Patriots (29 page)

“A Grecian philosopher,” Adams said, “who was lying asleep upon the grass, was aroused by the bite of some animal upon the palm of his hand. He closed his hand suddenly as he awoke and found that he had caught a field mouse. As he was examining the little animal who dared to attack him, it unexpectedly bit him a second time, and it made its escape.

“Now, fellow citizens, what think you was the reflection he made upon this trifling circumstance? It was this: that there is no animal, however weak and contemptible, which cannot defend its own liberty, if it will only
fight
for it.”

Almost fifty-two, Adams could have been the father of many of his lieutenants and the grandfather of some of the Mohawk apprentices at the Tea Party. For thirty years the people of Boston had watched him disdain money.

“For myself,” Adams said, “I have been wont to converse with Poverty. And however disagreeable a companion she may be thought to be by the affluent and luxurious, who were never acquainted with her, I can live happily with her the remainder of my days, if I can thereby contribute to the redemption of my country.

“Our oppressors cannot force us into submission by reducing us to a state of starvation. We can subsist independently of all the world. The real wants and necessities of man are few.”

If all others fail us, Adams concluded with a practical touch, we can live as our ancestors did, on the clams and mussels that abound off these Massachusetts shores.

When the Tory motion was put to a vote, the Meeting overwhelmingly struck it down. In its place, the town called on the Committee of Correspondence to persevere with its usual firmness. When his informants brought this news to General Gage, the new governor interpreted the vote much as his predecessor would have done. The better sort of people, he assured Lord Dartmouth, had tried to pay for the tea and to disband the Committee of Correspondence, but they had been outvoted by the lower class.

In another respect, however, Gage’s perception differed from Hutchinson’s. When the Ministry in London had suggested that Hutchinson buy Samuel Adams off with an honor or a pension, the governor had replied that such efforts would be worse than useless. Adams would use any new position as a better platform for further attacks. As for money, Adams had said,
“A guinea has never glistened in my eye.” All the same, bribe was a time-honored way of converting an enemy to a friend, and General Gage decided to try it. He sent a Colonel Fenton to call on Adams, empowered to bestow on him whatever rewards would end his opposition to the government. The figure might be one thousand pounds sterling for life for Adams and the same amount for his son.

Adams listened politely, even with a show of interest.

General Gage’s advice was that Adams should not displease His Majesty further, Fenton continued. Mr. Adams should remember the penalties of the act of Henry VIII, which allowed political enemies to be sent for trial in England. He could avoid that peril by changing his course, and in the process make his peace with the king.

When Colonel Fenton had finished, he waited for Adams to name his terms. Instead, Adams rose from his chair and said, “Sir, I trust I have long since made my peace with the King of Kings. No personal consideration shall induce me to abandon the righteous cause of my country.”

Showing the colonel to the door, Adams gave him a message
for his commander.
“Tell General Gage it is the advice of Samuel Adams to him no longer to insult the feelings of an exasperated people.”

—

Virginia’s day of fasting and prayer to protest the closing of Boston’s harbor was another sign that leadership in the House of Burgesses was being wrested from the older members by younger men—Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson. When they first learned of Boston’s plight, they shut themselves up in the legislative library and rummaged through precedents to support their call for a day of mortification. They then asked the Burgesses’ treasurer, who had a reputation for piety, to move their resolution, and it passed unopposed.

The same group, including Lee’s brother, Francis Lightfoot Lee, was meeting regularly now in the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern, down the road from the Burgesses in Williamsburg. Discussing how they should respond to the crisis in Boston, they had come to agree with Patrick Henry:
“United we stand, divided we fall.” They scheduled a convention for August 1, 1774, to pick delegates for the meeting in Philadelphia.

For the occasion, Thomas Jefferson had prepared an essay called
A Summary View of the Rights of British America.
Jefferson was a little past thirty now, but his document rang with youthful energy. At a time when the king was still being toasted and America’s troubles were being blamed on his wicked or indifferent ministers, Jefferson’s pamphlet denounced George III directly for a host of civil crimes. He even accused him of forcing slavery upon the colonies—a practice, Jefferson added, that insulted the rights of human nature. He ended his essay by urging the king to be honest. Do your duty, he told George III, and mankind will forgive you even your failures.

Jefferson’s vehemence might have been better received in Williamsburg if he had been on hand to defend his position. Instead, he fell ill with dysentery on his way to the capital and sent two copies ahead with his allies Patrick Henry and Peyton Randolph. Jefferson thought that Henry had probably been too lazy to read the essay. Randolph, Jefferson’s cousin, placed his copy on the meeting table for the other delegates to look over. Although they appreciated Jefferson’s skill with language—“Let those flatter
who fear; it is not an American art”—his essay went further than the majority were prepared to go. The convention chose seven men to send to Philadelphia, some from the liberal faction, some from the moderate, all highly regarded in the Burgesses. Peyton Randolph got the most votes, with one hundred and four. Then Richard Henry Lee and George Washington. Patrick Henry drew eighty-nine votes. The final three were Richard Bland, Benjamin Harrison and Edmund Pendleton. Jefferson, with fifty-one votes, was not chosen.

The Virginia convention also provided its delegates with instructions. All British imports were to end on November 1, 1774. That included any newly purchased slaves. If London did not lift its punitive measures against Boston within one year, all American exports to Britain would stop, including tobacco.

As the delegates left for home, the newly elected representatives prepared for their trip to Philadelphia. Patrick Henry met Edmund Pendleton at George Washington’s plantation, Mount Vernon, where they spent the night and lingered on for a noon dinner before leaving to cross the Potomac and stay overnight in Maryland. Washington, who had won a reputation for youthful bravery during the French and Indian War, had married an amiable widow with a tidy fortune behind her. As the men set out, Martha Washington bade goodbye to her guests. “I hope you will all stand firm,” she said.
“I know George will.”

Carpenters’ Hall, Philadelphia

HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF PENN SYLVANIA

S
AMUEL
A
DAMS
may have helped to reconcile Bostonians to their own deprivations, but his speech at the Town Meeting also reminded them that if he was going to represent them properly in Philadelphia he needed some polish. About a week before he was due to leave for the Congress, Adams and his family were eating their evening meal when someone knocked at the door. Their visitor turned out to be one of Boston’s most popular tailors, and he asked permission to measure Mr. Adams for a suit of clothes. Adams’ wife and daughter tried to pry from him the name of the person who had sent him, but he said he was not at liberty to tell. The tailor took the measurements and left. The family had barely returned to the table when there was another knock. This time Boston’s leading hatter wanted to establish the size of Mr. Adams’ head. He was soon followed by a shoemaker and then by other
craftsmen, all taking measurements, all refusing to say who had sent them.

A few days later, a large trunk addressed to Mr. Samuel Adams appeared at the family’s front door. Inside were a full suit of clothes, two pairs of fine shoes, a set of silver shoe buckles, sets of gold knee buckles and gold sleeve buttons, six pairs of silk hose and the same number of good cotton ones, a goldheaded cane, a cocked hat and a new red cloak. Cane and buttons were stamped with the insignia of the Sons of Liberty.

Other friends were coming forward more openly. They put up a barn in place of Adams’ old and decayed structure and made repairs on his house. One sympathizer asked diffidently whether it might not be said that Mr. Adams’ finances were rather low.

Adams answered that it was true. But he said being poor was a matter of indifference to him so long as his
poor
abilities were of any service to the public.

At that the other man pressed on him a purse with fifteen or twenty Johannes, a Portuguese gold coin that was worth more than three pounds sterling. Virginia had voted to pay its delegates half of one for each day’s service.

When the day came for the Massachusetts delegates to leave, James Bowdoin could not go because of sickness in his family. Samuel Adams, John Adams and Robert Treat Paine met at Thomas Cushing’s house and rode together to a dinner in their honor at Watertown. There the delegates said goodbye to fifty of their allies, including Samuel Adams, Jr., who had recently become a doctor. They left Watertown after the meal, but because the day was very hot they pushed on only as far as Framingham. Boston had sent them out in a lavish style that matched
Samuel Adams’ new wardrobe—a
coach and four, preceded by two white servants, armed and on horseback, and four blacks behind them, all in livery, two riding horses and two as footmen.

As the party passed through Connecticut over the next days, every town rang its bells and shot off its cannon. Cheering men, women and children crowded the doorways, and John Adams, who was not entirely averse to pomp, reflected that no governor, no general of any army, had ever been treated to such ceremony. At Hartford they met Silas Deane, one of Connecticut’s delegates, who gave the Massachusetts delegates a briefing on the New Yorkers
they would be meeting: which were merchants and which were lawyers, who was the most popular—that was Philip Livingston—and how they were related by marriage. At each stop along their route to Philadelphia, the Massachusetts group were meeting patriots who were new to them and ready to debate all over again the arguments in James Otis’ pamphlets of ten years ago.

This was John Adams’ first trip out of his own colony, and he was flooded with impressions. In New Haven he saw a
watermelon so red it looked painted. In New York the colonists had erected a solid lead statue of King George III on horseback, gilded and mounted on a towering marble pedestal. Adams had to admit that New York’s streets were more elegant, its houses grander, than those he had left behind. Everything seemed to have been decorated, even the red
brick buildings that Bostonians left unpainted.

Reaching New York had taken five days, and the Massachusetts party rested there. On Sunday the church services seemed old-fashioned to them, too much drawling and quavering from the clergymen. But they were treated to the most
sumptuous breakfast John Adams had ever seen—richly designed plates, large silver coffee urns and teapots, luxurious napkins, perfect toast and butter and, afterward, luscious peaches and pears and plums and musk-melon.

At each stop, the Massachusetts representatives were hearing more speculation about this delegate or that. It was indispensable gossip for men who would be meeting fifty strangers on whom their lives depended. John Alsop of the New York delegation was said to be goodhearted but not very able. James Duane was probably sensible, but to John Adams his squinting eye made him look a bit sly. Talking with Philip Livingston was impossible, since he was all rough bluster. Livingston was sure that if there was a breach with England the colonies would immediately make war among themselves. And besides, he demanded, what about the fact that Massachusetts had once hanged Quakers? John Adams found reasoning with him as futile as talking logic to an avalanche.

After four days in New York, the town’s luxuries were beginning to cloy. All this dining and drinking coffee in houses around the city might be pleasant enough, John Adams told his diary, but it was keeping the Bostonians from seeing the worthy things—the college, the churches, the printers and the bookshops.
As for the people: “With all the opulence and splendor of this city, there is very little good breeding to be found. We have been treated with an assiduous respect. But I have not seen one real gentleman, one well-bred man, since I came to town.” Adams concluded that New Yorkers had no modesty, no interest in another person’s opinion. They talked very loud, very fast and all at the same time. “If they ask you a question, before you can utter three words of your answer, they will break out upon you again—
and talk away.”

The Massachusetts delegates reached Philadelphia on Friday, August 29. Although they rode into town dusty and weary, they couldn’t resist heading for the City Tavern, which had been open for only a few months but already had the reputation of being the best public house in America, as good as anything London had to offer. They mingled there with a host of Philadelphians and met Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina. Delegates from the other colonies were also making their first judgments of the Bostonians, and some of the wealthier saw through Samuel Adams’ new finery and pronounced him a dangerous man with nothing to lose. Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia shared a coach with John Adams and found him cold and reserved.