Patriots (14 page)

The next day his written answer came: since the
Romney
was not his to command, he could not order it to leave Boston. James Otis reported that response to the Town Meeting and mentioned the governor’s graciousness. He truly believed, Otis said, that Bernard wished the colony well. When Bernard’s spies reported that rare compliment, the governor promptly passed it on to the king’s ministers in London. “Just at this time I am popular,” Bernard wrote on June 16. “I do not expect to
enjoy it a week.”

He would enjoy it five days.

—

During the last session of the Massachusetts House, Otis and Samuel Adams had suggested trying to unite the colonies by sending them a letter opposing the Townshend Acts. Most House members
had rejected the idea since London was sure to take the letter as a provocation, possibly even an invitation to another rebellious gathering like the Stamp Act congress. When the proposal was rejected two to one, Governor Bernard was delighted that two men wouldn’t again be inflaming a whole continent.

But, like the Burgesses of Virginia, who were always impatient to leave Williamsburg for their plantations, Boston’s farmers wanted to get back to their crops. Men from the country were inclined to be conservative, and Bernard watched his allies drift away from Boston while his enemies worked toward a majority. On February 4, 1768, the House appointed Samuel Adams, Otis, Thomas Cushing and Joseph Hawley to write a
circular letter. A sparsely attended session approved the letter and sent it on to the other colonies.

The letter marked a shift in the patriots’ argument. Adams and Otis now said that Parliament had no right to impose even external taxes if their sole purpose was to raise money. Levying taxes to pay the salaries of governors and judges had become a new violation of natural law. The letter stopped far short of rejecting Parliament’s authority altogether. The patriots were still not ready to say that England couldn’t use taxation to regulate trade. Instead, they recognized Parliament as the “supreme legislative power over
the whole Empire.” John Adams was surprised that his cousin would make that concession, and he blamed the vacillating Otis. Certainly Otis was willing to take credit for the letter. To a friend who asked about their progress, he replied, “They are nearly ready. I have written them all and handed them over to Sam Adams
to quieuvicue them”—Otis’ term for the editing.

During the months when America was debating the letter, King George was setting up a new impediment to reconciliation with the colonies. At the age of forty-one, Champagne Charley Townshend had died of a lingering fever, possibly typhoid. To replace him as chancellor of the exchequer, the king appointed Lord North, who regretted the repeal of the Stamp Act and believed that the colonies were on the brink of mutiny. Early in 1768, four months after North’s appointment, the king authorized a new office, a secretary of state for colonial affairs. That post went to Lord Hillsborough, a man who thoroughly endorsed Lord North’s policies. When Hillsborough received the Massachusetts circular letter, he took it at once to George III. Acting for the king, Hillsborough
then, in April 1768, wrote to warn each colonial governor that his legislature must ignore the Massachusetts letter, “which will be treating it with
the contempt it deserves.” Hillsborough also told Francis Bernard that the Massachusetts House must either disavow the letter or Bernard must
dissolve the House.

—

On June 21, five days after Governor Bernard congratulated himself on winning over Otis and the Town Meeting, he had to bring that peremptory message to the legislature. Having heard the king’s demand, the representatives demanded to see Hillsborough’s letter. By that time, Samuel Adams and the
Boston Gazette
had convinced the patriots that Bernard’s letters to London did not reflect a fair picture of Boston’s mood, and the House asked that Bernard also turn over his letters to Hillsborough. The governor responded as the patriots knew he would: “You may assure yourselves that I shall never make public my letters to his majesty’s ministers, but upon my own motion and for my own reasons.”

In that strained atmosphere, Otis took the House floor. “Who are these ministers?” he demanded. “The very frippery and foppery of France, the mere outsides of monkeys!” He added that the king appointed only boys as his ministers, and they had no education at all except for traveling through France, where they picked up slavish attitudes. Here Otis paused to congratulate himself and his allies: Not a person in England was capable of composing so elegant and so pure a piece of writing as the petitions that the House had passed during its last session. Then he moved on to accuse Parliament of being “a parcel of button-makers, pin-makers, horse jockeys, gamesters, pensioners,
pimps and whoremasters.” The public gallery was jammed and more men were listening at the doors as Otis began to praise Oliver Cromwell, not least for murdering a king. But however carried away, Otis stopped short of abusing George III. The speech was a two-hour violent rant, and Bernard collected it all from his spies and sent it off to London to let the Parliament know what sort of men he had to contend with.

Other arguments in the House that day were quieter but as determined. Why should this session undo a measure passed during the last one? By now, the circular letters had become a historical fact. They had appeared in newspapers. Many colonies had already
answered them. It was up to the world to judge the merit of the House’s position.

Samuel Adams composed the House’s response to Governor Bernard. “We have now only to inform your Excellency that this House have voted not to rescind, as required, the resolution of the last House; and that upon a division on the question, there were 92 nays and 17 yeas.” The members who had voted against rescinding the letter, Adams added, were moved by their duty to God, their king and their country, and their posterity. They ardently wished and humbly prayed that in the future the governor would be guided by those same principles.

—

Receiving the insolent message, Bernard immediately recognized its author. “Samuel Adams!” he had written about another example of Adams’ work. “Every dip of his pen stings
like a horned snake.” The next day, he dissolved the House. The patriots had moved another square forward in a game being played without rules or precedent on both sides of the Atlantic.

The patriots took the number “92” as a new rallying cry. The names of the seventeen dissenters were posted at the Liberty Tree. In a letter written on July 4, 1768, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania sent Otis a song he had composed with Arthur Lee of Virginia. One couplet ran:

Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all
,

By uniting we stand,
by dividing we fall.

Besides the circular letter, Samuel Adams and the patriots had launched three other campaigns against the Townshend Acts. Their crusade for a heightened sense of public morality was proving the least effective. Adams relished his reputation as a Puritan, and he desired a future in which the gallant citizens of his colony would shun foppery and carousing. He had been distressed by the customs commissioners, who he thought were importing a touch of London high life to Boston. At the Peacock Tavern the drinking often went on until four in the morning, and after one revel Thomas Hutchinson had been amused to see the commissioners and their ladies nursing hangovers. One woman’s rosy Nova Scotia complexion had turned so pale and sickly she might have been from South Carolina, and another bright and talkative wife had
become noticeably taciturn.
“Poor Paxton’s usual refreshing nap after dinner,” Hutchinson wrote to a friend, “was turned into a waking coma, more insensible with his eyes open than he used to be when they were shut.” He added that he only wished that the same misery could be visited on James Otis, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, William Molineux and another fifty patriots he could name.

Samuel Adams was concerned that Hutchinson might get his wish and the patriots would succumb to sodden and worldly pastimes. At first the Whigs had boycotted the commissioners’ parties, but slowly the attraction of fine clothes, gilded carriages and sumptuous banquets had eroded their high principles. Adams heard that Whig wives and Tory gentlemen were drinking punch together and dancing the minuet. When he complained that it was a
“bad thing for Boston to have so many gay idle people in it,” only the town’s clergymen seemed to listen. The staunchest Sons of Liberty set up a “Liberty Assembly” that would permit dancing but exclude the commissioners and their Tory friends. Even so, it was one battle that Samuel Adams had been losing up to the moment the mob sent the commissioners fleeing to Castle William.

Another of his tactics was not rooted in Adams’ morality but in his sense of expediency. He turned to exploiting the anti-Catholic sentiment that ran deep throughout the colony. Writing as “A Puritan” in the
Boston Gazette
, he claimed that popery was becoming even more of a threat to New England than the Townshend Acts, and he equated support for Bernard with allegiance to Rome. He divided towns by the way their delegates voted in the House—“Protestant” towns, Boston being the leading one, or such
“popish” towns as Hatfield, Salem and Springfield. Adams was appealing to instincts firmly rooted in Boston. The first book that children in the colony read was the
New England Primer
, whose frontispiece showed the Pope being pierced with darts.

The most direct of Adams’ campaigns worked best. From the time the acts took effect, November 20, 1767, many Bostonians had been boycotting luxury goods from Britain by signing a “nonimportation agreement.” At the same time, they were trying to produce more of their own goods throughout the province. During the brief experiment of 1765, the patriots had seen that a boycott could pinch English nerves quickly and severely. Now stricter enforcement at the customs offices was drawing off hard currency
from America, and bad times were spreading across the colonies. A ban on luxury imports was easy to maintain. As far away as Virginia, George Washington, the planter and retired colonel, welcomed the boycott because it gave his neighbors who were plagued by debt an acceptable excuse for cutting back on their lavish expenses.

The agreement drafted by Boston was relatively mild. By signing, a person promised to give a “constant preference” to those merchants who didn’t import from London. New York’s version was more stringent—a total boycott of the shops that continued to bring in British goods. To many patriots, those traders who didn’t sign were traitors.

Andrew Oliver had signed the nonimportation agreement on behalf of the family firm, but his brother Peter noticed the signatures of porters and washerwomen among those who were agreeing not to import silks, velvets, coaches and chariots. The patriots were insisting that any banned goods that arrived at the port–including all ready-made apparel, furniture and loaf sugar—be crated up and returned to London. But Peter Oliver claimed that mobs sometimes gathered at the pier, made off with the imported finery and shipped back wood shavings, brickbats and rancid bacon. He also accused the patriot merchants of drawing on their experience as smugglers to evade the boycott. They signed the agreement but brought in the prohibited items anyway, he charged. A Tory newspaper began running the names of those double-dealers.

—

Throughout the maneuvering, the Tories believed that they held one trump card. When London’s patience was finally exhausted, British troops would land in Boston, disband the Sons of Liberty, close the Town Meetings and crush the mob. Ever since the Stamp Act riots, Francis Bernard had been torn about calling for those troops. On the one hand, he was sure he had to have them to save his administration. But he knew that as soon as the town heard that troops were on their way, the mob would take vengeance against him. As Adams and Otis had suspected, Bernard was indeed trying to influence London against the patriots. In letters to the king’s ministers, the governor poured out his fears at the same time that Samuel Adams was assuring Hillsborough that the Massachusetts circular letter had been respectful, not at all seditious,
and that whoever told him otherwise was misinforming him. But in London, Bernard’s dire warnings rang truer than Adams’ bland reassurances.

Until troops could somehow be inveigled into the colony, there seemed to be no limit to the abuse Bernard would have to endure. One of Samuel Adams’ trustiest lieutenants, Joseph Warren, published as scathing an attack on Bernard as the
Boston Gazette
had yet dared to print. Writing as “A True Patriot,” the twenty-seven-year-old physician told the governor, “We have known for a long time your enmity to this province. We have had full proof of your cruelty to a loyal people. No age has, perhaps, furnished a more glaring instance of obstinate perseverance in the path of malice.” For good measure, Dr. Warren summed up the governor as a man “totally abandoned to wickedness,” concluding with a rhyme:

“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.”