In 1740, Massachusetts had sunk deep into depression. Farmers and workers had become indebted to merchants who had aggravated their distress by refusing to accept paper money in place of gold or silver. Deacon Adams, along with fellow members of Boston’s Caucus Club, had thrown himself into the conflict. The Caucus, an alliance of tradesmen and artisans, had first been known as the “Caulkers” Club, since shipwrights were well represented, and that had evolved to “Corcas” and then “Caucus.” For years the club had set the agenda for Boston’s Town Meetings and decided who would be appointed to the various town offices. Deacon Adams and his comrades wanted to revive the economy by instituting a floating currency backed with their own real estate. The colony’s richest merchants opposed this Land Bank, claiming that it would promote inflation and favor the debtors by cutting into the assets of those who lent money. Conservatives like Thomas Hutchinson demanded to be paid in gold and were hostile toward the Land Bankers. They called them “the idle and the extravagant,” more often “the rabble.” Deacon Adams’ participation upset them because he was, by their definition, a gentleman.
When the Land Bank supporters won a healthy majority in the Massachusetts House, the conservatives turned to the governor for protection. He threatened to strip the offices and titles of any man who invested in the Land Bank, and he punished Deacon Adams, who had risked his sizable fortune in the people’s cause, by removing him as justice of the peace. At the next election, however, the people gave the Land Bankers another overwhelming victory and sent Deacon Adams to the Council, the colony’s upper house. The governor vetoed his appointment and wrote to London for action. In 1741, Parliament declared the Land Bank illegal and charged its directors with financial crimes. If the Massachusetts court had not intervened, Deacon Adams’ enemies might have seized his property and sent him to jail.
That calamity had overlapped with another controversy in Boston, and both shaped the political opinions of young Samuel Adams. The deacon had enrolled his son in the Harvard class of 1740, paying his tuition in molasses and flour. In Cambridge, the greatest influence on the boy was George Whitefield, an evangelist who had arrived from England to lead a religious revival known as the Great Awakening. Samuel and many of his classmates responded to Whitefield’s call for spartan piety and gave up their fashionable clothes for Puritan gray. The Great Awakening—and promptings from his devout mother—had led Samuel to consider becoming a clergyman.
After graduation, however, Samuel began to study law, but his mother didn’t think that career was respectable enough and prevailed on him to quit. He returned to Harvard for a master’s degree. By the time he graduated, in 1743, the colony’s rich and powerful men had been denounced by the preachers of the Great Awakening for their lack of piety and by the Land Bankers for their greed. Samuel Adams was convinced on both counts. He argued in his final paper at Harvard that when the existence of the commonwealth was at stake it was lawful to resist even the highest civil authority. Deacon Adams had been crushed by superior forces, but his son didn’t believe he had been proved wrong.
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At twenty-one, Samuel Adams was apprenticed to Thomas Cushing, a wealthy trader and political ally of his father’s. Cushing, who was called “Death’s Head,” had no trouble separating his trading practices from his liberal politics. Within a few months, however, he saw that Samuel Adams was not able to make that distinction. He let Samuel go, informing the deacon that he trained young men for business, not politics. Deacon Adams’ next approach was to lend Samuel a thousand pounds to set himself up in business. Samuel immediately loaned a friend half of it. When the friend couldn’t repay him, Deacon Adams took his son into his malt business.
The young man spent his middle twenties learning to be a maltster. Then, in 1748, Deacon Adams died, and Samuel was free. His father’s will forgave the thousand-pound loan and left him the malt company, which ought to have ensured him a respectable place in Boston society. Instead, Samuel let the business slide away. He married the daughter of his clergyman at Old South Church and took his wife to live in the deteriorating house on Purchase Street with its fine view of the harbor and its pervasive smell of malt.
Samuel had also inherited debts from the Land Bank. At one point, he had to take out advertisements warning Boston’s new sheriff, Stephen Greenleaf, not to try to sell his house at public auction. A narrow escape on that occasion taught Adams a tactical lesson: he had made Sheriff Greenleaf back down by threatening to sue and by intimidating potential buyers. As he later described his technique, one should always “put your adversary in the wrong. And keep him there.”
In the early 1750s, Adams and a group of friends formed a secret club. Their newspaper, the Independent Advertiser, assailed the royal governor so persistently that conservatives called them “the Whippingpost Club.” Samuel Adams had chosen austerity for himself because he thought materialism softened the character and sapped what he called “the good old New England spirit.” But as the years passed and he had trouble maintaining his household, even friends began to wonder whether his indifference to money wasn’t a flaw in his character. The newspaper expired, and after five pregnancies in six years of marriage his wife died, leaving Adams with a son and a daughter. By 1763, at the age of forty-one, he was still passionate about liberty and justice, even though his fellow Bostonians weren’t paying him much attention.
Yet they had not lost their respect for Samuel Adams. Here was a man who lived by values that most of them honored only on the Sabbath. He had a good voice for the Sunday meeting and joined in singing the psalms. But the rest of the week he wasn’t a bore or a scold, and men were glad to have him at their table. In his middle years, Adams was still solidly built, with pale skin and light-blue eyes. Settling in at a tavern, drinking little, talking well, he wore the same red suit and cheap gray wig, its hair pulled back and tied in a bow. When the weather turned cold, he added a shabby red cloak.
Samuel Adams was building a following apart from the Caucus or the political factions. As he mingled at the taverns, the lodges and the volunteer fire companies, he asked shopkeepers and shipworkers their opinions and seemed to take their answers seriously. He could explain political injustice to an illiterate sailor without condescending, and he had no use for Thomas Hutchinson’s kind of social divisions. Adams sought out men who had spoken with a gentleman only to take his orders or abuse. His own ideas were unshakable, but he offered them in a tentative way that flattered his listeners. “I think . . .” Adams would begin, or “It seems to me . . .” He criticized such aristocrats as Hutchinson not as if he were a humble man who envied the lieutenant governor his wealth or position but as a moral superior.
Adams’ politics were cast in theological terms: goodness meant the welfare of the most people, evil was tyranny by the few. He regarded the Massachusetts General Court—the House of Representatives and the Council—as the equal of Britain’s Parliament. An Englishman might find that idea preposterous. But if one considered America from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River, it was the size of Great Britain, France, Spain, Germany and Italy combined.
Although he circulated along the waterfront, Adams was not neglecting likely recruits from his alma mater. He sought out young Harvard graduates who were clever and idealistic, and among his cadre were two students of medicine: Joseph Warren, tall, handsome and fearless, and Benjamin Church, a deacon’s son who wrote irreverent verses about his college tutors—“His matted wig of piss-burnt horse-hair made / Scarce covers half his greasy, shining head.” Drawing men into his circle, Samuel Adams played on their love of America, their suspicions of the British and any other resentments he thought might win them over. He cultivated, too, his ambitious young second cousin from the town of Braintree, John Adams, working upon John’s desire to be accepted by Boston’s scholars, lawyers and the men who ran the Town Meeting.
Preaching his message left Samuel Adams no time for any job except one of Boston’s sinecures. He had collected liquor taxes f
or the county for three years. Then, in 1756, he was elected one of the five general tax collectors. Bostonians knew they had made a shrewd choice. Each collector was required to post a personal bond to guarantee the delivery of his receipts. But when the colony was going through bad times, Samuel Adams would always defer the collections. If a smallpox epidemic ravaged Boston, he put them off again. His enemies accused him of skimming off public money to support even his frugal way of life, although no one offered any proof. It may have been a slander, but it was true that Boston wasn’t getting its tax money. And its lenient collector was sinking into substantial debt.
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Boston’s conservatives had been trying to do away with the Town Meeting for nearly fifty years. Why, they asked, should rich men who came to vote be jammed into a crowded hall with the lower classes? Who could blame the colony’s great merchants for their disgust when nearly destitute men stood up to claim the same privileges?
The conservative faction’s last attempt to gain control of the town government had come three years before, in 1760, when it had set up the “New and Grand Corcas.” The Boston Gazette had warned readers that this false caucus would try to buy votes and, failing that, would threaten workers with arrest or the loss of their jobs. The original Caucus had struck back at the conservatives by urging workmen to wash their hands and faces and put on their Sunday best so that they would look neat and clean at the next Meeting. The Caucus also instructed them to refuse any attempts at bribery and to vote in their self-interest. The conservatives lost that year, but the outcome was close enough for them to try again in 1763.
Before that election, the newspaper of the governor’s party, the Evening Post, printed an exposé of the Caucus. It accused Samuel Adams and his allies of conducting their business behind locked doors and then inventing a few sham debates to entertain the rabble. But Boston’s workmen had learned to trust the Caucus to look after them. Almost eleven hundred men turned out to vote, the greatest number in Boston’s history. The Caucus was vindicated, and Samuel Adams held on to his slippery pole as tax collector. James Otis fared even better. The Tories and the Evening Post had been calling him a wild and envious man, a raccoon, “a filthy skunk,” but his fellow citizens chose him to moderate their Meetings. He surprised everyone by using the forum to praise the new peace treaty with France and swear his abiding loyalty to England.
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Otis’ speech seemed to bury the recent ill-feeling, and calm in 1763 was agreeable to Thomas Hutchinson, who had been stealing time from his public duties to work on his history of the Bay Colony. Hutchinson was trying to write as he lived—avoiding emotion or interpretation, collecting facts and trusting them to speak for themselves. For him, one persisting scar from the recent controversies was the names that had been given to the colony’s factions. The Caucus had succeeded in branding the governor and his friends as Tories, an unpopular label in Massachusetts. Hutchinson considered it equally misleading that his opponents called themselves Whigs or, worse, patriots. But those were small irritations. Surveying the political scene, Hutchinson ignored the underlying tensions in the colony and hoped instead that future problems would stem only from petty ambition. That was something he could understand. Men who were out of power always wanted to be in.
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Governor Bernard understood Hutchinson’s liking for money better than Samuel Adams’ indifference to it. His annual salary totaled twelve hundred pounds, and he enjoyed other perquisites. He had ignored warnings that the people of Massachusetts might be difficult to manage when he had left his previous post as governor of New Jersey, and during his first years in Boston he seemed self-confident. He had all the signs of success—an Oxford education, a career in the law, a wellborn wife. Bostonians had no way of knowing how roughly life had treated Francis Bernard or that behind his placid facade he was full of trepidation.
His father, a clergyman, had died before he was three, and the Reverend Anthony Alsop, who came to Berkshire to replace him, married Francis’ widowed mother when her year of mourning was over. But Bernard’s mother died of smallpox a year later; his stepfather fled to Holland to escape a breach-of-promise suit, and Francis was left with an aunt. The suit was finally settled and Alsop returned to England, where he fell into his garden ditch and was drowned. Francis was thirteen.
Bernard studied at Christ Church, read law at the Middle Temple and married another orphan, who had a powerful uncle. He set out to found a family large enough to defy fate. His wife bore ten children who survived, but tragedy followed into the next generation. When his eldest son was admitted to Westminster, his friends celebrated by tossing the youth in the air on a blanket. He was dumped out, landed on his head and was severely injured.
It was Mrs. Bernard’s uncle, Lord Barrington, the secretary of state for war in London, who arranged for Bernard to be appointed governor of New Jersey, and after two years he bettered his prospects with the move to Massachusetts. By 1763, Bernard was aligned firmly with the Tories. With no divisive issue looming on the horizon, the squabbling had become personal. Servants in the governor’s house reported that he was stingy. The Tories mocked Samuel Adams as “Sammy the Maltster,” and James Otis became “Jemmy” in the conservative Evening Post: “Jemmy is a madman, Jemmy is an ass / Jemmy has a leaden head, and forehead spread with brass.”
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During 1763, a quiet interval, George III replaced William Pitt with George Grenville as prime minister. Grenville’s younger sister was married to Pitt, but the brothers-in-law were estranged and Grenville had never won Pitt’s following. Although King George had married and produced an heir, his court was finding that the amiable young man now was impatient with any adviser who dared to contradict him. Soon after Grenville’s appointment, the king was complaining, “When he has wearied me for two hours, he looks at his watch to see if he may not tire me for an hour more.” At the end of each interview, the king spurred Grenville on his way, “It is late. Good morrow, Mr. Greenville. Good morrow, Mr. Greenville.” It was George’s small revenge never to call his prime minister by his right name.
Grenville was dull but also dogged. The war had left England with a deep debt, and he was determined to reduce it. He began to entertain new ideas for raising revenue.
Patrick Henry opposing the Parsons’ Cause in Hanover Court House
VIRGINIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Henry
1763–64
WHILE George Grenville was struggling with England’s debt in the autumn of 1763, the Reverend James Maury of Fredericksville, Virginia, was worrying over his family’s budget. Bostonians might have found Maury’s preoccupation with money unbecoming in a minister, but Virginians had a less exalted opinion of their clergy. The Church of England had been the established religion from the time the colony was first settled, and the law required Virginians to take communion twice a year in an Anglican church, although their attendance was rarely enforced. Ministers of other denominations who went to the capital at Williamsburg for a dispensation would be licensed to preach, and the Presbyterians accepted that restriction. Baptists, Methodists and Quakers refused on principle and could expect to be jailed or fined. Sometimes they had their meetings broken up by the sheriff or by a Church of England clergyman leading a band of hostile neighbors.
With the Anglican Church enjoying that monopoly, many of its parsons took their positions as sinecures and turned to worldly pleasure. They could be seen at horseraces and cock fights—not always sober—or playing backgammon, billiards and cards. They also went dancing. As one visitor put it, Virginians would dance or die. The current fancy was the jig, which had reached plantation ballrooms by way of the slave quarters.
The Reverend Maury neither gambled nor danced. He eked out a living for his wife and his eleven children by teaching school. In daily life, he also made use of his classical education in naming his slaves—Clio, Cato, Ajax and Cicero. One of his brightest pupils, Thomas Jefferson of Albemarle County, had joined Maury�
�s classes in 1758, at the age of fifteen. Thomas’ father had died the previous year and left the boy a comfortable estate, but Thomas noticed that Pastor Maury was hard pressed. He seemed harassed by a lack of money and that he often complained about a recent law called the Two Penny Act.
The act’s very name reminded Virginia’s clergymen that they were paid servants of the state. Throughout the colony, each town’s officials—or vestrymen—hired a minister and set his salary. Since the vestry were usually large plantation owners, they paid in tobacco. In 1748, the Virginia House of Burgesses had fixed a parson’s salary at sixteen thousand pounds of tobacco a year, and vestrymen who did not provide that amount could be sued for damages. After the king ratified the legislation, it had become a royal law that only the king himself could undo.
But with the next bad crop, the legislators regretted their generosity. In 1755, and again three years later, they meddled with the quota. Instead of granting a parson the full sixteen thousand pounds—worth about four hundred pounds sterling in 1758—the Burgesses compelled him to accept Virginia’s depreciated paper money at the rate of twopence for every pound of tobacco. As a result, a clergyman was collecting only about one third of what the law had guaranteed him.
Virginia’s parsons were not men to take consolation in the beatitudes; they sued. After one court awarded a parson double his regular pay in damages, the Reverend Maury filed a similar suit in the courthouse at Hanover, eighteen miles north of Richmond. The case took a year and a half to come to trial, but then, in November 1763, the proceedings couldn’t have gone better for Maury and his fellow Anglicans. The court ruled that since the king had never agreed to repeal the law of 1748, the vestry had acted illegally in holding back two thirds of Maury’s pay. A hearing to assess damages was set for December 1.
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