by Nick Bunker
When he wrote to Gage on June 3, he gave the general the clearest instructions: ensure that the port remained closed until such time as the town of Boston had made amends for the destruction of the tea; convene the new mandamus councillors; find the Tea Party’s ringleaders of December, and bring them to justice; and if anyone stood in his way, Gage should use the full rigor of the law. Of course, Dartmouth hoped that in Massachusetts people of goodwill—“the thinking part,” he called them—would see sense. He still believed that the Tea Party had arisen merely from a cynical plot by a handful of fanatics. But if disobedience continued, then the general’s orders were unambiguous. “Whatever violences are committed must be resisted with firmness,” Dartmouth wrote. “The authority of this kingdom … must be vindicated, and its laws obeyed.”22
It would take until the autumn, but at last the colonial secretary would discover that the general’s mission was impossible. When Gage set off for New England in April, neither he nor his political masters could see just how volatile the colonies had already become. Shocked though they would be by the news of the Coercive Acts, the Americans soon regained the initiative. For the rest of 1774, they would always be two or three steps ahead of the British.
* * *
*1 The tea had a sterling value of £9,659, according to an invoice from the company. Divided among the taxpayers of Boston, this would have come to nearly £5 each: a heavy bill to pay, equivalent to more than a month’s wages for a craftsman.
*2 Carthage must be destroyed.
*3 On April 18, after a long delay caused by bad weather, the tea ship Nancy finally reached New York, only to turn back without unloading her cargo when her captain saw how much opposition he would face. News of this did not reach London until June 7.
*4 In 1778, Bull vehemently opposed a modest measure of reform that restored some civil rights to English Catholics. Two years later he helped to foment the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots, which left nearly five hundred people dead.
Chapter Thirteen
THE REVOLUTION BEGINS
Soon very soon expect to hear the thirsty earth drinking in the blood of American sons.
—NATHANAEL GREENE OF RHODE ISLAND, JULY 17741
In the eighteenth century, treason could take many forms, with the sword or with the pen. Long before the general arrived in Boston, and even with the war a year away, we find young patriots in America already committing lines to paper that might have sent them to the gallows if any British spy had read them.
For the British, the crisis had blown up suddenly, a storm coming out of a sky that was cloudy but not yet tempestuous. But for a rising generation of radicals in New England the events of 1774 were something for which they had been preparing ever since their childhood. William Molineux in Boston was only one of many people who had grown up with the Greek and Roman classics, reading accounts of civil war and tyrannicide. It is often said that Americans were reluctant to rebel—“revolutionaries despite themselves,” in the words of a recent scholar*1—but this tells us only part of the story. While it is certainly true of Washington, Franklin, and John Adams, men who had rebellion thrust on them, it is equally clear that some Americans were only too willing to fight. As early as the spring of 1774 they began to prepare, at first with words only, but soon enough with deeds as well.
This was the last thing Lord North expected. Time and again, during the debates in Parliament, speakers had risen on both sides of the chamber to argue that America would not shrink from war. In the press in London, many writers had said the same thing, but commentary such as this was easily dismissed if it came only from journalists or from oddballs in the Commons like Colonel Barré. With General Gage briefing them, the cabinet ministers remained convinced that Massachusetts would back away from bloodshed. If they had thought any differently, they would have increased the budget for the army when it came before Parliament late in January. In fact, the War Office left the numbers unchanged and even cut by two battalions the forces allocated to America and the West Indies. As for the navy, Lord North believed that only four frigates would be needed to seal the port of Boston. So the budget for the fleet was also frozen.
They had no reason to increase it because, for the first nine months of 1774, the British envisaged no military threat from this or any other colony. From the papers sent over by Governor Hutchinson—whose letters became all the more grim as the time for his departure approached—they had a thick dossier about the patriot leadership in Boston. They knew that government was breaking down, but what they saw was merely agitation, not a tight and disciplined insurgency. In time, the British infiltrated Samuel Adams’s Committee of Correspondence, but not at this early stage before General Gage arrived in Massachusetts. They had no idea how avidly some of Adams’s allies were already discussing the possibility of war or how widely the talk had spread.
For years, some radicals had been hinting at an armed struggle with the mother country. In 1771, for example, a columnist calling himself Centinel—this might have been Josiah Quincy Jr.—had begun to write for Boston’s new, radical paper, the Massachusetts Spy, branding Hutchinson a tyrant and calling the colonies “the asylum of freedom.” Attack their liberties, he wrote, and Americans would make “the appeal to the sword,” words that would later become a revolutionary mantra, repeated all along the eastern seaboard. But did a phrase like this really mean what it seemed? It might have been mere rhetoric, spoken figuratively, by orators with no intention of picking up a musket. In order for the crisis to spin entirely out of control and become a revolution, men and women in New England had to move beyond words and begin to make active preparations.
For the first hard evidence in 1774 of people in the region smuggling in arms and gunpowder, we will have to wait until the fourth week of August. It will be found in Rhode Island, where the plot apparently involved veterans of the Gaspée affair. But months earlier, in March and April, we can already hear serious talk about military action, not only in Boston, but also sixteen miles away in the harbor town of Marblehead. Already a bustling little place, it would become all the more important on June 1, when the port act came into force, because ships from England would arrive first either here or nearby at Salem. If small towns on the coast and in the hinterland aligned themselves with the radicals in Boston, Gage’s task would be hopeless. He would face a wide and diverse movement of resistance, rural as well as urban, with little warning of where the next Tea Party or the next Gaspée raid might occur.
Elbridge Gerry in 1798, by John Vanderlyn. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum
In fact, the towns of Essex County were quite as anti-British as their bigger neighbor to the south and already thinking about the practicalities of armed resistance, as well as the principles on which it might be based. In Marblehead there lived a future vice president of the United States, Elbridge Gerry. A Harvard graduate from the class of 1762, the son of a leading merchant in the town, he was wiry and intense, filled with nervous energy. Elected to the House of Representatives, he spoke with a stammer, but he outdid even his mentor Samuel Adams in the passion of his rhetoric.
On April 4, Gerry denounced the British in a letter addressed to Adams’s committee. North and his colleagues were evil men and tyrants, enemies of liberty with whom no compromise was possible. “They have taxed the colonies, and with unremitted ardor tried every measure which wicked policy could suggest,” he wrote. The British could never be trusted. He called the king’s ministers “persons of the most sordid principles, possessed of neither honour, honesty or knowledge … from whom no accommodation can be expected, and none ought to be looked for.”
These were fighting words from Mr. Gerry, and all the more significant because he wrote them before hearing a whisper about the Boston Port Act or any of the cabinet’s other measures. For many weeks, bad weather had kept ships in their harbors or blown them off course so that only a trickle of news crossed the Atlantic. Since the Tea Party, New England had received nothing from London except a few l
ines carried in the local press on March 28. Even then, the story gave no clue about the official response except a rumor—false, as it happened—that more battleships were on their way from England.
And yet, even with so little evidence to go on, Gerry assumed the worst about Great Britain and went on to issue something close to a call to arms. His letter had an urgent, practical purpose: he wanted the committee to form a new colonial militia to supersede the one that already existed. He argued that the empire kept the colonies in thrall by projecting an image of military might. “They have artfully taught Americans,” said Gerry, “the most exalted idea of British troops, and the most diminutive opinion of their own.” Just across the water in Salem, another Harvard graduate, Timothy Pickering, from the class of 1763, had been campaigning for years for a new, improved militia, drilling according to the latest methods, known as the Norfolk system and taken from a manual published in Britain during the Seven Years’ War. Gerry adopted the same idea. It was time, he said, for every town in Massachusetts to form a new force, with a salaried captain to train them in each county, paid for by the colonial assembly and using the Norfolk method.2
Whether Elbridge Gerry was aware of it or not, this was treason. As the law stood, both in England and in the colonies, it was a felony punishable by death to raise and finance an independent army or even to advocate this in a letter. Legally, an officer of a militia could hold his commission only from the governor, and only the governor could call the militia out to fight. As yet, the young assemblyman from Essex County had not incited anyone to actual rebellion. But he was clearly on the brink of doing so, even before word arrived about the closure of the port or the changing of the charter. If Gerry had been an isolated case, his comments might be dismissed as merely idle talk, but in fact a far more influential figure was saying exactly the same thing.
This was John Hancock, a keen part-time soldier in his role as Boston’s colonel of cadets. On March 5, displaying a new confidence and energy, he gave the annual address in memory of the Boston Massacre. Mounting a passionate defense of the Tea Party, he came close to accusing George III of waging war against his people. And toward the end, Hancock made his own impassioned plea for the creation of a new and improved militia.
If it were well trained and well regulated, Massachusetts would have nothing to fear from “the well known Grenadiers of Britain,” he said. “We want not courage; it is discipline alone in which we are exceeded by the most formidable troops that ever trod the earth.” If the colony were invaded, the militia would turn to fight “for their houses, their lands, their children … for their liberty, for themselves and for their God.”3
It was stirring stuff, but again the question arises: were these merely words, designed to frighten the governor, rather than a serious plan of action? But either way, Hancock and his comrades had already gone too far to turn back. Unless the British cabinet surrendered and simply ignored the Tea Party—which it could not do—some kind of armed conflict was all but inevitable.
Ever since December, the colony had been waiting to see how the British would react. If the colonial assembly had done nothing more in the meantime, perhaps the tension would have eased and tempers would have cooled. If Thomas Hutchinson had been able to send word to England that all was quiet, perhaps the destruction of the tea would have gradually faded in importance. Although it would always be seen as a crime, requiring some form of retribution, the British might have ceased to regard it as an act of outright treachery which proved that the colony’s government needed to be reformed entirely.
In fact, the situation went from bad to worse, with Hutchinson once again reduced to paralysis as his opponents became ever more aggressive and outspoken. The attack on John Malcolm was bad enough, but then, in March, two days after Hancock’s speech, Boston staged a repeat performance of the events at Griffin’s Wharf. A brig called the Fortune arrived, with a brave or foolhardy skipper who tried to land a load of tea. Sixty men in Indian costume came on board and dumped it in the water. And if these were only incidents of riot, hardly worthy to be deemed a threat to the empire as a whole, the same could not be said about another step taken by the House of Representatives. From a British point of view, the assembly had already declared de facto independence long ago, with its impudent petitions to the king, and now it committed an even more serious offense.
On February 24, the House had voted to impeach the chief justice, Hutchinson’s kinsman Peter Oliver. He was charged with accepting the salary paid by the Crown from the customs duties. Accompanied by threats of violence, the vote was more than just a gesture about a technicality. It meant that long before the Coercive Acts came into force, the colony was already headed for another collision with royal authority. Sooner or later, a judge would try to take his seat in a Massachusetts courtroom, and a crowd of patriots would have to prevent him from doing so. A week before the vote was taken, Hutchinson could already see which way the wind was blowing.
On February 17, he wrote a long, despairing private letter to Lord Dartmouth—private, so that it need never be disclosed to Parliament—in which he painted a portrait of disorder. “I see no prospect of the government of this province being restored to its former state,” he wrote. “Anarchy will continually increase, until the whole province is in confusion.” Everywhere, people denied the authority of Parliament; far to the west, in the Berkshire Hills, armed gangs were defying the rule of law, and in Boston every servant of the Crown found himself exposed “to the resentment and rage of the people.” The letter would arrive on Dartmouth’s desk at Easter, just in time for the second round of the parliamentary debates.4
Like Elbridge Gerry with his call for a new militia, Hutchinson was writing before the news arrived about the closure of the port of Boston. The anarchy that he described had arisen even though nothing had been heard from the mother country. This state of suspense continued into April, when, with the mood of the province already so inflamed, the ships began to arrive from England. They brought a stream of reports from London, each of which was more distressing than its predecessor. The first—describing Benjamin Franklin’s humiliation at the Cockpit—was received on about April 10. Within the week, in every port town from New Hampshire to the Delaware, the press ran the story of Wedderburn’s tirade, picked up from the Public Advertiser, where the coverage had been relentless.
Initially, the reports were brief; but as the weeks passed, they sprawled over many pages, with some newspapers even printing special supplements. Everywhere they caused outrage, and most of all in Philadelphia, which claimed Dr. Franklin as its own. His old neighbors took to the streets. They made a stuffed effigy of the Scottish lawyer, with a placard around its neck—“The Infamous Wedderburn”—and, for good measure, one of Thomas Hutchinson as well. They were carted through the town, kicked around for a couple of hours, and hanged from a scaffold. Somebody with a sense of humor brought along one of the doctor’s electrical machines. A spark was struck, and the effigies were burned to ashes, amid the cries of “a vast concourse of people.” The protest took place on the evening of May 3, by which time another ship had reached Massachusetts.
All the way over the North Atlantic the weather was splendid that spring. On May 1 the Minerva tied up in Boston, forty-two days out from England, a swift passage, two weeks shorter than the average. Her voyage was so fast, in fact, that she had carried a report of Lord North’s speech of March 14, in which he revealed the bill to shut the harbor. The Minerva also brought the leak from the cabinet about the plan to change the Massachusetts charter, something North had tried to avoid disclosing too early. In Virginia, the newspapers printed the story just two weeks later.5
At first, the Bostonians seem to have been reluctant to believe that the British would go quite so far. For a while, Wedderburn remained the chief talking point, arousing fury in Boston as well and pushing other matters to an inside page until the stories about the port bill and the changing of the charter were official. And then nine days lat
er, on May 10, another ship entered the harbor—ironically, a brig named Harmony—with mail from London up to April 2: the very day when Van had said that like Carthage, Boston must be destroyed.
With General Gage still three days away from his own landfall, the Harmony brought not only the intemperate words of Mr. Van but also the text of the Boston Port Act. In three weeks’ time the harbor would be sealed. The letters and papers on board the brig confirmed that the law would be changed to make the governor entirely supreme, with the seat of government transferred to Salem. The news found the radical party in excellent shape to respond. In the words of Thomas Young, “the perfect crisis” had arrived.
Falling ill again, John Hancock had taken to his bed, but only after receiving another great vote of confidence. Spring was election time, and the voters of Boston had recently met to choose their four members of the House of Representatives. Hancock topped the poll with Samuel Adams and Thomas Cushing close behind. With their positions secure, their friend the town clerk William Cooper called a town meeting, again at Faneuil Hall, on the morning of Friday, May 13, to debate their reply to the news that came with the Harmony. Samuel Cooper led a prayer, and his brother read the port act aloud. By the end of the session, the town had voted—unanimously, it was said—to use an old weapon against the British, but in a form far stronger than before. They called for a sweeping prohibition, by Massachusetts and every other colony, of any trade with Great Britain or the West Indies, import and export alike, until the port act was repealed. They sent Paul Revere to carry their words to Hartford, New York, and Philadelphia.6
