American Rebels

by Nina Sankovitch

  It was around this time that twenty-year-old Benjamin Blyth of Salem drew pastel portraits of John and Abigail. These presumably were meant to be gifts for the newly married couple, to be displayed in the home they would now share in Braintree, much as the oil paintings of Sam Quincy and his wife, Hannah, commissioned from John Singleton Copley, were displayed in their town house on Summer Street in Boston.

  Abigail Smith Adams, along with her portrait, settled easily into John’s small farmhouse just down the hill from her grandparents and across the yard from John’s mother, who lived in the larger farmhouse owned by John’s brother. From her new home, Abigail could see the grasses of the coastline from one set of windows, and from the other windows, she looked out on the village she had loved as a child and would once again call home as a wife.

  It was here in Braintree that lessons had been learned, not only by Abigail, schooled by her grandmother, but by Ned, Samuel, and Josiah Jr. and John Adams, who had absorbed lessons from their fathers, as well as from their early pastor, Reverend Hancock: to be grateful and to be caring; to build a community of hope and of opportunity. Lessons of hard work, optimism, and charity. In Deacon Adams’ insistence that John go to college, there was also the lesson that in America there were no boundaries; there was only possibility.

  Even Dolly Quincy, youngest of the Quincy clan, had the values of her community deeply instilled in her—by her father, a man who believed in the promises of God and the goodness of humanity, and by her cousins, men and women who believed that their colony was special and their rights sacrosanct.

  As the year 1764 drew to a close, there were few in the colony of Massachusetts who could even contemplate the end of British rule in America. The conflicts that arose over issues of smuggling and taxation were largely due to the decades of laissez-faire that had been previously exercised by the mother country; each colony had been allowed to proceed as it wished, without heavy taxation or much interference at all, just so long as goods continued to be sent to England and trade among the empire’s many holdings prospered.For most colonists, no matter how they felt about Parliament now trying to squeeze money out of the colonies, the king was still owed loyalty. Parliament could be straightened out and everyone would prosper once more.

  Nevertheless, all the elements for a movement toward colonial independence from England were there. The years of neglect by Parliament had given colonists confidence in their ability to self-rule. More than one generation of New England men and women had been raised to think for themselves instead of just relying on king or church. While deeply faithful, colonists were also interested in the natural world, trusted science, and followed reason. And beyond the loyalty owed the king, these men and women felt duty bound to their communities, their families, and their colony. Fierce, certain, and strong, that sense of duty and responsibility would carry them far. All the way to revolution, if need be.

  But first, flame had to be set to the tinder laid.

  PART TWO

  Spark

  1765–1773

  Let us catch the divine enthusiasm;

  and feel, each for himself, the godlike pleasure

  of diffusing happiness on all around us.

  —JOHN HANCOCK

  7

  The Mobs of Boston

  Happy People! Who enjoy this blessed Constitution.

  Happy! thrice happy people! If ye preserve it inviolate …

  —JOSIAH QUINCY JR.

  The night of August 26, 1765, was clear but dark, the moon just a sliver of light in the sky over Boston. The air was warm and humid, the scent of the harbor strong as the tide drew out. Josiah Quincy Jr. was alone in the family home on Marlborough Street. His brother Ned was on Long Island in New York, spending time with the family of Rebecca Lloyd and doing all he could to secure her affections. Josiah Sr. was where he could almost always be found now: in Braintree, with two young children underfoot (born of Anne Marsh, his third wife) and plenty to do as justice of the peace for the town, and managing the glass- and chocolate-making factories he’d founded.

  The bells of the Old South Meeting House had long pealed midnight, but Josiah Jr. was still awake. From his opened windows he could hear, coming across the rooftops and snaking through the narrow streets, sounds that carried in the heavy air: the swelling of voices into angry shouts, the pounding of feet, the loud ringing of wooden planks against metal. A mob had been raised, and now an invitation was being sent out, offered to all within hearing to join in.

  * * *

  Josiah knew, as all of Boston knew, that the mob tonight was led by Ebenezer Mackintosh and the Loyall Nine. Mackintosh was a shoemaker who had fought for England in the Seven Years’ War, and his fellow founders of the Loyall Nine included Thomas Crafts, a painter; George Trott and Henry Bass, jewelers; Benjamin Edes, publisher of the Boston Gazette; John Smith and Steven Cleverly, braziers; John Avery and Thomas Chase, distillers; and Joseph Field, a ship captain.

  What drove Mackintosh and the Loyall Nine, and what compelled the mob to follow where they led, was economic frustration, pure and simple. For the past few years Parliament had been tightening its control of Massachusetts. The British government felt that the New England colony had been following its own rules and its own laws and ignoring all efforts of the mother country to collect its due. Along with the Sugar Act of 1764, Parliament had imposed a long roster of import duties and put in place strong measures against smuggling. Even after the tax on sugar was repealed, the other measures remained.

  To the colonists of Massachusetts, the way they had been running the colony suited them just fine. As they had prospered, so had the English, argued the colonists: for decades the English economy had benefitted from trade with New England. And when England needed help in fighting the Seven Years’ War, the colonists had joined up and joined in. They sent their men by the hundreds to fight and did all they could to bolster supplies for the troops. There had been real profits in the supplying of goods, but there had also been real losses in the supplying of men—so many had died to keep the French at bay. How dare England now impose its financial costs on the colony, when so much treasure had already been paid with the lives of their own sons and husbands?

  Josiah Quincy Jr., who was by nature and training impelled to look at the situation from both sides, understood why the British wanted to control smuggling and collect new taxes and more duties on even more goods. But the measures had been enacted by Parliament without the protections of representation and process guaranteed to the colonists. It was this failure to follow legal precedent that Josiah could not countenance. That England was ignoring the economic miseries of its colonies in imposing new taxes mattered less to Josiah than the fact that Parliament had trampled on the colonists’ rights under British law.

  John Hancock understood firsthand the economic miseries suffered by his fellow colonists. He was a merchant of goods after all, and the main source of income for all of New England was in supplying goods. For the past ten years, New England merchants had supplied three vibrant markets: the armies of England waging the Seven Years’ War; England itself; and the English colonies of the West Indies.

  Now those markets were gone or drying up. All the money that had been made in Massachusetts through the waging of war—supplying food, clothing, tenting, and weaponry to the British Army and colonial troops—was no longer coming in; while at the same time, the postwar depression in both England and the West Indies meant a spiraling downward in trade with those markets.

  New England farmers, lumbermen, quarrymen, metalworkers, and fishermen suffered, as did everyone involved in the maritime and mercantile industries: merchants and trading agents, dockworkers and shipbuilders, sailors and warehouse laborers, rope makers and innkeepers and craftsmen of all types. Paul Revere, for one, almost went bankrupt when demand for his goods shrank down to the simplest of orders.

  Stores and inns were shuttered, and major mercantile firms went under. Ships lay empty at the docks, and the docks thems
elves grew more silent by the day. As one enterprise fell, so others followed, each business dependent on the others. The Boston Gazette reported in early 1765, in a poem lamenting the demise of Nathaniel Wheelwright’s trading company, how its “fiery Tail … swept lesser Stars Down from their sev’ral Orbits.”1

  As one of New England’s wealthiest merchants, John Hancock was not yet suffering. The House of Hancock was still buoyant and solvent, largely due to the capital it floated on. But Hancock worried for his fellow colonists, and for himself: “It is very difficult to carry on business, and unless redress’d Trade must dwindle,” he wrote to his agent, John Barnard, in England.2

  In March 1765, news had arrived on the spring ships from England that a new tax was to be imposed on the colonists. Promulgated under the leadership of Prime Minister George Grenville, the Stamp Act would surpass all other taxes previously levied in both breadth and reach. The act decreed that any transaction requiring paper—any sale or trade, any professional or legal license, any court action, any contract of any kind, any newspaper or pamphlet, as well as such incidentals as playing cards—had to carry an official stamp. Each stamp would have its price, from low to very high.

  The Stamp Act reached directly and deeply into the lives of every colonist and made them pay, again and again, for their daily activities.

  Hancock, through his English trading agents, had received early warning of the impending act. He wrote back a warning in return: “I hear the Stamp Act is like to take place it is very cruel we were before much burthened we shall not now be able much longer to support trade, and in the end Great Britain must feel the ill effects of it.”3

  Hancock urged his British agents, whose fortunes were as much at risk as his own, to do what they could to ensure the act would not be enforced: “if the Stamp Act takes place we are a gone people—do help us all you can.”4 He himself felt the weight of responsibility for the economy of Boston, a duty instilled in part by his uncle Thomas and in greater part by the ambitions of his aunt, that John be a leader—not just a commercial leader but a community figurehead, revered and responsible.

  The role of protector was one that John Hancock took seriously. He funded lavish public celebrations in Boston, provided firewood and foodstuffs to those in need, and helped widows and orphans. Even more important, he employed a vast number of colonists; John Adams reported that “not less than a thousand families were every day … dependent on Mr. Hancock for their daily bread.”5

  Hancock had been elected to serve as a selectman for Boston soon after news of the Stamp Act arrived. Along with his fellow selectmen, and his old friends from Braintree, Ned and Sam Quincy and their younger brother, Josiah (all now living in Boston), he worked on an official petition of protest against implementation of the Stamp Act, to be submitted to Parliament.

  Hancock also continued to work against the act privately, particularly in letters to his agents and friends in England, urging them to lobby on behalf of the American cause: “I wish we could be help’d out of our present Burthens and Difficulties, our Trade is prodigiously Embarrassed, & must shortly be ruined.… I, however, hope we shall in some measure be Releiv’d, & Doubt not your good influences to forward it.”6

  Josiah Quincy Jr. lent his efforts to numerous legal challenges being formulated against imposition of the Stamp Act. As he would write later, the act was clearly “unconstitutional.”7 But when Sam Adams, his compatriot in the Long Room Club, invited him to meetings with the Loyall Nine convened at the Green Dragon Tavern, Josiah refused to attend. He knew that it was at such meetings that many mugs of ale and punch were shared, and lawbreaking plans of protest were hatched. Josiah preferred to work within the rule of law, rather than outside it.

  * * *

  But many colonists found more hope in the mob actions proposed by the Loyall Nine than in legal arguments and formal petitions. To the Loyall Nine and their followers, it seemed as if the ever-increasing burdens imposed by Parliament fell hardest on the working class of the colony. In the eyes of Mackintosh and his men, while the common people of the colony suffered, those colonists favored by the Crown flourished. Where else to focus the fomenting frustrations and growing anger but toward Crown officials, living high and mighty in their fine town houses? The elite would have to pay for their unfair privileges, and mobs would exact the payment.

  Mobs were a feature of political protest that had come over to the colonies from England. Long used as the only weapon of the lower and artisan classes against the power of Parliament and the king, the results had been mixed in terms of effecting change. But as a venue for venting frustration, there seemed to be no better or more popular alternative, and recent mob-led protests in England provided vivid examples to the colonies: the 1763 uprisings in Devonshire to protest a cider tax; the Spitalfields riots of 1765 involving silk weavers angry over falling wages; and that same year, the violent gathering of over forty thousand weavers and glove makers upset over Parliament’s increasing taxes and regulations.

  Going back further, the Bushell riot in Glasgow in 1725 resulted in the destruction of the home of a member of Parliament, believed to be behind recent imposition of taxes; and in 1736, mobs in Edinburgh protested the prosecution of two smugglers. In both cases, the crowd was fired upon by British soldiers, and a number of protesters were killed. In 1725, the officer in charge in Glasgow was charged and convicted of murder but later pardoned by the Crown; in 1736, the same officer was once again charged, this time in Edinburgh. Not trusting the courts, the mob took matters into their own hands and, after dragging the officer from his quarters, executed him in a public hanging.

  These anti-Parliament movements overseas were well publicized in the colonies and inspired the colonists to hold their own protests against unwanted taxes and intrusions. The colonists freely borrowed slogans from their English brethren, chanting “Liberty, Property, and No excise!”8

  Thomas Hutchinson had already found himself the subject of mob threats. In the 1740s, he needed armed protection from crowds angry over his positions on currency and trade. In 1747, he served with Josiah Quincy Sr. on a town committee investigating mob action when people took to the streets to protest impressment—seizing men and forcing them into naval service. The committee described the troublemakers as “Foreign Seamen, Servants, Negroes and other Persons of mean and Vile Condition” who had “Committed great outrages and Disorders putting the Inhabitants of the Town in great Terror of their Lives.”9

  But the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 ignited a collective fury both broader and deeper than any seen before. Fed by populist groups like the Loyall Nine, the anger and frustrations of the colonists were also spurred on by the press. The colonial newspapers were full of “Letters from a Gentleman” or “Poem Created in Honor Of,” which were really diatribes, satirical in nature or straightforward in condemnation, condemning parliamentary policies governing Massachusetts.

  The press was hugely influential because the vast majority of colonists could read—and did. They displayed a voracious appetite for printed reports of news, politics, gossip, and everything in between. As the Boston Gazette proudly declared in 1765, “The common people in the Colonies are in general so well-informed, that a man who cannot read or write, is looked on with as much pity and contempt as the ancient Romans would have view’d the Barbarians of old Britain.”10

  In the summer of 1765, some of the newspapers (the ones with Whig overtones) reported that Virginia had approved the resolutions written by the firebrand Patrick Henry and vowed to oppose any taxes imposed by Parliament, and further held “that any person” arguing for compliance “shall be deemed, an Enemy.”11 Bostonians against the Stamp Act roared in approval.

  In fact, however, Virginia’s House of Burgesses had rejected most of Henry’s resolutions against the Stamp Act, including the one delineating enemies of the colony, and even Henry himself backed away from his proposed resolutions.

  But the truth didn’t matter as much as the message: the Sta
mp Act was to be opposed by any and all means. The men behind the Stamp Act—the uncaring, avaricious, and unjust elite class of politicians both at home and in England—had to be brought down, by word and by deed, and even by humor. The Boston Gazette printed a mock business proposal from an enterprising businessman that “all instruments be wrote on Bark, and so avoid the Stamp-Duties.… I am ready to Supply with good Writing Bark all those whose Consciences are bound by the late Act.”12 The Boston Gazette also reported that young women had joined the protest against the Stamp Act, and would refuse to marry, “as no Licenses for Marriage could be obtained” without an official stamp, and were “determined to join hands with none but such as will to the utmost endeavor to abolish the Custom of marrying with License.”13

  It was only a matter of time before humor and satire were left aside and the reactions to the Stamp Act became violent. Mobs were taking to the streets, and the focus of their ire were the wealthy and the well-connected.

  * * *

  John and Abigail Adams, living in their small farmhouse in Braintree, were not immune to the economic turmoils of their colony. As a lawyer, John’s interests were bound up with those of his clients, and if his clients were low on funds, they would not be engaging a lawyer whose fees they would have to pay. As trade fell, legal work fell along with it, and the signs were all there for a further dampening of the economy, especially if the Stamp Tax was allowed to stand.

  Try as he did to diligently build up his practice, John worried, and Abigail worried alongside him. She gave birth to their first child in July 1765, a girl they named Abigail and called Nabby. Much as Edmund Quincy’s wife Elizabeth had done in the early years of their marriage, Abigail created a household budget, cut expenses, expanded the kitchen garden, and thought about opening a small shop, where she could sell household items.