Lion of Liberty

by Harlow Giles Unger

  John Adams agreed with the governor’s words, but not his sentiments. “It is difficult to draw a line of distinction between the universal authority of Parliament over the colonies . . . and no authority at all,” Adams exclaimed. “If there be no such line, the consequence is either that the colonies are vassals of the Parliament or that they are totally independent. As it cannot be supposed to have been the intentions of the parties in the compact that we should be reduced to a state of vassalage, the conclusion is that it was their sense that we are thus independent.”16

  Hutchinson and Adams were both closer to the truth than they realized.

  When Virginia’s House of Burgesses finally reconvened in March 1773—more than a year after its previous meeting—Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and Thomas Jefferson responded to the Adams document and formed an eleven-man committee of correspondence.

  “Not thinking our old and leading members up to the point of forwardness and zeal which the times required,” Thomas Jefferson recalled,Mr. Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Francis L. Lee . . . and myself agreed to meet in the evening in a private room of the Raleigh [Tavern], to consult on the state of things. . . . We were all sensible that the most urgent of all measures was that of coming to an understanding with all the other colonies, to consider the British claims as a common cause to all, to produce a unity of action; and for this purpose that a committee of correspondence in each colony would be the best instrument for intercommunication; and that their first measure would probably be to propose a meeting of deputies from every colony at some central place, who should be charged with the direction of the measures which should be taken by all.17

  John Adams befriended Patrick Henry at the First Continental Congress and later sent him his pamphlet Thoughts on Government, which became the basis for Virginia’s constitution. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  Infuriated by the audacity of Henry and the others, Governor Dunmore dissolved the Assembly after only eleven days, but it was too late. The committees of correspondence that Henry and his counterparts across America had established became the mechanism for the colonies to act in concert if the mother country deprived Americans of more liberties.

  They would not have to wait long.

  Instead of rallying the support of powerful moneyed interests in the colonies, the English government persisted in driving them into the rebel camp. Early in 1773, East India Company shares plunged from 280 to 160 pence on the London Stock Exchange. The lingering Townshend Act tax on tea had cut American consumption so deeply that it pushed the company to the brink of bankruptcy, with 17 million tons of unsold tea spilling out of its British warehouses. So many members of Parliament owned East India Company shares, however, that they acted to save the company by exempting it from duties on tea landed in England for reshipment to America. In addition, Parliament gave the company a monopoly on tea sales in America, allowing it to bypass local wholesalers and retailers and sell directly to consumers through its own retail outlets at lower prices than independent retailers. With tea still one of America’s most popular beverages, the loss of tea sales threatened to bankrupt hundreds of small, independent stores and merchants—many of them Tories with no thoughts of rebellion until now.

  In September, the East India Company shipped a half-million pounds of tea to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Outside Philadelphia, a crowd of 8,000 threatened to board the Polly, which carried 697 chests of tea, as it prepared to sail up the Delaware River on Christmas Day. It put about and sailed out to sea, while East India Company consignees resigned, thus ending further tea shipments to the city. In New York, leaflets warned harbor pilots against guiding tea ships into the harbor, and after the Sons of Liberty labeled the East India Company’s consignees “enemies of America,” they too resigned. New York Governor William Tryon, who had moved from North Carolina, warned the British Board of Trade that it would require “the protection of the point of the bayonet and muzzle of the cannon”18 to land tea in New York. On December 2, the London arrived in Charleston, where a mass meeting produced results similar to those in Philadelphia and New York.

  On December 16, the first of three tea ships arrived in Boston Harbor and tied up at the wharfs. Hundreds of protesters pushed their way into Old South Church to demand that the governor order the ships back to England. When, at the end of the day, word arrived of his refusal, shouts of “To the wharf!” sent the crowd pouring into the streets towards the harbor. A group of forty or fifty disguised themselves amateurishly as Indians before boarding the three ships with blankets over their heads and coloring on their faces. Methodically, skillfully, they lifted tea chests from the holds with block and tackle, carefully split each open with axes, and dumped the tea and splintered chests into the water. They worked steadily until they had dumped all the tea—342 chests in all, valued at £9,659, or about $600,000 in today’s dollars. They damaged nothing else aboard the ships, and there were no fights, no brutality, no injuries to the crew—nothing but calm, orderly discharging of tea. Just who participated and who witnessed the “Tea Party” from shore remains one of American history’s tantalizing mysteries.

  On December 17, silversmith Paul Revere, a courier for Boston’s Sons of Liberty, rode to Philadelphia, spreading news of the “Boston Tea Party” in every town and village as he traveled—with dramatic effects. The colonies stopped drinking tea, ending forever the status of tea as America’s primary nonalcoholic beverage.

  London responded angrily to the Boston Tea Party, calling it vandalism. England’s attorney general formally charged Boston’s most outspoken political leaders—John Hancock and Samuel Adams, among others—with “the Crime of High Treason” and “High Misdemeanors” and ordered them brought to justice. Surprisingly, Virginia’s leaders did not disagree. Having abandoned anti-British boycotts, they had consumed 80,000 pounds of tea in 1773 and planned drinking more in 1774. Bostonians, Washington concluded, were mad, and like other Virginians he condemned the Boston Tea Party as vandalism and wanton destruction of private property—an unholy disregard for property rights.

  Although winter snows and bitter cold dampened Boston’s enthusiasm for street protests, spring brought a resumption of disorders followed by reprises of the Boston Tea Party elsewhere along the coast. A mob disguised as Indians boarded a tea ship in New York in March and dumped its entire cargo into the water. In April, a tea ship tied up in Annapolis, only to a have a mob set fire to it and destroy its cargo. A ship attempting to land tea in Greenwich, New Jersey, met the same fate.

  Infuriated by colonist insolence, George III ordered his ministry to punish Massachusetts in ways that would deter would-be rebels in other colonies. As ordered, Parliament responded with a series of “Coercive” measures, beginning with the Boston Port Bill that shut the city’s harbor until Boston compensated the East India Company for its losses and the customs office for uncollected duties on destroyed tea. All Boston-bound food supplies would divert to Salem, Massachusetts, where British troops would oversee delivery into Boston and, if necessary, starve the city into submission.

  The eloquent British parliamentarian Edmund Burke pleaded with his colleagues toreflect how you are to govern a people who think they ought to be free, and think they are not. Your scheme yields no revenue; it yields nothing but discontent, disorder, disobedience; and such is the state of America, that after wading up to your eyes in blood, you could only end just where you began; that is, to tax where no revenue is to be found.19

  The House of Commons ignored Burke and passed more Coercive Acts. One of them annulled the Massachusetts Charter and colonial self-government and gave the king or royal governor sole power to appoint or remove colonial executive officers, judges, and law enforcement officers. To silence radicals, Parliament banned town meetings without the consent of the governor and his approval of every item on the agenda.

  The first of the Coercive Acts seemed reasonable enough to those Virginians who had disapproved of the Boston Tea Party as vandalism. Bostonians ha
d condoned the destruction of private property; it was only just that they compensate the owners for damages. Even the legalized quartering of British troops in homes, as well as taverns and empty buildings, seemed reasonable enough to Virginia’s planter aristocracy as a necessary evil for maintaining law and order in rebellious Boston. But Virginia’s collective nods of sanctimonious approval for the initial Coercive Acts turned into collective outrage when Parliament extended its punishment of Bostonians beyond Massachusetts to other colonies, including Virginia. With passage of the Quebec Act, Parliament ended self-government in Canada and extended Canadian boundaries to the Ohio River, thus stripping Virginia and many of its wealthiest and most prominent citizens—Washington, Henry, the Lees, and many others—of hundreds of thousands of acres and millions of pounds of investments in lands north of the Ohio River extending to the Great Lakes. The Quebec Act proved a colossal political error that pushed Britain’s largest, wealthiest, and most heavily populated American colony firmly into the antiroyalist camp. Once fiercely loyal British subjects, Virginia’s Tidewater aristocracy now faced the loss of vast amounts of wealth accumulated over generations if the Quebec Act went into effect. With few exceptions, they decided to pool their collective wealth and organize the tens of thousands of Virginians who depended on them economically into an army to protect their property from the British government.

  Facing the loss of his Ohio properties, Henry raced to Williamsburg to organize the response. With Jefferson and other members of the committee of correspondence, Henry “cooked up a resolution . . . appointing the first day of June, on which the Boston Port Bill was to commence, for a day of fasting, humiliation and prayer to implore heaven to avert the evils of civil war, to inspire us with firmness in support of our rights, and to turn the hearts of the King and Parliament to moderation and justice.”20

  More important than the prayers it generated, Henry’s resolution served as a flare that signaled Virginia’s unity with other American colonies in their opposition to the Coercive Acts. Without support from the powerful Virginians, the other colonies would have been all but helpless to confront the powerful British empire. With Virginia, they could now resist the British with confidence of success.

  “The reception of the truly patriotic resolves of the House of Burgesses of Virginia gladdens the hearts of all who are friends to liberty,” Samuel Adams exulted to Richard Henry Lee. The New Hampshire Gazette was even more ecstatic: “Heaven itself seemed to have dictated it to the noble Virginians. O Americans, embrace this plan of union as your life. It will work out your political salvation.”21

  Chapter 6

  We Must Fight!

  With Virginia’s support, the other colonial committees made plans for an intercolonial congress in Philadelphia in September 1774. In anticipation, the Massachusetts committee drew up a binding covenant for the colonies to stop importing British goods and end all business dealings with Britain effective October 1—unless Parliament reopened the port of Boston and repealed the Coercive Acts.

  Henry urged Virginia’s Assembly to approve the covenant. Railing at the king, his ministers, and Parliament for starving the people of Boston, he worked the gallery spectators into such a frenzy that “some of the most prominent . . . ran up into the cupola and doused the royal flag which was there suspended,” according to Judge Spencer Roane.1

  “He is by far the most powerful speaker I ever heard,” Westmoreland planter George Mason declared.

  Every word he says not only engages but commands the attention; and your passions are no longer your own when he addresses them. But his eloquence is the smallest part of his merit. He is in my opinion the first man upon this continent, as well in abilities as public virtues, and had he lived in Rome . . . Mr. Henry’s talents must have put him at the head of that glorious commonwealth.

  Mason called Henry the “principal” author of the resolves and measures “intended for the preservation of our rights and liberties.”2

  Outside the assembly hall, Henry’s words roused people to action across Virginia. Along the shores of Chesapeake Bay, Richard Henry Lee’s neighbors, who had signed his Westmoreland Protests during the Stamp Act uprising, sent a huge supply of grain to Bostonians to ease the shortage created by the Boston Port Bill. The Virginia Gazette suggested a ban on horse racing and urged bettors to contribute moneys they would have spent on races to the relief of Boston. In Henry’s native Hanover County, farmers and other freeholders rallied around him, declaring,We are free men; we have a right to be so. . . . Let it suffice to say, one for all, we will never be taxed but by our own representatives; this is the great badge of freedom, and British America hath been hitherto distinguished by it. . . . Whether the people there [at Boston] were warranted by justice when they destroyed the tea we know not; but this we know, that the parliament, by their proceedings, have made us and all North America parties. . . . If our sister colony of Massachusetts Bay is enslaved we cannot long remain free. . . . We recommend the adoption of such measures as may produce a hearty union of all our countrymen and sister colonies. UNITED WE STAND, DIVIDED WE FALL. . . .3

  The British government responded by replacing the American-born civilian governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, with British General Thomas Gage, who marched into Boston with four divisions of troops and declared martial law.

  On August 1, the members of what had been Virginia’s House of Burgesses convened in Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg and agreed to cease buying all British goods except medicine and to end all exports, including tobacco, to which Britons had become addicted. It also voted to end the slave trade, which, it said, “we consider most dangerous to virtue and welfare in this country. ...”4 The convention then elected seven delegates to attend the intercolonial congress in Philadelphia, with George Washington receiving the most votes, followed by Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry. Thomas Jefferson failed to win a place among the delegates. To ensure a voice for conservative elders, the House named the venerable Edmund Pendleton of Caroline County, the Tidewater lawyer who had bitterly opposed Henry’s Stamp Act resolutions ten years earlier. Before the convention adjourned, Washington pledged, “I will raise one thousand men, subsist them at my own expense, and march myself at their head for the relief of Boston.”5

  At Washington’s invitation, Patrick Henry and Edmund Pendleton arrived at Mount Vernon on August 30 to rest up before proceeding together to Philadelphia the following day. Washington’s neighbor George Mason—firmly in favor of a blanket boycott of trade with Britain—joined them for supper. After a midday dinner the following day, Washington, Henry, and Pendleton mounted their horses and said their farewells to Martha. According to Pendleton, she stood at the door “talking like a Spartan to her son on his going to battle: ‘I hope you will all stand firm,’ she said. ‘I know George will.’”6

  The trio took four days to cover the 150 miles to Philadelphia by horseback and boat—often riding in the cool, predawn hours before breakfast and stopping for food and rest in Annapolis, Maryland; New Castle, Delaware; and Christina Ferry (now Wilmington), Delaware. Although Philadelphia took little or no notice of most arriving delegates, some 500 dignitaries and a delegation of officers from every military company went out to greet the celebrated Colonel George Washington and escort him and his friends to the city line, where a company of smartly uniformed riflemen and a military band escorted them from the city line past cheering crowds into the center of the city and the elegant City Tavern for a banquet. Of all the delegates, Washington was the most renowned. Every child in America—and many in Britain—could recount his military adventures in the West—the blood-curdling ambush by the French and Indians near Fort Duquesne [now Pittsburgh], the slaughter of 1,000 colonial troops, Washington’s daring escape through a hail of arrows and bullets, and his courage in leading survivors to safety.

  When Washington and Henry arrived in Philadelphia, Richard Henry Lee arranged for them to stay at the palatial mansion of his brother-in-law, Dr. William
Shippen Jr., America’s foremost lecturer on anatomy. Although scheduled to convene on Thursday, September 1, Congress did not have a quorum until the following Monday, but a banquet at City Tavern brought many delegates face-to-face before then. It proved a deep disappointment to both Henry and John Adams. “Fifty gentlemen, meeting together, all strangers, are not acquainted with each other’s language, ideas, views, designs,” Adams complained to his wife, Abigail. “They are therefore jealous of each other—fearful, timid, skittish.”7 Henry was neither fearful nor timid, nor skittish, but he was clearly uncomfortable—out of place, unable to understand the thinking or accents of many delegates—and with good reason. Without roads or public transport, establishment of cultural ties in colonial America had been difficult at best and often impossible. Philadelphia lay more than three days’ travel from New York, about ten days from Boston, and all but inaccessible overland from far-off towns such as Richmond or Charleston. There were few roads, and foul winter weather and spring rains isolated vast regions of the country for many months and made the South—and southerners—as foreign to most New Hampshiremen as China and the Chinese—and vice versa. In fact, only 60 percent of Americans had English origins. The rest were Dutch, French, German, Scottish, Scotch-Irish, Irish, even Swedish. Although English remained a common tongue after independence, German prevailed in much of Pennsylvania, Dutch along the Hudson River Valley in New York, French in Vermont and parts of New Hampshire and what would later become Maine. Authorschoolteacher Noah Webster compared the cacophony of languages to ancient Babel, and Benjamin Franklin had complained as early as 1750 that Germantown was engulfing Philadelphia. “Pennsylvania will in a few years become a German colony,” he growled. “Instead of learning our language, we must learn theirs, or live as in a foreign country.”8