Chapter 2 “Messenger of the Revolution”
IN MARCH of 1765, a series of destructive storms ravaged Boston Harbor, damaging ships and affecting commerce. The Sugar Act and rigorous enforcement of antismuggling laws had hampered trade, and now general economic conditions in Boston had deteriorated.1 By the spring of 1765, bankruptcies and business failures began to mount throughout the town, and demand for goods and services declined in dramatic fashion.2
To add to Boston’s economic malaise, word came from England that a stamp duty on the colonies had been approved by Parliament with little objection or debate. By November every newspaper, pamphlet, bill, note, bond, lease, license, deed, manifest, or other document printed on vellum or paper was subject to the Stamp Act, which levied a direct tax on colonists. According to one historian, this “fatal measure” was enacted with “arrogance and blind indifference [to] the sentiments and petitions of the colonists . . .”3 The cost of doing virtually any business in Massachusetts and beyond would now greatly increase—at a time when the citizenry could least afford it. Even more galling than the actual sums collected was the nakedly avaricious intent behind it. Most of the prior acts had at least been made in the name of regulating trade or commerce: this act, like the Sugar Act, was created purely for the purpose of raising money for Great Britain. Though the duties demanded under the measure were in and of themselves rather small, many colonists saw a sinister and veiled meaning in their passage. Joseph Warren charged, in rather excessive fashion, that the design of the Crown was to “force the colonies into a rebellion, and from thence to take occasion to treat them with severity, and, by military power, to reduce them to servitude.”4
As talk of the Stamp Act unfolded, Revere’s youngest daughter, Mary, died. Though the pall of death was constant in colonial life, the family naturally mourned the loss of the thirteen-month-old child who was born just as Boston’s smallpox epidemic receded. And to add to Revere’s troubles, once again his business was reeling.
With crippling unemployment spreading throughout the town, the goldsmith trade had declined sharply even before the new duties were to take effect. The services of such an artisan were considered a luxury afforded only by the wealthy during these difficult times. To curb his growing expenses, Revere leased out a portion of his shop, yet he still found himself in financial difficulty. Indeed, a local merchant, Thomas Fletcher, sued Revere for nonpayment of a demand note and attached his property to secure payment.5
The Crown had fatally misjudged colonial reaction to the Stamp Act. The imposed taxes were far-reaching and would clearly hinder not only tradesmen such as Revere but also businesses of all kinds throughout the colonies. Immediately, a clear demarcation of loyalties led to the proliferation of political parties. The Whigs—or the party of organized opposition—and the Tories—the party of submission to the king—sprang to life and split the colonists into divided factions. Open and aggressive hostility to the measure, however, was clearly the majority view in Boston and among the colonies at large.6
In England, Benjamin Franklin, then a colonial emissary, testified before the House of Commons regarding the response of his countrymen to the act:
“What was the temper of America toward Great Britain before the year 1763?” he was asked.
“The best in the world . . .”
“And what is their temper now?”
“Oh, very much altered.”7
Beginning with a set of unequivocal resolutions authored by Patrick Henry in Virginia that decried any person who supported the act as “an enemy to his majesty’s colony,”8 an organized effort against taxation without the consent of the people swept through the colonies. A groundswell of hostility in the form of angry town meetings, provincial assemblies, pamphlets, and broadsides created a sense of tension and antagonism to the British taxing authority. Across provincial America, private citizens banned together and forged nonimportation agreements aimed at the boycott of all British goods.9
In a measure intended to unify the colonial effort, the Massachusetts legislature adopted a letter to be circulated among the various provincial assemblies inviting delegates to a congress called for the purpose of enlightening the Crown to the grave state of affairs caused by the Stamp Act. Likewise, James Otis urged the creation of provincial committees to consider the overall effect of the measure on the colonies. “There ought to be no New England man, no New Yorker, known on the continent, but all of us Americans,” wrote one member of the Stamp Act Congress.10
In Boston and beyond, newspaper publishers inflamed the public with acerbic declarations on the natural rights of Englishmen and the duty of all citizens to rise in opposition to the enslaving measure.11 One New York newspaper irreverently proclaimed that with the passage of the Stamp Act, “Lady North American Liberty had died of a cruel stamp on her vitals but happily, she had left an only son, prophetically named Independence.”12
Protest inevitably turned to violence. As word of the pending Stamp Act spread through Boston, an angry mob of mostly tradesmen and shopkeepers turned its sights on Thomas Hutchinson and his brother-in-law, Andrew Oliver, who had been appointed as the Massachusetts stamp master. On the morning of August 14, 1765, effigies of Oliver and another instigator of colonial tax measures, Lord Bute, were suspended from a sprawling elm tree near Boston Neck. A series of labels were slung around the shoulders of Oliver’s dangling cloth corpse and on the left arm was written, “What greater pleasure can there be, than to see a stamp man hanging on a tree!”13 The majestic elm upon which the effigies hung would soon come to be infamously known as the Liberty Tree.
Later in the evening a similar mob removed the lifeless figures and carried them to the Town House, chanting, “Liberty, property, and no stamps!”14 The crowd loudly paraded through the building where the governor and council were reported to be meeting in evening session and then proceeded to Kilby Street, near Oliver’s Dock, and dismantled a building that they believed to be the home of the coming stamp office. Using timbers and beams from the demolished structure for kindling, the mob ignited a fire in front of Oliver’s Fort Hill home and burned the effigies amid chants and angry speeches. Finally, they shattered the windows of the house and ransacked the property. Andrew Oliver resigned his post as stamp master the following day.
On Sunday, August 25, Reverend Jonathan Mayhew delivered a sermon at the West Church, brazenly condemning the Stamp Act and inciting the congregation to further resistance. His flock listened with rousing fury and sprang into “God’s service.”15
The following day, another mob ransacked the Vice-Admiralty Court, where charges of trade violations were prosecuted without juries, and torched its records. The homes of several customs officers as well as the private mansion of Thomas Hutchinson met a similar fate. “The doors were immediately split to pieces with broad axes, and a way made there, and at the windows, for the entry of the mob; which poured in, and filled, in an instant, every room in the house,” Hutchinson later recalled. “They continued their possession until daylight; destroyed, carried away, or cast into the street, everything that was in the house; demolished every part of it, except the walls, as far as lay in their power; and had begun to break away the brick-work.”16 Ironically, Hutchinson had stood in staunch opposition to the Stamp Act.
Though most of the mob violence in the summer of 1765 appeared to be spontaneous and haphazard in form, in reality, a small group comprised mostly of local artisans and tradesmen had overseen and organized most of the protest effort. The Loyal Nine, as they called themselves, were men whose lives would be directly affected by the untenable revenue-raising measures of the Crown. Paul Revere knew several of the Loyal Nine, but it is unclear whether he was a direct participant in the mob violence of August 14 and August 25. What is very clear, however, is that during the period in question, Revere’s daybooks indicate a troubling lack of business activity.17
It would not be long before the Loyal Nine would develop into a more radical alliance that began appearing throughout the colonies with the goal of resistance—forcible if necessary—to the implementation of the Stamp Act. The Sons of Liberty, as they came to be known, advocated a more zealous and militant form of dissent that would one day morph into open rebellion. The rank-and-file members of the group, many recruited from the docks and sordid taverns of Boston, often resorted to violence and intimidation in furtherance of their rebellious objectives. The organization would cut through the social strata of the colonies, enlisting men such as Samuel Adams, statesman; Benjamin Rush, physician; James Otis, lawyer; Benjamin Edes, newspaper publisher—and Paul Revere, goldsmith.18
Though extreme in their beliefs, the Sons of Liberty recognized the need to leverage the political and social message of their cause. Enlisting the cooperation of sympathetic newspapers such as the Boston Gazette, they spread their message of opposition to tyranny across the colonies.
Satire and political caricatures soon became a critical tool of the Patriot movement. As an accomplished engraver, Paul Revere enthusiastically joined the resistance effort and adapted his trade to the creation of allegorical renderings of significant events.
In a copperplate engraving entitled “A View of the Year 1765,” borrowed from a British satirist, Revere depicted, in cartoon format, an elaborate and macabre Armageddon against the Stamp Act. A fierce dragon that personified the dreaded tax measure is confronted by a band of charging colonists led by a brave Bostonian with drawn and pitched sword. In the background appears the body of a pitiable British official hanging by the neck from a branch of the Liberty Tree, and below, the following rambling descriptive verse expresses Revere’s fiery sentiments:
America! see thy freeborn sons advance
And at thy Tyrant point the threatng Lance!
Who with grim Horror ope[n]s his Hell-like Jaws,
And MAGNA CHARTA grasps between his Claws.
Lo Boston brave! unstain’d by Placemen’s Bribe
‘Attack the Monster and his venal Tribe.’
See loyal Hampden to his Country true,
Present his Weapon to the odious Crew;19
It would be the first of many political expressions that would find life through Revere’s skillful hand and solidify him as a respected member of the Sons of Liberty.
Through these antics and the other carefully coordinated efforts of Whig leaders, encouraging results soon followed. In May of 1766, the lower house of the Massachusetts legislature was captured by resistance-minded statesmen such as James Otis, John Hancock, and Thomas Cushing, who ousted nineteen legislators earlier denounced by the Boston Gazette as “Tools to the Governor.”20
And on May 16, 1766, news that Parliament had repealed the Stamp Act arrived in Boston.
Through the streets of Boston, joyous cheering and festive gunfire filled the air. Church bells clanged with their song of victory and, in the harbor, ships unfurled their colors and saluted with cannon fire.
A more formal celebration three days later swelled to every corner of the town and marked the repeal with fireworks and bonfires that were viewed by jubilant and often inebriated celebrants. On the Boston Common the Sons of Liberty, almost assuredly assisted by Paul Revere, erected a “magnificent Pyramid illuminated by two-hundred-and-eighty lamps.”21 The translucent obelisk was decorated on each side with flowery verse and symbolic depictions of the fight against the British tax measures, and it became the unquestionable focal point of the town’s merriment.
“The Great Illumination,” as the celebration would be called,22 was to culminate with the placement of the pyramid at the foot of the Liberty Tree as a commemorative shrine to the event. Late into the evening, however, the structure, which was made primarily of oiled paper, predictably burst into flames and was instantly destroyed. Fortunately, Revere had earlier replicated for posterity each side of the creation in a copperplate engraving that he entitled, “A VIEW of the OBELISK erected under LIBERTY-TREE in Boston on the Rejoicings for the Repeal of the Stamp Act 1766.” And across the bottom, Revere decreed, “To every Lover of LIBERTY this Plate is humbly dedicated by her true born SONS in Boston, New England.”23
Though repeal of the Stamp Act was cause for colonial celebration, Parliament ominously reserved the future right through the enactment of the Declaratory Act “to do what the treasury pleased with three millions of freemen,” and it reasserted its authority to impose laws and statutes to bind the colonies as it saw fit.24 The united opposition to the act had taught the colonists that unwavering effort and concerted resistance would yield positive results. It was evident, however, that Revere and his fellow activists would need to stand strong and vigilant as events unfolded.
Among Whig leaders such as Adams, Warren, and Molineaux, questions of law and the policy of determined opposition often were considered within the quiet confines of private homes such as that of William Cooper in Brattle Square.25 The middling artisans and mechanics—the foot soldiers of the movement—however, carried on their business in the Green Dragon, once referred to as the “headquarters of the Revolution,”26 the Salutation, and other spirited taverns of Boston.
Revere became an active participant in these societies, including, most notably, the North Caucus,27 which held regular meetings at which minutes were kept and where support for designated political candidates and causes was solidified. He was known and respected among educated gentlemen, merchants, and artisans, and moved easily among each group, communicating ideas and unifying the parties in times of quarrel.
Though Revere returned his attentions to family and commerce following the repeal of the Stamp Act, he and his local brethren remained warily conscious of the political climate in Great Britain. In 1767 the colonial economy continued its sharp postwar decline, and Parliament persisted in its debate regarding responsibility for sharing England’s financial burdens. Revere’s business orders fell precipitously during the year, and by the fall his attentions would again be torn between diverse business pursuits and the cause of liberty.
The tone in Parliament toward the colonies had turned decidedly bitter. At the time there was a pervasive British attitude that His Majesty’s colonial subjects had dissolved into a collection of petulant and ungrateful rabble. It was almost universally agreed that staunch measures aimed at reasserting dominance and control over the colonies was required.
In May of 1767, Charles Townshend, England’s “vain and volatile”28 chancellor of the exchequer, successfully argued for the enactment of a series of measures that would lay import duties on glass, lead, printer’s paper, and tea, and also create a new board of customs commissioners in Boston with broad and sweeping trade enforcement powers, including expanded writs of assistance. Disturbingly, the revenue raised by the measures would be used, in part, to pay the salaries of colonial officials appointed by and beholden only to the Crown.29 The Townshend Acts, as they would become known, were to take effect in November.
Again, the colonies were roused into action. Nonimportation agreements initiated by Boston merchant John Rowe were signed, and a series of resolutions, addresses, and caucus meetings ensued. The press condemned Townshend’s measures as political subjugation and actively advocated the cause of opposition. “In the atmosphere of the late 1760s,” wrote one historian, “these measures and proposals were not simply irritating; they were explosive.”30
Though the colonial response to the measures was clearly hostile, the opposition movement maintained a posture of restraint and nonviolence, in contrast to its impulsive aggression against the Stamp Act. Now, the determined undertaking of dissent focused on public debate and democratic process.
On February 11, 1768, a circular letter drawn up by Samuel Adams and adopted by the Massachusetts House of Representatives, which set forth in detail the formal objections to the Townshend Acts, was disseminated among the various colonies to “harmonize with each other” in protest.31 Though the letter clearly and vigorously advocated the importance of unity and concert of purpose, it freely admitted the supremacy of Parliament and disclaimed all thought of independence.32 Nonetheless, the secretary of the colonies, Lord Hillsborough, dispatched an order to all colonial governors to ignore Adams’s letter, which he described as “seditious” and “of a most dangerous and factious tendency.”33 In a separate letter to the Massachusetts governor, Francis Bernard, Hillsborough demanded, in the name of the king, that “the resolution which gave birth to the circular letter” be immediately rescinded by the House of Representatives and that it “declare their disapprobation of that rash and hasty proceeding.”34 If the legislature so refused, proclaimed Hillsborough, then the king ordered Bernard to dissolve the house itself. In the words of one historian, “Indeed, from this moment the march of events tends straight towards the dissolution of the empire.”35
On June 30, the Massachusetts House of Representatives met in private session and refused to rescind the circular letter by a vote of ninety-two to seventeen. In the first of nine days of debate leading up to the vote, the fiery James Otis exclaimed, “Lord Hillsborough knows that we will not rescind our acts . . . He should apply to parliament to rescind theirs. Let Britain rescind her measures, or the colonies are lost to her forever.”36 The following day, Governor Bernard duly dissolved the Massachusetts assembly.
Contrary to Hillsborough’s order to the colonies to ignore Adams’s circular letter, most were in complete accord with their Massachusetts neighbors. Town and county meetings expressed concert and solidarity, and soon, Committees of Correspondence sprang into effect across colonial America in an effort to open direct and speedy lines of communication among “the friends of liberty.”37
In Boston, the “trumpeters of sedition” as Hillsborough called the publishers of the Boston Gazette, openly toasted the “Massachusetts Ninety-two” for their brave vote of refusal38—and chastised the cowardly seventeen.
And again, Paul Revere’s talents were put to use.
Commissioned by fifteen of his fellow Sons of Liberty, Revere crafted a large silver punch bowl elaborately engraved with scrolls, wreaths, and symbolic gestures of patriotism and bearing the inscription:
To the Memory of the glorious NINETY-TWO Members of the Honbl House of Representatives of the Massachusetts-Bay, who, undaunted by the insolent Menaces of Villains in Power, from a Strict Regard to Conscience and the LIBERTIES of their Constituents, on the 30th of June 1768, Voted NOT TO RESCIND.
The Liberty Bowl, as it would come to be known, would stand as a living tribute to the bravery and defiance of the “Glorious Ninety-Two.”39
As warmly as Revere honored the “nay” voters of the House of Representatives, he aptly lambasted the seventeen “Rescinders.” In an engraving entitled “A Warm Place—Hell,” Revere depicted, in farcical caricature, the seventeen “scoundrels” who voted for rescission being prodded by the devil into the fiery jaws of hell. “Now I’ve got you, a fine haul by Jove,” the devil exclaims. Above the terrified group flies an ominous demon with extended pitchfork urging, “Push on, Tim,” referring to the Tory legislator, Timothy Ruggles.40 Among the seventeen ridiculed votes to rescind appeared Dr. John Calef of Ipswich who, eleven years later, would witness many of the events of the doomed Penobscot Expedition and record his detailed observations in a daily journal.
As Revere finished the artwork for the plate, which by all accounts was a virtual replica of an earlier British engraving bearing the same name, one of his friends, Dr. Benjamin Church, came by the shop, observed the engraving, and suggested the following lyrical inscription, which Revere promptly added:
On brave RESCINDERS! to yon yawning cell,
SEVENTEEN such Miscreants there will startle Hell;
There puny Villains damn’d for petty Sin,
On such distinguish’d Scoundrels gaze and grin;
The out-done DEVIL will resign his Sway,
He never curst his MILLIONS in a day.41
Revere’s print was sold and widely circulated amongst the town, galvanizing opinion and rousing an already angered public.
As the events set in motion by Adams’s circular letter overtook the colonies, John Hancock’s sloop Liberty arrived in Boston Harbor carrying an illegal shipment of wine from Madeira. Customs officials seized the vessel, and Boston erupted into riots. Great Britain had already been alarmed by “a long concerted and extensive plan of resistance” to the authority of the Crown,42 and now, with the renewed violence in Boston, it had become clear that the only possible course to prevent open revolt and its spread throughout the colonies was the introduction of military force.43 The order to General Gage, commander in chief of His Majesties forces in America, to “strengthen the hands of the Government in the Province of Massachusetts Bay”44 went out on June 8, 1768.
On Governor Bernard’s refusal to convene the Massachusetts legislature in the face of the pending emergency, a convention comprised of nearly all towns and settlements in Massachusetts was held at Faneuil Hall to consider the situation. The convention was called by an earlier Boston town meeting, which had resolved that “money could not be levied, nor a standing army be kept up in the province, but by their own consent.”45
Though the convention was mindful to remain moderate in tone and respectful of the King throughout, the governor perceived the meeting as “an offence of a very high nature”46 and urged the members to disband. Clothing itself in the spirit of law and avoiding any talk of treason or rebellion, the convention passed a series of grievances and adjourned on September 28 after six days of meetings. Within hours of the adjournment, the first two regiments of British troops arrived in Boston Harbor. Thus, according to historian Bernard Bailyn, “One of the classic stages in the process of destroying free constitutions of government had been reached.”47
In the coming weeks the Royal forces in Boston swelled to menacing proportions. Revere would later memorialize the unwelcome arrival with a copperplate print showing the ships landing in the harbor. He described the peril of those uncertain days in Boston: “. . . the Ships of WAR, armed Schooners, Transports, &c., Came up the Harbour and Anchored round the TOWN: their Cannon loaded, a Spring on their Cables, as for a regular Siege. At noon on Saturday, October the 1st the fourteenth & twenty-ninth Regiments, a detachment from the 59th Regt and a Train of Artillery, with two pieces of Cannon, landed on the Long Wharf; there Formed and Marched with insolent Parade, Drums beating, Fifes playing and Colours flying, up KING STREET, Each soldier having received 16 rounds of Powder and Ball.”48
The Sixty-fourth and Sixty-fifth Regiments soon joined the Fourteenth and Twenty-ninth, and eight men-of-war advanced upon the harbor, flags unfurled and guns positioned. With loaded muskets and fixed bayonets, the Redcoats marched through the streets of Boston to the Common and to Faneuil Hall, where they sought shelter and station. Under the Billeting Act, Colonel Dalrymple, the British commanding officer, demanded quarters and supplies, but would encounter few friends among the populace of Boston.
Though little formal resistance was offered by the people, they welcomed the troops with indignation and open bitterness. “They were often abused and insulted, scurrilous attacks upon them made in the newspapers, and frequent affrays between the soldiers and townsmen took place.”49 The citizens threw caustic barbs of “tyranny!” and “treason!” at the soldiers, and the divide between Tory and Whig became wider than ever.
For the next two years, a troubled peace would hold between the two factions, but this stalemate of resentment and mutual hostility would not last for long.
Revere had begun 1768 with the addition of his fifth child, Mary, born on March 19. (Another daughter by the name of Mary had died in 1765 at the age of one.) By then the family had changed their church affiliation from the Cockerel, whose pastor had become too aligned with the Loyalists, to the more liberal congregation of the West Church where, to the consternation of his father, Revere frequently had visited as a boy.50
Despite the arrival of British troops in Boston, Revere’s Masonic activities strengthened during this period and, by the close of 1769, he held the lofty position of royal arch Mason of St. Andrew’s Lodge. At about the same time, the Massachusetts Grand Lodge received its charter and appointed Dr. Joseph Warren as grand master and Revere as senior grand deacon. Revere’s more clandestine activities within the Sons of Liberty also expanded, as did his alliances with the statesmen and leaders of the opposition movement. Though he missed little opportunity to propagandize against and profit from the British presence in Boston through inflammatory prints and publications, Revere curiously did not discriminate when it came to business interests. Even as provincial life bent and swayed under the weight of the British occupation, Revere maintained cordial relations with his Tory customers, several of whom would prove, in 1769, to be among his most important customers. At this time Revere also began to expand his professional interests into the practice of dentistry. Despite the dramatic geopolitical shifts that were occurring beneath his feet, his goldsmith business began to increase and, together with his foray into dentistry, he found a way to prosper financially. In early 1770 Revere purchased a two-story house in North Square, a short walk from his goldsmith shop on Clark’s Wharf.51
Even as Revere personally thrived, the fragile standoff in the Town of Boston continued. The presence of British soldiers continued to irk the citizenry, and petty quarrels began to escalate the tensions. “The troops greatly corrupt our morals and are in every sense an oppression,” wrote a Boston minister. “May Heaven soon deliver us from this great evil!”52
Nonimportation, the colonial boycott of certain British goods, had taken hold throughout the region and, by 1770, had begun to affect British commerce. Economic pressures were mounting on the Crown, and the Sons of Liberty sought, as always, to unify the colonies in their resolve. This was not always possible. Bowing to financial and political pressures, several Boston merchants elected to ignore the popular sentiment and deal in some of the forbidden goods.
On February 22, 1770, a bitter confrontation between one such merchant, Theophilus Lillie, and a band of unruly boys exploded on Middle Street behind Revere’s new home. When Lillie’s neighbor, Ebenezer Richardson, a roundly hated British informant, came upon the scene, chaos turned to violence. After briefly coming to Lillie’s defense, Richardson fled to his home with the crowd in hot pursuit. Finally, under a barrage of snowballs and invective, he “discharged a loaded Gun into the midst of the people”53 and eleven-year-old Christopher Seider became the victim of a “barbarous murder.”54
Four days later, Seider’s funeral procession, led by five hundred children and followed by another thirteen hundred citizens, wound through the streets of Boston amid tolling bells and cries of bitter indignation. Little Christopher Seider had become “a martyr in the cause of liberty.”55
In an emotionally charged trial viewed by “a vast Concourse of Rabble,” Ebenezer Richardson was convicted of murder in a classic case of jury nullification, despite convincing evidence of self-defense. Hesitant to order his execution, the court sought and obtained a pardon from the Crown, and Richardson was ultimately released.56
Boston now simmered like a kettle on an open hearth. On the night of March 5, despite snow-covered streets and frigid temperatures, mobs of men and boys roved about Boston taunting and insulting British soldiers. Sharp altercations flared between troops and citizens on King Street, Draper Alley, and at Dock Square. Soldiers were reported to be carrying clubs and cutlasses, while mobs of unruly countrymen armed themselves with sticks and canes.57
Private Hugh White, a posted sentry at the Custom House, was confronted by a young apprentice seeking satisfaction for services from another officer thought to be nearby. The altercation ended with White striking the man with the butt of his musket.
Shortly after nine o’clock, meetinghouse bells clanged a false alarm of fire, and a flood of townspeople poured into King Street to find only agitated soldiers and marauding gangs. A young man suddenly extended an accusatory finger at Private White and cried out, “There’s the soldier who knocked me down!”
“Kill him! Knock him down!” joined other voices.58
As a barrage of snowballs pelted Private White, he nervously retreated up the steps of the Custom House and loaded his musket.
“The lobster is going to fire!” shouted a boy.
A bookseller, Henry Knox, warned the sentry, “If you fire you must die for it.”59
White leveled his weapon and warned the rampaging crowd to stay back. He then shouted loudly to the main guard across the street for assistance, and moments later he was joined by seven soldiers who rushed upon the scene with bayonets fixed and muskets primed and loaded. An officer of the Twenty-ninth Regiment, Captain Thomas Preston, also arrived at the Custom House and took charge of his men.
The crowd goaded the soldiers to fire, hurling insults and striking them with sticks and snowballs. The air was thick with voices and confusion.
“Fire, fire if you dare!” a voice called out. “Why don’t you fire?”
Though some in the melee would later testify that they heard the word “fire,” it is unclear whether Captain Preston issued the order. History records, however, that on that evening of March 5, 1770, soldiers from the Twenty-ninth Regiment discharged their weapons upon the citizens of Boston, killing five and seriously wounding six others.
The “Horrid Massacre,” as it would come to be known, bonded the colonies and shaped public opinion like no previous act of the British government had done. “On that night,” John Adams later wrote, “the formation of American Independence was laid.”60
The funeral procession for the slain was attended by as many as ten to twelve thousand citizens, who mournfully wormed their way from the site of the massacre through the streets of Boston to the Granary Burying Ground.61 “So large an assemblage” had never been seen before in the town.62
After an inquiry ordered by Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson on the night of the shooting, Captain Preston and his men were arrested by the Suffolk County sheriffs pursuant to a warrant issued by Justices Richard Dana and John Tudor, and the following morning a committee of Whig leaders convened at Faneuil Hall and demanded that all British soldiers be removed from the town. Immediately, each side clamored to depose witnesses and to publicly issue their version of events in an effort to gain the informational high ground. Though it is unclear whether Paul Revere was present on King Street on the evening of the fifth, it is believed that he generated a detailed pen-and-ink plan of the massacre scene ostensibly for use at the legal proceedings ultimately brought against the soldiers.63
Revere’s creative involvement did not stop with evidentiary diagrams. On March 26, as the political fallout from the killings began to crystallize, the Boston Gazette advertised Revere’s copperplate engraving of the “Bloody Massacre,” as he called it. An inflammatory—and generally inaccurate—depiction of the event, Revere’s print shows a well-organized row of British soldiers firing in unison upon a helpless and peaceably assembled gathering of townspeople. Behind the Redcoats, Captain Preston stands with sword elevated, sternly commanding his men to shoot, and above him, one of Boston’s buildings bears the sign “Butcher’s Hall.” The bewildered crowd recoils in fear, and several citizens are shown gruesomely bleeding on the street from head, neck, and chest wounds. Beneath the print, Revere placed, as usual, a tirade of provocative verse, which included doggerel such as:
. . . With murd’rous Rancour stretch their bloody Hands;
Like fierce Barbarians grinning o’er their Pay.
Approve the Carnage and enjoy the Day.64
The print, which Revere sold and willingly profited from, is perhaps his best-known work of copperplate engraving and has been reproduced innumerable times through the years. As one Revere biographer explained, however, “Revere is under grave suspicion of having in this instance appropriated the work of another.”65 On March 29, 1770, following the advertisement of the print in the Gazette, a Boston engraver by the name of Henry Pelham penned a scathing letter to Revere:
SIR:
When I heard that you was cutting a plate of the late Murder, I thought it impossible as I knew you was not capable of doing it unless you coppied it from mine and as I thought I had intrusted it in the hands of a person who had more regard to the dictates of Honour and Justice than to take the undue advantage you have done of the confidence and trust I reposed in you.
But I find I was mistaken and after being at great Trouble and Expense of making a design, paying for paper, printing &c., find myself in the most ungenerous Manner deprived not only of any proposed Advantage but even of the expense I have been at as truly as if you had plundered me on the highway.
If you are insensible of the Dishonour you have brought on yourself by this Act, the World will not be so. However, I leave you to reflect and consider of one of the most dishonourable Actions you could well be guilty of.
H. Pelham.66
Revere’s plate asserts only that it was “Engrav’d Printed & Sold by Paul Revere Boston” and gives no hint of attribution to another. Certainly eighteenth-century standards of provenance and derivation were fairly lenient, but it does appear that Pelham entrusted his depiction of the “late murder” to Revere, and that his trust was shamelessly violated.67
In April, Great Britain repealed the Townshend revenue measures with the exception of the duty on tea, and later in the year, Boston’s merchants voted to terminate the nonimportation measures. Though trade and commerce slowly began to improve, Governor Hutchinson was ordered by the Crown to relinquish civil control of Castle Island to British authority, thereby essentially placing Massachusetts under martial law.68 For the next several years, an unsteady truce was maintained, and Boston found a semblance of calm amid the underlying anguish of British oppression.
On the first anniversary of the massacre, memorials and tributes appeared throughout the town—none, however, surpassing the “very striking Exhibition”69 prepared by Paul Revere. In the evening hours of March 5, his North Square dwelling was converted into a solemn monument adorned with creations and symbols depicting the events of the previous year. “The whole was so well executed,” wrote the Boston Gazette, “that the Spectators, whole Number amounted to several Thousands, were struck with solemn Silence, and their Countenances were covered with a melancholy Gloom.”70
At one chamber window of the house, Revere placed an illuminated depiction of Christopher Seider, mortally wounded and fighting for life while his friends helplessly look on. Nearby, an obelisk appeared bearing the face of Seider and the names of all five victims of the Horrid Massacre, and beneath were printed the lines:
Seider’s pale Ghost fresh-bleeding stands,
And Vengeance for his Death demands.71
Through another window was seen a row of pitiless British soldiers firing into a crowd of citizens, several of which lay wounded and bleeding on the ground, and above, the words “FOUL PLAY” were boldly transcribed. And through the last window, a woman, representing America, sits on the stump of a tree and points accusingly at the unfolding tragic events. The “never-to-be-forgotten 5th of March 1770”72 was soberly and stirringly memorialized by the Revere family.
The next several years marked a pause in the patriotic fervor that earlier had gripped the Town of Boston. Nonetheless, Whig leaders mustered the spirit of dissent with printed political invective and annual orations marking the anniversary of the Horrid Massacre. During this period of “superficial tranquility,”73 Revere remained active in Masonic activities, local politics, and the North Caucus. He continued his interest and awareness in the cause of economic freedom, and he greatly strengthened his associations with leaders of the movement such as Joseph Warren, Thomas Young, and Samuel Adams.
In October of 1772, word arrived in Boston of a requirement that the governor and provincial judges receive their salaries from the Crown rather than from the people whom they served. Predictably, the Whig leaders of Boston strenuously objected to the measure and conducted a series of town meetings to formulate a response.
At the urging of Samuel Adams, a formal Committee of Correspondence was unanimously voted on in Boston to meet and circulate “the infringements and violations”74 of Great Britain and the colonial responses thereto. Twenty-one men of stature, wealth, and education were chosen by town meeting vote to man the committee and to apprise the people in the most articulate and intellectual manner. Though not chosen as a member of Boston’s Committee of Correspondence, Paul Revere would nonetheless soon be called on to play a central and vital role in its work.
By 1773 the Revere family had swelled to seven children. Elizabeth had been born in late 1770 and Isanna, two years later. Of the eight children she delivered, Sara Revere would nurture all beyond infancy, though Mary, the fourth child born to the couple, died in 1765 at the age of one. With the difficult birth of Isanna, however, Sara would soon become weak and fall sick. On May 3, 1773, she died at the age of thirty-seven. Paul Revere would find himself alone, tending to the needs of seven children, a goldsmith shop, and a fledgling nation that would soon require his services.
No doubt Revere’s greatest distress in the days following Sara’s death was the care of the infant Isanna, who was sickly and not thriving. Though Revere’s mother and eldest daughter, fifteen-year-old Deborah, were a constant and supportive presence in the household, it became abundantly clear that a mother’s touch would be required to bond the family and allow it to endure.
Whether through true love or simple expedience, Revere would quickly find the answer to his wishes. Rachel Walker, a twenty-seven-year-old plain but educated Bostonian, caught his eye one afternoon in the summer of 1773. Esther Forbes writes, “Probably it was the attraction of Paul himself that made Rachel go with him, but the story is that it was pity for poor Isanna that made her stay that evening, and soon return for good.”75 They were married on October 10, 1773.
Though Isanna would die just weeks before they wed, Paul and Rachel Revere would have eight more children of their own in the coming years and enjoy a long and happy union that would endure late into their lives.
As Revere personally toiled and then recovered in 1773, the movement toward colonial unity likewise faltered despite the proliferation of Committees of Correspondence. Political factions developed among the Whig party, and the rallying cry of “British tyranny” seemed to evaporate with the repeal of the Townshend Acts and the withdrawal of the nonimportation measures. Overall interest in the militant exploits of the Sons of Liberty also began to wane as lethargy and division within the ranks seemed to cast doubt on the movement.
Whatever rancor and disunity existed among the colonies in the early 1770s, however, quickly and unambiguously evaporated with the passage of the Tea Act of 1773 on May 10, 1773. In an effort to save the cash-starved East India Company, which maintained excessive stockpiles of tea in its warehouses along the Thames River, Parliament passed a measure, effectively giving the company a monopoly on all teas sold in the colonial market and allowing these exports to be accomplished duty-free. The result, of course, was the undercutting of all other sources of the product while ensuring that the only remaining measure of the Townshend Acts—a tax on tea—was complied with in full.76
The North Caucus expressed the unified sentiment of Boston and provincial America when on October 23, 1773, it voted, “That this body will oppose the vending of any tea, sent by the East India Company to any part of the Continent, with our lives and fortunes.”77 In an unequivocal stroke, Paul Revere and his fellow caucus members had drawn the line against the oppressive Tea Act.
The resistance effort, led by the North Caucus and implemented by the Boston town meeting and Committee of Correspondence, sprang into action. They passed resolutions aimed at preventing the sale and consumption of East India tea and sent circular letters to the towns and villages of Massachusetts to implore compliance. The resistance used strong-arm persuasion on the various appointed “tea consignees” to resign their positions; upon their failure to do so, they were to be branded “enemies of their country.”78 Rachel Revere dutifully informed her family, “Children, this is the last cup of tea you will get for a long while.”79
On November 28 the British ship Dartmouth sailed into Boston Harbor carrying its cargo of one hundred and fourteen chests of East India Company tea. Immediately, the cry went forth in a handbill posted across the town:
The hour of Destruction or manly Opposition to the Machinations of Tyranny, stares you in the Face; every Friend to this Country, to himself and to Posterity, is now called upon to meet at FANEUIL HALL, at Nine o’clock THIS DAY, (at which Time the Bells will ring), to make a united and successful Resistance to the last, worst, and most destructive Measure of Administration.80
The meeting at Faneuil Hall—a graceful, red-brick Georgian structure built in 1742 near Dock Square and never meant to host the largest public events—was so roundly attended by the citizens of Boston that the leaders were forced to relocate to the Old South Meeting House. As thousands looked on, a resolution was passed on the motion of Samuel Adams “that the tea should not be landed,”81 and a round-the-clock guard of twenty-five men, including Paul Revere, was appointed to stand by the ship to ensure compliance with the decree.
Meanwhile, the Eleanor and the Beaver, both carrying a similar shipment of the “detested tea,”82 arrived in Boston and were moored alongside the Dartmouth at Griffin’s Wharf, where the appointed party stood guard. Frantic negotiations ensued with the ships’ owners and the tea consignees for the return of the cargo to England, but on each occasion, they answered that it was beyond their collective power to send the tea back. As the tense standoff continued, time would quickly become of the essence; for according to the law, twenty days after arrival, the ships could be seized by British authorities for nonpayment of duties and their contents sold at auction.83
On December 11 the owner of the Dartmouth, a Nantucket Quaker by the name of Francis Rotch, again informed the Committee of Correspondence that it was out of his power to return the tea to England.
“The ship must go,” came the response. “The people of Boston and the neighboring towns absolutely require and expect it.”84 To make matters worse, Governor Hutchinson was preventing passage of the ship in the absence of a permit that he refused to grant.
On December 16—the final day for the colonists to act—again permission to return the loaded Dartmouth to England was denied. As Rotch once again appealed to the governor for leave, the Old South Meeting House swelled with over seven thousand citizens from Boston and her surrounding towns. Josiah Quincy, Samuel Adams, Thomas Young, and others delivered impassioned discourses. “Who knows,” queried one speaker, “how tea will mingle with salt water?”85
As dusk fell upon Boston, Rotch finally returned with word that Governor Hutchinson had once again refused to allow passage to the Dartmouth without first offloading its cargo. Instantly, the crowd of people leapt to their feet with excited shouts and cries. “A mob! A Mob!”86 Samuel Adams slowly rose and was heard to say, “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.”87
At that moment, a group of about forty or fifty men wearing decorated blankets and other Mohawk garb appeared at the church doors and loudly shouted their “war whoop,” which was enthusiastically returned by those in the gallery. “Depend upon it, they were no ordinary Mohawks,” wrote John Adams.88
The horde made its way to Griffin’s Wharf, where the three ships and their incendiary cargo lay. “[W]hooping like Indians . . . ,” recorded the writer of the Dartmouth ship’s journal, “[the party] came on board the ship; and after warning myself and the custom-house officer to get out of the way, they unlaid the hatches and went down the hold, where were eighty whole and thirty-four half chests of tea, which they hoisted upon deck, and cut the chests to pieces, and hove the tea all overboard, where it was damaged and lost.”89
The “Tea Party,” as it would come to be known, was carefully planned and orchestrated by a clandestine gathering of the North Caucus in a meeting room of the Green Dragon Tavern, and Paul Revere and his Masonic brothers are known to have been active participants in both its preparation and execution. The records of St. Andrew’s Lodge, which typically met in another room at the Green Dragon Tavern, simply indicated that, as the action on Griffin’s Wharf was planned, the lodge was adjourned “on account of few Brother’s present.”90
Shortly after the Tea Party, a ballad by an anonymous author could be heard at the taverns and waterfront shops of Boston:
Rally Mohawks! Bring out your axes,
And Tell King George we’ll pay no taxes
On his foreign tea . . .
Our Warren’s there and bold Revere
With hands to do, and words to cheer
For Liberty and laws;
Our Country’s ‘braves’ and firm defenders
Shall ne’er be left by true North-Enders
Fighting Freedom’s call!
Then rally boys, and hasten on
To meet our chiefs at the Green Dragon.91
Now Revere’s role would change from propagandist engraver to envoy. As wooden fragments of battered tea chests washed up along the shores of Dorchester, Samuel Adams was busy transcribing a statement of the events of the previous evening for the Committee of Correspondence. Word of the destruction of the tea would have to be sent quickly to New York and Philadelphia. “The bearer,” wrote Adams, “is chosen by the committee from a number of gentlemen, who volunteered to carry you this intelligence.”92
With the scent of tea perhaps still lingering on his clothes and body, and fatigued by the tumultuous events of the previous night, Revere mounted his horse and journeyed south through the frigid air of the early winter. With Adams’s communiqué tucked safely in his satchel, he moved with remarkable speed for two hundred miles through the well-traveled post roads leading to New York and arrived on the night of December 21.
Revere delivered the committee’s message of “perfect jubilee”93 and provided the Whig leaders of New York with a detailed description of the tea’s destruction. Word of the event quickly circulated among the colonies and was accepted with satisfaction and support. Two days after Christmas, Revere arrived home in Boston bearing the news that New York’s Governor Tryon had pledged that all tea ships bound for New York would be denied port. The next morning, “all the Boston bells were rung.”94
The mood in Great Britain stood in stark contrast to that of the colonies. “The offence of the Americans . . . is flagitious. The Town of Boston ought to be knocked about their ears and destroyed,” the prime minister of England, Lord North, proclaimed before Parliament.95 While in America, John Adams described the event as “so bold, so daring, so firm, so intrepid and inflexible, [that] it must have so important Consequences, and so lasting, that I cant but consider it as an Epocha in History.”96
The Crown’s punitive response to Revere and his Tea Party began on March 31, 1774, with the passage of the Boston Port Bill, which essentially closed Boston Harbor to all further commerce until restitution was made to the East India Company for its losses in connection with the destruction of its tea. In the following days, Parliament sought to stymie the “tumultuous and riotous rabble”97 of Boston by the enactment of various measures requiring that the Massachusetts legislature be appointed by the king, that town meetings be abolished, that superior court judges serve and be accountable only to the king, that juries be selected by sheriffs loyal to the Crown, that British soldiers and officials charged with capital offenses be tried only in England, and that British troops be freely quartered within the province. The “Intolerable Acts,” as the legislation was called by the colonists, attempted to isolate the Town of Boston from the rest of America and divide the colonies with a wedge of coercion.98
On May 12, the Boston Committee of Correspondence resolved that “the impolicy, injustice, inhumanity, and cruelty of the act exceed all our power of expression”99 and voted unanimously to recommend that the colonies unite in a resolution terminating all trade with Great Britain. Again, Revere was chosen as an envoy to deliver the resolution to New York and Philadelphia. “My worthy friend again revisits you,” wrote Dr. Thomas Young to an acquaintance in New York. “No man of his rank and opportunities in life deserves better of the community. Steady, vigorous, sensible and persevering.”100
As Revere began his journey, word arrived in Boston that General Gage was to immediately replace Thomas Hutchinson as governor of Massachusetts. Gage had been stationed in New York City for much of the decade as commander in chief of British forces in America, yet he kept a watchful eye on Boston. “America is a mere bully . . . ,” he wrote in 1770, “and the Bostonians by far the greatest bullies.”101 Following the removal of his two infantry regiments from Boston after the Horrid Massacre, Gage had been angered and maintained that the Crown’s actions would be viewed by the colonies as capitulation and would encourage further acts of insolence. He argued in letters to his superiors that the prevalence of democracy was the root of the problem in the colonies and that restrictions on settlement beyond the coastal areas would allow London to better contain the proliferation of rebellious acts. American faith, laws, customs, and institutions, posited Gage, were adverse to British rule and required reforms or abolishment. Once accomplished, he argued, America would become dependent upon the Crown and dependence would breed submission. Though Parliament initially did not agree with the harsh measures advocated by General Gage, the Boston Tea Party would quickly change that view. In June of 1773 he had returned home to London on leave, and when word of the Tea Party reached King George III in February 1774, Gage was instructed to return immediately to Boston and to compel the town’s compliance with the Port Bill and all other measures of the Crown.102
By June 1, mere weeks after Gage’s arrival, Boston Harbor was subjected to a blockade of armed and uncompromising British vessels, and Boston herself fell victim to military rule. Four British regiments and twenty-two cannon manned by three artillery units were placed on Boston Common, and the Welch Fusiliers, an infantry company of the Prince of Wales Division, encamped at Fort Hill. Several companies of the Sixty-fourth Regiment oversaw the powder and artillery stores of Castle Island, and British troops were stationed in nearby towns to protect the governor’s residence and mandamus council, a body installed by Gage to replace the Massachusetts Assembly.103
Again New York and Philadelphia, and now Rhode Island and even the Tory stronghold of Connecticut, pledged their steadfast loyalty to Boston and communicated to Revere their willingness to stand shoulder-to shoulder with their Massachusetts brethren. As a result of Revere’s tireless embassies, “the continent, as one great commonwealth, made the cause of Boston its own.”104
During the summer of 1774, Revere grew in political savvy and patriotic rank. He was appointed to a town committee; and when called upon to serve on a Suffolk County grand jury, he refused, along with twenty-one others, on the ground that the judges’ salaries were paid by the Crown. And in June he issued his most provocative—almost scandalous—print engraving, again copied from a London cartoonist, of a helpless and bare-breasted woman representing America, held down by a series of British officials, one indignantly gawking beneath her robe, while another, the prime minister, forcibly pours a goblet full of tea down her throat. The obvious target of Revere’s inflammatory dramatization was the Boston Port Bill, a copy of which conspicuously protrudes from the pocket of one of the assailants. The bill itself, demonized by Revere’s inflammatory engraving, had the immediate effect of uniting and galvanizing the colonies against British acts of tyranny.
As the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, Revere would maintain the integral bond between the remaining political leaders of Boston and the congressional delegates hungry for news. In September he journeyed to Philadelphia bearing a copy of the Suffolk Resolves, drawn up by Joseph Warren and enacted by a convention of Suffolk County delegates to reinforce Boston’s opposition to the Intolerable Acts and to recommend the formation of a provincial congress. The body quickly endorsed the resolves and passed further resolutions condemning the acts of Parliament, which Revere duly brought back to Boston.105
As tensions grew in the colonies, Revere continued his envoy missions between Boston and the Continental Congress and, despite the growing sense of siege in his seaport home, remained optimistic and satisfied with his pivotal role in the revolutionary movement. He would write to his friend John Lamb, “We are in spirits, though in a garrison; the spirit of liberty was never higher than at present . . .”106
By early September, General Gage, with full understanding of the rebellious posture of Boston, began seizing powder and reinforcing his fortifications in and around the town. The Massachusetts legislature, having lacked the requisite legal recognition of the governor, soon reemerged as a newly formed provincial congress, named John Hancock as president, and reconvened in Concord.
Meanwhile in Boston, Revere joined a committee of nearly thirty men, mostly local mechanics, charged with “the purpose of watching the Movements of the British Soldiers, and gaining every intelligence of the movements of the Tories.”107 “For a time it was quiet,” records Justin Winsor in The Memorial History of Boston. “[B]ut it was only the lull before the storm; and the hour of the American Revolution, which had been so long in coming, was near at hand.”108