Desperate Sons

by Les Standiford

  Adams’s reply might have been expected. The Puritan told Gage’s emissary that he had long ago made his peace with the “King of Kings” and begged His Excellency to make no further insulting entreaties. With that, he returned to preparing for his journey.

  Adams and his fellow radical delegates did not envision an easy time at the convention, for they well understood the dueling interests that had brought the gathering into being. Whereas the Sons of Liberty and other ardent Whigs were hopeful that the meeting would produce a united call for the boycott on trade and a firm resolve for union, more conservative interests, including many merchants, went to Philadelphia in the hope that orderly relations with England—and certainly trade—could somehow be restored.

  The Massachusetts and Virginia delegations were viewed as the most liberal of the group, their resolve hardened by Parliament’s passage that summer of the Quebec Act, another measure sometimes included among the Intolerables. Among other contentious points, including the recognition of the Roman Catholic religion, the act ceded large tracts of frontier land coveted by Virginia developers back to Canada and increased the fears of western Massachusetts farmers that the British might also reclaim their own holdings on a whim.

  The chief opponents of the liberal faction were the delegations from Philadelphia and New York, where maneuvering by the merchants had produced agreement on the necessity of maintaining harmony with Great Britain and addressing any differences by petition to the king. Joseph Galloway, the speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, rose to prominence among the moderates on a platform that stressed such principles, including the insistence that ceding authority to various illegal conventions, committees, town assemblies, and mobs would in effect put an end to government itself. To Galloway and his proponents the so-called Intolerable Acts were simply the stuff of reason and order, and he counted on Adams and the Virginians to comport themselves so fearsomely that most delegates would turn to moderation.

  Adams proved to be more than a match for Galloway, however. As part of a backroom agreement engineered by Adams, the Massachusetts and Virginia delegations threw their support for the position of secretary of the congress to Charles Thomson, the most liberal member of the Pennsylvania delegation and a man who, John Adams wrote in his diary, seemed “the Sam. Adams of Phyladelphia.” Not wishing to portray his own delegation as fractured, Galloway joined the rest of the convention in approving Thomson unanimously.

  In a move surely calculated to show his temperate self, Adams stood up as delegates began wrangling on the opening of the second day as to whether it was appropriate to begin with a prayer of benediction. Given the great divide between Episcopalians, Quakers, and Puritans, to say nothing of the Papists and Jews, all of whom had scrabbled from the beginning for a place on the new continent, several members opposed the motion on the grounds that it would be a divisive way to begin. After a bit of back-and-forth, Adams rose to observe that although he himself was a devout Puritan, he was no bigot “and could hear a Prayer from a Gentleman of Piety and Virtue, who was at the same Time a Friend to his Country.”

  With that introduction, Adams told the body that he was informed that the Reverend Jacob Duché, a noted Episcopalian minister, was such a friend, and then suggested that Duché might deliver a benediction. The group, struck by such moderate advice, readily concurred and Duché, nominally a representative of the Church of England, rose to invoke Psalm 35, which beseeches the Lord to join in a fight against one’s enemies and to scatter them “as dust before the wind.”

  If that was not sufficient portent of Adams’s capabilities, what happened next put an end to any further speculation over the Congress’s direction. When he had left Boston for Philadelphia, Adams had been well aware of an upcoming conference of Committees of Correspondence from Suffolk (which included Boston), Middlesex, Worcester, and Essex counties, called in opposition to the Massachusetts Government Act. Though Adams could not be at the meeting, which commenced on August 26, he entrusted his colleague Joseph Warren to oversee the meeting at Faneuil Hall. As a result of their deliberations, the committees produced a document known as the Suffolk Resolves, which stated that the signees, while acknowledging the sovereignty of and their allegiance to George III, were nonetheless agreed, among other things, to: (1) reject the provisions of the Port Act, the Government Act, and the Justice Act; (2) ignore the dictates of any court or official of justice claiming authority under the Government Act; (3) refuse the payment of any taxes until the Government Act was repealed; (4) require the resignation of the newly appointed members of the governor’s council; (5) reject the provisions of the Quebec Act establishing Roman Catholicism as the state religion; (6) establish an armed militia in every town and require that the inhabitants of those towns “use their utmost diligence to acquaint themselves with the art of war as soon as possible” [italics added]; (7) withhold “all commercial intercourse with Great-Britain” and abstain from the use of British merchandise and manufactures; and (8) refrain from engagement in any “routs, riots or licentious attacks” or “outrage upon private property.”

  As Adams had arranged, a copy of the Resolves, signed in Massachusetts on September 9, was carried to Philadelphia by Paul Revere and read before the congress. In the eyes of the moderates, such declarations amounted to nothing less than an outright declaration of war, but the vote of the delegates, who included George Washington and Patrick Henry from Virginia, John Adams, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, and Christopher Gadsden from South Carolina, was nonetheless to endorse the Suffolk Resolves. Furthermore, it was the decision of the congress to publish the text of the Resolves along with the news of their endorsement in colonial newspapers at once.

  In the wake of such actions, the subsequent course of the congress was predictable. Galloway did his best, introducing a “Plan of Union of Great Britain and the Colonies” that called for the formation of a legislative association of colonies that would vote upon any act of Parliament before it could take effect, but as it seemed to yield to Parliament dominion over the colonies, only five delegations voted to approve it and the measure died.

  Instead, the congress drafted a “Declaration of Rights and Grievances,” which was addressed to King George, to whom the delegates professed their loyalty, yet it denied the right of Parliament to impose any legislation upon the colonies. The signees explained to the king that they could not submit to the acts pertaining to Massachusetts colony, nor to the Quartering Act, nor to the Quebec Act with its unfortunate establishment of the Roman Catholic religion and the dismantling of English law in favor of French law in that province. Until such time as those acts were revised or rescinded, the colonies said, they had no choice but to enter into an agreement suspending trade between the colonies and Great Britain as well as an agreement to suspend consumption of British goods and manufactures. In essence, the document cobbled together every complaint and stipulation that had accrued from the time of the Stamp Act to that moment. Despite the full force of the British government and the efforts of every loyalist in the provinces, the agenda of the Sons of Liberty now transcended local politics and became the guiding policy of the colonies as a whole.

  Shortly after the declaration was drafted, the congress set about the formulation of a “Continental Association,” designed to implement the provisions of the suspension of trade pact. Colonists would have to do without tea, sugar, lace and linen clothing, china, and manufactured goods such as muskets, silverware, and tools. In addition, the importation of slaves would cease. Nor would manufacturers in England any longer have access to American timber or by-products such as masts, staves, planks, turpentine, and tar. There would be no more iron, furs, wheat, corn for whiskey, rice, or tobacco, far and away the colonies’ most valuable crop. Nor would there be any more of the finely wrought American ships built in Charleston and sent to Britain to become men-of-war.

  Committees were to be appointed in every community in the colonies, their members charged with oversight of their neighbors.
The names of any persons found in violation of the agreement would be published so that such enemies of liberty could be excommunicated from the main. In addition, local committees were authorized to form “enforcement” groups and adopt such measures as were deemed proper for enforcement of the association’s aims. Though such might seem abhorrent to the modern reader familiar with the “block captains” and “building captains” common to Communist regimes, the promulgation of such extreme tactics also offers an insight into the degree of the colonists’ desperation: in order to achieve liberty, it seemed understood, liberty would necessarily be curtailed.

  And to ensure that all of those resolves did not go unnoticed in England, the congress capped its business by resolving to meet at a Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on May 10, 1775. If there was not a satisfactory response to the petition by then, the colonists would meet to debate what further steps should be taken.

  Of course, given the logistics of the times, all were aware that there would be no instantaneous response to those many brave actions. The resolutions of the congress would not reach London for six weeks or so. There would be a necessary period of deliberation there and another six weeks gone by before the British reply could return. Delegates knew that the new year would surely pass before they received any indication as to how their petition to His Majesty had been received.

  In the meantime, the delegates traveled back to their respective communities and turned their attention to carrying out the wishes of the Congress—to the degree possible, that is. In Charleston, the “General Committee,” as the Committee of Correspondence there called itself, took over most of the functions previously carried out by the colonial assembly. In due course, a Provincial Congress was formed, which then decamped from its original meeting rooms at Pike’s Tavern and took over the former Assembly Room in the state house. As Henry Laurens, a planter who was slowly drifting toward the liberal side, wrote his son, the group sat and conducted its affairs in those chambers “with all the Solemnity and formality of a Constitutional parliament.” As one of its first orders of business, the body quickly terminated any further suits for debt, an issue that had festered in the colony from the time that Parliament had invalidated the use of paper currency to settle such.

  There was also another attempt to land tea in Charleston, when the Britannia, captained by Samuel Ball, Jr., arrived from London and attempted to land three chests sent to local merchants. Though it was not East India tea, it was tea nonetheless and the General Committee approached the merchants to whom the freight was consigned and advised them what would have to be done. On November 3, the merchants grudgingly boarded the Britannia and, as the South-Carolina Gazette reported in its November 21 issue, dumped the tea into the harbor “as an obligation to Neptune.”

  In New York, where the Committee of Fifty-one gave way to a more radical Committee of Sixty upon the return of its delegation to Philadelphia, a Committee of Inspection was formed to police ship traffic in the harbor. On February 1, 1775, the James, loaded with coal and various items of merchandise from London, attempted to dock at the wharf of the Quaker merchant Robert Murray. When a crowd quickly gathered to protest, the ship’s captain sailed out into the bay. Eight days later, however, the James was back, this time accompanied by the British warship Kingfisher. The navy men were not about to set foot on the docks, however, and when the captain stepped ashore, he was snatched up by the protesting mob and paraded through the streets of the town until he swore to leave and never return.

  Anyone else might have seen the folly of trying to run the gauntlet set up by the New York committee, but Murray, who owned an opulent home in what was then a distant suburb and is now known as Murray Hill, was overextended. Thus he sought to land the cargo aboard a second ship, the Beulah, by sending a smaller boat out from New Jersey to meet the former near Staten Island. The goods were taken from the Beulah to Murray’s warehouse in Elizabeth, but Isaac Sears, who was in charge of the Committee of Inspection, soon heard of the matter and intimidated Murray’s employees into confessing their deeds.

  When confronted, Murray promised to send the fabric and pepper bales he’d unloaded back to England, issue a public apology, and make a donation to a local hospital in Elizabeth. That was enough for the members of the Elizabeth committee, but Alexander McDougall wanted to make an example of the greedy Murray and his reckless disregard for the cause. At McDougall’s urging, the New York Committee of Inspection announced that Murray and his business would be summarily banished from the city. At that juncture, according to a family biographer, Murray’s wife wrote a letter to Sears and McDougall, appealing a decision that would unfairly place “innocent Wives and helpless children in Unspeakable Distress.” Ultimately, Sears and McDougall gave in, and a neighborhood and a phone exchange in Manhattan would one day bear the family name, but more important, the dominance of the Sons in New York had been demonstrated in no uncertain terms.

  In Massachusetts, owing to the presence of Governor Gage and the aforementioned four regiments of troops he had brought to garrison on the common, Samuel Adams was having a more difficult time of it. While still in Philadelphia, Adams wrote to Gage on October 10, expressing concern that the new governor was busy turning Boston into a military encampment. “It is with the deepest Concern that we observe that . . . your Excellency is erecting fortifications round the town of Boston,” he wrote. “These Enormities committed by a standing Army, in our opinion, unlawfully posted there in a time of Peace, are irritating in the greatest Degree,” he continued, warning that they would, if not removed, “endanger the involving [of] all America in the Horrors of a civil War!”

  Such protests were to no avail, of course. In Gage’s mind, war was exactly what Adams and his cohorts wanted, and he would do exactly what he felt was needed to keep the unruly population under control. Though meetings of the town assembly, the chief thorn in the governor’s side, had been banned, Adams kept them going under the ruse that the gatherings were the continuation of a meeting originally convened and merely adjourned before the publication of the Governing Act. In December the town assembly appointed a sixty-two-person-strong Committee of Inspection of its own to enforce the directives of the Continental Congress, and Adams kept up a vigorous letter-writing campaign apprising the other colonies of the struggles in Massachusetts and thanking them for the continuing stream of relief supplies arriving in Boston.

  But there was no sign of a softening by Gage regarding Boston. On January 29, 1775, Adams wrote to Richard Henry Lee in Virginia, saying, “We appear to be in a state of Hostility. . . . Regiments with a very few Adherents on one side & all the rest of the Inhabitants of the Province backd by all the Colonies on the other!” Still there was hope that the petition of the Continental Congress would have some effect and that “the new Parliament will reverse the Laws & measures of the old.”

  However, if such hopes were disappointed, he told Lee, “I am well informd that in every Part of the Province there are selected Numbers of Men, called Minute Men—that they are well disciplined & well provided—and that upon a very short Notice they will be able to assemble a formidable Army.” Those Minutemen would not be the aggressors, he vowed, “but animated with an unquenchable Love of Liberty they will support their righteous Claim to it, to the utmost Extremity.”

  Much of the trouble in the colonies was because of the combative temperament of Gage and the meddling of former governor Hutchinson, Adams noted. The latter “has the Tongue & the Heart of a Courtier,” he said, and now spent time in London spreading inflammatory lies about the colonists and their aims. “I earnestly wish that Lord North would no longer listen to the Voice of Faction,” he told Lee, closing his letter not with a call to arms but with a call for reason to prevail: “If our Claims are just & reasonable they ought to concede to them.”

  Despite such hopes, there was not much sign of concession in England. When the petition of the congress finally arrived in London in mid-December and the king was apprised o
f its contents, his reaction was swift. If such behavior kept up, he said, there would be “slaughter” in the colonies.

  The petition was first delivered to Benjamin Franklin, in London, who was by now regarded as the de facto agent for all the colonies. Franklin was directed not only to lay the petition before the king but also to arrange for its publication throughout the United Kingdom. The king, however, refused to accept the document from Franklin, who was forced to deliver it to Lord Dartmouth, who in turn laid it before the king, who declared that he would turn it over to Parliament for disposition.

  While this game of hot potato went on, Franklin toured the hustings of England as well as the caucus chambers of London, passing word of the colonists’ proposals and attempting to lay the groundwork for a compromise that would necessarily involve repeal of the Coercive Acts. As Franklin told William Pitt during one such meeting, “The army cannot possibly answer any good purpose in Boston, but may do infinite mischief; and no accommodation can properly be proposed and entered into by the Americans, while the bayonet is at their breasts.” The sentiment struck home with Pitt, who begged his fellow members in the House of Lords to join him in petitioning the king to remove the troops from Boston. Otherwise, Pitt warned his colleagues, “You will be forced to a disgraceful abandonment of present measures and principles which you avow but cannot defend.”

  All that was of little avail, however, for by now King George, that personage to whom even Samuel Adams and the most fervent of the Sons of Liberty pledged allegiance, had had his fill of outrageous behavior from the colonists. They would have to acknowledge the supremacy of Parliament, or else.