1775 (79 page)

Patriots in Boston, by contrast, enjoyed the waterfront equivalent of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. The city was their playhouse. If the legal issues surrounding the principal Boston tea ship were complex—which they certainly were—Adams’s associates could opt for a splashy extralegal solution. The Patriot faction controlled the provincial House of Representatives, the Boston Town Meeting, most of the local press, the local jury system, and the all-important Boston waterfront. Hostile conservatives were institutionally weaker than in New York or Philadelphia. Because of Boston’s reputation, any serious provocation—dumping and destroying a large quantity of tea, say, versus simply turning back tea ships—could easily ignite British desire to teach the city a huge lesson. Parliament might even grasp the chance to rescind the privileges in the Massachusetts Charter of 1691. No other port city could dare such a notable conflagration—or so the Great Incendiary himself might have reasoned.

On December 16, the tea was dumped. From January through April 1774, Adams and his waiting, wary associates acted confidently rather than cautiously. They observed March’s fourth anniversary of the Boston Massacre with a strong speech delivered by John Hancock but largely written by Samuel Adams. It called for a Congress of all the colonies, applauded a well-ordered militia, and told Massachusetts to be ready to fight.
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For several months, the Patriot faction even ventured a second inflammatory gambit as the provincial House of Representatives voted to impeach a royal appointee, Chief Justice Peter Oliver, albeit maneuvers by Governor Hutchinson blocked its implementation.
²⁶
Then in May, details of the reported Boston Port Act finally arrived.

Despite initially unnerving many maritime Bostonians, the Port Act was a political overreaction that played into Patriot hands. As we have seen in
Chapter 9
, Opposition speakers during the debate in Parliament pointed out that no other English city had been so sweepingly punished. In North America, sympathy mushroomed from Maine to Georgia—literally. Maine sent firewood, fish, potatoes, and some sheep; and Georgia’s principal help took the form of £50 and 160 barrels of rice from Yankee-settled St. John’s Parish.
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Activists in the other major seaports were especially supportive.

Looking back five months later, Samuel Adams could write that reaction to the Port Act “wrought a Union of the Colonies which could not be brought about by the Industry of years in reasoning on the necessity of it for the Common
Safety.”
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By then, however, he had fanned a lot of dull embers, and Paul Revere had made an extraordinary five-day ride from Boston to Philadelphia with a copy of yet another fiery Massachusetts document, the Suffolk Resolves. The British Cabinet and its military commanders in America didn’t yet understand, but they were already being trapped in a Patriot-encircled Boston.

After May 1774, with its news of the Port Act and first hints of a Congress—to which Adams would be sent as a Massachusetts delegate—the Great Incendiary shifted more of his machinations to what later generations would call the national stage. And here is where his dual role as an orchestrator in both Boston and Philadelphia becomes difficult to track.

John Adams left a written portrait of his 52-year-old cousin in Philadelphia burning bundles of correspondence or, in summer’s temperatures, scissoring documents into strings and confetti. Congressional sessions were held in secrecy, prosecutions for treason remained possible, and the older Adams explained that “whatever becomes of me, my friends will never suffer by my negligence.” Later tampering may have further thinned the surviving documentation. William Wells, an Adams descendent who authored Samuel’s first biography in 1865, wrote that “there is…reason to believe that letters were abstracted early in the present [nineteenth] century by persons interested in their suppression.”
²⁹

In August, as he was about to leave for Philadelphia, Samuel Adams and his closest colleagues were monitoring several bubbling political cauldrons. Disgruntlement in Massachusetts’s central and western hinterland over Britain’s new Massachusetts Government Act brought out huge crowds of 4,000 and 5,000 protesters in shire towns like Springfield and Worcester. Not only did they shut down the courts, but the mere weight of their presence persuaded many objected-to Crown appointees to resign. Rural Massachusetts had become as radical as Boston. In the east, General Gage, fearing rising militancy, laid plans to march several battalions to Worcester, where Patriot weapons were stored. Arrangements were also made to remove His Majesty’s powder from the provincial powderhouse just outside Boston.

Four hundred miles to the south, Patriots in the Chesapeake provinces, readying themselves for the Continental Congress, prepared to wield tobacco as a political weapon. In doing so, they were embracing the nonexportation strategy Adams had long favored. In Philadelphia, the First Continental Congress was to convene on September 5, and some delegates were already arriving. The topic was the Coercive Acts and how to rectify Britain’s treatment of Massachusetts. In all of these venues, Adams had
associates and allies: across Massachusetts, fellow legislators, activists, and committees of correspondence; in Virginia, Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee; and in Philadelphia, activists like Charles Thomson, a local tea party strategist who in early September was elected secretary of the First Continental Congress. Thomson’s capacity for backstage politics was about to win him the ultimate accolade: “the Samuel Adams of Pennsylvania.”

As August became September, these several political worlds converged, and we can only surmise the plots and machinations lost to history by Sam Adams’s scissors or in his fireplace. On September 1, early in the Massachusetts morning, 250 redcoats sent by Gage removed the powder from the provincial powderhouse. However, with tensions building, he soon abandoned his planned march to Worcester. Over the next few days, as delegates gathered in Philadelphia, the hapless British general also moved to fortify Boston Neck: on September 2 the guard was doubled, and the next day four cannon were emplaced; a year later, it had become a substantial complex.
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The departure of Sam Adams for Philadelphia some weeks earlier had left Joseph Warren, a kindred spirit, chairing the Boston Committee of Correspondence and handling intelligence gathering and express rider scheduling. “Correspondence,” already hectic and prolific, doubtless surged on September 1. As redcoats bore away the gunpowder, rumors buzzed about soldiers on the march, and comments spread about the British fortifying Boston Neck. We know that dispatches were sent west toward Springfield, north into New Hampshire, and southwest to Connecticut.
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By the evening of September 1 and through the next day, reports began to circulate that Boston had been bombarded and six men killed.
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Patriot discussion became mobilization as militiamen and others began to march.

Warren, Revere, and other activists had undoubtedly kept messages flowing over what Gage had done and might yet be up to. Fear of military coercion had been a provincial staple since 1768. But as reports came of huge numbers of men heading for Boston—as many as 20,000, some from as far away as Connecticut and New Hampshire—many Patriot leaders, including Warren, sought to quell the exaggerations and turn back the marchers. A large-scale confrontation or an attack on the British in Boston would have been counterproductive.
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By September 2–3, the flow had stopped, and Gage by then had abandoned his proposed Worcester march. However, he continued to mount cannon and fortify Boston Neck. Perhaps the dispatches sent out were exaggerated; perhaps the dispatchers simply counted on rumor mills to grind as usual.

By September 9 and 10, reports based on the unfounded rumors—the supposed bombardments and multiple fatalities—reached the newly convened delegates in Philadelphia. As we saw in
Chapter 8
, the impact was electric. John Adams described the word
war
as being on everyone’s lips. In the meantime, Warren had taken over in Boston. On August 16, carefully circumventing the Massachusetts Government Act, he had scheduled an early September Suffolk County Convention in lieu of a special Boston Town Meeting, these now prohibited. He began work on an agenda. On September 9, the county convention issued the soon-to-be-famous Suffolk Resolves. They called for disobedience to the Coercive Acts and Gage’s appointees, endorsed nonexportation, denounced Gage’s fortification of Boston Neck, and advised Massachusetts to prepare for defensive war.

Paul Revere, Adams’s and Warren’s winged messenger, took horse for Philadelphia and arrived on September 16. He confirmed that the earlier reports had been excessive, but to a crowd still caught up in the possibility of war, he held out a literary sword—the bellicose Suffolk Resolves. With Samuel Adams and Charles Thomson at work, the Congress approved the resolves on September 17.
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Conservatives soon lost hope, and when Congress adjourned in October, a commercial war had been declared against Britain, and Massachusetts had been promised support against any British aggression.

If congressional embrace of the Suffolk Resolves was not quite a political coup, it came close—and Sam Adams and his associates dealt in just such Machiavellian accomplishment. Besides which, an even more important orchestration can be glimpsed, if hardly documented, seven months later in Sam Adams’s nighttime presence and apparent advice giving in Lexington as the minutemen gathered for morning’s historic encounter, then in the Patriot achievement in taking witnesses’ depositions that the British fired first, and finally in making sure that evidence and explanations got around the thirteen colonies and also over to England in record time. These details have already been discussed on
pages 12
–
13
, but it may well be that the last two weeks in April 1775 were when Samuel Adams orchestrated the triumphant consummation of his life’s work.

Bunker Hill and British Military Discouragement

The two-year victory of Massachusetts was stunning. In 1774, Thomas Gage had been prophetic, although disbelieved, in warning his superiors at home about the deep-seated hostility that Britain faced in Massachusetts and New
England. But after Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, the general became bitter and concluded that Massachusetts had been implacable and conspiratorial. In July 1775, Gage argued to Lord Dartmouth that Boston was where “the arch-rebels formed their scheme long ago. This circumstance brought the troops first here which is the most disadvantageous place for all operations.”
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Parenthetically, Joseph Galloway, the Pennsylvanian Loyalist and former Assembly speaker, came to the same conclusion, recalling in his memoirs that through Congress’s adoption of the Suffolk Resolves, “the foundation of military resistance throughout America was effectually laid.”
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Nine days after Bunker Hill, in a letter to an old friend, Lord Barrington at the War Office in London, Gage—perhaps even then looking out the window at Boston—summed up with a confession: “I wish this Cursed place was burned.”
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Nor was Gage alone in being affected. General Howe, who came through battle on June 19 without a physical wound, is thought by some to have suffered an important psychological one. The aides accompanying him all died or were wounded on the slopes, and he himself returned with his white gaiters reddened by the bloody grass. Some military historians have concluded that after Bunker Hill, Howe was usually reluctant to attack entrenched American positions.

However, a second psychology may also have been at work. Howe succeeded to the army command in North America (excluding Canada) when Gage sailed for England in October 1775. Early in 1776, his brother, Admiral Richard, Viscount Howe, was given the North American naval command. This joinder was unusual enough, but on the admiral’s arrival, the two brothers both assumed a second duty: as peace commissioners authorized to treat with the Americans. Both took that responsibility seriously. General William Howe was also the member of Parliament for Nottingham, a textile town with a large population of Protestant dissenters. In late 1774, he had promised that constituency not to take up arms against the Americans. Admiral Howe had held private negotiations with Benjamin Franklin in London for four weeks beginning on Christmas Day in 1774. He had hoped then that the ministry would appoint a peace commission on which he and Franklin could both serve, but by March the idea had come to naught.
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As we saw in
Chapter 14
, their older brother, Brigadier George Augustus Howe, killed at Lake George in 1758, had become famous among the American troops, admired for his empathy, his openness to new tactics, and his willingness to campaign alongside the New England troops. After his
death, Massachusetts paid for a commemorative tablet in Westminster Abbey, and Richard and William Howe, who had greatly admired their elder brother, probably took up their peace commissioner duties in that spirit. By spring 1776, their official instructions-cum-conditions—that for any colony to receive peace, it had to dissolve all congresses, conventions, and associations, and to disband all soldiers armed, arrayed, and paid by the illegal organizations—were outdated and not plausible for discussion even before July’s vote for independence. After July, the Howe brothers marched to their own peace-minded drummer: a willingness to win the war only by victories that promoted reconciliation, politically drained the rebellion, or wearied the Americans into giving up. Indeed, before and after the two brothers returned to Britain in 1778, they were accused of neglecting one military opportunity after another. The Howe family papers burned in later years, foreclosing any explanation, but possibly the scars of Bunker Hill and memories of the tablet Massachusetts legislators put in Westminster Abbey had combined in some way that will never be explained.