The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (37 page)

While these colonies acted and delayed, in Massachusetts and London events were taking place which would make a favorable response to the Circular Letter almost inevitable and contribute to a further estrangement of the colonies from Britain. Compared with what took place between the governor and the faction after February 11, the Circular Letter looms as an act of disinterested statesmanship. Within two weeks both sides reverted to form -- the faction resorting to invective, scurrility, and eventually to terror in an assault on Bernard and the Customs commissioners, and those royal worthies turning wildly to advocacy of a colonial representation in Parliament and, when the fatuity of that scheme became obvious to their obtuse minds, begging for ' troops to put down their tormentors. Locating the beginnings of this savagery is impossible -- in one way or another it had begun with Bernard's arrival eight years earlier -- but the Otis-led House gave a clear expression of its feelings when it accused Bernard of lying about it to the ministry at home. It then asked for copies of the governor's letters to the secretary of state, knowing that he would refuse, and when he refused, demanded his removal. Otis and Adams then gave Joseph Warren, a Boston physician, a chance to prove his mettle in the
Boston Gazette
. Warren did so in an article which approached the libelous, failing to reach it only by carefully omitting the governor's name, while accusing him of surrendering totally to "wickedness" and suggesting that he was closely related to the devil. Bernard should have realized that he could not win anything for himself or royal authority by taking on the
Boston Gazette
. But he evidently did not realize and, pronouncing the article a "virulent Libel," laid it before the Council and prepared to prosecute the printers of the newspaper. The Council wanted no part in this fray and advised bringing in the House of Representatives.
Bernard's political masochism

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was aching for satisfaction by this time and he followed the Council's advice. For two days the House pretended to deliberate and then dismissed the charge as without merit. According to Bernard, not an unprejudiced observer, the House's deliberations were enlivened by Otis -- "the Canker Worm of the Constitution of this Government" -- who raged "like a madman" in the House and abused everyone in authority.
¹⁸

Chief Justice Thomas Hutchinson then made an effort to come to Bernard's defense. Hutchinson probably hated these brawls with the faction even more than Bernard, and he must have recognized that he would not succeed in getting the grand jury in Boston to indict the printers of the
Gazette
for libel. But Hutchinson, a loyal and determined man, ordered the attorney general to draw a bill against the printers and he presented it to the grand jury, which predictably voted it down. The agents of the faction who made no effort to conceal their activitiesthey "were seen publicly to haunt the Grand Jury-men" -- proved more persuasive than the chief justice, governor, and attorney general combined. The grand jury made no indictment. While all this maneuvering was going on the "TRUE PATRIOT" made himself heard again in the
Gazette
, saying that he would not attempt to explain the "strange kind of compliment" that some paid to his recent piece by applying it to Governor Bernard. As for himself, he would "sooner cut my hand from my body" than impeach the reputation of an honest man. But, on the other hand: "whoever he is whose
conscience
tells him he is not the monster I have portraited, may rest assured I did not aim at him; but the person who
knows
the black picture exhibited, to be his own, is welcome to take it to himself." Bernard, perhaps realizing that he was diminishing his authority in these exchanges, now, belatedly, lapsed into public silence.
¹⁹

Whatever moral authority Bernard might have exercised had long since vanished. A group of local merchants did not even consider asking his advice about how they might proceed against the Townshend Revenue Act; nor did they trouble to inform him of a nonimportation agreement they made early in March. He could not have persuaded the merchants to delay action any more than he could stop the mob from celebrating the anniversary of the repeal of the Stamp Act two weeks later.
That

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night, March 18, a lonely group -- Commissioner Burch, his family, and Thomas Hutchinson -- spent the evening with the governor, while the mob -- a great number of people of all kinds, ages, and both sexes -swirled through Boston's streets, parading, yelling, and occasionally gathering around the houses of the Customs commissioners. Little damage was done -- a group of gentlemen leaders saw to that -- but Bernard and his associates felt fear nonetheless.
²⁰

In this atmosphere of tension and -- for royal officials, at least -- terror, the Customs commissioners blundered as badly as the governor. They yielded tos an impulse to strike back at one who had openly expressed his contempt for them and all their works. Their victim, whom they soon found to be an elusive target, was John Hancock, one of Boston's richest merchants. Hancock had snubbed the commissioners shortly after their arrival the previous year by refusing to allow the Cadet Company, a military organization which he captained, to participate in official exercises of welcome planned by Governor Bernard. Soon afterwards, he announced that be would not permit the company to attend a public dinner scheduled by the governor for the May election if the commissioners were to be present. The town backed up Hancock, who of course carried considerable influence in its meeting, by refusing the use of Faneuil Hall for the dinner.
²¹

The commissioners saw an opportunity to square accounts in April when Hancock had two tidesmen, minor Customs officials, forcibly removed from below decks of his brig
Lydia.
The tidesmen had boarded the
Lydia
soon after she tied up; Hancock did not object to their presence until they went below without authorization and without a writ of assistance. When the matter came to the attention of the commissioners they instructed the province's attorney general to file a criminal information against Hancock. The charge was interference with Customs officers in the performance of their duty. After an investigation, the attorney general declined to proceed on the grounds that the tidesmen had exceeded their authority and that Hancock had acted legally in having them removed.
²²

The attorney general's opinion failed to satisfy the commissioners, who promptly appealed to the Treasury Board in England. The case they made reveals much about the sources of the British failure to

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²⁰
Letters to the Ministry
, 13-17; "Diary of John Rowe", 65-66; and George G. Wolkins , "The Seizure of John Hancock's Sloop Liberty", MHS,
Procs.
, 55 ( Boston, 1923), 269-70.

²¹
Jensen,
Founding
, 281.

²²
Ibid.

govern successfully in America. Almost all of what the commissioners wrote indicates that they had proceeded with the intention of making an example of Hancock for what they deemed his political offenses. The procedural and legal issues of the matter were secondary to the challenge Hancock presented to royal authority. He was -- they wrote -one of the leaders of the "disaffected" in Boston; he had affronted them when they arrived and then again over the public dinner. He was an avowed opponent of Customs policy. The commissioners' argument for criminal action against him rested on the assumption that if he were not prosecuted, royal authority in America would have sustained still another blow. 23

For it was royal authority that concerned the Customs commissioners even more than the mundane job of collecting import duties and clearing entering and departing ships. Royal authority was a fascinating phrase, which to these officials seemed redolent of a declining empire. Thinking of its condition in America conjured up visions of popular government, an upstart equalitarianism, and the mob -- frightful visions all, and all crying for exorcism. In an attempt to understand the Americans who entertained such madness, one of the commissioners, Henry Hulton, had traveled throughout Massachusetts and Connecticut to observe the delusions at first hand. Hulton's sense of superiority is clear in his descriptions of what he found: in their behavior in day-to-day life, as well as in those mobs which had terrorized Boston, the Americans' showed a contempt for social rank. Yet they were energetic; a people of less energy could not have made the barren land pay. Even in this admission, grudgingly given, Hulton's incomprehension and his social remoteness are plain. He felt himself dealing with a lesser breed, hence his and the entire range of the placemen's prescriptions for Americans -- bring them to order, make them respect authority -- have origins in felt social differences as well as in the traditional policies of colonial government. 24

Not that the Customs commissioners were indifferent to strict enforcement of regulations governing commerce. They were determined to see these regulations observed by the service they supervised and by the merchants. When they arrived in November 1767 they had been shocked by the state of the Customs in America -- at least Hulton and Burch had been, for they were new to Boston. Temple and Paxton, who were experienced, had long recovered from whatever shock they felt when

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²³
Customs Commissioners to Lords of Treasury, March 28, 1768, in Wolkins, "Seizure", MHS,
Proes
., 55 ( 1923).

²⁴
Wallace Brown, "An Englishman Views the American Revolution: The Letters of Henry Hulton, 1769-1776",
HLQ
, 36 ( 1972), 15-24.

they first joined Customs, and Robinson, who had received a rough initiation when he tried to seize the
Polly
for smuggling molasses, knew something of American attitudes. With the exception of Temple, who had little use for the others, the commissioners intended to tighten up the system. Upon looking into the conduct of business in New England, they found smuggling "to a very great height" but only six seizures for violations in the past two and one-half years. And in these six seizures only one successful prosecution had followed; the other ships had either been retaken by mobs or released by local juries in court.
²⁵

The commissioners recognized that a part of their difficulty lay with their subordinates, some of whom took bribes, perhaps even solicited them. Their solution was to hire more officials, a curious decision and sure to fail unless they found some way to introduce honesty into the discharge of duties. Time soon demonstrated that they had failed.

Beaten by Hancock in the
Lydia
affair, the commissioners nursed their disappointment, and then on June 10 ordered Comptroller Benjamin Hallowell and Collector Joseph Harrison to seize Hancock's sloop
Liberty
. The
Liberty
had tied up on May 9 after a voyage from Madeira; she carried a cargo of wine, some of it "the best sterling Madeira," intended for Hancock's own table. The day the
Liberty
arrived, two tidesmen boarded to make certain that no cargo was unloaded that was not declared. The ship unloaded twenty-five casks of wine the next day; Hancock paid the required duty, and the tidesmen reported that nothing else was taken off. In the month that followed, the
Liberty
took on board barrels of whale oil and tar.
²⁶