American Tempest (25 page)

Incredibly, he brought in the demented hero James Otis to chair the committee. Otis was experiencing one of his occasional moments of lucidity, and Adams convinced his keepers to release him from his straitjacket to return to Boston. Then, with Adams barking orders, the committee agreed to produce documents of “Rights, Liberties and Privileges” for the people of Massachusetts. Three weeks later, the committee presented a seven-thousand-word declaration of the “State of the Rights of Colonists,” written by Sam Adams; a “List of Infringements and Violations of those Rights,” written by Dr. Joseph Warren; and “A Letter of Correspondence,” written by Dr. Benjamin Church, who had, apparently, abandoned his brief flirtation with Loyalists and re-espoused the “Glorious Cause.”

“Gentlemen,” Church's letter began, “We the freeholders and other inhabitants of Boston . . . can no longer conceal our impatience under a constant, unremmitted, uniform aim to enslave us, or confide in an administration which threatens us with certain and inevitable destruction.”
²⁰

Governor Hutchinson condemned the documents for inciting rebellion, saying their principles “would be sufficient to justify the colonies in revolting, and forming an independent state.”
²¹
Although Hancock and Cushing also disapproved, the cunning of Sam Adams trapped both into
playing roles neither had sought. After the Town Meeting had approved the Adams declaration and the Church resolution, the moderator would have to sign them or resign. Hancock had little choice but to pen his legendary signature across each near-treasonous document or flee to London as quickly as possible with as many of his assets as he could salvage. So much of his wealth was real property, however, he knew he would not be able to leave with enough money to live in his accustomed style in London. With the words
JOHN HANCOCK, moderator
, scrawled across the front page of Adams's incitement to rebellion, John Hancock suddenly reemerged as the reluctant leader of Boston's radicals.

After the Town Meeting, Edes and Gill at the
Gazette
printed six hundred copies of Adams's declaration for distribution to selectmen in nearly every town in Massachusetts. All saw John Hancock's signature and believed he was leading the rebellion against royal rule in Massachusetts. As the malevolent Samuel Adams had planned, Hancock was left with little choice but to resume his role as Adams's milch cow or try to seize control of the radicals and sweep Adams aside. He could no longer remain neutral and befriend both Loyalists and radicals.

The Adams statement of colonist rights and the circular letter produced a network of Committees of Correspondence throughout Massachusetts, and when the General Court met in January, it declared that Parliament had no authority to tax colonists without their consent. “I know no line that can be drawn between the supreme authority of Parliament and the total independence of the colonies,” Governor Hutchinson thundered in reply. “It is impossible that there should be two independent legislatures in one and the same state, for although there may be but one head, the king, yet two legislative bodies will make two governments as distinct as the kingdoms of England and Scotland before union.”
²²

Ironically, John Adams agreed with the royal governor, adding that

In effect, John Adams wrote what was America's first “Declaration of Independence,” and Parliament received it as further proof that the time had come to crush the treasonous activities in Massachusetts.

Instead of trying to rally merchant support in the colonies, however, the English government persisted in driving them into the rebel camp. Earlier in 1773, East India Company shares had plunged from 280 to 160 pence on the London Stock Exchange. Tea Act duties had cut American consumption and left the company near bankruptcy, with seventeen million pounds of unsold tea spilling out of its British warehouses. Although the company asked the government to eliminate the tea duty in North America, Lord North refused, saying colonists would interpret repeal as a sign of weakness. Instead, Parliament, many of whose members owned East India shares, passed a new law: the Tea Act of 1773, which gave the company a tea monopoly in America by letting it appoint its own licensees to sell tea directly to consumers and bypass wholesalers and retailers. By eliminating “middle men,” a handful of East India Company licensees would be able to sell tea at prices below even the cheapest smuggled tea, although they would drive untold numbers of small colonial merchants and shopkeepers out of business.

Despite the occasional nonimportation and nonconsumption agreements—or perhaps because of them—tea had remained a popular beverage among American women—a staple that meant survival for some storekeepers and small merchants—many loyal to the crown and opposed to the violent upheavals in the streets of Boston. To compound the government's blunder, the East India Company named as agents in the politically volatile province of Massachusetts the two merchant-banking houses run by the sons of Royal Governor Hutchinson and the sons of Loyalist Richard Clarke, whose daughter had married one of the Hutchinson boys. Both the Hutchinsons and Clarkes had ignored colonist nonimportation agreements, and their appointment as East India Company agents would now give them a monopoly on the tea trade in Massachusetts.

With no way of reconciling the Hutchinson-Clarke interests with those of Boston's many wholesalers and small merchants, Hancock had no choice
but to ally himself with the larger group. To solidify his leadership, he sought to restore political ties with Sam Adams. The opportunity came almost immediately when Benjamin Franklin—then in London—received a packet of letters that Governor Hutchinson and his brother-in-law Lieutenant Governor Andrew Oliver had sent to a friend in Parliament several years earlier. The letters urged “an abridgment of English liberties” in the American colonies and stripping self-government from “the hands of the populace . . . by degrees.”
²⁴

Franklin, who served as agent for Massachusetts and Pennsylvania in Britain, sent the letters to Thomas Cushing, who passed them on to Sam Adams, who read them to the House of Representatives. A committee headed by Hancock concluded that the letters were “designed to overthrow the [provincial] government and introduce arbitrary rule into the Province.”
²⁵
Adams published them and sent copies to the king with a petition asking that Hutchinson and Oliver be removed from office.

The scandal over the Hutchinson-Oliver letters allowed Hancock and Adams to close ranks, but Hancock made it clear he would no longer tolerate the violence, vandalism, and disruptions of democratic town meetings by Adams's gangs of ruffians. As long as he continued to finance the Sons of Liberty, Hancock declared, he, not Adams, would now dictate broad strategy. Although Hancock's new, aggressive stance took Adams aback, Adams recognized that without the political and financial support of the stable elements of Boston society, his independence movement would die, so he agreed to Hancock's terms. Energized by his new leadership role, Hancock set out to woo an entirely new class of colonist to “the Glorious Cause.” On June 29, the House adjourned, and a month later John Hancock attended the first service in the all-but-new Brattle Square Church that he had paid to restore. The cornerstone bore the name “Hon. John Hancock.” Harvard's trustees also honored their Patriot son—and benefactor—by naming him treasurer of the college, a position they hoped would serve to remind him of the college's constant need for financial gifts and bequests.

In September 1773 the
Boston Gazette
reprinted a series of inflammatory articles against the Tea Act that had appeared in Philadelphia and New York newspapers. The articles argued that the government-backed East India Company monopoly on tea sales would drive small merchants out of
business, encourage establishment of other government monopolies, and eventually destroy free enterprise. Sam Adams dusted off the plans he had used to prevent implementation of the Stamp Act: He would send his mob to frighten East India Company agents into resigning, then prevent ships from landing and offloading their tea—much as it had done with stamps in 1765.

On October 21, the Massachusetts Bay Committee of Correspondence wrote to similar committees in other colonies calling on them to prevent East India Company tea from landing in America. Five days later the
Boston Gazette
printed a handbill from Philadelphia that threatened the lives of “the Commissioners appointed by the East India Company for the sale of tea in America” unless they resigned.
²⁶

On Tuesday, November 2, 1772, a staccato of knocks on their respective front doors roused Thomas and Elisha Hutchinson from their beds. Each found a note nailed to their doors demanding their appearance at the Liberty Tree the following day “to resign your commission” as East India Company consignees. “Fail not upon your peril,” the notes warned. They bore the cryptic signature: “O.C.” [officer in charge].
²⁷

On November 3, Sam Adams, John Hancock, Dr. Joseph Warren, and other selectmen and Patriot leaders led more than five hundred Sons of Liberty to the Liberty Tree and demanded the resignation of the Hutchinson boys and Clarke's sons as tea agents. The Hutchinsons and Clarkes refused, and two days later, Hancock chaired a Town Meeting that declared them “daringly affrontive to the town.”
²⁸

By morning the following day, John Boyle wrote in his “Journal of Occurrences in Boston” that Bostonians “found a note stuck up in all parts of the town . . . at almost every corner . . . and a large flag was also hung out on the pole at Liberty-Tree, and at 11 O'Clock all the bells in town were set a ringing.”
²⁹

“Gentlemen,” the note began.

By noon, Hancock, Sam Adams, Molyneux, and Warren had arrived at the Liberty Tree, where more than five hundred were waiting in vain for the Hutchinsons and the other merchants. Incensed by the demands on the unsigned notice, the merchants sent word to the gathering refusing to bend to the will of a self-appointed group with no legal standing either as a body elected by the people or appointed by the government. Adams pronounced the response “daring [and] affrontive” and led the mob to the Hutchinson building, where it battered down the front doors and surged into the ground floor, smashing fixtures, but the mob was unable to breach the upper floors, where the merchants had barricaded themselves in.

A week later, Governor Hutchinson responded with a letter to Hancock, ordering him as commander of the Governor's Company of Cadets to “summon each person belonging to the company to be ready to appear in arms at such place . . . whensoever there may be a tumultuous assembling of people in violation of the laws.”
³¹
In effect, the governor's note forced Hancock to choose sides once and for all. Hancock chose to ignore the governor's order. There would now be no turning back.

“Now, brethren,” Sam Adams wrote in a circular letter for the Boston Committee of Correspondence to committees in other eastern Massachusetts towns, “we are reduced to this dilemma, either to sit down quietly under this and every other burden that our enemies shall see fit to lay upon us as good natured slaves or rise and resist this and every plan laid for our destruction as becomes freemen.” Adams declared that “this tea now coming to us [is] more to be dreaded than plague or pestilence.”
³²

In London, meanwhile, a few ships' captains, including James Scott, who commanded John Hancock's ship
Hayley
, refused to load their vessels with tea bound for America, but the East India Company quickly bribed its way onto other vessels, and by the end of October, 1,700 chests, with one hundred pounds of tea in each chest, sailed off to America.

On November 18, the Sons of Liberty gathered at the Liberty Tree and again demanded that the tea agents resign. Again, the agents refused. On Saturday, November 27, the
Dartmouth
, the first of four ships bound for Boston, anchored outside the harbor, and the next day, as it glided to the wharf, Sam Adams and a group of his “Mohawks” prevented it from tying up. On Monday morning, posters appeared throughout the town: