Desperate Sons

by Les Standiford

  It is an issue that he and his cousin differed upon profoundly. As John Adams would write to a friend a few years after the Revolution, “I begin to suspect that some Gentlemen who had more Zeal than Knowledge in the year 1770 will soon discover that I had good Policy, as well as sound Law on my side, when I ventured to lay open before our People the Laws against Riots, Routs, and unlawful assemblies. Mobs will never do—to govern States or command armies. I was as sensible of it in ’70 as I am in ’87. To talk of Liberty in such a state of things—!”

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  Charred to the Waterline

  By the end of 1770, it might have seemed that serious conflict between the colonies and England could be averted after all. John Adams, one of the “brace of Adamses” and member of the Boston Sons of Liberty, had successfully defended British soldiers who’d shot colonists dead in public and not a soul had taken to the streets in protest, though not for want of Samuel Adams’s trying. That half of the brace of Adamses published a series of articles in the Boston Gazette that were reprinted widely, signing himself as “Vindex,” poring over the testimony presented at the trial, reinterpreting facts, questioning the veracity of witnesses for the defense, and generally portraying the events of March 5 as the slaughter of innocents by depraved agents of an evil empire. “This Kilroi’s bayonet was prov’d to be the next morning bloody five inches from the point,” he wrote in a letter of December 17. “It was said to be possible that this might be occassion’d by the bayonet’s falling into the human blood, which ran plentifully in the street, for one of their bayonets was seen to fall. It is possible, I own; but much more likely that this very bayonet was stab’d into the head of poor Gray after he was shot, and that this may account for its being bloody five inches from the point—Such an instance of Savage barbarity there undoubtedly was.”

  An incendiary pamphlet, “A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston,” was hurried into print in London by the house of Edes and Gill, containing only the depositions of townspeople that were unfavorable to the soldiers. And though a more balanced follow-up edition, “A Fair Account of the Late Unhappy Disturbance in Boston,” would be published shortly thereafter, containing some two dozen affidavits that supported the soldiers’ actions, the concept of the events as a “massacre” was already alive. Still, no immediate repercussions ensued.

  Historians debate whether the events of March 5, 1770, were the most consequential of those leading up to the Revolution, and controversy regarding the culpability for the deaths and the motives of the prosecution and defense teams fills the pages of journals to this day. If indeed there was a river of discontent flowing in the colonies at the time, however, it seemed to have dived underground.

  In an entertaining summary of the shifting tides of opinion regarding the massacre, the historian Randolph Adams noted that in fact it might be true that John Adams had taken on the case of Preston out of principle and for the retainer of a single pound sterling—but, he also notes, the records of General Gage, not unearthed until the 1930s, indicate that John Adams, Josiah Quincy, and the others who assisted with the defense of Preston and the soldiers were actually paid a fee of £105 for their work, and, furthermore, Captain Preston considered sacking Adams halfway through the trial and replacing him with a more conservative associate.

  As Randolph Adams said of the endless refortification and debunking of the details of such a momentous event, “Verily, we have a ‘new school of history’ about every twenty years.” But, in the end, and whether it will ever be proved if it was the Americans or the British in the wrong on the night of March 5, Adams wrote, “there can be no doubt that the bloodshed was never forgotten.”

  That said, the aftermath of the saga’s conclusion was apparently placid. Merchants were relieved of the burden of nonimportation, and business on land and by sea was returned nearly to normal. The law had had its say on the matter of the shootings, and no one wanted more bloodshed on the streets. Some historians have referred to the months that followed as the “quiet period,” a time during which Governor Hutchinson could report to Hillsborough that his colony reflected a more “general appearance of contentment” than it had since the Stamp Act had first soured relations.

  In New York, things had been similarly quiet since early in 1770, with memories of the confrontations surrounding Golden Hill having faded, but the flags still fluttered from the liberty pole near the common to remind the people from whence they had come. Shortly after the planting of that splendid pole, however, it was revealed that the author of the acrimonious broadside attacking the DeLancey faction’s accommodation with the British was the well-known Sons of Liberty leader Alexander McDougall. Like his friend and associate Isaac Sears, McDougall had done well as a privateer plundering French ships during the Seven Years’ War and was now a prosperous trader with sizable landholdings near Albany and also the owner of a tavern near the city docks.

  Affluence would not save him in this instance, however. When testimony from the printer of the broadside revealed the identity of its author, McDougall was charged with libel against the government and jailed. Though he could have made bail on the charges, he instead chose to remain in jail while Sears and other Sons trumpeted the outrage of his imprisonment through press accounts in New York and across the colonies.

  McDougall languished martyrlike in jail for three months before prosecutors brought him to trial. Had he been convicted, it might have provided a spark for further protest in New York, but when the printer who identified McDougall died suddenly, the prosecution’s case collapsed, and McDougall went free.

  It would prove to be the last event of incendiary potential for some time in the previously contentious city. As in Boston, with business on the upswing and employment and wages increasing, discontent suddenly seemed an antique premise. The first statue in the city’s history was dedicated in August 1770 on Bowling Green, where not long before the governor’s coach had been burned, along with effigies of hated oppressors. Instead of martyrs or champions of liberty depicted there, the monument featured a most regal George III triumphantly placed astride his horse.

  In fact, the most victimized person in the city—at least in his own eyes—would have been the unfortunate Cadwallader Colden. Since Henry Moore’s departure in 1769, the long-suffering Colden had hoped that his steadfast loyalty would be rewarded with the promotion to governor, but it was not to be. Instead, John Murray, a Scottish nobleman, was appointed to the post. Murray, the Earl of Dunmore, and something of an opportunist, turned out not to be popular with anyone in New York, including Colden.

  Although Murray was appointed in January, he did not make his way to New York until October, whereupon he demanded 50 percent of the pay that Colden had been collecting as acting governor. Colden, not surprisingly, declined to comply, and William Smith, Jr., trying to curry favor, suggested that Murray, now in office, rule in his own favor. That was too much even for Murray, however; the new governor settled by submitting a petition to London that would eventually be declined.

  Worse yet, just days after he officially assumed his post, Murray received word from London that he was being transferred to Virginia, where the previous governor, Lord Botetourt, had died. Murray, who had taken the posting in New York as a move to advance his fortune, was outraged at being sent off to the hinterlands. According to Smith, who quickly saw the futility of trying to ally himself with such a venal hothead, Murray gave himself a farewell dinner, where he “took too Chearful a glass.” After drinking himself into incoherence, Murray brawled with his councilors, called his successor, William Tryon, a coward, and delivered a solid blow to the chest of the new governor’s secretary. Following that display, he staggered out into the New York streets in a rage, followed at a respectful distance by his worried servants.

  “Damn Virginia!” he is said to have shouted beneath the window of the prominent Tory surgeon Jonathan Mallet. “I asked for New York. New York I took, and they have robbed me of it.”

 
His superiors might well have been worried that Murray, left in the post at New York, could provoke another uprising by the force of his personality alone. “Was there ever such a blockhead?” Smith wrote in his diary. Soon enough, the earl was on his way to Virginia.

  With yet one more governor gone, Colden’s hopes were once more buoyed, but just as quickly they were dashed, for the king had already decided to promote Tryon, the governor of North Carolina, to the New York post. Tryon would remain New York’s governor into the Revolution, and faithful Colden, ever the bridesmaid, would die in 1776, in Flushing, at the age of eighty-eight.

  Meanwhile, in Charleston, and despite Christopher Gadsden’s exhortations, agreement on nonimportation also teetered in the wake of Parliament’s reduction of the Townshend duties. At a meeting of townsmen in December 1770, Gadsden and other leaders of the city’s Sons spoke spiritedly on behalf of “the expiring liberties” of the country, which it seemed “the merchants would sell like any other merchandise.” Gadsden argued that whatever the colonists might need from Britain they could easily get from Holland, but it was for naught. In South Carolina the die had long been cast; the vote to continue nonimportation failed. The meeting ended with a halfhearted gesture in Gadsden’s direction: a committee was appointed to “encourage” American manufactures, and the merchants did agree to abstain from importing tea, but it was clear that the steam was out of the radical movement in Charleston too, at least for the time being.

  As for the pledge to encourage local artisans, no grants were allocated by the assembly to any South Carolina craftsman or mechanic. In fact, imports into South Carolina from England quadrupled in 1771. At the same time, activity in the slave trade, which had briefly been blocked by the nonimportation agreements, quickly resumed. Though fewer than 2,000 slaves per year on average had been brought to South Carolina prior to nonimportation, the number increased to 5,000 in 1772 and 8,000 in 1773. The slave population, which had stood at 80,000 in 1769, grew by 1773 to 110,000, nearly half again as large. Modern sensitivities to the practice aside, the burgeoning population of slaves meant a corresponding drag on opportunity for craftsmen and laborers of the time. How could a free man earn a decent living, they lamented, when there were so many around him who were forced to work for nothing?

  Certainly, Sons of Liberty leaders such as Samuel Adams, Isaac Sears, and Christopher Gadsden remained unrelenting in their efforts to remind their fellow citizens of the dangers of collaborating with a designing enemy, but they were cast into much the same position as Ulysses trying to exhort his sailors to leave the land of the Lotus-eaters.

  It should be remembered that nearly 90 percent of the entire population of the colonies at the time was farmers, men far removed from the centers of population, whose struggle was an unrelenting one, with the land and the seasons and an array of natural plagues, far more so than with any aspect of politics. There had in fact been minor uprisings in the hustings over the issue of land rights, and there had been indignation over the arbitrary granting of vast tracts to cronies of the British ministry, but those had been of minor concern to the merchants, traders, and political activists, in whom wealth and influence were concentrated.

  If the British had been content with the benefits that began to accrue to them from the moment the Townshend duties were repealed, perhaps the present-day boundaries of Canada would have extended south to Key West and westward to San Diego. But of course they were not.

  Enforcement of the duties on tea, molasses, and other products still on the books remained spirited through the early 1770s, with despised customs agents active in Boston, New York, Charleston, and elsewhere. In Providence, long a smugglers’ stronghold, passions were inflamed by the appearance, in March 1772, of an armed British schooner, the Gaspée, on the waters of Narragansett Bay. As Deputy Governor Darius Sessions, a resident of Providence, wrote to Governor Joseph Wanton in Newport, residents of Providence had been “much disquieted” by the arrival of the Gaspée, which, according to Sessions, “much disturbed our Navigation. She suffers no vessel to pass, not even packet boats, or others of an inferior kind, without a strict examination, and where any sort of unwillingness is discovered, they are compelled to submit, by an armed force.”

  What principally troubled Sessions and others among the population was that Lieutenant William Dudingston, the commander of the Gaspée, would present no formal authority to conduct such business, and Sessions urged the governor to inquire into the matter, as Dudingston seemed to be comporting himself essentially as a privateer. Governor Wanton wasted no time in sending a letter to Dudingston demanding that he produce evidence of his authority to the high sheriff or face the consequences.

  Dudingston’s reply to the governor was fashioned of the same stuff that would one day prompt a fabled film line: “Badges? . . . I don’t have to show you any stinking badges.”

  Dudingston informed Wanton that he was the commander of one of His Majesty’s warships and that was all anyone needed to know. As for the rest, the rum-running miscreants of Rhode Island could mind their own business and keep an eye out for him into the bargain.

  It was not the answer the governor was looking for, a fact of which he quickly informed Dudingston. He demanded that the lieutenant produce written authority for his actions, and furthermore, he said, “I expect that you do without delay, comply with my request of yesterday, and you may be assured that my utmost exertions shall not be wanting to protect your person from any insult or outrage on coming ashore.”

  As Judge William Staples, the first chronicler of the Gaspée affair, put it, “Here ended the correspondence between the Governor and the Lieutenant.”

  Instead of answering the governor’s demands, Dudingston passed copies of the correspondence to Admiral John Montagu, the commander in chief of the British fleet in the colonies. On April 6, Montagu wrote back to Wanton in a manner that made it clear that the British forces considered themselves to be the final arbiters of what constituted their authority.

  As to the letters of Wanton’s that he viewed, Montagu termed them “of such a nature I am at a loss what answer to give them, and ashamed to find they come from one of his Majesty’s Governors.” Dudingston had been assigned to the Narragansett waters for the good of the citizens, Montagu reminded Wanton, “to protect your province from pirates and to give the trade all the assistance he can, and to endeavor, as much as lays in his power, to protect the revenue officer, and to prevent (if possible) the illicit trade that is carrying on at Rhode Island.”

  In short, Dudingston was only doing his duty, and furthermore, Montagu scolded, “it is your duty as a governor, to give him your assistance, and not endeavor to distress the King’s officers for strictly complying with my orders.” Nor should any of the more scurrilous of the province’s citizens undertake to interfere with the Gaspée and her men. He had already informed Dudingston, the admiral said, “that, in case they receive any molestation in the execution of their duty, they shall send every man so taken in molesting them, to me.”

  Rumors reached Montagu that there was talk in Providence of sending out an armed vessel to “rescue any vessel the King’s schooner may take carrying on an illicit trade,” but he minced no words about such an idea: “Let them be cautious what they do; for as sure as they attempt it, and any of them are taken, I will hang them as pirates.”

  Furthermore, Montagu said, he would forward copies of Wanton’s unfortunate letters to the home secretary, who just might have words of his own for an impertinent colonial governor. “I would advise you not to send your Sheriff on board the King’s ship again, on such ridiculous errands,” he concluded. “The Captain and Lieutenants have all my orders to give you assistance whenever you demand it, but further you have no business with them, and, be assured, it is not their duty to show you any part of my orders or instructions to them.”

  This, of course, prompted a barely contained response from Governor Wanton informing Montagu that he, too, would be sending copies of their cor
respondence to London, and suggesting that Montagu be careful about hanging any colonists. Such posturing continued back and forth for several days and might have gone on even longer had it not been for the events of June 9, a day upon which the watch aboard the Gaspée, which continued resolutely in the course of her duties, called out an alarm. The packet boat Hannah had been spotted moving furtively along the shallow waters on the northwestern side of the bay, near Pawtuxet, about five miles south of Providence.

  Dudingston gave orders, and soon the Gaspée was in full sail, closing in upon the Hannah. The adventure might have ended with a heave-to and a boarding, inspection, and seizure of the sort that had ignited the recent passions of the citizens, had it not been for the fact of its being low tide and Dudingston’s overeagerness to show who was in charge. In any case, there was a sudden lurching of the Gaspée, then a decisive jolt, and in the next moment the crew of the warship was watching the Hannah shrink rapidly in the distance from the decks of their own vessel, now run hard aground.

  The captain of the Hannah, Benjamin Lindsey, who had left Newport earlier in the day, continued his way north to Providence, where he arrived near sunset and quickly spread the word as to what had taken place. The tides would not rise sufficiently to free the Gaspée until at least midnight, he reckoned, and in short order, the merchants of Providence hit upon a way to solve the difficulties that Dudingston and his ship had created for them.

  John Brown, a prominent merchant and leader of the local chapter of Sons of Liberty, sent men to gather eight longboats from about the harbor and to muffle their oars and oarlocks. Shortly after sunset, a man was sent along Main Street, beating a drum and passing the word to curious townsmen: the Gaspée had run aground not far south in Narragansett Bay, and any true Son of Liberty who wished to join the party should hurry to the docks. The troubles of the recent weeks would soon be corrected.