Patriots (24 page)

As the shops were closing, a man marched down the main street of Providence, beating a drum. He directed anyone who wanted to help destroy the troublesome ship to a house on the wharf. Ephraim Bowen, nineteen years old, heard the call. At 9
P.M.
, with his father’s gun and his own powder horn and bullets, he went to the meeting spot. The room was already filled. Some men were going to the kitchen next door to cast their bullets. At ten o’clock the group crossed the wharf and boarded the longboats. Each boat had a sea captain to guide it.

Silently, the protesters rowed the boats into a line and moved toward the
Gaspee.
They got within sixty yards of their target before a sentinel called, “Who goes there?” They gave no answer. A minute later, Lieutenant Dudingston, in shirtsleeves but with a pistol in his hand, mounted the starboard gunwale and called, “Who comes there?”

The second time, Captain Abraham Whipple shouted back, “I am the sheriff of the county of Kent, God damn you! I have got a warrant to apprehend you, God damn you! So, surrender, God damn you!”

A man standing in the boat with Ephraim Bowen said, “Eph, reach me your gun and I can kill that fellow.” Bowen handed him the gun, and before Captain Whipple had finished his cursing the man fired through the darkness at Lieutenant Dudingston and exclaimed, “I have killed the rascal!”

In less than a minute after the challenge, the boats were alongside the
Gaspee
and the colonists were boarding without a fight. At the sight of their wounded commander, the crew on deck melted away.

A medical student in the raiding party, John Mawney, grasped a rope from the
Gaspee
’s bow and tried to swing himself on deck.
The rope slipped and he fell to his waist in water. When he recovered and boarded the schooner, Mawney found his friends tying the hands of the crew with tar-coated string. John Brown saw him and beckoned him to the deck. Brown told him not to mention any names but to go immediately into the cabin. There was a man bleeding to death inside.

Mawney entered the cabin. Lieutenant Dudingston was sitting huddled under a thin white blanket with blood pouring from his wound. Mawney saw that a musket ball had ripped open the lieutenant’s groin, five inches below his navel. He feared that the femoral artery had been severed, and he undid his waistcoat, took his shirt by the collar and began tearing it for bandages.

Dudingston stopped him. “Pray, sir, don’t tear your clothes. There is linen in that trunk.”

Mawney called on one of the raiding party to break open the trunk and start to tear linen and to scrape lint. The other man tried, but the linen was too new and stiff to raise lint from it. Mawney had pressed the heel of his left hand against Dudingston’s wound, and he directed his helper to slip his hand underneath Mawney’s own and press hard to keep the blood stanched. With that, Mawney tore the linen into compresses, stacked them six deep and told the other man to raise his hand. Mawney slapped the compresses into the gaping wound, wrapped another strip firmly around Dudingston’s thigh and pulled it tight.

As Mawney worked, other voices were calling to him. Finally the cabin door was forced open, and men from the raiding party rushed in to destroy Dudingston’s liquor supply. Mawney broke each bottle under the heels of his boots while others in the party carried Lieutenant Dudingston out of the cabin to one of the longboats. The rebel leaders told the
Gaspee
’s crew to collect their clothes and other belongings, put them onto the boats and set out for shore. One of the raiding boats stayed behind to set the
Gaspee
on fire. From a distance, the Rhode Islanders watched it burn down to the water line. Dudingston was put ashore at Pawtuxet, along with five men and a blanket for carrying him.

Almost everyone understood that since a king’s officer had been badly wounded and a king’s ship destroyed, secrecy was essential. Yet the next morning one young raider, Justin Jacobs, was found standing on the Great Bridge in Providence, wearing Lieutenant Dudingston’s gold-laced beaver hat and telling everyone
about the exploit. Other men from the expedition told him to take off the hat and shut up.

Rhode Island’s deputy governor, Darius Sessions, called on Lieutenant Dudingston that same day to make amends on behalf of the colony. He offered anything—money, surgeons, transfer to another place. The lieutenant asked that his men be collected and sent to Newport or Boston. But he refused to tell Sessions what had happened. Dudingston had let his ship be taken away from him, and if he lived he faced a court-martial. But if he died, Dudingston wanted the night’s humiliation to die with him.

—

When Thomas Hutchinson heard about the burning of the
Gaspee
, he said that if so flagrant an insult to England was ignored, all friends of the government would despair. But this indignity would surely rouse the British lion, which Hutchinson thought had been asleep these past four or five years. He decided that executing a few of the raiders would be the only effective way to prevent further attacks. At its last session, Parliament had extended the death penalty until a man could now be hanged for destroying so much as an oar on one of the king’s boats.

The alarm quickly reached London. The attorney general called the
burning five times as serious as the Stamp Act protests. But revenge would not be easy. Hillsborough ordered Admiral Montagu to go to Rhode Island and arrest the raiders. Then, within a week, Hillsborough resigned as secretary of state for the American Department, and William Legge, second Earl of Dartmouth, replaced him. The change held up Montagu’s mission.

With London in confusion, the Rhode Island patriots sought the expert counsel of Samuel Adams. A group of men, including the deputy governor, wrote to ask him what to do next. Adams agreed with Thomas Hutchinson that the
Gaspee
’s burning should open some eyes. But Adams wrote that it was the American colonists, not the British, who had been “too long dozing upon the brink of ruin.” The
Gaspee
affair should unite them again. Colonists must realize that an attack on one province was an attack on them all.

After pondering further, Adams wrote to Darius Sessions again: “I have long feared this unhappy contest between Great Britain and America would end in rivers of blood. Should that be the case, America, I think, may
wash her hands in innocence.” Still,
Adams said, that dreadful calamity should be prevented if at all possible. He urged Sessions to dissuade Rhode Island’s governor from cooperating with the royal commission being established to investigate the burning. The governor’s participation would only make the inquiry legitimate. And Rhode Island should draft a circular letter to tell the other colonies its side of the affair.

For the Tories, the episode was winding down to an unsatisfactory end. The official inquiry established that many of the raiders seemed to be gentlemen, although no specific names were cited. Lieutenant Dudingston recovered from his wound and tried to send a gold buckle to the man who had saved his life. It went unclaimed. Admiral Montagu’s solution for quelling the lawless people of Rhode Island was to ask London to send him warships.

—

Ever since the collapse of the nonimportation agreements, Samuel Adams had been casting about for a new way to bolster patriot spirits. Reviving the circular letter was his best inspiration. On behalf of the town of Boston, he drafted a pamphlet that attacked Hutchinson for accepting his governor’s salary directly from the crown. Each town in the colony was asked to endorse it. At first Thomas Hutchinson scoffed at the pamphlet as a puny weapon. Even in Boston, the governor wrote, the Whigs had not been able to revive their mob, and now they were trying to correspond with towns around Massachusetts, “which is such a foolish scheme that they must necessarily
make themselves ridiculous.”

For once, Tory optimism did not seem misplaced. James Warren reported to Samuel Adams from Plymouth about the neighboring towns he had been canvassing. “They are dead,” Warren said, “and the dead can’t be raised without a miracle.”

“Nil
desperandum
,” Samuel Adams chided him. Never despair. “That is a motto for you and for me. All are not dead; and where there is a spark of patriotic fire, we will rekindle it.”

What did it matter that the Tories were laughing at their efforts? Samuel Adams said he knew they would, but gradually his faith in the tactic was justified. Endorsements of Boston’s position began to come in from the western towns—from South Hadley, Petersham, Leicester and Lenox; from Essex, Lynn, Marblehead. Even from Plymouth, where James Warren had lost hope. From Framingham and Medford. From Concord. Until more than a third
of the two hundred and sixty towns in the province were allying themselves with Samuel Adams’ position.

On March 12, 1773, the House of Burgesses in Virginia named eleven members to maintain a correspondence with the sister colonies. Four months after Samuel Adams had linked the towns of Massachusetts, the colony of Virginia was expanding his plan into a full-fledged network across America. It was made only of paper, but Adams had forged a union.

—

One day in London, Benjamin Franklin was reviewing America’s affairs with a British friend. Franklin still expected a reconciliation between Britain and the colonies, and he had been angered when the Ministry in London sent troops to Boston. The other man told Franklin he was wrong. All the errors of recent years, he said, had been urged on Hillsborough and now Dartmouth by high-ranking American officials. Franklin claimed not to believe it. To convince him, the friend returned a few days later with a stack of letters.

They had been written between 1768 and 1771 to Thomas Whatley, one of the chief authors of the Stamp Act. Fourteen were from Thomas Hutchinson, and several had come from Andrew Oliver at the time he accepted the post of stamp master. Other Tories had also written frankly and unguardedly to keep Whatley informed of events in the colony. Hutchinson’s correspondence offered nothing that he hadn’t already said publicly many times, but when Franklin saw six of his letters he grasped their value at once. He got permission to send the originals to Boston, but the man who had provided them made certain stipulations: Whatley’s name was to be erased from each letter; no copies were to be made in America; and the letters were to be shown only to a few patriot leaders and then returned to England. Franklin insisted that his only motive in sending off the packet was to ease the bad feeling between the Americans and the London Ministry. The letters reached Thomas Cushing, the Massachusetts House speaker, at the end of March 1773.

History was repeating itself; the patriots remembered the time, four years earlier, when Francis Bernard’s letters had helped to destroy him. But then Edes and Gill had been able to publish them. Cushing wrote to Franklin that if Hutchinson’s letters were to
prove equally damaging, they must be released. Franklin consulted with his friend and replied that the letters still couldn’t be copied or published, but they could be kept in America for as long as they were useful, and they could be shown to anyone.

—

Rural life had palled quickly for John Adams, and he had returned to politics. Making the rounds of Superior Court, he took along Hutchinson’s letters and let them be read in the towns beyond Boston. As early as 1768 Samuel Adams had been suggesting that Hutchinson was engaged in a secret correspondence aimed at destroying America’s liberties. Now, although Adams didn’t have evidence, he had raw material that could be passed off as proof. But because of the restrictions on the letters, Adams didn’t believe they were proving useful, and he felt it was his duty to resolve the dilemma.

Over the next month, the patriots hinted that the letters would bring many dark things to light. The
Massachusetts Spy
, a new Whig newspaper underwritten largely by John Hancock, reported on June 3, 1773, that the amazing discoveries in the letters would make
tyrants tremble. A week later, Samuel Adams announced that copies of the letters had arrived in Boston independently of those that Franklin had sent. To buttress that claim, John
Hancock swore on the House floor that someone had passed this second set of letters to him on Boston Common. No one was fooled, least of all Benjamin Franklin. The copies were a ruse, he said, concocted to let the House break its pledge to him.

On June 15 the letters were published and went on sale, and Americans learned no more than what Hutchinson had said six months earlier during a debate with the legislature—that he believed that a colony because of its distance from the parent state could not enjoy every liberty of the citizens at home. But somehow that same point became far more sinister in a private letter, and Hutchinson was burned in effigy as far away as Philadelphia.

Writing as “Novanglus” in the
Boston Gazette
, John Adams denounced the governor as a vile serpent. In arguing for any abridgement of English liberties in America, Adams wrote, Hutchinson must surely be mad. Josiah Quincy, ignoring his earlier defense of the British soldiers, spoke now of their victims. He called
Hutchinson “the man against whom the blood of our slaughtered brethren
cries from the ground.”

Governor Hutchinson stood by helplessly as his letters were woven with those of other Tories into irrefutable proof of a conspiracy. Throughout America he was being accused of promoting views that he had never expressed, and his explanation of the limits on colonial freedom became, to readers, a call for England to deprive America of all her rights. That last slander, Hutchinson decided, was as though the patriots had accused King David of saying, “There is no God.” But what court could clear his name? The Massachusetts House was demanding that Hutchinson and his lieutenant governor, Andrew Oliver, be removed from their posts. That petition would go to the Privy Council in London, and Hutchinson could hope that its members would absolve him of the patriots’ charges, but the investigation might take months.

Hutchinson wrote to Lord Dartmouth, asking for a leave of six to nine months. If necessary, he would sail to England during that time to defend his reputation. But he was sixty-two years old and prone to seasickness, and he hoped to be spared the voyage. As he waited for a response, communication with England seemed to be slower than ever. The summer passed without Hutchinson receiving word on either the Massachusetts petition or his request for a leave. Cursed on every side in a colony he still loved, the governor waited for instructions.