Free Patriots by A. J. Langguth Page A

point, Samuel Adams wrote to Richard Jackson, who had replaced Mauduit as the colony’s London agent, exonerating the law-abiding people of Boston from any blame. The second riot had been perpetrated by “vagabond strangers” interested only in plunder.
    Adams didn’t try to explain the presence on both nights of Ebenezer Mackintosh, the twenty-eight-year-old shoemaker from the South End. Mackintosh’s ancestors had come from Scotland as indentured workers more than a hundred years before, supplying cheap labor for a Massachusetts ironworks. As freemen in later generations, however, the family hadn’t found the New World hospitable. When Ebenezer was fourteen, his father, Moses, had been warned out of Boston, which meant that the town was publicly relieving itself of any obligation to help him if he became destitute or sick. He took the boy to the community of Wrentham, which tolerated Moses for eight years and then gave him another warning out.
    By that time, Ebenezer was already working in Boston as a shoemaker in Ward 12, the section of the South End where the gallows stood. When Sheriff Greenleaf recruited him for a volunteer fire company, Ebenezer persuaded the other firemen to form a gang for Pope’s Day. Slightly built, with a sandy complexion, Mackintosh had learned to read and he liked to memorize verse, but his quick temper put him at the center of every brawl.
    The Tories considered Mackintosh only a tool of the patriots, and Peter Oliver admitted to agrudging admiration for him. His clashes on Pope’s Day had made him a well-known figure around Boston, and Bernard’s inquiry quickly identified Mackintosh as the leader at Hutchinson’s house. Sheriff Greenleaf was sent out with a warrant to arrest him.
    When he spotted Mackintosh in King Street, the sheriff summoned up his nerve and took him to jail. Very soon, a group of gentlemen sought out Greenleaf and delivered a potent threat. Although the Town Meeting had voted to send out patrols to prevent any further rioting, no man would agree to go that night unless Ebenezer Mackintosh was set free. Greenleaf returned to the Council to report that ultimatum.
    Hutchinson listened to the sheriff’s story. “And did you discharge him?”
    “Yes,” said Greenleaf.
    “Then you have not done your duty.”
    Bernard raised to three hundred pounds the bounty for identifying the mob’s leader. Hutchinson was not surprised when the reward went unclaimed. He guessed that the shoemaker was threatening to implicate the men who had planned the demonstration. And if Hutchinson had seen a letter from Henry Bass of the Loyal Nine, it would have confirmed his suspicions. Samuel Adams’ cousin wrote: “We do everything to keep . . . the affair private, and are not a little pleased to hear thatMackintosh has the credit of the whole affair.”
    —
    At first, the example of the mob’s assault on Andrew Oliver seemed to be spreading. Newspapers in other provinces praised Boston’s patriots, and in Newport, Rhode Island, local Sons of Liberty built effigies of their stamp master. He resigned within the week. In New York and New Jersey, stamp masters were also pressured into giving up their posts, and the nominees of other colonies fell into line until only Georgia’s stamp man was allowed to take up his duties unmolested. But after the attack against Hutchinson, patriot leaders outside Massachusetts agreed with Samuel Adams that more violence would only harm their cause.
    Even if the Stamp Act were eventually repealed, the Sons ofLiberty pledged that they would guard against any further abuses by Parliament. Christopher Gadsden of Charleston, South Carolina, had mobilized his social club against the Stamp Act, and he caught the mood of the patriots when he said that the Grenville Ministry “must have thought us Americans all a parcel of apes, andvery tame apes, too.”

Sons of Liberty broadside
    MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Politics
1765
    W HILE Samuel Adams was