Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  His wife, however, felt differently. After only half a year in England, Margaret already missed her native land. She may have wanted her new child to meet her family back in America. Given the growing sense of urgency surrounding Britain’s response to the Tea Party, Gage eventually decided that between the demands of his country and his wife, he had no choice but to return to America as military commander and royal governor of Massachusetts.

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  Once the Lively had sailed past the lighthouse set amid the cluster of little islands called the Brewsters (which the Pilgrims had named 153 years before for their lay minister William Brewster), the twenty-gun sloop-of-war headed north between Lovells Island to starboard and Georges Island to port. Up ahead, past Thompson, Spectacle, and Long islands to the west, was the cliff-faced oval of Castle William, where the British flag with its red St. George and blue St. Andrew crosses flew above the stone walls of a fort. About three miles beyond that Gage could see the rounded eminence of Boston’s Beacon Hill, surrounded by a bristle of spires and ship masts.

  For the next four days, Gage remained at the Castle, where he learned what he could from the tea consignees, whose confinement to the fort’s living quarters was now approaching six months. Also present at the Castle was Governor Thomas Hutchinson, who was soon to leave for London. Hutchinson, sixty-two, had come to represent all that the patriots claimed was wrong with the British Empire. In reality, he was far more sympathetic to the plight of provincial Massachusetts than his enemies ever allowed. Back in 1765 he had privately criticized the Stamp Act; he had also had reservations about many of the ministry’s subsequent actions. But rather than constantly challenge Parliament’s right to dictate policy, as the patriots insisted on doing, he felt it was in the colony’s best interests to work through proper governmental channels. At his house in Milton he had created his own version of an English country estate, where he watched in increasing bewilderment as the inhabitants of the province he loved above all else came to view him as a grasping and scheming traitor.

  Hutchinson and the tea consignees reported that Boston was in turmoil. Word of the Port Act, the first of several measures Gage was to enforce over the course of the next few months, had preceded the general by three days. The town was to be sealed off from almost all commercial activity until such time as “peace and obedience to the laws shall be so far restored.” By June 1, no ships requiring customs oversight were to enter Boston Harbor. By June 15, no ships were allowed to leave. With a fleet of British naval vessels patrolling a twenty-five-mile swath of coastline extending from Point Shirley to the north and Point Allerton to the south, Boston, the third largest port in North America, would be effectively cut off from the rest of the colonies and the world. Vessels were to go instead to Marblehead, twenty miles to the north, with nearby Salem becoming the new seat of provincial government as Boston was left to contemplate the enormity of its transgressions. Only after its citizens had repented of their sins and paid for the destroyed tea would the king and his ministers allow prosperity to return.

  Bostonians were stunned by the severity of the act. An entire community had been punished for the actions of a hundred or so rabble-rousers. Contrary to Britain’s own laws, Bostonians had been tried and condemned without having even been accused of a specific crime. By May 13 Josiah Quincy Jr., the lawyer who had warned back in December that desperate times were ahead, had already written a passionate response to the Boston Port Act that ended by quoting the Athenian statesman Solon. It was far better, Solon had said, “to repress the advances of tyranny and prevent its establishment.” But once tyranny had managed to assert itself, there was only one alternative: “Demolish it.”

  The loyalists surrounding Gage insisted that this heated rhetoric indicated that the Port Act was doing exactly as Parliament had intended. “I hear from many,” he reported to Secretary of State Lord Dartmouth, “that the act has staggered the most presumptuous.” What the patriots needed, Gage felt, was a chance for the consequences of the act to set in. “Minds so enflamed cannot cool at once,” he wrote Dartmouth, “so it may be better to give the shock they have received time to operate.” But as it turned out, time was not on Gage’s side.

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  On the very day that Gage arrived at the Castle, a town meeting was convened at its usual place on the second story of Boston’s Faneuil Hall on Dock Square, just a block to the north of King Street. Hanging from the walls were portraits of Peter Faneuil, the wealthy merchant of Huguenot descent who paid for the building’s construction in the 1740s; of former Massachusetts governor William Shirley; and of Isaac Barré, one of the patriots’ most outspoken friends in Parliament (even if he had voted in support of the Port Bill). On the ground floor beneath the hall, which was said to accommodate upward of 1,500 people, were the stalls of the town market. Swinging in the sky above the building’s cupola was a grasshopper weathervane (similar to that on London’s Royal Exchange) fashioned by Deacon Shem Drowne, the same coppersmith who had made the Indian archer above Province House.

  For the patriots, this “spacious hall” was a “noble school . . . where the meanest citizen . . . may deliver his sentiments and give his suffrage in very important matters, as freely as the greatest lord in the land.” For the loyalists, the town meetings at Faneuil Hall were closer to “a pandemonium than a convocation,” since any attempt to oppose the patriots was often met with shouts and even physical intimidation. All agreed that the last decade of political unrest had taken its toll on patriots and loyalists alike. But it wasn’t just the fisticuffs in the streets and the tarring and feathering. Something was going on inside all of them—a painful, almost cellular metamorphosis—as they struggled to define what it was to be an American in the British Empire.

  What the patriots were proposing, once the Enlightenment rhetoric and sanctimonious evocation of their forefathers had been pushed aside, was exactly what Governor Leverett had insisted on back in 1676: that Parliament had no say in what happened in Massachusetts. And as Thomas Hutchinson had pointed out just the year before, this was, in essence, a demand for independence—a word that these self-styled “conscience patriots” insisted was not yet part of their vocabulary. And as is often the case when someone is unable or unwilling to acknowledge the true implications of his or her beliefs, many of the patriots were plagued by periods of psychic and physical torment.

  James Otis was generally credited with initiating this remorseless quest for liberty back in 1761, by objecting to the British government’s right to search private premises without a warrant. Since then, the passionate attorney (whom John Adams dubbed the patriot’s Martin Luther) had dared to wonder out loud whether he’d been right. Otis’s mood swings and rants had become so extreme in recent years that he had been placed under the care of a family outside Boston. But Otis was only the most visible casualty of the tortured ambivalence that went with being a patriot. After representing the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre alongside Josiah Quincy in the fall of 1770, John Adams suffered a breakdown that required him to retreat temporarily to his ancestral home in Braintree. Two years later, he was distressed to discover that “my constitutional or habitual infirmities have not entirely forsaken me.” At a social gathering in Boston he lost control of himself when the subject turned to politics. In a violent verbal outburst he uttered the unspeakable truths that were on all their minds: “I said there was no more justice left in Britain than there was in hell—that I wished for war. . . . Such flights of passion, such starts of imagination, though they may [impress] a few of the fiery and inconsiderate, yet they lower, they sink a man.”

  They were a high-strung group of what we would call today overachievers—“ambitious beyond reason to excel,” as one of their descendants described them—and just about every leading patriot seemed to have some sort of psychosomatic complaint. The Reverend Samuel Cooper, whose dual role as a patriot and minister of the most affluent congregation in Boston le
d to the accusation that “silver-tongued Sam” possessed a “ductility quite Machiavellian,” suffered from what was said to be an addiction to snuff. John Hancock’s gout had a way of incapacitating him at times of greatest stress; and the lawyer Joseph Hawley, to whom John Adams deferred when it came to matters of political policy, was so racked by depression that he would one day take his own life. Even Josiah Quincy, who burned with a seemingly quenchless indignation, acknowledged, on occasion, that the loyalists might have a point.

  There was, however, one man who did not let the ambiguities upset him; who was so in sync with the great ideological engine driving the patriot movement that he transcended all the potential paradoxes and denials; and at 11:00 a.m. on May 13, the imperturbable Samuel Adams was chosen as moderator of the Boston town meeting.

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  He was fifty-one, but with his gray hair and trembling hands, he seemed much older. He had a resonant singing voice, a distrust of horses, and a giant Newfoundland dog named Queue that hated British soldiers. He had failed at every business venture he had ever attempted, but he had one extraordinary talent: he understood, in a deeply historical sense, the future.

  America had been founded by immigrants who, little thanks to their mother country, had made a life for themselves in a distant land. And now the mother country wanted to assert her right to control the descendants of those immigrants. But there was a blatant absurdity attached to this claim. England was a tiny island on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. America was a vast continent, with a population that doubled every twenty years and that would soon include more English people than lived in all of Britain. No matter how strong the ties between America and England, this fundamental fact could not be ignored.

  Samuel Adams lived and inhabited this truth. He invested it with the spiritual fervor of his Puritan ancestors but with an essential difference. Where the Puritans had seen God’s will lurking behind the seeming disorder of daily life, Adams, thanks to the Enlightenment, also saw a human hand. There were no unintended consequences in the eighteenth century. If something bad happened, someone had caused it to happen, and Boston was now the victim of a more-than-decade-old plot on the part of the British ministry to enslave America, to drain this bounteous land of all her resources so that England, an island lost to luxury and corruption, could sustain the fraudulent lifestyle to which it had become accustomed.

  Nothing could sway Samuel Adams from these beliefs. No personal antagonism (and there were plenty) was enough to make him lose sight of the struggle for American liberty. He’d labored for more than a decade writing articles and letters and attending meeting after meeting, but not until the fall of 1772, with the creation of the twenty-one-member Boston Committee of Correspondence, did he find a way to link the fate of Boston to the entire province and, ultimately, to all the colonies.

  Massachusetts (which then included what is today Maine) had more than 250 towns and a total population of about 300,000. By sending out open letters that were then discussed in town meetings across the colony, Boston patriots transformed what had once been a purely local form of government into a forum on the issues that affected everyone. Instead of worrying about repairing roads or bridges, citizens were now using the town meeting to debate the proper response to the Tea Act. This meant that even before Governor Hutchinson had a chance to issue his latest official pronouncement, the inhabitants of what were called the “country towns” of Massachusetts were talking among themselves, forming a consensus, and, more often than not, cheering Boston on its rebellious stand against British tyranny. Through the medium of the Committees of Correspondence, Samuel Adams and his compatriots had created what was, in essence, an extralegal, colony-wide network of communication that threatened to preempt the old hierarchical form of government.

  In the fall of 1772 the Boston committee announced its presence with the publication of the “Boston Declaration,” a kind of tutorial on why natural law superseded anything that Parliament could devise. To the committee members’ pleasant surprise, towns that had never before shown an interest in earlier political controversies responded warmly to Boston’s invitation to weigh in on the need to defend Massachusetts’s long-held liberties. Gorham (about ten miles inland of modern Portland, Maine) was one of seven townships granted to the veterans of King Philip’s War and their descendants in the early eighteenth century. During an Indian raid in 1746 that many town inhabitants still vividly remembered, five people had been killed and three abducted. For the citizens of Gorham, the fight for liberty was not about the current frustrations with Parliament; it was about the terror, anger, and violence that went with colonizing this ancient and blood-soaked land. “Our eyes have seen our young children weltering in their gore in our own houses, and our dearest friends led into captivity,” they wrote to the Boston Committee of Correspondence in January 1773. “We . . . have been used to earn our daily bread with our weapons in our hands. Therefore we cannot be supposed to be fully acquainted with the mysteries of court policy, but we look upon ourselves as able to judge so far concerning our rights as men. . . . We look with horror and indignation on the violation of them. . . . Many of our women have been used to handle the cartridge, and load the musket, and the swords which we whet and brightened for our enemies are not yet grown rusty.”

  In town after town, colonists took Boston’s statement of natural rights and made it their own. And as the citizens of Gorham had made unmistakably clear, they were more than willing to fight for those freedoms.

  Governor Hutchinson was so alarmed by the committee’s inroads throughout the province that he responded with a tutorial of his own. On January 1773 he delivered a lecture to both chambers of the General Court in which he pointed out the fallacies behind the committee’s assertions in the Boston Declaration. Instead of convincing the patriots of the errors of their ways, however, Hutchinson’s response only added to the growing momentum. Much to the governor’s apparent surprise, the Massachusetts House of Representatives quickly replied with a detailed treatise (written by members of the Committee of Correspondence) that laid the philosophical and legal groundwork for future thoughts about independence.

  In the months ahead, Hutchinson watched helplessly as the once lackadaisical pace of events in the colony seemed to accelerate into a disastrous rush. Soon after suffering through the storm ignited by his ill-conceived response to the Boston Declaration, Hutchinson found himself engulfed in the controversy surrounding the packet of letters leaked by Benjamin Franklin. Even before that began to die down in the fall of 1773, he was embroiled in the maneuverings that culminated in the Boston Tea Party. Through it all, the Boston Committee of Correspondence had been sending out letters that gave each controversy an impact and resonance it otherwise never would have had.

  The turnaround was remarkable. In the fall of 1772, Hutchinson had been congratulating himself on the contented calm that had settled over the colony. Then came the Committee of Correspondence, and within a year and a half, the governor’s reign was over—a downfall that had been hastened, if not scripted, by Samuel Adams and his junta of unelected committee members.

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  On the afternoon of May 13, 1774, in Faneuil Hall, the town meeting elected an eleven-man committee “to write a circular letter to the several towns of this province and to the several colonies, acquainting them with the present state of our affairs.” In addition to Samuel Adams, the committee included many members of the Committee of Correspondence, such as John Adams, Dr. Joseph Warren, Josiah Quincy Jr., and the mercurial and outspoken merchant William Molineux. But there were some surprising additions to the committee, most notably the politically amibiguous John Rowe, whose ties to the loyalists were as strong as, if not stronger than, his allegiance to the patriot cause.

  By naming Rowe and the others, Samuel Adams shrewdly addressed a potentially thorny problem. Boston had divided over the proper response to the Port Act. Many merchants were convinced that ther
e was a simple and sensible solution to the crisis, so sensible, in fact, that Benjamin Franklin had thought of it back in London soon after learning about the Tea Party. Why not simply pay for the tea? Rather than sit there and watch as commerce withered to nothing and the city filled up with British soldiers, why not swallow their collective pride and come up with the 9,660 pounds sterling (about $850,000 in today’s U.S. currency) required to put this whole sad affair behind them and move on with their lives?

  This was not what Samuel Adams and his compatriots wanted to hear. Rather than approaching the act as a problem to be solved, they saw it as an opportunity to be exploited. They argued that to capitulate now would only encourage even harsher measures in the future. And besides, given the haziness of the act’s wording, it was difficult to determine whether reimbursing the East India Company would be enough to convince the British Parliament to repeal the act. Instead of compliance, they wanted nothing less than a complete boycott of British goods—not just in Boston and Massachusetts but throughout all thirteen colonies.

  With the creation of the new committee containing Rowe and other merchants operating as a smoke screen, Adams proceeded to do exactly as he wanted. A motion was passed that the Committee of Correspondence should “dispatch messengers with all possible speed to the other colonies and the several towns in this province, charged with the letters [that] they have wrote relative to shutting up this harbor.” Then came the coup de grace: a motion was passed in support of the assertion that a boycott of British imports and exports “will prove the salvation of North America and her liberties.”

  Rowe assumed that the motion simply stated the mood of the meeting, and in the days ahead he worked with the committee to articulate what was supposed to be the town’s official response to the Boston Port Act. But it was all for nothing—the committee never delivered a recommendation. In the meantime, the Boston Committee of Correspondence’s May 13 letters stating the need for a boycott had long since been sent. The impression broadcast throughout Massachusetts and America was that Boston unanimously supported a boycott and expected the other colonies to follow suit. Bostonians, however, were far from agreed as to what to do about the Port Bill.