Patriots
Page 21
“Then there’s Mr. Cushing,” said the king. “I remember his name a long time. Is he not a great man of the party?”
“He has been many years speaker. But a speaker, sir, is not always the person of the greatest influence.” Hutchinson said it was Mr. Samuel Adams who was considered the opposer of government in New England.
“What gave him his importance?” the king asked.
“A great pretended zeal for liberty,” Hutchinson answered, “and a most inflexible natural temper.”
After some minutes while the king tried to puzzle out who the Congregationalists were and what they stood for, he changed the subject. “Pray, Mr. Hutchinson, does population greatly increase in your province?”
“Very rapidly, sir. I used to think that Dr. Franklin, who has taken much pains in his calculations, carried it too far when he supposed the inhabitants of America, from their natural increase, doubled their number in twenty-five years, but I rather think now that he did not.” Massachusetts seemed to have doubled in that time, Hutchinson said, and there weren’t enough settlers from Europe to account for the increase.
George took him up on that point. “Why do not foreigners come to your province as well as to the Southern governments?”
“I take it, sir, that our long cold winters discourage them. The Southern colonies are more temperate.”
The king asked why Massachusetts raised no wheat, and Hutchinson explained that the mid-July heat tended to shrivel the wheat, and straw became musty and black. The people lived on coarser breads mixed from rye and corn.
“What’s corn?” asked the king.
Hutchinson explained and added that some colonists preferred rye to wheat since it stayed moister.
“That’s very strange.” That was George’s way of dismissing what he didn’t understand. Returning to the more familiar ground of politics, he said he thought that New Yorkers were nearest to Boston in their opposition to the government.
“Does Your Majesty think nearer than Pennsylvania?”
“Why,” the king granted, “I can’t say that they do, of late. Rhode Island, Mr. Hutchinson, is a strange form of government.”
Hutchinson agreed. “They approach, sir, the nearest to a democracy of any of your colonies,” he said disapprovingly.
The talk turned to Indians.
“It looks, sir,” Hutchinson ventured, “as if in a few years the Indians would be extinct in all parts of the continent.”
“To what is that owing?” asked the king.
Hutchinson said he thought it was partly because they were dispirited “at their low despicable condition among Europeans who have taken possession of their country and treat them as an inferior race of beings.” But the governor also blamed “the immoderate use of spiritous liquors.”
The interview was running down. The king asked after Hutchinson’s family and advised him to stay home for a few days to recover his health. With that, George withdrew.
Thomas Hutchinson had been standing in the royal presence for almost two hours, and Lord Dartmouth worried that he might be tired.
“So gracious a reception has made me insensible of it,” the governor assured him. It had been one of the great days of Thomas Hutchinson’s life, and he hurried to a notebook before he forgot any of it.
—
General Thomas Gage left Castle William after three days and entered Boston to the welcome of cannon fire from the king’s ships in the bay and a coldly correct ceremony. Rumors were circulating that he had come to arrest the patriot leaders, and yet John Hancock, as commander of the cadets, was leading the general’s escort. Gage’s commission from George III was read out in the Council chamber, and the general was sworn in as Thomas Hutchinson’s successor. A reception followed at Faneuil Hall, with many toasts to the king and a hiss when Hutchinson’s good health was proposed.
Lord Dartmouth’s orders to Gage had been specific. The king wanted the ringleaders of the tea affair caught and punished. But, thousands of miles from London, Gage began to draw back from his brave words at the Ministry. All of America was receiving word of the Port Act and the other “Intolerable Acts,” and patriot newspapers were printing their texts with a thick black border. In towns around Boston, hangmen climbed up on their scaffolds to set copies of the acts on fire. Gage debated the wisdom of trying to enforce the Port Act by shutting down the trade in Boston’s harbor, but he consulted with naval officers and customs officials, who reminded him of his duty. On May 26 he told the legislators that on June 1 they would start meeting in Salem. He received the House’s list of newly elected Council members and vetoed thirteen of them, including John Adams. On June 1, 1774, he closed Boston Harbor.
Samuel Adams was determined to prevent Lord North from isolating Boston. He wrote to Arthur Lee in London that it was a “flagrant injustice” and “barbarous.” Even in the evil history of Constantinople he found nothing to match it. As chairman of the Overseers for the Poor, Adams collected food to prepare for the inevitable shortages. In another circular letter he called on citizens of every colony to ask themselves “whether you consider Boston now as suffering in the common cause.” That phrase touched the conscience of the continent, and one by one Committees of Correspondence pledged their complete support. In Virginia, the Burgesses declared June 1 a day of fasting and prayer, and Joseph Warren reported that a new group was being formed that would pledge to halt all trade with Britain until the Port Act was repealed. It would be called the Solemn League and Covenant.
For some months, Samuel Adams also had been floating the idea of a general congress of the colonies, a meeting that would be longer and more ambitious than the hurried gathering at the time of the Stamp Act. Writing under a pen name in the Boston Gazette the previous September, Adams had not only proposed the congress but also set out its agenda. Acting as independent but united states, the delegates should draw up a bill of rights, publish it around the world, and then send an ambassador to represent them at the British court. But, speaking for Boston, Adams couldn’t be that radical. Instead, he reassured the moderate or timid colonists that no one in Massachusetts wanted to break with England.
When New York’s Committee of Correspondence publicly proposed a meeting of all the colonies, Adams began to intensify his efforts. On June 7, 1774, the Massachusetts legislature convened in Salem. Adams was delayed. Ever since Gage had announced that he would soon be joined by four regiments, the Tory leaders had become brash again; now they taunted the patriots that their firebrand was afraid to show himself without the protection of the Boston mob. There was a rumor that Adams and Hancock had been arrested and would be shipped to England for trial. That was the mood in Salem when a Tory took a seat at the desk reserved for Samuel Adams as clerk of the House. Other Tories gathered around him there.
Adams appeared at last and made his way through the crowds at the door of the hall. Looking about, he saw that his place had been taken, and the man in a gold-laced coat showed no sign of moving. Adams stared at him and then addressed Thomas Cushing in a clear, firm voice. “Mr. Speaker, where is the place for your clerk?”
Everyone looked first to Adams, then to his chair. Cushing motioned him to it.
“Sir,” said Samuel Adams, “my company will not be pleasant to the gentlemen who occupy it. I trust they will remove to another part of the House.”
The Tories surrendered their beachhead. Adams had proved that though Salem might not be Boston it wasn’t Newgate Prison.
During the first days of the session, Adams and his confidants lobbied discreetly on behalf of their secret plan. They knew that a supposed patriot named Daniel Leonard was reporting regularly to General Gage. To trick him, Adams’ group pretended they were considering a payment to the East India Company for its tea. But on the first evening of the session Adams met with his nucleus of five men, and by the third night he had more than thirty members sworn to his side. To get commitments from a majority of the House took another week. On June 17, Adams struck.
There was an immediate clamor, and some members demanded to leave the hall at once. Adams took the key from the doorkeeper and put it into his own pocket.
A vote was called, but before it could be taken a Tory member claimed to have become ill. When he was allowed to leave the chamber, he went directly to General Gage. This was Gage’s first test, and he wanted to meet it firmly. He sent his secretary to dissolve the House. But the door had been locked again, and the key was still in Samuel Adams’ pocket. A page was permitted to enter the hall to tell Speaker Cushing that Gage’s secretary had brought a message from the governor. The page returned to say that the House chose to keep its door bolted.
The excitement was bringing out the people of Salem, and they filled the hallway and the stairs leading to the locked chamber. For lack of any other audience, Gage’s secretary read out his order to them.
Behind the locked door, the House was acting with nervous speed to endorse Adams’ plan. Only twelve members voted against sending the delegation. Since Gage was sure to refuse treasury money for the expedition, members voted to charge each town in the province a fee based on its last tax rolls. That should raise about five hundred pounds. After resolutions calling for the relief of Boston and a boycott of British goods, House members unlocked their door and obeyed the governor’s order to dissolve their session.
—
Britain’s Fourth and Forty-third Regiments landed at Long Wharf in mid-June 1774. The Fifth Regiment and then the Thirty-eighth arrived, then the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and companies of marines, until General Gage had an army of four thousand well-equipped men at his command to subdue a town of seventeen thousand. They camped on Boston Common. Most stores on the wharf had shut down, and men who could afford it were sending their families to the outlying towns. Real-estate values throughout Boston were dropping daily, and unemployment was rising. Sympathetic farmers and fishermen from the countryside sent carts of dried fish and corn, but Boston was suffering as Parliament had intended. Tories watched the suffering and decided to attack the patriots on their own territory. This time it was the conservatives who collected signatures to petition for a Town Meeting.
Because they had no jobs, even more men than usual could attend on June 27. After Samuel Adams was elected moderator, the crowd made its usual march from Faneuil Hall to the Old South, where a Tory offered a sweeping resolution. Boston should censure the conduct of its Committee of Correspondence, and the committee itself should be annihilated. Facing that challenge, Adams did not want to be trapped behind the moderator’s desk. He announced that if the committee’s conduct was going to be debated he would surrender his place, and Thomas Cushing agreed to take it. Adams went down to the floor of the Old South to hear out his enemies. The debate continued until dark and resumed at ten the next morning. When Adams chose to answer, his manner was less impassioned than earnest, speaking to the thousands of men as he had spoken to many of them individually along the wharves and at the Green Dragon.
“A Grecian philosopher,” Adams said, “who was lying asleep upon the grass, was aroused by the bite of some animal upon the palm of his hand. He closed his hand suddenly as he awoke and found that he had caught a field mouse. As he was examining the little animal who dared to attack him, it unexpectedly bit him a second time, and it made its escape.
“Now, fellow citizens, what think you was the reflection he made upon this trifling circumstance? It was this: that there is no animal, however weak and contemptible, which cannot defend its own liberty, if it will only fight for it.”
Almost fifty-two, Adams could have been the father of many of his lieutenants and the grandfather of some of the Mohawk apprentices at the Tea Party. For thirty years the people of Boston had watched him disdain money.
“For myself,” Adams said, “I have been wont to converse with Poverty. And however disagreeable a companion she may be thought to be by the affluent and luxurious, who were never acquainted with her, I can live happily with her the remainder of my days, if I can thereby contribute to the redemption of my country.
“Our oppressors cannot force us into submission by reducing us to a state of starvation. We can subsist independently of all the world. The real wants and necessities of man are few.”
If all others fail us, Adams concluded with a practical touch, we can live as our ancestors did, on the clams and mussels that abound off these Massachusetts shores.
When the Tory motion was put to a vote, the Meeting overwhelmingly struck it down. In its place, the town called on the Committee of Correspondence to persevere with its usual firmness. When his informants brought this news to General Gage, the new governor interpreted the vote much as his predecessor would have done. The better sort of people, he assured Lord Dartmouth, had tried to pay for the tea and to disband the Committee of Correspondence, but they had been outvoted by the lower class.
In another respect, however, Gage’s perception differed from Hutchinson’s. When the Ministry in London had suggested that Hutchinson buy Samuel Adams off with an honor or a pension, the governor had replied that such efforts would be worse than useless. Adams would use any new position as a better platform for further attacks. As for money, Adams had said, “A guinea has never glistened in my eye.” All the same, bribe was a time-honored way of converting an enemy to a friend, and General Gage decided to try it. He sent a Colonel Fenton to call on Adams, empowered to bestow on him whatever rewards would end his opposition to the government. The figure might be one thousand pounds sterling for life for Adams and the same amount for his son.
Adams listened politely, even with a show of interest.
General Gage’s advice was that Adams should not displease His Majesty further, Fenton continued. Mr. Adams should remember the penalties of the act of Henry VIII, which allowed political enemies to be sent for trial in England. He could avoid that peril by changing his course, and in the process make his peace with the king.
When Colonel Fenton had finished, he waited for Adams to name his terms. Instead, Adams rose from his chair and said, “Sir, I trust I have long since made my peace with the King of Kings. No personal consideration shall induce me to abandon the righteous cause of my country.”
Showing the colonel to the door, Adams gave him a message for his commander. “Tell General Gage it is the advice of Samuel Adams to him no longer to insult the feelings of an exasperated people.”
—
Virginia’s day of fasting and prayer to protest the closing of Boston’s harbor was another sign that leadership in the House of Burgesses was being wrested from the older members by younger men—Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson. When they first learned of Boston’s plight, they shut themselves up in the legislative library and rummaged through precedents to support their call for a day of mortification. They then asked the Burgesses’ treasurer, who had a reputation for piety, to move their resolution, and it passed unopposed.
The same group, including Lee’s brother, Francis Lightfoot Lee, was meeting regularly now in the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern, down the road from the Burgesses in Williamsburg. Discussing how they should respond to the crisis in Boston, they had come to agree with Patrick Henry: “United we stand, divided we fall.” They scheduled a convention for August 1, 1774, to pick delegates for the meeting in Philadelphia.
For the occasion, Thomas Jefferson had prepared an essay called A Summary View of the Rights of British America. Jefferson was a little past thirty now, but his document ra
ng with youthful energy. At a time when the king was still being toasted and America’s troubles were being blamed on his wicked or indifferent ministers, Jefferson’s pamphlet denounced George III directly for a host of civil crimes. He even accused him of forcing slavery upon the colonies—a practice, Jefferson added, that insulted the rights of human nature. He ended his essay by urging the king to be honest. Do your duty, he told George III, and mankind will forgive you even your failures.
Jefferson’s vehemence might have been better received in Williamsburg if he had been on hand to defend his position. Instead, he fell ill with dysentery on his way to the capital and sent two copies ahead with his allies Patrick Henry and Peyton Randolph. Jefferson thought that Henry had probably been too lazy to read the essay. Randolph, Jefferson’s cousin, placed his copy on the meeting table for the other delegates to look over. Although they appreciated Jefferson’s skill with language—“Let those flatter who fear; it is not an American art”—his essay went further than the majority were prepared to go. The convention chose seven men to send to Philadelphia, some from the liberal faction, some from the moderate, all highly regarded in the Burgesses. Peyton Randolph got the most votes, with one hundred and four. Then Richard Henry Lee and George Washington. Patrick Henry drew eighty-nine votes. The final three were Richard Bland, Benjamin Harrison and Edmund Pendleton. Jefferson, with fifty-one votes, was not chosen.
The Virginia convention also provided its delegates with instructions. All British imports were to end on November 1, 1774. That included any newly purchased slaves. If London did not lift its punitive measures against Boston within one year, all American exports to Britain would stop, including tobacco.
As the delegates left for home, the newly elected representatives prepared for their trip to Philadelphia. Patrick Henry met Edmund Pendleton at George Washington’s plantation, Mount Vernon, where they spent the night and lingered on for a noon dinner before leaving to cross the Potomac and stay overnight in Maryland. Washington, who had won a reputation for youthful bravery during the French and Indian War, had married an amiable widow with a tidy fortune behind her. As the men set out, Martha Washington bade goodbye to her guests. “I hope you will all stand firm,” she said. “I know George will.”