Patriots (8 page)

Adams’ political sense warned him that his opponents must not be allowed to make a martyr out of Andrew Oliver. The parade and the bonfire could be excused as legitimate protests by an oppressed people. But he sensed that the ransacking of Oliver’s house
had provoked deep misgivings, even among his allies. Not that rioting was a novelty in America. During the years of bad crops, Virginia and Maryland had seen tobacco revolts, and in the midst of a food shortage the people of Massachusetts had risen up to stop the exporting of meat and grain. Bostonians had razed whorehouses, and about thirty years earlier they had blackened their faces and gone out one night to burn down a barn that was blocking a proposed public road.

But everyone understood that the violence against Oliver’s property had been more serious. Boston’s leading citizens had seen a spark of anarchy and were determined to snuff it out. On Thursday, they called on Oliver and told him that he must appease the mob by resigning as stamp master. Oliver replied that he resented their lack of support when he had stood
“a single man against a whole people for thirty-six hours.”

At about nine o’clock that evening, a crowd of men and women gathered again outside Oliver’s house and shouted slogans about liberty and property. Oliver gathered his family around him and sent out a note. He said later that his message had promised only that he would delay taking office as stamp master until he had informed London about the public outcry over the act.

The crowd heard a different promise—that Oliver would send his resignation to London by the next ship. Since he seemed to be capitulating, they retreated to Oliver’s gate, sent up three cheers and hurried along to Thomas Hutchinson’s house. Hutchinson had counseled London against the Stamp Act, but his attempt the night before to quell the rioting made it easy to believe that he supported the tax.

Hutchinson heard the fists beating on his door and the voices demanding that he come out onto his balcony and swear that he had not endorsed the act. His courage—or pride—would always prevent the lieutenant governor from bowing to the will of a mob. Hutchinson braced for the worst and gave no answer. Before any ransacking could begin, a neighbor called from his window that he had seen the family in their carriage, heading for the country house in Milton. With that news, the spirit seemed to go out of the crowd and it reluctantly dispersed.

The rest of the week passed quietly. Possibly, the Sons of Liberty were planning more demonstrations. At least rumors kept
circulating of different plots and their targets. Hutchinson was inclined to blame the discontent less on the politicians than on several of the town’s clergymen, and the Tories quoted James Otis as calling Boston’s rebellious ministers his
“black regiment.” One of the most notorious was Jonathan Mayhew, an incendiary preacher who attacked the doctrine of the Trinity and called the organized clergy the greatest enemies of true religion.

Francis Bernard was convinced that Mayhew had joined with Samuel Adams and James Otis. But Bernard’s information was wrong. In his religion Mayhew might be a Nonconformist, a Dissenter, and he did describe himself as a friend of liberty, but before August was out Mayhew would find that he did not qualify as a Son of Liberty.

—

The Reverend Mayhew took his text on Sunday, August 25, 1765, from Galatians: “I would they were even cut off which trouble you, for brethren ye have been called unto liberty.” Thomas Hutchinson noticed that Mayhew ended his message there because the next verse went on to warn about limitations on liberty.

The next night, bonfires blazed again in King Street, and whistles and horns filled the air. Governor Bernard heard a large crowd gathering in the streets and crying, “Liberty and property!” and he reflected sourly that the mob always shouted those words when it intended to pull down a house. Once again the mob’s leader was Ebenezer Mackintosh from the South End. Tonight, however, his motives were less clear than they had been twelve days ago.

An official at the Vice-Admiralty Court, William Story, had been accumulating depositions that accused several Boston merchants of being smugglers. In this morning’s newspaper, Story had published an advertisement denying that he had sent those incriminating documents to England, but some members of the mob didn’t believe him and they tore up his living quarters, along with much of the Admiralty’s archives. Other men headed in the direction of the home of the comptroller of customs, Benjamin Hallowell. In a day when laborers might be earning less than sixty pounds a year, Hallowell had spent more than two thousand pounds on a new house. The mob ripped off his windows and doors, drank his wine cellar dry and carried off his official papers.

If Mackintosh had only been obliging a few merchants by destroying the evidence against them, the night’s rampage might have ended there. Instead, the mob’s two flanks joined forces and set out to wreak the
greatest civil violence North America had ever experienced.

Only that morning, Thomas Hutchinson had returned to Boston from his Milton country estate. By afternoon, he was hearing rumors that a mob was being raised again. He even knew it would attack officers from the Custom House and the Admiralty office. Hutchinson’s friends assured him that he would be spared. They said his courage the last time in standing up to rocks and insults had won the mob’s respect. For some reason, Hutchinson believed them.

Now he was at supper. Since the night was warm, he had dressed informally in a woolen jacket over his waistcoat. Around him at the table were his sister-in-law, Grizell Sanford, who had raised his children since his wife’s death; his sons Thomas Junior and Elisha, graduates of Harvard who were training to become merchants; Sarah, a daughter who was reaching marriageable age; Billy, Hutchinson’s youngest son; and Peggy, her father’s favorite, eleven years old and already acting as his secretary.

As the family ate, a friend burst in to warn them that the mob was heading their way. Hutchinson sent the children from the house and bolted the doors and shutters as he had done before. He was determined to wait out the assault alone. But Sarah came running back to say that she wouldn’t leave unless he came away with her. Hutchinson couldn’t resist, and they hurried together to a neighbor’s house. Stories circulating in town had Hutchinson not only encouraging Parliament to pass the Stamp Act but actually drawing up the law here in his mansion on Garden Court Street. A few minutes after he escaped, the mob fell upon the Hutchinson house in a fever of hatred.

One of Hutchinson’s sons was near enough to the axes splitting the front door to hear a cry on the night air: “Damn him! He is upstairs! We’ll have him!”

Some men ran at once to the top of the house, others swarmed into the graceful drawing room. Still more headed for the stores of liquor in the cellar. This time, merely tearing off wainscoting and breaking windows would not be enough to satisfy the mob. Instead,
men shattered the inner doors and beat down the walls between the rooms. Standing at the upper windows, they slit open mattresses and buried the lawn beneath a summer blizzard of feathers. They climbed the roof to swarm over a cupola, and even though the job took two hours, they finally sent it crashing down.

Word reached Hutchinson in his hiding place that the crowd had picked up his scent, and he wound his way through neighboring yards and gardens to a house even farther away. He stayed there until 4
A.M.
By then, the mansion he had inherited, one of the finest in Massachusetts, was a splintered shell. Near dawn, men were still crouched on the roof, prying up slate and boards. Only daylight stopped them from razing the house’s outer walls to the ground. Around the battered frame, every fruit tree had been broken to a stump and every shrub crushed back to the earth.

Out of the ruins came a trail of dinner plates and family portraits, books and children’s clothes. A strongbox had been broken open and nine hundred pounds taken. The manuscript pages of Hutchinson’s history of Massachusetts had been strewn in the mud, along with the rare documents he had spent a lifetime collecting.

—

The next morning, Hutchinson’s fellow justices in their red robes had already taken their places when he appeared in court. He was wearing what he had fled in and, because overnight the weather had turned abruptly cold, a few borrowed bits of clothing. Whether he had calculated the effect or not, the sight of this patrician man in his middle fifties, pale after his sleepless night and fitted out in other men’s clothes because his own lay trampled in the street, affected everyone in the court. Even Josiah Quincy, a twenty-one-year-old who was reading law with Oxenbridge Thacher and who had recently joined Samuel Adams’ Sons of Liberty, pitied the lieutenant governor. “Such a man in such a station,” Quincy described Hutchinson in his diary, “thus habited, with tears starting from his eyes and a countenance which strongly told the inward
anguish of his soul.”

Rising to speak, Hutchinson rejected any suggestion that he was appealing for sympathy. He had come to court, he said, only because there wouldn’t have been a quorum without him. But Hutchinson went on to demonstrate that the patriot leaders had no monopoly on eloquence.

“Some apology is necessary for my dress,” he said. “Indeed, I had no other. Destitute of everything: no other shirt, no other garment but what I have on, and not one in my family in a better situation than myself.”

He wanted to absolve himself, but with no suggestion that his spirit had been crushed. “I am not obliged to give an answer to all the questions that may be put to me by every lawless person, yet I call on God as my witness—and I would not, for a thousand worlds, call my Maker to witness a falsehood—I say I call my Maker to witness that I never, in New England or Old, in Great Britain or America, neither directly nor indirectly, was aiding, assisting or supporting—in the least promoting or encouraging—what is commonly called the Stamp Act but, on the contrary, did all in my power, and strove as much as in me lay, to prevent it.

“This is not declared through timidity, for I have nothing to fear. They can only take away my life, which is of but little value when deprived of all its comforts, all that was dear to me . . .”

Hutchinson said he hoped the people would see how easy it was to spread false reports against the innocent. But violence was wrong, even against the guilty. “I hope all will see how easily the people may be deluded, inflamed and carried away with madness against an innocent man.

“I pray God give us better hearts!”

—

The sacking of Hutchinson’s house had filled Jonathan Mayhew with remorse. He wrote at once to assure Hutchinson that he abhorred violence from his very soul, and he told friends that he would rather lose a hand than encourage such an outrage. But, like many Bostonians, Mayhew saw nothing improper about the demonstration two weeks earlier. His error had been in preaching liberty when his audience was so apprehensive about the threat to their freedoms. In the future, Mayhew said, he would try to calm his sensitive congregation rather than excite it.

Samuel Adams and his cohorts might not be feeling that same guilt, but they recognized a grievous tactical error. As Hutchinson was addressing the court, Adams at a Town Meeting heard Bostonians condemn the latest rioting, and he voted with them to help the sheriff keep order during the coming nights. When Hutchinson
was told about the vote, he noted that the loudest lamentations were coming from the very men who had destroyed his house.

Many Bostonians knew that Samuel Adams gathered his circle together every Saturday afternoon to edit Monday’s edition of the
Boston Gazette
, and they took the newspaper’s account of the second demonstration as a change in strategy. The report could have been dictated by Thomas Hutchinson: “Such horrid scenes of villainy as were perpetrated last Monday night it is certain were never seen before in this town, and it is hoped never will again.” The participants were
“rude fellows” who went about “heating themselves with liquor” before they vented their “hellish fury” on the lieutenant governor’s house. But the article also drew the same distinction that Mayhew had made. “Most people seem disposed to discriminate between the assembly on the 14th of the month and
their
transactions, and the unbridled licentiousness of this mob.” To underscore that point, Samuel Adams wrote to Richard Jackson, who had replaced Mauduit as the colony’s London agent, exonerating the law-abiding people of Boston from any blame. The second riot had been perpetrated by “vagabond strangers” interested only in plunder.

Adams didn’t try to explain the presence on both nights of Ebenezer Mackintosh, the twenty-eight-year-old shoemaker from the South End. Mackintosh’s ancestors had come from Scotland as indentured workers more than a hundred years before, supplying cheap labor for a Massachusetts ironworks. As freemen in later generations, however, the family hadn’t found the New World hospitable. When Ebenezer was fourteen, his father, Moses, had been warned out of Boston, which meant that the town was publicly relieving itself of any obligation to help him if he became destitute or sick. He took the boy to the community of Wrentham, which tolerated Moses for eight years and then gave him another warning out.

By that time, Ebenezer was already working in Boston as a shoemaker in Ward 12, the section of the South End where the gallows stood. When Sheriff Greenleaf recruited him for a volunteer fire company, Ebenezer persuaded the other firemen to form a gang for Pope’s Day. Slightly built, with a sandy complexion, Mackintosh had learned to read and he liked to memorize verse, but his quick temper put him at the center of every brawl.

The Tories considered Mackintosh only a tool of the patriots, and Peter Oliver admitted to a
grudging admiration for him. His clashes on Pope’s Day had made him a well-known figure around Boston, and Bernard’s inquiry quickly identified Mackintosh as the leader at Hutchinson’s house. Sheriff Greenleaf was sent out with a warrant to arrest him.

When he spotted Mackintosh in King Street, the sheriff summoned up his nerve and took him to jail. Very soon, a group of gentlemen sought out Greenleaf and delivered a potent threat. Although the Town Meeting had voted to send out patrols to prevent any further rioting, no man would agree to go that night unless Ebenezer Mackintosh was set free. Greenleaf returned to the Council to report that ultimatum.