The June mob, the public meetings, the vote of the House of Representatives, and the union feeling supplied zealous Loyalists with rich material to pervert into fresh argument for the necessity of troops to keep the people in order. It was promptly seized upon. The Commissioners set out the Boston tumults as the heralds of a rebellion that had begun its course over the continent. They not only sent a batch of falsehoods to England by Hallowell, but they also sent letters to General Gage, the Commander-in-Chief, whose head-quarters were in New York, with a request for troops, and to Commodore Hood at Halifax asking for more ships. General Gage was surprised at not receiving letters from the Governor, but with a soldier's promptness he at once (June 24) tendered to Governor Bernard all the force he might need to preserve the public peace; yet regarding it as improper to order the King's forces into a Province to quell a riot without a requisition from the Executive, he frankly advised the Governor to this effect. But the Governor did not want troops to quell a riot, and said so; and in answer to the tender, returned a long and heavy disquisition, showing why, though he considered troops essential to the promotion of the good of his country, he did not and would not make a formal requisition for any, and thus, all unconsciously, betrayed and condemned himself at every word,—for while he was talking of country, he was thinking of self. Commodore Hood, believing that the good people of Boston were actually on the eve of a revolt, and that the precious lives of the Commissioners were hardly safe in Castle William, where they now were, "immediately sent two more ships," which, he says, "secured the Castle from all attempts at surprising it." But, according to Hutchinson, though the people were mad, yet they were not Don Quixotes, and though a few might have talked of attacking it, yet the Castle was in no danger, even though no one of His Majesty's ships had been in the harbor.
The ships promptly arrived, and were moored about Castle William; but no troops appeared, though early in July the Governor felt sure they were ordered here from Halifax, from the fact that General Gage sent a batch of despatches, under cover to him, addressed to Lieutenant-Colonel Dalrymple, the senior British officer in command at that station. On forwarding these despatches, Bernard wrote to Dalrymple,—"You know that my situation requires that I should appear to know as little in the proceedings of this kind as can well be. I should, therefore, be obliged to you, if in conducting a business of this kind you would let me appear a stranger to it until it becomes necessary to communicate it to me officially. In the mean time any private hints, conveyed to me by a safe hand, will be acceptable."
A straightforward British officer must have conceived contempt for such an official, even before subsequent action on the part of this official elicited an expression of it.
The Governor was doomed to disappointment. The orders which he transmitted merely placed troops in readiness to proceed to Boston on his requisition, which requisition he steadily refused to make, and he wrote,—"The crisis awaits the arrival of the troops, and I now learn they are not coming." He next officially laid the tender of the Commanding General before the Council, when he found that its members were unanimously of the opinion that troops were not required. Now this body contained decided Loyalists; and this unanimity of opinion appears to have amazed the Governor. He advised Lord Barrington, that the fact convinced him that he could "no longer depend upon the Council for the support of the small remains of royal and parliamentary power now left, the whole of which had been gradually impeached, arraigned, and condemned under his eye"; which was arrant party-misrepresentation. He further expressed the opinion that the sending of troops to Boston ought to be a business of quartering and cantonment. "It is no secret," he said, "that this ought to have been done two years and a half ago. If it had, there would have been no opposition to Parliament now, and above all, no such combinations as threaten (but I hope vainly) the overthrow of the British Empire. If provision was to have been made against faction and sedition, the head-quarters should have been secured." Instead of this, "Boston has been left under a trained mob from August 14, 1765, to this present July 23, 1768."
While these things had been going on here, the die as to Massachusetts and Boston had been cast in the British cabinet, by the conclusion to place a military force at the command of the Governor. This decision was reached before the June meeting or the June riot; and it is quite in vain to seek the real reason for it in what appears on paper about the processions on the eighteenth of March or the equally insignificant prior manifestations. Hutchinson and Gage and other Loyalists admitted that all these were trifles. The Ministers were no strangers to mobs; even if there had been as violent ones in Boston as there were in London, they could not have acted upon them as proofs of disloyalty. Besides the calumnies that made out the popular leaders to be anarchists, that perverted love of the local government into a desire for independence, there was one that touched the pride of the mother-country; for the Loyalists said of the Bostonians,—(there is nothing like the language of the time to embody the spirit of the time,)—that "every dirty fellow, just risen from his kennel, congratulated his neighbor on their glorious victory over England; and they were so intoxicated with their own vast importance, that the lowest wretch among them conceived himself superior to the first English merchant." This was falsehood; for it is certain that the joy for the repeal of the Stamp Act was joy for harmony restored between the Colonies and Great Britain.
Thus, owing to such representations, while the people of Boston were deliberating in the great town-meetings of June, orders were on their way to General Gage, whose head-quarters were in New York, to place troops in Castle William, to station a detachment in Boston, and to keep a naval force in the harbor. The despatch of Lord Hillsborough, addressed to Governor Bernard, communicating this conclusion, was elaborate and able, and laid down in full the policy of the Government. The instructions were based on the pretence that Boston was "in possession of a licentious and unrestrained mob"; that it was animated by a disposition "to resist the laws and to deny the authority of Parliament"; and that the alleged "illegal and unwarrantable measures which had been pursued in opposing the officers of the revenue in the execution of their duty, and for intimidating the civil magistrates, showed the necessity of strengthening the hands of the Government." This despatch refers to five of Bernard's letters as containing such representations. It is worthy of remark, that Lord Hillsborough sharply rebuked the Governor for having all along asked the advice of the Council as to the introduction of the troops; for to admit such a function in the Council, he said, was to concede a power inconsistent with the Constitution. "It is you," are the official words, "to whom the Crown has delegated its authority, and you alone are responsible for the best use of it."
This action was unknown to the popular leaders, and the month of August passed in doubt as to whether the Ministers would be persuaded to quarter troops in Boston. The town was remarkably quiet, when the Governor issued (August 3, 1768) a proclamation against riots, and calling all magistrates to suppress tumults and unlawful assemblies, and to restore vigor and firmness to the Government. "It cannot be wondered at," said "Determinatus," (August 8,) in the "Gazette," "if the mother-country should think that we are in a state of confusion equal to what we hear from the orderly and very polite cities of London and Westminster. There, we are told, is the weavers' mob, the seamen's mob, the tailors' mob, the coal-miners' mob, and some say the clergy's mob; and, in short, it is to be feared the whole kingdom, always excepting the * * * * and P——t, will unite in one general scene of tumult. I sincerely pray for the peace and prosperity of the nation and her colonies, whose interest, if she would open her eyes, she would clearly discern to be undivided." The journals during this month have full details of these mobs. The coal-heavers of Wapping destroyed property and committed murders, and two thousand keel-men and sailors of Sunderland fairly beat off the King's troops that were sent against them from Newcastle. Happily such want of reverence for law was unknown in Boston or the Province. Still the Governor kept on representing that he was under the control of a mob; and another day of rejoicing gave him another opportunity of misrepresenting the people. This was the fourteenth of August, being the third celebration of the uprising against the Stamp Act. In the procession on this occasion there was one man who had had a hand in the attack on the Lieutenant-Governor's house on the twenty-sixth of August, and had in consequence incurred the penalty of death, and who was now celebrating his mob-exploits; and at the head of the procession were two Boston merchants, who thus were charged with countenancing mobs. The Governor well knew that the Patriots abhorred the outrages of the twenty-sixth of August as much as they gloried in the uprising against the stamp-duty on the fourteenth of August. Hutchinson, moreover, was a good deal disturbed by the public affronts put upon the Commissioners, who were still at the Castle, though their subordinates were in town collecting the revenue. The Cadets, on motion of Hancock, voted to exclude them from the usual public dinner; and the town voted to refuse the use of Faneuil Hall for the dinner, unless with the stipulation that the Commissioners were not to be invited. Such proceedings, with petitions and resolutions, made nearly the whole outrage of the Boston "trained mob" that the Governor talked about. Yet he affected to be in fear of an insurrection, and on the last day of the month whiningly wrote,—"The town is at present just as defensible as it was two years ago,—not a sergeant's guard of real soldiers within two hundred miles of it."
In a few days after, on a Saturday night, William Sheriff, aide-de-camp to General Gage, arrived in town from New York, which he left on Wednesday morning, bearing the following letter to Governor Bernard, the original of which is indorsed, "Received Sept. 3."
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