The Hellfire Rebellion (TimeWars 10)
When Lord Hillsborough received a copy of the Massachusetts circular letter. he took it to the king and then passed on His Majesty’s command to each colonial governor. instructing them to have their legislatures ignore the letter and “treat it with the contempt it deserves.” Governor Bernard was ordered to have the Massachusetts House formally rescind the letter. If they refused, the body was to be dissolved.
Bernard passed on his instructions to the House. The members voted. The order to rescind the circula
r letter was defeated by a vote of ninety-two to seventeen. Sam Adams sent a letter to Governor Bernard, informing him of the decision, and the nest day, Governor Bernard dissolved the House, as he was ordered by his king, knowing that by doing so, he played right into the hands of Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty. “The Glorious Ninety-two” became a rallying cry in Boston and the names of the seventeen who voted to rescind were posted on the Liberty Tree.
The boycott of British goods was taken up in earnest throughout all the colonies. A worried Parliament took up the question of the Townshend Acts and Lord North spoke before the body. “America must fear you before she can love you.” he told the members, urging them not to repeal the Townshend Acts until they saw America prostrate at their feet. In the fall of 1768, four thousand British troops arrived in Boston, nearly one redcoat for every four citizens. The elated Tories set off fireworks in celebration and taunted the patriots with a song called “Yankee Doodle.”
Yankee Doodle came to town. a-riding on a pony, stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni!
Yankee Doodle, keep it up!
Yankee Doodle, dandy!
Mind the music and the step, and with the girls be handy!
The song was meant to be derisive. During the French and Indian War. the British troops had taken to calling the New England militia “Yankee companies.” The word “macaroni” was London slang for a fop, a dandy, a foolish and superficial young man who hung about in taverns. The song was the Tories’ way of making fun of the radicals who met in the taverns on the waterfront, something they felt safe to do now that the British troops were present to protect them. Little did they know that their taunting song would soon be turned around on them, to be used as a marching tune by the Continental Army
There was trouble with the British troops right from the beginning. The Bostonians refused to house the soldiers, so they pitched their tents on Boston Common and commandeered the Fanueil Hall, seizing the arms that were stored there in the process. Governor Bernard also allowed the troops to take over the Town Hall, where the Massachusetts House had lately met. Many of the officers rented quarters in the town from loyalists, while radicals urged the enlisted soldiers to desert. Many of them did. Those who were caught were shot on the Common or whipped in public, the sight of which turned the sympathies of many nonradical Bostonians against the British and gave the citizens a new name to taunt the soldiers with-“bloody backs.” Fights often broke out between the troopers and the colonists and the constantly increasing tension male bloodshed inevitable.
On March 5, 1770, a crowd of Boston toughs gathered to taunt a British sentry. A squad of soldiers was sent to reinforce him, or perhaps to bring him back safely to the main guard, but as the soldiers reached the sentry, the gathering crowd closed in behind them, shouting abuse. For some fifteen minutes. there was a standoff, during which the troops stood at the ready while the crowd pelted them with rocks and ice. One soldier struck by a piece of ice fell-perhaps he slipped-but in any event, he fired. His shot set off a volley and when it was all over, five Bostonians lay dead and six were wounded. In the Gazette, Sam Adams wrote about the incident with outrage, and news of the “Boston Massacre” soon spread throughout the colonies. The radical cause gained a large number of new converts.
As sympathy for the patriotic cause spread through the colonies, the next major incident occurred when the British schooner Cayce ran aground while chasing a smuggler. The ship was boarded by a party of attackers, the captain was shot in the groin, and the crew was badly beaten. Then the boarders forced the crew over the side and burned the Gaspee to the waterline. But as outrageous as this act was to the British, nothing served to ignite their feelings against the colonies as much as the Boston Tea Party.
The man behind it. once again, was Samuel Adams. The East India Company was in serious financial trouble, due in no small part to having been bled dry by agents of the Network. To rescue the company from bankruptcy. Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773, allowing them to sell tea directly to America without first putting it on public sale in England, thereby eliminating the middlemen and allowing the tea-of which there was a surplus-to be sold more cheaply. More cheaply, in fact, then it could be bought from smugglers. And with a tax on it, as well. When the first shipment arrived in Boston, the colonists would not allow the tea to be unloaded. On December 16. 1773, one hundred and fifty members of the Sons of Liberty, posing as “Indians.” their faces blackened with burnt cork, boarded the British ships and dumped three hundred and forty-two chests of tea into the harbor. Among the “Mohawks” were Paul Revere and his apprentice, a young man named Johnny Small.
Still ahead for him lay Lexington and Concord, where he would hear “the shot heard round the world,” the bloody battle at Breed’s Hill and service with the Continental Army, which would include the near defeat at the Battle of Long Island, the brutal winter spent at Valley Forge, and, finally, the surrender of General Cornwallis after the siege at Yorktown. Eight years would pass from the shots fired at Lexington and Concord to the signing of the peace treaty in Paris in 1783. When it was all over. Capt. John Small would return to Boston as a full-grown man and settle down in Salem Street near Christ Church, where he would practice his trade as a silversmith. He would meet a pretty young woman named Anne Rafferty and marry, but though they would live a long and happy life together, the couple would not be blessed with any children. He would continue to be good friends with Paul Revere and his family until Revere’s death in May of 1818, and with a nice young couple named Jared and Sally Moffat, who were also childless, but he was never very comfortable around Sam Adams, though he never quite understood why.
He would always believe that Anne was the only woman he had ever loved, and yet sometimes, he would dream of a young woman, a blonde just like his wife, with striking features, dressed in male clothing. He would awake with vague memories of those dreams, but when he struggled to recall them, he could not summon up the face, much less the name.
Though his primary trade was as a silversmith, he would often do some gunsmithing on the side. He specialized in pistols. Sometimes, for no particular reason he could think of. he would find himself making drawings of a most peculiar-looking pistol, resembling nothing he had ever seen before, but the drawings never looked practical and something about them always filled him with a strange feeling of foreboding, so that he would crumple the drawings up and burn them, afraid that anyone should see them without really knowing why. He had one other slight idiosyncrasy in what was otherwise a perfectly normal and ordinary life. He had an unusual pet name for his wife, an eccentricity which Anne found both strange and somehow charming. He called her Andre.