America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (16 page)

Despite the growing threat of violence or arrest, Warren had volunteered to serve as the evening’s chief speaker. The thirty-three-year-old surgeon was, in the words of one British officer, “the greatest incendiary in America.”3 Blocked by the crowds milling around Old South, Warren circled the building until he found a ladder and an open window. The sight of Warren clambering up the ladder must have been comical; dressed as Cicero, the Roman orator, he had arrived wearing a white toga over his suit.

Dr. Warren’s toga wasn’t part of some amusing colonial-era mas-querade. Among the intelligentsia of America’s patriots and Sons of Liberty, there was a keen philosophical devotion to the glory of Rome’s republic, considered the zenith of republican history. For many of the Founding Fathers, the Roman republic represented their idealized vision of government, as Gordon S. Wood explains in
The Radicalism
of the American Revolution
: “According to classical republican tradition, man was by nature a political being, a citizen who achieved his greatest | 128 \

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moral fulfillment by participating in a self-governing republic. Public or political liberty . . . meant participation in government. And this political liberty in turn provided the means by which the personal liberty and private rights of the individual . . . were protected.”4

Statesman, philosopher, and senator, Cicero was considered Rome’s greatest orator. He was also viewed by American patriots as the greatest martyr of republicanism. After his assassination by antagonists, Cicero had been decapitated, his head and hands displayed in the Roman Forum. This dramatic demise might have served as a warning to Warren. But it was Cicero’s republican ideals, not his fate, that Warren had in mind as he stood and spoke in Old South.

After a rousing and flowery oration, Warren was thunderously ap-plauded by the partisan crowd. Then Samuel Adams stood to introduce a second speaker to the increasingly rambunctious audience. But when Adams said the words “Boston Massacre,” several British officers sitting in front immediately rose and hissed. Another shouted dis-approvingly, “Fie, fie.” But to the overflow crowd, the British officer’s words sounded instead like a shout of “Fire.” The packed house panicked. People jumped through windows and pushed for the doors. At that very moment, a British military unit marched by, and the sound of drums and pipes only added to the confusion and fear. It seemed as if the long-expected British assault on Boston was in full gear.

But the moment fell laughably short of Armageddon. According to a later report about the incident, the officer given responsibility for starting the violence by throwing the egg had fallen down while entering the meetinghouse. He had dislocated his knee and the egg had broken. As the crowd quickly dispersed in the general mayhem of the false alarm, the evening, fraught with such violent possibilities, ended not with a bang but a whimper. In a Boston on tenterhooks, expecting a | 129 \

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battle or perhaps even a war, this single broken egg—to contradict the familiar expression—would make no omelets. It was more like a stage prop in the final scene of an opéra bouffe or an absurd ending to some Gilbert and Sullivan costume drama with dashing uniformed soldiers and a toga-clad orator, except that the stakes were much higher. And the farcical conclusion of the events on that Boston night in March 1775 did not conceal the deep and dangerous divisions that were pushing the American colonies and Great Britain ever closer to war.

Such a state of affairs would have been inconceivable to the people of Massachusetts a mere dozen years earlier. When the Seven Years’

War formally ended in 1763, American colonials had just spent years fighting side by side with British regulars in the North American phase of the conflict, the French and Indian War, between 1754 and 1760. More accurately, they fought beneath their British counterparts, who were usually in command. Americans, including Massachusetts men, had fought in many of the war’s chief engagements, including the crucial battles of Quebec in 1759 and Montreal in 1760. New Englanders were overjoyed by the complete defeat of the French and the dismantling of their American empire, eliminating what had been the greatest single threat to colonial New England for a century. The victory also blunted the power of France’s traditional allies, the northeastern Indians.

When the Treaty of Paris ended the worldwide fighting in 1763

and secured Great Britain’s imperial triumph around the globe, it was seen as a victory for America as well. After years of intermittent warfare, the peace of 1763 ushered in a new era of optimism. As Fred Anderson described the moment: “To many of the inhabitants of New England, the successful conclusion of the war heralded nothing less than the beginning of the millennium. Even the most worldly of the | 130 \

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colonists undoubtedly agreed that the elimination of New England’s perennial antagonist and the accession of immeasurable tracts of virgin land could hardly fail to produce a thousand years of peace and prosperity in North America.”5

But the prosperity was short-lived. And the peace lasted barely a decade. How, then, did those men and women who crowded into Old South go from dutiful royal subjects to armed insurrectionists in the space of a dozen years? What great ground shift sent people with connections of kinship and common traditions to the barricades? Was it ever just about tea, stamps, and sugar?

There is no question that Enlightenment philosophy played a key role in firing the independent spirit of the Revolutionary generation.

The upheaval in religious, scientific, and political thinking that elevated reason above dogma and the traditional authority of church and state profoundly influenced the political leanings of such men as Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson. Whether found in the physics of Newton or the skepticism of Scottish philosopher David Hume and French philosopher Voltaire, these radical new ways of thinking and observing had broken what historian Peter Gray described in
The Enlightenment
as “the sacred circle.”

But for most Americans, these were largely the inconsequential musings of those fortunate enough not to have to work for a living.

There were many other bread-and-butter issues that struck at the purse strings of Americans at every rung on the social ladder. At its heart, the conflict boiled down to real estate, taxes, and property—and the power to control them.

The downward spiral in America’s unlimited fealty to London began almost immediately after the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven | 131 \

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Years’ War in 1763. The ink on the treaty was not yet dry when British forts in the western frontier around the Great Lakes and near modern Detroit came under Indian attack in what was called Pontiac’s Rebellion, named for the Ottawa chief who was one of its most prominent native leaders. The most prolonged and deadly conflict between Native Americans and British Americans since King Philip’s War, this series of battles was costly in lives lost and royal expenditure. It was not the battles themselves that stirred the trouble, however, but the royal reaction. To prevent further disputes with the midwestern tribes, King George III decided to restrict development of the vast interior territories that were now part of England’s American empire. News of his Proclamation of 1763 did not sit well with American land speculators, including George Washington, who had formed the Mississippi Company to purchase these newly available lands, which Americans felt they had fought to win.

As historian Colin G. Calloway wrote, “George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Arthur Lee, Patrick Henry, and others saw tyr-anny in Britain’s interference with their freedom to make a killing in the West. . . . Colonists who had fought and bled in the war were not about to be deprived of the fruits of victory by a distant government.

Land speculators would not watch their investments in Indian country slip away. The clash of French and British ambitions gave way to a clash of British and American ambitions.”6

Struggling under a massive government debt after the Seven Years’

War, and confronted by the ongoing cost of committing armies to the defense of the American colonies, Parliament and the king made another fateful decision that left the American “cousins” far from pleased.

Reasoning that the colonists should foot the bill for their own defense, Parliament passed the Sugar Act on April 5, 1764, to collect Ameri-

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can revenue on molasses brought from non-British colonies. A month later Boston attorney James Otis had condemned this “taxation without representation” at a town meeting, and in July he published “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved.”

By August, Boston merchants had agreed to boycott British luxury imports and were soon joined by other tradesmen. New York and the other colonies followed suit, in the first coordinated political action by Americans. In March 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, the first direct tax on the American colonies. Again designed to fund the cost of maintaining British armies in America, this tax applied to all printed materials and was met with stiff opposition in all thirteen colonies. Later that year, the Quartering Act, which required Americans to provide housing for British troops stationed in the colonies, went into effect, provoking further discontent.

For America’s large and growing lower classes, “No taxation without representation” was an empty phrase. These working poor had little if anything to tax. Without property, they often couldn’t vote.

They didn’t drink tea, the beverage of the wealthy. Nor did they have to worry—as George Washington or Thomas Jefferson did—that the king’s proclamation was keeping them from buying up western land. But they did have to face the prospects of impressment—essentially being kidnapped into service—by the Royal Navy and losing jobs to off-duty British soldiers who were permitted to look for work around Boston Harbor. In this antagonism toward British authority, the Boston “street” could link arms with upscale patriots, as they did at the Boston Tea Party.

That act of civil disobedience, repeated in several other colonies with considerably less fanfare, had brought the wrath of King George III and his acquiescent Parliament slamming down on Boston, seedbed | 133 \

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of America’s rebellious spirit. The colonial governor Thomas Hutchinson, a direct descendant of dissident Anne Hutchinson, who had been parrying for control of Boston’s politics with the likes of attorney James Otis and Samuel Adams for more than a decade, was recalled to London. He was replaced by General Thomas Gage, survivor of Braddock’s disastrous march and now commander in chief of British forces in North America. Additional troops were dispatched to garrison the port city, bringing their number to more than three thousand in a city of some twenty thousand.

At Gage’s insistence, Parliament issued the Massachusetts Government Act, which substituted royally appointed judges, sheriffs, and justices of the peace for locally elected ones. Officials elected in town meetings were also replaced by appointed royal councilors. And the town meetings, the beating heart of individual rights and local democracy since the Massachusetts charter was revised in 1691, were now subject to the consent and approval of the royally appointed governor.

This act had sparked outright rebellion in many rural Massachusetts towns, including Springfield and Worcester, where five thousand armed farmers had shut down the new royal Court of Common Pleas, and with it the authority of the British crown. Taking control of the courts themselves, groups of angry, disenfranchised farmers had, in essence, established the first popularly elected, independent government in America. 7 Moderates, accommodationists, and royalists in the other colonies might still be wavering or hoping for reconciliation with Great Britain. But rural Massachusetts had taken the lead in openly declaring its independence from the British throne.

And the contagion was spreading, largely through Samuel Adams’

Committees of Correspondence. A grassroots community of letter writers—an eighteenth-century quill-pen blogosphere—these commit-

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tees had created an effective, efficient patriot network throughout the colonies. By the end of 1774, the royal governor of Virginia reported to London that every county was “arming a company of men for the avowed purpose of protecting their communities. There is not a justice of peace in Virginia that acts except as a Committee man.”8

When Boston’s bustling port was closed in retaliation for the Tea Party, essentially cutting off the town’s lifeline, some thirty-five hundred men were put out of work. Parliament decreed that the harbor would remain closed until Massachusetts paid for the dumped tea as part of the Coercive Laws, passed to bring the defiant Americans back into line. Coincident with passage of these Intolerable Acts, as they were known in America, was the onset of another deadly epidemic.

“Smallpox continued its gradual but inexorable spread as the political insurgency mounted,” Elizabeth Fenn records in
Pox Americana,
her history of the smallpox outbreak that raged across America parallel with the Revolution. According to Fenn, rumor had it that General Gage was deliberately spreading the disease in Boston, as he supposedly had done to native Americans during the French and Indian War. 9

With the privations caused by the harbor shutdown, growing fears of an epidemic, and the ominous threat of harsh military action by the British—the warships in the harbor could provide plenty of eighteenth-century-style “shock and awe”—Boston’s mood was bleak. As John Adams, Samuel’s second cousin and the more temperate of the two, wrote to his wife, Abigail, “The Town of Boston, for ought I can see, must suffer Martyrdom: It must expire: And our principal consolation is, that it dies in a noble Cause. The Cause of Truth, of Virtue, of Liberty and of Humanity.”10