For the first time, the customs officials thought they could crack down forcefully. A crown ship, the H.M.S. Romney, with fifty guns, had entered the harbor in May and dropped anchor six hundred feet from shore. Armed with Kirk’s testimony and reassured by the gunship, the commissioners made their move. Near dusk, while many workers were leaving the docks, the commissioners boarded the Liberty and seized her as punishment for the false tax declaration.
Around the dock, the crowd’s mood was ominous. Even before the boarding, resentment against the Romney’s British crew had been running high. On Sunday an officer had prevented a group of impressed men from jumping ship, and the Romney’s captain, John Corner, had been heard calling Boston “a blackguard town ruled by mobs.” Now there were clearly enough men on the dock to retake Hancock’s sloop and sail it to safety. Seeing the danger, the customs men signaled the Romney to send barges of troops armed with bayonets. As the patriots protested, the Liberty was towed out to the Romney and secured under her guns.
That provocation once again transformed the crowd on the wharf into a mob. Throwing stones and swinging clubs, it burst upon the customs officials. Joseph Harrison, a collector, was beaten badly. His son, Richard, a customs clerk, was dragged through the streets by his hair. Thomas Irving, inspector of imports and exports, escaped with his sword broken and his clothes ripped. John Hancock’s Madeira, including an especially rich vintage he had ordered for his own table, disappeared from the pier.
About 10 P.M., the mob’s leaders spotted Harrison’s large pleasure boat at the wharf. Cheering, they dragged it to the Common and set it on fire. Moving across the open grass, the throng milled around the houses of Harrison and Benjamin Hallowell, the comptroller of customs, yowling and breaking windows. An Englishwoman staying with one of the commissioners thought the hideous noise sounded like attacking Indians. As she was packing her valuables and preparing to flee, she heard one of the leaders call out to the mob to stop its rampage. “We will defend our liberties and property by the strength of our arm and the help of our God. To your tents, O Israel.”
The next morning was quiet, but the commissioners decided that they were no longer safe in Boston and sent a delegate to Governor Bernard. He authorized the customs officers and their families to leave the harbor in a barge and take refuge on the Romney. Three days later, the party moved to unassailable quarters at Castle William, three miles into the harbor. Thomas Hutchinson saw to their comfort at the castle, providing food and a steady stream of Tory dinner guests.
These days, the Liberty Tree had a towering pole rising up through its branches. On Tuesday at 10 A.M., banners were flying from the top of the pole, and despite wet and disagreeable weather so many people had gathered at the trunk that the entire assembly moved a half mile to larger quarters at Faneuil Hall. Every time meetings were moved from the tree, there would be a stirring parade through the center of town and past the governor’s chambers.
At Faneuil Hall, the patriots made their protest legitimate by calling a Town Meeting for three o’clock that afternoon, and when even more people turned up than could fit inside, they moved to the lofty Old South Meeting House. The show of support for Hancock did not surprise John Adams. He calculated that a thousand Boston families depended for food every day of the year on Hancock’s business. Add to that the new firemen’s rig that Hancock had bought for the town and the thousand pounds sterling he had contributed to the Brattle Street Meeting House, and John Hancock was New England’s most popular man.
As the town debated its next step at the Old South, the commissioners across the harbor at Castle William were piecing together rumors to send to General Thomas Gage, the British commander in New York. They had heard that one speaker told the Town Meeting that “he hoped, and believed, that they would one and all resist, even unto blood” to defend Boston’s liberty. If that was Samuel Adams, he was finally saying aloud what he had been too discreet to suggest even to his closest allies. A Tory innkeeper, Richard Sylvester, claimed that on the day after the Liberty was taken Samuel Adams challenged a band of patriots to join him in an uprising: “If you are men, behave like men. Let us take up arms immediately and be free and seize all the king’s officers. We should be joined with thirty thousand men from the country with their knapsacks and bayonets fixed.”
Even if Samuel Adams was aroused to that pitch, he failed to sway his listeners at the Town Meeting. They voted instead to send a delegation to the governor, accusing the Romney of obstructing their harbor and threatening them with famine.
With two other men, John Hancock left the Meeting to ask Francis Bernard when he would receive the delegation. They found that the governor had left for his house in Roxbury, and the twenty-one delegates boarded eleven chaises and followed him there. They were dressed according to their means, Hancock in damask lined with silk, Samuel Adams in his worn plainspun. Heading the delegation was the oily Royall Tyler. Greeting him was an equally unctuous Francis Bernard. The governor exerted himself to charm the delegates he didn’t know and had wine passed around as he listened to their presentation. The delegates had become subdued in the governor’s presence, and they raised no objection when he said that he preferred to give his answer the next day, in writing. Bowing them out, Bernard was impressed with his own suave manners.
The next day his written answer came: since the Romney was not his to command, he could not order it to leave Boston. James Otis reported that response to the Town Meeting and mentioned the governor’s graciousness. He truly believed, Otis said, that Bernard wished the colony well. When Bernard’s spies reported that rare compliment, the governor promptly passed it on to the king’s ministers in London. “Just at this time I am popular,” Bernard wrote on June 16. “I do not expect to enjoy it a week.”
He would enjoy it five days.
—
During the last session of the Massachusetts House, Otis and Samuel Adams had suggested trying to unite the colonies by sending them a letter opposing the Townshend Acts. Most House members had rejected the idea since London was sure to take the letter as a provocation, possibly even an invitation to another rebellious gathering like the Stamp Act congress. When the proposal was rejected two to one, Governor Bernard was delighted that two men wouldn’t again be inflaming a whole continent.
But, like the Burgesses of Virginia, who were always impatient to leave Williamsburg for their plantations, Boston’s farmers wanted to get back to their crops. Men from the country were inclined to be conservative, and Bernard watched his allies drift away from Boston while his enemies worked toward a majority. On February 4, 1768, the House appointed Samuel Adams, Otis, Thomas Cushing and Joseph Hawley to write a circular letter. A sparsely attended session approved the letter and sent it on to the other colonies.
The letter marked a shift in the patriots’ argument. Adams and Otis now said that Parliament had no right to impose even external taxes if their sole purpose was to raise money. Levying taxes to pay the salaries of governors and judges had become a new violation of natural law. The letter stopped far short of rejecting Parliament’s authority altogether. The patriots were still not ready to say that England couldn’t use taxation to regulate trade. Instead, they recognized Parliament as the “supreme legislative power over the whole Empire.” John Adams was surprised that his cousin would make that concession, and he blamed the vacillating Otis. Certainly Otis was willing to take credit for the letter. To a friend who asked about their progress, he replied, “They are nearly ready. I have written them all and handed them over to Sam Adams to quieuvicue them”—Otis’ term for the editing.
During the months when America was debating the letter, King George was setting up a new impediment to reconciliation with the colonies. At the age of forty-one, Champagne Charley Townshend had died of a lingering fever, possibly typhoid. To replace him as chancellor of the exchequer, the king appointed Lord North, who regretted the repeal of the Stamp Act and believed that the colonies were on the brink of mutiny. Early in 17
68, four months after North’s appointment, the king authorized a new office, a secretary of state for colonial affairs. That post went to Lord Hillsborough, a man who thoroughly endorsed Lord North’s policies. When Hillsborough received the Massachusetts circular letter, he took it at once to George III. Acting for the king, Hillsborough then, in April 1768, wrote to warn each colonial governor that his legislature must ignore the Massachusetts letter, “which will be treating it with the contempt it deserves.” Hillsborough also told Francis Bernard that the Massachusetts House must either disavow the letter or Bernard must dissolve the House.
—
On June 21, five days after Governor Bernard congratulated himself on winning over Otis and the Town Meeting, he had to bring that peremptory message to the legislature. Having heard the king’s demand, the representatives demanded to see Hillsborough’s letter. By that time, Samuel Adams and the Boston Gazette had convinced the patriots that Bernard’s letters to London did not reflect a fair picture of Boston’s mood, and the House asked that Bernard also turn over his letters to Hillsborough. The governor responded as the patriots knew he would: “You may assure yourselves that I shall never make public my letters to his majesty’s ministers, but upon my own motion and for my own reasons.”
In that strained atmosphere, Otis took the House floor. “Who are these ministers?” he demanded. “The very frippery and foppery of France, the mere outsides of monkeys!” He added that the king appointed only boys as his ministers, and they had no education at all except for traveling through France, where they picked up slavish attitudes. Here Otis paused to congratulate himself and his allies: Not a person in England was capable of composing so elegant and so pure a piece of writing as the petitions that the House had passed during its last session. Then he moved on to accuse Parliament of being “a parcel of button-makers, pin-makers, horse jockeys, gamesters, pensioners, pimps and whoremasters.” The public gallery was jammed and more men were listening at the doors as Otis began to praise Oliver Cromwell, not least for murdering a king. But however carried away, Otis stopped short of abusing George III. The speech was a two-hour violent rant, and Bernard collected it all from his spies and sent it off to London to let the Parliament know what sort of men he had to contend with.
Other arguments in the House that day were quieter but as determined. Why should this session undo a measure passed during the last one? By now, the circular letters had become a historical fact. They had appeared in newspapers. Many colonies had already answered them. It was up to the world to judge the merit of the House’s position.
Samuel Adams composed the House’s response to Governor Bernard. “We have now only to inform your Excellency that this House have voted not to rescind, as required, the resolution of the last House; and that upon a division on the question, there were 92 nays and 17 yeas.” The members who had voted against rescinding the letter, Adams added, were moved by their duty to God, their king and their country, and their posterity. They ardently wished and humbly prayed that in the future the governor would be guided by those same principles.
—
Receiving the insolent message, Bernard immediately recognized its author. “Samuel Adams!” he had written about another example of Adams’ work. “Every dip of his pen stings like a horned snake.” The next day, he dissolved the House. The patriots had moved another square forward in a game being played without rules or precedent on both sides of the Atlantic.
The patriots took the number “92” as a new rallying cry. The names of the seventeen dissenters were posted at the Liberty Tree. In a letter written on July 4, 1768, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania sent Otis a song he had composed with Arthur Lee of Virginia. One couplet ran:
Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all,
By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall.
Besides the circular letter, Samuel Adams and the patriots had launched three other campaigns against the Townshend Acts. Their crusade for a heightened sense of public morality was proving the least effective. Adams relished his reputation as a Puritan, and he desired a future in which the gallant citizens of his colony would shun foppery and carousing. He had been distressed by the customs commissioners, who he thought were importing a touch of London high life to Boston. At the Peacock Tavern the drinking often went on until four in the morning, and after one revel Thomas Hutchinson had been amused to see the commissioners and their ladies nursing hangovers. One woman’s rosy Nova Scotia complexion had turned so pale and sickly she might have been from South Carolina, and another bright and talkative wife had become noticeably taciturn. “Poor Paxton’s usual refreshing nap after dinner,” Hutchinson wrote to a friend, “was turned into a waking coma, more insensible with his eyes open than he used to be when they were shut.” He added that he only wished that the same misery could be visited on James Otis, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, William Molineux and another fifty patriots he could name.
Samuel Adams was concerned that Hutchinson might get his wish and the patriots would succumb to sodden and worldly pastimes. At first the Whigs had boycotted the commissioners’ parties, but slowly the attraction of fine clothes, gilded carriages and sumptuous banquets had eroded their high principles. Adams heard that Whig wives and Tory gentlemen were drinking punch together and dancing the minuet. When he complained that it was a “bad thing for Boston to have so many gay idle people in it,” only the town’s clergymen seemed to listen. The staunchest Sons of Liberty set up a “Liberty Assembly” that would permit dancing but exclude the commissioners and their Tory friends. Even so, it was one battle that Samuel Adams had been losing up to the moment the mob sent the commissioners fleeing to Castle William.
Another of his tactics was not rooted in Adams’ morality but in his sense of expediency. He turned to exploiting the anti-Catholic sentiment that ran deep throughout the colony. Writing as “A Puritan” in the Boston Gazette, he claimed that popery was becoming even more of a threat to New England than the Townshend Acts, and he equated support for Bernard with allegiance to Rome. He divided towns by the way their delegates voted in the House—“Protestant” towns, Boston being the leading one, or such “popish” towns as Hatfield, Salem and Springfield. Adams was appealing to instincts firmly rooted in Boston. The first book that children in the colony read was the New England Primer, whose frontispiece showed the Pope being pierced with darts.
The most direct of Adams’ campaigns worked best. From the time the acts took effect, November 20, 1767, many Bostonians had been boycotting luxury goods from Britain by signing a “nonimportation agreement.” At the same time, they were trying to produce more of their own goods throughout the province. During the brief experiment of 1765, the patriots had seen that a boycott could pinch English nerves quickly and severely. Now stricter enforcement at the customs offices was drawing off hard currency from America, and bad times were spreading across the colonies. A ban on luxury imports was easy to maintain. As far away as Virginia, George Washington, the planter and retired colonel, welcomed the boycott because it gave his neighbors who were plagued by debt an acceptable excuse for cutting back on their lavish expenses.
The agreement drafted by Boston was relatively mild. By signing, a person promised to give a “constant preference” to those merchants who didn’t import from London. New York’s version was more stringent—a total boycott of the shops that continued to bring in British goods. To many patriots, those traders who didn’t sign were traitors.
Andrew Oliver had signed the nonimportation agreement on behalf of the family firm, but his brother Peter noticed the signatures of porters and washerwomen among those who were agreeing not to import silks, velvets, coaches and chariots. The patriots were insisting that any banned goods that arrived at the port–including all ready-made apparel, furniture and loaf sugar—be crated up and returned to London. But Peter Oliver claimed that mobs sometimes gathered at the pier, made off with the imported finery and shipped back wood shavings, brickbats and rancid bacon. He also accused
the patriot merchants of drawing on their experience as smugglers to evade the boycott. They signed the agreement but brought in the prohibited items anyway, he charged. A Tory newspaper began running the names of those double-dealers.
—
Throughout the maneuvering, the Tories believed that they held one trump card. When London’s patience was finally exhausted, British troops would land in Boston, disband the Sons of Liberty, close the Town Meetings and crush the mob. Ever since the Stamp Act riots, Francis Bernard had been torn about calling for those troops. On the one hand, he was sure he had to have them to save his administration. But he knew that as soon as the town heard that troops were on their way, the mob would take vengeance against him. As Adams and Otis had suspected, Bernard was indeed trying to influence London against the patriots. In letters to the king’s ministers, the governor poured out his fears at the same time that Samuel Adams was assuring Hillsborough that the Massachusetts circular letter had been respectful, not at all seditious, and that whoever told him otherwise was misinforming him. But in London, Bernard’s dire warnings rang truer than Adams’ bland reassurances.
Until troops could somehow be inveigled into the colony, there seemed to be no limit to the abuse Bernard would have to endure. One of Samuel Adams’ trustiest lieutenants, Joseph Warren, published as scathing an attack on Bernard as the Boston Gazette had yet dared to print. Writing as “A True Patriot,” the twenty-seven-year-old physician told the governor, “We have known for a long time your enmity to this province. We have had full proof of your cruelty to a loyal people. No age has, perhaps, furnished a more glaring instance of obstinate perseverance in the path of malice.” For good measure, Dr. Warren summed up the governor as a man “totally abandoned to wickedness,” concluding with a rhyme:
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