Prologue

Tuesday, December 13, 1774

Lashed by a bitterly cold northeast wind, a lone horseman galloped along the Post Road north of Boston. He moved in broad daylight, though the heavy gray clouds of a New England winter dimmed the low-angled sun. Galloped is perhaps too ambitious a word. A deep snowfall a few weeks before had first turned mushy and then solidified as the temperature dropped to sixteen degrees Fahrenheit at sunrise, leaving the road a jagged obstacle course of icy ruts and rock-hard ridges.

But onward the rider pressed. From his start early that morning in Boston, it had been twenty-four miles to Topsfield, then fourteen miles more to cross the Merrimack River at Newburyport. As the day waned, and with twenty-two miles still to go, the rider grew weary, but he was no stranger to such hardship. The horseman’s name was Paul Revere, and he was determined to reach Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and spread the alarm: “The regulars are coming!”

In the fleeting light of this short December afternoon, Revere rode into Portsmouth and went straight to the home of Samuel Cutts, a prosperous merchant whose substantial residence stood opposite his wharf and warehouse on the Piscataqua River. Cutts was a member of Portsmouth’s committee of correspondence, one of many such associations throughout Great Britain’s thirteen colonies that were increasingly trading information and voicing grievances against the British Crown. Put more bluntly, Cutts and the half-frozen messenger who knocked at his door were rebels.

The reason for Paul Revere’s urgency was that George III’s government had recently banned the importation of arms and gunpowder into North America in an effort to restrain this rebel faction in its deeds if not its words. Existing stores of arms and ammunition had immediately become highly prized. The principal New Hampshire cache was housed in aging Fort William and Mary on New Castle Island, several miles off Portsmouth Harbor.

Technically, these munitions were the king’s, kept in storage for use by both British regulars and colonial militia for their mutual self-defense. But as rebels exerted increasing influence over provincial legislatures, the distinction between Crown property and that of the individual provinces deepened. In response, General Thomas Gage, the British commander in chief in North America, had begun to exercise strict control over these stores for the Crown. The gist of Revere’s warning was that New Hampshire rebels should seize these weapons before British regulars en route from Boston could do so.

As Revere warmed himself by the hearth, members of Portsmouth’s committee of correspondence answered the summons to the Cutts residence. Some voiced concern that Revere had acted precipitously in delivering a warning from “only two or three of the Committee of Correspondence at Boston” when no fewer than seven were empowered to act. Lacking a quorum, the Portsmouth committee deferred action until a full meeting could be held the next day. But several committee members shared Revere’s sense of urgency. Rather than another meeting, daylight on Wednesday, December 14, was greeted by the beating of drums to summon volunteers to march on the fort.

By the time these Portsmouth men rowed to New Castle Island and joined inhabitants of New Castle, the resulting force numbered some four hundred. To oppose these local insurgents, Captain John Cochran commanded a total garrison of five men. But more than the soldiers under his command, Cochran was relying on the Union Jack flying from the fort’s flagpole to dissuade an attack. What better symbol of the power of his post? What colonial would dare assail it? To do so would be treason.

But that charge seemed of little concern to the local men who ignored Cochran’s refusal to open the gates, swarming over the walls despite the defenders’ discharge of several small cannons. The attackers quickly overpowered Cochran and his meager garrison. They “struck the King’s colours, with three cheers, broke open the Powder House, and carried off one hundred and three barrels of Powder, leaving only one behind.”¹

By nightfall, it was New Hampshire royal governor John Wentworth’s turn to send a hasty message in the opposite direction of Revere’s ride. Briefly recounting the “most unhappy affair perpetrated here this day,” Wentworth warned General Gage that with the gunpowder seized, another rebel force was forming “to carry away all the Cannon and Arms belonging to the Castle… unless some assistance should arrive from Boston in time to prevent it.” Far from taking responsibility for this occurrence, Wentworth went on to complain: “This event too plainly proves the imbecility of this Government to carry into execution his Majesty’s Order in Council, for seizing and detaining Arms and Ammunition imported into this Province, without some strong Ships-of-War in this Harbour.”²

The British regulars were indeed coming, but they were taking their time about it. On this particular ride, Paul Revere’s warning—based on rebel intelligence in Boston—proved a bit premature. In fact, while General Gage had contemplated the possibility of a raid, he did not start troops northward from Boston to Portsmouth on board the sloop HMS Canceaux until December 17, the day after receiving Governor Wentworth’s anguished plea for assistance. By then it was too late. On the morning after the first raid, Wentworth issued an order to assemble thirty local men from the First Regiment of Militia—supposedly loyal to the king—to assist Cochran’s garrison in withstanding another round of pilfering. As his officers later reported to the governor, they “caused the Drums to be Beat, & Proclamation to be made at all the Publick corners, & on the Place of Parade,” but no person appeared “to Enlist.”³

That same afternoon of December 15, another band of rebels rowed out to Fort William and Mary and made off with small arms, “fifteen 4-pounders, and one 9-pounder, and a quantity of twelve and four and twenty pound shot.” Waiting for the tide to come in, they then spirited their prizes away by boat up the estuary of the Piscataqua River to Durham. According to one loyalist, “a few flaming demagogues” had persuaded the good people of New Hampshire “to commit a most outrageous overt act of treason and rebellion.”⁴

British regulars finally arrived in Portsmouth on board the Canceaux late on December 17, and another contingent disembarked from the frigate HMS Scarborough two days later. By then, the rebel cause in New Hampshire was safe and well supplied, but the Redcoats would march again.