Patriots (13 page)

But Samuel Adams and his dwindling band were determined that Boston remember the protests. On August 16, 1766, one year after the effigies appeared on the Liberty Tree, the Sons of Liberty staged an anniversary dinner under its branches. While the town’s leading patriots toasted the king and Pitt, young apprentices and black seamen massed in the street and shouted the old slogans. The Tories continued to regard those men as
rabble and scum, but Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty were impressing on them that they had shared in one of Boston’s brightest moments.

—

When they opposed the Stamp Act, Lord Rockingham and Benjamin Franklin had unwittingly misled Parliament about the nature of the American protests. That was why, barely one year after the rioting, the king’s ministers could provide Samuel Adams for the second time with the inflammatory issue he had been lacking. Adams’ chief antagonist was another official trying to ease Britain’s debts, but Charles Townshend was no humorless accountant like George Grenville. His rollicking speeches in the Commons usually came after a long and festive supper, and they had won Townshend the nickname “Champagne Charley.” William Pitt—now Lord Chatham—considered Townshend a weak leader and was determined to see him gone. To prove himself, Townshend turned again to the idea of an American tax. But this time he would hold the colonists to their word. They had claimed
that they objected only to taxes on their internal affairs.
Townshend found that distinction ridiculous, but he would respect it. Fighting for his political life, he assured the Parliament that
he knew “the mode by which a revenue may be drawn from America without offense.” Few men in the Commons knew the Americans well enough to tell him that by the year 1767 that mode didn’t exist.

Townshend proposed imposing external duties, those collected at the ports, on several of the commodities that Americans were required by law to import exclusively from England—paint, paper, lead and tea. William Pitt, Lord Chatham, was ailing again, but, alarmed by this new provocation, he called on George III and persuaded him to dismiss Townshend from the Exchequer. When the king cast about for a replacement, however, he could find none, and it was Chatham who left the government.

An effective propaganda campaign in London by the American Tories helped Townshend win support in Parliament. Governor Bernard, Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver had been supplying their British friends with inflammatory articles from the
Boston Gazette
, especially those about the amnesty for the Stamp Act rioters. Down the coast, New Yorkers had begun to balk at paying part of the expense for quartering British troops there, and the Massachusetts House was congratulating New York on that insubordination.

In that climate, Townshend’s duties won passage easily. He could also earmark a portion of the new revenue to pay royal appointees for serving in America. For years, the patriots had thought that their only control over a haughty governor or judge was the fact that their legislature paid his salary. Townshend was removing that leverage. And to guarantee that the duties raised as much money as he had promised to Parliament, he was tightening control over America’s slack customs procedures. Townshend appointed five new commissioners of customs and sent them to Boston with broad powers. Since colonial jurors rarely convicted a local merchant of smuggling, Townshend’s acts set up new admiralty courts that could try smugglers without a jury. And the acts made it easier for customs officials to obtain writs of assistance.

In approving the Townshend Acts, Parliament was ignoring the way the Americans viewed their customs system. Rockingham’s
Ministry had listened to the colonies and cut the duties on molasses from threepence a gallon to one penny; since the old bribe and the new tax were identical, traders had lost any incentive to pay off the customs officials. But the veteran customs men London was sending to Boston would know even more lucrative ways to exploit their position. The punishment for violating the Sugar Act was seizure of a ship and its smuggled cargo. At customs, the trick was to pretend to be lax and then crack down abruptly and catch the merchants with large stores of contraband. In London, that increase in confiscated goods might look as though honest officials were finally doing their job. In Boston, shipowners and retailers
knew the tactic was extortion.

This time when Samuel Adams sounded the alarm, he could expect a reaction from his province. He argued that Townshend’s relatively small duties would soon give way to larger ones. They would be followed by British soldiers to enforce the law and strip America’s legislatures of their power. Adams knew, though, that abstract predictions aroused less fear and resentment than pointing out specific men with royal titles. These new commissioners of customs, he wrote, were
“the greatest political curses that could have been sent amongst us.” Adams proposed a fitting reception for them. As it happened, the commissioners would be landing in Boston on Pope’s Day. They should be taken into custody by Mackintosh’s irregulars, marched to the Liberty Tree and shown the wisdom of resigning their commissions immediately.

Once again, Adams was more militant than his allies. James Otis was among the patriots who weren’t willing to treat British representatives of the king as roughly as they had handled a fellow American like Andrew Oliver. In a long harangue at the Town Meeting, Otis upheld the king’s right to appoint as many customs officials as he pleased. As for threats or riots, Otis said that “to insult and tear each other in pieces was to act like madmen.”

The Pope’s Day parade went off on schedule on November 5, 1767, and the commissioners entered Boston without incident. The head of this new board, Henry Hulton, even paused with the crowd to join in laughing at the figures of the Pope and twenty demons as they were carried past. Whatever his disappointment, Samuel Adams was a tactician. Today he was advising the patriots that not a hair of the commissioners should be touched. But he
added, “The time is coming when they shall
lick the dust and melt away.”

For now, Adams would keep his forces leashed until the moment when all of Boston approved the next attack.

—

Three years had passed since the shortages in Samuel Adams’ tax collecting had first been revealed, and during that time the Tories had come to hate and fear him. One conservative artist said that if wanted to draw the devil, he would get Sam Adams to sit for him. But, as Peter Oliver complained, Adams had ingratiated himself so shrewdly with the vulgar classes that he seemed invulnerable. All the same, the Tory press kept up its assault. One article called Samuel Adams a cur-dog—“very artful, loves babbling, especially when he gets into a very large room; has been taught to run into houses, to pick up money and run away with it
directly to his kennel.”

By March 1767, Bostonians had become enough disturbed about the tax deficits to examine the books of its five collectors. The other four men were also found to have money outstanding, but Samuel Adams’ debts were three times the average. He owed a total of four thousand pounds. Thomas Hutchinson called that debt a
“defalcation,” and it would have meant public ruin for a less resourceful man. But, as the Tories watched in outrage, John Hancock rode in to save Adams by expanding his political patronage and guaranteeing control of the Town Meeting. As Peter Oliver put it, Hancock was already “as closely attached to the hindermost part of Mr. Adams as the rattles are affixed to the
tail of the rattle snake.”

After delays and lawsuits, the Town Meeting forgave much of Adams’ debt and transferred the remainder to another man to collect. At last, Samuel Adams was free from a persistent embarrassment.
“His power over weak minds,” said Peter Oliver, “was truly surprising.”

—

In May 1768, six months after the customs commissioners arrived from England, John Hancock’s sloop the
Liberty
entered Boston Harbor with a cargo of wine from Madeira. Her captain told the customs men that the wine on board totaled twenty-five pipes, or casks, which was slightly over three thousand gallons but
well below the ship’s capacity. A month later, Thomas Kirk, the investigator charged with verifying the report, came forward to claim that during his inspection he had been shoved into a cabin and nailed inside by a gang of men led by another of Hancock’s captains, John Marshall. While Kirk was held captive, other workers removed the stores of undeclared wine. When they were finished, Captain Marshall warned Kirk that his life and property depended on his silence. Now he was ignoring the threat and accusing Boston’s wealthiest merchant of violating the Townshend Acts. Captain Marshall couldn’t refute the story, since he had died, apparently of a heart attack, the day after the
Liberty
was unloaded.

For the first time, the customs officials thought they could crack down forcefully. A crown ship, the H.M.S.
Romney
, with fifty guns, had entered the harbor in May and dropped anchor six hundred feet from shore. Armed with Kirk’s testimony and reassured by the gunship, the commissioners made their move. Near dusk, while many workers were leaving the docks, the commissioners boarded the
Liberty
and seized her as punishment for the false tax declaration.

Around the dock, the crowd’s mood was ominous. Even before the boarding, resentment against the
Romney
’s British crew had been running high. On Sunday an officer had prevented a group of impressed men from jumping ship, and the
Romney
’s captain, John Corner, had been heard calling Boston
“a blackguard town ruled by mobs.” Now there were clearly enough men on the dock to retake Hancock’s sloop and sail it to safety. Seeing the danger, the customs men signaled the
Romney
to send barges of troops armed with bayonets. As the patriots protested, the
Liberty
was towed out to the
Romney
and secured under her guns.

That provocation once again transformed the crowd on the wharf into a mob. Throwing stones and swinging clubs, it burst upon the customs officials. Joseph Harrison, a collector, was beaten badly. His son, Richard, a customs clerk, was dragged through the streets by his hair. Thomas Irving, inspector of imports and exports, escaped with his sword broken and his clothes ripped. John Hancock’s Madeira, including an especially rich vintage he had ordered for his own table, disappeared from the pier.

About 10
P.M.
, the mob’s leaders spotted Harrison’s large pleasure boat at the wharf. Cheering, they dragged it to the Common
and set it on fire. Moving across the open grass, the throng milled around the houses of Harrison and Benjamin Hallowell, the comptroller of customs, yowling and breaking windows. An Englishwoman staying with one of the commissioners thought the hideous noise sounded like attacking Indians. As she was packing her valuables and preparing to flee, she heard one of the leaders call out to the mob to stop its rampage. “We will defend our liberties and property by the strength of our arm and the help of our God.
To your tents, O Israel.”

The next morning was quiet, but the commissioners decided that they were no longer safe in Boston and sent a delegate to Governor Bernard. He authorized the customs officers and their families to leave the harbor in a barge and take refuge on the
Romney.
Three days later, the party moved to unassailable quarters at Castle William, three miles into the harbor. Thomas Hutchinson saw to their comfort at the castle, providing food and a steady stream of
Tory dinner guests.

These days, the Liberty Tree had a towering pole rising up through its branches. On Tuesday at 10
A.M.
, banners were flying from the top of the pole, and despite wet and disagreeable weather so many people had gathered at the trunk that the entire assembly moved a half mile to larger quarters at Faneuil Hall. Every time meetings were moved from the tree, there would be a stirring parade through the center of town and past the governor’s chambers.

At Faneuil Hall, the patriots made their protest legitimate by calling a Town Meeting for three o’clock that afternoon, and when even more people turned up than could fit inside, they moved to the lofty Old South Meeting House. The show of support for Hancock did not surprise John Adams. He calculated that a thousand Boston families depended for food every day of the year on Hancock’s business. Add to that the new firemen’s rig that Hancock had bought for the town and the thousand pounds sterling he had contributed to the Brattle Street Meeting House, and John Hancock was New England’s most popular man.

As the town debated its next step at the Old South, the commissioners across the harbor at Castle William were piecing together rumors to send to General Thomas Gage, the British commander in New York. They had heard that one speaker told the Town Meeting that “he hoped, and believed, that they would one
and all resist,
even unto blood” to defend Boston’s liberty. If that was Samuel Adams, he was finally saying aloud what he had been too discreet to suggest even to his closest allies. A Tory innkeeper, Richard Sylvester, claimed that on the day after the
Liberty
was taken Samuel Adams challenged a band of patriots to join him in an uprising:
“If you are men, behave like men. Let us take up arms immediately and be free and seize all the king’s officers. We should be joined with thirty thousand men from the country with their knapsacks and bayonets fixed.”

Even if Samuel Adams was aroused to that pitch, he failed to sway his listeners at the Town Meeting. They voted instead to send a delegation to the governor, accusing the
Romney
of obstructing their harbor and
threatening them with famine.

With two other men, John Hancock left the Meeting to ask Francis Bernard when he would receive the delegation. They found that the governor had left for his house in Roxbury, and the twenty-one delegates boarded eleven chaises and followed him there. They were dressed according to their means, Hancock in damask lined with silk, Samuel Adams in his worn plainspun. Heading the delegation was the oily Royall Tyler. Greeting him was an equally unctuous Francis Bernard. The governor exerted himself to charm the delegates he didn’t know and had wine passed around as he listened to their presentation. The delegates had become subdued in the governor’s presence, and they raised no objection when he said that he preferred to give his answer the next day, in writing. Bowing them out, Bernard was impressed with his own suave manners.