Patriots (7 page)

In the Massachusetts House, James Otis drew up a letter to Jasper Mauduit that followed Adams’ outline. The London agent was to seek repeal of the Sugar Act and prevent the passage of a proposed law called the Stamp Act. The House also voted to send copies of Otis’ letter to legislatures in the other colonies and ask them to join the protest. Francis Bernard and Thomas Hutchinson worried that a concerted action by the colonies was likely to bring together every demagogue on the American continent. To stop the letters from being sent, the governor shut down the session.
“Perhaps I may be too suspicious,” Bernard wrote to London. “A little time will show whether I am or not.”

But Otis’ letter was widely circulated, delegates from other colonies began arriving in Boston with their own protests, and their meetings provoked the reaction Bernard had feared. The majority of Americans might be untroubled by the new taxes, but clusters of men in each colony seemed to be as agitated as James Otis. When Rhode Island’s delegates saw that their petition was weaker than New York’s, they went home to draft a harsher one.

Meanwhile, Grenville was moving on two fronts. His office answered the Otis letter by admitting that perhaps there shouldn’t be taxation without representation but pointing out that the Americans were being treated no differently from the 75 percent of adult male Englishmen who couldn’t vote for one reason or another, usually because they didn’t own sufficient property. Grenville insisted that those men—and the colonists—were in fact represented because each member of Parliament voted in the interests of the entire empire and not simply for his borough. In case that argument didn’t silence them, Grenville called in the American agents who lived in London. He said that America must contribute
to her own defense, and he wouldn’t hear any argument against Parliament’s inherent right to impose taxes.

“I am not, however, set upon this tax,” Grenville assured them. If the colonies could agree on a better solution, he would be pleased to consider it. Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania suggested that the financing of the French and Indian War had worked well enough. Let England say how much money it needed and let America decide how to raise it. But Franklin admitted that he couldn’t guarantee that each colony would agree to contribute its share.

In the end, Grenville went to Parliament in early February 1765 and introduced taxes he described as
“the easiest, the most equal and the most certain that can be chosen.” He would require that the colonists buy a stamp for every American newspaper, legal document or license and bond. They would also need stamps for any pamphlet, almanac, college diploma, deck of cards or pair of dice. The proposal’s very sweep guaranteed that no individual taxpayer would be overburdened. And because the richer colonies transacted more business than the poorer ones, they would pay more in taxes. To reduce tax evasion and bribes, only a few collectors would be licensed to issue the stamped paper and receive money for it.

Few voices in the House of Commons protested Grenville’s plan. One member who knew the colonies very well did oppose it, but he couldn’t convince his colleagues. Colonel
Isaac Barré had returned from the French and Indian War with a disfiguring wound in one cheek and high admiration for America’s fighting men. Barré ridiculed the suggestion that the colonists somehow owed England a debt. Rather, he said, the behavior of Britain’s officials toward Americans “on many occasions has caused the blood of those sons of liberty to recoil within them.”

In using the phrase
“sons of liberty,” Barré hadn’t meant to imply that the colonists were disloyal to Britain or the king. It was simply a familiar term for men who were determined to defend their freedom. But the political stresses of 1765 gave Barré’s phrase a new luster, and when reports of his speech reached America hundreds of men in each colony were proud to learn that they were being called Sons of Liberty.

Stamp master in effigy

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

D
URING
the early morning hours of August 14, 1765, a stately elm across from Boylston Market in Boston was festooned with several curious objects. By 5
A.M.
on that Wednesday, many Bostonians had heard about the decorations and were hurrying to see the tree for themselves. Hanging from one branch they found an effigy of Andrew Oliver, who was the recently appointed stamp master for Massachusetts Bay and Thomas Hutchinson’s brother-in-law.
Nearby hung a boot. Everyone understood that it was a symbol for Lord Bute, who the colonists feared was exercising a sinister influence over young King George. The figure of a devil popped from the boot with a copy of the Stamp Act in his hand. Oliver’s effigy was marked with his initials, and a couplet was pinned to the left arm:

What greater joy did New England see

Than a stampman
hanging on a tree.

Beneath the figure was a warning: “He that takes this down is an enemy to his country.”

Andrew Oliver had been married to a sister of Hutchinson’s wife for more than thirty years, and he shared the lieutenant governor’s keen sense of self-interest. Oliver had argued against the Stamp Act, not because it was wrong but because it would be unpopular. Once the act had passed and he was named the tax collector, however, he began to see benefits in it. The stamp master would draw a handsome salary.

During the spring of 1765, a prevailing calm had suggested that the usual dissenters had been exaggerating the public’s antagonism to the act. James Otis claimed that “one single act of Parliament had
set people a-thinking in six months more than they had ever done in their whole lives before.” But the public silence over the Stamp Act was so profound that by April the king’s supporters were assuring his ministers in London that the people would go along quietly. That response emboldened Andrew Oliver, and when the stamp master from Connecticut passed through Boston on his way from London, Oliver accompanied him on the ride out of town. His courtesy provoked an angry article in the
Boston Gazette
, and now there was this display hanging from the hundred-year-old tree on High Street.

As the crowd around the elm grew larger, its leaders began a boisterous charade. Every farmer or shopkeeper who brought his goods to market had to
flop down before the tree and have his wares stamped by the dummy on the tree. When Samuel Adams came out to take a look, some Tories suspected that he wasn’t seeing the display for the first time. One of them approached as Adams stared up at the branches and asked him whether he knew whom the effigy was supposed to represent. Adams was giving nothing away. He said he didn’t know and wanted to look into the matter.

As the morning wore on, Governor Bernard heard about the disturbance and urged his Council to take action. Most of the councilmen argued that it was only a prank and Bernard should ignore it. But Thomas Hutchinson, as chief justice, sent out Sheriff Greenleaf with orders to cut the effigy down. Greenleaf was soon back to report that he couldn’t do it. The throng at the tree was too large. He would be risking his own life and the lives of his men.

By late afternoon, Bernard was still calling upon the province’s councilmen to act, and they were trying to shame the sheriff into
doing something. The immediate problem was solved at dusk when the protest leaders cut down the figure of Oliver and nailed it to a board, which four men hoisted to their shoulders. Behind them, forty or fifty tradesmen led a march through the street, followed by several hundred townspeople. As they passed his office, Bernard heard them giving three cheers and he thought they sounded defiant. The procession continued down to a brick building that Andrew Oliver had constructed along the waterfront. The crowd was sure that Oliver meant it to be his stamp office, and they went to work destroying it. That took half an hour.

British tax stamp

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Sheriff Greenleaf was worried enough about the safety of Oliver and his family to persuade them to leave their house. They had barely retreated through their back garden when the crowd
came streaming up Fort Hill. There, in front of Oliver’s windows, men with knives beheaded his effigy. They set a great bonfire on the hill and burned the figure along with whatever scraps of wood they had brought from the building they had just torn down.

Until that point, reputable businessmen in the group, disguised in rough trousers and jackets, had managed to keep the crowd orderly. But when those men went home to their suppers, tempers around the bonfire were still running hot. Ebenezer Mackintosh, a South End cobbler, was well known for the gang he raised each Pope’s Day, and he led a charge against Oliver’s house.

Rioters broke open Oliver’s stables and were about to drag his chaise and coach to the bonfire when a few onlookers spoke against it. Instead, the mob burned only the coach’s door and several cushions. Then they raced to the bottom of Oliver’s garden and began ripping down a fifteen-foot fence. Once inside the garden, they stripped all the fruit from the trees, broke off the branches and tore down a gazebo. When men began to smash windows at the back of the main house, it was not idle vandalism. Window glass had to be imported from England and was expensive to replace.

The mob’s leaders wanted to search the neighborhood for the family, but a quick-witted friend headed them off, insisting that Oliver had taken his family to safety at Castle William in Boston Harbor. By then, men were inside the house and heading for the cellars, where they helped themselves to the stores of liquor. Upstairs, rioters found the family’s looking glass, which was reputed to be the largest in North America. They left it in shards and went on to break furniture and scatter the Oliver silverplate throughout the house. The patriots insisted later that no one made off with anything valuable.

At his office, Governor Bernard demanded that the militia send out drummers to beat an alarm. His officers told him that it was impossible—the drummers were part of the mob. Sometime before midnight, Thomas Hutchinson collared Sheriff Greenleaf and demanded that they go together to Oliver’s house and force the rioters to disperse. All his life Hutchinson had been giving orders, but tonight he had barely begun to speak to the crowd when a shout went up: “To your arms, my boys!” Hutchinson and Greenleaf were pelted with stones and forced to retreat. The dismantling of Oliver’s house went on for another hour.

The next morning, Bostonians were talking about nothing else. In the
Boston Gazette
, anonymously written articles treated the destruction lightheartedly, but Governor Bernard was offering a hundred-pound reward for the apprehension of the demonstration’s leaders. He was also promising amnesty to anyone in the mob who came forward with information, an offer that could prove embarrassing to Samuel Adams and his friends. They may not have intended that Oliver’s house be destroyed; that was probably a boozy afterthought by the mob. But otherwise, the entire protest had followed the patriots’ script as surely as any Town Meeting had ever done.

—

Samuel Adams’ legions did not all come from the Caucus. The Loyal Nine was a social club that met in Boston’s Hanover Square, and its members included several distillers, a jeweler and a sea captain. One of the nine, Henry Bass, was Samuel Adams’ cousin, and Adams was always a welcome guest at their meetings. He also had friends among the Masons, although he preferred smaller and more political groups; even a Tory like Andrew Oliver could be a Mason. To rally support against the Stamp Act, Adams had been speaking with workers from the docks and the ropewalks—those covered arcades where rope was braided—and at the Green Dragon Tavern in Union Street, the tavern in Salvation Alley and the Bunch of Grapes in King Street. These were the same men, or their sons, who had supported Deacon Adams and the Land Bank, and their resentment against the Hutchinsons and the Olivers was greater even than their outrage against the stamps. On Wednesday night, these new Sons of Liberty had supplied the muscle, but the planning had come from the second floor of Chase and Speakman’s distillery in Hanover Square, not far from the elm where the effigies were hung. In their drawing rooms, the Tories laughed at the patriots for meeting in taverns and distilleries. They claimed that the rabble depended on barrels of rum to give them courage, and they took to calling Samuel Adams “Sam the Publican.”