Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution Part 2

Cornhill had become Marlborough Street by the time they reached the block containing the governor's official residence, Province House. On the cupola of this stately three-story brick structure was a copper weathervane depicting an Indian with an arrow in his bow. When the wind was from the east, the Province House Indian seemed to be aiming at the even higher weatherc.o.c.k on the spire of the Old South Meetinghouse, just across the street. The crowd stopped between these two soaring buildings and ordered Malcom to curse Governor Hutchinson (who was safely ensconced at his country house ten miles away in Milton that night) and "say he was an enemy to his country." Malcom steadfastly refused.

On they proceeded through the freezing darkness, the cart's wheels crunching through the snow. They were now in the heart of the South End, the more affluent side of town, where Marlborough turned into Newbury Street. At the corner of Ess.e.x on their left, they stopped at the huge old elm known as the Liberty Tree. A staff rose above the topmost portion of the tree, on which a flag was often flown. This was where the first protests against the Stamp Act had been held back in 1765, and in the years since, the Liberty Tree had become a kind of druidical, distinctly American shrine to the inherent freedoms of man and that Enlightenment sense of "the state of nature" that exists before a people willingly submit to the dictates of a government of their own choosing. On this cold night, the people of Boston were directing their anger against a man who resolutely, even fanatically, insisted that they must defer to a distant king and a legislature that no longer respected their G.o.d-given rights, that obedience must be paid not only to their royal sovereign but to a man like John Malcom: a bitter and grasping underling whose world was crumbling beneath him. Malcom stood in the cart below the tree's bare winter branches and once again refused to curse the governor.

They continued down Newbury to where it became Orange Street. Soon they were approaching the town gate at Boston Neck, more than a mile from the Town House. The old brick fortification dated back to King Philip's War, when Boston had become a refuge for those attempting to escape the Indians, and once through the gate, they were out onto the thin strand of wave-washed earth that connected Boston to the town of Roxbury. On either side of them, the icy marshes and shallows extended out into darkness. On the left, just past the gate, was the gallows.

They placed a rope around Malcom's neck and threatened to hang him if he would not do as they'd previously ordered. By this time the tar had congealed into a frozen crust; his body's inner core had probably become so chilled that he no longer had the ability to tremble. Once again, he refused to curse the governor, but this time he asked that they would "put their threats into execution rather than continue their torture."

They took the rope off Malcom's neck, pinioned his hands behind his back, and tied him to the gallows. Then they began to beat him with ropes and sticks "in a most savage manner." According to one account they even threatened to cut off his ears. At last, he said he would do "anything they desired." They untied him and made him curse the governor and the customs board of commissioners. But his sufferings were not over.

For several more hours they continued to parade Malcom through the streets of Boston. Not everyone shared in the crowd's pitiless delight; a few people, including the man whose intervention had started this horrifying concatenation of events, the shoemaker George Hewes, were so appalled by Malcom's treatment that they attempted to cover him with their jackets.

By the time the crowd reached Copp's Hill near Malcom's home in the North End, he must have pa.s.sed out, for he makes no mention of this final stop, which is described in several newspaper accounts. Here, in the cemetery near the summit of the hill, was the grave of Malcom's younger brother Daniel. Daniel appears to have had the same fiery personality as his brother. Whereas John became a customs agent, Daniel sided with the opposite, more popular camp, famously barricading himself in his house in 1766 to prevent the crown's agents from finding the smuggled wine he had supposedly hidden in his cellar. When Daniel died in 1769 at the age of forty-four, he was a patriot hero, and the inscription on his gravestone described him as "a true son of Liberty / a Friend to the Publick / an Enemy to oppression / and one of the foremost / in opposing the Revenue Acts / on America."

Daniel had been celebrated for breaking the laws of his day. That night in January 1774, his loyalist brother John sat slumped in a chair that someone had placed inside the cart. It was true that he was obnoxious and impulsive, that he'd virtually invited the treatment he'd received. But the fact remained that this "enemy of the people" had been scalded, frozen, and beaten to within an inch of his life not because he'd taken a swipe at a shoemaker but because he upheld the unpopular laws that his brother had scorned. It had been a brutal, even obscene display of violence, but the people of Boston had spoken.

Around midnight, the crowd finally made its way back to Malcom's house on Cross Street, where he was "rolled out of the cart like a log." Once he'd been brought back into the house and his frozen body had begun to thaw, his tarred flesh started to peel off in "steaks." Although he somehow found the strength to make a deposition five days later, it would be another eight weeks before he could leave his bed.

The John Malcom incident had created a problem for Joyce Junior. Despite having declared himself to be the chairman of the committee of tarring and feathering, he had had nothing to do with what had happened to Malcom. In fact, he and other patriot leaders disapproved of this spontaneous and entirely unscripted outbreak of violence. In an attempt to clarify this potentially embarra.s.sing situation, he issued yet another proclamation, this one disavowing any a.s.sociation with the incident. "Brethren and fellow citizens!" the handbill read. "This is to certify, that the modern punishment lately inflicted on the ign.o.ble John Malcom was not done by our order-We reserve that method for bringing villains of greater consequence to a sense of guilt and infamy."

Over the course of the next few months, Joyce Junior posted more announcements (one of which appeared in the Boston Gazette over John Winthrop Junior's advertis.e.m.e.nt for a new shipment of flour) in which Winthrop's alter ego continued to issue threats against the tea consignees and their a.s.sociates. One night in April, the painter John Singleton Copley awoke to discover that his house on Beacon Hill (just down the street from the Hanc.o.c.k mansion) was surrounded by a raucous mob that wanted to know if a Mr. Watson from Plymouth was staying with him. At thirty-five, Copley had long since established himself as the foremost painter not only in New England but all America. A largely self-taught genius and purposefully apolitical, Copley had painted the portraits of many loyalists and of many patriots. He had an unmatched ability when it came to creating a sense of his subject's presence. When you looked at a Copley portrait, you felt as if the subject was there for all time, frozen in an eternal now. If there was anyone of whom all of Boston should have been proud, it was Copley. But as far as the patriots were concerned he could not be trusted since he was married to the daughter of a tea consignee.

George Watson, a merchant from Plymouth, was part of the extended loyalist family into which Copley had married. Copley explained to those gathered outside his house that it was true that Watson had visited him earlier in the day, but he had long since departed. In a letter to his brother-in-law, Isaac Winslow Clarke, still marooned on Castle Island, he recounted how the mob threatened that "my blood would be on my own head if I had deceived them; [that] if I entertained him or any such villain for the future [I] must expect the resentment of Joyce."

Copley had long since decided that he owed it to his talent to cross the Atlantic and see for himself the masters of Europe, and by the middle of June, he would be on his way to London, never to return. The irony was that Copley privately expressed his sympathies for the patriot cause. In years to come, his paintings of the 1760s and 1770s became the visual icons with which future generations of Americans celebrated Boston's revolutionary past. But in April 1774 Copley, a self-made artist who stared into the eyes of his subjects and somehow found a way to convey their imperishable essence, was being threatened by the thuggish minions of an overeducated trader who was the great-great-great-grandson of the colony's Puritan founder.

Copley wasn't the only artist in Boston who had an uneasy relationship with the city's patriots. Boston's most widely known poet was a twenty-one-year-old African enslaved woman named Phillis Wheatley, whose first volume of poems had been published in England just the year before and was now being sold in the city's many bookshops. Not only a precocious literary talent, Wheatley had used her growing fame during a recent trip to London to gain access to some of the foremost cultural and political figures of the day, including the secretary of state for the colonies, Lord Dartmouth (for whom the college in New Hampshire had been named), and Benjamin Franklin. She'd also used that fame to leverage a promise from her master, Daniel Wheatley, to grant her freedom.

For the citizens of Boston, whose love of liberty did not prevent one in five families from owning slaves, Wheatley's celebrity caused difficulties. In a letter that was reprinted in the Boston press that March, she wrote to the Mohegan preacher Samson Occom about the patriot cause's inherent duplicity. "For in every human breast," Wheatley wrote, "G.o.d has implanted a principle, which we call love of freedom; it is impatient of oppression, and pants for deliverance... . G.o.d grant deliverance in his own way and time, and ... [punish] all those whose avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the calamities of their fellow creatures. This I desire not for their hurt, but to convince them of the strange absurdity of their conduct whose words and actions are so diametrically opposite. How well the cry for liberty, and the reverse disposition for the exercise of oppressive power over others agree I humbly think it does not require the penetration of a philosopher to determine."

On the road from Cambridge to the ferry landing in Charlestown was a landmark that spoke to the legacy of slavery in New England. In 1755 the slave Mark had been executed for conspiring to poison his abusive master. Whereas his female accomplice had been burned to death, Mark had been hanged; his body was then stuffed into an iron cage that was suspended from a chain at the edge of the Charlestown Common, where the corpse was left to rot and be picked apart by birds. Long after the physical remains of the executed slave had disappeared, the place where "Mark was hung in chains" continued to be a much commented-on part of the landscape surrounding Boston. Slavery was more than a rhetorical construct for the city's white residents; it was an impossible-to-ignore reality in a community where African men, women, and children were regularly bought and sold and where anyone taking the road into or out of nearby Charlestown had no choice but to remember what had happened in 1755 when a black man threatened to overthrow his oppressor.

One of Boston's great collective fears during the recent occupation by British regulars in the year and a half leading up to the Boston Ma.s.sacre was that the soldiers might foment the city's slaves into a rebellion against their patriot owners. A 1768 pet.i.tion signed by the merchants John Hanc.o.c.k and John Rowe accused a captain of His Majesty's Fifty-Ninth Regiment of having encouraged "certain Negro slaves in Boston ... to cut their master's throats, and to beat, insult, and otherwise ill treat their said masters, a.s.serting that now the soldiers are come, the Negroes shall be free, and the Liberty Boys slaves-to the great terror and danger of the peaceable inhabitants of said town."

For years, members of Boston's black community had been signing pet.i.tions requesting that the province's General Court find a peaceable way to address their plight. In the spring of 1774 legislators voted on yet another unsuccessful pet.i.tion presented by "a great number of blacks of this province who by divine permission are held in a state of slavery within the bowels of a free and Christian country." As these pet.i.tioners knew all too well, what Phillis Wheatley called the "strange absurdity" of American slavery was not limited to the South.

The truth was that the righteous and coercive certainty of patriots such as John Winthrop Jr., aka Joyce Junior, had more in common with the increasingly autocratic and shortsighted policies promulgated by British prime minister Frederick North than either side would have cared to admit. They had drastically different agendas, but they went about achieving those agendas in essentially the same way. Both shared an indignant refusal to compromise. Neither had much to do with a democratic or popular will.

As it turned out, Joyce Junior's ominous and bl.u.s.tering announcements in the local press did more than even the tarring and feathering of John Malcom to create the impression in England that a brutish vigilantism reigned in the streets of Boston. In early March, as Parliament debated what to do in response to the Boston Tea Party, Joyce Junior's January 15 broadside was reprinted in the London papers. With the words of the "chairman of the committee for tarring and feathering" having come to the public's attention, even America's friends in Parliament felt that they must account in some way for this disturbing practice. On March 28, one member of the House of Commons acknowledged that "the Americans were a strange set of people, and that it was in vain to expect any degree of reasoning from them; that instead of making their claim by argument, they always chose to decide the matter by tarring and feathering." With the examples of both Joyce Junior and John Malcom before them, an almost unanimous consensus emerged in Parliament: Boston must suffer the worst of all punishments for its collective and apparently ongoing sins.

But if Joyce Junior and other patriot leaders regretted the tarring and feathering of John Malcom, the object of all this furor appears to have taken a different view. Malcom was proud of his sufferings. Later that year he sailed for London with a wooden box containing the ultimate trophy: a withered hunk of his own tarred-and-feathered flesh.

On January 12, 1775, Malcom attended the levee at St. James's, where he knelt before King George III and handed His Majesty a pet.i.tion. What Malcom wanted more than anything else, he informed the king, was to return to Boston and resume his duties as a customs official-but not as just any customs official. He wanted to be made "a single Knight of the Tar ... for I like the smell of it."

CHAPTER TWO

Poor Unhappy Boston

On Friday, May 13, 1774, a British sloop-of-war approached the lighthouse at the entrance to Boston Harbor. She was the Lively, twenty-eight days from England, with a notable pa.s.senger: Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, commander in chief of the military in North America and soon to be the new royal governor of Ma.s.sachusetts.

Gage, fifty-four, had spent much of the last decade stationed in New York City, but in his youth he had seen more than his share of death on the battlefields of Europe and the New World. At twenty-five he was at Fontenoy (in what is today Belgium), where after politely conferring across a narrow divide about when to begin the fighting, opposing British and French armies killed or wounded about fifteen thousand of one another. A year later, in 1746, he witnessed the brutal suppression of the Scottish Highland clans at Culloden. Nine years after that, he was in Pennsylvania with a young provincial officer named George Washington at the onset of the French and Indian War. Both Gage and Washington served under General Edward Braddock during the disastrous Battle of the Monongahela near modern Pittsburgh. As the British army marched through the dense American wilderness, a deadly barrage erupted from unseen French and Indian forces. Bullets riddled Gage's coat and grazed his eyebrow and stomach and wounded his horse, but somehow, like Washington, he survived. Applying some of the lessons learned in that humiliating defeat, Gage helped to establish a regiment of light infantry whose dress and tactics were better adapted to the guerilla-style fighting of the frontier. But all of this innovation went for naught when in 1758 Gage's superior officer, General James Abercromby, ordered an ill-advised a.s.sault on a fortified French position at Fort Ticonderoga that resulted in two thousand needless casualties.

Once given his own command, Gage showed a reluctance to fight. In 1759, while his good friend James Wolfe died in glorious triumph at Quebec, Gage dithered in Albany, apparently oblivious to orders to march on a French fort at the headwaters of the St. Lawrence. Despite talk of a censure, his close friend the commander in chief General Jeffrey Amherst had him installed as military governor of Montreal.

By that time Gage had married the beautiful Margaret Kemble of New Jersey. Her grandfather had been a merchant in Turkey; her grandmother had been Greek. Add some French and English blood, and it was no wonder that she radiated a bewitching exoticism, a sad and contemplative hauteur that is still discernible in the portraits of her that have survived. Gage, her senior by fourteen years, personified the English gentleman. With a straight and elegant nose on a slender face, he was a most upright and world-weary man. His friends were devoted to him, but no one matched the loyalty of his older brother, William, the famously absentminded viscount whose influence within the British ministry had helped to elevate Gage to the highest military rung in America.

For the last ten years Gage's duties as commander in chief had kept him in New York, where he and Margaret had lived in what was described as "conjugal felicity." By the spring of 1773 their two eldest sons, Harry and John, were enrolled at Gage's alma mater, Westminster School in London; in June, Gage and Margaret, who was once again pregnant, sailed with the rest of the family for England. It was Gage's first trip home in seventeen years.

He was disturbed to discover that London had changed almost beyond recognition while he'd been in America. In a letter to General Frederick Haldimand, who was serving in his stead in New York, he compared London to Constantinople or "any city I had never seen." The bureaucracy that had evolved during the last decade and a half as Britain attempted to maintain control over its expanding empire was not only large; it was appallingly inefficient. Gage spent his days in "a perpetual hunt," trying to find officials who were just as a.s.siduously trying to find him. No wonder the ministry had appeared so vacillating and indecisive in its dealings with the Americans. No one seemed to be in charge.

In welcome contrast to all this troubling change were his family's two ancestral estates-Highmeadow on his mother's side in Gloucestershire and Firle on his father's side in Suss.e.x. Both were still the inviting retreats they'd been when he was a boy, and it was at Highmeadow that their sixth child, Charlotte Margaret, was born in the summer of 1773. By the end of the year, Gage appears to have decided that it was time to make England his family's permanent home. Then, in January 1774, came word of the Boston Tea Party, and Gage was wanted in London for his expertise in colonial affairs.

On January 29 Gage attended a hearing at the c.o.c.kpit, an octagonal room in Whitehall Palace that had once served as a c.o.c.kfighting arena for Henry VIII and later, renovated by the architect Inigo Jones, as a small theater. The c.o.c.kpit now served as the judicial chamber for the king's Privy Council, and with tensions between Britain and the American colonies approaching a crisis, this was where Benjamin Franklin, agent for Ma.s.sachusetts, presented a pet.i.tion from the province's legislature requesting the removal of Governor Thomas Hutchinson.

A year before Franklin had leaked some letters written by Hutchinson and other colonial officials to patriot leaders in Boston. That the letters were private and had been acquired through undoubtedly nefarious means did nothing to quell the outrage they incited among the people of Ma.s.sachusetts. According to Samuel Adams, the letters provided incontrovertible proof that the governor had been a.s.sisting the ministry "in their designs of establishing arbitrary power."

Franklin, no keen revolutionary, had originally hoped that the letters would demonstrate that Hutchinson, not the British government, was responsible for Boston's troubles. With Hutchinson serving as the scapegoat, relations between the colonists and Britain might begin to improve. Franklin, however, had made a catastrophic miscalculation.

Representing the ministry at the hearing in the c.o.c.kpit was Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn. Wedderburn had a reputation for eloquence and mockery, and the privy councillors had invited a large number of spectators sympathetic to the crown who, along with Thomas Gage, had packed themselves into this intimate, theatrical s.p.a.ce for what promised to be the political equivalent of a blood sport.

For the next hour, Franklin, silent and stone-faced, endured an unceasing stream of abuse from Wedderburn as many of those surrounding the two men laughed and applauded. Franklin was, according to Wedderburn, not only a deceitful thief; he was the "first mover and prime conductor" of all the unrest in Boston and even had secret ambitions to succeed Hutchinson as governor.

Gage had known Franklin since the Braddock campaign back in 1755, when the Boston-born Philadelphian had helped to a.s.semble the many horses and wagons necessary to transport the troops and provisions into the Pennsylvania wilderness. The general seems to have been both fascinated and troubled by the spectacle of the sixty-eight-year-old polymath in an antiquated wig being ridiculed by a bellowing lawyer and a crowd of Britain's most influential politicians. "The Doctor was so abused," Gage wrote, "his conduct and character so cut and mangled, I wonder he had confidence to stand it; and the whole audience, which was humorous, to a man against him." No matter what anyone thought of Franklin's role in the controversy, the encounter did not bode well for the future of British-American relations.

On February 4 Gage was admitted into the inner sanctum of the British Empire: the small, richly furnished room known as the King's Closet at St. James's Palace, where he found himself in the presence of George III. For the colonists in America, the king represented their most cherished link to Britain. George III, it was said, remained steadfast in his love for his American subjects. It was the king's advisers in the ministry who were the problem. Several years before, the Boston lawyer James Otis had given voice to the fantasy that would have solved everything: If only England "was sunk in the sea so that the king and his family were saved" and brought to America. With England gone, the colonies could have their beloved king all to themselves, without the bother of that conniving and corrupt ministry and Parliament.

But as quickly became clear to Gage, the king was no uninvolved figurehead. With bulging, heavily lidded eyes, the king questioned him closely about Boston and Ma.s.sachusetts. The general, not normally the most a.s.sertive of men, seems to have been temporarily intoxicated by his proximity to ultimate power. "He says," George III reported to Lord North, "they will be lions, whilst we are lambs, but if we take the resolute part they will undoubtedly prove very meek." Gage maintained that only four regiments of soldiers were "sufficient to prevent any disturbance." The king urged North to meet with Gage and "hear his ideas as to the mode of compelling Boston to submit to whatever may be thought necessary."

Gage left the king with the impression that he was ready "at a day's notice" to return to America and implement whatever "coercive measures" were required. In actuality, he had deep reservations about returning to the colonies, particularly when it came to Ma.s.sachusetts. "America is a mere bully," he'd written back in 1770, "from one end to the other, and the Bostonians by far the greatest bullies." He might talk tough to the king, but he was by nature a kind and forgiving man. For a military officer, he had an unusual abhorrence for confrontation and, in his mid-fifties, with a total of three children attending schools in England, ample reason not to return to America.

His wife, however, felt differently. After only half a year in England, Margaret already missed her native land. She may have wanted her new child to meet her family back in America. Given the growing sense of urgency surrounding Britain's response to the Tea Party, Gage eventually decided that between the demands of his country and his wife, he had no choice but to return to America as military commander and royal governor of Ma.s.sachusetts.

Once the Lively had sailed past the lighthouse set amid the cl.u.s.ter of little islands called the Brewsters (which the Pilgrims had named 153 years before for their lay minister William Brewster), the twenty-gun sloop-of-war headed north between Lovells Island to starboard and Georges Island to port. Up ahead, past Thompson, Spectacle, and Long islands to the west, was the cliff-faced oval of Castle William, where the British flag with its red St. George and blue St. Andrew crosses flew above the stone walls of a fort. About three miles beyond that Gage could see the rounded eminence of Boston's Beacon Hill, surrounded by a bristle of spires and ship masts.

For the next four days, Gage remained at the Castle, where he learned what he could from the tea consignees, whose confinement to the fort's living quarters was now approaching six months. Also present at the Castle was Governor Thomas Hutchinson, who was soon to leave for London. Hutchinson, sixty-two, had come to represent all that the patriots claimed was wrong with the British Empire. In reality, he was far more sympathetic to the plight of provincial Ma.s.sachusetts than his enemies ever allowed. Back in 1765 he had privately criticized the Stamp Act; he had also had reservations about many of the ministry's subsequent actions. But rather than constantly challenge Parliament's right to dictate policy, as the patriots insisted on doing, he felt it was in the colony's best interests to work through proper governmental channels. At his house in Milton he had created his own version of an English country estate, where he watched in increasing bewilderment as the inhabitants of the province he loved above all else came to view him as a grasping and scheming traitor.

Hutchinson and the tea consignees reported that Boston was in turmoil. Word of the Port Act, the first of several measures Gage was to enforce over the course of the next few months, had preceded the general by three days. The town was to be sealed off from almost all commercial activity until such time as "peace and obedience to the laws shall be so far restored." By June 1, no ships requiring customs oversight were to enter Boston Harbor. By June 15, no ships were allowed to leave. With a fleet of British naval vessels patrolling a twenty-five-mile swath of coastline extending from Point Shirley to the north and Point Allerton to the south, Boston, the third largest port in North America, would be effectively cut off from the rest of the colonies and the world. Vessels were to go instead to Marblehead, twenty miles to the north, with nearby Salem becoming the new seat of provincial government as Boston was left to contemplate the enormity of its transgressions. Only after its citizens had repented of their sins and paid for the destroyed tea would the king and his ministers allow prosperity to return.

Bostonians were stunned by the severity of the act. An entire community had been punished for the actions of a hundred or so rabble-rousers. Contrary to Britain's own laws, Bostonians had been tried and condemned without having even been accused of a specific crime. By May 13 Josiah Quincy Jr., the lawyer who had warned back in December that desperate times were ahead, had already written a pa.s.sionate response to the Boston Port Act that ended by quoting the Athenian statesman Solon. It was far better, Solon had said, "to repress the advances of tyranny and prevent its establishment." But once tyranny had managed to a.s.sert itself, there was only one alternative: "Demolish it."

The loyalists surrounding Gage insisted that this heated rhetoric indicated that the Port Act was doing exactly as Parliament had intended. "I hear from many," he reported to Secretary of State Lord Dartmouth, "that the act has staggered the most presumptuous." What the patriots needed, Gage felt, was a chance for the consequences of the act to set in. "Minds so enflamed cannot cool at once," he wrote Dartmouth, "so it may be better to give the shock they have received time to operate." But as it turned out, time was not on Gage's side.

On the very day that Gage arrived at the Castle, a town meeting was convened at its usual place on the second story of Boston's Faneuil Hall on Dock Square, just a block to the north of King Street. Hanging from the walls were portraits of Peter Faneuil, the wealthy merchant of Huguenot descent who paid for the building's construction in the 1740s; of former Ma.s.sachusetts governor William Shirley; and of Isaac Barre, one of the patriots' most outspoken friends in Parliament (even if he had voted in support of the Port Bill). On the ground floor beneath the hall, which was said to accommodate upward of 1,500 people, were the stalls of the town market. Swinging in the sky above the building's cupola was a gra.s.shopper weathervane (similar to that on London's Royal Exchange) fashioned by Deacon Shem Drowne, the same coppersmith who had made the Indian archer above Province House.

For the patriots, this "s.p.a.cious hall" was a "n.o.ble school ... where the meanest citizen ... may deliver his sentiments and give his suffrage in very important matters, as freely as the greatest lord in the land." For the loyalists, the town meetings at Faneuil Hall were closer to "a pandemonium than a convocation," since any attempt to oppose the patriots was often met with shouts and even physical intimidation. All agreed that the last decade of political unrest had taken its toll on patriots and loyalists alike. But it wasn't just the fisticuffs in the streets and the tarring and feathering. Something was going on inside all of them-a painful, almost cellular metamorphosis-as they struggled to define what it was to be an American in the British Empire.