Patriots

by A. J. Langguth

  “If such men are by God appointed,

  The Devil may be the Lord’s anointed.”

  This time, Bernard was determined to be avenged. He went first to his Council, which advised him to take the matter to court or to the House. Bernard chose the House. His charge of libel was considered, but Bernard heard that during the night members had been subjected to the usual pressures, and the next morning the House dismissed his grievance. Freedom of the press was a great bulwark of the people’s freedom, House members told the governor. “Although defaming a man, public or private, is certainly an outrage, yet the freedom of newspapers to tell lies on public men is so associated with their power to tell the truth that we think it impolitic to attempt by law to punish such lying.”

  Bernard went to court, but the patriots haunted grand-jury members wherever they went, and he was defeated again.

  Reporting these humiliations to London, the governor was angry enough to be indiscreet. He criticized the fact that members were elected to the Council rather than appointed by the governor, which meant that they could not resist the will of the people. And he passed on a story that James Otis “behaves in the House like a madman; he abuses everyone in authority and especially the Council in the grossest terms.”

  The constant quarreling had caused men of both factions to question America’s relationship with Britain. As Francis Bernard vacillated about his future, he told Lord Barrington that he must stay in Boston, because replacing a governor when the people grew rebellious only increased their ill-temper. Resigning would be nothing but humoring a willful child. That metaphor for the colonies had been appropriate for many years. In the past, even men who had never set foot on British shores called England “home.” A kindly king had been regarded as father to his grateful children.

  But what happened when those children left home to live far away? When he opposed the Stamp Act, John Hancock pointed out that he already paid more taxes than anyone in Britain; he was a full-grown and independent man. Samuel Adams had inherited his father’s name and adopted his principles. If Adams could replace his father, what need did he have for a substitute in London? Another Junior, James Otis, was coping with a father who remained half captive to George III, and the younger Otis’ rebellion against one or another of those fathers led him to curse and repent, to cut his bonds and then, weeping, bind himself up again.

  Thomas Hutchinson had inscribed the flyleaf of his diary with a verse from Isaiah: “I have nourished children and brought them up, and even they have revolted from me.” Even after the Liberty had been seized Hutchinson wrote to London, “My hopes of tranquility have been confined to one plan—that we should be convinced the Parliament will not give up their authority; and then find by experience that it is exercised in the same gentle, tender manner that a parent exercises his authority over his children.”

  But a dutiful son like Hutchinson could never appreciate that Americans were no longer children and would not pretend to be. The metaphor had been outgrown. Thousands of citizens in the colonies had been swept into the struggle and had become Sons of Liberty rather than sons of a living king across the sea.

  In London, politicians were sure they knew how to deal with their offspring. “America must fear you—before she can love you,” Lord North told Parliament. Repeal the Townshend Acts? “I hope we shall never think of it, till we see America prostrate at our feet.”

  View of Boston and British warships landing their troops, September 30, 1768, by Paul Revere

  THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

  Occupation

  1768–69

  WITH THE Liberty rioting as his excuse, Francis Bernard asked his Council, early in July 1768, to recommend that he request troops from the crown. The Council members knew he was trying to pass an unpopular decision to them and replied that they preferred not to be knocked on the head. Neither did he, said Bernard. He wouldn’t act alone, but if they agreed to share the blame he would make the request. In his letters to London, the governor hinted broadly that he needed soldiers, but he also passed along a spy’s report that a leading Son of Liberty was saying that the man who requested British troops would certainly be put to death.

  When the rumors multiplied, a joint delegation from the House and the Council was sent to ask Bernard what he was doing behind their backs. Reporting the call to General Thomas Gage, Britain’s commander in New York, Bernard said that the delegates had been polite and had apologized for asking the question. He had given them a technically truthful answer: he had not asked for troops. But he assured Gage that the fact that he wasn’t requesting troops didn’t mean they weren’t wanted. “I must beg that you keep this letter to yourself as much as you can,” the governor ended, “. . . for obvious reasons.”

  During that anxious interlude, Bernard hoped that Gage and his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel William Dalrymple, would somehow rescue him on their own initiative. It was no use. Gage was not going to send soldiers to Boston without an official appeal from the governor, and the Council continued to advise Bernard that he didn’t need them. Bernard might have passed a more tranquil summer had he known what was going on across the Atlantic. Lord Hillsborough had been sufficiently alarmed by reports from the customs commissioners about the hostility in Boston that, even before the Liberty affair, he had directed General Gage to send at least one regiment from Halifax to Boston. That order took weeks to arrive in New York, and as Bernard’s letters grew more urgent Hillsborough ordered two regiments based in Ireland to set sail for Boston at once.

  The patriots in the Massachusetts House were writing openly to London while their governor was being furtive. One of Bernard’s spies reported an exchange between Otis and Samuel Adams when Otis asked what Adams intended to do with a recent letter to Hillsborough. Adams said that he intended to publish it in the Boston Gazette the next Monday.

  “Do you think it proper to publish it so soon that he may receive a printed copy before the original comes to his hand?” Otis asked.

  “What signifies that?” Adams answered. “You know it was designed for the people and not for the minister.”

  Otis twitted him. “You are so fond of your own drafts that you can’t wait for the publication of them to a proper time.”

  But Adams was not in a mood for teasing. “I am clerk of this House,” he said, “and I will make what use of the papers I please.”

  Even after Governor Bernard got word that troops were coming, he denied that he had received any official notification. But he verified the rumor of their arrival to friends, hoping that a slow confirmation of the news would give the calmer voices among the patriots a chance to prevail. When an English officer arrived from Halifax to make arrangements for his troops, however, all of Boston knew by nightfall what lay ahead. The Sons of Liberty called a Town Meeting for September 12, 1768, and at the top of Beacon Hill they rigged a makeshift alarm—a turpentine barrel on a tall pole. The Tories believed that when the troopships were sighted in the harbor, the barrel would be set aflame and, if Otis and Adams had their way, that would ignite the population.

  Francis Bernard viewed the barrel as a more personal provocation. He had received a false report that Adams was promising that when it was lighted thirty thousand men from the countryside would storm Boston, seize Bernard and Hutchinson, plunder the town treasury and fly their own flag from the Liberty Tree.

  By the time of the Town Meeting, Otis had become the chief incendiary of the Boston mob again. Two days before, he and Samuel Adams had met at Joseph Warren’s house to draft the agenda for the meeting. Now, with Faneuil Hall packed to the walls, the first order of business was a motion to haul down the turpentine barrel. The Meeting ruled it should stay. Next, Otis and Adams argued that the king could not impose an English army on the Massachusetts Bay Colony without the consent of the colony’s representatives. A committee had already asked Bernard to call an emergency session of the House and the Council. The governor had replied that because of the House’s refusal to resc
ind its circular letter, only the king could reconvene the session.

  Samuel Adams had foreseen that response and was ready with two other daring forays. First, Boston patriots would invite their counterparts in other Massachusetts towns to a convention in ten days’ time. Such a meeting would flout the governor’s ban against assemblies and let the colony make a concerted plan before the English regiments arrived. Adams also suggested that the citizens of Boston be armed with muskets from the town’s armory.

  Expecting that his listeners would balk at that open declaration of disloyalty to Britain, Adams had prepared an excuse for them. At his instigation, other patriots arose to warn that a new war with France was imminent. The town’s stock of arms had been taken from their storehouses a few days earlier on the pretext of cleaning them. Now, the patriots argued, they should be distributed so that the people could protect themselves against their enemies. Around the hall, men exchanged knowing looks. James Otis declared that the speakers and the audience “understood one another very well.” No one doubted who the invaders would be. But for the moment the Town Meeting voted against passing out muskets and musket balls. Gesturing to a cache at his feet, Otis said, “There are the arms. When an attempt is made against your liberties, they will be delivered.”

  During the interlude between that Town Meeting and the convention that was called for Boston, Samuel Adams and his allies strained to goad the colony into resistance. Three days after the Town Meeting, Sheriff Greenleaf screwed up his courage and hauled down the turpentine barrel. It was empty. But Samuel Adams’ exhortations were resounding as never before. “We will destroy every soldier that dares put his foot on shore,” he was quoted as saying. “His Majesty has no right to send troops here to invade the country, and I look upon them as foreign enemies.”

  Companies of the town’s militia began to march in drill formation and to practice firing their muskets. But no answering shots were being heard from the countryside. Only eastern Connecticut seemed ready to follow Boston’s lead; the town of Lebanon, which had demonstrated against the Stamp Act, now pledged to support Boston’s resistance “at the expense of our lives and fortunes.” More common, though, was the response from Hatfield, deep in western Massachusetts. There the Tory farmers scoffed at the transparency of alarms against the French. If France posed a real threat, shouldn’t Boston be welcoming the assistance of British troops? On Monday, September 19, Governor Bernard finally made public the orders bringing troops from Halifax and Ireland. Samuel Adams’ convention opened the following Thursday, but only seventy delegates appeared. As the warships drew closer, many Sons of Liberty found their resolve waning, and James Otis stayed away from the convention for its first three days.

  With Otis absent, Thomas Cushing was named the convention’s speaker. He set the tone by announcing that the meeting’s only purpose was to “bring together some prudent people who would be able to check the violent designs of others.” Samuel Adams was elected clerk, but without Otis’ oratory he couldn’t move the stolid delegates from the farms. When Otis finally appeared he was too late to alter the prevailing mood.

  Samuel Adams had tested the tide, and now he swam with it. As clerk, he saw to it that not a line of the Town Meeting’s defiance appeared in the convention’s published conclusions. Writing on behalf of the delegates, he called them “plain, honest men” and asked George III to regard their meeting as “a fresh token of the loyalty of our respective towns to his Majesty.”

  When the convention had been in session for just one week, British men-of-war were spotted off the Massachusetts coast. The delegates voted to adjourn. Or, as John Mein, the Tory printer, described the scene, they “broke up and rushed out of town like a herd of scalded hogs.” On that same afternoon, September 29, 1768, the ships drew near the harbor, approaching cautiously, unsure of their reception. The next day the fleet moved into siege formation, surrounded Boston from the northeast and pointed its guns at the town.

  This was the moment the Tories had awaited through three humiliating years. At Castle William, the customs commissioners set off skyrockets and sang choruses of “Yankee Doodle”:

  “Yankee Doodle came to town,

  a-riding on a pony.

  He stuck a feather in his hat

  and called him macaroni. . . .”

  Sung to an old air, the verses had evolved during the French and Indian War. By 1758 the British were referring to the New England militia as the Yankee companies. “Macaroni” was London slang for a fop, and for Samuel Adams, dreaming of a new Sparta, it was a galling serenade—this celebration of dancing and wenching and extravagant fashion.

  “Yankee Doodle, keep it up!

  Yankee Doodle, dandy!

  Mind the music, and the step,

  and with the girls be handy!”

  —

  For Francis Bernard, the arrival of the soldiers was three years overdue, but they presented fresh problems. He wanted one regiment quartered in town, with a back-up regiment on call at Castle William. But his Council refused to provide housing in town, preferring to restrict all of the troops to the Castle. Bernard wanted to prove to the English commander, Colonel Dalrymple, how restricted his authority was these days, and he arranged to ferry Council members to the Castle, where Dalrymple could meet with them in person. The colonel’s approach was mild. He said that his orders called for maintaining a regiment in the town, but he could assure the Council that his men would be well-behaved. He hoped that he would be among friends in Boston, and his troops would act in that same way.

  The Council would have none of it. Members pointed out that since Castle William was considered within the town limits, Dalrymple would be obeying his orders if he kept the troops there. The meeting broke up in a less friendly spirit. The colonel appealed again to Bernard, but the governor had retreated into the aggrieved helplessness that had become his only defense. General Gage had heard about the tumultuous Town Meeting and had sent word that both regiments should go ashore. Dalrymple was concerned that each day’s delay in landing his soldiers gave the Sons more time to plot their resistance.

  But when the day came, no one resisted. At noon on Saturday, October 1, 1768, with drums and fifes setting the pace, British soldiers in their bright-red coats and black three-cornered hats marched up King Street. Many of the drummers were black men, wearing yellow coats and the high white bearskin caps of the grenadiers. The officers were adorned with silver armor at the neck and the chest, crimson sashes at the shoulder and swords at the waist. Sergeants marched with halberds, the long-handled battle axes.

  For nearly four hours, the British paraded through the town, past Town House and the Old Granary Burying Ground, until at last they assembled on the cow pasture that Bostonians called their Common. The ranks included nine companies each from the Fourteenth and Twenty-ninth Regiments, one company of artillery and an eighty-four-man unit from the Fifty-ninth Regiment—a total of a thousand men. Paul Revere, the silversmith, stood on the sidelines, angered by the British insolence. But the soldiers could afford to be arrogant. Each soldier had been issued sixteen rounds of powder and ball, and Boston’s arms remained stacked in Faneuil Hall.

  —

  Samuel Adams had lost.

  Andrew Oliver’s small grandson watched the redcoats land and ran home happily. Now, the child announced, the mob wouldn’t tear down any more houses. His grandfather said that the sight of the troops on the Common allowed him to sleep easy in his bed. The Boston Gazette still promised that the people would not be awed into being taxed without their consent. And Samuel Adams could write, “I am in fashion and out of fashion as the whim goes. I will stand alone.” But Adams’ only immediate revenge was to take John Adams’ young son to the Common and try to instill in the child a patriotic loathing of the redcoats parading there.

  To the Tories, the few threats of defiance rang hollow. Before the troops had landed, General Gage had described the patriots as “a people who have ever been very bold in council but neve
r remarkable for their feats of action.” Boston’s cowed acceptance of the two regiments was proving him right. Mather Byles, the foremost Tory clergyman in Boston, met a group of patriots in the mall and taunted them with a pun: “Well, gentlemen, you have been exerting yourselves for some time, and I congratulate you now that your grievances are red-dressed.” In New York, the local Sons of Liberty derided Boston’s collapse as evidence of “the ridiculous puff and bombast for which our Eastern brethren have always been too famous.”

  Thomas Hutchinson was not so sure that Adams and his crowd had been routed. Calling the Massachusetts convention had been a bold stroke, and, if it hadn’t given Samuel Adams all he had asked, the meeting itself had been the most open step yet toward revolution. But for now the general opinion in England was that Americans could not endure the smell of gunpowder.

  For lack of better quarters, the Twenty-ninth Regiment pitched its tents on Boston Common. Dalrymple led the Fourteenth to Faneuil Hall and forced town officials to open one door. Inside was a bonus: before bedding down for the night, Dalrymple’s men commandeered the four hundred arms still on display from the Town Meeting. The next morning, Francis Bernard opened Town House to the troops, including the room where the House of Representatives usually sat. James Otis warned that the stench from the troops in the House chamber might be infectious and urged that members meet elsewhere.

  With winter approaching, the troops needed warmer lodging. Officers began to rent quarters in town, but some of their men solved the problem by deserting. Within two weeks, seventy men were gone, and Dalrymple was offering a reward of ten guineas to the soldier who would point out any man urging him to defect. Private Richard Ames of the Fourteenth was caught and shot on the Common as a warning to the others, and the execution shocked those Bostonians who were accustomed to the laxer discipline of their own militia. Dalrymple hoped his strictness would prevent more desertions and any further friction with the town. Public lashings on a soldier’s bare back with a cat-o’-nine-tails became a regular event.