Patriots

by A. J. Langguth

  Even the threat of reprisal couldn’t curb natural hostilities. One drunken British captain came upon a group of slaves one night in late October. “Go home,” he shouted, “and cut your masters throats.” He was hauled before a justice of the peace, and the town watchmen were ordered to keep Negroes off the streets late at night.

  —

  Boston’s antagonism gave the British troops reason to welcome the reinforcements London had promised. In mid-November, ships carrying the Sixty-fourth and Sixty-fifth Regiments finally arrived in the harbor after being blown off course as far as the West Indies. By that time, Colonel Dalrymple had rented enough warehouses to accommodate his men, and one leading patriot, William Molineux, was letting his property on Wheelright’s Wharf for twenty-five pounds sterling a month. A detachment of the fresh troops went to Castle William. The rest quietly took other lodgings in the town, and married officers found suitable rooms for their families. The customs officials returned from their exile at the Castle and took up their normal duties. Some even bought houses near Boston. The gala dances started up again.

  But in England, political life was roiling. America’s nonimportation agreements were choking off lucrative trade and throwing thousands of men out of work. Benjamin Franklin heard of rioting all over the country and saw for himself hordes of men storming through London streets. Prompted by letters from Governor Bernard and other Tories, Parliament was ready to take action against the lawless colonials, and George III pledged himself to enforce any measures Parliament might adopt. The Duke of Bedford, urging that England punish the instigators of the Boston riots, exhumed a law from the reign of Henry VIII that would permit Parliament to bring men like James Otis and Samuel Adams to England, where juries would convict them and judges would order them hanged. Early in 1769, Hillsborough wrote to Francis Bernard to inform him that the king wanted evidence sent to him of any treason committed within the colony since December 30, 1767.

  For eight years, the word “treason” had been flung about loosely in legislatures and courtrooms. Now the Tories had to produce evidence that would convince a British attorney general to prosecute. Thomas Hutchinson forwarded to London an affidavit from Richard Sylvester that accused Samuel Adams of open calls to rebellion against the English troops. Sylvester claimed that on one occasion Adams had spoken treason to seven men in the South End. Another time, he had called on Sylvester at his house and preached treason there: “We will take up arms and spend our last drop of blood before the king and Parliament shall impose on us.”

  Sylvester also gave evidence against Dr. Benjamin Church. In the Boston Gazette, Church had called Governor Bernard “Fop, witling, favorite stampman, tyrant tool. / Or all those mighty names in one, thou fool!’ According to Sylvester, Dr. Church was urging the patriots to seize both Bernard and Hutchinson and confiscate their papers to learn what lies against the people of Boston they were sending to London.

  As proof, the Sylvester affidavit was scant and somewhat tainted. Many of the alleged statements did reflect Samuel Adams’ prejudices—“The times were never better in Rome than when they had no king and were a free state, and as this is a great empire we shall soon have it in our power to give laws to England.” But since Sylvester was not a prominent Son of Liberty, why had Samuel Adams been calling regularly at his parlor? Still, that was the extent of the case against Adams, and the Boston Tories hoped it would be enough to get him shipped off to London, along with James Otis and John Hancock. Tories joked that when Samuel Adams passed the ropemakers’ galleries these days, he “shuddered at the sight of hemp.”

  In London, however, the attorney general reviewed the evidence, ruled that Samuel Adams and the rest had come “within a hair’s breadth” of treason, but declined to prosecute them.

  That refusal, combined with the growing pressure from the nation’s afflicted merchants, began to change Parliament’s mood. Arguments for restoring harmony with the colonies were once again being heard. Samuel Adams had never lost faith in the power of the nonimportation agreement, and now merchants throughout London were urging Parliament to recall Governor Bernard. From Hillsborough they won a pledge that Bernard not only would be replaced but would never again be appointed to any post in any colony. In March 1769, Hillsborough wrote to Bernard to inform him that it was he, not Samuel Adams, who would be boarding a ship headed for London. Officially, Bernard was being recalled only to report in person to the king on conditions. As consolation for the loss of his post, he would receive the title of baronet.

  Bernard was not fated to leave Massachusetts peaceably. Before Hillsborough’s instructions could reach Boston, a ship from London brought a new calamity for him. Bernard’s confidential letters to Hillsborough over the past months had come home again to America.

  —

  William Beckford was among those members of Parliament who were friendly to the patriots. He had invoked a House of Commons rule that permitted any member to read and make copies of all ministry correspondence. Beckford delivered the copies of Bernard’s letters to a London agent for the patriots, who dispatched six of them to America, most of them dating from November 1768, as well as one from General Gage to Lord Hillsborough. In his letters, Bernard had castigated the town of Boston and the Council for refusing to house the troops promptly and pressed again for changes in the charter to make the Council more responsive to the king and his governor. The Sons of Liberty read those letters in public, and there was a ferocious outcry. The Council immediately voted to print them as soon as the patriots could prepare an essay refuting them.

  Francis Bernard became fearful all over again. When his letters were printed, he warned London, they would be sent throughout the province to stir up the people, “and I fear it will have the worst effects.”

  Bernard’s fears always proved more reliable than his hopes. Writing home, a British officer stationed in Boston said: “His doubles and turnings have been so many that he has altogether lost his road and brought himself into great contempt.”

  —

  The spring opening of the Massachusetts legislature was delayed because the patriots objected to a British cannon that was aimed directly at the House chambers. The English officer in charge declined to move it. For a week, the House refused to transact business in the face of such a threat, and Bernard ordered the House session moved to Cambridge. Amid much angry protest, the House members met at Harvard College. There, Francis Bernard was told, someone had cut the heart out of his official portrait.

  The legislature finally convened, and Adams and Otis introduced a petition that Bernard be recalled. They charged that in opposing the patriots Bernard had opposed the king’s true interests, had misinterpreted conditions in Boston and had given the province “what is technically known as a black eye.” The hundred and nine House members present on June 27, 1769, passed the resolution unanimously.

  Bernard had received the summons to London, but in his opening statement to the legislature he hadn’t announced his departure. The baronetcy, however, was too good to keep secret, and the Boston Gazette was soon reporting the news with a barrage of mockery. No story about the governor failed to give him full due as “Sir Francis Bernard, of Nettleham, Bart.”

  As he prepared to leave, Bernard asked the hostile legislature to pay him a year’s salary in advance. The members turned him down and reminded him that during a smallpox epidemic he had charged the victims rent for their quarantine at Castle William. Now the patriots demanded that Bernard reimburse the colony at the same rate for the nights he had sheltered the customs commissioners there.

  Bernard wasn’t likely to find much sympathy in London. To ingratiate himself with his patron, he had arranged to have a native American artifact delivered to Lord Barrington. But when it arrived in London, his lordship’s thanks had been chilly.

  “I have been considering that the admirable canoe you were so good as to give me will be useless here,” Barrington wrote. “Nobody can navigate it or will venture to go into it. Let
me beg of you to give it to some other friend.”

  —

  On July 31, 1769, Francis Bernard boarded a warship, the Rippon, while his wife and large family stayed behind to close the houses. For a day the Rippon lay becalmed just outside Boston Harbor, and the governor couldn’t miss the festivities that were accompanying his departure. The Union Jack was run up the pole at the Liberty Tree, and banners flew from Hancock’s Wharf. Throughout the day he heard church bells and militia cannon. At night the Rippon still couldn’t sail, and its passengers saw a huge bonfire on Fort Hill, where Andrew Oliver’s effigy had burned four years before.

  If Bernard had left Massachusetts on that same day in 1765, his administration might have been judged a success. Apart from the blunder of appointing Hutchinson as chief justice, and an enthusiasm for money that opened him to scorn, he had brought a few small gifts that might have served him well in calmer times. Hutchinson had claimed he was a charming storyteller with an anecdote for every occasion. Bernard may not have been able to recite all of Shakespeare by heart, as he sometimes boasted, but no one would ever challenge him to prove it, and his appreciation of literature was genuine. He had promoted the fortunes of Harvard College and had drawn the designs for Harvard Hall. He was more kindly than not, more affable than many of his opponents. But he lacked the will or the sense to understand the nature of the battle. He had consistently underestimated the appeal of the patriots, sure that the people’s goodwill or his own deft maneuvering would keep the population civil. Bernard was an orphan who wanted above all to be loved, and in Boston he had come against the one heart that would never love him.

  —

  When Francis Bernard boarded the Rippon, it had just returned from taking the soldiers of the Sixty-fifth Regiment to Halifax. Since Boston had been quiet throughout the winter and the spring, General Gage had decided he could withdraw those troops and now the other regiment from Ireland, the Sixty-fourth. The second transfer was held up briefly when Samuel Adams persuaded the Massachusetts House to pass a resolution unanimously that no law—not merely no tax law—was binding on a colony unless its own legislature passed it. Thomas Hutchinson heard that Adams had told a Town Meeting, “Independent we are, and independent we shall be.” That sounded ominous enough for the officers in Boston to hold up the sailing of the Sixty-fourth.

  Half of the English garrison was gone, relieved to be escaping from Boston. There had been no serious outbreak, but Samuel Adams had seen to it that the hostility from the town was unrelenting. The disappointment of the Massachusetts convention had taught him that he had to recruit his allies from other Northern towns and not from the rural areas of his own province. In the fall of 1768, Adams and his allies in New York began a news service devoted to reporting the misbehavior of the British troops in Boston. Their “Journal of the Times” reached south to newspapers in Georgia and across the ocean to London’s Gentleman’s Magazine. John Adams was among those who went every Sunday evening to join in preparing copy with Samuel Adams, James Otis, William Davis and John Gill. He called it “working the political engine,” and he found cooking up each week’s anecdotes a curious business. The journal was a melange of sexual scandal and outright fabrication edited by his cousin Samuel, the province’s most puritanical and high-minded politician. News of rape abounded in the journal, and no woman was pictured as being safe from the English troops, who were usually called “bloody-backed rascals” for their red coats. It did the soldiers no good to respond that Boston women were so easy and willing that rape would have represented wasted effort. One soldier claimed that this Yankee war would be the first in history to produce more births than deaths.

  But according to the “Journal,” when the British weren’t raping, they were seducing. One story reported that an outraged citizen “the other morning discovered a soldier in bed with a favorite grand-daughter.” When they weren’t seducing, they were beating small boys in the street, carousing until dawn and profaning the Sabbath with gunfire and horseraces on the Common. Thomas Hutchinson read those stories and decided that Samuel Adams and his host of writers were a half dozen of the most wicked fellows on the globe. “They stick at nothing,” he complained, and no denial of one story would stop the concocting of another. Worse, Hutchinson detected signs that the campaign was stirring up previously cool heads in New York and Philadelphia.

  —

  Throughout much of his life, Hutchinson had wanted to be governor. Now, when the job was worse than worthless, his wish was being granted against his will. He had asked to stay on merely as chief justice, but London ordered him to assume Bernard’s duties as well. Since no announcement had been made about Bernard remaining in England, Hutchinson’s title would be acting governor. But with the Boston Gazette stepping up its attacks, that distinction didn’t make his job easier. The provocations between soldiers and the town weren’t all invented, nor were they all one-sided. Bostonians were accustomed to their own watchmen who demanded that anyone on the street at night identify himself, but now English sentinels were posted at public buildings around town to make the challenge. Many Bostonians couldn’t bring themselves to answer “Who goes there?” with the traditional password of “Friend.” They answered rudely or said nothing.

  Their most vulgar retorts, however, wouldn’t have shocked these troops. The Twenty-ninth Regiment was made up of rough men primed for a fight. Even the acting governor admitted that they were “bad fellows.” They jostled any Bostonian off the sidewalk or, if they thought they could get away with it, gave him a sharp dig in the ribs with the butt of a bayonet. The soldiers disrupted the town’s daily routine by parading through the streets and disturbed church services on Sunday by changing the guard. At Meeting times the band struck up a mocking rendition of “Yankee Doodle.” The English commander agreed to change the parade schedule and quiet the band, but John Adams found no relief. One regiment exercised directly in front of his house, and he was awakened each morning by an ear-piercing fife. The sight of the redcoats also convinced him that Britain’s determination to subjugate the colony was too strong to challenge.

  Reflecting on the differences in the patriot leaders, John Adams compared them to religious figures. Samuel Adams was like John Calvin, if Calvin could be imagined in a tavern. He was “cool, abstemious, polished.” James Otis was more like Martin Luther—“rough, hasty and loved good cheer.” But John Adams considered Otis unstable and was watching him these days with alarm. Opening the legislative session in Cambridge, Otis had inspired the Harvard students who flocked to hear him. They were moved to tears when Otis proclaimed that the first and noblest of duties was to serve one’s country, even to die for it. But privately he couldn’t stop talking, compulsively, nonsensically, obscenely. Adams mourned for him and for his effect on the patriots’ cause. And then Otis was fiercely struck down.

  —

  Through their contacts in London, the patriots received another packet of official correspondence, including letters from the customs commissioners to the Treasury in London. In them Otis was accused of treason. To a man who still proclaimed his loyalty to the king, the accusation was intolerable. On September 4, 1769, the Boston Gazette carried Otis’ paid advertisement assailing four of the commissioners. As a deliberate insult, he used only their first names as he asked Lord Hillsborough and the Board of Trade in London “to pay no kind of regard to any of the abusive representations of me or my country that may be transmitted by the said Henry, Charles, William and John or their confederates; for they are no more worthy of credit than those of Sir Francis Bernard, of Nettleham, Bart., or any of his cabal.” Otis had filed a defamation suit against Sir Francis, but he sought personal apologies from the men still in Boston. He went twice to see one commissioner, John Robinson, and left dissatisfied each time. Now, after calling all four “superlative blockheads” in print, Otis once again invoked natural law, this time against libel: “If Robinson misrepresents me, I have a natural right, if I can get no other satisfaction, to break his
head.”

  The next day, a Tuesday, Otis heard that Robinson had bought a stout walking stick. He went to the same store and demanded an identical one. Armed with it, he set out that evening for the British Coffee House, near the Custom House. He knew it was hostile territory, and when he entered he met the usual crowd of Tories, including captains from both British regiments, along with John Mein, the acerbic publisher, and William Browne, one of the seventeen representatives who had voted the previous year to rescind the Massachusetts circular letter.

  John Robinson entered the tavern, saw that Otis had no sword, and went at once to the back, where he unbuckled his own and set it down. He returned to confront Otis in the public room.

  Otis spoke first. “I demand satisfaction of you, sir.”

  Robinson asked what satisfaction Otis would prefer.

  “A gentleman’s satisfaction.” Gentlemen could fight only with their fists. Dueling with swords was against the law.

  Robinson said, “I am ready to do it.”

  But as they moved for the door, Robinson reached out to give Otis’ nose a scornful tweak. Otis blocked Robinson with his cane. Robinson raised his own, and for a moment they were dueling with their walking sticks. Then onlookers took away the canes, and they began pummeling each other with their fists.