Free Bunker Hill by Nathaniel Philbrick Page B

once-constant influx of shipping at the city’s docks—no longer had a way to support themselves.
    On Sunday, Rowe went for a walk along the wharves. In the past he would have seen ship after ship lined up along the waterfront with their sails drying in the late-spring sun as well as an anchorage full of coasting schooners and merchant ships. Boston Harbor was now shockingly empty; what vessels remained belonged, for the most part, to the British navy. “Tis impossible to describe the distressed situation of this poor town,” he wrote, “not one topsail merchantman to be seen.”

CHAPTER THREE

    The Long Hot Summer
    B y mid-June it seemed certain that an angry showdown between the merchants and the Boston Committee of Correspondence was about to erupt in Faneuil Hall. But matters were also coming to a head in Salem, where the province’s legislative body, the General Court, went into session on June 7. Reaction to Boston’s call for a boycott had been mixed, but sympathies for the town’s plight remained strong throughout the colonies. As indicated by letters received by the Boston Committee of Correspondence from committees in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia, the time was considered right for a meeting of representatives from all thirteen colonies to work out a coordinated response to the ministry’s attempts to limit colonial rights, for “an attack upon one colony was an attack on all.” It was time, Samuel Adams and his coterie of patriots decided, for the Massachusetts House of Representatives to select the delegates to represent the colony at what would come to be called the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia.
    Each year, the Massachusetts House chose a committee to draw up a report on the state of the province. This year it was secretly decided that the nine members of this committee should be the ones to come up with a slate of delegates for the Continental Congress. Unfortunately a loyalist had made his way onto the committee. Daniel Leonard was a lawyer descended from a family of Taunton ironmongers. Up until recently he had distinguished himself for his wit, style, and criticism of the administration; in fact, he had been the one who joked back in 1765 that Thomas Hutchinson’s house had been destroyed because of what Leonard judged to be his poorly written history of Massachusetts. That winter, however, Leonard had grown increasingly disaffected with the patriots. At some point in the spring he became a committed loyalist, a transformation that the residents of Taunton attributed to Thomas Hutchinson, who was seen speaking to Leonard on the town green beside what came to be known as the Tory Pear Tree.
    Whether or not Leonard had been seduced by Hutchinson, he was a most dangerous opponent to have on the committee. Not only was he still highly respected among the members of the House, but he might report the committee’s discussions to General Gage. It was decided that two committee meetings must be held each evening after the adjournment of the General Court. The first was to be a sham meeting in which the committee pretended to discuss the Port Bill, with Samuel Adams giving the impression that he might be open to paying for the tea. One of the committee members was another Taunton lawyer named Robert Treat Paine, who counted Leonard as a good friend. Paine marveled at how convincingly Adams strung Leonard along at these meetings. “It would be hard to describe,” Paine later wrote, “the smooth and placid observations made by Mr. S. Adams, saying that it was an irritating affair, and must be handled cautiously; that the people must have time to think and form their minds, and that hurrying the matter would certainly create such an opposition that would defeat the matter and many observations of this kind, all tending to induce Mr. Leonard . . . to think that matters would terminate in obedience to the Port Bill.” Each meeting ended quite abruptly, with Adams