American Tempest (18 page)

T
rue to his word, the captain of the
Romney
sent monstrous press gangs swarming ashore to terrorize the waterfront and impress whatever unlucky young men happened to cross their paths. With the menacing silhouette of the
Romney
and her big guns to protect them, the commissioners leaped at the chance to avenge Hancock's insults and insolence. One of the customs inspectors who had inspected the
Liberty
reversed his earlier testimony: He told of Hancock's men forcibly holding him aboard the
Liberty
on the night of May 9, that he heard the squeal of tackles hoisting goods, but his captors threatened to kill him and burn his home if he told what he knew.

A senior customs official responded by painting a broad arrow on the
Liberty
's mast—a signal she was now government property—and on June 10, the captain of the
Romney
sent a detachment of marines to haul the
Liberty
to a mooring beneath the
Romney
's massive guns. While marines made fast their lines, a mob of about five hundred “sturdy boys and Negroes” gathered on the wharf and pelted the marines with paving stones ripped from the streets.

As the sailors towed the
Liberty
out of range, the mob focused its attack on the customs official and his aide, beating them as they ran to their homes, catching one and dragging him through the streets while pelting
him with rocks and filth until friends could rescue him. The mob then gathered about the officials' homes, beating drums, blowing horns, and smashing windows with rocks while letting forth “the most hideous howlings—as the Indians do when they attack an enemy.”
¹
Another group at the harbor pulled the customs boat from the water and set it afire. The commissioners, meanwhile, fled with their families to the customs house to retrieve government cash and then rowed away under cover of darkness to the safety of the
Romney
and Castle William. Signs went up on the Liberty Tree urging citizens to attack the commissioners if they should reappear and attempt to collect duties. Sensing an imminent popular uprising, Governor Bernard prepared to flee and sent an urgent message to the New York headquarters of General Thomas Gage, the commander in chief of British forces in America, to send troops “to rescue the government out of the hands of a trained mob.”
²
Gage ordered two regiments to sail to Boston.

For Samuel Adams, the seizure of the
Liberty
and its cargo and the threat of British troops were the sparks he had awaited to light the flames of outright rebellion against British rule. He called his mob to the Liberty Tree.

“If you are men,” he cried out, “behave like men. Let us take up arms immediately and be free and seize all the king's officers. We shall have thirty thousand men to join us from the country . . . with their knapsacks and bayonets fixed. . . . We will take up arms and spend our last drop of blood.”
³
Adams pledged that the English masses would join in the uprising, citing “the great tumults and risings of the people all over England and Ireland . . . the weavers' mob, the seamen's mob, the tailors' mob, the coal miners' mob, and some say the clergymen's mob . . . will unite in one general scene of tumult . . . at the very gates of the palace, and even in the royal presence.”
⁴

In contrast to Adams, Hancock saw the seizure of the
Liberty
as a serious business loss. Months might pass while his loaded cargo ship lay idle awaiting a resolution of the court case. On Saturday morning, June 11, he sent his lawyers and his friend and fellow Freemason Dr. Joseph Warren to try to negotiate its release. Five years younger than Hancock, Warren—like everyone else of consequence in Boston—was a Harvard graduate. Although he started his adult years as a schoolmaster in 1759, he switched
course in 1761 to study medicine and gained fame by developing an unusual method of inoculating small pox patients—one of whom was the increasingly renowned John Adams. Warren's marriage to the daughter of a wealthy merchant bought him the luxury of dabbling in politics. He joined the Freemasons and became Grand Master of the Masonic Grand Lodge, where he formed close ties to John Hancock and other young Freemasons. Like them, he soon fell under the spell of Samuel Adams at the Green Dragon, and passage of the Stamp Act saw him plunge irretrievably into the maelstrom of Patriot politics. Opposed to and eager to prevent violence, he frequently offered to mediate local disputes between radical American merchants and British authorities. In the dispute over Hancock's
Liberty
, he offered to post a bond to guarantee the ship's availability when the case went to court. Meanwhile, Hancock would be able to send his ship and its cargo to London and carry on his trade. Fearful that the mobs might riot following Sunday Sabbath, the customs commissioners agreed. In the interests of restoring calm, the commissioners promised to return the ship to Hancock on Monday morning and forego pressing charges against him. Other merchants—as fearful of the possible effects of riots as the commissioners—poured into Hancock's house urging him to accept the settlement, and he did—happily and triumphantly.

Otis and Adams, however, stormed into Hancock's mansion, angrily accusing him of capitulating to the Customs Commission, the royal governor, and the Townshend Acts—in effect, committing treason against the Patriot cause. Although Hancock favored a moderate approach of accommodation and reconciliation with Britain, Otis and Adams shocked him into acting in the interests of self-preservation—to protect himself and his property against mob violence. He recognized that sheer numbers in the Boston streets favored the radical Otis-Adams camp. Even if British troops eventually crushed the mob, it would have ample time to destroy properties of all perceived enemies before the troops arrived, and Hancock had no intention of being one of those enemies. Rather than risk a fallout with the radicals, he decided to swallow his financial losses and assume the role of martyr and symbol of Patriot resistance. On Sunday evening, Hancock canceled his deal to recover the
Liberty
and threw his lot in with the radical Sons of Liberty street mobs.

On June 30, Governor Bernard asked the General Court to rescind its petition to the king to repeal the Townshend Acts. The Court refused, resolving defiantly “that this House do concur in and adhere to . . . that essential principle, that no man can be taxed, or bound in conscience to obey any law, to which he has not given his consent in person, or by his representative.”
⁵
With Gage's troops on their way, however, the House suddenly moderated the tone of the resolution to read, “That the sole right of imposing taxes on the inhabitants of this his majesty's colony of the Massachusetts Bay, is now and ever has been vested in the House of Representatives . . . with the consent of the council, and of his majesty the king of Great Britain, or his governor for the time being.”
⁶
Much as with Patrick Henry's inflammatory resolves, however, only the most offensive resolve went out to newspapers across the colony, and an infuriated governor dissolved the House of Representatives.

On August 1, sixty “Merchants and Traders of the Town of Boston” adopted a sweeping two-part nonimportation agreement. The first part banned imports of paper, glass, painters' colors, and tea beginning January 1, 1769, “until the acts imposing duties on these articles are repealed.” The second part of the agreement was a one-year ban on all other products imported from Britain except ten essentials, including salt, coals, fish-hooks and lines, hemp, duck, and shot. In the months that followed, merchant groups in New York, Philadelphia, Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island adopted similar agreements, although the products and degree of enforcement varied. Because Townshend duties applied largely to products that were made only in England, Americans could no longer turn to smuggling to evade them; the only way around the duties was to produce comparable products in America. Smuggling Dutch Tea and Portuguese Madeira wines, however, continued apace.

The boycott of dutiable goods was hardly universal. New Hampshire and New Jersey merchants refused to boycott British goods, and Loyalist merchants such as Boston's Hutchinson, Oliver, and Clarke added to their orders of British merchandise, knowing that large numbers of less vocal but nonetheless loyal subjects of the crown were ready and eager to pay the price for British tea and other products—duties and all.

In Virginia, the wealthy planter George Washington led the effort for agreement on nonimportation. In the South, the owners of great plantations such as Washington bought large enough quantities to buy directly from British merchants, without using American intermediaries like Boston's merchant houses. Having determined to cut back on his imports, Wash ington wrote to his friend and neighbor George Mason at Gunston Hall, another large plantation comparable to Washington's Mount Vernon:

Throughout the summer, Hancock's captive
Liberty
bobbed in the water beneath the guns of the British man-of-war. Merchants and artisans—and even the poor—made the pilgrimage up the hill to Hancock House to pay homage to Hancock for his martyrdom. At the Liberty Tree, Otis and Adams kept the mob's war fever burning with furious calls to arms. If British troops marched into Boston, Otis raged at a Town Meeting on July 14, there was “nothing more to do but to gird the sword to the thigh and shoulder the musket. . . . We should one and all resist even unto blood. There are your arms,” he shouted, and gestured at an armory containing four hundred muskets. “When an attempt is made against your liberties, they will be delivered to you.”
⁸
The meeting ended with Hancock, Adams, and other leaders going off in a convoy of carriages to petition the governor to recall the General Court. Bernard rejected the appeal, and Adams responded with a call to all the towns in Massachusetts to send delegates to a convention in Boston on September 22 to discuss “the peace and safety of his majesty's subjects in this province.”
⁹

Early in August, the trial of John Hancock and the
Liberty
got under way. John Adams agreed to represent Hancock. After two weeks, the court ordered forfeiture of the
Liberty
. Although the customs commissioners put
her up for sale, there were no buyers, so they decided to arm her and send her roaming the coast in search of smugglers. A year later, the
Liberty
's searches and seizures so infuriated Newport merchants and ship owners that they sent a mob to pierside to set fire to the ship and cheered as they watched the
Liberty
burn to her waterline.

On September 19, Governor Bernard announced he had sent for a thousand troops from Halifax, and Sam Adams saw his support begin to erode as anxiety over the approaching British troops undermined the bravado of many farmers and the less robust members of the mob. On September 22, only about seventy delegates from the colony's more than one hundred counties answered Adams's call to convention in Boston's Faneuil Hall. Few were eager to take up arms against professional British soldiers; indeed, they were terrified. The
New Hampshire Gazette
fed their fears, proclaiming,

Hatfield, Massachusetts, in the western part of the state, not only refused to send delegates to the Adams convention, it urged rural Massachusetts to let the Boston mob, which had started the rebellion on its own, fight British troops on its own. After it became evident that most delegates opposed violence, merchant Thomas Cushing, who, like Hancock, was helping to finance the Patriot cause, abandoned Sam Adams and joined the moderates.

Aware of the changing mood, Otis did not even show up for the first three days of the convention, and Hancock darted in and out, pretending that the press of business did not allow him to attend for any length of time. Although Governor Bernard called the convention illegal and warned delegates to return home, he reveled in the political schism between radicals and moderates and considered inviting Hancock to resume his place in the ruling oligarchy by offering him a seat in the Council, or
upper house. When British men-of-war pulled within sight of the Massachusetts coast on the fourth day of the convention, the delegates dashed off an innocuous petition for relief from taxation and military coercion and “rushed out of town like a herd of scalded dogs.”
¹¹
That afternoon, the governor rejected the petition, and five days later, on October 1, an armada of British naval vessels rode into Boston Harbor with twelve hundred regular, red-coated troops aboard. The ships pulled close enough to shore for Boston to see the fierce faces of the force they opposed. For the first time in American and British history, the government had deployed the vaunted British Army not to protect the empire, but to police it and enforce hated laws on British subjects.