Bunker Hill

establishing personal lines of communication among the communities.
    The Bostonians had objected to paying a tax on British tea, but they were more than willing to fund an expensive public works project if it helped the town get through the crisis. Under the direction of the town’s selectmen, municipal funds were used to hire jobless mechanics, artisans, and dockworkers to build ships, clean up the wharves, and repair roads. John Andrews complained that while the poor had the town to relieve them and the rich had their savings and rents, small merchants such as himself had nothing. “[The] burden falls heaviest, if not entirely, upon the middle people among us,” he wrote. And yet, despite all these anxieties, Andrews was amazed by how well his fellow citizens were holding up. “[There is] ease, contentment, and perfect composure in the countenance of almost every person you meet in the streets,” he marveled, which “much perplexes the governor and others.”
    —
    On August 6, the
Scarborough
arrived with the much-anticipated Massachusetts Government Act. Gage’s already tormented world suddenly became much worse. As part of the act, the king and the ministry had named thirty-six mandamus councillors—all of them loyalists—and on August 8, Gage assembled as many of them as he could in Salem. A disturbing number either did not respond to the summons or downright refused to accept their positions on the council, knowing that to be a mandamus councillor was to invite the kinds of abuses that the patriots had formerly directed against the tea consignees and John Malcom. The Massachusetts Government Act also made provisions for the selection of jurors in the superior courts, and talk was already circulating through the western parts of the province about preventing the courts from sitting. And then there was the issue of town meetings, which had been declared all but illegal.
    As if the Government Act wasn’t enough, Parliament had passed three additional pieces of legislation: the Administration of Justice Act, which the patriots branded “the Murderer’s Act” because it allowed governors to move the trials of royal officials accused of a crime to a venue outside their own colony (and thus “get away with murder”); the Quartering Act, which provided for housing British soldiers in a colony’s unoccupied buildings; and finally the Quebec Act, which, besides allowing French Canadians to practice Catholicism (not a popular provision among New England’s papist-hating Congregationalists), expanded that province all the way to the Ohio River to the south and to the Mississippi to the west. Many leading colonists, especially in Pennsylvania and Virginia, such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, had applied for land grants in this huge swath of territory, which included modern Ohio and Illinois. By effectively prohibiting western expansion, Parliament had found a way—unrelated to the unrest in Boston—to anger and frustrate not just the citizens of Massachusetts but virtually all of colonial America.
    Instead of making the colonists think about repentance, what were collectively referred to as the Coercive Acts had the opposite effect. Massachusetts’s patriots were more resolved than ever to persevere in their insistence on liberty while the loyalists were finding it increasingly difficult to defend the ministry’s overbearing measures. In the meantime, the undecided, whom John Andrews described as “the lukewarm that were staggering,” were moving ever closer to becoming confirmed patriots. But no matter what camp they were in, all agreed that the ministry had made a mess of the situation. Everywhere in Boston, Andrews claimed, Lord North was cursed “morn to noon and from noon to morn by every denomination of people.”
    —
    Joseph Warren was about as busy as a doctor could be in Boston, but that did not prevent him and his fellow Committee of Correspondence members from composing countless letters to towns throughout New England and beyond, thanking them for their donations or their letters and resolutions of support. Thirteen of these letters were received in a single day, and Thomas Young reported that he and the others convened “every day or two” to make sure all the correspondence was answered in a timely manner.
    From the first, Warren saw himself and all New England in a mythic quest that united the here and now of the present generation with the travails of their glorious