Patriots (21 page)

Adams, now twenty-eight, argued himself out of any doubts about marrying Abigail by entering a list of her virtues in his diary: “Tender feeling, sensible, friendly, a friend. Not an impudent, not an indelicate, not a disagreeable word or action. Prudent, modest, delicate, soft, sensible,
obliging, active.” But at nineteen, Abigail was perplexed by the difference between the suitor she knew, ardent, kindly, sensitive, and her friends’ impression of him as stiff and formidable. It troubled her that her friends—and sometimes she herself—felt ill at ease with him. Abigail, though, had learned how to deal with Adams when he became pompous. Once he complained to her that she was too free in crossing her legs when she sat. “A gentleman,” Abigail replied, “has no business to concern himself about the
legs of a lady.”

If the world found him haughty or ill-tempered, Abigail Smith knew better. She saw the man of the diary, not the drawing room, and agreed to marry him. Her choice baffled her father’s congregation. John Adams, with a bland face that could have been carved from suet, was not distinguished enough in family or prospects to deserve a fine-featured beauty like their preacher’s daughter. The resentment grew until Abigail’s father based his first sermon after the wedding on a verse from Luke: “For John came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and ye say, he hath a devil.”

John Adams did have a devil. It was his ambition. As the patriot cause spread, he had drafted Braintree’s brief against obeying the Stamp Act and had published well-received essays in the newspapers. But at the next election for selectmen from Braintree he was passed over, and he poured out his mortification to his diary.

With marriage, however, Adams’ entries were less self-lacerating. He became more assured socially, although his politics remained in flux. When Joseph Warren urged him to take an active part in the Boston Town Meeting, Adams replied that those public appearances were the
path to madness; Warren knew he meant James Otis. And Adams detested the Boston mob.

When the patriot fervor waned in the later years of the 1760s, John Adams had pulled further from the fray. He did refuse a high post in the Admiralty Court because of his Whig principles, and the sight of British troops on Boston Common never stopped enraging him. But most of the time Adams was back to providing for his family. At Salem he defended a man charged with fathering a bastard and managed an acquittal after his client testified in court, “I fucked once, but I minded my pullbacks. I swear I did
not get her with child.”

In August 1769, Adams had accepted a dinner invitation from three hundred and fifty Sons of Liberty in Dorchester to mark the fourth anniversary of the Stamp Act protest. Adams knew that James Otis and Samuel Adams promoted the celebration hoping to revive the flagging patriot spirit. John Adams went only as an onlooker. His pleasure in the lawyers’ club was being marred in that same period by Otis and his dervish moods. “He talks so much,” Adams wrote in his diary, “and takes up so much of our time, and fills it with trash, obsceneness, profaneness, nonsense and distraction that we have no [time] left for
rational amusements or inquiries.”

That had been John Adams’ life on the eve of the shootings in Boston. He remained convinced that moral laws made men equal and independent, but thought he was realistic about the physical and mental differences among them. Adams’ self-appraisal had led him to decide that the supreme urges of the human race were a need for fame and a love of power.

—

The morning after the fatal shootings on King Street, John Adams was sitting in his office near the steps of Town House when
James Forrest knocked at his door. Born in Ireland, Forrest was a successful merchant and a staunch Tory. With tears pouring down his cheeks, he said he had come with a very solemn message from a very unfortunate man. Adams, who knew Forrest slightly,
watched his florid weeping and recalled that he was often called the Irish Infant. His message was from Captain Preston, who was in prison and needed legal counsel but could get none.

Thomas Hutchinson

MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Adams didn’t know that it was Thomas Hutchinson who had recommended him to Preston, along with another young patriot lawyer, Josiah Quincy. The previous night Hutchinson had acquitted himself well, hurrying at first report to the site of the shooting. Once there, he found the noise from the crowd so loud that he couldn’t question Captain Preston. With Bostonians pressing
in on them, the acting governor went to the balcony of Town House and promised that justice would be done. “The law shall have its course!” Hutchinson cried. “I will live and
die by the law!”

After the people had gone home, Hutchinson had stayed on for most of the night, sending out justices of the peace to take depositions from eyewitnesses. By 3
A.M.
Captain Preston had agreed to surrender, and the long night ended as he was led to jail.

The patriots could only speculate about why Hutchinson would recommend Quincy and John Adams. Perhaps if either of them refused, it might be taken as proof that the patriots put their politics above justice, and yet if they accepted, their prestige might wane among the Sons of Liberty. Or Hutchinson may simply have observed John Adams in court and believed he was the best lawyer for so difficult a case. After the
Liberty
affair, the customs officers had sued John Hancock for smuggling, and Hancock had hired John Adams to defend him. The case had become painful drudgery for Adams as it dragged on throughout the winter, but at last the government had dropped its charges.

So it wasn’t necessarily a Tory trick that Forrest was standing before him, telling him that Josiah Quincy had said he would represent Preston and his men only if Adams would join the defense.

Forrest must understand, Adams told him, that this case would be as important as any ever tried in any court or country of the world. An accused person with his life at stake should have the counsel of his choice. But Captain Preston must expect from Adams no art or sophistry or prevarication, nothing more than fact, evidence and what the law would justify.

Forrest assured him that Captain Preston desired nothing more. From all that he had heard of John Adams, Preston had said, he could trust his life to him. “And,” Forrest added, “as God Almighty is my judge, I believe him to be an innocent man.”

“That,” John Adams reminded him, “must be ascertained by his trial, and if he cannot have a fair trial of that issue without my assistance,
without hesitation he shall have it.”

Forrest offered him a single guinea as retainer and Adams accepted it. Money was not the issue.

As John Adams took on Preston’s defense, Samuel Adams was savoring the sweetest moment in a lifetime of political agitating. He and the other patriots were referring to the killings the previous night as “the Boston Massacre,” and today thousands of men were crowding into Faneuil Hall, echoing Adams’ demand of the past two years: the British troops must leave Boston. At Town House, Thomas Hutchinson had to push his way through a delegation of Boston selectmen in order to meet with his Council. The Council members proved to be divided, but several members urged Hutchinson to order the troops out of town. He refused. The selectmen were admitted to the chamber and told Hutchinson of their fears. When they finished, he repeated that he did not have the power to order Colonel Dalrymple to remove his forces to Castle William.

Faced with that impasse, the meeting at Faneuil Hall sent a messenger to tell the selectmen to return there. Samuel Adams had organized a committee that would call on the acting governor and impress the people’s will on him even more urgently. The crowd at the hall had now reached three thousand, though the number of legal voters in Boston was only half that number. This time, Samuel Adams decided against sending other men to do his bidding. He and John Hancock and other leaders would confront Hutchinson directly. Hutchinson braced for the encounter by asking both Colonel Dalrymple and Colonel Carr to remain at his side.

The delegates were shown in. They took off their gold-laced hats from large white wigs and placed them on the table in front of them. When they had laid down their ultimatum, they retired to a nearby room while Hutchinson once again canvassed his Council. Now all but two members were urging him to give in. Hutchinson remained adamant. At that point, Colonel Dalrymple proposed a compromise. Since the Twenty-ninth Regiment was especially obnoxious to the Bostonians, and since the orders for that regiment originally called for them to be billeted at Castle William, Dalrymple was prepared to move them there while he awaited instructions from General Gage in New York.

When the town’s committee filed back into the chamber, Hutchinson repeated that he lacked authority over the troops but intimated that one regiment, the Twenty-ninth, might be removed.

Then Samuel Adams, confronting his lifetime adversary not
by letter or through the newspapers but face to face, gave his answer:

“If you have the power to remove one regiment,” Adams said, “you have the power to remove both. It is at your peril if you refuse. The meeting is composed of three thousand people. They are becoming impatient. A thousand men are already arrived from the neighborhood, and the whole country is in motion. Night is approaching. An immediate answer is expected.

“Both regiments or none!”

The room fell silent. Hutchinson tried to recover his bargaining position. You alone, he told the delegation, have the power to calm the people, and you must use it.

No, said Deacon William Philips, even if we got down on our knees before them, it would have no effect.

Know then, said Hutchinson, that if there is further violence or an attempt to drive the troops out of Boston, everyone who advised or abetted that effort will be
guilty of high treason.

Hutchinson stood, ending the interview, but Colonel Dalrymple stopped him. Wouldn’t Hutchinson agree to meet again with his Council that afternoon?

“I can do nothing further,” Hutchinson said, moving toward the door.

But Dalrymple repeated his request, and several Council members seconded him. Hutchinson agreed to another meeting that afternoon.

During a break for noontime dinner, Dalrymple sought out Hutchinson’s advisers with a further compromise. If, instead of issuing a direct order, the acting governor would simply express a desire that the troops be removed from town, Dalrymple would oblige him.

At 3
P.M.
a regular Town Meeting was convened at Faneuil Hall. The numbers again were so great that the session was moved to the Old South Meeting-house. Even there the overflow filled Cornhill Street. Samuel Adams read out Hutchinson’s concessions about one regiment, but his own answer had circulated among the audience beforehand, and they roared, “Both regiments or none!”

Hutchinson had watched the meeting move from Faneuil Hall past the doors of Town House to the Old South. When he convened the afternoon session, he knew he was alone with his decision. Samuel Adams had come back for the kill, and he noted
with relish that Hutchinson’s knees were trembling as he received news of the vote at the Town Meeting. Once more, the Boston delegation was asked to wait while Hutchinson met with his Council. Now even the two who had supported him in the morning had turned against his position. This current crisis, they warned Hutchinson, was not provoked by the sort of people who pulled down your house five years ago. This time, the rebellion is led by some of the very best men among us—wealthy men, religious men. Thomas Hutchinson took their remarks as proof that the whole bloody affair on King Street had been plotted by a clique of patriots as a callous way of getting the troops out of Boston. But even if they were making a confession, their admission didn’t ease his dilemma.

Hutchinson was assured that if the British troops stayed on, ten thousand men from throughout the province would march on Boston and annihilate them. Boston’s charter, its property, its future, all would be lost. Hutchinson asked the Council members to reconsider. They would not. Even his kinsman Andrew Oliver told him to yield.

At last, Hutchinson gave in.

Colonel Dalrymple tried to console him. “What else could you do?” he asked.

Hutchinson said, “Retire to the Castle and remain there until the people come to their senses.”

“And take the troops with you,” said their commander.

—

Three days after the shootings on King Street, funerals were held for the victims. Every shop in Boston was closed, and church bells tolled across the countryside. The procession for young Snider had been immense; this day’s march was even greater—ten thousand people, perhaps twelve thousand. The bodies of Crispus Attucks and James Caldwell, who had no house in town, had been placed in Faneuil Hall. Samuel Maverick was taken from his mother’s house in Union Street, Samuel Gray from his brother’s house in Royal Exchange Lane. The four hearses met in King Street. There they were joined by the coaches of Boston’s leading citizens. Behind that came a column of men six abreast and stretching for blocks through the town. The file proceeded to the Liberty Tree and then to the Old Granary Burying Ground, where the four
bodies were lowered into a
common grave. Curiosity had brought out even Hutchinson’s supporters. The loyalist clergyman Mather Byles watched the cortege and rephrased to a companion the question that Theophilus Lillie had raised two weeks before: “They call me a brainless Tory. But tell me, my young friend, which is better–to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away, or by three thousand
tyrants not one mile away?”