Governing Rebellion
The quest for order in revolutionary America, summer 1774
This is an installment of “Sestercenntenial Moments,” marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and its memory in our national life. For more on the background of the series, see here.
There’s a truly great moment in the 2008 HBO series John Adams that’s set on the eve of the Boston Tea Party in late 1773. A British colonial official is trying to offload East India Company tea over the objections of John Hancock, who describes himself as a long-suffering ship owner strangled by unfair competition. When the official (accurately) describes Hancock as a smuggler, Sam Adams, who’s on the scene, yells “shame on you,” echoed by the crowd that has formed behind him. By this point, the Brit is aware that the mob is a threat and tries to run away. But it’s no use: he’s tarred and feathered, Sam Adams taking glee in the scene even as his cousin John strenuously objects to “brutal and illegal acts.” The scene makes vividly clear that the American Revolution was no quaint affair discreetly conducted by men in tri-cornered hats. It was instead a coercive and violent event in which wrenching conflict was typical years before the first shots were fired.
In revolutions, righteous protest is relatively easy: it’s maintaining civil order that’s hard. Samuel Adams was the brilliant tactician who developed boycotts as a means of crippling British trade to counter imperial taxation—if you don’t buy anything, you don’t pay any tax. But the stunning effectiveness of the boycotts was a direct function of the intimidation, direct and indirect, that enforced it. There was always a danger that violence could get out of control.
This was something that many leaders of the Revolution, which included the real-life Adams cousins, were very mindful of and worried about. It’s why John, at the urging of Sam, served as defense attorney for British soldiers accused of murder during the Boston Massacre of 1770; they wanted to show that justice was possible in the colony. (Adams won an acquittal.) And it’s why the Act for Impartial Administration of Justice, one of the Intolerable Acts imposed after the Tea Party, was so offensive to the colonists: it took jurisdiction away from Massachusetts and required officials accused of a crime to be tried back in England. By that point, many colonists agreed that the colonial government of Massachusetts was illegitimate. But what would take its place?
The answer was the construction of an entirely new government alongside the old one, with a new set of elected officials to whom residents would pledge their obedience and loyalty. And by July of 1774, this process was well underway.
As with so many other things, one of the trickier aspects of this process involved money. That summer, scores of communities throughout the colony agreed to no longer transfer the tax payments they collected over the Harrison Gray, a treasurer with Loyalist sympathies. They held on to the money until fall, when the provincial congress voted to turn it over to Henry Gardner, their newly chosen receiver of taxes. The revenue was to be used for the defense of the colony—and here it should be noted that many local militia officers resigned their commissions with the Crown, becoming part of the soon-to-be-famous Minuteman units that would be on hand for the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. So it was that Massachusetts had a working government years before the Declaration of Independence.
Of all the remarkable achievements of the American Revolution, this ranks among the greatest. It reflects a striking degree of community cohesion, commitment to law, and a willingness to abide by both minority rights and majority rule. All these values are now fraying in American life. We would do well to remember and reaffirm them.
And that’s the way it seems.