American Tempest by Harlow Giles Unger

Author:Harlow Giles Unger
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780306819766
Publisher: Da Capo Press

The Boston Massacre. Paul Revere’s engraving of the event, copied without permission from a drawing by Henry Pelham, the half-brother of portrait artist John Singleton Copley. Pelham threatened legal action against Revere for the theft. (BOSTONIAN SOCIETY)

In the days after the massacre, Sam Adams, Cushing, and Josiah Quincy, a lawyer who was the youngest son of Colonel Josiah Quincy of Braintree, wrote influential friends in London, including former Massachusetts Governor Pownall, “acquainting them with the circumstances and facts relative to the late horrid massacre and asking the continuance of their good services in behalf of this town and province.” The letter was designed “to prevent any ill impressions from being made upon the minds of his Majesty’s ministers and others of the Town of Boston.”26

Although Governor Hutchinson tried to restore calm by appealing to the General Court for help, Sam Adams and his followers would have none of it. They packed meetings with three and four thousand people to shout, hoot, cheer, sing, and do whatever else they could to disrupt proceedings. On March 15, Hutchinson followed the example of his predecessor Governor Bernard and ordered the General Court to meet in mob-free Cambridge across the water from Boston. The Court met there intermittently over the next six months, in an increasingly frustrating debate over whether the governor had the constitutional right to tell the House where to meet. In a surprise split with Samuel Adams, Hancock supported the governor. He sensed a growing alienation of rural representatives toward Adams and the Boston radicals for forcing delegates from across the state to travel into the dirty streets of Boston every time the Assembly convened. They welcomed the opportunity to meet in Cambridge, and Hancock joined them. After weeks of inaction, however, the governor finally ordered the Court adjourned until the following year.

Despite Sam Adams’s efforts to rekindle the embers of violence, calmer voices began to prevail. Members of the Suffolk County Bar Association took the lead by organizing a force of three hundred lawyers, merchants, and other moderate townsmen to stand armed watch and patrol the town to prevent further mob violence. Equipped with a musket, bayonet, broadsword, and cartridge box, the short, round, thirty-five-year-old attorney John Adams volunteered for and took his regular turn on sentry duty outside Town House. Recalling the Boston Massacre, he later concluded, “On that night the foundation of American independence was laid.”27

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.