Last Refuge of Scoundrels

by Paul Lussier

  All American gods. All American heroes. The furthest thing from lily-white. Each his own brand of mad.

  Dr. Joseph Warren didn’t speak much. Mostly he came and went under his pen name, “Paskalos,” and hurled some of the best invective at England in Samuel Adams’s rag, the Gazette. He was said to be a good man, who had earned his popularity doling out free smallpox inoculations to the poor and choosing to live amid the ghostly, diseased, leprous forgotten on Castle Island. He said all the right things: argued for compassion for the poor, fairness under the law, even the need to raise our own army, which he secretly lusted to command. For the time being he was settling for secretly leading the Sons of Liberty, those roving shock troops that roamed the city and countryside clear to Medford giving innocent citizens and others an impossible time.

  Obsessed with death and glory, he’d routinely recruit needy Harvard students (including me, one time) to dig up shallow graves for him so he could dissect the corpses and wanted nothing more out of life than to die with his knees steeped in blood. He did just that, at Bunker Hill, after having predicted his death to the day.

  James Otis, code-named “Hampden,” was the best-loved lawyer in Boston—constantly threatening to hang himself, shoot himself, or bash someone with a brick. Hailed across the globe for his searing speech denouncing the hated “Writs of Assistance” (general search warrants issued by the crown to ferret out illegal goods), he took up the issue of the right to privacy and, for the first time in history, made it a viable cause (I read him religiously down in Charleston). When he wasn’t skewering Massachusetts’s Governor Bernard and his lieutenant, Hutchinson, in the press, he was banging his head against posts and racing through the statehouse during business hours screaming “Fire!” He’d howl at the moon, fire his musket without provocation, and, from his window, toss whatever he could lay his hands on at pedestrians, shouting “A man’s right to his life is his liberty, no created being could rightfully contest!” while alternately spewing “trash, obsceneness, profaneness, nonsense, and distraction” (according to John Adams) into the air. He was finally tied up, strapped down, and carried off to a farm, where he spent the latter part of his life. He too predicted the manner of his death correctly—by lightning.

  Samuel Adams, “Vindex.” The trouble with Adams was that although he said and wrote all the right things about liberty and was far and away the most aggressive advocate of independence and, later, war, he meant little of it and everyone knew it. Certainly, if one were to take his writings alone and were pressed in one’s search for heroes (as History always is), one could ferret out in his scathing attacks against monarchy and Parliament powerful, forward-thinking notions about a new and different democratic state. One could also find shining proof of his respect for the masses in his insistence on having a balcony built in the statehouse where the people were let in to watch the proceedings.

  But these records don’t reveal the true story. The wisdom and attitude on the street held Samuel Adams to be a religious fanatic, with antiquated and dangerous puritanical ideas of, yes, an independent, deeply religious republic, stoic to the core, with himself the arbiter of morals, and with intolerance for Quakers, Jews, Catholics, even Huguenots (all together, a good twenty percent of Boston’s population).

  As for his celebrated lack of interest in money—demonstrated by his tattered vest and dirty hair—even his cousin John Adams attributed this and his hatred of the British not to Lockean ideas of freedom but to his family being bankrupted after Parliament clamped down on the illegal land schemes his father was counting on to make them rich. John Adams: “Oh, he affects to despise riches, and not to dread Poverty, but in fact, no man is more ambitious for an elegant life style than he.” The greatest libertarian the world had ever seen? Maybe, maybe not. What we saw at the time was a not-so-well-meaning man, Boston’s ex-tax collector, who was doing his damnedest to avoid a jail sentence hanging over his head (for embezzling seven thousand pounds from the state of Massachusetts) by gathering support to overthrow the British crown.

  Hancock was another character who, in the intervening years, had emerged as an apparently bright and shining Patriot. Patriot, maybe. Bright? Decidedly not. Delicate, frail, whiny, tall, with eyes much too far apart, he was a sucker for flattery and had been complimented and cajoled into a friendship with Samuel Adams, who wanted access to Hancock’s cash in case the Puritan state never took hold and he was in need of bail (in fact, Hancock did wind up paying his embezzlement fines). Not being a very swift fellow (complete sentences a problem), he was popular with the ladies, and although he gave the rhetoric of Revolution his best “I-never-quite-made-it-through-Harvard-College” try, he was much less convincing than the others. Maybe it was the fact that ten years later he was still miffed over not being invited to the coronation of George III. (Or perhaps it was those fantasies he had of being crowned king himself.)

  Plagued by unreasonable fears, Hancock saw ghosts and lurking disease everywhere. Had it not been for the stress-relieving ritual executed by his loyal staff at his bidding of regularly smashing bone china because he claimed the sound cleared his mind, Hancock would probably never have lived to implant his gargantuan signature onto that famous parchment of the Declaration of Independence, written up in Carpenter’s Hall on one sweltering July afternoon.

  Then there was the “so very fat” John Adams who just wanted to be liked—another one History regards as a lover of the people. Which is particularly unsettling given Adams’s phobia of crowds and any activity that involved small talk, flattery, kind remarks, or discussing under any circumstances horses, women, weather, or dogs. Instead of relating, he preferred simply to judge, and did so, harshly. Even his own wife, his beloved Abigail, he excoriated publicly for singing like a canary, and looking like a pigeon when she walked. It was widely believed, in fact, that his commitment to laying the foundation for our independent country was mostly an excuse to get away from his wife, from whom at one point he stayed away for well on four years.

  Adams wanted to be seen as manly and also as tall—the latter, believe it or not, easier for him to pull off than the former (thanks to robes with vertical pleats and his insistence that he wasn’t short so much as fat). He had a volcanic temper and conspicuous breasts, and in his barrister’s robe of scarlet looked rather like an overripe, bewigged tomato.

  Despite a history of “fidgets, piddlings, irritabilities, insomnia, rashes, failing eyesight and an array of nervous ticks,” John Adams somehow found the stamina to manage long hours for The Cause. Good for business, he declared openly, all those political gatherings. “Good for ‘my little reputation,’” he declared, while passing out his card: “John Adams, Esq.” To “increase his connections with the people” (that is, to increase his roster of clients) was his motive; for, things being the way they were, “everyone was in trouble and in need of a lawyer, no matter the side.” A slave owner who needed defending against uppity servants; a man accused of rape; or a man charged with fathering a bastard (“I fucked once, but I minded my pullbacks, I did”). They all got off with Adams’s advocacy. So too did John Hancock once walk scot-free with Adams’s help, despite the fact that he’d shoved a customs officer into a ship’s cabin and then had him dragged through the street by his hair.

  So Adams gladly talked the talk of Revolution, mostly because it paid. Even though privately he was rigidly conservative, fearing rebellion would dangerously “embolden the little people,” that Britain was at worst misguided, never despotic, and that society required perfect submission to government: “Even in four-year-olds, for goodness’ sake, there are constitutional inequalities. Pray let nature alone.”

  And finally, there was Dr. Benjamin Church: the last of the coven making himself known at the Green Dragon Tavern. Here was the one deemed the standard bearer of The Cause. His very existence had come to define Patriotism. The first time I went to watch him, to listen to his poetry, such an aura preceded him that I was trembling.

  He turned
out to be a British spy.

  So these were the famous advocates of liberty I’d wanted to come to Boston to observe firsthand, whose reputations had awed me for four years, and whose oratory I’d read and been inspired by—all compromised, every last one of them. How shocked I was to find that few in their own environs took them seriously.

  So how then did they come to hold such position, such esteem? The truth is: They didn’t. When, soon after 1769, things started accelerating toward war, everyone understood that Venus was their inspiration, not Hancock, Warren, Church, or Adams—Samuel or John.

  It is true that the road to war began with a rare event, but not trade restrictions or rhetoric of a new and unusual kind. The American War for Independence began with Venus’ attempt to eclipse the sun. And those who choose to disagree with that are those who deny the truth: that human imagination, not documented facts or events, moves History, blow by blow.

  In 1769, the same year I returned to Boston, Venus went retrograde in her orbit, passing directly and defiantly in front of the sun instead of, as was usual, politely around.

  When news broke of the impending cosmic spectacle, the populace went mad. Although astronomers insisted that the event was insignificant beyond the scientific domain (a chance to better measure the distance of the earth from the sun), it was no use—the people would not be swayed.

  All over Boston, telescopes were set up in strategic locations, and as far north as Newfoundland crowds of thousands wrestled each other for tickets to sit in attendance as the astronomers watched the sky, announcing their observations to the breathless assembly.

  Prognosticators, soothsayers, and charlatans alike spoke from caves, mountaintops, and almanacs, predicting more rain, the world’s end, even the assassination of George III, not to mention the discovery of an exotic new spice isle. “Venus, Venus be brave!” you heard until blue in the face. Tell me that the events that transpired about this time—particularly in Boston, where Venus fervor was especially keen—were unconnected to this cosmological phenomenon, and I’ll tell you: Not so.

  Tell me, then, why virtually overnight, customs commissioners sent by England “to ensure the peace” were silenced, mocked, and locked into cabins on ships, when nothing in their approach to policy had changed from what it had been before.

  Explain to me why soldiers sent from England “to enforce the peace” and quartered all over town—fifteen hundred, all told, and more set to come—were only now barred from homes and lured into abandoned warehouses to be jailed, just for kicks, with a few vagrants, the diseased, and old whores.

  Explain to me too why just then Governor Bernard ordered cannon positioned directly outside the statehouse door, why the long-held and cherished right of assembly in America suddenly was on the wane.

  And explain to me why I chose to do what I did when I did: creep into the college library and cut a heart-shaped scrap out of the portrait of Governor Bernard. Not only that, but I fed it to some gulls, as if it were a real heart.

  I did it because, like everyone else, whether rational or not, I was emboldened by Venus’ example, by the possibility of the triumph of the tiny planet, and by love. I did it because Venus’ challenge spoke to what was deep in my heart: a desire to break with tradition and win the day.

  A burning desire, all too human, to cut the heart out of Governor Bernard’s likeness, because to me the portrait lacked totally in human dimension anyway and looked more real this way. I had no political comment whatsoever in mind; I was simply a lonely, drunk young man, sick with lovelessness and disillusion, tired of the gap between representation and reality. Governor Bernard, I was certain, was no more brightly hued and beatific than my father was kind, or than John Adams was a Rebel with a legitimate Cause.

  “So fine, let the records, the documents, the writings, and this oil before me be false! And let’s not make any bones about it. Let’s cut out the heart and let it be known that this portrait, ladies and gentlemen, just isn’t so!”

  It happened that this antic of mine was considered treasonous, and my claims to truth-seeking and not Tory-bashing fell on deaf ears. It didn’t help, of course, that Bernard had fled Boston for his life a week before—so fast that he had forgotten his wife at the dock—and Tories were on the hunt for revenge. Little did I know that the who-cut-the-heart-out-of-the-canvas-painting puzzle would consume most of Boston and start me on the road to Revolution.

  Within two days of my misdeed I was apprehended by a fellow student, a snot-nosed Tory named James Billingsley, who, as it turns out, had suspected me all along. Had I been thinking, of course, I never would have attended the Rebel fireworks display celebrating Bernard’s flight (poor hapless governor; even the ship consigned to whisk him away had fallen into the wind and, a week later, being still barely offshore, he had the best view of the show). Of course the celebration was riddled with Tory spies, including the aforementioned Billingsley, the nasty Tory with mucus perpetually oozing out of his face, who apparently had been suspecting me all along.

  For my sin, the rebellious defacement of the governor’s portrait, I was dragged to an abandoned blacksmith’s shop, cast to the ground, and roundly kicked in the head, throat, teeth, and stomach until I bled and pleaded for mercy. I quickly agreed, in exchange for my life, to do what I could to help my tormentors ruin John Hancock, who the Tories guessed (wrongly) was the ringleader of the Rebels and (rightly) the one financing the presses and the parties enjoining people to resist England, rise, and revolt.

  “Sam Adams writes the letter, yes, but Hancock pays the postage,” they used to say. “So break him, Lawrence. Or die.”

  They had just the plan . . .

  CHAPTER 11

  Father and Son

  The Tories’ campaign to break John Hancock was a sign of how out of touch they were. A series of essays running in their Chronicle was designed to sway public opinion. It attacked Hancock for being stupid and vain, but since nobody read the Tory rag but Tories (a case of preaching to the choir if ever there was one), the insults nonetheless added fuel to the fire about to rage insanely out of control, culminating with the Boston Massacre.

  They called Hancock a “Milch Cow,” a “weasel-brain,” an “aristocrat with a skull of uncommon thickness and a brain so small that its contents would not fill a teacup.” Excerpts were posted on tavern walls as entertainment. About the only individuals who didn’t find them funny were the “Gang of Six,” as they’d come to be called (Adams, Adams, Hancock, Warren, Otis, Church). It was joked that they failed to detect any humor in the exercise because they were the only ones who knew Hancock well enough to know the accusations, base language notwithstanding, to be decidedly true.

  Sam Adams’s belief that “the key [to successful propaganda] was the emotions, not the mind” was resplendently evident in his Journal of Occurrences, a “true” chronicle of the blazing-hot atrocities allegedly committed by the soldiers in Boston ostensibly sent to promote order and stabilize peace.

  Unapologetic, uninterested in standards of decency or integrity, History’s acclaimed Journal of Occurrences was so flagrantly spurious that it was first published outside of Boston, where the readership, a large percentage of which had never been to the city, was believed more gullible.

  In the premier issue, British regulars were depicted as beating small boys screaming for their mothers and deflowering Boston’s sweetest young virgins. There were accounts of babies being ripped squalling from their mothers’ wombs, of soldiers shooting innocent, elderly citizens on sight. Oh, the savageries went on and on.

  The British didn’t know what had hit them. And, more importantly, what on earth to do about it. What if people started believing what they read? Indeed, there was so much chatter about the accounts, they wound up taking on a certain validity, a life of their own.

  But now, with the help of the fuss over nonimportation of British goods, gentlemen like Tory fanatic John Mein, editor-in-chief of the Chronicle, saw their chance at last.

 
Nonimportation had not been enforced with any more success in Boston than it had in Charleston, which is why the Sons of Liberty had had to resort to disciplining resistant merchants with whatever it took: singeing transgressors with tar, clubbing them with fence posts, sodomizing their daughters—just the kind of heinous acts that the Journal of Occurrences was accusing the British of perpetrating. One couldn’t help but wonder, who was inspiring whom?

  It was the snot-nosed Billingsley’s idea to expose the patriotic maxim “Buy Yankee” as a hoax and a fraud. But how?

  Certainly I’d heard the rumors that Hancock routinely landed goods as far south as Jersey to avoid Boston’s more vigilant customs commissioners and then, under cover of night, lugged them to Boston by carriage. I’d also heard he packed British tea as anonymous freight and stored it offshore in schooners, selling it to select customers on the side.

  So for a start, my job was to dig up the ships’ manifests that editor Mein needed as proof of King Hancock’s betrayal to The Cause. Such exposure, it was hoped, would cause Hancock’s followers to disband, for suddenly the boycott would no longer be a badge of liberty, its enforcement no longer proof of dedication to the common good. It would be seen for what it was: a wild and cruel manipulation of unwitting fellow Patriots, a ploy to keep competition down, a means to reduce Hancock’s personal liability for English taxes. At which point, it was hoped, Hancock’s cabal would collapse like a house of cards.

  In truth, however, I must tell you that even the little Harvard Tory boys who sent me out on this mission didn’t care a whit what Hancock or his kind were up to. Not really. They themselves were in it for the money, a crown apiece, to be paid by Mein, upon receipt of “the facts”—none of which, of course, I expected to be able to retrieve.

  How on earth was I going to lay my hands on Hancock’s dockets? What was I supposed to do, sneak into his office, his home, the offices of the Gazette? And, my Lord, what if I were caught red-handed rifling through his files? I’d be in a lovely mess then, wouldn’t I?