A History of the American People

even more contemptuous view: I would not have men in mercantile cast every day collecting themselves together and debating on political matters.' This view was shared by the generals. General Guy Carleton, governor of Quebec, warned where it was all leading:A Popular
Assembly, which preserves its full Vigor, and in a Country where all Men appear nearly on a
Level, must give a strong bias to Republican Principles.' General Gage summed up the
conclusion: The colonists are taking great strides towards independence. It concerns great Britain by a speedy and spirited Conduct to show them that these provinces are British Colonies dependent on her and that they are not independent states.’ The upshot was that the British garrison in Boston, the most 'difficult' of the colonial cities, was suddenly increased by two whole regiments. That, as Franklin put it, wasSetting up a
Smith's Forge in a Magazine of Gunpowder.' On March 3, 1770, a sixty-strong mob of Boston
youths started to snowball a party of redcoats. There was a scrimmage. Some soldiers fired,
without orders, killing three youths outright and wounding others, two of whom later died.
Britain and its colonies were under the rule of law and for soldiers to open fire on civilians
without a previous reading of the Riot Act was to invite charges of murder or manslaughter. Ten
years later, indeed, the whole of central London was given over to the mob because of the
timidity of the military authorities for this reason. In this case the commander of the redcoats,
Captain Preston, was put on trial; so were some of his men. But there was no conclusive
evidence that an order was given, or who fired the shots, so all were acquitted, though to appease
the Bostonians two of the men were branded. This was to hand the colonists the first of a whole
series of propaganda victories-the story of the `Boston Massacre,' as it was called, and the failure
of Britain to punish those responsible. Sam Adams and Joseph Warren skillfully verbalized the
affair into a momentous act of deliberate brutality, and Paul Revere engraved an impressive but
entirely imaginary image of the event for circulation through the eastern seaboard.
The American Revolution was the first event of its kind in which the media played a salient
role-almost a determining one-from first to last. Americans were already a media-conscious
people. They had a lot of newspapers and publications, and were getting more every month.
There were plenty of cheap printing presses. They now found that they had scores-indeed
hundreds-of inflammatory writers, matching the fiery orators in the assemblies with every
polysyllabic word of condemnation they uttered. There was no longer any possibility of putting
down the media barrage in the courts by successful prosecutions for seditious libel. That pass had
been sold long ago. So the media war, which preceded and then accompanied the fighting war,
was one the colonists were bound to win and the British crown equally certain to lose.
Boston was now the center of outright opposition to British colonial rule. We can look at it
through the eyes of its most distinguished and certainly most acrimonious son, John Adams
(1735-1826), who was then in his thirties and a prominent lawyer of the city. Adams came from
Quincy, the son of a fourth-generation Bay Colony farmer, and was as impregnated with the self-
righteous, opinionated, independent-minded, and contumacious spirit of Massachusetts as
anyone who had ever crossed the Common. He was a Harvard graduate and had the high-minded
sense of intellectual superiority of that famous academy, and his sense of importance had been
much increased by his marriage in 1764 to Abigail Smith of Weymouth, an able, perceptive,
charming, and socially prominent lady. The proto-Republicans of Boston called themselves
Whigs, in sympathy with the London parliamentary critics of the British government, such as
Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, and Adams became a prominent Whig at the time of the
Stamp Act agitation. He published, anonymously, four notable articles attacking the British
authorities in the Boston Gazette, and he later brought out under his own name A Dissertation on