Patriots

by A. J. Langguth

  Sons of Liberty broadside

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  “Yes,” said Kit Monk.

  “You are only frightened,” Brewer assured him.

  But a man named John Hickling had felt the gaping wound in Samuel Gray’s head, and, as the powder blew away, others in the crowd began to realize what had happened. Men who had withdrawn now edged forward warily to care for the wounded. The soldiers reloaded and cocked their muskets.

  Captain Preston rushed down the firing line, pushing the musket barrels toward the night sky. “Stop firing!” he ordered. Furiously, he demanded to know why his men had fired. They said that they had heard the word “Fire!” and thought it had come from him. At once, Preston understood the enormity of what had happened.

  Benjamin Burdick, who had run a British soldier off his property, inspected the body of Crispus Attucks and then walked directly to the line of soldiers and peered at them in the moonlight.

  “I want to see some faces that I may swear to another day,” Burdick said.

  Captain Preston, with the prospect of a murder trial vivid before him, said, “Perhaps, sir, you may.”

  Abigail Adams in 1763, the year before her marriage, and John Adams, about 1764

  TWO PORTRAITS: MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

  Trial

  1770

  JOHN ADAMS had joined a club of fellow lawyers, and on the fifth of March they were meeting in the South End when the alarm bells began to clang. The club members assumed that the town was on fire, snatched up their hats and cloaks and ran off to help fight the flames. Only when he was in the street did Adams learn that British soldiers had fired into a crowd. Adams and his wife had lost an infant daughter only a few weeks before and were awaiting the birth of another child, and he hurried home to be with his family. The route took him past a company of British troops with muskets on their shoulders and bayonets fixed. The soldiers had left a narrow path for a man of Adams’ stocky build, but he pushed forward, ignoring the soldiers’ menacing expressions as if they were a row of marble statues. By the time he reached his house in Cold Lane, the town seemed to be calming down for the night.

  At thirty-four, John Adams was nearing the age James Otis had been when he argued against the writs of assistance, but Adams was aware that he had not made the same impact on the province. Both men had come from rural backgrounds. Like Speaker Otis, Adams’ father had once been a shoemaker before he became a farmer. But differences in the two boys’ characters had shown up early. The young Otis had loved the classics. John Adams had found studying Latin so dull that he went to his father one day and asked to be excused from it.

  “Well, John,” his father said, “if Latin grammar does not suit you, you may try ditching. Perhaps that will. My meadow yonder needs a ditch.”

  Exhilarated by his escape, the boy threw himself into the digging. Within minutes, he realized that a shovel weighed more than a textbook. That first morning was the longest he had ever endured, and he rejoiced when the day finally ended. After the second morning, he wanted to tell his father that he had made a mistake, but pride wouldn’t let him. By nightfall, John asked to return to Latin. In August 1751, at fifteen, John entered Harvard College.

  During graduation ceremonies four years later, Harvard’s president singled out John as a first-rate scholar, and a minister from Worcester hired him as Latin master for his grammar school. Nothing about the job appealed to the young man except the pay. An escort came for him with a horse, and, before he was twenty, John Adams went off to become a provincial schoolteacher.

  His class quickly saw through Adams’ teaching method. He picked the brighter boys and told them to teach their classmates while he wrote voluminously at his desk. He was considered pious, and the other masters supposed that he was composing sermons. But Adams was writing to his former classmates, mourning the end of their days at Harvard.

  Some days he passed the time by imagining himself a dictator, with his students as famous generals and distinguished politicians. Then he remembered that his generals were three feet tall and many of his politicians still wore infant petticoats. Very soon he was considering routes of escape. He rejected the ministry because he thought a congregation’s first requirement in choosing a preacher was not piety, integrity, good sense or learning; it was stupidity. Medicine was possible, and he thought of making his name as a surgeon. The army took personal wealth or a rich patron. Yet military service had one great appeal: he could find out whether he was a hero or a coward.

  Adams dipped into lawbooks, went to court to hear the colony’s better lawyers, and became drawn to the bar. He saw its shortcomings, all the hours lost on meaningless writs and indictments, but the law seemed a quick, sure road to prosperity, and he apprenticed himself to a leading lawyer.

  During the next two years, Adams taught during the day and studied law at night. Over meals, his tutor was something of a freethinker, interested in debating religion more than the law. John Adams, with a prickly disposition, enjoyed their debates, and other learned men also engaged him in friendly arguments that exposed him to theories of equality and liberty. Adams, conservative by nature, contended that some persons could never enjoy complete suffrage—women and children, idiots and madmen, criminals and debtors. But he was listening and learning. Most of all, he was watching himself and the impression he was making.

  Although he lived in a province that banned the theater, Adams treated life as though it were a drama going on around him. In his diary he recreated each day’s scenes and dialogue, then stood apart and criticized the figure he cut on Worcester’s stage. Almost always it was a poor one. He was sharp-tongued when he should have been bland, he wrote. Insipid when he should have been witty. With women, he was tongue-tied and awkward. Worst of all, he was sure he was irredeemably lazy. Why couldn’t he be like Mr. Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, whom the best people in Worcester considered an industrious genius? But then, should he be worrying so much about fame? No! Man’s true goals must be piety and virtue.

  Nothing seemed to come easily for John Adams, and being admitted to the bar at Braintree became another ordeal when his law tutor did not go along to present him to the court. Jeremiah Gridley came to his rescue, offering to shepherd him through the formalities. Then Gridley said, “Mr. Adams, permit me to give you a little advice. In the first place, pursue the law itself, rather than the gain of it.” And, he added, don’t marry early.

  When that last advice made John Adams smile, Gridley asked whether he was engaged.

  Adams said he was perfectly disengaged. But he couldn’t vouch for how long he’d remain so.

  Gridley smiled in resignation. “An early marriage will probably put an end to your studies and will certainly involve you in expense.” He looked at his watch. “You have detained me here the whole forenoon and I must go to court.”

  But John Adams followed Gridley’s advice. He threw himself into more study even though he couldn’t always find the volumes he wanted. “No books,” he wrote during a low moment, “no time, no friends.” His studies might not make him rich, but they were a way of gaining respect. Adams wanted to end the casual insolence of colleagues like Robert Treat Paine, who once challenged him during an argument to cite the source of his opinion.

  Adams said, “Vinnius.”

  “Vinnius!” said Robert Paine. “You can’t understand a page of Vinnius!”

  He had no right to say that to me, John Adams complained to his diary. He knows nothing of me at all. “For the future, let me act the part of a critical spy upon him, not that of an open unsuspicious friend.”

  —

  His diary had become John Adams’ one intimate. He could dissect in its pages each new personality entering his life. Hannah Quincy, for example, usually managed to lead their banter to some provocative question about the relation between a husband and a wife. John Adams found Hannah more thoughtful than most young women and noted with approval that she was always reading. More often, thou
gh, he analyzed himself: “I have not conversed enough with the world to behave rightly.” People always seemed to be laughing at him. Adams talked with Robert Paine about Greek, which made Paine laugh. He told Samuel Quincy that he wanted to be a great man, which made Quincy laugh. He lectured young women on the folly of love, which made everyone laugh. Meanwhile he was neglecting his true duty. “Reputation ought to be the perpetual subject of my thoughts and of my behavior. How shall I gain a reputation!”

  Over the next half-dozen years, Adams became known as a competent lawyer, an acceptance that brought him neither riches nor fame. He lamented that never had a man conducted so much business—Yankees were litigious—for so little profit. At the same time, he continued to examine the available young women of the colony. He came close to proposing to Hannah Quincy, but finally chose Abigail Smith, daughter of a Congregational minister and born to the Puritan aristocracy. Abigail’s father had given her and her two sisters the freedom to read and think at a time when learning for a woman was unfashionable. Daughters of wealthy families were taught only to read and write, add and subtract, and possibly play a musical instrument. Hannah Quincy and James Otis’ witty sister, Mercy, were exceptions. Abigail Smith had been too delicate to attend even a dame school. But she read—poetry, fiction, The Spectator from London—and wrote long letters to her friends, who disguised themselves with names like “Calliope,” “Aspasia” and “Aurelia.” Over their four-year courtship, Abigail became “Diana” in her letters to Adams, who was “Lysander.”

  Adams, now twenty-eight, argued himself out of any doubts about marrying Abigail by entering a list of her virtues in his diary: “Tender feeling, sensible, friendly, a friend. Not an impudent, not an indelicate, not a disagreeable word or action. Prudent, modest, delicate, soft, sensible, obliging, active.” But at nineteen, Abigail was perplexed by the difference between the suitor she knew, ardent, kindly, sensitive, and her friends’ impression of him as stiff and formidable. It troubled her that her friends—and sometimes she herself—felt ill at ease with him. Abigail, though, had learned how to deal with Adams when he became pompous. Once he complained to her that she was too free in crossing her legs when she sat. “A gentleman,” Abigail replied, “has no business to concern himself about the legs of a lady.”

  If the world found him haughty or ill-tempered, Abigail Smith knew better. She saw the man of the diary, not the drawing room, and agreed to marry him. Her choice baffled her father’s congregation. John Adams, with a bland face that could have been carved from suet, was not distinguished enough in family or prospects to deserve a fine-featured beauty like their preacher’s daughter. The resentment grew until Abigail’s father based his first sermon after the wedding on a verse from Luke: “For John came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and ye say, he hath a devil.”

  John Adams did have a devil. It was his ambition. As the patriot cause spread, he had drafted Braintree’s brief against obeying the Stamp Act and had published well-received essays in the newspapers. But at the next election for selectmen from Braintree he was passed over, and he poured out his mortification to his diary.

  With marriage, however, Adams’ entries were less self-lacerating. He became more assured socially, although his politics remained in flux. When Joseph Warren urged him to take an active part in the Boston Town Meeting, Adams replied that those public appearances were the path to madness; Warren knew he meant James Otis. And Adams detested the Boston mob.

  When the patriot fervor waned in the later years of the 1760s, John Adams had pulled further from the fray. He did refuse a high post in the Admiralty Court because of his Whig principles, and the sight of British troops on Boston Common never stopped enraging him. But most of the time Adams was back to providing for his family. At Salem he defended a man charged with fathering a bastard and managed an acquittal after his client testified in court, “I fucked once, but I minded my pullbacks. I swear I did not get her with child.”

  In August 1769, Adams had accepted a dinner invitation from three hundred and fifty Sons of Liberty in Dorchester to mark the fourth anniversary of the Stamp Act protest. Adams knew that James Otis and Samuel Adams promoted the celebration hoping to revive the flagging patriot spirit. John Adams went only as an onlooker. His pleasure in the lawyers’ club was being marred in that same period by Otis and his dervish moods. “He talks so much,” Adams wrote in his diary, “and takes up so much of our time, and fills it with trash, obsceneness, profaneness, nonsense and distraction that we have no [time] left for rational amusements or inquiries.”

  That had been John Adams’ life on the eve of the shootings in Boston. He remained convinced that moral laws made men equal and independent, but thought he was realistic about the physical and mental differences among them. Adams’ self-appraisal had led him to decide that the supreme urges of the human race were a need for fame and a love of power.

  —

  The morning after the fatal shootings on King Street, John Adams was sitting in his office near the steps of Town House when James Forrest knocked at his door. Born in Ireland, Forrest was a successful merchant and a staunch Tory. With tears pouring down his cheeks, he said he had come with a very solemn message from a very unfortunate man. Adams, who knew Forrest slightly, watched his florid weeping and recalled that he was often called the Irish Infant. His message was from Captain Preston, who was in prison and needed legal counsel but could get none.

  Thomas Hutchinson

  MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

  Adams didn’t know that it was Thomas Hutchinson who had recommended him to Preston, along with another young patriot lawyer, Josiah Quincy. The previous night Hutchinson had acquitted himself well, hurrying at first report to the site of the shooting. Once there, he found the noise from the crowd so loud that he couldn’t question Captain Preston. With Bostonians pressing in on them, the acting governor went to the balcony of Town House and promised that justice would be done. “The law shall have its course!” Hutchinson cried. “I will live and die by the law!”

  After the people had gone home, Hutchinson had stayed on for most of the night, sending out justices of the peace to take depositions from eyewitnesses. By 3 A.M. Captain Preston had agreed to surrender, and the long night ended as he was led to jail.

  The patriots could only speculate about why Hutchinson would recommend Quincy and John Adams. Perhaps if either of them refused, it might be taken as proof that the patriots put their politics above justice, and yet if they accepted, their prestige might wane among the Sons of Liberty. Or Hutchinson may simply have observed John Adams in court and believed he was the best lawyer for so difficult a case. After the Liberty affair, the customs officers had sued John Hancock for smuggling, and Hancock had hired John Adams to defend him. The case had become painful drudgery for Adams as it dragged on throughout the winter, but at last the government had dropped its charges.

  So it wasn’t necessarily a Tory trick that Forrest was standing before him, telling him that Josiah Quincy had said he would represent Preston and his men only if Adams would join the defense.

  Forrest must understand, Adams told him, that this case would be as important as any ever tried in any court or country of the world. An accused person with his life at stake should have the counsel of his choice. But Captain Preston must expect from Adams no art or sophistry or prevarication, nothing more than fact, evidence and what the law would justify.

  Forrest assured him that Captain Preston desired nothing more. From all that he had heard of John Adams, Preston had said, he could trust his life to him. “And,” Forrest added, “as God Almighty is my judge, I believe him to be an innocent man.”

  “That,” John Adams reminded him, “must be ascertained by his trial, and if he cannot have a fair trial of that issue without my assistance, without hesitation he shall have it.”

  Forrest offered him a single guinea as retainer and Adams accepted it. Money was not the issue.

  As John Adams took on Preston’s d
efense, Samuel Adams was savoring the sweetest moment in a lifetime of political agitating. He and the other patriots were referring to the killings the previous night as “the Boston Massacre,” and today thousands of men were crowding into Faneuil Hall, echoing Adams’ demand of the past two years: the British troops must leave Boston. At Town House, Thomas Hutchinson had to push his way through a delegation of Boston selectmen in order to meet with his Council. The Council members proved to be divided, but several members urged Hutchinson to order the troops out of town. He refused. The selectmen were admitted to the chamber and told Hutchinson of their fears. When they finished, he repeated that he did not have the power to order Colonel Dalrymple to remove his forces to Castle William.

  Faced with that impasse, the meeting at Faneuil Hall sent a messenger to tell the selectmen to return there. Samuel Adams had organized a committee that would call on the acting governor and impress the people’s will on him even more urgently. The crowd at the hall had now reached three thousand, though the number of legal voters in Boston was only half that number. This time, Samuel Adams decided against sending other men to do his bidding. He and John Hancock and other leaders would confront Hutchinson directly. Hutchinson braced for the encounter by asking both Colonel Dalrymple and Colonel Carr to remain at his side.

  The delegates were shown in. They took off their gold-laced hats from large white wigs and placed them on the table in front of them. When they had laid down their ultimatum, they retired to a nearby room while Hutchinson once again canvassed his Council. Now all but two members were urging him to give in. Hutchinson remained adamant. At that point, Colonel Dalrymple proposed a compromise. Since the Twenty-ninth Regiment was especially obnoxious to the Bostonians, and since the orders for that regiment originally called for them to be billeted at Castle William, Dalrymple was prepared to move them there while he awaited instructions from General Gage in New York.