American Rebels

by Nina Sankovitch

  Josiah was appointed head of a town committee to oversee all the donations coming into Boston, as well as locals’ contributions. His father-in-law, William Phillips, joined him on the committee, and together they converted substantial portions of donated goods to cash, which was then used to fund public works in Boston, employing as many jobless workers as possible.

  Josiah also found himself in charge of preparing all the citizens of Boston for possible violence when he was appointed to lead the newly created Safety Committee. The committee ran drills and organized the buying and storing of both arms and ammunition; if the British troops (more arriving every week) sought to impose Parliament’s measures through force, the townspeople would be ready.

  * * *

  By mid-June, the idea of a continentwide congress had taken hold in the colonies. John Dickinson, the Philadelphia farmer, wrote in a letter to Josiah Quincy Jr., “I have been able to collect the sense of the Colonies, [and] they are very unanimous in the Measure you mentioned of a Congress.”15 Messages passed back and forth between leaders of the colonies, and finally a date and place were chosen: September in Philadelphia. By the end of the summer, all the colonies, with the exception of Georgia, would agree to attend the Continental Congress.

  John Adams, Josiah Quincy Jr., John Hancock, and other members of the Boston Committee of Correspondence moved quickly to ensure their colony’s participation in the congress; they knew they had to act before the mandamus council was appointed to run the colony. Congressional representatives would have to be proposed and approved during the meeting of the General Court set for June 7, but Gage could not be told of the plan: if he were to suspect, he would suspend the meeting of the General Court.

  In order to appease any suspicions Gage had concerning their motives, the Massachusetts legislators showed up in Salem for the meeting of the General Court without making a single protest as to its new location. They began their business as usual, and proceeded to follow a routine agenda considering various colonial issues. With the intent of boring the spies they were sure that Gage had sent to the meeting, and fooling them into leaving, the legislators droned on and on over insignificant matters.

  Then, as evening approached, the true purpose of the meeting was put up for debate. Five men were proposed as representatives to attend the Continental Congress on behalf of the colony of Massachusetts. In addition, a request for funds was made to cover the expenses of the congressional delegation.

  Gage had indeed sent spies to the meeting, who raced to the Governor’s House to inform him of the plan to send delegates to the congress. Gage quickly sent an emissary to disband the meeting and suspend all further sessions of the General Court.

  But it was too late: the door was locked against the emissary and he read his official message out of doors, to the wind, with no one paying any attention at all. Meanwhile, inside the building a vote was taken on the appointments and the funding. Both proposals were resoundingly approved.

  John Adams was chosen as one of the delegates for Massachusetts, along with James Bowdoin, Thomas Cushing, Sam Adams, and Robert Treat Paine. John Hancock had withdrawn his name from consideration—his gout had returned with a vengeance in the spring—but he vowed to continue in his role as protector of Boston while the others represented the colony’s interests at the congress.

  That night all the men, along with their wives, gathered at the home of Joseph Warren to celebrate. Only John Hancock stayed away, reduced to bed rest for a fortnight, to be cared for by Dolly and Aunt Lydia. Abigail Adams must have wondered—for just a moment—if it might have been better for her John to be ill instead of going far away and leaving her alone once again to manage finances, home, farm, and family.

  Yet she couldn’t help but feel excited for her husband. They both understood that John had been given a great opportunity: “here is a new, and a grand Scene open before me—a Congress … an assembly of the wisest Men upon the Continent.” But John also felt nervous: “[I] feel myself unequal to this Business.… What can be done?”

  All he knew for sure was that “deliberations alone will not do. We must petition, or recommend to the Assemblies to petition, or [make] Spirited Resolves—[or pursue] bolder Councils.”16 It was a great honor to be asked to represent his colony, and an honor he would do his best to fulfill.

  His old friend Jonathan Sewall tried to convince John to refuse his appointment when the two men met up while attending court in Portsmouth, Maine. At Sewall’s request, the men took an early-morning walk together on the hill overlooking Casco Bay. The day was just warming up as they walked, with a mist rising off the water. Sewall asked John to stay away from Philadelphia, counseling him that “Great Britain was determined on her system; her power was irresistible and would certainly be destructive … to all those who should persevere in opposition to her designs.”17

  John answered that he was just as determined: “I had passed the Rubicon; swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country, was my unalterable determination.”18

  The two men parted that day, both with heavy hearts. They knew their friendship was at its end, perhaps never to be renewed; such a sad farewell was “the sharpest thorn on which I ever sat my foot,” John recalled later.19 Such separations between friends, and even within families, were occurring throughout the colony; sides chosen and painful breaches made.

  Josiah Quincy still held out hopes that his son Samuel would choose the right side; after all, Samuel was known to spout that “the House of Commons had no Right to take Money out of our Pocketts, any more than any foreign State” and to repeat “large Paragraphs from a Publication of Mr. Burke’s in 1766 [protesting English overreaching], and large Paragraphs from Junius Americanus [essays by patriot Arthur Lee].”20 When other Loyalists were attacked, at home, on the street, and even in church, Samuel remained unmolested and above reproof. There was hope for him, his father was sure of it, as was Josiah Jr., who continued to share his writings and his thoughts with his older brother.

  Hannah was less convinced that her brother would eventually align himself with his father and brother. She understood Samuel better, she thought, because of their similar dispositions. While Josiah Jr. had come to accept radical actions to protest what he saw as Parliamentary wrongs, neither Hannah nor Sam trusted mobs; like Samuel, Hannah was wary of an opposition that utilized intimidation and chaos to achieve its goals. Mercy Otis Warren, a friend to Hannah, had scolded her for her temerity in condemning “the calamities of our unhappy country” just because Hannah disapproved of “some rash and unjustifiable steps” taken against ministerial authority.

  Hannah saw another similarity between herself and her brother: they were both comfortable with keeping things the way they were. Having escaped the tyranny of her husband, Bela, Hannah had found peace again in Braintree with her father—and she feared any event that might disturb their happiness. Samuel had his love of “ease and retirement, though not idle nor unemployed in the valuable purposes of life.”21 Hannah doubted whether her brother, comfortable in his wealth and happiest with constancy in life and love, would ever join a group that was intent, above all else, on change.

  * * *

  John Hancock had been expecting a rebuke for his snub of Governor Gage, especially as the snub had been given in front of all the Cadets and the many Bostonians who had come out to the wharf that day. He was not surprised when, in late June 1774, he received a short letter of barely two lines, written and signed by Gage’s secretary, Thomas Flucker, removing Hancock from his command of the Corps of Cadets.

  But when the corps of eighty men heard the news, each and every one of them resigned their commissions, surprising not only Hancock but also Governor Gage. William Palfrey, Hancock’s clerk and also a member of the Cadets, reported to Sam Adams that the resignations had been undertaken without Hancock’s knowledge: “Had he known our intention he would have prevented it.… I was highly pleased to find out that we had out-Generaled the General.”22


  The Cadets further surprised Hancock by naming him their representative to Gage, charging him with returning not only their commissions but also their certificates of rank, along with the embroidered banner Gage had presented to them back in May. Their splendid uniforms were given to Hancock to keep safe until the unit might come back together again some day.

  * * *

  While many of those who had the resources to leave Boston did so, Edmund Quincy and his family stayed put. Edmund had lobbied for and received appointments to a number of the new committees sprouting up to run things in Boston, and he took great pride in his role as a justice of the peace. His daughter Katy was invited to join her sister and brother-in-law, Sarah and William Greenleaf, in Lancaster, a small village to the west, but Katy demurred, preferring to stay with her father and Dolly, who still flitted between the modest Quincy dwellings on Kingston Street and the Hancock mansion on Beacon Hill. Although the long dinner parties and afternoon outings were a thing of the past, Dolly found that her new role as nurse, companion, and even confidant to John suited her well.

  Josiah Sr. and Hannah Quincy Lincoln must have wanted Josiah Jr. and his wife, Abigail, to return to Braintree, where his health could be better served by fresh air, fresh food, and ample rest. But Josiah Jr., busy with his many committees, as well as with his commitments as a lawyer, was feeling stronger, thanks in part to the invigorations of his many patriotic duties; in part to the ministrations of Dr. Warren; and in part to the care taken by his wife in preparing his daily doses of alleviating herbs and tinctures of opium.

  Abigail was pregnant with the couple’s second child, due at the end of the summer. Josiah promised his father and sister that changes in domicile would be made then—but the changes to come would not be what either Josiah Sr. or Hannah had anticipated.

  * * *

  August 1774 was hot and dry across Massachusetts: crops wilted, dust stirred, food supplies shrank, and tempers flared. Even as other towns and villages in Massachusetts (including Braintree) and in other colonies announced their boycotts of British goods, the merchants of Boston refused to sign on to the far-reaching boycott Josiah Quincy Jr. had proposed in his “Solemn League and Covenant.”

  Their businesses were already reeling from the port’s closure, the failure of crops due to the hot summer, and the high costs of transporting goods from ports north to Boston. Without the participation of the Boston merchants, Quincy’s proposals for economic warfare against England were stalled—for now.

  Instead of instigating financial reprisals, the focus of the Boston patriots turned to dismantling British institutions in the colony, including the courts, the system for tax collecting, and the local militias. Colonists vowed to oppose “every civil officer now in commission in this province … [and] any said officers [who] shall accept a commission … or in any way or manner whatever assist … in the assault now making on our rights and liberties.”

  Defiantly, they declared, that “no obedience” was owed to anyone who accepted royal commissions or salaries.23 Colonists refused to pay their taxes to royally appointed officials, and the men in charge of village militias resigned their posts rather than serving under commissions confirmed by Gage. The militias were a colonial tradition: local volunteers participated in regular draining drills on town greens—and in Boston, on the Common—and had been doing so for one hundred years.

  But now new militias were formed, no longer under the control of the royal administration; they transformed from groups united to protect British authority to groups united to protest against British oppression. These newly motivated militias were captained now by independent leaders, many of them veterans of the Seven Years’ War—and none of them beholden to any entity other than the colony they loved.

  Colonists also refused to participate in a court system tainted, as John Adams had predicted, by an impeached chief justice. Even when Chief Justice Peter Oliver stayed away from court, they refused to sit as jurors and declined the oath of service. John Adams and Josiah Quincy Jr. were on the court circuit that summer—“Quincy and I have taken a bed together,” John wrote to Abigail in early July—and they bore witness as, from Worcester to Charlestown to Plymouth, jurors refused to serve.

  When the Superior Court opened in Boston in late August, it quickly became apparent that few cases would be heard. One by one, the jurors called forward by Chief Justice Oliver refused to take the oath, stating, “we believe in our consciences, that our acting in concert with a court so constituted … would be betraying the just and sacred rights of our native land … [which we need to preserve for] our posterity.”24

  John Adams had planned for this to happen, and yet with no courts in session, his legal work would end. There would be no money coming in to cover the expenses of keeping up a home, an office, and law clerks in Boston. John proposed that the family move back to Braintree, and once again Abigail agreed. When John left for Philadelphia to attend the Continental Congress, she took the children and returned to the farm in Braintree.

  * * *

  Governor Gage was desperate to come up with candidates to serve as mandamus councilors, men suitable to serve as the new governing body of Massachusetts. Just as desperately, the Loyalists of Massachusetts struggled to keep their names off the list of candidates, knowing that being named to the council was an open invitation for trouble. “Our fowling pieces are ready while our fishing lines are in hand” threatened a band of fishermen from Gloucester; they would not hesitate to act against those “stupid villains endeavoring to aid in fastening to our necks and that of our posterity the yoke of bondage.”25

  When the names of the thirty-six potential councilors were finally revealed, only twenty-five agreed to serve. Life for those twenty-five became very hard, very quickly, and for anyone who associated with them. Mandamus councilors and their Loyalist supporters were shunned on the streets where they lived or, worse, verbally “pelted and abused.” Their offices were sullied with dirt and feces; and in church, hymns led by Loyalists were met with studied silence. Their homes were fired into, their cattle were driven off, their horses painted in colors, and the tails of their horses sheared to stubs.26

  On the morning of August 10, the Massachusetts delegation to the first Continental Congress gathered in Boston, close to the home of John Hancock. Five regiments of British troops were running drills on the Common, its green grass long churned to dust under the feet of the soldiers and the summer’s unrelenting heat.

  But no one who passed along the Common and walked up Beacon Street even glanced at the Redcoats with their guns and bayonets, parading back and forth. All attention was focused on the small group at the top of the hill loading up a carriage with trunks and satchels, while offering handshakes and hugs all around.

  John Adams took a moment to grasp Abigail by the shoulders, the older children clustered around her skirts and little Thomas in her arms. Then he turned away and climbed into the carriage, “a coach and four, preceded by two white servants well-mounted and armed, with four blacks in livery, two on horseback and two footmen.”27

  The delegation was to travel in style and now, in plain sight of both the British troops drilling on the Common and the clusters of colonists gathering in the streets to wish them off with all the best, they set off. They stopped only to pick up Thomas Cushing at his home on Beacon Street, and then they proceeded on their way.

  Within days, Abigail, back now in Braintree, wrote to John. She missed him so much; although he had traveled often during the years she had known him, he had never gone so far away. The distance made time stretch: “It seems already a month since you left me.”28 She wrote of her fears: “The great anxiety I feel for my Country, for you and for our family renders the day tedious, and the night unpleasant.… What course you can or will take is all wrapt in the Bosom of futurity.”29 An unknown future, for her family, her husband, her country.

  Marshaling her study of history, she sought to gird herself, and John, for the necessary battle ahead: �
�we are told that all the Misfortunes of Sparta were occasioned by their too great Solicitude for present tranquility, and by an excessive love of peace, they neglected the means of making it sure and lasting.”30

  Seated at a window that looked out over the warm, quiet fields of the Braintree farm, Abigail couldn’t imagine anything more valuable than peace. Much-needed rain had finally fallen in the night, and the air was sweet-smelling from clover, marsh grasses, and the revived clusters of lavender planted by the back door.

  The means to secure peace, she knew, could be—and might well prove to be—brutal and would require “shedding Humane Blood, more Especially the Blood of our Countrymen.” War was coming to America; she was sure of it.

  By the end of the letter, Abigail regained her composure and understood her role: as the true compass, pointing the way for John. “I long impatiently to have you upon the Stage of action. The first of September or the month of September, perhaps may be of as much importance to Great Britain as the Ides of March were to Caeser. I wish you every Publick as well, as private blessing, and that wisdom which is profitable both for instruction and edification to conduct you in this difficult day.”31

  John would take her advice to heart, as her ambitions so neatly matched his own, for himself and for their country. From Princeton, where he received her letter, he wrote to her, “I have the strongest Hopes, that We shall yet see a clearer Sky, and better Times.”32 Then he climbed back into the black carriage and, with the other delegates, continued on his way south.