Independence (12 page)

WHAT LORD NORTH CALLED
the Coercive Acts were referred to by the residents of Massachusetts as the Intolerable Acts. It was a label that resonated with most colonists.

Nearly five months passed before the colonists knew precisely how North’s government would respond to the Boston Tea Party. That lengthy period was crucial for the leaders of the Massachusetts resistance movement. It provided them with an opportunity to explain Boston’s violent resistance to the Tea Act and to build a common front against London’s anticipated reprisals.

On the day after the events on Griffin’s Wharf, Boston’s popular leaders had called on Paul Revere for help. A muscular thirty-nine-year-old silversmith who had been active in the city’s resistance movement since the Stamp Act, Revere may have been among the “Mohawks” who dumped tea in Boston Harbor. The next morning he was asked by the leaders to ride to New York and Philadelphia with dispatches clarifying, and justifying, the Boston Tea Party. Revere sped away on his mission, the first of five long rides that he would make to these two cities. The account of what had occurred in Boston that he carried southward sketched out a narrative showing that Governor Hutchinson and his “Cabal” had turned a deaf ear to the “conciliatory” alternatives proposed by the patriots. It was Hutchinson who had “provoke[d] the people to destroy the Tea,” and it was the Royal Governor who was “answerable for the Destruction of the Tea.”
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Over the next several days the resistance leaders in Boston discovered that the Tea Act had been defied in New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. To their joy, Boston’s radicals learned too that no colony had condemned the violence in Massachusetts and that many newspapers throughout America ecstatically reported the destruction of the tea. The
Pennsylvania Journal
, for instance, presented the story of the Boston Tea Party as a festive “Christmas Box” to its readers. Town after town within New England applauded what had occurred in Boston Harbor, and during the winter the inhabitants of some villages proudly demonstrated that they were made from the same mettle as the Bostonians. When attempts were made in Hull, Massachusetts, and Shrewsbury, Connecticut, to sell East India Company tea—presumably that which had been saved from the fatally damaged
William
in Provincetown—crowds gathered and destroyed the tea chests. When a tavern owner in Weston, Massachusetts, tried to sell the commodity, a mob tore down his inn, though not before its members had helped themselves to all the liquor on the premises.
²

Throughout the winter and early spring, rumors of how the North ministry would respond spread like wildfire through New England. Some accounts had North caving in and telling the East India Company that it was solely responsible for gaining restitution for its lost tea. Wishful thinking of that sort ended in April, when sobering word arrived of the fury that percolated through the mother country. Some of the news was reported by Franklin, who advised that the “violent destruction of the Tea seems to have united all Parties here” against Massachusetts. Orders for “seizing persons”—that is, for arresting those responsible for the destruction of the tea—could not be ruled out, he added.
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On May 10 a vessel from London brought to Boston the jarring texts of the Intolerable Acts. Boston’s leaders at last learned that their city and province had been singled out for punishment. They knew at once that Massachusetts could not solely endure Britain’s retribution. A united front was essential if London was to be made to back down. Within seventy-two hours of learning the terms of the Intolerable Acts, the Boston Committee of Correspondence, in league with similar committees from eight nearby towns, sent word to their counterparts throughout America. Boston, the message exclaimed, had been “tried and condemned” without a hearing. The Bostonians’ bigger concern was that North’s ministry and Parliament wished to divide and conquer the colonies. Boston “is now Suffering … Vengeance in the Common Cause of America.” Be aware, they advised, that next “
you
will be called on to surrender your Rights.” Admitting that Boston could not “struggle alone,” the Massachusetts committees appealed for “joint Efforts” to resist this “Indignation.” They specifically urged “at least” the suspension of all trade with Great Britain by each of the thirteen American colonies and those in the West Indies “till the Act for Blocking up this [Boston] Harbor be repealed.” Utilizing dispatch riders and other channels, including the post office, Boston at the same moment appealed to towns and colonies throughout America for food and assorted supplies to sustain its beleaguered citizens while the harbor remained closed. Samuel Adams wrote some of the appeals and edited the remainder, taking pains to score every possible propaganda point. Boston’s entreaties were not without success. Within weeks aid poured in from as far away as Nova Scotia and Georgia; New York generously pledged to feed Boston for ten years.
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Revere carried Boston’s appeal into Rhode Island and Connecticut, after which he made a second ride to New York and Philadelphia. In addition to the pleas for provisions, Revere’s saddlebags contained confidential letters from Samuel Adams to leaders elsewhere. Adams once again outlined what he had said in countless newspaper essays. Wealth had corrupted the mother country. The decadence that came from a never-ending chase after “luxury and dissipation, … vanity and extravagance,” had driven Britain’s rulers to try to get their hands on American revenue in order to feed their wastrel habits. To this Adams added what he was not prepared to say publicly: Unless London ceased its exploitive policies and returned to “principles of moderation and equity,” its policies would inevitably result in “
the entire separation and independence of the colonies
.”
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Samuel Adams was fifty-two years old in 1774. Though he was sixteen years younger than Franklin, Adams was considerably older than most of those who are thought of as American Founders. Adams was ten years older than Washington, thirteen years older than his cousin John Adams, and nearly twenty years the senior of Thomas Jefferson. At a time when 95 percent of the colonists lived in rural America, Adams was thoroughly urban—so citified, in fact, that he did not know how to ride a horse. Adams may not have traveled much, but his reputation had spread throughout America. After Franklin, he may have been the best-known American by the time of the Intolerable Acts.

Adams’s father, Samuel Adams Sr., had been a Boston Puritan who succeeded as a brewer and merchant. The senior Adams had also been a major player in Boston’s politics, helping to shape a political faction in the 1730s and 1740s that advocated policies at odds with those pursued by Massachusetts’s royal government. Young Samuel, who had been raised in comfortable surroundings, received an excellent education, eventually earning two degrees from Harvard College. But soon after he completed college, his father suffered financial ruin, a calamity brought on when a banking scheme of which he was a part failed in the early 1740s. The financial debacle occurred in part as a result of the opposition of Thomas Hutchinson, who disapproved of Adams Sr.’s bank, and because Parliament disallowed it. Meanwhile, young Samuel had gone to work for a Boston mercantile firm. Temperamentally unsuited for the world of business, he predictably failed, and he foundered yet again when he took over his late father’s brewery toward the end of the 1740s.

Much of Samuel’s life in the fifteen years that followed—until he gained prominence in the protest against Britain—is shrouded in mystery. Indeed, the adult life of no other major Revolutionary leader is so obscure for such a long period of time as that of Samuel Adams through the 1750s and early 1760s. It is known that his wife of eight years died in 1757 of complications from pregnancy. He remained a widower for seven years, but in 1764 Adams wed Elizabeth Wells, a twenty-nine-year-old English immigrant who apparently had never previously married. Her father, who had emigrated as well, provided Adams with money, as his former father-in-law also continued to do. Without their financial assistance, Adams, his wife, and his two children—both from his first marriage—could not have gotten by as he struggled to earn a living from a series of low-paying municipal jobs, including posts as town scavenger, tax assessor, and tax collector. Contemporaries reported that, even with the beneficence of his fathers-in-law, Adams and his family lived on the margins of poverty, so hard up that kindly neighbors often provided food and clothing.

Adams’s economic plight appears to have been brought about by his obsession with politics. He had been captivated by politics while still a young boy and had relished listening to his activist father’s stories and reflections. Sometimes he sat in on political meetings held in his home. John Adams once remarked that “Mr. Sam. Adams … was born a Rebel.”
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More likely, it was the circumstances of his father’s financial misfortune that drew Samuel Adams deeper into politics and forged his militancy. From an early age, Samuel was aware that his father’s banking scheme, which had been widely popular in Boston, had been laid waste by a handful of officials in a faraway capital and their minions in America.

By the late 1750s Adams belonged to nearly every liberal political club in Boston. Like his father before him, he also was a major player in the Boston Caucus, something akin to a steering committee for the Country Party, the faction that resisted the policies of the royal governor. From the outset of his activism, Adams had been an implacable foe of Hutchinson and others who he believed had helped ruin his father, and the adversary too of a host of royal officials in Massachusetts who had worked tirelessly to seize and sell what remained of his father’s estate. It was in the course of his long battle to save the family’s property that Samuel learned much about politics, including how to use the press. He published an untold number of essays in Boston’s newspapers excoriating his foes, usually portraying them as inveterate enemies of liberty and property. After years of struggle, he finally won the battle to retain his father’s estate.

Samuel Adams by John Singleton Copley. A leader of Boston’s protest, Adams served in Congress from 1774 until 1781. Because he frightened many moderates, Adams remained in the background in Congress. He probably favored independence before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. (Photograph © 2011 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Given his outlook, and his two decades of political activism, Adams was perfectly prepared to play a crucial role in Boston’s resistance to Britain’s new colonial policies after 1765. He had few equals as an agitator, a fact subsequently acknowledged by Jefferson, who described Samuel Adams as “truly
the Man of the Revolution
,” a master of intrigue, subversion, and propaganda, and the man most responsible for giving birth to the colonial rebellion. John Adams concurred, remarking that Samuel had done more than anyone to shape and guide America’s resistance to imperial policies. In the tempest spawned by British taxation and regulation, Samuel Adams rapidly emerged as Boston’s premier political figure, drawing on the political skills he had previously honed.

Adams tended to politics with a feverish intensity, entertaining in his home, attending meetings, working with committees, socializing with artisans, drinking with laborers. While not an original thinker, he displayed a deft hand as an organizer. (He even took the lead in forming singing clubs for Boston’s artisans, probably as a subtle means of bringing them together, but also as a means of fostering a relationship with them.) In addition, Adams was among the first to understand the use of crowds. There can be little doubt that he was among those who mobilized the feral mobs that rampaged in Boston in 1765 protesting the Stamp Act and tearing down Hutchinson’s mansion. Three years later Adams carefully controlled the crowds that poured into the streets to demand the repeal of the Townshend Duties, seeing to it that they remained orderly, though menacing. Adams was a decent orator—one observer said that he spoke with a “nervous eloquence”—though he lacked the flair of Patrick Henry or Richard Henry Lee. His talent as a writer surpassed his ability as a public speaker, at least when it came to composing inflammatory tracts. One of his victims said that Adams’s pen “stung like an horned snake.” But Adams’s greatest strength was his uncanny ability to converse easily with men from every social and economic class, and even with the rustics sent to the Massachusetts assembly by the interior farming communities. Those who respected Samuel Adams and thought of him as a sincere companion ranged from the wealthiest merchants to tradesmen to brawny and uneducated—even illiterate—common laborers.