Stirring as it may have seemed to the governor, it turned out to be an unfortunate declaration, for Adams and the members of the assembly wasted no time in using the governor’s own words against him; if it were true, said Adams, that the citizens of the province were either the mere servants of Parliament or totally independent, and if it could be equally safely assumed that the men who had negotiated the colony’s charter in 1691 would never have given away their freedom, then logically there could be little doubt that Hutchinson himself regarded his constituents as independent of Parliament.
Adams pointed out that most colonial charters granted the power of governance to the colonies themselves and promised only that the laws enacted therein would be “not repugnant to the laws of England.” A long response to the governor drafted in large part by Adams on behalf of the assembly on January 26, 1773, painstakingly detailed a number of instances in which various British monarchs had acted to affirm the independence of the colonies from Parliament. From the beginning, Adams argued, the colonies had not been considered “within the realm of England,” and therefore they could not be considered subject to the laws governing that realm. Certainly, the inhabitants of the colonies had never given their assent to governance by Parliament, Adams said, and they were not about to give it now.
In his speech to the assembly, Hutchinson drew a dire picture for any colonists who might be desirous of an independency. The colonies would be gobbled up in a trice by the Spanish, the French, or the Dutch, he warned, and then they would find out what misery truly was. To that Adams responded by wondering whether it truly would be a “misfortune,” for the oppressive measures the colonies were now laboring under seemed misfortune aplenty.
In the end, Adams said, it appeared as if the governor were suggesting that indeed there was a need to choose between subservience and independence, and furthermore, if the governor expected “to have the line of distinction between the supreme authority of Parliament, and the total independence of the colonies drawn by us, we would say it would be an arduous undertaking, and of very great importance to all the other colonies; and therefore, could we conceive of such a line, we should be unwilling to propose it, without their consent in Congress.” What Adams was suggesting in those fateful lines was the formation of a Continental Congress in which the prospect of independence would be formally considered.
Still, despite that not-so-veiled threat, Adams said, things did not have to come to such a pass. The people of Massachusetts, he insisted, had not in the least “abated that just sense of allegiance which we owe to the King of Great Britain, our rightful Sovereign; and should the people of this province be left to the free and full exercise of all the liberties and immunities granted to them by charter, there would be no danger of an independence on the Crown.”
Adams’s protestations meant little to Hutchinson, who saw it all as hairsplitting by an opponent who was already determined to lead the colony toward independence. Hutchinson drafted a scathing response that reaffirmed his own legal reasoning, which occasioned an equally indignant reply from the assembly, and back and forth it went, well into 1773, though the implications of a desire for independence that had provoked their debate had already reached a much wider audience.
In Boston, a little-known visiting minister from England, John Allen, delivered a sermon at the Second Baptist Church that utilized the Gaspée affair to warn listeners about greedy monarchs, corrupt judges, and conspiracies at high levels in the London government. Allen then expanded his spoken sermon into a letter to Lord Dartmouth titled “Oration of the Beauties of Liberty”: “Suppose your Lordship had broke the Laws of his king, and Country; would not your Lordship be willing to be tried by a Jury of your peers, according to the Laws of the land? How would your Lordship like to be fetter’d with irons, and drag’d three thousand miles, in a hell upon earth?” The resulting document was distributed widely about the colonies, becoming one of the more popular political pamphlets of the run-up to the Revolution.
Meanwhile, in Virginia, word reached the House of Burgesses of the discord in Massachusetts and of the Gaspée inquiry in Rhode Island. On March 12, the burgesses voted to follow the lead of the local committees in Massachusetts and formed the first colony-level Committee of Correspondence, “to consist of fifteen members, any eight of whom to be a quorum; whose business it shall be to obtain the most early and authentic intelligence of all such Acts and resolutions of the British Parliament, or proceedings of administration as may relate to, or affect the British colonies in America, and to keep up and maintain a correspondence and communication with our sister colonies.” One of the original members of Virginia’s committee was Patrick Henry; another was the young burgess Thomas Jefferson.
“This House is fully sensible of the necessity and importance of a union of the several colonies in America, at a time when it clearly appears that the rights and liberties of all are systematically invaded,” the Virginia resolution stated. Thus, “in order that the joint wisdom of the whole may be employed in consulting their common safety,” the burgesses also resolved to try to convince all other colonies to join. The first order of the committee’s business would be to draft “a circular letter to the several other houses of assembly on this continent, enclosing the aforesaid resolves, and requesting them to lay the same before their respective assemblies, in confidence that they will readily and cheerfully comply.”
Indeed, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire quickly followed suit, and eventually all the other colonies did so, though it would be the end of 1774 before the New York Assembly became the last to officially join the network. Meantime, however, the committees, also organized in hundreds of cities and towns about the colonies and estimated to have included as many as eight thousand individuals at any given time, would eventually come to supplant the colonial assemblies as the true voice of the people. The committees, many of them made up of the same leadership as the various Sons of Liberty chapters, could also operate in secret, sharing information, opinions, and strategies for dealing with the British without fear of reprisal. What Thomas Hutchinson had once dismissed as irrelevant and foolish would become a most effective intelligence-sharing and morale-boosting operation, uniting a far-flung and politically disparate group of colonies as never before.
And soon there would be much of import to share.
Shortly after the Massachusetts Assembly voted in June 1773 to form its own Committee of Correspondence, Samuel Adams learned that Thomas Cushing, the assembly’s chairperson, had been sent a packet of potentially incendiary letters penned by Hutchinson and other British-appointed officials in the colony in the late 1760s. The letters, sent to a fellow government minister in London, presented the state of affairs in Massachusetts as precarious indeed. Hutchinson demonized Adams and other Whig leaders, encouraged the maintenance of the onerous customs control, and suggested that the situation called for the curtailment of what Britons might think of as ordinary privileges of citizenship.
In a letter of October 4, 1768, Hutchinson told his confidant, “Many of the common people have been in a frenzy . . . too many of rank above the vulgar have countenanced and encouraged them, and the executive powers have completely lost their force.” Indeed, troops were needed and quickly, he made clear: “For 4 or 5 weeks past, the distemper has been growing, and I concede that I have not been without some apprehension for myself.”
Though Benjamin Franklin claimed he had given the letters to Cushing only to provide the assembly speaker and his associates with insight into Hutchinson’s motives and intent, and only with the understanding that their contents would not be made public, the moment Adams learned of the letters, he calculated what would be the best use to make of them. With Cushing’s approval, he announced to the assembly that he had obtained damning letters that proved the true intentions of their governor and Parliament as regarded Massachusetts. Furthermore, Adams would—upon condition that they not be copied or quoted—read them al
oud to that body.
Of course, every delegate promised that not a word of what was to be quoted would pass beyond the chamber’s closed doors, and Adams had his dreamed-of audience in the palm of his hand. Following the reading of the correspondence, the assembly proclaimed by a vote of 101 to 5 that Hutchinson (himself born in Massachusetts, it might be noted) clearly had no respect for the constitution of the colony and had willfully attempted to impose “arbitrary power” upon its citizens.
“Ignorant as they be,” Hutchinson said of Samuel Adams and his fellow Sons, “the heads of a Boston town-meeting influence all public measures.” As to the so-called trade restrictions and onerous enforcement by customs agents, he vowed, “I know of no burden brought upon the fair trader by the new establishment.” In Hutchinson’s estimation, only the “illicit trader finds the risk greater than it used to be.”
The overall situation, he declared, “is most certainly a crisis,” one for which the “licenciousness of such as call themselves sons of liberty” was responsible. Perhaps most damning was Hutchinson’s declaration: “There must be an abridgement of what are called English liberties. . . . there must be a great restraint of natural liberty.”
Though it would be a few months before the packet was printed in its entirety, excerpts sufficient to damn Hutchinson in the eyes of the public were printed in the June 28 issue of the Boston Gazette and were widely disseminated throughout the colonies. Following a vote of 80 to 11, a petition crafted by Adams and calling for the removal of Hutchinson as governor of the province was soon on its way from the Massachusetts Assembly to the king. If the Hutchinson Letter Affair suggested that the “quiet period” was over, other events suggested that cacophony would soon be the order of the day.
When news of the disclosure of the Hutchinson letters became public in England, a furor ensued. Those missives, along with a few from Andrew Oliver, who had ascended to the post of lieutenant governor under Hutchinson, had been penned to Thomas Whately, an influential member of Parliament who had died in 1772. Though Benjamin Franklin declined to say who had delivered the letters to him, Whately’s brother William accused John Temple, a former lieutenant governor of New Hampshire and liberal sympathizer with the colonies. Whately and Temple fought a duel over the matter, and though Whately was wounded, the results satisfied neither man, and a second duel was arranged.
At that point Franklin intervened, publishing a letter in the London Gazette on December 27, 1773, that was eventually reprinted in the Boston Gazette of March 7, 1774. Franklin began by saying that unfortunately, Whately and Temple had engaged in a duel over a “transaction and its circumstances of which both of them are totally ignorant and innocent.” Neither man had been involved in the procurement of the letters, the statesman declared. He alone had obtained and transmitted the Hutchinson letters to Boston. Furthermore, there had been no inappropriate sharing of private correspondence, as was alleged. The letters, said Franklin, “were written by public officers to persons in public station, on public affairs, and intended to procure public measures.”
The correspondents quite frankly wished to stir up sentiment against the colonies in London, Franklin said, and certainly the letters had been effective in serving their intended purpose. Furthermore, the writers were concerned only that the letters not fall into the hands of any of the London-based colonial agents, “who the writers apprehended might return them, or copies of them to America.”
In this regard, their fears had been well founded, Franklin continued, for he, being the first such agent who had laid his hands on them, had “thought it his duty to transmit them to his constituents.” With that he ended the matter, sidestepping the question of just how he had obtained the letters, not making any apology for having sent them along, and signing himself as B. Franklin, “Agent for the House of Representatives of the Massachusett’s-Bay.”
Eventually, Franklin would be called before the Privy Council to explain his role in the matter further, but by the time he arrived in those chambers in late January 1774, news of an even more disturbing nature had reached the mother country. By the end of that interview, Franklin would have to reassess the whole of his diplomatic career.
The beginning of the end might be traced to the continuing economic woes of the British East India Company and the ensuing efforts of Parliament to prop up the unsustainable enterprise at the expense of the American colonies. When most of the provisions of the Townshend Acts had been repealed in 1770, leaving only the duty on tea, colonists had responded by either going without tea or consuming what was smuggled in from Holland. What was supposed to have been a boon to the struggling company simply had not materialized, so proponents in Parliament devised what seemed to be a foolproof plan.
Under the terms of the Tea Act of 1773, the present duty of 3 pence per pound, lingering since 1770, would remain. However, the tea company would no longer have to deliver its tea from India directly to Britain. Instead paying the required import duties in London and selling the tea to wholesalers, who would in turn package it for resale to the colonies, the company would now be permitted to transport tea directly from India to the colonies. Even with the 3 pence import duty factored in, this cutting out of the middleman would enable colonists to buy good-quality India tea—far superior to the smuggled product—at about 2 shillings per pound, a penny less than Dutch tea. How could the miserly tea-drinking colonists resist? Lord North, the prime minister who introduced the bill, and the others responsible for its design must have congratulated themselves on their ingenuity and cunning. Soon enough, though, the joviality in London would cease.
Some commentators point out that the ensuing furor in the colonies was proof that the ultimate rupture from the mother country was idealistic in nature, for if greed had been the only factor motivating the colonies, the prospect of cheaper tea would surely have been met with widespread approval. In fact, though, there was dissatisfaction of a practical nature associated with the Tea Act.
Wholesalers in London were not happy with being cut out of the loop, to be sure, for export of tea to the colonies had once been a profitable enterprise. A second opposed group consisted of American shipping interests, which would no longer collect freight charges for transporting the tea to colonial ports. In addition, the British East India Company would be required to off-load its cargo only to agents licensed by the Crown in the major port cities of Boston, New York, Charleston, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. Those agents—who effectively were granted a monopoly—would necessarily be selected from the ranks of merchants deemed to have remained loyal through the trials and travails of the past decade, a matter that further infuriated those who had gone along with the nonimportation agreements. In Massachusetts, passions were further inflamed by the fact that Governor Hutchinson himself was financially involved in the firm chosen to receive British East India tea in Boston.
Added to all this was the dissatisfaction of the many colonial merchants who dealt extensively in illicit Dutch teas; if North’s plan worked, they would find themselves out of business, along with the intrepid ships’ captains and their crews employed in the smuggling. All in all, there were quite a variety of interests opposed to the Tea Act on pragmatic grounds.
No public referendum was ever held that might have provided insight as to just how many Americans would have gone along with the prospect of cheaper, better tea, though Franklin later scoffed at the notion that the saving of a few pennies per year would have been enough to sway a colonist: “They have no idea,” Franklin said of the Tea Act’s champions in Parliament, “that any people can act from any other principle but that of interest; and they believe that threepence on a pound of tea, of which one does not perhaps drink ten pound in a year (!), is sufficient to overcome the patriotism of an American.”
Whether Franklin was right about “the people” in general will be forever uncertain, but it is undeniable that at an October 16 town meeting in Philadelphia a series of declarations was passed denouncing the Tea Act (with its
life span of five years) as nothing more than an extension of the Townshend duty on tea and calling for any merchant who had signed on as an agent for the British East India Company to end the arrangement.
Nor is there doubt about the reaction of Samuel Adams, for on October 21, Adams drafted a letter for the Massachusetts Committee of Correspondence warning that the Tea Act would not only have ruinous effects upon the local economies but also support the notion that Parliament could “bind the colonies” in all cases it saw fit. “It is easy to see how aptly this Scheme will serve both to destroy the Trade of the Colonies & increase the revenue,” he said before repeating what was by then a mantralike appeal for united action: “How necessary then is it that Each Colony should take effectual methods to prevent this measure from having its designd Effects.”
With Governor Hutchinson having suspended the Massachusetts Assembly, Adams was cut off from his most effective channel of activism. Still, he gathered a number of associates for a meeting of the North End Caucus, a Whig organization, at the Green Dragon Tavern, where those present voted to prevent the sale of British East India Company tea in Boston, even if it cost them their fortunes and their lives. A handbill was drawn up and circulated advising that a committee would meet beneath the liberty tree at noon on November 3 and that all those who had agreed to serve as consignees for the British East India Company were requested to attend and hand in their resignations.
The five hundred or so Liberty Boys who gathered beneath the great elm at the corner of Essex and Washington Streets to witness this ceremony were disappointed, for the consignees did not attend. As the gathering was breaking up, however, word spread that a number of the consignees had been spotted at a nearby warehouse. William Molineux, one of the leaders of the North End Caucus and a colleague of Adams’s on the city’s Committee of Correspondence, placed himself at the head of a group that marched on the warehouse to reiterate the demands that the consignees relinquish their positions. When the consignees declined, Molineux warned of the “heavy resentment” that would come their way as a result. The consignees took this as a signal to withdraw behind the doors of the warehouse, and the encounter ended without further incident.
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