Patriots (15 page)

The constant quarreling had caused men of both factions to question America’s relationship with Britain. As Francis Bernard vacillated about his future, he told Lord Barrington that he must stay in Boston, because replacing a governor when the people grew rebellious only increased their ill-temper. Resigning would be nothing but
humoring a willful child. That metaphor for the colonies had been appropriate for many years. In the past, even men who had never set foot on British shores called England “home.” A kindly king had been regarded as father to his grateful children.

But what happened when those children left home to live far away? When he opposed the Stamp Act, John Hancock pointed out that he already paid more taxes than anyone in Britain; he was a full-grown and independent man. Samuel Adams had inherited his father’s name and adopted his principles. If Adams could replace his father, what need did he have for a substitute in London? Another Junior, James Otis, was coping with a father who remained half captive to George III, and the younger Otis’ rebellion against one or another of those fathers led him to curse and repent, to cut his bonds and then, weeping, bind himself up again.

Thomas Hutchinson had inscribed the flyleaf of his diary with a verse from Isaiah: “I have nourished children and brought them up, and even they have revolted from me.” Even after the
Liberty
had been seized Hutchinson wrote to London, “My hopes of tranquility have been confined to one plan—that we should be convinced the Parliament will not give up their authority; and then find by experience that it is exercised in the same gentle, tender manner that a parent exercises his
authority over his children.”

But a dutiful son like Hutchinson could never appreciate that Americans were no longer children and would not pretend to be. The metaphor had been outgrown. Thousands of citizens in the colonies had been swept into the struggle and had become Sons of Liberty rather than sons of a living king across the sea.

In London, politicians were sure they knew how to deal with their offspring. “America must fear you—before she can love you,” Lord North told Parliament. Repeal the Townshend Acts? “I hope we shall never think of it, till we see
America prostrate at our feet.”

View of Boston and British warships landing their troops, September 30, 1768, by Paul Revere

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

W
ITH THE
Liberty
rioting as his excuse, Francis Bernard asked his Council, early in July 1768, to recommend that he request troops from the crown. The Council members knew he was trying to pass an unpopular decision to them and replied that they preferred not to be knocked on the head. Neither did he, said Bernard. He wouldn’t act alone, but if they agreed to share the blame he would make the request. In his letters to London, the governor hinted
broadly that he needed soldiers, but he also passed along a spy’s report that a leading Son of Liberty was saying that the man who requested British troops would certainly be put to death.

When the rumors multiplied, a joint delegation from the House and the Council was sent to ask Bernard what he was doing behind their backs. Reporting the call to General Thomas Gage, Britain’s commander in New York, Bernard said that the delegates
had been polite and had apologized for asking the question. He had given them a technically truthful answer: he had not asked for troops. But he assured Gage that the fact that he wasn’t requesting troops didn’t mean they weren’t wanted. “I must beg that you keep this letter to yourself as much as you can,” the governor ended, “. . .
for obvious reasons.”

During that anxious interlude, Bernard hoped that Gage and his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel William Dalrymple, would somehow rescue him on their own initiative. It was no use. Gage was not going to send soldiers to Boston without an official appeal from the governor, and the Council continued to advise Bernard that he didn’t need them. Bernard might have passed a more tranquil summer had he known what was going on across the Atlantic. Lord Hillsborough had been sufficiently alarmed by reports from the customs commissioners about the hostility in Boston that, even before the
Liberty
affair, he had directed General Gage to send at least one regiment from Halifax to Boston. That order took weeks to arrive in New York, and as Bernard’s letters grew more urgent Hillsborough ordered two regiments based in Ireland to set sail for Boston at once.

The patriots in the Massachusetts House were writing openly to London while their governor was being furtive. One of Bernard’s spies reported an exchange between Otis and Samuel Adams when Otis asked what Adams intended to do with a recent letter to Hillsborough. Adams said that he intended to publish it in the
Boston Gazette
the next Monday.

“Do you think it proper to publish it so soon that he may receive a printed copy before the original comes to his hand?” Otis asked.

“What signifies that?” Adams answered. “You know it was designed for the people and not for the minister.”

Otis twitted him. “You are so fond of your own drafts that you can’t wait for the publication of them to a proper time.”

But Adams was not in a mood for teasing. “I am clerk of this House,” he said, “and I will make what use of the papers I please.”

Even after Governor Bernard got word that troops were coming, he denied that he had received any official notification. But he verified the rumor of their arrival to friends, hoping that a slow confirmation of the news would give the calmer voices among
the patriots a chance to prevail. When an English officer arrived from Halifax to make arrangements for his troops, however, all of Boston knew by nightfall what lay ahead. The Sons of Liberty called a Town Meeting for September 12, 1768, and at the top of Beacon Hill they rigged a makeshift alarm—a turpentine barrel on a tall pole. The Tories believed that when the troopships were sighted in the harbor, the barrel would be set aflame and, if Otis and Adams had their way, that would ignite the population.

Francis Bernard viewed the barrel as a more personal provocation. He had received a false report that Adams was promising that when it was lighted thirty thousand men from the countryside would storm Boston, seize Bernard and Hutchinson, plunder the town treasury and fly their own flag from the Liberty Tree.

By the time of the Town Meeting, Otis had become the chief incendiary of the Boston mob again. Two days before, he and Samuel Adams had met at Joseph Warren’s house to draft the agenda for the meeting. Now, with Faneuil Hall packed to the walls, the first order of business was a motion to haul down the turpentine barrel. The Meeting ruled it should stay. Next, Otis and Adams argued that the king could not impose an English army on the Massachusetts Bay Colony without the consent of the colony’s representatives. A committee had already asked Bernard to call an emergency session of the House and the Council. The governor had replied that because of the House’s refusal to rescind its circular letter, only the king could reconvene the session.

Samuel Adams had foreseen that response and was ready with two other daring forays. First, Boston patriots would invite their counterparts in other Massachusetts towns to a convention in ten days’ time. Such a meeting would flout the governor’s ban against assemblies and let the colony make a concerted plan before the English regiments arrived. Adams also suggested that the citizens of Boston be armed with muskets from the town’s armory.

Expecting that his listeners would balk at that open declaration of disloyalty to Britain, Adams had prepared an excuse for them. At his instigation, other patriots arose to warn that a new war with France was imminent. The town’s stock of arms had been taken from their storehouses a few days earlier on the pretext of cleaning them. Now, the patriots argued, they should be distributed so that the people could protect themselves against their
enemies. Around the hall, men exchanged knowing looks. James Otis declared that the speakers and the audience “understood one another very well.” No one doubted who the invaders would be. But for the moment the Town Meeting voted against passing out muskets and musket balls. Gesturing to a cache at his feet, Otis said, “There are the arms. When an attempt is made against your liberties,
they will be delivered.”

During the interlude between that Town Meeting and the convention that was called for Boston, Samuel Adams and his allies strained to goad the colony into resistance. Three days after the Town Meeting, Sheriff Greenleaf screwed up his courage and hauled down the turpentine barrel. It was empty. But Samuel Adams’ exhortations were resounding as never before. “We will destroy every soldier that dares put his foot on shore,” he was quoted as saying. “His Majesty has no right to send troops here to invade the country, and I look upon them
as foreign enemies.”

Companies of the town’s militia began to march in drill formation and to practice firing their muskets. But no answering shots were being heard from the countryside. Only eastern Connecticut seemed ready to follow Boston’s lead; the town of Lebanon, which had demonstrated against the Stamp Act, now pledged to support Boston’s resistance “at the expense of our
lives and fortunes.” More common, though, was the response from Hatfield, deep in western Massachusetts. There the Tory farmers scoffed at the transparency of alarms against the French. If France posed a real threat, shouldn’t Boston be welcoming the assistance of British troops? On Monday, September 19, Governor Bernard finally made public the orders bringing troops from Halifax and Ireland. Samuel Adams’ convention opened the following Thursday, but only seventy delegates appeared. As the warships drew closer, many Sons of Liberty found their resolve waning, and James Otis stayed away from the convention for its first three days.

With Otis absent, Thomas Cushing was named the convention’s speaker. He set the tone by announcing that the meeting’s only purpose was to “bring together some prudent people who would be able to check the
violent designs of others.” Samuel Adams was elected clerk, but without Otis’ oratory he couldn’t move the stolid delegates from the farms. When Otis finally appeared he was too late to alter the prevailing mood.

Samuel Adams had tested the tide, and now he swam with it. As clerk, he saw to it that not a line of the Town Meeting’s defiance appeared in the convention’s published conclusions. Writing on behalf of the delegates, he called them “plain, honest men” and asked George III to regard their meeting as
“a fresh token of the loyalty of our respective towns to his Majesty.”

When the convention had been in session for just one week, British men-of-war were spotted off the Massachusetts coast. The delegates voted to adjourn. Or, as John Mein, the Tory printer, described the scene, they “broke up and rushed out of town like a herd of
scalded hogs.” On that same afternoon, September 29, 1768, the ships drew near the harbor, approaching cautiously, unsure of their reception. The next day the fleet moved into siege formation, surrounded Boston from the northeast and pointed its guns at the town.

This was the moment the Tories had awaited through three humiliating years. At Castle William, the customs commissioners set off skyrockets and sang choruses of
“Yankee Doodle”:

“Yankee Doodle came to town
,

a-riding on a pony.

He stuck a feather in his hat

and called him macaroni. . . .”

Sung to an old air, the verses had evolved during the French and Indian War. By 1758 the British were referring to the New England militia as the Yankee companies. “Macaroni” was London slang for a fop, and for Samuel Adams, dreaming of a new Sparta, it was a galling serenade—this celebration of dancing and wenching and extravagant fashion.

“Yankee Doodle, keep it up!

Yankee Doodle, dandy!

Mind the music, and the step
,

and with the girls be handy!”

—

For Francis Bernard, the arrival of the soldiers was three years overdue, but they presented fresh problems. He wanted one
regiment quartered in town, with a back-up regiment on call at Castle William. But his Council refused to provide housing in town, preferring to restrict all of the troops to the Castle. Bernard wanted to prove to the English commander, Colonel Dalrymple, how restricted his authority was these days, and he arranged to ferry Council members to the Castle, where Dalrymple could meet with them in person. The colonel’s approach was mild. He said that his orders called for maintaining a regiment in the town, but he could assure the Council that his men would be well-behaved. He hoped that he would be among friends in Boston, and his troops would act in that same way.

The Council would have none of it. Members pointed out that since Castle William was considered within the town limits, Dalrymple would be obeying his orders if he kept the troops there. The meeting broke up in a less friendly spirit. The colonel appealed again to Bernard, but the governor had retreated into the aggrieved helplessness that had become his only defense. General Gage had heard about the tumultuous Town Meeting and had sent word that both regiments should go ashore. Dalrymple was concerned that each day’s delay in landing his soldiers gave the Sons more time to plot their resistance.