American Tempest (16 page)

The celebration continued the next day. Hancock entertained twenty-nine merchants at the Bunch of Grapes, another popular merchants' tavern, near the end of Long Wharf. At Province House, the governor's mansion on Marlborough Street, Governor Bernard celebrated Repeal Day with his council by drinking to his majesty's health before stepping out courageously to mingle with the rest of Boston. Bernard clearly thought Repeal Day marked the beginning of peace in the colonies.

Unfortunately, Hancock's fellow merchants had unleashed forces they could no longer control. Having called their workers and the rest of Boston's
underclass to rebellion against British “taxes and tyranny,” they aroused ambitions for liberties that most could not distinguish from license, and the result was madness. New York's Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden warned that the merchants “who excited this seditious spirit in the people” no longer “have it in their power to suppress it.”
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In addition to stirring discontent among Boston's lowest social echelons, the city's merchants alienated some of the most brilliant and influential members of their own social and economic class—and weakened the ability of merchants as a group to control future political events. Indeed, the peaceful reconciliation with Britain that the merchants thought they had wrought marked but the beginning of all-out war for Otis and Adams. Seeking neither peace nor reconciliation, they saw repeal as the first victory in a war for American independence from Britain—and political power for themselves.

They fired their next shot in the House of Representatives on May 28, when Sam Adams's political coterie took firm control. It named Otis speaker, Adams clerk, and antiroyalists, including Otis's father, to the Governor's Council, or upper house. Governor Bernard picked up the gauntlet and, under his charter powers, rejected Otis as speaker and vetoed the Council elections. Sam Adams responded sarcastically, “Had your Excellency been pleased . . . to have favored us with a list and positive orders whom to choose, we should in your principles have been without excuse. But even the most abject slaves are not to be blamed for disobeying their master's will and pleasure, when it is wholly unknown to them.”
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Adams replaced Otis as speaker with the pleasant, unassuming Thomas Cushing, Jr., who, like Hancock, had graduated from Harvard, inherited a huge mercantile empire, and been lured into the radical camp leadership by the siren songs of the cunning Sam Adams. Also like Hancock, he envisioned the Stamp Act's repeal as a harbinger of calm over the seas that linked the colonies to their motherland.

Bernard, however, muddied the waters by presenting the General Court with a Parliamentary demand to bring Stamp Act rioters to justice and force them to compensate those who had suffered losses in the riots. Caught unprepared, assembly radicals recognized that refusal might cost them the support of moderates who supported Stamp Act repeal but condemned violence. Otis and Adams finally pushed through a compromise bill that compensated
riot victims but granted full amnesty to rioters. In defying Parliament and the governor, Otis and Adams called the amnesty a victory, but as British merchants had warned in their circular letter to their Massachusetts counterparts, it proved a costly victory that turned moderates in England and the colonies against Boston for condoning criminal acts and failing to respect basic English law.

Thomas Cushing, Jr. Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, he was an unassuming Harvard College graduate who had entered his father's prosperous merchant-banking firm before joining Samuel Adams's radicals and entering Boston politics.
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IBRARY OF
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What little warmth England retained for New England colonists disappeared after Parliament had to raise English duties and taxes at home to compensate for American refusal to pay the stamp tax and cover British defense costs in America. The increased property taxes forced farmers to raise the price of wheat, which raised the costs of flour and bread. Increased duties lifted prices of imported produce, wines, and other European essentials.
“Grievous are the complaints of the poor in every part of the Kingdom,” one newspaper reported, “on account of the extravagant price of provisions of all sorts. Every post brings fresh accounts of tumults, occasioned by the high price of bread. . . . There is nothing but riots and insurrections over the whole country, on account of the high price of provisions.”
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John Hancock tried to stay out of the line of fire between Governor Bernard and the Sam Adams–James Otis forces. For him, Repeal Day had marked the beginning of new opportunities to expand his business and make money—and he set to work doing just that. He outbid the market for whale oil, expanded exports to England, expanded the number of his retail stores, and ordered about £8,000 worth of new inventories to stock them. “He changed the course of his uncle's business, and built, and employed in trade, a great number of ships,” wrote Thomas Hutchinson, “and in this way, and by building at the same time several houses, he found work for a great number of tradesmen, made himself popular, was chosen selectman, representative, and moderator of town meetings, etc.”
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The expansion of his business expanded his spirit, and as his uncle had done, he became a major benefactor of his community. On May 22, he went to Cambridge, where he received enthusiastic applause at a pomp-filled public ceremony installing the first Hancock Professor of Oriental Languages at Harvard College. As business slowed for summer, he paid more attention to his new position as a member of the General Court. Its activities suddenly enthralled him, and he accepted posts on thirty different committees, whose functions ranged from regulating potash production to auditing the provincial treasurer's government accounts. Other court members deferred to his knowledge and experience as one of the colony's most successful merchants and head of what had become its largest enterprise. He discovered a gift for mediating differences, and delegates turned to him in increasing numbers for help in resolving disputes. His popularity grew daily—and nightly at the lavish dinners he offered at various taverns and on Beacon Hill. To Sam Adams's consternation, Hancock was also accumulating power as a spokesman for Boston's shopkeepers and merchants and eroding Adams's own political base. In response, Adams stepped up his personal propaganda in the
Boston Gazette
and in public
speeches. He staged demonstrations, parades, and fireworks to commemorate even the slightest triumph over royal governance.

“Otis and Adams,” wrote John Adams, “are politic in promoting these festivals, for they tinge the minds of people; they impregnate them with the sentiments of liberty; they render the people fond of their leaders in the cause, and averse and bitter against all opposers. To the honor of the Sons of Liberty, I did not see one person intoxicated, or near it.”
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In contrast, Loyalists scorned those who marched in the Adams demonstrations as “the rabble,” ignoring their potential political strength because few, if any, owned enough property to make them eligible to vote.

In early 1767 John Hancock celebrated his thirtieth birthday at one of his never-ending entertainments that sealed his political position as leader of an important merchant faction. Otis and Adams had little choice but to offer him a seat at their inner political circle, which met regularly above Edes's print shop. Sam Adams's political star, meanwhile, began to lose a bit of its luster as loyal royalists worked behind the scenes to produce some propaganda of their own, demeaning Adams as an embezzler of public funds. With Adams on the defensive, Hancock moved into the leadership breach, with coincidences continually working in his favor.

On the night of February 3, fire broke out in the bakehouse of one of his tenants. By morning, it had razed more than twenty buildings, including many of his own, and left fifty families homeless. After the General Court appropriated £400 for their relief, Hancock added £400 of his own money and saw to the distribution of huge stacks of free firewood to the poor throughout the city for the rest of what was one of the coldest winters in memory. Hancock constantly rode through town in his golden coach on the lookout for opportunities to relieve the most hard-pressed of Boston's underprivileged, both directly and indirectly. Boston had never seen any man of such evident wealth show such deep concern for the unfortunate. In addition to outright gifts of firewood, food, or free rent, he made substantial contributions to almost every church in the city, with seats and Bibles for the needy, window glass, communion tables, and pulpits. He paid for a three-hundred-pound bell at one church and gave cash gifts to churches to minister to the needy. The ministers did not forget
him in their sermons, and he gained a justifiable reputation as a great humanitarian with a deep devotion to his community and its citizens.

As the city's affection for Hancock increased, its disaffection with Sam Adams increased proportionately. In March the selectmen appointed a committee to examine the tax collector's books and found Sam Adams's collections for the provincial treasury short £2,300, whereas collections for the town were short £1,700. Bostonians were outraged and asked James Otis, of all people, as attorney for the town treasury, to charge his friend Adams with embezzlement. Otis called Boston's electors “a pack of damned stupid fools,” to which his enemies replied by calling him a “mad dictator.”
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Although Otis had no choice but to prosecute Adams, Sam Adams's political friends handpicked a lower court jury, which acquitted him. Forced by the governor to appeal the Adams verdict, Otis filed a less-than-enthusiastic appeal and—to his own surprise—won a surprising appellate court reversal of the lower court decision. The higher court issued a judgment against Adams for £1,463 based on the total amount missing, less the salary due him as tax collector. The court gave him nine months—until March 1767—to repay the city.

Although Sam Adams's political machine managed to reelect him and Otis to the House of Representatives in the May elections, John Hancock out-polled them both with 618 votes—44 votes more than the tarnished Adams. Hancock easily won reelection as selectman as well, and both Adams and Otis reluctantly recognized Hancock, the merchant king, as a new and unexpected full partner in Boston politics. Had a vengeful Parliament not acted just then, Otis and Adams might have disappeared from the political scene and left the moderate conciliator John Hancock to maneuver Boston's political machine between the conflicting interests of England and her colonists.

England, however, faced economic collapse and social upheaval. To quell the ongoing bread riots, Parliament reduced English farm and other property taxes 25 percent, cutting government revenues by £500,000 and leaving Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend desperate for new sources of money. Without the political strength to reduce the size of the military or the king's £800,000-a-year allowance—and without even considering tax increases for England's financially bloated nobility—
Townshend had no choice but to try to make colonists pay the full costs of the British military in North America.

Townshend's opponents—those who had fought for Stamp Act repeal—urged the House of Commons not to fan the flames of discontent in America, but those seeking to avenge the humiliation of repeal insisted that Massachusetts had usurped powers of the king by granting amnesty to Stamp Act rioters. Although Townshend scoffed openly at the distinction between external and internal taxes, in the interest of reconciling with the colonies, he agreed to impose only new external taxes.

On June 29, 1767, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts—the fourth and what would prove to be the decisive set of taxes that would incite Americans to rebel and declare independence. The Townshend Acts imposed import duties on five types of glass, red and white lead, paints, a full range of paper—and tea. Tea had become the rage among wealthy ladies in America after London magazines described it as the favorite beverage of the royal family and British aristocrats of note. Tea now entered the collective American mind as a symbol of British wealth and power.

Together the new duties would yield an estimated £40,000 a year for defending the colonies and “defraying the charge of the administration of justice and the support of the civil government.” Nor did the new acts leave any escape from paying duties. All the taxed items except tea were made only in England, thus preventing smugglers from bringing in cheaper goods from elsewhere. As for tea, the government effectively halved the six-penny duty on East India Company tea, leaving the net cost to American merchants below the price of smuggled Dutch tea.