Patriots (9 page)

Hutchinson listened to the sheriff’s story. “And did you discharge him?”

“Yes,” said Greenleaf.

“Then you have not done your duty.”

Bernard raised to three hundred pounds the bounty for identifying the mob’s leader. Hutchinson was not surprised when the reward went unclaimed. He guessed that the shoemaker was threatening to implicate the men who had planned the demonstration. And if Hutchinson had seen a letter from Henry Bass of the Loyal Nine, it would have confirmed his suspicions. Samuel Adams’ cousin wrote: “We do everything to keep . . . the affair private, and are not a little pleased to hear that
Mackintosh has the credit of the whole affair.”

—

At first, the example of the mob’s assault on Andrew Oliver seemed to be spreading. Newspapers in other provinces praised Boston’s patriots, and in Newport, Rhode Island, local Sons of Liberty built effigies of their stamp master. He resigned within the week. In New York and New Jersey, stamp masters were also pressured into giving up their posts, and the nominees of other colonies fell into line until only Georgia’s stamp man was allowed to take up his duties unmolested. But after the attack against Hutchinson, patriot leaders outside Massachusetts agreed with Samuel Adams that more violence would only harm their cause.

Even if the Stamp Act were eventually repealed, the Sons of
Liberty pledged that they would guard against any further abuses by Parliament. Christopher Gadsden of Charleston, South Carolina, had mobilized his social club against the Stamp Act, and he caught the mood of the patriots when he said that the Grenville Ministry “must have thought us Americans all a parcel of apes, and
very tame apes, too.”

Sons of Liberty broadside

MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

W
HILE
Samuel Adams was sounding the alarm in Boston against taxes on sugar and stamps, Patrick Henry in Virginia also had been gliding toward politics. The two years since he had triumphed over the parsons had been the best time of Henry’s life. Thomas Jefferson, who was now midway through his own rigorous law training with George Wythe, preferred to believe that Henry was far too lazy to succeed as a lawyer and that he spent all of his time in the woods hunting deer. But Henry had built up a healthy practice. He was being called—mostly around Hanover—“
the Orator of Nature,” and in the fall of 1764 he went to Williamsburg as the lawyer for Colonel Nathaniel Dandridge, his host at the Christmas house party five years before. On Dandridge’s behalf, Henry was challenging the seat of James Littlepage in the House of Burgesses. Littlepage was charged with having used undue influence during the last election,
when he had gone about the county knocking on doors and pledging to change the regulations over tobacco warehouses. In Virginia, candidates were expected to behave like gentlemen and refrain from asking for votes or making campaign promises. Littlepage was also accused of buying drinks for a man named Grubbs.

That last charge smacked of hypocrisy. On election day, Virginians stepped forward one at a time at the polls and named their choices out loud. Grubbs had come reeling over the courthouse green, bawling out his promise to vote for anyone who would give him another dram. Littlepage’s men had reached him first. But, like every other candidate, Dandridge had also provided refreshments that day. A man running for office set out near the polls several barrels of rum and neat whiskey, along with applejack and beer. Any candidate who didn’t offer a few drinks was considered too stingy or lacking in respect for his neighbors to deserve their votes. Several years earlier, a planter named George Washington had been rejected for failing to provide decent drink and a roast pig. Washington learned from that defeat, and the next time he ran he bought a quart and a half of liquor for each of his 361 supporters and won his seat in the Burgesses.

When members of the Committee on Privileges and Elections saw Henry’s coarse clothes, they treated him with a casualness just short of contempt. As he presented Dandridge’s case, however, their mood changed. They agreed that he put the case brilliantly, but they found Dandridge’s complaint frivolous and vexatious and ordered him to pay all costs.

The next year, with agitation over the Stamp Act spreading through the colony, Henry decided to run for his own seat in the Burgesses. His impatience made him skip over the usual path of serving first on a county court. When the House member from Louisa County resigned to become coroner, Henry hoped to vault directly to the Burgesses. He still lived in Hanover County, but he bought land in nearby Louisa to make himself eligible. Henry spent more than eight pounds sterling to get elected—seven pounds to buy twenty-eight gallons of rum, the rest for carrying it to the polls.

As he entered the House in May 1765, Patrick Henry was not a typical member. His colleagues owned an average of eighteen hundred acres—to Henry’s six hundred acres of poor land—and held forty slaves. Usually their holdings were inherited. Half of the
House leadership had been to college, most often William and Mary. But Boston’s division between Whigs and Tories was blurred in Williamsburg. Some of the one hundred and sixteen Burgesses who always supported the crown were called the Old Field Nags. Younger and more rebellious members were the High-Blooded Colts. Members of both groups might be from established Tidewater families, while others were called “Qo’hees,” came from the upper counties and wore buckskin to House sessions. Yet at home on their plantations, men from both factions spent their days out of doors and on horseback. They were often land poor, and they could be receptive to a democratic argument.

Even so, the House had its own established hierarchy, and within three days of taking his seat Patrick Henry was affronting its leaders. One of them, John Robinson, was both the speaker and the colony’s treasurer, and he had come up with a plan for a Public Loan Office. No one knew then that Robinson had been lending public money to his friends and that the Loan Office was his way of covering those illegal debts. But, alerted by an instinct, Henry listened dubiously to the argument that the office should extend credit to wealthy men who were momentarily strapped for cash. At the end, he rose to make his maiden speech.

“What, sir?” he asked. “Is it proposed then to reclaim the spendthrift from his dissipation and extravagance by
filling his pockets with money?”

The members ignored his objection and approved the Loan Office.

A few days later, Patrick Henry confronted the leadership again. Over the past year, the Burgesses had drafted earnest petitions against the Stamp Act. Now, with the current session ending and many members already returned home, word reached Williamsburg that the stamp duties would take effect in November. Only thirty-nine of the one hundred and sixteen members were still in the House as Henry scribbled out a set of resolutions on the blank page of an old lawbook. It was his twenty-ninth birthday, and he intended to celebrate with a speech.

Henry first presented four resolutions that followed along the lines of Virginia’s earlier protests, although they were framed in much sharper language: The settlers had brought to Virginia all of the liberties of the people of Great Britain. The two royal charters granted by King James I had conferred on the colonists the same
privileges as if they had been born in England and still lived there. Taxes must be levied on a people only by men they had chosen to represent them. This right of legislating their own affairs always had been recognized by Britain’s kings and her people. Henry then added a fifth resolution: Only a colony’s legislature could tax its citizens, and any attempt to transfer that power to another group would destroy freedom in Britain as well as in America.

For the House leadership, Henry’s offense was less in what he was saying than in his presuming, after only nine days in the Burgesses, to say anything at all. Thomas Jefferson was in the House lobby the next day to listen while Henry defended his resolutions, and what he heard made him revise his first impressions of Patrick Henry’s provincialism. Jefferson recalled years later that he would sometimes close his eyes as Henry spoke and, when he opened them again, could not remember a single word; he was left with only the impact of the speech, which was dazzling.

As Henry spoke, tempers in the chamber began to boil. The Old Field Nags were particularly incensed by Henry’s fifth resolution, which seemed to deny that Parliament ever had a right to tax the colonies. And in arguing his case, Henry had let himself be swept to the farthest boundaries of his position. Jefferson was listening when Henry warned Britain’s king against his unreasonable tax.

“Tarquin and Caesar had each his Brutus,” Henry said, speaking in a steady voice, “Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third-”

At that point, Speaker Robinson interrupted with a cry of “Treason! Treason!”

By now, the accusation was no novelty to Henry. He looked to the Speaker as he improvised an ending for his threat, “—may profit by their example!” And he added, “If this be treason, make the most of it!”

A Frenchman visiting Williamsburg that day was standing with Jefferson in the outer hallway, and he recalled that after Henry alluded to Caesar and Charles I he apologized for any affront he might have given the members and pledged his last drop of blood to the king.

Arrayed against Henry and his resolutions were Speaker Robinson and three of Henry’s examiners from two years ago, Peyton Randolph, George Wythe and Robert Carter Nicholas. They
argued that since the House was still waiting for a reply from London to the earlier petitions, they shouldn’t alienate the king’s ministers with Henry’s blunt language. But despite their prestige and seniority, Henry’s resolutions passed that afternoon, each by a narrow margin and the fifth one by the single vote of twenty to nineteen. Jefferson was still hovering by the door when Peyton Randolph came, fat and petulant, from the floor. “By God,” Randolph said, “I would have given five hundred guineas
for a single vote.”

Even though Randolph and the rest of Henry’s opponents were cautious men, they differed from Thomas Hutchinson in Boston. Privately Hutchinson might express reservations about the Stamp Act, but once it was passed it became law to him. In Virginia, even the most conservative Burgesses intended to go on protesting the act; they merely didn’t want to be lumbered with Patrick Henry’s provocative language.

Henry left the capital that night, his battle won and his reputation made. But the next day, when Thomas Jefferson went back to the House, he saw Peter Randolph, Peyton’s cousin, searching through old records for a precedent that would let the Burgesses expunge their vote. He found it. When the members convened that afternoon, they reconsidered Henry’s fifth resolution and defeated it.

By that time Henry’s resolutions were already circulating, and they soon found their way into the newspapers. In less than a month, the
Newport Mercury
had printed them all, along with a sixth that branded as an enemy to Virginia anyone who defended Parliament’s right to impose taxes.

—

In early July 1765, Henry’s resolutions reached Boston, where the patriots read them with admiration and a sense of shame for having let Thomas Hutchinson persuade them to soften their own letter to Parliament.

Oxenbridge Thacher’s wife had died of smallpox the year before. Now, though Thacher was only forty-five, it looked as though he would not recover from his own inoculation, and he sent for John Adams to take over some of his legal business. Adams, when he arrived, asked whether Thacher had seen the Virginia Resolves.

“Oh, yes,” said Thacher.
“They are men! They are noble spirits! It kills me to think of the lethargy and stupidity that prevails here. I long to be out. I will go out! I will go into court and make a speech, which shall be read after my death as my dying testimony against their infernal tyranny!”

Thacher’s agitation troubled Adams and he changed the subject. But he thought to himself that it was only because Thacher was confined to his bed that he could think Bostonians were apathetic. When Thacher died a few days later, the town held a special election for the House. A rich young merchant named John Hancock was a likely candidate, but the voters chose Samuel Adams.

In late September 1765, a month after the rioting, Governor Bernard convened the legislature to warn that the Stamp Act would be enforced. House members were still chastened by the mob’s rampage, but the Virginia Resolves had made them bold, and they were determined to stick by their plan to hold a protest meeting of all the colonies. Aware that it would be a historic occasion, the patriots were calling it the Stamp Act congress.

Francis Bernard was not sure how to cope with this latest challenge to his authority. The governor’s popularity had been dropping rapidly, and his hunger for money to support his large family, combined with a taste for luxury, made it easy for the patriots to paint Bernard as Hutchinson’s partner in greed. Before the riots, Bernard had seen himself very differently—good-natured, canny, unruffled. When a visitor from London asked how he dared walk through Boston without a bodyguard, Bernard had assured him that the people of Massachusetts were not bloodthirsty, and he had been advising London that the colonists were jealous of their liberties but remained loyal to the crown. Bernard had said that by indulging their sense of independence he could keep them calm. But now the riots had proved him wrong, and he was drafting a plan to put down the unrest.