Conceived in Liberty (198 page)

The Americans began an effective, even though spontaneous and unorganized, boycott of the galling newspaper of James Rivington. A newly organized “Friends of America” in New York systematized the boycott and sent letters to rebel committees throughout the colonies urging a general boycott of the “Pensioned Servile Wretch” and all of his advertisers. Radical meetings
pledged no further dealings with Rivington. By April 1775, twenty-one committees had acted to suspend purchases of the newspaper—led by committees and meetings in various counties of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. In mid-April, a mob in New Brunswick, New Jersey, hung Rivington in effigy. Driven to the edge of bankruptcy by the boycott and threatened by an angry mob, Rivington, not long after, pledged to give no further offense.

The Continental Association and the mass boycott were all very well. These measures served to radicalize the entire continent and to build an intricate network of spontaneous grassroots revolutionary institutions, often virtually replacing constituted authority with quasi-anarchic leadership. But none of these measures dealt directly with the really acute focus of conflict: Boston. It was Boston and Massachusetts, after all, that were being punished, oppressed, and militarily occupied. Massachusetts necessarily had to be the focal center of struggle. The moral and material support of the other provinces was most welcome. But would they join if armed support were necessary?

At the Congress Christopher Gadsden had urged initiating armed struggle against the British troops in Boston, but it was clear to the sagacious radical strategists of Massachusetts that the rest of America would not support such an effort. As the Continental Congress made clear, only
defensive
efforts would be supported against outright aggression by British troops. Furthermore, most of the radicals naively thought that the Continental Association would suffice to bring Britain to reason; they did not see as clearly as the Adamses and the Massachusetts radicals that Britain would not be deflected from all-out suppression. They would soon learn. Meanwhile, the radicals could only wait for that lesson and tell each other, in the words of John Adams, “I expect no redress but... increased resentment and double vengeance. We must fight.” Even those who expected armed conflict did not go so far as to anticipate actual American independence; conflict was to induce Britain to back down from its coercive imperialist policy. Indeed, the Massachusetts delegation to the Congress had to reassure even the Virginians that their aim was not independence—all the delegation, that is, except for Sam Adams, whose silence on the matter was eloquent in itself.

Soon after the opening of the Continental Congress, the provincial congress of Massachusetts assembled in a fateful meeting. General Gage had called for a meeting of the General Court in early October, but dared not lead the newly appointed mandamus councillors out from under the wings of the British troops. It was, furthermore, clear from town instructions to their representatives that the Assembly would hardly agree to the changes imposed by the Massachusetts Government Act. Most radical and frantically revolutionary were the instructions from the town of Worcester; these counseled the immediate return to the old Massachusetts charter of the seventeenth century, the (presumably forcible) opening of the port and removal of British troops, and a trial of the mandamus councillors for treason. In the light of this atmosphere of militancy, General Gage called off the meeting of the General Court.

But the Americans were prepared, and towns sent delegates to the extra-legal provincial congress that met at Concord on October 11, and later in the month at Watertown. The delegates faced a province without ports or judges or executives or legislature. Undaunted, the Massachusetts provincial congress made, as its operating executive, John Hancock president, and created a steering committee of fifteen: the Committee on the State of the Province, which included Hancock, Dr. Joseph Warren, and such leading radicals as Joseph Hawley of Northampton, James Warren of Plymouth, and Elbridge Gerry of Marblehead. Later, the four Massachusetts delegates to the Continental Congress were added to the province’s steering committee.

As a continuing operating organization, the provincial congress selected a smaller, eleven-man Committee of Safety, with John Hancock chairman and Dr. Joseph Warren among its members. The committee was authorized to call out the provincial militia and to collect munitions and supplies in preparation for meeting any future aggression by the British armed forces. Concord and Worcester were selected as the principal depots for military supplies. The militia officers, furthermore, were directed to recruit the best-qualified twenty-five percent of the militia, mainly veterans of the French and Indian War, into a ginger group known as “minutemen,” so called because they were expected to answer the committee’s call at a moment’s notice. The minutemen were formed into emergency companies of fifteen men each, and the men of each company had the power of freely electing their own officers, subject to the overall direction of the Committee of Safety. This project was based on the precedent of emergency units used as early as King Philip’s War in the mid-1670s.

The Committee of Safety proceeded with dispatch and efficiency to organize an armed militia, to repel any aggressive acts of the British troops. The aim was to raise a potential army of twelve thousand men in Massachusetts, and twenty thousand additional troops at the ready were requested from the other colonies in New England. Officers were to be democratically elected by the soldiery.

The militia trained hard. This time, in contrast to their unpreparedness when British troops earlier occupied Boston, the people of Massachusetts would be ready to counter any further invasion. All the militia of the colony were soon directed to train according to Colonel Timothy Pickering’s new book,
Easy Plan of Discipline for a Militia
(1775). From Salem, Pickering imaginatively simplified the stodgy and ritualistic rules of British army drill and emphasized the American woodsman’s habit of individual marksmanship, a practice particularly suited to an armed people’s guerrilla war. Political philosophy and military tactics blended as one, for Pickering stressed that the American soldier was an individualist, a freeman, and a property owner, in contrast to professional European soldiers trained as obedient “machines.” Pickering wrote that “men must see the reason and the use of any action or movement. ‘Tis the boast [of European commanders] that their men are mere machines.... God forbid that my countrymen should be thus degraded....”
*

A circular letter sent throughout the colony by the Committee of Safety asked the clergy to help raise a volunteer army. The committee, an anarchistic institution without coercive governmental powers to tax or to conscript militia, had to rely on volunteers and voluntary contributions. John Adams understood the revolutionary nature of what he was seeing: “At Watertown he had witnessed, John [Adams] told himself, a great Province governed not by police and penalty but by, as it were, two hundred and sixty volunteer consciences.”
**

The second provincial congress of Massachusetts, meeting at Cambridge on February 1, 1775, rapidly advanced these measures of defense. It also authorized the militia to collect military stores rapidly, either by purchase or by assuming jurisdiction over the stores of the Massachusetts government. Consequently, during March and early April, large stores were collected by the Americans at Concord. The congress, consistent with its devotion to liberty, refused to levy taxes on the people; it
recommended
that they voluntarily pay the provincial tax to the new revolutionary institutions instead. Addressing the citizens of Massachusetts, the congress exhorted: “Resistance to tyranny becomes the Christian and social duty of each individual. Fleets, troops, and every implement of war are sent into the province, to wrest from you that freedom which it is your duty, even at the risk of your lives, to hand inviolate to posterity. Continue steadfast, and... defend those rights which heaven gave, and no man ought to take from us.”

The Congregational ministry of Massachusetts was eager to take up the task offered it by the provincial congress. Eminent ministers like the veteran
Charles Chauncy, William Gordon, and Peter Thacher, of Boston; Peter Whitney of Northborough; and Timothy Hilliard of Barnstable, led the clergy in exhorting the right of resistance to the British. Eloquent were the calls to rise up and wield the sword of the Lord against oppression and “slavery,” in militia-mustering sermons. In Boothbay (now Maine), the Reverend John Murray, a Presbyterian, urged the right and duty of resistance to defend natural, God-given, and constitutional rights. The Reverend Samuel Eaton of Harpswell (Maine) went so far as to declaim at a militia-muster: “Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood!”

Particularly important expressions of Congregational support for the rebel cause came at a convention in radical Worcester County, in the interior of Massachusetts, in late March 1775. At this meeting a delegate, the Reverend Ebenezer Chaplin of Sutton, pleaded for liberty and separation of church and state. And in a widely printed and distributed speech, the Reverend Elisha Fish of Upton defended the right of property as unalienable by man; the right of each individual to enjoy his own earnings, Fish declared, was a corollary of his God-given rights of life and liberty.

Similar preachments were made by Congregational ministers throughout New England, especially New Hampshire and eastern Connecticut. Termed by Lieutenant Governor Oliver “gutters of sedition,” the Congregational clergy of New England led the revolutionary cause, and provided a stark contrast to the relatively nonpolitical clergy of New York and Philadelphia, the lukewarm support of the Baptists, and the Tory views of the Anglican clergy.

As tension mounted between the British troops and the swiftly preparing people of Massachusetts during the winter of 1774–75, several incidents brought the two sides inextricably closer to overt military conflict. On December 13, the noted courier and messenger of the Boston leadership, Paul Revere, warned the New Hampshire radicals of a British plan to garrison troops at Portsmouth. The very next day a band of troops, led by the prominent young lawyer Major John Sullivan and the young merchant John Langdon, swooped down on the British fort at Portsmouth and carried away cannons, small arms, and a hundred barrels of powder. Sullivan, a delegate to the Continental Congress, was now the major political figure in New Hampshire and leader of the popular radical forces there. Soon after the raid, Sullivan and Langdon were chosen by the provincial congress to be New Hampshire’s delegates to the Second Continental Congress.

The next clash also inflicted humiliation upon the proud British troops. On February 26, several hundred British soldiers were shipped clandestinely to Salem to seize military stores from the Americans. Not finding them there, the British marched to the stores at Danvers; but there they were forced by a larger number of Americans to wait while the stores were removed and then to retreat back to their ships. In Boston, another clash occurred soon afterward when Dr. Joseph Warren delivered the annual oration in commemoration
of the Boston Massacre. Gathered illegally at a town meeting, moderated by Sam Adams, the townspeople heard Warren eloquently champion the liberty of Americans
and
Englishmen, and attack the sending of British troops to occupy Boston. Then Warren declared: “An independence of Great Britain is not our aim, but if pacific measures are ineffectual, and it appears that the only way to safety is through fields of blood, I know you will undauntedly press forward, until tyranny is trodden under foot.”

As Warren concluded, British officers who had been courteously welcomed to the meeting began to hiss. In an obvious attempt to provoke the Americans into physical attack (which might not carry the support of the other colonies), the troops arrested a man for illegally buying a firearm offered by a British soldier. The next day the British arrogantly tarred and feathered the man, pinned on his back the label “American liberty, or a specimen of democracy,” and paraded him through the streets of Boston with an armed guard and military band.

*
Don Higgenbotham,
The War of American Independence
(New York: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 12–13.

**
Catherine Drinker Bowen,
John Adams and the American Revolution
(New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1950), p. 509.

The well-disciplined citizens of Massachusetts held themselves in check and refused to be provoked into attack; and their angry leader Sam Adams wrote: “See what indignities we suffer rather than precipitate a crisis.” It took no uncommon astuteness to see that the colonies and Great Britain were on collision course.

In late March, before the Virginia convention—an enlarged House of Burgesses meeting illegally at Richmond without authorization of the governor—the golden-tongued Patrick Henry made his most famous speech. In it he prophetically warned: “The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms!”

The major issue at the Virginia convention, and the occasion for Henry’s speech, was his resolution to strengthen and arm the Virginia militia for the clash that Patrick Henry was sure was fast approaching. Henry openly welcomed the imminent revolutionary clash: “Let it come. I repeat, Sir, let it come!” Henry dramatically concluded: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!” Henry’s resolution was ably supported by the radical theoretician Richard Henry Lee and the military-minded George Washington. But the resolution to strengthen the militia met stiff conservative opposition, led by three delegates to the Continental Congress: Edmund Pendleton, Benjamin Harrison, and Richard Bland. As a result, the Henry resolution won only by a slim vote. Indeed, the delegates refused to call up any sizable number of armed men and to seize the reins of government openly; and they appointed a conservative committee, dominated by Pendleton and Harrison, to oversee the military preparations.