Conceived in Liberty (178 page)

To tighten enforcement, the Boston merchants in late July appointed a committee to inspect any vessels from Great Britain with goods condemned by the agreement, and to publish the names of violators. Another committee circulated a pledge among Boston inhabitants to boycott any merchant so publicized in the handbills as violators. Governor Hutchinson was outraged by the effectiveness of these measures. He was particularly outraged by such regular and vital functions being conducted by
purely private,
nongovernmental bodies: in short, by nonstate, revolutionary institutions springing up directly from among the people. So effective were the committees that in early August most of the merchants named in the original handbills hastened to recant, and to promise to abide by the agreement.

Pressing their advantage, the Boston Committee of Merchants in mid-August condemned the remaining recalcitrants as “Enemies to the Constitution of their Country” and urged their boycott. The list now included John Mein, who stepped up his attacks to a level of continuousness. One unfair and misleading
charge said that the signing merchants themselves, including the eminent Hancock, were secret violators of the nonimportation agreement. Anguished and lengthy denials by the victims of Mein’s smear attacks did not at all deter him from compiling his charges into a large book, which was then widely distributed by eager customs officials throughout the colonies. Mein’s shrewd aim was to split the libertarian movement, and to sow distrust of the Boston leaders in the other provinces.

John Mein’s widely disseminated libel had a chilling effect in the colonies, and gravely weakened the zeal of the nonimportation movement even among the radical cadres in New York, Newport, and Philadelphia. Mein’s campaign also emboldened the nonsigning merchants and heartened Hutchinson’s consistent attempts to induce Parliament to outlaw boycott agreements.

The liberals reacted by stepping up their pressure campaign. The Boston Town Meeting, in early October, condemned the seven recalcitrant merchants, and resolved to enter their names on the town records so that “posterity may know who those persons were that preferred their little private advantages to the common interests of all the colonies....” The merchants, backed perhaps by hints of destruction of the recalcitrants’ property, then forced the sons and nephews of Hutchinson into line. Now there remained only three merchants, including Mein, whose names were advertised as “Those (who)
AUDACIOUSLY
continue to counteract the
UNITED SENTIMENTS
of the body of merchants throughout North America.” Of these, of course, the most hated was John Mein. The Free American Fire Company expelled Mein from membership, and the seniors of Harvard College resolved never again to have dealings with him. Finally, harsher measures were taken and his property was defaced and his person threatened.

Mein, it should be noted, was the inevitable focus of a growing climate of violence in Boston. In the first place, Mein had never been forgiven for the brutal and sudden clubbing of John Gill, a co-editor of the
Boston Gazette,
a year and a half earlier, an attack that Sam Adams and James Otis denounced as a “Spaniard-like attempt” on a free press. A far more precipitating event was a brutal crime that stunned the whole town of Boston. The liberals’ popular leader James Otis had denounced the customs board commissioners in the
Gazette
of September 4, 1769, for maligning the liberals as rebels and traitors. The next night, in brutal retaliation, John Robinson, one of the commissioners who had been so cordially hated a few years earlier in Rhode Island, set upon Otis with a gang of toughs and beat him unmercifully. From this assault Otis never recovered, having been rendered permanently insane. Boston’s beloved leader had fallen martyr to Tory violence, to what the aggrieved Sam Adams and the
Gazette
charged was an “intended and nearly executed assassination.” The people of Boston were ready to retaliate.

And so on October 28 a street crowd gathered against Mein and his coeditor John Fleeming. The frightened Mein shot into the crowd, wounding an
innocent bystander. Some angry citizens swore out a warrant against Mein “for having put innocent people in bodily fear.” Mein fled for his life to his spiritual home on a British vessel and thence to England, where the grateful King George awarded Mein a handsome pension for his diligent services.

The hated Tory Mein had finally been routed, but his venomous work went on. His faithful ally Fleeming continued to publish the
Chronicle,
and to publish and distribute updated editions of his and Mein’s compendium of charges against the nonimporting merchants of Boston. Finally, however, Mein’s heavy debts and the dwindling of subscriptions and advertisements caught up with the enterprise. John Hancock was able triumphantly to take possession of the paper in behalf of Mein’s creditors. By late June 1770, the voice of the most dangerous Tory organ in America, the
Boston Chronicle,
had finally been stilled.

The Boston nonimport movement, however, still faced grave problems. The original Boston agreement was scheduled to expire at the beginning of 1770. But in mid-October the merchants had joined their brethren in other
colonies by
continuing the agreement until repeal
of
the Townshend Acts. Many of the reluctant merchants grew restive at this turn of events and at the turn of the year eight began to bolt the agreement. A mass meeting of nonimporting merchants began in mid-January to sit in continuing session, the better to put pressure on truants. The eight offenders were unanimously condemned by the more than a thousand persons present, as having forfeited all confidence of their fellow men. The whole crowd then quietly visited each delinquent in turn, but four still refused to yield. By January 23, the merchants voted to withhold from the stubborn four “not only all commercial dealings but every act and office of common civility.”

Governor Hutchinson seized the occasion of the meeting to precipitate a test of strength with the merchants. He sent a message to the meeting denouncing it as illegal and its actions as terroristic. He ordered them to disperse and ban “all such unlawful assemblies for the future.” Later Hutchinson was able to induce the Council to approve his actions by a slim majority. The merchants, however, continued undaunted as before and the justices of the peace refused to act against them.

It is important here to distinguish between two
types
of violence: violence committed by the people against their oppressors or the allies of their oppressors (for example, the Stamp Act riots against Hutchinson, the intimidation of John Mein), and the violence used by the oppressors against the people or their leaders (for instance, the assault on Otis, the Massacre of St. George’s Fields). The difference is not simply a question of which side one may favor.
The former is the eruption of the people in indignation or rebellion against that minority that has arms of the state apparatus concentrated in its hands.
This
use of violence is a casting off of the unwanted rule-by-violence of a ruling clique. On the other hand, violence
against
the people by the (invariably better armed) ruling clique is a panicky attempt to stem the rising tide of indignation by the people, and to use the state’s means of violence to yoke its unwanted rule even more burdensomely to the neck of society. Violence by a rebellious populace is an attempt to overthrow the camouflaged everyday violence of rule by the state over the people. Open violence by the state is an attempt to use extra measures to sit on the shaky lid. The former violence is therefore in essence
defensive,
whereas the latter is offensive or
aggressive
beyond the everyday norm.

Violence against
individuals
is also very different in the two cases. Violence against state officials is an attempt by a rebellious people to cast off their rule. Violence against individual leaders of the people (Otis, for instance) reveals the unending tendency of oppressors to think of a revolutionary movement as being not a genuine mass movement based on real grievances, but a frenzied mob whipped up by a few radical and obstreperous demagogues. Violence against customs officials was an
inherent part
of the revolt against tyranny. The assault on Otis not only was purely vindictive, but also reflected the tyrannical Tory error of shifting blame from mass grievances to supposedly diabolic leaders who were seducing a people otherwise happy and content with their rulers and their lot. This error, of course, is a highly convenient one for the rulers to make, for it allows them to state that the hearts of a seemingly rebellious people
really
belong to their masters.

Violence had been building up in Boston since the arrival of the British troops in late 1768. Boston had to contend with troops and customs commissioners as well as with reluctant merchants. The liberals had not succeeded in mounting resistance to the landing of the troops, but, once there, they waged an unremitting campaign for the liberation of Boston. Sam Adams and James Otis led a campaign of persistent and indefatigable agitation and struggle. Particularly significant was the widening of the campaign beyond the weekly readership of the
Boston Gazette.
The campaign was superbly planned. An inner group of radical leaders wrote a daily account of the pettiness and brutality committed by the troops upon the people of Boston, and each week a record was sent to New York City, to John Holt, libertarian editor of the
New York Journal.
Holt published these items as the
Journal of Occurrences
or
Journal of the Times.
He then distributed the
Journal
widely throughout the colonies; it was reprinted in numerous newspapers from Massachusetts to Georgia. Authors of the
Journal
included Sam Adams; William Cooper, Boston town clerk and brother of the libertarian clergyman the Reverend Samuel Cooper; and the radical councillor James Bowdoin, a wealthy merchant of Boston.

During the summer of 1769, two of the four British regiments were removed, and Thomas Hutchinson replaced Bernard as governor. But the lessened power of the troops did not endear them more. Furthermore, the rumor spread that England planned to alter the precious Massachusetts constitution. The Boston Town Meeting again insisted on the repeal of the Townshend and other duties, as well as the recall of the customs commissioners and troops. The popular radical leaders continued their pressure. Numerous festivals (such as on the anniversary of the great Stamp Act riots) were promoted by Adams, Otis, and the Sons of Liberty to rally the people for liberty against its enemies; at such gala events toasts were drunk to commemorate the hallowed numbers 45 and 92, and calls were issued for
“strong halters, firm blocks,
and
sharp axes
to all such as deserve them.”

Agitation against the troops was supplemented by sterner measures. The people of Boston made it clear to the troops that they were unwelcome there. Occasionally, isolated soldiers were beaten up on the streets by groups of Bostonians. Soldiers aggressing against citizens were promptly hauled into court.

As a result of the persistence and fortitude of the Bostonians, the British troops began to grow ineffectual in enforcing the trade acts. For fear of popular upheaval, the civil authorities grew wary in calling on troops for their support. Thus, in late October 1769, Governor Hutchinson wanted to use troops against a mob that had seized a hated customs informer, but was warned off by the advice of the Council, sheriff, and justices of the peace. Also in late October, a crowd attacked a British troop with sticks and stones and forced it to disperse. The agitated Colonel William Dalrymple, commander of the troops, blustered that this incident was “but a prelude” and that “never was the popular insolence at such a pitch.”

Nonimportation, British troops, liberal agitation, mounting climate of violence, increasing edginess and ineffectuality of the soldiers—all culminated and came fatefully to a head in early 1770.

The culminating crisis unsurprisingly arose from the pressuring of the four mercantile holdouts against nonimportation: John Taylor, Theophilus Lillie, William Jackson, and Nathaniel Rogers, nephew of Governor Hutchinson. On February 22, some schoolboys led a crowd in placing an effigy of the four importers at the door of Theophilus Lillie. Seeing this, the “infamous informer” Ebenezer Richardson denounced the boys and tried to destroy the effigy. The appearance of the reviled customs informer was just what was needed to inflame the crowd, which pursued him to his house crying “Informer! Informer!” There the boys threw rocks at his house, whereupon the panicky Tory Richardson fired repeatedly into the crowd, killing eleven-year-old Christopher Snider and wounding the eleven-year-old son of Captain John Gore. The effect of this massacre of the children on Boston public opinion can readily be imagined. Richardson himself barely escaped being hanged on the spot. The four miscreant importers either left town or mounted an
armed guard. The funeral procession for little Christopher Snider, organized by the Sons of Liberty, was two miles long, perhaps the largest ever gathered in America. The huge funeral, significantly enough, was patterned after the Wilkite funeral in England for the innocent victim of the Massacre of St. George’s Fields. To the Boston liberals the murder of young Snider recalled the tragic assault upon Otis, “the object of the fury of the cursed cabal.” But Snider was “the first, whose
LIFE
has been a victim to the cruelty and rage of
oppressors!”
The
Boston Gazette
thundered that “the blood of
young Allen
[the victim at St. George’s Fields] may be covered in
Britain.
But a thorough inquisition would be made
in America
for that of
young Snider,
which crieth for vengeance, like the blood of the righteous
Abel.”

The killing of young Snider would not be the final incident. In less than two weeks, on March 2 and 3, clashes occurred between Bostonians and the troops. British complaints were to draw retorts by the Massachusetts Council that the evident solution was to withdraw the troops. For their part, the populace believed the customs commissioners (the bosses of Richardson) to be implicated in the child murder, and were indignant at the soldiers being used to guard the hated commissioners at the customhouse.