Chapter 7

Independence or Reconciliation?

Even as Bostonians sat on the hot seat, no one but the most ardent of rebels was yet talking openly about inevitable independence from Great Britain. Loyalist Daniel Leonard, writing as Massachusettensis, found such a thought deplorable. “It is our highest interest to continue a part of the British empire,” Massachusettensis lectured, “and equally our duty to remain subject to the authority of parliament.”

John Adams quoted this line in his rejoinder—addressing Massachusettensis as “our rhetorical magician”—and was quick to mention the prospect of the roles being reversed. “We are a part of the British dominions… and it is our interest and duty to continue so,” Novanglus acknowledged, but the time might not be far off “when the colonies may have the balance of numbers and wealth in [their] favour.” If that happened and the colonies should then in turn attempt to rule Great Britain “by an American parliament, without an adequate representation in it,” Novanglus predicted Great Britain would “infallibly resist us by her arms.”¹

But it was American arms that were on the minds of some two hundred delegates to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress when it convened in Concord on March 22 for another session. Two days later, under the hand of John Hancock, its newly elected president, the congress voted to continue “most vigorously” the defensive measures recommended by the prior session because “any Relaxation would be attended with the utmost Danger to the Liberties of this Colony and all of America.”²

Similar preparations were being undertaken throughout the colonies. In Richmond, Virginia, the House of Burgesses reconvened in a church after the royal governor dissolved its official proceedings in the capital at Williamsburg. Delegate George Washington wrote to his brother John Augustine Washington, thanking him “for the holly berries and cotton-seed” and expressing pleasure over John’s “laudable pursuit” in training an independent company of militia. George had already promised to review the Richmond militia company, of which he had been offered command, sometime during the coming summer. He told his brother that he could at the same time “review yours, and shall very cheerfully accept the honor of commanding it, if occasion require it to be drawn out, as it is my full intention to devote my life and fortune in the cause we are engaged in.”³ Surely George Washington must have sensed that the coming summer would bring much more action than military reviews.

As the Virginia legislature convened, one of its first acts was to ratify the nonimportation and nonconsumption measures of the First Continental Congress—the “American Continental Congress,” as its proceedings reported with emphasis—and thank Virginia’s loyal delegates to the same. Then it was Patrick Henry’s turn to speak to the military needs of the colony. Henry introduced a resolution on the tactical concerns of military preparation that was closely modeled on a resolution that had been passed by a Fairfax County convention chaired by George Washington. Henry’s strategy was clear. If the Virginia assembly, illegally convened though it was in the eyes of the king, chose to act on a plan of military preparedness, it would be following the same path as the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and establishing a de facto provincial government independent of Great Britain.

Debate on the resolution was heated and certainly not one-sided. Finally, Henry rose to defend his motion with words that held the attention of all assembled. To those who claimed that the resolution went too far, Henry asserted that events had already taken them that far down that road and more. “Gentlemen may cry peace, peace,” Henry proclaimed, “but there is no peace,” and any day might bring word of “the clash of resounding arms” from Boston. War was inevitable, Henry maintained. “Let it come,” he intoned, “let it come.” Then he dramatically flung his arms apart and pronounced the words for which he would best be remembered. “I know not what course others may take,” he told the assembly, “but as for me—give me liberty or give me death.”

Dead silence followed for a moment or two, as the gravity of Henry’s words took hold. Then, after another round of spirited debate, the moderates were voted down by five votes, and Patrick Henry was named chairman of a committee authorized to produce a colony-wide militia plan. Among those on his committee were George Washington, Richard Henry Lee, and Thomas Jefferson.⁴

THE DAY BEFORE PATRICK HENRY’S speech, Edmund Burke, one of the most distinguished orators, authors, and political theorists in England, rose to speak in the House of Commons. Ingrained though he was in the British system, Burke was a native of Ireland, and that island’s experience with British rule may well have colored his thinking on the crisis in America. Burke was decidedly opposed to Lord North’s unrelenting policies of coercion rather than conciliation toward the American colonies.

This was hardly Burke’s first time speaking out against such policies. Almost a year before, in the heat of the debate over the restrictions placed on Massachusetts by the Intolerable Acts, Burke argued against the effectiveness of such punitive measures, particularly that of bringing accused insurgents to trial in England. “If you govern America at all, Sir,” Burke told the House of Commons, “it must be by an army… they never will consent without force being used.”⁵

On that occasion, Lord North rose in rebuttal to say that while he did not profess to know the proper time “to lay a fresh tax on America,” he did know “this is not the proper time to repeal one.” But then North underscored the secondary status that many in his government accorded the Americans. “I will answer,” North went on with the haughty tone of an overly strict and superior parent, “that when they are quiet, and have a respect for their mother country, the mother country will be good-natured to them.”⁶

Whatever his strengths in other matters, Lord North had two personal drawbacks when it came to finding a peaceful resolution of the looming crisis in America. First, North was intensely, perhaps blindly, loyal to George III, and second, he was haughtily contemptuous of colonials in America, particularly those who opposed his policies. One should never allow contempt to color an appraisal of one’s enemies, and Lord North made this error repeatedly in his dealings with North America.

While Edmund Burke, former prime minister William Pitt, and others championed the cause of English liberty and sought to apply it evenly across the empire, a solid majority in Parliament supported Lord North’s views. Samuel Adams and others in the colonies had long hoped that the House of Commons would “be purgd at the next Election,” but that election, late in 1774, had only swelled the ranks of North’s Tories. Adams previously thought it “best that the Tories in their house have acted without Disguise,” but their actions did not as yet find disfavor among the majority of the British electorate.⁷ By the time the results of America’s renewed nonimportation and nonconsumption measures were felt on British merchants and manufacturers, North’s majority was safely ensconced for another seven-year term.

But that did not mean that Lord North and his government were without critics in Parliament. On January 20, 1775, William Pitt, the great commoner who as prime minister had won Great Britain a global empire during the Seven Years’ War and who now sat in the House of Lords as the Earl of Chatham, introduced a resolution calling for the immediate removal of all British troops from Boston. It was a gutsy move, but Pitt followed it with an even gutsier speech.

Listening in the gallery as Pitt’s specially invited guest was Benjamin Franklin. “The spirit which now resists your taxation in America,” Pitt told the assembled lords, “is the same… spirit which established the great fundamental, essential maxim of your liberties, that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent.” That was the crux of the matter: rebels in the colonies wanted equal standing in the British Empire. Then Pitt urged Lord North and his administration to take the step that it was increasingly clear they would never take: “With a dignity becoming your exalted situation, make the first advances to concord, to peace, and happiness.… That you should first concede is obvious, from sound and rational policy.”⁸

The House of Lords overwhelmingly voted down Pitt’s troop-removal resolution by a margin of sixty-eight to eighteen. George III’s response to the man who had won him an empire when he was but a boy king was to hope for the man’s early earthly demise.

Two months later, it was Edmund Burke’s moment to sound the same concerns in the House of Commons. He spoke passionately for hours and argued from numerous angles that the advantages of cooperation between Great Britain and its colonies far outweighed any advantages that might be derived from an intractable insistence on a right to tax them without due representation. “To prove that the Americans ought not to be free,” Burke bluntly noted, “we are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we never seem to gain a paltry advantage over them in debate, without attacking some of those principles, or deriding some of those feelings, for which our ancestors have shed their blood.”⁹

Lord North’s government, Burke charged, had led them down the path of the Intolerable Acts, dispatched General Gage and more and more troops, and sought to punish at every turn, but all these things had only made matters worse. “When I see things in this situation,” said Burke, shaking his head in despair, “after such confident hopes, bold promises, and active exertions, I cannot, for my life, avoid a suspicion, that the plan itself is not correctly right.”¹⁰

There was a growing spirit and greatness in America, Burke maintained, and “English privileges have made it all that it is; English privileges alone will make it all it can be.” Nearing his conclusion, he again urged Great Britain to take the first step, even as he leveled a dig at Lord North. “Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom,” concluded Burke, “and a great empire and little minds go ill together.”¹¹

But Burke’s words in the House of Commons fell on ears as unresponsive as Pitt’s pleas had in the House of Lords two months before. To implement his plan, Burke introduced six resolutions that he hoped would bring about reconciliation with the colonies. The first was supposed to be a plain statement of fact: essentially that the colonies of Great Britain in North America—including, by Burke’s count, Quebec—did not have “the liberty and privilege of electing and sending” representatives to Parliament. But even this was too much for Lord North and his hardliners. Who knew where such acknowledgment might lead? Burke’s speech was highly praised by Whigs of similar mind, but after this first attempt toward reconciliation was voted down 270–78, Burke held no hope for the passage of his remaining resolutions.¹²

On the American side of the Atlantic, not yet knowing of Burke’s speech or resolutions, John Adams, writing as Novanglus, nonetheless offered thoughts that coincided with Burke’s views. Noting that Scotland and Wales sent representatives to the British Parliament even though they were originally conquered countries, Adams asserted “the extreme difficulty, the utter impracticability, of governing a people who have any sense, spirit, or love of liberty, without incorporating them into the state, or allowing them in some other way equal privileges.”¹³

AS UNCERTAINTY OVER THE FUTURE continued to weigh on the leaders on both sides of the issue, it also affected men and women across all points of the social and economic spectrum. From Kensington, near Philadelphia, Eliza Farmar wrote her nephew, Jack Halroyd, who was a clerk for the East India Company in London. “Your wine is all unsold for there was no demand for it when it came,” she told him. Because of the nonimportation measures, “that sort is not so much drank here as Madeira.” As for herself, Mrs. Farmar admitted, “I never drank so little wine since I knew what it was.”

As if to underscore that the economic situation for wine was unlikely to change, Farmar noted, “the Non Importation is Strictly adheard to and after this month No Tea is to be bought sold or drank and there are Committees chosen for every Town to see that the Resolves of Congress are strictly observed and those that dont are lookd on as Enimies to America.”¹⁴

In the hills of Essex County, New Jersey (near present-day West Orange), twenty-year-old Jemima Condict was fighting a different battle. Having procrastinated for days over a troublesome toothache, she finally resolved one Monday morning “if Possible to have my toth out.” So down she went “to Dr. C. and he got his Cold iron ready.” But when he put his pliers in Jemima’s mouth, she quickly pulled them out, to the laughter of assembled onlookers. According to Jemima, they teased her and “Said if I dast not have A tooth Drawd I Never would be fit to marry. I told them I never Recond to be if twas as Bad as to have a toth Drawd.” Amid the ensuing laughter, the doctor gave a good yank, and Jemima “could put my Toth in my pocket & laugh with the Best of them.”¹⁵

A week or two later, on a Monday that she called Training Day, Jemima went with her father to see several companies of militia drill together. Jemima wrote in her diary that it would have been “a mournful Sight to see if they had been fighting in earnest.” That was indeed an obvious possibility, although “how soon they will Be Calld forth to the feild of war we Cannot tell, for by What we Can hear the Quarrels are not like to be made up Without bloodshed.” Jemima had “jest Now heard Say that All hopes of Conciliation Between Briten & her colonies are at an end for Both the king & his Parliment have announced our Destruction.”¹⁶

Across the ocean in London, Lord Dartmouth received a letter from William Franklin, the royal governor of New Jersey. Given the recent actions of the Continental Congress, William Franklin—inadvertently, perhaps—put his finger squarely on the heart of the matter when he implied that royal ego rather than the calls of Pitt and Burke for reconciliation seemed to be guiding British policy. “It seems apprehended by many sensible and moderate Men here,” Franklin, speaking for his loyalist friends, told Dartmouth, “that it will be the Opinion of the Mother Country that the Congress has left her no other alternative then either to consent to what must appear humiliating in the Eyes of all Europe, or to compel Obedience to her Laws by a Military Force.”¹⁷

Benjamin Franklin, the royal governor’s father, was about to depart London and sail back into the American cauldron. His chess moves with Lord Howe and Howe’s sister had come to naught, in part because Franklin would not be drawn into a more moderate position than he knew many of his brethren held in North America. Given the delays in cross-Atlantic communications, Franklin was only now writing Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania a response to Galloway’s stillborn compromise plan for a “mini-American Parliament.” It had been voted down at the Continental Congress six months before. “I cannot but apprehend,” Franklin told Galloway, “more Mischief than Benefit from a closer Union.”¹⁸

Joseph Galloway was a moderate who had strived for compromise but by now had irrevocably hung his hat with the loyalists. In the Pennsylvania Assembly, he spoke out strongly against the measures of the Continental Congress. His pro-loyalist resolution condemning its actions failed to pass, although more than one-third of the delegates—fourteen out of thirty-eight members—voted with him, a clear sign how divided that province was on the issue of open rebellion.

Galloway tried to put a positive spin on the outcome by telling William Franklin, “The People of this Province are altering their sentiments and conduct with amazing rapidity. We have been successful in baffling all the attempts of the violent Party to prevail on the People to prepare for war against the Mother Country.” That, of course, was unwarranted optimism. Galloway was an example of how difficult it was to know at what point, in the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, “the conflict between colonies and mother country became a war between America and Britain, and at what point, therefore, lack of enthusiasm for separation, or for war, became treason.”¹⁹

DURING THE LATTER PART OF March 1775, the front pages of the competing rebel Boston Gazette and loyalist Massachusetts Gazette and the Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser were filled in their entirety with the writings of Novanglus and Massachusettensis, respectively. Novanglus continued his essays into April, but Massachusettensis published his last column on March 27—perhaps because he thought his arguments had run their course or been overtaken by mounting tensions as all awaited some definitive word from England. “There is an awful disparity,” Massachusettensis concluded, “between troops that fight the battles of their Sovereign and those what follow the standard of rebellion.”²⁰

But as Massachusettensis’s pen fell silent, others spoke for the loyalist cause while casting themselves as compromising moderates. One letter, dated April 7, from “A Friend to Both Countries” appeared in the Boston Evening-Post. Inadvertently, perhaps, the author’s choice for framing the debate—“Both Countries” as opposed to “both sides” or even “both factions”—suggested how deep the split had already become. “At a time when the hostile parade of these colonies portend the most disagreeable effects,” wrote the author, signing himself only as “A Customer,” “it is evidently the duty of the moderate of all parties to unite… as the only probable means of rescuing this country from all the tragical concomitants of a civil war.”²¹

The truth of the matter was, as Joseph Galloway had learned, that it was too late for moderates. “A Customer’s” belief that “the first appearance of moderate measures adopted on our part, will be eagerly seiz’d by the ministry for accommodating this unnatural contest” was a belated hope. Parliament’s sweeping rejections of William Pitt’s and Edmund Burke’s reconciliation efforts were not yet known in America, but it would be only a matter of days before they were. And on the heels of this news, General Gage would receive instructions from Lord Dartmouth, dated January 27, 1775, as to how the general should proceed to deal with Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress continued to meet in Concord into the first week of April. On Thursday, April 6, James Warren wrote from there to “My Dear Mercy.” He had hoped to be home with her in Plymouth that day, but the congress had narrowly voted to sit another week in the hope of news, “and News we have,” he told her. Unofficial reports from England indicated that Parliament had not extended even a hint of reconciliation despite the efforts of Pitt and Burke. “I dare say,” James Warren went on, “you would not desire to see me till I could tell you that I had done all in my power to secure and defend us and our Country. We are no longer at a loss [about] what is Intended us by our dear Mother. We have Ask’d for Bread and she gives us a Stone, and a serpent for a Fish.”²²

What orders were coming to General Gage could only be surmised, but there was strong evidence afoot, and, for the rebels, there were ominous warnings. The April 10 issue of the Massachusetts Gazette and the Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser carried a report from London dated “War Office, Feb. 24.” It went on to say: “It is his Majesty’s pleasure that all officers, absent from regiments in North-America, do join their respective corps without delay.”²³ Likely the same ship that brought the report of Parliament’s recalcitrance also brought news that the sloop HMS Falcon, mistakenly reported as “the Faulkland,” had sailed from Spithead four days before the recently arrived ship “with dispatches for the General and Commander in chief.” Ninety-five feet in length, with a crew of 125, Falcon was nimble and quick. It could be expected any day. Among the rumors was the report that Lord Howe “was to come with two regiments of horse.” Regardless of such speculation, the rebel Massachusetts Spy reported, “The army in this town seem to be preparing for a matter & a considerable number of waggons are made and now ready for their use.”²⁴

If General Gage appeared to be showing great patience and restraint during this uncertain time, the same could not be said for most of his officers, particularly after informal word reached Boston that Parliament appeared resolved not to offer the colonies even a single leaf of an olive branch. “This has convinced the Rebels (for we may now legally call them so),” Lord Percy wrote a friend, “that there is no hopes for them but by submitting to Parliament.” The rebels remaining in Boston were evacuating, Percy claimed, and “have proposed in Congress, either to set it on Fire & attack the troops before a reinforcement comes, or to endeavour to starve us.” Which course they meant to adopt, only time would tell. “The Gen. however has received no Acc. whatever from Europe,” Percy concluded, “so that [on] our side no steps of any kind can be taken as yet.”²⁵

So, anticipating what increasingly seemed an inevitable clash of arms, partisans on both sides waited. Finally, the sloop HMS Falcon came into view off Boston Harbor. Many an eye fixed on the vessel with a sense of foreboding. Perhaps no one watching its arrival did so with more mixed emotions than General Thomas Gage. He was about to receive the orders a part of him had been dreading for almost fifteen years.²⁶