their way, cordial relations would have been completely restored. In June, 1770, for example, Rowe and a group of prominent Bostonians spent the evening at "Province House," drinking the king's health. “A great many gentlemen attended this Public Mark of Loyalty to his majesty & Family," something which could not have been done a year earlier.

Again, on January 18, 1771, the Queen's birthday, Rowe spent the evening at a very elaborate celebration, with "a very grand assembly," including the governor, lieutenant-governor, the officers of the royal army and navy, in fact as he put it, "all the best people in town a general coalition so that harmony, peace, & friendship will once more be established in Boston very good dancing & good musick but very bad wine & punch." Not even the bad wine and punch could conceal Rowe's deep satisfaction at the bright prospect of restored good feeling.

If this turn had been confined merely to social affairs, it would have had little, if any, historical significance, but it was manifested in every direction. In the Council, or upper house in the General Court, a number of members began to work with the governor, something they had not done since 1765. Prominent politicians were deserting the radicals, and going over to the other side.

The same break in radical forces was soon revealed in the very stronghold of the radicals, the House of Representatives. In the fall of 1770, Samuel Adams and his party met defeat for the first time in more than four years. Then, in the elections of 1771, the conservatives secured a clear majority. It really appeared for a time as though the whole dispute were over. Adams's party split into fragments, and some of his most active supporters either dropped temporarily out of politics as John Adams did, or went over to the conservative side, after the manner of John Hancock.

In New York, the years from 1770 to 1773 were exceptionally quiet and peaceful. The lower classes were prosperous and contented, the Sons of Liberty were no longer heard of, and relations with England had never been more cordial. There, as in Massachusetts, the dispute seemed to be over.

Perhaps it would have been, if the radical politicians had been inclined to accept defeat gracefully. Instead of welcoming the conservative reaction, they set themselves to check it, and to restore the condition of tense excitement and bitterness which had char

acterized the period before 1770. To Samuel Adams for example, the reëstablishment of good feeling was an unmixed calamity. After it started he spent the busiest three years of his life in an effort to combat it, and the war that came was a tribute to his success. The brighter the conservative prospects appeared, the more vigorously he worked. By means of newspaper articles, political campaigning, and direct personal appeals, he sought to bring back the super-heated emotionalism of Stamp Act times. Much of his effort was characterized by exaggeration. In order to arouse discontent, he regularly told his contemporaries that they were slaves, and that the government under which they lived was an absolute despotism. His purpose was to fill others with his own bitter hatred of Great Britain, and to spur them on toward independence.

COMMITTEES OF CORRESPONDENCE

Clever propaganda, properly conducted, will do wonders in creating public opinion, and Adams was most successful. Signs of renewed unrest were becoming visible in all directions. But propaganda alone is never enough to bring on revolution. What is needed to complete the process is an organization, through which the leaders can work. They must have something by means of which they can guide and direct the opinion they have created into the proper channels. Adams realized this need of organization, and by September, 1771, he was considering plans for it. He aimed at a whole system of committees, in all the colonies, so tied together by common aims and leadership that they could operate as a single unit. The Sons of Liberty had been working in that direction in 1766, when the repeal of the Stamp Act made further efforts unnecessary.

After discussing the project at length with his friends, Adams picked the fall of 1772 as a fitting time to carry his plan into effect. Thanks to his influence in the Caucus Club, he was able to have a special town meeting called, in spite of the vigorous opposition of his former colleagues, John Hancock and Thomas Cushing. There he proposed the appointment of a committee of correspondence, to keep in touch with similar committees to be appointed in other towns. At a second meeting held a few days later, the committee was appointed. It rarely happens that a revolutionary, or even a radical movement can win anything like the unanimous approval of any community, and Boston of 1772 was no exception to that rule. Both

these town meetings were small, with fewer than a fifth of the voters in attendance, and there is more evidence of general opposition than of general support. But Adams was in a position to ignore the unfavorable attitude of the majority. He controlled the group of politicians who managed all public affairs in the town, and for work of this sort he needed nothing else.

The next step was to induce the leading towns in the province to follow suit, for they could not be expected to act spontaneously, any more than Boston had done. By dint of his powers of persuasion, Adams won over some of his friends in nearby towns, and with these to set the example, the others gradually followed. By July 1773, almost every town in Massachusetts had its committee of correspondence.

Legislative committees to correspond with the governments of other colonies had been used occasionally by various assemblies, and regularly by the House of Burgesses in Virginia. For years that body had had a committee of correspondence, which could easily be made a revolutionary organ. After 1773 these agencies for keeping colonial governments in touch with each other became common.

The creation of the committees was the response of the radicals to the conservative reaction, and they could hardly have devised a more effective rejoinder. By the summer of 1773, a remarkable change had taken place in Massachusetts. The committees served as centers of radicalism from which the doctrines of Samuel Adams and the other Boston extremists could radiate into every corner of the province. The country districts became even more radical than Adams himself, while before this time they had consistently lagged far behind the Bostonians. Adams had worked purposely to arouse a spirit of intense bitterness against Great Britain, and on every hand there was evidence of his success. Perhaps the best illustration of the change was the attitude of John Hancock, always quick to align himself with the winning side. Before the summer of 1773 he had become reconciled with Samuel Adams, and the two were again at work in the same cause.

Between 1764 and 1770, there had been a series of genuine grievances against the British government, and these had aroused widespread opposition. After 1770, however, many of the real grievances practically disappeared, but the opposition did not expire with them. On the contrary it increased, both in intensity and in volume. Popu

lar opinion, so called, may spring spontaneously out of a common feeling, whether it be contentment or mad hatred; it may also be created, with very little as a cause except the determination in the minds of the creators. During the Sugar Act dispute, Samuel Adams had learned how to manufacture public opinion with a pen, and he turned his lesson to practical account in 1773.

CHAPTER XVI

THE BREAK WITH GREAT BRITAIN

Just how far the state of mind aroused throughout Massachusetts would have carried the people, if the British government had made no more blunders, is an open question. It may well be that the course of colonial growth, plus the undeniable estrangement from England which her new policy had aroused would have led inevitably to a separation. Certain it is that with the committees of correspondence actively at work, with the leaders always on the lookout for some new evidence of evil in British policy, the likelihood of a break was never entirely absent. The conservative reaction of course was a positive movement away from trouble, but it was not sufficiently far-reaching, and radicalism eventually carried the day. That it did so was due in part to Lord North, in part to Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts, and in part to Samuel Adams.

THE TEA ACT

Adams and his associates had been successful in arousing the populace on the strength of British measures which had dropped or were dropping out of sight. In order to hold his following in line he needed a much more alive issue, something which the people would seize upon as a sort of crowning outrage. Had the British Cabinet been aware of this situation it would naturally have tried not to play into the hands of the radicals. But at the particular time Lord North and his colleagues were considerably more concerned over the financial straits of the East Indian Company, than over American affairs. Formerly one of the most prosperous of all the great British trading corporations, the East India Company had met with serious reverses. By 1773 it was dangerously close to bankruptcy, and the government came forward with help. It happened that the company's warehouses were heavily stocked with tea, some seventeen million pounds in all; if this could be turned speedily into cash, the company might be saved. So the Cabinet aimed to provide a market for the unsold tea.