Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  Rumors circulated in Boston and the surrounding towns as early as Saturday the twenty-fourth that the mob would come out again on the following Monday night, and that its targets would include leading customs officials, Hutchinson, and perhaps even Bernard. Since Oliver had already promised to resign, the Stamp Act alone could not account for this. Hutchinson, of course, had set himself squarely in the mob’s sights on the night of the fourteenth, and the political gossip had it that he had actually advised Grenville on how best to tax America. But other animosities at work were personal and tinged more by economic than political factors. These can best be grasped when one understands that 1765 may well have been the worst year in Boston’s commercial history, the grimmest time in the interminably grim postwar depression.

  The city’s economy had been no better than sluggish since 1761, but nothing prepared Bostonians for the financial disaster that had struck at the beginning of 1765. In mid-January, Nathaniel Wheelwright, a merchant who had grown rich during the war by simultaneously acting as a British military contractor and trading with the French, abruptly stopped payment on his debts and ran for Guadeloupe. There were as yet no banks in North America, but Wheelwright had been acting as a kind of banker for many of Boston’s smaller merchants, shopkeepers, and artisans, taking their money on deposit and issuing interest-bearing personal notes in return. These notes had actually circulated as a kind of supplemental currency in Boston and the surrounding towns. Now he left £170,000 in unpaid obligations, a mountain of worthless paper, and a panic that flattened the town’s economy as effectively as the earthquake of 1755 had devastated Lisbon.

  In a panic of “pulling and hauling, attaching and summoning to secure themselves,” those who had lent Wheelwright money as commercial creditors and depositors soon began following him into default and flight. The General Court passed an emergency Bankruptcy Act in March to regularize the processes of financial settlement and, the legislators hoped, to stabilize the economy. This stopped the wholesale flight, but desperate debtors continued to run from their creditors, and the lengthening list of warrants sworn out for the arrest of fugitive debtors bore witness to Boston’s agonies: three warrants in March, four in April, four in May, nine in June, seven in July, eight in August. Ninety percent of them were authorized by Thomas Hutchinson, chief justice of the Superior Court—who (not coincidentally) collected generous fees on the administration of bankruptcies and seized estates. As Boston wallowed in the pit of depression, expressions of esteem for Hutchinson came as rarely to the lips of most merchants as they did to those of the artisans and laborers who made up its mobs.6

  The few Bostonians who did not actively despise Thomas Hutchinson were mostly related to him by birth, marriage, or business partnership, and that was another part of his problem. Never content to be the Bay Colony’s leading plural officeholder—he received salaries or fees as lieutenant governor, chief justice, probate judge for Suffolk County, and commander of Castle William—he had assiduously promoted members of the Hutchinson clan as candidates for government offices, along with the numerous Sanfords, Fosters, and Olivers to whom he was also related. In this critical respect the customs officers whose houses were said to be the mob’s targets closely resembled the lieutenant governor. All of them were placemen who made their livings from fees. All were reputed to be greedy and corrupt. And all of them were quite visibly wealthy. Their mansion houses stood in imposing contrast to the homes of artisans, shopkeepers, and laborers that surrounded them. 7

  Thus did the personal and the political converge in the small world of Boston, where face-to-face relationships did little to dissipate resentment, and where memories ran long. In this respect too Boston’s animosities pressed relentlessly against Thomas Hutchinson. Everyone in the cash-starved, debt-ridden colony knew that he had been responsible for creating its hard-money currency regime in 1749. If merchants thanked him for protecting their investments from inflation, Massachusetts’s chronically indebted farmers, as well as Boston’s tradesmen and laborers, had come to understand him as their foe. It was no accident that he held no significant elective office after 1749. The higher Governors Shirley, Pownall, and Bernard raised him in appointive offices, the lower he had sunk in public esteem.

  All these anxious enmities blossomed with the bonfire’s flames in King Street at dusk on August 26. Since morning people had been coming into Boston from the nearby towns, swelling the crowd of North and South End men who waited to hear Ebenezer Mackintosh’s directions. Bernard, fearing the worst, had packed his plate off to Castle William and arranged to take shelter there himself when the trouble started. The town’s customs officers similarly made themselves scarce. But beyond deciding to stay at home that evening rather than dining out, Hutchinson had made no effort to avoid the mob. He refused to believe they could hate him as thoroughly as, in fact, they did. 8

  The men who gathered in King Street chanted “Liberty and Property!”—which, as Bernard sourly observed, gave “the Usual Notice of their Intention to plunder and pull down a house”—and divided themselves into two groups.9 The first set off for the house of Charles Paxton, surveyor of customs and marshal of the Boston Vice-Admiralty Court. Paxton rented; but the mob found his landlord at home and eager to exercise the better part of valor by offering them a barrel of punch. Thus refreshed, they moved on to the mansion of Benjamin Hallowell, comptroller of customs, where they drank a good deal more while they sacked the place, wrecking the interior and its contents. Meanwhile, at the house of the register of the vice-admiralty court, William Story, the other half of the mob was draining the wine cellar as they broke furniture, windows, and china, and committed the files of pending customs cases to a bonfire. Thus when the two halves of the mob reunited for the remaining business of the evening they had already consumed a good deal of alcohol; and that almost certainly contributed to their remarkably violent behavior when they reached the handsome Georgian house of Thomas Hutchinson.

  The lieutenant governor had been at supper with his family when breathless messengers came to warn him that the mob was on its way. As Hutchinson later told the story to the province’s agent, Richard Jackson, they fled to a neighboring house where I had been but a few minutes before the hellish crew fell upon my house with the Rage of devils and in a moment with axes split down the doors and entred[. M]y son being in the great entry heard them cry damn him he is upstairs we’ll have him. Some ran immediately as high as the top of the house others filled the rooms below and cellars and others Remained without the house to be employed there. Messages soon came one after another to the house where I was to inform me the mob were coming in Pursuit of me and I was obliged to retire thro yards and gardens to a house more remote where I remained until 4 o’clock by which time one of the best finished houses in the Province had nothing remaining but the bare walls and floors. Not contented with tearing off all the wainscot and hangings and splitting the doors to pieces they beat down the Partition walls and altho that alone cost them near two hours they cut down the cupola or lanthern and they began to take the slate and boards from the roof and were prevented only by the approaching daylight from a total demolition of the building. The garden fence was laid flat and all my trees &c broke down to the ground. Such ruins were never seen in America. Besides my Plate and family Pictures houshold furniture of every kind my own children and servants apparel they carried off about £900 sterling in money and emptied the house of every thing whatsoever except a part of the kitchen furniture not leaving a single book or paper in it and have scattered or destroyed all the manuscripts and other papers I had been collecting for 30 years together besides a great number of Publick Papers in my custody.

  The next morning proved a cool one, and Hutchinson—twelve hours earlier one of the wealthiest men in Massachusetts—found that he had no coat to ward off the chill but the one his host lent him. He had lost virtually all of his personal possessions. He told Jackson he guessed the damages could not amount to less than three thousand pounds ster
ling, concluding—because money alone could not measure what his family had lost—“You cannot conceive the wretched state we are in.”10

  Yet Hutchinson remained convinced that the Loyal Nine—“the encouragers of the first mob”—never intended the destruction to go so far. On the day after the riot the political leaders of the province and town did their belated best to restore order. Hutchinson said he hoped that their “detestation of this unparalleled outrage” would bring some good out of the evil he and his family had suffered, but he remained bewildered by the ferocious “resentment of the people against the stamp duty.” He trembled to think of its consequences. The General Court, he thought, would not dare “enforce or rather advise the payment of it.” But what could be done? The tax was so constructed that no business or legal proceedings could be conducted without stamped paper. If the province did not submit, then “all trade must cease all courts fall and all authority be at an end.” If Parliament repealed the tax it would “endanger the loss of their authority over the colonies,” yet if it chose to compel submission by “external force” it risked “a total lasting alienation of affection.” Contemplating the ruin of his personal life, this master of the politic middle way found himself unable to imagine any alternative between anarchy on the one hand and brutal repression on the other. In the end he could only pray that the “infinitely wise God” might show Parliament a way out of the maze of violence in which he, and his colony, and the empire he loved, seemed hopelessly lost. 11

  Hutchinson did not yet know, when he wrote his plaintive letter to Richard Jackson, that riots were convulsing other towns beside Boston. The comparatively controlled crowd action of August 14, which so quickly produced Andrew Oliver’s resignation as stamp distributor, seemed to demonstrate a practical means of preventing the act from taking effect. When word of it arrived in other colonies, counterparts to the Loyal Nine—groups that often called themselves Sons of Liberty after Colonel Barré’s speech, which was now achieving a notoriety comparable to the Virginia Resolves—set about stuffing effigies, erecting mock gallows, and raising mobs to put the stamp-masters in a cooperative frame of mind. And they found, not infrequently, what the Loyal Nine had discovered on August 26: that mobs, once raised, could set their own agendas. Rhode Islanders first illustrated this principle on the day after the Boston mob destroyed Hutchinson’s house.12

  In Newport on August 20, the leaders of opposition to the Stamp Act began preparing to exhibit an effigy of the colony’s designated distributor, Augustus Johnston. On August 26, the day before the hanging and demonstrations were to take place, Martin Howard, who had taken on James Otis earlier in the year, denounced the idea in the press. Unwisely so: on the twenty-seventh, his effigy and those of his political friends in the Newport Junto dangled alongside that of the stamp-master. That evening an orderly crowd burned the effigies. Johnston did not resign, however, and the next night, encouraged by fresh news from Boston, the Newporters raised the stakes. First they sacked Martin Howard’s house as thoroughly as the Bostonians had demolished Hutchinson’s; then they destroyed the house and goods of another member of the Junto and hunted through the town for the collector and the comptroller of customs (both of whom had taken refuge aboard H.M.S. Cygnet, a British man-of-war in the harbor); finally, lest he think they had forgotten him, they carried off as many of Augustus Johnston’s household possessions as they could lay hands on.

  The next morning Johnston publicly resigned his office, an act that saved his house, got much of his property returned, and allowed him to resume his place in the community. But the collector of customs, an English placeman named John Robinson who had dedicated himself to rooting out smugglers, remained so unpopular that he did not dare leave the Cygnet until September 2, when Governor Samuel Ward finally gave him a bodyguard. Like Bernard, Ward had been unable to intervene and stop the riots. Unlike Bernard, he had not wanted to do so—at least not so long as the victims were Howard and his Junto, the avowed enemies of Rhode Island’s charter government. But Ward soon realized that the customhouse could not operate without its collector, ships could not enter and clear without an operating customhouse, and Newport could not live without its shipping.

  The Newport riots thus showed that even an institutionally autonomous colony could ill afford to dispense with the empire. The significance of this paradox—that colonists unwilling to abide the direct application of parliamentary sovereignty could not long survive outside the legal and mercantile system that Parliament had created—would become fully clear only after virtually every other colony had followed the path of Newport and Boston, and riots had in effect nullified the Stamp Act before it could take effect. Meanwhile, colonial mobs savored power’s sweet wine while stamp distributors choked down the dregs of humiliation.

  The prudent resigned at the first sign of threat, if not before. In New York, James McEvers renounced his appointment on August 22 to save his warehouse; in New Jersey, William Coxe surrendered his commission before a single effigy had swung, merely because he had heard the news from New England. George Meserve of New Hampshire announced his resignation at Boston on September 10, even before he stepped off the ship that had brought him from England. He had not yet seen the effigies that the Sons of Liberty had prepared to greet him in Portsmouth. When he did, he resigned again. Colonel George Mercer returned to Virginia on October 31, aboard the ship that carried the stamps for Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. Finding a similar reception, he made a similar obeisance. “Surrounded by more than 2000 People,” he wrote, “without a single Person, in the whole Colony, who dared openly to assist me, . . . I was obliged to submit . . . as the only possible Step, to secure his Majesty’s Property and my Person and Effects.” South Carolina’s inspector of stamps arrived on October 26, discovered that a mob of two thousand men had been only narrowly dissuaded from leveling his house a week earlier, and resigned on the twenty-eighth. The North Carolina distributor, a physician who had not sought the office, renounced his commission as soon as it arrived, before a mob of several hundred men. None of these stamp-masters would have chosen to resign as they did, for such acts of submission robbed them of the personal dignity they cherished. But all of them at least managed to save the property that in the end they valued more.13

  Others, less willing to defer to the mobs, found displays of personal courage repaid with economic or political ruin. For Maryland’s designated distributor, the merchant Zachariah Hood, steadfastness meant bankruptcy. He withstood a hanging in effigy on August 29, then saw a mob demolish his warehouse on September 2. Fleeing to New York, he placed himself under General Gage’s protection and vowed to execute his office, if necessary, from the deck of a man-of-war. But New York’s Sons of Liberty made his life so miserable that he dared not leave Fort George. When he finally ventured out, on November 28, a hundred mounted men seized him, carried him five miles into the country, and forced him to resign. Thereafter he returned to Annapolis and tried to rebuild his fortune, only to find that no one would do business with him. A broken man, in 1771 he went to England to seek compensation from the Crown, and he never returned.14

  Both Connecticut’s distributor, Jared Ingersoll, and Governor Thomas Fitch paid heavy financial and political penalties for trying to enforce the Stamp Act. Fitch feared that Parliament would counter any resistance in Connecticut by revoking the colony’s charter. During the war he had built a party of supporters among Old Light representatives from the colony’s western half, and the charter was an object as sacred to the predominantly New Light eastern representatives as to the westerners, so Fitch thought it safe to call a special session of the assembly and ask it for what amounted to an endorsement of the stamp tax. He therefore urged Ingersoll to stand fast, and the stamp-master in turn defied newspaper denunciations and repeated hangings in effigy. But as Ingersoll was making his way to Hartford for the assembly session, five hundred Sons of Liberty from eastern Connecticut—primarily veterans, led by former provincial officers—marched out
to intercept him at Wethersfield on September 18. There they held him hostage until he agreed not only to resign, but to toss his hat into the air and lead three cheers for “liberty and property.” Forming an escort, they conveyed him to Hartford, installed him in a tavern, summoned his fellow representatives, and forced him to reenact his resignation.

  Neither Ingersoll nor Fitch recovered his political standing thereafter, and the Old Light party to which they belonged soon lost its dominance in the assembly. Ingersoll’s law practice declined so badly that he had to call on London friends to secure him a vice-admiralty judgeship; but the court sat in Philadelphia, and the price of retaining his livelihood was exile from his home colony. Fitch, who had been elected twelve successive times to the governorship and who was surely one of the ablest politicians in Connecticut’s history, found that he had become unelectable. In the coming year he would publish a pamphlet explaining that he had been bound by his oath of office to uphold an act that he personally disapproved of, but no amount of explaining could restore his career. In the end he, too, solicited a position in the vice-admiralty court system— and, like Ingersoll, had to abandon his native colony to take it up.15

  Pennsylvania’s designated distributor, John Hughes, proved even braver than Ingersoll, while his partner Joseph Galloway remained as determined as Fitch to bring about a political solution. In the end, Hughes paid as dearly as any other stubborn stamp-master; and while by the quirks of Pennsylvania politics Galloway and the antiproprietary party maintained control in the assembly, they survived only to pay another day.16 Accounts of the riots in New England reached Philadelphia at the beginning of September, and Hughes soon came under pressure to resign. When he refused, the proprietary faction began to dabble in mob organizing: an ironic move for a court party, perhaps, but a strategically canny one, given the prospects of tarring the assembly’s dominant faction with the massive unpopularity of the Stamp Act. As rumors began to make it clear that Philadelphia houses could be demolished as easily as those in Boston, Galloway turned from writing newspaper pieces encouraging submission to organizing countermobs. On September 16 (a week after Hughes, as speaker of the House, failed to prevent the assembly from appointing delegates to the Stamp Act Congress), all that kept a mob from destroying Hughes’s house—and Benjamin Franklin’s—were the patrols of armed men whom Galloway sent into the streets. He and his property thus remained safe, but the strain of staying up all night under arms after weeks of enduring anonymous threats sent Hughes into physical collapse. When the stamped paper and his commission arrived from Britain on October 5, the fifty-three-year-old distributor seemed to be teetering on the edge of the grave. Nonetheless an antistamp crowd formed, thousands strong; and seven prominent Philadelphians called on him to urge his resignation. He tried to resist, and indeed managed to hold out for two more days before finally promising not to execute the act unless the neighboring colonies did so.