Chapter 6

Boston in the Bull’s-Eye

Boston was long accustomed to being the focal point of both American rebellion and British resolve. News of the Salem raid made headlines there just as the town prepared to commemorate the five-year anniversary of one of its most infamous events. The catalyst for that event had been jobs—more precisely, the lack of them. At the time, Boston was still feeling the economic pinch of the nonimportation boycott promoted in the wake of the Stamp Act crisis. Compounding the unemployment problem, British soldiers stationed in town were permitted to moonlight with part-time jobs. The result was competition for much-sought-after openings in the workforce, and it also increased friction with locals as soldiers came into daily interactions with Bostonians—and, inevitably, flirted with local women.

Monday evening, March 5, 1770, was a bitterly cold night. It had not been a peaceful weekend. On the previous Friday, there had been a bloody brawl between local workers and about forty off-duty soldiers looking for work at John Gray’s ropewalk. Higher-ups on both sides quickly got control of the situation, but groups of workers and soldiers, fueled by ample amounts of brew from various taverns, roamed the streets over the weekend, looking to restart the trouble.

No confrontations occurred on Saturday or Sunday, but that Monday evening a wig maker’s apprentice attempting to collect an overdue bill from a British officer got into a squabble with a lone sentry at the door of the Custom House on King Street near Boston’s Long Wharf. The sentry struck the apprentice with the butt of his musket. A small group of locals quickly appeared to support the apprentice, and the sentry called for assistance from Captain Thomas Preston, the officer of the watch. Someone sounded a downtown Boston alarm bell, usually reserved for fires or other great calamities, and men on both sides poured into the streets. With more bells ringing, about three hundred locals converged on the Custom House. They took up positions in front of Preston’s small detachment of eight British regulars who had been hastily dispatched to reinforce the building.

The crowd taunted the soldiers with angry words, including ill-advised shouts of “Fire, Fire!” Next they started throwing snowballs, rocks, and chunks of ice. When one soldier—greatly outnumbered as he and his fellow soldiers were—was knocked down by such a missile, he got to his feet and, undoubtedly partly in fear for what might happen next and perhaps partly in rage, fired one shot into the crowd. At the sound of his musket discharging, other soldiers fired as well. As the crowd surged forward, more shots—perhaps as many as a dozen or more—rang out before Captain Preston got control of his troops. But it was too late. Four Bostonians lay dead, and several others were badly wounded, one of whom died early the next morning. For Boston, what locals would call the Boston Massacre immediately became that generation’s Kent State shooting.¹

Blame was laid on both sides. General Gage placed it squarely on Samuel Adams and his cohorts. Gage claimed that the entire provocation had been “contrived by one Party,” meaning Adams’s radical leadership of Boston’s rebels.² On the other side, the Boston Gazette was quick to call the incident “a recent and melancholy Demonstration of the destructive Consequences of quartering Troops among Citizens in a Time of Peace.”³

But in a demonstration that civil law was still supreme in Boston, General Gage agreed to permit the soldiers who had fired to stand trial in a Massachusetts court. Given local sentiments, they would need one of the best lawyers in Boston to defend them. Despite his growing rebel beliefs, John Adams agreed to do so. Captain Preston, who had never given an order to fire, was acquitted, as were six of his soldiers. Two others were convicted only of manslaughter, not murder.

Certainly John Adams took a risk by representing such unpopular clients, but on the third anniversary of the shootings, while Adams acknowledged such representation had caused him great “anxiety,” he nonetheless called it “one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.” Condemning those soldiers to death for murder would, Adams believed, have been “as foul a stain upon this country as the executions of the quakers or witches anciently.”⁴ What, after all, was his cousin Samuel Adams agitating for if not an unalienable system of justice?

Samuel Adams used the Boston Massacre as a rallying cry to denounce every act of British occupation and oppression. Illustrations and editorials in the Boston Gazette and the Massachusetts Spy and a number of privately published pamphlets spread the Adams version of events throughout the colonies: despicable British regulars had fired on unarmed Americans without provocation. For his part, General Gage appears not even to have attempted to counter this stream of rebel propaganda, though his chances of success had he tried are open to question.

After the trial of the soldiers, tempers on both sides eased for a time. In the broadest sense, this period of relatively calm occupation lasted for almost three and one-half years, until the next flash point—the Boston Tea Party. But these were hardly quiet years for Samuel Adams, who was instrumental during this interlude in keeping up a torrent of political opposition in correspondence and editorials. In particular, Adams went to great pains to commemorate the tragedy of the Boston Massacre with annual memorials and speeches. Given the events of the previous six months, the fifth anniversary commemoration, on March 5, 1775, was to be one of his finest efforts.

THE KEYNOTE SPEAKER FOR THE gathering in the Old South Church was Dr. Joseph Warren, frequently confused with Mercy Warren’s husband, James, but in fact there was no connection between them other than their shared passion for the rebel cause. Joseph Warren was a medical doctor who had been the principal author of the Suffolk Resolves and was a member of Samuel Adams’s inner circle on Boston’s committee of safety, essentially an executive committee charged with military preparedness.

Joseph Warren was definitely one to command attention. Even among a relatively young generation of rebel leaders, Warren was younger than most, still only thirty-three years old that March. He was five years younger than John Hancock and nineteen years younger than Samuel Adams. He was an articulate writer and polished public speaker, and he had also been invited to give the 1772 commemoration address. Men on both sides of the issue listened to his words with attention, and it was generally acknowledged that his handsome good looks gave women cause to fixate on him as well.

Born in nearby Roxbury, where his father had been a farmer, Joseph Warren graduated from Harvard in 1759 and began his medical apprenticeship after a year of teaching school. In 1764, at age twenty-three, he married eighteen-year-old Elizabeth “Betsy” Hooton, who even by the standards of the day was something of a child bride. Betsy’s merchant father had just died, and their wedding announcement in the Boston Gazette described her as “an accomplished young Lady with a handsome Fortune.”⁵

The couple’s first child, also named Elizabeth, was born at some vague date in the spring of 1765, quite probably less than nine months after their wedding. Over the next eight years, Joseph and Betsy Warren had three more children, but Betsy died suddenly in May of 1773, leaving Joseph a widower with four small children between the ages of ten and three. Neither his medical practice nor his family responsibilities, however, kept Warren from a consuming participation in the rebel cause. Commenting two days before on Warren’s scheduled speech, Samuel Adams noted, “It was thought best to have an experiencd officer in the political field on this occasion, as we may possibly be attackd in our Trenches.”⁶

Because the March 5 anniversary fell on a Sunday in 1775, the memorial service was held on the following Monday. The church was packed to the limit. Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Joseph Warren, and other members of Boston’s revolutionary council occupied seats near the pulpit, but there was also a good showing of British officers in attendance near the front of the church. After preliminaries, Warren was introduced. Graciously saying that his audience should not expect “the enrapturing strains of eloquence which charmed you” from prior years’ speakers, including John Hancock, Warren nonetheless assured his audience that “with a sincerity, equal to theirs, I mourn over my bleeding country.”⁷

As always, Adams and Warren had scripted both a strong political message of the wrongs of British rule and an equally strong emotional reminder of images of their fellow citizens bleeding red on the white snow. “The baleful images of terror crowd around me,” Warren intoned, “and discontented ghosts with hollow groans, appear to solemnize the anniversary of the fifth of March.”⁸

By one Tory account, soon sent to the loyalist Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, the British officers present “frequently interrupted Warren, by laughing loudly at the most ludicrous parts… to the great discontent of the devoted citizens.”⁹ Undeterred, Warren forged ahead. Independence from Great Britain was not their aim, Warren maintained, but he acknowledged to his listeners, “However difficult the combat, you never will decline it when freedom is the prize.”¹⁰

After Warren was finished, Samuel Adams rose to move the appointment of an orator for the following year’s commemoration. As usual, he did not mince words in describing the event to be honored as a “Bloody Massacre,” words that even Warren had avoided. This was too much for the assembled British officers, and they took up cries of “Fie! Fie!” and “To Shame!”¹¹

To the assembled audience, especially to those in the balconies some distance from the pulpit, this came across and was repeated as “Fire! Fire!” and thinking the building ablaze, by one Tory report, they “bounced out of the windows, and swarmed down the gutters, like rats into the street.” By apparent coincidence, the Forty-Third Regiment of Foot, “returning accidentally from exercise,” was marching by with drums beating, and its appearance “threw the whole body into the utmost consternation.”¹²

At least one officer exchanged heated words with Adams at the pulpit, but by then the audience had largely made for the exits. Had a confrontation taken place, one British officer later speculated, it “wou’d in all probability have proved fatal to Hancock, Adams, Warren, and the rest of those Villains, as they were all up in the Pulpit together.” But the officer claimed he was glad that such had not occurred, because “it wou’d indeed have been pity for them to have made their exit in that way, as I hope we shall have the pleasure before long of seeing them do it by the hands of the Hangman.”¹³ Clearly, neither side took these annual rites as an opportunity for reconciliation.

MEANWHILE, BOSTON REMAINED IN THE bull’s-eye. General Gage had some four thousand soldiers under his command in Boston, roughly one for every four Bostonians. But he was surrounded by dozens of rural towns inhabited by tens of thousands of musket-toting rebels who seemed quite willing and able to rally great numbers of militia at a moment’s notice. No doubt Gage was inclined to agree with a London traveler who a few months before opined of British forces in North America: “They are too numerous indeed for ambassadors, and too few for soldiers.”¹⁴

Two of Gage’s regiments were quartered at Castle William, in the harbor, but ten other regiments and Major Pitcairn’s marines were quartered in encampments, makeshift barracks, and private dwellings throughout the town. The population of Boston had been steadily declining as rebels opted to evacuate to the countryside, but the loyalist population had been increasing to balance this exodus as mandamus councilors and other loyalists took shelter there. Samuel Adams boasted two days before the Boston Massacre anniversary, “We have almost every Tory of Note in the province, in this Town, to which they have fled for the Generals protection.”¹⁵

And four thousand troops did not necessarily mean four thousand effectives ready to take the field. It had been a hard winter on everyone. Many of Gage’s troops had been sick, and some had died. Samuel Adams believed that others had deserted; in addition, he wrote, “many I believe intend to desert” come spring. Adams estimated in early March that there were not more than 2,200 effective men under Gage’s command. Adams told a correspondent, “I have seen a true List of the 65th & the Detachment of Royal Irish, in both of which there are only 167 of whom 102 are effective.”¹⁶

This situation did not, however, keep most British officers from looking with disdain upon their colonial opponents. In fact, from General Gage on down, the greatest weakness of the British army might have been their underestimation of the rebels at every turn. “It is a curious Masquerade Scene,” one British officer wrote after observing Boston militia at drill, “to see grave sober Citizens, Barbers and Tailors, who never looked fierce before in their Lives, but at their wives, Children, or Apprentices, strutting about in their Sunday wigs in stiff Buckles with their Muskets on their Shoulders, struggling to put on a Martial Countenance.”¹⁷

When a member of the House of Lords dared to suggest “the impracticability of conquering America,” the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, responded that he did not “think the noble Lord can be serious on this matter.” So what if the colonies abound in men? Sandwich asked. “They are raw, undisciplined, cowardly men… [and] believe me my lords, the very sound of a cannon would carry them off.”¹⁸

Major John Pitcairn of the Royal Marines held similar opinions and was not afraid to put them in writing to Sandwich. He had arrived in Boston the previous November as part of a six-hundred-man force of marines. “I often wish to have orders to march to Cambridge,” Pitcairn wrote Sandwich in February of 1775, “and seize those impudent rascals that have the assurance to make such resolves.” Pitcairn acknowledged that he had “no orders to do what I wish to do, and what I think may easily be done,” which was to seize all the troublemakers and “send them to England.”¹⁹

Two days before the Boston Massacre commemoration, Pitcairn wrote again to the Earl of Sandwich and noted that General Gage had met with “some of the Great Wigs, as they are called here,” and swore to them that “if there was a single man of the King’s troops killed in any of their towns [General Gage] would burn it to the ground.” Whether Gage meant it, or whether the words made any impression on the local leaders, is debatable, but they did make for impressive rhetoric when repeated among Gage’s junior officers. Indeed, Pitcairn remained “satisfied that one active campaign, a smart action, and burning of two or three of their towns, will set everything to rights.” Nothing less, Pitcairn firmly believed, “will ever convince those foolish bad people that England is in earnest.”²⁰

AS THE BRITISH OCCUPIERS OF Boston looked down their noses at their rebel adversaries, Samuel Adams, under the auspices of the Boston committee charged with receiving and distributing donations, continued to crank out letters of thanks for the material support that other colonies were sending to Boston. He was always sure to include with his thanks exhortations to the greater collective cause. From the county and borough of Norfolk and the town of Portsmouth, both in Virginia, came “seven hundred and fifteen bushels corn, thirty-three barrels pork, fifty-eight barrels bread, and ten barrels flour.” Unfortunately, the ship carrying these provisions floundered, but not before the Boston men had “the good fortune of saving the most part of the cargo.”²¹

From Henrico County, surrounding Richmond, Virginia, came “three hundred twenty-nine and a half bushels wheat, one hundred thirty-five bushels corn, and twenty-three barrels flour.” In hindsight, Adams’s thank you carried some irony with it. “Having been born to be free,” Adams assured the Virginians of his fellow Bostonians, “they will never disgrace themselves by a submission to the injurious terms of slavery.”²² The skin color and legal status of the laboring hands that had grown that Virginia produce in the first place was not acknowledged as part of the communication.

Such generosity from other colonies was not lost on loyalists who despised the show of support and hoped that Boston might suffer more. “In God’s name,” asked loyalist writer and Anglican clergyman Samuel Seabury, “are not the people of Boston able to relieve their own poor? Must they go begging… from Nova-Scotia to Georgia, to support a few poor people, whom their perverseness and ill conduct have thrown into distress?”²³

But such donations were not always without controversy. When the schooner Dunmore brought a cargo of “valuable donations from our friends in Virginia,” Adams responded with the usual thanks, but added a warning that a recently built vessel had lately sailed from Boston to Virginia under a master named Crowel Hatch. Rebel tradesmen in Boston, feeling the economic downturn resulting from the closure of the port, had proposed to Hatch that they do the construction at a 5 percent discount. Refusing to work with rebels, Hatch demurred, got his ship built by “more ordinary workmen from the country,” and then, according to Adams, “proposed that the Committee should employ our smith, in making anchors for his vessel, at a price by which they could get nothing but their labor for their pains.”

When the rebel blacksmiths declined to work without a profit, Hatch, in Adams’s words, grew very angry and threatened repeatedly “that he would stop all the donations he could, and that no more should come from the place where he was going to, meaning Virginia.” Adams closed this letter by asking the Virginians “to use your influence that Capt. Hatch may not have it in his power, (if he should be disposed,) to traduce the Committee and injure the sufferers in this Town, for whose relief our friends in Virginia have so generously contributed.”²⁴

These donations to beleaguered Boston from throughout the colonies were the surest signs yet that Massachusetts was not standing alone. Other letters in the Boston press went to great lengths to emphasize this. “We have the Pleasure to inform you,” a correspondent identified only as “a Gentleman in South Carolina” wrote, “that in this Colony the [Continental] Association takes Place as effectually as Law itself.” Vessels from England had been obliged to return with their merchandise unloaded, he claimed, and Bostonians were assured of the “fixed Determination” of their southern cousins to adhere to the trade restrictions.²⁵

The number of similar anonymous letters appearing in colonial newspapers raises at least some question as to their veracity. It is not unthinkable that rebels, particularly the politically savvy and media-conscious Samuel Adams, desperately trying to rally the spirits of occupied Boston, might have occasionally fabricated some good news of solidarity and support with letters from “a Gentleman” somewhere.

On a more personal note, Samuel Adams also wrote to Arthur Lee, who was a trade representative in London and a brother in the famous clan of Richard Henry and Francis Lightfoot Lee, both of whom would later sign the Declaration of Independence. Adams told Lee that he understood the reluctance of many in England to risk support for the colonies “lest we should desert our selves” and give up the fight. “But assure them,” Adams continued, that “the people hold the Invasion of their Rights & Liberties the most horrid rebellion and a Neglect to defend them against any Power whatsoever the highest Treason.”²⁶

ONE OF GENERAL GAGE’S CHIEF lieutenants in this “Invasion of their Rights & Liberties” was Hugh Percy. In many respects, Percy epitomized all that most colonials with rebel leanings despised about the English ruling class, which largely resolved as a matter of right to be lord and master over them. Percy was the oldest son of Sir Hugh Smithson, who in 1766 became the first Duke of Northumberland. Thereafter, his son Hugh was known as Lord Percy or Earl Percy. Educated at Eton and St. John’s College, Cambridge, before he turned eighteen, Lord Percy then received a commission in the army. With his father’s influence, he rose rapidly to become a lieutenant colonel in a newly raised regiment of foot by the time he was twenty, in 1762. The following year, and again in 1768, Percy was elected unopposed as a member of Parliament, where he voted against the repeal of the Stamp Act. By December of 1768, he was appointed colonel of the Fifth Regiment of Foot, distinguished by its natty gosling-green facings, and in May of 1774 he departed with his regiment for service in occupied Boston.

Percy had a large, hooked nose that looked like the beak of a hawk, and he immediately came to view the rebel faction as appropriate prey. While praising Gage for his “great coolness & firmness,” Percy found the populace in general to be rash and timid. “To hear them talk,” he wrote his father soon after his arrival in Boston, “you would imagine that they would attack us & demolish us every night; & yet, whenever we appear, they are frightened out of their wits.”²⁷

On his infrequent trips outside Boston, Percy found the surrounding countryside to be “the most beautiful country I ever saw in my life,” but bemoaned the people as just the opposite. “The people here,” he told his second cousin, “are a set of sly, artful, hypocritical rascalls, cruel, & cowards. I must own I cannot but despise them compleately.”²⁸

As his time in Boston wore on, Percy was careful not to criticize Gage directly, but he did tell his father, “The general’s great lenity and moderation serve only to make them more daring & insolent.… He has given them every proof that his utmost wish is to restore peace & tranquillity without coming to violent measures.” His father’s response was to obtain an order permitting General Gage to send his son home to England, but the thirty-two-year-old colonel felt it his duty to remain with his regiment.²⁹

As the winter of 1774–75 wore on, Percy shared the anxiety of the “strange unsettled state” in Boston. By February, six months after his landing, disease had caused the deaths of two officers and 123 men, women, and children of the various regiments.³⁰ Percy put the best possible spin on it when he wrote a mentor and member of Parliament that the rebel leaders “undoubtedly grow more desperate as they see less hopes of escaping, and do all they can to drive the others to extremities.”

Meanwhile, Percy said, the British troops were “waiting with impatience the determinations and orders from yr side of the water.” That was undoubtedly true from General Gage down to the lowliest private. But Percy couldn’t refrain from letting his mounting frustrations show. Rather pointedly, he told the MP that whatever actions Parliament took, “I hope they will be pointed and effectual ones; for you left so many loopholes in the last acts you passed, that it was found not possible to enforce them.”³¹

Percy told his father much the same thing and foreshadowed the conclusions that Lord North’s government was reaching in London. Gage might well wish to be lenient and hope for some accommodation that would stem the irrepressible tide toward open warfare, but the choices were becoming increasingly black and white. “If Gt Britain relaxes in the least,” wrote Percy, “adieu to the colonies. They will be lost forever.”³²