Bunker Hill

hour and a half with Lord Dartmouth; on November 29, he witnessed the grand procession of the king (“I was not awestruck with the pomp,” he wrote); on December 16, he went to the House of Commons (where he “heard Lord North explain what he meant when he said he would have America at his feet”); on January 1, he conversed with Colonel Isaac Barré, who despite being a friend to America had voted for the Port Bill and was offended by some of Quincy’s remarks; and on January 20, in what proved to be the highlight of his trip to London, he attended the debates in the House of Lords and watched as Lord Chatham (whom Quincy compared to “an old Roman Senator”) spoke eloquently on the colonies’ behalf. All the while, Quincy was in discussions with a host of patriot-sympathizers, many of whom insisted that it was time for Massachusetts to act.
    Quincy, along with just about all political observers of the time, including Benjamin Franklin, was unaware of the extent to which Lord North had moved beyond the hard-line posturing of the last few months. It was true that on February 2, he had declared in Parliament that Massachusetts was now in a state of rebellion. He was also pushing forward yet another Coercive Act directed at shutting down the coastal fishery upon which New England depended. But he also had hit upon a seemingly counterintuitive idea that he believed would solve everything. Britain should refrain altogether from directly taxing America and allow each colony to determine on its own how to pay for the costs associated with its defense and civil government. Known as his “Conciliatory Proposition,” this plan represented a way for Britain to offer America an important concession without completely compromising its own authority. Thomas Hutchinson was so encouraged by the proposal that on February 22 he wrote his son back in Massachusetts, “I hope peace and order will return to you before the summer is over, and that I shall return before winter.”
    Parliament, however, was in no mood for conciliation. Many members were confused and frustrated by North’s sudden change of direction and gave the proposal little credence. But perhaps the biggest obstacle to finding a solution was the communication lag between Britain and her colonies. A ship took about a month to cross the Atlantic with news from America. When combined with the time required for the king and his ministry to work out a Parliament-approved response to each new development in Massachusetts, plus the extra month required to get that response back to America, misunderstandings between the British Empire and her increasingly indignant colonies were unavoidable. After a decade of building tension, Britain and Massachusetts had been reduced to shouting at each other across a vast and storm-tossed sea.
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    By the end of February, Quincy had decided that he must return home to Boston and communicate everything he had learned to Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren. Back in December, he had begun to spit up blood, and Franklin feared that his “zeal for the public . . . will eat him up.” Franklin was also troubled by Quincy’s growing conviction that war had become the only alternative. In early March, after the two talked long into the night, Franklin succeeded in convincing Quincy that caution, not a reckless need for action, was the best policy. “I was charmed,” Quincy recorded. “I renounced my own opinion. I became a convert to his. . . . This interview may be a means of preventing much calamity and producing much good to Boston and the Massachusetts Bay, and in the end to all America.” Although more than three thousand miles away in London, Quincy was being whipsawed by the same opposing opinions that were then being voiced on the floor of the Provincial Congress in Concord.
    The day before his departure, Quincy had one last interview with Franklin, who asserted, “By no means take any step of great consequence (unless on a sudden emergency) without advice of the Continental Congress.” As long as Massachusetts was able to avoid outright violence for the next year and a half and America adhered to the nonimportation agreement, Franklin believed that Parliament must be forced to relent and “the day is won.”
    On March 4, suffering from “fever and spasms” and still spitting up blood, Quincy sailed for New England. Throughout his stay in London he had been writing to his wife Abigail, who had given birth to a