From this time on the chain of events that led to open rebellion consists of a series of links so plainly joined and so well known that they need only the barest mention in this brief introduction to the actual war. The British government tried to give temporary aid to the East India Company by permitting the heavy revenue on tea entering English ports, through which it must pass before being shipped to America, and by licensing the company itself to sell tea in America.[72] To avoid yielding the principle for which they had been contending, they retained at colonial ports the threepenny duty, which was all that remained of the Townshend revenue scheme. Ships loaded with this cheap tea came into the several American ports and were received with different marks of odium at different places. In Boston, after peaceful attempts to prevent the landing proved of no avail, an impromptu band of Indians threw the tea overboard, so that the next morning saw it lying like seaweed on Dorchester beach.

This outrage, as it was viewed in England, caused a general demand for repressive measures, and the five “intolerable acts” were passed and sent oversea to do the last irremediable mischief.[73] Boston’s port was closed until the town should pay for the tea. Massachusetts’ charter was annulled, its town-meetings irksomely restrained, and its government so changed that its executive officers would all be under the king’s control. Two other acts provided for the care and judicial privileges of the soldiers who soon came to enforce the acts. Finally, great offence was given the Protestant colonies by granting religious freedom to the Catholics of Quebec, and the bounds of that colony were extended to the Ohio River,[74] thus arousing all the colonies claiming Western lands. Except in the case of Virginia, there was no real attack on their territorial integrity, but in the excitement there seemed to be.

Some strong incentive for the colonies to act together had long been the only thing needed to send the flame of rebellion along the whole sea-coast. When the British soldiers began the enforcement of the punishment meted to Boston, sympathy and fear furnished the common bond. After several proposals of an intercolonial congress, the step was actually taken on a call from oppressed Massachusetts (June 17, 1774).[75] Delegates from every colony except Georgia met in Philadelphia in September, 1774. Seven of the twelve delegations were chosen not by the regular assemblies, but by revolutionary conventions called by local committees; while in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, three of the remaining five states, the assemblies that sent the delegates were wholly dominated by the revolutionary element. Local committees may therefore be said to have created the congress, and they would now stand ready to enforce its will.

The assembled congress adopted a declaration of rights, but their great work was the forming an American association to enforce a non-importation and non-consumption agreement.[76] Local committees were to see that all who traded with England or refused to associate were held up as enemies of their country. The delegates provided for a new congress in the following May, and adjourned.

Meanwhile, General Gage and his “pretorian guard” in Boston were administering the government of Massachusetts with noteworthy results. A general court of the colony was summoned by Gage, who, repenting, tried to put it off; but it met, formed a provincial congress, and, settling down at Cambridge, governed the whole colony outside of Boston. It held the new royal government to be illegal, ordered the taxes paid to its own receiver instead of Gage’s, and organized a militia. Gage at last determined to disarm the provincials. His raid to destroy the stores at Concord (April 19, 1775) resulted in an ignominious retreat and the loss of two hundred and seventy-three men, to say nothing of bringing sixteen thousand patriots swarming about Boston.

II
THE OUTBREAK OF WAR, 1775

Though mainly social and economic forces brought the revolution to the stage of open warfare, a Massachusetts politician had so used these forces that both his friends and enemies thought the blame or the honor to be his. Samuel Adams began to desire independence as early as 1768. From that time it was his unwearying effort to keep alive the opposition to the British ministry. For years he sought to instil in the minds of rising youths the notion of independence. His adroit mind, always awake and tireless, toiled for but one end; and he was narrow-minded enough to be a perfect politician. Two opposing views could never occupy his mind at the same time. For sharp practices he had no aversion, but he used them for public good, as he saw it, and not for private gain. He was a public servant, great or small, from his earliest manhood—as inspector of chimneys, tax-collector, or moderator of town-meetings. He was ever a failure in business; in politics, shrewd and able. The New England town-meeting was the theatre of his action;[77] he directed the Boston meetings, and the other towns followed. His tools were men. He was intimate with all classes, from the ship-yard roustabouts to the ministers of the gospel. In the canvass and caucus he was supreme. Others were always in the foreground, thinking that theirs was the glory. An enemy said that he had an unrivalled “talent for artfully and fallaciously insinuating” malice into the public mind. A friend dubbed him the “Colossus of debate.” He was ready in tact and cool in moments of excitement; his reasoning and eloquence had a nervous simplicity, though there was little of fire, and he was sincere rather than rhetorical.

Adams was of medium stature, but in his most intense moments he attained to a dignity of figure and gesture. His views were clear and his good sense abundant, so that he always received profound attention. Prematurely gray, palsied in hand, and trembling in voice, yet he had a mental audacity unparalleled. He was dauntless himself, and thus roused and fortified the people. Nor were his efforts confined to the town-meeting, for he was also a voluminous newspaper writer. He showed no tolerance for an opponent, and his attacks were keenly felt. “Damn that Adams. Every dip of his pen stings like a horned snake,” cried an enemy. Thus he went on canvassing, caucusing, haranguing, and writing until the maddened Gage attempted to seize him and the munitions of war which he and his fellow-politicians had induced the colony to collect. Concord and Lexington and the pursuit into Boston were the results.

At the close of that long day of fighting (April 19, 1775) it was plain that war had begun, and the Massachusetts politicians who had pushed matters to that stage may well have had misgivings. A single colony could have no hope of success, and there was little in the past to make one believe that the thirteen colonies would unite even to defend their political liberties. Franklin gave a vivid picture of their different forms of government, different laws, different interests, and, in some instances, different religious persuasions and different manners.[78] Their jealousy of one another was, he declared, “so great that, however necessary a union of the colonies has long been for their common defence, ... yet they have never been able to effect such a union among themselves.” They were more jealous of each other than of England, and though plans for union had been proposed by their ablest statesmen, they had refused to consider them.[79] There were long-standing disputes between neighboring colonies over boundaries, over relations with the Indians, and over matters of trade.

The greatest danger, however, that confronted the American cause was political division on the subject of the relations with England. As the quarrel with the mother-country grew more bitter, it was seen that the British government had many friends in America who, if they did not defend the action of the ministry, at least frowned upon the violent opposition to it. They believed that America’s best interests lay in the union with Great Britain. The aristocracy of culture, of dignified professions and callings, of official rank and hereditary wealth tended to side with the central government.[80] The more prosperous and contented men had no grievances, and conservatism was the character one would expect in them. They denounced the agitators as demagogues and their followers as “the mob.”