Bunker Hill

and within a year and a half, the governor’s reign was over—a downfall that had been hastened, if not scripted, by Samuel Adams and his junta of unelected committee members.
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    On the afternoon of May 13, 1774, in Faneuil Hall, the town meeting elected an eleven-man committee “to write a circular letter to the several towns of this province and to the several colonies, acquainting them with the present state of our affairs.” In addition to Samuel Adams, the committee included many members of the Committee of Correspondence, such as John Adams, Dr. Joseph Warren, Josiah Quincy Jr., and the mercurial and outspoken merchant William Molineux. But there were some surprising additions to the committee, most notably the politically amibiguous John Rowe, whose ties to the loyalists were as strong as, if not stronger than, his allegiance to the patriot cause.
    By naming Rowe and the others, Samuel Adams shrewdly addressed a potentially thorny problem. Boston had divided over the proper response to the Port Act. Many merchants were convinced that there was a simple and sensible solution to the crisis, so sensible, in fact, that Benjamin Franklin had thought of it back in London soon after learning about the Tea Party. Why not simply pay for the tea? Rather than sit there and watch as commerce withered to nothing and the city filled up with British soldiers, why not swallow their collective pride and come up with the 9,660 pounds sterling (about $850,000 in today’s U.S. currency) required to put this whole sad affair behind them and move on with their lives?
    This was not what Samuel Adams and his compatriots wanted to hear. Rather than approaching the act as a problem to be solved, they saw it as an opportunity to be exploited. They argued that to capitulate now would only encourage even harsher measures in the future. And besides, given the haziness of the act’s wording, it was difficult to determine whether reimbursing the East India Company would be enough to convince the British Parliament to repeal the act. Instead of compliance, they wanted nothing less than a complete boycott of British goods—not just in Boston and Massachusetts but throughout all thirteen colonies.
    With the creation of the new committee containing Rowe and other merchants operating as a smoke screen, Adams proceeded to do exactly as he wanted. A motion was passed that the Committee of Correspondence should “dispatch messengers with all possible speed to the other colonies and the several towns in this province, charged with the letters [that] they have wrote relative to shutting up this harbor.” Then came the coup de grace: a motion was passed in support of the assertion that a boycott of British imports and exports “will prove the salvation of North America and her liberties.”
    Rowe assumed that the motion simply stated the mood of the meeting, and in the days ahead he worked with the committee to articulate what was supposed to be the town’s official response to the Boston Port Act. But it was all for nothing—the committee never delivered a recommendation. In the meantime, the Boston Committee of Correspondence’s May 13 letters stating the need for a boycott had long since been sent. The impression broadcast throughout Massachusetts and America was that Boston unanimously supported a boycott and expected the other colonies to follow suit. Bostonians, however, were far from agreed as to what to do about the Port Bill.
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    At noon on Tuesday, May 17, four days after his arrival at Castle Island, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage landed at Boston’s Long Wharf. A third of a mile long, lined with more than fifteen warehouses and shops (one of which had once been the boyhood home of the painter John Singleton Copley), Long Wharf was a wide and inviting platform of commerce that gestured toward the harbor and the ocean beyond like an opened hand.
    Five and a half years before, during the fall of 1768, Long Wharf had been the arrival point of the soldiers that had ultimately made the Boston Massacre an inevitability. Now, with the arrival of General Gage and the knowledge that at least four regiments of British soldiers were on the way, the town was being forced to relive that nightmare even as it prepared to suffer an altogether new ordeal.
    But there was at least one consolation. Governor Thomas Hutchinson, the most reviled man in all of Massachusetts, was to depart soon for England, and General Gage was said to be a most