Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor

by Richard R. Beeman

  The story of the Liberty affair gained in the telling on both sides of the Atlantic. Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty quickly put out the word that the seizure of the Liberty was a prelude to a full-scale British naval invasion of Boston. Royal Governor Francis Bernard, reporting on the event to his superiors back in London, made the mob action that night seem like the beginning of full-scale rebellion—a “trained mob,” he claimed, was now in control of the town of Boston.10

  In the aftermath of the seizure of the Liberty, the British attempted to prosecute Hancock for the alleged customs violations. Though Hancock no doubt was guilty of some customs violations, the evidence in this particular case was so flimsy that Hancock’s defense attorney, none other than John Adams, was able to have it thrown out of court. Nevertheless, Hancock did suffer a considerable loss as a consequence of the Liberty affair, for the British permanently confiscated the ship, converting it to a coast guard cruiser charged with the task of patrolling the waters of New England in search of—surprise!—smugglers!11

  The Liberty would ultimately come to an unhappy end—burned to cinders and ignominiously sunk in Newport, Rhode Island, by a mob of protesters in July of 1769. But there would be one happy consequence of the Liberty’s role in the coming of the American Revolution: it would propel John Hancock into even greater public prominence, not merely as the merchant prince of Boston, but, increasingly, as a political figure to be reckoned with. Hancock had begun to serve in the Massachusetts General Court, the colony’s lower house of assembly, but in his elections to that body in the aftermath of the Liberty affair, his popularity soared, so much so that he was now receiving as many votes as his fellow legislator Sam Adams.12

  In fact, the year 1768 would prove to be one that marked the beginning of an uneasy and highly competitive alliance between Hancock and Sam Adams. By 1768 Adams had already honed his skills as a provincial politician and as the principal organizer of opposition to British policy in the streets of Boston, and he had much to teach his younger colleague about the give-and-take of popular politics. The often shabbily dressed Adams was capable of putting his writing skills to work and crafting a sophisticated argument about America’s constitutional liberties on one day and of printing an incendiary broadside aimed at mobilizing a mob the next. He served as an ideal intermediary between the affluent and socially prominent politicians who served in the Massachusetts provincial assembly and the artisans, mechanics, merchant seamen and unskilled laborers who made up the Boston mob. The fashionably dressed John Hancock, riding around Boston in his gold coach, seemed an unlikely candidate to become a favorite of that mob, but his spirited defense of his own economic self-interest in his battles with English customs officials was seen by the men who made up the bulk of the workforce for the House of Hancock—the merchant seamen of Boston—as a defense of their interests too. At Harvard, Hancock had shown much more interest in living the good life than in studying, and it’s likely that he was much more interested in promoting his own interests than in philosophical concepts like the cause of liberty. Indeed, during the Liberty affair, the British had offered Hancock the return of his ship and, possibly, the dropping of all smuggling charges, if he posted the requisite bond and made appropriate gestures of obeisance to British authority. It was only after an angry confrontation with Adams, who intimated that Hancock would no longer be welcome in the Long Room Club and the Boston Caucus—the two radical organizations that essentially controlled the street politics of Boston—that Hancock turned down the offer.13

  Adams would again have reason to challenge Hancock’s patriotism in the latter half of 1770, in the wake of the Boston Massacre and after news of the repeal of the Townshend duties, the very taxes that had gotten Hancock in trouble in the first place, reached America. When Hancock heard reports of the confrontation between the Boston mob and Captain Thomas Preston and his British soldiers, he did everything he could to distance himself from the event, holing up in his Beacon Hill mansion until the furor died down. With the repeal of the Townshend Duties, Hancock’s motivation to be out front in his opposition to British policies began to wane.14

  Between the summer of 1770 and the passage of the Tea Act in 1773, Hancock seemed to reach a rapprochement with Governor Thomas Hutchinson. In the spring of 1772, the governor went so far as to honor Hancock with an appointment as commander of the Company of Cadets, a “gentleman’s militia” of eighty men that served as the governor’s honor guard. Sam Adams was furious—both that Hancock had been given the honor and that he had accepted it. He grumbled that the governor had exceeded his power in offering the commission to Hancock in the first place. But even more annoying, it appeared to Adams that Hancock truly had gone over to the other side. Rumors had been circulating that the Crown, in its attempt to quash the rebellious spirit in Boston, was thinking about conferring a formal title of nobility on Hancock. Had King George III been craftier, he would have followed through and awarded the title, for, given Hancock’s vanity, that might well have ended his association with the radical opposition in Boston.15

  In the fall of 1772, it still made sense for Hancock to distance himself from the radicals. In spite of his past conflicts with British customs officers, Hancock’s thoughts were still primarily about how to further the interests of John Hancock. Rapprochement, not further combat, seemed the best path toward that end. Certainly the idea of independence was nowhere in Hancock’s mind. Thus when Sam Adams persuaded a Boston town meeting to create a Committee of Correspondence in November 1772, designed to inform the people of British infringements of their rights, Hancock declined an invitation to join. Not wishing to become alienated from Boston’s radical political elite altogether, however, Hancock did agree, grudgingly, to sign an incendiary letter sent out to every town in Massachusetts containing a long list of America’s grievances against Parliament.16

  At this point, the tensions between Sam Adams and Hancock were becoming obvious enough that Thomas Hutchinson began to think more actively about ways to drive a wedge between the two. He wrote to friends noting that “Hancock and Adams are at great variance,” bragging that “I think we have so divided the [patriot] faction that it must be something very unfortunate which can unite them again.” That “something very unfortunate” happened, and it proved to be two unrelated events. The first was the passage by Parliament of the Tea Act, which would revive popular opposition to British trade policies all over America and make it impossible for merchants like Hancock to remain on the sidelines any longer. The second, occurring quite unexpectedly, was the controversy over the stolen letters written by Governor Hutchinson and Lieutenant Governor Andrew Oliver to a former English treasury official, Thomas Whately, the very same letters that had landed Benjamin Franklin in the cockpit in his confrontation with Lord Wedderburn.17

  Governor Hutchinson often wrote to his friend Thomas Whately back in England describing his travail in governing the obstreperous New Englanders. Those letters, meant only for his friend’s eyes, were written with the candor and informality typical of purely private communications not intended to be read by the public. Though much of what Hutchinson wrote was unexceptionable, he did not hide his contempt for his radical opponents in Boston, and at one point averred that in order to quell that opposition, “there must be an abridgement of what are called English liberties.” How Franklin came into possession of the letters remains a mystery to the present day. We do know, however, that it was Franklin’s decision to send the letters to Sam Adams that landed the good doctor in the cockpit in London. When Sam Adams received them, he was unable to resist the temptation, in spite of Franklin’s desire that they be kept confidential, to use them to stir up patriot opposition to the much-detested royal governor. In spite of his uneasy relationship with Hancock, he realized that their release might have more impact if his more conservative rival took the lead role. Sharing the contents of the letters with Hancock, he asked him to make an announcement to the Massachusetts General Court revealing the letters’ cont
roversial contents. Hancock, realizing that the explosive content of the letters could never be kept secret and that to fail to make an open break with Governor Hutchinson at this stage would be disastrous, agreed to do so. Two days later, Adams, with Hancock’s full concurrence, recited passages from the letters to the assembly, after which it voted by a margin of 101 to 5 to condemn the governor and his letters as having a “design and tendency . . . to subvert the constitution and introduce arbitrary power into the province.”18

  From that time forward, Adams and Hancock, whatever the differences in their personal and sartorial styles, whatever their differences in ideology and temperament, were destined—or doomed—to be partners in the fight against arbitrary British power in the colony of Massachusetts.

  By the time Hancock took his seat in the Second Continental Congress on May 10, he was by no means unknown to those outside of the Massachusetts delegation. The Liberty affair had become a cause célèbre throughout the American colonies, and, as the story of Lexington and Concord gained in the telling, the roles played by Hancock and Sam Adams were further inflated. Among the Massachusetts delegates, Sam Adams was still most widely known as the wily activist politician, and his cousin John as the most loquacious, and, to some, the most obnoxious, member of the delegation. Hancock, though initially known for his extravagant clothes and egocentric manner, would, as time passed, be thrust into a more prominent role.

  Neither Hancock nor Sam Adams could have predicted the circumstances that would put the flamboyant Massachusetts merchant into that role. Sometime around May 21, the Congress’s president, Virginia’s Peyton Randolph, announced that he had to return home to attend to his duties as leader of the Virginia provincial assembly, now meeting as the Virginia Convention. After considerable backstage maneuvering, John and Sam Adams, wrongly believing that Randolph would return quickly, proposed that Hancock assume the chair. They enlisted George Washington and his Virginia colleague Benjamin Harrison to support the nomination. When the delegates unanimously endorsed Hancock’s appointment, Harrison escorted him to the front of the room, reportedly commenting to the new president: “We will show Great Britain how much we value her proscriptions.”19

  When Peyton Randolph returned to the Congress in September of 1775, both he and most of the other delegates assumed that Hancock would step down and that Randolph would resume his position as president of the Congress. But Randolph’s “temporary” replacement had no intention of stepping down. And the delegates, having no past precedents either with respect to parliamentary procedure or simple, civil etiquette, sat passively by as Hancock continued in his role as president of the Congress. Randolph himself sat “very humbly in his seat,” while “our new one,” as John Adams caustically commented, “continues in the Chair, without Seeming to feel the Impropriety.” Hancock would continue to sit in the armchair on the raised dais in the front of the Assembly Room for the next ten months, until the time when the delegates finally reached their final, epochal decision on the relationship of the American colonies with their mother country.20

  FOURTEEN

  CONGRESS ASSUMES COMMAND OF A WAR

  ON MAY 24, 1775, after John Hancock walked up to the table on the raised dais in the front of the Assembly Room in the Pennsylvania State house for the first time, the Congress began a discussion of “the state of America.” Virtually everyone in the Congress would have agreed that America was in a perilous state indeed. Hancock and the Congress would quickly face a series of dramatic challenges. Their overtures to the king, Parliament and British people having been rebuffed, and facing renewed efforts at repression from royal governors throughout America, the members of Congress knew that they would have to respond on multiple fronts.

  The previous week’s news of the capture of Fort Ticonderoga raised Americans’ hopes that they might be able not only to defend themselves within their own colonies but also to “liberate” Canada in the bargain. But the news also raised new questions about the Congress’s role in overseeing an ever-expanding military conflict. As the militiamen commanded by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold stormed Ticonderoga (which at the moment of the attack was guarded by only two sentries; the other forty-two British soldiers at the fort were sound asleep), they cried out that they were taking the fort “in the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.” While there is no record of what the great Jehovah thought of the raid, there is an abundance of evidence indicating that the Continental Congress knew nothing about the operation and, moreover, had no idea what to do with Fort Ticonderoga now that it was supposedly in their possession.1

  It was one thing to agree on high-sounding resolutions about American rights and liberties, but quite another to take responsibility for managing the conduct of an expanding military operation. The Continental Congress, which had initially convened as an extra-legal assembly of representatives from individual colonies who owed their allegiance not to a “continental” legislature but to the British Crown, was evolving into a body that was not only assuming legislative powers binding on all of the British mainland colonies, but also making decisions about the prosecution of the war—an activity more commonly associated with the executive branch of a sovereign government.

  The “success” at Ticonderoga, and, later, at the neighboring British fort at Crown Point, twelve miles to the north, raised other questions. The raids on Ticonderoga and Crown Point had been carried out in the name of the Continental Congress. But, in fact, they had been orchestrated by extra-legal committees of safety in Massachusetts and Connecticut, with the acquiescence of the rebellious provincial governments of those colonies, without the Congress’s authorization. And the raids themselves had taken place on New York soil. New York’s political leaders, who had never been enthusiastic supporters of any kind of militant resistance against the British, could hardly have been pleased by this escalation of warfare in their own territory. In the eyes of many New Yorkers, the so-called victory at Fort Ticonderoga was just another example of the way in which the Continental Congress was pushing their colony into a war they ardently wished to avoid.2

  In fact, it had become clear as early as May 15 that, like it or not, New York’s fate would be inextricably linked with that of Massachusetts. In the wake of Lexington and Concord, royal officials in London began to lay plans to send additional troops to America, and it was widely believed that New York, with its strategically important port and a population more likely to be friendly to British troops than the fanatics of Boston, would be a destination for many of those troops. On May 15, the New York provincial legislature formally requested advice from the Congress on how it should proceed if the British troops arrived in the colony. The Congress responded immediately, albeit incompletely: the colony should act only defensively, and with restraint, but, “defend themselves and their property and repel force by force.” What it failed to do, at least at that juncture, was to give the New Yorkers any guidance, or support, on just how their colony might raise the necessary armies to repel an attack by the British.3

  Massachusetts and Connecticut were not the only colonies taking matters into their own hands. On May 23, the New Hampshire provincial assembly notified the Congress that it had gone ahead and ordered the raising of a militia force of 2,000 men—a step, the New Hampshire assembly explained, that was “too urgent to be delayed” until the Continental Congress came up with a coherent overall plan for the colonies’ defense. Pointedly, the New Hampshire legislators also made clear that they had no idea how they were going to pay the costs of raising that force, suggesting that the Congress should take at least some responsibility in that effort. By contrast, New York, less eager than its neighbor to the north, had to be prodded by the Continental Congress to prepare itself for the rapidly escalating conflict. On May 23, the Congress instructed New York’s militia to “be armed and trained and in constant readiness to act at a moment warning” and then issued more explicit instructions as to how and where they should plan for a possible British attac
k. And on May 31 the Congress took the further step of asking both New York and Connecticut to send reinforcements to the garrisons of Crown Point and Ticonderoga in order to defend those forts against a rumored British counterattack.4

  All of these developments—the unauthorized initiatives of Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire, as well as the far less enthusiastic support of the war effort in New York—caused Congress to realize that it had to take a coordinated approach to what was likely to be a rapidly escalating military conflict. The most significant step in causing Congress to take that step occurred on June 9, 1775, when it received a lengthy letter from the Massachusetts Provincial Convention asking for advice on two important matters.

  Ever since Parliament had passed the Massachusetts Government Act in early May of 1774 dissolving the Massachusetts General Court and putting the colony under the control of a military governor, the colony’s legislature, even though it continued to meet, was doing so wholly in defiance of the law. Faced with the increasingly burdensome task of both raising an army and paying for the cost of an ever-expanding military campaign, the members of the legislature were eager to acquire for themselves a greater sense of legitimacy among those Massachusetts residents from whom they were asking ever greater sacrifices. Although they knew that their colony was in a state of outright rebellion against British authority, their commitment to an orderly, civilian government was, if anything, greater than it had ever been in the past. In the words of the Massachusetts petitioners, “the sword should in all states be subservient to the civil powers,” and for that reason they believed it imperative that the civil power in Massachusetts be put on a firm legal basis. In asking the Continental Congress—itself an extra-legal body—to give them that legal sanction, they were, in effect, asking the Congress to acknowledge that their government was an entity entirely independent of royal authority.