Patriots (12 page)

“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 It is that the Stamp Act be repealed absolutely,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on February 22, 1766, in the presence of five hundred members, the House of Commons repealed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.

The Sons of Liberty had been planning the event for three weeks. They banned all bonfires except the ones they set, and they warned children, servants and the town’s two thousand slaves to stay off the streets. By Monday evening, prosperous men had paid up the bills of Boston’s debtors and cleared the jail. A local craftsman, Paul Revere, had engraved copperplates of a huge obelisk to rise beneath the Liberty Tree. It was lighted with two hundred and eighty lamps and inset with portraits of Rockingham, Pitt and other men who had spoken for the colonies. George III was also there, the only face shown in profile.

Hancock had ordered a stage for fireworks built in front of his house. At dusk, twelve rockets were set off near the workhouse and answered by a dozen from Hancock’s party. The volleys went back and forth, outdoing each other in star bursts and fiery wheels. Somehow, during the exchange, the obelisk caught fire and was destroyed.

Gentlemen and ladies passed from one open house to the next until, at 11
P.M.
, a horizontal wheel of fireworks sent sixteen dozen blazing serpents hurtling through the night air. That was the signal that the festival was over and the Sons of Liberty expected people to go quietly to bed.

Throughout the celebration, the Tories had been watching dourly.
“Every dirty fellow just risen from his kennel,” one wrote afterward, “congratulated his neighbors on their glorious victory over England.” Samuel Adams had also viewed the scene skeptically. The people of Boston seemed maddened with a new loyalty to Britain and their king. They thought the battle was over.

—

Because of Samuel Adams, John Hancock had presided over a night of bonfires, secure that a mob wouldn’t attack his lavish house or his lovely gardens. Since Adams had defeated him for the House seat, Hancock had seemed to renounce politics. He had told friends that the Stamp Act would probably ruin him and yet the colonies must submit to it. But during the months of protest, Samuel Adams had drawn him into his circle of patriots, and soon
Hancock was making lists of the dozen Boston Tories who, he joked, should be beheaded for supporting the use of stamps. As the town prepared for another election on May 6, 1766, some of Adams’ colleagues proposed backing a merchant named John Rowe for a House seat, but Adams turned his eyes toward Hancock’s house and asked, “Is there not another
John that may do better?” The patriots took the hint and gave John Hancock the victory.

Hancock, who was not yet thirty, had inherited the largest fortune in New England, which helped to explain why, despite his modest accomplishments, he had joined Samuel Adams’ roster of exceptional young men. At the time of his birth in North Braintree, John’s prospects had been less brilliant. His father and grandfather were clergymen, but that guaranteed them only respect, not riches. At the age of seven, John himself seemed destined for the clergy, until his father died, leaving a widow and three small children. John’s merchant uncle, the very successful Thomas Hancock, and his stout, kindly wife, Lydia, were childless, and they took the thin and frail child into their home as a cherished foster son.

Because of his delicacy, John was kept out of school for a year and allowed to become acquainted with his new guardians and their extravagant household. Thomas Hancock’s granite-faced mansion had been built to the plans of a London architect, with graceful black chimneys, a sloping tiled roof and fifty-four windows. Thomas Hancock ran four trading ships and instructed his captains to bring back luxurious furnishings—damasks, exotic plants, English wallpaper patterned with peacocks. From England had also come a black walnut clock that stood ten feet tall. For his gardens, Hancock imported peach and apricot trees from Bilbao, yews and holly from a London horticulturist. The holly vines arrived dead and some of the alien flower seeds never bloomed, but the five thousand pounds sterling that Hancock had spent on his house and grounds had produced a Boston showplace.

Thomas Hancock and his wife took an equal pride in their attractive foster child. At eight, John entered the Public Latin School, where the last hour of each day was devoted to a class in penmanship. At thirteen, he was enrolled at Harvard College. There he rose at 6
A.M.
for chapel services and afterward a breakfast of biscuits, coffee and beer. At noon the students poured themselves drafts of cider from two pewter mugs set out amid the
meat and vegetables. That indulgence toward alcohol, combined with the severe New England winters, bred habits that lasted a lifetime. When he became master of his uncle’s house, John Hancock kept a gallon jug of hot rum punch on his sideboard day and night.

He had entered the Harvard class of 1754 ranked fifth among his classmates, which assured him better chambers, a front pew at chapel and first choice of food at the head table in the commons. But Hancock was demoted four notches when he and another boy engaged in the undergraduate sport of getting a Negro slave drunk; the college authorities said they had endangered the slave’s life. Hancock’s rank had been restored by the time he sailed out into the world, a slender young man who favored lavender suits when he went riding in a family carriage always painted yellow. The Hancock rigs, however expensive, could never be quite sleek enough to be fashionable. Ordering a new carriage from London, Thomas Hancock explained the problem: “You know, Mrs. Hancock is none of the shortest and smallest of folks, though I’d prefer as light a one
as possible to her size.”

Thomas Hancock sent his ward to Europe for a final polishing, and John was visiting London in the fall of 1760 when George III was installed as king. John Hancock was dazzled by the coronation ceremonies. Presented at court, he received from his sovereign—who was one year younger—the snuffbox he took back to Boston.

Returning home, Hancock set about learning his uncle’s business. How Thomas Hancock had become rich so quickly had always puzzled some Bostonians. When he was not quite fourteen, Thomas had been apprenticed to a bookbinder in Cornhill Street. He stayed there for seven years and then opened his own bookshop in Ann Street. Within two years he was investing his profits in a load of goods bound for Albany, and that led naturally to importing—cloth, tea, books. But those small profits didn’t explain how he had gone from apprentice to merchant in less than a decade. Thomas Hutchinson had heard a story that during those first years in trade Hancock had bought a diamond cheaply and sold it at a vast profit. But Hutchinson knew that the truth was more prosaic. Thomas Hancock was a smuggler.

His smuggling would have been unremarkable except for the scale on which he operated. To cut his risk, he took only temporary
partners. With them he sent his ships with legal cargo to Surinam in Dutch Guiana and they returned with South American contraband. Hancock dealt in coarse cloth, ribbons, buckles, fans, all merchandise that could enter the colony legally only through Britain. He also dealt in hardware, pins, coal. And tea. From his own expertise, Hutchinson knew that Hancock bought cargoes of tea at St. Eustatius in the Dutch West Indies and shipped it to Boston in hogsheads marked as molasses. He also imported a few chests of tea from England to act as a cover for the smuggled barrels.

John Hancock began by waiting on customers at the store on the family pier, Hancock’s Wharf. When his uncle died of apoplexy in 1764, everyone agreed that John had proved himself qualified to take over the empire. But they were curious how he would handle his new riches, some seventy thousand pounds or more. For the first months after his mourning, John became a busy host, caught up in a round of parties and balls. He was the most eligible bachelor in New England. But when someone claimed him, it was not a Boston merchant’s daughter for marriage but Samuel Adams for politics.

On the day of Hancock’s election to the House, John Adams was walking on the Common when he ran into his cousin. They had taken a few turns around the green when they came into view of the mansion that Hancock had inherited two years earlier. Pointing up at its stone façade, Samuel Adams remarked, “This town has done a wise thing today.”

“What?” asked John Adams.

“They have made
that young man’s fortune their own.”

—

Samuel Adams was fifteen years older than John Hancock, and these days he was looking older still. On both sides of the Atlantic the strain of the past year had told on many of the chief figures. King George was said to be unstable. Pitt’s enemies claimed that his gout had moved to the brain. James Otis drank too much and raved on both sides of every issue. Thomas Hutchinson, perhaps warned by his father’s example, had undertaken a strict regimen of diet and exercise. John Hancock, never robust, was sending to London for a variety of remedies. And Samuel Adams suffered from a perpetual tremor, sometimes so severe that he
could barely write because of the way his pen careened around the page.

Dorothy Quincy Hancock

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON

And yet the mass of men remained tranquil. In his diary John Adams wrote that the repeal of the Stamp Act had hushed the popular clamor into silence. The Sons of Liberty seemed ready to disband. Governor Bernard spent much of the rest of 1766 trying to win compensation for Thomas Hutchinson and others who had suffered from the riots. But leaders in the House wanted to tie any payment to an amnesty for those men who had been arrested.
James Otis had persuaded the House to open a gallery for visitors, and for the first time in Massachusetts history those debates would be public.

Hutchinson was apprehensive when he heard himself described once again on the House floor as an unscrupulous man who lusted for power. He guessed that the charges were being repeated all over the colony. But he and Bernard were willing to accept the abuse—and agree to the amnesty—in order to get the reparations. Hutchinson had claimed losses of twenty-five hundred pounds sterling. An independent audit put the figure about seven hundred pounds higher, and the colony agreed to reimburse him. The riot’s leaders who had been set free from Sheriff Greenleaf’s jail had been lying low for months, but now they were walking boldly through the streets. Their amnesty prompted England to refuse the terms; by that time, however, Hutchinson had already been paid. Officially, the affair was ended.