Patriots (4 page)

The boy’s widowed mother, Augusta, was being consoled by a Scotsman named John Stuart, third Earl of Bute, who had become the young prince’s closest friend. He wrote to the earl about his most intimate worries—how badly he was racked by sexual desire, how eager he was to find a wife. The prince complained to Bute that Pitt treated them both like children: “He seems to forget the day will come when he must expect to be treated
according to his deserts.” Augusta wanted her son to reverse the crown’s loss of power and encouraged him to be sensitive to slights and condescension.
“Be a king!” she would tell her son. “George, be a king!”

One morning when George was twenty-two, he was summoned to the palace from an early gallop. An hour later, William Pitt arrived in his blue-and-silver carriage to tell him that his
grandfather had died and he was now George III. The young man’s first act as sovereign was to set out over a back road for Lord Bute’s estate. George would try to be a king to please his mother, but he needed someone to show him how.

—

In the two years after the writs-of-assistance case, many of James Otis’ countrymen tired of his insistent calls to oppose the royal governor and his circle. By the elections of 1763, Otis’ allies had lost control of the Massachusetts House and were outnumbered two to one by Francis Bernard’s faction. The peace treaty between Britain and France that same year had reminded Bostonians to be grateful for the victory over the French and the Indians. Thomas Hutchinson lectured his fellow citizens: God had delivered them from their foreign enemies, and the people shouldn’t go on quarreling among themselves. Otis was not adjusting to the days of good feeling. Even his brother was calling him
“Esquire Bluster,” and among his Whig allies he was
“Furio.” As the new House session of 1763 began,
Otis threatened once more to resign and once more changed his mind.

Much of the colony had lost interest in the factional bickering, though the conservatives were attempting to consolidate their control. Hutchinson and his group were supported by Francis Bernard, who wielded the king’s patronage. Otis’ political base depended on a shifting alliance of Boston’s merchants, lawyers and workingmen. To organize and inspire them he could rely on the tireless efforts of an ally, Samuel Adams.

—

Samuel Adams, a cousin of John, was a politician in a day when the label was demeaning. His father had been one before him, though he had been a successful maltster, the merchant who steeped barley in water to prepare it for brewing. At the Old South Church Samuel’s father had been known as
Deacon Adams, a godly man devoted to the Congregational faith. But above all, the deacon had been committed to politics, and the crusade of his life was an economic scheme called the
Land Bank.

In 1740, Massachusetts had sunk deep into depression. Farmers and workers had become indebted to merchants who had aggravated their distress by refusing to accept paper money in place
of gold or silver. Deacon Adams, along with fellow members of Boston’s Caucus Club, had thrown himself into the conflict. The Caucus, an alliance of tradesmen and artisans, had first been known as the “Caulkers” Club, since shipwrights were well represented, and that had evolved to “Corcas” and then “Caucus.” For years the club had set the agenda for Boston’s Town Meetings and decided who would be appointed to the various town offices. Deacon Adams and his comrades wanted to revive the economy by instituting a floating currency backed with their own real estate. The colony’s richest merchants opposed this Land Bank, claiming that it would promote inflation and favor the debtors by cutting into the assets of those who lent money. Conservatives like Thomas Hutchinson demanded to be paid in gold and were hostile toward the Land Bankers. They called them
“the idle and the extravagant,” more often “the rabble.” Deacon Adams’ participation upset them because he was, by their definition, a gentleman.

When the Land Bank supporters won a healthy majority in the Massachusetts House, the conservatives turned to the governor for protection. He threatened to strip the offices and titles of any man who invested in the Land Bank, and he punished Deacon Adams, who had risked his sizable fortune in the people’s cause, by removing him as justice of the peace. At the next election, however, the people gave the Land Bankers another overwhelming victory and sent Deacon Adams to the Council, the colony’s upper house. The governor vetoed his appointment and wrote to London for action. In 1741, Parliament declared the Land Bank illegal and charged its directors with financial crimes. If the Massachusetts court had not intervened, Deacon Adams’ enemies might have seized his property and sent him to jail.

That calamity had overlapped with another controversy in Boston, and both shaped the political opinions of young Samuel Adams. The deacon had enrolled his son in the Harvard class of 1740, paying his tuition in molasses and flour. In Cambridge, the greatest influence on the boy was George Whitefield, an evangelist who had arrived from England to lead a religious revival known as the Great Awakening. Samuel and many of his classmates responded to Whitefield’s call for spartan piety and gave up their fashionable clothes for Puritan gray. The Great Awakening—and promptings from his devout mother—had led Samuel to consider becoming a clergyman.

After graduation, however, Samuel began to study law, but his mother didn’t think that career was respectable enough and prevailed on him to quit. He returned to Harvard for a master’s degree. By the time he graduated, in 1743, the colony’s rich and powerful men had been denounced by the preachers of the Great Awakening for their lack of piety and by the Land Bankers for their greed. Samuel Adams was convinced on both counts. He argued in his final paper at Harvard that when the existence of the commonwealth was at stake it was lawful to resist even the highest civil authority. Deacon Adams had been crushed by superior forces, but his son didn’t believe he had been proved wrong.

—

At twenty-one, Samuel Adams was apprenticed to Thomas Cushing, a wealthy trader and political ally of his father’s. Cushing, who was called “Death’s Head,” had no trouble separating his trading practices from his liberal politics. Within a few months, however, he saw that Samuel Adams was not able to make that distinction. He let Samuel go, informing the deacon that he trained young men for business, not politics. Deacon Adams’ next approach was to lend Samuel a thousand pounds to set himself up in business. Samuel immediately loaned a friend half of it. When the friend couldn’t repay him, Deacon Adams took his son into his malt business.

The young man spent his middle twenties learning to be a maltster. Then, in 1748, Deacon Adams died, and Samuel was free. His father’s will forgave the thousand-pound loan and left him the malt company, which ought to have ensured him a respectable place in Boston society. Instead, Samuel let the business slide away. He married the daughter of his clergyman at Old South Church and took his wife to live in the deteriorating house on Purchase Street with its fine view of the harbor and its pervasive smell of malt.

Samuel had also inherited debts from the Land Bank. At one point, he had to take out advertisements warning Boston’s new sheriff, Stephen Greenleaf, not to try to sell his house at public auction. A narrow escape on that occasion taught Adams a tactical lesson: he had made Sheriff Greenleaf back down by threatening to sue and by intimidating potential buyers. As he later described his technique, one should always “put your adversary in the wrong. And keep him there.”

In the early 1750s, Adams and a group of friends formed a secret club. Their newspaper, the
Independent Advertiser
, assailed the royal governor so persistently that conservatives called them “the Whippingpost Club.” Samuel Adams had chosen austerity for himself because he thought materialism softened the character and sapped what he called “the good old New England spirit.” But as the years passed and he had trouble maintaining his household, even friends began to wonder whether his indifference to money wasn’t a flaw in his character. The newspaper expired, and after five pregnancies in six years of marriage his wife died, leaving Adams with a son and a daughter. By 1763, at the age of forty-one, he was still passionate about liberty and justice, even though his fellow Bostonians weren’t paying him much attention.

Yet they had not lost their respect for Samuel Adams. Here was a man who lived by values that most of them honored only on the Sabbath. He had a good voice for the Sunday meeting and joined in singing the psalms. But the rest of the week he wasn’t a bore or a scold, and men were glad to have him at their table. In his middle years, Adams was still solidly built, with pale skin and light-blue eyes. Settling in at a tavern, drinking little, talking well, he wore the same red suit and cheap gray wig, its hair pulled back and tied in a bow. When the weather turned cold, he added a shabby red cloak.

Samuel Adams was building a following apart from the Caucus or the political factions. As he mingled at the taverns, the lodges and the volunteer fire companies, he asked shopkeepers and shipworkers their opinions and seemed to take their answers seriously. He could explain political injustice to an illiterate sailor without condescending, and he had no use for Thomas Hutchinson’s kind of social divisions. Adams sought out men who had spoken with a gentleman only to take his orders or abuse. His own ideas were unshakable, but he offered them in a tentative way that flattered his listeners. “I think . . .” Adams would begin, or “It seems to me . . .” He criticized such aristocrats as Hutchinson not as if he were a humble man who envied the lieutenant governor his wealth or position but as a moral superior.

Adams’ politics were cast in theological terms: goodness meant the welfare of the most people, evil was
tyranny by the few. He regarded the Massachusetts General Court—the House of Representatives and the Council—as the equal of Britain’s Parliament.
An Englishman might find that idea preposterous. But if one considered America from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River, it was the size of Great Britain, France, Spain, Germany and Italy combined.

Although he circulated along the waterfront, Adams was not neglecting likely recruits from his alma mater. He sought out young Harvard graduates who were clever and idealistic, and among his cadre were two students of medicine: Joseph Warren, tall, handsome and fearless, and Benjamin Church, a deacon’s son who wrote irreverent verses about his college tutors—“His matted wig of piss-burnt horse-hair made / Scarce covers half his
greasy, shining head.” Drawing men into his circle, Samuel Adams played on their love of America, their suspicions of the British and any other resentments he thought might win them over. He cultivated, too, his ambitious young second cousin from the town of Braintree, John Adams, working upon John’s desire to be accepted by Boston’s scholars, lawyers and the men who ran the Town Meeting.

Preaching his message left Samuel Adams no time for any job except one of Boston’s sinecures. He had collected liquor taxes for the county for three years. Then, in 1756, he was elected one of the five general tax collectors. Bostonians knew they had made a shrewd choice. Each collector was required to post a personal bond to guarantee the delivery of his receipts. But when the colony was going through bad times, Samuel Adams would always defer the collections. If a smallpox epidemic ravaged Boston, he put them off again. His enemies accused him of skimming off public money to support even his frugal way of life, although no one offered any proof. It may have been a slander, but it was true that Boston wasn’t getting its tax money. And its lenient collector was sinking into substantial debt.

—

Boston’s conservatives had been trying to do away with the Town Meeting for nearly fifty years. Why, they asked, should rich men who came to vote be jammed into a crowded hall with the lower classes? Who could blame the colony’s great merchants for their disgust when nearly destitute men stood up to claim the same privileges?

The conservative faction’s last attempt to gain control of the
town government had come three years before, in 1760, when it had set up the “New and Grand Corcas.” The
Boston Gazette
had warned readers that this false caucus would try to buy votes and, failing that, would threaten workers with arrest or the loss of their jobs. The original Caucus had struck back at the conservatives by urging workmen to wash their hands and faces and put on their Sunday best so that they would look neat and clean at the next Meeting. The Caucus also instructed them to refuse any attempts at bribery and to vote in their self-interest. The conservatives lost that year, but the outcome was close enough for them to try again in 1763.

Before that election, the newspaper of the governor’s party, the
Evening Post
, printed an exposé of the Caucus. It accused Samuel Adams and his allies of conducting their business behind locked doors and then inventing a few sham debates to entertain the rabble. But Boston’s workmen had learned to trust the Caucus to look after them. Almost eleven hundred men turned out to vote, the greatest number in Boston’s history. The Caucus was vindicated, and Samuel Adams held on to his slippery pole as tax collector. James Otis fared even better. The Tories and the
Evening Post
had been calling him a wild and envious man, a raccoon,
“a filthy skunk,” but his fellow citizens chose him to moderate their Meetings. He surprised everyone by using the forum to praise the new peace treaty with France and swear his abiding loyalty to England.

—

Otis’ speech seemed to bury the recent ill-feeling, and calm in 1763 was agreeable to Thomas Hutchinson, who had been stealing time from his public duties to work on his history of the Bay Colony. Hutchinson was trying to write as he lived—avoiding emotion or interpretation, collecting facts and trusting them to speak for themselves. For him, one persisting scar from the recent controversies was the names that had been given to the colony’s factions. The Caucus had succeeded in branding the governor and his friends as Tories, an unpopular label in Massachusetts. Hutchinson considered it equally misleading that his opponents called themselves Whigs or, worse, patriots. But those were small irritations. Surveying the political scene, Hutchinson ignored the underlying tensions in the colony and hoped instead that future problems
would stem only from petty ambition. That was something he could understand. Men who were out of power always wanted to be in.