Taunton's patriots & tories: the patriotic struggle in one southeastern Massachusetts community led to honor for patriot Robert Treat Paine and obscurity for Tory Daniel Leonard. (History -- Struggle for Freedom).

The night air was cold that February evening in 1775. But Tory loyalist Colonel Thomas Gilbert and the 30 or so ruffians accompanying him were hot with resentment as they trudged along the rural road through Berkley, Massachusetts. The Sons of Liberty had all but taken over the town of Taunton, county seat of old Plymouth Colony's western county. Not only had the Sons of Liberty accosted Gilbert on that same road the previous year in an attempt to prevent him from accepting the post of sheriff for Bristol County, but they had also had committed the ultimate act of sedition on October 21, 1774. The Sons had erected a 112-foot high "Liberty Pole" on Taunton Green that day, opposite his majesty King George's courthouse, raised an American flag proclaiming "Liberty and Union," and pledged "to resist, even unto blood" attempts to restore the laws of England. This was the first open and organized demonstration of rebellion against the British Crown in the colonies.

Gilbert's earlier pleas for assistance from the new British governor, Thomas Gage, resulted in nothing more than encouraging words; Gage had more than enough trouble of his own in Boston. Gage suggested that Gilbert "form [military] companies to awe the rebellious subjects of England," and Gilbert did. Three hundred muskets had been ordered, received, and distributed to Tory sympathizers in Freetown and surrounding southern Bristol County neighborhoods.

Using the cover of night, Gilbert now marched his men stealthily toward Taunton. He hoped that by cutting down the Liberty Pole he would snuff out the wave of patriotism that had recently inflamed the town's citizens. The Sons of Liberty had already caused most of the Tories to leave town with their incessant taunting and intimidation, including the prominent barrister Daniel Leonard. Leonard had fled with his family to a virtual exile in Boston. Bristol County in Southeastern Massachusetts rivaled even Boston in its fervent patriotism; a Bristol County convention in the courthouse had echoed the Boston area's Suffolk County Resolves a few weeks later with a similar set of resolves of their own. When news arrived from Boston that the Continental Congress had unanimously adopted the Suffolk County Resolves, Taunton's Sons of Liberty hoisted a new scarlet "Liberty and Union" banner on their Liberty Pole the next day.

Massachusetts as a whole resembled an armed camp on that night of February 22, 1775. Militia exercises were performed daily, and sentries were placed on duty around the clock on roads in key towns like Taunton. Both prominent Tories and patriots occasionally found themselves under surveillance by their political opponents.

As Gilbert's men approached the outskirts of town, a patriot sentry fired his musket into the air, and the booming drumbeat of alarm through the winter air soon drew scores of patriot militiamen ready for action onto the Green. Seeing that he had lost the element of surprise, Gilbert withdrew his men back to Freetown. There would be another time, he could reasonably assume, when he could strike with the tremendous might of the British Army behind him. One of the first military maneuvers of the American war for independence had ended without incident.

Militia Colonel David Cobb reported the incident to his brother-in-law Robert Treat Paine, who had just returned from the first Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and who would sign the Declaration of Independence a year later. Cobb had been counseled not to initiate hostilities because the British would take it as a sign of war. Unsure as to whether the other colonies would support waging war against England, Massachusetts had to be careful not to get too far ahead of the pack. But the war was in fact already on. Paine had reputedly toasted at a dinner in Philadelphia during the first Continental Congress: "May the collision of British flint and American steel produce that spark of which shall illuminate the latest posterity." Paine knew war was coming, as did Samuel and John Adams, but many in Congress had not yet come to the same conclusion.

Finally, after the Sons of Liberty tarred and feathered two of Gilbert's men, Gage agreed to dispatch 200 soldiers to garrison Taunton. The troops were shipped to Newport, Rhode Island, but were delayed there when the captain of the transporting frigate Rose refused to sail up the Taunton River, believing the river to be too shallow. Gilbert rode down to Newport to make other arrangements for getting the troops to Taunton.

On April 10th, the alert patriot Colonel William Daggett from nearby Attleboro swooped down on Freetown with his men after learning of Gilbert's absence. He seized 35 muskets, ammunition, and took 29 Tory prisoners without casualties. The muskets and ammunition were added to Taunton's militia armory. The patriot forces ransacked Gilbert's home, and forced the captured Tories to recant their allegiance to the King and to pledge to behave better in the future. Many of Gilbert's erstwhile comrades agreed to the stipulation on the march up to Taunton, but others repented only after they were escorted to a nearby mine as prisoners of war. All were eventually released.

The British troops never arrived in Taunton. The battles of Lexington and Concord took place nine days after the Freetown altercation, and the war that most people in Massachusetts knew was coming had finally broken out into the open. All that remained was for the Continental Congress to recognize the fact with a declaration of independence, and for the Massachusetts delegation to lead Congress to that conclusion.

Patriot Paine and Tory Leonard

Bristol County's voice in the Continental Congress was the Taunton-based barrister Robert Treat Paine. Paine backed John and Samuel Adams in the move toward independence, despite a personal animosity and rivalry that had existed between himself and John Adams for nearly 20 years. John Adams had written in 1758 that "Bob Paine is conceited, and pretends to more knowledge and genius than he has.... He is an impudent, ill-bred, conceited fellow." But fate had thrown these leaders of the independence movement together, and the two worked well on the same team. Despite their personal differences, Adams admitted of Paine (from the same letter): "... yet he has wit, sense, and learning, and a great deal of humor; and has virtue and piety, except his fretful, peevish, childish complaints against the disposition of things."

There was no particular reason why Paine should have been selected as the congressman from Taunton. To the contrary, he was an unlikely candidate. When Paine found himself elected to the Massachusetts General Court (House of Representatives) in 1773, fellow Taunton representative Daniel Leonard accompanied him. Leonard had been a fiery defender of colonial interests against the British Parliament until about 1770, and even in 1773 his reputation remained strong enough to see him selected as a member of the Committee of Correspondence instead of Paine. Leonard socialized well with John Adams and was a darling of Boston society. The younger Leonard was the more experienced patriot in 1773, serving his fourth annual term at the time Paine began his first.

Paine had been a good student. He graduated from the prestigious Boston Latin school and was ninth in his class (out of 23) at Harvard. But Daniel Leonard was a better student, also attending Boston Latin and graduating second in his class at Harvard. Leonard was part of one of the most prominent families in the Taunton area. The Leonard family owned the prosperous town iron foundry and a huge plantation in nearby Norton. It dominated area politics so thoroughly that Taunton was sometimes called the "Land of the Leonards." Members of the Leonard family could be found in leadership positions of the patriot movement throughout Bristol County.

Though Paine had few family ties to political power, he could boast a prestigious line of ancestors. Robert Treat Paine's family arrived in Plymouth Colony in 1622, and his namesake great-grandfather, Robert Treat, had been a longtime governor of Connecticut colony. Robert Treat Paine sprung from a long line of Congregationalist ministers, and was himself a prominent minister's son. Counted among his ancestors were pastors of Boston's Old South Church and Harvard College.

Unlike moving directly on to a study of law after college like Leonard, Paine drifted from job to job for nearly a decade. After graduating from Harvard, Paine taught for a few years at the Boston Latin School and at a rural school in Lunenburg, in northern Worchester county. Tiring of teaching, Paine spent two years at sea. His shipping business went well, except for a permanent scar he received on his face when some drunken locals boarded his ship in Charleston Harbor and hit him with a bottle. Not long after a whaling expedition off the coast of Greenland, Paine decided he had had enough of the sea.

The long bouts alone at sea had given him time to think of his family occupation, and he preached for a while in a church in the Groton/Shirley area of Massachusetts. When the French and Indian War broke out in 1755, Paine volunteered to serve as chaplain in the local militia, and accompanied the militia in the disastrous assault on Crown Point. Returning from the war, Paine's father advised him to resume his legal studies (begun while teaching at Lunenburg) because the family had taken a financial turn for the worse. Though father and son had been wealthy enough to become small-scale shipping magnates and had owned black (African) and white (Irish) slaves in the past, his father -- the Rev. Thomas Paine -- was insolvent.

Paine was admitted to the bar during the same week of May 1757 that his father died, just in time to manage the legal disposal of his father's debts. Eventually, he would take his unmarried and indigent sister Eunice into his home and care for her. The young lawyer moved to Taunton to start up a legal practice in 1761.

"He was tall in stature," his grandson later described him, "and a voice, whose tones were a deep bass, a serious if not stern expression of countenance, and a severity as well as frankness of manner gave him the appearance of greater sternness than he possessed." Paine made friends easily with his famously quick wit, but (as was often the case with New England Puritans of that era) there are no records of him having any especially deep friendships outside of his family. A friend asked him a series of questions in a letter during 1762, and Paine's responses were characteristic of his light-hearted wit: "What side do you take in political controversies? Answer: The right side.... What of Writs of Assistance? Answer: Never was more need of them, I shall soon apply for one."

The latter quip might as well have been a comment on his romantic life. Paine didn't marry until after his 39th birthday, and showed few serious prospects before that. His thin, frail figure, his racking cough, and the stern nature of his scarred face failed to win the ladies' eye. Despite his ready wit, in conversation he often vacillated between appearing conceited and lacking in self-confidence.

Paine eventually won the heart of Sarah (Sally) Cobb, a young barmaid from a prominent family in town. The two were wed on March 15, 1770, but had succumbed to the temptations of the flesh before the blessed day; a baby boy was born two months later. Robert and Sally eventually had eight children, naming their first-born "Thomas" after his grandfather. ("Thomas Paine" would legally change his name as an adult to "Robert Treat Paine," arguing that he wanted a "Christian" name instead of having the same name as the famous but unrelated Thomas Paine who wrote Common Sense and The American Crisis and rejected organized religion. Robert Treat Paine Jr. eventually became an accomplished poet and playwright.)

Paine attended a state convention to protest the governor's dissolution of the elected Massachusetts legislature in 1768. Here Paine arrived at what he later called "a regard for that Revolution with which I intimately connected from the first moment." This first experience in patriotic politics -- combined with a high reputation as a lawyer -- led to another, much more high-profile assignment: Prosecuting the British soldiers charged with the Boston massacre. Although Paine lost the legal contest to John Adams (Captain Preston and most of the soldiers were declared innocent, though a few were convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter), Paine's spirited prosecution won him accolades in patriotic circles.

When Paine arrived in Boston as a new Taunton representative in the legislature, he began to witness firsthand why patriot activists were growing increasingly frustrated with the veteran Taunton representative. Leonard had taken an increasingly Tory position in debates at the General Court. He took the lead in opposing the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Peter Oliver, the only justice who refused to sign a pledge to receive a salary solely from the Massachusetts legislature and refuse remuneration from the British crown. Patriots rightly feared that judges who drew salaries from the British crown would have little sympathy for colonial complaints. Paine chaired the committee to impeach Oliver, and succeeded in getting Oliver impeached in February 1774.

The Oliver impeachment set in motion a chain of events that would lead both Leonard and Paine into exile from Taunton. Paine would spend several years away from his family in patriotic service, and Leonard would ultimately take his immediate family across the ocean to live out the rest of his life as a British citizen.

Leonard's opposition to Oliver's impeachment was the last straw for the patriots. He could no longer be trusted to attend important meetings. After the British Parliament closed down the Port of Boston until the cost of the Boston Tea Party was paid back, Tory Governor Thomas Hutchinson charged the legislature with the task of raising the money. Leonard was placed on the committee, Paine wrote, and "it was therefore considered unsafe for that committee to enter into the consideration of the state of the province on principles of opposition while he was present." Instead, the patriot-stacked committee spoke soothingly about paying back the East India Company for their tea losses when Leonard was present, and would talk of resistance when Pain was absent. The final deception took place when Paine convinced Leonard to go to Taunton with him while -- unknown to Leonard -- the General Court voted to send representatives to the first Continental Congress. The plan worked, and as a reward Paine was elected a congre ssional delegate in absentia. He would remain a congressman from 1774 through 1778.

Leonard's Exile for the British Crown

The Sons of Liberty hounded Leonard out of Taunton within months of the impeachment vote. A rally of 500 patriots was held on the Green to protest his acceptance of an appointment to join the British military government in Boston, and Leonard was hanged in effigy. Other Tories throughout Bristol County were subject to constant annoyances. Some had their wigs pulled off in public; others found that their horses had been shaved of their manes or tails, or that the horses had been painted in the red color of Taunton's rebel flag. The not-so-subtle message was that even the horses of Tories had the sense to be patriots. Though the Sons of Liberty spared Leonard's wife their torments, the ladies of Taunton decided one day to force her to march around the Liberty Pole and the town's new rebel flag in a mock deference to the patriot colors. She soon packed her bags for Boston, never to return.

Despite the Leonards' strong family ties to the region, the War for Independence split the extended family. In Bristol County and throughout the nation, it pitted brother against brother and father against son no less than the War Between the States did 85 years later. And while there was often a price to pay for patriotism, the price for siding with British tyranny was greater still.

Daniel Leonard was soon writing Tory pamphlets from his new Boston home under the pen name "Massachusettensus." The pamphlets had such a great effect on New England that John Adams felt compelled to rebut them in writing. As far away as Connecticut, patriot Governor Jonathan Trumbull complained of Leonard as Britain's "scribbler general."

After the British evacuated Boston, Leonard went to England, by way of Canada, and became a man without a home. Though Leonard would always be a British citizen at heart, he would also always consider Taunton his home. "New England was written upon his heart as Calais was upon Queen Mary's," Tory Governor Thomas Hutchinson sadly wrote of Leonard from his own British exile. The revolution had taken Leonard out of Taunton, but it hadn't taken Taunton out of Leonard.

In England, Leonard begged the king to compensate him for his loyalty and for the substantial property he lost. King George granted Leonard and several hundred other leading Tories a small pension. Leonard's considerable legal abilities also won him an appointment as attorney general of Bermuda. The appointment sent him, appropriately enough, away from England but not quite back to America. He served honorably as attorney general for Bermuda for 25 years, and he even visited America twice during the ensuing peace. But he visited America as a foreigner, and he exited this world (by committing suicide) as a forgotten and pitiable drunk on the streets of London.

Paine's "Exile" of Patriotic Service

Paine served the patriotic call away from Taunton in the service of Congress from July 1775 through January 1777, and his family suffered in his absence. Sally jested in a 1776 letter to him that "I expect we shall both walk with cans [sic] before I see you." Sally Paine did not even have the comfort of the torrent of intimate letters that Abigail Adams had to console her loneliness. Paine was not a prolific letter writer, and when he wrote friends in Taunton on congressional business he'd add at the bottom, "Let my wife read this letter, I haven't time to write her."

At the second Continental Congress, Paine signed the so-called "Olive Branch Petition" along with his friend John Hancock. Sent to King George in July 1775, the petition was a final appeal to reconciliation with Great Britain after the battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. King George's rejection of the petition resulted in the Declaration of Independence -- of which Paine became a signer -- and a new American nation. Paine's greatest service on the Continental Congress, other than signing the Declaration of Independence, was to encourage the domestic production of gunpowder.

Paine continued to hold leadership roles in the Massachusetts state government upon returning to the Bay State. He was continuously elected in the Massachusetts House of Representatives until 1777, serving as Speaker that year. He became state attorney general in 1777, and was appointed to a committee to draw up a state constitution in 1778 (his draft was overwhelmingly rejected by the electorate). Paine served on the Executive Council of Massachusetts in 1778 and 1779, and participated in the state constitutional convention in 1780. Upon adoption of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, Paine resumed the role of state attorney general, a post he held for the next decade. He eventually moved back to Boston. When his friend John Hancock offered him a judgeship in 1782, Paine rejected the offer claiming that to do the job he would have to close down his legal practice, which he could not afford to do. He accepted a judicial appointment as a Supreme Court justice in 1790, serving until 1804. Paine served honorab ly and impartially as a judge, but probably served a few years longer than he should have. His hearing had almost completely gone in the final years of his judgeship and, often carrying around a funnel shaped hearing aid, he could be heard bellowing at lawyers to "stop mumbling."

In contrast to Leonard's death, Paine's death in 1814 was mourned across the grateful state and new nation. "Alas! The Massachusetts triumvirate is broken. Judge Paine is no more," John Adams proclaimed on hearing the news of his death, who had in his later years given way to calling his old opponent his "ancient friend." The City of Taunton dedicated a statue in remembrance of Paine in 1904. The statue stands across the street from City Hall today, near the Taunton Green where the "Liberty and Union" banner still flies under the Stars and Stripes.

Thomas R. Eddlem resides in East Taunton, Massachusetts, not far from the road traveled by Thomas Gilbert and his colleagues on their quest to cut down the Liberty Pole.