Desperate Sons

by Les Standiford

  Whether his reasons for absenting himself from his home are to be fully believed, what happened next does bear out that Van Schaack had reason for his warning to the magistrates. “About 8 O’Clock at Night I heard a great noise at my house,” he would later write. “Being apprehensive the Mob was pulling it down and destroying my effects, I sent a trusty man to the Mayor.” Unfortunately, Van Schaack’s messenger was unable to get through, and, fearing for his life, Van Schaack fled to the British garrison in Albany for safe harbor.

  Meantime, as was reported in the New York Mercury, a group of nearly four hundred citizens of Albany made their way to Van Schaack’s home, “in very regular order,” only to be informed by servants that the master was not at home. “The Boys searched the House in every Room,” the correspondent wrote, “and not finding him, no Intreaties could prevent their committing some Outrages on the Furniture, Windows, and Balcony; which latter, tho’ a very elegant Piece of Work, was entirely demolished.”

  From there, the group marched out into the night in search of their quarry, “drawing Mr. Van Schaack’s pleasure Sleigh along with them, demolishing it piece meal, till they came to Captain Bradts, where they got Hay and Wood, and setting Fire to it, went with it blazing to Town.”

  In the morning Van Schaack ventured cautiously out from the garrison and along the quiet Albany streets. At the Dutch church, he found a notice hammered to the doors proclaiming that Van Schaack had “by great imprudence and unequaled obstinacy drawn upon himself the resentment of his Fellow Citizens to his considerable damage already.” Further, the notice advised, Van Schaack might well present himself at Williams’s Inn at ten a.m. on the following day to meet with the body that had posted this notice—that is, if he wished to “prevent worse consequences.”

  There was a less-than-heartening postscript added: “Damn you, Van Schaack, take care.” A second paper tacked beside the first featured a drawing of a man hanging from a gallows. “Henry Van Schaack” was the legend scrawled atop the drawing. “The just fate of a traytor” was added below.

  It is a testament either to his courage or to his obtuse nature that Van Schaack’s immediate response was to sit down and pen a letter to the group that had threatened him with a lynching, once again offering to sign only such documents as all his fellow citizens would be required to sign as well. At the same time, he dashed off an appeal to James McEvers, a New York City merchant who had actually accepted a post as a stamp distributor in that city. Van Schaack had discovered that his accusers suspected him of having applied to McEvers, he explained, and he implored McEvers to “clear me of this imputation . . . in the most full, ample and publick manner you can. . . . You, I dare say, will easily conceive that the speedier your answer reaches me the better.”

  There is no record that McEvers ever replied to that note, but if he did, he would surely have told Van Schaack of his own experience in such matters. In fact, McEvers had already posted a public notice of his resignation as a tax collector and also circulated a pledge to never again seek such employment.

  As the time for Van Schaack’s appearance at Williams’s grew near, friends came to implore him to relent. He would be ruined if he did not, they told him. Why continue this obstinacy?

  “These arguments, with My own mortifying reflections that others would Suffer by my ruin,” wrote Van Schaack, finally penetrated his resolve. Ultimately he appeared before the group, and despite his continued protest that it was “illegal, arbitrary and oppressive,” he signed the oath. He had never sought the post of stamp collector for the British, he swore; and he swore that he never would.

  For the men who had pummeled Van Schaack into submission, it was not so much a triumph over their fellow citizen—a former friend and colleague—as a blow against the British Parliament, that vast and predatory force intent, in their eyes, upon the continued oppression of every freedom-loving citizen in the colonies. It was hardly that in Van Schaack’s eyes, of course. He even came up with a name for the group of men who had so persecuted him these several days: the Sons of Tyranny and Ignorance, he called them.

  But over the course of their trials with Van Schaack, these men had come up with their own designation for themselves, and they could only hope that in time their methods and their aims would find favor in the hearts of their fellow citizens and inspire others to stand up to the abuses of the British lords.

  Sons of Liberty, they now called themselves, and they were certain that they fought for right.

  ( 4 )

  Storm Before the Calm

  In the United States, it is a schoolchild’s commonplace that the American Revolution, the event that so profoundly altered the political landscape of the modern world, was an exercise in ideology, distilled and conveyed over ensuing centuries in such stirring proclamations at that of Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Yet this view of history has proved controversial, at least within the realm of serious scholarship.

  As early as 1913, Columbia University professor Charles A. Beard, at the time one of the country’s most respected historians, published An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, in which he laid out a careful analysis of how the economic interests of the members of the Constitutional Convention had affected their votes and the ultimate wording of that document. The book set off a firestorm of debate within academic circles, Beard’s contentions raising serious doubt about the prevailing attitudes as to the “purity” of the American colonists’ motives.

  In 1967, Harvard professor Bernard Bailyn published the next major academic counterpunch in the debate. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution appeared as a carefully reasoned and persuasive analysis that, in the minds of some critics, reduced the theoretical edifice erected by Beard a half century before to ruins. “What was once the grandest house in the province,” said Richard Hofstadter in characterizing Beard’s once authoritative work, “is now a ravaged survival.”

  But despite the fact that traditionalists (to this day) have rallied around Bailyn’s work, his was hardly the last word. Ronald W. Michener, a University of Virginia professor, and his colleague Robert W. Wright, a financial historian at New York University, have worked for several years on a treatise that harks back to Beard. “I think there’s reason to doubt the Revolution would have happened as it did if it weren’t for these economic conditions,” says Michener. In their view, had the British been less eager to recoup the costs of fighting the French and the Indians by taxing the colonists, and had the deep recession plaguing the colonies been less severe and less protracted, the course of the United States’ journey to independence might have followed the mild-mannered path of Canada’s.

  Such daring analysis does not go unnoticed in the halls of contemporary academe, of course. Gordon S. Wood, an eminent historian from Brown University, says, “There was a great deal of instability, but that is hardly an explanation for the Revolution. I don’t think you can make a strong argument for an economic interpretation of the Revolution.”

  What can be deduced from such back-and-forth is that—at least among serious historians—the issue is a provocative one and, furthermore, is likely to be debated endlessly, for the simple reason that the seeming contradiction is ingrained irrevocably in the collective national consciousness. Surely, many Americans—when they are in a philosophical mood, that is—define themselves in terms of their allegiance to the concepts of individual liberty and freedom. That is one reason why so many tomes extolling the virtues of the founding fathers have been so popular in recent years. However, those same Americans have also been quick to “vote their pocketbooks” in the wake of the worst economic downturn since the crash of 1929. Woe indeed to any incumbent, regardless of party affiliation, who would dare to suggest that just possibly a few new taxes might be a good thing.

  In recent years, budget deficit critics, taxation opponents, and far-right conservatives have found common ground under the banner of modern-day “tea parties” of one strip
e or another, railing against big government and claiming to trace their lineage and their authority back to the patriots who opposed the British over tax issues in the 1760s. Opponents of the conservative groups scoff at such claims, pointing out that in contrast to the colonists of 1765, all modern-day Americans have representation in Congress. Members of the modern Tea Party movement might not like certain of those representatives, but they nonetheless have been elected by the populace.

  Rather than pick a side, however, this volume might frame the matter differently. In truth, the best narratives intertwine the physical and the psychological to create a sense of substance as they progress toward an inevitable end, as romantic or tragic as it might be.

  Thus, what better way to reframe the debate regarding the onset, struggle, and outcome of the American Revolution? Consider those who set the stage for rebellion then—the Sons of Liberty, individually and collectively—as protagonists, perplexed, confounded, and infuriated by a series of economic setbacks dealt them by the antagonistic, faraway British Parliament. At the same time, the Sons were conditioned in their thinking by 150 years or so of distance from and relative independence of the Crown to think of themselves as the possessors of certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

  Without such psychic certainty, they would have been ill equipped to carry out the physical struggles that lay ahead. The so-called contradiction, then, is truly to be understood as a synergy, in the same way that the great civil rights struggles of the twentieth century were grounded in moral principle but prompted by any number of very real and intolerable actions.

  One of the most significant things for the contemporary reader to understand about the American Revolution is that it took place in a setting that was nothing like the United States that we know today. In 1760, there were no more than 1.6 million inhabitants in the American colonies, nearly a quarter of them Negro slaves (as a measuring stick, consider that Phoenix, Arizona, tallied about 1.6 million in the 2010 census, all by itself). Slavery was practiced in all thirteen colonies, with most slaves in the North employed as household servants and most in Maryland, Virginia, and other southern colonies as agricultural workers on the great plantations. Wherever they were and whatever they were doing, the fact of their slavery was lamented by relatively few, accounting for the fact that such illustrious founders as John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington were slave owners. Though some opposed slavery on economic grounds, the moral issues surrounding the practice would have to wait until after the American Revolution for serious and widespread debate.

  Most of the colonists came from England and Scotland, along with a significant number from Germany. New York had been settled by the Dutch, who were still substantial in number and influence there. The total population of the colonies was divided roughly equally north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Virginia was the largest of the colonies, with about 340,000 inhabitants, nearly half of whom were Negro slaves. Second largest was Massachusetts, with about 200,000 persons, and third was Pennsylvania, with 184,000. New York was sixth, with a total of 117,000 inhabitants, about the same as North Carolina, which counted 110,000.

  Philadelphia was the largest city in the colonies, with some 20,000 citizens. Boston had 16,000 and New York City about 14,000. The only other city with more than 5,000 inhabitants was Charleston, South Carolina, with 8,000, though Salem and Marblehead, Massachusetts, flanking their own seaport about 20 miles north of Boston, had nearly 10,000 citizens between them.

  Nor were dark-skinned Africans and West Indians the only virtual slaves in the American colonies. There were a significant number of indentured servants at work there at well, including a number of convicted criminals who had escaped execution or prison in England in exchange for a certain period of bound slavery in the colonies. Estimates are that England sent as many as 50,000 convicts to the colonies in the half century leading up to the Revolution.

  Other white indentured servants were sold to slave traders by their impoverished parents or were simply snatched off the streets and tossed into the holds of ships to be transported and sold to the highest bidders in America. In addition, a number of impoverished Brits, Scots, and Irish looking for a fresh start (an unskilled laborer in England might make £2 for a year of carrying hod or guiding an ox across a field) voluntarily sold themselves into servitude in exchange for the high cost of passage—anywhere from £6 to £10—to the New World.

  Estimates by the U.S. Department of Labor suggest that as many as 80 percent of the total European emigration to the colonies consisted of voluntary “redemptioners,” who typically spent anywhere from three to seven years working off their obligations. These included scullery maids and manual laborers, of course, but in addition, there were bricklayers, carpenters, watch- and shoemakers, barrel makers, blacksmiths, and skilled artisans of many types who regularly advertised in newspapers as available “for sale.”

  In addition to those arriving as slaves were the many bound apprentices laboring in the colonies. These were orphans or children of impoverished parents who were willing to give up offspring they could not support. An apprentice typically gained freedom at age twenty-one, becoming a journeyman, free to seek paid employment within the craft he or she had learned (women, by and large, were apprenticed to learn “housewifery”).

  While the practice might seem brutish to the modern reader, apprenticeship at least offered the promise of upward mobility to an otherwise prospectless young person. One study suggests that there were about five hundred bound apprentices registered in Philadelphia in the mid-1750s. The Boston-born Benjamin Franklin was himself an apprentice (as a printer, to his own newspaper-owning brother), though he fled from his master before his term was up and would come to embody the original Horatio Alger, up-by-his-own-bootstraps success story.

  At the other end of the American social spectrum was the class from which “rulers”—given the limitations of the term in the British-bound colonies—were drawn. They included the landed gentry—in both North and South—and wealthy traders and merchants, as well as attorneys, clergymen, judges, and college professors.

  In between were the majority of the citizenry: small shopkeepers, farmers, artisans, printers, and skilled workmen, or mechanics, many of them only recently removed from bound labor of some type and distinctly aware of the difficulties of daily life. In that regard, statistics sometimes suggest that the average life expectancy of the time (in England as well as the United States) fluctuated between twenty-five and forty years, shocking numbers for contemporary Americans who expect to live to sixty-seven or sixty-eight at a minimum. However, such figures are greatly skewed by the inordinately higher rate of infant mortality of the time, which hovered at roughly 50 percent. Recent studies have shown that a person who reached the age of twenty-one in the colonies of 1765 might expect forty more years of life.

  However long they lived, distinctions between the social classes of those carrying on an existence in the colonies were clearly kept. In fact, some made it law that no person was “to dress above his degree.” Seating in churches and colleges was allocated according to rank, and families of station were careful to ensure that their children understood the importance of maintaining the bloodline—there was to be no marrying any mate less than a social equal. Still, there was nothing to stop an enterprising young man of the ilk of Franklin or Andrew Johnson, an apprenticed youngster who would eventually become president, from bettering himself.

  There were only seven colleges in the colonies at the time of the Stamp Act: Harvard, the College of William and Mary, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Brown. Most young men did not think of going to college unless they intended to join the clergy. And although secondary education was also a rarity, most towns in the North maintained an elementary school. Several studies show that the literacy rate in the colonies of the time reached 70 percent or higher, actually outstripping that in England, where the rate is estima
ted variously at 50 to 70 percent. Reading—especially of prayer books and the Bible—was encouraged in most homes, and the ability to write was valued as a practical path to upward mobility: carrying on a business or a trade.

  Though life for the privileged few might have included travel and exploration, riding, sailing, hunting, reading, and religious and philosophical study, most colonists worked hard, six days a week. Leisure for most was confined to Sunday gatherings with family and friends and was often organized around the church. Children rolled hoops, tossed balls, and played variants of the hiding-and-seeking games that children have always played. Adults sang, played instruments, indulged in variants of bridge and rummy, and read aloud to each other. Courtship was carefully regulated in all aspects, and most married women, whether of means or no, stayed home to cook, can, gather honey, make candles from animal fat, sew, and raise children.

  Men, when they were not working, did gather outside the home to gamble at dice, cards, and cockfighting. They frequented taverns to participate in those activities as well as to debate and to fight when words seemed inadequate to make a point.

  Given the difficulty of making ends meet for the common man and the fact that a fair number of criminals had been sent over from England, crime—particularly theft—was not uncommon. Crime was punished variously: by hanging (which even a bit of forgery or counterfeiting could get a person), whipping, ducking in a local stream or pond, or a period of painful exposure in the pillory and the stocks of the public square, where a transgressor’s ears might be nailed fast to the wood frame clamped about his or her neck and arms or his or her nostrils slit for good measure. There were few prisons, given the expense of maintaining them, so that criminals who hadn’t been hanged were sent back to the streets, even if many were permanently branded—as Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter nearly was—according to their sins on the forehead, cheeks, arms, or hands (B for burglary, T for thief, R for rogue, and so on.)