A.J. Langguth’s Patriots: The Men Who Started The American Revolution is my favorite history book ever. It’s not a scholarly analysis—it just tells the story of the American Revolution. But Langguth writes so well, that the book reads like a novel. The old saw that you can’t put it down really is true of Langguth’s writings, and especially this great book.
Patriots begins in Boston, in 1761, when James Otis stands up to argue that Massachusetts, not Britain, had the power to tax. Although the argument was too radical for his friends in the Boston Town House, within fifteen years it would become one of the touchstones of the Revolutionary cause.
Langguth focuses in large part on personalities: the lower-middle-class Samuel Adams, too indifferent about money, who “lived by values that most [Bostonians] honored only on the Sabbath”; the exceedingly wealthy John Hancock, whose relationship with Adams varied between tense alliance and outright hostility; the quiet, wealthy George Washington; the arrogant governor Thomas Hutchinson; the angry, radical Patrick Henry—about the only character Langguth fails to portray compellingly is Thomas Jefferson. (In fact, Langguth’s description of Jefferson is very bad; the only false note in the book. Fortunately, it lasts for only a few pages.)
One of my favorite passages is Langguth’s exciting description of the Boston Massacre: British troops had been stationed in the town; fights had broken out between the locals and the soldiers, and tension was already running very high. Down at the city’s rope-works, only a few days before, some soldiers and locals had got in a serious fight with wooden clubs that the workers used for making rope. The Boston Gazette had been publishing heated attacks on British officials, and rumors were rampant. On March 5, 1770, hearing that hundreds of local patriots were arming themselves with clubs, a tavern owner told a boy to start ringing the bell at the Brick Church. Locals who remembered a big fire a few years before, thought the bill must be a fire alarm and began running into town to fight the fire. Meanwhile, at the Boston Customs House, where the British soldiers were headquartered,Private Hugh White of the Twenty-ninth was on duty in the sentry box. The apprentices had gathered where one of them, young Edward Garrick of Piemont’s wigmaking shop, spotted a British officer named John Goldfinch passing the sentry post. Garrick began jeering at him.
“There goes the fellow who won’t pay my master for dressing his hair,” he cried.
Goldfinch ignored him.
But even after the officer had disappeared the boy kept it up. Goldfinch was cheap, Garrick said. He wouldn’t pay Piemont the money he owed him.
Now Private White rose to the bait. Of course his captain would pay his debts, White said. Captain Goldfinch was a gentleman.
There were no gentlemen in that regiment, said Garrick.
Hugh White stepped out of the small sentry box and into the street. “Let me see your face,” he said.
Garrick did not flinch. “I am not ashamed to show my face.”
White swung his musket and struck Garrick a blow on the side of his head with its butt. Dazed and reeling, the young man ran to the doorway of a shop and began to yell for help. White followed and hit him again.
The shouts of Garrick and his friends attract a crowd of curious and angry Bostonians. “With the bells clanging and packs of boys racing through the streets, one civilian asked a group of British officers, ‘Why don’t you keep your soldiers in the barracks’” Another confrontation a few blocks away narrowly escaped violence when a respected local merchant dispersed an angry crowd. But as the people started to walk away, they ran into the wounded Garrick, bleeding and pointing an accusing finger at White. The throng pressed in on White, hurling icicles at him, along with chunks of ice pried from the street. Private White shouted that he could not leave his post. If they did not stop, he said, he would have to call the main guard and the crowd would take the consequences…. As the pelting went on, White fixed his bayonet and let everyone see that he was loading his musket.
Henry Knox, a heavyset Boston bookseller [who would become President Washington’s Secretary of War—TMS] approached White and urged him not to fire. If he did, he would die for it.
“Damn them,” said White. “If they molest me, I will fire.”
Jonathan Austin, a law clerk for John Adams, had been drawn to King Street by the bells and tried with no success to send the crowd home. Ice was bursting around Private White’s head when he pounded on the door of the Custom House. Inside, no one would open it. White heard a chorus of shouts from the crowd: “Kill him! Kill him!” “Knock him down!” “Fire, damn you, fire!” “You dare not fire!”…White could see the mob flocking to King Street. As he ducked from shards of ice, he shouted for help. “Turn out, Main Guard!”
Inside the Customs House, the Captain Thomas Preston and Lieutenant James Basset considered their options. They decided to take a half dozen men to relieve the besieged Hugh White.The relief party reached Hugh White’s sentry box, and Henry Knox cautioned Captain Preston as he had done with White…. [Preston] brushed Knox aside and ordered Private White to join the relief column. As he left the box, the crowd didn’t try to stop him. With White safe, Preston turned his men around and ordered them to march back to the Main Guard. But the mob had become too dense for the soldiers to move, and all at once the fury that had been growing for eighteen months erupted on King Street.
“Damn you, you sons of bitches, fire!” someone shouted from the crowd. “You can’t kill us all.”
Preston formed his men in a semicircle next to a corner of the Custom House. They stood three feet apart as men from the crowd pressed within inches of their bayonets….
Preston again urges the mob to disperse, but they ignore him. Local tories join the crowd on the side of the soldiers, agitating the mob still further. Samuel Gray, one of the ropemakers who had fought [a few days before], had rushed to King Street vowing to knock a few heads. A little drunk, he clapped an apprehensive friend on the back and told him, “They dare not fire.” Around him sticks and ice flew through the air, and men were yelling, “Damn you, you rascals, fire!” “You dare not fire!” “Fire and be damned!”
A Tory had worked his way behind Preston’s men and took up the cry in a different spirit. “Fire!” he urged the soldiers. “By God, I’ll stand by you whilst I have a drop of blood! Fire!”
It was the one word everyone was shouting—those who heard the bells and still thought the town might be burning, those goading the troops for their impotence, the Tory who wanted the British soldiers to avenge his politics. Everyone—except Captain Preston—was shouting “Fire!”
Langguth is the author of several books, including A Noise of War, an exciting telling of Julius Caesar’s rise to power, and Our Vietnam, a somewhat disappointing history of the Vietnam War. He’s an outstanding writer who conveys the tension and excitement of historical events that can sometimes seem uninteresting to modern audiences. I very highly recommend Patriots.
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