Chapter One Tory Hunting January 25, 1774, was a bitterly cold day in Boston, with two feet of snow on the ground. John Malcom, a fifty-one-year-old minor customs official, was on his way home from his office near the Boston harbor, when passersby observed him suddenly cursing and physically threatening a small boy on a sled who had apparently rammed him. George R. T. Hewes, a poor shoemaker who had carried one of the Boston Massacre's mortally wounded victims to a doctor four years earlier, intervened to protect the child. Shouting and scuffles ensued. Malcom struck Hewes on the head with his cane, knocking him temporarily unconscious. Bystanders then broke up the fight, and Malcom returned home. But the crowd would not let Malcom off lightly. And even though the scene had appeared to be a private squabble, that night Bostonians made sure that their response bore the hallmarks of Revolutionary justice. Before taking on his current post, Malcom had worked for the British Empire as a sea captain and army officer fighting throughout the North American theater of the Seven Years' War. He had become notorious across the colonies after being arrested for debt and counterfeiting in 1763. A decade later, while working as a comptroller, he was suspended for malpractice and extortion. Many Bostonians knew of his checkered past and would likely remember that in 1771 Malcom had helped Governor Sir William Tryon of North Carolina murderously suppress the Regulator uprising, a revolt of backcountry farmers against colonial taxes and tax officials. At dusk, a sizable crowd gathered outside Malcom's home at the end of Cross Street. When Mrs. Malcom failed to disperse them, her husband leaned out of a window and struck one man with his sword, piercing his chest. Malcom then brandished loaded pistols, boasting that he would kill numerous opponents for the governor's bounty. As men started to bring ladders to take the house, the Malcoms barricaded themselves in a second-floor room, but the assailants soon breached a window. The irate intruders seized Malcom and, as he later declared, "by violence forced [him] out of the House and Beating him with Sticks then placed him on a sled they had Prepaird." Some gentlemen now became concerned that matters might get out of hand. They urged restraint and appealed to official justice. But there was no stopping the frenzied crowd--1,200 people, according to the diary of a local merchant (a likely exaggeration)--in whose eyes Malcom had "behaved in the most capricious, insulting and daringly abusive manner." Anne Hulton, a recent arrival from England whose brother was a commissioner of customs in Boston, was nauseated to see Malcom undergo "cruel torture," first being "stript Stark naked, one of the severest cold nights this Winter . . . his arm dislocated in tearing off his cloaths." Most contemporaries would have been familiar with the procedure that Malcom was about to endure. Those who needed reminding might consult the recipe recounted by another Massachusetts Loyalist: "First, strip a Person naked, then heat the Tar untill it is thin, & pour it upon the naked Flesh, or rub it over with a Tar Brush, quantum sufficit." That night, the crowd picked up a barrel of tar at a conveniently located wharf. "After which, sprinkle decently upon the Tar, whilst it is yet warm, as many Feathers as will stick to it." Malcom's tormentors may well have taken pillows from his own home as they began their night's work. "Then hold a lighted Candle to the Feathers, & try to set it all on Fire; if it will burn so much the better. But as the experiment is often made in cold Weather," such as prevailed that January night, "it will not then succeed--take also an Halter, & put it round the Person's Neck, & then cart him the Rounds." After Malcom had been forced into a cart, his assailants poured hot tar over his head and large parts of his body. The tar burned through his skin and scalded his flesh. Next, the crowd covered him in feathers before pulling the cart on to the Town House--the seat of the governor, legislature, and courts depicted in the center of Revere's Boston Massacre image. They whipped him severely at multiple locations, and halfway between the governor's residence and the Old South Meeting House they ordered him to curse Thomas Hutchinson, now the hated royal governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, whose house a Stamp Act mob had virtually dismantled in 1765. Malcom refused. He was taken to the Liberty Tree, a large elm at the corner of Essex, where, again, he valiantly (or recklessly) declined to condemn the governor. He was then dragged to the municipal gallows, a rope around his neck presaging what might lie in store, and still he rebuffed them. Could they at least "put their threats in Execution Rather than Continue their Torture?" Malcom now pleaded. They bound his hands behind his back, tying him to the gallows or swinging the rope's other end across the beam, and beat him with cords and sticks. By one account, they threatened to cut his ears off. When his torturers demanded that Malcom curse the king and the governor, he defiantly damned all traitors. Finally, with the tar encasing his freezing, bruised body, Malcom could take it no more: he cursed as ordered. Having already defiled and shamed him, Malcom's persecutors added one more insult. They made him swallow huge quantities of tea, toasting the king and other members of the royal family. Malcom gulped down the liquid until he turned pale and "filled the Bowl which he had just emptied." They beat him back to the Custom House and all the way to Copp's Hill, concluding a "Spectacle of horror & sportive cruelty," as Anne Hulton described it, that had taken as many as five hours. George R. T. Hewes, who later distanced himself from the street's brutality (he had also been unarmed the night of the Boston Massacre) had been following the procession with a blanket to shield the hypothermic Malcom. Around midnight, now back outside his family home, they finally "rolled [Malcom] out of the cart like a log." Doctors, reported Hulton, considered it "impossible this poor creature can live. They say his flesh comes off his back in Stakes." Malcom did survive. His physical recovery would have been slow, starting with the scraping of the tar from his body. Perhaps turpentine would have been used, as with other victims of tarring and featherings, revealing his bloody skin and likely removing bits of it with the tar to expose raw flesh wounds. It would be many weeks before he would be able to leave his bed; for the rest of his life, he would bear the scars of his ordeal. * * * Malcom's torture, almost four years after the Boston Massacre, occurred at a moment when the town was once again at the center of colonial-imperial strife. After Britain had removed the troops from Boston and repealed most of the Townshend Acts, three calmer years had ensued. But by 1773 tensions were again rising. The British government resolved to pay the salaries of the Massachusetts governor and judges from the remaining tax on tea, thus bypassing the colonial assembly. In addition, the Tea Act of that year, adopted to help the East India Company pay off its debt, gave a small number of merchants, the so-called tea consignees, a monopoly on the right to sell tea in America. Soon a coalition of Boston politicians, artisans, and merchants cut out from the trade targeted those tea consignees and their warehouses. On December 16, 1773, some one hundred men--merchants, artisans, apprentices, and local teenagers, the shoemaker Hewes among them--boarded three ships at Griffin's Wharf and threw forty-six tons of tea overboard to prevent it from being sold. The British government learned about the Boston Tea Party in late January 1774. The prime minister, Lord North, denounced the town as the "ringleader of all violence and opposition to the execution of the laws of this country." Over the following months, Parliament passed harsh legislation to punish Boston for destroying private property and resisting imperial rule. The Boston Port Bill closed the port until full damages were paid. An amendment to the Massachusetts charter permitted the governor to appoint councillors, judges, and sheriffs. One regulation stated that any royal official or soldier accused of a capital offense could be tried in England rather than locally. Another law said that imperial troops could now be quartered in unoccupied dwellings. At the same time, the Quebec Act extended that colony's border south, protecting French Catholics' way of life but also limiting the American colonies' westward expansion. Rather than containing the incipient American insurgency, as the British government had hoped, these Coercive Acts (or Intolerable Acts, in the rebels' words) helped unify opinion across the diverse colonies. While colonists continued tea protests from New Hampshire to Virginia, over the spring and summer of 1774 they also prepared for concerted political action. In September, fifty-six delegates sent by the legislatures of twelve of the colonies (only Georgia abstained) gathered in Philadelphia, then the largest city in North America. On average forty-five years old, most of these men were very wealthy, and several dozen of them were veteran colonial legislators. They met for seven weeks in Carpenters' Hall. The single most important achievement of this unprecedented Continental Congress was to pass the Continental Association, a non-importation, non-consumption, and non-exportation agreement boycotting British goods. The delegates hoped that by harming British manufactures, revenue, and commerce, the boycott would force Britain to repeal the legislation "calculated for enslaving these Colonies." Drawing on lessons from earlier, more fragmented economic boycotts, the Continental Congress designed the new Continental Association to cover all colonies, and to involve all segments of society, not just merchants. To implement this ambitious scheme, the Congress created a system of surveillance and persecution whereby Americans watched and judged the words and actions of their fellow countrymen. * * * To enforce the boycott laid out in the Association agreement, the Continental Congress required that "a committee be chosen in every County, City, and Town" of each colony "attentively to observe the conduct of all persons touching this Association." If an individual was found to be in breach, he (and occasionally she) was to be denounced in the newspapers, so that "all foes to the rights of British-America may be publickly known, and universally contemned as the enemies of American liberty." Imagine how sinister such phrasing must have sounded to skeptics, let alone opponents of the boycott. And the Continental Congress offered little specific guidance on the workings of these committees; each was free to establish additional regulations. No one could predict how exactly this experiment in grassroots enforcement might play out. In very little time, "committees of safety" formed in communities across the colonies--their ominous name echoing that of similar groups organized in the previous century during the English Civil War. By spring 1775, some 7,000 men served on such bodies. To the Loyalist lieutenant James Moody it seemed that the rebels "maddened almost every part of the country" with their committees, admonishing everyone to "Join or die!" The committees scrutinized and chastised those they suspected of violating Association rules. But anyone considered disloyal to the American cause was now at risk of being persecuted. In towns and counties across America, the committees fostered a dangerous climate that threatened psychological and physical violence to those whom the Revolutionaries derogatively called Tories and whom we now call Loyalists. According to a long-standing stereotype, Loyalists were mostly white, prosperous, Anglican elites. Yet Loyalists included not only imperial officials and large landowners but also merchants, farmers, shopkeepers, bakers, tailors, and poor craftsmen and laborers; Anglicans as well as Quakers, Methodists, French Huguenots, and Irish Roman Catholics. The historical record affords us the occasional demographic snapshot: of the one-third to one-half of the male inhabitants of Deerfield, Massachusetts, who had been identified as Loyalists, some 40 percent were merchants, tavern owners, and artisans, 30 percent farmers, and 15 percent professionals. There were Loyalists in every social echelon and geographic region. It is fair to assume that virtually every white colonial American in 1775 knew a Loyalist. Patriots regularly mocked Loyalists for their base personal and materialistic urges: the Tories, they said, lusted after office and wealth, prestige and influence. But in the same way that the motivations of the Revolutionaries were complex, Loyalists, too, acted out of both principle and pragmatism. Loyalists shared with Patriots "preoccupations with access to land, the maintenance of slavery, and regulation of colonial trade," as the historian Maya Jasanoff has put it. Until well into 1775, most in both camps professed loyalty to the British monarch. Loyalists felt a deep commitment to constitutional protections of their liberties, and many also agreed with the Patriots that specific British policies were undesirable or even unacceptable. However, unlike the Revolutionaries, who eventually sought an independent republic, the Loyalists remained devoted subjects of King George III and wished to resolve any disagreements within the existing constitutional framework. To them, separation from the mother country threatened economic dislocation and the disruption of their personal networks. Many also doubted that America could win a war against the mighty British Empire. But in addition to ideology and beliefs, Loyalists also followed their individual and group interests. Over the course of the war, many Americans would come to decisions about which army might best protect their families and their property, frequently reevaluating their options as the local military situation shifted. Minorities such as Highland Scots in North Carolina, Anglicans in New England, German immigrants in Pennsylvania, or Dutch farmers in New Jersey tended to side with what they perceived to be a more tolerant British Empire rather than throw in their lot with a potentially more oppressive American majority. Similarly, several tens of thousands of runaway slaves who joined the British, and many of America's indigenous peoples, such as five of the six Iroquois nations, perhaps hoped that a victorious, diverse British Empire would treat them more fairly than a triumphant white America. As the lines between Patriots and Loyalists hardened, soon they cut right through communities--and indeed families. Perhaps the most famous example is that of the Franklins of Philadelphia: Benjamin, until 1774 the Empire's best friend in America but now one of its angriest and most implacable foes, and his son, William, New Jersey's last royal governor who evolved into a passionate leader of American Loyalists. But the Revolution also divided lesser-known families, both white and of African heritage, such as the Whitecuffs. Benjamin was a black freeman who spied for and served with the British Army and later the Royal Navy. His father, also a freeman, was a farmer and sergeant fighting with the Patriots, as was his brother. Benjamin was twice captured and escaped the noose narrowly on both occasions; his father and brother both fell in the war. Family ties did not necessarily soften hearts. When John Adams declared that he would have hanged his own brother if he had been a Loyalist, it was easier for him to say given that, unlike others, he did not actually have a sibling on the other side of the political divide. The same was not true in the case of Gouverneur Morris, a congressional delegate from Westchester, New York, who remained in close contact with his two Loyalist sisters; his mother and most of his brothers-in-law and half brothers were also Loyalists. As a prosecutor of Loyalists, Morris nevertheless advocated public executions: terror would frighten waverers and inspire others to fight for America's cause. Excerpted from Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth by Holger Hoock All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
