Patriots

by A. J. Langguth

  For the House leadership, Henry’s offense was less in what he was saying than in his presuming, after only nine days in the Burgesses, to say anything at all. Thomas Jefferson was in the House lobby the next day to listen while Henry defended his resolutions, and what he heard made him revise his first impressions of Patrick Henry’s provincialism. Jefferson recalled years later that he would sometimes close his eyes as Henry spoke and, when he opened them again, could not remember a single word; he was left with only the impact of the speech, which was dazzling.

  As Henry spoke, tempers in the chamber began to boil. The Old Field Nags were particularly incensed by Henry’s fifth resolution, which seemed to deny that Parliament ever had a right to tax the colonies. And in arguing his case, Henry had let himself be swept to the farthest boundaries of his position. Jefferson was listening when Henry warned Britain’s king against his unreasonable tax.

  “Tarquin and Caesar had each his Brutus,” Henry said, speaking in a steady voice, “Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third-”

  At that point, Speaker Robinson interrupted with a cry of “Treason! Treason!”

  By now, the accusation was no novelty to Henry. He looked to the Speaker as he improvised an ending for his threat, “—may profit by their example!” And he added, “If this be treason, make the most of it!”

  A Frenchman visiting Williamsburg that day was standing with Jefferson in the outer hallway, and he recalled that after Henry alluded to Caesar and Charles I he apologized for any affront he might have given the members and pledged his last drop of blood to the king.

  Arrayed against Henry and his resolutions were Speaker Robinson and three of Henry’s examiners from two years ago, Peyton Randolph, George Wythe and Robert Carter Nicholas. They argued that since the House was still waiting for a reply from London to the earlier petitions, they shouldn’t alienate the king’s ministers with Henry’s blunt language. But despite their prestige and seniority, Henry’s resolutions passed that afternoon, each by a narrow margin and the fifth one by the single vote of twenty to nineteen. Jefferson was still hovering by the door when Peyton Randolph came, fat and petulant, from the floor. “By God,” Randolph said, “I would have given five hundred guineas for a single vote.”

  Even though Randolph and the rest of Henry’s opponents were cautious men, they differed from Thomas Hutchinson in Boston. Privately Hutchinson might express reservations about the Stamp Act, but once it was passed it became law to him. In Virginia, even the most conservative Burgesses intended to go on protesting the act; they merely didn’t want to be lumbered with Patrick Henry’s provocative language.

  Henry left the capital that night, his battle won and his reputation made. But the next day, when Thomas Jefferson went back to the House, he saw Peter Randolph, Peyton’s cousin, searching through old records for a precedent that would let the Burgesses expunge their vote. He found it. When the members convened that afternoon, they reconsidered Henry’s fifth resolution and defeated it.

  By that time Henry’s resolutions were already circulating, and they soon found their way into the newspapers. In less than a month, the Newport Mercury had printed them all, along with a sixth that branded as an enemy to Virginia anyone who defended Parliament’s right to impose taxes.

  —

  In early July 1765, Henry’s resolutions reached Boston, where the patriots read them with admiration and a sense of shame for having let Thomas Hutchinson persuade them to soften their own letter to Parliament.

  Oxenbridge Thacher’s wife had died of smallpox the year before. Now, though Thacher was only forty-five, it looked as though he would not recover from his own inoculation, and he sent for John Adams to take over some of his legal business. Adams, when he arrived, asked whether Thacher had seen the Virginia Resolves.

  “Oh, yes,” said Thacher. “They are men! They are noble spirits! It kills me to think of the lethargy and stupidity that prevails here. I long to be out. I will go out! I will go into court and make a speech, which shall be read after my death as my dying testimony against their infernal tyranny!”

  Thacher’s agitation troubled Adams and he changed the subject. But he thought to himself that it was only because Thacher was confined to his bed that he could think Bostonians were apathetic. When Thacher died a few days later, the town held a special election for the House. A rich young merchant named John Hancock was a likely candidate, but the voters chose Samuel Adams.

  In late September 1765, a month after the rioting, Governor Bernard convened the legislature to warn that the Stamp Act would be enforced. House members were still chastened by the mob’s rampage, but the Virginia Resolves had made them bold, and they were determined to stick by their plan to hold a protest meeting of all the colonies. Aware that it would be a historic occasion, the patriots were calling it the Stamp Act congress.

  Francis Bernard was not sure how to cope with this latest challenge to his authority. The governor’s popularity had been dropping rapidly, and his hunger for money to support his large family, combined with a taste for luxury, made it easy for the patriots to paint Bernard as Hutchinson’s partner in greed. Before the riots, Bernard had seen himself very differently—good-natured, canny, unruffled. When a visitor from London asked how he dared walk through Boston without a bodyguard, Bernard had assured him that the people of Massachusetts were not bloodthirsty, and he had been advising London that the colonists were jealous of their liberties but remained loyal to the crown. Bernard had said that by indulging their sense of independence he could keep them calm. But now the riots had proved him wrong, and he was drafting a plan to put down the unrest.

  Bernard thought the answer was to send American representatives to Parliament. He calculated that twenty members from the colonies and ten from the West Indies should be enough to pacify the people. Then, mulling over his proposal, he raised the figures to thirty and fifteen. Even those higher numbers would be a cheap price to pay for tranquillity. But in the meantime, Bernard was living under constant stress. The spies he had planted among the patriots represented his only security, and they were unreliable. Twice he sent away his papers and valuables because he expected a mob to descend on him.

  These days when he wrote to London, Bernard lamented Britain’s folly of levying taxes before she had sent troops to tighten her control over the colonies. He complained that because of threats from the mob, he was governor only in name. “The dignity of Great Britain will require an absolute submission,” Bernard wrote, “and these people are not at this time disposed to give it.” Where Hutchinson had prayed for better hearts, Bernard was more pragmatic: “God give us better times.”

  For the governor, any rays of light were faint ones. Bernard tried to convince the Lords of Trade in London that his position wasn’t strong enough to let him oppose the Stamp Act congress, which had been called for October 1, 1765, in New York. But he was pleased to report that two of the three delegates from Massachusetts were friends of his government and that they would agree to nothing improper. Bernard even hoped that the congress might recommend submitting to the Stamp Act for the time being. If so, even the bothersome Massachusetts House would have to go along. And yet, he warned, rioting in Boston could break out again at any time.

  From London, the king’s ministers offered Bernard one hundred regular British soldiers to protect Castle William in the bay. The governor declined them. They wouldn’t be enough to provide security, he said, and the sight of the troops might only inflame the mob. Lord Barrington arranged to send Bernard a letter of recall, which the governor could use at his discretion. Bernard assured his patron that he was ready to leave Massachusetts for any other royal post—except in the West Indies. He thought his complexion was too fair to expose to the Caribbean sun.

  Just before the Stamp Act congress convened in New York, the first stamped paper arrived in Boston Harbor. The stamp was shaped like a badge, with “America” lettered at its top. Around a Tudor rose ran the motto of the Order of the G
arter, Honi soit qui mal y pense—Shame to him who thinks evil of it. In large letters across the bottom was the value of the stamp in shillings and pence. A town council’s documents would cost one shilling, a bail bond twice that amount. When Bernard asked the House what it wanted him to do with the paper, the members replied that the stamps were none of their business. The governor had the paper sent to Castle William under guard of the British warships in the harbor.

  —

  Governor Bernard’s two trustworthy delegates to the Stamp Act congress were Timothy Ruggles and Oliver Partridge from the western counties. James Otis was to be the third representative, but for months his behavior had been so erratic and contradictory that even the governor sometimes could take comfort from one of his speeches. Had Otis written a tract last year against England’s right to tax the colonies? Now he was publishing another defending that right. In the first pamphlet, Otis had spoken out against slavery: the law of nature made all men free, whether they were white or black. Did Otis free his own slave? He did not.

  Falling into melancholia, Otis would curse the day he ever became a Whig. Then, exhilarated by the cheers of a Town Meeting, he would challenge George Grenville to come to America and meet him in hand-to-hand combat on the floor of the Massachusetts House. And what had been Otis’ reaction to Patrick Henry’s resolutions? He called them treasonable.

  Despite Otis’ rudeness to him, Oxenbridge Thacher had usually been able to pull him back into the patriot ranks. But now Thacher was dead. Only steady attacks from the Tories—especially some nasty verses by a customs official named Samuel Waterhouse—had convinced the Sons of Liberty to return Otis to the House of Representatives. Once installed, though, he had been railing against Francis Bernard as harshly as ever. What James Otis would do at the Stamp Act congress, no one wanted to predict.

  —

  Twenty-seven men responded to the invitation from the Massachusetts House and traveled to New York for the congress. The governors of Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia refused to convene their legislatures to select delegates. In New Jersey and Delaware the governors also balked, but their assemblymen met all the same and chose delegates from among themselves. The legislators of New Hampshire declined to send anyone but volunteered in advance to sign whatever statement might come out of the meeting.

  The congress was giving its delegates a rare chance for free discussion among the colonies. Parliament had established mail service in America as early as 1710, but postage rates were exorbitant, and a letter from Boston to Philadelphia never arrived in less than a week. New Yorkers could keep in close touch with eastern New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, Delaware and western New Jersey sent letters and parcels along the Delaware River, but the people of South Carolina felt more isolated from the northern colonies than from the West Indies.

  As its first decision, the congress passed a vote that would have heartened Francis Bernard. James Otis had put himself forward as chairman, but his notoriety disturbed the other delegates and they turned instead to Timothy Ruggles. The invitation from Massachusetts had called for a statement from this congress that was loyal and humble, and nothing about Otis suggested either quality.

  Setting to work, the delegates found themselves facing one central issue. They all agreed that Britain had no right to meddle in the internal affairs of her colonies. Parliament couldn’t take away basic rights—trial by jury was one—and it couldn’t raise money by taxing commerce within the colonies. But most delegates granted that Parliament could regulate the colonies’ trade. Otherwise, of what use were her colonies to Britain? The congress had to decide whether to list Parliament’s rights or simply spell out those it did not have.

  The wrangling went on for twelve days, with a break for the Sabbath. Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina argued against acknowledging Parliament’s authority in any way. This congress, Gadsden said, was leading him to believe that “there ought to be no New England men, no New Yorker, known on the continent, but all of us Americans.”

  The final statement came close to what Gadsden had wanted. Among its thirteen resolutions, the language of the twelfth was the most vivid, calling for those full liberties that were vital to the “prosperity and happiness of these colonies.” Representatives from New York, Connecticut and South Carolina hadn’t been authorized to sign any statement until their colonies had a chance to approve it, and at first Otis said he wouldn’t sign, either. But after another delegate brought Otis around, Timothy Ruggles became one of the two individual members who refused to sign. Thomas McKean from Delaware kept badgering him to give his reasons. Finally Ruggles said that the statement went against his conscience. McKean continued to berate him until Ruggles, twenty years older and more than six feet tall, challenged him, “Young man, you shall hear from me tomorrow.”

  Instead of dueling, however, Ruggles rose before dawn and slipped away from New York. Back in Boston, the House scolded him for not following its instructions, but James Otis’ behavior was even less pleasing to the patriots. Before he left New York, Otis was heard to say that if the government in London didn’t send troops to Massachusetts very soon, the people would be “cutting one another’s throats from one end to the other of it.” Governor Bernard picked up that story and passed it along gleefully to his friends in Britain. But on October 25, 1765, the same day that the Stamp Act congress adjourned, the Massachusetts House passed its own resolutions, as combative as Patrick Henry’s, insisting that the colonists were “unalienably entitled to those essential rights in common with all men.”

  When James Otis got back to Boston, he was no longer in a conciliatory mood. Reporting on the congress to the Town Meeting, he became so vituperative against Thomas Hutchinson that his audience seemed sorry Hutchinson no longer had a house left to destroy. But then John Adams heard that Otis had told a customs officer that of course Parliament had the right to tax the colonies and only a damned fool would deny it.

  —

  As Pope’s Day, the fifth of November, approached, Boston seemed ripe for more violence. According to the gossip, the mob’s leaders had drawn up a list of fifteen wealthy men whose houses they could plunder, and Samuel Adams recognized that a potent political asset might degenerate into a gang of thieves. Since he knew both Ebenezer Mackintosh and Samuel Swift, the leader of the North End gang, Adams brought them together to fuse their traditional rival marches into one patriotic crusade.

  For a street fighter, Swift had a curious background. Fifty years old, he had graduated from Harvard five years before Samuel Adams, and he too had studied briefly for the clergy. Swift turned instead to law, and he maintained a steady practice and a circle of friends that included Thomas Hutchinson. The lieutenant governor knew exactly how the mob was run these days. Swift and Mackintosh controlled the rabble. The Loyal Nine—along with other groups of distillers, carpenters and master masons—tried to control Swift and Mackintosh. But behind the scenes the influential merchants among the patriots, such men as William Molineux and Solomon Davis, took over on important matters. They scheduled a Town Meeting to provide a stage for James Otis, whom Hutchinson was calling “the distracted demagogue of Boston.”

  To seal the new friendship between the rival gangs, the Whig merchants underwrote a huge banquet called the Union Feast, which gave gang members from North and South Boston a chance to celebrate liberty with unlimited drinks. One popular toast wished any friend of the Stamp Act “a perpetual itching without the benefit of scratching.” When Pope’s Day arrived, the gangs paraded in orderly ranks, led by Mackintosh and Swift in magnificent uniforms of blue and red and hats laced with gold. Small canes rested on their left arms as they delivered orders to their assistants through speaking trumpets. Blacks had been kept from the march, and there was not a weapon or a club to be seen. At Mackintosh’s side was a colonel in the Massachusetts militia, who praised the gangs for their discipline and assured the crowd that the shoemaker held one of the highest posts in government. Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty
couldn’t yet claim an army, but they were reminding Boston that they had their own shock troops.

  —

  As Boston’s traditional politics continued to unravel, Samuel Adams’ life was becoming more stable. Not only had Boston voters sent him to the House of Representatives, but he had taken a second wife, Elizabeth Wells, the daughter of one of Deacon Adams’ closest friends. Although some twenty years younger than Samuel, she was proving to be an exemplary wife—intelligent, amiable, a kindly stepmother to his children. She also knew the secret of running a household on next to nothing, which continued to be her husband’s annual income. The mother of Adams’ first wife tried to lighten the young bride’s routine by presenting her with a slave named Surry. When Adams immediately set her free, she chose to stay on in the house as a servant.

  Adams’ increasing prominence had led the Tories to look harder at his laxity as a tax collector. An audit revealed that he had been especially lenient during the fire of 1760, which destroyed one tenth of Boston, and during another smallpox epidemic. His deficit had risen to seven thousand pounds. At the next election, Adams suggested that the job pass to other hands, but his townsmen recognized that no one else was likely to be so obligingly slipshod and insisted on his reelection. For the moment, Adams seemed to be safe.

  In the House of Representatives, members were finding him indispensable for his hard work and his genius for compromise. Whenever he was appointed to a committee—and within weeks he had been named to all of the important ones—Adams would appear with a complete set of resolutions on whatever subject was being debated. Having framed the discussion on his own terms, he was then ready to give way amiably on the small details. Thomas Hutchinson recognized the way Adams was manipulating the House and blamed him for its new belligerence.

  When the Stamp Act took effect, on November 1, 1765, Hutchinson decided that the protests of Adams, Patrick Henry and the Sons of Liberty had alarmed every family from Canada to Pensacola. Tories like Peter Oliver told the story of a country gentleman whose servant refused to go out to the barn one dark night because he was afraid. “Afraid of what?” his master demanded. “Me ’fraid Massah Tamp Act he catch me,” said the servant.