American Tempest (19 page)

Boston greeted the ships with silence as the commander of the troops, Lieutenant Colonel William Dalrymple, stepped ashore to meet selectmen and arrange quarters for the troops. All agreed to try to avoid violence. The selectmen suggested quartering the troops at Castle William, but the colonel rejected it as too small. The colonel agreed not to quarter troops in private homes, but fearing an outbreak of disease and violence if his men remained in tight quarters aboard ship, he insisted that his troops disembark and spend the weekend in Faneuil Hall. The selectmen had no choice but to agree.

One by one, longboats rowed to Long Wharf, discharging Redcoats in full battle regalia, each bearing sixteen rounds of ammunition, until two regiments—twelve hundred soldiers for a city with barely fifteen thousand people—stood smartly at attention at the pier. Suddenly, a staccato of commands pierced the stillness of the harbor, and “with drums beating, fifes playing and colors flying,” they marched in precision up King Street onto the Common, “as if taking possession of a conquered town.”
¹²
After a drill on the Common to intimidate the Boston mob, they went off to Faneuil Hall for the weekend. Silversmith Paul Revere, whose anger had been building as he watched the troops land, walked back to his shop at the end of Hancock Wharf to engrave the “insolent parade” on copper.
¹³
When General Gage arrived from New York, some troops moved to the Common to establish a permanent encampment. Rumors swept across town that Gage would declare martial law and send troops into every home to disarm the citizenry and arrest “a number of gentlemen, who have exerted
themselves in the cause of their country.”
¹⁴
Gage's only goal, however, was to restore order in the streets and the smooth functioning of the royal provincial government. By the end of the month, he felt confident enough to report “the appearance of peace and quiet in this place.”
¹⁵

British troops drill on Boston Common. In 1768, they drilled after landing in Boston to quell the beginning of the American Revolution. Hancock House, the palatial mansion of Tea Party Patriot John Hancock, sits on the upper right.
(E
NGRAVED BY
S
IDNEY
L. S
MITH FROM A WATERCOLOR BY
C
HRISTIAN
R
EMICK IN
1768. P
UBLISHED BY
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HARLES
E. G
OODSPEED,
B
OSTON, IN
1902. P
HOTO COURTESY OF THE
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MA)

To Hancock and the rest of Boston, however, the troops seemed a disease, infecting every nook and cranny of the city. They had turned the green of the Common into a sea of muck, sprouting tents and reeking of campfires, rotting garbage, human and animal wastes, and all other imaginable filth. Despite their promise to leave, troops continued living in Faneuil Hall—and in Town House, the Massachusetts state capitol. In the harbor, the fleet commander had anchored his ships along shore, one behind the other, broadsides facing the town with the maws of their big guns agape, ready to belch cannon balls. Backed by armed sailors, customs commissioners boarded every vessel that entered or left the harbor.

On October 13, less than two weeks after the fleet arrived, a New York newspaper published an anonymously written article called “Journal of Transactions in Boston,” purportedly chronicling events in Boston. It proved to be the first of a yearlong series that would appear in newspapers across the colonies and in England under the eventual title “Journal of Occurrences.” Insisting its report was “strictly fact,” the “Journal of Occurrences” described daily, blood-curdling atrocities of British troops in Boston—of their beating small boys, raping young girls . . . of their violations of the Sabbath with gunfire, drinking, and gambling. It described the inconsolable grief of an elderly Patriot who “the other morning discovered a soldier in bed with a favorite grand daughter.”
¹⁶
The anonymous author was the consummate propagandist Sam Adams, who used the Journal to promote the cause of independence and venerate its heroes. Governor Bernard called the articles a “collection of impudent, virulent, and seditious lies; perversions of truth and misrepresentations.”
¹⁷
Suspecting Adams as author, he accused him of publishing the articles in far-off New York to prevent Bostonians from disputing their accuracy.

Misrepresentations notwithstanding, the Journal would not have succeeded without the arrogance and miscalculations of British political and military leaders. Most refused to believe that anyone fortunate enough to be a British subject would dare or even want to rebel. As Thomas Hutchinson put it, “I cannot think that, in any colony, people of any consideration have ever been so mad as to think of revolt. Many of the common people have been in a frenzy and talked of dying in defense of their liberties and have spoke and printed what is highly criminal; and too many of rank above the vulgar, and some in public posts have countenanced and encouraged them.”
¹⁸

Ignoring all appeals from saner minds—at home and abroad—for restraint, the British political and military high commands remained intent on asserting their authority in the most provocative ways. In doing so, they fed Sam Adams more fuel than he needed to keep the flames of discontent raging in Boston and everywhere else his “Journal of Occurrences” appeared. On October 29, British troops in Boston abandoned the Common for winter quarters in various public buildings. Hancock and other Bostonians were just beginning to relax in their absence when the
troops returned two days later in full force, at slow march, with drums rolling ominously. In their midst was a young soldier, draped in white, accompanied by a chaplain reading from an open Bible. The procession halted. A firing squad snapped to the ready, aimed, fired, and marched away, leaving the body and its pale shroud in a pool of blood and mud. As echoes of the fatal round resounded through the silent grove, the drums resumed their eerie roll while commanders led their regiments on an endless, slow march around and around the corpse, to demonstrate the inevitable fate of deserters.

Adams had no sooner written his description of the grizzly scene when, on the evening of November 2, the British once again went out of their way to provoke colonists with an order to the troops to stand ready for possible rioting the next day. The next morning, the marshal of the vice-admiralty court marched up Beacon Hill and arrested John Hancock. Not satisfied with having confiscated the
Liberty
, Governor Bernard decided to crush Hancock and the Sons of Liberty by filing criminal charges against the merchant for smuggling goods aboard the
Liberty
. Bernard believed he could destroy the Patriot movement by cutting off its source of funds at the House of Hancock. To avoid imprisonment, Hancock posted a £3,000 bond—an amount equal to the value of the goods the crown said he had smuggled on the
Liberty
. John Adams agreed to defend him.

From the outset, the trial was illegal. Although offloading a vessel without a true and perfect inventory was grounds for seizure and forfeiture, there was no eye witness or evidence of such offloading. Nevertheless, the attorney general of the province charged Hancock with landing one hundred pipes of wine, worth £3,000. The law subjected smugglers to fines equal to triple the value of the goods they smuggled—in this case, £9,000, with one-third to go to the crown, one-third to the governor, and one-third to the informer. To ensure Hancock's subsequent bankruptcy, the attorney asked for penalties adding up to another £100,000 for failing to obey lawful orders of a crown agent, and encouraging assault on and illegal imprisonment of the agent. The attorney general made the case as costly as possible for Hancock and everyone he knew, demanding that all Hancock's friends, relatives, business associates, and employees appear in court
for hours of endless questioning. He even considered calling Hancock's aging aunt, the widow of Thomas Hancock. One after the other, the witnesses answered the attorney general's questions with expressions of ignorance or lapses of memory. The case dragged on day after day, week after week, exhausting the entire town.

“I was thoroughly weary and disgusted with the court, the officers of the crown, the cause, and even with the tyrannical bell that dongled (sic) me out of my house every morning,” John Adams grumbled.
¹⁹
As the trial enervated the rest of Boston, it energized Samuel Adams, whose accounts of the trial in the “Journal of Occurrences” lifted John Hancock to national prominence as a martyred hero for what Patriots now called “the Glorious Cause.”

John Adams argued that the law under which the court had tried his client was illegal because it denied his client the right of a jury trial and, in effect, repealed the Magna Carta “as far as America is concerned” and “degraded John Hancock below the rank of an Englishman.” The court agreed, and after three months, when government prosecutors were unable to present any evidence or eye-witness testimony to substantiate the charges against Hancock, the government backed down. “The Advocate General prays leave to retract this information and says Our Sovereign Lord the King will prosecute no further hereon.”
²⁰

Boston greeted the decision with a mixture of joy and anger—joy at Hancock's acquittal; anger at the mean-spirited governor and attorney general who had put Hancock and the rest of the town through the unnecessarily long and painful ordeal of a trial. Hancock himself sat at ease in his home, luxuriating in the adulation that enveloped Beacon Hill. Letters of praise, encouragement, and congratulations arrived from across the colonies, from Britain, from Europe. Sam Adams had created a new champion of resistance who, to Adams's eventual regret, would ultimately displace him in the front ranks of the revolutionary leadership.

In February 1769 the events associated with the
Liberty
had so aroused Parliament that it decided to apply Henry VIII's ancient “Treason Act” to punish those responsible. Long unused, the act ordered those suspected of treason brought to trial in England, regardless of whether the crimes were committed in or out of the realm.

The Treason Resolution produced angry counter resolutions in Massachusetts and nine other colonies. In addition to protesting the Treason Resolution and Townshend Acts, the Massachusetts Assembly complained about “the establishment of a standing army in the colony in time of peace without the consent of the General Assembly.”

At the Town Meeting in March 1769, Hancock garnered the most votes for selectman, and in May he won 500 of the possible 508 votes for the House of Representatives, which immediately elected him Speaker
pro tem
and a member of the Governor's Council. Governor Bernard was out of town and had named Chief Justice Hutchinson as lieutenant governor, who promptly vetoed the election of his old friend Hancock for both posts. The House replaced Hancock with Dr. Joseph Warren. Less outspoken than Otis, Adams, or Hancock, Warren may have seemed more ineffectual to Hutchinson, when, in reality, he was at least as dangerous to royal governance as the others.

By mid-July Royal Governor Bernard had had enough of the Boston mobs and decided to return to the peace and dignity of his stately home in Mother England. On August 1, Boston steeple bells rang out defiantly, flags all but enveloped the huge Liberty Tree, and guns fired continuously from Hancock Wharf as Bernard sailed off, leaving Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, the former merchant and still chief justice, as new governor
ex officio
. Two weeks later the Sons of Liberty marched under the noses of British troops to the Liberty Tree to toast the anniversary of their founding four years earlier, when they hung Andrew Oliver's effigy and attacked his home. That evening, Hancock's coach led a procession of 119 carriages—with Otis taking up the rear—across the neck to a tavern in Dorchester on the mainland to toast victory at another of Hancock's elegant dinners.

By the time Bernard left Boston, it was clear to Massachusetts merchants that their partial boycott of British imports had been ineffective, and they now imposed a near-total boycott that shut down the flow of all but a handful of British products into the province. Every colony except New Hampshire followed suit, and by the end of the year British imports into the colonies had plunged 38 percent to about £1.34 million, from £2.2 million the previous year. In Boston, Hancock promoted the boycott
tirelessly, even supplying substitute merchandise on credit to small merchants faced with closing for lack of English merchandise. Once mocked as the milch cow for Sam Adams, Hancock was buying so much personal political power that if the Patriot conflict with England had ended then, he would have had a near-monopoly on Massachusetts banking, retailing, and wholesaling.