Chapter Five

GAGE’S RETURN

Governor Thomas Hutchinson had at his disposal an overwhelming military and naval force, but that was not as helpful in the Tea Act crisis as might be imagined. Hutchinson was unwilling to unilaterally call out the army, be it the regulars or the militia, and there was some question as to whether he even had the legal authority to do so. What’s more, Hutchinson understood that if the military were called out, the situation might quickly spin out of control.

For backing on the military question he looked to the Council, the upper body of the General Court. In most colonies, members of the Council were appointed by the governor, and the governor could thus count on them for support. In Massachusetts, however, they were elected by the General Court and were of a more patriotic bent than in other colonies. As a result, Hutchinson could never find a majority who were willing to back him up. Writing to the American secretary, Dartmouth, with regard to the use of military force, Hutchinson explained, “I have not one magistrate in the province who would venture upon such a measure.” As to calling up the Company of Cadets, who served as a personal guard for the governor, their lieutenant colonel (appointed by Hutchinson in 1772) was John Hancock, and he had little inclination to use force against the protesters.

Hutchinson, of course, had already asked for leave, a request that had been granted, and someone was needed to take his place. In the spring of 1774, King George realized that he had the perfect man for that embattled office. On April 9 Dartmouth wrote to General Thomas Gage, still on leave in England, saying:

The King having thought fit that you should return immediately to your command in North America and that you should proceed directly to Boston on board His Majesty’s ship Lively, now lying at Plymouth ready to sail with the first fair wind, I send you herewith … a commission … appointing you Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief of His Majesty’s province of Massachusetts Bay.

On a number of levels Gage was a brilliant choice. Having spent seventeen years in America in various positions of authority, and being married to an American, he knew the country as well as any nonnative might, and certainly understood the political situation better than anyone in the ministry or Parliament. Gage was already known and respected by most Americans. As someone with a generally positive attitude toward the colonies, he could at least understand the colonial point of view, while there was no question of his being completely devoted to enforcing the will of king and Parliament.

To that end, Gage believed as the king did that it was time to take uncompromising measures with the rebellious Americans. Nevertheless, Gage was not an unreasonable or overly aggressive sort, not the kind who might claim that Bostonians “ought to be knocked about their ears and destroyed.” He knew far more about war than any civilian governor, and he was not about to blunder thoughtlessly into bloodshed.

Naming Gage as governor in chief also went far toward solving the issue of calling up the military, since Gage was also still commander in chief of the army in North America. Should Gage meet with opposition in enacting the new parliamentary acts, Dartmouth wrote, “your authority as the first magistrate combined with your command over the King’s troops will it is hoped enable you to meet every opposition and fully to preserve the public peace by employing those troops with effect.”

Use of the military, however, was to be a last resort. Dartmouth reminded Gage “it will be your duty to use every endeavour to avoid it, to quiet the minds of the people, to remove their prejudices, and by mild and gentle persuasion” induce them to obey the law. Gage had the right temperament to fulfill such a directive, if indeed it were still possible. He would certainly look to the military only when all other options were expended. Given the buildup of men and arms on both sides during the years 1774 and 1775, the terrific violence that broke out under Gage’s watch, and the years of fighting that followed, it’s easy to forget how long and hard both sides sincerely worked to avoid bloodshed—and how eager each was to blame the other when it came.

Dartmouth’s orders to Gage were many pages long and included a copy of the Boston Port Bill, which closed the port of Boston and Gage, as his primary mission, was expected to enforce. Since the ministry could not predict what sort of political climate Gage would find when he arrived in Boston, he was instructed to meet with the military and civilian leaders “at the town or within the Castle (as circumstances shall point out)” and determine what steps should be taken to enforce the will of Parliament and the king.

Boston, “where so much anarchy and confusion have prevailed,” was no longer to be the seat of government; Gage and the General Court were to relocate to Salem. Gage was also instructed to prosecute “in the ordinary courts of justice within the colony” those individuals whom the attorney general and solicitor general had determined might be tried for high treason. The king considered the punishment of those offenders “as a very necessary and essential example to others,” but he also understood that a guilty verdict might not be easy to come by in America. Gage was warned that if “the prejudices of the people should appear to you to be such as would in all probability prevent a conviction,” he was to give up the prosecution. An “ineffectual attempt,” Dartmouth wrote, “would only be a triumph to the faction and disgraceful to the government.”

For all of the unwarranted optimism so often displayed by the ministry, Dartmouth, in this instance at least, seemed to have a healthy understanding of the problems that Gage would face. “The last advices from Boston,” he wrote, “are of a nature to leave but little room to hope that order and obedience are soon likely to take [the] place of anarchy and usurpation.”

In that Dartmouth was certainly right, and Gage certainly knew it. Since the Tea Party, the situation in Boston had been largely a stalemate as everyone waited for the reaction from London. The Patriots took the opportunity to further solidify their position, making plans for the creation of a purely colonial postal system and forming new committees of correspondence in various towns. Hutchinson understood the threat that such activities posed, and he informed the Patriot leaders that their plans were “unconstitutional and unwarrantable upon any principles of the English government.”

On March 6 the brig Fortune arrived in Boston with thirty chests of tea aboard. If there was any thought that Bostonians were feeling remorse for their actions of the previous December, it was answered the next day when sixty men in Indian guise went aboard the brig and dumped her cargo of tea into Boston Harbor. “The owners of the tea are very silent,” Hutchinson reported to Dartmouth, and would probably not press charges even if they knew who perpetrated the crime. The original consignees of the tea destroyed in the first Tea Party were still hiding out in Castle William, and the current owners did not care to join them.

This second Boston Tea Party may have lacked the drama of the first, but it served as proof that colonial attitudes had hardened, just as the Parliament in London was deciding what to do about it. Rumors were crossing the Atlantic with regard to the punishment Parliament would mete out to the Bostonians, and tensions were escalating. Sam Adams and the other radical leaders in Boston had been actively promoting another nonimportation agreement with the merchants of Massachusetts and the other colonies, though distrust among the merchants based on the failures of the last such agreement were making things more difficult. Hutchinson and the General Court had come to such an impasse that on March 9 he prorogued the legislature, that is, dismissed them without actually dissolving the body, though there was considerable business still to be decided.

On May 10 a ship arrived from London carrying the official version of the Boston Port Bill, and the reaction in Massachusetts and the other colonies was as intense as it was unsurprising. Sam Adams wrote to Arthur Lee in London with his usual understatement, “For flagrant injustice and barbarity, one might search in vain among the archives of Constantinople to find a match for it … For us to reason against such an Act, would be idleness. Our business is to find means to evade its malignant design.”

As word spread, the other colonies moved to support Boston, even if the merchants of those colonies were not entirely on board with nonimportation. A town meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, proclaimed, “We are of opinion that an universal stoppage of all trade with Great Britain … until such time as the port of Boston shall be reinstated in its former privileges, &c., will be the best expedient.” A committee in Chestertown, Maryland, voted a series of resolves “thus to baffle the designs of a corrupt and despotic Ministry” (most Americans still felt it was Parliament, not the king, that was behind the repression). From Philadelphia came a broadside reading (with a nod to Ben Franklin, the city’s most famous resident), “An union of the colonies, like an electric rod, will render harmless the storms of British vengeance and tyranny.”

It was right in the middle of all this that His Majesty’s Ship Lively of twenty guns dropped anchor in Boston. Her primary passenger, General Thomas Gage, was no doubt relieved to disembark from the cramped sloop-of-war with her tiny cabin and 130-man crew. The day was Friday, the 13th of May, and if Gage did not think that date an unlucky one at the time, he soon would.

“I CANNOT GET A WORSE COUNCIL”

General, now Governor, Gage anticipated trouble in Boston. He had urged his wife to stay behind in England, but she refused. Instead, she sailed three weeks after her husband, going first to New York, where she remained with old friends until September before joining her husband.

The general was probably not encouraged to find that former governor Hutchinson, the chief justice, the customs commissioners, and the consignees of the East India Company’s tea were all either hiding out at Castle William or off in the countryside, “not daring to reside in Boston.” On the same day that Lively came to anchor in the harbor, a town meeting was taking place in Faneuil Hall “to determine upon proper measures to be taken by the town,” in reaction to the Boston Port Bill. Sam Adams was elected moderator, and the bill itself was read and its implications explained to the people, with, one would imagine, a heavy anti-Parliament slant.

After some debate it was voted, as the opinion of the town, that if the other colonies were to stop all imports and exports to Great Britain until the port bill was repealed, “the same will prove the salvation of North America and her liberties.” If, however, the other colonies continued to trade with England, “there is high reason to fear that fraud, power, and the most odious oppression, will rise triumphant over right, justice, social happyness and freedom.” The choices seemed pretty clear-cut.

A committee consisting of Sam and John Adams, Joseph Warren, John Rowe, Josiah Quincy, William Molineux, and others was elected to compile the various suggestions offered at the town meeting and report back. Another committee was selected to go to Marblehead and Salem with word of what the Boston town meeting had decided.

From Castle William, Gage sent word ashore of his arrival. He remained at the garrison until Tuesday, May 17, when arrangements could be made for his formal reception. He may have feared that his arrival would be seen as an opportunity for further protest. When he stepped off the boat and onto Long Wharf, however, he was met with all the pomp appropriate for an official of his stature. A number of the members of the General Court were there to greet him, along with Hancock’s Company of Cadets, under arms, and “many of the principal gentlemen of the town.”

Long Wharf ran into King Street, where the Troop of Horse, the Company of Artillery, the Company of Grenadiers, and several militia companies, all under arms, were arrayed along Gage’s route and saluted him as he passed. The Town House, in which the Council Chamber was located, stood at the end of King Street. There Gage’s commission was read by the secretary, and “after the usual ceremonies” he was sworn in as governor and vice admiral of the province. The high sheriff then read Gage’s proclamation that all officers and officials would remain in their places until further orders. This was “answered with three huzzas, firing of cannon from the battery and artillery company, and three vollies of small arms.”

Gage reviewed the militia and received the compliments of the gentlemen present; then the entire party retired to Faneuil Hall, “where an elegant entertainment was provided at the expense of the Province.” Only those who were professed friends of the government were invited, with the result that, according to one attendee, “there were but very few Gentlemen of the Town asked to Dine there.”

The welcome that Gage received in Boston was dignified and restrained. The general was a known and respected figure in America, and certainly anyone coming to replace the despised Hutchinson would have been looked on with favor, at least initially. The Boston Port Bill had only just arrived, the rest of the Intolerable Acts were not yet known in Boston, and no one knew what parliamentary orders Gage carried with him. Merchant John Rowe, who was part of the Patriot movement but not at all the radical that Sam Adams or Joseph Warren was, wrote in his diary, “The Lively, Man of Warr … has Brought out Genl Gage, our New Governour. God Grant his Instructions be not severe and I think him to be a Very Good Man.”

Sam Adams and others recognized the potential threat inherent in having the office of military commander and civilian leader invested in one man. Adams wrote to Arthur Lee, “We expect studied insult in the appointment of the person who is Commander-in-chief of the troops in America to be our Governour.” With this sense of wariness on both sides, Gage launched into the business of governing the rebellious colony. Once he did that, once the welcomes were over and the business begun, the goodwill broke down with astonishing speed and was replaced by bitter animosity. The only surprise, in retrospect, was that it still took eleven months before people started shooting at one another.

Soon after Gage’s arrival, Boston Harbor was shut down, per the Boston Port Bill, while a draft of the act altering the charter of Massachusetts, which was still being debated in Parliament, found its way into print in the colonies. “I am afraid of the Consequences that this Act will Produce,” wrote merchant Rowe, again taking a moderate and considered position. “I wish for Harmony & Peace between Great Britain Our Mother Country & the Colonies—but the Time is far off. The People have done amiss and no sober man can vindicate their Conduct but the Revenge of the Ministry is too severe.”

On May 25 the General Court met and elected a new Council. Gage, who now had the authority to appoint all the councilors, immediately overturned the election of twelve of them who were considered particular enemies of the crown. On June 7 the General Court met again at Salem, where the Port Bill specified they were to meet, and things continued to unravel. Several bills were passed that made the colony, not the crown, responsible for the salaries of the governor and the agents for Massachusetts in London, thus giving the colonial legislature greater influence over them. This was long a point of contention, and Gage refused to sign the bills into law.

Around that same time, the many committees of correspondence, which had been created throughout the colonies as a response to the crisis of the past years, now began to show their worth. Letters moved up and down the coast as various colonial governments, reacting to the latest parliamentary outrage in Boston, called for a congress of representatives from all the colonies. The consensus was that the people of Massachusetts should name the time and place for such a meeting.

On June 17 a town meeting was held at Faneuil Hall, not to discuss the planned Continental Congress, which was something of an open secret, but to discuss the current crisis and the manner in which the city of Boston would meet it. Letters from the various committees of correspondence were presented to the people, and votes taken on how to respond to them. It was exactly the sort of local, popular government that Parliament expected Gage to put a stop to.

On the same day, June 17, a committee of the House of Representatives, which had been considering the question of the Continental Congress, was ready to report to the House as a whole. The committee had been meeting for days, and its deliberations were strictly secret. To throw Gage off, the members spread the rumor that their discussions “were upon moderate and conciliating measures.” Now, as the House met to consider the question, committee member Sam Adams ordered the door to the meeting hall locked, and he personally pocketed the key. Despite the precautions, one of the members, pleading illness, was allowed to leave, and he immediately reported the goings-on to Gage.

On hearing that the House was voting on delegates to the Continental Congress, Gage dispatched the secretary of the province, a man with the unfortunate name of Thomas Flucker (who also happened to be the father-in-law of future Revolutionary War general Henry Knox), with a proclamation dissolving the General Court. Adams, however, would not unlock the door, so Flucker stood on the stairs outside the hall and read the proclamation to the people assembled there while on the other side of the door the General Court carried on with the vote.

It was decided that the first meeting of the first Continental Congress would take place in Philadelphia on September 1. Five delegates from Massachusetts were chosen. Among them were Sam Adams and his cousin John Adams, who, in agreeing to the post, was taking his first real step into politics. The House then voted a tax to be paid by the local communities to raise £500 for the support of the delegates. That done, Adams unlocked the doors, and the Court allowed itself to be dissolved.

A week later Thomas Gage wrote to the Earl of Dartmouth with a report on the proceedings:

If the dissolution will be productive of good or not remains to be known, but from what I could learn or see I cannot get a worse Council or a worse Assembly who with exceptions … appeared little more than echoes of the contrivers of all the mischief in the town of Boston. Those demagogues I am informed are now spiriting up the people throughout the province to resistance.

It had been just six weeks since his celebratory arrival at Faneuil Hall.

MEN AND ARMS

As the summer wore on, the troops began to arrive. The transport carrying the 4th Regiment, the King’s Own, anchored in Boston on June 10, just around the time Gage was starting to lock horns with the General Court, and the men came ashore on the 14th. They made camp on Boston Common, “notwithstanding the violent threat denounced against us.”

The next day the 43rd joined them on the Common, and soon after that the 5th and the 38th arrived from Ireland. Before long the sprawling green fields were covered with lines of sharp white tents, officers’ marquees, bright regimental colors snapping in the breeze, men in scarlet uniforms marching in precise order, stacked muskets, and lines of field guns. Captain Evelyn of the King’s Own noted that the troops “with a small park of artillery, of six pieces of cannon and two cohorns, make a formidable appearance.” The commons, symbol of communal welfare, that part of the city reserved for the people, had became a garrison, overrun by the hated redcoats.

The people of Boston did not fail to notice the formidable appearance of the soldiers, and they resented it deeply. A classic and inevitable conflict was once again setting up in Boston. Gage needed troops to maintain order. The presence of the troops inflamed the Americans, who made their anger known at every opportunity. This in turn created a loathing for the Americans on the part of the soldiers. Evelyn explained to his father in a letter written soon after his arrival that the friends of the king “are distinguished here by the name of Tories, as the Liberty Boys, the tarring-and-feathering gentlemen, are by the title of Whigs.”

Evelyn did not think the troops were in any danger of being attacked, despite the undisguised animosity toward them. The Bostonians, he felt, “upon paper … are the bravest fellows in the world, yet in reality I believe there does not exist so great a set of rascals and poltroons.”

On July 1, John Rowe noted in his diary, “The Preston Man of Warr with Admirall Graves came into this harbour this day, as did several Transport Ships with the Remainder of the 5th and 38th Regiments on board. Lord Percy is with them.” With the seat of government moved to Salem, Gage as governor was obliged to live there, and not Boston, so Percy found himself with “the honour of commanding the Troops encamped” on the commons.

Like Evelyn, Percy quickly developed a dislike for the locals. “The people here are a set of sly, artful, hypocritical rascalls, cruel, & cowards,” he wrote to a relative back in England. “I must own I cannot but despise them compleately.” Soon journals were reporting confrontations between soldiers and the people of Boston.

As the summer grew hotter (“We have days here full as hot as Spain,” Percy wrote), so, too, did the political and military machinations. With the closing of the Port of Boston, which prevented any sort of supplies from reaching the city by water, the other colonies began to send relief: rice from the South landed at Marblehead, as stipulated by the Port Bill, and transported overland; sheep and cattle driven to Boston from nearby communities or shipped like the rice and landed elsewhere. A Boston paper noted, “Yesterday arrived at Marblehead, Captain Perkins, from Baltimore, with three thousand barrels of Indian corn, twenty barrels of rye, and twenty-one barrels of bread, sent by the inhabitants of that place for the benefit of the poor of Boston, together with one thousand bushels of corn from Annapolis, sent in the same vessel and for the same benevolent purpose.”

One of those who brought supplies was Israel Putnam, a fifty-six-year-old former soldier who arrived in Boston with 130 sheep from his hometown of Brooklyn, Connecticut. Putnam was a Massachusetts native by birth, descended from a family that had settled in Salem in 1640. In his twenties, Israel had moved with his young bride to Connecticut, where he farmed his land and soon became one of the leading men in his community.

At the outbreak of the French and Indian War, Putnam joined a Connecticut regiment and received a commission as second lieutenant. Soon after, he joined the ranger unit commanded by Robert Rogers, with whom he remained throughout the war. Roger’s Rangers were famous for some of the hardest fighting in the most brutal conditions. They operated in the area of Lake George and Lake Champlain, specializing in woodland-style tactics and small-unit guerrilla actions against the enemy.

By 1758 Putnam had advanced to the rank of major. He was at the side of General George Howe in the skirmish during which Howe was killed. At one point Putnam was captured by Indians, and when his fellow rangers came to his rescue they found him tied to a tree with preparations under way to burn him alive. Four years later Putnam was shipwrecked in Cuba while sailing on an expedition to capture Havana.

With the end of the French and Indian War, Putnam continued his military career, fighting against the Indians in an uprising known as Pontiac’s Rebellion. Finally, in 1764, after a decade of tough military service, he retired into civilian life. He had reached the rank of colonel.

Israel Putnam’s exploits during the French and Indian War made him famous, and a second marriage to a wealthy widow, after the death of his first wife, improved his fortune and his social standing. As the conflict with Great Britain heated up, Putnam stood solidly with the Patriot cause, serving as chairman of his local committee of correspondence. When he arrived in Boston at the head of his regiment of sheep, the people were delighted to see him. “The old hero, Putnam, arrived in town on Monday…,” one of the Boston Patriots wrote. “He cannot get away, he is so much caressed, both by the officers and the citizens.” Putnam did eventually return to Connecticut. The next time he marched for Massachusetts, he would not be leading sheep.

While in Boston, Putnam stayed at the home of Joseph Warren. With Sam Adams off to Philadelphia, Warren now assumed an even larger role in the organized resistance to parliamentary authority. Between his medical practice and the increasing burden of his political activities, the young doctor was constantly on the run. In August he wrote to Sam Adams in Philadelphia, assuring him he would soon send all the news and intelligence from Boston. “Haste now prevents it,” he pleaded, “as I am constantly busied in helping forward the political machines in all parts of this province.”

It was in August that the next two acts of Parliament “for regulating the government of Massachusetts Bay” arrived at Gage’s office in Salem. One of the new rules called for the Council to be made up of councilors selected by the king, not elected by the House. Gage had already dissolved the old Massachusetts legislature in frustration. Now he moved quicky to assemble a new one that would be friendly to the Crown. “No time was lost in forming the new Council,” he assured Dartmouth. Unfortunately, being a king’s appointee in Revolutionary Boston was not an entirely safe proposition, and some of the new councilors, Gage reported, “refused to accept the nomination or are wavering.”

Lord Percy, for one, was disgusted. “Such a set of timid creatures I never did see,” he wrote to a friend. “Those of the new Council that live at any distance from town have remained here [Boston] ever since they took the oaths, & are, I am told, afraid to go home again.” Such accusations were easier to make when, like Percy, you were surrounded by British troops day and night.

Another clause in the new act banned the calling of town meetings without the governor’s consent, which he was unlikely to give. Once again Gage found nothing but frustration in trying to enforce this provision. Anticipating this order of Parliament, the participants in a town meeting in July, rather than ending the meeting, had simply adjourned it. Thus when the meeting was assembled in August they were not actually calling a new meeting, just continuing the old one. Gage assembled the selectmen of Boston and read the clause to them. They protested “they had called no meeting, that a former meeting had only adjourned themselves.” Gage pointed out that “by such means they might keep their meetings alive these ten years.”

In other communities the people were careful to obey the ban on town meetings. Instead, they held their meetings in the countryside, at which point they became county meetings, which were still permissible according to their reading of the act.

By one means or another the people of Boston and the surrounding communities continued to meet, and the results of their meetings were increasingly radical. Hoping for more coordinated action, a committee from the town of Worcester requested a meeting with that of Boston to agree on a general plan to resist new parliamentary acts. Ultimately, representatives from the counties of Suffolk (which included Boston), Essex, Middlesex, and Worcester met at Faneuil Hall. Joseph Warren was elected to chair.

The result of the meeting was some of the strongest statements yet with regard to the steps to be taken to resist Gage and the Parliament. It was voted that the seating of all officials named under the new act was unconstitutional. Another resolve called for the thorough defeat of the new measures for regulating the government of Massachusetts and said that courts held under the act ought to be opposed. Most significantly, it called for a Provincial Congress, that is, a new government for the colony of Massachusetts completely divorced from Gage, the General Court, and the Parliament in London.

On August 30 the county of Middlesex held a convention to consider the resolutions of the Faneuil Hall meeting. The results of that meeting, voted on the following day, perfectly delineated the state of mind among most members of the Patriot factions in Massachusetts and most other colonies as well. They began with the resolution, based on the still widely held belief that it was the Parliament, not the king, that was oppressing them, “that as true and loyal subjects of our gracious Sovereign George the Third, King of Great Britain, &c. we, by no means, intend to withdraw our allegiance from him.” For all the upheaval, most Americans were still a long way from contemplating independence.

Questions of Parliament’s right to tax were now small beer compared to the issues raised in the Intolerable Acts, which allowed the king to stack the Council and the courts with his men, stop town meetings, and close down the port of Boston. The resolves made the now familiar arguments that Parliament had no authority to alter the charter of the colonies and, in words that would find their echo in the First Amendment of the Constitution, that “every people have an absolute right of meeting together to consult upon common grievances, and to petition, remonstrate, and use every legal method of their removal.”

As with the Faneuil Hall meeting, perhaps the most significant result of the Middlesex Resolutions was the resolve that read, “It is the opinion of this body of Delegates, that a Provincial Congress is absolutely necessary in our present unhappy situation.” This was the first time a county as a whole had called for the establishment of a colonial legislature separate from the existing government. Others would follow. Soon Massachusetts would essentially have two governments: that approved by Parliament and headed by General Gage, and that approved—and adhered to—by the people.

The Middlesex Resolutions closed with the following words:

No danger shall affright, no difficulties intimidate us; and if in support of our rights, we are called to encounter even death, we are yet undaunted, sensible that he can never die too soon, who lays down his life in support of the laws and liberties of his country.

The British troops encamped on Boston Common would have scoffed at such a statement, and considered it more of the Americans’ courage on paper. Even so, they also understood, as did the Americans, that the time was not far off when that proposition would be put to the test.