Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution Part 3

What the patriots were proposing, once the Enlightenment rhetoric and sanctimonious evocation of their forefathers had been pushed aside, was exactly what Governor Leverett had insisted on back in 1676: that Parliament had no say in what happened in Ma.s.sachusetts. And as Thomas Hutchinson had pointed out just the year before, this was, in essence, a demand for independence-a word that these self-styled "conscience patriots" insisted was not yet part of their vocabulary. And as is often the case when someone is unable or unwilling to acknowledge the true implications of his or her beliefs, many of the patriots were plagued by periods of psychic and physical torment.

James Otis was generally credited with initiating this remorseless quest for liberty back in 1761, by objecting to the British government's right to search private premises without a warrant. Since then, the pa.s.sionate attorney (whom John Adams dubbed the patriot's Martin Luther) had dared to wonder out loud whether he'd been right. Otis's mood swings and rants had become so extreme in recent years that he had been placed under the care of a family outside Boston. But Otis was only the most visible casualty of the tortured ambivalence that went with being a patriot. After representing the British soldiers involved in the Boston Ma.s.sacre alongside Josiah Quincy in the fall of 1770, John Adams suffered a breakdown that required him to retreat temporarily to his ancestral home in Braintree. Two years later, he was distressed to discover that "my const.i.tutional or habitual infirmities have not entirely forsaken me." At a social gathering in Boston he lost control of himself when the subject turned to politics. In a violent verbal outburst he uttered the unspeakable truths that were on all their minds: "I said there was no more justice left in Britain than there was in h.e.l.l-that I wished for war... . Such flights of pa.s.sion, such starts of imagination, though they may [impress] a few of the fiery and inconsiderate, yet they lower, they sink a man."

They were a high-strung group of what we would call today overachievers-"ambitious beyond reason to excel," as one of their descendants described them-and just about every leading patriot seemed to have some sort of psychosomatic complaint. The Reverend Samuel Cooper, whose dual role as a patriot and minister of the most affluent congregation in Boston led to the accusation that "silver-tongued Sam" possessed a "ductility quite Machiavellian," suffered from what was said to be an addiction to snuff. John Hanc.o.c.k's gout had a way of incapacitating him at times of greatest stress; and the lawyer Joseph Hawley, to whom John Adams deferred when it came to matters of political policy, was so racked by depression that he would one day take his own life. Even Josiah Quincy, who burned with a seemingly quenchless indignation, acknowledged, on occasion, that the loyalists might have a point.

There was, however, one man who did not let the ambiguities upset him; who was so in sync with the great ideological engine driving the patriot movement that he transcended all the potential paradoxes and denials; and at 11:00 a.m. on May 13, the imperturbable Samuel Adams was chosen as moderator of the Boston town meeting.

He was fifty-one, but with his gray hair and trembling hands, he seemed much older. He had a resonant singing voice, a distrust of horses, and a giant Newfoundland dog named Queue that hated British soldiers. He had failed at every business venture he had ever attempted, but he had one extraordinary talent: he understood, in a deeply historical sense, the future.

America had been founded by immigrants who, little thanks to their mother country, had made a life for themselves in a distant land. And now the mother country wanted to a.s.sert her right to control the descendants of those immigrants. But there was a blatant absurdity attached to this claim. England was a tiny island on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. America was a vast continent, with a population that doubled every twenty years and that would soon include more English people than lived in all of Britain. No matter how strong the ties between America and England, this fundamental fact could not be ignored.

Samuel Adams lived and inhabited this truth. He invested it with the spiritual fervor of his Puritan ancestors but with an essential difference. Where the Puritans had seen G.o.d's will lurking behind the seeming disorder of daily life, Adams, thanks to the Enlightenment, also saw a human hand. There were no unintended consequences in the eighteenth century. If something bad happened, someone had caused it to happen, and Boston was now the victim of a more-than-decade-old plot on the part of the British ministry to enslave America, to drain this bounteous land of all her resources so that England, an island lost to luxury and corruption, could sustain the fraudulent lifestyle to which it had become accustomed.

Nothing could sway Samuel Adams from these beliefs. No personal antagonism (and there were plenty) was enough to make him lose sight of the struggle for American liberty. He'd labored for more than a decade writing articles and letters and attending meeting after meeting, but not until the fall of 1772, with the creation of the twenty-one-member Boston Committee of Correspondence, did he find a way to link the fate of Boston to the entire province and, ultimately, to all the colonies.

Ma.s.sachusetts (which then included what is today Maine) had more than 250 towns and a total population of about 300,000. By sending out open letters that were then discussed in town meetings across the colony, Boston patriots transformed what had once been a purely local form of government into a forum on the issues that affected everyone. Instead of worrying about repairing roads or bridges, citizens were now using the town meeting to debate the proper response to the Tea Act. This meant that even before Governor Hutchinson had a chance to issue his latest official p.r.o.nouncement, the inhabitants of what were called the "country towns" of Ma.s.sachusetts were talking among themselves, forming a consensus, and, more often than not, cheering Boston on its rebellious stand against British tyranny. Through the medium of the Committees of Correspondence, Samuel Adams and his compatriots had created what was, in essence, an extralegal, colony-wide network of communication that threatened to preempt the old hierarchical form of government.

In the fall of 1772 the Boston committee announced its presence with the publication of the "Boston Declaration," a kind of tutorial on why natural law superseded anything that Parliament could devise. To the committee members' pleasant surprise, towns that had never before shown an interest in earlier political controversies responded warmly to Boston's invitation to weigh in on the need to defend Ma.s.sachusetts's long-held liberties. Gorham (about ten miles inland of modern Portland, Maine) was one of seven townships granted to the veterans of King Philip's War and their descendants in the early eighteenth century. During an Indian raid in 1746 that many town inhabitants still vividly remembered, five people had been killed and three abducted. For the citizens of Gorham, the fight for liberty was not about the current frustrations with Parliament; it was about the terror, anger, and violence that went with colonizing this ancient and blood-soaked land. "Our eyes have seen our young children weltering in their gore in our own houses, and our dearest friends led into captivity," they wrote to the Boston Committee of Correspondence in January 1773. "We ... have been used to earn our daily bread with our weapons in our hands. Therefore we cannot be supposed to be fully acquainted with the mysteries of court policy, but we look upon ourselves as able to judge so far concerning our rights as men... . We look with horror and indignation on the violation of them... . Many of our women have been used to handle the cartridge, and load the musket, and the swords which we whet and brightened for our enemies are not yet grown rusty."

In town after town, colonists took Boston's statement of natural rights and made it their own. And as the citizens of Gorham had made unmistakably clear, they were more than willing to fight for those freedoms.

Governor Hutchinson was so alarmed by the committee's inroads throughout the province that he responded with a tutorial of his own. On January 1773 he delivered a lecture to both chambers of the General Court in which he pointed out the fallacies behind the committee's a.s.sertions in the Boston Declaration. Instead of convincing the patriots of the errors of their ways, however, Hutchinson's response only added to the growing momentum. Much to the governor's apparent surprise, the Ma.s.sachusetts House of Representatives quickly replied with a detailed treatise (written by members of the Committee of Correspondence) that laid the philosophical and legal groundwork for future thoughts about independence.

In the months ahead, Hutchinson watched helplessly as the once lackadaisical pace of events in the colony seemed to accelerate into a disastrous rush. Soon after suffering through the storm ignited by his ill-conceived response to the Boston Declaration, Hutchinson found himself engulfed in the controversy surrounding the packet of letters leaked by Benjamin Franklin. Even before that began to die down in the fall of 1773, he was embroiled in the maneuverings that culminated in the Boston Tea Party. Through it all, the Boston Committee of Correspondence had been sending out letters that gave each controversy an impact and resonance it otherwise never would have had.

The turnaround was remarkable. In the fall of 1772, Hutchinson had been congratulating himself on the contented calm that had settled over the colony. Then came the Committee of Correspondence, and within a year and a half, the governor's reign was over-a downfall that had been hastened, if not scripted, by Samuel Adams and his junta of unelected committee members.

On the afternoon of May 13, 1774, in Faneuil Hall, the town meeting elected an eleven-man committee "to write a circular letter to the several towns of this province and to the several colonies, acquainting them with the present state of our affairs." In addition to Samuel Adams, the committee included many members of the Committee of Correspondence, such as John Adams, Dr. Joseph Warren, Josiah Quincy Jr., and the mercurial and outspoken merchant William Molineux. But there were some surprising additions to the committee, most notably the politically amibiguous John Rowe, whose ties to the loyalists were as strong as, if not stronger than, his allegiance to the patriot cause.

By naming Rowe and the others, Samuel Adams shrewdly addressed a potentially th.o.r.n.y problem. Boston had divided over the proper response to the Port Act. Many merchants were convinced that there was a simple and sensible solution to the crisis, so sensible, in fact, that Benjamin Franklin had thought of it back in London soon after learning about the Tea Party. Why not simply pay for the tea? Rather than sit there and watch as commerce withered to nothing and the city filled up with British soldiers, why not swallow their collective pride and come up with the 9,660 pounds sterling (about $850,000 in today's U.S. currency) required to put this whole sad affair behind them and move on with their lives?

This was not what Samuel Adams and his compatriots wanted to hear. Rather than approaching the act as a problem to be solved, they saw it as an opportunity to be exploited. They argued that to capitulate now would only encourage even harsher measures in the future. And besides, given the haziness of the act's wording, it was difficult to determine whether reimbursing the East India Company would be enough to convince the British Parliament to repeal the act. Instead of compliance, they wanted nothing less than a complete boycott of British goods-not just in Boston and Ma.s.sachusetts but throughout all thirteen colonies.

With the creation of the new committee containing Rowe and other merchants operating as a smoke screen, Adams proceeded to do exactly as he wanted. A motion was pa.s.sed that the Committee of Correspondence should "dispatch messengers with all possible speed to the other colonies and the several towns in this province, charged with the letters [that] they have wrote relative to shutting up this harbor." Then came the coup de grace: a motion was pa.s.sed in support of the a.s.sertion that a boycott of British imports and exports "will prove the salvation of North America and her liberties."

Rowe a.s.sumed that the motion simply stated the mood of the meeting, and in the days ahead he worked with the committee to articulate what was supposed to be the town's official response to the Boston Port Act. But it was all for nothing-the committee never delivered a recommendation. In the meantime, the Boston Committee of Correspondence's May 13 letters stating the need for a boycott had long since been sent. The impression broadcast throughout Ma.s.sachusetts and America was that Boston unanimously supported a boycott and expected the other colonies to follow suit. Bostonians, however, were far from agreed as to what to do about the Port Bill.

At noon on Tuesday, May 17, four days after his arrival at Castle Island, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage landed at Boston's Long Wharf. A third of a mile long, lined with more than fifteen warehouses and shops (one of which had once been the boyhood home of the painter John Singleton Copley), Long Wharf was a wide and inviting platform of commerce that gestured toward the harbor and the ocean beyond like an opened hand.

Five and a half years before, during the fall of 1768, Long Wharf had been the arrival point of the soldiers that had ultimately made the Boston Ma.s.sacre an inevitability. Now, with the arrival of General Gage and the knowledge that at least four regiments of British soldiers were on the way, the town was being forced to relive that nightmare even as it prepared to suffer an altogether new ordeal.

But there was at least one consolation. Governor Thomas Hutchinson, the most reviled man in all of Ma.s.sachusetts, was to depart soon for England, and General Gage was said to be a most reasonable man, with an American wife.

Gage was met at Long Wharf by a delegation that included the upper chamber of the General Court, known as His Majesty's Council; the town selectmen; and a host of other officials, including the province's secretary, Thomas Flucker. Preceding this august group were the Independent Company of Cadets, the elite of Boston's militia, who were responsible for accompanying the royal governor at official functions. Dressed in red coats with blue facings, patterned on the uniforms worn by the British Foot Guards, the cadets were the governor's official bodyguards and were commanded by John Hanc.o.c.k.

If Samuel Adams was the guru of the patriot cause, Hanc.o.c.k, thirty-seven, was its uncrowned king. Handsome, with the stubble of a beard visible on his clean-shaven cheeks, he'd recently scored a major success in March with a surprisingly well-delivered Ma.s.sacre Day Oration, an annual event held in the Old South Meetinghouse that provided Bostonians with a stirring reminder of the evils of a standing army. No one in America had lived a more privileged life than John Hanc.o.c.k, and yet there was a profound difference between him and the man whom it was now his sworn duty to protect, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage. Gage's family had lived on their estate in the Suss.e.x town of Firle since the fifteenth century. His status as British gentry was something that he and everyone he knew took for granted. Hanc.o.c.k's wealth, on the other hand, was only a generation old. His uncle, who had adopted him when he was a boy, had ama.s.sed much of his fortune selling arms and provisions to the British army during the French and Indian War. John Hanc.o.c.k's inherited wealth had provided him with a beautiful house on Beacon Hill, an ornate carriage, fashionable clothes, and a nasty case of gout, but it had not won him the sense of ent.i.tlement that the landed aristocracy in England enjoyed. As anyone in the colonies could see, fortunes could be lost even more quickly than they could be made, and as a consequence, the wealthy in America tended to be (relative to their counterparts in Britain, at least) an insecure and touchy lot.

Much has been said in both his and our own time to malign Hanc.o.c.k's intelligence and temper, but not even Samuel Adams proved as adept at responding to the mood swings of the American people. After his uncle's death, he purposely changed the direction of the family business to include a variety of house and shipbuilding projects that came to employ, his lawyer John Adams estimated, at least one thousand Boston families. In the 1770s, as his wealthy peers throughout New England became the objects of envy, suspicion, and open ridicule, Hanc.o.c.k became ever more popular. He served diligently both as a selectman and as a moderator at town meetings. Whereas the idealistic fervor of Samuel Adams could rub even patriots the wrong way, Hanc.o.c.k had the charismatic flair required to attract a loyal popular following, and it was little wonder that Hutchinson had once tried to bring him into the loyalist fold. To the end, however, Hanc.o.c.k remained his own man. He declined to serve on Samuel Adams's Boston Committee of Correspondence, and as Thomas Gage was about to discover, Hanc.o.c.k had a talent for the deftly delivered stab in the back.

Cannons were fired from Admiral Montagu's flagship, HMS Captain, and from the batteries in the North End and on Fort Hill to the south. Gage had brought with him both his chariot and his coach, and it's more than likely that at least one of these vehicles was used to transport him and his retinue up Long Wharf to King Street. Here he received a standing salute from the companies of militia, artillery, and grenadiers before reaching the Town House, whose red bricks had recently been painted gray to resemble stone. Once he'd stepped from his carriage to the entrance of the Town House, he climbed the stairs to the council chamber, where he presented his commissions from the king to the upper house of the General Court. After taking the required oaths, he appeared on the balcony overlooking King Street and read a proclamation directing all militia officers to maintain their commissions until receiving further orders, which prompted three volleys from the companies on the street below. A vast crowd had a.s.sembled on the square that had formerly been the scene of the Boston Ma.s.sacre and the tarring and feathering of John Malcom, and on that afternoon in May they gave their new governor three rousing cheers.

Once he'd had a chance to be introduced to a large number of Boston's leading citizens, Gage was again escorted by Hanc.o.c.k and the cadets, this time to Faneuil Hall, where he enjoyed what was described as an "elegant dinner," even if his toast to his predecessor Governor Hutchinson elicited a prolonged hiss. At some point, Gage presented Hanc.o.c.k with his personal flag, featuring the Gage family coat of arms.

Inevitably, Hanc.o.c.k, the young and arrogant darling of the patriot movement, ran afoul of Thomas Gage. Later in the summer, Gage accused Hanc.o.c.k of not paying the proper respect as he pa.s.sed between the cadets' lines at the entrance to the governor's residence at Province House. When Gage angrily called for Hanc.o.c.k's dismissal, the cadets responded by returning Gage's flag and refusing to serve under another commander. Hanc.o.c.k had lost his command, but Gage had been robbed of his personal guards. Once again, Hanc.o.c.k had found a way to elevate his standing among the people of Boston.

On May 25, the new royal governor suffered through an Election Day sermon at the First Meeting based on the scriptural proverb "When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn." Later that day he was presented with a slate of twenty-eight candidates for his own governor's council that was filled with patriots. As was his right, he rejected thirteen of them, including John Adams and Harvard professor John Winthrop. He also reminded both houses of the General Court that as of June 1 they would be meeting not in Boston but, as the Port Act required, in Salem. Instead of living in Province House, Gage needed to be based near the new temporary capital, and over the course of the next few days he made arrangements to stay in a mansion in the little town of Danvers, just a few miles from Salem.

On May 29, Admiral Montagu began setting up the blockade that would prevent all shipping from reaching or leaving Boston Harbor. Given the size of the anchorage, it was no easy matter. The Magdalen was placed at Point Shirley at the harbor's extreme northeastern corner, the Mercury fourteen miles to the south at Point Allerton, and the Tamar hovered near the harbor entrance at the Brewsters. Six other vessels took up positions throughout the inner harbor, with the largest and most conspicuous of the warships, the admiral's flagship Captain, placed between Long and Hanc.o.c.k's wharves, the entire Boston waterfront comfortably in range of her guns.

On June 1 John Rowe recorded in his diary, "This is the last day any vessel can enter this harbor until this fatal act of Parliament is repealed. Poor unhappy Boston. G.o.d knows only thy wretched fate. I see nothing but misery will attend thy inhabitants."

But the Boston Port Act was only the beginning. The very next day, word reached the city that a vessel had arrived in Marblehead with a draft of another bill that would be referred to in the months ahead as the Ma.s.sachusetts Government Act. Not content with sealing off Boston, Parliament had decided to strip the colony of the essence of its royal charter, which dated back to 1692. With the exception of one pro forma annual gathering to elect town officials, regular town meetings, the lifeblood of the patriot movement, were to be forbidden. Instead of being nominated by the House of Representatives, subject to the governor's veto, the upper chamber of the General Court was to be handpicked by the king through what was called a writ of mandamus (Latin for "we command").

It now seemed as if everything Samuel Adams had predicted was about to come true. By August, when the Government Act went into effect, every town in Ma.s.sachusetts would be deprived of its liberties.

John Rowe received the disturbing news while attending a meeting of fellow Boston merchants. Rowe was a moderate, a man doomed to see both sides of the situation and to reserve judgment; he loved the mother country, but he also cared deeply about the town of Boston. Back in December he appears to have gotten so caught up in the excitement surrounding the Tea Party that he was heard to shout, "Who knows how tea will mingle with salt water?" It was an exclamation he had come to regret as he struggled to play both sides of the political fence. "The people have done amiss [with the Tea Party]," he wrote in his diary, "and no sober man can vindicate their conduct, but the revenge of the ministry is too severe."

Samuel Adams seems to have taken the Government Act as a kind of goad. It was time, he and the Boston Committee of Correspondence decided, to circ.u.mvent the merchants and their attempts to pay for the tea and appeal directly to the farmers of the country towns. Since the merchants' livelihood was based on trade with London, they would always be wary of anything that might endanger that profitable relationship. It was the "yeomanry" of the country-people like the farmers of Gorham who kept their muskets at the ready even when plowing their fields-who could be counted on to do the right thing. "Is it not necessary," Samuel Adams wrote on May 30, "to push for a suspension of trade with Great Britain as far as it will go, and let the yeomanry (whose virtue must finally save this country) resolve to desert those altogether who will not come into the measure?" Perhaps if England's merchants were made to suffer at least a portion of the economic misery inflicted on Boston, the British ministry might begin to see the error of their ways.

On June 2, the committee began drafting what it melodramatically t.i.tled "The Solemn League and Covenant." In the tradition of Joyce Junior, this was a startlingly direct reference to the English Civil War and the 1643 agreement by which Parliament combined with Scotland against the Royalists. As its t.i.tle suggested, the Solemn League and Covenant was all about commitment and coercion. By signing this agreement, New Englanders were pledging not only to boycott all British goods but to spurn and vilify any of their countrymen who dared to do differently.

On June 8 the committee quietly sent out copies of the Solemn League and Covenant to towns throughout Ma.s.sachusetts over the signature of the town clerk, William Cooper. It took only a few days for word of the covenant to make its way back to the merchants in Boston. As was to be expected, they were outraged. In what was nothing less than a barefaced act of intimidation, the committee was attempting to precipitate a boycott by creating the false impression that Bostonians had already agreed to the measure and then, once they'd used that lie to get the country towns on their side, force the merchants into line.

Like John Rowe, John Andrews was a merchant who had always been cautiously supportive of the patriot cause; but this underhanded move by Adams and his committee was simply too much. The patriots' reckless disregard for the principles they were supposedly working to uphold might, in Andrews's view, serve the purposes of the British ministry by fracturing the city into two warring factions. "Those who have governed the town for years past ... seem determined to bring total destruction upon us ... ," he wrote his brother-in-law in Philadelphia. "I am afraid we shall experience the worst [of] evils, a civil war."

By this time, transports containing the promised regiments of soldiers had begun to arrive in the harbor. On June 14, Lieutenant Colonel George Maddison and the Fourth Regiment disembarked at Long Wharf and after marching up King Street pitched their tents on the Boston Common, near the livestock pound. John Rowe reported that there were "a number of spectators to see them." The following day, the Fourth Regiment was joined by Major Clerk and the Forty-Third, who set up camp near the workhouse to the northeast. Traditionally, the common had been a bucolic oasis, where lovers liked to stroll at dusk along the tree-lined path known as the Mall; with the arrival of hundreds of soldiers, it was becoming an open-air barracks and training ground. The troops had displaced the town's sizable herd of cows, many of which attempted to return to their old grazing grounds ("where the richest herbage I ever saw abounds," marveled one officer) until driven away by stones thrown by the regiments' sentries.

In the meantime, the waterfront, normally a center of nonstop commotion, had grown eerily silent. Goods and provisions were still allowed to enter Boston, but because of the Port Bill they had to be first off-loaded at Salem then transported overland by wagon to Boston-a trip of almost thirty miles that one merchant claimed cost even more than the freight from England. Even worse, Boston's stevedores, sailors, and mechanics-indeed, anyone who relied on the once-constant influx of shipping at the city's docks-no longer had a way to support themselves.

On Sunday, Rowe went for a walk along the wharves. In the past he would have seen ship after ship lined up along the waterfront with their sails drying in the late-spring sun as well as an anchorage full of coasting schooners and merchant ships. Boston Harbor was now shockingly empty; what vessels remained belonged, for the most part, to the British navy. "Tis impossible to describe the distressed situation of this poor town," he wrote, "not one topsail merchantman to be seen."

CHAPTER THREE

The Long Hot Summer

By mid-June it seemed certain that an angry showdown between the merchants and the Boston Committee of Correspondence was about to erupt in Faneuil Hall. But matters were also coming to a head in Salem, where the province's legislative body, the General Court, went into session on June 7. Reaction to Boston's call for a boycott had been mixed, but sympathies for the town's plight remained strong throughout the colonies. As indicated by letters received by the Boston Committee of Correspondence from committees in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia, the time was considered right for a meeting of representatives from all thirteen colonies to work out a coordinated response to the ministry's attempts to limit colonial rights, for "an attack upon one colony was an attack on all." It was time, Samuel Adams and his coterie of patriots decided, for the Ma.s.sachusetts House of Representatives to select the delegates to represent the colony at what would come to be called the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

Each year, the Ma.s.sachusetts House chose a committee to draw up a report on the state of the province. This year it was secretly decided that the nine members of this committee should be the ones to come up with a slate of delegates for the Continental Congress. Unfortunately a loyalist had made his way onto the committee. Daniel Leonard was a lawyer descended from a family of Taunton ironmongers. Up until recently he had distinguished himself for his wit, style, and criticism of the administration; in fact, he had been the one who joked back in 1765 that Thomas Hutchinson's house had been destroyed because of what Leonard judged to be his poorly written history of Ma.s.sachusetts. That winter, however, Leonard had grown increasingly disaffected with the patriots. At some point in the spring he became a committed loyalist, a transformation that the residents of Taunton attributed to Thomas Hutchinson, who was seen speaking to Leonard on the town green beside what came to be known as the Tory Pear Tree.

Whether or not Leonard had been seduced by Hutchinson, he was a most dangerous opponent to have on the committee. Not only was he still highly respected among the members of the House, but he might report the committee's discussions to General Gage. It was decided that two committee meetings must be held each evening after the adjournment of the General Court. The first was to be a sham meeting in which the committee pretended to discuss the Port Bill, with Samuel Adams giving the impression that he might be open to paying for the tea. One of the committee members was another Taunton lawyer named Robert Treat Paine, who counted Leonard as a good friend. Paine marveled at how convincingly Adams strung Leonard along at these meetings. "It would be hard to describe," Paine later wrote, "the smooth and placid observations made by Mr. S. Adams, saying that it was an irritating affair, and must be handled cautiously; that the people must have time to think and form their minds, and that hurrying the matter would certainly create such an opposition that would defeat the matter and many observations of this kind, all tending to induce Mr. Leonard ... to think that matters would terminate in obedience to the Port Bill." Each meeting ended quite abruptly, with Adams insisting that since it was so hot and they had been attending court all day, "it was unprofitable to sit any longer" and time to go to bed. Once the meeting had been adjourned, however, all the members except Leonard "immediately repaired to a retired room ... , shut their doors and entered freely and fully on all the subjects of grievances."

After three nights of these clandestine meetings, Adams and his fellow committee members had come up with a slate of candidates for the Continental Congress that included Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Robert Treat Paine. But they still had a problem. When it came time to make their report to the House of Representatives, Leonard would instantly know that he had been tricked. He might even succeed in blocking their efforts to elect representatives to the Continental Congress. He must not attend the meeting of the House on Friday, June 17. But how to get him out of Salem?

Paine had an idea. The Court of Common Pleas was to sit in Taunton on Tuesday, June 14. He would convince Leonard that the two of them should attend that session with the understanding that they would get back to Salem in time "to attend all important business." So on Sat.u.r.day, June 11, the two lawyers set out on the fifty-five-mile journey to Taunton. A week later on Sat.u.r.day, June 18, they were on the road back to Salem when they heard the news that forever ended their friendship.