Revolution! America – Chapter 3 – The Brick Chronicle

In early 1770, tensions peaked between Bostonians and occupying soldiers. Redcoats were harassed, insulted to their faces by citizens, and pelted with snowballs, oyster shells, stones, and glass bottles by gangs of youths. On March 5, a mob that was later described by John Adams as “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs” surrounded eight soldiers. Accompanied by shouts of “kill them!” they pressed in toward the soldiers and pelted them with ice and garbage.

Amid direct dares from the mob for the soldiers to fire on them, a man named Crispus Attucks, who was a sailor and runaway slave of mixed African and Native American descent from Framingham, Massachusetts, threw his club at one of the Redcoats, knocking him to the ground. A shout of, “Damn, you! Fire!” was heard, and the soldiers fired into the crowd, killing five, including Attucks, and wounding six others.

To keep this outburst of violence from inciting the people into open rebellion, Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson acted quickly to have the eight soldiers arrested and charged with murder. He also ordered both regiments of Redcoats in Boston to leave the city and station themselves at nearby Castle William. This was enough of a victory in the eyes of many Bostonians for calm to return to the streets.

In the months that followed, Samuel Adams and other radicals dubbed the March 5 incident “The Boston Massacre” and sought to fan the flames of resistance to royal authority by portraying the Redcoats as having conspired to commit violence against innocent citizenry— and promoted as martyrs those who had been killed. A drawing by artist Henry Pelham depicting events in this light was quickly copied without permission and sold by local silversmith Paul Revere. It became widely popular.

In November, in the interest of providing a fair trial, the cousin of Samuel Adams, the respected thirty-five-year-old lawyer John Adams, reluctantly agreed to defend the eight Redcoats at trial. Overwhelming witness testimony painted the mob as the instigators of the violence. In the end, six of the soldiers were acquitted. Two were found guilty of manslaughter, but as first time-offenders they had their sentences reduced to a branding of their thumb.

Parliament again relented, repealing all the Townshend Acts except for a negligible duty on tea. Then in 1773, the Tea Act was passed, aimed at helping the financially troubled British East India Company by granting it a monopoly and eliminating middlemen so it could sell its tea to the colonies through selected consignees at prices even lower than smuggled Dutch tea. Affected colonial merchants and political radicals protested the act by blocking cargo ships from unloading what Samuel Adams called their “seeds of slavery” and by using intimidation to force tea consignees to resign.

In Boston, on December 16, 1773, a group of fifty colonists dressed themselves as Native Americans, shouted war whoops, and boarded three docked cargo ships. Over three hours, they methodically hauled up 342 chests full of tea from the holds, split them open, and dumped them into Boston harbor as hundreds of citizens silently looked on. The tea destroyed that night was valued at one million dollars in today’s currency.

The reaction of other colonists was mixed. Emboldened anti-royalists seized and destroyed tea in copycat actions in New York City, Annapolis, Charleston, and again in Boston a second-time months later. Others, like George Washington in the Virginia legislature, condemned the Bostonians’ for their unlawful disregard of property rights. While many colonists had sworn off drinking tea, Virginians consumed eighty thousand pounds of tea in 1773.

Before news of the “Destruction of the Tea” (as it was called at the time) reached Britain, rebellious mobs continued to hold sway in Boston. In January 1774, the staunchly loyalist customs official John Malcom had his front door kicked in. After briefly holding his attackers at bay with a sword, he was overpowered and carried outside where he was stripped and scalding hot tar was poured over his body.

Malcom was covered in feathers and then paraded through town in a tumbrel for five hours with occasional stops where he was whipped and beaten. He was then taken to the Liberty Tree and told to renounce his commission. When he defiantly refused, he was brought up on a scaffold where a rope was put around his neck, and when the mob threatened to hang him, he responded that he wished they would.

They next threatened to cut off Malcom’s ears, and at this he finally complied and was then brought back to his home. Doctors treating Malcom noted that when peeling off the tar, his flesh came off his back in pieces. This was the second tar-and-feathering Malcom had survived, having been attacked two months earlier in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

In Britain, the Destruction of the Tea was cause for alarm and declared an act of high treason. The city of Boston was now considered to be in open rebellion and in the control of an irrational mob. Americans were described as “a strange sett of people,” by one member of Parliament, who went on to say that it was “in vain to expect any degree of reasoning from them . . . instead of making their claim by argument, they always choose to decide the matter by tarring and feathering.”

While Parliament in Britain was debating how to respond to the insurrection, John Hancock gave a speech to the public at the Old South Meeting House in Boston on the fourth anniversary of the Boston Massacre, March 5, 1774. He called on citizens to arm themselves to defend against tyranny and guard against enslavement. He urged them to be prepared to fight and die to protect their property, families, and liberty from the hands of their royal oppressors, and to see that “those noxious vermin will be swept forever from the streets of Boston.”

Six weeks later, Parliament voted to make a strong example out of Boston to discourage rebellion in other colonies. The British navy shut down the port of Boston so the city would be starved into submission. The royal governor was replaced by the military general Thomas Gage, and four regiments of Redcoats were sailed in from Ireland. Town meetings were banned, and public or unoccupied buildings could now be commandeered to house British troops.

Solidarity with Massachusetts from the other colonies was limited until mid-1774 when Parliament transferred all the lands of the Ohio Valley to Quebec. Suddenly, wealthy land speculators from Virginia and Pennsylvania who had large claims in the Ohio Valley (men such as George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Benjamin Franklin) found themselves aggrieved. One of the richest men in America, owner of twenty thousand acres of farmland and about three hundred slaves, Washington expressed his indignance, saying, “They have no right to put their hands in my pockets.”

In September 1774, delegates from twelve colonies, including Patrick Henry, George Washington, Samuel Adams, and John Adams, met in Philadelphia for a “Continental Congress” to formulate a unified response to Parliament’s “Intolerable Acts,” as they were deemed. They established a boycott of all British goods, urged all colonies to raise militias, and sent a politely worded petition of grievances to King George III, which was promptly ignored upon receipt.

Meanwhile, in Concord, Massachusetts, a “Provincial Congress” established itself and assumed the right to govern the province, collect taxes, buy supplies, and raise a militia. Headed and partially funded by John Hancock, it was the colonists’ first independent government body. It quickly ordered artillery, mortars, bombshells, thousands of arms and bayonets, and authorized the training of “minute men” to be ready in a moment’s notice for battle.

After years of high rhetoric in praise of man’s liberty and in condemnation of attempts at enslavement, the self-appointed rebel government soon found itself petitioned by four African slaves to “take our deplorable case into serious consideration, and give us that ample relief which, as men, we have a natural right to.” After some debate, the Provincial Congress rejected the motion to consider the slavery issue.

In March 1775, amid rumors that the British would soon round up the rebel leaders and have them tried in England, the Virginia legislature met in a church hall in Richmond. There, Patrick Henry made an impassioned call for armed rebellion. “We must fight!” he implored. “Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Chapter Title

Revolution!

America - Chapter 3

The Flame Is Spread Through All The Continent And One Colony Supports Another In Their Disobedience To Superior Powers

1770 — 1775

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Chapter End

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