Bunker Hill

Boston, the third largest port in North America, would be effectively cut off from the rest of the colonies and the world. Vessels were to go instead to Marblehead, twenty miles to the north, with nearby Salem becoming the new seat of provincial government as Boston was left to contemplate the enormity of its transgressions. Only after its citizens had repented of their sins and paid for the destroyed tea would the king and his ministers allow prosperity to return.
    Bostonians were stunned by the severity of the act. An entire community had been punished for the actions of a hundred or so rabble-rousers. Contrary to Britain’s own laws, Bostonians had been tried and condemned without having even been accused of a specific crime. By May 13 Josiah Quincy Jr., the lawyer who had warned back in December that desperate times were ahead, had already written a passionate response to the Boston Port Act that ended by quoting the Athenian statesman Solon. It was far better, Solon had said, “to repress the advances of tyranny and prevent its establishment.” But once tyranny had managed to assert itself, there was only one alternative: “Demolish it.”
    The loyalists surrounding Gage insisted that this heated rhetoric indicated that the Port Act was doing exactly as Parliament had intended. “I hear from many,” he reported to Secretary of State Lord Dartmouth, “that the act has staggered the most presumptuous.” What the patriots needed, Gage felt, was a chance for the consequences of the act to set in. “Minds so enflamed cannot cool at once,” he wrote Dartmouth, “so it may be better to give the shock they have received time to operate.” But as it turned out, time was not on Gage’s side.
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    On the very day that Gage arrived at the Castle, a town meeting was convened at its usual place on the second story of Boston’s Faneuil Hall on Dock Square, just a block to the north of King Street. Hanging from the walls were portraits of Peter Faneuil, the wealthy merchant of Huguenot descent who paid for the building’s construction in the 1740s; of former Massachusetts governor William Shirley; and of Isaac Barré, one of the patriots’ most outspoken friends in Parliament (even if he had voted in support of the Port Bill). On the ground floor beneath the hall, which was said to accommodate upward of 1,500 people, were the stalls of the town market. Swinging in the sky above the building’s cupola was a grasshopper weathervane (similar to that on London’s Royal Exchange) fashioned by Deacon Shem Drowne, the same coppersmith who had made the Indian archer above Province House.
    For the patriots, this “spacious hall” was a “noble school . . . where the meanest citizen . . . may deliver his sentiments and give his suffrage in very important matters, as freely as the greatest lord in the land.” For the loyalists, the town meetings at Faneuil Hall were closer to “a pandemonium than a convocation,” since any attempt to oppose the patriots was often met with shouts and even physical intimidation. All agreed that the last decade of political unrest had taken its toll on patriots and loyalists alike. But it wasn’t just the fisticuffs in the streets and the tarring and feathering. Something was going on inside all of them—a painful, almost cellular metamorphosis—as they struggled to define what it was to be an American in the British Empire.
    What the patriots were proposing, once the Enlightenment rhetoric and sanctimonious evocation of their forefathers had been pushed aside, was exactly what Governor Leverett had insisted on back in 1676: that Parliament had no say in what happened in Massachusetts. And as Thomas Hutchinson had pointed out just the year before, this was, in essence, a demand for independence—a word that these self-styled “conscience patriots” insisted was not yet part of their vocabulary. And as is often the case when someone is unable or unwilling to acknowledge the true implications of his or her beliefs, many of the patriots were plagued by periods of psychic and physical torment.
    James Otis was generally credited with initiating this remorseless quest for liberty back in 1761, by objecting to the British government’s right to search private premises without a warrant. Since then, the passionate attorney (whom John Adams dubbed the patriot’s Martin Luther) had dared to wonder out loud whether he’d been right. Otis’s mood swings and rants had become so