“Boston was quiet & no hurt done”

On 8 Sept 1774, two days after the men at the First Continental Congress heard dire reports about the Crown military attacking Boston, accurate information arrived in Philadelphia.

The army had not killed half a dozen civilians. The navy had not bombarded the town. In fact, over two tense days nobody had been hurt at all.

Robert Treat Paine recorded the new news in his diary:

By the Post came advice from N. York that a person had arrived from Boston & Newport since the time Supposed in [Israel] Putnams Letters & that Boston was quiet & no hurt done.

John Adams did likewise, characteristically with more emotion:

The happy News was bro’t us, from Boston, that no Blood had been spill’d but that Gen. [Thomas] Gage had taken away the Provincial Powder from the Magazine at Cambridge [sic]. This last was a disagreable Circumstance.

Roger Sherman of Connecticut wrote the next day:

We were Alarmed a few Days ago with a report that Boston was fired upon by the Land and Sea forces, but it has been Since Contradicted.

Also on 9 September, Caesar Rodney of Delaware wrote about news from Massachusetts: ”A letter to Mr. [Thomas] Cushing by Express from Boston informs that all is Quiet as Yet…” He went on to discuss other forms of resistance snarling up the Suffolk County court sessions and mandamus Council.

People in the eighteenth century were used to hearing false reports and contradictory information to sort out. They knew that news could take days and weeks to travel, and be garbled along the way. They must have been used to rethinking how they understood distant events based on new facts.

Nonetheless, those reports of the British military attacking Boston must have tinged how the delegates at this Continental Congress viewed the ongoing dispute with the Crown. The news arrived just as those men were getting acquainted and setting out the rules for their body.

On 6 September, the same day that the false rumors prompted the Congress to adjourn early, Samuel Adams was proposing that the Rev. Jacob Duché, an Anglican, lead the body in prayer. As I wrote way back here, that “masterly stroke of policy” helped allay worries that the New Englanders were all religious bigots who would drag the whole continent into an unnecessary fight. And now Adams’s home town was under attack?

Philadelphians began to ring their church bells “muffled” in mourning for the Boston dead. According to Silas Deane, Christopher Gadsden (shown above) of South Carolina was “for taking up his Firelock, & marching direct to Boston.” John Adams wrote, “Every Gentleman seems to consider the Bombardment of Boston, as the Bombardment, of the Capital of his own Province.”

Then came the better news. Deane reported, “The Bells of the City are now ringing a peal of Joy on Acct. of the News of Boston’s having been destroy’d being contradicted.” The Congress didn’t have to consider military matters after all. At least, not right away. But for a couple of days, the delegates had faced the possibility of a war against the imperial government. Could their actions keep that from happening, or did they need to prepare for it—or was it possible to do both?