Independence (13 page)

Stout and of middling height, Samuel Adams was not charismatic. But he was ruggedly handsome and comfortable with male comaraderie. Good politicians are often good actors, and Adams had a chameleonlike skill at self-presentation. His public persona of flinty toughness led to him being described as “staunch and stiff and strict, and rigid,” not a man who could be bullied by the powerful and certainly not one who would ever betray his followers. Abigail Adams was struck by Samuel’s “obliging, engaging Manners” and thought him a man of “genteel Erudition.” Her husband, John, a Harvard graduate, saw Samuel as “polished, refined.” Others saw him as an ordinary man who dressed simply, lived modestly, and worshipped regularly, singing in his church choir. Workers must have glimpsed uncontrived down-to-earth qualities in him. On the other hand, Samuel Adams’s foremost enemies, including Hutchinson, dismissed him as “a great Demagogue” given to “low art and cunning.” No matter how varied and dissimilar, each description captured a side of Samuel Adams.
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Virtually alone among America’s principal Founders, Samuel Adams seems not to have been driven by personal ambition. An American whose Puritan ancestors had emigrated more than a century before the Stamp Act, Adams may never have been enthralled with Great Britain; and to be sure, whatever affection he ever felt for the mother country vanished after his father’s fortunes were ruined by British officials. But private rancor alone did not drive Adams. Eighteenth-century England was in the throes of a great economic transformation, which Adams did not fully understand but which made him uncomfortable, for he feared that what he perceived to be the luxury and dissipation sweeping the mother country threatened New England’s old Puritan virtues.

By the 1770s nearly a quarter of England’s population was engaged in industry, building, and commerce. What has been called a “commercial revolution” and a “consumer revolution” was afoot with seminal social consequences. Industrial capitalism was reshaping many facets of English life. As historian J. H. Plumb has written, “the hold of the past had been weakened” and “old traditions and old techniques” were tottering. It is easier to comprehend the changes today than it was in Adams’s time, but it is clear that he found Great Britain’s stupendous growth of wealth, and what he regarded as that wealth’s malign influence, to be especially disconcerting. Life in the British homeland seemed to him to be increasingly shaped by an irrepressible urge for ever more riches and by an insatiable lust for sumptuous indulgences. Such things were “
Superfluities
,” he said, and likened chasing after them to the “
worshipping of graven images
” worthy of “the
whore of Babylon
.” He believed that the inexhaustible covetousness that had seized the ruling class in the mother country was what lay behind their desperate plans for using coercion and force to “enslave the colonists” and render “the greater part of the people in Britain … slaves.”
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While most who would embrace the American Revolution looked to a new world, Samuel Adams was uncomfortable with modernity and sought to preserve an older New England world that lay far from Britain’s reach and was as yet untainted by the supposed decay in the homeland. He longed to preserve the old Puritan virtues, what he called “the ancestral Spirit of Liberty” and “the ancient principles” of a moral society. Adams had been careful never to publicly utter the word “independence” before 1774. To do so would have been not just a seditious act; it would have been politically ill-advised. One can only guess when he came to hope for American independence, but, like others, he knew as early as 1765 that a break with Britain was a conceivable outcome of the imperial troubles, and it is not likely that he was troubled by such a possibility.
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With Massachusetts singled out for retribution, Samuel Adams’s goal in May 1774 was to achieve a united American response. Once he secured the formation of the Solemn League and Covenant, a formal commitment by the towns of Massachusetts to boycott all British imports after September 1, he appealed to the other colonies to adopt a similar embargo. That was all he asked for. Adams knew that some in Massachusetts hoped each colony would send delegates to a continental congress that might hammer out a unified national response, but he was wary. He wanted rapid action and knew that it would take weeks for the colonies to agree to a congress and still more time for them to elect their congressmen and for those delegates to finally assemble. Thereafter, months might elapse before the congress took any action, if it acted at all. Nor could Adams be sure what a national congress would do. The Stamp Act Congress in 1765, given to waffling, had not endorsed an embargo of British trade and had adopted a namby-pamby statement on American rights, even acknowledging that the colonists owed “all due subordination” to Parliament. Even if a continental congress was an improvement and agreed to a trade embargo, additional months would pass before any boycott was finally put in place. The Boston Port Act was to take effect on June 1. Adams wanted a national boycott in place as soon after that date as possible.
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While Adams had serious reservations about a congress, others thought such a gathering was essential. By June 1—a day of peaceful protest in numerous colonies, observed by flying flags at half mast, fasting, and the melancholy tolling of muffled bells—momentum was building for a national conclave. Already, several towns and the Rhode Island and Connecticut committees of correspondence had called for a continental congress. Connecticut’s committee, in fact, had urged two congresses: a gathering of the northern colonies in July and a national meeting later.
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No single motive drove those who desired a national congress. Some wanted a congress in the hope that it would agree to something less provocative than a national boycott. Others, including Philadelphia’s merchants, who had lost commerce to nearby Baltimore when Maryland had not joined the embargo against the Townshend Duties, wanted a guarantee that this time the trade stoppage would be observed by every colony. Some believed a display of American unity would be the best means of forcing London to back down. Others prayed that a national congress might be a vehicle for arranging a compromise solution to the imperial crisis. Not a few saw a congress as the best means of restraining the radical firebrands in violence-prone Massachusetts. Still others thought hostilities were unavoidable. For them, a congress was essential for securing American unity prior to the conflict. Others wished to measure sentiment throughout the colonies before they agreed to steps that could lead to war.
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By the second week in June the notion of a continental congress had begun to take on an air of inevitability, leaving Samuel Adams with little choice but to endorse the idea. Besides, he glimpsed a promise that something good could come from a congress. Colony after colony had condemned the Intolerable Acts. The Boston Port Act had been widely denounced as a measure that would make the innocent suffer along with the guilty. A number of colonies had seen the Administration of Justice Act as confirmation that Britain aimed to negate all aspects of American autonomy. But it was the Massachusetts Government Act that aroused the most concern and scorn, for in that legislation Parliament had arbitrarily altered the Bay Colony’s charter. Issued by the Crown at the time each province came into being, the charters were viewed by most colonists as sacrosanct written constitutions that structured the provincial governments and guaranteed the colonists the “rights of Englishmen.” As was true of the residents of Massachusetts, whose charter had been in place for nearly a century, few Americans could remember a time when their colony’s charter had not existed. But if London could arbitrarily obliterate Massachusetts’s charter, it could do the same with any colony’s. And if London could unilaterally change a charter, what would it change next? Would suffrage rights be curtailed? Would the number of elected officials be decreased? Would the Anglican Church be made the established church in each colony? Would the Quakers in Pennsylvania and other minority sects still be able to worship freely?
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By early August every colony, with the exception of Georgia, a new and remote province, had chosen to participate in a national congress and had appointed its delegates. As governors dissolved or prorogued the assemblies in the hope of preventing them from meeting, the assemblymen in many colonies simply acted through illegal bodies. In Virginia, for instance, the members of the House of Burgesses learned on May 24 that the royal governor, John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore, had dissolved the legislature. The next day, most of the burgesses gathered at the nearby Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, reconstituted themselves as an “association,” and urged a boycott of East India Company tea. Some seventy-five days later, after two other southern colonies, Maryland and South Carolina, had voted in extralegal assemblies to send delegates to a continental congress, the former members of the House of Burgesses convened again in Williamsburg as the Virginia Convention. This time they endorsed a continental congress and chose seven delegates to attend.
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Formidable opposition to a congress existed only in New York and Pennsylvania. Soon after word of the Coercive Acts arrived in May, a meeting of three hundred Manhattan merchants created the Committee of Fifty-One. In this hub of commerce, the merchant-dominated committee controlled New York City politics throughout that summer. The committee was deeply divided from the outset. Many businessmen had no stomach for another ruinous trade embargo and no particular empathy for Massachusetts. Some not only resisted the push for a national congress but also urged that the committee adopt a statement applauding the change in Massachusetts’s charter. Committee meetings were so heated that fistfights were common, and on one occasion Isaac Sears, who was sometimes thought of as the “Samuel Adams of Manhattan,” was subjected to a “good drubbing,” according to a colleague. The committee wrangled for nearly ten weeks before it sanctioned the province’s participation in the congress, and then it selected a slate of Manhattan-only delegates that did not include Sears. When elected, the delegates announced that “at present” they favored an embargo. New York was backing a continental congress, but reluctantly, and largely as its merchants believed that such a meeting offered the last best hope for reaching an accommodation with the mother country and avoiding rebellion and social upheaval.
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Pennsylvania’s merchants were no more enthralled with the prospect of a congress and the loss of trade than their counterparts in Manhattan, and they resisted both steps through the Assembly Party, the political party that Franklin and Joseph Galloway had created two decades earlier, The Assembly Party had been formed prior to the imperial crisis, and the cornerstone of its existence had been to make Pennsylvania a royal province. For a very long time after Franklin went to London in 1764 to campaign for a royal charter, Galloway continued to believe that such a change was likely. Galloway’s optimism arose in no small part because of Franklin’s buoyant reports. To say that Franklin was not always candid with Galloway would be an understatement. By 1768 at the latest, Franklin correctly concluded that all hope was lost that the British government would royalize Pennsylvania. With Galloway, however, Franklin put on a sanguine face. It was true that the current ministry would never consent to royalization, Franklin reported in 1768, but he inexplicably predicted that better days lay ahead. A “Party is now growing in our Favour,” Franklin said. Five months later he told Galloway that “our Friends are … increasing.” In 1770 he intimated that as Lord North held Pennsylvania in high regard, his ministry might recommend royalization, but only if the colony remained quiet and caused no problems for the British government. Franklin’s ongoing cheeriness about royalization was a stretch at best, a calculated falsehood at worst. Not infrequently, Franklin exhibited a penchant for duplicity, and in this instance, whether from his burning hatred of the proprietors or his all-consuming ambition, he strung Galloway along. Franklin enticed his friend to oppose the foes of Parliament’s taxes. Meanwhile, quietly and covertly, Franklin opened channels with John Dickinson and other Proprietary Party leaders, who were managing Pennsylvania’s resistance to parliamentary taxation. For a long time—a fatally long time—Galloway believed what Franklin was telling him. After all, they had been friends and allies for years, and Franklin was on the scene in London. By the time Galloway understood Franklin’s guile, he had painted himself into a corner from which escape was nearly impossible.
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Forty-four years old in 1774, Galloway was considerably younger than Franklin. He had been born into a comfortable and upwardly mobile Quaker family in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, though while he was still a child, his parents moved to Kent, Delaware. Galloway had not attended college, but after years of private tutoring and an apprenticeship to a lawyer, he moved to Philadelphia and opened his own law practice at age eighteen. As his practice flourished, Galloway rose rapidly in Philadelphia society. He joined elite clubs and fraternities, gained entrée to intellectual and scientific circles (he served for a time as the vice president of the American Philosophical Society), and in 1753 married Grace Growden, the daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia merchant who simultaneously sat as a judge on Pennsylvania’s highest court and served as the speaker of the house in the Pennsylvania assembly. Long before Galloway reached his thirtieth birthday, he owned a large town house on Market Street in Philadelphia and five country estates, the greatest of which, Trevose, stood majestically in Bucks County, north of the city.