DESPERATE SONS
Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Hancock, and the Secret Bands of Radicals Who Led the Colonies to War
LES STANDIFORD
Dedication
This book is dedicated to don of dons Phil Sullivan,
who taught me to be suspicious of knowledge
and to treasure wisdom.
And to the memory of Zander,
who lived his brief life fully.
Epigraph
I write these things as they seem true to me,
for the stories told by the Greeks
are various and in my opinion absurd.
—HECATAEUS THE MILESIAN,
father of history,
fifth century BC
You haven’t got a revolution
that doesn’t involve bloodshed.
—MALCOLM X
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
1 - O Albany!
2 - Measures Illegal, Unconstitutional, and Oppressive
3 - The Sons Are Born
4 - Storm Before the Calm
5 - Nourished by Indulgence
6 - Unleashed
7 - Strong Drink in Plenty
8 - Murderer of Rights and Privileges
9 - Morning After
10 - Hornets and Firebrands
11 - From Airy Nothing
12 - First to Blink
13 - Better Days
14 - Townshend Fans the Flames
15 - The Road to Massacre
16 - Affray in King Street
17 - Trial of the Century
18 - Charred to the Waterline
19 - Prelude to a Party
20 - Mad Hatter’s Ball
21 - Intolerable
22 - Congress of Sons
23 - Shot Around the World
24 - The Conqueror Silent Sleeps
25 - Shade of Paradise
26 - What Remains
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Also by Les Standiford
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Acknowledgments
I am greatly indebted to many who helped me find my way through this undertaking, including my stalwart guide through the stacks both near and far, Adis Beesting, reference librarian at Florida International University. Special thanks are also due James R. Kelly, humanities bibliographer at the W. E. B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts, who was so helpful during the early floundering days.
Many thanks as well to my editor, Bill Strachan, who believed in this material from the beginning and whose patience and encouragement allowed me to persevere. I am also indebted to my agent, Kim Witherspoon, who unfailingly provided me with assurance that it was possible.
As usual, I could count on James W. Hall and Mitchell Kaplan for careful over-the-shoulder reading and invaluable conceptual advice, and I am equally fortunate to have the careful proofing eyes of Bill Beesting and Brian Sullivan. And as always, I am grateful for the support of so many friends and my family, who have reminded me so often and for so long that such work is worthwhile: Madeleine Blais; Mike and Liz Novak; Steve Leveen; my closest and most faithful reader and mother-in-law, Rhoda Kurzweil; my wife, Kimberly; my son, Jeremy; and my daughter, Hannah. I strive to do you all proud.
Author’s Note
Can there truly be anything left to say about the set of events that compose the American Revolution? Possibly it is an odd question at the beginning of a book about that very subject, but it is also the sort that this writer has asked himself before.
Of course, it is the reader who is best positioned to give the final answer as to whether a book should have been created, but on the other hand, and since there is very little of the slightest historical import that has not been written about well and truly, one might argue that we could, except for the production of the most arcane treatises, leave off the writing of history altogether. I speak theoretically, of course.
If someone asks me just what sort of history it is I aspire to, I might cite E. H. Gombrich and his book A Little History of the World, in which he covers most everything of importance from the Stone Age through the atomic bomb in 277 lyrical pages. Ostensibly the book was written for children, though if most of my own graduate students came to class having mastered half of what Gombrich has to give, I’d feel a minder of geniuses. “History begins,” Gombrich says, “with a when and a where. It is 3100 BC, when, as we believe, a king named Menes was ruling over Egypt. If you want to know exactly where Egypt is, I suggest you ask a swallow. Every autumn, when it gets cold, swallows fly south. Over the mountains to Italy, and on across a little stretch of sea, and then they’re in Africa, in the part that lies nearest to Europe. Egypt is close by.” My kind of history, if you want to know. Gombrich’s purpose is not to remake history but to bring readers to a fresh appreciation of it.
In the present case, the story centers not so much on the individuals whose names have become synonymous with the American Revolution: the activists turned glorified statesmen such as John Hancock, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams; and the familiar firebrand heroes such as Paul Revere, Patrick Henry, Nathan Hale, and others. Nor did I wish to tread the familiar ground of the revolutionary battlefield—once I reached the moment where the “shot heard round the world” is fired, I reasoned, I would quit the field. This, in fact, is the story of the group of men who brought the colonies to that pass.
Academic historians have discussed the Sons of Liberty in discrete contexts in numerous books and articles. And certainly a number of the struggles and the exploits sometimes associated with the Sons of Liberty, including the Boston Massacre, the Midnight Ride, and the Boston Tea Party, are prominent in the popular consciousness—as are the names of Revere, John Adams, Hancock, Henry, and others. But despite the drama and the importance of their role, I am aware of no overarching work of narrative history focusing on the Sons of Liberty in readying the colonies for battle against Great Britain, a step of such magnitude that modern readers may find it difficult to truly appreciate: consider for a moment that the counterculture movement of the 1960s had actually been successful in toppling the U.S. government at gunpoint, and one might begin to comprehend the accomplishment of the Sons.
My intention here is to tell the story surrounding a group of men who propelled the country to the breaking point. Some of these men have been termed the “Old Revolutionaries” by one prominent historian who has studied a handful of them in depth, but the title is something of a misnomer. Certainly, it is an epithet none would have ever visited upon themselves while in the thick of it.
These were vigorous men, men of action and of conviction. Most of them were considered dangerous by the majority of the citizenry among whom they lived, and some of them actually were. More than one was willing to commit acts of violence in service of the causes that they espoused.
Yet, by the time a new nation was ready to be formed, few would find places of prominence in its governance. For one thing, it was understood that if these men were willing to destroy one system of government, what was to prevent them from becoming impatient with the new one? True revolutionaries—men willing to risk everything to topple a regime—simply cannot be trusted. Or to put it a different way, one man’s patriot is another man’s terrorist.
The descriptions of events at the heart of this book are drawn largely from letters, newspapers, historical accounts, broadsides, and other contemporary documents. These materials reflect a growing unrest in the American colonies of the 1760s and 1770s, and nearly simultaneous
eruptions of acts of violence and civil disobedience in Boston, New York, Providence, Charleston, and elsewhere. There was a long history of friction between the colonies and the mother country prior to 1765, of course, and although much was made of philosophy and concepts such as liberty and the right to self-governance, a great deal of unrest in the decade prior to the outbreak of war also came down to money.
Lest that all sound too venal, it should be understood that the operative attitude of many colonists in late 1765 was that they were being bled dry by an utterly indifferent British Parliament looking to bail out of its own overspending by exploiting Britain’s colonies. The ability to run a successful business—or indeed to earn a living—brave spokesmen such as Samuel Adams complained, was being compromised by the ever-more-onerous tax legislation imposed upon the colonies. Worse yet, the colonists had no say because such matters were being debated thousands of miles away. In fact, when stated in this fashion, the reasons for the discontent of the American colonists sound much like the complaints of the contemporary citizens of Main Street when the possibility of any new tax is mentioned in Congress or during presidential debates.
Nearly 250 years ago, a group of American citizens decided that the conditions under which they were governed were intolerable; eventually they realized that no change would be forthcoming as a result of mere complaint and petition. Action would have to be taken. And because such actions were illegal, often directed at individuals and property, and because they could be punished by imprisonment and even death, their undertakings and the identities of those who carried them out would by necessity be covert. In short, there was an almost simultaneous eruption within the American colonies of cells of a secret radical society committed to imposing forcible change upon the established government.
In some ways, this might sound like a description of what the Western world is facing today in its war against terrorism. Who in recent years has not been chilled by the specter of cells of terrorists springing up around the globe, connected not by a flow of information and orders from some dogma-spewing central leadership but rather by some nearly telepathic or genetic fury and a sense of common purpose that transcend logic?
Many Americans shake their heads at such an incomprehensible scenario. Who are these people? Why do they hate us so? How on earth could we have come to such a pass? Why can they not be reasoned with? In fact, the British were asking very similar questions about the American colonists as early as 1765.
Perhaps, then, there is something beyond mere amazement in tracing the story of how the American colonies found their way to independence with a covert group of radicals leading the way. The basic contradiction between means and ends that so perplexed and angered those distant colonists and their patrons has, after all, ignited fierce debate among contemporary Americans as we wage our own wars in defense of democracy.
The men who came to call themselves Sons of Liberty were patriots in their own eyes and are likely to seem so in the eyes of most Americans of this day. In the eyes of the British (and not a few fellow colonists) of the 1760s, however, they were terrorists who deserved to pay dearly for the things they had done.
Certainly, when they undertook to plan and carry out such actions as the Albany “Riots,” the burning of the HMS Gaspée, and the Boston Tea Party, the Sons of Liberty were not playing at symbolic gestures that would become the stuff of cant and schoolboy legend—they were laying their lives on the line in missions at a time when many of their fellow citizens were straddling the fence between obeisance to their lawful leaders and a commitment to an untested form of republican government.
The danger and the level of intrigue involved were hardly less than those associated with secret operatives and resistance fighters who would do anything to stop the spread of fascism across Europe in the twentieth century. And whatever debate might have existed about their methods, these Sons of Liberty finally led their fellow colonists to kick themselves free of the political gravity that had previously held them and to go to war against their protector, the mightiest nation known to that time.
This is the story, then, of how those forces metamorphosed from murmurings of a vague injustice into focused operations of resistance, led by men who dared to do what most were too fearful even to contemplate. The kindling of the fire of common purpose that would one day bring the British to their knees is the center of this book. The men involved were indeed desperate sons.
( 1 )
O Albany!
Maligning Albany is a very old game,” begins the highly regarded novelist William Kennedy’s personal history of his hometown. “The early Dutchmen were targets of derision by visitors who found their city dismal, dingy, and dirty. The English didn’t do much better with it. In 1876 the famed architect Stanford White had this to say: ‘Misery, wretchedness, ennui and the devil—I’ve got to spend another evening in Albany. Of all the miserable, wretched, second-class, one-horse towns, this is the most miserable.’ ”
But despite those slurs heaped upon poor Albany (or perhaps because of them), Kennedy has found sufficient inspiration in the warts, shortcomings, and cynical machinations of his hometown to set a number of acclaimed novels there, earning for himself a Pulitzer Prize and comparisons to James Joyce and Joyce’s exploitation of Dublin in the process.
As efficiently and effectively as Kennedy has mined the fictive ore of Albany, however, he has left at least one story untold. Possibly he passed it over because his explorations have centered on more modern Albany; or perhaps he left it alone because, in this tale, Albany plays a different kind of role, the one usually attributed to a grander city, with its famous bell, its Independence Hall, and more. In this real-life narrative, wretched Albany takes its place as the true cradle of liberty, for the events of early 1766 that took place there, and the desperate men who fashioned them, helped send the colonies careening toward a war of independence as surely as any other actions and actors of the time.
To begin, let us consider the fate of Henry Van Schaack, one of the early Dutchmen who did not find Albany “dismal, dingy, and dirty.” In fact, Van Schaack found great success there as a merchant in the so-called Detroit, or western, fur trade, an enterprise controlled from the beginning of the eighteenth century on the North American continent largely by the French. In the 1750s, however, as hostilities escalated between the British and the French along the western frontier and the French and Indian War became a reality, business became vastly complicated for Van Schaack.
As a result, he began looking for something more secure, and in 1757 he found it, or at least believed he had: he became the postmaster of Albany, and he fulfilled the gray duties of the office without incident for some ten years—until he made the mistake of considering yet another post offered to him by the king of England, and in doing so fanned passions that would eventually feed the flames of war.
On the Saturday night of January 4, 1766, sometime between 10 and 11, with the temperature in the teens and falling, Van Schaack heard a knock at his door. He opened it to find William Benson, a townsman whom he knew vaguely, standing there with a guarded expression on his face. A number of people were gathered in the public rooms at Thomas Williams’s inn, Benson told Van Schaack. The group was eager to speak with him, and wondered if he mightn’t be willing to “step over.”
When Benson refused to elaborate beyond the addition of the word “immediately,” Van Schaack became leery. He was well aware that the City Corporation often entertained at Williams’s at holiday times, and although most of the city officials—and the most boisterous component of government, the fire department—were fellow Dutchmen, there was something in Benson’s demeanor that put Van Schaack on guard. He told Benson that he would come on over, and in fact he did so, but not before rounding up a couple of his neighbors, just in case.
Van Schaack and his companions made their way to the inn, their breath billowing in the frigid air as they speculated about the nature of this summons. Probably it was just the exuberant f
iremen who wanted their postmaster there for a round of New Year’s toasts, one of his friends told Van Schaack. Everyone knew how the firemen in Albany were about their celebrations.
Or perhaps they’d gotten lathered up and wanted Van Schaack’s support for some move to further elevate the fortunes of their department in the coming year, his other companion suggested. Though the group was made up primarily of volunteers, it was nonetheless a mark of some distinction to be invited into the ranks. The department roster was studded with the names of the city’s most prominent families (most of them Dutch and including the Beckmans, the Cuylers, the Ten Eycks, the Ten Broecks, the Visschers, et al.); there had just been purchased a second, brand-new fire engine of which everyone in Albany could be proud; and one of the two city servants who actually drew a salary was the department’s engine mechanic. Additional to the firemen themselves was the cadre of elected officials called “firemasters,” elected annually from each of the city’s wards and charged with the task of inspecting the districts’ buildings for fire hazards.
In all, the firemen and the firemasters constituted a formidable group of citizenry, and, given the avowed purpose of their organization and the requirement to act quickly and decisively when called upon, they did not tend toward reticence in making their feelings known. They were important, and they knew it. Whatever it was that necessitated his appearance at Williams’s—and though Van Schaack was a seasoned enough politician to suspect a matter far more serious than what his companions theorized—the firemen probably had something to do with it.
In fact, he did spot the faces of many firemen as he and his companions entered the crowded hall at the inn. Of the thirty to forty men jammed into the stifling room, perhaps two-thirds were associated with the department. And though he knew the names of many of the men, he also took note that those around him were primarily the sons of his contemporaries, young men in their twenties and early thirties. Their fathers might have held boxes in the balcony of the Dutch Reformed Church, but these were not dour, reserved burghers surrounding him. Van Schaack was among the firebrands.
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