Patriots (31 page)

Galloway’s proposal did not come up again, and sometime later it was erased from the minutes. Galloway knew that Adams had engineered his defeat. “He eats little,” Galloway said of him, “drinks little, sleeps little, thinks much, and is most decisive and indefatigible in the pursuit of his objects.”

—

The Congress disbanded on October 24 after seven intense weeks, and the exhausted delegates were happy to be heading home. Patrick Henry had urged that they keep their deliberations
secret, and that vow, along with the uncertain delivery of mail, had kept them doubly separated from their wives and families. John Adams had learned the cost of being locked up with so many voluble men, and he complained to Abigail that if a proposition was presented that three and two made five, the result was two days of speeches on logic and rhetoric, law, history, politics and mathematics, before at last the resolution passed unanimously. Samuel Adams’ wife wrote to tell him that Tories were flocking to Boston from the countryside to seek protection under General Gage’s guns. Elizabeth Adams, who shared her husband’s politics, said the Tories’ arrival had turned the town into a den of thieves, a cage of every unclean mind.

His political allies also had kept Adams informed of events at home.
Dr. Benjamin Church wrote to say that he was doing his duty to keep the public alert, and Joseph Warren was proving himself worthy of his teacher. Following Adams’ instructions, Dr. Warren drew up a set of resolutions called the
Suffolk Resolves and got them passed at a county meeting. They declared that the Port Act needn’t be obeyed and called on the people to prepare for a defensive war against England whenever Boston sounded the alarm. In Philadelphia, Joseph Galloway recognized the Suffolk Resolves as a declaration of war, but they were presented to the Congress so reassuringly that rejecting them would be disowning Boston in its hour of distress. Passing the resolutions consoled Samuel Adams for the delays and loopholes added to the trade boycott.

The delegates were leaving Philadelphia with affectionate regret. John Adams had come to know Patrick Henry better after they spent an evening working together on a petition to the king. Henry had told Adams about his lack of education, how he had read Virgil and Livy at fifteen but had never looked into a Latin book since. His father had died about that same time, Henry said, and he had been struggling through life ever since. Recording that tale in his diary, John Adams gave no sign that he had been touched by Patrick Henry any more than Thomas Jefferson had ever been. Adams was dryly amused, though, by Henry’s high-flown ideas and his praise for exalted minds, by which he seemed to be including his own. And yet Patrick Henry was clearly an ally against men like Galloway and Jay, and they had parted that evening as brothers.

In Boston, General Gage was sending mixed signals both to London and to his own edgy men. Just before the Continental Congress met, Gage had estimated privately to Francis Bernard’s patron, Lord Barrington, that in a war with England the colonies could be vanquished in a year or two. His optimism was well received in London. But less than a month later Gage wrote to Thomas Hutchinson, recommending that he show the letter to Lord Dartmouth and urging that the Intolerable Acts be suspended, since it would take no fewer than twenty thousand men to crush an uprising. That disagreeable prospect had barely been digested when the Ministry received word that the Continental Congress had adopted the bellicose Suffolk Resolves. Now war, which had been considered so unlikely just weeks before, started to seem possible, even imminent. And leading Britain’s troops was a general whose vacillations had discredited him with his superiors.

Gage’s September 1 raid against the public store of gunpowder at Cambridge had contributed to his pessimism. Although the British soldiers had commandeered three hundred barrels of powder, the price had been a storm of protest. The rumors that had reached the Congress in Philadelphia had been even more inflated throughout Massachusetts, where men had heard that six colonists had been killed and that Boston was in flames. Within a day, tens of thousands of farmers from miles around Boston laid down their plows and were marching to the town. Two or three thousand reached Cambridge, where they found that the reports were untrue. Heading for home, they advised men on the road to turn back. But their spontaneous outpouring had been a warning to Gage.

These days, the general seemed to lack the will to carry out the orders he had helped shape. Gage was striving to prevent incidents in the streets, and his troops complained acidly when he refused to let them wear sidearms around Boston. They called him “the Old Woman” and claimed that he sided with the town in any dispute. British troops were deserting freely, caught only when they were rash enough to show themselves in the marketplace. By January 1775, discontent in the ranks had spread so far that soldiers said one cannon in the center of Boston was reserved as a signal against mutiny. If it was fired, all the men who chose to stick by Thomas Gage were to hurry there with their weapons.

The petitions from the Continental Congress were being ignored by everyone in London, with the significant exception of William Pitt. Lord Chatham ended a long retirement to tell the House of Lords that he had read Thucydides and had studied the greatest statesmen of history, but that for solid reasoning, sagacious force and wise conclusions no nation had ever done better than the Congress at Philadelphia. “When your lordships look at the papers transmitted from America,” he said, “when you consider their decency, firmness and wisdom, you cannot but respect their cause and
wish to make it your own.”

Chatham made a politic bow to the British armed forces before he made his next point. The troops, he said, had his warmest love. All the same, “you may call them an army of safety and of guard. But they are in truth an army of impotence and contempt, and to make the folly equal to the disgrace, they are an army of irritation and vexation.”

In Commons as Pitt and in Lords as Chatham, he had given Parliament consistent advice for ten years, and it had been consistently rejected. Now the House of Lords defeated by a vote of 68 to 18 his motion to withdraw the troops from Boston. Less than two weeks later, he returned to urge that the vindictive measures of the previous April be repealed and that Parliament renounce forever its right to tax the colonies. In the House of Commons, Edmund Burke argued the same point on grounds of simple expediency: an abstract right to tax was not worth the consequences that seemed to lie ahead. In his letters Lord Chatham was putting the case as starkly as he could:
“We shall be forced ultimately to retract. Let us retract while we can, not when we must.”

Retract? Never! said John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich. He called the Americans raw, undisciplined, cowardly men, and he said he hoped they would not field forty or fifty thousand soldiers but two hundred thousand. It would make conquering them all the easier. Large majorities in both houses showed that Parliament believed Montagu.

—

As Samuel Adams and his Massachusetts colleagues were meeting in Philadelphia, the colony’s towns had elected delegates to a new Massachusetts Provincial Congress after the dissolution of
the House by General Gage. Convening in Salem, with Hancock as president, the delegates launched the colony’s first government independent of the British king. They ordered money held back from the royal collections and channeled into their own accounts. They set up elite units within the militia—companies of fifty privates who were instructed to be ready to move at the shortest notice. And they established Committees of Safety to oversee those shock troops, who were calling themselves Minute Men.

On January 27, 1775, Lord Dartmouth sent explicit orders for General Gage to arrest the principal rebels in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. The Americans couldn’t mount much resistance now, and any conflict with them should come before their rebellion had a chance to ripen. John Hancock certainly qualified under Dartmouth’s definition as a leading actor, and yet Gage did not move against him. Hancock went on living in Boston, with his aunt, Lydia Hancock, and her young protégée, Dorothy Quincy, a cousin of Josiah and Hannah Quincy. Aunt Lydia had been determined for years that her nephew should marry Dorothy.

When Boston’s Tories decided that General Gage didn’t seem to know whom to arrest, they attempted to enlighten him. They tossed leaflets into British camps and barracks telling the soldiers what was expected of them if a rebellion broke out: “You will put the above persons to the sword, destroy their houses and
plunder the effects!” Samuel Adams headed the list of fifteen names, along with Hancock, Thomas Cushing, Josiah Quincy and Dr. Benjamin Church. John Adams was somehow omitted, and William Molineux frustrated them by dying in bed before he could be stabbed. The Tory note had a postscript—“Don’t forget those trumpeters of sedition, the printers, Edes and Gill, and Thomas.”

—

As Gage weighed his next step, the time came around for the fifth annual commemoration of the Boston Massacre of March 1770. Samuel Adams was again chairman of the committee to pick an orator, and this year, with British troops swarming over Boston, the choice was especially delicate. Threats were being made against any man who gave the address, and when Dr. Joseph Warren, who had spoken three years earlier, heard about them, he asked Adams to choose him again.

On the Monday of the oration, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Dr. Benjamin Church and other leaders took their places on the raised platform of the Old South. Immediately, about forty British soldiers crowded into the doorway, and Adams called out an invitation for them to take seats at the front. Soldiers and civilians waited nervously more than an hour for Warren to arrive. Men in the audience were looking quizzically around the hall when a one-horse carriage approached the drugstore across the street and Dr. Warren hurried inside, followed by a servant with a large bundle. When Warren appeared again, he was wearing a toga in the style of Cicero. He crossed the street, entered Old South and climbed into its pulpit, which had been draped in black.

After his dramatic entrance, Warren’s speech seemed muted. Gesturing with a white handkerchief in his right hand, he seemed to be avoiding any phrases that might offend the soldiers in the front rows, and with good reason. A number of officers were outraged that General Gage hadn’t seized the chief rebels and were vowing to do it themselves. Their strategy called for an army ensign to throw a raw egg at Joseph Warren in the pulpit. That signal would set off his fellow soldiers, who would rush forward and arrest Adams, Hancock and possibly several others.

When Warren’s speech ended, there was applause from the patriots and groaning from the soldiers and the Tories, but Dr. Warren had committed no flagrant offense.

Samuel Adams got to his feet determined to correct that oversight. Speaking on behalf of the town, he wanted to thank Dr. Warren for his elegant and spirited oration. Then he provoked the British troops. There would be another oration next year, Adams announced, to commemorate the bloody massacre of the fifth of March, 1770. At the words “bloody massacre” the soldiers began to hiss, and some officers cried loudly, “Oh, fie! Fie!”

In the galleries, the patriots heard their shout as “Oh, fire! Fire!” They swarmed out windows to the roof and clambered down gutters to the street. At the same time, the Forty-third Regiment was returning from an exercise and marching near the Old South. Its drums threw the crowd into even greater panic. Inside the hall, Samuel Adams restored order and found a way to put the patriots in the right. If it were not for their restraint, he claimed later, no British soldier would have left the Old South alive.

When the aborted British plot was revealed, the patriots dwelled on one detail, whether or not it was true. The egg hadn’t been thrown on cue because the soldier who was supposed to throw it had slipped and fallen on his way inside the hall, dislocating his knee and breaking the egg.

—

General Gage had inherited informers from Thomas Hutchinson, and Samuel Adams’ circle suspected that someone high in their council was betraying them, but they had not unmasked him. For routine intelligence, Gage depended upon British soldiers who put on civilian clothes and rode out to reconnoiter. About the time Adams was organizing the memorial at the Old South, Gage had sent out two officers to scout the lay of the land between Boston and Concord, where the patriots were said to be storing arms. Sometime during the spring, Gage would have to march his troops there and confiscate them.

Ensign D’Bernicre and Captain Brown set out on their scouting dressed in brown outfits with red handkerchiefs knotted at the neck. It was D’Bernicre’s first trip out of Boston, and he found Cambridge with its brick college buildings a pretty town. So far, no one on the road seemed to be taking notice of them, and the two soldiers traveled on to Watertown, which was considered a large town in America, but which D’Bernicre thought would be a village in England. The two spies stopped for dinner at a tavern owned by a patriot, expecting their disguises to shield them through the meal.

A black woman came politely to their table, took their order and returned with their food. But as they ate, they noticed that she kept eyeing them. Then she slipped out of the tavern. When she returned, the scouts thought they had better be a little friendlier.

It’s very fine country around here, one said.

So it is, the woman answered, and we have got brave fellows to defend it. If you go farther up the road, you’ll find that it is so.

That warning disconcerted the soldiers. Throwing down money for their bill, they made their escape, but outside the inn they learned that the woman had told even more to Captain Brown’s servant, John. She had recognized the captain from five years earlier in Boston, and she had guessed that his errand now was to draw a map of the countryside.

The two soldiers consulted. Being picked for this mission had been an honor and they had left a number of jealous rivals behind in their regiment. If they went back now, they’d look foolish. There was no choice but to push on.