Patriots

by A. J. Langguth

  An official at the Vice-Admiralty Court, William Story, had been accumulating depositions that accused several Boston merchants of being smugglers. In this morning’s newspaper, Story had published an advertisement denying that he had sent those incriminating documents to England, but some members of the mob didn’t believe him and they tore up his living quarters, along with much of the Admiralty’s archives. Other men headed in the direction of the home of the comptroller of customs, Benjamin Hallowell. In a day when laborers might be earning less than sixty pounds a year, Hallowell had spent more than two thousand pounds on a new house. The mob ripped off his windows and doors, drank his wine cellar dry and carried off his official papers.

  If Mackintosh had only been obliging a few merchants by destroying the evidence against them, the night’s rampage might have ended there. Instead, the mob’s two flanks joined forces and set out to wreak the greatest civil violence North America had ever experienced.

  Only that morning, Thomas Hutchinson had returned to Boston from his Milton country estate. By afternoon, he was hearing rumors that a mob was being raised again. He even knew it would attack officers from the Custom House and the Admiralty office. Hutchinson’s friends assured him that he would be spared. They said his courage the last time in standing up to rocks and insults had won the mob’s respect. For some reason, Hutchinson believed them.

  Now he was at supper. Since the night was warm, he had dressed informally in a woolen jacket over his waistcoat. Around him at the table were his sister-in-law, Grizell Sanford, who had raised his children since his wife’s death; his sons Thomas Junior and Elisha, graduates of Harvard who were training to become merchants; Sarah, a daughter who was reaching marriageable age; Billy, Hutchinson’s youngest son; and Peggy, her father’s favorite, eleven years old and already acting as his secretary.

  As the family ate, a friend burst in to warn them that the mob was heading their way. Hutchinson sent the children from the house and bolted the doors and shutters as he had done before. He was determined to wait out the assault alone. But Sarah came running back to say that she wouldn’t leave unless he came away with her. Hutchinson couldn’t resist, and they hurried together to a neighbor’s house. Stories circulating in town had Hutchinson not only encouraging Parliament to pass the Stamp Act but actually drawing up the law here in his mansion on Garden Court Street. A few minutes after he escaped, the mob fell upon the Hutchinson house in a fever of hatred.

  One of Hutchinson’s sons was near enough to the axes splitting the front door to hear a cry on the night air: “Damn him! He is upstairs! We’ll have him!”

  Some men ran at once to the top of the house, others swarmed into the graceful drawing room. Still more headed for the stores of liquor in the cellar. This time, merely tearing off wainscoting and breaking windows would not be enough to satisfy the mob. Instead, men shattered the inner doors and beat down the walls between the rooms. Standing at the upper windows, they slit open mattresses and buried the lawn beneath a summer blizzard of feathers. They climbed the roof to swarm over a cupola, and even though the job took two hours, they finally sent it crashing down.

  Word reached Hutchinson in his hiding place that the crowd had picked up his scent, and he wound his way through neighboring yards and gardens to a house even farther away. He stayed there until 4 A.M. By then, the mansion he had inherited, one of the finest in Massachusetts, was a splintered shell. Near dawn, men were still crouched on the roof, prying up slate and boards. Only daylight stopped them from razing the house’s outer walls to the ground. Around the battered frame, every fruit tree had been broken to a stump and every shrub crushed back to the earth.

  Out of the ruins came a trail of dinner plates and family portraits, books and children’s clothes. A strongbox had been broken open and nine hundred pounds taken. The manuscript pages of Hutchinson’s history of Massachusetts had been strewn in the mud, along with the rare documents he had spent a lifetime collecting.

  —

  The next morning, Hutchinson’s fellow justices in their red robes had already taken their places when he appeared in court. He was wearing what he had fled in and, because overnight the weather had turned abruptly cold, a few borrowed bits of clothing. Whether he had calculated the effect or not, the sight of this patrician man in his middle fifties, pale after his sleepless night and fitted out in other men’s clothes because his own lay trampled in the street, affected everyone in the court. Even Josiah Quincy, a twenty-one-year-old who was reading law with Oxenbridge Thacher and who had recently joined Samuel Adams’ Sons of Liberty, pitied the lieutenant governor. “Such a man in such a station,” Quincy described Hutchinson in his diary, “thus habited, with tears starting from his eyes and a countenance which strongly told the inward anguish of his soul.”

  Rising to speak, Hutchinson rejected any suggestion that he was appealing for sympathy. He had come to court, he said, only because there wouldn’t have been a quorum without him. But Hutchinson went on to demonstrate that the patriot leaders had no monopoly on eloquence.

  “Some apology is necessary for my dress,” he said. “Indeed, I had no other. Destitute of everything: no other shirt, no other garment but what I have on, and not one in my family in a better situation than myself.”

  He wanted to absolve himself, but with no suggestion that his spirit had been crushed. “I am not obliged to give an answer to all the questions that may be put to me by every lawless person, yet I call on God as my witness—and I would not, for a thousand worlds, call my Maker to witness a falsehood—I say I call my Maker to witness that I never, in New England or Old, in Great Britain or America, neither directly nor indirectly, was aiding, assisting or supporting—in the least promoting or encouraging—what is commonly called the Stamp Act but, on the contrary, did all in my power, and strove as much as in me lay, to prevent it.

  “This is not declared through timidity, for I have nothing to fear. They can only take away my life, which is of but little value when deprived of all its comforts, all that was dear to me . . .”

  Hutchinson said he hoped the people would see how easy it was to spread false reports against the innocent. But violence was wrong, even against the guilty. “I hope all will see how easily the people may be deluded, inflamed and carried away with madness against an innocent man.

  “I pray God give us better hearts!”

  —

  The sacking of Hutchinson’s house had filled Jonathan Mayhew with remorse. He wrote at once to assure Hutchinson that he abhorred violence from his very soul, and he told friends that he would rather lose a hand than encourage such an outrage. But, like many Bostonians, Mayhew saw nothing improper about the demonstration two weeks earlier. His error had been in preaching liberty when his audience was so apprehensive about the threat to their freedoms. In the future, Mayhew said, he would try to calm his sensitive congregation rather than excite it.

  Samuel Adams and his cohorts might not be feeling that same guilt, but they recognized a grievous tactical error. As Hutchinson was addressing the court, Adams at a Town Meeting heard Bostonians condemn the latest rioting, and he voted with them to help the sheriff keep order during the coming nights. When Hutchinson was told about the vote, he noted that the loudest lamentations were coming from the very men who had destroyed his house.

  Many Bostonians knew that Samuel Adams gathered his circle together every Saturday afternoon to edit Monday’s edition of the Boston Gazette, and they took the newspaper’s account of the second demonstration as a change in strategy. The report could have been dictated by Thomas Hutchinson: “Such horrid scenes of villainy as were perpetrated last Monday night it is certain were never seen before in this town, and it is hoped never will again.” The participants were “rude fellows” who went about “heating themselves with liquor” before they vented their “hellish fury” on the lieutenant governor’s house. But the article also drew the same distinction that Mayhew had made. “Most people seem disposed to discriminate between the a
ssembly on the 14th of the month and their transactions, and the unbridled licentiousness of this mob.” To underscore that point, Samuel Adams wrote to Richard Jackson, who had replaced Mauduit as the colony’s London agent, exonerating the law-abiding people of Boston from any blame. The second riot had been perpetrated by “vagabond strangers” interested only in plunder.

  Adams didn’t try to explain the presence on both nights of Ebenezer Mackintosh, the twenty-eight-year-old shoemaker from the South End. Mackintosh’s ancestors had come from Scotland as indentured workers more than a hundred years before, supplying cheap labor for a Massachusetts ironworks. As freemen in later generations, however, the family hadn’t found the New World hospitable. When Ebenezer was fourteen, his father, Moses, had been warned out of Boston, which meant that the town was publicly relieving itself of any obligation to help him if he became destitute or sick. He took the boy to the community of Wrentham, which tolerated Moses for eight years and then gave him another warning out.

  By that time, Ebenezer was already working in Boston as a shoemaker in Ward 12, the section of the South End where the gallows stood. When Sheriff Greenleaf recruited him for a volunteer fire company, Ebenezer persuaded the other firemen to form a gang for Pope’s Day. Slightly built, with a sandy complexion, Mackintosh had learned to read and he liked to memorize verse, but his quick temper put him at the center of every brawl.

  The Tories considered Mackintosh only a tool of the patriots, and Peter Oliver admitted to a grudging admiration for him. His clashes on Pope’s Day had made him a well-known figure around Boston, and Bernard’s inquiry quickly identified Mackintosh as the leader at Hutchinson’s house. Sheriff Greenleaf was sent out with a warrant to arrest him.

  When he spotted Mackintosh in King Street, the sheriff summoned up his nerve and took him to jail. Very soon, a group of gentlemen sought out Greenleaf and delivered a potent threat. Although the Town Meeting had voted to send out patrols to prevent any further rioting, no man would agree to go that night unless Ebenezer Mackintosh was set free. Greenleaf returned to the Council to report that ultimatum.

  Hutchinson listened to the sheriff’s story. “And did you discharge him?”

  “Yes,” said Greenleaf.

  “Then you have not done your duty.”

  Bernard raised to three hundred pounds the bounty for identifying the mob’s leader. Hutchinson was not surprised when the reward went unclaimed. He guessed that the shoemaker was threatening to implicate the men who had planned the demonstration. And if Hutchinson had seen a letter from Henry Bass of the Loyal Nine, it would have confirmed his suspicions. Samuel Adams’ cousin wrote: “We do everything to keep . . . the affair private, and are not a little pleased to hear that Mackintosh has the credit of the whole affair.”

  —

  At first, the example of the mob’s assault on Andrew Oliver seemed to be spreading. Newspapers in other provinces praised Boston’s patriots, and in Newport, Rhode Island, local Sons of Liberty built effigies of their stamp master. He resigned within the week. In New York and New Jersey, stamp masters were also pressured into giving up their posts, and the nominees of other colonies fell into line until only Georgia’s stamp man was allowed to take up his duties unmolested. But after the attack against Hutchinson, patriot leaders outside Massachusetts agreed with Samuel Adams that more violence would only harm their cause.

  Even if the Stamp Act were eventually repealed, the Sons of Liberty pledged that they would guard against any further abuses by Parliament. Christopher Gadsden of Charleston, South Carolina, had mobilized his social club against the Stamp Act, and he caught the mood of the patriots when he said that the Grenville Ministry “must have thought us Americans all a parcel of apes, and very tame apes, too.”

  Sons of Liberty broadside

  MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

  Politics

  1765

  WHILE Samuel Adams was sounding the alarm in Boston against taxes on sugar and stamps, Patrick Henry in Virginia also had been gliding toward politics. The two years since he had triumphed over the parsons had been the best time of Henry’s life. Thomas Jefferson, who was now midway through his own rigorous law training with George Wythe, preferred to believe that Henry was far too lazy to succeed as a lawyer and that he spent all of his time in the woods hunting deer. But Henry had built up a healthy practice. He was being called—mostly around Hanover—“the Orator of Nature,” and in the fall of 1764 he went to Williamsburg as the lawyer for Colonel Nathaniel Dandridge, his host at the Christmas house party five years before. On Dandridge’s behalf, Henry was challenging the seat of James Littlepage in the House of Burgesses. Littlepage was charged with having used undue influence during the last election, when he had gone about the county knocking on doors and pledging to change the regulations over tobacco warehouses. In Virginia, candidates were expected to behave like gentlemen and refrain from asking for votes or making campaign promises. Littlepage was also accused of buying drinks for a man named Grubbs.

  That last charge smacked of hypocrisy. On election day, Virginians stepped forward one at a time at the polls and named their choices out loud. Grubbs had come reeling over the courthouse green, bawling out his promise to vote for anyone who would give him another dram. Littlepage’s men had reached him first. But, like every other candidate, Dandridge had also provided refreshments that day. A man running for office set out near the polls several barrels of rum and neat whiskey, along with applejack and beer. Any candidate who didn’t offer a few drinks was considered too stingy or lacking in respect for his neighbors to deserve their votes. Several years earlier, a planter named George Washington had been rejected for failing to provide decent drink and a roast pig. Washington learned from that defeat, and the next time he ran he bought a quart and a half of liquor for each of his 361 supporters and won his seat in the Burgesses.

  When members of the Committee on Privileges and Elections saw Henry’s coarse clothes, they treated him with a casualness just short of contempt. As he presented Dandridge’s case, however, their mood changed. They agreed that he put the case brilliantly, but they found Dandridge’s complaint frivolous and vexatious and ordered him to pay all costs.

  The next year, with agitation over the Stamp Act spreading through the colony, Henry decided to run for his own seat in the Burgesses. His impatience made him skip over the usual path of serving first on a county court. When the House member from Louisa County resigned to become coroner, Henry hoped to vault directly to the Burgesses. He still lived in Hanover County, but he bought land in nearby Louisa to make himself eligible. Henry spent more than eight pounds sterling to get elected—seven pounds to buy twenty-eight gallons of rum, the rest for carrying it to the polls.

  As he entered the House in May 1765, Patrick Henry was not a typical member. His colleagues owned an average of eighteen hundred acres—to Henry’s six hundred acres of poor land—and held forty slaves. Usually their holdings were inherited. Half of the House leadership had been to college, most often William and Mary. But Boston’s division between Whigs and Tories was blurred in Williamsburg. Some of the one hundred and sixteen Burgesses who always supported the crown were called the Old Field Nags. Younger and more rebellious members were the High-Blooded Colts. Members of both groups might be from established Tidewater families, while others were called “Qo’hees,” came from the upper counties and wore buckskin to House sessions. Yet at home on their plantations, men from both factions spent their days out of doors and on horseback. They were often land poor, and they could be receptive to a democratic argument.

  Even so, the House had its own established hierarchy, and within three days of taking his seat Patrick Henry was affronting its leaders. One of them, John Robinson, was both the speaker and the colony’s treasurer, and he had come up with a plan for a Public Loan Office. No one knew then that Robinson had been lending public money to his friends and that the Loan Office was his way of covering those illegal debts. But, alerted by an instinct, Hen
ry listened dubiously to the argument that the office should extend credit to wealthy men who were momentarily strapped for cash. At the end, he rose to make his maiden speech.

  “What, sir?” he asked. “Is it proposed then to reclaim the spendthrift from his dissipation and extravagance by filling his pockets with money?”

  The members ignored his objection and approved the Loan Office.

  A few days later, Patrick Henry confronted the leadership again. Over the past year, the Burgesses had drafted earnest petitions against the Stamp Act. Now, with the current session ending and many members already returned home, word reached Williamsburg that the stamp duties would take effect in November. Only thirty-nine of the one hundred and sixteen members were still in the House as Henry scribbled out a set of resolutions on the blank page of an old lawbook. It was his twenty-ninth birthday, and he intended to celebrate with a speech.

  Henry first presented four resolutions that followed along the lines of Virginia’s earlier protests, although they were framed in much sharper language: The settlers had brought to Virginia all of the liberties of the people of Great Britain. The two royal charters granted by King James I had conferred on the colonists the same privileges as if they had been born in England and still lived there. Taxes must be levied on a people only by men they had chosen to represent them. This right of legislating their own affairs always had been recognized by Britain’s kings and her people. Henry then added a fifth resolution: Only a colony’s legislature could tax its citizens, and any attempt to transfer that power to another group would destroy freedom in Britain as well as in America.