On the impact of both Joyce Junior and the tarring and feathering of John Malcom on the English press, see R. T. H. Halsey, The Boston Port Bill as Pictured by a Contemporary London Cartoonist, pp. 82–143; Halsey reprints the account of Malcom being forced to drink large quantities of tea as well as the engravings it inspired, pp. 82–86, 92. The March 28, 1774, description of Americans as a “strange set of people” by a member of the House of Commons was reprinted in the Boston Gazette on May 16, 1774. Benjamin Thatcher refers to how John Malcom took a piece of his own tarred-and-feathered skin to London with him in Traits of the Tea Party, p. 133. Frank Hersey in “Tar and Feathers” quotes from John Malcom’s petition to the king in which he asks to be made “a single Knight of the Tar,” p. 463.
Chapter Two—Poor Unhappy Boston
On Thomas Gage’s background and his wife Margaret Kemble Gage, see John Richard Alden’s General Gage in America, pp. 19–204. For a less sympathetic portrayal of Gage, see John Shy’s “Thomas Gage: Weak Link of Empire,” pp. 3–38, in vol. 2 of George Washington’s Generals and Opponents, edited by George Athan Billias. David Hackett Fischer in Paul Revere’s Ride quotes Gage’s letter comparing London to Constantinople or “any other city I had never seen” (p. 40). Carl Van Doren provides a detailed account of Franklin’s experience in the Cockpit in Benjamin Franklin, pp. 461–77. Gage’s comments about Franklin are in a note in Alden’s General Gage in America, p. 200. King George’s description of his meeting with Gage is in no. 1379—“The King to Lord North,” in CKG, p. 59. Gage describes America as “a bully” in a November 12, 1770, letter to Lord Barrington, cited in Alden’s General Gage in America, p. 188. On navigating the islands of Boston Harbor, I have relied on Nathaniel Shurtleff, A Topographical and Historical Description of Boston, pp. 416–578. Bernard Bailyn provides a probing portrait of Thomas Hutchinson in The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson; I am also indebted to several unpublished manuscripts by John Tyler, who is editing a new edition of Hutchinson’s letters. Andrew Walmsley’s Thomas Hutchinson and the Origins of the American Revolution is a succinct analysis of how the governor served as a scapegoat for the patriots.
For the text of the Port Act, see Province in Rebellion (subsequently referred to as PIR), edited by L. Kinvin Wroth et al., 1:44–51. For the text of Josiah Quincy Jr.’s “Observations on . . . the Boston Port-Bill,” see Josiah Quincy’s Memoir, pp. 359–469. Gage speaks of giving the Port Bill “time to operate” in a May 19, 1774, letter to Lord Dartmouth, Correspondence of Thomas Gage, p. 355. On Faneuil Hall, see Abram Brown’s Faneuil Hall and Market, pp. 123–30. Thomas Young describes Faneuil Hall as “a noble school” in a March 22, 1770, letter cited by Ray Raphael in Founders, pp. 80–81. Peter Oliver speaks of a meeting of the House of Representatives as “a pandemonium” in OPAR, p. 67. Peter Shaw in American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution writes about conscience patriotism (pp. 23–24); he also writes insightfully about the psychic toll of the Revolution on such patriots as James Otis (pp. 77–108); John Adams (pp. 109–30); Joseph Hawley (pp. 131–52); and Josiah Quincy Jr. (pp. 152–75). John Adams tells of his uncontrolled outburst in an entry in his diary made in late December 1772 in Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 2:75–76. In his Autobiography (vol. 3 of his Writings), Adams describes a revealing exchange between himself and Joseph Warren regarding the psychological cost of the patriot movement. According to Adams, Warren frequently and unsuccessfully urged him to “harangue” at Boston town meetings. “My answer to him always was, ‘that way madness lies.’ The symptoms of our great friend Otis, at that time, suggested to Warren a sufficient comment on these words at which he always smiled and said, ‘it was true’ ” (p. 291). Henry Adams’s reference to his Boston ancestors being “ambitious beyond reason to excel” is cited by Walter McDougall in Freedom Just Around the Corner, p. 147. Gillian Anderson in the “The Funeral of Samuel Cooper” cites the references to “silver-tongued Sam” and to his “ductility,” p. 657. Clifford Shipton cites the reference to Cooper’s eventual mental breakdown being attributed to “the inordinate use of Scotch snuff,” SHG, 11:211. In a March 15, 1773, letter to Benjamin Franklin, Cooper refers to having spent the winter “confined to my house . . . by my valetudinary state, and been little able to see and converse with my friends,” The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 20:110.
On Samuel Adams, see the biographies by John Miller, William Fowler, Ira Stoll, and Mark Puls. Adams seems to have been a “revolutionary ascetic,” of the type described in Bruce Mazlish’s book of the same name. In an April 4, 1774, letter to Arthur Lee, Adams writes of the future he sees for America and England: “It requires but a small gift of discernment for anyone to foresee that providence will erect a mighty empire in America, and our posterity will have it recorded in history, that their fathers migrated from an island in a distant part of the world, [the inhabitants of which] were at last absorbed in luxury and dissipation; and to support themselves in their vanity and extravagance they coveted and seized the honest earnings of those industrious emigrants. This laid a foundation of distrust, animosity and hatred, till the emigrants, feeling their own vigor and independence, dissolved every former band of connection between them and the islanders sunk into obscurity and contempt” (p. 82). On the population and number of towns in Massachusetts, see L. Kinvin Wroth’s interpretive essay in PIR, 1:1–3. Richard D. Brown’s Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts is an excellent study of the Boston Committee of Correspondence and the towns; for the beginnings of the committee, see pp. 38–122. G. B. Warden also provides a useful account of the committee’s activities in Boston, 1689–1776, pp. 241–74. Brown cites the town of Gorham’s January 7, 1773, letter to the Boston Committee of Correspondence in Revolutionary Politics, p. 118. For the exchange between Hutchinson and the House of Representatives in early 1773, see The Briefs of the American Revolution, edited by John Phillip Reid, pp. 7–102. On the May 13, 1774, town meeting, see the minutes in Boston Town Records, 1770–1777, pp. 171–74.
Charles Bahne calculates the cost of the East India Tea lost on December 16, 1773, in the Friday, December 18, 2009, entry of J. L. Bell’s blog Boston 1775, http://boston1775.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-much-was-tea-in-tea-party-worth.html. Stephen Patterson writes of Samuel Adams’s political maneuvering at the expense of John Rowe and other merchants in Political Parties in Revolutionary Massachusetts, pp. 74–83. Gage’s arrival and reception at Straight Wharf on May 17 is detailed in the May 23, 1774, issue of the Boston Gazette. On John Hancock, see Herbert Allan’s John Hancock: Patriot in Purple, William Fowler’s The Baron of Beacon Hill, and Harlow Giles Unger’s John Hancock: Merchant King and American Patriot. John Andrews details the falling out between Hancock and Gage in entries written on August 16 and 17, 1774, in “Letters of John Andrews” (subsequently referred to as LJA): 342–43. Reverend Gad Hitchcock’s May 25, 1774, sermon preached before General Gage is in PIR, 1:299–322. Gage’s rejection of the patriot councillors is described in an article in the May 30, 1774, Boston Gazette, which also reprints the speech Gage gave before both houses of the General Court.
John Rowe tells of where the British naval ships were stationed around Boston Harbor in the May 29, 1774, entry of his Diary, pp. 272–73; his reference to “Poor unhappy Boston” is made on June 1, 1774 (p. 273). Francis Drake in Tea Leaves recounts how John Rowe asked, “Who knows how tea will mingle with salt water?” at the Old South Meetinghouse prior to the night of the Tea Party (p. 63). Rowe expresses regret for the Tea Party as well as criticism of the ministry’s response in a June 2, 1774, entry in his Diary, p. 274. In a May 30, 1774, letter to Charles Thomson, Samuel Adams writes of how the “yeomanry . . . must finally save this country” (Writings, 3:99). A transcript of the Solemn League and Covenant is in PIR, 1:453–59. John Andrews voices his disapproval of the League and Covenant in a June 12, 1774, entry in LJA, p. 329. John Rowe tells of the arrival of the Fourth and Forty-Third Regiments on June 14 and 15, 1774, in his Diary, p. 275. Captain
Harris writes of the sentries on the common hurling stones at the cows and of the lushness of the grass in an August 7, 1774, letter, in S. R. Lushington, The Life and Services of General Lord Harris, p. 34. John Andrews complains of the inconvenience and cost of shipping goods overland from Salem to Boston in letters written on August 1, 20, and November 9 (pp. 336, 344, 383). John Rowe describes Boston’s “distressed situation” in a June 12, 1774, entry of his Diary, p. 275.
Chapter Three—The Long Hot Summer
I am indebted to Kinvin Wroth and his fellow editors for the title of this chapter; part 3 of volume 1 of their compilation of primary sources in PIR is entitled “Long Hot Summer: June 18–Sept. 28, 1774.” The reference to “an attack upon one colony was an attack upon all” is in Edmund Burnett, The Continental Congress, p. 20. Robert Treat Paine, in a 1795 note in the Robert Treat Paine Papers, MHS, recounts how in June 1774 he contributed to Samuel Adams’s plan to prevent Daniel Leonard from interfering with the selection of delegates for the Continental Congress. William Hanna includes an account of the Paine-Leonard incident in his History of Taunton, pp. 100–101. Ralph Davol in Two Men of Taunton tells the story of Daniel Leonard, Thomas Hutchinson, and the Tory pear tree, pp. 208–9. On Daniel Leonard, see the biography in James Henry Stark, The Loyalists of Massachusetts, pp. 325–32. Gage’s proclamation dissolving the General Court on June 17, 1774, is in Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts, vol. 5 (1773–74,) p. 291. Thomas Young describes the gathering of “very important and agreeable company” at Joseph Warren’s house in a June 19, 1774, letter cited by Richard Frothingham in his Life of Joseph Warren (LJW), p. 325. In addition to Frothingham’s biography of Warren, there is John Cary, Joseph Warren: Physician, Politician, and Patriot, and Samuel A. Forman, Dr. Joseph Warren (DJW). As in many matters relating to Joseph Warren, I am indebted both to Forman’s book and to my correspondence with Forman since his book’s publication; Forman provided me with input on Warren’s eye color in a March 1, 2012, e-mail. In Paul Revere Esther Forbes writes of Warren, “He had a mobile face . . . and the ‘fine color’ so much admired. In his portrait his hair is powdered, but his coloring and even the shape of his face suggest he was very blond” (p. 66). Warren’s account and ledger books (the first for 1763–68, the second running from May 3, 1774, to May 8, 1775) are at the MHS. The ledger book provides almost a daily record of the patients he saw and what he prescribed for each of them; his first mention of “Miss Mercy Scollay” is on May 30, 1774.
Forman analyzes Warren’s medical practice in DJW, pp. 107–8, 335–44; he also provides a physician’s perspective on Warren’s possession of “the touch”: “that ephemeral human quality enabling [a physician] to connect with patients in a way that, quite aside from treatments we would view as archaic, made people feel at ease, confident and healed. It is much more than the placebo effect of a sugared pill, rather a human and humane interaction depending on communication, compassion, and a transmittable confidence that a health condition, no matter how grave, could be dealt with in the best possible way” (pp. 88–89). J. P. Jewett in The Hundred Boston Orators refers to the position of Warren’s pew (“opposite the old southern door, in the body of the house”) at the Brattle Street Meetinghouse; he also mentions that in 1835, when the site of Warren’s house on Hanover Street was excavated, “wired skulls, from his anatomical room, were discovered” (p. 48). Forman in DJW cites William Gordon’s claim that Warren was “judged handsome by the ladies,” p. 179; he also speculates that Warren and Hooten’s first child was conceived out of wedlock, p. 182.
Samuel Forman hypothesizes that the John Singleton Copley painting titled Lady in a Blue Dress at the Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago is that of Mercy Scollay at age twenty-two (DJW, p. 379). Edward Warren, the son of Joseph Warren’s younger brother John, describes Mercy Scollay as “a woman of great energy and depth of character” in his Life of John Warren, M.D., p. 87. The poem “On Female Vanity” appears in the June 1774 issue of Isaiah Thomas’s Royal American Magazine. In an introduction that precedes the poem, Thomas explains how he came to publish the poem: “I was lately in a company, where the conversation turned to the non-consumption agreement. . . . One of the company desired a lady to give him a list of the necessaries of life for a fine lady, and she soon sent him an elegant copy of verses; which falling into my hands I enclose to you.” “On Female Vanity” appears under the title “To the Hon. J. Winthrop, Esq.” in Mercy Otis Warren’s 1790 collection Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous. My thanks to J. L. Bell for identifying Mercy Otis Warren as the poem’s author. In a September 27, 1774, letter to Mercy Otis Warren, Hannah Winthrop repeats the rumor that the poem was written by Mercy Scollay and that Joseph Warren was “the gentleman who requested it” (in Warren-Adams Letters, 1:33).
The June 27–28, 1774, town meeting minutes are in Boston Town Records, 1770–1777, pp. 177–80. Richard D. Brown in Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts includes a detailed account of the town meeting and cites Jonathan Williams’s letter describing the meeting’s first day and the fact that there were “many people just idle enough to attend”; Brown writes, “The test revealed the limits of the Boston committee’s capacity for political leadership . . . always resting on continuous public consent rather than any formal, institutionalized authority” (pp. 196–99). John Andrews’s account of the meeting is in a July 22, 1774, entry in LJA, pp. 330–32. See also Stephen Patterson, Political Parties in Revolutionary Boston, pp. 83–85. John Rowe writes of the overwhelming vote in favor of the Committee of Correspondence in the June 28 entry of his Diary, p. 277. Gage complains of the “timidity and backwardness” of the loyalists in a July 5, 1774, letter to Dartmouth, in Correspondence of Thomas Gage, p. 359. The June 1774 propaganda sheet inviting the soldiers to desert is in the Gage Papers at the Clements Library. Thomas Hutchinson writes of Gage’s unsettling letter to his wife in an August 20, 1774, entry in his Diary, 1:223–24. John Rowe records the arrival of Admiral Graves, General Percy, and the Fifth and Thirty-Eighth regiments in his Diary, p. 277. One of the best portraits of Percy during his time in Boston, even if heightened by more than a few fictional flourishes, is provided by Harold Murdock’s Earl Percy’s Dinner Table. Of note to J. K. Rowling fans, the Percy ancestral estate known as Alnwick Castle in Northumberland served as Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter films. Lieutenant Williams of the Twenty-Third Regiment writes of the large number of prostitutes in Boston in a June 12, 1775, entry in his Journal: “Perhaps no town of its size could turn out more whores than this could. They have left us an ample sample of them” (p. 5). Mount Whoredom appears on several British maps of Boston made during the siege. John Andrews refers to the incident at Mrs. Erskine’s and the violent encounter after that, as well as to Percy’s attempts to see that justice was done, in an August 1, 1774, entry in LJA, pp. 333–35.
The many letters chronicling the donations to Boston are contained in “Correspondence, in 1774–1775, between a committee of the town of Boston and contributors of donations for the relief of the sufferers by the Boston Port Bill,” in MHS Collections, 4th ser., 4:1–275. John Andrews mentions the donations from South Carolina, Marblehead, and Connecticut and the public works projects in an August 1, 1774, letter in LJA, p. 337; he complains of how “middling people” are the ones on whom “the burthen falls heaviest,” in an August 20 letter, p. 344. The Massachusetts Government and Justice Acts as they were received by Gage are reprinted in PIR, 1:506–19; in a postscript to Gage (also in PIR, 1:519–22), Lord Dartmouth appended the recently passed (on June 2, 1774) Quartering Act. On the Quebec Act, see chapter 6, “The Problem of Quebec,” in Peter Thomas’s Tea Party to Independence: The Third Phase of the American Revolution, pp. 88–117. John Andrews describes how Parliament’s punitive acts “encouraged the sons of freedom to persevere . . . and confirmed the lukewarm that were staggering” in an August 25 letter; he tells how “every denomination of people” disapproved of Lord North in an Aug
ust 11 letter; both in LJA, pp. 347, 341. Thomas Young’s August 19, 1774, letter to Samuel Adams about the huge volume of correspondence being received by the committee is cited by Richard Frothingham in LJW, p. 343.
Joseph Warren’s reference to the “glorious stands” appears in the October 7, 1765, issue of the Boston Gazette under the byline “B. W.” Following up on an identification provided by Warren’s contemporary Harbottle Dorr, Warren biographer John Cary finds “stylistic characteristics” that confirm the piece as Warren’s, especially the “inordinate number of imperative sentences charging the people to action,” in Joseph Warren, p. 43. Frothingham in LJW, p. 405, reprints Warren’s “A Song of Liberty,” which was sung to the tune of “The British Grenadier.” The loyalist Peter Oliver in OPAR claims that Warren’s earlier financial problems were solved by marrying “a tolerable sum of money; he also took administration on part of a gentleman’s estate which he appropriated to his own use” (p. 128). This is a reference to Warren’s curious role as court-appointed administrator of the estate of the merchant Nathaniel Wheelwright, whose bankruptcy in 1765 proved the financial undoing of many Boston merchants, including John Scollay, father to Mercy. Wheelwright left Boston and died of yellow fever in Guadeloupe in 1766, and in 1767, Warren became administrator of the Wheelwright estate; see J. L. Bell, “A Bankruptcy in Boston, 1765,” Massachusetts Banker, fourth quarter, 2008, pp. 14, 16, 18, 23. Peter Oliver also makes the claim that by 1774, Warren’s devotion to the patriot cause “had reduced his finances to a very low ebb. He was now forced to strike any bold stroke that offered” (OPAR, p. 128). According to Edward Warren, in Life of John Warren, p. 33, Joseph Warren “was of a free and liberal disposition, and never acquired any rigid notions of economy”; Edward Warren also describes Joseph Warren’s copartnership with James Latham, “surgeon in the King’s or 8th Regiment of foot” to erect a smallpox hospital at Point Shirley in Chelsea (p. 21), adding, “It is certainly curious to see Joseph Warren at this time, July 1774, forming a partnership for 21 years with a surgeon in his majesty’s regiment of foot. . . . It is very certain that [he did not have] any idea or wish at this time for a separation from the mother country” (pp. 40–41). In a letter written to John Hancock on May 21, 1776, Mercy Scollay refers to Warren’s partnership in the hospital as a possible source of income for his now orphaned children, who “might be benefited by their father’s part of the profits” (at CHS). Joseph Warren insists “that nothing is more foreign from our hearts than a spirit of rebellion” in an early June letter to Charles Thompson cited by Richard Frothingham in LJW, p. 332. Mercy Scollay’s sister Priscilla and her husband, Thomas Melvill, were destined to become the grandparents of the novelist Herman Melville, whose father added a final e to the family name.