Sergeant Lamb's America Page 10
The irony of the situation lay in this: that the American boast, to be able to defeat the French and Spanish armies if they invaded the colonies, was taken seriously neither by the British nor by the Americans themselves. Yet it now appears evident that it could have been made good, to judge by the fearful mauling that our armies encountered at their hands when we attempted the same thing.
The Stamp Act was soon repealed, in consequence of a petition to the King and to the Houses of Lords and Commons by a Continental Congress: to which novel institution all the American colonies sent representatives. That the petition was granted was, some will say, evident proof that virtual representation in our Parliament was more effective than the actual representation of any English city. Had Old York or Old Boston shown such ill temper over the stamp-duties as their namesakes across the Ocean had done, it would have been a matter for the constabulary and armed forces to settle without delay, nor would any Mr Pitt have pleaded for indulgence towards them.
The withdrawal of the Stamp Act was presented as a pure act of royal benevolence, and a Declaratory Act was at the same time passed, maintaining the authority of the British Parliament over the colonies, without any reserve.
Yet the mischief was now done, for where England had yielded once she might be expected to yield again. The problem of finding funds for the defence of America and of the West India Islands, on which the colonies were dependent for a great part of their trade, remained unsettled. Mr Pitt became the Earl of Chatham, accepted power for a while, grew worse of the gout and being unable to attend to colonial affairs, left his Chancellor of the Exchequer to act as he pleased in the matter. Now, the compromise tacitly agreed upon between England and America, at the close of the Stamp Act dispute, was that Parliament would refrain at least from imposing internal taxation, which was to be left to the Colonial Assemblies to manage, stamp-duties being counted as internalities. To the principle of external taxation, in the sense covered by the Trade Acts, the colonists gave a grudging consent; though to be sure, as an Irish Member of Parliament put it, there seemed but little difference in effect, whether money was to be taken from the coat-pocket or the waistcoat-pocket. This Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Townshend, therefore felt himself at liberty to crack on whatever external duties he pleased, and on various goods, among them tea, that had hitherto passed free of tax. Nor was the expected increase in revenue to be devoted to the quartering of troops in America, but to a fund for the regular payment of colonial governors and judges. Mr Townshend very properly explained to Parliament that in a country where lawlessness abounded and justice was often a matter of favour, the persons in chief legal authority must now be raised above the temptation to venality. But to the Americans it seemed that these fees were a bribe to the Governors and judges to settle all questions to the advantage of the King’s friends. The associations formed to refuse English imported goods grew stronger than before, so that the value of such goods fell by a million pounds sterling in a single year. The mob grew still more turbulent, especially that of Boston and New England generally; and even the Loyalists began to think that America should now be treated with the former ‘salutary neglect’ that gave these low people no excuse for their outrages. To press for the payment of taxes which never could cover the cost of collection seemed like burning down a barn in order to roast an egg.
Chapter VII
IN THE summer of the year 1768, two regiments of Foot, The Fourteenth and The Twenty-ninth, and one company of Artillery, were sent to Boston to assist the magistrates and revenue-officers in enforcing the law. This measure was represented by the Boston politicians as if a great herd of lions had been let loose on the town to tear and mangle the inhabitants; but from what I have been told by men of The Fourteenth who later fought beside me in Canada and upper New York, the matter was altogether different – these soldiers felt themselves so many Daniels in the wild beasts’ den. For the lawyers and the Congregational ministers, their allies, controlled the populace, the most sturdy and intemperate part of which lived in Fish Street and Battery Marsh. This mob, under the respectable dress of town-meetings, put terror upon all those who were accounted friends of England; by beatings, burnings, and that strange indignity of tar and feathers the use of which had been discontinued by our ancestors, so I have read, about the time of bad King John. No magistrate and no jury, whatever their real convictions might be, dared bring in a verdict obnoxious to the real rulers of Boston; it was endangering his own life and property for any officer of the law to call assistance of the military; and the individual British soldier accused, however falsely, of a crime, however trifling, was altogether at the mercy of these base-minded, factious, and enthusiastic people.
Constantly soldiers and even officers were arrested on frivolous charges, refused bail, and kept in jail until the case came up for trial; when, the prosecutors not coming forward, the case was dismissed and no explanation or satisfaction offered. On one occasion a soldier was arrested in barracks by a constable; since the warrant of arrest did not particularize the soldier by name, his officers appeared on his behalf in court to protest against this infringement of his rights as a citizen. They were thereupon indicted for riot and rescue and made to pay a heavy fine, while the magistrate thundered at them from the bench, threatening them with the vengeance of the town! Two soldiers of The Fourteenth, emerging one day from the hospital after a bout of fever and scarcely able to walk, were set upon by the mob and half-killed by sticks, fists, and boots. They appealed to Major-General Mackay, their commander, for redress and he condoled with them for their misfortunes. ‘But,’ said he, ‘be advised and seek no revenge. For even if you can identify your assailants, as you say, there is no justice for soldiers in Boston. Here is half a guinea for each of you, my lads. Drink and forget.’
And it may not be credited, but it actually occurred to my knowledge: a soldier found guilty (I do not know how justly) of a petty theft was condemned to pay damages to the amount of some seventy pounds sterling, but not having so many pence was indented as a slave and sold for a term of years to the highest bidder! For the custom of selling white men into servitude was still oddly common in this land of liberty.
It may be asked, why did not General Mackay proclaim martial law and reduce the mob to reason by a warning shot or two? He was not permitted. Lord Chatham, the Prime Minister, had adjured the House in passionate tones: ‘Let affection be the only bond of coercion: pass an amnesty over the errors of the colonists: by measures of lenity allure them to their duty.’ The soldiers of the garrison had strict orders never to strike an inhabitant of Boston, whatever the provocation. This the Bostonians knew; and they took every advantage of their knowledge. Soldiers passing peacefully down the street would be saluted from their rear with cries of ‘What cheer, lobster scoundrels?’ or ‘Hello, you red-herring rascals!’ and pelted with stones or filth, the assailants then scuttling away. A sentry standing guard at the entrance to the Custom House or the Magazine would be mobbed by impudent youths, one plucking at his side-arm, another trying to knock off his tall cap with a stick, a third daubing with dirt his white buckskin accoutrements. And these young limbs of mischief would encourage one another: ‘Don’t be skeered, lads. He dursen’t fire. He’s a bloody-back coward like the rest.’ This term of abuse, ‘bloody-back’, alluded, like the others, to the scarlet cloth of the infantry uniform; but glanced also at our military custom of flogging delinquents, by which the Americans professed at this time to be greatly shocked. Our men showed a great and disciplined forbearance at Boston.
It was indeed a strange place. The Saints, as the Bostonians were called in fun by the other colonists, were perfectly scandalized by the innocent military music of horns, clarinets, hautboys, and bassoons, especially when played after dark through the streets on the King’s birthday, or the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, or St George’s Day. Their wives and daughters would shudder and draw their skirts aside if they passed a soldier in the streets. In certain peculiar moral observ
ances, such as the limitation of Sabbath Day travelling, or the abstention from black-puddings, they were near as strict as Jews. Yet for scheming, evading, overreaching, hoodwinking, and, in a favourite phrase of their own, being ‘smart men’, the people of Massachusetts in general and of Boston in particular were a byword in the remaining colonies. As for Boston Common – to see the women who sneaked out there at night for clandestine pleasure with the soldiery, you might well (said my informants, with an oath) have believed yourself on Wimbledon Common or Blackheath!
Next came the so-called ‘Boston Massacre’ of March 1770. A private of the Twenty-ninth Regiment, passing early one Saturday morning along a public rope-walk, was hailed by some ropers there, and asked, ‘Would you like to do a job of work?’ He replied innocently enough that he would gladly undertake work to supplement his meagre pay. ‘Then come and clean out our coffee-house’ (as they termed a privy) ‘you damned rascal bloody-back,’ they cried. Says he: ‘Boys, I have a prophecy to make. Before much more hemp has been twisted on these walks, your backs will be bloody too.’ A fisticuff fight began, three of his comrades running up to defend him, but all these men dutifully refrained from using their sidearms. An officer approaching, the fight was broke off before a decision was reached, but not before the prophetic soldier had engaged the ropemakers in a friendly enough spirit, for he was an Irishman, to fight it out on the Monday morning following – but teeth, nails, and kicking barred. On Sunday the Congregational ministers – the same who used to rant in the pulpits about the Demon Bishops of Britain and how, among other perquisites of episcopacy, every tenth-born child was ravished from its mother’s side, along with the tithe-calf and the tithe-pig, for his monstrous appetite – these having got wind of the coming appointment, preached that a massacre of the honest ropers was secretly intended by the British, and that this diabolical plot must be forthwith frustrated. So our four champions, accompanied by a few comrades, all equally unarmed, were astonished on arriving at the agreed place of encounter to find a great number of men drawn up with clubs and sticks to oppose them, the ministers darting among the crowd with cries of exhortation and defiance.
They stood and laughed. At this the mob began to hurl stones, and the bells of a neighbouring church started pealing, setting off all the other peals in Boston. ‘Town-born, turn out!’ was a cry taken up in all parts of the town.
The mob then moved away from the rope-walk under the influence of a tall, large man, wearing a red cloak and a white wig, and approached Murray’s Barracks where they dared the soldiers at the gate to come out and fight like men; at the same time pelting them with snowballs in which stones were wrapped. The soldiers’ only answer was a silent contempt; and a passing officer ordered them into barracks. The same ringleader then withdrew them from the barracks and harangued them earnestly. They uttered huzzas and cried: ‘On to the Main Guard!’ and breaking up into distinct divisions converged on the Custom House in King Street by different routes. Captain Preston, the officer on duty, called out a sergeant and twelve men of the guard with bayonets fixed on their muskets. This order was to protect the sentry, who was now being pelted with snowballs by the rabble. On the appearance of this party, frantic shouts arose of: ‘Cowardly bloody-backs! You dursen’t fire agin us. Fire, I say, you bloody-back slaves!’ The most furious group, composed of sailors who had lost their livelihood by the British interruption of the smuggling trade (the mainstay of this city of Saints) advanced to the very points of the bayonets with most unsaintly oaths and execrations.
Captain Preston pushed his way through the ranks and begged the fellows to go quietly home and play at snowballs among themselves, if they would avoid bloodshed. But the sailors now tried to strike the muskets down with their clubs, and a blow was aimed by one of them at the Captain himself, which he avoided. Among the guard were comrades of the soldier who had been sold into slavery by the miserable action of the magistrates; and one man (the same who gave me this account) had lately been offered by a lawyer the sum of fifty pounds to swear a false affidavit against his own lieutenant, a most humane and excellent officer. Their lungers itched at the triggers.
A sailor struck a soldier on the arm with a club at the moment that the red-cloaked ringleader was shouting back at the Captain. ‘Do your worst, damn you! We ain’t afeared!’ The man’s musket went off, but without effect. One of the rabble then happening to shout, ‘Fire, my men, fire!’ in mimicry of an English officer’s tones, this was mistaken for Captain Preston’s own order. Several men discharged their pieces. Four sailors fell dead and seven more wounded, two mortally.
To convert an indifferent cause into one that seems to have overwhelming justice on its side, there is nothing so convenient as a martyr: and here was a whole maniple of martyrs. The town broke immediately into full commotion; but, upon the Governor promising to commit Captain Preston and his men to jail and to withdraw the whole of the garrison behind the walls of Castle William, which was a barracks on an island in the harbour, there was no recourse to open fighting. Yet the whole of the colony of Massachusetts threatened to avenge the ‘dastardly crime’, as it was described. Fantastically distorted accounts of the occurrences were sent back to England by the penmen of Boston, which the Opposition newspapers published in extenso as a means of discrediting the Ministry. Two revolutionary leaders, of whom one was the well-known Mr John Adams, a self-taught lawyer, then came forward, politically enough, to offer themselves as counsel for the prisoners at their trial. Captain Preston, the sergeant, the sentry, and ten men of the guard were by aid of his eloquence honourably acquitted of the charge of murder. The two remaining men, who were said to have initiated the volley, were found guilty of manslaughter but punished only lightly. Any other verdict would have been plainly scandalous and a damage to the revolutionary cause; yet that these honest soldiers escaped with their lives was advanced as a signal proof of the impartiality of American justice. And at the same time the mob-leaders and ministers did not hesitate to speak of ‘the Boston Massacre’, as if there had been a grave miscarriage of justice, the British having secretly overawed the jury by threats.
I have by me an old copy of the Boston Gazette of March 1771, referring to the Boston Massacre, in which is mentioned that rancorous Whig, Mr Paul Revere, whose exploits at the beginning of the Revolution have been very dramatically recounted, but without great relation to the truth:
In the Evening there was a very striking Exhibition at the Dwelling-House of Mr Paul Revere, fronting the Old North Square. At one of the Chamber-Windows was the appearance of the Ghost of the unfortunate young Seider, with one of his Fingers in the Wound, endeavoring to stop the Blood issuing therefrom; near him his Friends were weeping: And at a small distance, a monumental Obelisk, with his Bust in Front: – On the Front of the Pedestal, were the Names of those killed on the Fifth of March: Underneath the following Lines,
‘Seider’s pale Ghost fresh bleeding stands,
And Vengeance for his Death demands.’
In the next Window were represented the Soldiers drawn up, firing at the People assembled before them – the Dead on the Ground – and the Wounded falling, with the Blood running in Streams from their Wounds; Over which was wrote foul play. In the third Window was the Figure of a Woman, representing america, sitting on the Stump of a Tree, with a Staff in her Hand, and the Cap of Liberty on the Top thereof, – one Foot on the Head of a Grenadier lying prostrate grasping a Serpent – Her Finger pointing to the Tragedy.
The whole was so well executed, that the Spectators which amounted to many Thousands, were struck with solemn Silence, and their Countenances covered with a melancholy Gloom. At nine o’clock the Bells tolled a doleful Peal, until Ten; when the Exhibition was withdrawn, and the People retired to their respective Habitations.
King George, who was at that time in the full vigour of his powers, the sad lunatic strain not having yet revealed itself, chafed at the confusion into which national affairs had fallen. No fewer than three Prime Ministers had re
signed office within a space of seven years. He decided that his Kingdom must for a while at least be managed by a Ministry which would pursue a continuous policy and be proof against faction. He therefore instituted a system of personal government – that is, government under his own direction – the parliamentary leadership being given to Lord North, a well-intentioned but slack-minded Tory. Lord North was bound to the King by a stronger tie than mere loyalty, being his near cousin: his mother had been the daughter of one of George II’s German mistresses. At the King’s gracious desire Lord North removed the vexatious ‘Townshend duties’ that had occasioned such a falling-off in the American trade, reserving only a single one, namely, the tax on tea, as a token that the King did not waive his sovereign rights. Thus a great landowner, who freely allows the people of a neighbouring village to walk through his park land, nevertheless for one day in the year keeps the great gates shut from sunrise to sundown and admits nobody: lest a ‘right of way’ be created which might somehow be inconvenient to him or his heirs. The duty on tea was chosen to be retained as one which, after reckoning in the cost of its collection, yielded practically no revenue to the Crown and could therefore not constitute a legitimate grievance. This measure had a good effect upon trade, which soon recovered its former volume, especially since the American associations formed against the importation of English-manufactured goods had now achieved the hidden object for which they had been intended The shelves of the American merchants were at last cleared, and without loss, of the huge stocks which they had laid in at the close of the French war, before trade had become depressed by the confusions of peace. Yet the two great questions outstanding, that of providing for the external defence of America and that of protecting loyal persons from the molestation of the ‘Liberty Boys’ (as the revolutionaries now styled themselves) remained unsettled. Matters improved still more in the following year, 1771, there being an alarm of war with Spain. The colonists showed themselves agreeable now to red-coats being quartered among them, and even gave assistance to royal recruiting-parties: our regiments being considerably under strength owing to desertions.