Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution Part 24

For reading and commenting on the ma.n.u.script I am indebted to J. L. Bell, Philip Budden, Dr. Samuel Forman, William Fowler, Erik Goldstein, Peter Gow, Michael Hill, Paul Lockhardt, Jennifer Philbrick McArdle, Bruce Miller, Melissa D. Philbrick, Marianne Philbrick, Samuel Philbrick, Thomas Philbrick, Gregory Whitehead, and Hiller Zobel. All errors of fact and interpretation are mine and mine alone.

At Viking Penguin, I have been privileged to work, once again, with the incomparable Wendy Wolf. Thanks also to Clare Ferraro, Nancy Sheppard, Margaret Riggs, Francesca Belanger, Katherine Griggs, James Tierney, Andrew Duncan, Louise Braverman, Meghan Fallon, and Carolyn Coleburn. Thanks to Miranda Ottewell for the copyediting and to Margaret Moore Booker for the index. Thanks also to Jeffrey Ward for the maps.

My agent, Stuart Krichevsky, has been showing me the way for more than fourteen years; thanks again, Stuart, for your friends.h.i.+p and guidance. Thanks also to his a.s.sociates Shana Cohen and Ross Harris. Thanks to Meghan Walker of Tandem Literary for keeping me connected to my readers through my Web site and social media.

Finally, a special thanks to my wife, Melissa, and to all our family members for your support and patience.

Notes

Abbreviations

AAS-American Antiquarian Society

AA4-American Archives, 4th series, edited by Peter Force

BAR-The Beginnings of the American Revolution, edited by Ellen Chase

CHS-Cambridge Historical Society

CKG-The Correspondence of King George the Third, vol. 3, edited by John Fortescue

DAR-Doc.u.ments of the American Revolution, edited by K. G. Davies

DJW-Dr. Joseph Warren, by Samuel Forman

EIHC-Ess.e.x Inst.i.tute Historical Collections

FYAR-The First Year of the American Revolution, by Allen French

HSOB-History of the Siege of Boston, by Richard Frothingham

JEPC-The Journals of Each Provincial Congress of Ma.s.sachusetts in 1774 and 1775, edited by William Lincoln

LAR-Letters of the American Revolution, edited by Margaret Willard

LJA-Letters of John Andrews

LJW-The Life of Joseph Warren, by Richard Frothingham

MHS-Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society

NDAR-Naval Doc.u.ments of the American Revolution, edited by William Bell Clark

NEHGR-New England Historical and Genealogical Register

NEQ-New England Quarterly

NYPL-New York Public Library

OPAR-Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, by Peter Oliver

PGW-The Papers of George Was.h.i.+ngton: Revolutionary War Series, edited by Philander Chase

PIR-Province in Rebellion: A Doc.u.mentary History of the Founding of the Commonwealth of Ma.s.sachusetts, 17741775, edited by L. Kinvin Wroth

PNG-Papers of Nathanael Greene, vol. 1, edited by Richard Showman

SHG-Sibley's Harvard Graduates, by Clifford s.h.i.+pton

SSS-The Spirit of Seventy-Six, edited by Henry Steele Commager and Richard Morris

WMQ-William and Mary QuarterlyAn immense amount has been written about the American Revolution, especially as it relates to its beginnings in Boston, and I am indebted to all the authors and editors referred to in the notes and bibliography. Several late-breaking (and, in one instance, ongoing) additions to the scholarly canon have provided information and insights that would have not been available if I had attempted to write this book just a few years earlier. Samuel Forman in his biography Dr. Joseph Warren (2011) has brought a much-needed physician's perspective to the life of his subject while unearthing all sorts of new connections and a.s.sociations, particularly when it comes to Warren's relations.h.i.+p with his fiancee, Mercy Scollay. Two books about the Battle of Bunker Hill, Paul Lockhardt's The Whites of Their Eyes (2011) and James Nelson's With Fire and Sword (2011), have provided different but complementary perspectives on the battle, while Nelson's earlier publication George Was.h.i.+ngton's Secret Navy (2008) helped put the maritime side of the story in a fresh context. Although the Boston Tea Party is only briefly touched on in what follows, Benjamin Carp's Defiance of the Patriots (2010) arrived just in the nick of time, as did Ron Chernow's monumental George Was.h.i.+ngton (2010), Vincent Carretta's Phillis Wheatley (2011), Jack Rakove's Revolutionaries (2010), T. H. Breen's American Insurgents, American Patriots (2010), Neil Longley York's Henry Hulton and the American Revolution (2010), and Ray Raphael's Founders (2009), which expanded on the view originally presented in Raphael's New Englandspecific The First American Revolution (2002). Most recently, the publication of J. L. Bell's General George Was.h.i.+ngton's Headquarters and Home-Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts (2012) by the U.S. Park Service has given the story of the Siege of Boston a depth and scholarly rigor that had not previously existed. Bell's blog Boston 1775 continues to provide an informative and highly entertaining window into the history and scholars.h.i.+p of revolutionary Boston.

Two final points: First, I have adjusted the spelling and punctuation of quotations to make them more accessible to a modern audience-something that had already been done by the editors of several collections cited below. Second, even though provincial Boston was technically a town (since it was governed by a board of selectmen instead of a mayor), I refer to it on occasion as a city. Not only does this help to distinguish Boston from the much smaller towns in the province; it reflects the usage of those in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for whom the term "city" applied to any community, large or small, as in John Winthrop's biblically inspired reference to Boston as a "city on a hill."

Preface-The Decisive Day

The description of John Quincy Adams's response to the Battle of Bunker Hill is based primarily on the notes provided in Abigail Adams's June 18, 1775, letter to her husband, in Adams Family Correspondence, edited by L. H. b.u.t.terfield, pp. 22224. My thanks to Caroline Keinath at the Adams House National Historic Site in Quincy, Ma.s.s., for showing me the hill on which John Quincy Adams and his mother watched the battle. In a February 13, 1818, letter to Hezekiah Niles, John Adams writes, "But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations" (Works, 10:28289). On the ways that interpersonal relations.h.i.+ps determined political beliefs, see the quotation from Henry Laurens cited by Gordon Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution in which Laurens claimed that personal animosities "did more to make him a patriot ... than all the whig pamphlets he might have read" (p. 63); Wood also cites the claim by a Philadelphian that he had known "every person, white and black, men, women, and children in the city of Philadelphia by name," even though that city was considerably larger than Boston (p. 59). John Adams claimed that only about a third of the population was dedicated to the patriot cause at the beginning of the Revolution in an August 1813 letter to Thomas McKean (Works, 10:63); according to Robert Calhoon ("Loyalism and Neutrality," in A Companion to the American Revolution, edited by Jack Greene and J. R. Pole, p. 235), about 20 percent of the colonists were loyalists, with at least half the population wanting to avoid a conflict altogether and with the patriots gaining the support of between 40 and 45 percent of the population. Walter McDougall in Freedom Just Around the Corner writes that the American colonists were the "least taxed people on earth" and also enjoyed the "highest per capita standard of living of any people on earth" (pp. 118, 123). Gene Sharp's From Dictators.h.i.+p to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation was first published in Bangkok in 1993 by the Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Burma; since then it's been translated into thirtyone languages and counting; it's now in its fourth U.S. edition and is published, perhaps suitably given the city's revolutionary history, in East Boston by the Albert Einstein Inst.i.tution. See Sheryl Gay s...o...b..rg, "Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution," New York Times, February 16, 2011.

Chapter One-The City on the Hill

My description of Josiah Quincy Jr.'s speech in Old South Meetinghouse on December 16, 1773, is based primarily on Josiah Quincy's Memoir of Josiah Quincy, which cites Daniel Greenleaf's memory of Quincy's dramatic words (pp. 12425); Greenleaf had been a student of the Lovells at Boston Latin School and was in the gallery that day. Edward Randolph's letter to King Charles II concerning the claims made by Ma.s.sachusetts governor Leverett is cited in Michael Hall's Edward Randolph and the American Colonies, pp. 2425. Leverett's b.l.o.o.d.y leather battle jacket is at the MHS. On the aftereffects of King Philip's War, see my Mayflower, pp. 34546, and Stephen Saunders Webb's 1676: The End of American Independence, pp. 40916. On the overthrow and jailing of Governor Edmund Andros, see G. B. Warden's Boston, 16891776, pp. 314. On the 1745 Siege of Louisbourg, see J. Revell Carr's Seeds of Discontent: The Deep Roots of the American Revolution, 16501750, pp. 186262.

On Britain's economic policies during the first half of the eighteenth century, see James Henretta's "Salutary Neglect": Colonial Administration Under the Duke of Newcastle, pp. 32325, 344. On the debt generated by the end of the French and Indian War, see Alvin Rabushka's Taxation in Colonial America, pp. 56869. L. Kinvin Wroth describes the trade patterns and other economic activities of Ma.s.sachusetts in the mid-1700s in an interpretive essay in Province in Rebellion (PIR), 1:13. My thanks to former British consul general in Boston Philip Budden for pointing out the Puritan roots of the slogan "No taxation without representation," in a private correspondence. Oliver d.i.c.kerson a.n.a.lyzes the effects of the various acts in The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution; according to d.i.c.kerson, the customs officers were "paid out of the revenue collected" (p. 203). Ray Raphael provides a good synopsis of James Otis's arguments on the writs of a.s.sistance in Founders, pp. 1317. On the details of what happened in the Boston Ma.s.sacre, see Hiller Zobel's The Boston Ma.s.sacre, pp. 180205, and Richard Archer's As if an Enemy's Country, pp. 182206. John Greenwood writes of the comet and the fears of an apocalypse in The Revolutionary Services of John Greenwood, pp. 34. The comet that appeared in the night sky over New England during the summer of 1773 was much commented on at the time and is now known as Lexell's Comet (for Anders Johan Lexell, who computed its...o...b..t); modern-day astronomers have estimated that Lexell's Comet pa.s.sed closer to Earth than any other comet in recorded history.

John Tyler's Smugglers and Patriots is an excellent examination of the complex role merchants played in the controversies leading up to the Revolution, particularly when it came to the impact Dutch smugglers had on the Boston Tea Party (pp. 171210). My account of the Tea Party depends largely on Benjamin Carp's Defiance of the Patriots, pp. 11840, and Benjamin Labaree's The Boston Tea Party, pp. 14045. According to Edward Byers in Nation of Nantucket, whale oil exports const.i.tuted almost 53 percent of all pounds sterling earned by New England's exports to Great Britain in the years prior to the Revolution (p. 144). On Hanc.o.c.k's attempts to corner the whale oil market, see Eric Jay Dolin's Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, pp. 13235; see also W. T. Baxter's The House of Hanc.o.c.k, especially pp. 24346, on Hanc.o.c.k's final disastrous 1766 campaign to corner the market, which resulted in the loss of 3,600 pounds sterling and effectively ended Hanc.o.c.k's attempts to compete with the Nantucketers. Also adding to the anti-Nantucket feeling among the Boston patriots was the fact that one of the leading customs officials in Boston, Nathaniel Coffin Sr., came from a family with deep island connections, a point made by James Grieder in "The Boston Tea Party Unmasked: Nantucket's Real Role in the Start of the American Revolution," Historic Nantucket, vol. 62, no. 1, p. 12.

Joyce Junior's broadsides and other announcements appeared in the January 17 and 31, March 28, and April 4, 1774, issues of the Boston Gazette; an advertis.e.m.e.nt for John Winthrop Junior's latest s.h.i.+pment of "Baltimore Flour" also appears in the April 4 issue. My description of Joyce Junior's back history is based in part on two articles by Albert Matthews, "Joyce Junior" and "Joyce Junior Once More." The ident.i.ty of Joyce was revealed by a loyalist commentator in a listing of various patriot leaders from 1775 in the James Bowdoin papers at the MHS; see MHS Proceedings, 2nd ser., 12 (18978): 13942. A physical description of Joyce Junior appeared in the November 9, 1821, Boston Daily Advertiser: "A man used to ride on an a.s.s, with immense jack boots, and his face covered with a horrible mask, and was called Joyce, Jr. His office was to a.s.semble men and boys in mob style, and ride in the middle of them, and in such company to terrify adherents to royal government, before the Revolution. The tumults which resulted in the ma.s.sacre, 1770, was excited by such means. Joyce Junior was said to have a particular whistle, which brought his adherents, etc. whenever they were wanted." Esther Forbes writes insightfully about the hazy genealogy of Joyce Junior and its connection to Pope Night in Paul Revere, pp. 96, 127, 189, 211, 32629, 47172. On Pope Night, see J. L. Bell, "Du Simitiere's Sketches of Pope Day in Boston 1767." Alfred Young describes Joyce Junior as "an all-powerful figure who would mobilize the people against their enemies but would not countenance mob action," in the chapter "Tar and Feathers and the Ghost of Oliver Cromwell," in Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution, p. 164; elsewhere Young speaks of the "conservative backlash" that followed the Tea Party in the spring of 1774, p. 121. A version of Joyce Junior appears in Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "My Kinsman, Major Molineux." On John Winthrop Jr. see Clifford s.h.i.+pton's biographical essay in SHG, 16:29495.

My account of Boston in 1774 is based largely on Nathaniel Shurtleff, A Topographical and Historical Description of Boston; Shurtleff refers to the Nathaniel Hawthorne short story collection, Legends of Province House, that talks about how the Indian atop Province House appeared to be aiming at the weatherc.o.c.k of the Old South Meetinghouse, p. 601; see also Walter Muir Whitehill's Boston: A Topographical History. On the Liberty Tree at the corner of Ess.e.x and Newbury streets, see Arthur Schlesinger, "The Liberty Tree: A Genealogy." Richard Frothingham in History of the Siege of Boston (HSOB) writes of the flagstaff that rose out of the top of the Liberty Tree, p. 27. See Deacon Tudor's Diary for an account of the deep snow in Boston in late January; on January 31 he wrote: "Still cold, fine sledding for 200 miles to the westward as travelers tell us and snow in general 3 feet deep. This January for the most part has been very cold" (p. 45). My description of the tarring and feathering of John Malcom is based largely on Frank Hersey's "Tar and Feathers: The Adventures of Captain John Malcom," which reprints accounts of the incident that appeared in Boston newspapers, as well as Benjamin Irvin's "Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 17681776" and Walter Watkins's "Tarring and Feathering in Boston in 1770." In old age, George Hewes provided two accounts of his encounter with John Malcom, first in James Hawkes, A Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party, pp. 3335, and then in Benjamin Thatcher, Traits of the Tea Party, pp. 12734. See also Alfred Young's The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, pp. 4651.

Benjamin Carp writes about the relations.h.i.+p between colonial firefighters and the patriot cause in "Fire of Liberty: Firefighters, Urban Voluntary Culture and the Revolutionary Movement," pp. 781818. On January 20, 1766, John Adams recorded in his diary Daniel Leonard's comments on the destruction of Thomas Hutchinson's house: "Thought Hutchinson's History did not s.h.i.+ne. Said his house was pulled down, to prevent his writing any more by destroying his materials" (1:300). According to Pauline Maier in "Revolutionary Violence and the Relevance of History," "Mobs were too easily transformed into corporate organs of their communities to be considered explosive repositories of dissent. The rioters of one night might serve the next evening as posse, military company or ... fire company" (p. 131). See also Maier's "Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth Century America" and her seminal From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 17651776. On William Russell, see Francis Drake, Tea Leaves, p. 159. According to an account that received wide distribution in England in the fall of 1774, Malcom was forced by the crowd to toast the king and his family and drink a large amount of tea, which was ultimately forced down his throat with a funnel-an anecdote that inspired a well-known engraving. However, none of the Boston newspapers makes any mention of the tea-drinking episode, and even more significantly, Malcom himself never refers to it in his own detailed account of his sufferings, in which he is careful to enumerate all the outrages committed by the Bostonians. I have, therefore, chosen not to include the tea-drinking episode in my account of Malcom's tarring and feathering. See R. T. H. Halsey, The Boston Port Bill as Pictured by a Contemporary London Cartoonist, pp. 8286, 93, for both the engraving and the newspaper accounts. The story of John Malcom's patriot brother Daniel is told in George Wolkins's "Daniel Malcom and Writs of a.s.sistance." In a January 31, 1774, letter, the loyalist Ann Hulton writes in detail about the tarring and feathering of John Malcom and reports, "The doctors say that it is impossible this poor creature can live. They say his flesh comes off his back in steaks." Letters of a Loyalist Lady, p. 71.

John Singleton Copley's April 26, 1774, letter to Isaac Clarke telling of how he was threatened with a visit from Joyce Junior is in Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, p. 218. Jules David Prown in John Singleton Copley in American Art writes of the "stunning immediacy" of Copley's portraits and the "sense of presence, of the physical ent.i.ty and personality of the sitter, which is conveyed across the span of 200 years. The subject of the portrait appears as a distinct, knowable human being" (p. 53). The statistic that one in five Boston families owned slaves in the second quarter of the eighteenth century comes from Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, p. 51. An advertis.e.m.e.nt for Phillis Wheatley's new book of poems appears in the January 24, 1774, issue of the Boston Gazette. On Wheatley and how she had become a "political hot potato," see David Waldstreicher, "The Wheatleyan Moment," pp. 54041. Her February 11, 1774, letter to Samson Occom is reprinted in William H. Robinson's Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings, p. 332. See also Vincent Carretta's Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage, pp. 15960. Abner Goodell writes about the execution and gibbeting of Mark in "The Trial and Execution ... of Mark and Phillis," pp. 2830. In his account of his famous ride, Paul Revere refers to the place "where Mark was hung in chains," in "A Letter from Col. Paul Revere to the Corresponding Secretary," p. 107. On the advertis.e.m.e.nts for slaves in Boston newspapers, see Robert Desrochers Jr.'s "Slave-for-Sale Advertis.e.m.e.nts and Slavery in Ma.s.sachusetts, 17041781." On the legislative attempts to end slavery in colonial Ma.s.sachusetts, see George Moore's Notes on the History of Slavery in Ma.s.sachusetts, especially pp. 13840, and "Negro Pet.i.tions for Freedom," pp. 43237. F. Nwabueze Okoye writes pa.s.sionately about the reality of slavery in American colonial society in "Chattel Slavery as the Nightmare of the American Revolutionaries." The October 31, 1768, pet.i.tion signed by John Hanc.o.c.k and John Rowe accusing a British officer of inciting Boston's slaves to revolt is in Boston Under Military Rule, 17681769, edited by Oliver Morton d.i.c.kerson, p. 16.

On the impact of both Joyce Junior and the tarring and feathering of John Malcom on the English press, see R. T. H. Halsey, The Boston Port Bill as Pictured by a Contemporary London Cartoonist, pp. 82143; Halsey reprints the account of Malcom being forced to drink large quant.i.ties of tea as well as the engravings it inspired, pp. 8286, 92. The March 28, 1774, description of Americans as a "strange set of people" by a member of the House of Commons was reprinted in the Boston Gazette on May 16, 1774. Benjamin Thatcher refers to how John Malcom took a piece of his own tarred-and-feathered skin to London with him in Traits of the Tea Party, p. 133. Frank Hersey in "Tar and Feathers" quotes from John Malcom's pet.i.tion to the king in which he asks to be made "a single Knight of the Tar," p. 463.

Chapter Two-Poor Unhappy Boston

On Thomas Gage's background and his wife Margaret Kemble Gage, see John Richard Alden's General Gage in America, pp. 19204. For a less sympathetic portrayal of Gage, see John Shy's "Thomas Gage: Weak Link of Empire," pp. 338, in vol. 2 of George Was.h.i.+ngton's Generals and Opponents, edited by George Athan Billias. David Hackett Fischer in Paul Revere's Ride quotes Gage's letter comparing London to Constantinople or "any other city I had never seen" (p. 40). Carl Van Doren provides a detailed account of Franklin's experience in the c.o.c.kpit in Benjamin Franklin, pp. 46177. Gage's comments about Franklin are in a note in Alden's General Gage in America, p. 200. King George's description of his meeting with Gage is in no. 1379-"The King to Lord North," in CKG, p. 59. Gage describes America as "a bully" in a November 12, 1770, letter to Lord Barrington, cited in Alden's General Gage in America, p. 188. On navigating the islands of Boston Harbor, I have relied on Nathaniel Shurtleff, A Topographical and Historical Description of Boston, pp. 416578. Bernard Bailyn provides a probing portrait of Thomas Hutchinson in The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson; I am also indebted to several unpublished ma.n.u.scripts by John Tyler, who is editing a new edition of Hutchinson's letters. Andrew Walmsley's Thomas Hutchinson and the Origins of the American Revolution is a succinct a.n.a.lysis of how the governor served as a scapegoat for the patriots.

For the text of the Port Act, see Province in Rebellion (subsequently referred to as PIR), edited by L. Kinvin Wroth et al., 1:4451. For the text of Josiah Quincy Jr.'s "Observations on ... the Boston Port-Bill," see Josiah Quincy's Memoir, pp. 359469. Gage speaks of giving the Port Bill "time to operate" in a May 19, 1774, letter to Lord Dartmouth, Correspondence of Thomas Gage, p. 355. On Faneuil Hall, see Abram Brown's Faneuil Hall and Market, pp. 12330. Thomas Young describes Faneuil Hall as "a n.o.ble school" in a March 22, 1770, letter cited by Ray Raphael in Founders, pp. 8081. Peter Oliver speaks of a meeting of the House of Representatives as "a pandemonium" in OPAR, p. 67. Peter Shaw in American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution writes about conscience patriotism (pp. 2324); he also writes insightfully about the psychic toll of the Revolution on such patriots as James Otis (pp. 77108); John Adams (pp. 10930); Joseph Hawley (pp. 13152); and Josiah Quincy Jr. (pp. 15275). John Adams tells of his uncontrolled outburst in an entry in his diary made in late December 1772 in Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 2:7576. In his Autobiography (vol. 3 of his Writings), Adams describes a revealing exchange between himself and Joseph Warren regarding the psychological cost of the patriot movement. According to Adams, Warren frequently and unsuccessfully urged him to "harangue" at Boston town meetings. "My answer to him always was, 'that way madness lies.' The symptoms of our great friend Otis, at that time, suggested to Warren a sufficient comment on these words at which he always smiled and said, 'it was true' " (p. 291). Henry Adams's reference to his Boston ancestors being "ambitious beyond reason to excel" is cited by Walter McDougall in Freedom Just Around the Corner, p. 147. Gillian Anderson in the "The Funeral of Samuel Cooper" cites the references to "silver-tongued Sam" and to his "ductility," p. 657. Clifford s.h.i.+pton cites the reference to Cooper's eventual mental breakdown being attributed to "the inordinate use of Scotch snuff," SHG, 11:211. In a March 15, 1773, letter to Benjamin Franklin, Cooper refers to having spent the winter "confined to my house ... by my valetudinary state, and been little able to see and converse with my friends," The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 20:110.

On Samuel Adams, see the biographies by John Miller, William Fowler, Ira Stoll, and Mark Puls. Adams seems to have been a "revolutionary ascetic," of the type described in Bruce Mazlish's book of the same name. In an April 4, 1774, letter to Arthur Lee, Adams writes of the future he sees for America and England: "It requires but a small gift of discernment for anyone to foresee that providence will erect a mighty empire in America, and our posterity will have it recorded in history, that their fathers migrated from an island in a distant part of the world, [the inhabitants of which] were at last absorbed in luxury and dissipation; and to support themselves in their vanity and extravagance they coveted and seized the honest earnings of those industrious emigrants. This laid a foundation of distrust, animosity and hatred, till the emigrants, feeling their own vigor and independence, dissolved every former band of connection between them and the islanders sunk into obscurity and contempt" (p. 82). On the population and number of towns in Ma.s.sachusetts, see L. Kinvin Wroth's interpretive essay in PIR, 1:13. Richard D. Brown's Revolutionary Politics in Ma.s.sachusetts is an excellent study of the Boston Committee of Correspondence and the towns; for the beginnings of the committee, see pp. 38122. G. B. Warden also provides a useful account of the committee's activities in Boston, 16891776, pp. 24174. Brown cites the town of Gorham's January 7, 1773, letter to the Boston Committee of Correspondence in Revolutionary Politics, p. 118. For the exchange between Hutchinson and the House of Representatives in early 1773, see The Briefs of the American Revolution, edited by John Phillip Reid, pp. 7102. On the May 13, 1774, town meeting, see the minutes in Boston Town Records, 17701777, pp. 17174.

Charles Bahne calculates the cost of the East India Tea lost on December 16, 1773, in the Friday, December 18, 2009, entry of J. L. Bell's blog Boston 1775, http://boston1775.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-much-was-tea-in-tea-party-worth.html. Stephen Patterson writes of Samuel Adams's political maneuvering at the expense of John Rowe and other merchants in Political Parties in Revolutionary Ma.s.sachusetts, pp. 7483. Gage's arrival and reception at Straight Wharf on May 17 is detailed in the May 23, 1774, issue of the Boston Gazette. On John Hanc.o.c.k, see Herbert Allan's John Hanc.o.c.k: Patriot in Purple, William Fowler's The Baron of Beacon Hill, and Harlow Giles Unger's John Hanc.o.c.k: Merchant King and American Patriot. John Andrews details the falling out between Hanc.o.c.k and Gage in entries written on August 16 and 17, 1774, in "Letters of John Andrews" (subsequently referred to as LJA): 34243. Reverend Gad Hitchc.o.c.k's May 25, 1774, sermon preached before General Gage is in PIR, 1:299322. Gage's rejection of the patriot councillors is described in an article in the May 30, 1774, Boston Gazette, which also reprints the speech Gage gave before both houses of the General Court.

John Rowe tells of where the British naval s.h.i.+ps were stationed around Boston Harbor in the May 29, 1774, entry of his Diary, pp. 27273; his reference to "Poor unhappy Boston" is made on June 1, 1774 (p. 273). Francis Drake in Tea Leaves recounts how John Rowe asked, "Who knows how tea will mingle with salt water?" at the Old South Meetinghouse prior to the night of the Tea Party (p. 63). Rowe expresses regret for the Tea Party as well as criticism of the ministry's response in a June 2, 1774, entry in his Diary, p. 274. In a May 30, 1774, letter to Charles Thomson, Samuel Adams writes of how the "yeomanry ... must finally save this country" (Writings, 3:99). A transcript of the Solemn League and Covenant is in PIR, 1:45359. John Andrews voices his disapproval of the League and Covenant in a June 12, 1774, entry in LJA, p. 329. John Rowe tells of the arrival of the Fourth and Forty-Third Regiments on June 14 and 15, 1774, in his Diary, p. 275. Captain Harris writes of the sentries on the common hurling stones at the cows and of the lushness of the gra.s.s in an August 7, 1774, letter, in S. R. Lus.h.i.+ngton, The Life and Services of General Lord Harris, p. 34. John Andrews complains of the inconvenience and cost of s.h.i.+pping goods overland from Salem to Boston in letters written on August 1, 20, and November 9 (pp. 336, 344, 383). John Rowe describes Boston's "distressed situation" in a June 12, 1774, entry of his Diary, p. 275.