American Tempest (17 page)

In addition to new taxes, the Townshend Acts created new vice-admiralty courts to try smugglers and their accomplices without juries and provided for direct payment of judges and governors by Parliament rather than by colonial legislatures, thus making them independent of colonial influence. Townshend himself died before the acts took effect on November 20, and he never saw the havoc his vengeful scheme would wreak on the British Empire.

News of the Townshend Acts arrived in America in September 1767 and spread consternation across the colonies. The new taxes were particularly galling in colonies that had repaid their debts from the French and Indian
War. Indeed, Massachusetts had liquidated most of its war debt by 1767 and halved the rest of its provincial debt to a mere £40,000—a figure that the provincial government could erase by selling lands in the wilderness. With its debt all but eliminated, Massachusetts rescinded all the extra taxes it had exacted during the war, thus adding impetus to the colony's economic expansion. Adding still more impetus to the colony's economic growth was a dramatic shift in the Massachusetts balance of trade with the mother country, creating a huge inflow of specie—silver and gold coins and ingots—into the vaults of Boston's merchant bankers. The Townshend Acts threatened to reverse that flow, and rather than stand by idly, John Hancock called together the town's merchants to urge reimposition of the partial boycott of English imports that had proved so effective two years earlier in forcing Stamp Act repeal. As he had in '65, Hancock urged targeting only nonessential luxury goods—gloves, shoes, gold and silver thread, silks, and the like, which provided the most profits to English merchants.

“It is surprising to me,” he wrote to a London associate, “that so many attempts are made on your side to cramp our trade. New duties every day increasing. In short, we are in a fair way of being ruined. We have nothing to do but unite and come under a solemn agreement to stop importing any goods from England.”
¹⁷

On October 28, a Boston town meeting approved Hancock's proposal for a partial boycott of British luxury goods. The limited scope of the boycott reflected Hancock's views that a moderate approach would be more likely to bring Parliament to its senses and, more likely, to win support from merchants elsewhere in the colonies. At the same time, Hancock pushed through a resolution urging colonists to reduce their dependence on other British goods by making their own clothing, jewelry, cheeses, malt liquors, cordage, and anchors. Until then, England had forbidden colonists' production of such goods to prevent competition with similar manufactures in Britain.

New Englanders responded enthusiastically, with churches organizing women's circles to spin textiles while forming close-knit social ties. “The female spinners kept on spinning six days of the week,” Peter Oliver noted acidly, “and on the seventh the parsons took their turns and spun out their prayers and sermons to a long thread of politics.”
¹⁸

At least twenty-eight towns in Massachusetts set up spinning bees, according to local newspapers, with one town—Middletown—weaving more than 20,500 yards of cloth in 1769, or almost a yard and a half for every man, woman, and child in Boston. According to the
Boston Gazette
, a group of lesser entrepreneurs—among them William Molyneux—“erected a building 50 feet in length and two stories high for a manufactury house” in which they installed looms and hired workers to weave woolens.
¹⁹
Like Paul Revere, Molyneux was of Huguenot descent and bore an all-but-instinctive passion for individual liberties, including freedom of worship and freedom from taxation. Born to a family of modest means, he lacked the Harvard education of Boston's more prominent merchants but nonetheless succeeded in establishing a successful, albeit small, merchant house amidst the giants of Boston's competitive trade world.

By adding a nonconsumption agreement to the nonimportation agreement and expanding home manufacturing, Boston now threatened to effect a virtual end to trade with Britain. Even proroyalist merchants such as the Hutchinsons, Olivers, and Clarkes could not continue importing if American customers refused to buy their goods. The nonconsumption agreement amounted to a declaration of commercial independence and cleared the first barrier to political independence.

A few days later, on November 5, 1767, the
Pennsylvania Chronicle
published the first of twelve stirring essays by Philadelphia's John Dickinson, who had drafted the declaration at the Stamp Act Congress. His essays—
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania
—appeared in twenty of the twenty-six newspapers in all thirteen colonies and in pamphlet form. They united American opposition to the Townshend Acts by supporting Boston's declaration of commercial independence and calling the debate over external and internal taxes meaningless. He charged that Britain could bleed the colonies as effectively with external as with internal taxes and that there was no difference between the Townshend Acts and the Stamp Act. Both, he said, burdened the colonies with unconstitutional taxes.

Dickinson argued that “if Britain can order us to come to her for necessities, we want and can order us to pay what taxes she pleases before we take them away or when we land them here, we are . . . slaves.” There was no need for Americans to pay taxes for military protection, he said, because the
colonies had already more than compensated Britain with commercial benefits from trade. The colonists were “pouring the fruits of all their labors into their mother's laps. . . . How many British authors have demonstrated that the present wealth, power and glory of their country are founded on these colonies?”

Dickinson spared no vitriol in attacking the Townshend Acts for stripping colonial assemblies of financial control over judges and governors:

Dickinson warned that the Townshend Acts would make America another Ireland, where British taxes had been of benefit to only British sinecures and pensioners. “Besides the burdens of pensions in Ireland,” he added, “all the offices in that poor kingdom have been . . . bestowed upon strangers. . . . In the same manner shall we unquestionably be treated.”
²⁰

The
Letters
provoked deep anger among colonists and equally deep anxiety among Loyalists. Newport and Providence joined the Massachusetts boycott, and New York did the same near the end of the year. Massachusetts Governor Bernard conceded that the
Letters
were “artfully wrote” and sent “a compleat set” to a friend in Parliament with the warning that they had been “universally circulated” and that if they “should receive no refutation . . . they will become a kind of colonial Bill of Rights.” On December 5, four weeks after his first
Letter
appeared in Philadelphia, Dickinson sent copies of all twelve to James Otis in Boston and urged that Massachusetts, as the center of colonial trade with England, take the lead in organizing colonial opposition.

“The liberties of our common country appear to me to be at this moment exposed to the most imminent danger,” he wrote to Otis, “and this apprehension has engaged me to lay my sentiments before the public in
Letters
, of which I send you a copy. . . . Only one has yet been published and what their effect may be, cannot yet be known, but whenever the cause of American freedom is to be vindicated, I look towards the Province of Massachusetts Bay. She must, as she has hitherto done, first kindle the sacred flame, that on such occasions must warm and illuminate the continent.”
²¹

The first Dickinson
Letter
appeared in all three Boston newspapers on December 21, 1767, and the following day, Otis, Sam Adams, John Hancock, and Thomas Cushing petitioned the king to repeal the Townshend Acts as violations of their “sacred rights” as Englishmen “of being taxed only by representatives of their own free election.” Adams and Otis sent a circular letter to the other North American colonial assemblies urging them to send similar petitions. Governor Bernard called the letter seditious and dissolved the General Court, but it was too late. In England, the Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs, Lord Hillsborough, shot off two letters—one to Governor Bernard with the king's order that the Massachusetts House condemn the circular letter and the second to all other provincial governors to prevent their assemblies from acting on the Massachusetts resolution—by dissolving them if necessary.

Like Bernard, Hillsborough acted too late to thwart the inexorable march of the colonies toward independence. Indeed, far from slowing the march, Hillsborough's letters spurred it forward. In Boston, Hancock called for expanding the partial boycott of British goods to a total boycott. Virginia, New Jersey, and Connecticut issued their own petitions to the king, with Virginia sending a circular letter to other colonies, urging support for the Massachusetts boycott. By the end of 1767 Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Hampshire, South Carolina, North Carolina, and New York had ignored the admonitions of their royal governors and sent their own petitions to the king.

On March 14, 1768, the Boston Town Meeting overwhelmingly reelected Hancock as selectman and appointed him to several key committees—one of them to enforce the judgment against Sam Adams for the missing funds in his accounts at the tax collector's office. With his payments already a year overdue, Adams asked for another six-month stay to put his financial affairs in order. After a long debate that tarred Adams with epithets ranging from
patriot to pilferer, the town decided to ask the treasurer to stay all action against Adams until Hancock's committee could reexamine town accounts. The tide of events, however, quickly washed away memories of Adams's embezzlement. Although Hancock loaned Adams some of the money and Adams collected additional funds here and there, he would never repay his entire debt.

Indeed, Adams managed to refocus Boston's attention after the Town Meeting by announcing plans for another of his constant demonstrations and parades—this one to celebrate Repeal Day again, a “Day of Triumph over Great Britain,” on March 18. Anticipating tar and feathers, the customs commissioners went into hiding, but to their own and the governor's surprise, Sam Adams astonished his followers by announcing, “NO MOBS—NO CONFUSIONS—NO TUMULTS.” To ease the mob's disappointment, he added, “We know WHO have abused us . . . but let not a hair of their scalps be touched: The time is coming when they shall lick the dust and melt away.”
²²

On April 8, 1768, three weeks after his reelection as selectman, Hancock's brig
Lydia
tied up at Hancock Wharf with spring orders from London that the commissioners suspected included tea, paper, and other dutiable goods. Two customs agents boarded her the following morning. Hancock charged from his office to the wharf and, with a small mob, including the ship's captain, rushed on board and blocked the men's access to the hold. That night, one of the customs agents sneaked below deck under cover of darkness, but Hancock was waiting with about eight or ten men, one of whom shone a lantern in the frightened agent's face. Hancock demanded to see the agent's orders and writ of assistance, or search warrant. His orders were undated and he had no writ. Hancock told his men to seize the agent and carry him topside. With the mate and boatswain suspending the terrified young man by his arms and thighs, Hancock asked him, “Do you want to search the vessel?” He insisted he did not, and they let him go ashore unharmed.

Hancock's assault on the British agent was the first physical attack on British authority in the colonies, and overnight, it raised him to hero's status in Boston. Although the commissioners appealed to the attorney general of Massachusetts to prosecute Hancock, the attorney general decided
that the men who had carried the agent ashore had borne no arms. Moreover, the agent had boarded the vessel illegally, without a writ or the permission of the captain. Several days later, a mob stoned two commissioners while they rowed away from Long Wharf. The commissioners blamed Hancock for the incident, calling him “an idol of the mob” and adding that, “this infatuated man now gives out in public, that if we, the commissioners, are not recalled he will get rid of us before Christmas.”
²³

On May 4, Boston jubilantly reelected Hancock to the provincial House of Representatives, which, in turn, elected him to the Governor's Council. The governor, however, rejected Hancock, as well as Adams, Otis, and other Patriot leaders. Five days later, at sunset on May 9, another Hancock ship, the sloop
Liberty
, sailed into port. It had come from Madeira, and customs inspectors expected to find a shipload of wine. Because of the darkness, they postponed their inspection until morning, by which time they found the ship bobbing high in the water, with only twenty-five pipes in its hold—less than one-quarter of the ship's capacity. When questioned by the commissioners, the inspectors could not explain the curious void and insisted they had seen no wine taken ashore during the night.

A month later, after Hancock had unloaded the
Liberty
and reloaded her with cargo bound for England, the
Romney
, a fifty-gun, British man-of-war, sailed into Boston Harbor, commanded by a ruthless captain who thundered to all within earshot, “The town is a blackguard town and ruled by mobs . . . and, by the eternal God, I will make their hearts ache before I leave.”
²⁴
As he aimed his cannons at the town, Bostonians prepared for far worse pain than heartache.