Patriots (28 page)

Hutchinson assured the king that in his letters he had tried to avoid dealing in personalities.

George asked, “Could you ever find, Mr. Hutchinson, how those letters came to New England?”

“Dr. Franklin, may it please Your Majesty, has made a public declaration that he sent them,” Hutchinson replied. Speaker Cushing said he had shown them to only six people.

“Did he tell you who were the persons?” the king asked.

“Yes, sir.” Hutchinson named the six but added that Cushing’s list did not include the two Mr. Adamses.

“I have heard of one Mr. Adams,” the king said. “But who is the other?”

“He is a lawyer, sir.” Hutchinson could have volunteered much more about John Adams.

“Brother to the other?”

“No, sir, a relation.” Hutchinson explained that John Adams had been a member of the House but was not currently, that he had been elected to the Council but had been refused a seat by the governor.

The king said he thought the episode of the letters had been strange and wondered aloud where Benjamin Franklin might be at the moment. Then, apparently still musing, the king asked, “In such abuse, Mr. Hutchinson, as you have met with, I suppose there must have been personal malevolence as well as party rage?”

For Hutchinson, the size of his pension could depend on his answer to that innocent question. It was vital that the king appreciate how much he had endured in his service. The upheaval in Massachusetts must not come to look like petty bickering among colonials. “It has been my good fortune, sir,” Hutchinson began cautiously, “to escape any charge against me in my private character.” Then he explained respectfully to George that the attacks had come only over what the king had required him to do.

George did not drop his line of pursuit. “I see they threatened to pitch and feather you.”

Since Hutchinson was there to instruct the king, he would be thorough. “Tar and feather, may it please Your Majesty. But I don’t remember that ever I was threatened with it.”

Lord Dartmouth stepped in to protect the king from seeming to be wrong, since being contradicted could excite George to near-madness.

“What guard had you, Mr. Hutchinson?” the king then inquired.

It was not the time for Hutchinson to tell about his flights to Milton or the armed forces at Castle William. “I depended, sir, on the protection of Heaven. I had no other guard.” He added that he had hoped the mob meant only to intimidate him. “By discovering that I was afraid, I should encourage them to go on.”

“Pray,” George asked, “what does Hancock do now? How will the late affair affect him?”

“I don’t know to what particular affair Your Majesty refers.”

“Oh! A late affair in the city,” the king said vaguely. “His bills are being refused.” He turned to Dartmouth, who this time couldn’t help him.

Hutchinson recalled that there had been a minor flap between Hancock and a London merchant. “Mr. Hancock, sir,” Hutchinson went on, since the king seemed intrigued, “had a very large fortune left to him by his uncle, and I believe his political engagements have taken off his attention from his private affairs.”

“Then there’s Mr. Cushing,” said the king. “I remember his name a long time. Is he not a great man of the party?”

“He has been many years speaker. But a speaker, sir, is not always the person of the greatest influence.” Hutchinson said it was Mr. Samuel Adams who was considered the opposer of government in New England.

“What gave him his importance?” the king asked.

“A great pretended zeal for liberty,” Hutchinson answered, “and a most inflexible natural temper.”

After some minutes while the king tried to puzzle out who the Congregationalists were and what they stood for, he changed the subject. “Pray, Mr. Hutchinson, does population greatly increase in your province?”

“Very rapidly, sir. I used to think that Dr. Franklin, who has taken much pains in his calculations, carried it too far when he supposed the inhabitants of America, from their natural increase, doubled their number in twenty-five years, but I rather think now that he did not.” Massachusetts seemed to have doubled in that time, Hutchinson said, and there weren’t enough settlers from Europe to account for the increase.

George took him up on that point. “Why do not foreigners come to your province as well as to the Southern governments?”

“I take it, sir, that our long cold winters discourage them. The Southern colonies are more temperate.”

The king asked why Massachusetts raised no wheat, and Hutchinson explained that the mid-July heat tended to shrivel the wheat, and straw became musty and black. The people lived on coarser breads mixed from rye and corn.

“What’s corn?” asked the king.

Hutchinson explained and added that some colonists preferred rye to wheat since it stayed moister.

“That’s very strange.” That was George’s way of dismissing what he didn’t understand. Returning to the more familiar ground of politics, he said he thought that New Yorkers were nearest to Boston in their opposition to the government.

“Does Your Majesty think nearer than Pennsylvania?”

“Why,” the king granted, “I can’t say that they do, of late. Rhode Island, Mr. Hutchinson, is a strange form of government.”

Hutchinson agreed. “They approach, sir, the nearest to a democracy of any of your colonies,” he said disapprovingly.

The talk turned to Indians.

“It looks, sir,” Hutchinson ventured, “as if in a few years the Indians would be extinct in all parts of the continent.”

“To what is that owing?” asked the king.

Hutchinson said he thought it was partly because they were dispirited “at their low despicable condition among Europeans who have taken possession of their country and treat them as an inferior race of beings.” But the governor also blamed “the immoderate use of spiritous liquors.”

The interview was running down. The king asked after Hutchinson’s family and advised him to stay home for a few days to recover his health. With that, George withdrew.

Thomas Hutchinson had been standing in the royal presence for almost two hours, and Lord Dartmouth worried that he might be tired.

“So gracious a reception has made me insensible of it,” the governor assured him. It had been one of the great days of Thomas Hutchinson’s life, and he hurried to a notebook before he forgot any of it.

—

General Thomas Gage left Castle William after three days and entered Boston to the welcome of cannon fire from the king’s ships in the bay and a coldly correct ceremony. Rumors were circulating that he had come to arrest the patriot leaders, and yet John Hancock, as commander of the cadets, was leading the general’s escort. Gage’s commission from George III was read out in the Council chamber, and the general was sworn in as Thomas Hutchinson’s successor. A reception followed at Faneuil Hall,
with many toasts to the king and a hiss when Hutchinson’s good health was proposed.

Lord Dartmouth’s orders to Gage had been specific. The king wanted the ringleaders of the tea affair caught and punished. But, thousands of miles from London, Gage began to draw back from his brave words at the Ministry. All of America was receiving word of the Port Act and the other “Intolerable Acts,” and patriot newspapers were printing their texts with a thick black border. In towns around Boston, hangmen climbed up on their scaffolds to set copies of the acts on fire. Gage debated the wisdom of trying to enforce the Port Act by shutting down the trade in Boston’s harbor, but he consulted with naval officers and customs officials, who reminded him of his duty. On May 26 he told the legislators that on June 1 they would start meeting in Salem. He received the House’s list of newly elected Council members and vetoed thirteen of them, including John Adams. On June 1, 1774, he closed Boston Harbor.

Samuel Adams was determined to prevent Lord North from isolating Boston. He wrote to Arthur Lee in London that it was a “flagrant injustice” and “barbarous.” Even in the evil history of Constantinople he found nothing to match it. As chairman of the Overseers for the Poor, Adams collected food to prepare for the inevitable shortages. In another circular letter he called on citizens of every colony to ask themselves “whether you consider Boston now as suffering in the common cause.” That phrase touched the conscience of the continent, and one by one Committees of Correspondence pledged their complete support. In Virginia, the Burgesses declared June 1 a day of fasting and prayer, and Joseph Warren reported that a new group was being formed that would pledge to halt all trade with Britain until the Port Act was repealed. It would be called the Solemn League and Covenant.

For some months, Samuel Adams also had been floating the idea of a general congress of the colonies, a meeting that would be longer and more ambitious than the hurried gathering at the time of the Stamp Act. Writing under a pen name in the
Boston Gazette
the previous September, Adams had not only proposed the congress but also set out its agenda. Acting as independent but united states, the delegates should draw up a bill of rights, publish it around the world, and then send an ambassador to represent them at the British court. But, speaking for Boston, Adams couldn’t
be that radical. Instead, he reassured the moderate or timid colonists that no one in Massachusetts wanted to break with England.

When New York’s Committee of Correspondence publicly proposed a meeting of all the colonies, Adams began to intensify his efforts. On June 7, 1774, the Massachusetts legislature convened in Salem. Adams was delayed. Ever since Gage had announced that he would soon be joined by four regiments, the Tory leaders had become brash again; now they taunted the patriots that their firebrand was afraid to show himself without the protection of the Boston mob. There was a rumor that Adams and Hancock had been arrested and would be shipped to England for trial. That was the mood in Salem when a Tory took a seat at the desk reserved for Samuel Adams as clerk of the House. Other Tories gathered around him there.

Adams appeared at last and made his way through the crowds at the door of the hall. Looking about, he saw that his place had been taken, and the man in a gold-laced coat showed no sign of moving. Adams stared at him and then addressed Thomas Cushing in a clear, firm voice. “Mr. Speaker, where is the place for your clerk?”

Everyone looked first to Adams, then to his chair. Cushing motioned him to it.

“Sir,” said Samuel Adams, “my company will not be pleasant to the gentlemen who occupy it. I trust they will remove to another part of the House.”

The Tories surrendered their beachhead. Adams had proved that though Salem might not be Boston it wasn’t Newgate Prison.

During the first days of the session, Adams and his confidants lobbied discreetly on behalf of their secret plan. They knew that a supposed patriot named Daniel Leonard was reporting regularly to General Gage. To trick him, Adams’ group pretended they were considering a payment to the East India Company for its tea. But on the first evening of the session Adams met with his nucleus of five men, and by the third night he had more than thirty members sworn to his side. To get commitments from a majority of the House took another week. On June 17, Adams struck.

Before he rose to speak, he instructed the doorkeeper to lock the House. None of the one hundred and twenty members present were to be let out, and no one else was to be let in. When he was sure no Tory could escape to General Gage, Adams introduced
his resolution: Five delegates—James Bowdoin, Thomas Cushing, Robert Treat Paine, John Adams and himself—would meet with representatives from the legislatures of the twelve other colonies. The meeting would take place on September 1, 1774, at Philadelphia or any other site that was deemed suitable.

There was an immediate clamor, and some members demanded to leave the hall at once. Adams took the key from the doorkeeper and put it into his own pocket.

A vote was called, but before it could be taken a Tory member claimed to have become ill. When he was allowed to leave the chamber, he went directly to General Gage. This was Gage’s first test, and he wanted to meet it firmly. He sent his secretary to dissolve the House. But the door had been locked again, and the key was still in Samuel Adams’ pocket. A page was permitted to enter the hall to tell Speaker Cushing that Gage’s secretary had brought a message from the governor. The page returned to say that the House chose to keep its door bolted.

The excitement was bringing out the people of Salem, and they filled the hallway and the stairs leading to the locked chamber. For lack of any other audience, Gage’s secretary read out his order to them.

Behind the locked door, the House was acting with nervous speed to endorse Adams’ plan. Only twelve members voted against sending the delegation. Since Gage was sure to refuse treasury money for the expedition, members voted to charge each town in the province a fee based on its last tax rolls. That should raise about five hundred pounds. After resolutions calling for the relief of Boston and a boycott of British goods, House members unlocked their door and obeyed the governor’s order to dissolve their session.

—

Britain’s Fourth and Forty-third Regiments landed at Long Wharf in mid-June 1774. The Fifth Regiment and then the Thirty-eighth arrived, then the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and companies of marines, until General Gage had an army of four thousand well-equipped men at his command to subdue a town of seventeen thousand. They camped on Boston Common. Most stores on the wharf had shut down, and men who could afford it were sending their families to the outlying towns. Real-estate values throughout Boston were dropping daily, and unemployment was rising. Sympathetic
farmers and fishermen from the countryside sent carts of dried fish and corn, but Boston was suffering as Parliament had intended. Tories watched the suffering and decided to attack the patriots on their own territory. This time it was the conservatives who collected signatures to petition for a Town Meeting.

Because they had no jobs, even more men than usual could attend on June 27. After Samuel Adams was elected moderator, the crowd made its usual march from Faneuil Hall to the Old South, where a Tory offered a sweeping resolution. Boston should censure the conduct of its Committee of Correspondence, and the committee itself should be annihilated. Facing that challenge, Adams did not want to be trapped behind the moderator’s desk. He announced that if the committee’s conduct was going to be debated he would surrender his place, and Thomas Cushing agreed to take it. Adams went down to the floor of the Old South to hear out his enemies. The debate continued until dark and resumed at ten the next morning. When Adams chose to answer, his manner was less impassioned than earnest, speaking to the thousands of men as he had spoken to many of them individually along the wharves and at the Green Dragon.