Most of the new Association committees were scrupulous in adhering to the mandate laid out for them by Congress, taking care, in the words of the Richmond, Virginia, committee, “to “confine ourselves literally within the line of duty marked out to us by the Continental Congress.” But that did not mean that there were not significant variations in the way in which the committees did their business within their local communities. In Sutton, Massachusetts, for example, the Association committee reflected the Puritan heritage of that community. On the one hand, the Sutton committee members were reluctant to take precipitous action in publicly shaming those who had violated the boycott. “What,” the Sutton committee asked, “if there should appear any symptoms of sorrow and hopes of repentance” among the violator? The Sutton committee members concluded that those who publicly apologized might be restored “to fellowship” without having to endure being publicly rebuked. On the other hand, the Sutton committee offered little leniency to those who refused to cooperate in giving information about possible violations, including heads of families who refused to “use his or her parental authority in obliging all under them strictly to observe said Association.”20
On occasion, though, other committees were not so scrupulous in discussing and implementing enforcement and punishment procedures that conformed to the guidelines issued by Congress or to the wishes of the local community. In Connecticut, Simon Deane, brother of congressional delegate Silas Deane, lamented that the committee’s work was often marked by “so much petty mobbing and disorder.” And in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, a committee that learned that the owners of a ship had imported tea in violation of the terms of the Association, ordered that the tea be removed from the ship and burned; but that was not enough for some in the community, who threatened to tear down the house of one of the owners of the vessel and who were successful in coercing local merchants not only to burn the tea, but the ship as well.21
There was at least one occasion in which local enforcement of the Association had a direct impact on the Continental Congress itself. In November of 1775, when Martha Washington was scheduled to pass through Philadelphia on her way to join her husband at his encampment in Boston, a number of Philadelphia’s most prominent residents, including some of the members of Congress, arranged to stage a fancy dress ball at City Tavern in her honor. As some of the town’s residents became aware of the elaborate arrangements for the event being made at City Tavern, they began to express their anger at a festivity that would be in such obvious violation of the austere directives of the Association. On the day of the ball, Christopher Marshall, a Quaker member of Philadelphia high society, was told that if the ball were held that evening, City Tavern “would cut but a poor figure tomorrow morning.” Marshall first tried to find John Hancock, who was by then serving as president of the Congress, to warn him. Unable to find Hancock, he managed to track down Sam Adams and asked him if he could intervene and arrange to call off the ball. Adams, whose strict Puritan lifestyle made him especially sensitive to the ways in which a fancy dress ball might be perceived by the residents of the city, called together a meeting at the American Philosophical Society of the event’s organizers, and they agreed call it off. A few members of the organizing committee, perhaps joined by Hancock, then paid a visit to Martha Washington to explain to her that out of respect for “our worthy and brave General, now exposed in the field of battle, in defense of our rights and liberties,” it would be best if she did not attend the ball, a request to which she agreed. Later that evening, congressional delegate Benjamin Harrison, a wealthy Virginia planter who was used to fancy affairs of the sort planned in honor of Mrs. Washington, lambasted Sam Adams for his role in canceling the event. Harrison declared that it was not only a “legal,” but a “laudable” tribute to both the general and his wife. Martha Washington never recorded her feelings about the sudden cancellation of the event, but in the eyes of many Philadelphians, the decision may well have saved the Continental Congress’s principal after-hours meeting place from total destruction!22
If the committees overseeing the implementation of the Association were, on the whole, restrained in their enforcement of the boycott, British officials hardly saw it that way. Virginia’s Lord Dunmore compiled a catalogue of their abuses, including their “illegal searches,” their surveillance of “every inhabitant without distinction” suspected of wrongdoing, their harsh interrogations and their efforts to stigmatize anyone they suspected of violating what he derisively referred to as “the Laws of Congress.” This last, disparaging reference to the laws of Congress was, much as Dunmore would have been loath to admit it, yet another proof of the legitimacy the Congress had gained through its decision to authorize the creation of the local committees. The net effect of all of this, Dunmore grudgingly acknowledged, was devastating to his power and authority. Lawful government, he wrote to his superiors back in London, had effectively ended. Nor was Dunmore the only royal official in America complaining about the challenges to his authority. In North Carolina, Governor Josiah Martin complained of evil demagogues who were manipulating the passions of the people in much the manner of a puppeteer pulling the “magic wires” of puppets. Even in Georgia, where things had been relatively calm for most of the decade, the royal governor there, Sir James Wright, wrote to officials back in London that “the licentious spirit . . . has now gone to great a length” so that there was little he could do to control it.23
More than any previous American action, the creation of the Association brought the conflict with England down to the local level, with an effect that was felt in people’s daily lives. Not surprisingly, there were at least some Americans who shared Lord Dunmore’s distaste for the committees. A conservative New Yorker, Samuel Seabury, later to become a Tory, complained that the committees, which relied on “mobs and riots,” were imposing a “tyranny, not only over the actions, but over the words, thoughts, and wills of the good people of this province.” And one Philadelphian, obviously voicing the views of the increasingly pro-British Joseph Galloway, claimed that the committees “aimed at a general revolution, and were promoting every measure to overthrow our excellent Constitution;—drunk with the power they had usurped, and elated with their own importance, they were determined on nothing so much as to increase discord and confusion.” There were no doubt others, in New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere, who may have felt unease at, or perhaps even opposed, the actions of the local committees of the Association, and it is likely that the charge given to the committees to use shame and ostracism as a means of enforcing the terms of the boycott may also have served to coerce into silence many of those who felt that unease. But on the whole, what is striking about the implementation of the Association was the extent to which all elements of society—artisans and mechanics as well as merchants and lawyers, radical activists as well as individuals inclined to a more moderate stance—came together in common cause in enforcing the boycott. Even in Philadelphia, where there was no shortage of British sympathizers, some of the town’s most conservative merchants, such as Thomas Wharton, chose to join radicals like Charles Thomson, Joseph Reed and Thomas Mifflin on that city’s committee in hopes of tempering some of its actions.24
The First Continental Congress had never been conceived by any of its members as a revolutionary body. Indeed, many of the politicians from New York and Pennsylvania who had first proposed it hoped that it would be just the opposite—a gathering of thoughtful and deliberative men who would work to moderate the behavior of some of the more radical New Englanders and find a peaceful path toward reconciliation with their mother country. But in creating the umbrella organization of the Association, the Congress had taken an important step toward transforming American resistance to British policies from one consisting of isolated acts of protest emanating from a few commercial cities and colonial capitals of government to a grassroots movement affecting nearly every town and county in America. In so doing, the Congress had taken a huge step in rendering British institution
s of government in America virtually powerless, while at the same time granting authority to altogether new American institutions of government—from the elite body of the Continental Congress to the popularly elected local committees charged with enforcing the Association. It was the beginning of a truly revolutionary transformation in American government. But it was, of course, only the beginning. With the outbreak of war on April 19, 1775, that revolutionary transformation would accelerate. The committees of the Association, working with newly formed “committees of safety,” would become the agents of revolution.
General Gage’s Dilemma
By the winter and early spring of 1775, Massachusetts’ military governor, General Thomas Gage, found himself in an unenviable position—thoroughly detested by the residents of Massachusetts and nearly wholly disrespected by royal officials back in London. He was receiving increasingly strident orders from London to crack down on the Massachusetts resistance. Lord Dartmouth had told Gage’s predecessor, Thomas Hutchinson, that all those who signed the Association should be considered guilty of treason, and Dartmouth meant for Gage to begin treating them as traitors. But given the relatively modest military force at his disposal—probably fewer than 3,500 troops—Gage knew he could never contain the escalation of resistance occurring not only in Boston but throughout the Bay Colony. As he wrote to Lord Dartmouth, the people of the colony were “numerous, worked up to a fury, and not a Boston rabble but the freeholders and farmers of the country.” He estimated that it would take at least 20,000 troops, about seven times as many as he had at his disposal, to subdue the rebellious spirit in the colony. By January of 1776, he had already sensed the size and spirit of the rebellion: “if you would get the better of America in all your disputes, you must conquer her.”
But his masters back in London would have none of it. Ignoring his call for additional troops, Gage’s superiors in London sent back angry missives denouncing him as “devoid both of sense and spirit.” Disputing Gage’s claim that the opposition was numerous and that it had the support of the great majority of the people of the colony, Lord Dartmouth, who had never set foot there, characterized the Massachusetts opposition as a “rude rabble without plan, without concert, and without conduct.” He considered Gage’s request for 20,000 troops ridiculous. All Gage needed to do was to arrest the “principal actors and abettors in the provincial congress” and punish them swiftly and, Dartmouth predicted, the opposition would cower into submission. If Gage were not up to the task, many of his critics in London complained, then he should be replaced by someone of greater “spirit.”25
Gage had been bombarded with these petulant messages from his superiors in London all of the winter and early spring of 1775, but in mid-April of 1775, he received a more formal directive from Dartmouth. The letter was actually dated January 27, but because of further tinkering with its language and then a particularly slow passage across the Atlantic, it did not reach him until April 14. It ordered him to arrest the leaders of the Massachusetts resistance and to seize any munitions the rebels had been storing. Whether through wearied resignation or through a sudden jolt of pent-up anger and frustration over the king’s subjects whom he was supposed to be overseeing, Gage swung into action. His sudden gathering of all the British troops at his disposal was impossible to hide from Bostonians, who had already been fearing such action. In that sense, the course of events of April 19, if not their precise timing, had been long anticipated.26
On that day, as the Massachusetts’ delegates to the Second Continental Congress readied themselves to leave the following week for Philadelphia, the shots heard round the world were fired, first at Lexington, and then, in a far bloodier confrontation, in Concord. The evening before, the fiery Boston orator Dr. Joseph Warren, who was himself the target of possible arrest by the British army, met with Paul Revere. He asked Revere to ride to Lexington and warn Sam Adams and John Hancock that a company of British soldiers was traveling to Lexington to arrest them and then to move to Concord to seize the guns and ammunition that the Boston patriots had stored there. In fact, Gage’s orders from Lord Dartmouth placed top priority on the seizing of the arms and ammunition in Concord, but if Gage were able to capture Boston’s two most dangerous rebels in the process, all the better.27
Fearing that someone might tip off the Bostonians to his plan to march British troops on Concord, Gage issued an order prohibiting anyone from leaving the city. But Revere, leaving his home on North Square, a few blocks from the North Church about 10:15 p.m., quickly mounted his horse and rode to a wharf on the waterfront of the Charles River in the North End of Boston just before Gage’s troops received the order. There he met two friends, Joshua Bentley and Thomas Richardson, who would help him row a small boat across the river. They were nearly spotted by a British warship on the river, but Revere’s vessel, shrouded in a dark shadow of an unusually bright moon, managed to sneak by and reach the other side of the river by about eleven p.m. Meeting with a group of patriot sympathizers, he announced, “I want to git me a horse.” His patriot greeters were well-prepared: they furnished him with one of the fastest horses in town, Brown Beauty, a mare belonging to John Larkin, deacon of the local Congregational church. Revere then set out, on his famous midnight ride, heading north across Charleston Neck and then turning west on the road to Lexington, hoping to find Adams and Hancock in time to warn them of their impending arrest. Eluding British troops along the way, Revere rode toward Lexington, warning people along the road of a possible British attack. He arrived in Lexington around midnight, and was joined there about a half hour later by another rider, William Dawes, who had taken a different route across the dangerous and heavily patrolled Boston Neck. The two men met with Adams and Hancock in the home of one of Hancock’s relatives, warned them to get out of town and then continued to Concord, sounding the alarm of the British attack along the way. At about 5:30, just as the sun was rising, a shot was fired in Lexington—we will never know which soldier from which side pulled the trigger first—and then a volley of fire erupted from each side. It was a brief skirmish, but eight Lexington townspeople were killed and nine wounded. At the moment those shots were fired, Adams and Hancock were hiding in the fields, “near the scene of the action.” They made their way to the parsonage in the town of Woburn, northwest of Lexington. Later in the day, at Concord, the Massachusetts militiamen and the British regulars would engage in sustained combat; at the end of the day, the toll of dead and wounded among the militiamen stood at around ninety, and among the British regulars some 250. The American Revolutionary War had begun.28
Adams and Hancock had avoided arrest, or some more terrible fate, by leaving the scene of battle before it had actually begun. But even after the fighting at Lexington and Concord had ended, and with the British soldiers now actively seeking their arrest, they had no choice but to hole up in Woburn for a few more days. On April 24 they made their way to Worcester, about forty-seven miles west of Boston, where they stayed out of sight until they were joined by Thomas Cushing and Robert Treat Paine. Ever concerned about his appearance, Hancock had managed in the immediate aftermath of the battles to get some proper outfits of clothing, probably brought to him in Worcester by his wife, Dolly, and his Aunt Lydia. Adams, who had escaped from the British with nothing more than the typically soiled and tattered clothes on his back, had to rely on Hancock’s generosity to purchase a new suit of clothes for his journey to Philadelphia.29
The four Massachusetts delegates left Worcester on April 28, riding toward Hartford, where on April 29 they met up with the fifth, John Adams, who had been delayed due to illness. They banded together with members of the Connecticut delegation somewhere around Stamford. From that point on, the two delegations were accompanied by armed guards, and, as news of the battles of Lexington and Concord spread, they were greeted in every town through which they passed by frenzied crowds cheering their progress and denouncing their British foes. In New York City, it seemed as if every man, woman and child turned out to celebra
te their arrival. John Hancock’s description of their welcome in New York is vivid if also egocentric:
When we Arriv’d within three Miles of the City we were Met by the Grenadier Company and Regiment of the City Militia under Arms, Gentlemen in Carriages and on Horseback, and many Thousand of Persons on Foot, the Roads fill’d with people and the greatest Cloud of Dust I ever saw. In this Scituation we Entered the City, and passing thro’ the Principal Streets of New York amidst the Acclamations of Thousands . . . the Numbers of Spectators increas’d to perhaps Seven Thousand or more . . . no Person could possibly be more notic’d than myself.30
Sam Adams, already becoming thoroughly weary of Hancock’s penchant for self-promotion, would later describe him as behaving as if he were an “oriental prince,” and this tension would continue during their time together in Congress. But that bit of personal rivalry aside, the Massachusetts and Connecticut delegations, now joined by the delegates from New York, moved together toward Philadelphia. As they made their way into the city on the morning of May 10, escorted by some 200 militiamen with their swords drawn, the streets were lined with people jubilantly shouting their welcome.31
A profound shift in the popular mood had taken place between the adjournment of the First Continental Congress in late October of 1774 and the convening of the Second Congress in May of 1775. The First Continental Congress had been a closed affair in which leading politicians and intellectuals sought simultaneously to defend what they esteemed to be their constitutional liberties while at the same time seeking a path toward reconciliation with their mother country. By May, in the aftermath of Lexington and Concord, the delegates would begin their deliberations in Congress amidst an aroused and engaged American population—a population that was prepared to cheer their efforts on behalf of American liberty, but which might also be prepared to turn wrathful if the delegates appeared out of step with the fast-evolving state of popular opinion. In the fall of 1774, the delegates might have been able to convince themselves that they were leading public opinion, but by May of 1775 many of those delegates would find themselves in a struggle to keep up with the popular mood.
Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor Page 24
