The Whites of their Eyes (8 page)

Boycotting Bostonians proved so forbiddingly unwilling to pay the Townshend Duties and Governor Bernard so hapless at restraining their protests that the British Army arrived, to maintain order. In October of 1768, a month after Boston’s merchants signed a formal agreement to boycott British goods, two regiments of regular infantry wearing coats the color of boiled lobster disembarked from ships in the harbor, marched through the streets of the city, wheeling massive artillery, and pitched camp in Boston Common. Bernard gave
the officers the keys to the Town House. Another regiment of soldiers laid siege to the Manufactory House, availing themselves of a Quartering Act passed by Parliament in 1764. Andrew Eliot despaired, “Good God! What can be worse to a people who have tasted the sweets of liberty!”
²⁸

Four days after the redcoats landed, someone stole into Harvard Hall, in Cambridge, took a knife to a three-quarter-length portrait of Bernard, painted by Copley, and cut from the canvas the shape of a heart. The culprit left behind a note explaining that this “was a most charitable attempt to deprive him of that part, which a retrospect upon his administration must have rendered exquisitely painful.” Bernard: you heartless bastard. Copley attempted a repair. “Our American limner, Mr. Copley, by the surprising art of his pencil, has actually restored as
good a heart
as had been taken fr
om it,” Edes reported, “tho’ upon a near and accurate inspection, it will be found to be no other than
a false one
.—There may it long remain
hanging
, to shew posterity the true picture of the man, who during a weak and wicked Administration, was suffered to continue in the seat of Government, a sore scourge to the people, until he had happily awakened a whole continent to a thorough sense of their own interest, and thereby laid the foundation of American greatness.”
²⁹
Before the year was out, Bernard was recalled to London, and Thomas Hutchinson was named acting governor. Copley who, in 1767
, had married the daughter of a prominent Tory merchant, contemplated a crossing, too. “You have nothing to Hazard in Comeing to this Place,” Benjamin West wrote to him from London.
³⁰

“The whol conversation of this Place turns upon Politics,” Jane Mecom wrote to her brother, “as you will see by the News Papers If you give yr self the Troble to Read them, But
they will not Infalably Informe you of the Truth; for Every thing that any Designing Person has a mind to Propagate Is stufed into them.” Jane Mecom came from a family of printers, but she didn’t have much use for blusterers: “for my Part I wish we had Let alone strife before it was medled with & folowed things that make for Peace.”
³¹

The arrival of the army, far from containing the crisis, exploded it. Paul Revere made an engraving, titled
The Landing of the British Troops in Boston
, and Phillis Wheatley, who, now about fifteen years old, had begun writing poetry, juvenilia, composed a verse: “On the Arrival of the Ships of War, and the Landing of the Troops.” (It does not survive.)
³²
The British placed two cannons at the base of the Town House, facing, not toward the Long Wharf and across the ocean at invading enemies, but into the town. The legislature moved to Cambridge, to meet in Harvard Hall. Edes began p
reparing a daily
Journal of the Times
, stories, most written by Samuel Adams and not all of them true, about atrocities committed by redcoats on the people of Boston, like the one about a woman, raped by a soldier, who staggered across the Common only to die beneath the Liberty Tree. Picked up and printed in newspapers across the colonies, the syndicated
Journal of the Times
proved crucial to the resistance movement (and has been credited with originating the political exposé as a journalistic form). Attempting to rouse support in the southern colonies, Edes’s writers also charged British offi
cers in Boston with attempting to incite a slave rebellion by trying “to persuade some Negro servants to ill-treat and abuse their masters, assuring them that the soldiers were come to procure their freedoms, and that with their help and assistance they should be able to drive all the Liberty Boys to the devil.”
³³

The specter of slave rebellion wielded massive political power in the eighteenth century. Everywhere in the colonies, slaves who murdered their owners were subject to the most atrocious punishments meted out in the English-speaking world. In Antigua, in 1736, some black men convicted of conspiracy were roasted alive, others were broken on the wheel, and some starved to death. Five years later, thirteen black men were burned at the stake in New York City, and seventeen more were hanged, for conspiring to burn the city down and murder their masters. In 1755, a black woman convicted o
f poisoning her owner, a merchant from Charles-town, was burned at the stake in Cambridge; her coconspirator, a man named Mark, was hanged in an iron gibbet on Boston Neck.
³⁴
Some Sons of Liberty, like Otis and Appleton, might argue for an end to slavery, but New England was by no means seized with abolitionist fervor; slave owners in Massachusetts, as everywhere, lived in fear of insurrection. In 1769, a British captain stationed in Boston was indicted by a grand jury “for stirring up, exciting, and encouraging the Negro slaves in Boston to a conspiracy against their masters.”
³⁵

The people of Boston were offended by the British Army: the soldiers swore; they were rapists, papists, blasphemers, infidels, Irish; they were inciting a slave rebellion. “The town i
s now a perfect garrison,” Edes’s
Journal
reported.

What an appearance does Boston now make! One of the first commercial towns in America, has now several regiments of soldiers quartered in the midst of it, and even the Merchants Exchange is picquetted, and made the spot where the main guard is placed and paraded, and their cannon mounted; so that instead of our merchants and trading people transacting
their business, we see it filled with red coats, and have our ears dinn’d with the music of the drum and fife.
³⁶

In September of 1769, a British customs commissioner beat James Otis on the head, badly, with a cane. Even before the beating, Otis had been unstable. “His imagination flames, his passions blaze,” John Adams had written in his diary. “He is liable to great inequalities of temper.” Now he grew worse. “Mr. Speaker, the liberty of this country is gone forever! and I’ll go after it!” Otis hollered from the floor of the Assembly, and then ran out the door. “He rambles and wanders like a ship without a helm,” Adams wrote.
³⁷
Otis ran through the streets of Boston, naked, firing a musket
and smashing windows, helter-skelter.
³⁸
Watching her brother’s decline, Mercy Otis Warren prayed for her own sanity:

From reason’s laws let me ne’er swerve

But calmly, mistress of my mind.
³⁹

Otis was declared incompetent, and carried, like Peter Franklin Mecom, to the countryside, bound hand and foot.
⁴⁰

“A series of occurrences,” the Boston Town Meeting declared in early 1770, “afford great reason to believe that a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty.” That their king had ordered British soldiers to take up arms against them only further fueled Bostonians’ fears that their liberties were being destroyed, one by one. In decrying the king’s army, Bostonians were much influenced by John Trenchard’s treatise,
An Argument, Shewing, that a Standing Army Is Inconsistent with a Free Government
. Trenchard wrote, “If we look through the World, we shall find in no Country, Liberty and an Army stand together;
to know whether a People are Free or Slaves, it is necessary only to ask, whether there is an Army kept amongst them.” Some colonists began to suspect a vast conspiracy. Jefferson would look back at the years between 1765 and 1770 and agree that while “single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day, a series of oppressions . . . too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.” For many in the colonies, both inside and outside Boston, the arrival of the army offered the best proof, the final proof they needed, of just such a plot. “The
MONSTER
of a standing
ARMY
,” one colonist wrote, was borne of “a
PLAN
. . . systematically laid, and pursued by the British ministry . . . for enslaving America.”
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When the troops landed, Andrew Eliot offered a grim prediction: “there will never be that harmony between Great Britain and her colonies than there hath been; all confidence is at an end; and the moment there is any blood shed all affection will cease.”
⁴²
That moment came. “Not the battle of Lexington or Bunker Hill, not the surrender of Burgoyne or Cornwallis,” John Adams would later write, “were more important events in Ameri
can history than the battle of King street on the 5th of March, 1770.”
⁴³

About nine o’clock on March 5, 1770, the bells in Boston’s churches rang out the alarm for fire. From across the city, men and boys raced to the Town House, carrying leather fire buckets and crying, “Fire, fire!” “There is no fire,” young Benjamin Davis told a ropemaker named Samuel Gray. “It is the soldiers fighting.” Gray kept on running to King Street, shouting over his shoulder, “Damn their bloods.” Thomas Marshall, a tailor, looked out the window of his shop next door to the Custom House. Through the crowd, he spied a
party of British soldiers and “saw their swords and bayonets glitter in the moonlight.” Benjamin Burdick, who had left his house with his Scottish broadsword, headed toward the Town House, where a private named Hugh White stood behind seven grenadiers of the Twenty-ninth Regiment, under the command of Captain Thomas Preston. An hour earlier, White had left his sentry box to strike a young wigmaker’s apprentice in the head with his musket, after the apprentice had taunted him by insulting a British officer who had failed to pay his wigmaker’s bill. “Fire, damn you, fire!” the crowd goaded Pre
ston. A bookseller named Henry Knox, just twenty years old, stepped forward and grabbed Preston’s coat. “For God’s sake, take care of your men,” he pleaded. “If they fire, you die.” “Are you loaded?” Burdick asked Hugh Montgomery, one of the grenadiers. Montgomery said yes. Lifting his broadsword, Burdick swung with all his might at Montgomery’s musket. Montgomery stumbled, raised himself up from the ice, pulled the butt of his gun tight to his shoulder, and fired. “From that moment,” Daniel Webster would later write, “we may date the severance of the British Empire.”
⁴⁴

“The man on my left hand dropped,” Burdick said, in a deposition he gave at Faneuil Hall that night. “I asked him if he was hurt, but received no answer, I then stooped down and saw him gasping and struggling with death.” Crispus Attucks, a sailor, died from two bullet wounds in his chest. Attucks was a runaway slave. He had been advertised in the
Boston Gazette
, twenty years before:

Ran-away from his master
William Brown
of
Framingham
on the 30th of
Sept
. last a Mulatto Fellow about 27 Years of Age, named
Crispus
, 6 Feet and 2 Inches high, short curl’d Fair, his Knees nearer together than common; and had on
a light colour’d Bearskin Coat, plain brown Fustian jacket, or brown all-Wool one, new Buckskin Breeches, blue Yarn Stockings and a checked woolen Shirt. Whoever shall take up said run-away and convey him to his aforesaid Master shall have
10 pounds
old Tenor Reward, and all necessary Charges paid. And all Masters of Vessels and others are hereby cautioned against concealing or carrying off said Servant on Penalty of Law.
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He was the first to die. Behind him, Samuel Gray spun and fell, his skull shattered by a bullet to the head. A bullet bounced off a wall and pierced the belly of seventeen-year-old Samuel Maverick. Two more shots felled an Irish sailor named James Caldwell. Patrick Carr, an apprentice leather worker, was hit by a musket ball that “went through his right hip & tore away part of the backbone.”

When John Coburn, hearing the bells, had grabbed his fire buckets and knocked on a neighbor’s door to rouse him, “He told me it was not a fire, it was a riot.” Benjamin Burdick’s wife, who, like Coburn’s neighbor, had an uncanny and altogether suspicious foreknowledge that the bells rang for something other than fire, also called it an “affray,” as did Phillis Wheatley, in a poem she wrote on the occasion, titled, “On the Affray in King Street.” In the eighteenth century, an “affray” was akin to a “riot” (in 1757 Edmund Burke wrote of “the suppressing of riots and affrays”), while “
massacre” meant then what it means now: the indiscriminate slaughter of a large number of innocent people. Five dead men—some of them armed with clubs and swords—do not a massacre make. But “massacre” it had to be, even though massacre it patently was not. Such, at least, was the conclusion reached by Samuel Adams sometime before eleven o’clock
on the morning of Tuesday, March 6, when he, along with John Hancock and five more of the Sons of Liberty, drafted a report in which they called the soldiers’ firing part of “a settled plot to massacre the inhabitants.” Adams arranged for Edes to issue a pamphlet,
A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston
, and commissioned a ship to carry it to London. Paul Revere, meanwhile, engraved a picture of the scene,
The Bloody Massacre Perpetrated on King Street
, which Edes printed. It was a copy, really, of a drawing made by Copley’s half brother, Henry Pelham. (Pelham, outraged
by this act of plagiarism, wrote to Revere that it was “truly as if you had plundered me on the highway.”) Like the
Horrid Massacre
, the
Bloody Massacre
overstated both the preparedness of the soldiers and the helplessness of the crowd. Revere’s black-booted grenadiers are a well-regulated firing squad, flawlessly commanded from the rear by Preston, ordering them, with raised sword, to fire on a crowd of unarmed, middle-aged gentlemen, bewigged and bewildered. In many surviving copies, a colorist named Christian Remick has painstakingly painted the soldiers’ coats red, a vividness balanced only by t
he shocking abundance of red blood spilling out of the wounds of the fallen men. Over the Custom House, Revere placed a sign reading “Butchers Hall,” lest the verses that appeared below the illustration prove insufficiently explicit.