Chapter 4
Volleys of Words
In the decade before 1775, rebels and loyalists aggressively used political propaganda to promote their individual agendas—just as political leaders have done throughout history. When events such as the Boston Tea Party and the Intolerable Acts occurred, both sides were quick to put their respective spins on the issues and to circulate their ideas as widely as they could. What gave colonial media wider distribution and greater weight than merely a local readership would have conferred was the postal system, which sped newspapers and letters from committees of correspondence to every corner of the colonies.
By 1775, thanks to Benjamin Franklin’s efforts years before, the thirteen colonies enjoyed a state-of-the-art postal system. Franklin was appointed postmaster of Philadelphia in 1737. At the time, there was little communication between the colonies—at least not on an urgent basis—and mail delivery even between principal cities was a matter of “maybe it gets there, maybe it doesn’t.” Most often, mail was entrusted to a private traveler known to be going that way.
By 1753, Franklin was deputy royal postmaster for North America, essentially a postmaster general for the colonies. By the time Franklin left Philadelphia for his extended stay in England, he had eliminated this haphazard approach and unified and streamlined mail delivery into a truly reliable postal system. His post riders pioneered twenty-four-hour travel, using lanterns when necessary, horse relays, and centralized offices in major towns. Not only did his system reduce delivery times and increase reliability, it also proved profitable. The canny Franklin may or may not have realized at the time that he was nurturing what would one day become an essential component of revolutionary communication.
Riders carrying letters and newspapers made the trip from Boston to Philadelphia in five days and reached as far south as Charleston, South Carolina, in a month. This gave newspapers wide and relatively timely circulation, and it was common for papers in Boston and New York to reprint news of interest from Georgia and the Carolinas and vice versa. As political events heated up, rebels and loyalists—there were newspapers aligned with both sides—could read what their brethren were doing throughout the colonies.
Perhaps even more important, rebel committees of correspondence had direct and speedy—for the times—access to committees in other colonies. Initially, these committees were formed for a limited duration in response to a specific event—such as the committees in Massachusetts and New York, which promoted the Stamp Act Congress—but by 1775, some committees of correspondence had become shadow governments. This was particularly true after Parliament disbanded colonial legislatures with the passage of the Intolerable Acts. The postal system allowed rebel committees of correspondence to exchange news, formulate cooperative plans, and direct concerted action.
FOR MUCH OF THE HEYDAY of American newspapers during the twentieth century, major cities boasted at least two papers of competing political persuasions. It was no different in Boston in 1775. Among the newspapers in Boston that year, Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy and the Boston Gazette, published by Benjamin Edes and John Gill, trumpeted the rebel cause. Brothers Thomas Fleet Jr. and John Fleet’s Boston Evening-Post and Richard Draper’s Massachusetts Gazette—variously known as or published in tandem with the Boston News-Letter and Boston Post-Boy—were bastions of loyalist thought.
In just one example of the heated exchanges that occurred early in 1775, a writer signing himself only as “a Friend to Peace and Good Order”—who was in truth loyalist Harrison Gray—published a pamphlet containing inflammatory criticism of the recent Continental and Massachusetts Provincial Congresses. Calling the adoption of the Suffolk Resolves nothing “short of high treason and rebellion,” Gray charged that “the only apology that could be made for their conduct was, that they came into this vote immediately after drinking thirty two bumpers of the best madeira,” and that by the following morning “they were ashamed of what they had done; but it was then too late for a reconsideration of the vote.” Gray claimed that to avoid such mistakes in the future, the delegates “prudently determined to do no business after dinner.”1
Edes and Gill, writing in the Boston Gazette in rebuttal, termed Gray’s pamphlet “despicable” and noted it was “commonly called the Gray Maggot.” As for Gray’s “most impudent and false Assertion,” the Gazette replied that as the minutes of the congress showed, “they never did any Business after Dinner.” The Suffolk Resolves, the Gazette concluded, “were acted upon on a Saturday in the Forenoon.”2
Perhaps the longest-running war of words occurred between two writers signing themselves “Massachusettensis” and “Novanglus.” As John Adams recalled many years later, upon his return from the First Continental Congress in November of 1774, he “found the Massachusetts Gazette teeming with political speculations, and Massachusettensis shining like the moon among the lesser stars” in defense of the loyalist cause. Adams immediately surmised that Massachusettensis was none other than his estranged friend, Jonathan Sewall. Told that Massachusettensis “excited great exultation among the tories and many gloomy apprehensions among the whigs,” Adams “immediately resolved to enter the lists with him.”3
If his suspicion of Sewall’s involvement was indeed his belief at the time, it brings a particular poignancy to the exchange. Not only were the two men advocates of their respective causes, they also were estranged friends turned determined adversaries. But in fact, as Adams acknowledged later, he was in error. Massachusettensis was not Jonathan Sewall but yet another Massachusetts lawyer named Daniel Leonard.
Born in Norton, Massachusetts, in 1740, Daniel Leonard was the son of the owner of an iron foundry in nearby Taunton. Entering Harvard in 1760, Leonard finished second in his class and felt compelled to prove his merits by delivering his commencement speech in Latin. He returned to Taunton and practiced law with Samuel White, who was also the speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly. Leonard married White’s daughter, Anna, in 1767, but she died in childbirth the following year. Later, he married Sarah Hammock and had three children with her. In 1769, he became king’s attorney for Bristol County.
Smart, wealthy, well connected, and recognized as one of the finest legal minds in Massachusetts, Leonard was a prime example of just how difficult it sometimes was to determine which side one was on—or even that a crisis requiring a choice of sides was at hand. Not only did Leonard have all the trappings of royally connected power and esteem, he was also a lieutenant colonel of the Bristol County militia. In this capacity, he reportedly spoke coolly of King George, king’s attorney though he was.
Then in 1774, royal governor Thomas Hutchinson appointed Leonard a mandamus councilor. Now his allegiance was really being tested. Leonard denied that he had changed his position, but he chose to don the robe of loyalist rather than be further swayed by rebel arguments. When rebels in Taunton challenged his decision, Leonard’s home was attacked by a mob firing shots and breaking windows. Like many rural mandamus councilors, Leonard sought refuge in occupied Boston.4
Whether or not this thirty-four-year-old lawyer and businessman—run out of his own town by rebels—took it upon himself to speak out for the loyalist status quo or was possibly encouraged to do so by General Gage is not known. But in December of 1774, Leonard began his series of articles—in the form of letters to the editor—that were published in the Massachusetts Gazette and the Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser. Leonard chose to sign himself Massachusettensis, a concocted name with a Latin flair.
The use of pseudonyms or pen names by contributors was not at all unusual in those days, but just why writers adopted them is an interesting question. There usually was little mystery—among the well informed, at least—as to the true identity of an author. Newspapers were leaky sieves of gossip and innuendo. Libel laws may have been of some concern, but prosecution was usually reserved for blatant assaults on individual character rather than advocacy of general political views. Such presumed anonymity tended, however, to allow authors to express views more pointed and accusations more personal than if they had signed their own names. Some authors no doubt also felt that such pseudonyms—particularly when they referenced noted Roman statesmen or were otherwise Latin flavored—added a mark of distinction and gravity to their words.
Samuel Adams appears to have used at least twenty-five pseudonyms, including Candidus, Populus, and A Son of Liberty, and Alexander Hamilton (Publius, Americanus), Benjamin Franklin (Silence Dogood, Richard Saunders), Robert Livingston (Cato), and James Madison (Helvidius) all employed pen names. Another advantage, according to journalism historian Eric Burns, was that the more pseudonyms an author used, “the more likely it was that readers would think of him as several authors [and] his views, therefore, would seem to be held by many rather than simply one man with a prolific pen.”5
Daniel Leonard was somewhat of an exception to the hate-mongering that frequently sprang from such pseudonymous columns; the impassioned pleas he made as Massachusettensis for loyalty to the king began in a balanced and moderate tone. “When a people, by what means soever, are reduced to such a situation, that every thing they hold dear, as men and citizens, is at stake,” Leonard wrote in his first letter, dated December 5, 1774, “it is not only excusable, but even praiseworthy for an individual to offer to the public any thing that he may think has a tendency to ward off the impending danger.”6
A main theme of the loyalist argument that Leonard underscored was the impossibility of the colonies surviving on their own or prevailing in a direct struggle against the assembled might of Great Britain. “With the British navy in the front, Canadians and savages in the rear, [and] a regular army in the midst,” Massachusettensis noted, “desolation will pass through our land like a whirlwind, our houses be burnt to ashes, [and] our fair possessions laid waste.”7
As January of 1775 passed, Leonard’s weekly missives became more strident. “You are loyal at heart, friends to good order,” Massachusettensis told his readers. “But you have been most insidiously induced to believe that Great-Britain is rapacious, cruel and vindictive.”8 Two weeks later, he warned: “To deny the supreme authority of the state is a high misdemeanor… to oppose it by force is an overt act of treason, punishable by confiscation of estate and most ignominious death.”9
John Adams chose to answer Massachusettensis as Novanglus, meaning “New Englander,” but he took his time doing so. His first Novanglus letter appeared in the Boston Gazette on January 23, 1775, seven weeks after Massachusettensis’s opening salvo. Adams’s tone was uncompromising from the start, particularly about the inevitability of Great Britain’s power. Massachusettensis was mistaken, Adams wrote, when he said “the people are sure to be loosers in the end. They can hardly be loosers, if unsuccessful,” Adams maintained, “because if they live, they can but be slaves, after an unfortunate effort, and slaves they would have been, if they had not resisted.” Death, Adams went on to assert, “is better than slavery.”10
That same week, not yet knowing that he had a direct adversary in the field, Massachusettensis continued to develop the theme of the dangers of the colonies surviving on their own. “Destitute of British protection,” he asked, “what other Britain could we look to when in distress?” Would not the trade, navigation, and fisheries, which no nation dared to violate while protected by British colors, “become the sport and prey of the maritime powers of Europe?”11
Adams chose to address himself to Leonard’s arguments in the order of their publication, pursuing him “in his own serpentine path.” His adversary, Adams wrote, “conscious that the people of this continent have the utmost abhorrence of treason and rebellion, labours to avail himself of the magic in these words.” As to the charge that rebels had subverted the long-cherished freedom of the press, Adams termed it but one example of his opponent’s wily art “intended to excite a resentment against the friends of liberty.” Both sides had their respective newspapers at their service, even if Adams was slightly disingenuous in concluding, “the Massachusetts Spy, if not the Boston Gazette, has been open to them as well as to others.” As for the pro-loyalist papers, Adams maintained “the Evening-Post, Massachusetts Gazette & Boston Chronicle, have certainly been always as free for their use as the air.”12
WHILE MASSACHUSETTENSIS AND NOVANGLUS ENGAGED in this war of words, Samuel Adams was also getting his writings, if not always his real name, in newspapers in Massachusetts and throughout the colonies. As Boston suffered under the deprivations of the closure of its port, support in the form of cash, goods, livestock, and crops poured in not just from surrounding Massachusetts counties but also from other colonies, including far-off Georgia. As chairman of the Boston committee of correspondence, Adams frequently either wrote or directed the writing of acknowledgment letters for those expressions of support and then made sure to give them wide circulation.
Of course, Samuel Adams never shied away from a political controversy. When loyalists cast aspersions upon those administering these donations, the Boston committee of correspondence was quick with a response over Adams’s signature as chairman. “The Printers in this and the other American Colonies,” Samuel Adams wrote, “are requested to insert the following in their several News Papers.” (Here again an effort was being made to gain a much wider circulation than just Boston.) “The Committee appointed by the Town of Boston… think themselves obliged, in this publick Manner, to contradict a slanderous Report raised by evil minded Persons, and spread in divers Parts of this Province, and perhaps more extensively thro’ the Continent.” There was absolutely no truth, Adams asserted, to reports that each member of the Boston committee was compensated six shillings, or, as some claimed, as much as half a guinea (ten shillings) a day for their attendance, in addition to receiving a commission on donations received. Any such reports were “in every part… groundless and false.”13
But there were also other writers—besides the small group that might be called “the usual suspects”: white, male, and upper-class—dipping their pens for the rebel cause and their own individual agendas. History’s shorthand has long spoken of April 1775 in decidedly masculine terms: minutemen, alarm riders, armed men and boys. But in an era when women could neither vote nor own property without restrictions, women shared the heady dangers of revolution as rebels or bemoaned the upheaval of their lifestyle as loyalists.
The writer Mercy Otis Warren was a strong-willed woman whom one would not want on an opposing side. Warren’s diminutive frame and gentle features belied the determination that burned behind her dark eyes when they focused on a mission. She was born in West Barnstable, on Cape Cod, on September 25, 1728, the third child and first daughter of James and Mary Otis. Her father was a merchant, attorney, and local judge who had prospered enough to own a substantial house with three dormers crowning the second story and employ laborers and indentured servants to look after the surrounding fields. Among the help were at least one African American and several Native American slaves.
Mercy’s mother was dour, reserved, and frequently depressed. There seems little doubt that having thirteen children over twenty years, only seven of whom survived, may have had something to do with her outlook. James Otis, on the other hand, was outgoing, gregarious, and an affable host. He had a keen wit and a penchant for ideas that he passed on to his children. His only regret was that he lacked a formal education. This he determined to remedy in his eldest sons, and in due course James Jr.—known as Jemmy—and Joseph were sent off to Harvard. Such a path was unthinkable in that day for Mercy, but she learned to read and write and sharpened her intellect in father-daughter discussions that went well beyond domestic conversations. She also joined her brother Jemmy’s tutoring sessions with the local minister as he prepared for college.
At Harvard, Jemmy Otis met James Warren, two years his junior. Warren’s father was the high sheriff of Plymouth County and well acquainted with Jemmy’s father, but exactly when James Warren first met Mercy Otis is uncertain. What is certain is that their marriage in a civil ceremony on November 14, 1754, found Mercy at twenty-six almost an old maid by the standards of the day and James at twenty-eight an aspiring merchant and farmer with political ambitions.14
James Otis dispatched one of his domestic servants to help Mercy and James in the Warrens’ saltbox-style home in Plymouth. And Mercy soon needed that help, as beginning in 1757 she bore five healthy sons over the next nine years. Her focus was what was expected of colonial women: home, hearth, and husband, but by their own accounts, Mercy and James adored one another. “I again tell you that on your happiness depends mine,” he wrote her during an absence nine years into their marriage. “I am uneasy without you… [and]… wish for the time that I am to return… everything appears so different without you.” Years later, her own ardor had not cooled. He was “the center of my early wishes,” Mercy told James, and he continued to be “the star which attracts my attention.”15
The Warrens’ circle of friends came to include John Adams and his wife, Abigail. Mercy Warren was sixteen years Abigail Adams’s senior, and Abigail found an intellectual mentor in her. “You, Madam,” Abigail wrote Mercy just before the Boston Tea Party, “are so sincere a Lover of your Country, and so Hearty a Mourner in all her Misfortunes that it will greatly aggravate your anxiety to hear how much she is now oppressed and insulted.” Abigail called tea “this weed of Slavery.”16
By now, Mercy Warren’s youngest was seven, and she was increasingly turning her pen to political issues. Mercy herself had found a mentor in Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay, a British historian who flouted strictures against feminine intellectual engagement. Beginning in 1763, Macaulay published a liberal Whig history of England in eight volumes, essentially arguing the importance of personal liberty. Mercy’s brother had maintained a correspondence with Macaulay, but after Jemmy Otis deteriorated mentally, Mercy assumed his role. When asked by Mercy “whether the genius of Liberty has entirely forsaken our devoted isle [England],” Macaulay replied that Parliament’s regrettable Intolerable Acts were “a complete answer,” but encouraged Mercy not to lose hope. There were still liberal Whigs in Great Britain “who strenuously and zealously defended the injured rights of your countrymen.”17
Mercy Warren hoped so but was dubious about their ability to carry the American cause in Parliament. “America stands armed with resolution and virtue,” Warren told Macaulay as 1774 came to an end, “but she still recoils at the idea of drawing the sword against the nation from whence she derived her origin. Yet Britain, like an unnatural parent, is ready to plunge her dagger into the bosom of her affectionate offspring.”18
But Mercy Warren desired a broader audience for her political thoughts. To publish openly as a woman in Puritan Massachusetts would have been regarded as scandalous at best. Her first anonymously published work, a play entitled The Adulateur, which satirized the administration of Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson, had been published in Isaiah Thomas’s rebel-friendly Massachusetts Spy in the spring of 1772. Political commentary thinly disguised as a fictitious play was a generally safe vehicle, particularly as plays in Puritan society were read by individuals at home rather than acted out.19
The Adulateur was well received and particularly championed by Mercy’s husband, James, who, like Samuel Adams and many others, thought Governor Hutchinson a two-faced scoundrel, serving Great Britain while giving lip service to Massachusetts interests. When Benjamin Franklin leaked Hutchinson’s personal letters favoring a stronger role for the governor to the press in 1773, Adams seized on them to prove the point. The disclosures were perfectly timed to coincide with the publication of Warren’s second play, The Defeat, which portrayed Hutchinson as the diabolical Rapatio and ended with his gubernatorial downfall.20
A rather convoluted poem about the Boston Tea Party, entitled “The Squabble of the Sea Nymphs; or the Sacrifice of the Tuscararoes,” followed. It was written with the encouragement of John Adams, but Mercy nonetheless told Abigail that she would not be upset if John told her to stop writing and “lay aside the pen of the poet (which ought perhaps to have been done sooner).” Instead, Adams arranged the poem’s publication in the Boston Gazette.21
A few months later, after James Warren was elected to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, Mercy wrote Abigail Adams of her increasing apprehensions about the looming rebellion. “No one has at stake a larger share of Domestic Felicity than myself,” she told her younger admirer. “I see no Less than five sons who must Buckle on the Harness And perhaps fall a sacrifice to the Manes of Liberty.”22
It was during this period of heightened anxiety that Warren committed her fears to parchment and anonymously published The Group. Characters reappeared from her earlier plays, and she gave voice to the difficulty of choosing a side and sticking with it. One character named Beau Trumps, who loudly espoused loyalty to the king, was assumed by alert readers to be modeled after Daniel Leonard, the king’s attorney for Bristol County who was then safely ensconced in Boston writing as Massachusettensis. A character named Simple Sapling—before accepting a royal bribe—took note that the opposing rebels were “Resolv’d to die, or see their country free.”23
But there was more to The Group than the bashing of mandamus councilors. A strong secondary theme, according to Warren biographer Nancy Rubin Stuart, carried “a pro-female message that lamented the personal hardships of war forced upon women married to greedy husbands.”24
Here Warren was publicly espousing political views about the status of women that went back to early conversations with her father and brothers about basic liberties. Before his mental breakdown kept him from writing, Mercy’s brother Jemmy Otis had asked the bombshell question quite pointedly in a 1764 pamphlet: “Are not women born as free as men?” If that was indeed so, he continued, should not they also have “a natural and equitable right to be consulted… in the formation of new original compact or government?”25 Mercy Otis Warren and her confidante Abigail Adams thought so, but both their husbands, adoring of their wives though they were, were not so sure.
While striking this chord of equal rights and liberty, Mercy Warren still sought reassurance from men about the worth of her writing. Husband James was perhaps too biased in his effusive praise, but Mercy coyly expressed her doubts to others that “it has sufficient merit for the public eye.” John Adams, for one, demurred and once more arranged publication in the Boston Gazette of the first two acts of The Group, which appeared in the same issue as Adams’s first missive as Novanglus.26 By February of 1775, The Group and its anonymous author were the talk of rebel Boston.
THERE WAS ANOTHER WRITER WHO published his views on liberty and freedom but who brought a vastly different perspective to the issues and framed the debate in even more inclusive terms than did Mercy Otis Warren. His name was Caesar Sarter, and he was a black former slave of about fifty years of age. Sarter had been captured in Africa and brought to Massachusetts as a youth. His exact ownership is a mystery, but by 1774, after twenty years in bondage, he was living as a freeman in Newburyport, just north of Boston.
There was a strong Quaker influence among freed blacks at the time because of the Religious Society of Friends’ pioneering stance in favor of abolition, and much of what Sarter had to say carried strong biblical overtones. Whether or not Sarter had help drafting his letter is open to question, but there can be no question that the agony of Sarter’s personal experience flowed through his words. It must have taken courage to put his thoughts on paper and perhaps even more courage for the printers of the Essex Journal and Merimack Packet of Newburyport to publish them.
Sarter began by reminding readers that the political climate in which they lived was “a time of great anxiety and distress among you, on account of the infringement… of the natural rights and privileges of freeborn men. [Permit me] to tell you, and that from experience,” Sarter went on, “that as Slavery is the greatest, and consequently most to be dreaded of all temporal calamities; so its opposite, Liberty, is the greatest temporal good, with which you can be blest!” Surely, he wrote, the freemen of Massachusetts recognized this because they were engaged in “struggles to preserve it.”
Like others in the fight, Sarter harked back to the quest for freedom that had prompted so many Europeans to come to America in the first place. Unlike his own experience of being brought to America against his will, those white forefathers had fled England because of strong feelings about the “worth of Liberty” as well as “their utmost abhorrence of that curse of curses, slavery.” As for those who piously thought Africans happier in America, “every man,” wrote Sarter, “is the best judge of his own happiness, and every heart best knows its own bitterness.”
The first step in any quest for freedom from Great Britain, Sarter maintained, was for Americans to “let the oppressed Africans be liberated.” Not until then could rebels look “with consistency of conduct” for a blessing on their own endeavors to cast off the shackles of British rule. “I need not point out,” Sarter concluded, “the absurdity of your exertions for liberty, when you have slaves in your houses.”27
One of those who heartily agreed with Caesar Sarter was Abigail Adams. While John was attending the First Continental Congress in the fall of 1774, there had been what Abigail termed “a conspiracy of negroes,” the first major indication that slaves in Boston were asking to fight for General Gage on the loyalist side in exchange for their freedom. The entire episode was “kept pretty private,” according to Abigail, but she did not refrain from telling John her wish that “there was not a slave in the province.”
Then Abigail, who had had her own conversations with Mercy Warren about women’s rights, echoed Caesar Sarter’s incredulity. “It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me,” Abigail wrote John, “to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”28
Truth be told, however, most of the rebels firing off volleys of words about liberty and freedom reserved them for a limited group of white males from the middle and upper classes. Equality was a cherished word, but one not widely or freely shared. To apply it universally to include females and black and Indian slaves was as yet unthinkable.