American Tempest (37 page)

James Bowdoin, who joined the Tea Party movement after the Boston Massacre, remained on the fringes of the political picture during and immediately
after the Revolution because of an ongoing struggle with tuberculosis. In 1785, when the ever-popular John Hancock resigned as governor and allowed his lieutenant governor Thomas Cushing to finish out his term, Bowdoin decided to run against Cushing for the governorship and won. Faced with enormous state debts from the Revolutionary War, Bowdoin raised taxes—as Hancock had stubbornly refused to do. The popular response mirrored that of Boston Patriots after the British had tried raising taxes in the 1760s and 1770s. Farmers across the state rebelled. In western Massachusetts, former Captain Daniel Shays, a struggling farmer like the others, convinced neighbors that Boston legislators were colluding with judges and lawyers across the state to raise taxes to exorbitantly high levels and foreclose on properties when farmers found it impossible to pay. With that, he shouted what some feared would provoke a second American Revolution: “Close down the courts!”

Echoing his call, farmers marched to courthouses in Cambridge, Concord, Worcester, Northampton, Taunton, and Great Barrington—and shut down the civil courts. Hailed by farmers across the nation, the shutdowns frightened courts into ending foreclosures in Massachusetts. Determined to expand his success, Shays led a force of five hundred men to Springfield, where one thousand more farmers joined him. After shutting down the State Supreme Court, they marched to the federal arsenal, intent on seizing arms, ammunition, and artillery. In Boston, meanwhile, Bowdoin raised money privately and recruited a force of four thousand troops to march to Springfield to crush Shays and his rebels. Before they arrived at Springfield, however, soldiers at the arsenal unleashed a few artillery blasts that fell short of the approaching farmers but amply demonstrated the advantages of cannonballs over pitchforks. The troops from Boston chased the farmers to their homes and captured most of their leaders, although Shays fled to safety in what was then the independent republic of Vermont. In defeat, however, Shays's army scored a resounding victory when farmers across the state went to the polls and voted Governor Bowdoin and three-fourths of the legislature out of office. Recalled to power by popular demand, John Hancock and a new, pro-farmer legislature declared a tax holiday for a year, reduced taxes thereafter, released imprisoned debtors to go back to work, and exempted clothing, household possessions, and tools of trade from
seizure in future debt proceedings. Bowdoin retired from politics and died in relative obscurity on November 6, 1790.

The irony of Bowdoin's ruthless suppression of Shays's tax protesters was not lost on other Tea Party leaders such as John Hancock or, indeed, on Revolutionary War leaders such as George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Richard Henry Lee. Only twenty years earlier, they had protested Britain's imposition of the all-but-miniscule stamp tax to help pay war debts incurred defending Americans in the French and Indian War. Although all British subjects
except
Americans paid the stamp tax, Patrick Henry branded anyone who supported Parliament's efforts to tax Virginians “AN ENEMY TO THIS HIS MAJESTY'S COLONY.”
²
When he assumed the reins of government as Virginia's first governor, Patrick Henry not only taxed Virginians, he did so without their consent. Contrary to the promises of liberty and representation in government that American Patriot leaders had made to rouse the citizenry to rebellion, the state constitutions they wrote after the war limited voting and the right to stand for office to white, male property owners. As each state defined the minimum amount of tangible assets that qualified a man as a property owner, it further limited those who could vote to the same men of wealth and influence who had governed the states under royal governors before the Revolution. South Carolina, for example, required voters and candidates for governor to have assets of at least £10,000; Pennsylvania levied a hefty poll tax; Virginia limited voting to owners of at least five hundred acres of land. The qualifications disenfranchised many shopkeepers, craftsmen, farmers, and other hard-working, productive earners with small properties who had fought in the Revolution to get the vote and have a say in government.

For them—and, indeed, for most Americans—the Revolutionary War and independence from Britain produced few immediate benefits or changes in their way of life—except to free the wealthy elite in each state, America's “aristocracy” of sorts, to govern without oversight by British authorities. In effect, independence left those in power in each state free to exploit the land and the less fortunate without having to share their profits with the crown. Those who served the wealthy before the Revolution continued to serve them afterward, having gained no benefits. At the urging of John Hancock, Sam Adams, and other Tea Party Patriots, John Russell,
a Boston stone mason, had smeared his face with lampblack and red ochre to board the
Dartmouth
on the night of December 16, 1773. Promised liberty, the right to vote, and no taxation without representation if he joined the Tea Party, he helped dump tea in Boston Harbor and went to fight for independence in the Revolutionary War. After he had done as they asked and raised them to political power, he remained a stone mason with no more individual rights or liberties than he had enjoyed under British rule. Only three of the newly independent states guaranteed the right of free speech, and although every state protected freedom of religion, five established state religions that taxed all citizens to support them, whether or not they practiced those faiths. Only eleven states guaranteed freedom of the press, and only eight protected the right to peaceful assembly. The Articles of Confederation that united the new states in “a firm league of friendship” did not guarantee any individual freedoms or even trial by a jury of one's peers—a right that had been guaranteed to British subjects since King John's signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. Contrary to the promise of the Declaration of Independence, Americans would have to wait more than a decade for a new constitution to grant them “certain inalienable rights.”

More than eighty-five thousand Americans out of a population of about 2.5 million quit their native land during and after the American Revolution, stripped by savage mobs of their properties, their citizenship, and their birthrights. But the number is far more significant than it appears at first. Most of the émigrés were New Englanders—well over sixty thousand, or more than 10 percent of the population of that region. Thousands more Loyalists who refused to quit their native land fled westward into the wilderness, abandoning valuable properties their families had owned for generations and starting anew—often under assumed names and identities. Many of those who fled could trace their family roots in America to the time of the landing of the
Mayflower
at Plymouth. All had come seeking individual liberty and economic opportunity—the right to free speech, freedom to worship as they chose, freedom of the press, and freedom to reap the riches of their labors. For as many as 150 years, they had helped transform a savage land into a thriving country of productive farms, forests,
mines, villages, towns, and ports. Most had obeyed the laws of the land, more or less scrupulously, and worked to better its economy and government. And for their loyalty to their country and its legal government, their countrymen expelled them. Most Loyalists were patriots who loved America; they and their forebears had fought for America in countless conflicts with Indians, in one war with the Spanish in the Florida area, and in three wars with the French, culminating with the French and Indian War.

After arriving in London in 1774, Thomas Hutchinson argued in vain with the king and his ministry to repeal the Coercive Acts. A year later Massachusetts officials sold his Boston townhouse and the rest of his estate and proscribed him—in effect stripping him of his birthright and the nationality he and his forebears had embraced for 150 years.

As the Massachusetts uprising turned into a full-scale revolutionary war, Hutchinson resigned himself to exile, writing the third volume of his
History of the Province of Massachusetts
and mixing in London's political and literary circles with such luminaries as Edward Gibbon, author of
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. The premature deaths of his daughter Peggy and his son Billy, however, crushed him emotionally, and he died on June 3, 1780 at the age of sixty-nine, a broken man without a family or a country.

As screaming Boston mobs hounded the Oliver family day and night, Peter Oliver's wife collapsed and died in 1775. Oliver himself sailed out of Boston with the British army on March, 17, 1776, as the Redcoats finished destroying Castle William. Oliver reached Halifax, then sailed to London, where he was reunited with his brother-in-law Thomas Hutchinson. In the spring of 1778 he moved into the country near Birmingham, where members of the Oliver-Hutchinson clan gathered and settled after fleeing Massachusetts. By then, Oliver had arranged for his son and his son's wife to
come to England. While there, he wrote his remarkable memoir,
Peter Oliver's Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View
. “We have seen a set of men,” he wrote, “favored with the liberty . . . under the auspices of the English government and protected by it, but under an obligation to conform to such regulations as should be made by its authority.

Peter Oliver died in Birmingham on October 13, 1791 at the age of 78. His son and daughter, who had followed him to England, died of tuberculosis within five years. His last son, Thomas, lived to be ninety-two, but died without issue, thus ending his line of the family, whose ancestors had arrived in America in 1630.

Like Thomas Hutchinson and Peter Oliver, tens of thousands of Loyalist Americans died in exile after the American Revolutionary War, never quite understanding why their fellow countrymen had driven them from their native homes. Indeed, one of the ironies of the American Revolution—of the Tea Party tempest—is that it cost the new nation some of America's most brilliant people—men that Patrick Henry described as “an enterprising,
moneyed people” who would have made enormous contributions to the new nation's political, economic, and social evolution.

Even more ironic was that a decade after independence the American government seemed to mirror the very British government that Tea Party Patriots had fought to shatter. Virginia's Patrick Henry railed that the American Constitution had created “a great and mighty president with . . . the powers of a king” and given Congress the powers of Parliament to impose “unlimited . . . direct taxation.” The Revolution from Britain, it seemed, had been for nought.

Elected Virginia's first governor, Henry became the only American Patriot leader to seek reconciliation by inviting exiled Loyalists to return to their native land with the promise to restore their property and citizenship rights. “The quarrel is over,” he boomed.

W
hen in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitles them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government, having its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably
the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all have in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.