Desperate Sons

by Les Standiford

  According to the website People of Colonial Albany Live Here, the “Sons of Liberty Constitution” was first reproduced in 1876 in a Schenectady periodical, the American Historian and Quarterly Genealogical Record (vol. 1). Only a photocopy of the original document remains in the holdings of the Colonial Albany Social History Project.

  Along with Dawson, Walsh, and Maier, a series of articles by Champagne, “The Military Association of the Sons of Liberty,” “Liberty Boys and Mechanics of New York City,” and “New York’s Radicals and the Coming of Independence,” constitutes the principal critical examination of the influence of the Sons of Liberty per se on the development of the Revolution.

  12. FIRST TO BLINK

  Franklin’s examination before the House of Commons has been widely reproduced; the reprintings include an appearance in The World’s Famous Orations, a multivolume set compiled by William Jennings Bryan in 1906.

  Contemporary newspaper accounts, along with commentary by Montresor, form the basis of the narrative of the Stamp Act’s repeal and its reception in the colonies.

  13. BETTER DAYS

  Carter’s edition of Correspondence of General Thomas Gage is the source for letters attributed to the general, along with the Gage Manuscripts held at the University of Michigan libraries and discussed later in the text.

  Schlesinger’s “Liberty Tree: A Genealogy” is a captivating and thoroughgoing treatise on the principal icon of the Sons movement in colonial America. Jenkins (The Greatest Street in the World) also provides a lively account of the liberty pole’s various manifestations in New York. See also “The Liberty Pole on the Commons” in the New-York Historical Society Quarterly Bulletin.

  Schecter’s Battle of New York provides the definitive overview of New York’s convoluted politics during the run-up to the Revolution.

  14. TOWNSHEND FANS THE FLAMES

  Mayhew’s letter to Otis is found in Bradford’s Memoir of the Life and Writings of the good reverend.

  Adams’s letters are collected in Cushing’s four-volume set, The Writings of Samuel Adams.

  The observer of unmatched joy is John Rowe, who provides a rhapsodic account of the festivities in Letters and Diary of John Rowe, Boston Merchant.

  Chaffin’s “Townshend Acts of 1767” appears in the pages of that principal repository of scholarship regarding the American Revolution, the William and Mary Quarterly.

  Modern editions of Dickinson’s collected essays are easily found.

  The account of the contretemps between Otis and Adams is found in Letters to the Right Honourable the Earl of Hillsborough.

  The most recent treatment of Adams’s activities is the meticulous account of John K. Alexander, Samuel Adams: The Life of an American Revolutionary (2011).

  Details of the Romney confrontation were assiduously reported in the local press and are the subject of Dickerson’s thoughtful “John Hancock: Notorious Smuggler or Near Victim?”

  15. THE ROAD TO MASSACRE

  John Adams’s letter to Rush of May 21, 1807, is found in vol. 9 of The Works of John Adams.

  The complete list of Sons present at the dinner in Dorchester is found in Palfrey, “An Alphabetical List.”

  John Adams’s Diary and Autobiography referred to is the four-volume set edited by Butterfield.

  As Alexander points out, Samuel Adams’s reputation has waxed and waned among biographers over the years. Earlier writers such as Wells painted him in hagiographic fashion, as a saintly savior of his country, whereas the mid-twentieth-century view tended toward a portrait of Adams as a Machiavellian manipulator and master of propaganda management; cf. John Miller, Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda. Maier’s summary “A New Englander as Revolutionary,” in The Old Revolutionaries, is an engaging portrait of an individual as the living embodiment of an idea.

  A discussion of Gadsden as “country factor” is found in Rogers, “The Charleston Tea Party.”

  The detailing of Gadsden’s activities in Walsh’s Charleston’s Sons of Liberty lays out support for the oft-repeated description of Gadsden as “the Samuel Adams of South Carolina.”

  A comprehensive summary of the DeLancey-Livingston political maneuvering is found in Klein, “Democracy and Politics in Colonial New York.”

  Events surrounding the so-called Battle of Golden Hill were drawn nowhere more colorfully than in the contemporary New York press, renderings that enliven the scholarship that has descended since.

  The anecdote regarding the skull-splitting efficacy of the halberd is variously reported in accounts of the demise of Charles the Bold.

  16. AFFRAY IN KING STREET

  The brawl provoked by Otis is detailed in Tudor’s 1823 Life of James Otis and has become a staple of renderings of the Sons’ activities in Boston since.

  The Gailer incident was duly reported by the local press. For an in-depth discussion of the practice of tarring and feathering, see Irvin, “Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties.”

  Phillis Wheatley is also believed to have penned a poem titled “On the Affray in King-Street,” treating the events of the Boston Massacre. That title appears in a list for a collection she proposed for publication in 1772. However, the collection never appeared, and Wheatley scholars debate the legitimacy of various fragments said to be taken from “Affray”; no copy of the finished poem survives. See Minardi, Making Slavery History, p. 4.

  There are many accounts of the events leading up to and making up what is commonly referred to as the Boston Massacre, including the contemporary press coverage and other contemporary accounts taken up later in the text. Of the modern accounts of the event, none is more complete or colorful than Hiller Zobel’s aptly titled The Boston Massacre (1970).

  17. TRIAL OF THE CENTURY

  The role of John Adams in the defense of Captain Preston and his men is one of the more intriguing anecdotes to come out of the lead-up to the Revolution, owing to the delicious irony involved, a fact of which Adams himself was not unaware. His own comments on the matter have fed a number of subsequent well-drawn assessments, including Reid’s “A Lawyer Acquitted” (1974) and McCullough’s rendering of the material in John Adams (2001).

  John Adams’s trial notes and a record of his speeches are found in Kidder’s History of the Boston Massacre (1870).

  18. CHARRED TO THE WATERLINE

  Randolph Adams’s reassessment, “New Light on the Boston Massacre,” is also a stoic, evenhanded reflection on the endless malleability of history.

  The early exploits of Isaac Sears, Alexander McDougall, and the labyrinthine twists of prerevolutionary New York politics form a compelling thread through the first third of Schecter’s authoritative Battle of New York, which continues its narrative through the British evacuation of the city in 1783.

  The unfortunate behavior of John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, is detailed in the diary Historical Memoirs of William Smith.

  Details of the adventures surrounding the Gaspée incident are drawn from contemporary press accounts as well as the wealth of letters, depositions, and other accounts originally compiled by William R. Staples (Documentary History of the Destruction of the Gaspee) in 1845 and republished by the Rhode Island Publications Society in 1990. To this writer, the narrative deriving from such materials virtually dictates itself, with the characters rivaling those drawn from any novelist’s imagination.

  19. PRELUDE TO A PARTY

  Hutchinson’s involvement in the events transpiring in Massachusetts is nowhere better rendered than in his History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, from 1749 to 1774.

  Close watch on assemblies heeding Samuel Adams’s call for the formation of Committees of Correspondence throughout the colonies was kept by the contemporary press.

  Copies of the Hutchinson letters were eventually published in Boston by Edes and Gill in 1773.

  20. MAD HATTER’S BALL

  North’s various strategies are limned in the voluminous correspondence carried on with the king, collected and edited
by W. B. Donne in The Correspondence of King George III with Lord North from 1768 to 1783.

  As Upton (“Proceedings of ye Body”) notes, the story of the Boston Tea Party has been the subject of endless retellings. Yet, though the event has reached near-legendary status, accounts of it derive from very few sources. The minutes of the various “tea meetings” appear in the local press, including the Massachusetts Gazette and Weekly News-Letter, the Boston Evening Post, and the Massachusetts Spy. Principal public records are to be found in the Boston Town Records, 1770–1777. There are a half-dozen or so private diaries and letter collections by both Tories and Radicals who attended meetings and witnessed the events of the evening of December 16, and a number of accounts from purported participants transcribed at sometime following, most of which agree in the main with events as reported in the press and elsewhere. The British viewpoint is expressed in thoroughgoing fashion by Hutchinson in his Letters and History, though his account varies little from those of the radical press save in tone. Upton’s 1965 work adds the perspective of an anonymous observer who kept a record of his observations at the various tea meetings, including the transcription of Rowe’s mixing-tea-with-saltwater comments and a careful detailing of the events of December 16. The anonymous accounts were found among the papers of Canadian judge Jonathan Sewell, a resident of Cambridge at the time of the disturbances in Boston. Evidence suggests, however, that the accounts were penned by one of Sewell’s cousins and somehow found their way into the judge’s hands.

  Though legend has it that Samuel Adams gave the preordained signal for the descent upon the British tea ships at the end of the tea meeting on December 16, the documents unearthed by Upton suggest otherwise. When the disturbances began in the streets, our anonymous narrator reports, “Mr. Adams, Mr. Hancock [and] Dr. Young with several others called out to the people to stay, for they had not quite done.” If indeed Adams was aware of plans for any upcoming “Tea Party,” it seems at the very least to have begun without him.

  Hewes’s account of his involvement in the “Tea Party” was transcribed by Hawkes as A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party in 1834, at a considerable remove from the events themselves, and historians often cast a suspicious eye on such long-postponed narratives. However, there is little in Hewes’s rendering to suggest prevarication, or any motive for it.

  The account of the Philadelphia Tea Party is drawn from the Philadelphia Gazette and other press accounts as well as from Eberlein and Lippincott, The Colonial Houses of Philadelphia and Its Neighborhood (1912).

  The irony of the Charleston tea being auctioned off for the benefit of the revolutionary government in South Carolina is reported in Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, p. 298.

  21. INTOLERABLE

  The king’s letter to North is included in Donne’s edition of the Correspondence.

  North’s addresses and submissions to Parliament are found in History, Debates and Proceedings of Both Houses.

  Samuel Adams’s letters regarding Gage and matters related to the Intolerable Acts are found in his Writings.

  Gadsden’s letter to Adams pledging South Carolina’s support is referenced in Walsh, Charleston’s Sons of Liberty.

  Washington’s letter to Fairfax is contained in the Sparks edition of his Writings.

  22. CONGRESS OF SONS

  The work of the Continental Congress has of course been widely documented and analyzed. An early and comprehensive treatment is that of Burnett, The Continental Congress (1941).

  A compelling discussion of the British maneuvering in response to the Continental Congress is found in Macksy, The War for America, 1775–1783.

  The account of fellow Bostonians eager to burnish the appearance of Samuel Adams comes from the Sargent edition of the Letters of John Andrews.

  Hannah Adams’s narrative of Governor Gage’s overtures to her father is included in Wells, The Father of the Revolution, p. 193.

  An account of the difficulties in Charleston is found in Rogers, “The Charleston Tea Party.” Rogers describes the activities of Laurens as a man who would transform from a conservative plantation owner to one who, at the reading of the Declaration of Independence, resolved to free his slaves on the spot. As he wrote his son John shortly thereafter, “I am now by the Will of God brought into a new World & God only knows what sort of a World it will be.”

  An account of Robert Murray’s attempt to land tea in New York in early 1775 is contained in Monaghan, The Murrays of Murray Hill.

  Dartmouth’s letter to Gage is found in the Gage Manuscripts at the Clements Library, University of Michigan.

  23. SHOT AROUND THE WORLD

  The Tory-leaning Rivington’s Gazette account of Cunningham and Hill’s travails at Liberty Square in New York is collected in Moore, Diary of the American Revolution from Newspapers and Original Documents.

  Pinckney’s letter to Sears and Lamb is collected in American Archives: Documents of the American Revolution, a substantial digitized collection compiled by the Northern Illinois Libraries.

  The escalating conflict in South Carolina is detailed in the South-Carolina Gazette and in Walsh.

  A rendering of Carrington’s stirring account as well as a summary of the controversy surrounding the true nature of Henry’s oration is found in Cohen, “The ‘Liberty or Death’ Speech,” in the William and Mary Quarterly (1981).

  The lead-up to the events at Lexington and Concord and the battles of that fateful day have of course been the subject of much scrutiny. A thorough and readable version is Tourtellot, Lexington and Concord: The Beginning of the War of the American Revolution.

  Paul Revere’s detailed retelling (“A Letter from Col. Paul Revere to the Corresponding Secretary,” 1798) of his actions in this legendary drama make for far more compelling reading than many of the overheated retellings cobbled together since.

  Warren’s role in the events, as well as his overarching relationship with Samuel Adams, is detailed by Frothingham in his Life and Times of Joseph Warren (1865).

  Pertinent correspondence between Warren and Adams is collected in Warren-Adams Letters, vol. 1, 1743–1777.

  24. THE CONQUEROR SILENT SLEEPS

  Emerson, as much a philosopher as a poet, distills into six simple words the profound significance of the actions at Concord on April 19, 1775—i.e., the world’s astonishment that American colonists would actually go to war against Great Britain. The brief poem, which has become the veritable anthem for the Revolution, while acknowledging the fact that the combatants were long dead at the time of its writing, closes with the prayer to the spirit that prompted the actions: “that made those heroes dare / To die, and leave their children free”; the sentiment is one that might live on forever.

  In addition to the encyclopedic overview of Smith (A New Age Now Begins), the various scholarly analyses, and the more narrowly focused volumes mentioned previously, general readers might find the works of two so-called economic interpreters of the Revolution to be companionable summaries of the whole of the era, even if more ideologically oriented historians question the precision of their research and findings: see, for example, Stanford University professor John C. Miller’s Origins of the American Revolution (1943) and Merrill Jensen’s The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution (1968).

  An interpretation of the significance of the Sons of Liberty movement from the Marxist point of view is provided by Herbert Morais, “The Sons of Liberty in New York,” in Morris, The Era of the American Revolution, where the thesis is that the Revolution was as much a practical class struggle to determine who would rule the roost—in New York, at any rate—as it was an ideological struggle between colonists and Britons.

  Gage’s letter to Smith is found in the Carter edition of his Correspondence.

  Alden’s “Why the March to Concord?” provides a concise summary of British intention and its thwarting at Concord and Lexington.

  A stirring summary of the events at Concord and the
tragic end of the hapless William Marcy is given by Smith, A New Age Now Begins.

  25. SHADE OF PARADISE

  Gage’s published offer of a pardon to every Son but Adams and Hancock is collected in the Printed Ephemera Collection of the Library of Congress, Portfolio 38, Folder 17.

  Maier’s astute estimation of Samuel Adams’s career is found in “A New Englander as Revolutionary,” in The Old Revolutionaries.

  A readable summary of Franklin’s return to the colonies and his eventual immersion in the American Revolution is given by Walter Isaacson in “Benjamin Franklin Joins the Revolution” (2003).

  The account of Otis’s unfortunate end is found in Sarah Loring Bailey, Historical Sketches of Andover.

  A thoughtful appraisal of Gadsden’s bedrock political identity is found in Walsh, “Christopher Gadsden: Radical or Conservative Revolutionary?”

  Maier’s summary estimation of the Sons’ influence is found in “The Intercolonial Sons of Liberty,” in From Resistance to Revolution.

  26. WHAT REMAINS

  An interesting summary of various secret fraternal organizations in the Civil War era is found in Fesler, “Secret Societies in the North.”

  Bickley’s unlikely, if diverting, escapades are detailed by Crenshaw in “Knights of the Golden Circle.”

  On the contemporary Tea Party movement and the nature of its relations with the original Sons, see Lepore, “Tea and Sympathy: Who Owns the American Revolution?”

  Bibliography

  Primary Sources, Newspapers, with Year Beginning Publication

  The Boston Chronicle (1767)

  The Boston Gazette (1719)

  The Boston News-Letter (1704)

  The Boston Post-Boy (1735)

  The Connecticut Courant (Hartford, 1764)

  The Massachusetts Spy (1770)

  The Newport Mercury (1758)

  New-York Chronicle (1769)

  The New-York Gazette (1759)

  The New-York Gazette, and the Weekly Mercury (1768)

  The New-York Gazette, Revived in the Weekly Post-Boy (1747)

  The Pennsylvania Chronicle (1767)