Desperate Sons

by Les Standiford

  It was also reported that the mob who had advanced on the house of Oliver (he who had been unwise enough to fulfill “a very unpopular office”) had not only burned up the coach and stripped the garden’s trees of their fruit but also made their way into the cellar of the house “and helped themselves to the liquor that they found there.” Among other depredations, the mob had managed to shatter two mirrors, one said to be “the largest in North America.”

  According to the Gazette, Oliver sent letters to a number of individuals believed to be connected to the protesters, assuring them that he had not in fact taken the position of stamp master. It was not enough to prevent protesters from gathering again in the town square that next evening, whereupon the makings of a bonfire were piled high. Only when a proclamation sent by Oliver to disown any interest in the position was read aloud did the mob disperse, though some marched down to the residence of Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson to have a chat. Finding Hutchinson not at home, they concluded the evening by marching about the city, stopping here and there to read from Oliver’s letter, a copy of which they were assured was already on its way to London via packet ship.

  The story concluded with the writer sharing word that the crowds involved in the fracases had by no means been made up solely of residents of Boston but had been swelled by others from Charleston, Cambridge, and other nearby towns. The truth of these rumors, the reporter said, tongue firmly in cheek, would “possibly be hereafter discovered by the Vigilance, Industry, and Zeal of the Attorney-General.”

  As to the origin of the effigies, the reporter theorized that they had been constructed in Cambridge, as evidenced “from this remarkable Circumstance, that the very Breeches were seen upon a Gentleman of that Town on Commitment Day.”

  Bernard’s fears that the events of August 12 and 13 were only the prelude to “much greater Commotions” proved to be prophetic. On the evening of August 26, Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson was sitting at dinner in his Boston home with his family when there came a frenzied pounding at his door. A mob was on its way and the family would have to flee, a friend explained to Hutchinson, who was disbelieving at first. There had been rumors that there was trouble afoot, but the word was that protesters intended to march to the home of Charles Paxton, an officer of the Vice Admiralty Court, as well as that of Benjamin Hallowell, the customs chief of Boston. The houses of admiralty officers might also be a target, Hutchinson’s intelligence suggested, but he had been assured that he was no longer at risk. “The rabble were satisfied with the insult I had received and that I was become rather Popular,” he told his friend Richard Jackson, the agent for the colony of Connecticut.

  Hutchinson, who had already faced the mob once, might have been tempted to stand his ground, but putting his family at risk was out of the question. “I directed my children to fly to a secure place,” he told Jackson, “and shut up my house as I had done before intending not to quit it but my eldest daughter repented her leaving me and hastened back and protested she would not quit the house unless I did. I could not stand against this and withdrew with her to a neighbouring house.”

  It was just as well that his daughter forced him to flee. They’d been gone only minutes, before, as Hutchinson put it, “the hellish crew fell upon my house with the rage of devils and in a moment with axes split down the doors.” From the house next door, Hutchinson and his family listened in disbelief to the shouts of the men who had broken into his home.

  “Damn him!” one cried. “He is upstairs. We’ll have him.”

  Hutchinson peered through his neighbor’s curtains, watching the shadows of men bustle past the windows of his home, even to the top of the house. The rooms downstairs, he saw, were jammed with mob members, so many that most of the crowd was forced to mill about the street outside.

  “They’ll be in here soon enough,” the friends who’d raised the alarm told Hutchinson. He’d better get his family out to someplace safer.

  Thus “I was obliged to retire thro yards and gardens to a house more remote,” Hutchinson told Jackson. He and his family huddled there in fear until nearly 4 a.m., he said, “by which time one of the best finished houses in the Province had nothing remaining but the bare walls and floors.”

  “Not contented with tearing off all the wainscot and hangings and splitting the doors to pieces,” he continued, “they beat down the Partition walls and altho that alone cost them near two hours they cut down the cupola or lanthern and they began to take the slate and boards from the roof and were prevented only by the approaching daylight from a total demolition of the building.”

  The sight to which Hutchinson and his family returned would have been evocative of a hurricane’s passage: “The garden fence was laid flat and all my trees &c broke down to the ground,” he said. “Such ruins were never seen in America. Besides my Plate and family Pictures household furniture of every kind, [and] my own my children and servants apparel, they carried off about £900 sterling in money and emptied the house of everything whatsoever except a part of the kitchen furniture, not leaving a single book or paper in it and have scattered or destroyed all the manuscripts and other papers I had been collecting for 30 years together besides a great number of Publick papers in my custody.”

  Indeed, it must have seemed to Hutchinson that the world was turned upside down. Only a few weeks before, he had been a comfortable and well-paid minister of the king, in charge of one of the most prosperous of the American colonies. And then one night a hundred men had burst into his home with the apparent aim of killing him.

  He’d had to flee without so much as a coat. “The evening being warm I had undressed me and slipt on a thin camlet surtout over my wastcoat,” he told Jackson. “The next morning the weather being changed I had not cloaths enough in my possession to defend me from the cold and was obliged to borrow from my host.

  “Many articles of cloathing and good part of my Plate have since been picked up in different quarters of the town,” he continued, “but the Furniture in general was cut to pieces before it was thrown out of the house and most of the beds cut open and the feathers thrown out of the windows.”

  Given the evidence of such fury, Hutchinson decided to spirit his children down to Milton, a southern suburb where he kept a second residence, but as they rode, hidden behind drawn curtains, two separate parties of men attempted to stop their coach. As the coach slowed a third time, Hutchinson heard his coachman mutter and drew the curtain aside. A group of men approached from the roadside and one called out, “There he is.”

  The driver yanked the reins and managed to turn the coach about, galloping them back the safety of the British garrison in Boston. “My daughters were terrified,” Hutchinson told Jackson, “and said they should never be safe.”

  For all that he had gone through, Hutchinson told Jackson that it was his belief that others among the colonists had come forward with apologies that he seemed surprisingly willing to entertain: “The encouragers of the first mob never intended matters should go this length and the people in general express the utmost detestation of this unparalleled outrage and I wish they could be convinced what infinite hazard there is of the most terrible consequences from such daemons when they are let loose in a government where there is not constant authority at hand sufficient to suppress them.”

  He was further reassured that more responsible parties would make him financially whole: “I am told the government here will make me a compensation for my own and my family’s loss which I think cannot be much less than £3000 sterling. I am not sure that they will. If they should not it will be too heavy for me and I must humbly apply to his Majesty in whose service I am a sufferer.”

  But for Hutchinson the matter clearly went far beyond monetary concerns. “This and a much greater sum would be an insufficient compensation for the constant distress and anxiety of mind I have felt for some time past and must feel for months to come,” he explained. “You cannot conceive the wretched state we are in. Such is the resentment of the people ag
ainst the stamp duty that there can be no dependence upon the general court to take any steps to enforce or rather advise the payment of it.”

  Hutchinson could not have been more blunt concerning the prospects of the Crown’s insisting upon the enforcement of the tax: “Such will be the effects of not submitting to it that all trade must cease, all courts fall, and all authority be at an end.”

  Nor should the king and his ministers feel shamefaced, Hutchinson insisted. The fear that Parliament would lose its authority over the colonies if it backtracked on the Stamp Act was to be disregarded, he counseled. For if military force sufficient to ensure compliance were ever applied, it would mean the danger of “a total lasting alienation of affection” between the colonies and the Crown.

  “Is there no alternative?” the shaken Hutchinson pleaded before closing. “May the infinitely wise God direct you.”

  ( 7 )

  Strong Drink in Plenty

  Following the account of the events through Hutchinson’s eyes may allow the modern reader to more fully appreciate the magnitude of the shift that was taking place in the colonies of 1765. Of course, the mob was convinced of the rectitude of its actions (or ceased to think too much at all after a certain point). And it is pointed out by more than one historian that Hutchinson and his governor were not exactly hail-fellow-well-met.

  But it is difficult to find much beyond sheer astonishment in the account the lieutenant governor gives concerning his experience. How could matters have come to this? he seems sincere in asking. And what in God’s name was to be done about it? What a monumental shift it must have seemed from the way things had always been.

  As it turned out, Hutchinson’s intelligence was partially correct. Before descending upon his house, the mob had indeed ransacked the homes of William Story, the deputy registrar of the Admiralty Court, and Benjamin Hallowell, the customs collector for the Port of Boston. On the following Monday, September 2, the front pages of both the Boston Gazette and the Boston Post-Boy carried vivid descriptions of those events.

  Since Story was only a renter, accounts agreed, the mob had spared the building in which he lived and had been content to burn his papers and furniture. The damage to Hallowell’s home was more severe—in addition, the rioters did “drink and destroy the Liquors in his Cellars, take away his Wearing-Apparel, break open his Desk and Trunks, and take out all his Papers, and about Thirty Pound Sterling in Money.” Governor Bernard announced a reward of £100 for the identification of anyone involved in the crimes and £300 “for the Discovery of the Leader or Leaders of the aforesaid.”

  While Bernard waited in vain for someone to claim the reward, other such disturbances were popping up spontaneously elsewhere in the colonies. On August 27, in Newport, Rhode Island, demonstrators carried the effigies of Augustus Johnston, their newly appointed stamp commissioner, along with two other royal officials, to a gallows newly erected in front of the town courthouse, where they were hanged. To attract a larger crowd, organizers of the event promised “strong drink in plenty with Cheshire cheese.” As the Newport Mercury of September 2 reported, while Johnston and the other officials fled for safety to the Cygnet, a British man-of-war anchored in Newport harbor, demonstrators punctuated their event by cutting down the effigies and tossing them onto a bonfire.

  The crowd then dispersed and the matter might have ended there, had not Johnston and his associates come back ashore so soon. The following afternoon, as they stepped off the docks, the group was accosted by a small party of men who had been among the rioters of the day before. Words were exchanged, and one of the men put Johnston in a headlock. Though the scuffle was broken up and Johnston and his associates made away for their homes, the trouble did not end. Within hours, the mob assembled again, and with faces painted in disguise and sharpened axes raised, they made for the homes of Johnston and the British ministers.

  The actions taken were much the same as in Boston: doors were kicked down, furnishings shattered, paintings slit, and—of course—stocks of liquor consumed. Johnston and his friends had the good sense to flee their homes, and no physical harm came to anyone, but the following morning Johnston’s resignation of the post of stamp master was read aloud in the town square to great huzzahs.

  The Mercury offered an interesting postscript: scarcely was the resignation read when a man whom the paper identified as a young Irishman named Maffaniello stood up to identify himself as the leader of the depredations enacted over the previous days. According to the writer, Maffaniello was immediately arrested and taken aboard the Cygnet for safekeeping. This, however, raised a fresh outcry in the town, and the fearful authorities ordered Maffaniello released.

  The next day found Maffaniello marching about the streets of Newport, boasting of his power and threatening to destroy the homes of all British officials in the town unless “they made him Presents agreeable to his demands.” At this, former stamp master and still attorney general Johnston had heard enough. As it is reported, Johnston “heroically seized upon” Maffaniello, “and some Gentlemen running to his assistance, they carried him off to Jail.”

  “This proved effective,” the reporter added. “Nobody appeared to rescue him, nor to say a Word in his Favour. He is now under Confinement;—the Town is again in Peace, and we sincerely wish it may continue so.”

  It was an understandable wish, but an unlikely one, for the discontent underlying the disturbances in Boston and Newport was incubating like a fever throughout the colonies. Newspapers played a role in fueling the fire of discontent, of course, but events that took place in Boston on August 26 would not be reported in Newport until a week later. When Rhode Islanders took to the streets the very next day, they had no idea what their counterparts seventy miles to the north had done. The juggernaut had begun to roll, independent of control.

  In New York, Stamp Master James McEvers resigned his post shortly after word came of what had transpired in Boston, and the New-York Gazette published a letter congratulating him for the move. The letter, reprinted in a number of colonial papers in the weeks to follow, also contained a call addressed “To the Stamp Officers who have not yet resign’d.”

  “You have now an opportunity put into your hand of showing whether you are friends or enemies to your country,” the writer said. “If we are enslaved, it will be thro’ the helping hand you lend towards it; for if you do your duty to your country by a refusal, we shall undoubtedly preserve our rights and liberties—His Majesty and our brethren in England will hear our complaints, and redress our grievances.”

  On October 7, 1765, the first pan-colonial or “continental” congress opened in New York City, at the site that would eventually become known as Federal Hall. Though Virginia, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Georgia were not represented, each sent word that it would go along with whatever the body decided.

  After some debate as to whether certain delegates were authorized to vote or merely advise, the work began in earnest. In their words (Journal of the First Congress of the American Colonies, in Opposition to the Tyrannical Acts of the British Parliament), “The congress took into consideration the rights and privileges of the British American colonists, with the several inconveniencies and hardships to which they are, and must be subjected by the operation of several late acts of parliament, particularly the act called the stamp act.”

  For the next ten days (the body did not meet on Sundays) the various issues were debated, and on October 19 the seven voting members (Connecticut and South Carolina are not named) signed a Declaration of Rights, a document that might be properly thought of as the precursor to another declaration that would appear some eleven years later.

  Following what was described as “mature deliberation,” the members were agreed on certain rights and grievances of the colonists in America: “The members of this congress, sincerely devoted, with the warmest sentiments of affection and duty to His Majesty’s person and government, inviolably attached to the present happy establishment of the Protestant successio
n, and with minds deeply impressed by a sense of the present and impending misfortunes of the British colonies on this continent,” it began, “esteem it our indispensable duty to make the following declarations, of our humble opinions, respecting the most essential rights and liberties of the colonists, and of the grievances under which they labor, by reason of several late acts of Parliament.”

  The declarations were fourteen in all, many of them covering what by that time were familiar assertions:

  That colonists were, like residents of Great Britain, subjects of the king and owed their loyalty as well to “that august body, the Parliament of Great Britain.”

  That colonists were also “entitled to all the inherent rights and privileges of his natural born subjects within the kingdom of Great Britain.”

  That it was “the undoubted rights of Englishmen, that no taxes should be imposed on them, but with their own consent, given personally, or by their representatives.”

  That the colonists were not, and “from their local circumstances” could not practically be, represented in Parliament.

  That “the only representatives of the people of these colonies are persons chosen . . . by themselves,” and that furthermore only taxes imposed by their own assemblies could be construed as constitutional.

  That it was “unreasonable and inconsistent with the principles and spirit of the British constitution” for Parliament to extract monies from colonists for the benefit of the Crown.

  That trial by a jury of one’s peers (not admiralty officers) was the right of every resident in the colonies.

  That the recent Stamp Act “and several other acts,” by extending the jurisdiction of the courts of admiralty beyond its traditional limits subverted the rights and liberties of the colonists.