Bunker Hill

never was tarred and feathered anyhow.”
    This was too much for Malcom, who took up his cane and smashed Hewes in the head, ripping a two-inch gash in his hat and knocking him unconscious. When Hewes came to his senses, a Captain Godfrey was admonishing Malcom, who soon decided to beat a hasty retreat to his home on Cross Street.
    All that afternoon word of the incident circulated through the streets of Boston. By eight o’clock in the evening, an angry crowd had assembled outside Malcom’s house. By that time Hewes had visited Dr. Joseph Warren, just across the Mill Bridge on nearby Hanover Street. Both a physician and a distant relative, Warren had told him that if it weren’t for his extraordinarily thick skull, Hewes would be a dead man. On Warren’s advice, Hewes applied to a town official for a warrant for Malcom’s arrest, but it now seemed that a different kind of justice was about to be served.
    Earlier in the evening, Malcom had taken a manic delight in baiting the crowd, bragging that Governor Hutchinson would pay him a bounty of twenty pounds sterling for every “yankee” that he killed. His undoubtedly long-suffering wife, the mother of five children (two of whom were deaf), opened a window and pleaded with the townspeople to leave them alone. Whatever sympathy she had managed to gain soon vanished when Malcom pushed his unsheathed sword through the window and stabbed a man in the breastbone.
    The crowd swarmed around the house, breaking windows and trying to get at the customs official, who soon fled up the stairs to the second story. Many Bostonians served as volunteer firemen, and men equipped with ladders and axes were soon rushing toward the besieged house on Cross Street. Even Malcom appears to have realized that matters had taken a serious turn, and he prepared “to make what defense he could.”
    Nine years before, this section of the city had been the scene of one of the most notorious acts of violence ever directed against an official in colonial America. On August 26, 1765, as outrage over the Stamp Act swept across the colonies, a mob of several hundred Bostonians attacked the home of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, breaking windows, beating down doors, and destroying the house’s elaborate furnishings. Hutchinson was also a historian, and countless manuscript pages were found scattered in the street—a fact that moved the lawyer Daniel Leonard to suggest that the crowd had acted not out of anger over the Stamp Act but to prevent the publication of yet another ponderously written volume of Hutchinson’s history of Massachusetts.
    Collective violence had been a long-standing part of colonial New England, a trait the English settlers had brought from the mother country. Crowds tended to intervene when government officials acted against the interests of the people. In 1747 a riot had broken out in Boston when a naval press gang seized several local sailors. Twenty-three years later, anger over the depredations of yet another press gang contributed to the
Liberty
Riot of 1768, triggered by the seizure of John Hancock’s ship of the same name by Boston customs officials. In that the crowds were attempting to address unpunished wrongs committed against the community, they were a recognized institution that all Bostonians—no matter how wealthy and influential they might be—ignored at their peril. But as John Malcom was about to find out on that frigid night in January 1774, and as Thomas Hutchison had learned almost a decade before him, the divide between a civic-minded crowd and an unruly and vindictive mob was frighteningly thin.
    —
    Malcom and his family huddled in their home’s second floor. A locked door stood between them and the angry crowd down below. They heard the thud of the ladders against the sides of the house and the cries of the men and boys as they climbed up to the second-story windows and punched through the glass. It was then that “a Mr. Russell,” perhaps William Russell, an usher (or teaching assistant) at a school on Hanover Street, appeared inside the house. Smiling broadly, he assured Malcom that he came in friendship and shook the customs officer’s hand. He then asked if he could see Malcom’s sword. Desperate for whatever assistance he could find, Malcom reluctantly handed over the weapon, only to watch as Russell (who, if he indeed was William Russell, had participated in the Tea Party) called out to the others in the house that Malcom was