Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor

by Richard R. Beeman

  But what alternatives remained? In defiance of all of the evidence that he had previously laid out with respect to the state of opinion among members of Parliament, the king’s ministers and the people of England, Dickinson clung to the belief that if the colonies persisted, peacefully and with “Unanimity & Firmness,” they could win over a majority in Parliament and “within 12 months dethrone the ministry.”14

  The second option proposed by Dickinson—to continue preparations for war but simultaneously to petition the king and Parliament for relief—was in his view better than the first. But given the failure of their past petitions, Dickinson admitted that this too was unlikely to be successful. So Dickinson championed a third option—the dispatching of American agents to England to negotiate a settlement.

  Dickinson spoke at some length on this third option. He wove back and forth between pessimism over the state of Anglo-American relations and optimism that American concessions on the matter of Parliament’s authority to regulate trade for the benefit of the whole empire, along with a concerted diplomatic effort, might swing English public opinion to their side. Dickinson hoped that a careful negotiation between capable and flexible American agents (although he had in the past clashed with Benjamin Franklin in the local politics of Pennsylvania, he must have had the good doctor in mind here) and the British king, might result in a form of treaty spelling out a limited set of American obligations to the mother country while at the same time providing explicit protections from encroachments on fundamental American liberties.

  He also anticipated criticism that his position was excessively timid and subservient to English interests. Far from being an indication of American timidity, Dickinson argued, such an approach might be seen as an evidence of American strength. After all, when the king and Parliament first received the petitions from the Continental Congress, England had not yet “lost a battle,” but Lexington and Concord had changed all that. Moreover, Americans were now “more united & and more determined beyond all Comparison” than they had been just six months earlier, a fact, he claimed, not lost on the British.15

  The author of the famed Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania was an eminently rational man, a systematic thinker and writer. But his long, rambling speech to the Congress on May 23 was filled with contradictory logic and contradictory evidence. A thoroughly detached listener—and there may have been none of those in the chamber that day—might have been able to see that Dickinson was engaged not only in an argument with those “extremists” advocating more radical action, but also in an argument with himself—between his head, which could easily see the gravity of the situation, and his heart, which still insisted on allegiance to the king and the empire.

  Dickinson predicted that his speech would not be pleasing to many of the delegates, and he was correct. Patrick Henry rose to his feet that same day and in a lengthy retort hotly disputed Dickinson’s proposal to offer trade concessions to the British. In doing so, he argued, the body would be repudiating the very position it had taken six months earlier in its Declaration of Rights and Grievances. Even more odious to Henry, Dickinson had left the impression that he was prepared to backtrack even further, going so far as to volunteer to repay the East India Company for the tea destroyed in Boston. Richard Henry Lee and Thomas Mifflin would quickly side with Henry against Dickinson, but that was predictable. More tellingly, South Carolina’s John Rutledge, who had often been on the fence in the fall of 1774, stepped forward to denounce Dickinson’s plea for reconciliation. Silas Deane, recording a few details of the debate in his diary, recollected that Rutledge had treated Dickinson’s plan “with the utmost Contempt,” opposing “any Concession whatever” to Lord North and the British ministry.16

  Uncharacteristically, John Adams appears not to have spoken during this particular debate, although in the coming weeks he would make clear his contempt for Dickinson’s point of view. Dickinson, he later commented, was attempting the impossible by holding “the sword in one hand and the olive branch in the other.” Adams ridiculed the notion that American agents could somehow succeed in “the education of the sovereign, . . . the Lords, the Commons, the electors, the army, the navy, the officers of the exercise, customs, &c, &c, &c,” when all of those individuals and agencies had proven themselves so irretrievably corrupted. For Adams, “powder and artillery are the most efficacious, sure, and infallible conciliatory measures we can adopt.” But Adams, at least temporarily, kept his peace, for even he realized that provoking discord among the delegates at that moment would be counterproductive.17

  Adams knew too that Dickinson had his supporters, some of whom, especially the delegates from New York, genuinely agreed with him. Others, although they held out little hope that further petitions and negotiations would do much good, nevertheless saw no harm in going the extra mile to seek a reconciliation—so long as that reconciliation occurred on American terms.

  Over the course of the days between May 23 and May 26 a variety of delegates proposed resolutions aimed at charting America’s next steps. Late in the day on May 26, the delegates reached tentative agreement. The first three of the four resolutions adopted that day passed unanimously. The first was purely rhetorical, stating the obvious fact that “his Majesty’s most faithful subjects” had been placed in a “dangerous and critical situation” by the concatenation of events culminating in the battles of Lexington and Concord. The second, making specific reference to the warfare in Massachusetts, vowed to put all of the colonies in a state of defense in support of the residents of that colony. The third, again an exercise in rhetoric and not action, offered a perfunctory plea for “a restoration of harmony between our Mother Country and these colonies.” The fourth resolution, which passed only narrowly, agreed to open negotiations with the British “in order to accommodate the unhappy disputes subsisting between Great Britain and these colonies.” That request for negotiations was to be included in a petition to the king, a petition of the sort envisioned all along by John Dickinson.18

  Dickinson had, at least for the moment, gotten his way. But all of the resolutions passed on May 26 were exceedingly vague. They did not specify the means by which the colonies would defend themselves, nor did they spell out the precise language of the petition to the king or the method by which negotiations might be carried out. Although satisfying those like Dickinson who wanted to go the extra mile to seek reconciliation, they did not yield any ground on the subject of Parliament’s authority over the colonies. Although Dickinson may have seen the resolutions as a form of olive branch to the British, they did not include a concession about the right of Parliament to regulate trade. And, consistent with the position taken by both sides in the debate in Congress, the resolutions made it clear that the Americans were not only prepared to defend themselves but, indeed, that they were already taking steps to do so.

  To fail to include the commitment to a determined military defense of the colonies would have run the risk of alienating another, even more important group in the country. Outside the walls of the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House, the people of America, in town and county meetings across the country, had expressed their determination to resist British military advances. Although the delegates to the Congress had vowed to carry out their deliberations in secret, the growing militancy of Americans out of doors was becoming readily apparent to all. However much the delegates to the Congress may have believed in the efficacy of their strategy of secrecy, at some level they realized that they could not—should not—insulate themselves entirely from those people whose fates and whose freedom were at stake.

  THIRTEEN

  JOHN HANCOCK ENTERS THE DRAMA

  MOST AMERICANS KNOW at least one thing about John Hancock—he was the man who put his “John Hancock” at the very top of the list of signers of the Declaration of Independence, in a handwriting that was at least half again as large as that of any other signer. It was an outsized signature from a man with an outsized ego. During the decade leading up to ind
ependence, he had, depending on the direction in which the political winds were blowing, been at times one of the most visible and flamboyant opponents of British attempts to tax the merchants of Boston, and at others, a man who seemed wholly comfortable with some of the perks that royal officials were pleased to bestow upon him. Larger than life in many ways, John Hancock would play no small role in the Continental Congress during the year leading to independence.

  As we have seen, when John Hancock and his fellow delegates from Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York rode into Philadelphia together on May 10, they received a heroes’ welcome. Never a man to undervalue his own worth and standing among his fellow citizens, Hancock claimed that the focus of the public’s attention was the most illustrious hero of them all—the bold, courageous leader of the fight for liberty in Massachusetts—none other than himself. Although a recent biographer has claimed that Hancock, “more than anyone else there, made enormous sacrifices and deserved [the] public acclaim,” it is likely that at least two of Hancock’s traveling companions—John and Sam Adams—would have had a different view of who deserved to be the objects of the public’s affection that day.1

  John Hancock came from a long line of Massachusetts ministers. His father, the Reverend John Hancock, was the Congregational minister in Braintree and probably the most respected man in town. The younger John Hancock was born in January 1737. The other Braintree lad, John Adams, a year older than Hancock, remembered the Reverend Hancock as “one of the most amiable and beloved of men” but described the son as having “a peevishness that sometimes disgusted and afflicted his friends.”2

  Adams’s youthful acquaintance with John Hancock did not last long. In the spring of 1744, Reverend Hancock died of a sudden illness, leaving the family in relative poverty. But young John Hancock was not destined to live a life of deprivation. His uncle, Thomas Hancock, owner of the House of Hancock, Boston’s most powerful and profitable merchant house, but childless after thirteen years of marriage, promised Reverend Hancock’s widow that he would support her and her children for life if she allowed her oldest son John to come to Boston and live with him as his adopted son. And so, from the age of seven, John Hancock was raised in one of the wealthiest and most opulent households in all of Boston.

  John Hancock’s life on Beacon Hill was altogether different from his early childhood in Braintree. Where he had once dressed in the plain clothes suitable to a young son of a Puritan minister and had gone to a small, local elementary school, he now wore the clothes of a young gentleman and attended Boston Latin, the town’s most prestigious private school. At the age of thirteen and a half—an early age even at a time when it was not unusual for boys to enter college in their middle teens—he was admitted to Harvard, where he was ranked fifth in his class of twenty, purely as a result of his social standing. Because of his youth, Hancock resided during his freshman year at the home of a congregational minister in Cambridge, but in his sophomore year he moved into Harvard’s oldest building, Massachusetts Hall, which then served as the dormitory for all Harvard students (today it houses Harvard’s president and other university officials). In spite of the college’s injunction to students to lead “sober, righteous, & Godly lives,” Hancock used a portion of his newfound independence to indulge in frequent bouts of drinking. During one binge, he and his friends made a slave owned by former Harvard President Edward Holyoke drink to “such a degree as greatly endangered his life.” That particular episode caused the ruling elders at Harvard to “degrade” his class rank down to ninth, an unusually severe punishment.3

  Whereas both Sam and John Adams had been diligent students at Harvard, Hancock did not allow either intellectual ambition or diligence to get in the way of having a good time. He continued merrily in his partying, drinking ways. When he graduated in 1754, his academic record was wholly undistinguished, but he wasn’t concerned, because he had always had his eye on mercantile success, not academic honors. He immediately went to work for the House of Hancock, where he began to learn not only the business but also how to emulate the affluent style of his uncle and adoptive father, Thomas. Still only eighteen, he began to dress in the most elegant clothing styles from London, outdoing even Uncle Thomas, wearing fancily ruffled shirts, silver-buckled shoes, gilt-edged jackets and one particularly stunning red velvet outfit. There were frills not only on his cuffs, but on his shirt front. He was every inch a dandy from his bob wig down to his fancy-buckled shoes. Fully comfortable with the flamboyance of his attire and of his personality, he began to socialize with other members of Boston’s mercantile elite, continuing to indulge his taste for fine food and wine.4

  But John also became serious about learning the business of being a merchant. He mastered not only the finances of what had become Boston’s largest and most successful mercantile firm but also how to negotiate with the full range of people with whom a successful merchant had to deal—sellers, buyers, ship owners, captains and, perhaps most important, the ordinary seamen who manned the ships. In John Adams’s recollection, Hancock “became an example to all the young men of the town. Wholly devoted to business, he was as regular and punctual at his store as the sun in its course.”5

  In 1760, John’s uncle sent him to London. He spent a year there not only making the necessary connections with the city’s leading merchants, but also raising his standard of living still further, spending a small fortune on an even more up-to-date English wardrobe, dining in the city’s finest restaurants and, in general, taking advantage of the considerably higher standard of living available to a London gentleman. His expenses during that year were so high that they earned him a rebuke from his uncle. John responded that he had felt out of place by “the Plainess of my Dress,” so, “to appear in Character I am obliged to be pretty Expensive.”6

  Whatever friction there may have been between John and his uncle quickly disappeared. When John returned to Boston in the fall of 1761 he was welcomed back into the firm. Indeed, he was quite obviously being groomed to take over the business. Thomas Hancock had been sick for some time, and when he finally succumbed to apoplexy in 1764, John, now twenty-seven, found himself the head of the House of Hancock, proprietor of a business with a large warehouse, several stores and a fleet of six ships, as well as contracts with dozens of other ship owners who helped the firm build its transatlantic trade.

  Hancock would prove an excellent steward of the company, and an even more ostentatious symbol of its wealth. He spent even more money on clothes and fine food, and took particular pleasure in being driven around town in a coach made of gold. Hancock’s conspicuous consumption and his obvious delight in displaying his wealth seems more appropriate to the twenty-first-century New York of Donald Trump than it does to eighteenth-century Puritan Boston, but most of the residents of the town—the Adamses perhaps excepted—seemed to enjoy sharing vicariously in his opulent lifestyle.7

  Like most Boston mercantile firms, the House of Hancock had always managed to avoid paying at least some of the customs duties levied on goods imported into the port of Boston. To put it more simply, some degree of smuggling was a part of their business. In fact, John Hancock, as proprietor of one of Boston’s largest firms, probably found it less necessary to smuggle than some of smaller merchants operating with only one ship. But it is likely that, prior to the enactment of the Molasses Act of 1764, which was aimed at tightening up on the enforcement of customs duties on that product, ships sailing under the banner of the House of Hancock may have smuggled in as much as a half a million gallons of molasses each year from the West Indies without paying the obligatory customs duties. When Parliament initiated its first serious attempts to enforce existing customs laws in 1764, and then followed up by imposing new taxes with the Stamp Act in 1765 and the Townshend duties in 1767, British customs officers, both suspicious and perhaps jealous of Hancock’s lavish lifestyle, seemed particularly eager to make an example of him.8

  This would all come to a head on April 9, 1768, when British customs office
rs boarded his ship Lydia, moored in Boston Harbor, suspecting that the cargo contained smuggled tea, paper and possibly other illicit goods. Hancock quickly mobilized a bunch of seamen who blocked the customs officials’ access to the ship’s hold. That evening, a customs agent without a search warrant tried to sneak into the hold of the ship to inspect the contents, but Hancock and a small mob captured him, brought him above-deck and dangled him over the side of the ship until the agent agreed he had no business aboard the Lydia that evening. British officials were forced to sit by and watch while Hancock’s mob humiliated their agent. Part of the reason for their passivity owed to the fact that the agent had not gone through the proper legal channels in seeking to search the ship, but an even more important reason was that the size and passion of the mob was far greater than anything the royal officials could muster.9

  The royal officials in Boston hardly forgot that moment of humiliation. A month later they sought revenge. This time they prepared a proper warrant to search another of Hancock’s ships, the Liberty. Hancock’s ship entered Boston Harbor with what was likely a full cargo of “the best sterling Madeira,” most of it unreported on the ship’s bill of lading. But Hancock was prepared for the customs officers. He managed to unload the illegal cargo in the dark of night. Later, finding cargo that only took up one quarter of the ship’s capacity, the customs officials collected the required duty on that small cargo—about twenty-five casks of wine—but they knew they had been duped. Frustrated by their inability to prosecute Hancock for the wine they knew he had smuggled, they decided instead to lay in wait to find another excuse to get back at their nemesis. On June 10, after Hancock had reloaded the Liberty with what was most likely a legal cargo of whale oil and tar bound for England, the customs officers, aided by a detachment of sailors from the fifty-gun British man-of-war Romney, seized the Liberty on the trumped-up charges that customs documents had not been filled out properly. Hancock had not in fact posted bond on the cargo before it was loaded on board as he was technically required to do, but the common practice was to do so before the ship actually sailed for its destination. The customs officers then proceeded to tow the Liberty out into the harbor and to anchor it under the “protection” of the Romney. As the sailors were carrying out their orders, they were greeted by a hail of rocks and garbage thrown by a mob of “sturdy boys & negroes.”