Desperate Sons: Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Hancock, and the Secret Bands of Radicals Who Led the Colonies to War

318 Pages·2012·1.45 MB·English

by  Les Standiford

DESPERATE SONS
Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Hancock, and the
Secret Bands of Radicals Who Led the Colonies to War
LES STANDIFORD
Dedication
This book is dedicated to don of dons Phil Sullivan,
who taught me to be suspicious of knowledge
and to treasure wisdom.
And to the memory of Zander,
who lived his brief life fully.
Epigraph
I write these things as they seem true to me,
for the stories told by the Greeks
are various and in my opinion absurd.
—HECATAEUS THE MILESIAN,
father of history,
fifth century BC

You haven’t got a revolution
that doesn’t involve bloodshed.
—MALCOLM X
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note

1 - O Albany!
2 - Measures Illegal, Unconstitutional, and Oppressive
3 - The Sons Are Born
4 - Storm Before the Calm
5 - Nourished by Indulgence
6 - Unleashed
7 - Strong Drink in Plenty
8 - Murderer of Rights and Privileges
9 - Morning After
10 - Hornets and Firebrands
11 - From Airy Nothing
12 - First to Blink
13 - Better Days
14 - Townshend Fans the Flames
15 - The Road to Massacre
16 - Affray in King Street
17 - Trial of the Century
18 - Charred to the Waterline
19 - Prelude to a Party
20 - Mad Hatter’s Ball
21 - Intolerable
22 - Congress of Sons
23 - Shot Around the World
24 - The Conqueror Silent Sleeps
25 - Shade of Paradise
26 - What Remains

Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Also by Les Standiford
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Acknowledgments
I am greatly indebted to many who helped me find my way through this
undertaking, including my stalwart guide through the stacks both near and far,
Adis Beesting, reference librarian at Florida International University. Special
thanks are also due James R. Kelly, humanities bibliographer at the W. E. B. Du
Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts, who was so helpful during the
early floundering days.
Many thanks as well to my editor, Bill Strachan, who believed in this material
from the beginning and whose patience and encouragement allowed me to
persevere. I am also indebted to my agent, Kim Witherspoon, who unfailingly
provided me with assurance that it was possible.
As usual, I could count on James W. Hall and Mitchell Kaplan for careful
over-the-shoulder reading and invaluable conceptual advice, and I am equally
fortunate to have the careful proofing eyes of Bill Beesting and Brian Sullivan.
And as always, I am grateful for the support of so many friends and my family,
who have reminded me so often and for so long that such work is worthwhile:
Madeleine Blais; Mike and Liz Novak; Steve Leveen; my closest and most
faithful reader and mother-in-law, Rhoda Kurzweil; my wife, Kimberly; my son,
Jeremy; and my daughter, Hannah. I strive to do you all proud.
Author’s Note
Can there truly be anything left to say about the set of events that compose the
American Revolution? Possibly it is an odd question at the beginning of a book
about that very subject, but it is also the sort that this writer has asked himself
before.
Of course, it is the reader who is best positioned to give the final answer as to
whether a book should have been created, but on the other hand, and since there
is very little of the slightest historical import that has not been written about well
and truly, one might argue that we could, except for the production of the most
arcane treatises, leave off the writing of history altogether. I speak theoretically,
of course.
If someone asks me just what sort of history it is I aspire to, I might cite E. H.
Gombrich and his book A Little History of the World, in which he covers most
everything of importance from the Stone Age through the atomic bomb in 277
lyrical pages. Ostensibly the book was written for children, though if most of my
own graduate students came to class having mastered half of what Gombrich has
to give, I’d feel a minder of geniuses. “History begins,” Gombrich says, “with a
when and a where. It is 3100 BC, when, as we believe, a king named Menes was
ruling over Egypt. If you want to know exactly where Egypt is, I suggest you ask
a swallow. Every autumn, when it gets cold, swallows fly south. Over the
mountains to Italy, and on across a little stretch of sea, and then they’re in
Africa, in the part that lies nearest to Europe. Egypt is close by.” My kind of
history, if you want to know. Gombrich’s purpose is not to remake history but to
bring readers to a fresh appreciation of it.

In the present case, the story centers not so much on the individuals whose
names have become synonymous with the American Revolution: the activists
turned glorified statesmen such as John Hancock, George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams; and the familiar firebrand heroes
such as Paul Revere, Patrick Henry, Nathan Hale, and others. Nor did I wish to
tread the familiar ground of the revolutionary battlefield—once I reached the
moment where the “shot heard round the world” is fired, I reasoned, I would quit
the field. This, in fact, is the story of the group of men who brought the colonies
to that pass.
Academic historians have discussed the Sons of Liberty in discrete contexts
in numerous books and articles. And certainly a number of the struggles and the
exploits sometimes associated with the Sons of Liberty, including the Boston
Massacre, the Midnight Ride, and the Boston Tea Party, are prominent in the
popular consciousness—as are the names of Revere, John Adams, Hancock,
Henry, and others. But despite the drama and the importance of their role, I am
aware of no overarching work of narrative history focusing on the Sons of
Liberty in readying the colonies for battle against Great Britain, a step of such
magnitude that modern readers may find it difficult to truly appreciate: consider
for a moment that the counterculture movement of the 1960s had actually been
successful in toppling the U.S. government at gunpoint, and one might begin to
comprehend the accomplishment of the Sons.
My intention here is to tell the story surrounding a group of men who
propelled the country to the breaking point. Some of these men have been
termed the “Old Revolutionaries” by one prominent historian who has studied a
handful of them in depth, but the title is something of a misnomer. Certainly, it is
an epithet none would have ever visited upon themselves while in the thick of it.
These were vigorous men, men of action and of conviction. Most of them
were considered dangerous by the majority of the citizenry among whom they
lived, and some of them actually were. More than one was willing to commit
acts of violence in service of the causes that they espoused.
Yet, by the time a new nation was ready to be formed, few would find places
of prominence in its governance. For one thing, it was understood that if these
men were willing to destroy one system of government, what was to prevent
them from becoming impatient with the new one? True revolutionaries—men
willing to risk everything to topple a regime—simply cannot be trusted. Or to
put it a different way, one man’s patriot is another man’s terrorist.

The descriptions of events at the heart of this book are drawn largely from
letters, newspapers, historical accounts, broadsides, and other contemporary
documents. These materials reflect a growing unrest in the American colonies of
the 1760s and 1770s, and nearly simultaneous eruptions of acts of violence and
civil disobedience in Boston, New York, Providence, Charleston, and elsewhere.
There was a long history of friction between the colonies and the mother country
prior to 1765, of course, and although much was made of philosophy and
concepts such as liberty and the right to self-governance, a great deal of unrest in
the decade prior to the outbreak of war also came down to money.
Lest that all sound too venal, it should be understood that the operative
attitude of many colonists in late 1765 was that they were being bled dry by an
utterly indifferent British Parliament looking to bail out of its own overspending
by exploiting Britain’s colonies. The ability to run a successful business—or
indeed to earn a living—brave spokesmen such as Samuel Adams complained,
was being compromised by the ever-more-onerous tax legislation imposed upon
the colonies. Worse yet, the colonists had no say because such matters were
being debated thousands of miles away. In fact, when stated in this fashion, the
reasons for the discontent of the American colonists sound much like the
complaints of the contemporary citizens of Main Street when the possibility of
any new tax is mentioned in Congress or during presidential debates.
Nearly 250 years ago, a group of American citizens decided that the
conditions under which they were governed were intolerable; eventually they
realized that no change would be forthcoming as a result of mere complaint and
petition. Action would have to be taken. And because such actions were illegal,
often directed at individuals and property, and because they could be punished
by imprisonment and even death, their undertakings and the identities of those
who carried them out would by necessity be covert. In short, there was an almost
simultaneous eruption within the American colonies of cells of a secret radical
society committed to imposing forcible change upon the established government.
In some ways, this might sound like a description of what the Western world
is facing today in its war against terrorism. Who in recent years has not been
chilled by the specter of cells of terrorists springing up around the globe,
connected not by a flow of information and orders from some dogma-spewing
central leadership but rather by some nearly telepathic or genetic fury and a
sense of common purpose that transcend logic?
Many Americans shake their heads at such an incomprehensible scenario.
Who are these people? Why do they hate us so? How on earth could we have
come to such a pass? Why can they not be reasoned with? In fact, the British
were asking very similar questions about the American colonists as early as
1765.
Perhaps, then, there is something beyond mere amazement in tracing the