The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (44 page)

liberty pole, sawed it into pieces, and thoughtfully left them in front of a tavern which served as the headquarters of the Sons of Liberty. The Sons did not need firewood, and the next day with 3000 supporters in attendance they put up a new pole. While they were at work, the soldiers distributed an abusive broadside, provoking a skirmish followed by a full-scale battle at Golden Hill. The fight lasted, off and on, for two days and produced many wounded and one death.

As bad as civil-military relations were in New York, they were worse in Boston. New York could blame some of its own citizens for requesting that the army send troops into the colony in spring 1766 during the tenant uprising, but no one that Boston regarded as its own had asked for troops. They had arrived nonetheless at the end of September 1768 under the cover of a line of warships which seemed to menace the town. The troops resplendent in red coats, with their bayonets glistening, were ferried by small boats and barges to the long wharf, and from there had marched to drums and shrill fifes, obviously ready for anything. The manner of their landing had offended many Bostonians; the warships swinging at anchor were in a line usually assumed when armed opposition was expected and broadsides were to be delivered in support of an assault. From headquarters in New York, General Gage had authorized this disposition, with the conviction that he was sending the troops into a treasonous camp. The words he used at this time to describe the Bostonians convey something of his own grim mood -- they were "mutinous," they were "desperadoes," they were guilty of "sedition."
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The redcoats had landed unopposed. Whatever inclination had existed to resist them with guns had evaporated with the knowledge that the squadron from Halifax was off Boston. As the ships began to make their way into the harbor, the convention of Massachusetts towns, in John Mein's unkind phrasing, "broke up and rushed out of Town like a herd of scalded hogs." The rush from Boston made its citizens realize that for the moment at least they were very much alone with the British army.
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Boston was frightened but not cowed by the troops. The authorities, including the Council and the selectmen, returned a firm "no" to all requests for quarters and supplies. Barracks were available on Castle Island, they said, and if the governor and British commanders did not choose to use them, there were quarters to be rented in town.
Colonel

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Dalrymple, temporarily in command, did not choose to scatter his soldiers about in private homes, inns, and taverns. Maintaining discipline was difficult enough in the best of conditions; in a fragmented command it was almost impossible.
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For the time being, as we have seen, the army had to settle for less than satisfactory billets. The 29th Regiment, which was carrying full field equipment, pitched tents on the common, and the 14th settled into Faneuil Hall, drafty, cramped, and uncomfortable. The next day Bernard threw open the town house, where the Council and the House of Representatives met, and a part of the 14th shifted its quarters.

None of these arrangements would be sufficient for the coming cold weather; the 29th in particular had to be sent into winter quarters. Governor Bernard had ordered the province's "Manufactory House," once the site of spinning schools and now rented out to private tenants, cleared for occupancy by the soldiers. The tenants, however, refused to move, and for the next three weeks Sheriff Greenleaf, urged on by Bernard and Thomas Hutchinson, tried by persuasion and then by force to move them. Finding the door bolted and the windows barred, the sheriff broke in only to find himself and his party trapped by outraged tenants. A number of grotesque scenes followed, played up and doubtless embroidered by the local newspapers which took to calling the sheriff's actions the "siege of the Manufactory House" and dubbing the sheriff "the General." At the climax of the "siege," with the children of the tenants at the windows of the manufactory crying for bread, and bakers prevented by the sheriff from supplying them, some provisions were delivered after a scuffle with clubs swinging, heads cracked, and much screeching on both sides.
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Before the month was out the 29th evacuated the common, and the 14th, the town house and Faneuil Hall. Both moved into warehouses and other buildings rented from private citizens. Even William Molineux, one of the reliables in the Otis-Adams cohort, leased a warehouse to the army, apparently seeing nothing incongruous in taking the army's money while opposing the army's presence. The army's money may have reduced the hostility of others, however. Having the troops in Boston added to the business of victualers, bakers, and tavern owners, to name several sorts who made a good thing out of the garrison.
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Yet no circumstance, no arrangement, and no planning could head

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off trouble between troops and civilians. Relations were abrasive from the beginning despite a persistent admiration and sympathy felt by many civilians for the soldiers. The discipline meted out to the troops, barbarous by civilian standards, conventional by military standards, increased that sympathy for a time. Soldiers received hundreds of stripes for minor offenses and as many as a thousand lashes was not unusual. The regimental drummers ordinarily delivered this punishment, a fact white Boston found hard to accept, for most of these drummers were Negroes. Most Negroes that Boston knew were slaves. On the last day of October, a more severe punishment was displayed -- execution by firing squad. The victim, Richard Ames, a private convicted of desertion, was executed for the edification of the ranks, all properly drawn up on the common while the drums beat.
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The ranks did not learn from this spectacle, or perhaps they did; in any case desertion continued: about forty had slipped away in the first two weeks and thereafter several left almost every night. Desertion contributed to bad feeling between the troop commanders and the civilian population. The army blamed the civilians for enticing the men away and infuriated the town by the methods it used to catch them. Informers were hired and patrols sent out, some disguised as local citizens to entrap the deserters and any unwary citizens who might have offered aid.

If clashes between patrols looking for deserters and citizens all too willing to hide them cut into the residue of sympathy the town felt for ordinary soldiers, the behavior of these soldiers completely destroyed any surviving good feeling. Not that the soldiers behaved badly by the standards of the time; they behaved as if they were in a "garrison town," the term they employed in describing Boston to angry citizens. With the connivance of their officers they broke the quiet of the Sabbath with drums, fifes, and derisive renditions of "Yankee Doodle." They also drank to excess, behavior not uncommon in soldiers in the eighteenth century. Andrew Eliot, a Boston parson and a careful man, reported that the soldiers were "in raptures" at the cheapness of liquor in the town. The women in the town aroused another sort of rapture and endured rapes, assaults, and earthy suggestions. Theft of goods was more common than theft of virtue, however, as the town discovered, with burglaries and armed robberies on the streets on the rise.
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What set Boston teeth on edge more than any of these crimes -- or

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the soldiers' behavior -- was the military presence. Having to stomach a standing army in their midst, observe the redcoats daily, pass by troops stationed on Boston Neck who occupied a guardhouse on land illegally taken it was said from the town, and having to receive challenges by sentries on the streets, their own streets, affronted a people accustomed to personal liberty, fired their tempers, and gnawed away at their honor. The sentries' challenges symbolized much of what the town felt was wrong: coming and going as they pleased subject only to civil authority had long been their right. Now with sentries and guards posted at the barracks-warehouses, officers' houses, and public buildings, coming and going were subject to challenge. Almost instinctively civilians refused to respond, and sometimes were seized by the guard for their scruples, and if they resisted they might feel a rifle butt or a bayonet. Until fairly late in the occupation these encounters occurred with neither side willing to give way. The best that could be hoped for until the troops were pulled out was an uneasy standoff. The troops might have a legal right to challenge, "A freeman" wrote in the
Boston Gazette
, but this right implied no obligation on the part of the inhabitants "black, white, or grey" to answer. "I would never quarrel with the guards for asking me the question, nor should they ever quarrel with me with impunity, for despising their question and passing by in silence."
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Neither the troops nor the citizens were capable of restraining themselves for long while living side by side. The troop commanders would have settled for peace and harmony. The popular leaders would not, and by a skillful, sometimes malicious, use of the newspapers they made a bad situation worse. The
Boston Gazette
under Edes and Gill continued. to publish its versions of public occurrences, and in October 1768 popular leaders invented a fresh vehicle, the "Journal of the Times," reports and articles written in Boston purporting to offer a faithful account of the state of affairs in a town occupied by the army and the American Board of Customs Commissioners. The "Journal" was sent first to the
New York Journal
where it was published and then reprinted in the Pennsylvania Chronicle. After that it was widely reprinted throughout the colonies, in Boston by the Evening Post whose readers probably had forgotten the exact details of the atrocities being played upon. In some cases the stories seem to have been pure -- or, according to the authorities and the army, impure -- fabrications.
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Although the "Journal of the Times" exploited and invented incidents of violence and oppression, the winter passed without a major crisis. Townsmen were encouraged by the departure in June and July of the 64th and 65th Regiments. The relative ease of the first winter's stay apparently persuaded the home government that two regiments could handle Boston. Hence two were sent to Halifax, and the 14th and 29th remained in the town.

By spring 1769 the early awe of the troops felt by civilians had completely worn off, replaced by a grim, sometimes contemptuous familiarity. In this atmosphere fights were more common and, more often perhaps than before, picked by the inhabitants of the town who also discovered fresh ways of protecting themselves from the soldiers and of harassing them in the process. The law offered the new means of protection and harassment as the courts began enforcing a statute which allowed a person convicted of theft to be sold into indentured servitude if he could not raise a sum three times the value of the stolen goods to be paid to the victim of the theft. This procedure does not seem to have been invoked often, but it shocked the troop commanders. The first time it was used, June 1769, Gage recommended smuggling the accused soldier aboard ship; that expedient proved unnecessary when the civilian who had purchased the soldier's indenture settled out of court for a small sum.
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