"God be praised! the troops are landed, and critically too," Commodore Hood said, after he had received from Lieutenant-Colonel Dalrymple an account of his entrance into Boston. The Commodore reflected, with infinite satisfaction, he wrote, that, in anticipation of a great emergency, he collected the squadron; that he was enabled to act the moment he received the first application for aid; and that he was prepared to throw forward additional force until informed that no more was wanted: and now, with an officer's pride, he advised George Grenville, that on the twenty-seventh day from the date at New York of the order of General Gage for troops, the detachment was landed at Boston. The two commanders were well satisfied with each other. Hood characterized Dalrymple as a very excellent officer, quite the gentleman, knowing the world, having a good address, and with all the fire, judgment, coolness, integrity, and firmness that a man could possess. Dalrymple wrote to Hood,--"My good Sir, you may rest satisfied that the arrival of the squadron was the most seasonable thing ever known, and that I am in possession of the town; and therefore nothing can be apprehended. Had we not arrived so critically, the worst that could be apprehended must have happened." Both were good officers and honorable men, who believed and acted on the fabulous relations of the Boston crown officials.
"Our town is now a perfect garrison," the Patriots said, after the troops were posted, and the rough experiment on their well-ordered municipal life had fairly begun. It galled them to see a powerful fleet and a standing army watching all the inlets to the town,--to see a guard at the only land-avenue leading into the country, companies patrolling at the ferry-ways, the Common alive with troops and dotted with tents, marchings and countermarchings through the streets to relieve the guards, and armed men occupying the halls of justice and freedom, with sentinels at their doors. Quiet observers of this strange spectacle, like Andrew Eliot, wondered at the infatuation of the Ministry, and what the troops were sent to do; while the popular leaders and the body of the Patriots regarded their presence as insulting. The crown officials and Loyalist leaders, however, exulted in this show of force, and ascribed to it a conservative influence and a benumbing effect. "Our harbor is full of ships, and our town full of troops," Hutchinson said. "The red-coats make a formidable appearance, and there is a profound silence among the Sons of Liberty." The Sons chose to labor and to wait; and the troops could not attack the liberty of silence.
The House of Representatives, on reviewing the period of the stay of the troops in Boston, declared that there resulted from their introduction "a scene of confusion and distress, for the space of seventeen months, which ended in the blood and slaughter of His Majesty's good subjects." The popular leaders, who repelled, as calumny, the Loyalist charge that they were engaged in a scheme of rebellion, said that to quarter among them in time of peace a standing army, without the consent of the General Court, was as harrowing to the feelings of the people, and as contrary to the constitution of Massachusetts, as it would be harrowing to the people of England, and contrary to the Bill of Eights and of every principle of civil government, if soldiers were posted in London without the consent of Parliament; in a word, that it was as violative of their local self-government as the Stamp Act or the Revenue Act, and was also an impeachment of their loyalty. They, therefore, as a matter of right, were opposed to a continuance of the troops in the town.
The question of removal now became an issue of the gravest political character, and of the deepest personal interest; and a steady pursuit of this object, from October, 1768, to March, 1770, gave unity, directness, and an ever-painful foreboding to the local politics, until the flow of blood created a delicate and dangerous crisis.
The crown officials and over-zealous Loyalists, during this period, resisted this demand for a removal of the troops. The officers urged that a military force was needed to support the King's authority; the Loyalists said that it was necessary to protect their lives and property; and the Ministry viewed it as vital to the success of their measures. Lord Hillsborough,--who was an exponent of the school that placed little account on public opinion as the basis of law, but relied on physical force,--in an elaborate confidential letter addressed to Governor Bernard, urged as a justification of this policy, that the authority of the civil power was too weak to enforce obedience to the laws, and preserve that peace and good order which are essential to the happiness of every State; and he directed the Governor punctually to observe former instructions, especially those of the preceding July, and gave now the additional instruction, to institute inquiries into such unconstitutional acts as had been committed since, in order that the perpetrators of them might, if possible, be brought to justice. It is worthy of remark, that there is nothing more definite in this letter as to what the Ministry considered to be unconstitutional acts.
As American affairs were pondered, at this period, (October, 1768,) by Under-Secretary Pownall, a brother of Ex-Governor Pownall, Lord Barrington, and Lord Hillsborough, in the deep shading of the misrepresentations of the local officials of Boston, they appeared to be in a very critical condition. These officials had, however, the utmost confidence in the exhibition of British power, and in the wisdom of Francis Bernard. The letters which the Governor now received, both private and official, from these friends, were, as to his personal affairs, of the most gratifying character; and their congratulations on the landing of the troops were as though a crisis had been fortunately passed. Lord Hillsborough congratulated him, officially, "on the happy and quiet landing of the troops, and the unusual approbation which his steady and able conduct had obtained." Lord Barrington, in a private letter, said,--"There is only one comfortable circumstance, which is, that the troops are quietly lodged in Boston. This will for a time preserve the public peace, and secure the persons of the few who are well affected to the mother-country." Both these leading politicians--there were none at this time more powerful in England--expressed similar sentiments in Parliament from the Ministerial benches: Lord Hillsborough sounding fully the praise of the Governor, and Lord Barrington, in an imperial strain, terming the Americans "worse than traitors against the Crown, traitors against the legislature of Great Britain," and saying that "the use of troops was to bring rioters to justice."
The sentiment expressed as to the future was equally gratifying to the Governor. Lord Hillsborough, (November 15, 1768,) in an official letter, said,--"It will, I apprehend, be a great support and consolation for you to know that the King places much confidence in your prudence and caution on the one hand, and entertains no diffidence in your spirit and resolution on the other, and that His Majesty will not suffer these sentiments to receive any alterations from private misrepresentations, if any should come"; and in a private letter, by the same mail, the Secretary said,--"If I am listened to, the measure you think the most necessary will be adopted." It is not easy to see how a Government could express greater confidence in an agent than the Secretary expressed in Francis Bernard; and the talk in Ministerial circles now was, as it was confidentially reported to the Governor, that, as he had nothing to arrange with the faction, and nothing to fear from the people, he could fully restore the King's authority.
The tone of the Governor's letters and the object of his official action, by a thorough repudiation of the democratic principle, and a jealous regard for British dominion, were well calculated to inspire this confidence; for they came up to the ideal, not merely of the leaders of the Tory party, or of the Whig party, but of the England of that day. There was then great confusion in the British factions. Ex-Governor Pownall, after comparing this confusion to Des Cartes's chaos of vortices, remarked, (1768,) in a letter addressed to Dr. Cooper,--"We have but one word,--I will not call it an idea,--that is, our sovereignty; and it is like some word to a madman, which, whenever mentioned, throws him into his ravings, and brings on a paroxysm." The Massachusetts crown officials were continually pronouncing this word to the Ministry. They constantly set forth the principle of local self-government, which was tenaciously and religiously clung to by the Patriots as being the foundation of all true liberty, as a principle of independence; and they represented the jealous adherence to the local usages and laws, which faithfully embodied the popular instincts and doctrine, to be proofs of a decay of the national authority, and the cloak of long-cherished schemes of rebellion. And this view was accepted by the leading political men of England. They held, all of them but a little band of republican-grounded sympathizers with the Patriots, that the principles announced by the Patriots went too far, and that, in clinging to them the Americans were endangering the British empire; and the only question among the public men of England was, whether the Crown or the Parliament was the proper instrumentality, as the phrase was, for reducing the Colonies to obedience. Lord Barrington, in his speech above cited, laid most stress on the denial of the authority of Parliament: all who questioned any part of this authority were regarded as disloyal; and hence Lord Hillsborough's instructions to Governor Bernard ran,--"If any man or set of men have been daring enough to declare openly that they will not submit to the authority of Parliament, it is of great consequence that His Majesty's servants should know who and what they are."
Another class of British observers, already referred to, of the school of Sidney and Milton, lovers of civil and religious liberty, saw in Boston and Massachusetts a state of things far removed from rebellion and anarchy. They looked upon the spectacle of a people in general raised by mental and moral culture into fitness for self-government and an appreciation of the higher aims of life, as a result at which good men the world over ought to rejoice, a result honorable to the common humanity. They pronounced the late Parliamentary acts affecting such a people to be grievances, the course of the Ministry towards them to be oppressive, and the claims set forth in their proceedings to be reasonable; they even went so far as to say that the equity was wholly on the side of the North-Americans. Thus this class, as they rose above a selfish jealousy of political power, fairly anticipated the verdict of posterity. Thomas Hollis, the worthy benefactor of Harvard College, was a type of this republican school. "The people of Boston and of Massachusetts Bay," he wrote in 1768, "are, I suppose, take them as a body, the soberest, most knowing, virtuous people, at this time, upon earth. All of them hold Revolution principles, and were to a man, till disgusted by the Stamp Act, the stanchest friends to the House of Hanover and subjects of King George III."
The representations made to the Ministry, at this time, (October, 1768,) by Bernard, Hutchinson, and Gage, were similar in tone. There was very little government in Boston, according to Gage; there was nothing able to resist a mob, according to Hutchinson; so much wickedness and folly were never before combined as in the men who lately ruled here, according to Bernard. The Commander-in-Chief and the Governor sent despatches to Lord Hillsborough on the same day (October 31, 1768). Gage informed the Secretary that the constitution of the Province leaned so much to the side of democracy that the Governor had not the power to remedy the disorders that happened in it; Bernard informed him that indulgence towards the Province, whence all the mischief had arisen, would ever have the same effect that it had had hitherto, led on from claim to claim till the King had left only the name of the government and the Parliament but the shadow of authority. There was nothing whatever to justify this strain of remark, but the idea which the people had grasped, that they had a right to an equal measure of freedom with Englishmen; but such a claim was counted rebellious. "I told Cushing, the Speaker, some months ago," the Governor says in this letter, "that they were got to the edge of rebellion, and advised them not to step over the line." The reply of the Speaker is not given, but he was constantly disclaiming, in his letters, any purpose of rebellion. Now that Bernard saw, what he had desired to see for years, troops in Boston, he was as ill at ease as before; and at the close of the letter just cited he says,--"I am now at sea again in the old weather-beaten boat, with the wind blowing as hard as ever."