Desperate Sons

by Les Standiford

  Furthermore, it was painful for him to imagine her fear at hearing “the Noise of War” so near her. He added, “I pray to God to cover the heads of our Countrymen in every day of Battle, and ever to protect you from Injury in these distracted times,” and confided that he felt great affliction at the death of their good friend Dr. Warren, who had been killed while defending against a British advance on Breed’s Hill on June 17. Though he had been commissioned a general in the Massachusetts militia, Warren had taken a place in the bunkers alongside all the other common soldiers who kept the British contained in Boston.

  From the outset, however, Adams had not seemed daunted by the ultimate cost of the conflict. One contemporary scribe reported that he turned to John Hancock at the moment following receipt of the news from Lexington to say, “O! what a glorious morning is this.” And indeed he did rejoice that the citizens of Massachusetts had responded to the call to arms issued by the Continental Congress, even if they had, in his words, been “driven to Resistance through Necessity.” In any case, it was his unequivocal pronouncement that his compatriots might at last “justly claim the Support of the confederated Colonies.”

  Of course, any reader who can appreciate the tragedy of a simple-minded boy being shot dead off a wall for the crime of a cheery hello to a group of passing soldiers—or one who laments the folly of war in general—might have reservations about the propriety of any man’s “rejoicing” over such a conflict’s beginning. But Adams would not be the first activist to point out that there comes a time when it is clear that polite and peaceful petition to an oppressive master will not serve to bring about meaningful change. In the final analysis, as Malcolm X declared in his 1963 Message to the Grassroots, “You haven’t got a revolution that doesn’t involve bloodshed.” Certainly, Adams would over time be reviled as an ultimate propagandist and rabble-rouser, but at the same time he is identified by many as the one individual above all who guided the country to a revolution that is alternately regarded as glorious, bloody, and inevitable.

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  Shade of Paradise

  On June 12, 1775, during the early days of the Siege of Boston, General Gage issued a proclamation meant to put an end to the armed conflict. “I avail myself of the last effort within the bounds of my duty, to spare the effusion of blood,” he said, “to offer, and I do hereby in his Majesty’s name, offer and promise, his most gracious pardon in all who shall forthwith lay down their arms, and return to the duties of peaceable subjects, excepting only from the benefit of such pardon, Samuel Adams and John Hancock, whose offences are of too flagitious a natur.”

  Gage’s supercilious offer only hardened the resolve of those who had taken up arms, but it also announced to the world at last, and in no uncertain terms, the identity of the most effective Sons of Liberty in the American colonies. Gage’s backhanded designation was hardly the only recognition of Samuel Adams’s contributions. Comparing him to the helmsman of the Trojan warship, Thomas Jefferson would declare some fifty years later, “If there was any Palinurus to the Revolution, Samuel Adams was the man. Indeed, in the Eastern States, for a year or two after it began, he was truly the Man of the Revolution.”

  For all that, after the war began Adams would become very much a backroom politician. (As Pauline Maier has pointed out, many studies of Samuel Adams have fixated on the rather shortsighted observation that his career climaxed in 1776.) Though active as a behind-the-scenes facilitator at the Second Continental Congress, he assumed no office there. Though he was a supporter and signer of the Declaration of Independence, the voluminous scribe’s part in its creation was chiefly advisory, though he did serve as the Massachusetts representative on the committee that drafted the Articles of Confederation, the loosely circumscribed precursor to the strongly federalist U.S. Constitution composed ten years later.

  In late 1781, Adams left the Continental Congress and returned to Boston to reenter the world of Massachusetts politics, though that time he was attempting to refine the procedures of a new form of government, not prod his peers to battle. By that time Samuel Adams had also fallen out with his old ally and now Massachusetts governor John Hancock, owing in large part to what the self-effacing Adams considered extravagant, self-aggrandizing behavior on the latter’s part. And later, during the debate on the new U.S. Constitution, Adams further marginalized himself as a staunch opponent of the move toward a strong central government. The effort reinvigorated his interest in national politics, however, and his tireless work to amend what he considered a flawed document led to the formulation of the Bill of Rights in 1791 and, along the way, a rapprochement with Hancock.

  In 1789, Adams was elected to serve under Hancock as lieutenant governor of the state, a development that would surely have chagrined Thomas Gage had he been alive to witness it: the two men he blamed above all for his woes were now the lawfully elected leaders of his former colony. Gage, recalled in disgrace to England shortly after the disastrous Battle of Bunker Hill in the early days of the Siege of Boston, died in 1787. He was preceded in his journey to the shades by a fellow former governor and another legendary foe of Adams, Thomas Hutchinson, who died in 1780 in London, where he had continued to serve as a largely marginalized adviser to the British government and work on his epic History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, the third and final volume of which was published posthumously in 1828.

  Adams would assume the most significant political office of his life in 1793, at the age of seventy-one, when Hancock died and Adams ascended to the governorship. The following year, he was elected to the post in his own right, the first of four annual terms he would serve. In the first ever contested presidential election, that of 1796, he was selected by fifteen members of the Virginia delegation in a move to place him as vice president to his fellow anti-Federalist Thomas Jefferson, but the staunch Federalist John Adams won the election handily, and Jefferson, under the system that was then used, became vice president as the second-place finisher.

  At the end of his gubernatorial term in 1797, Samuel Adams finally retired from politics, so afflicted with the condition of essential tremor that he could no longer write. He died on October 2, 1803, at the age of eighty-one, the old Puritan eulogized in the Boston press as “The Father of the American Revolution.”

  Of the several “old radicals” so prominent in the early days of the formation of the Sons of Liberty—and excepting perhaps the two-time governors Patrick Henry of Virginia and the more moderate John Hancock in Massachusetts—Samuel Adams had, by most accounts, the most significant postrevolutionary political career. Yet even that later success came to him grudgingly and nearly by default. The fact is that Samuel Adams was not a politician or a bureaucrat but a zealot; in terms of his public life, he viewed himself not so much as an individual but as the embodiment of an idea, and as such he was far more suited for the work of toppling an oppressive government than for the comparatively dull business of building and maintaining a better one.

  Of course the other prime movers of the American rebellion—among them James Otis, Christopher Gadsden, Isaac Sears, and John Lamb—command their fair share of pages in the more obscure annals, but despite the courage they displayed at a time long before a war was declared, before public opinion swung unequivocally their way, before it was deemed politically correct to don a uniform and take up arms against the oppressor, it is chiefly the aficionados of history who recognize their names today.

  Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin deserve their accolades, just as Philadelphia can justly lay claim to the sobriquet “birthplace of liberty.” But it is just as truthful to say that the American Revolution was birthed on a chill night in 1766 in Albany, New York, and that Samuel Adams is in fact the real “Father of his Country.”

  It is a commonplace that history is written by the victors, but it is a lesser recognized corollary that the most popular of those histories are those most vigorously promulgated by the new regime in charge. In comparison with the actions of the Sons
of Liberty, for instance, Benjamin Franklin and his city, said to have cradled liberty, actually came a bit late to the party.

  In fact, Franklin was on board a ship bound for the colonies the day fighting broke out in Lexington and Concord. He had endured a very difficult time in London since accusations had surfaced regarding his role in circulating the Hutchinson-Whately letters, his reputation among the British forever sullied by a vicious attack concerning the matter by Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn before the Privy Council in late January 1774.

  Franklin arrived in Philadelphia on May 5, 1775, only to learn that the long-threatened war had begun and he was to be Pennsylvania’s delegate to the Second Continental Congress, where his most celebrated contributions as a statesman would begin. He was a member of the Committee of Five deputed to draft the Declaration of Independence and served as minister to France from 1776 to 1785, during which time he would negotiate the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

  As for James Otis, the onetime confidant of Samuel Adams and sometimes credited with coining the phrase that formed the backbone of rebellion, “No taxation without representation,” his public life essentially came to an end following the ill-fated coffeehouse tussle with tax man John Robinson in 1769. In the wake of his death in 1783, it was widely reported that he had previously written his sister, Mercy Otis Warren, “My dear sister, I hope, when God Almighty in his righteous providence shall take me out of time into eternity that it will be by a flash of lightning.” Though no copy of that alleged letter remains, this much is certain: Otis, by then adjudged “harmlessly insane,” was standing in the doorway of his caretaker friend’s house in Andover on an otherwise bright May afternoon in 1783 when a bolt from a lone dark cloud passing overhead struck him dead.

  Christopher Gadsden, often called the “Samuel Adams of the South,” attended the Second Continental Congress as a member of the South Carolina delegation but left in 1776 to assume command of the state’s military forces, repulsing a British attack on Charleston in 1778. Shortly after, he was appointed vice president (lieutenant governor) of South Carolina, a post he held for two years, until the British captured Charleston and remanded Gadsden to prison at the old Spanish fort of Castillo de San Marcos in Saint Augustine, Florida.

  Refusing various blandishments offered by the British, Gadsden spent forty-two weeks in solitary confinement there, until he was finally paroled to Philadelphia. He eventually returned to South Carolina and served in its House of Representatives, though his deteriorating health, exacerbated by his prison confinement, prevented any significant role in the new government. He died after a fall in Charleston in 1805, at the age of eighty-one, and is perhaps best known today for his creation of the “Don’t Tread on Me” rattlesnake flag, which he presented to the first commander in chief of the U.S. Navy, Commodore Esek Hopkins.

  The firebrand privateer Isaac Sears remained in New York following the Battle of Lexington, serving as the commander of that city’s militia until Washington’s army arrived in June 1775. In one of his more celebrated actions, he led a raiding party that November on the offices of the Tory-controlled Rivington’s Royal Gazette, destroying the press and melting its lead into bullets for the revolutionary troops. When the British captured the city in 1777, Sears fled to Massachusetts, where he resumed a profitable career as a privateer. He returned to New York in 1783 when the British withdrew, living in grand style in a mansion off Bowling Green and reestablishing himself in local politics. A series of questionable financial transactions put him deep into debt and led to his fleeing the city in 1786, whereupon he became involved in a trading venture to China. He contracted a fever and died in Canton on October 28, 1786.

  John Lamb, along with Sears one of the original founders of the New York Sons of Liberty, was also active in the early revolutionary resistance in New York. As the commander of the militia’s artillery company, on August 23, 1775, he led a midnight raiding party intent on capturing the twenty-one British cannon installed on the Battery, at the city’s southern tip. They had hauled off eleven of the cannon before a man-of-war anchored nearby spotted them and began a barrage on the city that would end with a third of the population of 25,000 fleeing the island in terror.

  Though that mission ended in a standoff, Lamb continued to serve as an artillery officer in the Continental Army with distinction and was appointed a brigadier general by the war’s end. As a reward for his service, he was named the first customs collector of the Port of New York, a post he held until 1797, when the newly elected president, John Adams, removed him after a deputy was accused of embezzling tax revenues. Lamb, along with Samuel Adams, Isaac Sears, and many others among the original Sons of Liberty, maintained a staunch states’-rights, anti-federalist stance to the very end. He died in poverty on May 31, 1800.

  Though the intrepid rider and messenger Paul Revere never aspired to a position of leadership within the ranks of the revolutionaries, he would become, after Hancock, the most enduringly successful businessman of them all. He served a somewhat controversial career as an infantry major during the war, then, after weathering charges of insubordination, returned to Boston to open a hardware supply store. Eventually, he established an iron and brass foundry in the city, becoming renowned as a caster of church bells and eventually a major supplier of ships’ hardware and fittings. As the nineteenth century dawned, Revere opened the first copper mill in the United States, the Revere Copper Company, which endures to this day. Revere, whose business interests led him to the federalist position after the war, died in 1818 in Boston at the age of eighty-three and is buried in the Granary Cemetery, along with his former compatriots Samuel Adams and Isaac Sears.

  Whether these men and the countless others who identified themselves as Sons of Liberty and Liberty Boys were motivated to risk everything primarily for principle or for their pocketbooks is surely an imponderable in the end. Perhaps principle was everything to the resolute Puritan Samuel Adams; but to merchants and traders such as Hancock, Lamb, and Sears, or workingmen and their supporters such as Revere and Gadsden, principle was as much a justification as a cause. And in the end, what does it truly matter?

  Whatever their motivations, without the Sons of Liberty, there would have been no Revolution as we know it. As Pauline Maier makes clear in her discussion of the group in the formative Stamp Act days, the Sons set everything into motion. They legitimized the very notion of resistance and, in organizing as they did, provided a means by which momentous change might be implemented. They allowed—in Maier’s words—that ultimately, “resistance could become revolution.”

  In desperation they found common cause, and, as unlikely as it initially seemed—even to themselves—they went to war against the most powerful military force in the world, emerged victorious, and created a new nation, devoted to principle and supported by practice.

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  What Remains

  Though the signing of the Treaty of Paris on September 3, 1783, put an end to the Revolutionary War and established an irrevocably independent United States, the Sons of Liberty enjoyed a brief reincarnation in New York, when, following the evacuation of the British, Isaac Sears and John Lamb reorganized their political activities around an antiloyalist platform. There was a great deal of lingering hostility on the part of those who had suffered at the hands of the British and their sympathizers during the occupation of the city from late 1776 through the end of the war. For weeks following the withdrawal of British troops, newspaper accounts described a number of beatings, tarrings and featherings, and various forms of threats and intimidation against those thought to be Tories, and by December, the Sons would win sufficient seats in the state assembly to ensure passage of a number of hostile measures directed against loyalists.

  Anyone accused of Tory leanings by so much as a single citizen could be deprived of the right to vote, and those accused of collaborating with the British during the occupation were subject to an onerous tax. At a massive rally held on the city’s common in March 1784
, there were calls that any remaining loyalists be expelled from the state by May 1, and—in direct contravention of the treaty ending the war—that their property be confiscated and sold at auction.

  Though some saw the proposed expulsion of so many longtime citizens as counterproductive to the revitalization of the war-ravaged city and considered such actions a direct contradiction of the principles that had fueled the Revolution in the first place, the radicals’ hold on the populace remained solid until a scandal broke shortly before elections for the state assembly in June 1784. Sears, Lamb, and other influential leaders within the Sons organization, it was discovered, had been buying up the pay certificates of beleaguered veterans at a discount, then using the proceeds to invest in forfeited Tory properties in and around the city. As a result of the charges, the Sons were lambasted at the polls, and Sears was forced out of the city, in disgrace and deeply in debt.

  Though the debacle of 1784 may have marked the end of the Sons of Liberty as an effectual political entity, the spirit of the organization has endured in any number of manifestations through the ages. During the Civil War, a group of northern Democrats opposed to the war, supportive of states’ rights, and committed to rapprochement with the South and a condoning of the practice of slavery became known as “Copperheads.” The name was given them, after the venomous snake, by Republicans supporting Abraham Lincoln and the war effort. The “Peace Democrats,” as they were also called, did not resist the epithet but in fact adopted a clever response: the copper “head” referred to in their view was the likeness of the Goddess of Liberty then stamped on the face of the copper penny, which they adopted as their proud symbol.