John Gridley, a nephew of the well-known lawyer, was walking in King Street and had paused by the open door when he heard Otis’ challenge. As the two men fought, Robinson’s friends began to push Otis and hold his arms. Gridley shouted that it was a dirty thing to treat a man that way, and he rushed in between Otis and Robinson. Someone grabbed Gridley by the shoulder. He pulled away and seized Robinson by the collar. When the commissioner drew back, his coat was torn down to its pockets. A man standing on a bench struck Gridley twice on the head with a weapon, and he was blinded by his own blood. Flailing about, Gridley took a blow on his right hand that broke his wrist. He heard men shouting “Kill him!” and knew they meant Otis.
Gridley was pushed out of the coffeehouse. Fighting his way back inside, he picked up a walking stick from the floor. A lamp had been broken or snuffed out, but one witness saw men holding Otis while Robinson struck him in the face. Another blow had laid open the bone of Otis’ forehead. Benjamin Hallowell, the comptroller, succeeded in separating the two men. Gridley reached Otis and tried to defend him with his good left hand. But the fight was over. Otis went off to have his wounds dressed.
Painful as the set-to had been for Otis, it was a grim blessing to the patriots. From that night on, Otis’ mad extravagances could be blamed on his martyrdom. John Adams knew better. Passing an evening with Otis two weeks after the attack, he found him, if anything, more cheerful and subdued and consequently better company than he had been for months. But Boston’s sympathies lay with Otis. The Boston Gazette announced that the brawl had been an assassination attempt. Otis endorsed that interpretation and sued Robinson for three thousand pounds in damages, charging him with “very unfair play.” A month after the attack, Robinson married a Boston merchant’s daughter and sailed for England, leaving his father-in-law to see the case through court. Years later, although Otis refused a cash settlement, Robinson was ordered to pay all costs.
Of the chief Tory figures, William Browne fared the worst. Many patriots were convinced that he had struck the blow that broke Gridley’s wrist, and they became more hostile to him than to Robinson. Browne was forced to hide the next day in a back room of the coffeehouse until late in the afternoon, when the patriots found him and bore him to Faneuil Hall for a preliminary hearing. Two thousand spectators jammed the hall, and when James Murray, a justice considered friendly to Browne, arrived, they pushed him back each time he tried to enter. Finally, amid jeers and boos—to which Murray responded with courtly bows–he was permitted inside.
The judges held Browne on charges of assault. When no one would stand his bail, Justice Murray announced that he did not approve of Gridley’s beating but would post the bond. When Murray made his way to the door, someone snatched off his wig and other men tried to trip him. His friends shielded the bald-headed justice as he moved toward his house, followed by men bearing his wig on a pole. As Murray disappeared inside, some men in the mob remembered that John Mein had also been at the coffeehouse the previous night. They rushed to his bookstore and to the shop where he printed his Tory newspaper. At each place the mob’s leaders smeared Mein’s signs with a mixture of excrement and urine, which they called “Hillsborough’s paint.”
—
While those upheavals were going on in Boston, a fourteen-year-old merchant’s apprentice sat at his desk in the West Indies, praying to be delivered from a life of trade. Alexander Hamilton was a small and slender boy with no prospects for the glory he craved. His beautiful mother, Rachel, had been pressed into marriage at sixteen with a rich cotton farmer from Copenhagen, but within a few years he had charged her with adultery. Under the Danish laws that governed the island of St. Croix, he had her jailed. Upon her release, Rachel Lavien or Levine or Lawein—her planter husband had been careless about the spelling of his name-left him with their small son, Peter, and went to live with her mother. Two years after the separation, when Rachel was in her early twenties, she met James Hamilton, who was ten years older. The handsome fourth son of a Scottish laird, he had come to make his fortune on the island.
In England, divorce took an act of Parliament, but in the West Indies people were more inclined to shrug away formalities. Hamilton lived with Rachel Lavien long enough to give her two sons and fritter away her small inheritance. He drifted away, but Rachel remained an attractive and popular woman despite her two fatherless children. James was ten when Hamilton left, Alexander two years younger. Rachel opened a small store, and Alexander helped her to run it until her death five years later. Rachel’s family did what they could for the boys. James was apprenticed to a carpenter. Alexander was sent to help a thriving island merchant.
At school Alexander had enjoyed his brief exposure to the classics. He spoke French well and went regularly to a Jewish schoolmistress who taught him the Decalogue in Hebrew. He wanted to become a great captain of war, but he was stuck forever behind a desk. Alexander poured out his frustrations in November 1769 in a letter to his favorite cousin, Ned Stevens, who had gone to New York to study medicine.
“For to confess my weakness, Ned,” Alexander wrote, “my ambition is prevalent, so that I contemn the groveling condition of a clerk, or the like, to which the future condemns me and would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station.”
Alexander Hamilton knew how absurd his self-pity might sound in New York, and he asked his cousin not to mock him. “I shall conclude by saying, I wish there was a war.”
“The Bloody Massacre,” by Paul Revere
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Massacre
1770
SAMUEL ADAMS was hardening the lines. When more cargo from London arrived in early October 1769, the organizers of the nonimportation agreement demanded that it be locked up until the agreement expired on New Year’s Day. Later that month, Adams also persuaded a special Town Meeting that any merchant who had continued to import goods should be considered an enemy of the people. Someone protested that several men who had rejected the agreement were now ready to sign it. For such men it was too late, Adams said. “God perhaps might possibly forgive them, but I and the rest of the people never could.”
Adams had come prepared with a list of those he wanted stigmatized, and high on the list was the Tory publisher John Mein. For the past three months Mein had been printing the names of patriot merchants who claimed to support the agreement as they went on importing and selling the forbidden goods. Adams disliked seeing those lists, because he was more concerned with defending patriot reputations than with punishing a few backsliders. One firm that Mein didn’t name was Thomas Hutchinson’s, which was building a secret stockpile of tea against the day it could be sold openly. Hutchinson handled those transactions himself and wrote to London in code.
What Mein spared Hutchinson he gave double to John Hancock. In Mein’s Chronicle James Otis was dismissed as “Muddlehead,” but Hancock was “Johnny Dupe, Esq., alias the Milch-cow,” for the way the patriots were milking him. The Tories often said that Samuel Adams might write the letters but John Hancock paid the postage. The mockery had spread far enough to rankle Hancock, and Mein elaborated on it. Hancock was “a good-natured young man with long ears—a silly conceited grin on his countenance—a fool’s cap on his head.” The Chronicle said that Hancock also wore a blindfold so that he couldn’t see who was rifling his pockets.
Two days after that attack appeared, Mein and his partner, John Fleeming, set out along King Street for Mein’s print shop. Both men had begun to carry guns since Mein was named an enemy of the town. Now twenty men surrounded them, including the hot-tempered William Molineux and a merchant named Edward Davis. The patriots began to shout at Mein, and Davis poked Mein in the ribs with his cane.
Mein pulled out his pistol and cocked it and, with Fleeming at his side, backed up King Street, shouting that he would shoot the first man who touched him. The crowd pursued him but kept out of range of his weapon. “Knock him down!” some cried, and “Kill him!” With bits of brick flying,
Mein and Fleeming reached the British sentries at the Main Guard station near Town House. Those soldiers let the two men slip to safety behind them. Mein would have escaped injury altogether except for Thomas Marshall, a tailor, who had picked up a heavy shovel during the flight up King Street. Marshall delivered a blow that gashed Mein’s shoulder. In the melee Fleeming’s pistol discharged, but no one was injured.
As a crowd of two hundred clamored outside the guardhouse, Mein sent a message to Hutchinson, demanding that the law come to his aid, but meanwhile Molineux and Samuel Adams went to a justice of the peace and applied for a warrant to arrest Mein for firing his pistol during a peaceable assembly. They were accusing the wrong man, but the justice issued the warrant. When they showed up with it at the guardhouse, Mein hid in the attic while Adams and the others searched for him. After they had left, Mein borrowed a British uniform and escaped to Colonel Dalrymple’s house.
The episode had proved to both sides how severely limited Thomas Hutchinson’s new authority was. Despite prodding by Mein, who remained in hiding, the acting governor did not call out British soldiers to protect him. Hutchinson’s Council refused to authorize the use of British troops to put down a disturbance. On Pope’s Day John Mein snuck aboard a British ship, and he sailed for London ten days later. Reflecting on the mob that had milled in front of his guardhouse, Colonel Dalrymple realized that the crisis he had been expecting was coming on very fast.
—
When the nonimportation agreement ended officially, on New Year’s Day, 1770, Thomas Hutchinson and his two sons were eager to begin turning a profit. But the boycott’s organizers wanted to punish those who had been stockpiling goods, and they ruled that nothing should go on sale before the time it took a ship to sail to London and return. Hutchinson’s sons rejected that new restriction. They broke off the locks that the Committee of Inspection had fastened to the doors of their warehouses and moved the tea to a hiding place.
Faced with that defiance, Samuel Adams arranged a mass meeting at Faneuil Hall. The patriots voted unanimously to have William Molineux lead a delegation ordering merchants to obey the extension. The first trader they approached, William Jackson, barred his doors, and the delegation shouted at him for a while but went away.
Jackson had heard that the Hutchinsons might capitulate and turn over their tea, and he hurried to their house, where Thomas Junior, thirty years old, and Elisha, twenty-five, lived with their father. The Hutchinsons agreed to hold firm. The next morning they sent away the wagons that the patriots had brought to collect the tea. Back at Faneuil Hall, James Otis spoke. No one could understand him. William Molineux was determined to lead a demonstration to Hutchinson’s house, but Otis, John Hancock and other prominent patriots refused to join him. The acting governor now represented the king; any appearance of coercion could mark the patriots as traitors. Emotion ran high until Molineux leaped up, announced he was leaving and hinted at suicide. Thomas Young, a patriot doctor, cried out, “Stop, Mr. Molineux! Stop, Mr. Molineux! For the love of God, stop, Mr. Molineux! Gentlemen, if Mr. Molineux leaves us, we are forever undone! This day is the last dawn of liberty we ever shall see.”
Molineux returned, and Otis and Adams agreed to join a committee that would go to the Hutchinsons. A thousand men and boys followed as they marched to the North End. From a window, Hutchinson asked the leaders what they wanted. Molineux said, “It is not you but your sons we desire to see.”
One of the sons came to stand beside his father at the window. Hutchinson invoked the king’s authority and warned the crowd to leave. No one moved. Hutchinson chided Otis for lending himself to an illegal assembly. The acting governor said that he could make out six or seven of the men who had helped to tear down his house four and a half years before. “Gentlemen,” Hutchinson said, “when I was attacked before, I was a private person. I am now the representative of the greatest monarch on earth, whose majesty you affront in thus treating my person.”
At that the delegation backed away. But after they left, Hutchinson encountered more resistance. He wanted to use troops to disband Samuel Adams’ irregular assemblies in Faneuil Hall, but the Council continued to refuse. When they saw Hutchinson’s helplessness, his fellow Tories persuaded him to give in. Hutchinson capitulated completely. The next morning he sent word to Faneuil Hall that he would see that his sons turned over their tea, along with any money they had received from that already sold. It was the bitterest moment of Hutchinson’s political life. Even the destruction of his house, he wrote afterward, had not distressed him as much.
—
The patriots began taking even bolder measures against traders who refused to bow to them. They pointed a large wooden hand labeled “Importer!” at offending shops. One of them belonged to Theophilus Lillie, who had refused to join the boycott, saying, “I’d rather be a slave under one master than under a hundred or more. At least, with one, I might be able to please him.”
Despite that refusal, Lillie was regarded as a harmless man, but his neighbor, Ebenezer Richardson, was a known informer for the Custom House. When the crowd caught Richardson trying to pull down the wooden hand pointing at Lillie, they attacked him with stones and dirt. Disappearing into his house, Richardson swore to the patriot leaders, “By the eternal God, I’ll make it too hot for you before night.”
One of the patriots, Thomas Knox, shouted after him, “Come out, you damn son of a bitch! I’ll have your heart out! Your liver out!”
Richardson came to his door and tried to run off a swarm of boys. Leave, he said, or he would make a lane through them. The boys answered that King Street was a public place and they wouldn’t go. Thomas Hutchinson heard of the disturbance and gave Sheriff Greenleaf a direct order to break up the crowd. Greenleaf said he didn’t think it was safe to try.
Back inside with his family, Richardson saw a stone hurtle through a window and strike his wife. He went upstairs, rested his musket barrel on a windowsill and fired down into the crowd. A boy of eleven, Christopher Snider, was just bending to pick up a rock when a cluster of small pellets tore into his chest.
At the sound of the shot, the bell of the church on Hanover Street began to toll, and from all over Boston men rushed to Richardson’s house. Trapped upstairs, he held off the crowd with a cutlass. “Damn their blood,” he said. “I don’t care what I’ve done.”
Richardson might have been lynched, although—for all their loud oaths—the patriots had never killed anyone. Molineux persuaded the crowd to bring Richardson before a justice of the peace. At Faneuil Hall, he was charged with firing at Snider with swanshot. That evening the boy died.
Over the weekend, Samuel Adams and his colleagues organized the largest funeral the American continent had ever seen. Snowdrifts from a blizzard on Saturday did not stop their procession late Monday afternoon from the Liberty Tree to the Old Granary Burying Ground. First five hundred schoolchildren marched two by two. Some carried banners that read in Latin, “Innocence itself is nowhere safe!” Then came six young men bearing the coffin, followed by family and friends and two thousand citizens of Boston.
Thomas Hutchinson watched unmoved. “The boy that was killed was the son of a poor German,” he wrote, disturbed by the way the town was being manipulated. “A grand funeral was, however, judged very proper for him.”
—
Four days later, toward noon on Friday, March 2, 1770, William Green was working out of doors with a group of men who were braiding hemp for John Gray. As one of Boston’s largest ropemakers, Gray hired unskilled workmen by the day, and when soldiers from the British regiments wanted to pick up extra money they would spend off-duty hours at the ropewalks. These days work was scarce, and Bostonians resented the competition.
Patrick Walker of the Twenty-ninth Regiment was approaching the walk when William Green hailed him: “Soldier, do you want work?”
“Yes, I do, faith,” said Walker.
“Well, then,” said Green, “go and clean out my shithouse.”
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p; “Empty it yourself,” the soldier said.
After a few curses, Private Walker swore by the Holy Ghost that he would be avenged. He rushed at Green and the other ropemakers, but they made short work of him. Nicholas Ferriter knocked him down. John Wilson snatched up a bare cutlass that had fallen out of Walker’s coat. Humiliated, Walker fled to his barracks.
It was a minor incident compared with the night John Mein was driven up King Street or Ebenezer Richardson’s shooting of Christopher Snider. But it wasn’t over.
At the barracks, Patrick Walker recruited eight or nine fellow troopers, and within twenty minutes they were back at Gray’s ropeworks, armed with clubs. They searched out Green and his friends and demanded to know why they had roughed up Walker. As their answer the ropemakers shouted for reinforcements and threw the soldiers off the premises.
John Hill, an elderly justice of the peace, had presided over many hearings for unruly British soldiers. He was watching now from a nearby window as the British troopers returned, this time in a gang of forty men. Hill called to a tall Negro drummer who was leading them, “You black rascal! What have you to do with white people’s quarrels?”
“I suppose,” the drummer replied, “I may look on.”
Hill came outside and ordered everyone to go home. Instead, the soldiers rushed at a group of ropemakers who were gathered around a tar barrel and beat them with clubs. But the workmen had their own weapons—the heavy wooden slats they used for twisting rope. Once again, the soldiers were forced to run back to the barracks. Justice Hill prevailed on the Bostonians not to follow after them.
The next day, Saturday, another fracas at another ropeworks, MacNeil’s, ended the same way. Three grenadiers from the Twenty-ninth Regiment were routed, one of them with a fractured skull. A worker suspected that another British soldier had followed him to his boardinghouse, and he asked his landlord, a barber named Benjamin Burdick, to look out the window. Burdick said he saw a soldier loitering near the house.
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