Chapter III: The Approach of Revolution

The ministers did persist, and there was revolution. Within less than a year from those memorable autumn days of 1773 when the East India Company’s ships came into port with their cargoes of tea, the colonies had set up a Congress at Philadelphia which looked from the first as if it meant to do things for which there was no law; and which did, in fact, within less than two years after its first assembling, cut the bonds of allegiance which bound America to England. The colonists did not themselves speak or think of it as a body set up to govern them, or to determine their relations with the government at home, but only as a body organized for consultation and guidance, a general meeting of their committees of correspondence. But it was significant how rapidly, and upon how consistent and executive a plan, the arrangements for “correspondence” had developed, and how naturally, almost spontaneously, they had come to a head in this “Congress of Committees.” There were men in the colonies who were as quick to act upon their instinct of leadership, and as apt and masterful at organization, as the English on the other side of the water who had checkmated Charles I.; and no doubt the thought of independent action, and even of aggressive resistance, came more readily to the minds of men of initiative in America, where all things were making and to be made, than in old England, where every rule of action seemed antique and venerable. Mr. Samuel Adams had been deliberately planning revolution in Massachusetts ever since 1768, the year the troops came to Boston to hold the town quiet while Mr. Townshend’s acts strangled its trade; and he had gone the straight way to work to bring it about. He knew very well how to cloak his purpose and sedulously keep it hid from all whom it might shock or dismay or alienate. But the means he used were none the less efficacious because those who acted with him could not see how far they led.

It was he who had stood at the front of the opposition of the Massachusetts assembly to the Stamp Act; he who had drafted the circular letter of Massachusetts to the other colonies in 1768 suggesting concert of action against the Townshend acts; he who had gone from the town meeting in Faneuil Hall to demand of Hutchinson the immediate removal of the troops, after the unhappy “massacre” of March, 1770; he who had led the town meeting which took effectual measures to prevent the landing of the tea from the East India Company’s ships. No man doubted that his hand had been in the plan to throw the tea into the harbor. It was he who, last of all, as the troubles thickened, had bound the other towns of Massachusetts to Boston in a common organization for making and propagating opinion by means of committees of correspondence. It was late in 1772 when he proposed to the town meeting in Boston that the other towns of the colony be invited to co-operate with it in establishing committees of correspondence, by means of which they could exchange views, and, if need were, concert action. The end of November had come before he could make Boston’s initiative complete in the matter; and yet the few scant weeks that remained of the year were not gone before more than eighty towns had responded.

It turned out that he had invented a tremendously powerful engine of propaganda for such opinions and suggestions of action as he chose to put upon the wind or set afloat in his private correspondence,—as he had, no doubt, foreseen, with his keen appreciation of the most effectual means of agitation. Here was, in effect, a league of towns to watch and to control the course of affairs. There was nothing absolutely novel in the plan, except its formal completeness and its appearance of permanence, as if of a standing political arrangement made out of hand. In the year 1765, which was now seven years gone by, Richard Henry Lee had taken an active part among his neighbors in Virginia in forming the “Westmoreland Association,” which drew many of the leading spirits of the great county of Westmoreland together in concerted resistance to the Stamp Act. Four years later (1769) the Burgesses of Virginia, cut short in their regular session as a legislature by a sudden dissolution proclaimed by their royal governor, met in Mr. Anthony Hay’s house in Williamsburg and adopted the resolutions for a general non-importation association which George Mason had drawn up, and which George Washington, Mr. Mason’s neighbor and confidant, read and moved. There followed the immediate organization of local associations throughout the little commonwealth to see to the keeping of the pledge there taken. Virginia had no town meetings; each colony took its measures of non-importation and resistance to parliamentary taxation after its own fashion; but wherever there were Englishmen accustomed to political action there was always this thought of free association and quick and organized coöperation in the air, which no one was surprised at any time to see acted upon and made an instrument of agitation.

BORMAY & CO., N. Y.]

What made the Massachusetts committees of correspondence especially significant and especially telling in their effect upon affairs was that they were not used, like the “Westmoreland Association” or the non-importation associations of 1769, merely as a means of keeping neighbors steadfast in the observance of a simple resolution of passive resistance, but were employed to develop opinion and originate action from month to month,—dilatory, defensive, or aggressive, as occasion or a change of circumstances might demand. The non-importation associations had been powerful enough, as some men had reason to know. The determination not to import or use any of the things upon which Parliament had laid a tax to be taken of the colonies,—wine, oil, glass, paper, tea, or any of the rest of the list,—was not a thing all men had thought of or spontaneously agreed to. Certain leading gentlemen, like Mr. Mason and Colonel Washington, deemed it a serviceable means of constitutional resistance to the mistaken course of the ministry, induced influential members of the House of Burgesses to indorse it, and formed associations to put it into effect,—to see to it that no one drank wine or tea which had been brought in under Mr. Townshend’s taxes. There was here no command of law,—only a moral compulsion, the “pressure of opinion”; but it was no light matter to be censured and talked about by the leading people in your county as a person who defied the better sort of opinion and preferred wine and tea to the liberties of the colony. Associated opinion, spoken by influential men, proved a tremendous engine of quiet duress, and the unwilling found it prudent to conform. It was harder yet for the timid where active committees of correspondence looked into and suggested opinion. Men could give up their wine, or women their tea, and still keep what opinions they pleased; but committees of correspondence sought out opinion, provoked discussion, forced men to take sides or seem indifferent; more than all, saw to it that Mr. Samuel Adams’s opinions were duly promulgated and established by argument.

Men thought for themselves in Massachusetts, and Mr. Adams was too astute a leader to seem to force opinions upon them. He knew a better and more certain way. He drew Mr. Hutchinson, the governor, into controversy, and provoked him to unguarded heat in the expression of his views as to the paramount authority of Parliament and the bounden duty of the colonists to submit if they would not be accounted rebels. He let heat in the governor generate heat in those who loved the liberty of the colony; supplied patriots with arguments, phrases, resolutions of right and privilege; watchfully kept the fire alive; forced those who were strong openly to take sides and declare themselves, and those who were weak to think with their neighbors; infused agitation, disquiet, discontent, dissonance of opinion into the very air; and let everything that was being said or done run at once from town to town through the ever talkative committees of correspondence. He sincerely loved the liberty to which America had been bred; loved affairs, and wanted nothing for himself, except the ears of his neighbors; loved the air of strife and the day of debate, and the busy concert of endless agitation; was statesman and demagogue in one, and had now a cause which even slow and thoughtful men were constrained to deem just.

The ministers supplied fuel enough and to spare to keep alive the fires he kindled; and presently the system of committees which he had devised for the towns of a single colony had been put into use to bring the several colonies themselves together. Opinion began to be made and moved and augmented upon a great scale. Spontaneous, no doubt, at first, at heart spontaneous always, it was elaborately, skilfully, persistently assisted, added to, made definite, vocal, universal,—now under the lead of men in one colony, again under the lead of those in another. Massachusetts, with her busy port and her noisy town meetings, drew the centre of the storm to herself; but the other colonies were not different in temper. Virginia, in particular, was as forward as Massachusetts. Virginia had got a new governor out of England early in 1772, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, who let more than a year go by from his first brief meeting with the Burgesses before he summoned them again, because he liked their lack of submission as little as they liked his dark brow and masterful temper; but he suffered them to convene at last, in March, 1773, and they forthwith gave him a taste of their quality, as little to his palate as he could have expected.

It was in June, 1772, while the Virginian burgesses waited for their tardy summons to Williamsburg that his Majesty’s revenue cutter _Gaspee_ was deliberately boarded and burned by the Rhode Islanders. The Burgesses had but just assembled in the autumn when the ominous news came that a royal commission had been sent over to look sharply into the matter, and see to the arrest and deportation of all chiefly concerned. Dabney Carr, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and Thomas Jefferson, young men all, and radicals, members of the House, privately associated themselves for the concert of measures to be taken in the common cause of the colonies. Upon their initiative the Burgesses resolved, when the news from Rhode Island came, to appoint at once a permanent committee of correspondence; instruct it to inquire very particularly into the facts about this royal commission; and ask the other colonies to set up similar committees, for the exchange of information concerning public affairs and the maintenance of a common understanding and concert in action. By the end of the year Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and South Carolina had adopted the suggestion and set their committees to work.

Massachusetts, of course. This was Mr. Samuel Adams’s new machinery of agitation upon a larger scale. Adams himself had long cherished the wish that there might be such a connection established between the colonies. In the autumn of 1770 he had induced the Massachusetts assembly to appoint a committee of correspondence, to communicate with Mr. Arthur Lee, of Virginia, the colony’s agent in London, and with the Speakers of the several colonial assemblies; and though the committee had accomplished little or nothing, he had not been discouraged, but had written the next year to Mr. Lee expressing the wish that “societies” of “the most respectable inhabitants” might be formed in the colonies to maintain a correspondence with friends in England in the interest of colonial privilege. “This is a sudden thought,” he said, “and drops undigested from my pen”; but it must have seemed a natural enough thought to Mr. Lee, whose own vast correspondence,—with America, with Englishmen at home, with acquaintances on the continent,—had itself, unaided, made many a friend for the colonies over sea at the same time that it kept the leading men of the colonies informed of the opinions and the dangers breeding in England. But Mr. Adams’s town committees came first. It was left for the little group of self-constituted leaders in the Virginian assembly, of whom Richard Henry Lee, Mr. Arthur Lee’s elder brother, was one, to take the step which actually drew the colonies into active coöperation when the time was ripe. It was, in part, through the systematic correspondence set afoot by the Virginian burgesses that something like a common understanding had been arrived at as to what should be done when the tea came in; and the lawless defiance of the colonists in that matter brought the ministers in England to such a temper that there were presently new and very exciting subjects of correspondence between the committees, and affairs ran fast towards a crisis.

Teas to the value of no less than eighteen thousand pounds sterling had been thrown into the harbor at Boston on that memorable night of the 16th of December, 1773, when “Captain Mackintosh,” the redoubtable leader of the South End toughs of the lively little town, was permitted for the nonce to lead his betters; but what aroused the ministers and put Parliament in a heat was not so much the loss incurred by the East India Company or the outcry of the merchants involved as the startling significance of the act, and the unpleasant evidence which every day came to hand that all the colonies alike were ready to resist. After the tea had been sent away, or stored safe against sale or present use, or thrown into the harbor, at Philadelphia, Charleston, New York, and Boston, as the leaders of the mobs or the meetings at each place preferred, there was an instant spread of Virginia’s method of union. Six more colonies hastened to appoint committees of correspondence, and put themselves in direct communication with the men at Boston and at Williamsburg who were forming opinion and planning modes of redress. Only Pennsylvania held off. The tea had been shut out at Philadelphia, as elsewhere, but the leaders of the colony were not ready yet to follow so fast in the paths of agitation and resistance. Members of Parliament hardly noticed the exception. It was Boston they thought of and chiefly condemned as a hot-bed of lawlessness. Not every one, it is true, was ready to speak quite so plainly or so intemperately as Mr. Venn. “The town of Boston ought to be knocked about their ears and destroyed,” he said. “You will never meet with proper obedience to the laws of this country until you have destroyed that nest of locusts.” But, though few were so outspoken, no doubt many found such a view very much to their taste, excellently suited to their temper.

At any rate, the ministers went a certain way towards acting upon it. In March, 1774, after communicating to the House the despatches from America, the leaders of the government, now under Lord North, proposed and carried very drastic measures. By one bill they closed the port of Boston, transferring its trade after the first of June to the older port of Salem. Since the headstrong town would not have the tea, it should have no trade at all. By another bill they suspended the charter of the colony. By a third they made provision for the quartering of troops within the province; and by a fourth they legalized the transfer to England of trials growing out of attempts to quell riots in the colony. News lingered on the seas in those days, waiting for the wind, and the critical news of what had been done in Parliament moved no faster than the rest. It was the 2d of June before the text of the new statutes was known in Boston. That same month, almost upon that very day, Thomas Hutchinson, the constant-minded governor whom Samuel Adams had tricked, hated, and beaten in the game of politics, left his perplexing post and took ship for England, never to return. Born and bred in Massachusetts, of the stock of the colony itself, he had nevertheless stood steadfastly to his duty as an officer of the crown, deeming Massachusetts best served by the law. He had suffered more than most men would have endured, but his sufferings had not blinded him with passion. He knew as well as any man the real state of affairs in the colony,—though he looked at them as governor, not as the people’s advocate,—and now went to England to make them clear to the ministers. “The prevalence of a spirit of opposition to government in the plantation,” he had already written them, “is the natural consequence of the great growth of colonies so remote from the parent state, and not the effect of oppression in the King or his servants, as the promoters of this spirit would have the world to believe.” It would be of good omen for the settlement of difficulties if he could make the ministers see that the spirit which so angered them was natural, and not born of mere rebellion.

Mr. Hutchinson left General Gage governor in his stead,—at once governor and military commander. Gage was to face a season of infinite trouble, and, as men soon learned, did not know how to face it either with patience or with tact and judgment. The news of Boston’s punishment and of the suspension of the Massachusetts charter, of the arrangements for troops, and of the legal establishment of methods of trial against which all had protested,—and, in the case of the _Gaspee_ affair, successfully protested,—had an instant and most disturbing effect upon the other colonies, as well as upon those who were most directly affected. The ministers could not isolate Massachusetts. They were dealing with men more statesmanlike than themselves, who did not need to see their own liberties directly struck at to recognize danger, though it was not yet their danger. They had protested in the time of the Stamp Act, which affected them all; this time they protested even more emphatically against measures aimed at Massachusetts alone. What was more significant, they had now means at hand for taking action in common.

Virginia, no doubt, seemed to the ministers in England far enough away from Massachusetts, but her Burgesses acted upon the first news of what Parliament was doing,—a month before the text of the obnoxious acts had reached Boston. In May, 1774, they ordered that June 1st, the day the Boston Port bill was to go into effect, be set apart as a day of fasting and prayer,—prayer that civil war might be averted and that the people of America might be united in a common cause. Dunmore promptly dissolved them for their pains; but they quietly assembled again in the long room of the Raleigh Tavern; issued a call thence to the other colonies for a general Congress; and directed that a convention, freely chosen by the voters of the colony as they themselves had been, should assemble there, in that same room of the Raleigh, on the first day of August following, to take final measures with regard to Virginia’s part in the common action hoped for in the autumn. The next evening they gave a ball in honor of Lady Dunmore and her daughters, in all good temper, as they had previously arranged to do,—as if nothing had happened, and as if to show how little what they had done was with them a matter of personal feeling or private intrigue, how much a matter of dispassionate duty. They had not acted singularly or alone. Rhode Island, New York, and Massachusetts herself had also asked for a general “Congress of Committees.” The Massachusetts assembly had locked its doors against the governor’s messenger, sent to dissolve it, until it had completed its choice of a committee “to meet the committees appointed by the several colonies to consult together upon the present state of the colonies.” It was chiefly because Massachusetts called that the other colonies responded, but the movement seemed general, almost spontaneous. Virginia and Massachusetts sent their real leaders, as the other colonies did; and September saw a notable gathering at Philadelphia,—a gathering from which conservatives as well as radicals hoped to see come forth some counsel of wisdom and accommodation.

Every colony but Georgia sent delegates to the Congress. Not all who attended had been regularly elected by the colonial assemblies. The Virginian delegates had been elected by Virginia’s August convention, a body unknown to the law; in some of the colonies there had been no timely sessions of the assemblies at which a choice could be made, and representatives had accordingly been appointed by their committees of correspondence, or elected directly by the voters at the town and county voting places. But no one doubted any group of delegates real representatives,—at any rate, of the predominant political party in their colony. In New York and Pennsylvania the conservatives had had the upper hand, and had chosen men who were expected to speak for measures of accommodation and for obedience to law. In the other colonies, if only for the nonce, the more radical party had prevailed, and had sent representatives who were counted on to speak unequivocally for the liberties of the colonies, even at the hazard of uttering words and urging action which might seem revolutionary and defiant.

It was noteworthy and significant how careful a selection had been made of delegates. No doubt the most notable group was the group of Virginians: Colonel Washington; that “masterly man,” Richard Henry Lee, as Mr. John Adams called him, as effective in Philadelphia as he had been in the House of Burgesses; Patrick Henry, whose speech was so singularly compounded of thought and fire; Edmund Pendleton, who had read nothing but law books and knew nothing but business, and yet showed such winning grace and convincing frankness withal in debate; Colonel Harrison, brusque country gentleman, without art or subterfuge, downright and emphatic; Mr. Bland, alert and formidable at sixty-four, with the steady insight of the life-long student; and Mr. Peyton Randolph, their official leader and spokesman, whom the Congress chose its president, a man full of address, and seeming to carry privilege with him as a right inherited. Samuel Adams and John Adams had come from Massachusetts, with Mr. Cushing and Mr. Paine. South Carolina had sent two members of the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, Mr. Christopher Gadsden and Mr. John Rutledge, with Mr. Edward Rutledge also, a youth of twenty-five, and plain Mr. Lynch, clad in homespun, as direct and sensible and above ceremony as Colonel Harrison. Connecticut’s chief spokesman was Roger Sherman, rough as a peasant without, but in counsel very like a statesman, and in all things a hard-headed man of affairs. New York was represented by Mr. John Jay, not yet thirty, but of the quick parts of the scholar and the principles of a man of honor. Joseph Galloway, the well-poised Speaker and leader of her House of Assembly, John Dickinson, the thoughtful author of the famous “Farmer’s Letters” of 1768, a quiet master of statement, and Mr. Thomas Mifflin, the well-to-do merchant, represented Pennsylvania. It was, take it all in all, an assembly of picked men, fit for critical business.

Not that there was any talk of actual revolution in the air. The seven weeks’ conference of the Congress disclosed a nice balance of parties, its members acting, for the most part, with admirable candor and individual independence. A good deal was said and conjectured about the “brace of Adamses” who led the Massachusetts delegation,—Samuel Adams, now past fifty-two, and settled long ago, with subtle art, to his life-long business, and pleasure, of popular leadership, which no man understood better; and John Adams, his cousin, a younger man by thirteen years, at once less simple and easier to read, vain and transparent,—transparently honest, irregularly gifted. It was said they were for independence, and meant to take the leadership of the Congress into their own hands. But it turned out differently. If they were for independence, they shrewdly cloaked their purpose; if they were ambitious to lead, they were prudent enough to forego their wish and to yield leadership, at any rate on the floor of the Congress, to the interesting men who represented Virginia, and who seemed of their own spirit in the affair.

There was a marked difference between what the Congress said aloud, for the hearing of the world, and what it did in order quietly to make its purpose of defeating the designs of the ministers effective. At the outset of its sessions it came near to yielding itself to the initiative and leadership of its more conservative members, headed by Joseph Galloway, the trusted leader of the Pennsylvanians, a stout loyalist, but for all that a sincere patriot and thorough-going advocate of the legal rights of the colonies. He proposed a memorial to the crown asking for a confederate government for the colonies, under a legislature of their own choosing, very like the government Mr. Franklin had made a plan for twenty years ago in the congress at Albany; and his suggestion failed of acceptance by only a very narrow margin when put to the vote. Even Edward Rutledge, of South Carolina, who spoke more hotly than most men for the liberties of the colonies, declared it an “almost perfect plan”; and the Congress, rejecting it, substituted no other. It turned, rather, to the writing of state papers, and a closer organization of the colonies for concert of action. Its committees drew up an address to the King, memorials to the people of Great Britain and to the people of British North America, their fellow-subjects, and a solemn declaration of rights, so earnest, so moderate in tone, reasoned and urged with so evident and so admirable a quiet passion of conviction, as to win the deep and outspoken admiration of their friends in Parliament and stir the pulses of liberal-minded men everywhere on both sides of the sea.

So much was for the world. For themselves, they ordered a closer and more effective association throughout the colonies to carry out the policy of a rigorous non-importation and non-consumption of certain classes of British goods as a measure of trade against the English government’s policy of colonial taxation. It recommended, in terms which rang very imperative, that in each colony a committee should be formed in every town or county, according to the colony’s local administrative organization, which should be charged with seeing to it that every one within its area of oversight actually kept, and did not evade, the non-importation agreement; that these committees should act under the direction of the central committee of correspondence in each colony; and that the several colonial committees of correspondence should in their turn report to and put into effect the suggestions of the general Congress of Committees at Philadelphia. For the Congress, upon breaking up at the conclusion of its business in October, resolved to meet again in May of the next year, should the government in England not before that time accede to its prayers for a radical change of policy. Its machinery of surveillance was meanwhile complete. No man could escape the eyes of the local committees. Disregard of the non-importation policy meant that his name would be published, and that he would be diligently talked about as one who was no patriot. The Congress ordered that any colony which declined to enter into the new association should be regarded as hostile to “the liberties of this country.” Samuel Adams himself had not had a more complete system of surveillance or of inquisitorial pressure upon individual conduct and opinion at hand in his township committees of correspondence. In the colonies where sentiment ran warm no man could escape the subtle coercion.

Such action was the more worthy of remark because taken very quietly, and as if the Congress had of course the right to lead, to speak for the majority and command the minority in the colonies, united and acting like a single body politic. There was no haste, no unusual excitement, no fearful looking for trouble in the proceedings of this new and quite unexampled assembly. On the contrary, its members had minds sufficiently at ease to enjoy throughout all their business the entertainments and the attractive social ways of the busy, well-appointed, cheerful, gracious town, the chief city of the colonies, in which there was so much to interest and engage. Dinings were as frequent almost as debates, calls as committee meetings. Evening after evening was beguiled with wine and tobacco and easy wit and chat. The delegates learned to know and understand each other as men do who are upon terms of intimacy; made happy and lasting friendships among the people of the hospitable place; drank in impressions which broadened and bettered their thinking, almost as if they had actually seen the several colonies with whose representatives they were dealing from day to day; and went home with a cleared and sobered and withal hopeful vision of affairs.

It was well to have their views so steadied. Events moved fast, and with sinister portent. Massachusetts could not be still, and quickly forced affairs to an issue of actual revolution. Before the Congress met again her leaders had irrevocably committed themselves to an open breach with the government; the people of the province had shown themselves ready to support them with extraordinary boldness; and all who meant to stand with the distressed and stubborn little commonwealth found themselves likewise inevitably committed to extreme measures. The Massachusetts men not only deeply resented the suspension of their charter, they denied the legal right of Parliament to suspend it. On the 9th of September, 1774, four days after the assembling of the Congress at Philadelphia, delegates from Boston and the other towns in Suffolk County in Massachusetts had met in convention and flatly declared that the acts complained of, being unconstitutional, ought not to be obeyed; that the new judges appointed under the act of suspension ought not to be regarded or suffered to act; that the collectors of taxes ought to be advised to retain the moneys collected, rather than turn them into General Gage’s treasury; and that, in view of the extraordinary crisis which seemed at hand, the people ought to be counselled to prepare for war,—not, indeed, with any purpose of provoking hostilities, but in order, if necessary, to resist aggression. They declared also for a provincial congress, to take the place of the legislative council of their suspended charter, and resolved to regard the action of the Congress at Philadelphia as law for the common action of the colonies.

It gave these resolutions very grave significance that the Congress at Philadelphia unhesitatingly declared, upon their receipt, that the whole continent ought to support Massachusetts in her resistance to the unconstitutional changes in her government, and that any person who should accept office within the province under the new order of things ought to be considered a public enemy. Moreover, the Suffolk towns did not stand alone. Their temper, it seemed, was the temper of the whole colony. Other towns took action of the same kind; and before the Congress at Philadelphia had adjourned, Massachusetts had actually set up a virtually independent provincial congress. General Gage had summoned the regular assembly of the province to meet at Salem, the new capital under the parliamentary changes, on the 5th of October, but had withdrawn the summons as he saw signs of disaffection multiply and his authority dwindle to a mere shadow outside his military lines at Boston. The members of the assembly convened, nevertheless, and, finding no governor to meet them, resolved themselves into a provincial congress and appointed a committee of safety to act as the provisional executive of the colony. The old government was virtually dissolved, a revolutionary government substituted.

The substitution involved every hazard of license and disorder. A people schooled and habituated to civil order and to the daily practice of self-government, as the people of Massachusetts had been, could not, indeed, suffer utter demoralization or lose wholly and of a sudden its sobriety and conscience in matters of public business. But it was a perilous thing that there was for a time no recognized law outside of the fortifications which General Gage had thrown across Boston Neck, to defend the town against possible attack from its own neighbors. Town meetings and irregular committees took the place of officers of government in every locality. The committees were often self-constituted, the meetings too often disorderly and irregularly summoned. Everything fell into the hands of those who acted first; and inasmuch as the more hot-headed and violent are always at such times the first to act, many sober men who would fain have counselled restraint and prudence and the maintenance so far as might be of the old order, were silenced or overridden. The gatherings at which concerted action was determined upon were too often like mere organized mobs. Men too often obtained ascendency for the time being who had no claim upon the confidence of their followers but such as came from audacity and violence of passion; and many things happened under their leadership which it was afterwards pleasant to forget. No man of consequence who would not openly and actively put himself upon the popular side was treated with so much as toleration. General Gage presently found Boston and all the narrow area within his lines filling up, accordingly, with a great body of refugees from the neighboring towns and country-sides.

The LIBERTY SONG. _In Freedom we’re born, &c._

Come join hand in hand brave Americans all,
And rouse your bold hearts at fair Liberty’s call.
No tyrannous acts shall suppress your just claim,
Or stain with dishonour America’s name.

_In Freedom we’re_ born _and in Freedom we’ll_ live,
_Our purses are ready._
_Steady, Friends, Steady._
_Not as Slaves, but as Freemen our money we’ll give._

Our worthy Forefathers—Let’s give them a cheer
To Climates unknown did courageously steer;
Thro’ Oceans, to deserts, for freedom they came,
And dying bequeath’d us their freedom and Fame.

_In freedom we’re_ born _&c._

Their generous bosoms all dangers despis’d,
So highly, so wisely, their _Birthrights_ they priz’d;
We’ll keep what they gave, we will piously keep,
Nor frustrate their toils on the land and the deep.

_In Freedom we’re_ born, _&c._

The Tree their own hands had to liberty rear’d;
They liv’d to behold growing strong and rever’d,
With transport they cry’d, “now our wishes we gain,
For our children shall gather the fruits of our pain.”

_In Freedom we’re_ born _&c._

Swarms of placemen and pensioners soon will appear
Like locusts deforming the charms of the year;
Suns vainly will rise, Showers vainly descend,
If we are to drudge for what other shall spend.

_In Freedom we’re_ born _&c._

Then join hand in hand brave Americans all,
By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall;
In so Righteous a cause let us hope to succeed,
For Heaven approves of each generous deed.

_In Freedom we’re_ born, _&c._

All ages shall speak with amaze and applause,
Of the courage we’ll shew in support of our laws;
To die we can bear—but to serve we disdain,
For shame is to Freedom more dreadful than pain.

_In Freedom we’re_ born, _&c._

This bumper & crown for our Sovereign’s health,
And this for Britannia’s glory and wealth;
That wealth and that glory immortal may be,
If she is but just—and if we are but Free.

_In Freedom we’re_ born _&c._]

It gave those who led the agitation the greater confidence and the greater influence that the ministers of the churches were for the most part on their side. The control of Parliament had come, in the eyes of the New England clergy, to mean the control also of bishops and the supremacy of the Establishment. Now, as always before, since the very foundation of the colony, the independence of their little commonwealths seemed but another side of the independence of their churches; and none watched the course of government over sea more jealously than the Puritan pastors.

Not only those who sided with the English power because of fear or interest,—place-holders, sycophants, merchants who hoped to get their trade back through favor, weak men who knew not which side to take and thought the side of government in the long run the safer,—but many a man of dignity and substance also, and many a man of scrupulous principle who revered the ancient English power to which he had always been obedient with sincere and loyal affection, left his home and sought the protection of Gage’s troops. The vigilance of the local committees effectually purged the population outside Boston, as the weeks went by, of those who were not ready to countenance a revolution. There was, besides, something very like military rule outside Boston as well as within it. The provincial congress met, while necessary, from month to month, upon its own adjournment, and, prominent among other matters of business, diligently devoted itself to the enrolment and organization of a numerous and efficient militia. Local as well as general commanders were chosen; there was constant drilling on village greens; fire-arms and ammunition were not difficult to get; and an active militia constituted a very effective auxiliary in the consolidation of local opinion concerning colonial rights and the proper means of vindicating them.

It is the familiar story of revolution: the active and efficient concert of a comparatively small number controlling the action of whole communities at a moment of doubt and crisis. There was not much difference of opinion among thoughtful men in the colonies with regard to the policy which the ministers in England had recently pursued respecting America. It was agreed on all hands that it was unprecedented, unwise, and in plain derogation of what the colonists had time out of mind been permitted to regard as their unquestioned privileges in matters of local self-government. Some men engaged in trade at the colonial ports had, it is true, found the new policy of taxation and enforced restrictions very much to their own interest. The Sugar Act of 1733, which cut at the heart of the New England trade with the French West Indies, and which Grenville and Townshend had, in these last disturbing years, tried to enforce, had, it was said, been passed in the first instance at the suggestion of a Boston merchant who was interested in sugar growing in the British islands whence the act virtually bade the colonial importers take all their sugar, molasses, and rum; and no doubt there were many in all the American ports who would have profited handsomely by the enforcement of the law. But, however numerous these may have been, they were at most but a small minority. For a vast majority of the merchants the enforcement of the acts meant financial ruin. Merchants as well as farmers, too, were hotly against taxes put upon them in their own ports by an act of Parliament. They were infinitely jealous of any invasion of their accustomed rights of self-government under their revered and ancient charter. Governor Hutchinson himself, though he deemed the commands of Parliament law, and thought it his own bounden duty as an officer of the crown to execute them, declared in the frankest fashion to the ministers themselves that their policy was unjust and mistaken.

But, while men’s sentiments concurred in a sense of wrong, their judgments parted company at the choice of what should be done. Men of a conservative and sober way of thinking; men of large fortune or business, who knew what they had at stake should disorders arise or law be set aside; men who believed that there were pacific ways of bringing the government to another temper and method in dealing with the colonies, and who passionately preferred the ways of peace to ways of violence and threatened revolution, arrayed themselves instinctively and at once against every plan that meant lawlessness and rebellion. They mustered very strong indeed, both in numbers and in influence. They bore, many of them, the oldest and most honored names of the colony in Massachusetts, where the storm first broke, and were men of substance and training and schooled integrity of life, besides. Their counsels of prudence were ignored, nevertheless,—as was inevitable. Opinion formed itself with quick and heated impulse in the brief space of those first critical months of irritation and excitement; and these men, though the natural leaders of the colony, were despised, rejected, proscribed, as men craven and lacking the essential spirit either of liberty or of patriotism.

It was, no doubt, a time when it was necessary that something should be done,—as well as something said. It was intolerable to the spirit of most of the people, when once they were roused, to sit still under a suspension of their charter, a closing of their chief port, the appointment of judges and governors restrained by none of the accustomed rules of public authority among them, and tamely utter written protests only, carrying obedience to what seemed to them the length of sheer servility. It happened that there had gone along with the hateful and extraordinary parliamentary measures of 1774 an act extending the boundaries of the province of Quebec to the Ohio River and establishing an arbitrary form of government within the extended province. It was a measure long ago planned. Its passage at that time had nothing to do with the ministers’ quarrel with the self-governing colonies to the southward. But it was instantly interpreted in America as an attempt to limit the westward expansion of the more unmanageable colonies which, like Massachusetts, arrogated the right to govern themselves; and it of course added its quota of exasperation to the irritations of the moment. It seemed worse than idle to treat ministers who sent such a body of revolutionary statutes over sea as reasonable constitutional rulers who could be brought to a more lawful and moderate course by pamphlets and despatches and public meetings, and all the rest of the slow machinery of ordinary agitation. Of course, too, Samuel Adams and those who acted with him very carefully saw to it that agitation should not lose its zest or decline to the humdrum levels of ordinary excitement. They kept their alarm bells pealing night and day, and were vigilant that feeling should not subside or fall tame. And they worked upon genuine matter. They knew the temper of average men in the colony much better than their conservative opponents did, and touched it with a much truer instinct in their appeals. Their utterances went to the quick with most plain men,—and they spoke to a community of plain men. They spoke to conviction as well as to sentiment, and the minds they touched were thoroughly awakened. Their doctrine of liberty was the ancient tradition of the colony. The principles they urged had been urged again and again by every champion of the chartered liberties of the colonies, and seemed native to the very air.

If not constitutional statesmen, they were at least the veritable spokesmen of all men of action, and of the real rank and file of the colonists about them,—as Patrick Henry was in Virginia. John Adams had read to Henry, while the first Congress was sitting in Philadelphia, Joseph Hawley’s opinion that what the ministers had done made it necessary to fight. “I am of that man’s opinion,” cried the high-spirited Virginian. That was what men said everywhere, unless imperatively held back from action by temperament, or interest, or an unusual, indomitable conviction of law-abiding duty, upon whatever exigency or provocation. It is not certain that there could be counted in Massachusetts so much as a majority for resistance in those first days of the struggle for right; but it is certain that those who favored extreme measures had the more effective spirit of initiative among them, the best concert of action, the more definite purpose, the surest instinct of leadership, and stood with true interpretative insight for the latent conviction of right which underlay and supported every colonial charter in America.

And not only every colonial charter, but the constitution of England itself. The question now raised, to be once for all settled, was, in reality, the question of constitutional as against personal government; and that question had of late forced itself upon men’s thoughts in England no less than in America. It was the burden of every quiet as well as of every impassioned page in Burke’s _Thoughts on the Present Discontents_, published in 1770. The Parliament of 1774 did not represent England any more than it represented the colonies in America, either in purpose or principle. So ill distributed was the suffrage and the right of representation that great centres of population had scarcely a spokesman in the Commons, while little hamlets, once populous but now deserted, still returned members who assumed to speak for the country. So many voters were directly under the influence of members of the House of Lords, as tenants and dependants; so many members of the House of Lords were willing to put themselves and the seats which they controlled in the Commons at the service of the King, in return for honors and favors received or hoped for; so many elections to the Lower House were corruptly controlled by the court,—so full was Parliament, in short, of placemen and of men who counted upon the crown’s benefactions, that the nation seemed excluded from its own councils, and the King acted as its master without serious let or hinderance.

The Whig party, which stood for constitutional privilege, was utterly disorganized. Some Whigs had followed Chatham to the end, despite his uncertain temper, his failing health, his perverse treatment of his friends; some had followed, rather, the Marquis of Rockingham, whose brief tenure of power, in 1766, had been but long enough to effect the repeal of the odious Stamp Act; but nothing could hold the divergent personal elements of the party together, and there was no place for a party of principle and independence in an unrepresentative Parliament packed with the “King’s friends.” Ministries rose or fell according to the King’s pleasure, and were Whig or Tory as he directed, without change of majority in the Commons. “Not only did he direct the minister” whom the House nominally obeyed “in all matters of foreign and domestic policy, but he instructed him as to the management of debates in Parliament, suggested what motions should be made or opposed, and how measures should be carried.” The Houses were his to command; and when Chatham was gone, no man could withstand him. Persons not of the ministry at all, but the private and irresponsible advisers of the King, became the real rulers of the country. The Duke of Grafton, who became the nominal head of the government in 1768, was not his own master in what he did or proposed; and Lord North, who succeeded him in 1770, was little more than the King’s mouthpiece.

Thoughtful men in England saw what all this meant, and deemed the liberties of England as much jeoparded as the liberties of America. And the very men who saw to the heart of the ominous situation in England were, significantly enough, the men who spoke most fearlessly and passionately in Parliament in defence of America,—statesmen like Chatham and Burke, frank soldiers like Colonel Barré, political free lances like the reckless John Wilkes, and all the growing company of agitators in London and elsewhere whom the government busied itself to crush. It was the group gathered about Wilkes in London who formed, under Horne Tooke’s leadership, the famous “Society for supporting the Bill of Rights,” with which Samuel Adams proposed, in his letter to Arthur Lee in 1771, that similar societies, to be formed in the several colonies in America, should put themselves in active coöperation by correspondence. Those who attacked the prerogative in England were as roundly denounced as traitors as those who resisted Parliament in America. Wilkes was expelled from the House of Commons; the choice of the Westminster electors who had chosen him was arbitrarily set aside and annulled; those who protested with too much hardihood were thrown into prison or fined. But each arbitrary step taken seemed only to increase the rising sense of uneasiness in the country. The London mob was raised; rioting spread through the country, till there seemed to be chronic disorder; writers like “Junius” sprang up to tease the government with stinging letters which no one could successfully answer, because no one could match their wit or point; an independent press came almost suddenly into existence; and because there was no opinion expressed in the House of Commons worthy of being called the opinion of the nation, public opinion formed and asserted itself outside the Houses, and began to clamor uncomfortably for radical constitutional reforms. Mr. Wilkes was expelled the House in 1769, just as the trouble in America was thickening towards storm; and long before that trouble was over it had become plain to every man of enlightened principle that agitation in England and resistance in America had one and the same object,—the rectification of the whole spirit and method of the English government.

George III. had too small a mind to rule an empire, and the fifteen years of his personal supremacy in affairs (1768-1783) were years which bred a revolution in England no less inevitably than in America. His stubborn instinct of mastery made him dub the colonists “rebels” upon their first show of resistance; he deemed the repeal of the Stamp Act a fatal step of weak compliance, which had only “increased the pretensions of the Americans to absolute independence.” Chatham he called a “trumpet of sedition” because he praised the colonists for their spirited assertion of their rights. The nature of the man was not sinister. Neither he nor his ministers had any purpose of making “slaves” of the colonists. Their measures for the regulation of the colonial trade were incontestably conceived upon a model long ago made familiar in practice, and followed precedents long ago accepted in the colonies. Their financial measures were moderate and sensible enough in themselves, and were conceived in the ordinary temper of law-making. What they did not understand or allow for was American opinion. What the Americans, on their part, did not understand or allow for was the spirit in which Parliament had in fact acted. They did not dream with how little comment or reckoning upon consequences, or how absolutely without any conscious theory as to power or authority, such statutes as those which had angered them had been passed; how members of the Commons stared at Mr. Burke’s passionate protests and high-pitched arguments of constitutional privilege; how unaffectedly astonished they were at the rebellious outbreak which followed in the colonies. And, because they were surprised and had intended no tyranny, but simply the proper government of trade and the adequate support of administration throughout the dominions of the crown, as the ministers had represented these things to them, members of course thought the disturbances at Boston a tempest in a teapot, the reiterated protests of the colonial assemblies a pretty piece of much ado about nothing. The radical trouble was that the Parliament really represented nobody but the King and his “friends,” and was both ignorant and unreflective upon the larger matters it dealt with.

It was the more certain that the promises of accommodation and peaceful constitutional reform which the supporters of the government in America so freely and earnestly made would be falsified, and that exasperation would follow exasperation. The loyal partisans of the crown in the colonies understood as little as did the radical patriotic party the real attitude and disposition of the King and his ministers. The men with whom they were dealing over sea had not conceived and could not conceive the American point of view with regard to the matters in dispute. They did not know whereof Mr. Burke spoke when he told them that the colonial assemblies had been suffered to grow into a virtual independence of Parliament, and had become in fact, whatever lawyers might say, coördinated with it in every matter which concerned the internal administration of the colonies; and that it was now too late to ask or expect the colonists to accept any other view of the law than that which accorded with long-established fact. Mr. Burke admitted that his theory was not a theory for the strict lawyer: it was a theory for statesmen, for whom fact must often take precedence of law. But the men he addressed were strict legists and not statesmen. There could be no understanding between the two sides of the water; and the loyalists who counselled submission, if only for a time, to the authority of the ministers, were certain to be rejected among their own people. The spirit of American affairs was with the patriots, and would be with them more and more as the quarrel thickened.

It thickened fast enough, and the storm broke before men were aware how near it was. While winter held (1774-1775), affairs everywhere grew dark and uneasy, not only in Massachusetts, where Gage’s troops waited at Boston, but in every colony from Maine to the Gulf. Before the end of 1774 the Earl of Dunmore reported to the government, from Virginia, that every county was “arming a company of men for the avowed purpose of protecting their committees,” and that his own power of control was gone. “There is not a justice of peace in Virginia,” he declared, “that acts except as a committee-man”; and it gave him the graver concern to see the turn affairs were taking because “men of fortune and pre-eminence joined equally with the lowest and meanest” in the measures resorted to to rob him of authority.

To the south and north of Virginia, counsels were divided. Those who led against the government in North Carolina had good reason to doubt whether they had even a bare majority of the people of their colony at their back. Every country-side in South Carolina, for all Charleston was as hot as Boston against the ministers, was full of warm, aggressive, outspoken supporters of the King’s prerogative. The rural districts of Pennsylvania, every one knew, were peopled with quiet Quakers whose very religion bade them offer no resistance even to oppressive power, and of phlegmatic Germans who cared a vast deal for peace but very little for noisy principles that brought mischief. Many a wealthy and fashionable family of Philadelphia, moreover, was much too comfortable and much too pleasantly connected with influential people on the other side of the water to relish thoughts of breach or rebellion. Virginians, it might have seemed, were themselves remote enough from the trouble which had arisen in Massachusetts to keep them in the cool air of those who wait and will not lead. But they were more in accord than the men of Massachusetts itself, and as quick to act. By the close of June, 1775, Charles Lee could write from Williamsburg, “Never was such vigor and concord heard of, not a single traitor, scarcely a silent dissentient.” As the men of the several counties armed themselves, as if by a common impulse, all turned as of course to Colonel Washington, of Fairfax, as their natural commander; and no one in Virginia was surprised to learn his response. “It is my full intention,” he said, “to devote my life and fortune to the cause we are engaged in.” On the 20th of March, 1775, the second revolutionary convention of Virginia met at Richmond, not at Williamsburg; and in it Mr. Henry made his individual declaration of war against Great Britain. Older and more prudent men protested against his words; but they served on the committee on the military organization of the colony for which his resolutions called, and Virginia was made ready.

Here our general _authorities_ are still Bancroft, Hildreth,
and Bryant; David Ramsay’s _History of the American
Revolution_; the last volume of James Grahame’s _Rise and
Progress of the United States of North America_; John Fiske’s
_American Revolution_; Thomas Hutchinson’s _History of
Massachusetts_; John S. Barry’s _History of Massachusetts_;
Richard Frothingham’s _Rise of the Republic of the United
States_; Justin Winsor’s _The Conflict Precipitated_, in the
sixth volume of Winsor’s _Narrative and Critical History of
America_; and the twelfth chapter of W. E. H. Lecky’s _History
of England in the Eighteenth Century_. To these we now add
Frank Moore’s _Diary of the American Revolution_; George
Chalmers’s _Introduction to the History of the Revolt_; Timothy
Pitkin’s _Political and Civil History of the United States_;
and the fourth volume of John Richard Green’s _History of the
English People_. Here, also, the biographies of the chief
public men of the period must be the reader’s constant resource
for a closer view of affairs, particularly the _Lives_ of
such men as John and Samuel Adams, John Dickinson, Franklin,
Hamilton, Patrick Henry, John Jay, Jefferson, the Lees, George
Mason, James Otis, Timothy Pickering, and Washington.

The chief _sources_ that should be mentioned are the _Debates
of Parliament_; the _Annual Register_; the _Proceedings_ and
_Collections_ of the Historical Societies of the original
States; Peter Force’s _American Archives_; Jared Sparks’s
_Correspondence of the Revolution_; Hezekiah Niles’s
_Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America_; _Copy of
Letters sent to Great Britain by Thomas Hutchinson_, reprinted
in _Franklin Before the Privy Council_; P. O. Hutchinson’s
_Life and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson_; and the published
speeches, letters, and papers of the leading American and
English statesmen of the time.