Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  Virginia’s appointed stamp commissioner was plantation owner Colonel George Mercer, a close friend to George Washington, it so happened. He arrived in Williamsburg from London just a day or two before the tax was to take effect, only to encounter a large, restless crowd demanding he step down as stamp commissioner. He asked for time to consider the crowd’s plea, then hurried over to a nearby coffeehouse to consult with Royal Governor Francis Fauquier—who later said he would have called the protesting crowd a “mob,” except that it was “chiefly if not altogether composed of Gentlemen of property in the Colony, some of them at the Head of their respective counties, and Merchants of the country, whether English, Scotch, or Virginia.”

  The next morning, Mercer arose to find an estimated two thousand persons awaiting him…and his answer. Deciding that discretion should rule in the face of such numbers, he promptly resigned as stamp commissioner.

  Early Internet

  SO, THERE WERE THE BOSTON MASSACRE AND THE BOSTON TEA PARTY. BUT, IN between, there also was the Gaspee Incident.

  The Gaspee, a British armed schooner, was on customs duty and chasing smugglers in Narragansett Bay one night in June of 1772. Unfortunately for ship and crew, it ran aground. At which point a crowd of Rhode Islanders, some of them prominent citizens of the Providence area, stormed the ship and burned it to the waterline.

  This seemingly rash act came during a relatively quiet period for the uneasy relationship between the colonies and the Mother Country. Thanks to the repeal of the Townshend Acts, the quarrels had abated for the moment. In North Carolina, all attention recently had been focused upon the minor war between uplanders and lowlanders, with Royal Governor William Tryon and his planter allies of the lowlands roundly defeating the upland “Regulators,” as they were called, in the Battle of Alamance Creek. In Pennsylvania, would-be settlers from Connecticut tilted with Pennsylvanians over land in the Wyoming Valley, while to the north others hungry for land argued over claims in the Hampshire Grants, located between New York and New Hampshire.

  The Gaspee Incident, however, shifted the colonial focus back to relations with Mother England. While moderate Patriots were aghast at the outright attack on an armed British ship, local efforts to unearth the perpetrators were not taken seriously. But then London sent a royal investigating commission—with stern promises of trial in England for the guilty parties, probably followed by hangings. The commission, though, failed to find a single person to prosecute. With such mockery made of royal authority, Rhode Island’s Collector of Customs could only moan, “There’s an end to collecting a revenue and enforcing the acts of trade.”

  From the Patriot point of view, on the other hand, there was the danger that royal use of an investigatory commission in one case could be a precedent for the intrusion of like bodies in all kinds of other colonial affairs.

  For all the Royals and Loyalists in North America, meanwhile, there was worse news than the failure of the Gaspee commission, far worse, yet to come. In Massachusetts, Governor Thomas Hutchison put out the word that starting in 1773 he and the colony’s judges would be paid their salaries by the Crown, meaning, according to the onlooking Patriots, that colonial officials would be beyond local control. In no time, reinvigorated Committees of Correspondence were back in action in Boston and throughout the colony. Their stream of resolutions, pamphlets, and news items led to the formation of more such committees in town after town, matched by a similar eruption of revolutionary cells in colony after colony.

  In the end, through organizations such as the Sons of Liberty and the multitudinous committees of correspondence springing up all over, the Patriots of North America had formed an interlocking “Internet,” providing one another with the latest in revolutionary words and deeds.

  In Virginia, for example, the House of Burgesses in March of 1773 formed a colony level Committee of Correspondence specifically to look into the Gaspee Incident and its ramifications. The empowering resolution, adopted on a motion by Thomas Jefferson’s brother-in-law, Dabney Carr, asked the legislatures of Virginia’s sister colonies to appoint one or more persons of their own membership as like committees “to communicate from time to time…”

  In the Virginia capital of Williamsburg the very next day, the local Virginia Gazette carried an explanation by an unnamed “Gentleman of Distinction,” probably a Burgesses leader. The item said in part: “…[W]e are endeavoring to bring our Sister Colonies into the strictist union with us; that we may resent, in one Body, any Steps that may be taken by Administration to deprive any one of us the least Particle of our Rights and Liberties.”

  While not the first such example to be seen or heard in these revolutionary days, these were the code words on the tongues of Patriots far and wide. Colonies in a Union. Our rights. Our liberties.

  Up in New England, instead of Web sites spreading the word of this early “Internet,” it often was horseback riders galloping into far-flung towns and villages with the latest news or Patriot propaganda. “Selected riders carried the writings…deep into the Berkshire hills, to the green shores of Rhode Island, down through the rolling Connecticut fields, far over the New Hampshire border,” wrote Bruce Lancaster in his history, The American Revolution.

  In this regard, he also noted, “No horseman was busier than silversmith Paul Revere, who might have a mass of pamphlets or letters or only a scrap of paper bearing the single line: ‘Mr. Revere will give you all the news. J. Adams.’”

  John Adams, naturally.

  America’s Man in London

  HE HAD KNOWN THAT TAKING ON THE ROLE OF LONDON AGENT—I.E., LOBBYIST—for his native Massachusetts would endanger his many connections in England. For all her faults, he loved the Mother Country. And he was quite a well-known figure there. He enjoyed a Crown salary as deputy postmaster general for America. He was a recipient of British scientific honors, he had many friends in high and low places…he had even talked a number of them into joining him in plans to found a twenty-million–acre western colony in lands later to comprise the state of Illinois.

  Despite the opposition of Lord Hillsborough, secretary of state for America, the truly high and mighty Privy Council had approved the scheme; the chagrined Hillsborough had then resigned. Benjamin Franklin, together with his son William, also a committed Anglophile, had the “right people” behind them and stood poised to reap a fortune.

  But the Boston “Massacre,” an outgrowth of protests over the latest British decision to quarter troops in Boston, rankled and deeply offended. Never mind that a handful of British soldiers had been hard-pressed by an angry, dangerous-looking mob of about four hundred Colonials. For Ben Franklin, the street mob wasn’t the real issue. The issue, he said in a letter to a friend back in Massachusetts, was that it was unconstitutional for the British to keep “a standing army…among us in time of peace, without the consent of our assemblies.” Not even the king, Franklin argued, could do the same in England without the approval of Parliament.

  And so, putting aside all risks, when the Massachusetts legislature ignored acting Governor Thomas Hutchison’s objections and decided to choose its own agent, Ben Franklin agreed to be the colony’s man in London.

  Franklin’s stint in England started out well enough, but not quite three years later, with violent revolution stirring in America, the erudite Franklin came across a set of potentially incendiary letters that Hutchison had penned back in 1768 and 1769, during the riots that had greeted the punitive Townshend Acts.

  In the course of communicating with a Treasury official named Thomas Whatley, Hutchison had called for the deployment of British troops to discourage the mobs on Boston’s streets. Worse, he had stated, “There must be some abridgement of what is called British liberty.” Franklin sent the letters back to Boston to show, he later said, that not all the troublemaking could be blamed upon the British—there were also ill-advised Loyalist friends and agents, like Hutchison.

  When the gist of the governor’s remarks became public, a double furor ar
ose. “From Worcester to Boston indignant citizens demanded Hutchison’s ouster as governor,” wrote historian Thomas Fleming in his book Liberty! The American Revolution. “As the story spread to other colonies, Hutchison was burned in effigy in several cities and compared to Judas Iscariot, Nero and other villains of history.” Franklin soon received a petition from the Massachusetts legislature requesting that Hutchison be removed as governor.

  It would now be agent Franklin’s delicate job to see that the petition reached the desk of King George III, after traveling through the hands of Lord Dartmouth, the new secretary of state for America.

  Of course, wasn’t it Ben Franklin himself who first obtained the letters and sent them back to America? Where they became public and thus brought about the framing of the petition? Wouldn’t it seem—in England, anyway—that he somehow orchestrated the entire affair?

  Keep in mind, too, that Ben Franklin was a very public figure in the Mother Country. Not only was he active socially, he knew how to get his name—and his American point of view—in the newspapers. “In London,” wrote Fleming, “Benjamin Franklin jousted with anti-Americans in the press, but his wit seemed to make the dispute almost good-natured. ‘Rules By Which A Great Empire May Be Reduced To a Small One’ skewered the government’s American policies. ‘An Edict By The King of Prussia’ declared England to be a Prussian colony, because the first settlers had been Germans. In Franklin’s satiric scenario, the king of Prussia proceeded to announce taxes and duties similar to the ones England had imposed on America, warning that anyone who opposed them would be guilty of high treason.”

  Where Franklin obtained the Hutchison-Whatley correspondence is still not known for sure, but the deceased Thomas Whatley’s brother William accused Franklin’s fellow American John Temple of stealing the letters. Temple then fought a duel with William Whatley and wounded him. Franklin, shocked at these events, hurriedly placed a notice in the Public Advertiser saying, “I alone am the person who obtained and transmitted to Boston the letters in question.” He also asserted that the letters “by public officers to persons in public stations” were not really private and, in fact, were well known to various officials in England.

  Then came a summons for Franklin to attend a hearing before the august Privy Council on the petition to remove Governor Hutchison of Massachusetts—on January 29, 1774, Ben Franklin would be standing in the “Cockpit” before England’s most powerful men, other than the king himself.

  The Cockpit? Once the site of cockfighting and located in a section of Whitehall, noted Fleming, it was now a meeting place for the prime minister and his cabinet. And the rumor in London was that certain parties were out to skewer colonial America’s best-known spokesman in England.

  As if Ben Franklin didn’t have enough to worry about while he—and the two lawyers he hired—prepared for the crucial confrontation, there now came, by ship, a startling bulletin from the American colonies. It was news of the Boston Tea Party and related acts of defiance in America. Here was added trouble…or could it be unexpected opportunity for the clever lobbyist?

  As Fleming also noted, the latest news from America presented the issue in simple terms. “The King’s ministers, face to face with the one American in London who could speak for all the colonies, could prove they wanted to settle the quarrel peacefully by letting Benjamin Franklin explain why Thomas Hutchison’s talk of abridging British liberty was at the heart of America’s grievance against England.”

  Unfortunately, Franklin would be pitted against newly appointed Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn, whose sense of conscience even Prime Minister Lord North called “accommodating.” King George III once echoed North’s opinion by noting the “duplicity that often appears in his [Wedderburn’s] political deportment.”

  In anticipation of a bloodletting, a rare total of thirty-six English lords crowded into the chamber chosen for what would amount to a prosecutorial attack on Ben Franklin by Wedderburn. “They sat at a long table in the center of the spacious chamber, built in drawing-room style with a fireplace at one end,” wrote Fleming. “Through the windows at that end loomed St. James palace, the King’s residence.”

  So crowded was the room that Lord North, arriving late, couldn’t find a seat and had to stand beside the seated council president. Then, after Franklin’s two lawyers presented the argument for removal of Governor Hutchison, Wedderburn advanced to the table and launched a scathing personal attack upon Ben Franklin.

  Governor Thomas Hutchison had only acted, only spoken, as a loyal minion of the king, argued Wedderburn. If he had lost the confidence of the so-called “people,” that was Franklin’s doing. What’s more, Franklin was a thief! “I hope, my Lords, you will mark and brand that man, for the honor of this country, of Europe, of mankind,” shrilled the Scotsman Wedderburn.

  The solicitor general indulged in his tirade for almost a full hour, and all the while Ben Franklin stood quietly, said an onlooker later, “like a rock, in the same posture, his head resting on his left hand, and in that attitude abiding the pelting of the pitiless storm.”

  In the meantime, added Fleming’s account, “the Cockpit rocked with laughter at Wedderburn’s sallies and the lords of the Privy Council studied him [Franklin] with mocking, haughty eyes.”

  Finally, thankfully, the storm of abuse ended, unanswered at the moment by its victim. Ben Franklin of course left the chamber deeply humiliated, but at the same time the scales had dropped from his eyes. Clearly, there could be no real accommodation between the Mother Country and her restless, freedom-seeking Colonials. “The deep affection he had acquired for England and Englishmen had been demolished in front of his eyes,” wrote Fleming. “That these great lords, most of whom he knew personally, could allow him to become the target of a man as despicable as Alexander Wedderburn was almost beyond belief. A profound, even immense personal resentment multiplied his rage.”

  It may or may not be true, but there is a postscript to relate here as well. While the Revolution would later prove the ultimate satisfaction for Ben Franklin’s wounded feelings, he allegedly was able to take Wedderburn by the arm as the crowd in the Cockpit broke up and left the bloodied chamber, and Franklin was able to whisper into the Scotsman’s ear this prophetic promise: “I will make your master a little king for this.”

  True story or not, in the coming years that would be an outcome to which Ben Franklin himself would contribute in great measure.

  “I Am an American!”

  IT WAS A FAREWELL DINNER TO REMEMBER. THERE WAS THE MASSACHUSETTS firebrand Samuel Adams, rough, tough…and dressed in a wine-colored suit, a gift from the Sons of Liberty. There, too, was Virginia’s tall, imposing Colonel George Washington, rather stunning in blue and gold braid. John Adams, for that matter, wore blue and canary, looking handsome in his wig.

  The site was the City Tavern on Philadelphia’s Walnut Street. The occasion, on October 20, 1774, was an end…and a beginning, really. It was a farewell dinner for the fifty-six members of America’s first Congress but a prelude also for those future Continental Congresses that would authorize creation of a national army, declare independence from England, and make war, revolutionary war.

  Not that it was the very first congress ever held in the colonies. In fact, two such gatherings had preceded it. The first, attracting representatives from New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, had met in Albany in 1754 to consider a concerted approach to Indian relations—and to hear Benjamin Franklin’s discussion of a colonial union. Next, in 1765, came the Stamp Act Congress, a three-week meeting in New York of delegates from nine colonies. They sent George III a petition calling for repeal of the Stamp Act, an action eventually taken.

  Just nine years later, in 1774, the stubborn Colonials were at it again, this time in response to the Coercive or Intolerable Acts passed by Parliament, specifically the measure closing the port of Boston to all shipping except for military supplies and essential foodstuffs. That legislative action was taken in Eng
land on March 31, but America wouldn’t receive word of the blockade until the docking of the first ship to cross the Atlantic from England.

  Once the bitter news reached America, however, Patriot organizations in the various colonies wasted little time in agreeing to concerted action. As early as May 17, Providence, Rhode Island, issued a call for a colony-wide congress to discuss the latest British restrictions on colonial freedoms. Philadelphia chimed in on May 21 and New York followed suit May 23.

  In Williamsburg, Virginia, Royal Governor Lord Dunmore had dissolved his obstreperous Virginia Assembly, but no great matter—members of the House of Burgesses met in Raleigh Tavern on May 27 to issue their own call for a Continental Congress. It should develop “a general and uniform plan for the defense and preservation of our common rights,” the Virginians resolved.

  Thus it would be, and from June to August of that year, the various colonies—Georgia excepted—went about the business of choosing the men (for they were all men) who would represent them at this greatest, most important colonial congress yet.

  The newly chosen delegates would be traveling to Philadelphia, the meeting place suggested by the Massachusetts Assembly when it acted on June 17 to join the stampede toward a congress. As events turned out, forty of the original fifty-six convened as a single legislative body on September 5, 1774, in the city’s newly constructed Carpenters’ Hall. Their remaining brethren would be filtering into town shortly.

  Church bells in the city of thirty thousand had rung out in greeting, and now, in their first legislative hall, the delegates would be hearing the repeated peal of clarion calls to action. First, though, the housekeeping preliminaries allowed one and all to look about and gauge their fellow delegates, in many cases for the first time. “Big, dark John Sullivan, lawyer and militia major from New Hampshire, could soon pick out Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Matthew Tilghman of Maryland, George Read of Delaware and Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina,” wrote Bruce Lancaster in The American Revolution. “Gray old Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, veteran of that first, feeble Congress in Albany in 1754, sat near the dais, listening to John Dickinson of Pennsylvania and Caesar Rodney of Delaware.”