American Rebels

by Nina Sankovitch

  From the windows of their home, John and Abigail could see the hills of Boston; although they couldn’t hear the roar of the angry mobs, they had read about the crowds swarming through the streets at night, “like Devils let loose.”14 But as John wrote in a letter that was printed in the Boston Gazette on August 12, 1765, even more than the “blind, undistinguishing Rage of the Rabble,” he and Abigail feared the tightening grip of the British government on its American colonies, epitomized now in the “rash, mad, and Dogmatical” Stamp Act.15

  In Hingham, Bela Lincoln also seethed under the impending requirements of the Stamp Act. All the professions, lawyers and doctors included, would have to update their paperwork and licenses with the expensive new stamps, and Bela’s medical practice and his farm were already being run at costs exceeding what Lincoln could bring in.

  The year before, Bela had been one of a group commissioned by the General Court of Massachusetts to travel to London to present their petition of protest against the Sugar Act directly to Parliament. When the tax on sugar and molasses was repealed, Lincoln had felt hopeful that Parliament would ease back on their demands on the colonists of Massachusetts. But now an even more burdensome tax had been enacted, and all of Lincoln’s efforts to help the colony seemed futile.

  Esther Quincy Sewall wrote to her sister Dolly, who was living in Boston with her parents and sister Katy, and asked about the mood in town. In Charlestown, on the other side of the Charles River, where Esther lived with her husband, she felt safe within the confines of their home and society: most of their friends were part of the colony’s administrative corps and had sworn fealty to the Crown when taking on their commissions. With Hutchinson’s continued support, Jonathan’s law practice only continued to grow.

  But outside this bubble of comfort and security, Esther sensed a growing desperation in the streets of her waterside town and saw in the eyes of the market women a turn of resentment and anger. A tremor of anxiety ran under the lines of Esther’s letter; Dolly knew her older sister had always been timid, but now she seemed frightened by the world around her.

  While not fearful like her sister, Dolly nevertheless felt anxious about the rising tensions in Boston. Already her father’s fledgling beverage business was suffering in the depressed economy, and rumors abounded of further troubles to come. Having secured a license in 1762 for the manufacture of cider, wine, and beer, Edmund had been building up a small storehouse, but sales were slow.

  Business lagged even more as Edmund began to spend his days at the frequent conferences convened by Boston Town Meeting. A populist at heart, he was intent on contributing his voice to the growing demands of the citizens of Boston. Fearing the mob, he always made sure to return to his modest home by early evening from these meetings.

  Once safely home, he shared all that had happened at the town meeting with Dolly and her sister Katy, sparing no detail in his recounting of the long debates. Politics interested the young women, particularly now that the interests of their sister Esther, married to a man with close ties to Crown officials, seemed at odds with the growing Whig sentiments of their father, their uncle Josiah Quincy, in Braintree, and their cousin Josiah Jr.

  Politics, however, worried Dolly less than the state of the family business. Having already lived through one turn of fortune with her father, she feared another. The extended Quincy family would always support their own, Dolly knew, but in the back of her mind, another hope flared. John Hancock’s attentions had continued; she was often invited to his mansion to attend the lavish dinners planned out by Lydia, with multiple courses made up of soups, meats, fish, fruits, pastries—and wine, plenty of wine. “I like pale Wine … I like rich Wine,” John Hancock wrote to his agents in London, and they supplied him, sending in one shipment alone four hundred gallons of the best Madeira.16

  Perhaps Dolly’s future prosperity would be founded on more than just her father’s spirits business. Lydia Hancock seemed intent on making it so, always encouraging her nephew in the young woman’s direction and making sure Dolly felt welcome in their home. Dolly also enjoyed the time she spent in public with Hancock, basking in the prestige she received as his companion. Sound in both finances and politics, John Hancock just might be the right partner for her. Her mother, who spent most of her time in Braintree, thought so; her father, who kept his daughters close to his side in Boston thought so too. Dolly herself was coming closer and closer to the same conclusion.

  * * *

  The evening of August 26 started off with a large bonfire set to light in front of the home of the royal governor, Francis Bernard. Although Bernard complained often about the costs of raising and launching his ten children, in truth he was a wealthy man and a well-connected one; his wife was niece to William Barrington, who was the Second Viscount Barrington and the British secretary of war. Bernard was a smug man as well and deficient in understanding the people over whom he governed: he had predicted that his term as governor would be “quiet and easy.”17

  The bonfire burned hot, and the crowd grew. The dockworkers and small merchants shouted for Governor Bernard to come outside and respond to their complaints about taxes. But he did not appear. He remained hidden away behind the locked doors of his home, protected by a staging of armed soldiers.

  Enraged, the group outside tore apart the fencing along the street, pulling the broken planks off and adding them to the fire, banging the staves against the metal stakes. This was the sound that Josiah Quincy Jr. heard through the open windows of his home. It was an invitation to join in the mob, and many answered the call.

  Newcomers were welcomed. Barrels of punch and cider were brought in from neighboring taverns and drinks were offered up to any and all in attendance. Shouts of “Liberty and Property” rang out; this was “the Usual Notice of their intention to plunder and pull down a house,” Bernard noted later.18

  The angry crowd tumbled along the streets of Boston, gathering momentum as more and more people joined in. The swollen gathering of protesters broke apart to roam in smaller mobs around the city. One mob surrounded the home of Benjamin Hallowell, the comptroller of customs, but Hallowell convinced the group to accompany him to a tavern, where he purchased a barrel of punch for them.

  While the gesture saved his house, the continued drinking only further inflamed the men, who went on to break into the house of William Story, an official from the High Court of Admiralty, which tried customs and smuggling cases. The mob tore his home apart from the inside out looking for official court documents, which were then burned in an impromptu bonfire.

  Josiah Quincy Jr., listening from his home, feared that the house of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson would be a likely target for the mob’s anger. Doubts about Hutchinson’s devotion to the colony had long been growing. Yes, it was true that in addition to his governmental duties, he had been writing a history of the colony, but such a project did not prove his allegiance to his fellow colonists. Ever since the writs of assistance case in 1761, Josiah Sr. and his sons Ned and Josiah Jr. had ceased to believe the lieutenant governor had their best interests at heart.

  Rumors had spread over the past few weeks that Thomas Hutchinson supported the Stamp Act, and that he was behind the appointment of his brother-in-law, Andrew Oliver, as stamp master for the entire colony (this was later proved to be false). On August 14, a mob had gathered under a large elm tree at the corner of Essex and Orange streets, from which they dangled an effigy of Oliver. They then cut the effigy down and carried it through the streets in a mock funeral, finally beheading it in a grand display in front of Andrew Oliver’s home. The mob pummeled the house with stones, forced their way in through a back door, and ransacked the wine cellar.

  Now the time had come to attack the home of Hutchinson himself. The mob was at fever pitch, fed by liquor and frustration and anger. The different bands of marauders gathered together as one and marched to Hutchinson’s mansion on Garden Court Street in the North End. The mansion had been built by Edward Hutchinson, Th
omas’ great-grandfather and the son of Anne Hutchinson of Braintree. Thomas had lived there with his wife for twenty years, and after she died in 1754, he remained in the home with his children. He never remarried.

  Three generations of Hutchinsons had filled the three-story home with imported furniture and finely woven silk rugs, china from the Far East and silver forged in Boston, family heirlooms and portraits, and a library boasting hundreds of books. From the outside, its façade was elegant and imposing and it seemed impenetrable. But the night’s events would prove otherwise.

  As Hutchinson wrote later, he and his oldest daughter, Sarah, who had refused to leave the home without him, had just escaped through the back door when “the hellish crew fell upon my house with the rage of devils.”19 The mob smashed through the front door with an ax, then every window and door was opened, thrown wide to allow dozens of men to stream in.

  The marauders tore portraits and paintings from walls, stomped on chairs and overturned tables, threw china plates and cups to the floor, slashed through rugs, smashed windows and moldings, and tossed books from shelves, burning them in piles on the floor, along with official Crown documents rifled from desks. They carried off the silver as trophies of the evening but everything else was destroyed.

  Hutchinson despaired when he found later that the mob “scattered or destroyed all the manuscripts and other papers I had been collecting for 30 years together besides a great number of Public papers in my custody.”20 He had in his possession papers from the very first settlements of Massachusetts. The mob cared nothing for history: the present was all that mattered, and the present demanded the destruction of everything in sight.

  A group of men left the house and went out in search of Hutchinson himself, certain that he was hiding somewhere in the neighborhood. Hutchinson and Sarah ran through back gardens, going as fast as they could, and then hid in heavy bushes under the cover of darkness and waited for dawn to break.

  Throughout the night, the mob continued their destruction: “Not contented with tearing off all the wainscot and hangings and splitting the doors to pieces they beat down the Partition walls … they cut down the cupola … and they began to take the slate and boards from the roof and were prevented only by the approaching daylight from a total demolition of the building. The garden fence was laid flat and all … trees &c broke down to the ground.”21

  By five o’clock in the morning, little of the house remained, save the foundation and portions of the walls. Hutchinson would later write to a friend, “Such ruins were never seen in America.”22

  Josiah Quincy Jr. was at breakfast when a messenger boy knocked at his front door. Josiah read the note quickly, standing in the hall. He raised his eyes to meet the pale face of the messenger and asked if the boy had seen the destroyed home.

  The boy nodded.

  Josiah turned back to the note. How could this be true? “One of the best finished houses in the province has nothing remaining but bare walls and floors. Gentlemen of the army, who have seen towns sacked by an enemy, declare they never saw such fury.”23

  And what of Hutchinson himself? The boy answered before turning to leave: rumor was that Hutchinson had fled with his daughter to join the rest of his family on Castle Island, stronghold of the British military in Boston Harbor. Josiah shut the door behind the boy and then returned to his library. How could peace ever be restored to Boston, he wondered; a city once ruled by law was now ruled by mobs.

  8

  Warmest Lovers of Liberty

  It is commonly said that these Colonies were peopled by Religion—

  But I should rather say that the Love of Liberty,

  projected, conducted, and accomplished the settlement of America.

  —JOHN ADAMS

  Josiah Quincy Jr. dressed hurriedly. It was the first day of the fall seating for the Superior Court of Massachusetts and he had clients to represent. As he pulled on his pressed jacket, he wondered if Thomas Hutchinson would take his place in court that morning. Hutchinson was usually the most well kempt of men and never looked more to advantage than when dressed for court, resplendent in black judicial robes embellished with thick golden bands and wearing a wig of white curls.

  But Hutchinson’s robes, bands, and wig had been burned to ashes last night, along with the rest of his clothes and all his furnishings, books, and papers—indeed, the entire house was gone. After such a devastation, would the chief justice be able to summon the strength to take his place at the center of the judges bench?

  When Thomas Hutchinson passed through the door to enter the courtroom, the gathered lawyers and petitioners gasped. The first thing Josiah noticed was that Hutchinson was dressed in evening clothes; the second thing was that the man’s fine silk breeches were soiled at the knees, as if he had been kneeling in mud. Above the breeches, his white shirt was rumpled and stained and his cravat lay limply at his neck, discolored with sweat. His meager hair had been clumsily pulled back, held with a simple ribbon. Josiah guessed the ribbon had been lent to him by one of his daughters.

  It was Hutchinson’s face that Josiah would remember always, “with tears starting from his eyes, and a countenance which strongly told the inward anguish of his soul.”1 The man looked exhausted, in heart and mind, his eyes hollow and rimmed with shadows, his mouth a thin line of suppressed emotion.

  Everyone in the courtroom rose as Hutchinson took his place on the bench. They continued to stand as he turned to face them all, and then began to speak. Instead of proceeding to the cases that waited to be heard that day, Hutchinson told his fellow judges, along with the gathered lawyers, clients, and court watchers, what had happened to him and his family the night before. He explained that the clothes he wore on his back were the only ones he still owned: he was “destitute of everything, no other shirt; no other garment but what I have on.”2

  He went on to swear that the punishments exacted upon him and his family were unjust: “I call my Maker to witness, that I never … was aiding, assisting, or supporting … what is commonly called the Stamp Act.” He finished by condemning all mob violence as warrantless, no matter the situation, but especially when “people, deluded, inflamed … [become] carried away with madness against an innocent man.” He ended with the entreaty, “I pray that God give us better hearts!”3

  Court was then adjourned for the day.

  Josiah set out for his law offices on King Street but then turned around and began to walk the other way. He wanted to see Hutchinson’s house for himself. What he saw left him stunned: “the destruction was really amazing,” he would write later, and never forget.4 It was a sight that would haunt him for both its warning and its premonition of just how far the fury of citizens could go when they were denied their rights and suffered economic hardships and uncertainties as a result.

  When Josiah finally returned to his office, he was too agitated to work on the cases that awaited his attention. He paced back and forth across the narrow room that housed his working desk, pausing occasionally to look out the window. The street below was busy with life, people walking hurriedly, horses and wagons passing by. A normal day—but not at all normal, when such an evening had passed before.

  Josiah sat down, reaching for his journal underneath a pile of law papers. He opened to an empty page and began to scrawl down all he remembered of Hutchinson’s speech in court that morning, and then his own reactions to it and to the events leading up to the ransacking of Hutchinson’s home. He wrote to restore order both within himself and out there, in the street outside his windows, in the colony for which he hoped so much.

  Like the rioters of the night before, whom Josiah described as “too justly inflamed” and “the warmest lovers of liberty,” Josiah was enraged by the “enslavers and oppressive taxmasters” in charge of the colony.5 But unlike those who had caused “destructions, demolitions, and ruins,” Josiah vowed to find recourse to “the slavery and distress of a despotic state” in “that best asylum, that glorious medium, the British Constitution.
… Happy people who enjoy this blessed constitution!” He ended the journal entry with a quotation from an English play, in which the Roman senator Cato delivers a prayer to the deity of law:

  Remember, O my friends! the laws, the rights,

  The generous plan of power delivered down,

  From age to age, by your renowned forefathers,

  So dearly bought, the price of so much blood:

  Oh! Let it never perish in your hands,

  But piously transmit it to your children.

  Do thou, great Liberty! Inspire our souls,

  And make our lives in thy possession happy,

  Or our death glorious in thy just defence.6

  For now, Josiah would keep his writings on liberty, justice, and the law confined to the courtroom and to the work he did for the Boston town committee. But soon, very soon, events would push him into the public sphere, and he would then share his thoughts with the world, all in hopes of shaping the opinions of the citizens he valued so much and saving the colony he loved.

  * * *

  Over the next few weeks, thousands of people across Massachusetts flocked to Boston to see the ruins of Hutchinson’s house. When the novelty of the sight wore off, Hutchinson hired workers to rebuild the home much as it was. But he would never feel comfortable there again. Soon Hutchinson would look for a new house, leaving the terrible memories of the summer of 1765 behind.

  Condemnation of the destruction of Hutchinson’s home was widespread in Boston and across the province, but the motivation behind the attack was largely supported. As John Hancock wrote in a letter to England, “The injury that has been done … is what I abhor and detest as much as any man breathing and would go to great lengths in repairing his loss. But an opposition to the Stamp Act is commendable.”7