Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (15 page)
Assessing these years, historian Fred Anderson summarized Washington’s experience in the Virginia theater’s fighting: It would be merely silly, if it were not morally repugnant, to maintain that war builds character. And yet it ought not to be denied that, for better or for worse, military service and combat mold the views and the character of those who experience them. . . . He [Washington] was a man for whom the strains of command and the experience of seeing men killed and wounded as a result of his orders had burned away the delusion that courage and valor—or even victory—will necessarily make the decisive difference that commanders long to achieve. . . . He had gained self-confidence and self-control, and if he could not honestly number humility among his virtues, he had at last begun to understand his limita-tions. George Washington, at age twenty-seven, was not yet the man he would be at age forty or fifty, but he had come an im-
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mense distance in five years’ time. And the hard road he had traveled from Jumonville’s Glen, in ways he would not comprehend for years to come, had done much to prepare him for the harder road that lay ahead.13
a Atermath z
The French and Indian War, the North American phase of the Seven Years’ War, concluded with the fall of Quebec in 1759, a battle in which the French general Montcalm and British general Wolfe both died, and the capture of Montreal the following year. Elsewhere around the rest of world, the fighting continued until the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763. Under its terms, France surrendered almost all of its North American territory to England. In Nova Scotia, the British forced out all of the French living in what was called Acadia. Most of these displaced Acadians traveled south to the vicinity of New Orleans and would later be known as Cajuns.
By the time the war was over, Great Britain also had a new monarch in George III, who had taken the throne in 1760. And in Boston, a feisty American lawyer named James Otis would issue his first political tract and argue that American colonists possessed all the rights of an English citizen.
Meanwhile back in Virginia, the retired Colonel Washington, not yet turned thirty, had slipped into the new and much more comfortable role of country squire. After leaving Virginia’s service he had made his match, marrying Martha Dandridge Custis on January 6, 1759. Barely five feet tall and plump, the twenty-five-year-old Martha, widow of one of Virginia’s wealthiest men, Daniel Parke Custis, gave | 116 \
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George Washington the property, slaves, and wealth he had dreamed of, along with her two children, whom he treated as his own. Now securely numbered among the “well-read, well-fed and well-wed,” as a historian once described the Founding Fathers, Washington became a member of the House of Burgesses, experimented with crops, and turned his attention to other concerns of Virginia’s planter class—such as the problem of runaway slaves.
Fairfax County (Virginia) August 11, 1761
The last of these Negroes were brought from an
African
Ship in
August
1759, and talk very broken and unintelligible English; the second one, Jack, is Countryman to those, and speaks pretty good English, having been several Years in the Country. The other, Peros, speaks much better than either, indeed has little of his Country Dialect left, and is esteemed a sensible, judicious Negro. . . .
. . . Whoever apprehends the said Negroes, so that the Subscriber may readily get them, shall have, if taken up in this County, Forty Shil-lings Reward, beside what the Law allows; and if at any greater Distance, or out of the Colony, a proportionable Recompence paid them, by George Washington
N.B. If they should be taken separately, the Reward will be proportioned.14
At the time George Washington placed that advertisement seeking the return of some runaway slaves in 1761, the gentleman farmer probably did not foresee a future note he would pen, with its reference to a different sort of “slavery.” At the end of a business letter dated May 31, 1775, Washington wrote from Philadelphia to his old friend George William Fairfax: | 117 \
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Before this letter can reach you, you must, undoubtedly have received an Account of the Engagement in the Massachusetts Bay between the Ministerial Troops (for we do not, nor cannot yet prevail upon ourselves to call them the King’s Troops) and the Provincials of that Government. But as you may not have heard how that affair began, I inclose you the several Affidavits that were taken after the action. . . .
Unhappy it is though to reflect that a Brother’s Sword has been sheathed in a Brother’s Breast, and that the once happy and peaceful plains of America are ether to be drenched with Blood, or Inhabited by Slaves. Sad alternative! But can a virtuous man hesitate in his choice?15
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| timeline \
1763 The Treaty of Paris ends the Seven Years’ War.
Pontiac’s Rebellion. Indians overrun British forts on the western frontier, including the British garrison at Detroit.
1764 Parliament passes the Sugar Act to collect American revenue on molasses brought from non-British colonies.
James Otis condemns Britain’s “taxation without representation” at a Boston town meeting; In June, the Massachusetts House of Representatives organizes a Committee of Correspondence to communicate with the other twelve colonies over their common grievances; in August, Boston merchants agree to boycott British luxury imports and are soon joined by the other colonies.
1765 The Stamp Act is passed by Parliament, the first direct tax on the American colonies. Passage of the tax is met with opposition in all thirteen colonies.
The Quartering Act goes into effect. Under it, colonists must provide housing for British troops stationed in America. It provokes further discontent.
Secret groups called Sons of Liberty form to resist the Stamp Act.
1766 The Stamp Act is repealed that same day that the Declaratory Act becomes law, asserting that the British government has the complete power to pass laws governing the American colonies.
1767 The Townshend Revenue Acts place a tax on tea, paper, and other imports.
John Dickinson publishes
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies.
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1768 British warships arrive in Boston to reinforce the customs officials, and two regiments of infantry are billeted in Boston.
1770 On March 5, British troops kill five Boston civilians in what becomes known as the Boston Massacre. Defended by John Adams, the British soldiers charged in the massacre are tried; the commander and six men are acquitted by the civil jury.
1773 The Tea Act is passed. In December, Boston militants hold the Boston Tea Party, destroying British tea in protest.
1774 The Coercive Laws (Intolerable Acts) are passed by Parliament.
On September 5, the First Continental Congress convenes in Philadelphia.
1775 On April 18–19, American militias make stands at Lexington and Concord. On May 10, the British Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain is captured with its rich arsenal of munitions. The Second Continental Congress meets in Philadelphia. On June 14–15, after voting to raise six companies and authorizing salaries for soldiers, Congress unanimously appoints George Washington to lead the Continental army.
Battle of Bunker Hill fought on June 17.
After a twelve-day journey from Philadelphia, George Washington reaches Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 3 and takes command of the Continental army.
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That a Revenue be raised in Your majesty’s Dominions in America for defraying the expenses of defending, protecting, and securing same.
—Preamble to the Sugar Act (1764)
What a glorious morning for America!
—Samuel Adams,
remark after the battles of Lexington and Concord (April 1775)
Our men inlist very slow and our Enemy have got a Re-inforsement of five Regiments and if the New army is not Reased in season I hope I & and all my townsmen shall have virtue anofe to stay all winter as Volentears.
—Joseph Hodgkins,
cobbler and minuteman (November 1775)
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Boston, Massachusetts—March 1775
One of the assassins carried an egg. It was not the weapon of choice. It was merely the signal to begin a brawl, a melee intended to provide cover for the killings. A word spoken against the king was all it would take. The egg would be thrown, a riotous uproar would follow, and in the ensuing panic and confusion, the American rebels targeted for death would either be carted away or finished off. The British officers on hand would see to that. If a few treasonous, upstart Yankee skulls were cracked in the offing, all the better.
The conspiracy was set to unfold during a memorial held on the fifth anniversary of the Boston Massacre, that signal event of March 5, 1770, when a company of British soldiers, pressed by an angry crowd, had opened fire, killing five of Boston’s “town-born.” The memory of those deaths—kept alive by Paul Revere’s engraving, an icon hanging in many patriot homes—had been elevated to something approach-ing a high holy day on Boston’s civic calendar. The service planned for this evening was part solemn remembrance of the dead and part political theater for a crowd whose mood was more combative than somber. The event would serve as a propaganda platform for a town that savored a good public donnybrook every so often and relished any chance to thumb its nose at the occupying British regulars, the hated “lobsterbacks.”
As the huge audience filled Boston’s Old South meetinghouse to overflowing, some of the more volatile members of the crowd may have | 125 \
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had more in mind. One observer, a British lieutenant, reported that “almost every man had a short stick or bludgeon in his hand . . . many of them were privately armed.”1 After all, these were the same people who had hanged royal tax officials in effigy, chased a stamp tax collec-tor from office, riotously ransacked the home of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, burned a British ship, and tarred and feathered more than a few royalists.
For the portly, palsied fifty-three-year-old patriot firebrand Samuel Adams, chief organizer of the evening’s proceedings, this memorial provided a fresh opportunity to goad the British. Adams knew that another deadly attack on Americans might be the spark to galvanize the cause of independence in Massachusetts and throughout the colonies. He also knew Old South and the crowd well. Baptized into this Congregational bastion, Samuel Adams had been there on December 16, 1773, the fateful date of the Tea Party, using his canny genius for focusing and even manipulating the street anger of Boston’s under-class. “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country,” he had told the thousands in attendance, his words sending the Sons of Liberty into action. Their faces blackened and poorly disguised as native Americans, some eighty men with axes had climbed aboard three British ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into the harbor.
Responding in raw fury, the powers in London and a new military governor, General Thomas Gage, had clamped a mailed fist around Boston and then squeezed harder, issuing a series of punishing laws that crippled the port’s economy. The harbor had been closed, forcing thousands of men out of work. Food supplies were cut short, sending prices skyrocketing and leaving pantries bare. As basic necessities disappeared, malnutrition worsened a smallpox epidemic that grew more deadly with the onset of New England winter. And thousands more | 126 \
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British troops streamed into the city’s already close quarters, commandeering beds in private homes and further unsettling a tense, fright-ened population.
So it was an uneasy Boston on this March evening in 1775, a little more than a year after the Tea Party and its brief celebratory after-glow. Accustomed to the sight of British troops drilling and marching around Boston—and often competing with them for jobs, which also stuck in the craw of Boston’s working class—the crowds gathering to commemorate the massacre must have been stunned by the sight of some three hundred British regulars arriving at Old South. These were the same occupying redcoats who had perpetrated the Boston Massacre in the first place, who had opened fire when unemployed townies, some fresh from the tavern, threw stones and snowballs at some British sentries. Now at the service marking those deaths, many of these townspeople—some hungry, angry, and out of work—had to mingle with equally aggrieved British soldiers whose disdain for their American “cousins” was deep and often on display. Both sides were clearly spoiling for a fight.
Forty or so seemingly bored British officers ominously pushed to the front of the meeting hall, exuding the air of superiority and arrogance that only stoked American antagonism. Attempting to ease tensions, Samuel Adams asked people to surrender their seats to the redcoats. Adams didn’t know he was the chief target of their plot.
The British soldiers had arrived at this Boston Massacre memorial expecting to put a stop to the mob of treasonous Americans before the situation disintegrated any further. They had no sympathy or regard for the Americans and came expecting to end the simmering rebellion and get back home to England with the traitorous rebels in chains—or dead. Samuel Adams’ biographer Mark Puls described | 127 \
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the mood: “With war plans gearing up, the Whigs lived in daily fear that Adams, Hancock and Dr. Warren and other provincial leaders would soon be arrested or perhaps shot. Gage held warrants for the arrest of Adams and Hancock. Adams suspected that as soon as more regiments appeared in Boston, they would be arrested, chained and sent to England.”2
The British soldier carrying the egg that night was supposed to throw it at the moment any treasonous or otherwise incendiary remarks were made in the meetinghouse. With one swift blow, the British hoped to take out the three most dangerous provocateurs, the purse, head, and heart of the Massachusetts rebels: wealthy merchant-shipowner John Hancock, politician Samuel Adams, and charismatic physician Joseph Warren.