Guardians of Liberty
Sam Adams and John Hancock

by Olga Hall-Quest

BOSTON HARBOR—1771

Key to Map 

A Old Meetinghouse B Christ Church C Trinity Church D Old North Meetinghouse

E Old South Meetinghouse F Work House G Governor’s House H Kings Chapel I Prison

From a map published by A. Hamilton, Jr., January 16, 1776

Grade Level and Copyright 

Grade Level is 9.0 using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test on the entire manuscript.

First edition published by E. P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1963.

Fifth Printing July 1967.

Electronic edition published by Ebooks for Students, Ltd., 2023.

This ebook is in the public domain, and is free of all copyright restrictions. It is also free of digital rights management protection so you can distribute copies to your students, their parents, and other prospective readers. 

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Other Books by Olga Hall-Quest:

With Stanley in Africa

How the Pilgrims Came to Plymouth

Jamestown Adventure

Shrine of Liberty: The Alamo 

1

Old Boston on the Bay

Boston wondered about Sam Adams. How his family lived was a mystery to everyone. There was a time when he had worked in his father’s brewery on Purchase Street near the water, but since Deacon Adams’s death, Sam had not worked at anything. His old brown suit was shiny from long wear and his shoes were scuffed and shabby. Usually there was a button missing from his coat, and his gray wig, when he thought to wear it, was set haphazardly on his head. The old home on Purchase Street was as run-down in appearance as its owner.

It was well known that Sam Adams had got into difficulties while he was a tax collector for Boston. But the people were tolerant about that. They thought he was the best collector the town had ever had, because he never took their money when they were hard up. He despised money, but he knew how much trouble the lack of it could cause and was sympathetic. His father had lost almost everything in a disastrous banking venture. For years Sam had to fight to hold on to what was left—not much more than the old house he lived in.

This did not worry him, though. His only interest was politics. He believed it was a patriotic virtue to neglect his own affairs for the good of the people. He would not let them forget how precious freedom was or how zealous they had to be in their efforts to keep the British government from infringing on their liberties. Sam thought so little of the mother country that he was ready to cut all ties with her, but not many others in the colonies were that radical yet. Those who were critical of the royal governors and the British Parliament were called Whigs, and those who stoutly defended the Crown were known as Tories. They took their names from the two political parties in England.

Sam Adams spent much time at the taverns talking politics with the leading citizens. He was adroit at influencing their thinking, never pushing an argument too far and never losing his temper. More often he sat back and let others do the talking, but no one underestimated Sam Adams’s power and influence. He could often be seen talking with the artisans—carpenters, shipwrights, and other craftsmen. Admittedly, he was trying to do their thinking for them, trying to make them good Whigs. But Sam really enjoyed stopping by the ropewalks, the shipyards, and the docks to chat with the workingmen.

Not all the men he saw along the waterfront were shipwrights, caulkers, and spar-makers. There were wealthy merchants, too, who came to supervise the loading and unloading of ships. Sam Adams had been observing one in particular whose wharves were up at the north end of the crescent-shaped harbor. He stood out among the stout older merchants, for he was young and handsome. From the three-cornered hat atop his powdered wig to the shining buckles on his shoes, he was smartly turned out.

Sam Adams paid no attention to the fine clothes or good looks. He was thinking what a lot of good John Hancock could do with the pile of money he had just inherited from his Uncle Thomas.

Boston had not seen much of this young man. He was never one of the boys who dived off the end of a wharf to go swimming on a hot summer’s day, or who went sledding down the icy slopes in winter. He had been the little boy, and later the young man, who could be glimpsed riding with his uncle and aunt in a great coach.

Now when Sam looked out over the harbor, he was thinking not of the magnificent view, with the gulls sweeping in and the ships riding high, but of how he could make a good Whig out of young John Hancock.

The Boston that Sam Adams and John Hancock knew was very different from the city of today. Then it was a peninsula connected at the southwest with the mainland by a neck so narrow that the town was almost an island.

It was a hilly town, having three large hills and numerous smaller ones. Above them rose the tall, slender steeples of the many churches. And below, clustered thickly and closely, were the houses, most of them wooden, with their jumble of chimneys trailing streamers and plumes of smoke. With a population of about twenty thousand, the town had become crowded.

Years later, Boston’s hills were cut down, and the dirt and gravel were used to fill in Roxbury Harbor, Back Bay, and Mill Cove, and even to build up more land out in the harbor.

But in that earlier time, there was just one way to come into the town by land. With Roxbury Harbor on the right and Back Bay on the left, one rode over the mile-long, tide-washed neck before reaching the town gate, having passed the gallows and the town bull in his pasture. The guarded brick gate had two entrances, one for pedestrians and the other for vehicles, horsemen, and animals.

Inside, the traveler continued on his way along “the High Street ’ (now Washington) that began as Orange, soon changed to Newbury, then to Marlborough, and finally terminated at the old State House as Cornhill. Here at the corner was King, a short, broad street that led down to Long Wharf, the great pier that extended half a mile out into the harbor.

King Street (now State) was Boston’s busiest thoroughfare. It was noisy with the traffic of carts and drays rattling and rumbling, and of horses’ hooves striking the cobblestones. As drivers and horsemen shouted, pedestrians leaped wildly, trying to find safety on the precarious footways alongside.

One-horse chaises and coaches maneuvered through the crowded street. After the day’s work, Thomas Hancock would be driven by his coachman along King, past the old State House, and on out to Treamount (Tremont) where the coach turned left and then right to ascend the steep slope of Beacon Street. Up there on Beacon Hill, Uncle Thomas had built the first of the great houses of brick and stone. The present State House stands on the site and is no higher than Beacon Hill was then.

The Hancock mansion overlooked the Common below, where the tinkling of cow bells could be heard, and where the people walked leisurely under the stately elms of the mall. The croaking of frogs was heard along Frog Lane (now Boylston Street), a few blocks south of the Common.

The old State House, also called the Town House, fronted upon both King and Cornhill. It was a brick building of two stories with a high tower, which “on rejoicing days” was illuminated. The lower part formed the merchants exchange. On the upper floor the royal governor and the officers of the Crown met in the Council Chamber, and those who spoke for the colony and guarded its liberty in the Hall of Representatives. High above King Street, the lion and the unicorn of England guarded the tower.

Nearby, in Dock Square, was Faneuil Hall, which wealthy, civic-minded Peter Faneuil had built as a market house for Boston. It was a brick structure, with open arches below and a floor above with various rooms and a hall large enough to hold a thousand people. Boston’s town meetings were held here, and so many patriotic gatherings that Faneuil Hall came to be called the Cradle of Liberty.

The weather vane on its cupola was the work of Shem Drowne, a coppersmith whose distinctive vanes decorated the tops of several buildings in Boston. Why he chose a grasshopper for Faneuil Hall is not known, but there it was in a crawling position, worked out in fine detail, with glass eyes that glinted in the sunlight.

Dock Square was the business center of the town. The streets close by were lined with the shops of grocers, wig-makers, tanners, wheelwrights, coppersmiths, printers, booksellers, and tallow chandlers. In a house on the corner of Hanover and Union streets, Benjamin Franklin had worked at making tallow candles for his father, and had found relief from boredom by throwing whatever came to hand into nearby Mill Pond.

There were many grocery stores on Hanover Street, but there were no fish markets in the North End. In the morning, housewives came out to buy fish when they heard the tin horns of the peddlers. They went up and down the streets tooting their horns and crying, “Fresh cod, haddock, and mackerel, just come in at the head of the ferry-ways.” Later in the day, the oystermen came around, carrying heavy sacks filled with oysters and calling out in high-pitched voices, “Oys! Finey oys! Buy any oys?”

Anne Street, like Union, led out of Dock Square, curving close to the waterfront. After a few blocks, it became Fish Street. At the head of Hancock’s Wharf, Fish broadened out into North Square. This was not a square in shape, but a long triangle cobbled with beach pebbles. At the apex stood Old North Meeting, the church of the Mathers. The Reverend Samuel Mather, the fourth generation of this family of distinguished New England preachers, lived in a house on Moon Street across from the church.

Around the neat, shady little square were the homes of silversmiths, tailors, mast makers, and boat builders. Paul Revere was one of the two silversmiths. His small, two-story wooden house with the peak roof, overhanging second story, and narrow diamond-paned windows, still stands. Two doors below the Revere house was a three-story brick mansion. And just off the square was the great house of Thomas Hutchinson.

Both Paul Revere and the aristocratic Hutchinsons attended New Brick Church nearby. Because of Deacon Shem Drowne’s weather vane, it was known as the Cockerel Church. High on the steeple was a “hearty and tough old cock” who was like a faithful sentinel to the people of Boston and a welcome sight to mariners coming into port.

Several blocks north of the square, Christ Church stood, tall and beautiful, on Salem Street. The Old North Church, as it is often called, had the highest and most graceful steeple of all the churches in Boston and bells of the clearest and sweetest tone. One of two Episcopal churches (King’s Chapel was the other), it had a “royal peal” of eight bells, with an inscription on each. One read: “We are the first ring of bells cast for the British Empire in North America. Anno, 1744.” But the two lanterns hung in its steeple to signal that the British were coming have given Christ Church greater fame than its bells.

Another of the city’s famous churches was the Old South Meetinghouse at the corner of Marlborough and Milk streets. Noted ministers had preached from its high pulpit, but, like Christ Church, it became famous for its association with the Revolution. Since it could hold a larger crowd than Faneuil Hall, some of the great patriotic meetings were held here.

The church steeples dominated the skyline. Below them was a thicket of marvelous chimneys. There were spacious chimneys rising high above hipped roofs, huge chimneys straddling steep pitch roofs, and tall, stately chimneys paired at either end of gambrel roofs. They rose singly, in pairs, and in clusters, some low and squat, but most of them tall and capacious. Every roof, from the grubbiest little wooden house to John Hancock’s fine mansion out on Beacon Hill, had its chimneys.

Winters were severe in the province of Massachusetts Bay, and coal did not come into use until the next century. In early fall, the woodsawyers came out in full force. They sawed wood in front of the houses and then piled it neatly in the woodhouse or the cellar.

And those big chimneys had to be cleaned. For that dirty work there were brigades of little Negro sweeps. They walked the streets with sooty blankets over their shoulders plaintively crying, “Sweep o’ sweep! Sweep o’ sweep!” At work, they swept the soot from a chimney into the blanket down below. Upon reaching the top, they paused to look out over the roofs and sing a sad little song. Chimney sweeps found nothing cheerful in their way of life.

While Boston slept beneath its steeples and its chimneys, the night watch slowly paced the streets, calling out at intervals: “Half-past twelve o’clock and a clear morning,” or, “One o’clock and a severe snowstorm.” Whatever the weather, it was comforting to hear his voice.

2 

Sam Adams of Purchase Street

In an August morning in the year 1751, Sam Adams sat at the breakfast table reading the Boston News-Letter. Suddenly he frowned as his eye fell on an unpleasant item that concerned him:

To be sold at public auction at the Exchange Tavern in Boston. Tomorrow at noon, the dwelling house, malt house, and other buildings, with the garden and lands adjoining, and the wharf, dock, and flats before the same, being part of the estate of the late Samuel Adams, Esq., deceased, the said estate being taken by warrant or execution with the hand and seal of the Honorable Commissioners for the more speedy finishing of the Land Bank scheme.

There it was again! After seventeen years the “honorable” Land Bank Commissioners were still hounding him, still trying to take possession of his house and what was left of his small estate. Sam’s most potent weapon was his pen, and now he turned it against the commissioners, determined to silence them.

In a terse letter, he warned the sheriff that he would prosecute any person who dared to trespass upon his property. Then he took his case to the citizens in the columns of the newspapers. All property owners, he argued, were involved in this action, their holdings subject to the same unjust seizure that threatened his. Moreover, he declared, the public should know that the Land Bank Commissioners had dawdled for years just to keep on drawing their big salaries. As a result of these disclosures, the commissioners eventually lost their jobs. Rid at last of their harassments, Sam Adams was assured of a home for himself and his two small motherless children.

Samuel Adams, Sr., had built the old house on Purchase Street for his bride back in the year 1713, and here Sam was born on the Sabbath day of September 16, 1722. The Adams house could not be compared with the great mansions of Boston, but it was a comfortable two-story house in the South End near the waterfront and the Adams Wharf. As a merchant, the father had prospered, and as a godly man and a pillar of his church, he had come to be known as Deacon Adams. Besides the wharf, he owned a profitable brewery near his house.

Young Sam was given an education that befitted the son of a well-to-do, highly respected citizen of Boston. After having been drilled in Latin and Greek for eight years at the Boston Latin School, he went on to Harvard College across the Charles River in Cambridge.

While Sam diligently applied himself to the study of advanced courses in Greek and Latin, and in astronomy, physics, logic, and philosophy, Deacon Adams became involved in a ruinous financial scheme. For a long time, Massachusetts had been plagued by monetary problems. There was so little hard money in the colony that farmers and town workers were often in debt to the merchants, who further depleted the amount of gold and silver coin in circulation by sending it to England to pay for manufactured goods.

To relieve this situation, the Land Bank was founded in Boston with Deacon Adams as its director. The eight hundred members who participated in the scheme all owned land, which they put up as security for loans of paper money printed by the bank. Then as people borrowed the paper money, it was spent and went into circulation. For a short while, Deacon Adams and his associates prospered. But the scheme was unsound, and in the spring of 1741 the crash came.

The founders of the Land Bank were not dishonest. They sincerely believed that their paper-money scheme would aid hard-pressed small businessmen and farmers, and thereby bring prosperity to Massachusetts Bay. But the wealthy Boston merchants, whose large fortunes had been built up from the sea trade, were opposed to the Land Bank all along. And they were right. Land is not money.

None knew this better than young Thomas Hutchinson. He was an expert in banking, as well as Boston’s most distinguished citizen. He lived in a mansion on the slope above Clark’s Wharf in that part of the North End where other wealthy merchants had built impressive homes. In the midst of the bitter controversy, Hutchinson appealed to England, and Parliament promptly declared the Land Bank illegal.

Deacon Adams did not threaten Thomas Hutchinson with barrel staves, daring him to show his face, as did some of the small property owners who were ruined by the collapse of the Land Bank, but he was one of the so-called martyrs. He lost heavily, and for the next seventeen years, the Land Bank Commissioners periodically threatened to seize what was left of his estate—the brewery, the wharf, and his house. It remained for young Sam, some years after his father’s death, to put an end to their harassment by enlisting the aid of the sympathetic citizens of Boston.

After catastrophe struck, the Deacon managed somehow to keep his son in college. Sam did his part. He worked for his meals by serving as a student-waiter in the noisy dining hall.

By this time, Sam Adams was already absorbed in what was to be the consuming interest of his life—politics. He hated Thomas Hutchinson for ruining his family and felt a burning resentment toward the British Parliament for having interfered in the affairs of Massachusetts Bay.

The Land Bank crash had sharply divided Boston into two camps. On one side were the little businessmen, the farmers, and the artisans, who were determined not to become “but slaves and vassals of the rich.” They formed the large group that Sam Adams would weld into the revolutionary Whig faction in the years ahead. On the other side was the aristocracy, composed mainly of the wealthy merchants. As Tories, they would look to King and Parliament for protection from the “commonalty.” Sam would not forget the part Thomas Hutchinson had played in the Land Bank crash of 1741.

In 1743, after seven years at Harvard College, Sam Adams took his master’s degree. On a hot July day, he stood on the platform of the Cambridge meetinghouse before the bewigged and beruffled dignitaries of church and state to declaim his thesis in Latin. William Shirley, Governor of Massachusetts Bay, was there, along with members of the clergy and prominent old graduates. They had toasted one another with good Madeira and feasted heartily before the commencement orations began. But they must have been startled out of their torpor when young Sam Adams started to argue in the affirmative on the thesis: “Whether it be lawful to resist the Supreme Magistrate if the Commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved.”

Deacon and Mrs. Adams were proud of their son, but it was a keen disappointment to them that Sam showed no interest in becoming a minister. He had been brought up in a home that was strict even by Boston’s standards in the observance of religious practices. From earliest childhood, he had been accustomed to prayers before meals and Bible readings at bedtime, and he had regularly attended services and sung hymns at the Reverend Samuel Checkley’s meetinghouse.

But it was the political atmosphere in his home, rather than the religious, that had made the deepest impression on Sam Adams’s thinking and character. Deacon Adams was as strong and upright a pillar in Boston politics as he was in his church, “a true New England man and honest patriot.”

He had risen from tithingman to become one of Boston’s representatives in the General Court. Here he had made it clear where he stood on the touchy matter of colonial rights when he urged the other representatives to use their “utmost endeavor that the great privileges we enjoy by the English Constitution and the Royal Charter may be preserved from all encroachments.” No one was more alert than Deacon Adams in his vigilance to preserve New England’s liberties from encroachments by the British government.

At home on winter evenings, when burning logs crackled in the big fireplace and candlelight cast moving shadows on the walls, young Sam had listened with rapt attention to endless discussions of grievances against the mother country and of threats to New England’s liberties. Elisha Cooke, one of the early leaders in the patriot cause, came often to these political gatherings in the Deacon’s home. Sam probably knew that Governor Jonathan Belcher had accused Cooke of being an enemy to “all kingly government” and one who tried to “poison the minds of his countrymen in order to assert the independence of New England.” It was a heady “poison” to the young boy who absorbed Cooke’s republican notions as a plant soaks up water.

He was also schooled by his father in the ways of the Boston caucus. Deacon Adams himself had organized the Whig caucus clubs—the North, the Middle, and the South. These clubs were political organizations that tried to manage elections and dictate policies. (The word “caucus” is still in use, and in the United States means a private or preliminary meeting of members of a political party to select candidates and plan party policies.)

The North Caucus met in a private room of the old Salutation Tavern on the corner of Salutation Alley and Ship Street. The tavern had been nicknamed “The Two Palaverers” from its sign of two elegant gentlemen bowing to each other. Here small shopkeepers, artisans, and shipbuilders held their secret meetings. What they decided, under Deacon Adams’s leadership, about town offices and town business usually carried the town meetings. The Deacon was a highly successful politician, and his son learned from him how the caucus clubs worked.

When Sam finished college, he had no notion of how he was going to make a living, and did not seem much concerned about it. The Deacon was. He got a job for his son in the countinghouse of his old friend Thomas Cushing. That lasted for just a few months. Reluctantly, Mr. Cushing had to report that he was training young men for business, not for politics. Then Sam borrowed a thousand pounds from his father to start a business of his own, promptly lent it to a friend, who in turn lost it, and that was the end of that venture.

Alarmed by Sam’s indifference to money, Deacon Adams put him to work in his brewery. And there he did well enough until the old Deacon died in 1748. The following year Sam married Betty Checkley, the daughter of his pastor, and with a loyal, hardworking wife to keep his clothes patched and somehow to make ends meet, he was free to think more about politics and less about malt and beer.

With some friends, Sam founded a newspaper called the Independent Advertiser. In his first venture as a political writer, Sam Adams was able to arouse little support for the patriot cause. Governor William Shirley was riding high on a wave of prosperity that had come to Massachusetts Bay after the close of King George’s War in 1748. The religious fervor that had swept the province in the early 1740’s had subsided. The people had not become irreligious. They were just not as excited about being good Puritans as they had been during the days of the Great Awakening. They had come to like the good things of life that money could buy.

So Sam Adams, who had never taken money seriously, and who had so little of it, began crusading against the evils of money-making in the columns of the Independent Advertiser. He warned that the scramble for wealth was strangling “the good old New England spirit of the early settlers”—and Boston called him the Old Puritan. He wrote about the decline of Rome as a “dreadful example” of what happened when people cared too much about luxuries— and he was called the Old Roman. Some even thought he was a little odd. It was not long before the Independent Advertiser folded. Sam went on living frugally—more from necessity than from taste.

In the years following Deacon Adams’s death, Sam gave up all pretense of tending to business. The brewery closed down, the wharf sagged, and the house fell into a sad state of disrepair. It was only when the Land Bank Commissioners threatened to take from him what little was left that he bestirred himself to do something about his declining fortunes. He would write furious letters of protest and then go on about his real business, which was politics.

Sam went often to the Caucus Club where he sat for hours huddled with the Whig leaders. Or, following a practice he had begun, he would take some promising young man to one of the Whig clubs to convert him to the patriot cause. Walking the streets, he stopped often to talk to whoever would listen. During the lean, unrewarding years, he watched the royal governor with a sharp eye and kept the people informed of every threat to their rights. It was the small flame of liberty that he carefully tended lest New Englanders forget how precious it was.

Although Sam Adams always turned a cheerful face to the world, his friends became concerned about the Old Roman’s diminishing means. So, with the best of intentions, in 1756 they elected him to the office of tax collector of Boston. A more unlikely person for the job could hardly have been found, and predictably, Sam got into deep trouble.

Easygoing and kindhearted, he ambled about the streets of the town listening sympathetically to the hard-luck stories of taxpayers rather than taking their money. Even when promised the money on a certain date, Sam forgot to go back to collect it. Worse, he now and again dipped into the town’s tax funds to take money for his own use. He was popular with the taxpayers, but in 1764 an investigation caught up with his lax methods and brought to light a shortage of several thousand pounds. A jail term hung over him until he was providentially saved from disgrace by the generosity of John Hancock.

In this dark year of 1764, Sam Adams brought a second wife to live in the ramshackle old house on Purchase Street. His first wife had died in 1757. Betsy Wells was as loyal and devoted a wife as Betty Checkley had been, and as diligent and skillful at making out with scant means. Sam had at least been exceptionally fortunate in his two marriages.

But here he was at forty-two, looking years older and getting nowhere, even in the field of politics. His hair was gray, and both his hands and his voice sometimes shook with a palsy. He wore the same seedy clothes year in and year out and was, to all appearances, a middle-aged failure. Even his friends saw him only as a “plain, simple, decent citizen.” But, since Sam scorned money and had no interest in anything but politics, he could not be called a financial failure.

Sam Adams had been forced by circumstances to mark time. Except for intervals of a few years, there had been continuous war since his graduation from college. England had been at war with France for almost a century, and the fighting had been on a world-wide scale. In America, there were successive phases of this conflict—King William’s War, Queen Anne’s, King George’s, and finally, the Seven Years’ War.

During these years of the French and Indian Wars, the colonies had to look to the mother country for protection, and young men in New England fought to protect their own frontiers from the enemy. Governor Shirley held office for sixteen of those years, and he was one of the ablest of the royal governors. It was not a time to wage political battle with the Tories or the British Parliament, so the Whigs had to sit on the sidelines. Sam Adams kept the faction alive, even though no political plums fell to its members. He had waited for years and years with Job-like patience for his own advancement and, more important to him, for others to catch up with his thinking about colonial rights and grievances.

Meanwhile, he had been filling the Whig ranks with bright young men. One of the brightest was his second cousin, John Adams, a young lawyer who lived in the village of Braintree, a few miles from Boston. A short, plump little man with a smooth round face, John was thirteen years younger than Sam. He had a sharp, logical mind, and was cautious, bluntly honest, and forthright. Like Sam, he was ready to fight for “the rights of Englishmen,” but he believed in gradual change rather than sudden upheaval. Sam had to be cautious in wooing John to his own radical thinking.

One day when they were walking along the streets of Boston discussing the fortunes of the Whigs, they stopped in front of the Hancock mansion. “I have done a very good thing for our cause by enlisting the master of that house into it,” Sam told John.

For the moment, John Adams could not see what good rich John Hancock would be to the Whigs. “I have done a wise thing by making his fortune our own,” Sam explained. “He has great riches, and we can give him consequence to enjoy them.”

The Whig cause could, indeed, use John Hancock’s money. It had men with brains and it had Sam Adams’s caucus clubs, but it was poor in pocket. Just how Sam had done this “wise thing” remained his secret. The Tories, who had been caught napping, declared it was in the same way that the Devil had seduced Eve, “by a constant whispering” at Mr. Hancock’s ear.

3 

John Hancock, Esq., of Beacon Hill

Holding on to the hand of his Uncle Thomas, little John Hancock walked up, up, up the stone steps and paused before the great walnut door to catch his breath. Then the door opened, and he was almost smothered in the capacious embrace of a very tall and very fat lady with bulging black eyes. She was his Aunt Lydia, and on this most exciting day in his life, he had been brought to live with her and his Uncle Thomas as their adopted son. It was an exciting day for them, too, for they had no children of their own.

Except for rare visits with his clergyman grandfather in Lexington, John had spent all of his seven years in the village of Braintree. His father was a clergyman, too, and the boy was born in the parsonage on January 23, 1737. The Reverend John Hancock was a good man, but one of no particular distinction. He is remembered only as the father of John, and for having baptized John Adams, who was two years younger than his own John. The boys played together and went to the same school, “as soon as we were out of petticoats,” John Adams wrote many years later.

In 1744, the Reverend John Hancock died, and life changed magically for the young boy who had never known anything except the simple pleasures of village life and the privations of being a poor clergyman’s son. Young John Hancock came to live on Beacon Hill in the great stone mansion of Boston’s wealthiest merchant.

Thomas Hancock was the second son of the Lexington parson, but the pastoral life had held no appeal for him. Apprenticed to a Boston bookbinder on Anne Street, it was not long before he married his master’s daughter and had a bookshop of his own. He did not have a degree from Harvard College, but he had what it takes to make money—driving ambition, canny business sense, tremendous energy, and a jovial personality.

Uncle Thomas called his bookshop the Bible and Three Crowns, but soon Bibles and other books were pushed back on the shelves to make room for a bewildering variety of imports—tea, stationery, fancy dress goods and ribbons, hardware, leather goods, ships’ stores, sugar, molasses, and much else. The old Clark Wharf became Hancock Wharf, and here Hancock’s ships unloaded cargoes from the islands of the West Indies, Canada, England, Holland, and Spain.

Like other merchants, Uncle Thomas made some of his profits from smuggling, but that was not held against him. Such illegal trade was considered entirely respectable by the colonists, because they thought that the duties imposed by England’s Navigation Acts were unjust.

But Thomas Hancock owed much to the mother country. During the French and Indian Wars, he had a virtual monopoly on supplying the British fleet and armies in America. This enterprise was so profitable that at the close of King George’s War in 1748, he complained that “peace has put a stop to all our trade.” He was back in the thick of things, though, during the Seven Years’ War, and was elevated to His Majesty’s Agent for Transports. Long before that day, people spoke with awe not of the Bible and Three Crowns, but of the House of Hancock.

The great merchant was a portly man of medium height.

He stands in one of his portraits dressed in a dark three-quarter-length coat, knee breeches, white hose, and silver-buckled shoes. The strong, full face is framed in an immense fluffy wig that falls to his shoulders. But it does not overshadow the prideful expression of the dark, narrow eyes and the firmly set mouth.

Such a man might well have become so absorbed in making money that he would have had no other interest and no time for anything else. This was not so with Uncle Thomas. He took as much pleasure in spending money as he did in piling up a fortune, and he gave as much attention to the details of expensive living as he did to managing his far-flung mercantile business. Everything had to be imported; and since he was not easy to please, there was much correspondence, and Uncle Thomas wrote the long letters himself.

The mansion, which was now to be home to young John Hancock, was one of the show places of Boston. It was a two-story stone structure with a railed balcony above the front door. Three dormer windows overlooked the Common, and the top of the gambrel roof was spanned by wooden railings that connected two pairs of slender chimneys.

The massive front door opened into a wide entrance hall that extended to the back. On the left, a staircase with a hand-carved balustrade curved gracefully up to the floor above. All the rooms had fireplaces, and everywhere there were rich furnishings, the soft shine of mahogany, and the gleam of polished brass.

At the back, the windows overlooked the most beautiful gardens in Boston. There had been reams of correspondence with a London horticulturist about box, yew trees, holly, and jessamine vines. And sea captains came back from faraway ports with fruit trees Uncle Thomas had ordered—mulberry, peach, and apricot. Such gardens needed expert care, so he imported an English gardener.

There was an English coachman, too. Uncle Thomas’s most prized possession was the coach which he called his chariot. It had been built in London, and for three years the proud merchant corresponded with his agent about its details. Most particularly, it had to accommodate Aunt Lydia’s height and bulk, and the step had to be low because of her weak knees. There was fringe around the top, and four dozen little harness bells to make a merry jingle on snowy rides in winter when the coach was mounted on runners.

Overcome, perhaps, by the chariot’s magnificence, Uncle Thomas had written that he hoped the agent would not think “it savors too much of vanity.” But it was evident that he never felt so proud as when he and Aunt Lydia rode forth in the elegant coach. Here, for all to see, was the wealthiest man in the colony, who had once been a poor country boy.

It must have taken young John awhile to get used to all the grandeur. He was a handsome lad but delicate, and for more than a year he was tutored at home. Then he entered the Boston Latin School where, during the long school day, he mastered Latin and Greek and applied himself to penmanship and the mending of quill pens. He was ready for Harvard College at fourteen, and four years later he took his degree.

There was no question what young John Hancock would do after his graduation from college. Uncle Thomas was eager to take him into the House of Hancock. The boy had never disappointed his uncle in any way, and now he settled down to business and soon proved that he had both the industry and the aptitude to master the complexities of his uncle’s mercantile empire. “And what a school this was!” John Adams wrote. “Four large ships plying between Boston and London and other business in proportion. John became an example to all the young men of the town. Wholly devoted to business, he was as regular and punctual at his store as the sun in his course.”

John Hancock was not only a model of industry, but as a fashionable dandy, the envy of the young men of Boston. He was tall, slender, and graceful, and wore his expensive London-tailored clothes with the air of a young aristocrat. In his wardrobe, there were suits of broadcloth, satin, and velvet. Some were laced with gold and silver. He had a brocaded dressing gown, and his muslin shirts were ruffled with the finest lace.

After John had put in six years of hard work, Uncle Thomas decided that he was ready to profit from a trip to England. Instructions and letters of introduction were written; and early in June of 1760, John sailed for London, a young man on his own for the first time. “Write me how the world goes on the other side of the water,” Uncle Thomas said at parting.

And letters did, in time, start coming from the dutiful John. There were reports on visits with his uncle’s agents and business associates. In October he attended the funeral of King George II, who had died on the twenty-fifth and was succeeded by his grandson, George III.

“On Sunday last, the Prince of Wales was proclaimed King with great pomp and joy, but his coronation will not be till April,” John wrote. He hoped to stay long enough to be present at the ceremonies. But George Ill’s plans for a September marriage to Her Most Serene Highness, the Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg, delayed his coronation, for he wanted to ascend the throne with a queen.

Uncle Thomas warned John of the danger of crossing the Atlantic in the autumn and advised him to forgo the coronation and return home. That was all right with John. He had seen enough of London and was feeling homesick. “The greatest estate in England would be but a poor temptation to spend my days there,” he had written Aunt Lydia.

So John Hancock returned to Beacon Hill and his uncle’s countinghouse. He had a good head for business, and on January 1, 1763, the shrewd old man made him a partner in the House of Hancock. About a year later, Thomas Hancock’s health began to fail. He did not lose his zest for life, and he kept doggedly active in business, but on August 1, 1764, he died at the age of sixty-one.

On the following Monday, the Boston Gazette carried an announcement of his death:

On Wednesday last, about noon, the Honorable Thomas Hancock, Esq., one of His Majesty’s Council for this Province, was seized with an apoplexy just as he was entering the Council chamber and expired about three o’clock p.m. at his seat, to which he was carried soon after he was taken with the fit. He was one of the most noted merchants in New England. Having no issue, he has left the bulk of his estate to his nephew, Mr. John Hancock.

At the age of twenty-seven, the son of the poor country parson of Braintree came into a fortune that made him the wealthiest man in New England.

4

Rumblings of Rebellion

After the Seven Years’ War came to an end in 1763, there were good times in Massachusetts. It was a boom such as the province had never seen. Hundreds of workmen were building ships in the great yards along the waterfront. The harbor swarmed with vessels, large and small—merchant ships, sloops, whalers, ferries, and fishing ketches. Tall-masted, ocean-going ships loaded and unloaded cargoes at the warehouses along the piers.

The merchants had never been more content, for all this activity meant business for them. They had also profited by the war. The British army had paid hard money for huge quantities of supplies, and many of the merchants made fortunes, or, like Thomas Hancock, grew richer.

There was rejoicing in England, too, when the long, costly wars with France ended. But Englishmen were quickly sobered by a look at the staggering national debt. There were clamorous protests from the British taxpayers. Why should they have to carry the burden of paying for a war that had been fought for the benefit of the American colonials, and more, have to pay for the maintenance of an army in America? England feared that France might attack again, and she could not depend on the colonies to unite and defend themselves.

The colonists angrily retorted that colonial soldiers had fought and died to win the war, too, and that it had also drained them of money. The English pooh-poohed that.

They had heard about the great houses of brick and stone in Boston, and how both the ladies and gentlemen there dressed in the finest silks, satins, and laces.

England was now the greatest power in the world, but she did not know how to govern the American colonies. Many British statesmen still thought of the colonists as children that had to be disciplined. But the colonies in America had grown beyond the disciplinary and dependent stage. They had worked out their own form of democratic government in their colonial assemblies, and they had come to value freedom above everything else. Now that they did not need England’s military protection, they chafed under the restrictions that kept them from expanding.

The old Navigation Acts with their stifling regulations of trade were still in force. The colonists could produce only raw materials. Manufacturing was forbidden, and all trade had to be with the mother country. It was all right for them to mine ore and convert it into iron, but the tools and weapons that were made from the metal had to be manufactured in Great Britain.

Colonial merchants could buy goods in France or any other country, but the merchandise had to be shipped first to England and duty paid on it there before it could be sent to America. And it could be shipped only in colonial or English vessels. Exporters in the colonies could not send their products wherever they wanted. American goods had to be shipped to England, where English buyers bought and then resold them. Either way, importing or exporting, English merchants took the larger share of the profits.

Since manufacturing was not permitted, the distilling of rum became an important industry, especially in New England. There was a lively trade with the West Indies, where the distillers got the molasses for the rum. The Sugar Islands raised very little food. Chunky, broad-beamed ships sailed south from New England, loaded with cargoes of corn, wheat, dried meat, and salt fish, together with pipe-staves for the molasses barrels, which they sold to the West Indians.

There was no duty on molasses that New England distillers bought from the British West Indies, but the supply was not adequate for their needs. They had to buy from the French and Spanish islands, too. In 1733 Great Britain had imposed a duty of sixpence a gallon on molasses from these islands. This was prohibitive, and the distillers took gleefully to smuggling. As a way of dealing with British injustice, smuggling became a respectable business.

During the Seven Years’ War, the mother country was outraged to learn that merchants in New England were carrying on a profitable trade with the French in the West Indies—even supplying the enemy with food! At that time the hated writs of assistance were slapped upon the province of Massachusetts. They gave customs officials the right to enter not only warehouses, stores, and ships, but even private dwellings in search of smuggled goods.

The merchants were stung to action. They would take their case to the Supreme Judiciary Court. Sam Adams could not fight the writs of assistance for them in court. They needed a lawyer and chose James Otis, the first of the great revolutionary figures upon whom the spotlight was focused.

James Otis, at thirty-five, was the most brilliant lawyer in Boston. He was a large man with a short, thick neck and narrow, penetrating eyes. Although loyal to the mother country, he was a strong defender of the rights of the colonies. And he did not hesitate to give up his position as King’s advocate to represent the merchants in their fight against the writs.

The case was heard on a February day in 1761 when the streets of Boston were covered with snow and ice. Crowds gathered in the Council Chamber of the old State House. The judges in their crimson robes and huge wigs filed in and took their seats around the big fireplace.

From the moment that he began to speak until he finished four hours later, James Otis held his audience spellbound by his magnetism and his eloquence. In his great speech he did not question the legality of the writs. “I argue in favor of British liberties,” he said, as he paced the floor in short quick strides. “I oppose that kind of power the exercise of which, in former periods of English history, cost one King of England his head and another his throne.”

John Adams, who had just begun the practice of law, was there, “too lost in admiration” to make notes. “Otis was a flame of fire,” he said later. “Then and there, the child Independence was born.”

James Otis did not win his case against the Crown, but he brought into sharp focus the threat to colonial rights and liberties. The Tories said it was he “who first broke down the barriers of government to let in the Hydra of Rebellion” by attacking the writs of assistance. The writs were issued in the colony—and smuggling went on as it had before.

By 1764, it was clear to King George III that his American colonies had gotten out of hand and must be reined in. His ministers agreed that a reorganization of colonial administration was badly needed.

It was also clear by now what kind of sovereign Great Britain and her colonies were to have in young George III. He was amiable enough and temperate, preferring barley water to wine. He was so conscientious and so industrious that he spent long hours at his desk wrestling with the problems of government. But, unfortunately, he had no understanding of statesmanship, and, lacking imagination, he could be as stubborn as a mule. His ministers also lacked the insight and the qualities of greatness that were so urgently needed to rule an empire.

George Grenville was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and in March 1764 he introduced the Sugar Act which imposed new duties on Spanish wines and a few other imports and raised the tax on sugar. In an attempt to end smuggling, the tax on molasses from the Spanish and French West Indies was reduced by half, from sixpence to threepence a gallon. There was a howl from the merchants, who knew the distilling trade would be hard hit if the act was rigidly enforced.

Sam Adams was concerned about something more serious. In studying the text of the Sugar Act, he noted with alarm that it proposed that “new provisions and regulations should be made for improving the revenue” of the Empire, and further, that it was “just and necessary that a revenue be raised for defraying the expenses of defending the colonies.”

This was an entirely new policy. The Navigation Acts had been designed to regulate trade, but the purpose of these new measures was to raise revenue. The taxes from the Sugar Act were to be used to support British troops in the colonies.

Whether the Parliament of Great Britain had the constitutional right to tax the colonies was debatable, with something to be said for each side. There was no question, however, of its being unwise.

It was customary for the people to appoint a committee in town meeting to prepare instructions that would express their wishes to the representatives in the Massachusetts General Court. Sam Adams was a member of this committee in the spring of 1764, and he was chosen to write the instructions.

He was not unprepared. He had been thinking for years about the principles that became the great issues of the Revolution. The report Adams submitted to the people assembled in Faneuil Hall on the twenty-fourth of May was lengthy. The most important and the most eloquent part concerned the new policy of taxation by Parliament.

“For if our trade may be taxed, why not our lands? Why not the produce of our lands, and, in short, everything we possess or make use of?” he asked.

“This,” he declared, “annihilates our charter rights to govern and tax ourselves. If taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the character of subjects to the miserable state of tributary slaves?”

The instructions that Sam Adams wrote for the representatives in 1764 denied publicly for the first time the right of the British Parliament to tax the colonies without their consent.

But most New Englanders, and particularly those in the rural communities, had not been deeply stirred either by Otis’s speech in 1761 or by Sam Adams’s instructions. They wanted to forget their grievances and enjoy the prosperity that the Seven Years’ War had brought. It was not long before the Tories were chuckling over Otis’s failure “to raise a flame” in the colony. “With all his puffing and blowing,” they said, “he has been able only to raise a smoke.”

Sam Adams remained cheerful and patient. He could wait. Meanwhile, he made the rounds of the Whig caucus clubs, delighted to have young John Hancock under his wing. At the Green Dragon in Union Street and at the Bunch of Grapes in King Street, there were always heated discussions of British tyranny, and Sam reveled in them.

At the Salutation, or in someone’s garret, the men sat around drinking rum punch and smoking their long white pipes while they talked about choosing selectmen, assessors, collectors, wardens, and representatives. This was the caucus of which Sam Adams was boss, and he had seen to it that John Hancock was chosen a selectman.

It pleased him to see the aristocratic young man in his fine clothes mingling with the rough fellows from the shipyards, the ropewalks, and the dock. Sam sat back in his rumpled old suit, drawing on his pipe, and thinking with a twinkle of satisfaction in his blue eyes of the great things John could do for the Whigs.

Here at the Salutation Tavern, they would see Paul Revere, the gifted silversmith and craftsman who could make anything from false teeth to mellow-toned church bells. He was an ardent patriot, and so popular among the artisans that he won many of them to the Whig cause. Intelligent, level-headed, and daring, he was held in such esteem by the educated, wellborn Whig leaders that they admitted him to their inner circles.

There were evenings when Sam Adams met with the members of the exclusive Long Room Club, of which he was the leader. This is believed to have been the first of the secret clubs that did so much to bring on the Revolution. It met in the “long room” on the second floor of the Edes and Gill printing office behind the old State House in Dassett Alley. The offices and hand press that printed the inflammatory Boston Gazette occupied the space on the first floor.

Little is known about what went on in the Long Room Club, for the talk here was treasonable. Its membership was made up of the intellectual leaders of the Revolution. Most of them were Harvard graduates. Paul Revere was the only artisan among them. James Otis was a member, as were the two doctors, Joseph Warren and Benjamin Church, and the Reverend Samuel Cooper, the scholarly pastor of the Brattle Street Church.

And of course Sam Adams had brought John Hancock into this select, radical group. Since coming out of Uncle Thomas’s countinghouse, he had learned much about Boston that he had not known before. He had come to know a good deal more about George III, too, since the day in London when he had heard him joyfully proclaimed King.

Sam Adams was in his element. He talked happily about the downfall of the British government and waited patiently for some fresh grievance to rouse the people. They would wake up when George Grenville turned loose another “menacing monster,” such as the Sugar Act.

5 

Riots and Celebrations

January 1765 was a month of bitter cold in New England, the coldest in twelve years. The harbor froze and the streets were glazed with ice. Indoors, people huddled around their big fireplaces and talked not of the weather, but of the depression. The years of wartime prosperity were over.

Merchant John Rowe recorded the bankruptcies in his diary. “The trade has been much alarmed this day,” he wrote on the fifteenth. “Mr. Wheelwright stopped payment and kept his room. A great number of people will suffer by him.”

Four days later he noted, “Very bad accounts. Mr. John Scollay shut up. Mr. John Dennie shut up and Peter Bourne at the North End. Am likely to be a large sufferer by Scollay.” Mr. Rowe did not go to church the next day because his mind was “too much disturbed.”

The collapse of many of the great mercantile houses threw thousands out of work and affected almost everyone. Trade with the West Indies dwindled, and most of the ships were laid up that year. Farmers suffered, too. There was no market for their grain, and prices dropped so low that it did not pay them to drive livestock to town.

Trade had met with “a most prodigious shock,” John Hancock said. But the House of Hancock was little shaken and had the financial resources to build more ships, wharves, and warehouses even during this period of widespread unemployment. It was reliably reported that as many as a thousand New England families were dependent upon John Hancock for a living. Sam Adams could be certain that they would vote for the Whigs.

Whatever the economic reasons for the depression, there was no doubt among the colonists that England was to blame. It could not have been a worse time for George Grenville to release another “menacing monster,” but that was what he presently did. England had long been used to stamp taxes, so Grenville reasoned that this would be a good way to raise more revenue in the American colonies.

There was little opposition in Parliament on the February day in 1765 when the Stamp Act was passed. No one questioned the wisdom of the act except Colonel Isaac Barre, who had fought with the British troops at Quebec.

“But why would these American children, planted by our care and protected by our arms, be so ungrateful as not to want to contribute their small share of revenue?” one member of the House of Commons asked.

Barre quickly retorted, “They planted by your care! No, your oppression planted them in America.” In his heated defense of the colonists, he called them “sons of liberty.” Barre’s speech was read in the colonies, and it was not long before the patriots were calling themselves “Sons of Liberty.”

The Stamp Act required all commercial papers and all legal documents to carry a stamp costing from a halfpenny to upwards of twenty shillings. Newspapers, bills of lading, notes and bonds, ships’ clearance papers, and wills and deeds would have to be stamped. The tax would be especially hard on lawyers, who were the most articulate and influential group in the colonies.

But George Grenville, reasoning so logically, thought this would be the best of all taxes for revenue. Quite simply, it would fall equally upon all the colonies and upon all classes of people, and with the advantage to England that few officers would be needed to enforce it. Grenville anticipated no trouble.

Francis Bernard was now the royal governor of Massachusetts Bay. He was honest, mild-mannered, and scholarly, but he had so little understanding of the colonials that he came to Massachusetts with the expectation of enjoying the leisurely life of a country squire.

Thomas Hutchinson, the Lieutenant Governor, believed in rule by the wellborn and the well-educated. He was also judge of probate, member of the Governor’s Council, and chief justice of the province. There were so many Hutchinsons and their kin in the government that Sam Adams spoke scornfully of them as the “oligarchy.”

Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson knew the province of Massachusetts Bay well enough to doubt the wisdom of the Stamp Act. But now that it had been passed, neither he nor Governor Bernard expected the colonists to do more than protest against it. Andrew Oliver, Hutchinson’s brother-in-law, was appointed stamp collector of Boston.

To the consternation of the loyal servants of King George III, the Stamp Act united all the colonies and all classes in violent opposition. By falling upon all the people, it gave everyone a grievance.

John Hancock groaned, “The Stamp Act will entirely stagnate trade here.” And then, in a burst of patriotic fervor, he added, “I will not be a slave. I have a right to the liberties and privileges of the English Constitution.”

The most eloquent voice was raised in the Virginia House of Burgesses, meeting in Williamsburg in May 1765. With impassioned oratory, young Patrick Henry urged the adoption of the Virginia Resolutions, of which he was the author. The Resolutions were a declaration of resistance to the Stamp Act and an assertion of the right of the colonies to make their own laws.

In his speech, Patrick Henry solemnly declared, “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third (here he was interrupted by cries of ‘Treason! Treason! ’) and George the Third may profit by their example! If this be treason, make the most of it.”

In Boston, during that summer of 1765, Sam Adams wrote petitions, resolutions, and instructions to the representatives in the General Court denouncing the Stamp Act. By August, there were stirrings and whisperings that something was about to happen—something ugly. Certain to be involved in it were the rougher sort of artisans, tradesmen, and mechanics who had participated in many a celebration of Pope’s Day on the fifth of November.

This observance had its beginning in England as Guy Fawkes’ Day, and celebrated the anniversary of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. That was the name given to a conspiracy for blowing up King James I and the Parliament on November 5, 1605, in retaliation for laws passed against Roman Catholics. Guy Fawkes, who was one of the chief conspirators, was caught and executed.

For some years, Pope’s Day had been observed in Boston by rival gangs, one from the North End and the other from the South End. Each had its huge carriage with a platform on which sat the mimic pope, monks, friars, and “old Nick himself with the appropriate horns, tail, and pitchfork.” And each gang was under the command of a captain and his lieutenants.

The popes’ carriages started out at daybreak, hell-bent for battle. Whenever the rival gangs met, each fought fiercely for possession of the other’s pope and devil. Bricks, stones, and bottles were hurled, and cudgels wielded with such effect that people were often badly injured and sometimes killed.

By evening the carriages were attended by a drunken mob that had swelled in numbers during the day, and all through the night decent people were kept awake by the “confused medley of rattling carriages, the noise of the popes’ drums, and the infernal yelling of those who were fighting for possession of the devil.” After the battle was won, the two gangs then made a bonfire of their popes and devils outside the town gate.

The General Court had tried without success to stop these wild celebrations. And Boston’s constables had been powerless to control the mobs.

Early on the morning of August 14, citizens on their way to work were startled by a sight they had not seen, even on Pope’s Day. At the corner of Newbury and Essex streets stood a grove of elms. And there, dangling from a limb of the tallest elm, were two effigies. One was of Andrew Oliver, secretary of the province and stamp master for Boston. His effigy, stuffed with straw, had a painted face and wore yellow breeches.

Swinging beside it was a large boot with a devil leering out of the top. This was no Pope’s Day devil. It was an effigy of Lord Bute, who was said to have been instrumental in getting the Stamp Act passed.

More and more people came, and stood, and stared as though hypnotized by what they saw. At dusk, someone stepped out from the crowd around the tree and cut down Oliver’s effigy. Then, as if at a signal, forty or fifty men “of the highest reputation” led the procession that marched to the State House where Governor Bernard and the council sat upstairs. Carrying the figure of Oliver before them, they paraded through the ground floor chanting, “Liberty, property, and no stamps.”

Now two thousand strong, the mob surged down King Street, yelling and whacking down fences along the way. Turning right into Kilby, they headed for Oliver’s Dock. The small building that had recently gone up there was said to be the new stamp office. Within minutes, axes had leveled it to a pile of broken planks.

Oliver’s house was close by. The crowd swarmed into the yard, trampling flowers and shrubbery, and smashed every window on the lower floor. While the family shivered upstairs, they broke in, wrecked the furniture, and drank all the wine. At midnight, they burned Andrew Oliver’s effigy on top of Fort Hill.

The next morning Sam Adams was seen standing under the great elm looking up into its branches. Others had come back to stare, too. Someone approached Adams and asked if he knew who had hung the effigies on the tree. But he seemed lost in thought and only shook his head.

In its account of the riot, the Gazette quoted Colonel Barre’s speech to Parliament in which he defended the Americans and called them “sons of liberty.” The phrase caught on. Thereafter patriots everywhere came to be called by that name. And the great elm was christened Liberty Tree. Soon there were “liberty trees” in most of the towns and villages up and down the coast.

The fourteenth of August was a day to remember, and for many years it was observed in New England as “the happy day on which Liberty arose from a long slumber.” Sam Adams said it ought to be forever remembered in America because “the people shouted, and their shout was heard to the distant end of the continent.”

The Tories dryly remarked that it was strange indeed to commemorate a day on which the mob had done little more than terrify an old man out of his wits. That much had been accomplished, for some weeks later Andrew Oliver said that he would resign his office as stamp collector.

Thomas Hutchinson had suffered, too. Once he had been the most popular man in the province. He loved Massachusetts and was writing its history in several volumes. No other man had served the province so long and in so many ways. But now the people were saying that he was ambitious, that he was greedy and grasping. Having enumerated all the offices held by the lieutenant governor and his relatives, John Adams asked, “Is it not enough to excite jealousies among the people?”

And Sam was out to get his scalp by fair means or foul. Had not Thomas Hutchinson brought ruin to his family and to many small property owners by advising the British Parliament to close the Land Bank? This deep personal resentment and patriotic zeal made Sam Adams the bitter enemy of Hutchinson and other Crown officers, as well as the Parliament of Great Britain.

So the crafty politician started a whispering campaign. The word was passed around in taverns and clubs that Hutchinson had strongly supported the Stamp Act and that Governor Bernard had assured George Grenville it would be enforced. This propaganda was so effective that the Congregational clergy began to denounce the Governor and Thomas Hutchinson in their sermons. Governor Bernard called the ministers “the Black Regiment.”

But Sam Adams had not yet got the cudgel boys in hand. Monday, August 26, was a day of stiffing heat. In the evening, people sat out on their doorsteps seeking relief in whatever random breeze blew up from the harbor. No one noticed the stealthy figures that slipped out of the darkening streets and alleys and gathered in front of the old State House. Presently there was a roaring bonfire on the cobbles. When the people saw the red glow against the fading light, they knew it meant trouble and went inside their houses and barred the doors and closed the windows.

Soon there was a milling mob of five hundred in King Street. Alexander Mackintosh was in command. Brutish and insufferably boastful, he was the captain of the South End gang. As the flames of the bonfire died down, the shrill mob whistle was heard, and the crowd went tramping down to the wharves. There they broke into the house of a judge of the Admiralty Court, hacked the furniture to pieces, and drank the wine cellar dry. After repeating this performance at the house of one of the customs commissioners, they were in “a dangerous state” and ready for the big “frolic” of the evening.

Cheering, yelling, and whistling, the crowd started toward the North End. Someone warned the Lieutenant Governor that the mob was out and talking of tearing down his house. Hutchinson was a widower with five children, three boys and two girls. He quickly hustled them off to a neighbor’s house. He planned to remain at home behind locked doors, but his older daughter returned, declaring she would stay with her father. There was little time left. They could hear the howling close by. Concerned for his child’s safety, Hutchinson hurried out the back door with her and escaped.

It was none too soon. “In a moment the hellish crew fell upon my house with the rage of devils and with axes split the doors and entered,” the Lieutenant Governor later recalled.

There had never been such savage destruction in the colony. The drunken mob reeled through the beautifully furnished rooms, slashing portraits to shreds, ripping out the paneling, shattering fine china and glassware, and breaking furniture. Closets were opened and their contents flung out the windows, together with the manuscript pages of Thomas Hutchinson’s History of Massachusetts. Men climbed to the roof, wrecked the cupola, and pried loose slate and boards. Silver plate, jewelry, and nine hundred pounds in money were carried away by the looters. By dawn “one of the best finished houses in the province had nothing remaining but the bare walls and floor.”

The people of Boston were shocked and shamed. In town meeting the next day, they listened to the Lieutenant Governor defend himself with tears in his eyes. Calling upon God as his witness, he swore that he had neither aided nor supported the Stamp Act. “Every face was gloomy,” the Gazette reported, “and we believe every heart affected.”

Sam Adams was shaken, too. He had certainly taken no part in the barbarous treatment of Thomas Hutchinson, but he was concerned about the effect it would have on the Whigs. To absolve them of blame, he declared it must have been “vagabond strangers” who plundered the Lieutenant Governor’s mansion. But Adams knew that something drastic had to be done. Either the Whigs had to cut off all connections with the tough bully boys, or they had to bring them under control. Tamed, they could be useful, and Sam Adams, with his wide acquaintance among them, was the man to do it.

In October, Adams was elected to the House of Representatives, the body which made the colony’s laws and acted as intermediary between the people and the Crown.

James Otis was the most popular of Boston’s representatives, and he and Sam Adams worked as a team, “driving on at a furious rate.” Otis had Adams elected to all the important committees and took the rough drafts of his own articles and speeches to him so that he could “pour a little oil in them.”

Governor Bernard was dismayed. “With inflammatory speeches within doors, and the parades of the mob without,” he said irritably, “the faction has entirely triumphed over the little that remains of government.” The Governor’s peace and quiet had been so rudely shattered that he must have refrained from reading the Gazette, that “infamous paper” which made a mockery of the government. On the front page, in the lower right hand corner, was a box for the King’s stamp, but now it was decorated with a drawing of a skull and crossbones. And there was Paul Revere’s cartoon showing a snake divided into parts to represent the colonies with the caption, “Join or Die!”

Twenty-eight representatives from nine of the colonies met in New York that October to discuss the Stamp Act. There had never been anything like the Stamp Act Congress. It was the first time the colonies had come together on their own initiative. At the start, Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina stressed the need for unity. “There ought to be no New England or New York man,” he said. “All of us should be Americans.”

Then the delegates framed their resolves and drafted a petition to the House of Commons. The language was more moderate than that of Patrick Henry, but the burden of their protest was the same—that taxation without representation was tyranny.

The Stamp Act took effect on the first of November. It was a solemn day in Boston as church bells tolled from steeples all over town. It was a sad day for liberty throughout the American colonies and. was everywhere observed as a day of mourning.    

On November 5, an apprehensive Boston was treated to an observance of Pope’s Day such as it had never expected to see. “Captain” Mackintosh, who had been mysteriously released from jail, appeared on the streets at the head of a procession in which the cudgel boys of the North and South Ends marched peaceably together.

Attired in a red and blue uniform and a gold-laced three-cornered hat and carrying a cane, the “Captain-General” marched arm in arm with Colonel Brattle of the militia. He gave marching orders to his “troops” through a speaking trumpet, and Colonel Brattle complimented him and told him his post was “one of the highest in the government.”

Afterward there was a big “unity feast” at the Green Dragon. Whig merchants and politicians joined the cudgel boys “with heart and hand in flowing bowls and bumping glasses” to commemorate the end of the rivalry between the North and South Ends.

John Hancock, who was there with Sam Adams, paid for the feast and, as master of ceremonies, made a speech in which he reminded “Captain” Mackintosh and his “troops” that they were needed now to fight British tyranny. Hancock learned that night how pleasant the sound of applause could be.

As usual, Sam Adams sat back and let someone else take the center of the stage. He could relax for the moment, lift a quizzical eyebrow, and smile as he listened to the uproar and the clink of glasses. He had John Hancock working for the Whigs, and he now had the mob under control and could truly be called the “mob master of Boston.” It was a “trained mob,” as Governor Bernard later observed, and it never got out of hand again.

Weeks passed, and still there were no stamps in Boston. They had been left at Castle Island, for Governor Bernard did not dare to land them in the town. Business in Boston came virtually to a standstill. The customhouse was closed, and ships lay idle in the harbor, neither loading nor unloading. The merchants in Boston and other colonial towns had taken a bold step. They had decided that they would not trade with the mother country until the Stamp Act was repealed.

Without stamps, no legal papers could be drawn and the courts ceased to function. It was finally decided in town meeting to petition the Governor to open the courts. John Adams, James Otis, and Jeremiah Gridley were appointed to make the appeal. They spoke eloquently in the Council Chamber where the Governor and the council members sat and listened politely. But their pleas were in vain, for Governor Bernard said simply that he had no authority to open the courts without using the King’s stamps.

On Wednesday, the first of January 17 66, John Adams wrote in his diary:

Severe cold and a prospect of snow. This year brings ruin or salvation to the British colonies. The eyes of all America are fixed on the British Parliament. In short, Britain and America are staring at each other. What will they say in England when they see the resolves of the American legislatures, the petitions from the united colonies, the resolutions of the merchants in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere?

For weeks, members of the British Parliament had been locked in furious debate over those resolves, petitions, and resolutions. And merchants and manufacturers who had been hurt by the American boycott of English goods were making their angry voices heard, too. They were not interested in politics. All they knew or cared about was that “trade was all shut up.” Seven hundred thousand pounds in orders from America had been canceled before the end of 1765.

Benjamin Franklin, agent for Pennsylvania, was questioned. He warned that if British soldiers were sent to America to enforce the Stamp Act, they would not find a rebellion, but they might make one. William Pitt, England’s great statesman and a friend of the colonies, stood up in Parliament and said, “I rejoice that America has resisted.” And on March 18, 17 66, the Stamp Act was repealed.

John Hancock’s new brig Harrison came into port on Friday, May 16, with news of the repeal. Town meeting was hastily called, and the selectmen voted that the celebration should be held on Monday, since a day of preparation would be needed.

At one o’clock on that morning of the nineteenth, the bells began to ring from one steeple and then another, until there was a sweet and joyous chiming from all the churches. Cannon boomed from the fort out on Castle Island, and closer by, the guns from the North and South Batteries. And in the hour just before dawn, strolling musicians walked through the streets playing violins and flutes.

The people came out into the cool, fresh air early on that May morning to find the town aflutter with flags and banners. They rippled from every steeple, and the branches of Liberty Tree had been hung with bright-colored streamers. On the Common, the Sons of Liberty had built an enormous pyramid, towering up four levels, on which they had placed 280 lamps. All that day the ships in the harbor fired salutes, and drummers paraded the streets beating their drums.

The evening of “the great illumination” came and the town went wild with joy. Boston became a city of lights. They could be seen in every window of every house, and the great pyramid seemed to be ablaze. Above the Common, John Hancock’s mansion outshone all the others, as did his hospitality. He not only kept open house for “the genteel part of town,” but provided wine and entertainment for the “commonalty.”

Casks of Madeira were rolled out on the Common, and while the crowd drank Mr. Hancock’s wine, they were also treated to a spectacular display of fireworks. There were rockets, beehives, serpents, and wheels lighting up the dark in fantastic shapes.

After the last wheel had burned out, the people gathered around the Liberty Tree. Hundreds came—men, women, and children—and each brought a lighted lantern that the Sons hung on the branches. When the last lantern had been hung the crowd stood back and stared in wonder at the lighted tree. It looked like a huge Christmas tree, and the spirit of Christmas was in the hearts of the people that night. For they took up a collection and bought freedom for all the poor debtors who were in jail.

Following repeal and celebration, a deceptive calm settled upon noisy, riotous Boston. Sam Adams was not fooled by what the British Parliament had done. It was fear, he believed, rather than a sense of justice that had brought about repeal of the Stamp Act.

There was the Declaratory Act, too, which had been passed at the same time. It stated that Parliament had the right to make laws governing the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” But almost no one except Sam Adams seemed to be alarmed by the threat in this act.

Throughout the year 1766, he worked to strengthen the Whig cause. Through his influence, John Hancock, just twenty-nine, was elected to the General Court. Another of the four Boston representatives was Adams’s friend Tom Cushing, “steady and constant, busy in the interest of liberty.” James Otis was the new speaker of the house and Adams had taken on heavier duties as clerk.

The Tories were steadily losing ground. The “Black List” of the Tory representatives who, Adams and Otis declared, had been in favor of the Stamp Act was published in the Gazette, as were the names of all Tories who voted against the Whigs in the House of Representatives.

This campaign of harassment and intimidation had resulted in victory for the Whigs at the polls. And Sam Adams gloated over their success in purging the council of Tories. Four judges of the Supreme Court, the secretary of the province, and the King’s attorney had been ousted.

But now the people wanted to believe that the fight with the royal government was over. During the lull, many Boston merchants who had been friends of the Whig politicians began to look with favor upon the Tories. And in 1767, the Tories regained most of the seats they had lost in the General Court.

It was a time of low ebb for the patriot cause, but Sam Adams made use of it by working to win the good will of the common people. The Whigs staged patriotic parades, feasts, and celebrations with fireworks.

The Tories had no respect for the masses and made no effort to understand them or to win their support. It was Governor Bernard’s boast that the Tories could count in their ranks “almost every person of fortune and fashion throughout the province.” To him and to other proud Tories, Sam Adams’s friends who marched and gathered around the Liberty Tree singing the “Song of Liberty” were nothing but the rabble.

And when Adams and his friends threatened their peace and security, the Tories turned to the mother country for protection. They made a fatal mistake in failing to recognize the power and the importance of the common people.

6 

The Coming of the Redcoats to Boston

With so many wooden houses crowded close together, Boston was plagued with fires. One of the worst in the town’s history started in the bakehouse of one of John Hancock’s tenants on the night of February 4, 1767. Twenty buildings burned to the ground and forty families were left homeless. The General Court contributed four hundred pounds for their relief, and John Hancock augmented the fund with “golden showers of guineas.”

It was Hancock’s custom to distribute food and firewood to the poor during the winter. He was naturally kind and generous, but he also craved applause and was delighted when the crowd ran alongside his coach cheering him as “King Hancock.” His donations of money to the churches also won the loyalty of the influential clergy. There were expensive gifts, too—bells, pulpits, and communion tables.

Such generosity paid off handsomely. In May he was re-elected to the House of Representatives and polled more votes than Sam Adams, James Otis, or Thomas Cushing. The Whigs were still in the doldrums, and Adams was hard-pressed to keep the patriot cause aflame. Then, in its blundering fashion, the British Parliament came to his aid.

Charles Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was a flashy young politician who was noted more for his wit than his judgment. In the London coffeehouses, where he was often seen, he was known as “Champagne Charley.” As the new chancellor, with political fences to mend, he did some hard thinking about how to get money from the rebellious colonials.

At the time of the Stamp Act, the colonists had denied the right of Parliament to impose an internal tax, but conceded that external taxes were constitutional. The difference was simply this: an external tax was collected at the water’s edge, as for example customs duties; an internal tax was levied within the boundaries of a country, as a stamp or property tax.

Townshend thought the distinction was ridiculous, as did almost everyone else, but he took advantage of it by proposing that taxes be levied on paint, glass, lead, paper, and tea. These were commodities that the colonies could import only from Great Britain, and Townshend convinced the House of Commons that a large revenue could be raised by taxing them.

To insure the success of his new program, he planned certain changes in the administration of the colonies. The salaries of governors and judges would hereafter be paid by England from revenues raised in America, rather than by the colonial assemblies. The customs service was to be overhauled by a board of customs commissioners with headquarters in Boston.

With little thought of their effect on the American colonies, the House of Commons passed the Townshend Acts. They turned out to be as disastrous as the Stamp Act, as almost anyone except a muddle-headed Champagne Charley could have foreseen.

Sam Adams cried, “Tyranny!” and roused Boston with his “dreadful scarecrows.” The governors and judges, he thundered, would now become “overlords” of the colonies.

The British government planned to tax New England farms. Popery was abroad in the land and spreading rapidly. Everyone would have to submit to the English bishops.

By the time the customs commissioners arrived in November, the people were in the mood to give them the same rough treatment that Andrew Oliver had received. But there were no riots and no mistreatment of the new officials.

After Adams had fired his propaganda blasts, he settled down to deal with the Townshend Acts at the winter session of the General Court. Formal protest was made to King George, and a circular letter was sent to the other colonies.

The letter explained how Massachusetts felt about the new duties. It did not ring the “alarm bell to revolt” against Parliament, for Sam Adams knew that none of the colonies was ready to take so radical a step. It was little more than a cautious denial of Parliament’s right to levy external taxes for the purpose of raising revenue to make governors and judges independent of the colonial assemblies.

The response throughout the colonies was immediate and gratifying. They agreed so enthusiastically with Adams’s position that he felt he had accomplished his purpose of uniting them. It would be some time before he heard what the mother country thought about the circular letter.

In the meantime, Sam Adams’s Mohawks, as the Tories called the Sons of Liberty, had begun to make life uncomfortable for the commissioners. They kept them awake at night by beating drums and blowing horns, and howling like Indians about to make an attack. Some nights the officials were startled out of their sleep by the sound of glass breaking and awoke to find shattered windowpanes.

On May 9, 1768, John Hancock’s sloop Liberty docked at his wharf. The vessel carried well over a hundred casks of fine Madeira, and it had been rumored that the commissioners intended to teach smugglers a lesson by collecting the full duty on the wine.

Hancock’s agent was at the dock to see that the usual procedure was followed. He went on board with the customs officer, and after a few drinks in the captain’s cabin, made the customary gesture. The officer refused to take the bribe. Without further ado, the agent and the captain seized and bound him, and left him locked in the cabin.

That night the cargo was quickly unloaded, and Hancock’s agent coolly recorded in the customs book that the ship had carried five casks of wine. It was a daring thing to do. Especially so since the British frigate Romney, a fifty-gun man-of-war, had nosed unannounced into the harbor and lay anchored not far from the docks.

The terrified customs officer was released and warned to keep his mouth shut or he would not live to open it again. The Liberty was briskly loaded with tar and whale oil for another outgoing voyage, and everything seemed normal at Hancock’s Wharf.

On Friday, June 10, men from the ropewalks and shipyards strolled down to the dock at the end of the day’s work. They wanted to have a look around, they said, to see that Mr. Hancock’s boat got away without any trouble. As they watched, a little sailboat came across the water and drew up alongside the wharf. Two customs officials stepped out and went aboard the Liberty. While the collector, Mr. Hallowell, looked on, Mr. Harrison tacked a printed sheet to the sloop’s mainmast. At the top of the paper was an arrow drawn in heavy black fines. It was the King’s broad arrow, which meant that the Liberty was now Crown property.

At a signal from Mr. Hallowell, sailors put out from the Romney in two boats and rowed over to the dock. As they were landing, the workmen raised their voices in angry shouts and began to hurl bricks and stones. The customs officials were hit, but they managed to escape from the infuriated crowd by running as if the devil himself were after them.

They left their sailboat behind, and after they had disappeared, the Sons of Liberty dragged it to shore, and carried it up Beacon Hill to John Hancock’s house. There, before Mr. Hancock’s door, the boat was set afire and burned. Although the events of this evening were thereafter referred to as the Liberty Riot, nothing more disorderly occurred. “While the boat was burning, some gentlemen who had influence over them persuaded them to depart. This was put to a vote, whereupon proclamation was made, ‘each man to his tent,’ which was a watchword among them.”

The commissioners were so terrified that they refused to remain in Boston any longer. With their wives and children, they took refuge behind the guns of Castle William. They would stay at the fort, they declared, until British soldiers came to protect them. Governor Bernard sent an urgent request to the ministry in London to send troops “to rescue the government out of the hands of a trained mob.”

In the meantime, John Hancock had to be punished for his high-handed defiance of the mother country. He had lost the Liberty, and now the King’s advocate had him arrested and ordered him to pay the staggering sum of one hundred thousand pounds in fines. John Adams agreed to serve as counsel for Hancock. His bail was fixed at three thousand pounds, and the case dragged on in court until it was suspended by the outbreak of the Revolution.

The young aristocrat of Beacon Hill was now applauded by the people not only for his generosity, but also for his courage. Here was a man who would risk his vast fortune for the sake of a principle, and the poorest artisan in town admired him for it.

Toward the end of June, Boston received an answer to the circular letter from Lord Hillsborough, Secretary of State for the Colonies. Sam Adams, as clerk of the house, read the Secretary’s message to the representatives. Lord Hillsborough denounced the Massachusetts Circular Letter as an outrageous attempt to disturb the public peace and as “calculated to inflame the minds of good subjects.” He demanded that the letter be rescinded.

James Otis sprang to his feet and delivered a rousing oration. Rescind the circular letter? Never! When a vote was taken, it was found that ninety-two representatives were against rescinding and seventeen in favor. The next day Governor Bernard angrily dissolved the General Court.

The ninety-two were hailed throughout the colonies as courageous patriots. Fifteen Sons of Liberty commissioned Paul Revere to make a handsome silver punch bowl inscribed to “The Glorious Ninety-two.”

All through that summer of 1768, Boston waited, tense with anxiety, to see what would happen next. There were persistent rumors that British troops were coming. At town meeting, James Otis declared that if England sent her redcoats against the colony, there was nothing to do but “gird the sword to the thigh and shoulder the musket.” And Sam Adams said, “We will take up arms and spend our last drop of blood.”

Although he believed the mother country was in a state of moral decay and economic decline, Adams knew that Boston could not fight the British regulars singlehanded. So he worked feverishly through the pages of the newspapers to make zealous patriots of the New England farmers and country people. The Gazette was their favorite paper, because Adams made it such lively reading, and he fed them columns of propaganda.

On September 3, Governor Bernard reluctantly confirmed what the people said they had known all along: British troops would, be quartered in Boston! General Gage had ordered two regiments to sail from Halifax for Boston. They could be expected in about three weeks. Sam Adams warned that they were being sent to bring the people to the brink of slavery.

But what could the Whig patriots do with the Assembly closed to them, with the General Court dismissed by the Governor’s order? Somehow this obstacle to getting the representatives of the people together had to be overcome.

At town meeting in Faneuil Hall on September 12, Adams stood up, looking more disheveled than usual. He had, he said, a very important proposal to make. But first he reminded his audience of the old Massachusetts law which required every citizen to be well armed with musket and powder and bullets when danger threatened. Danger? Why, it was pretty generally known that the French were on the way to attack them again. There was a ripple of laughter. Everyone understood what that meant.

And then Sam Adams made the radical suggestion that representatives of the people in all the towns of Massachusetts Bay be called to a “convention” to meet in Boston on September 22. Since such a convention would be the equivalent of a session of the legislature, it was an act of open defiance against Governor Bernard, but the citizens voted for it.

Delegates from about one hundred towns arrived at Faneuil Hall on the appointed day. By now it was known that several regiments were on the way from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Ireland. How could resistance fighters be mobilized in so short a time? Who would lead the Sons of Liberty to battle for their freedom?

The martial spirit that Sam Adams had hoped would animate the convention was absent. The delegates from rural Massachusetts took the attitude that water was needed to douse the fire rather than a bellows to fan it. The conservative Whigs prevailed. Better to let the troops land unopposed, they counseled, and then plan to get rid of them. And Sam Adams, with his usual caution and shrewd sense of political timing, bowed to conservative opinion.

The Massachusetts Convention of 1768 was, however, a milestone on the road to revolution. Even though no extreme action was taken, the mere fact that the rural delegates had come to the convention was a triumph for Sam Adams. He had shown the people how to govern themselves without royal sanction. And in doing this, he had paved the way for the historic Continental Congress.

On Friday, September 13, 1768, the guns boomed at Castle William in salute to the twelve transports and ships of war on their way into the harbor. It was the most joyful sound the commissioners and their families had heard in a long time. Now they could return safely to Boston, and they waved flags and shouted themselves hoarse.

There was no welcome for His Majesty’s Navy as the ships docked around the town with a clanking of anchor chains and with cannon loaded and ready to fire. The bells of Boston were strangely silent, and so were the people.

At noon on the fine fall day of October 1, the troops from Halifax began to land on Long Wharf and form ranks. Seven hundred regulars of the Fourteenth and Twenty-ninth Regiments, in scarlet coats and cocked hats and with shouldered muskets, marched up King Street between crowds of townspeople who packed the footways on both sides. Officers with drawn swords led “the insolent parade” to the roll of drums and the whistling of fifes. And in the rear, a train of artillery rattled up the cobbled slope.

There was no disturbance. The people simply stared at the redcoats in sullen silence, shocked that they had been sent not to protect them, but to act as a police force.

The selectmen refused to cooperate with Colonel Dalrymple, the commanding officer, in providing barracks for his troops. So he chased the cows off the Common and used it as a camp site for some of his men. With Governor Bernard’s permission, others were housed in Faneuil Hall, and the rest found quarters in warehouses and sail lofts. The main guard was stationed opposite the old State House, and cannon were planted almost at its doors.

More troops arrived from Ireland a few weeks later, bringing the number of British soldiers in Boston to about four thousand. General Thomas Gage himself came to help with the problem of finding quarters for them all. He was now commander in chief of the British army in America with headquarters in New York. By the time winter set in, the troops were as warmly bedded as they could be in an inhospitable town.

Some of the regulars soon decided that a free life in Massachusetts Bay was preferable to police patrol in Boston and deserted. Colonel Dalrymple took extreme measures. When caught, a deserter was to be promptly shot on the Common. Lesser infractions were punished by brutal whippings. Boston was used to riots, but the town was repelled by the cruelty of British military discipline.

There were no big parades that winter by the Sons of Liberty and few meetings under Liberty Tree. Instead, there were military parades, drills on the Common and in the squares, and the marching of the British soldiers. Even on the Sabbath, a day when the people did nothing but walk quietly to church, the troops were out practicing military maneuvers. The sounds of drum and fife and the barks of command came through the closed doors and windows of the churches to disturb and distract the worshipers. And the sentries were everywhere, even challenging a man’s right to enter his own house.

There was, of course, more business for the shopkeepers. The officers had money to spend and spent it freely in the stores and markets. The taverns profited most of all. It was another of Boston’s severe winters when the harbor froze solid, and the soldiers declared that the only way they could keep warm was to get drunk. Even the poorly paid regulars could buy rum because it was so cheap, and there were nightly brawls in the taverns.

For Tory families, the social life in Boston was livelier than it had ever been, and with the young officers around, there were flirtations and courtships. On the first day the troops landed, one young captain looked up and caught the mischievous eye of a pretty girl leaning over a balcony. “That girl seals my fate,” he said to the officer at his side. And so she did, for later they were married.

The gay social whirl of parties and dinners and military concerts shocked Sam Adams. But the Old Puritan had little time to lament the corruption of morals that he saw in these innocent “frolics.” He was busy fighting the Townshend Acts with the weapon that had proved so effective against the Stamp Act—boycott of English goods.

Adams had started the nonimportation agreement. And with the Sons of Liberty in other towns enthusiastically behind the plan, merchants throughout the colonies agreed not to import anything from Great Britain. Committees of inspection were organized to enforce the agreement.

In Boston, Adams stirred up enthusiasm for nonimportation at town meeting. He persuaded his fellow citizens to give up a long list of British imports which he considered “unfit for Whigs and old Puritans.” When the “subscription paper” was circulated in the town, it was ridiculed by the Tories, who said that Sam Adams was trying to get porters and washerwomen to promise not to buy satins and laces and coaches. Sam believed that he was not only hurting the mother country, but was leading Massachusetts back to the good old days of austerity. He tried, without much success, to promote colonial manufactures. The people were told that to wear homespun was the mark of an American patriot. But John Hancock could not go along with that.

Without imports from England, he was having trouble, as were other merchants, keeping his shelves stocked. However, it was risky not to abide by the agreement. The names of violators were published in the Gazette, and British goods discovered by the inspectors were shipped back to Great Britain. Uncooperative merchants were sometimes treated to a tar-and-feathering, and young boys made a sport of hurling snowballs at their customers.

The merchants in England felt the pinch of this second boycott, too, and Lord Hillsborough became alarmed over the formidable opposition to the Townshend Acts in America. It was time for appeasement again, he decided. In a circular letter, he cautiously informed the colonies that for “commercial reasons” the ministry was considering repeal of all duties except the tax on tea.

Sam Adams angrily declared that Lord Hillsborough’s offer was nothing but a “sugar plum” to tempt the merchants to surrender. What had he promised to do about the redcoats and the customs commissioners in Boston? And did not Parliament still hold on to its right to tax the colonies?

But the colonial merchants and the committees of inspection were tired of the struggle to maintain the boycott. By the summer of 1769, even the Whig merchants in Boston were ready to call it off.

On the last day of May, Governor Bernard convened the General Court for the first time in a year, hoping that the presence of His Majesty’s soldiers had subdued the rebellious legislators. But the squabbling began all over again, and finally the Governor adjourned the session and ordered the Court to meet thereafter in Cambridge.

It was his last official act. Francis Bernard was so weary of the thorny problems of government in Massachusetts Bay that he served notice of his intention to return to England “to lay before His Majesty the state of the Province.” That his report would be black indeed did not worry the Bay colonists. Boston celebrated his departure in late July with the glad ringing of bells and the firing of cannon. The Gazette reported that the town was at last “free of a scourge to this Province, a curse to North America, and a plague on the whole Empire of Britain.” Thomas Hutchinson now became governor of the unruly colony.

With the town overrun with redcoats, Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty thought it would be best to celebrate the anniversary of August 14, 1765, that memorable day of protest against the Stamp Act, somewhat quietly with a picnic in the country.

Three hundred and fifty loyal Sons piled into coaches and chaises and drove out to Dorchester. Sam Adams and Cousin John were there, and John Hancock, who provided the picnickers with casks of his choicest Madeira. The guests sat around two long plank tables “laid in the open field by the barn, with between three and four hundred plates, and an awning of sailcloth overhead.”

The best part of the feast were the barbecued pigs, smoking hot from the pits, and fragrant and crusty with charcoal. It was a very different kind of celebration from other days, but the Sons did not forget liberty. With Sam Adams leading them, they all joined lustily in singing the “Liberty Song”:

Come join hand in hand, brave Americans all, And rouse your bold hearts at fair Liberty’s call; No tyrannous acts shall suppress your just claim, Or stain with dishonor America’s name.

Our worthy forefathers, let’s give ’em a cheer, To climates unknown did courageously steer; Thro’ oceans to deserts for freedom they came, And dying bequeath’d their freedom and fame.

It had been a relief to escape, even for a day, from occupied Boston.

The Whigs were becoming more and more concerned about James Otis, who was showing increasing signs of mental instability. Sometimes he was excitedly happy and gay, then he was deeply despondent and moody. Ever since he had entered politics, his enemies had declared he was insane. He had even been called the “mad dictator of Boston.”

Everyone knew that poor Otis had a “ranting Tory wife” who nagged and scolded him. Yet he loved her. His friends sympathized with him, tried to shield him, and hoped that his eccentric behavior would get no worse.

Sam Adams became disturbed when Otis started talking loosely about matters that had been discussed in secrecy at their clubs. And John Adams was alarmed by his “bullying, bantering, reproaching, ridiculing.” Someday when his friends were not around to protect him he would get into serious trouble.

It happened at the Royal Coffee House, a favorite meeting place of the British officers and Crown officials. One evening in September 1769, Otis got into an argument with one of the customs commissioners who accused him of treason to Great Britain. Otis scowled darkly and demanded an apology. There was a sudden commotion, and in the fight that ensued James Otis was severely wounded in the head.

He never fully recovered, and it became sadly apparent even to his friends that Otis was going insane. He tried desperately during the next few months to keep his balance, but his drinking bouts and his “drunken distracted frolics” became more and more frequent. People who had respected and admired him as the most brilliant lawyer in Boston no longer went to him for legal counsel. His law practice dwindled to nothing.

“Otis is in a confusion,” John Adams wrote in his diary. “He loses himself, rambles, and wanders like a ship without a helm. I fear he is not in his perfect mind. I tremble, I mourn for the man and his country. Many others mourn over him with tears in their eyes.”

The man whose writings and whose oratory had inflamed and inspired patriotism in all the colonies had become a burden and an embarrassment to the Whigs in Boston. At last Sam Adams called on his old friend and gently suggested that he resign as a representative of the General Court. James Otis complied without protest.

A few months later, merchant John Rowe was recording in his diary that “Mr. Otis got into a mad freak tonight and broke a great many windows in the State House.” In another drunken frenzy, he fired off guns several times from an upper window in his town house. There could no longer be any doubt about his insanity. So James Otis was bound hand and foot, placed in a chaise, and driven to a house in the country where he was put in the care of a custodian. It was a sad day for Boston.

7

The “Horrid” Massacre

Sam Adams did not sit idly waiting for Boston to be rid of the redcoats. From the time of their arrival, he had written furiously to stir up hatred against them. Installments of his “Journal of Events” were sent to newspapers in all the colonies. People looked forward to reading these pieces as if they were parts of a novel. For Adams knew how to write human-interest stories.

His readers gasped over the horrifying “atrocities” committed by the soldiers in Boston. According to Adams, they took vicious pleasure in beating up small boys. They insulted women and made it unsafe for them to appear on the streets. Even the men were not safe in the taverns where the soldiers brawled and caroused at all hours. It was shockingly sinful, too, the way the British troops violated the Sabbath.

Sam Adams’s fertile imagination supplied most of the lurid details, but there was some basis of truth in his stories. What he did not mention were the provocations that angered the soldiers and drove them to retaliate. Those innocent little boys, for example, tormented the troops almost beyond endurance.

Their jeering whistles could be heard everywhere. They ducked out of alleys to hurl snowballs and sharp chunks of ice at the redcoats. Street urchins followed them in packs yelling, “Lobsters for sale! Who’ll buy red lobsters today?” When the soldiers turned on them and threatened to bash in their skulls, the rowdy youngsters screamed, “Bloody backs! Bloody backs!” and scampered off to collect more snowballs.

The soldiers would have liked to bayonet Adams’s huge Newfoundland dog. Queque hated redcoats as much as his master did. Whenever he saw one, he rushed at him barking ferociously.

With each weekly issue of the “Journal,” its readers became more incensed. Clashes with the redcoats increased. Tempers of both the soldiers and the citizens got shorter. During the dark, snowy days of February 1770, tension mounted.

Benjamin Franklin had warned Parliament years before that if troops were sent to Boston they would not find a revolution but would make one. Now he wrote to the Reverend Samuel Cooper that he had been “in constant panic” since the soldiers had landed. The British, he said, were hopefully waiting for the “doom of Boston.” There had even been talk of sending Sam Adams and John Hancock to London to try them for treason. And the Tories whispered among themselves that Adams “shuddered at the sight of hemp.”

Two regiments had been sent back to Halifax during the summer. The hated Twenty-ninth was still there, however. Even Thomas Hutchinson had said of them, “They are in general such bad fellows in that regiment that it seems impossible to restrain them.” The soldiers were idle most of the time, ill-paid, and eager to work at odd jobs to make a little money. On Friday, March 2, one of the privates of the Twenty-ninth strolled around the corner from his barracks and stopped at Gray’s ropewalks. Sam Gray, an employee who was not related to the owner, asked him if he wanted something to do in his spare time. The soldier replied that he would be glad to have work. When Sam Gray casually said they could use him to clean out a stable, he promptly punched the rope walker on the jaw.

After a brief scuffle, the private ran back to his barracks and returned presently with some of his buddies, among them, Private Kilroy, one of the toughest fellows in the regiment. The ropewalkers, hardy veterans of Pope’s Day fights, were expecting the soldiers. In the battle that followed, they gave them such a trouncing that the regulars finally limped back to their barracks swearing vengeance.

Boston was muffled by a fall of snow on Monday, March 5. It seemed unlikely that anyone would be out in the gray silence of that cold day to make trouble. But the weather cleared in the afternoon. The snow stopped, the sun came%out, and icicles dripped from the eaves.

After dark the moon rose, and the streets came alive with people. There were more soldiers out than usual, loitering about their barracks and sauntering along in groups. Civilians were out in large numbers, too—rough boys, apprentices, sailors, dock workers, and ropewalkers. They jostled the soldiers, jeered and swore at them, and the regulars pushed and cursed back.

Outside Murray’s barracks on Brattle Street, a crowd gathered, armed with clubs, staves, and jagged pieces of ice. They began to taunt the soldiers and blows were exchanged. Captain Goldfinch came up, ordered his men inside, and closed the doors of the building. Then he started over to King Street to check the main guard.

It was past eight o’clock, and shadows lay across the moonlit streets. Candlelight shone in some of the windows and lighted lanterns hung in doorways. The captain had almost reached the customhouse when a barber’s apprentice came squawking after him. Pointing a dirty finger at the officer, the boy howled that he’d better pay his master the shaving bill he owed him.

The sentry outside the customhouse, a man named Montgomery, had been the target for the past ten or fifteen minutes of snowballs and chunks of ice. Here, too, a crowd had gathered to guffaw as the guard berated and threatened his tormentors. Hearing a barber’s boy insult an officer, he dared the little rascal to show his face. When the boy walked impudently up to him, Montgomery lost all patience and struck him with the butt of his musket. It was not enough of a blow to hurt the boy, but the crowd edged closer, calling the sentry a bloody-back murderer.

Meanwhile, a strange incident was taking place near Faneuil Hall. A “motley rabble” had gathered around a mysterious stranger, who harangued them in a loud voice to make an attack upon the soldiers.

Described as a “tall, large man in a red cloak and a white wig,” no one ever knew for certain who he was. When he finished speaking, a tremendous cheer went up and then the cry, “To the main guard!” Others heard the summons and ran pell-mell to join the crowd that poured into the square in front of the old State House.

And now, just before nine o’clock, a church bell began to peal wildly. Windows went up, people leaned out to ask where the fire was, and men came running with their fire buckets. Nobody knew anything about a fire, but the yelling and whistling over at the old State House rose to a higher pitch. Some who had come out to fight the fire went over to see what the excitement was about.

They found Montgomery, the lone sentry at the customhouse, panic-stricken. Someone had shouted, “There’s the bloody-back who tried to kill the barber’s boy.” And the crowd, several hundred strong, pressed around him menacingly, screaming, “Kill him! Kill him!”

Montgomery was nervously priming his musket and warning the ugly mob that he was going to fire when a huge mulatto suddenly towered over him. It was Crispus Attucks, more than six feet tall and a giant of a man about forty-eight years old.

Egged on by those just behind him, Crispus raised his club and told the terrified “lobster” he was going to knock off his claws. Montgomery backed away and shouted at the top of his voice, “Main guard! Main guard!”

Captain Preston heard him and left the guardhouse at once with seven men. They crossed King Street, shouldering their way through the crowd, and reached the beleaguered sentry. With the soldiers in a half circle around the sentry box, Preston took a position in front of them and gave the order to load and prime.

For a moment there was silence. Someone close to the Captain asked if he intended to fire upon the people. No, he had no such intention. And then the jeering, the whistling, and the shouting started again. The mob pushed forward, and Crispus Attucks swung his club and knocked Montgomery down. There was a struggle, but the sentry recovered his musket and got to his feet.

Suddenly the command “Fire!” was given. The next instant Montgomery toppled Attucks with two balls in the chest. He fell dead at the soldier’s feet.

By a quirk of fate, Private Kilroy was one of the soldiers, and in the front rank of the mob was Sam Gray, the rope-walker who had started the fight with the regulars of the Twenty-ninth Regiment. Kilroy had already singled him out. Now he took quick aim and the ropewalker fell dead beside Crispus Attucks.

Farther back in the crowd, a sailor named James Caldwell was killed instantly, and near him, Sam Maverick, a young apprentice who had taken no part in the riot. Patrick Carr was mortally wounded and died four days later. Several people had been struck when the soldiers fired into the crowd, and five were killed.

The dead and wounded were quickly carried away, while Captain Preston made frantic efforts to prevent another fusillade. He swore he had not given the order to fire, and there were witnesses who said he did not. It was never established who did. The mob was struggling to get away when pandemonium broke out afresh. Drums beat, calling the British soldiers to arms, and church bells began to ring furiously. The streets soon filled with bewildered and panicky citizens.

Somehow Governor Hutchinson got through the milling crowd, reached the old State House, and stepped out upon the second-floor balcony. In the moonlight, he looked down upon a sea of angry upturned faces and raised his hand for silence. Then he spoke feelingly of the terrible shedding of blood that night, pleaded with the people to go quietly back to their homes, and promised them that justice should be done.

The crowd slowly began to disperse. By three o’clock in the morning, the town was quiet. There was silence in the square under the shadow of the old State House where the mob had howled, and the guns had spurted fire and death. Patches of bloodstained snow were mute evidence of what came to be called the “Boston Massacre.” Sam Adams often referred to it with a shudder as that “horrid Massacre.”

The next morning people were out in the streets early. The skies were overcast and a chill wind blew from the north. During the night the Sons of Liberty had sent expresses far and wide with the alarming news that the redcoats were threatening to attack Boston. Men had already come in from the country armed with muskets. Pledges of support were pouring in. Word came from Portsmouth and from Salem that if Boston needed help, they would send thousands to her defense.

With Captain Preston and his eight men confined in the stone jail, the immediate clamor was for the withdrawal of all the British troops from the town. At eleven o’clock that morning of March 6, a great mass meeting was held in Faneuil Hall.

There was hardly standing room left when Sam Adams rose to speak. He had forgot to put on his wig, and his wispy gray hair was brushed back behind his ears. The familiar old suit looked as if it had been slept in, but it is doubtful that Adams had gone to bed the night before. He talked about the horrors of that night, told his hushed audience there would be more bloodshed if the Governor refused to remove both the Fourteenth and the Twenty-ninth regiments. No word had come from him, and thousands of loyal New Englanders stood ready to answer Boston’s call to arms.

If Governor Hutchinson chose to stand aloof at this critical hour, the people would go to him. Sam Adams headed the committee that went to see him in the Council Chamber of the old State House.

In the meantime the crowd grew larger, swelled to three thousand, more than twice the number Faneuil Hall could hold. So they swarmed over to the Old South Meetinghouse and quickly filled every pew and jammed the aisles. Many were unable to squeeze in and stood outside the church.

At three o’clock, the committee returned from their conference with Governor Hutchinson. Sam Adams’s expression was somber. His hands shook, but his voice was firm as he made his report. Hutchinson had said he would remove the Twenty-ninth Regiment, whose soldiers had fired into the crowd, and Colonel Dalrymple would keep the Fourteenth confined to their quarters, but orders for the removal of both regiments to Castle Island would have to come from General Gage in New York.

Sam Adams waited for the angry muttering to subside. Then, very slowly and distinctly, he asked if it was the people’s pleasure to bow to the Governor’s decision. There was a thundering “Nay! Nay! Nay!” And when he put the question should it be both regiments or none, the response of “Aye! Aye! Aye!” all but shook the rafters of the church.

A light snow was falling when Adams and the committee returned to the old State House and mounted the stairs to the second floor. They crossed the narrow hall and walked into the large square room where James Otis had protested, with memorable eloquence, against the writs of assistance nine years before.

Instead of the judges whom Otis had addressed, there were twenty-eight councilors seated around the long oval table with Governor Hutchinson at the head. The scene on this gray March day in 1770 was as splendid as it had been then. Scarlet cloaks were draped over the backs of chairs and the councilors wore powdered wigs and fine broadcloth suits. Firelight and candlelight shone on full-length portraits of the two Stuart kings that Francis Bernard had hung on the walls—James II and Charles II, regal in purple velvet robes bordered with ermine.

It was the kind of opulent scene that Sam Adams hated, and the shabby Old Puritan stood unabashed before Governor Hutchinson to tell him for the second time what was the will of the people. Again he denounced the “dangerous, ruinous, and fatal effects of standing armies in time of peace.” Again he warned that the people were armed and ready to rise against the troops who had spilled patriot blood—that fifteen thousand New Englanders would rush to their assistance.

Hutchinson’s hazel eyes darkened with anger. Sam Adams came a step closer, lifted his arm, and pointed a shaky finger at him. If he had the authority to remove one regiment, he had the authority to remove two. With finality, Adams told him it must be both regiments or none. It was a moment of triumph for him, for as Hutchinson hesitated, Adams observed that his old enemy trembled and that his face turned pale.

He stepped back and waited while the Governor sat down and held a whispered conference with the councilors and Colonel Dalrymple. Then Hutchinson rose again, bowed coldly to Sam Adams, and informed him that his petition was granted, that Colonel Dalrymple would make preparations at once for the removal of both regiments to Castle Island.

On Thursday of that same week, the streets of the city were crowded again. People had come in droves to pay their last respects to the fallen martyrs of that “horrid Massacre”—or simply to gape at the spectacle. It had been planned for dramatic effect by Will Molineaux and the Sons of Liberty.

Molineaux was a middle-aged merchant who had been ruined by the depression. The big, rough Irishman blamed England for his misfortune and, as merchant John Rowe said, had now become “first leader in dirty matters.” Many suspected that he was the mystery man in the red cloak and white wig who had harangued a crowd the night of the massacre.

The funeral procession formed in King Street while church bells in Boston and in neighboring towns tolled slowly and mournfully. Thousands walked in solemn silence in the cortege—through the town, past the jail where Preston and his men were held, and out to the Old Granary-Burying Ground.

It had been a harrowing week. Everyone was exhausted by the excitement and emotional strain. They were even ready to forget for a while that John Adams and his law partner, young Josiah Quincy, Jr., had agreed to defend Captain Preston and the soldiers. In the spring of 1768, John Adams had moved his family from Braintree to Boston. Since then his law practice had grown and he had become increasingly active in the Whig cause.

On the morning after the massacre, while the crowd was assembling for the mass meeting in Faneuil Hall, a friend of Captain Preston had come to him in great agitation. He had been trying desperately to find legal counsel for the captain. Not one of three Crown lawyers he had called on would even touch the case. In tears and almost in despair, he pleaded with John Adams to defend Preston.

And John Adams, knowing that he risked everything, consented to take the case. “I had no hesitation in answering,” he said, “that counsel ought to be the very last thing that an accused person should lack in a free country; that the bar ought, in my opinion, to be independent and impartial, at all times and in every circumstance.”

The Sons of Liberty were incredulous. They could not understand why John Adams, a prominent Whig, would be willing to defend murderers, and they let no opportunity pass to ridicule and insult him. What distressed the honest, courageous little lawyer most of all was the jubilation of the Tories. They mistakenly believed he had come over to their side.

But the Sons of Liberty laid down their hatchets, and the people forgot their troubles and anxieties on March 27, the day the last of the redcoats marched down to Long Wharf to be transported to Castle William. It was a mild, sunny day, and the whole town was out or leaning out of the windows to see the troops off.

The Sons had their last fling at insulting the hated soldiers, but it was all in prankish fun. They escorted the Fourteenth and the Twenty-ninth regiments from their barracks to the wharf. Will Molineaux led them, cavorting ludicrously in a red and blue uniform, and lifting his three-cornered hat to wave to the crowds that lined the streets and roared with laughter at his antics. The devilish little boys were there, too, skipping along and screaming, “Good-by, bloody-backs! Good-by, lobsters!” The “lobsters” were really red in the face that day, the most humiliating they had ever known.

The final insult came from Britain’s prime minister. When Lord North heard about the ignominious departure from Boston, he called them Sam Adams’s two regiments.

The Sons of Liberty were not going to let the world forget the “horrid Massacre,” though. Paul Revere soon had ready an engraving of it that pictured the massacre in the way Sam Adams and the Sons wanted everyone to believe it had happened.

In the engraving, a group of citizens are standing in attitudes of distressed bewilderment against the background of the old State House. The slain lie at their feet, with one expiring victim held up by two bystanders. To the right are the redcoats in a stiff, straight line, their pointed muskets enveloped in smoke. Captain Preston’s sword is raised as if he had just given the order to fire. And in the foreground, a little black dog looks out, unfrightened and unconcerned. This picture had wide circulation in the colonies and in England, and has become one of America’s most famous engravings.

While Revere worked on the picture, Sam Adams, with the assistance of John Hancock and other Whigs, prepared a report on the massacre. Adams was in a hurry, for he wanted his report to reach London ahead of the unfavorable account that he knew Governor Hutchinson and Colonel Dalrymple would send to the King and Parliament.

Ninety-six witnesses were found, and from each Adams obtained a sworn statement. All but two testified that the soldiers had behaved like bloodthirsty devils on the fateful night, roaming the streets and terrifying peaceful citizens with “drawn swords, cutlasses, and bayonets.”

The ninety-six depositions were sent to London together with a twenty-two-page report—“A Short Narrative of the horrid Massacre in Boston, perpetrated in the evening of the fifth day of March, 1770, by soldiers of the Twenty-ninth Regiment, with some observations on the state of things prior to that catastrophe.”

The “Narrative,” with an introduction signed by prominent Whigs, was published in Boston and distributed throughout the province.

John Adams and Josiah Quincy read the depositions with grave misgivings. They were indignant that such outrageous lies had been told as the sworn testimony of ninety-four witnesses. There was not a word about the desperate plight of the lone sentry who had warded off insults and missiles and finally, in fear for his life, had called the main guard. The two lawyers decided that there was no chance of a fair trial unless the case could be postponed until the passions of the people cooled. And Governor Hutchinson, by shrewd work behind the scenes, succeeded in delaying the trial until the fall term of court.

It did not disturb Sam Adams that two highly respected Whigs had undertaken the defense of the “butchers.” Rather, it pleased him that they had, but not from any desire that the soldiers should have a fair trial. Adams was undoubtedly afraid that evidence damaging to himself and the radical Whigs would be brought out if the soldiers were defended by probing lawyers sympathetic to the Crown. John Adams, Sam believed, would protect the reputation of the Whigs.

Preston and the soldiers were given the fair trial they had been promised, and John Adams’s skillful and conscientious handling of their defense saved them. He was ably assisted by young Josiah Quincy, who moved both the jury and courtroom audience with his beautiful voice and impassioned rhetoric.

To secure an impartial jury, John Adams had insisted upon and had got a panel composed entirely of country men. To Cousin Sam’s dismay, not a single Son of Liberty from Boston or from any other town was accepted for the panel.

The evidence that had the most telling effect was given by the wounded Irishman, Patrick Carr. Even as he lay dying, he refused to blame the British soldiers for having fired upon the crowd in front of the customhouse. He declared they had done so in self-defense. Back in Ireland he had seen mobs, and he had been present when soldiers were called out to quell them, but “he had never in his life seen them bear half as much before they fired.”

For Captain Preston and six of his men, the verdict was “Not guilty.” Two, Privates Kilroy and Montgomery, were acquitted of murder, but were judged guilty of manslaughter. As punishment, each man was branded on his thumb with a hot iron.

Weary of turmoil and bloodshed, the people accepted the acquittals sullenly but without violence. For Bostonians, they had behaved “remarkably decent.”

8 

Revenge on Thomas Hutchinson

On the very day of the Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770, Parliament voted to repeal all the Townshend duties except that on tea. By far the largest revenue came from the tax on tea, and this one duty was enough to remind the colonists that England had not given up her right to tax them.

Even so, the news of limited repeal was welcome to merchants and the unemployed in Boston. Nonimportation had been a failure. There was no uniform observance of it, and the towns fell to squabbling. The provinces accused one another of not working hard enough to make it a success. Now they abandoned the agreement altogether. John Hancock announced in the pages of the Gazette that he had returned to normal business:

John Hancock
Informs the Public

That after the most strict compliance with the Nonimportation Agreement during its continuance, he has received by the ship Lydia an assortment of goods which he will sell wholesale, at the very lowest rates, at his store, No. 4, East End of Faneuil Hall Market, where constant attendance will be given and the favors of his customers duly acknowledged.

Imperturbable as ever, Sam Adams said the Nonimportation Agreement had lasted longer than he expected. Now he decided to arouse public opinion by retrying the British soldiers in a series of articles in the Gazette that he signed “Vindex.” He and other Whig patriots had written their version of what happened on the night of the massacre in the “Narrative,” which had been circulated throughout the province.

Adams now told the story again so that New Englanders might never forget either the horrors of that night or how justice had been mocked at the trial of the soldiers. There were gory details. Kilroy’s bayonet was bloodied three inches from the point after he had viciously stabbed the dead ropewalker. And dogs had come into King Street to lap up patriot blood after the massacre.

Now that the trial was over, Sam Adams could criticize Cousin John’s defense point by point. Why, he asked, had there been such insistence on having only men from the country to serve on the jury? Why had Boston men been entirely excluded? He raised doubts that the witnesses had told all they knew, and asked who could know how testimony had been obtained from Patrick Carr as he lay dying.

Reading Sam’s articles, John Adams shook his head sadly. He was not angry or offended. He still loved and respected his cousin and, though he deplored his tactics, he understood that to Sam Adams nothing mattered but the cause—that for it he would do anything.

On March 5, 1771, the first anniversary of the Boston Massacre, the Gazette came out bordered in black and church bells tolled again. But the people were utterly weary of political wrangling. They wanted to enjoy the fruits of peace for awhile now that England had made some concessions. With no fresh grievances to rail against, Sam Adams renewed his attack on Thomas Hutchinson. Working quietly and cautiously, the Governor had evacuated the colonial garrison from Castle William and had turned the fort over to the redcoats. To strengthen their position, the British Ministry made Boston Harbor the headquarters of the Royal Navy.

To Sam Adams this was an outrage because Castle William was not Crown property. It had been built by the province of Massachusetts Bay. But Adams could work up no indignation outside Boston over the Governor’s highhanded seizure of the fort. Nor was that all. The country people began to talk differently about the massacre trials. Perhaps the mobbish Boston Whigs were not as blameless as they had tried to make themselves appear. Thomas Hutchinson had always been admired throughout Massachusetts. People in the rural communities were saying now what an able governor he was. The Tories delightedly reported that they were beginning “to look around with astonishment” and show that “they were willing to hear with both ears.”

Even in Boston it was evident that Sam Adams’s popularity had waned. In the May elections, he barely polled enough votes to be returned as one of the town’s four representatives. Sam took it philosophically, making the wry comment that he was sometimes in fashion and sometimes out of fashion. He refused to believe the cause was hopeless. “Where there is a spark of patriotic fire,” he declared, “we will enkindle it.”

Governor Hutchinson and his Tory friends pressed their advantage. While casting slurs on Boston, they played up the flourishing state of the province. Taxes and the public debt had never been lighter or trade brisker. The people should know that these were blessings conferred upon them by good King George. Why listen to gloomy malcontents like Sam Adams? “All’s well in Massachusetts Bay” became the slogan of the Tories as they urged the people to go to the polls and sweep the discontented Whigs out of office.

Privately, the Tories were not so confident that all was well as long as Sam Adams was around spreading his malicious propaganda. There seemed to be no way of silencing him or of getting rid of him. It was rumored that the Tories had tried to bribe him, but he was incorruptible, and they knew he would spurn any office that Governor Hutchinson might offer him.

Now an order came from the King to move the General Court to Cambridge. Sam Adams spoke out vehemently against it. The royal prerogative could be exercised only if it were for the good of the province, he boldly declared, and demanded that the Governor return the court to Boston. Hutchinson’s indignant refusal brought about a deadlock.

The conservative Whigs did not support Adams, however. They were almost as alarmed as the Governor. John Hancock, whose loyalty had been wavering, introduced a motion in the House of Representatives that Hutchinson be petitioned to remove the court to Boston solely on the grounds of inconvenience. There were no bridges connecting the town with the mainland, and the ferries were slow; travel to Cambridge was time consuming. It was a defeat for Sam Adams when the Governor did finally bring the General Court back to Boston, not in defiance of the royal instructions, but for the sake of convenience.

These were dark days for the Whigs. Even some of the radicals took fright and deserted them. The Tories waved banners and jubilantly went after Sam Adams, determined to ruin his reputation. They dug into his past and came up with the old charge of his having embezzled public funds while he was tax collector. As a result, they said, the people had been burdened with an “insupportable town tax,” but this public defaulter had been allowed to go free.

While the Tory propagandists slung mud at Sam Adams, the Governor wooed John Hancock. Toward the end of January 1772, he noted: “Hancock has not been seen at the Whig clubs for the past two months and seems to have a new set of acquaintances.” Reflecting hopefully upon this, and being well aware of Hancock’s vanity, Hutchinson decided to offer him a commission in the Governor’s own company of cadets, whose chief function was to serve as an honor guard.

So John Hancock received this formal commission from Governor Thomas Hutchinson: “His Excellency, the Captain-General, has been pleased to commission John Hancock, Esq., to be Captain of the Company of Cadets with the rank of Colonel.”

It was no great honor, but it tickled Hancock’s vanity to be addressed as “Colonel,” and he relished the idea of strutting in public in the trappings of an officer. He accepted the commission with pleasure and promptly inserted an advertisement in the newspapers: “Wanted immediately for His Excellency’s Company of Cadets: two lifers that understand playing. Those that are masters of music and are inclined to join the Company are asked to apply to Colonel John Hancock.”

Merchant Rowe was soon noting in his diary the public appearances of the Colonel and his cadets: “Colonel Hancock turned out this afternoon in the Common with the Cadet Company. They made a good figure and behaved very well throughout the whole of the exercise.”

It was really a joke on Thomas Hutchinson. He thought he had read the mind of the wealthy young merchant—chuckled at the thought that he was subtly leading him into the Tory camp. But John Hancock was using the Governor to build up his personal popularity. With Adams’s hold on the party leadership weakening, Hancock had an ambitious eye turned in that direction.

In the elections of May 1772, though the conservatives failed to oust him, Sam Adams was re-elected to the House of Representatives by so few votes that the Whigs were alarmed. Coming to their senses, they recognized the Tory menace and clamored for a reconciliation between Adams and Hancock.

To Hutchinson’s dismay, John Hancock, too, was re-elected as a representative, a position he accepted just as if he were not the colonel of the Governor’s cadets. Moreover, he made peace with Sam Adams, and to show that the reconciliation was complete, he engaged John Copley to paint his and Adams’s portraits and hung them side by side in his parlor. Sam said it was the Tories’ “scurvy trick of lying” that had caused the breach.

Governor Hutchinson was baffled by his failure to ensnare John Hancock, but the Tories were still in power in January 1773. After three years of peace and prosperity, the Governor could confidently report that “any union between the colonies is pretty well broke.” He fervently added, “I hope never to see it renewed.”

The Whigs were “pretty well broke,” too, but there were some rude shocks ahead for the Governor and his friends. England now began to meddle in colonial affairs again.

The Ministry had put Governor Hutchinson beyond control of the colonists by paying his salary from the revenue collected by the customs commissioners. Now Lord North proposed to do the same thing with the five judges of the Superior Court of Massachusetts. Heretofore they had been paid by the House of Representatives, and this had given the colonists a weapon, since they could either grant or withhold the judges’ annual salaries. As a mere matter of convenience, Lord North explained, the salaries would henceforth be paid by the Crown. The only control the people had over these Crown appointees was taken from them. Bit by bit and one by one, colonial rights were being chiseled away.

In town meeting, Sam Adams reminded the citizens that the province had made effective use of correspondence committees, particularly during the Stamp Act crisis. There was now an even greater need, he said, to inform people in all the towns of what was being done in Boston to preserve their liberties. And Boston should know how New Englanders throughout the province, even in the remotest villages, felt about British taxation, the judges’ salaries, and other matters affecting their rights.

Let there be an exchange of letters discussing these problems, Sam Adams urged, not only between the towns of Massachusetts Bay and Boston, but among central committees in all the provinces. There was no better way to bring about unity, Adams declared, and it was only by united action that the American colonies could safeguard their freedom.

There were cries of protest from timid Whigs, but “the Grand Incendiary of the Province” overrode all opposition to his plan. The response of the towns was immediate. Plymouth was the first, after Boston, to appoint a committee of correspondence, and it was followed by Cambridge, Marblehead, Charlestown, Newburyport, and many others throughout Massachusetts. Early in 1773, the Virginia House of Burgesses adopted the plan, and soon other colonial assemblies were appointing correspondence committees.

Emboldened by this success, Sam Adams began to speak of the House of Representatives as “His Majesty’s Commons.” Its debates he termed “parliamentary debates,” and the provincial laws, “the laws of the land.”

At first Governor Hutchinson scoffed at the committees of correspondence, calling them a foolish scheme, and said the Whigs were making themselves ridiculous. But he learned to his chagrin how dangerously effective they could be. Before long he lamented, “All on a sudden, from a state of peace, order, and general contentment, the province was brought into a state of contention, disorder, and general dissatisfaction.”

The committees of correspondence were not all that upset Thomas Hutchinson in that year of 1773. By some devious means, a packet of letters he had written to a friend in England fell into the hands of Sam Adams.

Just how Benjamin Franklin, serving in London as postmaster general of the colonies, obtained this Hutchinson correspondence has never been revealed. But he sent the letters to “six or seven of the people’s leaders” in Boston, specifying that they were confidential—that they were not to be printed or copied.

There was nothing in the letters that could be called inflammatory—nothing that was not already known about the Governor’s opinions and his ideas about the problems of governing Massachusetts. But it was something else to see them expressed in his private letters. He spoke of “our scandalous newspapers” and “our incendiaries.” Of the leaders of the people he had written, “Ignorant though they be, yet the heads of Boston town meeting influence all public measures.” This was the aristocrat speaking in unmistakable tones of scorn and condescension.

And in a letter that he wrote soon after his house had been plundered and wrecked by the Boston mob, he said: “I never think without pain of the measures necessary for the peace and good order of the colonies. There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties.”

Sam Adams had waited a long time for the chance to take revenge on Thomas Hutchinson. He wanted to ruin his reputation and destroy the man. It did not matter to Adams that Franklin had requested that the letters be treated confidentially. He did not even care what happened to Franklin (and it happened that Franklin lost his position as postmaster general as a result of the affair).

Adams first read the letters aloud to the members of the House of Representatives. Then he edited them for publication in the Gazette, with a running commentary that would leave no doubt in readers’ minds of just how contemptible the Governor of Massachusetts was.

Hutchinson was bewildered by the hatred that “a dozen harmless letters” aroused in the people. Even John Adams wrote of him: “Bone of our bone! Born and educated among us. Vile serpent! ”

9 

The Famous Tea Farty

Sam Adams had succeeded so well in damaging Thomas Hutchinson’s reputation that even the country people now looked upon him with suspicion and distrust. Patriots in all the colonies were beginning to shake off the lethargy that had kept them inactive in furthering the cause of liberty for three years.

Once again there were encouraging signs of rivalry for leadership in the fight against British tyranny. There was particularly strong competition for this honor between Massachusetts and Virginia. Sam Adams believed that Massachusetts should lead all the colonies and that Boston should lead the Bay province.

The British government saw what the Chief Incendiary was doing to arouse the colonies. Certainly London had had warning enough that this was the worst of all times to give the colonies fresh grievances. Yet, with folly that is almost incomprehensible, the mother country now gave Sam Adams a weapon that enabled him to attack the royal government with the “boldest stroke that had yet been struck in America.”

Tea was a favorite beverage of the colonists, and so much was drunk that America was one of the principal markets of the world. Legally, tea was supplied by the great East India Company, which had a monopoly of the English tea business. Having come close to bankruptcy by mismanagement, the company had raised the price of tea. Colonial merchants balked at paying the higher prices and took to smuggling tea from the Dutch East Indies.

Within three years, the amount of tea imported by the colonies from the East India Company dropped from 800,000 pounds a year to less than 100,000 pounds. With a seven-years’ supply in their warehouses in London, and with indebtedness to the British government mounting, the company was in real trouble.

Parliament came to the rescue with the Tea Act, a plan to dump the East India tea on the colonies. To take the profit out of smuggling, the price was reduced from twenty to ten shillings a pound, and the company was permitted to export the tea in its own vessels. The government retained the tax of threepence a pound. American retail merchants were cut out of the market when the government appointed “consignees,” merchants especially authorized to sell tea in the colonies.

Surely, British statesmen reasoned, the colonists would jump at the chance to buy tea for half the price it cost in London. New Englanders particularly liked genuine British bohea, a high-grade black tea. But the Sons of Liberty quickly took the matter in hand. Even before Sam Adams had mobilized the Boston Sons against the Tea Act, consignees in the southern colonies had been forced to resign.

John Hancock and other Whig merchants who would be driven out of the tea market seethed with indignation. They were all the more incensed because the consignees in Boston were Tory merchants and included Hutchinson’s two sons. On November 1, it was voted in town meeting to follow the example of New York and Philadelphia in getting rid of them.

Merchant John Rowe wrote in his diary that when he “got abroad” the next day he found a poster “stuck up at almost every corner: ”

To the Freemen of this and the neighboring towns, Gentlemen, you are desired to meet at Liberty Tree on the third day of November at 12 o’clock noon, then and there to hear the persons to whom the tea is shipped by the East India Company make a public resignation of their office as Consignees upon oath, and also to swear that they will reship any tea that may be consigned to them by said Company by the first vessel sailing for London.

The bells of Boston rang on the appointed day, and hundreds flocked to Liberty Tree to witness the resignation of the consignees. The Sons were there with plans for a big celebration. To the dismay of everyone not a single Tory importer obeyed the summons.

Backed by Thomas Hutchinson, who was determined to enforce the Tea Act, the Tory merchants screwed up their courage and defied the Sons of Liberty to do their worst. Sam Adams was furious. It was disconcerting to see New York and Philadelphia taking the lead in this crisis. The tea must not be landed in Boston!

By English law, the Governor could not sign an order to send the ships back to England with the tea unless the duty had been paid. However, if they anchored beyond Castle William instead of entering the port of Boston, they could avoid paying the duty and return to England. Governor Hutchinson, therefore, made plans to order the captains to hold their ships below the fort until some solution to the problem could be found.

Sam Adams, however, was not interested in finding a peaceful way out. He wanted to strike a blow at the British government that would set an example for all the colonies. Boston was in ferment again. Everyone asked: “When are the tea ships expected?” and speculated about what would happen after they had arrived. Lights burned late in the Long Room above the Edes and Gill printing office, where Sam Adams and his associates worked to get posters and circular letters ready for distribution.

The Boston Committee of Correspondence directed all the activities. Country people were warned that there would be more despotic taxation if the tea were landed. They were kept informed about the measures the Boston Sons of Liberty were taking in the crisis. The correspondence committees in rural Massachusetts were invited to come to Boston to participate in the mass meetings. Sam Adams knew how important it was to have their support.

While the patriots debated strategy, the consignees lost courage and petitioned the Governor for protection against the Sons of Liberty, who at any moment, they feared, might seize and tar and feather them. But Governor Hutchinson was as helpless as his appointees. His demands that the crowds in Faneuil Hall disperse had been received with boos and hisses. John Hancock had insolently refused to hold the cadets in readiness to defend the Crown officials in an emergency. Frustrated and angered at every turn, Thomas Hutchinson retired to his country home in Milton, seven miles from Boston. The Tory tea merchants fled to Castle William.

Boston was thrown into a frenzy when the Dartmouth, first of the tea ships, arrived on November 28. Express riders mounted their horses and galloped off to carry the news to the towns and villages.

Next morning another poster was put up all over Boston. It read:

Friends! Brethren! Countrymen! That worst of plagues, the detested tea, shipped to this port by the East India Company, is now arrived in the harbor. The hour of destruction, or manly opposition to the machinations of tyranny, stares you in the face. Every friend to his country, to himself, and to posterity, is now called upon to meet at Faneuil Hall at nine o’clock this day, at which time the bells will ring to make united and successful resistance to this last, worst, and most destructive measure of administration. Boston. November 29, 1773.

The bells rang and the people came. With Sam Adams and his liberty crew in virtual possession of the town, business was transacted briskly and without opposition. The Dartmouth had anchored below Castle Island. Her captain was summoned and ordered to bring the ship in and tie her to Griffin’s Wharf. Francis Rotch, the owner of the vessel, was warned that if he unloaded her it was “on his peril.”

The Sons of Liberty took no chances. Twenty-five of them, armed with muskets, went down to the wharf that night to keep watch over the Dartmouth. John Hancock was also there with some of his cadets, who were more loyal to their colonel than to the Governor.

A few days later, the Beaver and the Eleanor came in and were fastened by long cables to the wharf near the Dartmouth. Three hundred and forty-two chests of tea, valued at 18,000 pounds, were stored in the holds of the ships. On Friday, December 17, the tea would be liable to seizure by the customs officers for nonpayment of duties. Time was running out. Governor Hutchinson had refused to issue clearance papers without a receipt from the customhouse showing that the duty had been paid.

On Thursday morning, December 16, Mr. Rotch was sent to Milton to make a last-minute appeal to the Governor to give permission for the ships to leave. A meeting had been called for three o’clock that cold, rainy afternoon. Faneuil Hall was not large enough to hold the crowds that came, and the meeting was transferred to the Old South Meetinghouse. Still there was an overflow of hundreds in the street outside.

John Hancock presided at the meeting. He stood in the pulpit, a tall slender figure, impeccably dressed, delicate ruffles showing below the sleeves of his dark coat and his powdered wig carefully in place. There was an audible murmur of admiration as he spoke in a strong, clear voice.

One by one he introduced the speakers who sat grouped around him in high-backed chairs—Dr. Joseph Warren, young Josiah Quincy, Will Molineaux, and Sam Adams. While they waited for Mr. Rotch, the Whig leaders entertained the assembly with the kind of speech-malting they liked to hear—eloquent and inflammatory.

Time passed quickly. The rain stopped, and as dusk fell, candles in sconces on the walls of the church were lighted. It was dark at a quarter to six when Mr. Rotch came back with word that Governor Hutchinson had flatly refused clearance for the ships.

There was a moment’s pause. Then Sam Adams rose slowly to his feet and said quietly, “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.”

The words were a signal to the Mohawks waiting outside. Instantly there were war whoops from the gallery, shouts and yells from the people below.

“To the docks!”

“To Griffin’s Wharf!”

“Boston Harbor a teapot tonight!”

People quickly left their seats, and as they pushed and struggled to get out the doors, they heard John Hancock’s voice above the uproar: “Let every man do what is right in his own eyes.”

Outside, more than a hundred tea-party “Indians” had gone whooping down to the dock. Their faces were smeared with red paint and blackened with soot, and they carried hatchets and axes. The crowd hurried after them. They gathered around the wharf and by the eerie light of the moon silently looked on.

The Mohawks were well organized and well disciplined. Commanded by Lendall Pitts, the son of a prosperous merchant, they were divided into three groups, and each, under a lieutenant, was assigned to a tea ship.

The procedure was the same on the three brigs. A sharp order brought the mate around with the keys and a cabin boy with lighted lanterns. The heavy chests were hoisted up on deck, and husky men and boys fell to work breaking them open with their axes and hatchets. Then, with a mighty heave, they lifted the boxes and dumped their contents overboard.

Now and then a puffing Indian looked up at a companion and grunted, “Me know you,” but that was all the conversation and the only noise except for the sharp whacks of axes on the wooden chests.

All three cargoes had been thrown into the harbor before dawn. The finest English bohea was washed along the shore in great drifts by the incoming tide all the way from Boston to Dorchester.

Their work finished, the Indians shouldered tomahawks and axes, and to the shrill notes of a fife, marched off. There had not been even a whistle from His Majesty’s ships that rode at anchor a short distance away. At the head of Griffin’s Wharf, the Mohawks were startled by the bang of a window that was suddenly raised. Looking up, they saw the broad, homely face of Admiral Montague pop out. He was there spending the night with a Tory friend, and now he leaned out the window and said, “Well, boys, you’ve had a fine, pleasant evening for your Indian caper. But mind, he who dances must pay the fiddler.”

Young Lendall Pitts waved his tomahawk and said, “Oh, never mind, Admiral. Just come out here and we’ll settle the bill in two minutes.” The Admiral’s head popped back and the window was slammed down.

The names of all the young men and boys who “made a little salt-water tea” that night were never made public. It is known, though, that Paul Revere was one of them. Later that same day he was in the saddle, riding express. The Boston Committee of Correspondence had chosen him to carry their account of the tea party to New York and Philadelphia. Now these colonies would learn what Boston’s Sons of Liberty could do, Sam Adams crowed, mightily pleased that leadership had been restored to his town.

Cousin John heard about the exploit of the Mohawks at noon that day on his way home from Plymouth, where he had been attending court. He was almost as elated as Sam. There had been no mob violence and no drunken revelry— “no mean movement for private revenge,” he said. Rather, he saw in the destruction of the tea “a dignity, a majesty, and a sublimity in this last effort of the patriots” that he greatly admired.

An unknown rhymester saw much to admire, too, and composed “The Rallying Song of the Tea Party:”

Rally Mohawks! bring out your axes, 

And tell King George we’ll pay no taxes 

On his foreign tea; 

His threats are vain, and vain to think 

To force our girls and wives to drink His vile Bohea!

Then rally boys, and hasten on 

To meet our chiefs at the Green Dragon.

Our Warren’s there and bold Revere With hands to do, 

and words to cheer 

For Liberty and laws; 

Our Country’s ‘braves’ and firm defenders 

Shall ne’er be left by true North-Enders 

Fighting Freedom’s call!

Then rally boys, and hasten on 

To meet our chiefs at the Green Dragon.

10

Humiliation of Boston

Other colonies had refused permission to land the tea—had stored it in warehouses to remain unsold, or had sent the tea ships back to England. But the mother country vented her wrath upon Boston. Government spokesmen declared that the reason the tea had been destroyed there was because the Boston fanatics always tried to thwart the acts of Parliament.

Englishmen bitterly observed that New Englanders had shown themselves to be “the only people on earth who can trample on our once boasted spirit with impunity.” King and Parliament agreed that the question was whether the colonies should give laws to England, or England to the colonies. And they decided to make an example of Boston. General Gage, in London to make a report on Massachusetts Bay, told King George that Boston would be very meek “if we take the resolute part”—that with four regiments he was sure he could tame the rebellious town.

Colonel Barre warned the British government that for ten years it had been “goading and teasing” the Americans into rebellion. And Richard Fuller, leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons, said, “If ever there was a nation running headlong to its ruin it is this.” But such warnings were brushed aside.

News of the terrible punishment that was to be meted out to Boston was received on May io, 1774. Parliament had ordered the port closed on the first of June. After that day, no ships would be allowed to enter or leave the harbor until the town agreed to pay for the tea that had been destroyed. There would be no more broad-beamed little vessels coming in from the West Indies to nose around the great-sailed merchant ships—not even the little fishing ketches. Instead, the harbor would bristle with His Majesty’s men-of-war, for more warships were coming to enforce the blockade.

Boston was to be starved into submission and humiliated intolerably by other acts of Parliament. All “disturbers of the King’s peace” could be sent to England for trial. Henceforth, members of the council, judges, and jurors would be chosen by the Crown. After August 1, no town meetings could be held without the Governor’s consent. And thereafter, Salem, twenty miles to the north, would be the capital of Massachusetts Bay.

As they had done so often in the past, the citizens of Boston surprised their oppressors by stiff-necked resistance to these latest and worst of tyrannies. In Faneuil Hall, their leaders denounced the Port Bill and the Coercive Acts with “a freedom and energy” that could be compared to that of the orators of ancient Rome.

Sam Adams trumpeted: “It is not the rights of Boston only, but of ALL AMERICA which are now struck at.” And he declared, “Now is the time when ALL, should be united in opposition to this violation of ALL!”

Paul Revere, tireless, devoted to the cause of freedom, and absolutely trustworthy, was the leading express rider for the patriots. He carried the most important messages and news to the other colonies and went on the most hazardous missions. Now the Boston Committee of Correspondence, which was soon to be called the Committee of Safety, sent him off on the long, hard ride to New York and Philadelphia with a report on Parliament’s most oppressive act:

They have ordered our port to be entirely shut up, leaving us barely so much of the means of subsistence as to keep us from perishing with cold and hunger. A fleet of British ships of war is to block up our harbor until we shall make restitution to the East India Company, and obedience is paid to the laws and authority of Great Britain. The single question then is, whether you consider Boston as now suffering in the common cause, and sensibly feel and resent the injury offered to her.

The Gazette reassured its readers that “Our worthy citizen, Mr. Paul Revere, is by now well on his way with important letters to the Southern colonies.”

On May 13, the Lively came into port bringing General Thomas Gage, who had returned to take Thomas Hutchinson’s place as governor of Massachusetts and to serve as commander of the British forces. Some days later, Hutchinson left for England, never to return to his native land.

General Gage arrived in Boston on a prophetically stormy day. Cannon boomed from Castle William and from Admiral Montague’s warships in the harbor. Boston gave him a subdued but civil welcome, and he was escorted to Province House, the official residence of the governor of the province.

It was a tall brick mansion that stood in landscaped grounds opposite Milk Street. Atop its octagonal, lanternshaped cupola was another of Deacon Shem Drowne’s weather vanes, an erect, almost life-sized Indian poised to let fly an arrow from his bow.

Soon after his arrival, Gage revoked John Hancock’s commission because his cadets failed to salute His Excellency upon his entry into the town. The cadets stood stoutly by their colonel, and the corps was disbanded. One of the town’s humorists commemorated the incident in a jingle that was published in the radical Massachusetts Spy, in which King George expresses his displeasure:

Your Colonel Hancock, by neglect, 

Has been deficient in respect; 

As he my Sovereign toe ne’er kissed, 

’Twas proper he should be dismissed.

I never was and never will 

By mortal man be treated ill.

No jingles were written in farewell to Thomas Hutchinson. But he received a letter signed by one hundred and twenty Tories thanking him for his services to Massachusetts Bay. He had given distinguished service to the province he deeply loved, but there could be no compromise of principles for the haughty aristocrat. He believed that the people should be ruled by men of intellect and breeding, and he was unswervingly loyal to His Majesty, King George III. With a last look at his country house and beautiful gardens and orchards in Milton, Thomas Hutchinson sailed for England. He left never doubting that his stay would be temporary, but he lived out the rest of his life in lonely and unhappy exile.

General Gage could not have relished his assignment to rebellious Boston. He had lived for many years in America and had an American wife, so he was well acquainted with the ways of the colonists. He was fifty-two, amiable, well-meaning, and popular, and as an officer, capable enough but far from brilliant. He had been sent to Boston to preserve order and to close the port. On June 1 he declared the port of Boston to be closed.

Even the ferries were tied up and the ships were moved to Marblehead and Salem, there to gather barnacles and creak dismally at their moorings. There was no demand for sailors now. There was no work for dock hands, shipbuilders, ropewalkers, sail makers, and the army of men usually employed at the shipyards. Every business in town suffered. Suddenly there were thousands of jobless men. with nothing but time on their hands.

Once again Boston was overrun with soldiers. They marched and drilled, and the young officers strutted about resplendent in scarlet and white and gold. In a few weeks, five thousand redcoats were quartered in the town. They behaved remarkably well, not only because they had been chosen with more care, but because General Gage was determined that there should be no clashes between the citizens and the soldiers. He was so strict that his officers complained that “Tommy feels no affection for his army.” Awed or frightened by the General’s disciplined troops, rowdy little boys kept their mouths shut. They did not whistle at the soldiers or call them “bloody-backs” and “lobsters.”

By the time Paul Revere returned, fast riders were bringing messages of sympathy and promises of support to Boston. The letter from the Sons of Liberty in Norfolk, Virginia, expressed what all the colonies felt: “Be assured we consider you as suffering in the common cause and look upon ourselves as bound by the most sacred ties to support you.”

Carts laden with gifts of food for the blockaded town came in over the Neck. Marblehead sent great quantities of “good eating fish, one and three-quarter casks of olive oil and thirty-nine pounds, five shillings, and sixpence in cash.” Farmington, Connecticut, sent four hundred bushels of rye and Indian corn, and Chelmsford, Massachusetts, forty bushels of rye. Donations of rice came from Charleston, South Carolina, and flour from Maryland. Philadelphia and other towns sent money.

On a hot August day, one of the best known and best loved soldiers in America coaxed and prodded one hundred and thirty sheep through the town gate and drove them down High Street to Dock Square. Just the sight of Israel Putnam, waving a long stick in one hand and his rusty three-cornered hat in the other, gave the dispirited Bostonians a tremendous lift. When the word flew about town that Old Put had come, the citizens turned out to line the street all the way from Orange to Cornhill. Cheers drowned out the bleatings of the flock that the old soldier had driven all the way from Pomfret, Connecticut, about a hundred miles away.

Everyone knew about Old Put. He had been a ranger in the French and Indian campaigns, had been captured by the redskins, and rescued in the nick of time from flames that licked at his feet. He was absolutely fearless and miraculously lucky. There were already more than a score of legends that attested to his courage, his resourcefulness, and his luck. Now he was ready to lick the redcoats. He declared it would take only a few skirmishes to send them hightailing.

Earlier that summer there had been forewarnings of the Revolution that many people now believed to be inevitable. Patriots in all the colonies pondered the grave question of what political action to take. They thought back to the time when most of the colonies had united in the Stamp Act Congress of 1765.

It was even more important now that they come together to discuss the plight of Boston and the strained relations with the mother country that affected them all. Acting through their committees of correspondence, the colonies resolved to hold a congress in Philadelphia. It was to convene on September 5, 1774, and it would be known as the First Continental Congress.

But first, formal approval to hold the Congress would have to come from the colonial assemblies, and delegates would have to be elected. The Whig members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives made careful plans for their next meeting after Sam Adams had talked to them privately about the Congress. Cautious efforts were made to discourage Tory members from coming. Quite casually the Whigs spoke of routine matters to be discussed and expressed the hope that the session would be brief.

Secrecy was of the utmost necessity. General Gage had moved his official residence from Boston to Danvers on the outskirts of Salem, where he could keep closer watch on the “fanatics.” If word of their plans had leaked out, he would have forbidden them to come together.

On the afternoon of June 17, the Massachusetts legislature convened in the meetinghouse at Salem. As the members filed in and took their seats, the Whigs nervously turned their heads to see who was there. Just before the meeting began, John Hancock whispered to Sam Adams that he had counted eleven Tories. Sam was prepared for this. He discreetly stationed a guard at the locked doors and ordered that no one be allowed in or out until the meeting was over.

Then he stood calmly before the assembled representatives, and in a voice that shook only slightly, put forward the motion: “That a General Congress of deputies meet at Philadelphia to consult together upon the present state of the colonies, and to deliberate and determine upon wise and proper measures for the recovery and establishment of their just rights and liberties, civil and religious.”

Instantly there were angry protests from the Tories. One of their members who sat in the back of the room rose quickly, went to the doorkeeper, and with his hands pressed to his stomach said, “I am going to be sick. Let me out!” Momentarily flustered, the guard unlocked the door and let him through. The “sick” Tory mounted his horse and galloped off to Danvers to tell the Governor what the traitorous Whigs were up to.

In the meantime, the House passed the motion for a general congress by a vote of 120 to 11. With the Tory minority sitting in sulky silence, the patriots went on to elect the five Massachusetts delegates—Sam Adams, Thomas Cushing, James Bowdoin, John Adams, and Robert Treat Paine. Sam Adams had other plans for John Hancock.

Of course the delegates would not be expected to pay their expenses out of their own pockets. And while the Whigs were discussing this matter, there came a terrific pounding on the doors and sounds of an angry voice. The doorkeeper hurried down the aisle and reported that the Governor’s secretary, Thomas Flucker, was outside shouting that by the order of His Excellency, the meeting was dissolved. By the order of Sam Adams, the doorkeeper went back to guard the doors and the meeting continued. It was voted to pay the delegates five hundred pounds to cover their official expenses. Then the doors were opened, and the victorious Whigs walked out into the bright sunlight.

It was the last time the House of Representatives met under the authority of a royal governor. After that day, Governor Gage angrily refused to convene the assembly at Salem or anywhere else in the province. Sam Adams had foreseen that the people of Massachusetts would have to devise a way of governing themselves. In accordance with a plan he had worked out, representatives from all parts of the province met at Salem early in October and organized the Provincial Congress. John Hancock was elected chairman of the new body that would carry on the duties and functions of the old Massachusetts Bay General Court.

The Whigs in Boston were solidly united now, and town and country were joined in the fight against British oppression. Beyond the borders of Massachusetts, patriots in the other colonies were more alert to the threats to their liberties than they had ever been before. Even now, though, British statesmen were unaware of the growing strength of the revolutionary movement in America. General Thomas Gage was still confident he could tame the Boston fanatics.

11

The First Continental Congress

The summer of 1774 was hot and very dry in Boston. Daily the redcoats paraded and drilled—wheeled, marched, presented arms. The clump of army boots on the cobblestones, the roll of drums, and the shrill notes of the fife had become familiar sounds.

Tories who had been treated roughly by patriots in other towns flocked into Boston seeking safety under the protection of General Gage and his soldiers. The bells no longer pealed joyfully for celebrations, and an air of gloom and depression hung over the town.

But with the coming of August, there was a stir of expectancy. The Massachusetts delegates would soon be leaving for the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Sam Adams would tell the leaders of other colonies about Boston’s wretched condition, and they would surely do something about it.

There was more than a flurry of excitement in Sam’s household on Purchase Street. For the moment he could relax and think about something other than politics— about a new wardrobe, of all things! His long-suffering Betsy was so pleased she was almost in tears.

Of course the Old Puritan had not given a thought to what he would wear to the Congress. In any case, the shiny old suit he was wearing would have seemed good enough. But his friends had got together and decided they could not let the leading patriot of Boston turn up in Philadelphia shabbily dressed.

Sam never knew who sent the tailor to take his measurements for a new suit. He came one day with all the paraphernalia of his trade, saying that some gentlemen had told him to call and that Mr. Adams was “to choose his cloth.” He suggested dark red broadcloth and, quite dazed, Sam agreed it would be a good choice.

The peruke maker followed the tailor, and Sam was fitted with the most stylish wig he had ever owned. There seemed to be no end to the procession of tradesmen who came to his door. Besides the new suit and the new wig, he was presented with two pairs of buckled shoes, a smart cocked hat, two ruffled shirts, and six pairs of white silk stockings. He would have to get used to the feel of silk on his legs for he had always worn cotton hose.

To plain Sam Adams, it was all quite overwhelming. His blue eyes grew misty and his hands shook as he fingered the fine broadcloth of his new suit. It was wonderful to have kind friends, but surely this expression of good will was more of an honor to the cause than to him personally. He believed quite sincerely that it was.

On Wednesday morning, August 10, the streets in the neighborhood of Thomas Cushing’s mansion near Beacon Hill were filled with people. They were in a happy mood. This was the great day of departure for the delegates to the Congress in Philadelphia. Cushing was one of them, and they were meeting here at his house with friends and relatives who had gathered to wish them Godspeed. There were only four delegates, as James Bowdoin had given up the trip because of his wife’s illness.

Abigail Adams, John’s wife, and Sam’s Betsy were there in flower-sprigged summer dresses and little white bonnets. John Hancock was among the patriots who had come to see their friends off, and he had brought the charming and pretty Dorothy Quincy with him. Since her mother’s death, she had lived in the Hancock mansion as the ward of Aunt Lydia. Miss Dolly was as slender as a reed, with large eyes wide-set in a pert little face—pointed chin, short nose, and a high rounded forehead. Everyone knew that John Hancock, ten years older than she, had been courting her for three years, that she could not make up her mind to say yes, and that Aunt Lydia was determined to make it up for her.

But it was Sam Adams upon whom all eyes were fixed that morning, rather than upon Miss Dolly in her ruffled dress and lace bonnet, tied fetchingly under her chin with a black velvet ribbon. The old patriot cut such a dashing figure in his elegant attire that everyone stared at him in admiring disbelief. He was a handsome man, but no one had noticed it before. Sam was obviously pleased in a shy, embarrassed way. His family beamed adoringly upon him—Betsy and his grown daughter Hannah, and his son Dr. Sam, who had graduated from the medical school at Harvard.

Toasts were drunk to the Congress, to the Sons of Liberty, to the delegates. Now good-bys were being said, the wives bravely pressing back their tears. The handsome coach, with its red silk curtains and red cushions, stood in front of the house, the four sleek horses impatiently jerking at the harness.

From his high seat, the driver, with a groom beside him, held on to the reins tightly. Two footmen in livery sat behind. Four armed horsemen would ride alongside the coach as an escort.

The crowd, too, had been waiting with impatience for a last look at the delegates. When the four men walked out and stepped into the coach, hundreds of well-wishers pressed forward with hands outstretched and voices lifted in cheers. The groom slammed the door, climbed to his seat, and at a flick from the driver’s whip, the horses clattered off over the cobblestones. The crowd roared, “Sam Adams! Sam Adams!” And Sam Adams leaned back, tired but very happy.

The procession trotted down Treamount Street, out past the Common where British regiments were encamped and, with Boston behind them, followed the post riders’ route. At Watertown, the travelers were feasted and toasted and sent on their way with ringing cheers. It was the kind of warm reception that was to be tendered them again and again.

The journey took them through Marlborough, Worcester, Brookfield, and on to Springfield. There they turned south and drove to Hartford, Connecticut, and then southwest to Middletown, Wallingford, and into New Haven. Here it seemed that the entire population had turned out to give them a wild, joyous welcome. With church bells ringing and cannon booming a salute, it was as if they had come out “to see a coronation,” John Adams said.

On Saturday morning, August 20, the delegates, weary, disheveled, and begrimed with dust, drove over King’s Bridge and into New York. The gentlemen from Massachusetts rested here for a week, went sight-seeing, were wined and dined, and talked politics endlessly with the New York delegates and leading citizens—all of them too conservative for Sam Adams and Cousin John.

The following Friday the ferry carried them across the Hudson River to New Jersey. They visited Princeton, and at Trenton took the ferry over the Delaware River into the province of Pennsylvania. At Frankfort other carriages and coaches joined them, and a great parade of delegates drove the remaining five miles into Philadelphia. A week remained before the Congress would hold its first session. This interval gave the delegates time to get acquainted with one another and with the city.

Although Boston had its start a full half century earlier, Philadelphia, with thirty thousand inhabitants, was the largest city in America. It was a great shipbuilding center and a city of wealth and culture. Benjamin Franklin, now an old man and its most distinguished citizen, had walked up Market Street on his arrival, a penniless boy with a “great puffy roll” under each arm and his mouth full of warm bread. Among the many improvements he had introduced were paved streets. The streets were lighted with street lamps—a great convenience, the Bostonians observed. But not even Ben Franklin could do anything about the oppressive heat in summer and the flies and mosquitoes.

Unlike the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay, the Quakers of Pennsylvania had been tolerant of other religions and from the beginning had given the people a large measure of political liberty. Such freedom had attracted many educated European immigrants. Teachers, painters, doctors, and scientists had come to live in Philadelphia. It was quite startling to the good Congregationalists from Boston to find so many different faiths in the Quaker city. Besides the Quakers, there were Presbyterians, German Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, and Moravians.

How well the wealthy Philadelphians lived in their elegantly furnished brick houses, which lined both sides of spacious High Street. These rich families had country seats, too, out along the Schuylkill River, with such colorful names as Sweetbrier, Lemon Hill, and Strawberry Mansion. It was the kind of luxurious living that was downright offensive to Sam Adams. He found it much more interesting to explore the docks on Front Street and to chat in his easy fashion with sailors, riggers, and shipyard workers, just as he did in Boston.

But Cousin John, with his avid interest in everything, visited and dined in some of the wealthy homes, where dinner was at four in the afternoon. Philadelphians had prodigious appetites, he observed, and recorded in his diary that on one occasion he was served “turtle, flummery, jellies, sweetmeats of twenty sorts, trifle, whipped sillabub, and floating island” along with “every other thing.” The wines were excellent and he drank Madeira “at a great rate.”

The Massachusetts men did much more that first week in Philadelphia than explore the city and observe the manners and customs of its citizens. They spent long hours in conferences, sounding out the political beliefs of the delegates and planning their own strategy.

Although the colonies had responded with sympathy and aid when Boston’s port was closed, many Americans feared and distrusted the hot-headed radicalism of Sam Adams. Few of the representatives were ready as he was to speak out for independence, and they were suspicious of his ambitions. They said Sam wanted Massachusetts to be the head of America, Boston the head of Massachusetts, and himself dictator of Boston.

The delegates of the Bay province were well aware of this distrust. They had come to the Congress with no particular program and with the intention of keeping quiet and making themselves as inconspicuous as possible. Sam Adams worked hard, though, at behind-the-scenes wirepulling and maneuvering for political advantage.

At ten o’clock on Monday morning, September 5, the delegates assembled in Carpenters’ Hall, a two-story brick building on Chestnut Street that was owned by the carpenters’ guild. There in the East Room on the ground floor, Peyton Randolph of Virginia was unanimously chosen president of the Congress, and Charles Thomson of Philadelphia was named secretary. The next important business was to decide how the delegates were to vote. Every colony except Georgia had sent a delegation. Should the vote be by colonies, with one vote to a colony, or should each of the fifty-three representatives cast a vote?

There was a long discussion and then Patrick Henry, Virginia’s great orator and member of the House of Burgesses for nine years, rose to speak. He was a slight man, plainly dressed and wearing an unpowdered brown wig. There was a smoldering fire in his deep-set blue eyes.

The delegates listened with a profound sense of destiny when he said: “Let freemen be represented by numbers alone! The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian but an American!”

Christopher Gadsden, South Carolina’s outspoken advocate for liberty, was a delegate. Gadsden had expressed the same sentiments at the Stamp Act Congress. The colonists were not ready to accept Patrick Henry’s revolutionary concept. They were still more conscious of the boundaries that divided their respective colonies than of being united as Americans. But Patrick Henry’s words impressed them so deeply that for a few moments after he sat down, there was complete silence.

When the discussion was resumed, John Jay of New York proposed that one vote be given to each colony, and the next morning his motion was seconded. There would be one vote for each colony represented.

Among the representatives of Virginia was a towering, broad-shouldered man who sat silent throughout the proceedings and who was the only delegate in uniform. By his presence alone, Colonel George Washington made his influence felt. He sat erect in the blue-and-buff uniform of the Fairfax County militia. Now forty-two years old, he had fought with exceptional bravery and distinction in the French and Indian War. A man of great dignity and disciplined patience, he lacked the oratorical gifts of Patrick Henry, but he was respected for his quiet good sense and his capacity for decision. As one of the wealthy landed aristocrats of Virginia, Colonel Washington had much to lose if the quarrel with the mother country brought disaster to the colonies. But he was uncompromisingly opposed to taxation without representation, and was a staunch defender of American rights.

The Adamses sat silent, too, like well-behaved children seen but not heard. There was one occasion during the early sessions when Sam Adams, having shrewdly calculated the effect, did speak up. Tom Cushing proposed that the Congress be opened each morning with a prayer. It was customary in the meetings of legislative bodies, he said, but John Jay objected. How could satisfactory choice of a minister be made when so many different faiths were represented?

Sam Adams rose slowly and took the floor. Perhaps it was presumptuous since he was a stranger in the city, he said hesitantly, but he would like to suggest that Mr. Duche, the Episcopal clergyman of Philadelphia, be asked to offer such a prayer. His own church was not that of Mr. Duche’s, but—well, he hoped he was not so bigoted that he could not listen to the prayer of a pious man of any faith who also loved his country, and this good report he had heard about the Episcopal minister.

There were whisperings, murmurings, and pleased smiles. It seemed that the Congregationalists of Massachusetts were not so rigid, or so unbending, as was generally believed. And yes, the Congress should have the benefit of an opening prayer. Without further objection or debate, the delegates approved the suggestion, and Mr. Duche came each morning to read from the Scriptures and to pray.

Before leaving for Philadelphia, Sam Adams had discussed with Dr. Joseph Warren plans for a convention of representatives of Suffolk County, which included Boston. Warren had promised that he would draft a set of resolves. Adams waited anxiously for news of this convention. It came about the middle of September when Paul Revere rode into Philadelphia bringing the Suffolk Resolves.

Excitement gripped the delegates as Peyton Randolph read them aloud. Although declaring that “We cheerfully acknowledge George the Third to be our rightful sovereign,” the Resolves made so violent an attack upon Britain that the members of the First Continental Congress were startled.

The people of Suffolk County were advised to defy the despotic Boston Port Bill. They were urged to prepare for a defensive war against England by ordering their committees of safety to organize and strengthen the militia. If British troops in Boston should take the offensive, they asked, would the other colonies come to her aid with an armed force?

Joseph Galloway, leader of the Philadelphia conservatives, exclaimed that the Suffolk Resolves were, in effect, a declaration of war against the mother country. He had offered a plan for the political union of America and Great Britain to be known as the American Grand Council. Grandiose nonsense, the Adamses called it, and were glad to hear the last of it when the plan was shelved. In the caucuses, Sam Adams had fought Galloway at every step and suspected that he was a Tory.

For days the inflammatory Suffolk Resolves were debated in caucuses and on the floor at Carpenters’ Hall. Then, to the dismay of the conservatives, the Resolves were formally adopted by a majority of the Congress. It was a great victory for the Massachusetts men.

There was much talk in the sessions that followed about another nonimportation agreement. But the Congress had no authority to impose its resolutions upon the colonies, and could only strongly urge that they boycott British goods and stop exports to Great Britain.

Finally, a Loyal Address to the King was drafted and approved: “Had we been left to enjoy in quiet the inheritance left us by our forefathers, we should at this time have been peaceably, cheerfully, and usefully employed in recommending ourselves by every testimony of devotion to Your Majesty, and of veneration to the state from which we derive our origin.”

Nothing had been said about independence. Sam Adams knew he was almost alone in desiring it. Others were not ready “to dispute the matter with the sword.” But he could wait; he could be patient a little longer. The time would come. How eager he was now to get back to his beloved Boston—how eager to sit down with the Sons of Liberty and hear them tell what they had been doing to resist the invaders.

On Wednesday, October 26, the First Continental Congress adjourned after having made plans to meet again in May of the next year—the fateful year of 1775.

12 

Acts of Defiance

Boston had changed during the absence of the Massachusetts delegates. General Gage had stepped up the activities of the occupying troops and the town was now more than ever a British military stronghold. The redcoats were everywhere; the harbor was crowded with British warships. More frightened Tories had swarmed in. Mrs. Sam Adams had written her husband that “the once happy town” had become “the cage of every unclean bird” who had made the town his “ark of safety.”

Fortifications had been built on the Neck. Sam Adams chuckled when he heard they were being called beaver dams by veterans of the French and Indian Wars. And he applauded the Sons of Liberty who were making things difficult for General Gage.

The Quartering Act gave the Governor the right to put his soldiers in any private home that had room for them. But Boston was so overcrowded that General Gage was trying to get badly needed barracks built for the redcoats. Boston carpenters refused to work on the fortifications and the barracks even though they needed employment. Wagons coming in from the country with provisions for the troops broke down and spilled over, and boats carrying supplies sank for no apparent reason.

Josiah Quincy had boarded a ship at Salem and was now in England. There had been an air of secrecy about his departure and his mission. It was known only that he had gone to London to try to make clear the American position to the British. Sam Adams must have frowned disapprovingly when he heard of it.

What heartened him more than anything else was the work done by the Provincial Congress. John Hancock, its president, had been untiring in his efforts to organize the Congress and to make it function as the only government of Massachusetts. To elude General Gage, the Provincial Congress had no fixed place of meeting. It met first at Salem, then at Concord, and more recently at Cambridge.

Hancock had been appointed chairman of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, which became the military arm of the Provincial Congress. The committee was authorized to call up the militia for active duty and to procure military stores. It was at this time that the famed minutemen, armed citizens who agreed to turn out for service at a minute’s notice, were organized.

On every village green the minutemen could be seen drilling. Many of them came armed with the old squirrel guns they had used to repulse the French. Why were they drilling? Obviously, they said, to prepare for defense against their old enemy. Had not the mother country thought a standing army necessary in America lest the French return and attack again?

Seeing the farmers with their clumsy weapons and dressed not in fine uniforms but in nondescript homespun, the British regulars jeered. Why these local troops were nothing but a ragtag. In battle they would run at the first whiff of gunpowder.

General Gage was not amused. He had seen what the colonials from the country towns of New England could do with their squirrel guns when he had fought with them against the French. After that experience, he would never be so foolhardy as to think they lacked courage. The earnestness with which they drilled now made him nervous. He must send an urgent request to England for more troops. He must keep a close watch on the colonials. There was no telling when they might rush into Boston from the country.

Early in December, the Provincial Congress convened in the meetinghouse at Watertown. John Hancock presided over the two hundred and sixty men who represented towns, both large and small, in Massachusetts Bay. They were not men of wealth or education as were those who had attended the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, but farmers, fishermen, carpenters, bakers, and small shopkeepers.

Sam Adams had urged that a New England army be created, and this was the most important business the representatives discussed. They agreed that Massachusetts should raise a force of twelve thousand men, and that ways and means should be found for providing them with military equipment. Letters were to be sent to other New England colonies, strongly advising them to take the same action. Before the representatives dispersed on December 10, they elected five delegates to the Second Continental Congress— Sam Adams, John Hancock, Robert Paine, John Adams, and Elbridge Gerry.

That winter of 1774-75 was “the warmest in memory of man.” The Charles did not freeze, and this at least relieved General Gage of the fear that “the country” would sweep in over the frozen river that connected Boston with Charlestown and Cambridge. The warm weather was a blessing for the many poor people, and for Paul Revere and the mechanics who formed a committee that winter to watch the movements of the redcoats and gather intelligence about the activities of the Tories. They held their meetings at the Green Dragon and took turns patrolling the streets of Boston all night in pairs.

Just after the Provincial Congress at Watertown adjourned, Paul Revere went on a hazardous ride for the patriots. He could no longer go galloping down High Street and out through the town gate. Now, if a man was not a Tory in good standing, he had to obtain a pass from military headquarters at Province House before he could leave town. Revere gave some plausible excuse, got his pass, and rode out of Boston at a sedate pace. When he was out of sight of the British sentries, he put spurs to his horse and covered the sixty miles to Durham, New Hampshire, over slippery roads at top speed. He arrived on the afternoon of December 13 with important news for John Sullivan, drillmaster of the local minutemen.

General Gage had made plans to send two regiments to Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth Harbor to strengthen the weak garrison there and to occupy the town. There was no time to lose. Could John Sullivan beat the redcoats to the fort? The hardy patriot thought he could.

A picked group of young men were alerted, and that night they manned clumsy vessels, rowed the few miles down river to Portsmouth Harbor, and pushed their boats as close to the fort as possible. By moonlight they waded waist-deep in icy water up to the fort.

The order to surrender came as such a shock to the captain in command of a handful of men that he gave up without making any attempt to defend the fort. Having bagged the garrison, the colonials went briskly about the business of removing a hundred kegs of powder and a great stack of guns from His Majesty’s fort to their boats. The next day they dug a pit under the pulpit of the meetinghouse in which to hide the stores.

This was the first outright attack upon a British fort that the colonists had made. If General Gage had not been reluctant to stir up more trouble, there would have been severe penalties for the young men who took part in the raid, and Paul Revere would have been clapped into prison. But the worst that happened to Revere was that he could get no more passes at Province House. The resourceful courier, therefore, got himself a boat and kept it hidden near his house in North Boston.

About two weeks after the seizure of the King’s fort and military stores at Portsmouth, the documents of the First Continental Congress were received in London—the Loyal Address to the King, and the Declaration of Rights. Both King and Parliament disdained to read them until it suited their convenience. Parliament would not sit until sometime in January.

However, the papers were given wide circulation and were read and discussed in London. One severe critic called the colonial gathering in Philadelphia the “Congress of Anarchy.” Poor Josiah Quincy, weak and ill, got nowhere with his pleas that they try to understand the Americans. They were arrant cowards and seditious fools, the loyal British declared angrily.

Benjamin Franklin and other colonial agents also pleaded in vain for justice and fair treatment. Lord North called Franklin the “most malicious and dangerous enemy” in Great Britain.

The government refused to listen to the counsel of those statesmen who were friends of the Americans. Old William Pitt, now Lord Chatham, spoke in the House of Lords in their behalf. “All attempts to impose servitude upon such a mighty continental nation must be in vain,” he warned the peers.

But with stubborn finality, King George III told his minister Lord North, “The New England governments are in a state of rebellion. Blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.”

Five years had passed since the British troops had fired upon the crowd in King Street. Each year since then the Boston Massacre had been commemorated on March 5 by an orator who reminded the people gathered in the Old South Meetinghouse that it had been the blood of the innocent that was shed that night as a result of England’s sending the soldiers to Boston.

In March 1775, the situation in Boston was far worse than it had ever been. Excited and fearful, young and old asked if there would be a celebration of the massacre this year. Sam Adams calmly assured them there would and that Joseph Warren would be the speaker.

On the evening of the fifth, the crowds came early to the Old South Meetinghouse, every man feeling the “palpitations of his own heart.” It was observed that many British officers and soldiers had come too. Sam Adams and John Hancock sat with the selectmen in the pulpit, which was draped with black cloth.

While waiting for the speaker, Sam Adams, who was moderator, stood up and politely requested the townspeople sitting in front to move back and let the officers have their seats. “I took care to have them treated with civility,” he said later, “so they might have no pretense to behave ill. For it is a good maxim in politics to put and keep the enemy in the wrong.”

It was said that the soldiers had come intending to behave very badly. Reportedly, they had planned to seize Adams, Hancock, and Warren if the speakers offended them by insulting the King or his officers. The signal was to have been an egg thrown at Warren’s head. But the young officer who was entrusted with carrying the egg fell on his way to the meeting and it broke.

Joseph Warren was late because it took him so long to adjust the folds of the flowing toga he wore. Finding the church packed to the doors, he somehow managed to climb a ladder and come in through a window back of the pulpit. Taking the posture of a Roman orator, with a white handkerchief in his right hand and his left in the folds of his toga, he launched into the mildest massacre oration the people had ever heard. Not once, they noticed, did he refer to the massacre as bloody. It was the many scarlet coats in the audience that had prompted him to be cautious, for he did not want to start a riot.

For all his care to give the British soldiers no excuse for misbehavior, Sam Adams was disappointed in Warren’s speech. At its conclusion he came forward and proposed that “the thanks of the town be presented to Dr. Warren for his elegant and spirited oration, and that another be delivered on the next fifth of March to commemorate the bloody massacre of the fifth of March, 1770.”

Instantly there were shouts of “Oh fie, fie!” from the redcoats. The men who sat in the gallery thought they had cried, “Fire! Fire!” and “bounced out the windows and swarmed down the gutters like rats.”

Order was restored and, surprisingly, the meeting ended without further disturbance. It was well known that the patriot leaders were flirting with danger—that at any moment they might be seized and sent to England aboard a British man-of-war to be tried for treason. The Tories were again saying that Sam Adams turned pale at the sight or mention of hemp. His friends said he showed “amazing fortitude, noble resolution, and undaunted courage.”

John Hancock, too, was a marked man, and as brave as Adams in his contempt of danger. Both patriots were jeered at in a rhyme that was printed in a Tory newspaper and widely quoted:

As for their King, John Hancock, 

And Adams, if they’re taken, 

Their heads for signs shall hang on high 

Upon that hill called Beacon.

Joseph Warren was not a target of Tory versifiers, but he was not overlooked. Riding along the Neck one day out toward the place of execution, he passed a group of British officers. One called after him, “Go ahead, Warren, you’ll soon come to the gallows.”

General Gage still hesitated to take the step that he knew would precipitate revolt and would probably cost him his own head. The general’s patience might last forever, but not King George’s. The British monarch had become impatient with excuses and was demanding that the insolent Boston rebels be put in chains and sent to London where they would not be handled so gently.

13 

Lexington and the Bloody Gauntlet

Spring came early after that mildest of winters. Now in April there was the sound of running waters, clumps of marsh marigold brightened the wet meadows, and in the greening woods the wild columbine hung out its little red bells.

General Gage, penned up in Boston with his restless troops, knew the time had come when he had to act. He had occupied the town for almost a year, exercising tact and restraint in his efforts to bring the rebellious provincials under control. But with military preparations now going forward outside of Boston, the rebellion instead of cooling had become dangerously explosive.

The Tories, as miserable in the blockaded town as the patriots, grumbled and tried to prod the general to action. They called him the “Old Woman,” and his officers laughed at him behind his back.

The worst criticism came from King George and his ministers. They had no understanding of the temper of the Americans or of the strength and extent of the rebellion. Why, they asked testily, could not the military governor in Boston seize the rebel leaders and put down insurrection before it got out of hand?

General Gage decided to act. He sent spies to gather accurate information about the military stores that he knew the provincials had hidden in Concord. Wearing gray coats over coarse shirts and leather breeches, and carrying a kerchief bundle in one hand and a walking-stick in the other, Gage’s men disguised themselves as Yankee laborers looking for work. They were to take close note of the roads they traveled, and of the mood of the people.

The reports that came back to the General convinced him that it would not be too difficult or too hazardous to seize the stores at Concord—cannon, muskets, barrels of gunpowder, food, and supplies. Moreover, there was a good chance that Sam Adams and John Hancock could be taken. It was known that they had left Boston to attend the Provincial Congress in Concord and would be staying somewhere nearby.

Courtesy: The United States Military Academy Department of History.

General Gage made his plans with the utmost secrecy. A large force would move by boat across the Charles River to East Cambridge. From there they would march along lonely country lanes to the road that led to Concord. The troops were to leave Boston on the night of April 18.

So large an undertaking could not be accomplished overnight without preparations. And the patrolling mechanics had not relaxed their vigilance. They had seen the rowboats belonging to the British transports hauled in for repairs. It had been observed, too, that Gage’s grenadiers, his heavy-duty stalwarts, and the light infantry companies had been withdrawn from their regiments for some special duty.

Then on Saturday night, April 15, Paul Revere and his companions saw the rowboats launched and anchored under the sterns of the men-of-war. Their suspicions were aroused and they were not slow in drawing conclusions.

On that Saturday, the Provincial Congress had adjourned in Concord. Dr. Joseph Warren returned to Boston, risking his life to remain there as long as possible to direct the activities of the patriots. He was the only Whig leader in the town. John Adams was at his home in Braintree. Josiah Quincy was on his way home from England and would die aboard ship in sight of the Massachusetts shore. Dr. Benjamin Church was “keeping company” with the British officers and before the year was over would be convicted of spying for the British.

Sam Adams and John Hancock dared not risk going back to Boston. They would be leaving soon for the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and until then, they were staying with the Reverend Jonas Clark at the parsonage in Lexington, which had been built by Hancock’s grandfather. Mrs. Clark was John’s cousin. Aunt Lydia and Miss Dolly were at the parsonage, too, having driven over in the family carriage.

After he had watched the boats being rowed out to the warships, Paul Revere went at once to Warren’s house to report to the doctor. General Gage was undoubtedly planning something—most likely a march to seize the two leaders, although presumably the British did not know where they were, and the valuable stores hidden at Concord. It was decided that Revere should leave for Lexington early the next day to warn Adams and Hancock and to alert the people of Concord.

How he made that trip is not known. He probably crossed the river before daylight Sunday morning in the boat he kept hidden in North Boston and rode on from East Cambridge. He warned Adams and Hancock of their danger, but they chose to remain at the parsonage in Lexington. In Concord, the patriots began at once removing the stores to safer hiding places.

On his way back on Sunday evening, Paul Revere stopped in Charlestown just across the broad mouth of the Charles River from Boston to see Colonel William Conant, a loyal patriot. He told Conant that the Boston Sons of Liberty believed that the British were going to march on Concord, and that he and Dr. Warren had worked out a system of signals that Colonel Conant must watch for each evening.

If the British should leave Boston by water, he would see two lighted lanterns hanging in the high steeple of the Old North (Christ) Church. If they marched out of town by land over Boston Neck, one lantern would be the signal. Revere himself would try to bring details of their movements to Charlestown, but if he failed, Colonel Conant must send out couriers as soon as he had seen the signal.

Monday was dark and dreary; rain fell intermittently. In an atmosphere of mounting tension, the British went forward with their plans and the townspeople watched and listened.

Behind closed doors at Province House, General Gage issued orders to his officers. Colonel Francis Smith, ponderous and bumbling, was given command of seven hundred men. Old Major Pitcairn, pious and profane and likable, would go as a volunteer and serve as second in command. And young Lord Percy, slender and dashing, was to be held in readiness to bring up reinforcements if they should be needed. Gage did not think they would be; he could not believe the rebels would take up arms against His Majesty’s troops.

It was clear and cool on Tuesday, the eighteenth. Boston was astir early. It was soon evident that the grenadiers and the light infantry companies had received orders to report for active duty. Some were billeted in private houses and the sergeants were having difficulty finding all their men.

Where, for instance, was the soldier-husband of the woman who did housework for Mrs. John Stedman on Winter Street? Mrs. Stedman did not know. Well, the sergeant would be much obliged if she would tell the soldier, in case he did come around, that “he was to report himself at eight o’clock at the bottom of the Common, equipped for an expedition.” The soldier never got this message, Dr. Warren did.

But neither he nor Paul Revere learned of General Gage’s plans for trapping patriot messengers who might try to get through to warn Concord. On Tuesday afternoon, the General sent out two groups of officers, one with orders to conceal themselves in the woods near Charlestown, the other to watch the roads closer to Concord. They carried their arms under their long blue coats, and if asked why they were out, were to say that they were looking for deserters.

There could be no secrecy, though, about moving the Somerset into the mouth of the Charles River. Obviously, the man-of-war was there to intercept any boat trying to get across to Charlestown, and the British troops would be ferried over the river under its shadow.

And there could be no concealment at the riverfront along the Common of preparations for their departure. Toward dusk the rowboats were drawn up there, and the soldiers and officers were arriving. Townspeople, too, had come out to watch and to chatter excitedly. Moving unrecognized among them, Lord Percy heard a man say, “The British troops have marched, but will miss their aim.”

“What aim?” the officer asked.

“Why, the cannon at Concord.”

General Gage was dumfounded when Lord Percy reported this conversation. Not even the British troops knew yet where they were going. How had his secret, so closely guarded he thought, leaked out?

Meanwhile, the patriots, meeting at Dr. Warren’s house, had completed their plans. They had decided to send two expresses, and William Dawes had agreed to make the attempt to ride out over the Neck. There was no question about his loyalty, but he had not been active in the patriot cause before. It seemed that if anyone could bluff his way past the sentries it would be Billy Dawes. He had a comic streak, and with his long nose and close-set blue eyes, he could play the merry fool or the drunken lout convincingly.

Just before ten o’clock a messenger rapped on the door of Paul Revere’s house in North Square. Dr. Warren wished him to come at once. He was ready, and he walked rapidly over the shadowy cobblestones to the doctor’s house on Hanover Street.

The meeting was brief. The time had come for Paul Revere to make his historic ride. Billy Dawes had already started, and Dr. Warren urged Revere to set off immediately for Lexington to warn Sam Adams and John Hancock. He himself would stay in Boston a little longer to gather whatever information he could. With a quick handclasp the two friends parted.

Robert Newman, the young sexton of Christ Church, had promised to carry the lanterns up the wooden stairs, past the eight great bells, and on up to the highest window in the belfry. Revere found him waiting in a dark street near the church, whispered, “Ready—the signal, two lanterns.”

Then he hurried back to his house in North Square, making his way unnoticed through the redcoats who thronged the streets and the square. He pulled on heavy riding boots, got into a short stirrup, bid his family good-by, and was gone. In the north part of town where Revere kept his boat hidden, two friends waited, ready to row him across the river. Looming up menacingly in the mouth of the river was the great black hulk of the Somerset, and a short distance upstream the British troops were being ferried across to Cambridge.

The boatmen pushed off cautiously and with muffled oars rowed well to the east of the heavily armed man-of-war. As Paul Revere later described the scene, “It was then young flood, the ship was winding, and the moon was rising.”

No hail of shot came from the warship’s guns, and no watchful British seaman barked the order to heave to. The little rowboat moved slowly, almost noiselessly, across the water and Revere was landed on the Charlestown side.

At Colonel Conant’s he found a group of patriots eager for news of the happenings in Boston. But first, had they seen the signal from Christ’s steeple? Yes, a “glimmer and then a gleam of light” from the two lanterns had been clearly visible. And could they find him a horse? He would need a good one. Deacon John Larkin offered his best.

While the horse was being groomed and saddled, he told the company “what was acting” in Boston. Just before he left, Richard Devens, a member of the Committee of Safety, came in with news of the British patrol. Revere learned for the first time that General Gage had sent out officers that afternoon to block the roads leading to Concord.

Devens said he was driving down from Lexington in his chaise and, just after sunset, had met ten British officers on horseback. They had stopped and asked him if he knew where “Clark’s Tavern” was. Suspecting that they were looking for the patriot leaders, he had sent a messenger to the Clark parsonage with a warning.

And now the horse was at the door. It was eleven o’clock when Paul Revere stepped out into the bright moonlight, booted and spurred. He adjusted the stirrups, checked girths and bit with a practiced hand, patted the animal's sleek neck, and swung into the saddle and was off.

He rode through the quiet town and out over Charlestown Neck with the Mystic River on his right and the Charles on his left. Beyond was the desolate expanse of salt marshes, clay pits, and scrub crossed by two roads. Revere turned left, intending to take the shorter route through Cambridge to Lexington. He came to the spot where the moon shone eerily upon a skeleton hanging in chains from a gibbet inside an iron cage. It was that of Mark, a slave who had conspired to poison his master and whose remains had hung here for twenty years as a ghastly warning to other slaves.

On past the rattling bones of Mark, on through the moonlight and the shadows, and suddenly Revere saw two mounted officers ahead under a tree near the road. He was close enough to recognize their British cockades. As one of them started toward him, he turned his horse sharply about and rode at a full gallop for the Mystic road. Looking back, he saw that his pursuer’s heavier charger had got stuck in a clay pit.

With the road to Cambridge blocked, Paul Revere took the longer way, following the Mystic River, crossing into Medford over a plank bridge. Here he “awakened the captain of the minutemen,” then, having recrossed the Mystic, got back on the road he had first planned to take, and “alarmed almost every house” until he came to Lexington.

And so through the night went his cry of alarm 

To every Middlesex village and farm, 

A cry of defiance and not of fear, 

A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, 

And a word that shall echo forevermore!

While bells were ringing and armed patriots were riding hither and yon in Middlesex County shouting “The regulars are out!” the British soldiers were huddled together, wet and shivering, on the Cambridge shore waiting for the order to march. They had been rowed across the Charles River at its widest point, had landed in the marshes, and to get out had walked through water up to their knees. As there were not enough boats, it was midnight before all the regulars got across. Then, for some reason, Colonel Smith had held them there in Cambridge until two o’clock on the morning of the nineteenth.

When Paul Revere arrived in Lexington about midnight, he could hear the voices of the minutemen who had gathered in Buckman’s Tavern after Richard Devens’s messenger brought word that a British patrol was abroad. Across the road on the left, the triangular village green lay in the shadow of the dark, barnlike meetinghouse, with its detached wooden belfry nearby.

John Parker, captain of the minutemen, had taken the precaution to post a guard around the parsonage that stood a short distance from the green on the road leading to Bedford. Sergeant Munroe was in command, and when Revere rode up and asked to be admitted, the Sergeant warned him not to make any noise because the ladies and gentlemen had gone to bed and did not want to be disturbed.

“Noise!” Revere shouted. “You’ll have noise enough before long! The regulars are out!”

John Hancock heard him and called, “Come in, Revere, we are not afraid of you.”

He strode in, his dark eyes alight with excitement, and told the parson and his guests, who were standing around in their night clothes, that the redcoats were coming—not just a patrol but close to a thousand.

John Hancock called for his sword and his gun. He would join the minutemen at once and fight with them if they opposed the British regulars. Sam Adams laid a restraining hand on his friend’s arm and said he was talking nonsense, that they had something more important to do.

While they argued, William Dawes arrived, and he and Revere decided to go over to Concord to spread the alarm far and wide in that direction. On the way out of Lexington, they were joined by Samuel Prescott, a young doctor from Concord. The three men had covered about half the distance when four British officers rode out of the woods and with drawn pistols ordered them into a pasture. Dr. Prescott jumped his horse over a low stone wall and got through to Concord. Whooping “Ha, boys, I’ve caught two of ’em!” Dawes, too, managed to escape. But Revere galloped toward a wooded part of the pasture, squarely into a nest of six other officers, who seized his bridle and ordered him to dismount. He was sharply questioned by Major Mitchell, the officer in command. Asked his name, he answered, “My name is Revere.”

Was he Paul Revere? Yes, and when the officer explained that they were out looking for some deserters, Revere said he knew better. He knew they would miss their aim, for he had warned the country. There would soon be five hundred men in Lexington.

Alarmed, Major Mitchell knew he must hurry or the patrol would be cut off from Colonel Smith’s advancing troops. They had picked up four mounted country men before Revere was caught; now with their prisoners the officers rode down toward Lexington at “a pretty smart pace.” Within a mile of the town, they heard shots—to alarm the country, Revere told the Major.

Mitchell decided he must get rid of his captives. The horses of the country men were unsaddled and driven off, and the men turned loose to make their way home on foot.

A little farther along, more reports from the guns at Lexington were heard, and Major Mitchell again called a halt. This time Revere’s horse was given to a sergeant whose own mount had tired. The gallant horse whose “hurrying hoof beats” had been heard by so many patriots that night was lost to the British.

Alone and on foot, Paul Revere left the road for fear of getting caught again and set out across pastures and through the woods for Lexington. He knew the parsonage was close by when he found himself stumbling over the stones in a burying ground. At the Reverend Clark’s, the argument between Hancock and Adams had gone on and on, but Mr. Hancock was finally persuaded that “it was improper for him to expose himself against such a powerful force.” When they heard Revere’s report, the rebel leaders made haste to depart. Hancock’s clerk, John Lowell, and Revere went with them to the house of the widow of a clergyman in Woburn, three miles northeast of Lexington. But as Hancock’s trunk containing important papers was at Buckman’s Tavern, at the clerk’s request, Revere went back with him to help carry it away.

It was gray dawn when they returned in John Hancock’s chaise. The meetinghouse bell was clanging, and a drummer was calling the minutemen to take their places with the company that was already lining up on the green between the church and the tavern. Young men and old, most of them farmers dressed in work clothes, came on the run, holding on to their muskets.

Captain Parker was giving orders, telling those who had just arrived where to stand. There had been conflicting rumors. The regulars were coming, they were not coming —all the reports had been false. But then a messenger arrived and told the captain he had seen the redcoats half a mile down the road.

Looking down from a window in an upper room of Buckman’s Tavern, Paul Revere saw “the British very near upon a full march.” The sun had just risen. Its sparkling light fell across freshly turned furrows in the fields, brightened blossoming apple orchards, and glittered on the steel bayonets of the scarlet-coated troops advancing in orderly ranks into Lexington. Major Pitcairn, astride his horse, commanded the six companies, and with him were the mounted officers who had taken Revere.

Colonel Smith had not been long upon the march from Cambridge when he heard the ringing of distant church bells and the firing of guns. Sensing that he was in for trouble, he had dispatched Major Pitcairn ahead with six light companies to take the two bridges at Concord. He had also sent word back to General Gage that he would need the reserves.

So it was Pitcairn leading the six companies of redcoats, and Major Mitchell and his officers, that Paul Revere saw from the window of the tavern. They were close now, and taking a last look at the oncoming scarlet waves, Revere hurried to help Lowell with John Hancock’s trunk. That was what he had come to do. It was not his business to take a stand with the minutemen.

With the trunk in hand, he and John Lowell passed quickly by the thin, ragged line, hardly more than seventy men, waiting there on the green. Some were running across the road to the meetinghouse for powder. What were they going to do? Captain Parker himself was rather vague about it. He had said they intended only to stand and resist the regulars if they “should insult or molest us.”

At a distance of about fifty yards the redcoats halted. Captain Parker warned his men, “Don’t fire unless fired on, but if they mean to have a war let it begin here.” Major Pitcairn galloped up close to the minutemen and was reported to have called out, “Disperse, you rebels, you villains, disperse. Lay down your arms. Why don’t you lay down your arms?”

Then, as if in answer, the first shot was fired, but not by the minutemen lined up on the green. Pitcairn had commanded his men not to fire. It was never known who fired that first shot. Most likely it was a patriot, shooting from the cover of a stone wall or from a window in Buckman’s Tavern.

But it was the signal for a volley from the ranks of the redcoats. When the east wind swept away the cloud of gun-smoke, the minutemen could be seen flying helter-skelter in all directions. With ringing cheers, the regulars broke ranks and pursued them.

Back on the green, Jonas Parker, an older cousin of the Captain, was on his buckled knees fumbling for bullets. A bayonet quickly finished him. Jonathan Harrington, with a ball in his chest, dragged himself to his own doorstep where he collapsed and died at his wife’s feet. Eight of the minutemen were killed and ten wounded. One British soldier suffered a slight wound, and Major Pitcairn’s horse was grazed by a bullet.

Among those who had watched from open doors and windows was John Hancock’s Aunt Lydia. A bullet had zipped past her head as she leaned out an upper window at the parsonage. When Adams and Hancock heard the volleys fired by the regulars, they fled into hiding some distance from Woburn. As they were driving off in Hancock’s carriage, “Sam Adams felt his soul swell with uncontrollable joy as he contemplated the future, and with prophetic utterance of his country’s dawning independence, he exclaimed, ‘O! What a glorious morning is this!’ ”

It seemed so long ago, but it was in the early morning hours of that same Wednesday, April 19, that Dr. Prescott escaped from the British patrol and returned to Concord. The town had been alarmed, and minutemen came from Lincoln and other villages to join the local company. Reports of what had happened at Lexington came in, and a group of nearly two hundred farmers decided to march down the road to meet King George’s troops.

When the provincials saw the redcoats coming, they wisely turned about and, with their “drums and fifes agoing,” led the regulars into Concord. The British fifes and drums had also begun to play, and altogether they had “grand music,” as Corporal Amos Barrett said. Numbering less than three hundred, the minutemen manned a hill above the road leading to North, or Concord, Bridge.

Colonel Smith, having arrived with the main body of troops, was now in command of the redcoats. After the rout at Lexington, he did not think the rebels in Concord would put up much of a fight. He sent a few detachments to hunt for the military stores, then ordered a small force to take the South Bridge. Six companies of light infantry were ordered out to take Concord Bridge, which was more important because the British had to cross it to reach Colonel James Barrett’s farm, where they knew some cannon were hidden.

In the meantime, the rest of the officers could relax and have breakfast at a tavern. Word came that the provincials had gathered in large numbers on the far side of Concord Bridge. Colonel Smith decided to go himself with reinforcements. While he marched slowly out of town at the head of his men, the skirmish at the bridge was fought and won by the minutemen.

Captain Walter Laurie had been left there with a small force while the rest of the British troops marched off to Barrett’s farm. When the minutemen advanced toward the bridge to drive off the enemy, Laurie’s men fired upon them. The embattled farmers stood their ground and “fired the shot heard round the world.” The redcoats ran. “Their balls whistled well,” Corporal Amos Barrett reported, “but they fired too high.” The skirmish had lasted only three or four minutes. Both sides lost several men.

The retreating troops ran smack into Colonel Smith, plodding along with two companies of grenadiers. They all returned to Concord Green, and presently, the companies sent out to take the bridge and the cannon returned, too, having failed to take either.

Now the entire British force was assembled in Concord. But why had not Lord Percy come with the reinforcements he had ordered so many hours before? Colonel Smith asked. He fumed and waited. He would be as late in leaving Concord as he had been all along.

Blunders and misunderstandings in Boston had delayed Percy’s departure until nine o’clock that morning when he had finally set out with about a thousand troops. While Percy marched and Smith waited, hundreds of provincials, alarmed and aroused, hurried toward Concord on foot and on horseback. Since Paul Revere and Billy Dawes had spread the first warning, other couriers had swung into the saddle and galloped from village to village, and from house to house, with word that the redcoats were out—that they had marched on Lexington, on Concord.

Bells answered bells throughout the countryside, and everywhere there was the roll of drums calling men to arms. Farmers, tanners, mechanics, wheelwrights, shopkeepers came from all the towns and villages in Essex, Middlesex, Norfolk, and Worcester counties. Boys too young and men too old to fight grabbed muskets and powder horns and marched to Concord. At Chelmsford a woman tried to keep her boy at home, but the lad said, “I hear the shoots and I’m going.”

Old Sam Whittemore, who lived in Cambridge, and at eighty was not limber enough for the march, was sure the British would retreat through his town. So he took down his old squirrel gun from the mantelpiece, and got his horse pistols ready, saying he would wait and pick off a redcoat or two when they came back.

The skirmish at the bridge was over about ten o’clock. For two hours afterward, Colonel Smith dawdled in Concord, uneasy and uncertain what to do. It was noon when he finally made up his mind to march back by way of Lexington. The ranks were re-formed and the long column moved out in the unseasonably warm April sunshine, their drums and fifes silent.

The retreating redcoats were not molested until they came to the place where the road narrowed at a bridge a mile out of town. Then of a sudden, Corporal Barrett said, “a great many lay dead and the road was bloody.” There was “hardly any seeing” the enemy that now took expert aim at the fleeing regulars, for the angry farmers shot from behind trees and low stone walls, and from behind the doors and windows of houses and barns along both sides of the road.

The redcoats fell to the ground in such numbers that the officers made no effort to close ranks. Major Pitcairn’s horse was shot from under him. Colonel Smith suffered a painful leg wound, and it was reported that he would have surrendered if he could have found “somebody of sufficient rank to whom he could offer his sword.” The minutemen had no need of officers. Each man fought for himself and wasted no bullets.

Lord Percy did not come to the rescue with fresh troops and two cannon until midafternoon. He found the King’s grenadiers and crack light infantry lying spent and bedraggled along the roadside, a half mile beyond Lexington and the green where they had dispersed the thin line of patriots early that morning, and where the first blood had been shed.

Now in command, Percy re-formed the disorganized troops, put out flankers to protect the main body, and slowly retreated toward Boston. All along the nineteen-mile route, the redcoats were harassed by the minutemen “in their skulking way behind hedges and walls.”

There was another skirmish on the outskirts of Cambridge. Old Sam Whittemore took part in it, crouched down behind a stone wall. He took aim with his musket and shot a redcoat dead, then cocked his horse pistol and killed another one. If he had not been badly wounded, he might have picked off two or three more. Old Sam survived his near-fatal brush with the retreating regulars and died peacefully thirteen years later at the age of ninety-three.

At sunset, Lord Percy got his troops across Charlestown Neck. They camped on Bunker Hill, which commanded the Neck and was protected by the Somerset anchored in the Charles River.

It was estimated that the British lost 273 men on that memorable April 19, 1775, and the Americans 95. The patriots had shown the redcoats that they would fight. More, they had demonstrated their ability to hold their own against well-trained troops. The regulars did not laugh that day at their clumsy weapons; they learned that the rebels would not flinch and run at the smell of gunpowder.

14 

News of Bunker Hill for the Commander in Chief

The exhausted redcoats remained only a few hours on Bunker Hill. That night of April 19, General Gage sent armed transports to evacuate the wounded, on the next day all the troops were withdrawn to Boston. They could see the rebels, across the river in Cambridge, standing around their breakfast fires. Why had they not dispersed and returned to their homes? This was no army, this motley ragtag of Yankee farmers and tradesmen. It was true that the angry patriots who had so suddenly left their farms and their shops were not yet an army, but they would soon become one.

Most of the members of the Boston Committee of Safety had escaped to Cambridge, where Dr. Joseph Warren, chairman of the committee, set up temporary headquarters at the house of Jonathan Hastings. With John Hancock and Sam and John Adams on their way to the Congress in Philadelphia, responsibility for managing the affairs of Massachusetts rested almost entirely upon Dr. Warren. As president of the Provincial Congress and as chairman of its Committee of Safety, he labored heroically to bring order out of chaos.

On the morning of the twentieth, while the redcoats were being ferried back to Boston, he met with the militia officers at the Hastings house in Cambridge. Paul Revere had returned, and Warren engaged him as a messenger “to do the outdoor work of the committee.” He would stand ready to ride at a moment’s notice and was given the use of two horses.

In the afternoon, General Artemas Ward, Commander in Chief of the Massachusetts militia, arrived to take command of the unorganized minutemen. He was not well, but when an express rider had brought news of the fighting to his town of Shrewsbury, he had mounted his horse and ridden to Cambridge. He was a slow middle-aged officer who had fought in the French and Indian Wars, but he was dependable and popular. Now, working with Dr. Warren and his committee, he struggled to make an army out of the milling thousands that had gathered here on the outskirts of Boston.

They had come and were still coming, not only from towns in Massachusetts, but from Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. News of Lexington and Concord had traveled fast, and minutemen in towns far away had grabbed their muskets and marched off to headquarters at Cambridge. They came tramping in companies over the rough country roads, dressed in leather breeches and home-spun shirts, and in tattered uniforms and rusty cocked hats. Gray-haired old Israel Putnam had come, too, leaving his plow standing in the furrow when the news flashed by. He had more courage than ability, but he was appointed second in command.

There were not enough tents, so the men built rude sailcloth shelters and thatched huts. Farmers brought in wagonloads of provisions, and from the kitchen at Harvard College came pots, kettles, and utensils.

In May an army of a different kind was on the roads, pushing its way past the volunteers hurrying to Cambridge. With the redcoats bottled up in Boston and the minutemen grimly watching from across the river, war had begun, and hordes of refugees swarmed out looking for a haven. As the Whigs streamed out of Boston, the Tories streamed in.

There were rich and poor, “parents with bundles in one hand and a string of children in the other, wandering out of town, not knowing whither they go.” The Boston Committee of Safety sent five thousand of them to houses around Worcester. Many others, including most of the prominent Whigs, crowded into Watertown, which became the capital of Massachusetts until the British evacuated Boston. The Provincial Congress met here, and Dr. Warren came up from Cambridge to stay at the Hunt house.

Although many of the volunteers grew restless and went back home to plow and plant their fields, others came to take their places and thousands stayed. They did not have enough guns and ammunition; they were dirty, ill-fed, and poorly clothed and housed, but these farmers and tradesmen established a siege that kept the British penned up in Boston. British ships could move freely in and out of the harbor, but the city was dependent upon the country round about for food and fuel.

The rebel army across the Charles reduced the redcoats to a diet of salt meat and fish. “They have cut off our good beef and mutton,” a hungry captain of the Fifth Regiment grumbled. “We are completely blockaded and subsisting almost on salt provisions.”

General Gage made a last futile effort to win the rebels back, and showed yet again how little he understood them. If they would lay down their arms, he announced in a proclamation, they would be pardoned for having fought against His Majesty’s troops—all except their traitorous leaders, Sam Adams and John Hancock. The Yankee soldiers spat on their hands and kept building entrenchments and redoubts.

Sam Adams and John Hancock were safe in Philadelphia, where Sam was trying to persuade the delegates of the Second Continental Congress to declare independence and support New England in her fight against King George’s troops.

Aunt Lydia and Miss Dolly were safe, too. They had left the parsonage at Lexington soon after the retreat of the redcoats and had been driven south to the home of friends in Fairfield, Connecticut. Here Miss Dolly received a letter from John, dated May 7. He and Sam Adams had reached the outskirts of New York where they were joined by the other Massachusetts delegates and those from Connecticut.

The Hancock coach led the procession, and John reported that the spectators rushed forward and clamored to take out his horses and drag the coach into the city. “In short,” he wrote with swelling vanity, “no person could possibly be more noticed than myself.” Vain he certainly was, but he may have been right, for he was known and admired throughout the colonies for his generosity and his defiance of King George.

Along the way people waved and cheered. Nearly a thousand uniformed soldiers with fixed bayonets and a military band escorted the delegates through the city and down Broadway to Fraunces Tavern, where they sat down to a supper of fried oysters.

They were again welcomed as if they were heroes home from the wars when they approached Philadelphia on the morning of May 10. A cavalcade of gentlemen on horseback, as many more in a hundred carriages, and a company of riflemen came out to meet them. They formed a long procession that marched slowly between lanes of cheering thousands and entered the city to the ringing of bells.

The martial spirit that pervaded the Quaker city cheered the men from Massachusetts. There were even companies of “Fighting Quakers” who had seceded from the Society of Friends and taken up arms with the patriots. Battalions in brown and white uniforms with white leather belts crossed over the breast made a “most elegant appearance.” They wore small hats with a tuft of deer’s fur in the cockade, and slung from their belts were cartouche boxes on which the word Liberty was lettered large. Some companies dressed in green uniforms and jockey caps; the riflemen wore tow-cloth caps and belted shirts dyed the color of a brown autumn leaf.

With the many uniformed companies out drilling morning and evening, it was evident that the spirit of Lexington prevailed here in Philadelphia. But for all the martial ardor, the Congress that now met for the second time was timid and irresolute.

The delegates sat in the State House on Chestnut Street—the red brick building that has become the shrine Americans know and revere as Independence Hall. The meetings were held in the ground-floor room at the east end, a beautiful white-paneled room, with tall windows on two sides and twin fireplaces behind the president’s table that faced the gathering.

Among the few newcomers, the most famous and the most distinguished was wise, tolerant, and experienced Benjamin Franklin. As agent for the colonies in London, he had striven for two decades to promote understanding and concord between them and the mother country. But after 1770, he had been reviled as a spy by King George and his advisers. Franklin had recently returned home, and now at seventy he served as a representative of Pennsylvania.

Colonel Washington, calm and dignified as always, was there again in uniform, a black cockade in his hat and a sword at his side. Thomas Jefferson, another distinguished Virginian, was to arrive later.

The Congress unanimously elected John Hancock President to succeed Peyton Randolph. Hancock was far from the intellectual equal of many of the attending statesmen, but in the conscientious performance of demanding duties, he rendered valuable service to the colonies.

To the consternation and disgust of the New England delegates, the Congress settled down to the leisurely business of appointing committees for one thing and another—to study ways and means of supplying the colonies with arms, to borrow money for the purchase of gunpowder for an army that did not exist, to estimate the total cost of defense.

The Middle and Southern colonies did not object to consideration of such military matters, and they believed that the companies and battalions should drill and be ready for an emergency, but independence was a word that made them shudder, and they showed no enthusiasm for adopting the army now camped outside Boston. They soon made it clear that they wanted further negotiation with King George and Parliament—as if there had been no Lexington and Concord, and as if there were no redcoats in Boston.

John Adams struggled manfully to control his temper and his tongue. “We find a great many bundles of weak nerves,” he wrote Dr. Joseph Warren. “We are obliged to be as delicate and soft and modest and humble as possible.”

On May 18, the Congress learned that Fort Ticonderoga, at the southern end of Lake Champlain, had been captured. The order to take the fort had been given by Dr. Warren in the hope that the rebels could obtain heavy guns.

Captain Benedict Arnold of Connecticut and Ethan Allen of New Hampshire shared command of the Green Mountain Boys who rowed across the dark lake in the early morning hours on May 10. They caught the small garrison asleep and took the fort without a shot having been fired. Taking the lion’s share of credit in this exploit, Ethan Allen reported that when the commanding officer asked him by what authority he demanded surrender of the fort, he had answered, “In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.”

The Continental Congress was acutely embarrassed by the seizure of Ticonderoga. True, it was strategically important, for it commanded the approach to the St. Lawrence River. And, although the cannon could not yet be moved for lack of transport, Allen and his Green Mountain Boys had brought back badly needed powder and small arms. But taking the offensive against the mother country would certainly not help the cause of peace. The conservative majority, led by John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, was determined to make another effort to placate King George.

Toward the end of May, while the delegates sweltered in muggy heat and flies buzzed around them, Dickinson moved that “An Humble and Dutiful Petition” be sent to His Majesty. It would make clear that the colonies eagerly desired settlement of the unhappy disputes by negotiation. This was more than John Adams could take. His patience worn ragged, he threw caution to the winds and bitterly denounced “half-way patriots” who wasted precious time on humble petitions that were not even read.

The futile petitioning and praying for redress of grievances irked Sam Adams as much as they did his cousin. But he saw the danger of antagonizing the conservatives, not only at the Congress, but everywhere in the colonies. Better to wait “till the fruit is ripe before we gather it,” he warned John. Outwardly calm and unruffled, he worked all the harder “to remove old prejudices, to instruct the unenlightened, convince the doubting, and fortify the timid.”

The vote on the “Humble Petition” was a unanimous “Aye.” Convinced that unity was an absolute necessity, John Adams submitted to the will of the majority, but it had gone against the grain.

Then, on June 2, a letter came from the Provincial Congress in Watertown. Would the Continental Congress give Massachusetts advice and help in forming a new and permanent government? “We tremble at having an army, although of our countrymen, established here without a civil power to provide for and control them,” Dr. Warren wrote. And would the Congress take over entire regulation and direction of this army at Cambridge?

The Congress handled both requests as gingerly as if it had been tossed a sputtering firecracker. In effect, it did nothing. It seemed more urgent to consider sending a second petition to the King.

Instead of railing against the stupidity of yet another humble plea to His Majesty, John Adams used his powers of persuasion to convince the delegates that it was vitally necessary to appoint a commander in chief of the troops strung out in makeshift camps all the way from Cambridge to Roxbury. General Artemas Ward, now in command there, and John Hancock were New England’s candidates for the position.

John Adams had made his choice, and it was neither General Ward nor John Hancock. George Washington, he believed, was the man best qualified for so important a command. Having fought as an officer in the French and Indian Wars, he had had more experience in command than any other American. And many believed that the appointment of a Southern commander was necessary to win the support of the colonies south of Connecticut. For the Southern party was jealous of a New England army under the command of a New England general.

On the morning of June 15, John Adams rose and spoke briefly to the assembled delegates about the seriousness of the military situation at Cambridge. There would soon be no army, he warned, unless the Congress adopted it as the Continental Army and appointed a commander in chief.

Seated at the President’s table and facing the room, John Hancock leaned forward, an expression of pleased expectancy on his face. He had gloried in being a dashing figure as colonel of the company of cadets in Boston, but how much more dashing he would be as commander of the army, and how much more glorious it would be! He was confident that he was about to hear his name suggested for the high position he coveted. Instead, he heard John Adams say, “I have but one gentleman in mind for that important command, a gentleman from Virginia who is among us and very well known to all of us.”

Hancock’s face darkened and he looked as if he had been struck a blow. “I never remarked a more sudden and striking change of countenance,” John Adams wrote later. “Mortification and resentment were expressed as forcibly as his face could exhibit them.”

When Sam Adams stood up and seconded his cousin’s motion, Hancock felt that he had, indeed, been betrayed. For a long time thereafter he nursed a deep grudge against the Old Puritan to whom he had given so much of his fortune to use for the Whig cause.

Congress did not take the vote that day. But the following day, when Thomas Johnson of Maryland put the motion a second time, George Washington was unanimously chosen as “supreme Commander of the forces raised and to be raised in defense of American liberty.”

The tall Virginian accepted the appointment with moving humility and modesty. “I do not think myself equal to the command I am honored with,” he said. “However, as the Congress desire, I will enter upon the momentous duty and exert every power I possess in their service.”

While the delegates in Philadelphia were choosing a commander in chief, General Gage in Boston was debating what action he should take. When the rebels did nothing but ridicule his offer to pardon all of them, except Sam Adams and John Hancock, the “Old Woman” knew that he had to do something. He was being prodded to take the offensive by three generals who had been sent over from England to assist him—William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne. Plans were finally laid to occupy and fortify the outlying heights of Dorchester and the peninsula of Charlestown, both strategic locations from which rebel cannon could threaten Boston.

The Americans received intelligence of these plans almost as soon as they were made, and the Boston Committee of Safety moved swiftly to counteract them by recommending to General Ward that Bunker Hill be fortified without delay.

There were three hills on Charlestown Peninsula— Bunker Hill, Breed’s Hill, and Morton’s Hill. Bunker Hill, just inside Charlestown Neck, was the highest, and to the southeast it was connected by a ridge with Breed’s Hill. The Americans decided to build a strong redoubt on the slope of Bunker Hill facing the river, and to plant their cannon there. It was an ideal site, and commanded a fine view of Boston. On the afternoon of June 16, Colonel William Prescott marched off with a thousand Massachusetts soldiers to fortify the hill.

Old Israel Putnam came charging up from Connecticut again, this time with two hundred militiamen and, with much huffing and puffing, argued that the better site for a battle would be along the slope of the lower hill. Old Put had a general’s commission, but as he had no authority over the Massachusetts troops, Colonel Prescott could have ignored him. Instead, he ignored the instructions of the Committee of Safety and moved down to Breed’s Hill.

The Massachusetts farmers worked all night to make a forty-foot-square redoubt. At daybreak they were still at it, and “almost beat out” when the British across the river discovered that they were up to some deviltry and began to bombard them with cannon fire.

Dodging cannonballs (one of the men was killed and hastily buried), they labored to get the redoubt finished. In spite of Colonel Prescott’s frantic encouragement, some of them dropped their tools and disappeared over the hill. Later that morning, the earthworks were completed. While the Colonel waited for the cannon and food for the famished men, Old Put came tearing up the hill bellowing that the redoubt should have been built on Bunker Hill. Prescott had had enough of his advice, and when he refused to move his men, Old Put roared that he was a general and would build his own redoubt on Bunker Hill. Some of Prescott’s soldiers elected to go with him, and no more was seen of them that day on Breed’s Hill.

Meanwhile the high British officers in Boston had reached the decision that the rebels must be driven from Charlestown Peninsula. General Howe’s plan to make a direct frontal attack on their redoubt was finally approved, and it was agreed that he should execute it. Howe could have left Boston at once for so minor an action, but he wanted to lift the morale of the long-inactive regulars by making such preparations as a large-scale expedition would have required. Taking victory for granted, he proceeded at a leisurely pace that morning.

When Colonel Prescott saw that the British were in no hurry to cross the river, he sent Captain Thomas Knowlton and Old Put’s Connecticut men down the hill to build a little rail fort closer to the landing place. It consisted of two fence rails with the space between filled with bushes, hay, and grass which the soldiers found on the spot. Knowlton’s detachment was presently strengthened by Colonel John Stark and his New Hampshire regiment that had marched across the Neck through fire from two floating batteries of twelve-pounders.

Shortly after noon, on June 17, barges filled with British soldiers pushed off and moved slowly across the river. Within an hour General Howe had his entire force of about three thousand regulars lined up on the north side of the Charles. He divided them into a left wing under General Robert Pigot and a right wing that he himself commanded. Around two o’clock he gave the order to attack.

Crouched behind the redoubt and the rail fence, the colonials waited. They were wide-awake now, having forgotten hunger and fatigue in the excitement of the battle that was about to begin. The two cannon that had been brought to the hill were useless, for the artillery captain had gone “right off home to Cambridge as fast as he could.”

Those who had remained could watch the spectacle of the precise and beautiful ranks of redcoats advancing up the slope through the tall grass. Brilliant in their scarlet uniforms and with bayonets flashing in the sun, they moved slowly, for the day was hot and they were burdened with heavy equipment. They came on with great confidence, expecting an easy victory and having no inkling of the “chokey mouthful” waiting to receive them.

When the defenders of the redoubt could “see the whites of their eyes,” Colonel Prescott shouted the order to fire. The instant response was a hailstorm of bullets that raked Howe’s lines with punishing effect. Officers and regulars were killed without having fired a shot. There was another charge, and again the bullets from muskets poking through holes and over the parapet took deadly toll of the redcoats and forced them to retreat down the hill to the shore.

During this lull in the fighting, Dr. Joseph Warren suddenly appeared in the redoubt armed with a musket and a cartouche box a retreating sergeant had given him. He had been appointed a major general but as yet had no commission.

When Colonel Prescott offered him the command, he refused, saying that he had not come to take command, but to fight as a volunteer. So Dr. Warren was on the hill dressed in “a light colored coat with a sprig on the buttons, a tie wig, and a white-fringed waistcoat,” ready to fight as a private while General Howe was re-forming his lines to make another uphill charge.

General Pigot, in command of the British left wing which was supposed to flank the hill and surround the redoubt, had been compelled to retreat. But the red-hot cannon balls fired from the ships in the river had set Charlestown ablaze, and the town now lay in smoking ruins.

General Howe’s next charge was repulsed, and again entire companies of redcoats were left dead and wounded in the high grass before the redoubt. With dogged determination to take the fort at any cost, Howe re-formed his shattered lines and for a fourth time drove furiously against the earthworks. His officers were amazed at the stubborn resistance of the defenders. But their ammunition was almost spent, and as the redcoats pressed close to the fort, suddenly the fire of the colonials “went out like an old candle.”

Prescott was forced to order a retreat, but it was a fighting retreat. With rocks, broken muskets, and their bare fists, the colonials fought “from one fence or wall to another” until they were driven off the peninsula of Charlestown.

The body of the beloved Dr. Warren, dead at the age of thirty-four, was left lying close to the redoubt where he had fallen with a musket ball in his head just as the fort was overrun. A British officer reported that “everybody remembered his fine silk-fringed waistcoat.” The men who had fought side by side with him never forgot his cool courage.

Out in the tall salt grass under the hot sun, hearty old Major Pitcairn bled to death after having been shot through the chest.

For the British, Bunker Hill was a “dear-bought victory.” One thousand of their men were killed or wounded, as against four hundred Americans. It was said that General Howe never recovered from the shock of seeing his troops march bravely up the hill only to be mowed down by such fire as they had never faced before.

The Americans lost the hill and Charlestown was reduced to ashes, but for them Bunker Hill was a great moral victory. The stouthearted farmers who stayed to fight with Colonel Prescott proved to their own countrymen and to the British that they could fight—not only Indian fashion, behind trees and stone walls as they had done at Lexington and Concord, but in the open and under continuous attack by the disciplined British regulars. The scarlet-coated troops learned at appalling cost that the rebels were not a “cowardly rabble.”

Not all the minutemen who came to the hill by the river’s edge that hot June day remained to fight. Many, like the artillery captain, went “right off home as fast as they could,” and others left with Old Put to watch the battle from the top of Bunker Hill. General Ward did not send reinforcements to Colonel Prescott after the battle started. The wonder was that with so much confusion and disorganization there were gallant men who did stay with Prescott.

A week later, on Friday, June 23, 1775, General Washington and his military entourage left Philadelphia on the journey northward to Cambridge. It was a clear, bright day with a cooling breeze. Drums beat, bands played, and happy crowds waved flags and cheered the mounted officers as they cantered by. Twenty miles outside the city the cavalcade was stopped by a dusty messenger who paused on his way to Philadelphia just long enough to report that the Battle of Bunker Hill had been fought and that Dr. Joseph Warren had been killed.

15 

The Fateful Declaration

Late in June 1775, after the Battle of Bunker Hill, Thomas Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia to take his seat among the delegates at the Second Continental Congress. At thirty-two he was tall, angular, fair-skinned, and freckled, with sandy reddish hair.

Unlike his fellow Virginians, Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, Jefferson was not an eloquent speaker. He was a learned man, a scholar who could express himself best on paper. Although he rarely spoke during the sessions of the Congress, he was as impatient as voluble, peppery John Adams with the moderates who clung to the hope that peace could be made with the mother country.

Dickinson’s Petition to the King was sent to London early in July. Dubbed the “Olive Branch Petition” by John Adams, it was the final effort to settle differences amicably. For the sake of unity, all the delegates had signed it.

The colonies were so sharply divided that New Jersey threatened to make a separate peace with Britain. Sam Adams, losing patience at last with the “half-way patriots,” threatened a New England Confederation, independent of both Britain and the American colonies.

In August, the Congress adjourned for a brief vacation. When it reconvened in September, John Hancock brought his bride back with him. After a long courtship, he had finally won the elusive Dolly Quincy. In a quiet ceremony at which the Reverend Andrew Eliot officiated and upon which Aunt Lydia beamed, “The Honorable John Hancock, Esq., and Miss Dorothy Quincy, both of Boston, were married at Fairfield, August 28, 1775.” John was thirty-eight and Dolly ten years younger.

The Continental Congress continued to try to run a war and govern a country while its members clashed over the issue of independence. As cold weather came on, problems multiplied and gloom deepened. General Washington could not act without the approval of the Congress, and from Cambridge he sent urgent messages to Philadelphia almost daily. John Hancock handled this and a vast amount of other correspondence during the hours when he was not presiding over the delegates.

On December 30, 1775, a second American army was defeated in a night assault upon Quebec in driving snow and darkness. General Richard Montgomery was killed and Benedict Arnold was wounded.

Then in January 1776, ships from England brought dire news of the King’s October speech to Parliament and of the Prohibitory Act. Clenching his royal fist, George III had spoken angrily of the disturbances in America as a “desperate conspiracy.” It was the intention of his insolent subjects, he said, to establish an independent empire, and there was just one way to deal with the rebellion—crush it!

As in the early years of the dispute, there were thoughtful statesmen in Parliament who criticized the King and his ministers and urged that steps toward reconciliation be taken. To that end, Edmund Burke made his great speech on conciliation. Many other Englishmen, including merchants, manufacturers, artisans, and scholars, protested the use of arms against the Americans and argued that concessions should be made. But the stubborn King and his cabinet refused to listen to sound advice or heed the warning that “you may bruise America’s heel, but you cannot crush its head.”

The government spurned the “Olive Branch Petition,” and disdained to negotiate with the “illegal” Continental Congress. In December 1775, all hope of reconciliation was dashed when Parliament passed the Prohibitory Act. It was in effect a declaration of war, for it proclaimed that the colonies were no longer under British protection and ordered a blockade of American ports from Maine to Georgia and the seizure of American ships at sea.

Even more shocking to the colonists was the news that foreign mercenaries were being recruited to reinforce General Howe’s army. Unable to raise enough troops in Britain, the government was forced to buy the services of German soldiers. Seventeen thousand were bought from the Prince of Hesse-Kassel, and all the German hirelings came to be called Hessians. The use of these mercenary troops was, for most of the colonists, the final blow. It was all too evident that the mother country intended to treat them as foreigners, and hatred of Britain and even of the British people spread through the colonies.

Before Lexington, few Americans had been with Sam Adams in wanting independence. Even months afterward, the great majority continued to cling to hope of reconciliation. They asked for nothing more than what they considered their rights, and on those terms would have been happy to remain within the British Empire.

Now when it was clear that Britain intended to wage war, there were many who still hung back, fearful of taking the bold step of declaring independence. In this moment of indecision, a transplanted Englishman spoke to them in a little pamphlet he had written, and gave them the courage to take that step.

It was at the suggestion of Benjamin Franklin that Thomas Paine had come to Philadelphia late in the year of 1774. He was of humble birth, and in England he had been a failure. But he was a gifted writer and a lover of freedom. Thirteen months after his arrival in America he wrote a forty-seven-page pamphlet called Common Sense. “Nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Tom Paine said modestly of his booklet.

It caused a sensation. Soon after its publication in Philadelphia early in January 1776, almost half a million copies were sold. It was written in language that the people could understand and with an emotional fervor that carried enormous appeal: “O ye that love mankind, stand forth! Ye that dare oppose not only tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth!”

And it would have been a stolid patriot indeed who would not have thrilled to the single line on the last page of Common Sense. There in stark black letters could be seen for the first time in print the daring words:

THE FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES OF AMERICA.

After the appearance of Common Sense, the word independence no longer terrified the colonists. They began to talk about it freely and openly in their homes, in the streets, and in taverns and clubs. There were the timid ones who argued that disaster would surely follow in the wake of a declaration of independence. But many more were willing to take the risk, contending that the rights for which patriots had already fought and died would be assured them only by an independent America.

No argument, though, could budge the moderates in the Congress who held fast to hope of reconciliation. Independence still had a frightening import for them. One delegate shouted that he felt “like a child being thrust violently out of his father’s house.”

In determined opposition, John Adams hammered out, over and over again, the case for independence: “Nothing can save us but discipline in the army, governments in every colony, and a confederation of the whole.” John Adams was the “main pillar in debate,” and Cousin Sam might well have been called the main pillar in the caucus. His labors here went unrecorded, but he was constantly at work behind the scenes. And without the aid of the caucus, independence might have been long delayed by the proponents of conciliation.

Late in March there was a pause in the fierce debating when the heartening news of the evacuation of Boston by the British troops reached Philadelphia. No one rejoiced more than Sam Adams. At last the hated redcoats had been driven from his beloved town.

Earlier in the winter of 1775, Washington had almost despaired of breaking the frustrating stalemate. His restless troops were inactive in Cambridge, and the British army was pinned down across the river in Boston. General Gage had been recalled to England, and Howe was in command. He still held Bunker Hill, but neither the British nor the Americans had taken Dorchester Heights, the two hills that overlooked the harbor to the southwest. With siege guns Washington could fortify them and starve out the enemy. But where was he to find the necessary artillery?

While the Commander in Chief pondered this question, Henry Knox came up with the daring suggestion that he be allowed to go to Fort Ticonderoga and bring back the cannon that had been captured by Ethan Allen. The Boston bookseller accomplished what, even to Washington, had seemed to be an impossible feat. Yoke upon yoke of oxen dragged heavy sleds loaded with cannon, mortars, and howitzers the three hundred miles from Ticonderoga to Cambridge through forested wilderness, across frozen rivers, and over snowy mountains.

On March 1, 1776, the “noble train of artillery” rumbled into Cambridge. A few days later General Howe looked up at the fortifications on Dorchester Heights, shook his head in startled disbelief, and at once began preparations to evacuate his bored, hungry troops. On March 17, the British fleet sailed out of the harbor. A thousand Boston Tories, miserably crowded in the holds of the ships, left with Howe.

A few days later, John Hancock received a letter from General Washington in which he wrote:

It is with the greatest pleasure I inform you that, on Sunday last, the seventeenth, about nine o’clock in the forenoon, the Ministerial army evacuated the town of Boston, and that the forces or the United Colonies are now in actual possession thereof. The town, although it has suffered greatly, is not in so bad a state as I expected to find it; and I have a particular pleasure in being able to inform you, Sir, that your house has received no damage worth mentioning.

Uncle Thomas’s great house and other mansions had been spared because they were occupied by the British generals. John’s Dolly would return to preside as hostess over the Beacon Hill mansion, for Aunt Lydia had died at Fairfield, Connecticut, on April 25 at the age of sixty-two.

The old Whig residents of Boston who came back in the wake of the army found the town more sadly changed than it could have appeared to General Washington. Most of all they missed the beautiful trees. Fuel had been so scarce that nearly all of the trees had been cut down. The elms along the Common and the famous row of sycamores in front of Dr. Cooper’s church were gone, and Liberty Tree itself had been sawed into fourteen cords of wood. Fences and old wooden buildings had been cleaned out, and the old Adams house on Purchase Street was too badly-damaged to be restored. Old North Meeting had been wrecked for firewood, and Old South Church had been cleared of all its pews except one which was used as a pigsty and converted into a riding ring for the British cavalry. Close by, the ancient Governor Winthrop house had been razed and a fine row of buttonwood trees chopped down.

While Bostonians worked to remove all traces of the British occupation and to restore their homes and businesses, the great debate on independence moved toward its climax in Philadelphia.

Each of the thirteen colonies now had its own government, free of royal authority, and one by one they had begun to instruct their representatives in the Continental Congress to vote for a declaration of independence. The Massachusetts delegation had been so authorized in January 1776. The representatives of Georgia received instructions to vote for separation on April 5, and on April 12, North Carolina’s delegates joined them.

Virginia took a bolder step. On May 15 the convention ordered its delegates in the Continental Congress “to declare for independence.” Three weeks later, on Friday, June 7, Richard Henry Lee rose and asked leave to propose a resolution “according to the instructions of my constituents.” Every one of the fifty delegates present watched and listened as Lee read from the sheet of paper in his hand:

Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown; and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

Sam Adams did not have time to nudge his cousin, so fast did John leap to his feet to second the motion. But the moderates had not been won over. These included many of the delegates of the five middle colonies from New York to Maryland. Among their leaders were John Dickinson and James Wilson of Pennsylvania, and Robert Livingston and James Duane of New York, who argued that it was too soon to close the door to reconciliation.

In the Prohibitory Act, there was the vague promise that the Crown would send over commissioners to inquire into colonial grievances. And now the conciliation men harped endlessly on the need and the wisdom of waiting for these peace commissioners. The colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and South Carolina held back. Thomas Jefferson observed that they “were not matured enough for falling from the parent stem.” It would be most prudent, he advised, to wait awhile for them and to postpone the final decision to the first of July. And on Monday morning, June 10, that was what the radicals and the moderates agreed to do.

Both factions agreed, too, that it would be prudent to have a Declaration of Independence ready should the final vote be affirmative. Not even the conciliators wanted to see such an important proclamation “huddled up in a hurry.” On June 11, Congress appointed a committee of five men to compose the declaration. They were: Jefferson, John Adams, Franklin, Robert Livingston of New York, and Roger Sherman of Connecticut.

In the afternoon these gentlemen walked along the quiet, shady streets to the house at Seventh and Market where Thomas Jefferson was staying. They climbed the stairs to his second-floor parlor and sat down to discuss how they would execute their task. It was at once obvious that one hand would be better than five, and since Jefferson had the reputation of a “masterly pen,” he was the committee’s choice to write the declaration.

Jefferson protested that one of the older men should be chosen—John Adams or Franklin. Adams said bluntly that he should keep in the background because he was feared and hated in the Congress, and Franklin, with little round spectacles pushed up on his forehead, bowed to the younger Jefferson. So the Virginian was left alone in his parlor to find the words and the phrases that would give majestic expression to the Declaration of Independence that would eloquently justify the American Revolution to the world.

While Jefferson wrote, the leaders of both factions redoubled their efforts to win the support of the delegates. The champions of independence labored all the harder for knowing how necessary a unanimous vote was. To win by a majority was not enough. What would be the position of those colonies which voted against independence? Would they be enemy states aligned with Great Britain?

The Congress should act for all the colonies and for all the people. Nothing but a united independent America was conceivable to the advocates of independence. New York continued to refuse to give instructions for separation, even though it was known that General Howe’s fleet was on the way there from Halifax. Since April General Washington had been fortifying the city.

John Hancock was seldom seen at the City Tavern, the Coffee House, or the Indian Queen where men argued heatedly for and against independence. Of necessity, he had to give all his time to the correspondence that had become an increasingly heavy burden—letters to Washington and the other generals, and to the colonial assemblies. Now he was urging the people to greater effort in a letter that was circularized in the northern colonies. He wrote:

Our affairs are hastening fast to a crisis, and the approaching campaign [Howe’s attack on New York] will, in all probability, determine forever the fate of America. We have many disadvantages at present to struggle with, which time and progress in the art of war will remove. But this circumstance should rouse us to superior exertions. The militia of the United Colonies may be depended upon. They are called upon to say whether they will live slaves or die free men. The cause is certainly a glorious one. In short, on your exertions together with those of the other colonies the salvation of America now evidently depends. Quicken your preparations and stimulate the good people of your government and there is no danger, notwithstanding the mighty armament with which we are threatened, but you will be able to lead them to victory, to liberty, and to happiness.

On July 1, 1776, the members of the Congress assembled in the State House to take action on Richard Henry Lee’s resolution. It was sizzling hot, and the warm air blowing in through the tall open windows gave scant relief to the delegates in their stiff coats of plum, sky blue, cherry red, and canary yellow. Even at nine o’clock in the morning, they mopped their brows and wished they could take off their coats and their wigs.

A pile of letters and papers lay on the table before President Hancock, and the clock in the State House tower was striking twelve when he finished reading them. Then the important business of the day began with his announcement that the Congress would now “resolve itself into a committee of the whole to take into consideration the resolution concerning independence.”

Again, and for the last time, voices were raised in angry and bitter debate over the burning issue. John Dickinson, looking pale and drawn, spoke most vehemently for those who still held out for conciliation. In a voice choked with emotion, he argued that to withdraw from the protection of Great Britain by declaring independence would be like “destroying our house in winter before we have got another shelter.”

The sky darkened while Dickinson spoke, and the clerk hurried to lower the windows and bring candles to light the chamber. When John Adams took the floor, the storm broke and he had to raise his voice to make himself heard above the crash of thunder and rain beating against the windowpanes. No record of his impassioned speech was kept, but Jefferson said afterward that he came out “with a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats.”

The tide was running strong for independence. Before the meeting adjourned that stormy afternoon, John Dickinson knew that his faction had lost. Wrongheaded but sincere, he declared, “I would rather forfeit popularity forever than vote away the blood and happiness of my countrymen.”

The next morning the delegates met to take the final vote. It was Tuesday, July 2, a gray day with overcast skies. Dickinson and Robert Morris stayed away, and at last Pennsylvania came out for independence. South Carolina capitulated, and Caesar Rodney, after an eighty-mile ride in darkness and rain, arrived just in time to swing Delaware over to the affirmative side. Twelve colonies voted for independence that day, and New York’s vote was promised at a later date.

For Sam Adams, it was a triumphant moment. By voting to sever all political connection with Great Britain, the patriots had at long last caught up with his own thinking.

He had almost despaired at times of their ever doing so. Even after Lexington, what most Americans and their leaders wanted was not freedom, but their rights as Englishmen.

All his life Sam Adams had wanted a free America, and he had devoted his life to that end. He had asked nothing for himself, and had worked behind the scenes while others took the center of the stage. Having fired his cousin with patriotism, Sam Adams sat back and applauded John’s eloquence in the Congress. And now it was Cousin John who best expressed what both he and Sam felt about the momentous decision:

The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable in the history of America. I believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forwards, forevermore.

But the day that Americans came to celebrate as the most memorable in their history was not the second, when the vote for independence was taken, but the fourth of July 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was approved.

Debate on the document that Jefferson had submitted to the Congress started in the afternoon of July 2. From a livery stable across the street, swarms of big blue-black horseflies buzzed into the chamber where the delegates sat, stinging the distinguished gentlemen through their white silk stockings.

Thomas Jefferson, sitting beside Dr. Franklin, suffered from more than the heat and the horseflies. It was his manuscript that the delegates were criticizing and revising, and he winced with every change they made. Dr. Franklin comforted him with fatherly pats and amusing anecdotes. Many years later, Jefferson made his own wry little joke by saying that the Declaration of Independence went through the Congress much faster because of the horseflies.

Surprisingly, the great document did not suffer from the revisions of fifty-odd editors. It was, in truth, improved by every alteration that they made. But for all the additions and deletions, it remained Thomas Jefferson’s masterly work. No other patriot could have given such moving and exalted expression to the conception of liberty—not liberty for Americans alone, but for all mankind:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

The Declaration of Independence was formally approved by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, but the amended draft could not be signed by the delegates. The only names it bore were those of John Hancock, the president of the Congress, and Charles Thomson, the secretary, who attested John Hancock’s signature. And it was not until July 19 when New York joined with the other twelve colonies that it could be called “The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen States of America.”

Immediately after its adoption on July 4, the Declaration was printed, and copies were circulated in the states for proclamation. Meanwhile, Timothy Matlock worked on an “engrossed copy.” That was ready for signatures on August 2, 1776. On that date most of the fifty-six members of the Congress signed it. Some signed still later in 1776, and the last, Thomas McKean of Delaware, did not sign before 1777.

John Hancock’s bold signature was centered beneath the text. The other fifty-five were grouped by states, beginning with the Georgians on the left and ending with the New Englanders on the right.

It is unlikely that the patriots joked as they signed the historic document, so the colorful stories about the signing that have come down through the years are probably legendary rather than historical. The most familiar is the story of Hancock’s signing. He is supposed to have said that he wrote his name in large, bold letters so that John Bull could read it without spectacles and double the reward on his head. Actually, Hancock’s signature was characteristically large, in his personal letters as well as in official documents.

Signing the Declaration that summer of 1776 was no matter for joking. Every man who signed it knew that he might be signing his death warrant. Five years of war lay ahead—White Plains, Brandywine, Valley Forge. New York and Philadelphia would be occupied by the enemy, and the Continental Congress driven to Lancaster and Baltimore.

The signers were brave men who pledged to one another “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.” To King George III, the Declaration of Independence was high treason.

16 

Last Years

At the time of the Declaration of Independence, Sam Adams stood at the pinnacle of his career. He was fifty-four years old, and he had lived to see his dream of an independent America realized. Moreover, he was honored and acclaimed as the foremost revolutionist—as the man who for so many years had worked untiringly and unselfishly to make America independent of the mother country. Thomas Jefferson said of him that he was “truly the Man of the Revolution.”

But Sam Adams’s hour of fame and glory as the chief figure of the Revolution was brief. His great talent was for overturning governments. He was an astute politician with a bagful of tricks who firmly believed that the end for which he labored justified any means. Now that the great end of independence had been accomplished, by fair means and foul, Sam Adams was left without a cause. He knew nothing of rebuilding a government. He had none of the qualities of statesmanship that so brilliantly characterized Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

During the winter of 1779-80, Sam was appointed, along with John Adams and James Bowdoin, to a subcommittee to draw up a state constitution. But it was John Adams who wrote the Massachusetts Constitution, with the exception of Article III. Adopted in June 1780, it brought into being the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The shackles of British tyranny had at last been struck off, the yoke lifted. But freedom from English rule was not all that Sam Adams had dreamed of. He had been the Chief Incendiary, who through the years kept the fires of rebellion burning, and he had been the Old Puritan who forever hankered for the “good old days.”

He believed the Revolution would do more than establish an independent state. It would also, he confidently expected, usher in another Puritan Age of temperance, frugality, and fortitude. Boston would be another “Christian Sparta” and a refuge for the virtuous now that Thomas Hutchinson and the rest of the old aristocracy had been driven out.

Sam Adams was bitterly disillusioned. To his dismay, Boston was taken over by men who had “hid in holes and corners” while patriots gambled everything they had for liberty and fought the Revolution. They were the profiteers, the speculators, and the privateers who, with their ill-gained wealth, drove many of the old merchants out of business and moved into the Tories’ abandoned houses. The “mushroom gentry” moved into high places in society, too, and imitated the British in “every idle amusement and expensive foppery.” Sam Adams quivered with shock. Nor was that all. He was struck another blow when John Hancock, having returned to Boston from Philadelphia, campaigned for the governorship of Massachusetts and won.

Hancock had suffered no loss of prestige or popularity in Massachusetts during the two and a half years he was president of the Continental Congress. When his coach rolled into Boston, escorted by mounted soldiers, he was given the kind of thundering welcome that was accorded the royal governors in earlier years, and was wildly cheered by the people.

He was still the popular idol—still remembered for his generosity to the town and to the poor, for his dashing patriotism, and for his glamorous showmanship. An aristocrat, and enormously rich, John Hancock had turned against his own class politically to cast his lot with the patriots and to risk life and fortune as a revolutionist. His personal popularity was so great that there was no public office he might aspire to that the voters of Massachusetts would not give him. And when he ran for the governorship in the fall of 1780, he was elected by an overwhelming majority.

The day of his inauguration on October 25 was “remarkably fair and pleasant.” The celebrations started early with the “ringing of bells, the firing of cannon, and other demonstrations of public rejoicing,” and the ceremonies lasted all day. Regal and handsome in crimson velvet, John Hancock was escorted in his coach to the Old State House. There in the Council Chamber, where the appointments of eight royal governors had been announced in other years, he made a brief speech and took the oath of office as the first governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

There followed a round of parties and balls that quite scandalized Sam Adams. He observed that even the “sober inhabitants” attended the brilliant governor’s balls to pay court to John Hancock. Moreover, the Governor set an example which gave the people such a taste for lavish entertainment as made the “turtle feasts,” the “frolics,” and the concerts of the old aristocracy and the British customs officials seem modest indeed.

“Why should this new era be introduced with entertainments expensive and tending to dissipate the minds of the people?” the Old Puritan asked sourly, and added, “Our Bradfords, Winslows, and Winthrops would have revolted at such scenes of dissipation and folly.”

He worked zealously to awaken the people to their moral peril. Again, as he had done far back in his early manhood, he cited Greece and Rome as dreadful examples of what happened when the citizens lost their “manly virtues.” But the citizens of this new era were possessed by such “a rage for ease, luxurious living, and expensive diversions” that they only laughed at the quaint ideas of old Sam. Sadly and pathetically, he wrote, “I love the people of Boston. I once thought that city could be a Christian Sparta. But alas! Will men never be free? There are times when people are not worth saving, when they have lost their virtue. I pray God this may never be said of my beloved Boston.”

Sam Adams, who had been the prime mover of the Revolution, was out of step with the times. Having taken so active a part in creating a new republic, he was now vainly trying to turn back the clock. The stern virtues of the Puritans had served them well in conquering a wilderness, but that time had passed.

It was a bitter disappointment, too, for the strait-laced Old Puritan to see himself supplanted in the affections of the people by vain, worldly John Hancock. With his “peculiar talent for pleasing the multitude,” he had become the leader of the “true Republican party” and the political boss of Massachusetts. Hancock had been schooled by Adams in politics, and he had mastered all the tricks. He was a true patriot, and however dramatically, could sincerely declare, “I will defend the liberties of the people to the last drop of my blood.” John Hancock, governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, was now the man of the people—not Sam Adams, the Man of the Revolution.

Sam Adams came to accept this and all his other disappointments with resignation. Instead of crusading for the good old days, he began to look around for whatever political crumbs he might pick up. In the spring of 1781, he resigned as a delegate to the Continental Congress and was elected to the Massachusetts Senate. Out of deference to “the good, the worthy old patriot Mr. Adams,” its members elevated him to the office of president.

Out on Beacon Hill, Dolly Hancock was a charming hostess at the elaborate entertainments in the Hancock mansion. And now she and the Governor had a little son, John George Washington Hancock, who was born in 1778, the year they returned to Boston. But the windows of the great house were sometimes dark for weeks at a stretch, and no sounds of music and laughter were heard. At such times John Hancock would be confined to his bed with prolonged attacks of gout. It was an affliction from which he had suffered for years, and which had worsened as a result of the strain he had been under while serving as president of the Continental Congress. He was ill when the thrilling news of Washington’s great victory over Cornwallis at Yorktown on October 19, 1781, reached Boston, and was unable to celebrate it.

A visitor to the Governor’s sickroom on a day in June 1782, wrote:

Governor Hancock had the appearance of advanced age, though he was only forty-five. He had been repeatedly and severely afflicted with gout. Mr. Hancock was nearly six feet in stature and of slender person, stooping a little and apparently enfeebled by disease. His manners were very gracious and his face had been very handsome. At this time, about noon, the Governor wore a red velvet cap, within which was one of fine linen, and was dressed in a blue damask gown lined with silk, a white stock, a white satin embroidered waistcoat, black satin knee breeches, white silk stockings, and red morocco slippers.

Early in 1785, Hancock was stricken with such a severe seizure of gout that one day he had to be borne from his carriage by servants. They placed him on a sofa in the parlor of his mansion and had to cut off his new suit to relieve the torture of his swollen joints before carrying him upstairs to bed. For political reasons as well as poor health, he resigned that year from the governorship.

John Hancock fought his affliction gamely to the end. In 1787 he was back in the governor’s chair. The year had begun with a heartbreaking personal loss to Dolly and him. On January 27, their nine-year-old son and only child suffered a fatal accident. Trying out a new pair of skates on the icy sidewalk, he fell and died from a head injury. In spite of grief and declining health, Governor Hancock carried on his official duties and at the beginning of 1788, performed a distinctive service for his state and his country.

On September 17, 1787, another great decision had been made in the old State House in Philadelphia. On that date, in the room where the Continental Congress had voted to accept the Declaration of Independence, the Federal Convention completed the Constitution after four months of work. But before the Constitution could be made law, it had to be approved by the people in popularly elected state conventions. Opposition to the document was particularly strong in Massachusetts, but largely owing to Governor Hancock’s work in the convention and his “amazing power of persuasion,” it was ratified by a small majority in February 1788. George Bancroft, the historian, wrote that his “conduct in support of the Constitution was, from beginning to end, consistent and wise.”

John Hancock was even stronger politically in Massachusetts after the convention, and on April 7, 1788, was reelected governor by a landslide. Prosperity had returned, and he was virtually the undisputed ruler of a great state. But Hancock’s popularity and political success stimulated his soaring ambition. Ill as he was, he would have aspired to no less an office than president of the United States had he not realized that George Washington’s election was certain.

Instead, he campaigned as vigorously as his crippled condition would permit for the vice-presidency, but he ran no better than fifth among eleven candidates. John Adams, who had returned to America after serving as minister to England, won the election. George Washington was the unanimous choice for president.

Surprisingly and happily, the friendship between John Hancock and Sam Adams was renewed after a break that had lasted for fourteen years. The hard feelings and harsh words were forgotten. Both men had suffered disappointments and heartache. Like Hancock, Adams had lost his only son. Young Dr. Sam had served throughout the war as an army surgeon, and wartime hardships ruined his health. He died in 1788 at the age of thirty-seven.

There was no longer a Whig faction. Now there were the Federalists, who favored a strong central government, and the Anti-Federalists, who believed federal power should be limited and states’ rights protected. Sam Adams was an ardent Anti-Federalist who thought the Constitution was a menace to popular liberty. In 1788, he entered the race for the Federal Congress and was defeated by the Federalist candidate. He was also defeated that same year when he ran for the lieutenant governorship. But the old Whig had mellowed. “From my youth,” he wrote, “my mind has been strongly impressed with the love of mankind, and though I am old, the lamp still burns.”

Given John Hancock’s powerful support in 1789, Sam Adams did succeed in becoming lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. His election attested to Hancock’s strength, however, rather than to his own popularity. Just as in 1772, when they had patched up a quarrel to make war on the Tories, so now they joined forces to fight for states’ rights. At their inauguration they took the oath of office dressed in almost identical suits of American manufacture—dark broadcloth with silver buckles—for the purpose of encouraging domestic industry.

For the next three years, Hancock and Adams were reelected annually to the offices of governor and lieutenant governor respectively. By 1793 it had become increasingly evident that John Hancock was losing his battle against disease. Now serving his eleventh term as governor, he was rarely seen at public functions. His association with Sam Adams was again as intimate as it had been in pre-Revolutionary days. “My friend, what are we coming to?” Hancock wrote him early in August. “It is time to step forth and oppose the current of opinions and pursuits that are threatening to establish a system foreign to your ideas and mine.”

Six weeks later, Governor Hancock stepped forth publicly for the last time. After having read to the General Court a message regarding a suit brought against the state, he said: “I feel the seeds of mortality growing fast within me. But I think I have, in this case, done no more than my duty as the servant of the people.” On Tuesday morning, October 8, 1793, John Hancock died in his fifty-seventh year.

In death as in life, the people of Massachusetts honored their favorite son as no other in the state had ever been honored. It would have pleased John Hancock.

His body lay in state at the mansion on Beacon Hill throughout the week, and thousands of mourners moved slowly past the bier. At sunrise on Monday the fourteenth, the day of the funeral, “the bells in all the public edifices in his town opened the scene by tolling without cessation for an hour.” Flags in the town, at the Castle, and on the ships in the harbor hung at half-mast and at one o’clock all the stores and shops closed.

In the procession that formed at two o’clock were Vice-president John Adams and the black-robed justices of the federal courts, representatives of Harvard College, municipal officers and church dignitaries. Acting Governor Sam Adams walked ahead of the six oldest councilors who served as pallbearers, and there was an artillery guard of honor. Upwards of twenty thousand people followed in the rear of the cortege that moved out across the Common and eastward to circle the old State House. There Sam Adams, tottering with fatigue, had to drop out.

To the muffled beating of drums and the solemn boom of cannon, the procession wound north to Treamount Street and then west to the Old Granary Burying Ground. And here John Hancock was buried beside his Uncle Thomas in the family tomb as a rifle company fired a volley in farewell.

After Hancock’s death, Sam Adams had the satisfaction of being elected twice to the governorship, in 1795 and in 1796. He was still plain Sam Adams who lived frugally and shunned Boston society. He and his wife Betsy lived in an ugly frame house on Winter Street and rarely entertained.

The styles for men had changed, but Sam still wore his old-fashioned tie wig, cocked hat, knee breeches, and buckled shoes. And even as governor, he would have preferred to walk, as he had done when he was tax collector for Boston so long ago. But his friends presented him with a horse and carriage and insisted that he ride.

With the rising Federalist tide, Sam Adams knew defeat lay just ahead, so he announced toward the close of 1796 that he would not be a candidate for governor at the next election. In retirement he was a pathetic, broken-down old man who shuffled wearily about his house and in his garden.

His face would light up when old friends called and he could talk about the glorious past when, as the Man of the Revolution, he had fought, singlehanded at times, King George’s “menacing monsters.”

The palsy which had always shaken Sam Adams became so bad that he could no longer write. There was John Avery, though, his “faithful friend and secretary,” upon whom he could depend. He lived to see Thomas Jefferson become president of the United States and was heartened by what he believed was a victory for his own lifelong principles. “The storm is over, and we are in port,” he wrote Jefferson when the Republicans came into power.

The storm was over for Sam Adams in the early morning of October 2, 1803. His wife and daughter and a few close friends were at his bedside when death came peacefully. His funeral was quiet and simple as was fitting for the Old Puritan, and he was laid to rest in the Old Granary Burying Ground not far from where John Hancock lay.

Sam Adams and John Hancock had been active in the most stirring period of their country’s history. Although neither achieved greatness, each played his role in the creation of a new nation with honor and distinction. They served the cause of freedom with a devotion and dedication for which they should be honored and remembered as two of the foremost guardians of liberty.

Bibliography

Adams, Charles Francis (ed.). Works of John Adams, Vol. II. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1850.

Alden, Richard John. The American Revolution, 1775-1783. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954.

Allan, Herbert S. John Hancock: Patriot in Purple. New York: The Beechhurst Press, 1953.

American Heritage (eds.). Let Freedom Ring: The Story of Independence Hall. New York: American Heritage Publishing Company, 1962.

Blaney, Henry R. Old Boston. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1896.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker. John Adams and the American Revolution. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1949.

Drake, Samuel Adams. Old Boston Taverns and Tavern Clubs. Boston: W. A. Butterfield, 1917.

-. Old Landmarks and Historic Personages of Boston. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1900.

Fast, Howard. Citizen Tom Paine. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943.

Forbes, Esther. Paul Revere and the World He Lived In. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942.

French, Allen. The First Year of the American Revolution. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934.

Frothingham, Richard. History of the Siege of Boston and of the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1872.

-. Life and Times of Joseph Warren. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1865.

Hosmer, James K. Samuel Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1909.

Kraus, Michael. The United States to 1865. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1959.

Miller, John C. Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1936.

Porter, Edward G. Rambles in Old Boston. Boston: Cupples, Upham and Company, 1887.

Rowe, John. Letters and Diary. Boston: W. B. Clarke Company, 1903.

Scheer, George F. and Hugh F. Rankin. Rebels and Redcoats. New York: The World Publishing Company, 1957.

Thatcher, Benjamin B. Traits of the Tea Party. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1835.

Thwing, Annie Haven. Crooked and Narrow Streets of Town of Boston. Boston: M. Jones, 1920.

Tourtellot, Arthur B. The Charles. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1941.

Tudor, William. Life of James Otis of Massachusetts. Boston: Wells and Lilly Company, 1823.

Ward, Christopher. The War of the Revolution, Vol. I. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952.

Wecter, Dixon. The Hero in America. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941.

Wells, William V. Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, Vols. I—III. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1865.

Woodward, W. E. A New American History. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1936.

Index

Adams, Abigail

Adams,   Elizabeth   (Betty) Checkley

Adams,   Elizabeth   (Betsy) Wells, , no, 

 Adams, Hannah

Adams, John

appearance

on Hancock

on Otis

on Stamp Act crisis

defends British soldiers

delegate to First Continental Congress 

to Second Continental Congress

urges celebration of July 

Vice-President of United States

Adams, Samuel

appearance

attitude toward money

birth

financial problems

student at Harvard

father’s political influence

tax collector

marriages, palsy

wins Hancock

alarmed over taxation

denounces Stamp Act

enemy of

Hutchinson

elected to House of Representatives

“mob master” of Boston

Whig leader

Massachusetts Convention

boycotts English goods

attacks redcoats

threatened with arrest

demands removal of redcoats

Boston Massacre

committees of correspondence

agitates against Tea Act

opposition to Port Bill

delegate to First Continental Congress

to Second Continental Congress

warned of arrest

avoids capture

on Battle of Lexington

state senator

lieutenant governorgovernor

death

Adams, Deacon Samuel

Adams, Samuel, Jr.

Allen, Ethan

Arnold, Benedict

Attucks, Crispus  

Avery, John

Barre, Colonel Isaac

Barrett, Corporal Amos

Barrett, Colonel James  

Belcher, Jonathan 

Bernard, Francis

Boston, description of 

Boston Committee of Correspondence

Boston Committee of Safety

Boston Gazette

Boston Latin School

Boston Massacre

Boston Neck

Boston News-Letter

Boston Port Bill

Boston Tea Party

Bowdoin, James

Braintree, Mass.  

Breed’s Hill (Mass.)

Bunker Hill

Bunker Hill, Battle of

Burke, Edmund 

Bute, Lord

Caldwell, James 

Cambridge, Mass.

Carpenters’ Hall (Philadelphia)

Carr, Patrick

Castle Island

Castle William

Caucus clubs

Charles River

Charlestown, Mass.

Charlestown Neck

Church, Benjamin

Churches of Boston

Christ (Old North)

Old South Meetinghouse

Clark, Reverend Jonas

Coercive Acts  

Common Sense 

Conant, Colonel William

Concord, Mass.

Concord Bridge, Battle of

Continental Congress, First

Continental Congress, Second

Cooke, Elisha

Cooper, Reverend Samuel 

Cushing, Thomas

Dalrymple, Colonel William

Danvers, Mass.

Dawes, William

Declaration of Independence

Declaratory Act

Devens, Richard  

Dickinson, John

Dorchester Heights

Drowne, Deacon Shem

Duane, James

East India Company

Faneuil Hall

Fort Ticonderoga

Fort William and Mary  

Fourteenth Regiment (British)

Franklin, Benjamin

Fraunces Tavern 

French and Indian Wars

Gadsden, Christopher

Gage, General Thomas

Galloway, Joseph

General Court, Massachusetts Bay Colony

George III, of England

Goldfinch, Captain

Gray, Sam

Green Mountain Boys  

Grenville, George

Griffin’s Wharf

Guy Fawkes Day

Hancock, Dorothy Quincy

Hancock, John  

appearance

generosity

adopted by uncle

inherits fortune

supports Whigs

opposes StampAct

elected General Court

defies customs commissioners

colonel

opposes Tea Act

chairman Provincial Congress

delegate to First Continental Congress

to Second Continental Congress

heads Committee of Safety

warned of arrest

marriage

signs Declaration of Independence

governor

gout

political ambitions

death 

Hancock, John George Washington

Hancock, Lydia

Hancock, Thomas

Hancock’s Wharf

Harrington, Jonathan,  

Harrison, Mr.

Harvard College

Hillsborough, Lord

House of Representatives, Massachusetts Bay

Howe, General William

Hutchinson, Thomas

Independent Advertiser

Jay, John

Jefferson, Thomas

Johnson, Thomas

Kilroy, Private

Knowlton, Captain Thomas  

Knox, Henry

Land Bank

Land Bank Commissioners

Larkin, Deacon John 

Laurie, Captain Walter 

Lee, Richard Henry

Lexington, Battle of

Lexington, Mass.

Liberty Riot 

Liberty Tree

Livingston, Robert 

Long Room Club  

Long Wharf  

Lowell, John

McKean, Thomas 

Mackintosh, Alexander

Massachusetts Bay, Colony of

Massachusetts Circular Letter

Massachusetts Convention

Matlock, Timothy, 

Milton, Mass.  

Mitchell, Major 

Mohawks, Sam Adams’s

Molineaux, William

Montague, Admiral John

Montgomery, Private

Morris, Robert 

Munroe, Sergeant

Navigation Acts

Newman, Robert 

North, Lord

Oliver, Andrew

Otis, James

Paine, Robert Treat

Paine, Thomas  

Parker, John

Parker, Jonas 

Percy, Lord

Pigot, General Robert 

Pitcairn, Major

Pitt, William

Pitts, Lendall

Pope’s Day

Prescott, Dr. Samuel

Prescott, Colonel William

Preston, Captain

Prohibitory Act

Provincial Congress

Putnam, Israel

Quartering Act

Quincy, Josiah, Jr.

Randolph, Peyton 

Revere, Paul

Revolution, American

Rodney, Caesar

Rotch, Francis

Rowe, John

Salem, Mass.

Sherman, Roger  

Shirley, William

Smith, Colonel Francis

Somerset 

Sons of Liberty

Stamp Act

Stamp Act Congress

Stark, Colonel John  

Suffolk Resolves  

Sugar Act

Tea Act

Thomson, Charles

Tories

Townshend, Charles 

Townshend Acts

Twenty-ninth Regiment (British)

Virginia House of Burgesses

Virginia Resolutions

Ward, General Artemas

Warren, Joseph

drafts Suffolk Resolves

starts Revere on ride 

heads Committee of Safety

president Provincial Congress

spurs the Congress to action

fights at Bunker Hill

death 

Washington, George 

Watertown, Mass.

Whigs

Whittemore, Sam 

Wilson, James  

Writs of assistance

About the Author

Olga Hall-Quest, a Texan by birth, lived in New York City for many years. She received her B.S. degree from Columbia University and her M.A. from New York University. Mrs. Hall-Quest had wide experience as a teacher in both elementary and secondary schools. Among her other books were: With Stanley in Africa, How the Pilgrims Came to Plymouth, Shrine of Liberty: The Alamo, and Jamestown Adventure.

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by James Peck (9.4)

Mississippi Notebook: Freedom Summer June-August 1964

by Nicholas Von Hoffman (8.7)

Bayard Rustin: Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movement

by James Haskin (11.0)

Power to the People: The Rise and Fall of the Black Panther Party

by Jim Haskins (11.3)

Thaddeus Stevens: Militant Democrat and Fighter for Negro rights

by Elizabeth Lawson (11.7)

The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott, Founder of the Chicago Defender

by Roi Ottley (11.0)

Harlem: People, Power, and Politics 1900-1950

by Roi Ottley, previously published as New World A-Coming for which Ottley won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (9.5)

The Legend of John Brown

by Richard O. Boyer (15.9)

Military History

Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific with Maps

By Robert Leckie (7.4). One of our bestsellers with over 6,000 positive ratings on Amazon. One of the sources for the HBO series on "War in the Pacific."

Serenade to the Big Bird

by Bert Stiles (6.2)

Agent in Italy with a Study Guide

by S.K. (6.4)

One Soldier: Vietnam in 1968

by John Shook (7.3)

The New Legions

by Donald Duncan (6.7)

U.S. Marines in Vietnam: Small Unit Action in 1966

by Captain Francis J. "Bing" West (6.2)

Last Flight from Singapore

by Arthur Gerald Donahue, D.F.C. (8.7)

Patrol

by Fred Majdalany (4.9)

Journalism and Biographies

Runaway Russia

by Florence McLeod Harper (6.4)

Mrs. R: The Life of Eleanor Roosevelt

by Alfred Steinberg (8.3)

War in Korea: the Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent

by Marguerite Higgins (Pulitzer Prize Winner for International Reporting) (8.4)

Abraham Lincoln

by James Daugherty (8.8)

Revolution in Mexico-Death is Incidental

by Heath Bowman and Sterling Dickinson (8.8).

Benjamin Franklin: The First Civilized American

by Philips Russell (9.5)

Eugene V. Debs: A Man Unafraid 
by McAlister Coleman

Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life, an Autobiography

by Diego Rivera with Gladys March (10.7)

Sea and Earth: The Life of Rachel Carson

by Philip Sterling (7.3)

Vanquishing Yellow Fever: Walter Reed
by Edward F. Dolan (Author), Dan Siculan (Illustrator) (4.5)

Peace and Bread in Time of War 
by Jane Addams 9 (15.3)

A Stranger in My House: Jews and Arabs in the West Bank

by Walter Reich (14.5)

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