Desperate Sons

by Les Standiford

  A sizable group associated with the Copperheads was that of the Knights of the Golden Circle, formed by a colorful Cincinnati physician named George Washington Lafayette Bickley. Bickley, a schemer with a pedigree equal to that of any snake-oil salesman from a Mark Twain novel, had a long history of involvement with secret fraternal societies and decided to form his own in 1859, with the express intention of creating a paramilitary force for the seizing of Mexico. There, a vast new slave state would be created, with himself (he had somehow acquired the title of “General” to supplant that of “Dr.”) at its helm.

  Though it might seem vaguely lunatic to the modern reader, Bickley’s idea found great favor in the South and was the subject of any number of laudatory news articles in that region. When the Civil War broke out, Bickley adroitly shifted his group’s focus from an assault on Mexico to the support of Confederate interests, and soon enough, the Knights, primarily a southern-based entity, organized chapters in a number of states, including Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, where Copperhead activists were prominent.

  Various financial and other irregularities plagued the group, however, and in order to distance themselves from scandal, as well as from its charismatic founder, leaders reorganized in late 1863 as the Order of American Knights, and then again in 1864 as the Order of the Sons of Liberty, influenced both by the lofty imprimatur of the former resistance organizations and by the Copperheads’ own affinity with the symbol of liberty. As the Union gradually gained control of the war and the war’s end became inevitable, the group lost its influence, however, and eventually disbanded.

  As might be expected, there were any number of vestigial groups of Sons who maintained connections during their service in the Revolutionary War and afterward, though the purpose of such associations was far more fraternal and honorary than actively political. One claiming a connection to the original Sons endures to this day: the Improved Order of Red Men, headquartered in Texas and maintaining chapters in seventeen states, including California, New York, New Jersey, and Virginia. Like the similarly democratically inclined “Tammany” groups that were popular in the years following the Revolution (one of which grew to substantial political influence in New York), the Red Men honor the contributions of workingmen to the Revolution and fashion their regalia and nomenclature after the Iroquois, Algonquian, and other Native tribes, prompted in part by the disguises worn during the Boston Tea Party, as well as by the essential “American” nature of the Native inhabitants. Richard Nixon and former chief justice of the United States Earl Warren are sometimes cited as having been members of the group.

  The exploits of the Sons of Liberty have also entered modern American popular culture from time to time. In 1943, a Houghton Mifflin editor, Esther Forbes, published a novel for young readers, Johnny Tremain, which follows the adventures of a fictive young apprentice silversmith injured while working on a sizable commission from none other than John Hancock. Tremain later meets Paul Revere and eventually becomes a stalwart of the Sons of Liberty—“those carefully organized ‘mobs’ who often took justice into their own hands.” The book, which remains the sixteenth best-selling children’s title of all time, won the Newberry Medal in 1944 for Massachusetts resident Forbes, who had previously been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1942 for—what else—a biography of Paul Revere.

  In 1957, Forbes’s book was adapted into a Walt Disney film with speaking parts for characters that included Samuel Adams, James Otis, Paul Revere, and even General Gage. The film, while serviceable, never rose to the heights of its literary predecessor, and failed to find much favor with critics, including the often dyspeptic Leslie Halliwell, who dismissed it as a “schoolbook history with little vitality.”

  A somewhat more intriguing film is 1939’s two-reel short Sons of Liberty, directed by Oscar winner Michael Curtiz, of Casablanca fame. The twenty-minute film tells the true story of a Jewish émigré, Haym Salomon, played in the film by Claude Rains. Salomon, a financier from Poland, arrived in New York City in 1775 and became involved with local merchants attempting to continue foreign trade. Soon he was a member of the New York Sons, and in 1776 he was arrested by the British on charges of espionage.

  Though the British later pardoned the German-speaking Salomon on the condition that he serve as an interpreter for the Hessian mercenaries brought in to aid the fight against the colonists, the financier was in short order working to help free American prisoners and encouraging the German soldiers to desert the British. He was arrested again by the British but escaped and made his way to Philadelphia, where he worked for the remainder of the war to raise capital for military operations.

  Curtiz’s film, part of Hollywood’s anti-Nazi, pro-liberty campaign of the late 1930s and early ’40s, is hampered by the attempt to pack a feature’s worth of material into a twenty-minute frame, but Rains, often consigned to villainy in his roles, is redoubtable as Salomon and enlivens what could have been torturous. Though Sons of Liberty is seldom seen, the determined can find it packaged as extra material on the DVD of an Errol Flynn vehicle, Dodge City (1939), also directed by Curtiz.

  Perhaps the most popular reminder of the Sons comes in the form of the various Samuel Adams craft brews that constitute the cornerstone of the Boston Beer Company and account for about 1 percent of the American beer market. Adams would no doubt be pleased by the fact that, following the 2008 sale of Anheuser-Busch to European interests, the producer of “Sam Adams” became the largest American-owned brewery in the country. As to whether Adams ever brewed beer himself, Boston Beer Company cofounder Jim Koch reports being approached in the late 1990s by a rare-documents dealer offering a receipt signed by Adams for the purchase of hops, something only a brewer would have purchased. Koch balked at the price being asked by the dealer, however, and the document has since disappeared.

  A somewhat different vestigial reminder of the Sons comes in the form of efforts of contemporary Tea Party members to ally themselves with the aims of the prerevolutionary patriots. Generally decrying the steadily burgeoning federal government committed to a continuing “slide into socialism,” and complaining of oppressive taxation and excessive government spending, such groups appeal to contemporaries by insisting that the radicals who brought the nation into being would be appalled by what government has become—and one supposes that there is at least a sampling of Samuel Adams Boston Lager consumed along with other American brews at their rallies.

  Nor is there much doubt that Samuel Adams and many of his steadfast states’-rights compatriots would be appalled at the size and nature of the current federal government, its annual expenditures, and its dizzying array of taxes. However, for contemporary patriots supposing that Samuel Adams would champion any talk of rebellion or violent action against that government, they might consider the “old revolutionary’s” comments regarding the violent uprising known as Shays’s Rebellion, which took place in two far-western counties of Massachusetts in 1787, when Adams was serving as a senator in the State Assembly.

  When some 1,500 armed and tax-burdened farmers under the command of former Continental Army captain Daniel Shays threatened to march upon the Springfield Arsenal as part of a plan to disrupt court and governmental proceedings in the state, the governor ordered a contingent of 4,000 state militiamen to meet them. The resultant battle left four of Shays’s men dead and twenty wounded. When friends of Shays went to Adams, expecting support for a pardon of the rebellion’s leaders, he gave them a stinging lesson in democracy.

  According to his first biographer, William Wells, Adams’s reply was curt and to the point. “In monarchies, the crime of treason and rebellion may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished,” he allowed, “but the man who dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.”

  Adams would have further occasion to echo such sentiments in 1794, when a group of western Pennsylvania corn farmers protested a new excise tax passed on whiskey they were distilling. After they shot at federal revenuers
and some five hundred men stormed the home of a federal tax inspector, General John Neville, President Washington sent a force of 15,000 militiamen to put down the so-called Whiskey Rebellion. By the time the troops arrived, the rebellion had evaporated, but as then-governor Samuel Adams was quick to tell his legislature, “What excuse then can there be for forcible opposition to the laws? If any law shall prove oppressive in its operation, the future deliberations of a freely elected Representative, will afford a constitutional remedy.”

  That old Son labored long and hard to create a government in which every man owned a voice and no man bowed before another. In his view, the very fact of the republic’s existence was an eternal guarantee of liberty. For Adams and his fellow Sons, disobedience to a monarchy had proved unavoidable, but disobedience to the republic that replaced it was simply unthinkable. They had fought desperately to make it so.

  Notes

  Most of the materials pertaining to the exploits of the Sons of Liberty and the American Revolution are contained within the public archive, and the principal details have been often cited in various divergent contexts. However, where I have made use of any singular piece of scholarship, I have endeavored to acknowledge that in the text or within these notes. I have also included a notation of primary and secondary sources consulted (and not otherwise referenced in the text) chapter by chapter, in order to aid the reader interested in following a particular line of inquiry more deeply.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  As to the nature of the continuing historical enterprise, I recently presided over a seminar at a major institution in the Northeast with doctoral students of history, all of them laboring on dissertations that were biographical in nature. During the discussion period, one student enthusiastically described his project, having to do with a certain American female who had accomplished something notable early on in her life. “She never did another thing of any importance so long as she lived,” he told me proudly, “but no one has ever written about it!”

  The title of a 1980 volume by Pauline Maier, a protégée of the well-known Bernard Bailyn and a noted historian in her own right, is The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams. Beyond Adams, Maier there discusses the work and influence of Dr. Thomas Young, Josiah and Mary Bartlett, Richard Henry Lee, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton.

  Maier also devotes a chapter of 1972’s From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 to the impact of the Sons on activities pertaining to the Stamp Act crisis: “The Intercolonial Sons of Liberty and Organized Resistance, 1765–1766.”

  For a thorough and evenhanded survey of the significant literature pertaining to the American Revolution, see Rothbard, “Modern Historians Confront the American Revolution.” Along the way, the well-known libertarian laments, “Disgracefully, there has been very little work done on two vital revolutionary organizations and institutions in the pre-Revolutionary period: the committees of correspondence, and the Sons of Liberty.”

  1. O ALBANY!

  William Kennedy’s personal history of the town is a highly selective, subjective, and entertaining one for fans of the Albany novels or those with some other interest—whatever that might be—in the subject.

  Stanford White, who went on to design one manifestation of Madison Square Garden, the Washington Square arch, etc., penned his feelings about Albany to his mother while he was twenty-three and still in the employ of Henry Hobson Richardson, a noted architect of the day, to whom the quote is sometimes mistakenly attributed.

  The particulars of Van Schaack’s travails are contained in McAnear, “The Albany Stamp Act Riots”; in Van Schaack, Memoirs; and in issues of the New York press (New York Mercury, Gazette, and Post-Boy, late January 1766).

  Becker’s article “Growth of Revolutionary Parties and Methods in New York Province” provides an overarching context for radical activities for the decade 1765–1774.

  The most thorough treatment of the Stamp Act Crisis comes from Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan in their aptly named volume, The Stamp Act Crisis. Edmund Morgan’s article “Colonial Ideas of Parliamentary Power” is a persuasive summary of the colonists’ perception of their rightful place in the hierarchy limned by the British Constitution.

  The most authoritative (and entertaining) source on Franklin comes from the statesman himself—his autobiography is available in various editions.

  A most readable and carefully researched “people’s history” of the American Revolution, deftly summarizing a welter of materials from public documents of the time, is Page Smith’s two-volume opus A New Age Now Begins.

  For a thorough treatment of the difficulties of comparing currency values across history, see McCusker, How Much Is That in Real Money?

  2. MEASURES ILLEGAL, UNCONSTITUTIONAL, AND OPPRESSIVE

  References to various acts of Parliament and associated debates are drawn largely from Parliamentary History of England, as well as from History, Debates and Proceedings of Both Houses of Parliament of Great Britain.

  For more on Franklin and his observations on the currents of the Atlantic, see Lacoute, “The Gulf Stream Charts of Benjamin Franklin and Timothy Folger.”

  For a diverting treatment of travel in the period, see Fontenoy, The Sloops of the Hudson River.

  4. STORM BEFORE THE CALM

  Fictional narratives of import trace the efforts of a protagonist (Ahab/Sons of Liberty) to accomplish some momentous task (harpoon the damnable white whale/go to war against tax-hungry oppressors). But that is not enough to make for real satisfaction. Unless there is some underlying psychological and thematic concern (vengeance/rights of man) that richly complicates the events that occupy the surface of the tale, a reader is left with the equivalent of an action thriller (Moby-Dick reduced to Jaws III/American Revolution: The Video Game). The best stories intertwine the physical and the abstract to create a sense of substance as they progress toward an inevitable end, as tragic or triumphant as it may be.

  The debate between pragmatists and ideologists is voluminous, but the works cited in the text should suffice for most. For a summary of the Michener-Wright position on economic forces shaping the Revolution, see Arango, “A Revolutionary Recession: Did a Sour Economy Set Off the American War for Independence?” Hofstadter’s assessment of Beard is found in The Progressive Historians, page 344.

  Population figures come from the U.S. Census, immigration and employment statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor. The Smith volumes provide a comprehensive overview of general living conditions in colonial America, as do countless other volumes and websites, including that of Colonial Williamsburg.

  5. NOURISHED BY INDULGENCE

  For further details of the Townshend-Barré debates, see History, Debates and Proceedings of Both Houses of Parliament of Great Britain.

  For the role of Samuel Adams in local government and other details of the proceedings of the Boston Assembly, see Boston Town Records.

  Smith’s letters are collected in Historical Memoirs of William Smith.

  For a treatment of the evolving role of newspaper reporting during the period, see Schlesinger, “The Colonial Newspapers and the Stamp Act,” as well as his Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain.

  As noted, Henry’s resolutions were widely reprinted in various forms in the colonial press. While Jefferson’s account (see Randall) is well intentioned and that of Henry’s first biographer (Wirt) is stirring, the most intriguing recounting of Henry’s oration may be “Journal of a French Traveller,” reprinted anonymously in American Historical Review in 1922. A recent blog posting by Joshua Beatty of the Feinberg Library, SUNY Plattsburgh, suggests that the eighty-year-old mystery of the “traveller’s” identity may have been solved. See Beatty’s “The ‘French Traveller,’ Patrick Henry, and the Contagion of Liberty” (Lemonade & Information, March 26, 2011). For a modern reassessment of the import of Henry’s actions before the burgesses, see the 2011 artic
le published by Australian scholar Rhys Isaac (librarian Beatty’s former mentor).

  6. UNLEASHED

  Unger’s John Hancock: Merchant King and American Patriot is the definitive, and highly readable, biography of the man with the most famous signature in the world.

  Bernard’s letters to the home secretary were not made public until 1769, though all the while Adams and others of the Sons in Massachusetts suspected that he was communicating surreptitiously with his superiors. An account of the means by which the letters were finally procured is in Walett, “Governor Bernard’s Undoing.” Copies of the letters are found in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

  Huchinson’s account is found in the Diary and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson.

  The full account of the business of the Stamp Act Congress is found in Journal of the First Congress of the American Colonies.

  The account of the disturbances in Charleston is found in the South-Carolina Gazette for the dates and is also part of the full-length narrative of Sons activity in the state by Walsh, Charleston’s Sons of Liberty.

  10. HORNETS AND FIREBRANDS

  Montresor’s Journals, Colden’s Letters and Papers, and contemporary press accounts form the basis of the narrative of the Stamp Act disturbances in New York.

  Also of interest are Dawson, The Sons of Liberty in New York (1859), and a contemporary eyewitness account, “tolerably correct in the main,” reproduced as “The Stamp Act Riot: A Letter Written on the Day Following,” in New York City During the American Revolution.

  Commentary by Morgan and Morgan and Becker constitutes the definitive evaluation of the significance of the Stamp Act events in the evolution of the Revolution.

  Another well-drawn narrative of the events is found in Engleman, “Cadwallader Colden and the New York Stamp Act Riots.”

  “An Excellent New Song” is quoted in Dawson, The Sons of Liberty in New York.

  11. FROM AIRY NOTHING