American Tempest (14 page)

The Green Dragon Tavern. This was a public tavern that served as the meeting house for Boston's Freemasons.
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Sensing Hancock's fear and indecision, Sam Adams pounced on the young merchant. His technique of ingratiating himself was “the same manner that the devil is represented seducing Eve, by a constant whispering at the ear,” according to Peter Oliver. The seductive whispers left unsuspecting listeners “closely attached to the hindermost part of Mr. Adams as the rattles are affixed to the tail of a rattlesnake.” Whenever anyone tries to disengage himself from Adams's thrall, Oliver went on, Adams “like the cuttlefish would discharge his muddy liquid, and darken the waters to such a hue that the other was lost.”
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Hancock listened closely to what Sam Adams had to say. Knowing that Adams was perhaps the only man in Boston who could guarantee the safety of his property, Hancock decided to pay for that guarantee—at least for a while—with financial support for Adams and what would soon evolve into the Tea Party movement. Adams soon dug so deeply into Hancock's pockets that the merchant won the reputation of being Adams's “milch cow.”
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Boston, its harbor and environs, 1775–1776. Charlestown lies across the water to the north, with Breed's Hill on the right extremity and Bunker's Hill to the northwest, near the neck.
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On September 23, fourteen boxes of stamps arrived in Boston, but with no stamp distributor to accept them, they went to the British garrison on Castle William. Boxes destined for Rhode Island and New Hampshire remained on board ship, guarded by two men-of-war. A few days later, stamps for other states arrived in Philadelphia and New York in anticipation of November 1, when the act would take effect. Calling the stamps “the most disagreeable commodity that was ever imported,” Hancock continued appealing to influential friends in London, predicting that if the stamps were “carried into execution they will entirely stagnate trade here, for it is universally determined here never to submit to it . . . and nothing but the repeal of the act will right the consequence of its taking place. . . . For God's sake use your interest to relieve us. I dread the event.”
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Five colonies—Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and South Carolina—responded to the call of the Massachusetts General Court to meet in New York, and delegates from three other states that
failed to respond—New York, New Jersey, and Delaware—showed up anyway. The Stamp Act Congress, as the gathering was called, brought together for the first time leaders from all sections of the American colonies.

From the opening session on October 7, however, it was clear that delegates harbored a wide range of opinions on dealing with Parliament. Erudite moderates who favored conciliatory negotiations with Parliament outnumbered the radicals, and dismissing all suggestions for public protests and boycotts, the moderates took control of the proceedings. Although James Otis headed the Massachusetts delegation, Congress rejected, by one vote, his nomination as chairman in favor of a more moderate delegate.

After eleven days the congress approved a “Declarations of Rights and Grievances of the Colonists in America,” written largely by the brilliant moderate John Dickinson, a prominent Philadelphia lawyer and member of the Pennsylvania legislature. Dickinson adopted the position of John Hancock—that the only way to force repeal of the Stamp Act was by recruiting the help of English merchants. Dickinson's declaration maintained that the Stamp Act deprived colonists of “two privileges essential to freedom”—taxation by consent and trial by jury. Devoid of inflammatory language, the document reiterated the argument against taxation by Parliament without colonist representation but, in effect, agreed to colonist taxation by their own legislatures if the Stamp Act were repealed.

“The invaluable rights of taxing ourselves,” Dickinson declared, “are not . . . unconstitutional but confirmed by the Great Charter of English liberties.” He called it unjust to try American ship owners and merchants in a far-off Halifax admiralty court, adding that such trials would deprive the accused of the constitutional right to trial by a jury of his peers. His document dissociated itself from antiroyalist radicals, however, by asserting that American colonists “glory in being subjects of the best of kings having been born under the most perfect form of government . . . and esteem our connection with Great Britain as one of the great blessings.” Dickinson said he believed that Parliament would almost certainly redress American grievances when it receives assurances “that the inhabitants in the colonies have the most unbounded affection for his majesty's person, family and government, as well as for the mother country, and that their subordination to the parliament is universally acknowledged.”
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John Dickinson. A prominent Philadelphia lawyer and member of the Pennsylvania legislature, he wrote a series of stirring essays—
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania
—that united American opposition to Britain's Townshend Acts.
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Even the obsequious whimper at the end of Dickinson's declaration, however, left delegates too fearful of British government retaliation to affix their names to the document. Only one signature appeared—that of the clerk of the congress—and only six colonies agreed to sponsor the petitions to the king and Parliament. Otis was furious. He arrived in Boston railing irrationally against the Stamp Act, the British in general, and Thomas Hutchinson in particular. In what Otis's friends called “incoherent ravings,” Otis urged citizens at a town meeting to march to the ruins of Hutchinson's home and destroy its remaining fragments. He challenged British Prime Minister George Grenville to a one-on-one duel on the floor of the House of Commons to determine whether the colonies were to be
free or enslaved by British tyranny. Thomas Hutchinson responded by calling Otis “more fit for a madhouse than the House of Representatives.”
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On October 31, 1765, 250 merchants in Boston, 200 in New York, and 400 in Philadelphia agreed to stop importing all but a select list of goods from England and Europe on the following day, when the Stamp Act was to take effect. The merchants hoped the boycott would so damage English trade that their agents and suppliers in England would force Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act. John Hancock recognized he would have little choice but to join the boycott. Not doing so would have been tantamount to pledging allegiance to the royal governor, after which he surely would have had to flee to Castle William and abandon his beloved Beacon Hill property to Sam Adams's mob. In a letter designed for Sam Adams as much as for his London agent, he wrote of his fears and of his intention to join the boycott. If his ships left England before November 1, he pledged to unload them when they arrived, refill them with whale oil, and send them back to England. If the ships left after November 1, however, he said he would remove their cargoes, haul the vessels ashore, and cancel his orders for all spring goods.

“I now tell you, and you will find it come to pass, that the people of this country will never suffer themselves to be made slaves of by a submission to the D——d act,” Hancock wrote.

As it turned out, Hancock had nothing to lose and everything to gain by supporting the merchant boycott. Financially, the boycott could not
have come at a better time. Sales were slow, and his warehouse was filled with unsold goods. He could not have bought another shilling's worth of goods even if he had wanted to. Along with that of many other American merchants, his credit had run out in London, and as he wrote, a letter from his London agent demanding payment of old bills stared up at him. The merchant boycott, therefore, gave him time to sell off inventories and accumulate some cash. Moreover, his inability to buy stamps left him unable to pay any London bills. All remittances as well as other financial and legal documents required stamps, and there were none to be had.

Hancock assailed the Stamp Act with passion:

By the time the Stamp Act was due to take effect, all stamp officers in the colonies had resigned, and with no stamps available, the Act was irrelevant except as a symbolic affront. Americans nevertheless greeted November 1 as a day of mourning, with bells tolling throughout the day. The Sons of Liberty—Adams, Edes, and the others—gathered at the Liberty Tree to hang effigies of Grenville and another member of parliament. That evening, they put the effigies in a cart, and as thousands marched behind, they wheeled it past the Town House and on to the gallows on Boston Neck. The courts and customs houses had no choice but to close. Business came to a standstill.

After a few unanticipated days of festivity, however, Boston resumed its normal activities, ignoring the Stamp Act completely. Newspapers published, the courts heard cases, and stores reopened—all without stamps. The customs house also reopened and allowed goods to flow in and out normally. Ships from London arrived with autumn merchandise after the stamp tax deadline, and merchants like Hancock simply refilled them with whale oil and sent them back to London as they had always done. Although they sent completed documents with purchase orders for spring merchandise,
they told their London agents not to fill them until Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. Excusing his inability to repay his outstanding debts, Hancock chuckled to himself that English law alone was preventing him from issuing remittances without stamps. Although he distanced himself from the violence that the Stamp Act had engendered, he warned that he would remain unflagging in his support of the merchant boycott.

“The injury that has been done to Hutchinson,” Hancock wrote, “is what I abhor and detest as much as any man breathing and would go to great lengths in repairing his loss. But any opposition to the Stamp Act is commendable.”
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The Stamp Act took effect a week before Pope's Day, which was Boston's version of Guy Fawkes Day, when England celebrated the execution of the leader of a Catholic conspiracy to blow up Parliament in 1604. Instead of a single, traditional parade, with dancing and other festivities, however, Boston's Pope's Day had turned ugly a year earlier in 1764, when two rival gangs—each a neighborhood crime family of sorts—staged parades that inevitably met head on. After the bloodshed subsided, a little girl lay dead.

Sam Adams subsequently befriended the leaders of both gangs and, by the following summer, he had united them into a single, powerful armed force under the shoemaker Mackintosh and added what was now a street army of toughs—mostly part-time waterfront workers—to his political protests. In August 1765 the Mackintosh force had formed the core of the mob that sacked the homes of Andrew Oliver and Thomas Hutchinson—and frightened John Hancock off his political fence on Beacon Hill. On the evening before Pope's Day, in November 1765, Adams displayed the street power he now wielded at a “Union Feast” he sponsored for the two gangs to mingle with merchants and politicians—“with heart and hand in flowing bowls and bumping glasses.”
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John Hancock was there—indeed, had not dared stay away—and in the end, to Adams's delight and everyone else's cheers, he picked up the $1,000 tab for the entire dinner.