Patriots (17 page)

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When Francis Bernard boarded the
Rippon
, it had just returned from taking the soldiers of the Sixty-fifth Regiment to
Halifax. Since Boston had been quiet throughout the winter and the spring, General Gage had decided he could withdraw those troops and now the other regiment from Ireland, the Sixty-fourth. The second transfer was held up briefly when Samuel Adams persuaded the Massachusetts House to pass a resolution unanimously that no law—not merely no tax law—was binding on a colony unless its own legislature passed it. Thomas Hutchinson heard that Adams had told a Town Meeting, “Independent we are, and
independent we shall be.” That sounded ominous enough for the officers in Boston to hold up the sailing of the Sixty-fourth.

Half of the English garrison was gone, relieved to be escaping from Boston. There had been no serious outbreak, but Samuel Adams had seen to it that the hostility from the town was unrelenting. The disappointment of the Massachusetts convention had taught him that he had to recruit his allies from other Northern towns and not from the rural areas of his own province. In the fall of 1768, Adams and his allies in New York began a news service devoted to reporting the misbehavior of the British troops in Boston. Their
“Journal of the Times” reached south to newspapers in Georgia and across the ocean to London’s
Gentleman’s Magazine.
John Adams was among those who went every Sunday evening to join in preparing copy with Samuel Adams, James Otis, William Davis and John Gill. He called it
“working the political engine,” and he found cooking up each week’s anecdotes a curious business. The journal was a melange of sexual scandal and outright fabrication edited by his cousin Samuel, the province’s most puritanical and high-minded politician. News of rape abounded in the journal, and no woman was pictured as being safe from the English troops, who were usually called “bloody-backed rascals” for their red coats. It did the soldiers no good to respond that Boston women were so easy and willing that rape would have represented wasted effort. One soldier claimed that this Yankee war would be the first in history to produce more births than deaths.

But according to the “Journal,” when the British weren’t raping, they were seducing. One story reported that an outraged citizen “the other morning discovered a soldier in bed with a
favorite grand-daughter.” When they weren’t seducing, they were beating small boys in the street, carousing until dawn and profaning the Sabbath with
gunfire and horseraces on the Common. Thomas Hutchinson read those stories and decided that Samuel
Adams and his host of writers were a half dozen of the most wicked fellows on the globe.
“They stick at nothing,” he complained, and no denial of one story would stop the concocting of another. Worse, Hutchinson detected signs that the campaign was stirring up previously cool heads in New York and Philadelphia.

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Throughout much of his life, Hutchinson had wanted to be governor. Now, when the job was worse than worthless, his wish was being granted against his will. He had asked to stay on merely as chief justice, but London ordered him to assume Bernard’s duties as well. Since no announcement had been made about Bernard remaining in England, Hutchinson’s title would be acting governor. But with the
Boston Gazette
stepping up its attacks, that distinction didn’t make his job easier. The provocations between soldiers and the town weren’t all invented, nor were they all one-sided. Bostonians were accustomed to their own watchmen who demanded that anyone on the street at night identify himself, but now English sentinels were posted at public buildings around town to make the challenge. Many Bostonians couldn’t bring themselves to answer “Who goes there?” with the
traditional password of “Friend.” They answered rudely or said nothing.

Their most vulgar retorts, however, wouldn’t have shocked these troops. The Twenty-ninth Regiment was made up of rough men primed for a fight. Even the acting governor admitted that they were “bad fellows.” They jostled any Bostonian off the sidewalk or, if they thought they could get away with it, gave him a sharp dig in the ribs with the butt of a bayonet. The soldiers disrupted the town’s daily routine by parading through the streets and disturbed church services on Sunday by changing the guard. At Meeting times the band struck up a mocking rendition of “Yankee Doodle.” The English commander agreed to change the parade schedule and quiet the band, but John Adams found no relief. One regiment exercised directly in front of his house, and he was awakened each morning by an
ear-piercing fife. The sight of the redcoats also convinced him that
Britain’s determination to subjugate the colony was too strong to challenge.

Reflecting on the differences in the patriot leaders, John Adams compared them to religious figures. Samuel Adams was like
John Calvin, if Calvin could be imagined in a tavern. He was
“cool, abstemious, polished.” James Otis was more like Martin Luther—“rough, hasty and
loved good cheer.” But John Adams considered Otis unstable and was watching him these days with alarm. Opening the legislative session in Cambridge, Otis had inspired the Harvard students who flocked to hear him. They were moved to tears when Otis proclaimed that the first and
noblest of duties was to serve one’s country, even to die for it. But privately he couldn’t stop talking, compulsively, nonsensically, obscenely. Adams mourned for him and for his effect on the patriots’ cause. And then Otis was fiercely struck down.

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Through their contacts in London, the patriots received another packet of official correspondence, including letters from the customs commissioners to the Treasury in London. In them Otis was accused of treason. To a man who still proclaimed his loyalty to the king, the accusation was intolerable. On September 4, 1769, the
Boston Gazette
carried Otis’ paid advertisement assailing four of the commissioners. As a deliberate insult, he used only their first names as he asked Lord Hillsborough and the Board of Trade in London “to pay no kind of regard to any of the abusive representations of me or my country that may be transmitted by the said Henry, Charles, William and John or their confederates; for they are no more worthy of credit than those of Sir Francis Bernard, of Nettleham, Bart.,
or any of his cabal.” Otis had filed a defamation suit against Sir Francis, but he sought personal apologies from the men still in Boston. He went twice to see one commissioner, John Robinson, and left dissatisfied each time. Now, after calling all four “superlative blockheads” in print, Otis once again invoked natural law, this time against libel: “If Robinson misrepresents me, I have a natural right, if I can get no other satisfaction,
to break his head.”

The next day, a Tuesday, Otis heard that Robinson had bought a stout walking stick. He went to the same store and demanded an identical one. Armed with it, he set out that evening for the British Coffee House, near the Custom House. He knew it was hostile territory, and when he entered he met the usual crowd of Tories, including captains from both British regiments, along
with John Mein, the acerbic publisher, and William Browne, one of the seventeen representatives who had voted the previous year to rescind the Massachusetts circular letter.

John Robinson entered the tavern, saw that Otis had no sword, and went at once to the back, where he unbuckled his own and set it down. He returned to confront Otis in the public room.

Otis spoke first. “I demand satisfaction of you, sir.”

Robinson asked what satisfaction Otis would prefer.

“A gentleman’s satisfaction.” Gentlemen could fight only with their fists. Dueling with swords was against the law.

Robinson said, “I am ready to do it.”

But as they moved for the door, Robinson reached out to give Otis’ nose a scornful tweak. Otis blocked Robinson with his cane. Robinson raised his own, and for a moment they were dueling with their walking sticks. Then onlookers took away the canes, and they began pummeling each other with their fists.

John Gridley, a nephew of the well-known lawyer, was walking in King Street and had paused by the open door when he heard Otis’ challenge. As the two men fought, Robinson’s friends began to push Otis and hold his arms. Gridley shouted that it was a dirty thing to treat a man that way, and he rushed in between Otis and Robinson. Someone grabbed Gridley by the shoulder. He pulled away and seized Robinson by the collar. When the commissioner drew back, his coat was torn down to its pockets. A man standing on a bench struck Gridley twice on the head with a weapon, and he was blinded by his own blood. Flailing about, Gridley took a blow on his right hand that broke his wrist. He heard men shouting “Kill him!” and knew they meant Otis.

Gridley was pushed out of the coffeehouse. Fighting his way back inside, he picked up a walking stick from the floor. A lamp had been broken or snuffed out, but one witness saw men holding Otis while Robinson struck him in the face. Another blow had laid open the bone of Otis’ forehead. Benjamin Hallowell, the comptroller, succeeded in separating the two men. Gridley reached Otis and tried to defend him with his good left hand. But the fight was over. Otis went off to have his wounds dressed.

Painful as the set-to had been for Otis, it was a grim blessing to the patriots. From that night on, Otis’ mad extravagances could be blamed on his martyrdom. John Adams knew better. Passing an
evening with Otis two weeks after the attack, he found him, if anything, more cheerful and subdued and consequently better company than he had been for months. But Boston’s sympathies lay with Otis. The
Boston Gazette
announced that the brawl had been an
assassination attempt. Otis endorsed that interpretation and sued Robinson for three thousand pounds in damages, charging him with
“very unfair play.” A month after the attack, Robinson married a Boston merchant’s daughter and sailed for England, leaving his father-in-law to see the case through court. Years later, although Otis refused a cash settlement, Robinson was ordered to pay all costs.

Of the chief Tory figures, William Browne fared the worst. Many patriots were convinced that he had struck the blow that broke Gridley’s wrist, and they became more hostile to him than to Robinson. Browne was forced to hide the next day in a back room of the coffeehouse until late in the afternoon, when the patriots found him and bore him to Faneuil Hall for a preliminary hearing. Two thousand spectators jammed the hall, and when James Murray, a justice considered friendly to Browne, arrived, they pushed him back each time he tried to enter. Finally, amid jeers and boos—to which Murray responded with courtly bows–he was permitted inside.

The judges held Browne on charges of assault. When no one would stand his bail, Justice Murray announced that he did not approve of Gridley’s beating but would post the bond. When Murray made his way to the door, someone snatched off his wig and other men tried to trip him. His friends shielded the bald-headed justice as he moved toward his house, followed by men bearing his wig on a pole. As Murray disappeared inside, some men in the mob remembered that John Mein had also been at the coffeehouse the previous night. They rushed to his bookstore and to the shop where he printed his Tory newspaper. At each place the mob’s leaders
smeared Mein’s signs with a mixture of excrement and urine, which they called “Hillsborough’s paint.”

—

While those upheavals were going on in Boston, a fourteen-year-old merchant’s apprentice sat at his desk in the West Indies, praying to be delivered from a life of trade. Alexander Hamilton
was a small and slender boy with no prospects for the glory he craved. His beautiful mother, Rachel, had been pressed into marriage at sixteen with a rich cotton farmer from Copenhagen, but within a few years he had charged her with adultery. Under the Danish laws that governed the island of St. Croix, he
had her jailed. Upon her release, Rachel Lavien or Levine or Lawein—her planter husband had been careless about the spelling of his name-left him with their small son, Peter, and went to live with her mother. Two years after the separation, when Rachel was in her early twenties, she met James Hamilton, who was ten years older. The handsome fourth son of a Scottish laird, he had come to make his fortune on the island.

In England, divorce took an act of Parliament, but in the West Indies people were more inclined to shrug away formalities. Hamilton lived with Rachel Lavien long enough to give her two sons and fritter away her small inheritance. He drifted away, but Rachel remained an attractive and popular woman despite her two fatherless children. James was ten when Hamilton left, Alexander two years younger. Rachel opened a small store, and Alexander helped her to run it until her death five years later. Rachel’s family did what they could for the boys. James was apprenticed to a carpenter. Alexander was sent to help a thriving island merchant.

At school Alexander had enjoyed his brief exposure to the classics. He spoke French well and went regularly to a Jewish schoolmistress who taught him the
Decalogue in Hebrew. He wanted to become a great captain of war, but he was stuck forever behind a desk. Alexander poured out his frustrations in November 1769 in a letter to his favorite cousin, Ned Stevens, who had gone to New York to study medicine.

“For to confess my weakness, Ned,” Alexander wrote, “my ambition is prevalent, so that I contemn the groveling condition of a clerk, or the like, to which the future condemns me and would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station.”

Alexander Hamilton knew how absurd his self-pity might sound in New York, and he asked his cousin not to mock him. “I shall conclude by saying, I
wish there was a war.”