Nine The Revolt from Within
By the mid-1740s, the fire of the revival had begun to cool. The caustic writings of ministers like Charles Chauncy had damaged the movement by depicting it as a hotbed of fanatics, and key evangelists like Gilbert Tennent and George Whitefield had offered apologies for their conduct and the excesses of their followers. But in large part, the momentum of the movement slowed because it had achieved its goal—spreading a new idea of religion throughout the colonies and melting the hearts of congregants who had experienced the New Birth. Those with less passion fell away from the movement and returned to their old ways, and those who had been intrigued at first by the revival became its foes once the danger of the radicals became evident. However, even though it was no longer the focus of most news stories and pamphleteering, the revival did not end. Instead, it found new avenues to bring people to Jesus.
No fewer than one hundred Separatist churches opened their doors after the mid-1740s. They swept up restive parishioners who had become frustrated by their pastors’ lack of evangelizing or colorless and tepid sermons and wanted fresh new preachers who could give voice to the Holy Spirit with all the intensity it deserved. Sometimes that meant hiring itinerants who could speak to people’s hearts with strength and vitality; sometimes it meant choosing lay congregants who styled themselves as ministers despite having no training for it.
Amid the wreckage of the parishes that had foundered in the revival, the one denomination that prospered was Baptism. Luring thousands of New Lights who longed for both a stricter interpretation of the Bible and a looser expression of emotions, the Baptists seemed well suited to the new spiritual reality, with a series of rules designed to speed people’s path to salvation. They forbade unconverted ministers to lead worship in their services; they rejected the “Halfway Covenant” that allowed unconverted parents to baptize their children into membership; and they refused to accept anyone other than adults to become members through immersion in water. Non-Baptists saw the standards as severe, but the rules gave the sect an aura of moral purity that appealed to countless Separatists, who sought a faith that reflected their values and rejected the compromises that many Protestant churches allowed. Even though this faith had been a small and declining sect before the 1740s, it grew quickly in the years after the revival’s peak, and finally began to convert large parts of America that hadn’t yet been touched by the movement.
Separatist Baptists in particular were famed for their fierce preaching and missionary zeal. Using their passion and will to convert sinners to Christ, they poured into the frontier of New England and the isolated settlements and wooded encampments of New Hampshire and northeastern Massachusetts. They kept the revival alive in these places well after it had dissipated in the major cities; and from there, many itinerant Separatists descended into the Southern backcountry of Virginia and North Carolina to lend their fire to country parishes and turn them into evangelical strongholds.
Tireless Baptist preachers like Isaac Backus rode the circuit over huge distances—in his case giving 2,400 sermons over nearly 15,000 miles—to bring countless people closer to Christ. In Virginia, Baptists denounced the dancing, horse racing, and gambling popular with the gentry, and quickly became notorious for their edicts. They renounced fine clothing and frivolities, spoke solemnly and called each other “Brother” and “Sister,” and decried the inequities of plantation society. They promised their audiences relief through divine grace from the miseries of disease, debt, poverty, violence, and sudden death—all hallmarks of life in the rural South. Although some critics saw them as “the most melancholy people in the world,” others considered them a menace to the British social order, not unlike the radical Levellers of revolutionary England. As one observer noted, in search of spiritual perfection, they “cut off their hair, like Cromwell’s round-headed chaplains.”
Baptists also encouraged women to exhort and to express their feelings of rebirth in Christ. Opponents wrote of their “solemn groans and lamentations” and “crying out in fits” and “weeping and crying in a most extraordinary manner.” Yet what seemed like enthusiastic madness to outsiders proved quite convincing to Baptist regulars, who saw such women as having a special means of divine access. Some women even became leaders of their congregations, enflaming crowds with their testimonies and, in one woman’s case, “melt[ing] a whole concourse into tears by her prayers and exhortations.” Slaves, too, found an emotional release through their testimony and rebirth in Baptism, and the sect found many converts among Southern bondsmen—many more than among the Anglican gentry, who considered Baptists a threat to the world they had created. They had good reason to be worried: Baptist doctrine showed the cruelty of the caste system everywhere present; it offered spiritual uplift and transcendence to those desperately in need of it; and it established a sober and upright alternative to the mindless gaiety and posh lifestyles and gamesmanship of the upper classes.
The Baptists were not militant revolutionaries. But with their severe Calvinism, their focus on the lower and working classes, and the intensity of their worship, they became a key part of the vanguard of Americans who represented the “revolt from within.” Such radicals rejected gentry life and the culture of the elite and emphasized strict Biblical teaching and behavior. They resisted the authority of the higher powers and sought what looked to be an emergent theocracy. They could not be ridiculed into submission, bought off, or dismissed, and even as the revival slowed around them, they kept up their advance into rural and frontier America, changing it irrevocably. And in the decades to come, their numbers would only grow.
Not a Baptist in faith, but rather in style, Andrew Croswell foresaw many of the dramatic changes that continued to shape the colonies in the years after the revival’s peak. His deeply emotional, sometimes unhinged church services, his openness to exhorters and self-proclaimed ministers, and his condemnation of wealth and greed made him a forerunner of the tactics of late-revival Baptists. He didn’t follow the sect’s spiritual practices, but he did push parishioners to revolt from their unconverted ministers and fueled the growth of Separatist churches, many of which later aligned with Baptism. In fact he became so identified with splintered parishes and rump congregations that by 1746 he was ready to lead his own in Boston. The city had remained a potent lure for him ever since he had sent James Davenport to storm its gates a half-decade before.
Word of Croswell’s plan to assume control of a Boston pulpit alarmed the town’s ministers, who saw it as nothing less than the arrival of a second Davenport on their doorstep. Since they would soon have to contend with the heretic Jonathan Mayhew at one extreme, they could only imagine the trouble that might ensue as Croswell promised a rebirth of radicalism at the other. Warning that Croswell’s presence would be “offensive and dangerous” to the peace and stability of the town, they tried to prevent his relocation to Massachusetts from Groton, Connecticut, but failed. When he did move to Boston, he justified all their worries, bringing the anger and passion of a committed zealot. There would be no immediate turn toward moderation for him, as there had been for Gilbert Tennent in Philadelphia. Rather, Croswell started lighting fires as soon as he arrived.
In his Second Defence of the Old Protestant Doctrine of Justifying Faith, Croswell served notice to his enemies: He would not withdraw from any of the battles he had joined, or compromise the purity of his message just to make friends with a few pastors in his new hometown. He launched broadsides against his foes in print and issued a series of tracts that defamed his enemies and declared the battles he fought to be like a holy war. Of the unredeemed ministers who opposed him, he asked “GOD of his infinite mercy [to] cause poor people to separate from these men, who are blind leaders of the blind, before they fall into the Pit with them!”
Founded at the height of the revival, Croswell’s church was first called the “Dear Society of Saints” before he renamed it “Eleventh Church” two years into his ministry. His congregation included a motley selection of castoffs and fragmented groups who had fled other Congregational churches due to their unredeemed ministers or differences over faith and doctrine. Even before his assumption of the pulpit, the church already had a reputation as a pariah in town, and his leadership only ensured its ostracism. No mainline ministers wanted anything to do with it or him; they shunned him from official functions and organizations, and either outright opposed him or pretended as if he didn’t exist. For he stood as an embarrassment to the Boston ministers—of the grotesque behavior of New Light fanatics, of the extremism of the revival, and of the contempt for moderation that had poisoned the community. The ministers called Croswell a Separatist who intended to destroy the harmony of local religion. He saw it differently: He was the apostle of true Calvinist faith, and they were the real Separatists from the word of God.
Shortly after he arrived, he set about to elevate the spiritual quality of his parishioners by interrogating them about the condition of their souls—all to “publicly pull down the Kingdom of Satan, and build up the Kingdom of Christ.” Warning that some of them were returning to their old unregenerate ways, he forbade drinking and gambling, chattering mindlessly on the Sabbath, gossiping about others and—with the greatest cheek—“disputing about words and things which edify not, but only [en]gender strife.” It took some gall for Croswell to denounce the rebels and dividers in his flock, but he meant it: anyone violating his rules would be rebuked and or even censured, if “they appear to be incorrigible in their wickedness.” At the same time, he stressed that he preached “the joyful religion of Jesus Christ” filled with light and song and beauty, and admonished those Congregationalists who seemed to revel in gloom and misery. Oddly, despite the severity of Croswell’s behavior against his foes, his spiritual exhortations became ever more hopeful and triumphant—making him perhaps the angriest optimist ever to occupy a pulpit in America.
Throughout his time in Boston, and before that in Groton, Croswell’s peculiar methods infuriated other clerics, just as they endeared him to his parishioners. But his fellow pastors weren’t the only figures of authority to cast a wary eye on his ministry. He also vexed the colonial magistrates who claimed his gospel of ecstatic praising and clamorous singing was a danger to public order. Undaunted, Croswell attacked civic leaders as “more fit for Bedlam than the Bench”—implying a notorious asylum suited them better than a courtroom.
Other New Lights also railed against legislators and the laws they had passed to crush the revival and stifle dissent. Most notably, in Connecticut they had enacted statutes to stop itinerancy, uncontrolled worship, and dissent from the established church. They passed laws that forced Separatists to pay taxes to support religions that were not their own and threatened them with jail time if they attended unauthorized services. Labeled as “fraudulent dissenters,” many New Lights trundled off to prison rather than compromise their faith, and their plight became so notorious that it influenced other colonists to turn against such taxes and laws that favored official religions.
Some Separatists went further and condemned any civil interference with religion whatsoever. They saw it as dangerous and corrupting and could recite any number of instances in which the authorities had favored one sect over another, to the detriment of both. Whether it was Anglicans earning favored status in Virginia or Congregationalists in Massachusetts, the Separatists became so incensed by such biased laws that they resolved, as Reverend Isaac Backus did, to resist “the illegal and discriminatory practices of government on behalf of the state Church.” From these complaints arose new ideas of religious toleration and liberty of conscience—not because of a commitment to universal human values, but because people of faith wanted their own system of belief to be protected by colonial laws, not targeted by them. The only way to do that was for the British state to favor no sect over another. It was a powerful idea that took shape in the aftermath of the revival, though its ultimate consequences would take another forty years to emerge.
Unfortunately, the demand for religious freedom came at the wrong time. The Crown and the administrative weight of the British state had no interest in diminishing their own power. If anything they sought to enlarge it, and to find new avenues for securing control over the king’s subjects in America and bringing the empire to other parts of the world. And the best way to achieve that kind of dominion was through the continued, and seemingly endless, pursuit of war.
What Americans called King George’s War had been going on for several years as the North American theatre of the War of the Austrian Succession. The objectives were complex, but for the colonists fighting for Britain, it meant capturing the fortress of Louisbourg, which guarded the approach to the St. Lawrence River. This “Gibraltar of the New World” enabled France, Britain’s current enemy, to control the cod fisheries off Newfoundland and launch attacks with its Indian allies against the northern frontier of America. It was a relatively straightforward mission, but proved to be controversial.
In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, now clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly, pleaded with lawmakers to assist the expedition and provide whatever troops and funding they could. Aside from a token bit of financial support, however, the Quaker-dominated legislature refused to endorse any campaign of foreign violence, just as it resisted creating an armed militia to protect the colony from domestic attack. Farther north in New England, the campaign roiled public feelings for different reasons—the difficulties in finding mariners to sail, the opposition from many quarters of society, and the constant need for the British state to draw its manpower from local citizens. Despite a recruitment campaign led by preachers like George Whitefield, many New Englanders feared a debacle like Cartagena would ensue, in which 80 percent of the men who fought in that ill-fated expedition against the Spanish power in Colombia were killed.
Surprisingly, the attack on the fortress at Louisbourg was a success, as the French capitulated after a six-week siege. Some 3,600 men from Boston and other towns in the region fought in the campaign and took considerable pride in their role in the victory, by capturing a strongpoint more than a few observers claimed was unconquerable. In light of their success, they hoped that their triumph would translate into better fortune for themselves and their economically beleaguered—and spiritually exhausted—home region. But that hope proved to be fleeting.
Boston alone lost 8 percent of its population of adult men, mostly to disease as the soldiers contracted illness on the field of battle and in their frigid camps, bereft of fuel and protection from the elements. Those troops who survived received a full year of garrison duty at the fort for their troubles—not the French booty and prizes they had been promised, which went into the coffers of the Royal Navy. And instead of thanks from their superior officers for their volunteer service, the New Englanders received a fair share of contempt. Commodore Charles Knowles, the new governor of Cape Breton Island, which included the fort, called the victorious American troops little better than outlaws, made up of “blacksmiths, tailors, barbers, shoemakers, and all the banditry them colonies affords.” To the Duke of Newcastle, Knowles wrote of their filth and laziness, and their stubborn and wayward attitudes, which made them unfit for proper soldiery and an embarrassment to the Crown.
The soldiers returned their officers’ contemptuous feelings. They saw them as petty martinets, hostile to common men recruited from the countryside, and cruel and abusive in their conduct. When they finally returned home, they brought well-nurtured hostility and resentment against their British comrades—bitter feelings that quickly spread to the rest of the population.
Upon their return, the New Englanders discovered that the war had not brought an end to the troubles in their region; if anything it had made things worse. While the soldiers had been suffering at Louisbourg, colonial elites had profited handsomely by their labors. War profiteers amassed fortunes through bribes and corruption, and they flaunted their wealth with expensive mansions and shameless displays of affluence. Meanwhile, more residents than ever became mired in debt, with the war fueling runaway inflation and the collapsing value of paper currency.
Amid such hardships, the character of public speech had also changed. The recent victory of the British armed forces over Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites in Scotland had enhanced the stature of the military—and provoked an unwelcome crackdown on dissent. In the House of Commons, lawmakers fearful of future rebellions demanded submission to the government under the excuse of the Divine Right of Kings, which cast the British monarch as the infallible vice-regent of God. They warned that any act of subversion against the Crown would be treated with the severity used against the Jacobite rebels, and that any questions over the legitimacy of the British throne would be treated as treason. In this creeping authoritarian atmosphere, royal governors demanded prayer and fasting in the name of King George II, and many colonists took pains to profess their loyalty to the monarchy, upon fear of imprisonment or worse.
One who did not cower was Charles Chauncy. Although he certainly had no interest in undermining the king, he had grown frustrated with the rule of local magistrates and their seeming disinterest in fixing the problems of Massachusetts and other provinces. His own financial condition was precarious, as he struggled on a meager salary amid the colony’s high inflation. Thus, this member of the religious elite, who had held so much sway in public opinion in recent years, now felt reduced to the status of the common folk he occasionally belittled. Like them, he blamed the authorities for the colony’s woes.
In May 1747, Chauncy gave an election sermon, a speech to the colony’s legislature at the beginning of its session. Free from the fears many had about criticizing public officials, Chauncy used the sermon as an opportunity to scold the lawmakers for neglecting the needs of their constituents and implored them to do better. He told them religion was at a low state, riven by faction and blasphemy, and sin had crippled the unity and values of the community. College teachers, ministers, and other professionals were underpaid or lived in penury. The value of currency had plummeted, the economy had stagnated, and instead of fixing matters, the higher powers had waged fruitless battles against other countries. As he said, “Rulers also should endeavor to keep the state from being embroiled in foreign war, by contriving, in all prudent ways, to engage and continue the friendship of neighboring nations.” He warned against the infringement on the rights of British subjects and questioned the excuses the colonial leaders had made when they did so. “Tis the just exercise of power that distinguishes right from might; authority that is to be revered and obeyed, from violence and tyranny, which are to be dreaded and deprecated.”
Chauncy demanded that rulers be fair and impartial in executing the laws of the nation, and above reproach in their conduct—not mired in corruption, deceit and self-interest. They should not defraud or oppress the public, or use violence as a means of achieving political ends. Instead, they must “preserve and perpetuate to every member of the community, so far as may be, the full enjoyment of their liberties and privileges, whether of a civil or religious nature.”
It was a bracing call to arms for both secular and spiritual freedom, and it echoed some of the things the Baptists and Separatists had been saying about the importance of dissent in a climate of repression. While Chauncy had fiercely battled the New Lights in the past over religion, his rhetoric in politics now began to parallel their own. Published throughout the region, Chauncy’s sermon was simply titled, Civil Magistrates Must Be Just, Ruling in the Fear of God.
Although the speech drew Chauncy favorable attention, even among revivalists, one group to whom it did not appeal were clerics of the Church of England. Still reeling from being cast as villains during the revival, these churchmen attacked the works of dissenters and allied themselves closely with the government. In print and from the pulpit, they compared leading nonconformists to Jacobites, and argued for the complete marriage of church and state in one happy and unquestioned union. They drew new attention to the holiday of Fast Day in midwinter, offering prayers and lamentations for the martyred soul of King Charles I, who had been executed by Puritan rebels a century before. They warned of contemporary dissenters—heirs of those murderous Puritans—who demanded such things as religious liberty and freedom from the established church. And they claimed that colonial subjects who refused to submit to the Church of England put their allegiance to Britain into question. In short, the supremacy of the king was paramount, and submission to the state church essential, all of it adding up to “obedience to God, king, lords and bishops—and in that order.”
Some Anglican churchmen went further and argued that a bishop should be elevated to govern America on its own soil. Such a bishop would have seemingly innocuous powers—to ordain ministers locally, instead of forcing them to sail back to Britain; to oversee priests and commissaries and other figures in the American church; and to provide a method of governance that would ensure adherence to church laws and cohesion with church policy. But what sounded benign to Anglican clerics sounded like nothing less than tyranny to American dissenters.
Fired up by George Whitefield’s attacks on the leaders of the Church of England, as well as Charles Chauncy’s own condemnations, Reformed Protestants chafed against the primacy of that faith and its protected status. To them the church was a menace that threatened to crush native traditions while it forced compliance to a minority faith governed by an overseas monarch. Its leaders had been enemies of the revival from the beginning and had done all they could to thwart it, to shame its proponents, and to trumpet its failings. And now, with Anglicanism pressing farther into the heartland of New England, the threat arose that the British state and church might unite to crush any sects that didn’t accept the king as the Lord’s earthly emissary.
Accordingly, Anglican clergymen openly argued that more needed to be done to advance the Church of England’s cause in the New World. Clerics in Connecticut sent a letter to the Bishop of London decrying the lack of an American bishop, which was “a very great obstruction to the propagation of religion.” Their eagerness matched that of powerful figures like the Bishop of Oxford, Thomas Secker, who had been calling for the creation of such a bishop since 1741. Secker had been ascending the church hierarchy for more than a decade, and had emerged as a formidable opponent of dissenting faiths. He exhorted SPG missionaries to convert as many wayward Protestants as they could to the Church of England, and developed a strategy that, if enacted, would create an all-encompassing system of spiritual and secular belief. Even Secker’s own colleagues feared his rising power, calling him “Leviathan.”
By 1747 Secker’s efforts and those of other Anglican high churchmen had had a galvanizing effect. One sympathetic writer in a Boston newspaper even claimed that “in a few years time Episcopacy will generally prevail in this part of the world.” Slanted laws, SPG missionaries, ample funding, and a taste for revenge all motivated the churchmen to try converting New Englanders to the national religion, and to make inroads into places where few had dreamed it would ever penetrate. Their pride reached an apogee when the first Anglican church in Boston, King’s Chapel, erected its foundation on a hallowed burial ground for Puritans from the previous century—literally building a church upon the bones of people’s ancestors.
Congregational and Presbyterian ministers and laity reacted with horror to such developments. They had warned for years of such a dangerous moment, and now it had come to pass. However, they failed to admit that their own actions had let it happen. Namely, they had preached during the revival against the moderates and the unconverted in their own faiths, and sowed controversy with each new attack. As these battles over belief raged, the more tolerant parishioners drifted over to the Church of England, since they saw no place for themselves in Calvinist churches that demanded moral purity in exchange for salvation. Others were repelled by the spectacle of James Davenport and Andrew Croswell and the other radicals and wanted only to join a church that could offer quiet reassurance and support for their good works—instead of condemnations. And still others refused to believe that the New Birth or the rigid “five points of Calvinism” were the only means of finding God. If aligning themselves with the state church meant a closer connection to their creator, many northerners were happy to do so. Still, for a lot of wavering American Christians, this was a brutal choice: whether to support a British-oriented church headed by a secular monarch, with all of its threats of tyranny and subjugation, or to hold to their old dissenting faiths, which condemned them for being imperfect and which promoted a bleak and judgmental theology.
Put into ever more extreme camps by the evangelical revival, the Calvinists and the Anglicans could find little common ground. The members of each group saw the worst in the other, even if they shared many of the same traits—harsh judging, censorious behavior, divisive tactics, broken loyalties. And with each new religious or political controversy, the distance between the groups only grew, and the antagonism hardened. For many, the greatest test of faith occurred when Boston erupted in the worst riots in memory.
The roots of the trouble went back to the checkered victory at Louisbourg. After capturing the fort, the Royal Navy had plans to make it a juggernaut in the war against its maritime enemies. Manning and protecting the fort would be essential, and the most convenient sailors for the job were just down the coast in New England. However, many of them had returned home bitter at their treatment and wary of the prospect of ever serving in the armed forces again. Wages were higher with private shippers, and few wanted to endure the deprivation and cruelty of the British navy when they had the choice not to, so most chose to remain private citizens. However, the navy could not accept such intransigence. It faced huge rates of desertion when its ships entered port, and had countless difficulties finding mariners to enlist. So instead of trying to persuade these experienced sailors to join the ranks, it decided to force them instead.
The practice of impressment had become critical for running a modern global empire. Britain deployed the practice ruthlessly and repeatedly in the Americas, filling its fleet with men it either apprehended through offshore interceptions of private vessels, or through the onshore attacks of press gangs. Hunting down sailors known to have skills in operating a vessel, the gangs would seize these men in the streets, on the seas and sometimes in their homes, dragooning them for duty for months or years on a British warship. Often the friends and families of sailors would help them resist such kidnappings, but they had neither the force of law nor arms on their side. Impressment was legal under British legal codes, subject to the approval of royal governors, and resistance to it was forbidden. Despite this, reaction to the practice was common and sometimes violent.
Colonists saw impressment as a violation of their rights as British subjects, and an encroachment on their ability to decide their own affairs. Massachusetts governor William Shirley attempted to moderate the policy with intermittent success, but new outrages seemed to undercut any possibility of compromise between the sailors of coastal cities and the mounting needs of the Royal Navy. In 1745 two seamen lost their lives at the hands of a press-gang in a Boston boarding house, and the event incited protest and public anger. Two years later, a parliamentary act upheld the old “Sixth of Anne” policy that placed limits on impressment—but only in the West Indies. The lawmakers decided it had never applied in North America, and naval officials were free to nab any men they needed.
An anonymous pamphlet by “Quincius Cincinnatus” denounced the open infringement on colonists’ liberties and wondered whether the people of the Northeast, despite all they did for the Crown, would be “the first victims destined to be sacrificed to a arbitrary and illegal power[.]” Conspiracy talk surfaced of the British government bargaining away the Louisbourg fort back to the French, and then handing over the whole of New England to the Catholic power. Such a prospect was unlikely, but it did heighten ill feeling against the government, and made people who had always considered themselves loyal subjects of the king wonder whether His Majesty’s government cared at all to protect their rights and security. They soon found their answer, as the fleet of Commodore Charles Knowles appeared in the waters off New England, ready to round up sailors and press them into service against their will.
Knowles had already insulted colonial troops and thought them slovenly and drawn from the lowest quarters of society. He claimed they were exceptionally lazy and in camp they had used timber from the walls of their own living quarters for firewood, and buried the dead under their floorboards. He didn’t necessarily want to kidnap such wretched New Englanders for naval service, but with manpower in the fleet running low, he had little choice but to secure maritime labor however he could.
Residents of Boston knew the fleet might have designs on its citizens and took steps to prepare themselves. Skilled sailors took the most precautions, refusing to man the private coasters that carried fuel and provisions into Boston, for fear of being abducted. But with the town dependent on the water trade for much of its supplies, the loss of such cargo threatened its livelihood. It was in this charged atmosphere that on November 16, 1747, Knowles mounted one of his boldest roundups yet.
In the late evening hours, his press-gang swept over the vessels in the harbor and snatched any men they could find, including shipbuilders’ apprentices, shipwrights, and other unlucky souls who had the misfortune to be working on boats when the invaders arrived. From there, the gang stormed into town, accosting sailors as well as craftsmen, laborers, slaves, servants, and random civilians. They scoured the docks and the waterfront looking for any other able-bodied men who could man the fleet and then summarily hauled them back to captivity for service in the Royal Navy.
The press-gang hadn’t completed its brutal work before a mob of Bostonians arose to stop them. Armed with sticks, cutlasses, clubs, and shipwrights’ pitch mops, the hastily assembled crowd swarmed through the streets looking for members of the press-gang and, finding few of them, decided to seize naval officers instead. First a lieutenant, then about a dozen other men of rank found themselves shackled and led away by the mob—collateral to secure the release of the forty Americans who had been pressed into military service.
The masses then assaulted a sheriff and his deputies and surrounded the governor’s house, with a few troublemakers lobbing rocks at it. The mob leaders blamed William Shirley for the roundup, but the governor claimed he had permitted no such action in the town or its waters. That part was true: Knowles had acted illegally. Hours later, as a legislative council discussed the matter with the governor, the mob surrounded its chambers, breaking windows and threatening to storm the building. Persuaded they should refrain from attacking the legislature, the crowds moved on to the waterfront, where they burned a barge they thought was part of Knowles’s fleet, though it actually belonged to one of the rioters. Shirley used the distraction to flee the town and deliver any remaining British officers back to the protection of the navy offshore. He also called out the militia to suppress the crowds, which now numbered in the thousands, but few militiamen arrived to put down the violence. Many, in fact, were part of the mob itself.
Communicating with the commodore, Shirley argued for the release of the impressed sailors, since he had not approved such a move and it had to be reversed. Knowles refused and instead threatened to bombard the town with his cannons: “By God I’ll now see if the king’s government is not as good as a mob!” In the end, however, Shirley prevailed upon Knowles to refrain from firing on Boston and used his political skills to negotiate with the rioters, the navy, the legislature, and the General Court to bring matters to a conclusion without further violence. Although it took several days for the mob to disperse, for the militia to appear, and for order to be restored, the town did return to peace and the goals of the Boston rioters were achieved: the impressed men would be released in exchange for the return of the British officers to their vessels.
In the days to come, official reports would appear condemning the violence and blaming it on “foreign seamen, servants, Negroes, and other persons of mean and vile condition.” Governor Shirley, however, knew better. In a letter, he wrote “the insurrection was secretly countenanced and encouraged by some ill-minded inhabitants and persons of influence in the town.” Indeed, instead of the traditional “lower orders” alone rising up in protest, this time a broad swath of citizens contributed to the violence, from the elite who Shirley suspected had quietly encouraged the rioters, to merchants, craftsmen, farmers, and women—all of them enraged by the tactics of the British military and willing to risk their lives to stop it.
The governor realized something unusual had taken root in Boston. A restless, aggressive energy animated the town folk, and contributed to their peculiar hostility to colonial rulers. In the last decade, their bellicose nature had worsened considerably, and Shirley thought he knew the reason. As he saw it, “what I think may be esteemed the principal cause of the mobbish turn in this town is its constitution” and the town meetings that were controlled by “the meanest inhabitants.” Instead of top-shelf gentlemen and wealthy merchants running things, Shirley feared the rabble had gained the upper hand, both in the streets and in the town caucuses. He could already see the dangers of democracy, even on a small scale, and it disturbed him. So in his letter to the Lords of Trade, he recommended changing the town’s constitution to make it hospitable to the proper execution of British law—and stifling this new, potentially seditious, American disorder.
The Knowles Riot was the greatest revolt against the power of the British state since the Revolution of 1688. It drew most of the Boston populace into a tumult against the authorities, it lasted for several days, and it largely succeeded. Despite the overwhelming firepower that the Royal Navy could have directed against the town, the protestors did not retreat, and instead achieved their goal of curbing impressment, at least temporarily. It was both a warning of the threat of the masses to the ruling elite and a milestone in disobedience against a colonial system many had come to see as unfair, oppressive, and increasingly foreign to their interests.
Such a daring act could not have happened in the Boston, or the America, of a decade earlier. The previous seven years of battles over faith had hardened the town folk and made them resistant to calls for their submission. Through repeated bouts of conflict and near anarchy, they had gained courage and audacity, whether they were hurling insults against preachers or testifying to God in the streets. And now they had summoned that same energy to fight for their freedoms as royal subjects. As historian Gary Nash wrote, “Such bold defiance of the highest authorities, moreover, accorded well with the vision that the Awakeners had called forth,” as common citizens rose up to demand an answer to their grievances from “power-hungry, morally bankrupt figures who misused their power.”
Two weeks after the violence peaked, an anonymous pamphlet appeared that brought all the objections of New Englanders together in one brief, cogent argument. It carried the title An Address to the Inhabitants of [Massachusetts and Boston]; Occasioned by the Late Illegal and Unwarrantable Attack upon Their Liberties, and the Unhappy Confusion and Disorder Consequent Thereon. It was easy to see why the author of the pamphlet chose to hide his name, for the publication was a strike against the ruling powers—a warning that would “inspire in the minds of the people in this province, especially, in this town, with a proper sense of the imminent danger their lives, and liberties, are in.”
The author denounced the barbarous system of impressment that had plagued the colony as well as “the arbitrary, and illegal conduct, of those who have been the authors of our late sufferings, and the confusion and disorders consequent upon them.” He implicated the British navy, and all the men of power who licensed its actions, for much of the suffering, and vilified the press-gangs who did the dirty work. New Englanders had repeatedly made their grievances known about these issues, but their legislature had never delivered them to the Crown, and as a result, they continued to have their liberties violated and their rights abused. Although the recent mob activity was dreadful and regrettable, it was also inevitable under the present regime, as people labored under the yoke of such a system. The author signed the pamphlet as “your most humble servant, Amicus Patriae”—“a lover of his country,” in Latin—but the signs pointed to Samuel Adams as the actual scribe.
The twenty-five-year-old Adams was a little-known market clerk whose family was in the business of making malt for beer. His father Samuel Sr. also worked as a church deacon, and had been popularly elected as a representative in the Boston Caucus by a town meeting—exactly the kind of institution Governor Shirley had found so threatening. Members of the caucus worked to protect the common people against abuses by the gentry and local magistrates, and Samuel Sr. became one of its most powerful and well-known members. Through watching his father’s endeavors, Samuel Jr. came to have a flair for politics himself.
He graduated from Harvard College in 1743, part of the same class as Jonathan Mayhew, but did not pursue a course in divinity. Instead, his interest was in public affairs. In his thesis for the degree of artium magister (the modern Master of Arts) he answered the question, “Whether it be lawful to resist the Supreme Magistrate, if the Commonwealth cannot be otherwise preserved” with a bracing defense of the right to resist oppression. Such an argument was almost unheard of from a graduate student. Young Adams claimed that natural rights existed that allowed citizens to defend their liberties, even by force. The logic for the argument derived from John Locke—the same philosopher who had animated the writings of Jonathan Edwards, to a very different end—and it served as a defense of freedom against tyranny. Some authorities interpreted his thesis as “an unprecedented act of incipient ‘treason,’” but Samuel Adams could have argued in no other way. For he had seen what the British state could do to ruin a person, and that person was his father.
At the beginning of the 1740s, Samuel Sr. had been instrumental in crafting an innovative idea called the Land Bank, in which Massachusetts land owners desperate for hard currency could mortgage their holdings in exchange for legal tender, with goods like hemp, flax, and iron also accepted in trade. The scheme became popular among the public, but it incurred the wrath of Parliament, which had repeatedly withdrawn issue of the colony’s paper money and wanted only hard currency like gold or silver to be used as payment for debts. The Land Bank was an affront to their plan, and as an idea that derived from the colonists, it was doubly cursed. So Parliament made an ex post facto judgment declaring that the Land Bank had been illegal from the moment of its creation. Worse, any disgruntled holders of its currency could demand the full value of their money back in hard currency plus interest. If the directors of the Land Bank could not pay it, they would be held liable for triple damages in court or could forfeit their estate or be imprisoned.
Working class people saw the attack on the Land Bank as an attempt to enrich the wealthy, and they cursed them openly as “carnal wretches, hypocrites, fighters against God, children of the devil, cursed Pharisees” among other insults that tied together the villains of the evangelical revival with the villains of the economic system. Public outrage and protests ensued, and one observer wasn’t alone in fearing anarchy and the outbreak of “mutiny, sedition, and riots” in response to the legislative action.
Parliament crushed the Land Bank and nearly destroyed the material wealth of Samuel Adams Sr., including much of his property holdings. This was the intended result, since men like current governor William Shirley and later governor Thomas Hutchinson thought the best way to cripple the town meetings was to undercut their leaders. If they could devastate the finances of Samuel Sr., it would serve as a potent example to other restive colonists of the danger of testing the will of the authorities.
For the next twenty years, Samuel Sr. and his successors would continue to be on the hook for old debts held by Land Bank customers. These obligations were even passed down to Samuel Jr., who had much less skill in business than his father and who would struggle to hold the family estate together. Ultimately, he learned a stern lesson in imperial politics from his dad’s troubles and from the bank’s failure: namely, the British government cared not a whit about fairness, and would take any arbitrary, unfair action it desired—even if that action ruined families and plunged citizens into debt—in order to achieve a political end. So Samuel Jr.’s Harvard thesis was no mere exercise; it was a profound statement of principles, just as his “Amicus Patriae” pamphlet was in fighting military oppression.
Samuel Jr.’s father died a few months after the Knowles Riots, and he became the sole Samuel Adams. Having imbibed much of his father’s animosity against the government, he continued to express his feelings publicly—first by forming a political club devoted to debating the controversial matters of the day, then by creating a newspaper filled with essays by that club’s members, called The Independent Advertiser. Although the paper had several authors, Adams controlled much of its editorial content and perspective, and often his views were designed to provoke a reaction.
By 1748 Adams’s newspaper essays had gone well past the sentiments of Amicus Patriae. He now claimed the anti-impressment rioters not only had the right to fight the press-gangs, but should have resisted any bombardment from Commodore Knowles’s fleet with outright insurrection—“if he offered to advance upon the town, he should advance at his peril.” He compared Governor Shirley to King James II, who was widely seen as a tyrant who had been justly toppled by the Glorious Revolution. Not only did citizens have the “natural right” to resist such despots, but they had no other choice if their magistrates refused to protect them. In fact, riots and other violent actions could be considered natural rights.
Adams demanded the king curtail the power of Governor Shirley over Massachusetts, and that the acts of the colony’s General Court be given the same weight as those of the British Parliament. As he saw it, only local institutions, and not overlords from overseas, could guarantee the protection of the colonists’ rights. He had contempt for the esteemed gentlemen and country squires whose economic interests Parliament had taken pains to protect, and said they had “an itch for riding the beasts of the people” in order to subdue them. And he channeled the populism that was now rising in the streets of New England, condemning any elitist who “despises his neighbors’ happiness because he wears a worsted cap or a leather apron,” and any man of wealth who “struts immeasurably above the lower size of people, and pretends to adjust the rights of men by the distinction of fortune.” This type of rhetoric had a strong effect in the heady atmosphere of Boston. And it had a familiar ring, too, in the voices of colonists just as passionate as he was.
Samuel Adams had grown up during the evangelical revival. He had witnessed Whitefield at his fiery peak, and the effects of the New Birth on his classmates at Harvard. This experience had a profound impact, even for a scholar studying public affairs and classical authors. For Adams became as much a student of the new revivalists as he was of the old philosophers, and he learned to unite the power of God with the power of civil action to battle inequity, tyranny, and greed. Indeed, “his first revolt was against materialism and his first hatreds were against those he believed hostile to the rebirth of the Puritan or ‘old Roman’ spirit in New England.” Just like ministers such as Jonathan Edwards, he blamed sin as the primary cause of injustice and exalted people’s return to faith.
He had come to God early in life, with his father encouraging him to become active in the Congregational church, or even to study for ordination as a minister. But while Adams found politics more to his liking, he never strayed far from the rugged old Calvinism he heard preached in the meetinghouses and at home. Mankind was depraved, wickedness was ubiquitous, and the only way to find redemption from misery was through God’s grace. Didn’t Boston’s struggles prove the truth of that theology? And wasn’t it a test of faith to stand up to despotic rulers, even under threat of death or imprisonment? He could only answer in the affirmative, and promise to fight the corruption in society as the revivalists had fought it in church.
He saw moral decay throughout New England, from the wealth of its merchants to the practices of its magistrates, and in the Independent Advertiser he inveighed against both. He lamented how Puritanism had declined and left “our morals, our constitution, and our liberties” in a degenerate state; and he called for a rebirth of the old virtues and new protections for the freedoms all people shared under God. Like Whitefield, he targeted Anglican high churchmen—not for their religious beliefs, but for being agents of oppression. He claimed the new King’s Chapel in Boston, being constructed over the burial ground of Puritan forefathers, was just like those of “Popish countries,” built and beautified at the expense of the poor. He attacked the mercantile trade with the French Catholic enemy, and was later aghast when the fort of Louisbourg was bargained away in a negotiation between the world powers—an insult to all the New Englanders who had fought to take it. And he raised the ominous issue of a colonial Anglican bishop, which was not only a danger to native dissenters, but “might be likely to disturb this people in the enjoyment of their inviolable liberties.”
The Independent Advertiser folded after only a year. But as Samuel Adams rose to prominence in the coming decades, it served as a template for the rhetoric of rebellion he would pioneer. The grievances might have been secular, and the political theory taken from the European Enlightenment, but the incendiary style and piercing rhetoric came straight from the evangelical movement . . . and the flames of revival that still flickered on.