The Massachusetts House asked Samuel Adams to write a new protest against the act, and the town of Braintree chose John Adams to frame a similar letter. Samuel assured his cousin that the assignment would get him better known and promote his law practice, but John Adams was less sure. Since a standoff over the stamps was developing—the people wouldn’t buy them, and Governor Bernard wouldn’t recognize any legal papers without them—the courts were sure to be shut down. John Adams took the crisis as a personal affront and poured out his anguish to his diary. “I have had poverty to struggle with—envy and jealousy and malice of enemies to encounter, no friends or but few to assist me,” he wrote, and now, just as he was beginning to succeed, along came the Stamp Act to ruin him, and incidentally to destroy America as well.
His only consolation was Samuel Adams’ invitation to meet with the patriot leaders. For almost three years, John Adams had been tantalized by gossip about the Caucus Club, which held its meetings in the attic of Tom Dawes, an officer in Boston’s militia. John had heard that Dawes would take down a movable partition in order to give the whole group room enough to assemble. “There,” Adams told his diary, “they smoke tobacco till you cannot see from one end of the garret to the other.” He assumed that they also drank flip, a drink made with an egg beaten in sweetened ale, set by the fireplace and stirred until it was thick. At last his cousin was giving him the chance to see for himself, and the prospect appealed to John Adams immensely, especially since membership in the Caucus was considered good for business.
When the night arrived, John Adams was impressed by the genial familiarity of the members and their politeness to him, a stranger. But the private faces of these public men held few surprises. Around the hearth, James Otis would blaze with rage and then fall into despondency. Thomas Cushing was diligent in gathering intelligence about the Tories, but even among these allies he remained silent, even secretive. Samuel Adams urged his colleagues to approach political matters delicately, but whenever a matter of principle became involved he turned stiff and inflexible. John Adams saw that Samuel wasn’t versed in the law; after all, he wasn’t a lawyer. But he felt that Samuel had the most thorough understanding of liberty and the deepest and most radical love of it. John Adams left the meeting pleased with his cousin.
—
A month after the Stamp Act took effect, Andrew Oliver had still not officially resigned his commission as stamp master. Throughout the colonies, other officials were giving up the post, and on December 16, 1765, the Boston Gazette published an anonymous letter accusing Oliver of plotting to keep the office. That evening the Loyal Nine gathered at a distillery in Hanover Square. A few hours later, as Oliver was preparing for bed, his servant was handed a letter ordering Oliver to appear at noon the next day under the elm where his effigy had first hung. Over the last few months the patriots had named it the Liberty Tree and were calling the area around its trunk Liberty Hall.
If Oliver showed up, the note concluded, he would be treated with the greatest politeness. “If not . . . !”
The night was stormy, but by dawn the town was covered with broadsides from the press of Edes and Gill. “St - - p! St - - p! St - - p! no,” they read and invited all Sons of Liberty to gather at the Liberty Tree to hear Oliver’s statement. The leaflets ended, “A Resignation? Yes.”
Since both Hutchinson and Bernard were at their country houses, Oliver couldn’t reach them for advice. He sent a friend to ask Ebenezer Mackintosh whether he could spare himself a drenching on this rainy morning and offer his resignation at Town House instead. The shoemaker refused, and Oliver’s friends warned him that if he didn’t appear he might set off another riot. As a result, Andrew Oliver began the half-mile trek to the Liberty Tree, with Mackintosh leading the procession. When they arrived, they found that two thousand people had braved the downpour to witness this moment.
Standing under the bough where his effigy had hung four months ago, Oliver read his resignation. He said he detested the Stamp Act and hoped that now he would no longer be considered an enemy but only another man. His humiliation complete, the crowd gave Oliver three cheers and sent him home.
Even before that public drama, Oliver’s refusal to accept the stamps had left Governor Bernard in a quandary. Every other official was edging away from the issue and trying to force the decision on him. Bernard had expected that the Sons of Liberty would close down both the harbor and the courts by boycotting any activity that required stamps, but they had devised a more artful response, one that wouldn’t bring commerce to a standstill. They ignored the law and went on with life exactly as before.
Tory shipowners faced a harder choice. They didn’t want to defy Parliament, but neither did they want their houses leveled by the Sons of Liberty. When they came to Bernard for permission to load their vessels, he referred them to his attorney general, who in turn announced that the rheumatism in his right arm had become so severe that he couldn’t attend to any business at all. The impasse was resolved when customs officials heard that a mob was ready to storm their offices. On December 17, 1765, the Custom House opened again and cleared all the ships in the harbor. Their owners did not require stamps.
That night Samuel Adams joined the Sons of Liberty at a banquet to celebrate.
—
Now that they had opened the harbor, the patriots turned to the courts. The morning after the banquet, the Sons of Liberty called a special meeting in Faneuil Hall to ask Francis Bernard and his Council to let the courts resume their business. Not long before, Bernard had received a disturbing letter from the king’s ministers in London. They had assumed that the revolt had arisen only among the ignorant lower classes, and the letter expressed their surprise at his administration’s “total languor and want of energy” in putting down the challenge. To placate London and yet save his residence from the torch, Bernard realized that he had to shift the responsibility for the courts. He called a meeting of his Council members to inform them that he was leaving entirely in their hands the decision to open the courts.
Meanwhile, Samuel Adams was busy explaining the issue to men at the taverns and along the docks. Late on a winter afternoon, he stopped by the Hancock countinghouse, the office of the young merchant he had defeated for the House. John Hancock was sitting by the fire with several Boston officials, talking about Adams’ petition to open the courts. After the round of formal greetings, Hancock invited Adams to take a pinch from his gold snuffbox. It was engraved with a likeness of George III, a gift from the young king when Hancock had visited London during the coronation.
Getting to business, Adams reminded the group of the seriousness of this cause. “If we approve that petition tomorrow”—he pulled his draft from a side pocket—“we must choose a committee of our best legal men to present and enforce it. It is useless to petition the governor and Council unless we have some emphasis behind it.”
Hancock and his friends agreed with that evaluation, and John Adams soon learned, to his trepidation, that he had been chosen to supply that emphasis by speaking before the Council. He came prepared with a page of notes headed “Right,” “Wrong” and “Remedy,” but he abandoned his formal argument and simply charged that Parliament had no more right than a French legislature to tax the colonies. Jeremiah Gridley, the colony’s patriarch of the bar, spoke next, and then James Otis, who began to weep and delivered his remarks with tears streaming down his cheeks. Since all three men were arguing points of law, Bernard and his Council saw a way out for themselves. They passed along the decision on whether to open the courts to the judges themselves.
The Probate Court of Suffolk County was currently in session, although Thomas Hutchinson, one of its judges, wouldn’t consider conducting further court business without the stamps. Friends rode out to Milton to plead with him. They offered him three options: Bow to the will of the people. Quit his judgeship. Or leave the country. Ever since his house was destroyed, Hutchinson had been talking about spending some time in London, and now his friends we
re assuring him that his life was in danger. Hutchinson rode into Boston, expecting to find such turmoil that he would have to escape immediately to New Hampshire and book the next passage to England. Instead, the town was sullen but peaceful. Then, consulting with Governor Bernard, Hutchinson found another way to advance his family’s fortunes. Even if he didn’t go abroad, he could leave the court temporarily and let his brother take his place. Forster Hutchinson, thirteen years younger than Thomas, didn’t share his brother’s aversion to conducting court business without stamps. Following his example, courts around the province began to open again. By late January 1766, the Massachusetts House was supporting, by a vote of eighteen to five, a call to open all of them.
But as the moment approached for an open defiance of Parliament, travelers returning from England said that George Grenville’s government had fallen and that Parliament might repeal the Stamp Act. The same Boston lawyers who had been demanding that Superior Court be opened on March 1, 1766, now wondered whether it was wise to be identified with the insurgents. Suddenly, James Otis wasn’t willing to appear in court, and Thomas Hutchinson fabricated a reason to be out of Boston during the showdown. At last an old lawsuit was exhumed, one that had been held over for a year and didn’t require stamps. It was tried, and the patriots claimed another victory. The court then adjourned, to let Parliament struggle with cutting the knot they were all tied into.
As they waited, merchants in New York were boycotting all English goods, and they were joined by the patriots of Boston. Rumors about the Stamp Act’s repeal came before the boycott could become fully effective, but the patriots had evolved a strategy for punishing British arrogance in the future. Parliament might meet to undo the damage of the past year, but could Parliament repeal the new spirit in America?
John Hancock, by John Singleton Copley
MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
Hancock
1765–68
IN THE SPRING of 1765, King George III fell ill with a sickness serious enough that his councillors urged Parliament to make some provision for his successor. The debate over that regency bill exposed the tensions between George Grenville on one side and Lord Bute and the king’s mother on the other, and when the vote came, Grenville’s side was defeated. By then, George III had recovered and was incensed by the affronts to his mother. Determined to have a new prime minister, the king put aside his antipathy for William Pitt and interviewed him for the post, but Pitt was ridden with gout and all but retired from public life. When he declined, George turned instead to Charles Watson-Wentworth, the Marquis of Rockingham. The marquis was an unprepossessing young man who led a faction that had opposed almost everything Grenville had introduced, including the Stamp Act.
Each ship from the colonies brought Rockingham fresh reports of demonstrations and riots against the act. The readers of London’s conservative newspapers were indignant. One Tory wrote, “These yellow shades of men are by no means fit for a conflict with our troops.” Another writer accused the Sons of Liberty of hypocrisy for upholding their own right to inflict violence on the customs officers but arguing that the king’s forces had no right to retaliate. With the new prime minister, the opinions that counted most heavily came from his supporters among England’s manufacturers and traders. They told him that America’s threat to boycott their goods could worsen Britain’s current recession, and they wanted the Stamp Act repealed.
Grenville and another House leader, Charles Townshend, were adamant that the Stamp Act remain. King George was insisting that Parliament uphold its right to tax. At best, he would agree to some sort of modification in the law. In that stalemate, who held the title of prime minister had become less important than who had the power to sway the Commons. After twelve months away from the House floor, William Pitt returned in January 1766 to avenge himself on George Grenville, a boyhood friend who was now a bitter enemy. Early in the debate, Pitt rose on his crutch and announced that every measure taken during Grenville’s ministry had been entirely wrong.
As always, those first words came so quietly that Pitt couldn’t be heard beyond the next bench. During his absence, he had been rumored to be gravely ill, perhaps mad. This day, men wondered whether he would have the strength to continue. They might have remembered that Pitt had always turned his infirmities to his advantage. Now he was recalling that “when the resolutions were taken in the House to tax America, I was ill in my bed.” But, Pitt added, if he could have endured being carried to the House floor he would have come, just to testify against the Stamp Act. Today’s debate over its repeal was more important than anything the House had faced since it confirmed the Bill of Rights nearly a hundred years ago. In this present case, said Pitt, the colonists shared the natural rights of mankind and the peculiar privileges of Englishmen.
Usually, Pitt seemed to appeal directly to each member, but now he was lifting his voice implacably: “The Americans are the sons, not the bastards, of England.” He ridiculed Grenville’s contention that the colonies were somehow already represented in Parliament as “the most contemptible that ever entered the head of a man.” America’s assemblies had always possessed a constitutional right to give and grant their own money. “They would have been slaves if they had not enjoyed it,” Pitt said. He would never admit to the justice of taxing America internally, he added, until she enjoyed representation.
Springing up to defend his act, Grenville warned that the Stamp Act issue was only a pretext for the colonies to move toward independence. “Ungrateful people of America!” Grenville cried, and chided Pitt for remarks that would lead to revolution.
Stung by that challenge, Pitt stood, along with the other members who wished to speak, and the House members demanded that he be allowed to reply. “Mr. Pitt!” they shouted. “Go on!” Pitt mocked the House rule that would have stopped him from making a second address—“I do not speak twice; I only finish.” Then, glancing at his notes, he launched his rebuttal. In private life, Pitt had always deplored laughter and taught his children that it was a sign of vulgarity. But in debate he relied upon the laughter his sarcasm could provoke.
“I have been charged,” he began, “with giving birth to sedition in America. I rejoice that America has resisted. . . . The gentleman asks, When were the colonies emancipated? But I desire to know when they were made slaves. . . . In a good cause, on a sound bottom, the force of this country can crush America to atoms. I know the valor of your troops. I know the skill of your officers. But on this ground, on the Stamp Act, when so many here will think it is a crying injustice, I am one who will lift up my hands against it.
“In such a cause, your success would be hazardous. America, if she fell, would fall like a strong man. She would embrace the pillars of the State, and pull the Constitution along with her.
“Is this your boasted peace? To sheathe the sword, not in its scabbard, but in the bowels of your countrymen? . . . The Americans have not acted in all things with prudence and temper. They have been driven to madness by injustice. Will you punish them for the madness you have occasioned?
“Upon the whole,” Pitt concluded, “I will beg leave to tell the House what is really my opinion. It is that the Stamp Act be repealed absolutely, totally and immediately.”
Pitt carried the day. At 2:30 A.M. on February 22, 1766, in the presence of five hundred members, the House of Commons repealed the Stamp Act. But even his allies insisted on one compromise to reassure the king and his faction. They passed the Declaratory Act, an intentionally vague restatement of Parliament’s right to make binding laws for the colonies. Over Pitt’s objection, the act was adopted.
Rockingham’s fragile Ministry soon collapsed. Once again, King George asked William Pitt to lead the government, and as an inducement the king elevated him to the title of Lord Chatham. Throughout Europe, men were astonished that the Great Commoner would think that moving to the House of Lords represented a promotion. “It argues a senselessness to glory,” said the king of Poland, “to forfeit the name of
Pitt for any title.”
—
During the debate over repeal, Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania’s agent in London, had gone to the Commons to answer questions about the mood in the colonies. He had been invited as a leading authority on the American character, and he reminded his audience of the immense goodwill that Americans had felt toward Britain only three years earlier. Franklin hoped to soothe those members who felt that the Sons of Liberty must be taught a lesson, and he assured the Commons that the colonists accepted the idea of taxes on their trade and objected only to taxing their internal affairs. Some Americans agreed with Franklin in making that distinction, but many did not. He hadn’t been in America during the last two years or felt for himself the heat of a Stamp Act bonfire. Franklin added that he could foresee no resentment over the Declaratory Act, especially if it was never enforced.
A member asked whether British soldiers could enforce the Stamp Act. Franklin replied that they could not. “What are they to do? They cannot force a man to take stamps who chooses to do without them.
“They will not find a rebellion. They may indeed make one.”
—
Almost three months after Parliament’s vote, a copy of the repeal of the Stamp Act reached Boston in mid-May 1766. At 1 A.M. the following Monday, the patriots began their celebration by ringing bells in the church steeple nearest the Liberty Tree. The bells of Christ Church answered them from the North End, and by 2 A.M. the town resounded with gunfire, drums and singing. Boys climbed rooftops to hang out flags, and John Hancock, a part owner of the ship that brought the news, opened his house overlooking the Common and provided Madeira wine for the rounds of toasting. James Otis and the other patriots who lived around the Common did the same, and the result was the greatest party Boston had ever seen.
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