American Tempest (36 page)

As Oliver sailed off, a rebel mob attacked Oliver Hall, his magnificent home in Middleborough, and burned it to the ground. His nephew, Reverend Andrew Oliver, remained behind and revisited the site. After the fire, he reported, “the ruins gradually fell to decay, and it is difficult now to discover any traces of what once stood there.”
²⁴

As Howe was evacuating Boston, Patriot General Alexander Lord Stirling's forces put down a Loyalist counter-revolution in New Jersey and arrested its leader, Royal Governor William Franklin, the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin. “I have provided good, genteel, private lodgings for him,” Lord Stirling wrote to President Hancock from Elizabethtown. “I intend he shall remain until I have directions from Congress what to do with him.”
²⁵
After discreet discussions with his father, Hancock ordered William
Franklin imprisoned in Litchfield, Connecticut, where he remained for two years before being exchanged for Patriot prisoners. He eventually went into exile in England.

A few days later President Hancock heard from Washington:

Earlier, on March 3, Congress had sent Connecticut's Silas Deane to Paris to purchase war materiel and recruit officers to help train American militiamen, and word soon arrived that France had guaranteed the safety of American ships sailing into French harbors and would provide clandestine material support for the Continental Army. Congress announced that all American ports would now be open to trade with all nations but Britain.

On April 12, a North Carolina convention joined Massachusetts in declaring its independence from Britain, and Virginia followed suit on May 15. On June 7, after a year had passed since the appointment of Washington as commander in chief, Congress looked back on an extraordinary number of American triumphs. Confident that the British would withdraw rather than submit to further humiliations, Virginia Congressman Richard Henry Lee stood in the Continental Congress to resolve that “the United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.” In the debate that followed, Congress voted to postpone a decision on the resolution until July 1, but nonetheless appointed a committee consisting of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Robert Livingston (New York), and Roger Sherman (Connecticut) to prepare a formal Declaration of Independence. Members of the committee then assigned to Jefferson the task of writing the document. On July 2, twelve of the thirteen states voted in favor of Richard Henry Lee's resolution, with New York abstaining until it could obtain the consent of the New York Provincial
Congress. Boston's Thomas Cushing joined John Dickinson in voting against the resolution.

King George III. His refusal to read, let alone sign, John
Dickinson's Olive Branch Petition motivated the Continental Congress to issue and sign the Declaration of Independence and end the king's sovereignty over the richest jewel of the English empire.
(L
IBRARY OF
C
ONGRESS
)

After a few changes by Adams and Franklin, the committee presented Jefferson's Declaration of Independence to the Congress on July 4, 1776. Congress approved the document—without dissent—and President Hancock signed it, with Pennsylvania's Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Congress, witnessing Hancock's signature. None of the other members of Congress could sign it without the approval of each of their state legislatures. Hancock ordered copies made and, after it had been read to the public on July 8, he sent copies to all the states for their legislatures' approval (see
Appendix A
for text).

Silence reigned over the State House in Philadelphia on August 2, 1776, as each of fifty-five signatories affixed their names to the document that severed the ties of Britain's thirteen American colonies with the motherland. Although Thomas Cushing and John Dickinson again refused to sign, for them and all the framers and signers of the Declaration of Independence, the tempest had ended.

A
s experienced statesmen like John Hancock, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson assumed leadership of Congress, the most bellicose Tea Party Patriots like Samuel Adams slipped to the rear of national leadership. The time for tearing down government had ended; the time had come to build a new government—and a new nation. The fiery words of Sam Adams and the original Tea Party Patriots had roused Americans to rebellion, but proved of little value devising military strategy or negotiating complex agreements between state leaders or foreign rulers and military commanders. Nor were they of any help raising money for arms, ammunition, clothes, shoes, blankets, and tents for the troops. And they proved counterproductive for guiding the American people to productive peacetime pursuits.

To the consternation of many Tea Party leaders, the revolution they had helped foment not only failed to end taxation, it forced the new, independent state governments to tax more heavily than the British had proposed or would ever have conceived of proposing. Like other colonies, Massachusetts had to support its own government and an armed militia on its own—without British help. In addition, the states collectively had to support a central national government and a national military force—two entities the British government had previously financed without colonist help. For a
while, the Continental Army and state militias could rely on materiel captured or stolen from the British, but they soon learned they would have to buy the arms and ammunition they needed at a steep price, borrowing much of the money but eventually taxing citizens to raise the rest.

Of the original Tea Party Patriots, only John Hancock had the genius to rise to national prominence—as President of the Continental Congress and, indeed, first President of the United States of America under the Articles of Confederation that Congress approved in 1777. He spent nearly two, often heroic years in that post before returning to Massachusetts to assume command of the state militia and lead it into action at the battle of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1778. In 1780 the people of Massachusetts elected him the state's first governor by an overwhelming majority. He held the post for five years, resigning suddenly in February 1785 after disingenuously pleading exhaustion and allowing Lieutenant Governor Thomas Cushing to finish his term. In fact, the state was facing bankruptcy, and Hancock saw no way out of the financial morass without imposing the very taxes that he and his fellow Tea Party leaders had so vehemently opposed under British rule. His successor James Bowdoin had no choice but to raise property taxes, and in doing so, he set off widespread antitax rioting. Bowdoin raised private moneys to send an armed militia to crush the rebellion and leave the state's farmers seething with discontent and anger that they misdirected at Bowdoin.

Recovering from his convenient bout with fatigue, Hancock won reelection to the governorship with grand promises to ease the plight of farmers. Reducing his own salary as a sop to protesters, he cajoled the legislature into declaring a one-year tax holiday, obtained full pardons for farmer protesters, and forced through legislation ending the self-defeating practice of seizing tools from debtors and sending them to prison, with no means of ever repaying their debts. He and Lieutenant Governor Thomas Cushing helped finance Boston's recovery, turning it into America's most beautiful city—with Hancock claiming most of the credit while the modest Cushing stood silently in Hancock's shadow. The people of Massachusetts reelected Hancock to the governorship until his death in 1793.

Despite his bluster, Sam Adams, unlike Dr. Joseph Warren, spent the war without firing a shot at the British—or contributing perceptibly to the
deliberations of the Continental Congress. He returned to Boston in 1781 but never recovered his influence or popularity. As the hugely popular Hancock was contributing every moment of his time and every penny of his personal wealth rebuilding Boston, Adams all but disappeared from public life after the war, unable or unwilling to contribute to reconstruction. After a failed attempt to win election to Congress, he resigned himself to oblivion until Hancock invited him to serve as lieutenant governor after Cushing's death in 1788. Adams remained in that obscure post until Hancock's death in 1793, when he automatically acceded to the governorship. He won reelection in 1794 and served until 1797. In acceding to the governorship, the one-time leader of the Tea Party Patriots—and arch foe of British taxation—now warned would-be tax protesters, “The man who dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.”
¹
Samuel Adams died on October 2, 1803, one of the most puzzling figures in early American history.

Boston rebuilt, 1789. View of Boston from Breed's Hill after Governor John Hancock and Lieutenant Governor Thomas Cushing led and helped finance Boston's recovery from the war and turned it into America's most beautiful city.
(B
OSTONIAN
S
OCIETY
)

James Otis, Jr. drifted in and out of sanity after his beating in the British Coffee House. By September 1771 he added heavy drinking to his
erratic behavior, and three months later the probate court declared James
non compos mentis
and appointed his younger brother Samuel A. Otis his guardian. Although watched most of the time, James nonetheless managed to slip away with a rifle on June 17, 1775 and ran off to Bunker's Hill, where he rushed into battle amidst a hail of bullets. Amazingly, he escaped unharmed—one of the few to do so. He spent the rest of his days in quietude until lightning struck him dead as he stood in the rain to watch a thunderstorm near a farmhouse in Andover on May 23, 1783.

Thomas Cushing, the most moderate of the Tea Party Patriot leadership and an opponent of independence, remained in John Hancock's shadow at the Continental Congress as he had in Boston's revolutionary government and after independence as Hancock's lieutenant governor—a post he held until his death on February 28, 1788.

Dr. Benjamin Church, the radical who had shared quarters with Hancock when they were boys in Harvard, was arrested in October 1775 for spying for the British army. According to a report by George Washington to President Hancock, Church had been divulging Minuteman and Continental Army plans to General Thomas Gage for at least a year. Contrary to his claim, he had not been arrested in Boston after the Battle of Lexington but had gone straight to Gage's headquarters to report Minuteman activities, allowing the majority of the Redcoats on the Lexington road to escape capture after the battle at Concord Bridge. After assuming administration of the Continental Army Hospital in Cambridge, Church had shown a remarkable ability to slip in and out of Boston—always returning with surprisingly large amounts of medical supplies. During the summer he had sent his mistress with a coded message to one of Gage's aides, but she delivered it to someone who turned out to be a Patriot who reported her. She was arrested and confessed. The Massachusetts General Court, perhaps out of consideration for the past services of their longtime colleague, sent Church to jail in Norwich, Connecticut, where he remained until the end of the Revolution, “debarred the use of pen, ink and paper.” After the war, he sailed to exile in the West Indies, but the ship never arrived, and he was never seen or heard from again.