sometimes modified to a simple dipping of a victim in a barrel of molasses followed by a tumble in a pile of goose fathers, victims in the colonies did not always get off so easily.

  The most common “tar” used in the practice was gum taken from pine trees. Sometimes it was heated, causing serious blistering of the skin; sometimes it was applied straight out of the barrel with a trowel. Sometimes the recipient was allowed to remain clothed, but it was not always so. And depending on how much time elapsed in the usual parading of the offender about the community, the tar could easily harden, making its removal exceedingly difficult.

  Try to imagine removing hardened tar from hair, face, ears, nose, eyes, and genitals. Most victims of the practice lost a good deal of body hair; those lucky enough not to have strips of skin peeled away with the tar suffered severe rashes. Surely, to be tarred and feathered was a humiliating experience, but it was a painful one as well.

  In any case, Adams responded to criticism of such incidents by pointing out that had there been no unconstitutional levies and no unnecessary occupation of troops, such things would never take place. In a letter to London, Thomas Hutchinson complained that Adams was pressing for the removal of the remaining troops to Castle William. Meanwhile, with the coming of the new year, Adams found the tide turning against him on the nonimportation issue.

  Largely because associations in the other colonies were unwilling to extend the terms of nonimportation to the Sugar Act and other duties, Adams was forced to be content with Boston’s decision to do the same; nonimportation would cease once the Townshend duties were abolished. Though this flew in the face of his fears that the tea tax would constitute a fearsome precedent if it remained, the clamor for an increase in business and the enjoyment of goods too long forgone was simply too strong. Still, he kept up his effort to brand several prominent irreconcilables as traitors to the cause of liberty and to urge a public boycott of their businesses.

  A group of more than 1,300 jammed Faneuil Hall in late January to hear the names of several merchants castigated as “importers” and ignored Hutchinson’s orders to disperse. At the same meeting, a resolution calling for abstinence from drinking tea was passed, and shortly thereafter, several groups of Boston women joined in by forming their own agreements “against drinking foreign TEA.”

  Still, irreconcilable merchants continued to import the product, and tensions remained high. On February 22, 1770, protesters picketed outside the shop (on present-day Hanover Street) of Theophilus Lillie, a dry-goods retailer and one of the merchants identified by the town meeting as an “obstinate and inveterate enemy.” Though Lillie was but one of four merchants singled out by the council as an “importer,” he went to the trouble of publishing an indignant reply in the Boston Chronicle, a conservative paper supporting the interests of the Crown. In the piece, Lillie complained that although he was no politician it did strike him as strange that “people who contend so much for civil and religious liberty” should be so ready to deprive others of theirs.

  In Lillie’s view, he was just an ordinary merchant trying to make a living who had made the mistake of ordering some goods from England before nonimportation was agreed upon. By the time the goods arrived, the agreement had gone into effect and he had been forced to store the goods, a state of affairs that he described “as punishment for an offence before the law for punishing was made.” What most annoyed Lillie was the principle of the thing: “If one set of private subjects may at any time take upon themselves to punish another set of private subjects just when they please, it’s such a sort of government as I never heard of before.”

  Such niceties of logic served only to call particular attention to Lillie, however, and on the Thursday in question, a day when town schools released their restless pupils early, a demonstration formed outside Lillie’s shop. One of the boys (he would have been the son of a workingman) carried a sign in the shape of a hand with a pointing finger aimed at Lillie’s shop and bearing the legend “importer.” A second of the boys planted a pole topped with a likeness of Lillie’s head in the ground nearby, and catcalls and hurrahing began.

  Soon after, Ebenezer Richardson, a known informant employed by the despised customs commissioners, happened by and took offense at the demonstration. He first tried to wrest the sign away from the youth carrying it, and when that failed, he made a rush at the pole bearing the effigy of Lillie, but that went no better. Richardson, who was something of a buffoon according to contemporary press accounts, then retired to his home, which was not far from the site of the demonstration.

  Some of the boys trailed Richardson to his home, exchanging insults with him all the way. When Richardson reached his house, he turned upon his tormentors, and, as it is reported in the Boston Gazette of February 26, “swore by GOD that he would make the Place too hot for some of them before Night.” If they did not go away, he added, he would “make a Lane through them.”

  At this point, garbage began to pelt the Richardson home, and Richardson’s wife ran out to gather up the slops and hurl them back at the crowd. In short order, rocks and paving stones began to rattle the board
s of the house. One window was shattered and then another.

  Richardson, who had fled inside the house with his wife as the bricks began to fly, appeared at one of the gutted windows with a musket raised. It was the sort of bravado that only inflamed the crowd to new heights. A hail of bricks and curses flew at Richardson, who raised his musket to his shoulder . . .

  . . . and fired.

  Sammy Gore, a boy at the front of the crowd, took several buckshot pellets to his hands and thighs. Eleven-year-old Christopher Seider, later identified as an uninvolved passerby drawn by the commotion, took the brunt of the charge in his chest and died a few hours later.

  By that point, the crowd of unruly boys had been supplanted by a mob of adults, who stormed the house and dragged Richardson into the street. He was carried to Faneuil Hall, where witnesses confirmed the events surrounding the shooting and a panel of magistrates ordered him held in the county jail for trial.

  “This innocent Lad is the first whose Life has been a Victim to the Cruelty and Rage of the Oppressors,” said the Gazette, and even if the language was overblown, the account had the statistics correct. Young Seider was the first clear casualty of the nascent war.

  In a postscript either penned or approved by Samuel Adams, the account used the unfortunate outcome as the basis for a swipe at the occupying troops. “It is hoped the unexpected and melancholy Death of young Seider will be a Means for the future of preventing any, but more especially the Soldiery, from being too free in the Use of their Instruments of Death,” the piece opined, closing with an announcement of the funeral that would take place on the afternoon of February 26: “It is hoped none will be in the Procession but the Friends of Liberty, and then undoubtedly all will be hearty Mourners.”