Read Bunker Hill for Free Online Page B

to the Boston Massacre was that the soldiers might foment the city’s slaves into a rebellion against their patriot owners. A 1768 petition signed by the merchants John Hancock and John Rowe accused a captain of His Majesty’s Fifty-Ninth Regiment of having encouraged “certain Negro slaves in Boston . . . to cut their master’s throats, and to beat, insult, and otherwise ill treat their said masters, asserting that now the soldiers are come, the Negroes shall be free, and the Liberty Boys slaves—to the great terror and danger of the peaceable inhabitants of said town.”
    For years, members of Boston’s black community had been signing petitions requesting that the province’s General Court find a peaceable way to address their plight. In the spring of 1774 legislators voted on yet another unsuccessful petition presented by “a great number of blacks of this province who by divine permission are held in a state of slavery within the bowels of a free and Christian country.” As these petitioners knew all too well, what Phillis Wheatley called the “strange absurdity” of American slavery was not limited to the South.
    The truth was that the righteous and coercive certainty of patriots such as John Winthrop Jr., aka Joyce Junior, had more in common with the increasingly autocratic and shortsighted policies promulgated by British prime minister Frederick North than either side would have cared to admit. They had drastically different agendas, but they went about achieving those agendas in essentially the same way. Both shared an indignant refusal to compromise. Neither had much to do with a democratic or popular will.
    As it turned out, Joyce Junior’s ominous and blustering announcements in the local press did more than even the tarring and feathering of John Malcom to create the impression in England that a brutish vigilantism reigned in the streets of Boston. In early March, as Parliament debated what to do in response to the Boston Tea Party, Joyce Junior’s January 15 broadside was reprinted in the London papers. With the words of the “chairman of the committee for tarring and feathering” having come to the public’s attention, even America’s friends in Parliament felt that they must account in some way for this disturbing practice. On March 28, one member of the House of Commons acknowledged that “the Americans were a strange set of people, and that it was in vain to expect any degree of reasoning from them; that instead of making their claim by argument, they always chose to decide the matter by
tarring and feathering
.” With the examples of both Joyce Junior and John Malcom before them, an almost unanimous consensus emerged in Parliament: Boston must suffer the worst of all punishments for its collective and apparently ongoing sins.
    But if Joyce Junior and other patriot leaders regretted the tarring and feathering of John Malcom, the object of all this furor appears to have taken a different view. Malcom was proud of his sufferings. Later that year he sailed for London with a wooden box containing the ultimate trophy: a withered hunk of his own tarred-and-feathered flesh.
    On January 12, 1775, Malcom attended the levee at St. James’s, where he knelt before King George III and handed His Majesty a petition. What Malcom wanted more than anything else, he informed the king, was to return to Boston and resume his duties as a customs official—but not as just any customs official. He wanted to be made “a single Knight of the Tar . . . for I like the smell of it.”

CHAPTER TWO

    Poor Unhappy Boston
    O n Friday, May 13, 1774, a British sloop-of-war approached the lighthouse at the entrance to Boston Harbor. She was the
Lively
, twenty-eight days from England, with a notable passenger: Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, commander in chief of the military in North America and soon to be the new royal governor of Massachusetts.
    Gage, fifty-four, had spent much of the last decade stationed in