Chapter Nine

OFFICERS AND MEN

Once the decision was made to create a Massachusetts army, no time was wasted in gathering the armed forces. Joseph Warren penned a circular letter to the towns in Massachusetts, entreating them to “hasten and encourage by all possible means the enlistment of men to form the army, and send them forward to headquarters, at Cambridge, with the expedition which the vast importance and instant urgency of the affair demand.”

On the same day another, somewhat less empathetic letter was written to the governors of the neighboring colonies, saying, “We pray your Honours would afford us all the assistance in your power, and shall be glad that our brethren who come to our aid may be supplied with Military Stores and Provisions, as we have none of either more than is absolutely necessary for ourselves.”

The men of the nearby towns and more distant colonies complied, and no doubt would have even without the circular from the Committee of Safety. Men from New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut grabbed up arms and provisions and headed off to war. A correspondent from Connecticut wrote to a friend in New York a few days after the battle with the news, “We are all in motion here, and equipt from the Town, yesterday, one hundred young men, who cheerfully offered their service … Men of the first character and property shoulder their arms and march off for the field of action. We shall, by night, have several thousands from this Colony on their march.”

One of the companies preparing to leave from New Haven, Connecticut, was the Governor’s 2nd Company of Guards under the command of Captain Benedict Arnold. In the case of New Haven, the town leaders opted to not send the local militia to Boston until the reasons for fighting at Lexington and Concord were better known. The young militiamen under Arnold’s command were of a different opinion and opted to go despite what the town fathers said. When the old guard refused to open the town’s magazine to allow the troops to gather their guns and powder, Arnold gave them five minutes to change their mind before he would have his men break the door down. In the face of such determination the city fathers complied, and soon Arnold and the “Footguards” marched off, part of the great influx of troops to Cambridge.

The logistical considerations were all but overwhelming, with little hope of getting things straightened out soon. More men were coming in every day, and already no one was sure of how many were already there or how many would ultimately arrive. A few days after the Battle of Lexington and Concord, John Adams rode from his home in Braintree to the army’s headquarters in Cambridge. “I saw General Ward, General Heath, General Joseph Warren [Adams, like Pickering, refers to Warren by the title he will later hold] and the New England Army,” the future president wrote in his autobiography. “There was great Confusion and much distress: Artillery, Arms, Cloathing were wanting and a sufficient Supply of Provisions not easily obtained. Neither the officers nor Men however wanted Spirits or Resolution.”

From Cambridge Adams traveled along the road to Lexington and the scene of the action, talking to people along the way. This experience convinced him “that the Die was cast, the Rubicon passed, and as Lord Mansfield expressed it in Parliament, if We did not defend ourselves they would kill Us.” John Adams, the short, stocky lawyer from Braintree, who had never until that point been at the forefront of radical activity, would, in the aftermath of the fighting outside Boston, become one of the most vocal and effective advocates for American independence.

In all about 20,000 men turned out for the Lexington Alarm. That said, not all of those were encamped outside Boston. Many who had headed off for the fighting turned back when they heard it was over. Many of the Massachusetts militia who turned out were not prepared to stay in the field, or did not intend to do so. As new troops were arriving from more distant communities or colonies, others were leaving camp and going home, adding to the confusion. Even weeks after the battle James Warren wrote to John Adams, then in Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress, “As to the Army, it is such a shifting, fluctuating state as to not be capable of a perfect regulation. They are continually going and coming.”

There is no way to know how many men were part of the ad hoc army around Boston in those first days of the war, though the number must certainly have been more than 10,000, or well over twice General Gage’s force. By April 22, as the military and political leaders struggled to organize the troops they had, efforts were made to temporarily stem the influx of men. The committee of correspondence in Newburyport, Massachusetts, for example, received a circular letter from the Committee of Safety saying that “they have a sufficient number of men arrived, and therefore would not have any more come from the Northward for the present.” The Committee of Safety would certainly want more men, but not before they had some level of organization in place.

Among those who did arrive in Cambridge was General Israel Putnam, who made his appearance on April 21, sans men or sheep but with plenty of enthusiasm for the fight. It was actually the second time he had headed off for battle in that neighboring colony. The year before, when Gage had ordered his troops to gather up provincial stores of gunpowder and secure them in Castle William, news of the affront quickly spread to the other colonies. By the time it reached Putnam the rumor had grown to include an attack on Boston by the regulars and the British fleet, leaving several Americans dead.

With perhaps more ardor than consideration, Putnam called for Connecticut’s militia to turn out and march for Boston. Thousands grabbed up arms and prepared to head north as Putnam’s call to action moved south to other colonies. Before any troops took to the road, however, additional news arrived indicating that the alarm was false. Putnam wrote to the leaders in Massachusetts, albeit likely exaggerating, “But for counterintelligence we should have had forty thousand men well equipped and ready to march this morning.” Still, the significant number that did turn out was an indication of how ready the country was for war, even a year before the fight at Lexington Green. Word of this mobilization helped convince Gage to begin fortifying Roxbury Neck.

It was the morning of April 20 when the Lexington Alarm reached Putnam’s hometown of Pomfret by way of a letter forwarded from Worcester to a local named Daniel Tyler, who happened to be Putnam’s son-in-law. Putnam and his fourteen-year-old son, also named Daniel, were in the middle of plowing a field when Tyler hurried up with the news. Years later, Daniel Putnam would tell the story of how his father raced off at once, leaving Daniel with instructions to unhitch the horses and join him in Massachusetts as soon as he was able. Then the elder Putnam grabbed a horse from the stable and, still wearing his plowing clothes, rode off to spread the alarm, confident that this time it was the real thing.

The story of Israel Putnam leaving the plow to race off to war is one of the great, if now largely forgotten, legends of the Revolution. It is certainly plausible—Putnam was a farmer, and it was plowing season—but it also smacks enough of Cincinnatus to make one dubious. (Cincinnatus, the Roman leader who was called away from his plow at a time of crisis to take the office of dictator, and who resigned his absolute rule when the crisis had passed, was viewed by many as the ideal of military and civic honor. This was particularly true in the republican-minded United States following the Revolution.) Plow or no, Putnam did make the rounds of the nearby towns, raising the alarm and consulting with the local militia officers. By the time he returned home he found hundreds of men under arms and ready to follow him to Massachusetts.

Putnam was not ready to lead them, however, probably because he did not want to suffer the delay that would invariably come from having to move so many men a hundred miles to another colony. Instead, he assured them that other officers were on their way to bring them to camp at Cambridge. Then Israel Putnam, still wearing his plowing clothes, rode off for the field of battle.

By the following day he had arrived at Cambridge and thrown himself into the fight, or at least the preparations. He met with the Committee of Safety and wrote that same day to a militia colonel in Connecticut urging him to send 6,000 men to Cambridge “as speedily as possible.” Ward’s orderly book records for April 21, “This day, General Putnam, of Connecticut, attended the Council of War.” In honor of the famous frontier fighter, the password, or “parole,” of the day was “Putnam.”

Another man who joined the fight around this time and who would play a pivotal role in the Battle of Bunker Hill was Colonel John Stark of New Hampshire, a seasoned combat veteran, as prickly as he was tough, of middling height but muscular and strong from a life of exertion. Stark had already gained a reputation as a hunter and woodsman before the outbreak of the French and Indian War. When the fighting started he was recruited into Rogers’s Rangers, where he and Putnam served together.

John Stark had spent much of his youth hunting and trapping. During one of those trips he and a companion had been taken by Indians and held captive for some time, during which they endured beatings and other mistreatment. Throughout the ordeal Stark stood up to his captives, winning their respect and even the nickname “Young Chief.” In the months he spent with the natives, first as a captive and then more as an adopted son, Stark learned a great deal about their techniques of hunting and warfare, lessons that would serve him well in the wilderness fighting to come.

Stark fought with Rogers’s tough, hard-driving ranger corps in the wilderness around Lake George and Lake Champlain. There he came in contact with many of the men with whom he would fight in the American Revolution, such as Putnam and Artemas Ward, and those he would fight against, such as Thomas Gage. Like Putnam, Stark was a friend of George Augustus Howe, the two men fighting side by side on several occasions. Stark mourned the death of Howe for the rest of his life, though he admitted that the Americans in the Revolution were better off not having him as an enemy.

Stark took part in both Abercrombie’s failed attack on Fort Ticonderoga in 1758 and Amherst’s successful assault the following year. He spent the entire French and Indian War in the northern theater and took part in some of the war’s toughest combat. When the peace was signed, Stark retired to his home in Dunbarton, New Hampshire. There he and his wife, Molly, and their eleven children ran their extensive farm and several mill operations.

Word of the fighting at Lexington and Concord reached John Stark while he was working at his sawmill. He immediately returned home, changed his clothes (unlike the impetuous Putnam), mounted up, and rode off south toward Massachusetts. Along the way he rallied his neighbors, and soon hundreds were following the famous Colonel Stark to the theater of action.

By April 22 Stark and his men had been incorporated into the army around Boston. On that day he was sent with 300 troops to the town of Chelsea, on the Mystic River about five miles northeast of Boston, “to defend the inhabitants of said town.”

Artemas Ward remained in overall command with his headquarters in Cambridge and around 5,000 men in his camp. He sent General John Thomas to secure Roxbury with another 5,000 and stationed still more troops at posts circling Boston where they could keep their eyes on the city. The general expectation was that Gage would strike soon, while the American troops were weak and disorganized. Amos Farnsworth noted in his journal of April 22, “This night was Alarmed by the Regulars firing at our gard on the neck turned out And marched towards them but nothing more Ensued.” The next few weeks would bring one alarm after another, with the newly minted soldiers grabbing their muskets and scrambling to their posts. Still the redcoats did not come.

A MOST DISTRESSED CONDITION

The Committee of Safety met on the morning of the fighting at Lexington and Concord and again the following day, April 20. There was no executive authority that the people of Massachusetts recognized, at least not those people numbered among the rebels, so the Committee of Safety took it upon itself to fill that role.

Dr. Joseph Warren was increasingly central to the work of the committee. Indeed, with Hancock and Sam and John Adams preparing to leave for the meeting of the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, the work of heading up the provincial government fell to Warren. For the next two months, from the fighting at Lexington and Concord to the Battle of Bunker Hill, two of the most epoch-making months in American history, Joseph Warren was the very epicenter of the military and political storm.

No one at that point was thinking in terms of grand strategy. It was not the plan of the Committee of Safety to lay siege to Boston. The strategy, such that it was, devised by the committee and the military leaders did not extend beyond organizing the army and preparing for a possible attack by the redcoats. Indeed, through the course of the yearlong siege of Boston there was little discussion of the fact that they were trying to lay siege to the city. Rather, the situation devolved into a stalemate in which there were few other military options.

Joseph Warren seemed to sense this early on. Even while others were still concerned about another British attack, Warren wrote to Arthur Lee, “I cannot precisely tell you what will become of General Gage; I imagine he will at least be very closely shut up in Boston.” In fact, Gage beat the new American army to the punch and stopped all free communication with the countryside. No one passed over Roxbury Neck without his permission.

One of the first concerns of the men on the Committee of Safety was to get their friends out of Boston, before they were forced to suffer the deprivations that the Loyalists and the king’s troops would soon feel.

Warren wrote to Gage on April 20, a very civil letter. Proud of the role he had played thus far in the Revolution, Warren reminded Gage that he had never tried to hide his activity. “Your Excellency knows very well,” he wrote, “the part I have taken in publick affairs; I ever scorned disguise.” He went on to ask “how many days you desire as may be allowed for such as desire to remove from Boston, with their effects, and what time you will allow the people in Boston for their removal.” Gage was permitting only thirty wagons at a time to come into the city, and Warren suggested that this rule would slow things unnecessarily.

Gage did not reply to Warren’s letter, as he did not consider Warren to be a legitimate government official. Gage was, however, willing to negotiate with the selectmen of Boston, who in turn informed Warren of their agreements and looked to the Committee of Safety for approval.

The selectmen met with Gage on April 21 to discuss the developing crisis in the town. Just as the Americans were expecting Gage at any minute to launch an attack against their lines, so Gage was at least aware of the possibility that the Americans might attack Boston, even if he was not overly frightened by the prospect. Gage’s primary concern was that the Patriots still in the city would rise up and join in on such an attack. He knew most of them had guns secreted in their homes, and such an armed mob within his lines could be devastating. If that happened, Gage warned the selectmen, it might “issue in very unhappy consequences to the town,” by which he meant Boston might be put to the torch, or worse.

Gage assured the selectmen that his men “should do no damage, nor commit any act of violence in the Town,” if the selectmen in turn would make sure the people of Boston stayed out of any fight that might take place.

The next day the selectmen called a meeting of “the Freeholders and other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston,” to inform them of the discussion they had had with Gage and to vote on an agreement with the governor. “After much debate and some Amendments,” wrote John Rowe, “they Passed two Votes which were presented to the general.”

In the first vote, the people of Boston agreed to keep the peace if Gage and his troops would do the same. In the second, the people reminded Gage that he had assured them, at the time he began fortifying Roxbury Neck, that “he had no intention of stopping up the avenue to the Town.” Now they intended to ask the governor “to give orders for opening the communication, not only for bringing Provisions into the Town, but also that the inhabitants, such of them as incline, may retire from the Town with their effects without molestation.”

The selectmen called on the governor the following day and read him the resolves voted on at the town meeting. A long conference ensued. Gage was happy to let the rebellious population leave. Boston was a fairly populous city with only one road in and out, and it depended on food and other supplies coming in to market every day. Just two days after the Battle of Lexington and Concord, John Rowe was writing in his diary, “All Business at an end & all Communication Stop’d between the Town & Country. No Fresh Provisions of any kind brought to this market, so that Boston is in a most Distressed Condition.” It was only going to get worse, much worse, and Gage was eager to have fewer mouths to feed.

On the other hand, he did not want to augment the army at his gates by allowing all these armed rebels to leave Boston. Finally he agreed that if the people who wished to leave would deposit their firearms at Faneuil Hall, under the care of the selectmen and labeled with their names so that they might later retrieve them, then Gage would give those people permission to go. This was approved at yet another town meeting, and Gage even agreed to let them leave by land or water, saying “he would desire the Admiral to lend boats to facilitate the removal of the effects of the inhabitants.”

Out of principle Gage would not communicate with Warren, but he also understood that Warren was the one who held the real authority beyond the town limits of Boston. He therefore asked the selectmen to write to Warren to request that “those persons in the country who may incline to move into Boston with their effects may have liberty to do so without molestation.” The general feared that Loyalists beyond the protection of the army in Boston would be mistreated and would want to seek protection in the city. To this Warren and the Committee of Safety agreed, though it does not appear that many Tories took advantage of this arrangement That is hardly a surprise, given that the suffering in the city was already well known.

On April 27 the selectmen returned to Gage once more with word that all of the arms belonging to those wishing to leave, more than two thousand in all, were now stored in Faneuil Hall. After some more back-and-forth, Gage agreed that on the following day he would receive applications for passes to leave Boston “as soon as persons wanting them shall be ready to depart.”

In the end it would not be so easy. Gage did not issue passes as freely as he suggested he would. John Rowe wrote, “April 28. This day I apply’d to get a Pass to go out with my Effects but could not prevail.” The Loyalists who chose to remain in town howled in protest at Gage’s allowing the rebellious faction to leave. As Gage explained to Dartmouth, the Loyalists felt that “none but the ill inclined will go out, and when they are Safe with their Effects, the Town will be set on Fire.” In the Tories’ way of thinking, the Patriots were serving as a human shield.

Another sticking point was “the Meaning of the Word Effects.” When Gage said “effects” he meant personal effects only. This came as an ugly surprise to the many merchants in Boston who assumed it also meant their inventory of merchandise, in which they had considerable capital invested.

Merchant John Andrews, who planned to sail with his wife for Nova Scotia, felt that if “I can escape with the skin of my teeth, shall be glad, as I don’t expect to be able to take more than a change of apparell with me.” In truth, Andrews also hoped to escape with all the goods stored in his warehouse, as well. He and three friends had chartered a ship to carry them and their effects, including merchandise, to Halifax. On May 6 he wrote to a friend in Philadelphia, “You’ll observe by this that I’m yet in Boston, and here like to remain.”

Andrews’s problem was not an inability to secure papers to leave but “the absolute refusal of the Governor to suffer any merchandise to be carried out of the town.” Rather than endure the economic devastation that would come with his merchandise being commandeered or looted, Andrews chose to send his wife on ahead while he remained behind, minding the store and suffering the deprivations of living in Boston under siege.

As the complaints of the Loyalists grew louder, Gage felt pressured to halt the exodus. This he could not do overtly without breaking his word, so instead found means to slow it. Warren wrote to the governor of Connecticut, “The general is perpetually making new conditions, and forming the most unreasonable pretenses for retarding their removal from that garrison.”

On May 10 the Provincial Congress wrote to Gage reminding him of his agreement and pointing out that they had received considerable intelligence that the people had met with “numerous delays and embarrassments,” in trying to leave the town. “A delay of justice is a denial of it,” they pointed out, “and extremely oppressive to the people now held in duress.”

At the same time, and unknown to anyone, Joseph Warren sent a personal letter to Gage, appealing to the governor’s reason and humanity. “As no living Person knows, or ever will know from me of my writing this,” Warren wrote in the postscript, “I hope you will excuse a Freedom which I very well know would be improper in a Letter which was to be exposed to general View.”

Warren addressed the issue of Gage’s unwillingness to negotiate with the Provincial Congress. He asked Gage if he would be willing to sacrifice the interests of England and the peace in the colonies just for form’s sake. He warned that the people of Massachusetts would not suffer Gage to break his agreement, and asked that Gage adhere to it “without hearkening to the mad Advice of Men I know have deceived you.”

Despite the overblown condemnations of Gage he often churned out for public consumption, Warren seems to have harbored a real respect for Gage’s decency and humanity. This comes through in the letter written to Gage directly after Lexington and Concord, on the same topic, and in this one. As in that earlier letter, Warren insinuated that Gage was being fed bad advice by men who “care not if they ruin you” and hoped that the governor’s natural inclinations would lead him to a humane course of action.

Warren genuinely believed that most of what he saw as Gage’s mistakes were the result of nefarious council he was receiving. Around the same time he was writing to Gage, Warren wrote a letter to Arthur Lee in London, touching in part on Gage’s efforts to show that the Americans fired the first shot on Lexington Green. “My private opinion…,” Warren wrote, with no reason to be anything but candid, “is that he is really deceived in the matter, and is led (by his officers and some of the most abandoned villains on earth, who are natives of this Country, and who are now shut up with him in Boston) to believe that our people actually began the firing.”

Gage was certainly a humane man, as Warren imagined, but he also had much more than just the comfort of the rebellious population of Boston to consider. Neither the official letter nor Warren’s backdoor appeal did any good. Emigration slowed and finally stopped. Joseph Warren wrote to Adams, using a properly surgical metaphor, “General Gage, I fear, has trepanned the inhabitants of Boston.”

CAPTAIN DERBY’S MISSION

If there was one thing that Joseph Warren had learned during his association with Sam Adams and the Boston radicals, it was the power of propaganda and the importance of being first to market with one’s message. Days after the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the Provincial Congress assembled a committee to collect depositions concerning the fighting, “to be sent to England from the first ship from Salem.” These depositions would support the suggestion that the regular troops had been the aggressors and had fired first.

For three days eyewitnesses to the fighting were sought out and their stories recorded. Warren penned a letter to “the Inhabitants of Great Britain,” whom he called “Friends and Fellow-Subjects,” containing a brief though largely accurate account of what had taken place on April 19, with a few notable additions and omissions. Despite the fact that no one knew, or knows now, who actually fired the first shot, Warren stated unambiguously that “the Regulars rushed on with great violence, and first began hostilities by firing on said Lexington Company.” Warren recounted the atrocities committed by the troops on their way back to Boston but failed to mention the great violence done to them by the Massachusetts militia.

Warren’s letter to the people of Great Britain, the depositions, and newspaper accounts of the action were packaged up and sent to Benjamin Franklin, who still served as Massachusetts’s agent in London. Warren asked that Franklin print the enclosed papers and disperse them through every town in England. He warned Franklin that Gage had already sent off a “fallacious account of the tragedy,” and Warren certainly hoped that the material from the Provincial Congress would be disseminated first.

The letters were carried to England by Captain John Derby of Salem in his fast schooner Quero. Derby was instructed to sail for Ireland and from there cross over to England to avoid any cruisers that might be on the lookout for him in the English Channel. Derby ignored that advice and made right for Southampton on the south coast of England, which he reached unmolested. On May 29 Derby personally arrived in London with the packet from the Provincial Congress. Despite leaving four days after Gage’s ship, his speedy Quero arrived twelve days ahead of it, thus assuring that the American version of events was the first to be disseminated.

The news of Lexington and Concord rocked London, giving the already vocal opponents of Lord North’s administration more reason for discontent and making their call for a change of administration louder. Lord George Germain, who would soon replace Dartmouth as the American secretary, wrote to a friend, “It is Strange to see the many joyful faces upon this Event, thinking, I conclude, that Rebellion will be the means of Changing the Ministry.” Former governor Thomas Hutchinson, still rattling around London, wrote, “The Opposition here rejoice that the Americans fight, after it had been generally said they would not.”

The king and his ministers were, of course, the most dismayed of all, and incredulous that the embattled farmers might have actually put the regular army on the run, but they could also detect the taint of propaganda in Warren’s address, and so held their opinions until they could read the official dispatches from Gage. “I am impatient for the true and full account,” Germain wrote. Dartmouth did not wait until Gage’s reports to arrive before writing a letter to Gage saying, “It is very much to be lamented that We have not some Account from you of this Transaction.” It was a pointless letter, particularly as Derby told Dartmouth that Gage sent his report four days before he, Derby, left. In fact, though, people were angry, and they were blaming Gage for the fact that Derby’s documents arrived first.

Gage’s report arrived on June 10. Most friends of the ministry had been waiting for the general’s accounts, assuring themselves that they would prove the American versions were bogus. Thomas Hutchinson, who had firsthand knowledge of the armed citizens of Massachusetts, was not so certain. “I assured many gentlemen who would give no credit to Darby’s account,” he wrote in his diary, “that it would prove near the truth.”

Hutchinson was right. When Gage’s account was read, those hoping to disprove Warren’s account “received but little comfort, from the accounts themselves being much the same with what Darby brought.” In fact, the king’s friends had been so sure that Gage’s account would be more favorable, that they were, according to Hutchinson, “more struck than if they had not been so sanguine before. As one general exclaimed, ‘How often have I heard you American Colonels boast that with four battalions you would march through America; and now you think Gage with 3000 men and 40 pieces of cannon, mayn’t venture out of Boston!’”

Confirmation of the defeat of the British army shook the credibility of the administration and gave even more fuel to the opposition. One paper wrote, “The sword of civil war is drawn, and if there is truth in heaven, the King’s Troops unsheathed it. Will the English Nation much longer suffer their fellow subjects to be slaughtered?” A group called the Constitution Society advertised for a collection of £100 “for the widows, orphans, &a, of the brave Americans inhumanly murdered by the K[ing]’s troops at Lexington, April 19th 1775, because they preferred death to slavery.”

Dartmouth was understandably displeased and seems to have been the most annoyed that Derby’s account was the first to arrive in England. This is perhaps understandable given that America was his responsibility and he had the most to lose in the propaganda wars regarding those colonies. In his next letter to Gage he began by pointing out, again, that the documents from the Provincial Congress had arrived ahead of the official reports. He mentioned that the initiative shown by the rebels had “its effect in leaving for some days a false impression upon the people’s minds,” though, of course, not as false as Dartmouth had hoped. He expressed his wish that in the future Gage would send such important correspondence “in one of the light vessels of the fleet.”

The disaster at Concord and Lexington had happened largely because Dartmouth had urged Gage to be aggressive and make “a test of the people’s resolution to resist.” Now that the test had been made to the detriment of the ministry, Dartmouth stepped away from it in a most shameful manner. “I am to presume that the measure of sending out a detachment of your troops to destroy the magazine at Concord,” he wrote, “was taken upon the fullest consideration of the advantage on one hand and hazard on the other of such an enterprise and all the probable consequences that were to result from it.” The question fairly reeked of disapproval, and much of the rest of the letter continued in the same tone.

Gage probably guessed that he would take the fall if the situation in Massachusetts did not improve. He might have suspected that his position as governor and commander in chief would not survive Concord and Lexington. In late June, though, as Dartmouth’s letter of tacit disapproval was sailing east to west, another letter from Gage, describing a second disaster, was sailing west to east. This letter described the bloodbath that was the Battle of Bunker Hill, and Gage must have known then that his tenure was at an end.

As Hutchinson wrote in his diary after hearing Gage’s description of Concord and Lexington, “The prospect is dark and discouraging.”