Bunker Hill

century. And yet, given our tendency to focus on the Founding Fathers who were at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia when all of this was unfolding in and around Boston, most of us know surprisingly little about how the patriots of Massachusetts pulled it off.
    In the pages that follow, I hope to provide an intimate account of how over the course of just eighteen months a revolution transformed a city and the towns that surrounded it, and how that transformation influenced what eventually became the Unites States of America. This is the story of two charismatic and forceful leaders (one from Massachusetts, the other from Virginia), but it is also the story of two ministers (one a subtle, even Machiavellian, patriot, the other a punster and a loyalist); of a poet, patriot, and caregiver to four orphaned children; of a wealthy merchant who wanted to be everybody’s friend; of a conniving traitor whose girlfriend betrayed him; of a sea captain from Marblehead who became America’s first naval hero; of a bookseller with a permanently mangled hand who after a 300-mile trek through the wilderness helped to force the evacuation of the British; and of many others.
    In the end, the city of Boston is the true hero of this story. Whether its inhabitants came to view the Revolution as an opportunity or as a catastrophe, they all found themselves in the midst of a survival tale when on December 16, 1773, three shiploads of tea were dumped in Boston Harbor.

Part I
    LIBERTY

    Liberty is all very well, but men cannot live without masters. There is always a master. And men either live in glad obedience to the master they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine. In America this frictional opposition has been the vital factor. It has given the Yankee his kick.
    —D. H. Lawrence,
Studies in Classic American Literature
, 1923
    Resentment is a passion, implanted by nature for the preservation of the individual. Injury is the object which excites it. Injustice, wrong, injury excites the feeling of resentment, as naturally and necessarily as frost and ice excite the feeling of cold, as fire excites heat, and as both excite pain. A man may have the faculty of concealing his resentment, or suppressing it, but he must and ought to feel it. Nay he ought to indulge it, to cultivate it. It is a duty. His person, his property, his liberty, his reputation are not safe without it. He ought, for his own security and honor, and for the public good to punish those who injure him. . . . It is the same with communities. They ought to resent and to punish.
    —Diary of John Adams, March 4, 1776
    The tumult of the people is very properly compared to the raging of the sea. When the passions of a multitude become headstrong, they generally will have their course: a direct opposition only tends to increase them; and as to reason, one may as well expect that the foaming billows will hearken to a lecture of morality and be quiet. The skillful pilot will carefully keep the helm, and so steer the ship while the storm continues, as to prevent, if possible, her receiving injury.
    —Samuel Adams, March 25, 1774

CHAPTER ONE

    The City on the Hill
    M ore than five thousand people waited inside the Old South Meetinghouse, the largest gathering place in Boston. On that evening in the middle of December 1773, they were impatient to hear what Governor Thomas Hutchinson had to say about the three ships bearing East India tea currently tied up to Griffin’s Wharf. After several unsatisfactory meetings, in which they debated about how to respond to the governor’s stubborn insistence that the tea must be landed, many of them, particularly those who had traveled from towns outside Boston, wanted to go home. It was then, just as frustration and exhaustion began to push increasing numbers of people out the door, that the most eloquent lawyer in this town of eloquent lawyers rose from his seat in the east gallery and was given permission to speak.
    Josiah Quincy Jr. was only thirty-one years old and dying of tuberculosis. He was cross-eyed and pale and yet burned with a frightening ferocity in the cold air of the unheated meetinghouse. He’d just returned from a tour of the colonies that had taken him from South Carolina to Rhode Island (suggested by his physician, Dr. Joseph Warren, who had hoped the milder temperatures might improve his rapidly deteriorating health). Quincy knew firsthand that a surprising