Patriots (38 page)

Allen and his Boys didn’t expect the British crown to support them in their struggle with New York, and the dispute had left Allen with a passion for liberty. Lexington to him was only another proof of Britain’s desire to enslave all of America. In a vote of confidence at the Catamount Tavern in Bennington, the Green Mountain Boys elected Allen their commander for the assault on Fort Ti. He withdrew to plan his campaign, and the Boys readied themselves by getting drunk.

They were deep in their preparations when Benedict Arnold arrived at the tavern. Colonel Arnold, resplendent as ever, announced that he had come to lead the charge against Ticonderoga. The Boys laughed. Arnold produced his commission from the Massachusetts Committee of Safety. To show how impressed they were, the Boys climbed on the tables and danced, flapping their coattails at him. One of their number spelled out their message: If Ethan Allen was replaced, the Boys would stay home. Amid mockery and shouts, Colonel Arnold was taken to meet Allen. Hours passed, heads cleared, and the Boys learned that their mission would now have two commanders. One of them had an army of two hundred and fifty men, the other had a piece of paper signed in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Boys reached the shore at Lake George well before dawn, but neither of their leaders had remembered that the water here was a mile wide, and no one had boats. It was nearly daybreak before they had rounded up enough small craft to row eighty-three men across the water to the fort’s high walls. The Boys crept to the fortress gate. It was open. The sentry on duty was asleep. At the prospect of such an easy victory, the Boys began to whoop, which roused the sentry. He aimed his weapon, thought better of it and ran away. Ticonderoga had been built as a garrison for four hundred men, but during the dozen peacetime years the British had let it deteriorate and kept it severely undermanned.

A British lieutenant, Jocelyn Feltham, who heard the triumphant shouts ringing over the battlements, jumped from bed, threw open his door and ran into an immense man. Another, very dapper man was standing beside him. By what authority have you stormed this fort? Lieutenant Feltham demanded.

“In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!” roared Ethan Allen.

When they pressed on to the commander’s quarters, Allen’s eloquence failed him. Waving his sword above his head, he shouted over and over,
“Come out, you old rat!”

Captain William Delaplace appeared, nearly speechless. “Damn you,” he said,
“what—what—does this mean?”

Allen assured the captain that the Green Mountain Boys had already disarmed his men; there had been only forty-two of them. At that news, Captain Delaplace held out the hilt of his sword in surrender.

It was then that the battle for Ticonderoga began in earnest. The Boys had discovered stores of rum. As they reinforced their high spirits, they ran through the fort, grabbing what they could from the British soldiers. Since Ethan Allen didn’t try to stop them, Benedict Arnold raised his voice above the din to declare that military law strictly forbade looting. Several Boys spat at Colonel Arnold’s feet.

One American had found a trinket, and its British owner was trailing after him, pleading to have it back. Colonel Arnold wrested it away and returned it. The Boy loaded a musket and pressed it hard against Arnold’s chest. Admit, he demanded, that Ethan Allen was the leader here.

Benedict Arnold stared contemptuously at the man and said he was the official commander appointed by the authority of Massachusetts Bay and to him the Green Mountain Boys were behaving like drunken outlaws. The man lowered his weapon.

Four days later, fifty men recruited by Benedict Arnold’s officers arrived on the scene, and Arnold took formal command of the fort, with its one hundred and twenty iron cannon, two brass cannon, fifty swivels, two 10-inch mortars, ten tons of musket balls, three cartloads of flints, thirty gun carriages and ten cases of powder.

—

Since their escape from Lexington, Samuel Adams and John Hancock had kept moving, but the stealth and the isolation were taking a toll of Hancock’s nerves. From Worcester he wrote to the colony’s Committee of Safety asking, What were they to do next? Where were the rest of the delegates who would be going to the second session of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia–Thomas Cushing, Robert Treat Paine, John Adams? Hancock
craved news and was full of advice. Seize Castle William! Stop up the port!
“Boston
must
be entered; the troops must be sent away. Our friends are valuable, but the country must be saved.” Hancock added that he and Adams needed some sign of support from their countrymen. Where was the escort that would prove that they were the first citizens of the colony and not criminals on the run? “We travel rather as deserters, which I will not submit to.”

A few days later, Lydia Hancock, along with Dorothy Quincy, joined her nephew at Worcester, and the party left for New York. At Fairfield, Connecticut, Hancock entrusted his aunt and Miss Quincy to the sheriff, Thaddeus Burr. After Hancock and Adams set out for Philadelphia, Burr welcomed another house guest to his mansion, his nephew Aaron.

The young man was a precocious nineteen. When he was an infant, his mother’s death had launched Aaron Burr on a lifelong quest for affection, and he was helped along by his remarkable looks. He was slight but with a large head, a wide mouth and deep-set hazel eyes that many women found irresistible. He had come to understand early that every time a woman fell in love with him and he rejected her, however gently, he had made another enemy. All the same, he kept their letters. Some were from ladies, some from less than ladies, but Aaron cherished them all. His father, who died when Aaron was young, had been president of the College of New Jersey and had raised the money for Nassau Hall, the first building erected when the college moved to Prince Town. Aaron had applied for the freshman class when he was eleven years old and looked nine, but the college had rejected him. Two years later he was admitted as a sophomore. He had studied law and had eloped. The couple was caught at a ferry crossing and Burr was ducked in the water by the young woman’s brothers. Now he was caught up in the politics exploding around him.

That commitment didn’t stop Burr from a few days’ flirtation with Dorothy Quincy. He enjoyed listening to his own deft flattery, and Lydia Hancock watched as he and Dolly Quincy talked together with obvious fascination. Miss Quincy discovered that Burr not only was pleasingly handsome but also had been left pleasantly rich. He may not have had John Hancock’s holdings–few men did—but young Burr could support a wife in comfort. To her irritation, however, Dolly Quincy was never left alone
with him. Lydia Hancock was always at her side. When Burr cut his visit short,
Dolly Quincy knew whom to blame.

Her fiancé was also being diverted during his journey to Philadelphia. New York had provided a reception fit for a king, and Hancock described the scene to Miss Quincy in detail while assuring her that such displays were distasteful to him. Within three miles of the town he had been met by a grenadier company, a militia regiment, men in carriages and on horseback and thousands of people following in the road on foot and raising the greatest cloud of dust Hancock had ever seen. A mile outside New York, men stopped his carriage, freed the horses and insisted on using their own muscle to pull him into town. Hancock told Miss Quincy that he had protested against that excessive display and prevailed on them to return his horses. But he let her know that
“in short, no person could possibly be more noticed than myself.”

At King’s Bridge, just north of New York, Hancock and Samuel Adams had joined the other Massachusetts delegates, and although Miss Quincy wouldn’t know it from Hancock’s letter, all five men had been included in the tumultuous welcome. It was Samuel Adams, riding in Hancock’s phaeton, who had put a stop to pulling the carriage by hand. He thought the spectacle would be humiliating and said he wouldn’t permit his fellow citizens to degrade themselves to the level of beasts.

By the time the delegates reached Philadelphia, Samuel Adams no longer cut much of a figure. His fine apparel had been abandoned when he fled Lexington, and he had only the clothes on his back. He needed a new outfit for this second session of the Congress, but he had almost no money of his own and he questioned the ethics of charging his clothes to the colony. In the end, politics prevailed. He decided that he must not disgrace Massachusetts, and Massachusetts should pay the bill, which it readily did.

No gentlemanly attire could deceive the conservative delegates as they convened on May 10, 1775, this time in Pennsylvania’s State House. They suspected that Adams hoped to use the bloodshed at Lexington to provoke Congress into declaring America independent from Britain. If they were right, Adams stood nearly alone in that goal. Benjamin Franklin had come home from London and was there as one of Philadelphia’s delegates. But Franklin’s resolutions were mild ones—offering official thanks to Lord Chatham,
to Edmund Burke, to all the members of both houses who had championed America’s cause. Otherwise, to the dismay of John Adams, Franklin spent most of the proceedings fast asleep in his chair.

The session was barely launched when Samuel Adams’ emissary, John Brown, showed up with news that Ticonderoga had been captured, along with its hoard of weapons. Ethan Allen was even talking about attacking Montreal and Quebec. The report disconcerted most delegates in Philadelphia. They first passed a resolution that Allen and Benedict Arnold take charge of the Ticonderoga artillery but make an inventory so that everything could be returned to Britain when harmony was restored. That order was soon countermanded. In fact, some delegates detected a slight shift in this session toward Samuel Adams’ more combative position. For the first time, Georgia had sent a delegation to Philadelphia. Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania had retired. George Washington of Virginia was attending every session in his colonel’s uniform.

John Adams, before he had come to Philadelphia, had toured Dr. Warren’s headquarters at Cambridge and had found confusion and shortages. He had retraced the march to Lexington and talked with townspeople along the route. Now he offered the Congress a comprehensive military plan. First, he urged the delegates to protect the patriots still living in Boston, who might be robbed, even killed, given the temper of the British soldiers. Adams recommended that each colony seize all British officials and hold them—humanely and generously—as hostage for Boston’s patriots. Each colony should then set up its own new government, and the Continental Congress should declare independence and offer to negotiate peace terms with Britain. Adams also wanted to warn the British that if fighting continued, America would seek alliance with France, Spain or any other European power. At the same time, Congress should consider Warren’s volunteers in Cambridge as a Continental Army, appoint a commanding general for them and underwrite their pay and costs.

Presenting that package, John Adams saw horror and detestation on many faces around the hall, particularly from some Pennsylvania delegates. He wasn’t wrong this time to think he was unpopular. The delegates advocating reconciliation were determined to resist him, although the Congress had no trouble rejecting an
unsatisfactory peace proposal from Lord North. John Dickinson, the “Pennsylvania Farmer,” who had joined the Congress, introduced a resolution asking the king to open negotiations that would heal the breach. Samuel Adams, who tried to avoid public speeches, was content to let his cousin lead the attack against Dickinson.

Charles Thomson, the Congress’s secretary, wanted to prevent a break between the Bostonians and the Pennsylvanians. He had confided to John Adams that Dickinson and his family were under great pressure from the Quakers. Dickinson’s mother had warned him,
“Johnny, you will be hanged, your estate will be forfeited and confiscated, you will leave your excellent wife a widow and your charming children orphans, beggars and infamous.” Hearing that made Adams appreciate more than ever the support he was getting from his own wife and family.

After Adams’ speech opposing reconciliation, Adams was called from the hall. John Dickinson grabbed his hat and followed him into the courtyard.
“What is the reason, Mr. Adams,” Dickinson asked, “that you New England men oppose our measures of reconciliation? Look ye! If you don’t concur with us in our pacific system, I and a number of us will break off from you in New England, and we will carry on the opposition by ourselves in our own way.”

Adams considered it a rude lecture, but he knew Dickinson had the votes. For once, even Samuel Adams was advocating a moderate public position. Although he promised his friends
“one of the grandest revolutions the world has ever yet seen,” he also reminded them that he had learned to wait until the fruit was ripe before he tried to gather it. John Adams accepted that argument reluctantly and voted for Dickinson’s resolution. But in his diary he denounced the latest petition to the king as an embarrassing imbecility. He made his disgust more widely known a little later in a letter to Boston that described Dickinson as
“a great fortune and piddling genius who has given a silly cast to our whole doings.”

While his cousin was emerging as a leader in this new session of the Congress, Samuel Adams learned of the loss of another protégé. Josiah Quincy had been near death when he went to London to sound out British opinion and had died on shipboard during the return trip. The loss struck Samuel Adams hard. One of Quincy’s last letters to his wife expressed the devotion that
Adams kindled in his young followers. “The character of your Mr. Samuel Adams runs very high here,” Quincy had written from London. “I find many who consider him the
first politician in the world.”

—

John Hancock had taken his reception in New York and Philadelphia as proof that he was the world’s foremost politician, and during this second session he received two more tributes. From Boston, General Gage issued a general pardon for all Americans who had taken part in the rebellion so far, but made two exceptions—Samuel Adams and John Hancock.