During the period between 1764 and 1773, this escalation of popular resistance, followed by British attempts both to repress the resistance and punish the resisters, was confined principally to American seaport cities and a few colonial capitals of government. And, at least in the eyes of British officials in London, the town of Boston was not only the most obstreperous and violent of those centers of resistance but almost certainly the prime instigator. And again from the British point of view, the blame for Boston’s central role in the conflict could be laid at the door of just a few fanatical, self-interested demagogues who had made that town a many-headed “Hydra” of protest.7
“Picture of the Devil”
Public enemy number one, to royal officials both in Boston and in London, was a shabbily dressed, but tireless and brilliant political agitator named Samuel Adams. Peter Oliver, who would become one of the most outspoken of Massachusetts’ Loyalists, later would say of Adams that if one “wished to draw a picture of the Devil, that he would get Sam Adams to sit for him.”
The route that Adams had taken to achieve his fame (or, from the British point of view, infamy) had been circuitous. The son of a moderately prosperous Boston brewmaster and local politician, also named Samuel Adams, the younger Sam Adams’s family lineage was distinguished enough that when he entered Harvard in 1736 at the age of fourteen, his class rank, determined not by academic merit but by his family’s social status, was number five in a class of twenty-two. At the urging of his father, he studied theology during his undergraduate years, but even then his natural inclination was toward politics. After graduating from Harvard in 1740, he spent a few years halfheartedly attempting to begin a career in business, but then he returned to his alma mater in 1743, where he focused his intellectual efforts on political philosophy, writing his master’s thesis on the subject of “Whether it be lawful to resist the Supreme Magistrate, if the Commonwealth cannot be otherwise preserved.”8
Although Adams remained a devout Puritan all of his life, he was not drawn either to the clergy or, indeed, to any other occupation likely to earn him a living. For many years after his graduation from Harvard he seemed a young man adrift. Upon his father’s death in 1748, Sam inherited a modest fortune. He took over the management of his father’s brewery, but it was clear to all around him that he had neither the talent nor the inclination to keep the business thriving. The brewery went quickly downhill and, with it, the inheritance from his father. In 1758, virtually all of the Adams estate—the brewery, his house and a variety of other modest landholdings—were put up for auction by the town sheriff. Showing a flash of the skills that he would use so effectively during the revolutionary crisis, Adams swung into action, appearing in person at the auction, scaring off potential bidders on the property by threatening to sue anyone who set foot on his property. He averted foreclosure, but holding onto the property did little to improve his precarious financial position; the brewery would soon fail altogether, and his house fall into disrepair. Adams’s personal life during those years provided equal cause for despair. In 1749, at the age of twenty-seven, he married the twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth Checkley, and they immediately set out to create a large family. Over the course of the next six years Elizabeth would give birth to five children. This was an age, however, when infant mortality was extremely high, and only two of Elizabeth’s children survived beyond the age of three months. And, when Elizabeth gave birth to a stillborn son in July of 1757, she was so weakened by the delivery that she died a few weeks later, at the age of thirty-two, leaving Adams a widower, a single parent of two children and the proprietor of a declining brewery business.9
In the midst of his financial and personal travail, Adams was beginning to involve himself in the civic affairs of his hometown of Boston, earning a reputation as an intelligent and reliable public servant. He volunteered to serve on a variety of committees, one overseeing the operation of a local school and another charged with the task of inspecting the town’s chimneys. He was also developing a following as an eloquent and persuasive journalist, writing on a variety of civic and political issues. As early as 1756 he began to write newspaper essays questioning the excessive concentration of power in the hands of Massachusetts’ royal governor, William Shirley. Adams had also become a member of several of Boston’s political clubs, including the influential Boston Caucus, a group of Boston residents who regularly supported the prerogatives of provincial political leaders against those of royal government officials. In 1760, he had become sufficiently prominent in local politics that the Boston town meeting asked him to help in the drafting of instructions for the town’s four members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
Adams was rewarded for his local political activism in 1756 by being elected one of the town’s four tax collectors, a potential, though somewhat risky, path toward a more influential career as a public servant. Whether through inattention to duty or, perhaps, excessive charity, he proved an abysmally poor collector of the town’s tax revenues. A report issued by the town in March of 1763 indicated that of the £4,000 in taxes that remained uncollected during the previous year, Adams was responsible for £2,200 in those tax arrears. As much as his casual approach to tax collection may have appealed to some of his fellow residents, the Boston officials responsible for balancing the town’s budget were not pleased, and Adams was soon thereafter relieved of his responsibilities.10
At that moment, at the dawn of America’s impending conflict with Great Britain, Sam Adams, though undeniably smart, articulate, well-educated and reasonably well-connected, had not yet found his calling. Idling his time away in Boston’s taverns and coffeehouses talking politics and writing occasional newspaper pieces, Adams did not seem destined for fame. He and his second wife, Elizabeth Wells, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of a family friend, lived in the rundown house left him by his father. Anyone who encountered Adams on the street at that time would have found him wearing tattered, ill-fitting cast-off clothes collected either by his frugal new wife or donated by neighbors.
The Imperial Crisis and Sam Adams’s Rise to Fame
Sam Adams’s life would began to change dramatically when news of Great Britain’s first serious steps to tighten up on the financial administration of its empire—the enactment by Parliament of first the Sugar Act, and later the Stamp Act—reached Boston. The Stamp Act would prove particularly vulnerable to political attack, because its imposition of taxes on virtually all legal, commercial and public documents would have their greatest impact on such highly vocal occupational groups as lawyers, merchants and newspaper printers. Adams, whose writings about local politics had already gained him a modest following, was ready to seize the opportunity to enhance his reputation as a defender of American liberty. At the request of the Boston town meeting, he helped to draft the town’s first response to Parliament’s newly announced intention of levying new taxes on the colonies. And he began to shift his formidable writing skills into high gear, authoring an ever increasing number of pamphlets denouncing royal encroachments on American liberties. Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, who would soon become one of Adams’s principal targets, grudgingly acknowledged Adams’s increasing literary skills during this period, noting, however, that much of the improvement consisted of the “talent of artfully and fallaciously insinuating into the minds of his readers a prejudice against the characters . . . he attacked.”11
Already a member of politically active organizations such as the Boston Caucus, Adams became closely associated with (though never a formal member of) a group of politically radical shopkeepers and artisans known as the Loyal Nine, formed in response to the passage of the Stamp Act. As the leader of that group’s successor organization, the Sons of Liberty, Adams mobilized not only working and middle-class Bostonians but also the city’s growing population of unemployed and underemployed sailors, semiskilled and unskilled workers in a protest movement the likes of which America had never seen.
The new protest movement erupte
d with ferocity in August of 1765. That month, a humble shoemaker named Ebenezer McIntosh led his 2,000-man gang, the South End Mob, in the coerced resignation of the man assigned the job of collecting the Stamp Tax, Andrew Oliver. Oliver’s resignation, which was quickly followed by the mob’s demolition of the new customs house and then, a few days later, the destruction of the home of Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson, made it abundantly clear to British officials just how powerless they were in the face of an enraged citizenry. When the royal governor, Francis Bernard, ordered the arrest of McIntosh, Boston’s sheriff, Stephen Greenleaf, ruefully noted that if he were to arrest McIntosh, royal officials would soon discover that there were not any government buildings left standing in the town. An embarrassed Bernard, defending his inaction to his superiors back in London, admitted that “the mob was so general and so supported that all civil power ceased in an Instant, and I had not the least authority to oppose or quiet the Mob.” With Bernard’s admission of defeat, British attempts to enforce the Stamp Act in Boston effectively came to an end.12
Boston’s example would not be lost on Great Britain’s other colonies in America. Although resistance to the Stamp Act outside of Boston may not have been as violent or as dramatic, it was in the end equally effective. The British Parliament, with many of its members gritting their teeth and vowing to continue their attempt to tax the colonies, repealed the Stamp Act in February of 1766.
American opposition to the Stamp Act in Boston and elsewhere set a pattern that would be repeated during the years from 1766 to 1773. The British Parliament, at the urging of the King’s Ministry, a group of the king’s chief advisers who acted as his chief operatives in Parliament, would attempt to assert its authority over the colonies, and the colonies would successfully resist. The British would make a tactical retreat but would continue to assert their theoretical right, as they did in the Declaratory Act in 1766, to “legislate for the American colonies in all cases whatsoever.” This pattern of royal assertion, colonial resistance and royal retreat had other consequences. As Americans of all social classes continued to clash with British royal officials and British soldiers, the conflict escalated from a clash of constitutional principles and economic interests to one with an intensely personal dimension. Royal officials like Thomas Hutchinson came to despise men like Sam Adams, who seemed to spend every waking moment making their lives miserable. British soldiers, charged with keeping order and greatly outnumbered by unruly members of tireless mobs, felt increasingly angry and beleaguered. And those feelings were reciprocated by their American antagonists.
The most concerted and well-organized forms of American opposition during the years 1766–1773 occurred in America’s seaport cities, where the colonists’ economic interests were most directly threatened by the British policies of taxation and commercial regulation and where there were larger concentrations of middle- and lower-class residents capable of exerting a show of force in resisting British policies. Although American resistance occurred in fits and starts, declining and then re-emerging with the appearance of new British provocations, the overall tone of that resistance began to change. American grievances against British policies were founded both in economic interest and in constitutional principle. Economic interest was based in the natural desire to avoid any taxes or any form of regulation that might affect Americans’ pocketbooks. Constitutional principle was expressed in resolutions and petitions drafted in virtually every American colonial legislature that Parliament did not have the authority to tax the colonies without their consent. Some of the mounting antagonism between the British and the colonists was no doubt a natural consequence of the escalation of the constitutional and economic conflict that divided the two sides. But it was given an added boost by the conscious attempts of men like Sam Adams to organize and energize the opposition. Organizations like Boston’s Sons of Liberty would spread to other colonies, serving as a critical mediating force between the sorts of upper-class colonists who served in the provincial legislatures and ordinary townspeople who would make up the rank and file of the resistance movement. Sam Adams proved particularly effective at using a longstanding institution of civic governance, the Boston Town Meeting, as a means of implementing the agenda of the Sons of Liberty. Normally a town meeting would only be called at regularly scheduled times in order to discuss and act on the regular business of the town, which included things like the granting of licenses for taverns and coffeehouses or the enforcement of regulations preventing wild pigs from running through the streets. But in this new, politically volatile environment, Adams’s verbal and organizational skills enabled him to arrange for extraordinary sessions of the town meeting in which he and like-minded Boston radicals would rouse the populace to oppose some new British provocation.13
However well-organized the opposition in Boston may have been, Sam Adams was acutely aware that the American resistance to British policy needed to be orchestrated and coordinated on an intercolonial basis to be truly effective. As early as 1771 he wrote to Arthur Lee, a Virginian who had published an influential set of essays denouncing the recent British policies, suggesting that “in every colony societies should be formed out of the most respectable inhabitants”; those societies, he believed, could join forces and cause the “enemies of our common liberty . . . to tremble.” It would be another year before he would effectuate his plan, but in the fall of 1772, he made his move. At a Boston Town Meeting on November 2, he proposed that “a committee of correspondence be appointed . . . to state the rights of the colonists and of this Province in particular, as men and Christians, and as subjects; and to communicate and publish the same to the several towns and to the world.” After several hours of debate, the Bostonians endorsed Adams’s proposal. Adams wasted no time. The Boston Committee of Correspondence held its first meeting the next day, and from that meeting would emerge plans to organize similar committees in towns all across Massachusetts, and then to widen the network to other colonies. It was the beginning—the bare beginning—of a coordinated, American resistance movement.14
Not everyone in the colony was pleased. Daniel Leonard, a Massachusetts lawyer who would eventually cast his lot with the Tories, described Adams’s actions as the “foulest, subtlest, and most venomous serpent ever issued from the egg of sedition.” Thomas Hutchinson, promoted to the position of royal governor of Massachusetts in 1771, was equally unhappy, but in a letter to Lord Dartmouth, one of King George’s chief advisers, he grudgingly acknowledged the popularity of Adams’s proposals, advising the king to ban any further town meetings in Boston, which he believed to be the source of all of the spirit of rebellion that Adams was fomenting.15
But spread it did. Not only did other Massachusetts towns form similar committees, but, one by one, nearly all of the colonies followed suit—Virginia, in March of 1773, followed by Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire and South Carolina a few months later. By the time the Massachusetts “Mohawk Indians” had their tea party on December 16, 1773, New York and Pennsylvania, the perennial laggards in the resistance to British policy, were beginning to organize committees of their own.16
The Tea Act and Its Consequences
It was in this context of growing political activism in Boston and a heightened alertness on the part of other colonies that rumors began swirling in America in the spring of 1773. The British, it was said, intended to give a monopoly on the trade in tea to its principal, but financially troubled, commercial enterprise in South Asia, the East India Company. In the past the company had been required to send its ships through English ports before traveling to America, but by the terms of the Tea Act, which went into effect in 1773, it was allowed to transport the tea it obtained in the India trade directly to the American colonies, thus lowering its costs. By early October Americans learned that the British Parliament had not only awarded a monopoly to the company, but also that the royal government intended to levy taxes on the tea, to be collected in America from Americans, once the East India Company had landed t
he tea on American shores. The members of Parliament who voted in favor of the act thought it would be a win-win situation, for not only would it help the East India Company to carry out its trade more efficiently, but it might also actually serve to lower the price of tea in America, since the company would no longer have to pay taxes levied on its trade in England. But there were two problems with this reasoning. First, most Americans were accustomed to buying tea smuggled in from Holland—tea on which they paid no taxes. And perhaps of greater importance, many Americans, and, in particular, nearly all American merchants, recognized that not only would the granting of a monopoly to the East India Company shut them out of the tea trade altogether, but it could also, in the long run, leave the Company free to charge whatever price they wished for their imported tea.
As soon as he heard news of the passage of the Tea Act, Sam Adams began to organize the opposition to its implementation. On Friday, November 5, he and other Boston radicals organized a town meeting in Faneuil Hall, Boston’s principal marketplace and meeting hall. The wealthy and prominent Boston merchant John Hancock moderated the meeting, though given Hancock’s previous history of confrontational opposition to British customs policies, few could doubt that the outcome of the meeting would be anything but moderate. The citizens vowed “a virtuous and steady opposition to this ministerial plan of governing America” and made clear their opposition to any attempt either to unload or sell the tea in Boston.17
Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor Page 4