Revolution! America – Chapter 2 – The Brick Chronicle

While the French concentrated their war efforts in Europe, the British poured manpower and resources into protecting their American colonies, eventually turning the tide against the French and their Native American allies. By 1760, British forces had taken Quebec and Montreal, forcing the surrender of French forces in North America.

With the British navy firmly in control of the seas and with France cut off from its colonies, it was a mystery how the Canadians had managed to rearm and resupply themselves throughout the war. The shocking answer came when it was discovered that as many as forty ships from Boston, Rhode Island, and New York had been smuggling supplies to the enemy.

To crack down on the rampant colonial smuggling that was also costing Britain badly needed revenue in lost duties and taxes, Parliament expanded the power of customs officers to search ships and even the homes and offices of merchants on any suspicion of smuggling.

In Boston in 1761, a thirty-six-year-old lawyer and fiery orator named James Otis challenged these searches before the Superior Court, calling them “instruments of slavery” that violated Englishmen’s liberty. He noted such searches represented the kind of power that had previously “cost one king of England his head.” Though Otis lost the case, his rhetoric against the dangers of tyrannical royal authority stirred many, and John Adams would later recall that “the child Independence was then and there born.”

As the French handed over their forts in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes area to the British, a wave of colonial settlers soon flowed west, encroaching on Native American lands. In response, in 1763, Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa organized a confederation of tribes to drive the British out. The tribes quickly captured seven poorly defended forts and slaughtered nearby settlers.

Fort Pitt, located at what would become the city of Pittsburgh, was too strong to overrun, so it was put under siege. When two tribal leaders approached the fort to negotiate with the British, they were sent back with a gift of provisions including blankets from the fort’s smallpox hospital. Wrote the British commander in chief in North America: “You will do well to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.”

The conflict between the tribes and the colonists was marked by atrocities on both sides. Raids on settlers were brutal. In southern Pennsylvania, four Delaware tribal warriors bludgeoned a pregnant woman named Susan King Cunningham, cutting her open and leaving the fetus beside her body. The next day they set upon a rural colonial schoolhouse, shooting and scalping the schoolmaster, then scalping nine children and taking four others prisoner.

Farther to the east, a group of fifty white settlers known as the Paxton Boys killed six members of a small peaceful village of Conestoga who had adopted Christianity and had lived among the colonists for decades. Fourteen members of the tribe who had been away for the night returned to find their people shot and scalped and all their huts burned to the ground.

These survivors were put in protective custody at a community workhouse in Lancaster, but two weeks later another band of Paxton Boys returned, broke down the doors to the workhouse, and butchered the six adults and eight children inside. “Along the west side of the wall lay a stout Indian, whom I particularly noticed to have been shot in his breast,” noted one local who came across the scene. “His legs were chopped off with a tomahawk, his hands cut off; and finally a rifle ball discharged in his mouth; so that his head was blown to atoms.”

An even larger number of armed Paxton Boys then marched toward Philadelphia to demand Native Americans in protection there be handed over to them. The renowned scientist, philosopher, and diplomat Benjamin Franklin organized a militia to meet them outside the city. The Paxton Boys were convinced to disperse, but upon hearing their grievances, the governor agreed to give the frontiersmen more representation in the state legislature and to reinstitute the payment of bounties for the scalps of any Native Americans more than ten years old.

The war with the tribal confederacy ended in stalemate with a treaty of truce. Hoping to establish peaceful frontier relations and bring about a return of the lucrative fur trade, Britain’s King George III issued a proclamation forbidding settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains. This was a matter of consternation to poorer colonists seeking new lands to settle and to land speculators who had intended to increase their fortunes through the acquisition of massive tracts of land in the Ohio Valley.

The costs of the two recent wars had driven Great Britain into enormous debt, putting an immense tax burden on the citizens of the motherland. George III now determined that the prosperous American colonies would have to bear some of the costs of their own protection. Accordingly, Parliament passed the Sugar Act, which lowered the tax on molasses (used to make rum), but put measures in place so customs officials would actually collect the long ignored tax and smuggling would be curbed.

Resistance to the Sugar Act was limited but found its most vocal opponent in forty-year-old Bostonian Samuel Adams, a Harvard graduate, failed brewer, and failed local tax collector. Adams was a firebrand political radical, and in May 1764, he represented the Boston Town Meeting before the city’s legislature, warning of the dangers of submitting to a royal tax: “For if our trade may be taxed, why not our lands? Why not the produce of our lands and everything we possess or make use of?. . . If taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable state of tributary slaves?”

Parliament’s next revenue generating measure was the Stamp Act of 1765, a form of taxation which had been in use in Britain for seventy years and had been successfully implemented in other colonies as well. The act required printed materials such as newspapers, magazines, and legal documents to bear a royal stamp that could be purchased from locally appointed stamp distributors, generally for a negligible price.

Though hardly onerous, this tax affected all of society, both rich and poor. It united in protest those who used paper the most: lawyers, merchants, and newspapermen. In the weeks and months after its announcement, printers refused to publish arguments in favor of the tax and quickly galvanized public opinion against it by featuring diatribes against the Stamp Act, penned by men like James Otis and Samuel Adams.

In May 1765, in a rump session of the Virginia legislature, the newly-elected twenty-nine-year-old Patrick Henry introduced strongly worded resolves rejecting any attempt to tax Virginians except by their own elected legislature. These defiant resolves were approved and then reprinted in newspapers across the colonies, often paired with further resolves Henry had not introduced to the legislature, which branded anyone who spoke in favor of such taxes as an enemy of Virginia.

Soon Stamp Act opposition groups calling themselves Sons of Liberty sprung up in major cities to take action. In Boston, the appointed stamp distributor was a wealthy merchant and philanthropist named Andrew Oliver. On August 14, an effigy of Oliver was hung from the branch of a giant oak tree that came to be known as the Liberty Tree. The governor ordered the effigy taken down, but the crowd that had gathered around it was so unruly that the deputies refused to put their own lives in danger.

That evening, after hours of imbibing free rum offered by local distillers, the mob riled itself into a frenzy. They tore down the effigy and marched through the city streets, chanting “Liberty! Property! And no stamps!” When they got to Oliver’s mansion, they beheaded the effigy and burned it.

In unrestrained fury, the mob destroyed Oliver’s gardens, then broke down the doors of his residence and smashed the windows. Not finding Oliver or his family inside, the mob raided his wine cellar and set about destroying his fine furniture, art collection, crystal ware, china, and mirrors. When the governor and sheriff arrived, they were driven away by thrown stones. The militia could not be summoned, as the drummers who would normally summon them were among the looters.

The next day, Andrew Oliver was found and carried by a mob to the Liberty Tree. Under threats of death and harassment of his family, he was forced to resign as stamp distributor. News of these events traveled quickly to the other colonies, where similar tactics against stamp distributors and their wealthy political supporters were used to ensure that the Stamp Act would never be enforced.

Parliament finally relented and repealed the Stamp Act in 1766. Still determined to have the colonies pay some share of the costs of their own protection, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts in 1767, which were not direct taxes, but which did raise duties on imported paper, paint, lead, glass, alcohol, and tea. By now, though, the mood of many colonists was defiant. Boston’s wealthy and popular merchant (and smuggler) John Hancock joined with Samuel Adams to organize a boycott of British goods.

Other colonies joined the boycott, which was enforced through searches of incoming ships by hastily organized Merchant Committees of Inspection and through intimidation tactics. Those seen wearing British-made clothing on the streets were harassed. In New York, a jeweler displaying British wares in his shop was brought by a mob to a “Liberty Pole” where a scaffold had been erected, and he was forced to pledge cooperation. Another noncomplying merchant named Hills had his goods seized and burned, after which he fled the state.

In 1768, the Boston legislature issued a letter to the other colonies denouncing the legality of the Townshend Acts. When the royal governor of Boston demanded the letter be revoked, the legislature voted 92 to 17 against revocation. The governor responded by dissolving the legislature completely. Now fearing he had lost control of the city to mobs, at his request, four thousand Redcoats were sent to Boston to restore order.

Throughout the military occupation, the shocking and “strictly factual” deeds of British troops (from thefts, insults, and assaults to murder, attempted rapes, and the seduction of Bostonian wives) were chronicled in newspapers in New York and other colonies. Though published anonymously as a “Journal of Occurrences,” it is believed these were the highly embellished works of Samuel Adams, keeping anti-British sentiment high.

Despite a tense atmosphere, customs officials returned to inspecting ships sailing into Boston Harbor, and certain bold merchants who remained steadfastly loyal to their king, Parliament, and the rule of law resisted the boycott of British goods. Noted one such merchant: “It always seemed strange to me that people who contend so much for civil and religious liberty should be so ready to deprive others of their natural liberty.”

Indeed, when Boston’s loyalist newspaper, the Chronicle, published evidence that John Hancock’s ships were carrying supposedly boycotted goods, a group of insurgent “Liberty Boys” responded by chasing after the paper’s publisher, John Mein, with shouts of “Kill him! Kill him!” Accustomed to carrying a pistol for his own protection, Mein managed to fend them off just long enough to escape to the safety of a Redcoat guardhouse.

Another mob then headed toward Mein’s house, but along the way came across a suspected customs house informant named George Gailer. The mob seized him and stripped him naked, poured a thick coat of hot tar over his body, and covered him in feathers before parading him around town in a tumbrel. “Thus,” observed loyalist Peter Oliver, “the liberty of the press was restrained by the very men who, for years past, had been halloowing for liberty herself.”

Chapter Title

Revolution!

America - Chapter 2

Disobedience Is The True Foundation Of Liberty; The Obedient Must Be Slaves

1760 — 1769

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Chapter End

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