American Tempest (31 page)

As merchants, landowners, and lawyers were posturing in Philadelphia, Boston was preparing for rebellion, with the Loyalist
Boston Evening Post
listing Hancock, Sam Adams, Bowdoin, and Cushing as “authors . . . of all the misfortunes brought upon the province.” The newspaper appealed to British troops, asking that “the instant rebellion happens—that you will put the above persons to the sword, destroy their houses, and plunder their effects. It is just that they should be the first victims to the evils they brought upon us.”
⁷

On September 20, Hancock's ship arrived safely in Salem Port with the shipload of gunpowder from London. With Patriot ammunition at the ready, Hancock ordered carpenters, who were building barracks for new contingents of British troops, to walk off their jobs. Gage demanded that Hancock order the men back to work. Hancock responded angrily that food shortages had made the men too hungry to work and that Gage was responsible for having “taken every possible measure to distress us.”
⁸
Gage agreed to allow foodstuffs shipped to and from points within the harbor if the men went back to work, but Hancock refused, suspecting that Gage
would close the harbor once the barracks were finished. Gage had to send to Halifax for carpenters to complete work on the barracks.

Three weeks later 250 self-appointed or nominally elected delegates from across Massachusetts met in Concord at the First Provincial Congress and staged a coup d'état, overthrowing royal rule and creating America's first independent government. It assumed all powers to rule the province, collect taxes, buy supplies, and raise a militia. It elected Hancock president, with far-reaching powers across the province—the first governor of the first independent state in the Americas. He immediately sent Paul Revere to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia with news of Massachusetts independence and the creation of the continent's first autonomous government.

After three days at Concord, the Provincial Congress moved to Cambridge, and after a few days there it moved again, continually changing locations every few days to prevent Gage from interfering in its deliberations. After two months, it agreed on a broad program of military preparedness. It authorized the Committee of Safety to organize a corps of “minute men” to “hold themselves in readiness [for battle] on the shortest notice.” It agreed to provide each militiaman with “an effective fire arm, bayonet, pouch, knapsack, thirty rounds of cartridges and balls.”
⁹
The Provincial Congress also ordered immediate procurement of twenty pieces of field artillery, carriages for twelve battering cannons, four mortars, twenty tons of grape and round shot, ten tons of bombshells, five tons of lead balls, one thousand barrels of powder, five thousand arms and bayonets, and seventy-five thousand flints. Total costs came to almost £21,000. To raise the money, Hancock ordered provincial tax collectors to turn over their receipts to a congressional receiver-general instead of the royal provincial treasurer. Those tax collectors who did not flee to British camps willingly complied with Hancock's order rather than risk Patriot tar and feathers, but the taxes they collected fell far short of the costs of arming the militia. Whenever he had to, Hancock solicited whatever resources he could from other merchants and used his own money to cover the difference.

Just as the Provincial Congress had achieved unity on military issues, a bitter debate broke out over a motion that “while we are attempting to preserve ourselves from slavery, that we also take into consideration the
state and circumstances of Negro slaves in this province.”
¹⁰
The motion was a response to a circular letter from Massachusetts slaves: “The efforts made by the legislature of this province in their last sessions to free themselves from slavery, . . . [we] cannot but expect your house will . . . take our deplorable case into serious consideration, and give us that ample relief, which, as men, we have a natural right to.”
¹¹
It was signed by Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, Felix Holbrook, and Chester Joie, all of them slaves.

The irony of Patriot slave owners protesting duties as a form of enslavement had undermined support of liberal thinkers in England and America for the colonist cause. Boston merchant Theophilus Lillie protested that “people who contend so much for civil and religious liberty should be so ready to deprive others of their natural liberty.”
¹²
In London, Samuel Johnson expressed outrage at the Boston atrocities, asking, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”
¹³

The First Provincial Congress of Massachusetts rejected outright the motion to consider the slave issue.

In mid-October the Continental Congress in Philadelphia declared as unconstitutional thirteen parliamentary acts dating back to 1763. Calling the Coercive Acts cruel and unjust, it passed ten resolutions defining colonist rights, including individual rights to “life, liberty and property” and exclusive jurisdiction of elected provincial assemblies over taxation and internal legislation. The provinces pledged to stop importing British goods, to end the slave trade, to end consumption of British products and foreign luxury products, and to end all exports to Britain, Ireland, and the British West Indies. Congress also established the first “union” of sorts of the American colonies by forming the Continental Association. With establishment of that association, John Adams later argued, “the revolution was complete, in the minds of the people, and the union of the colonies, before the war commenced.”
¹⁴

After forming the Continental Association, Congress issued a proclamation to the king and the British and American peoples, reasserting the rights of colonists to govern themselves. Delegates agreed to reconvene on May 10, 1775, if Britain did not redress American grievances before then. In effect, the Congress rejected all authority of the British Parliament and declared the provinces independent, with only the British king retaining sovereignty in America.

When Samuel Adams and the other Massachusetts delegates returned from the Continental Congress to Boston, they found that in their absence, John Hancock had gathered the reins of power over the new Patriot government firmly in his hands—especially the powerful Committee of Safety. The Provincial Congress was still scurrying from town to town, with Gage unable to act against it without scattering his troops across the face of eastern Massachusetts and diluting his strength in Boston. At the beginning of November Hancock usurped the royal governor's prerogative of issuing the annual Thanksgiving Day proclamation in Massachusetts. He omitted the king's name from the document for the first time in colonial history. Two weeks later Hancock and the Provincial Congress called for twelve thousand volunteer Minutemen. Before it adjourned in December, the Provincial Congress elected Hancock to replace Bowdoin as delegate to the Second Continental Congress to be held the following May. Sensing the historic import of the Second Congress, Hancock accepted, adjourned the Provincial Congress until February 1, 1775, and returned to Boston.

Loyalist colonists and British soldiers were pouring into Boston from outlying areas, where armed Patriots had put Redcoats in fear for their lives. In Boston it was Loyalists' and soldiers' turn to bully Patriots who stood in their way, and Hancock's political prominence combined with his wealth put him in great personal danger. Rumors circulated that British troops were about to arrest, try, and hang Hancock and Adams. Other rumors insisted that British officers planned to assassinate Hancock, Adams, and Warren, but an officer vigorously denied the charges: “It would, indeed, have been a pity for them [Hancock and the others] to make their exit in that way, as I hope we shall have the pleasure of seeing them do it by the hands of the hangman.”
¹⁵

In London Governor Hutchinson pleaded with Lord Dartmouth to reverse the arrest orders for Hancock and Adams. “Lord Dartmouth . . . spake with great emotion that he was not the one that thirsted for blood,” Hutchinson noted in his diary, “but he could not help saying that he wished to see Hancock and Adams brought to the punishment they deserved, and he feared peace would not be restored until some examples were made which would deter others.”
¹⁶

On February 27, 1775, Lord North succumbed to the arguments and pleas of Thomas Hutchinson to seek reconciliation with the American colonies. As Hutchinson had urged, North offered to recognize the Continental Congress and pledge that Parliament would no longer impose any taxes on the colonies other than customs duties without the consent of the provincial assemblies. In return, he asked that the Continental Congress recognize Parliament's “supreme legislative authority and superintending power.” As petitions from merchants in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Liver pool, Manchester, and almost every other trading city demanded restoration of normal commercial relations with the colonies, the House of Commons agreed to adopt the principles of Lord North's reconciliation scheme by pledging to “forbear” laying taxes on any colony whose assembly agreed to tax itself to pay the costs of defense and support the civil government and judiciary within the province.

The king, however, would have none of it and demanded that the troops crush the rebellion in Massachusetts before England made any concessions. Lord Dartmouth, still Britain's secretary of state for colonial affairs, responded with blanket orders to royal governors and commanding generals in America to use whatever means necessary to enforce the Coercive Acts in Massachusetts and “arrest the principal actors and abettors.”
¹⁷
Edmund Burke pleaded with his colleagues in Parliament to reconsider. “The use of force alone is but temporary,” he protested. “It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again, and a nation is not governed which is perpetually being conquered.”
¹⁸

Parliament relented only slightly after Burke's speech by offering a blanket pardon to repentant rebels—with the exception of such “principal gentlemen who . . . are to be brought over to England . . . for an inquiry . . . into their conduct.” Among them were George Washington, Patrick Henry, John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, and others. Then, in an all-but-inexplicable show of churlishness, the House of Commons not only declared Massachusetts in a state of rebellion, it proceeded to bar New England fishermen from the North Atlantic fisheries and forbid New England colonies from trading with any nation but Britain and the British West Indies. Nor was that enough. Two weeks later Parliament extended the trade
restrictions to include New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina.

With Dartmouth's blanket arrest orders, Thomas Hutchinson knew he had lost his quest to bridge the divisions among his countrymen. “You are contending for a phantom,” he wrote to an old friend in Boston—possibly Thomas Cushing, the merchant who had remained the most moderate of Boston's Tea Party Patriots. “You say you are British subjects,” he pleaded, “and you suppose you are constitutionally exempt from one of the obligations which British subjects are under. But if you are exempt from the one, you are exempt from all—and so, are not British subjects.”

In writing to his friend, Hutchinson was wrestling with an important question, trying to analyze a problem that faced thousands of the most thoughtful American and British political and religious leaders and thinkers: When does disagreement over the principles of a government or religion cross the line between legitimate, beneficial reform and illegitimate subversion that infringes on the rights of other participants in that government or system. “Whilst you continue to deny the authority which made the laws,” Hutchinson posited, “with what face can anybody apply for relief from them, either in whole or in part?

Despite his pessimism, Hutchinson promised to persevere in his efforts to seek reconciliation. “The prospect is so gloomy,” he admitted, “that I am sometimes tempted to endeavor to forget that I am an American, and to turn my views to a provision for what remains of life in England. But the passion for my native country returns, and I will determine nothing until your case is absolutely desperate.”
²⁰

When news of Parliament's trade embargo reached Virginia, the state assembly moved the capital inland to Richmond from Williamsburg, where
a build-up of British naval strength in nearby waters raised the menace of the royal governor arresting Washington, Henry, and other Virginia political leaders. A town of only 600 residents and 150 homes, Richmond had no assembly hall as such. The largest seating area was in St. John's Anglican Church on Richmond Hill, with space in its pews for about 120 people.