Bunker Hill

no sober man can vindicate their conduct, but the revenge of the ministry is too severe.”
    Samuel Adams seems to have taken the Government Act as a kind of goad. It was time, he and the Boston Committee of Correspondence decided, to circumvent the merchants and their attempts to pay for the tea and appeal directly to the farmers of the country towns. Since the merchants’ livelihood was based on trade with London, they would always be wary of anything that might endanger that profitable relationship. It was the “yeomanry” of the country—people like the farmers of Gorham who kept their muskets at the ready even when plowing their fields—who could be counted on to do the right thing. “Is it not necessary,” Samuel Adams wrote on May 30, “to push for a suspension of trade with Great Britain as far as it will go, and let the yeomanry (whose virtue must finally save this country) resolve to desert those altogether who will not come into the measure?” Perhaps if England’s merchants were made to suffer at least a portion of the economic misery inflicted on Boston, the British ministry might begin to see the error of their ways.
    On June 2, the committee began drafting what it melodramatically titled “The Solemn League and Covenant.” In the tradition of Joyce Junior, this was a startlingly direct reference to the English Civil War and the 1643 agreement by which Parliament combined with Scotland against the Royalists. As its title suggested, the Solemn League and Covenant was all about commitment and coercion. By signing this agreement, New Englanders were pledging not only to boycott all British goods but to spurn and vilify any of their countrymen who dared to do differently.
    On June 8 the committee quietly sent out copies of the Solemn League and Covenant to towns throughout Massachusetts over the signature of the town clerk, William Cooper. It took only a few days for word of the covenant to make its way back to the merchants in Boston. As was to be expected, they were outraged. In what was nothing less than a barefaced act of intimidation, the committee was attempting to precipitate a boycott by creating the false impression that Bostonians had already agreed to the measure and then, once they’d used that lie to get the country towns on their side, force the merchants into line.
    Like John Rowe, John Andrews was a merchant who had always been cautiously supportive of the patriot cause; but this underhanded move by Adams and his committee was simply too much. The patriots’ reckless disregard for the principles they were supposedly working to uphold might, in Andrews’s view, serve the purposes of the British ministry by fracturing the city into two warring factions. “Those who have governed the town for years past . . . seem determined to bring total destruction upon us . . . ,” he wrote his brother-in-law in Philadelphia. “I am afraid we shall experience the worst [of] evils,
a civil war
.”
    By this time, transports containing the promised regiments of soldiers had begun to arrive in the harbor. On June 14, Lieutenant Colonel George Maddison and the Fourth Regiment disembarked at Long Wharf and after marching up King Street pitched their tents on the Boston Common, near the livestock pound. John Rowe reported that there were “a number of spectators to see them.” The following day, the Fourth Regiment was joined by Major Clerk and the Forty-Third, who set up camp near the workhouse to the northeast. Traditionally, the common had been a bucolic oasis, where lovers liked to stroll at dusk along the tree-lined path known as the Mall; with the arrival of hundreds of soldiers, it was becoming an open-air barracks and training ground. The troops had displaced the town’s sizable herd of cows, many of which attempted to return to their old grazing grounds (“where the richest herbage I ever saw abounds,” marveled one officer) until driven away by stones thrown by the regiments’ sentries.
    In the meantime, the waterfront, normally a center of nonstop commotion, had grown eerily silent. Goods and provisions were still allowed to enter Boston, but because of the Port Bill they had to be first off-loaded at Salem then transported overland by wagon to Boston—a trip of almost thirty miles that one merchant claimed cost even more than the freight from England. Even worse, Boston’s stevedores, sailors, and mechanics—indeed, anyone who relied on the once-constant influx of