Blows Must Decide
1774
Twenty years later, the colonies continued to feel the effects of the war that George Washington had started in 1754. The fighting had left Great Britain with a magnificent empire and a ruinous debt. The government’s attempts to tax the colonies had generated more protests than revenues and had goaded the inhabitants to the edge of violent insurrection.
During the tense summer of 1774, two men sat discussing the affairs of the day over pints of ale in the Boston tavern The Bunch of Grapes. One was the tall, paunchy Henry Knox, a well-known city bookseller of twenty-four, given to booming laughter and subtle, insightful analysis. The other was a pudgy, lame Rhode Island businessman named Nathanael Greene. Eight years older than Knox, he still showed the roughness of his country upbringing. But Greene was an avid learner and was in fact one of Knox’s best customers. The liberal-minded Knox admired his friend’s enthusiasm. To know freedom and not defend it, Greene asserted, was “spiritual suicide.”
Knox’s shop, the London Book-Store, was stocked with volumes on weapons, strategy, and tactics, ranging from Caesar’s Commentaries to Maurice de Saxe’s influential Mes Reveries, on the art of war. British officers frequented the shop to brush up on military theory. It was no contradiction that Knox had transformed himself into an expert on war. Both he and Greene had access to information that was out of the reach of most citizens, who could not afford to purchase books. Knox suggested a reading list for his friend, who was compiling a substantial library.
Knox had grown up during the last war. Greene had experienced the conflict as a teenager, although his Quaker family’s strict pacifism discouraged participation. Both men had come of age during the increasingly contentious and tumultuous years that followed the peace treaty of 1763. Both now sensed that the clash of interests between Great Britain and her American colonies was careening toward armed conflict.
His father’s bankruptcy and early death had forced Knox to drop out of Boston Latin School, a preparation for Harvard, at age nine. His mother apprenticed him to a firm of booksellers, where an indulgent proprietor let him continue his studies with borrowed tomes. Knox read Plutarch’s lives of great men, taught himself French, and absorbed the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers.
He knew violence early. Boston had for decades endured riots touched off by hunger and poverty. Forced impressment into the British navy particularly rankled seamen. The economic bust that followed the French and Indian War brought to the city a declining economy, high unemployment, and a flagrant contrast between rich and poor. Boston would come to be called the “Metropolis of Sedition,” a place where inhabitants, British observers noted, had an overblown notion of “the rights and liberties of Englishmen.”
A yearly occasion for expressing those rights was Pope’s Day, November 5, a date that commemorated the failed 1605 plot by papists to decapitate the English government. The day gave Boston’s poorer inhabitants a chance to shake their fists at alien Catholics and generally let off steam. Working men and apprentices like Knox looked forward to Pope’s Day as a rare respite from work. It was the annual jubilee of the gangs from the city’s North and South Ends. Once, when a wheel came off a Pope’s Day float, the prodigiously strong Knox lifted the axle himself to heave the weighty contraption forward.
During the celebration, parading crowds of “servants, sailors, workingmen, apprentices and Negroes” invaded the homes of the well-to-do to beg alms and strong drink. They broke the windows of burghers who stinted them. The day culminated in a monumental brawl, to which boys and young men came armed with “Clubs, Staves and Cutlasses” and fought among themselves with gusto. Afterward, the participants destroyed their floats in a huge bonfire. The teenaged Knox gained a reputation as one of Boston’s toughest street fighters, something to brag about in a city populated by fist-hard seamen and muscled dock workers.1
In August 1765, when Knox was fifteen, Bostonians turned out for a more pointed purpose. Britain had imposed the Stamp Act. This tax on newspapers, legal writs, playing cards, and other documents was the first direct tax on the colonies. The protests took on many of the trappings of Pope’s Day: bonfires blazed and intimidating mobs roamed the city. A “hellish crew” invaded the home of wealthy stamp master Andrew Oliver, smashed a mirror “said to be the largest in North America,” and wrecked the place.2 The mob later burst into the mansion of royal lieutenant governor Thomas Hutchinson and left his home a wrecked shell.
Boston authorities expected new violence when Pope’s Day itself rolled around that November. Something more ominous greeted them. The North and South End factions, guided and bribed by radical Whigs like John Hancock and Samuel Adams, had made peace. The gangs marched together and gathered at the Liberty Tree, a celebrated elm on Boston Common. Effigies of government officials replaced those of the pope and devil. Oliver worried that “the People, even to the lowest Ranks, have become more attentive to their Liberties.”3
Riots and gang fighting melded easily into political protest and what Massachusetts governor Francis Bernard called a “general Levelling, and taking away the Distinction of rich and poor.”4 The mob began to think and reason. Boston became the focal point of growing discontent in the colonies. The gangs came to see themselves as “the people out of doors,” the assertive bane of monarchs. The Stamp Act, never enforced, was soon repealed.
Two years later, Knox watched as Bostonians marked King George III’s twenty-ninth birthday with a salute from three brass cannon. The concussions, the flashes of fire, and the power of the eruptions kindled his imagination. The seventeen-year-old immediately joined the artillery company, a branch of the provincial militia, and began to drill under Lieutenant Adino Paddock, a chair-maker and staunch Tory.
The unit attracted many of the same young men Knox knew from the South End gangs, the sons of mechanics and shipyard workers. The handling of great guns, as exacting as it was muscular, engaged both his intellect and his physical prowess. The science of artillery incorporated mathematics, mechanics, geometry, and chemistry. The company, known as the Train, became Knox’s absorbing interest. Drills were rigorous. Paddock passed on techniques learned directly from British artillery officers. Engineering was part of the gunner’s trade, and Knox studied the construction of fortifications and secure gun emplacements.
A new wave of rioting greeted the 1768 import duties known as the Townshend Acts. A British officer called Boston “a blackguard town and ruled by mobs.”5 Patriots began a boycott of British goods. The British government sent four regiments, nearly two thousand soldiers, to occupy Boston. The order was handed down by General Thomas Gage, the agreeable, cultivated officer who had led the advanced guard across the Monongahela thirteen years earlier. Gage, like Braddock before him, now reigned as military commander of all North America.
Knox joined the thousands of Bostonians who watched this “invasion,” which contemporary historian Mercy Otis Warren called the beginning of the “American war.” The troops marched up from the Long Wharf with fifes screeching and flags unfurled. One regiment featured black Afro-Caribbean drummers in yellow coats with red facings, a bizarre sight to the locals.
Intended to quell unrest, the occupation set off a seven-year slide toward war. Radicals encouraged citizens to arm themselves. Artillery drill took on an added urgency. The Train comprised both Whigs and Tories, designations borrowed from British political parties. In America, Whig came to be associated with “patriot,” Tory with “loyalist.” Both factions imagined rolling the great guns into action, one to resist oppression, the other to keep the peace.
In a city of fifteen thousand residents, the presence of so many soldiers became a festering intrusion. On the night of March 5, 1770, Knox was walking home through dark, frigid streets. He encountered a commotion around the Custom House. Bells were ringing as if announcing a fire. Residents were rushing into the street and shouting. He came upon some rowdy youths—a few years earlier he might have been one of them—taunting a British sentry.
The boys, backed up by a growing crowd, threw snowballs and jeered. Knox ordered them back and, seeing the sentry load his musket, told him “if he fired he died.” The sentry pointed his gun, the boys dared him to shoot.
Eight or nine men of the British guard, commanded by Captain Thomas Preston, hurried to the sentry’s aid, bayonets fixed. Knox, watching the situation spin out of control, grabbed Preston’s coat and warned him not to fire on the crowd. “Bloody backs!” the boys continued to scoff. “Lobster scoundrels!” The insult referred to the submission of British soldiers to the lash under the army’s draconian disciplinary regime, a degradation for which Americans felt deep scorn.
The scene grew chaotic. Bells continued to clang, more snowballs flew, chunks of ice. There were shouts of “You can’t kill us all!” and dares to “Fire!”
The regulars jabbed at the crowd with their bayonets. A soldier slipped. A shot shattered the cold air. After a pause, during which Preston failed to give a decisive command, the rest of the hyped-up soldiers fired a staccato volley. The street became a pandemonium of smoke, shouting, and groans. Five civilians fell dead, six suffered wounds.
Express riders carried word of the “massacre” through the city and out to the countryside. Thousands of citizens prepared to march on Boston. The colony teetered on the precipice of war, but no war came. Henry Knox testified as an eyewitness during the trial, in which lawyer John Adams successfully defended Preston against a charge of murder.
An alarmed British ministry withdrew their soldiers from Boston and repealed the Townshend taxes on all items except tea. Tensions eased. But the anniversary of the Boston Massacre became an annual focus of patriot rallies and an occasion for incendiary orations.
* * *
While Knox had known early the rough world of Boston’s crowded streets, Nathanael Greene had grown up two miles from his nearest neighbors. He had passed his youth working on the family farm and toiling at his father’s successful iron forge on the western shore of Narragansett Bay. Unlike his brothers, he was an avid reader, devoting every slack moment to whatever books he could get hold of.
While a life of hard work built his strength, Greene suffered from several physical ailments. He walked with a limp. Asthma attacks sometimes kept him struggling for breath night after night. He had dared to receive an inoculation for smallpox—the dangerous protective measure remained controversial—but in addition to conferring immunity, the procedure had left him with a scarred right eye prone to inflammation.
The domination of Greene’s severe Quaker father shaped his life into his late twenties. At an age when Henry Knox was swinging his fists in street brawls, Greene was still sneaking out to forbidden dances. He did not really come of age until his father died in 1770. That same year, the twenty-eight-year-old Greene fell in love with the well-connected Nancy Ward. She did not return his affection; her indifference broke his heart. He fantasized about winning the lottery: “I intend to turn Beau with my part of the Money,” he explained, “and make a Shining Figure.”6
Greene regretted his upbringing as a “Supersticious” Quaker, and his lack of formal education. “I feel the mist [of] Ignorance to surround me,” he later wrote.7 On his own he read Enlightenment authors like Voltaire and John Locke. Jonathan Swift, whose satires skewered English policies in Ireland, was a favorite. But the demands of the prosperous business that he and his brothers had inherited consumed his time. Politics remained theoretical. In February 1772, that changed.
One of the Greene brothers’ ships, the Fortune, with cousin Rufus Greene at the helm, was accosted in Narragansett Bay as it transported a load of West Indian rum and sugar. The commander of the British revenue schooner Gaspee, a “haughty, insolent” man named Dudingston, had become the scourge of Rhode Island traders. He led a boarding party onto the Greenes’ cargo vessel.
The British sailors slapped Rufus around and confiscated the ship. Import duties were one of the few consistent sources of Crown revenue. The government was determined to prevent traders from sneaking past the customs house at Newport. The myriad of coves and islands in the bay made Rhode Island a smuggler’s paradise. Greene’s cargo may have been legal, but the Gaspee’s captain was going to make sure that the cargo had been taxed. When he heard the news, Nathanael erupted. It was piracy, he declared. He brought a court action against Lieutenant Dudingston, making the officer subject to arrest by Rhode Island authorities. New England merchants cheered the defiant Greene, who became obsessed with the affair. The seizure had brought into sudden focus for him the many issues of rights and liberty that had been percolating in the colonies for years.
The crew of the Gaspee continued to interdict shipping. In June 1772, chasing a merchantman in the bay, the British schooner ran aground. A gang of citizens, spurred on by the radical patriot group called Sons of Liberty, formed a posse and rowed out in longboats. During their altercation with Dudingston, they shot him in the groin, arrested him, and burned the schooner.
News of the outrage crackled through the colonies. Boston patriot Samuel Adams thought it could touch off a contest between Britain and America that would “end in rivers of blood.” The British offered a reward and threatened to send the perpetrators to England for trial. With the Gaspee’s captain now in custody, Nathanael Greene, who had a solid alibi for the night of the incident, pursued his lawsuit. He won a judgment of three hundred pounds for the improper seizure of his ship.
Finding himself in the middle of the great issues of the day, Greene changed. By bringing a lawsuit and by taking an interest in armed conflict, he was veering further and further from his pious upbringing. A year after the incident, he was barred from his Quaker meeting, probably for visiting a Connecticut tavern. More and more, he turned his attention to colonial politics. He frequently traveled the fifty miles to Boston and observed firsthand the contentious affairs of that beleaguered city. He formed a friendship with Henry Knox.
* * *
The instinct that prompts modern booksellers to install coffee bars was not absent in the eighteenth century. Once he opened his own shop, Knox turned it into “a fashionable morning lounge.” His charm and love of humorous stories helped make his London Book-Store one of the most popular hangouts for Boston’s smart set. It also became a hub for Boston radicals.
The affable proprietor helped organize a new militia unit known as the Boston Grenadier Corps, which absorbed some of the more Whig-oriented members of the Train. As with the British grenadiers, all the men had to be tall. They dressed in fancy uniforms and drilled in the evenings with musket and cannon. Knox, one of the most knowledgeable as well as the tallest, was elected an officer. The unit drew praise, even from British military men, for its spruce appearance.
In the summer of 1773, while he was hunting ducks in Boston’s wetlands, Knox’s gun burst. The explosion blew off the pinkie and ring finger of his left hand, a graphic reminder that a cannon could rupture in the same way, and with much more grievous effects. Henry self-consciously wrapped his mangled hand in a black silk handkerchief. On parade with his militia unit he “excited the sympathy of all the ladies.”
One who found Knox intriguing was Lucy Flucker, the plump, comely daughter of Thomas Flucker, royal secretary of Massachusetts, “a high-toned Loyalist of great family pretensions.”8 The seventeen-year-old Lucy was educated, spirited, skilled at chess and card games, and endowed with a wit that matched Knox’s own. Their mutual infatuation grew into a passionate, largely secret, courtship.
Relations between Britain and her colonies continued to fray. The one remaining tax sparked a confrontation in 1773, when British ministers handed a monopoly on the tea trade to the East Indian Company. Angry colonists responded with a boycott. Knox was one of those who guarded a British tea ship to prevent the crew from unloading its goods. On December 16, 1773, radicals disguised as Indians famously tossed more than forty-five tons of tea into the harbor in an act of rebellion. The government harshly punished this provocation by passing a series of “intolerable” acts, closing Boston Harbor, renewing the military occupation of the city, and imposing martial law.
In the wake of such unrest, Lucy’s parents were reluctant to approve of Knox. They considered him too low class for their daughter and possessed of dangerous political opinions. Lucy, however, loved him “too much for my peace.” The Fluckers “gave a half-reluctant consent,” but when the lovers were married in June 1774, Lucy’s parents refused to attend the wedding. Tension in the city ratcheted ever higher that summer. Lucy’s father tried to entice his son-in-law with the offer of a commission in the British army. Knox refused.
Around the same time, Nathanael Greene finally gave up his crush on Nancy Ward and fell for Catherine Littlefield, a teenager with “a snapping pair of dark eyes,” whom he had known as a girl. Called Caty, she was thirteen years younger than the thirty-two-year-old businessman. Their romance blossomed quickly—they were married in July 1774.
Like Knox, Greene responded to the growing colonial turmoil by forming one of the many militia units springing up around New England. Soon after his marriage, he began to drill with the group that would become the Kentish Guards. Greene smuggled a black-market musket out of Boston and helped recruit British army veterans to train the battalion. The men marched about in red coats trimmed with green. They drank, socialized, and dreamed of violent action.
Because Greene’s knowledge of military theory outstripped that of his fellow militiamen, he expected to be elected an officer. But his comrades could not countenance a lieutenant with a limp at their head. They voted him down. It was, for the sensitive Greene, a “stroke of mortification.” “Nobody loves to be the subject of ridicule,” he opined. His confidence shaken, he almost quit the unit, but instead decided to soldier on as a lowly private.9
Over the winter of 1774–1775, the drills became increasingly meaningful. Showing the fist, the British ministry sent their military commander on the continent, General Gage, to Boston as royal governor. He brought four thousand more regulars with him. The ministers hoped that Gage, with his long experience in the colonies and his American wife, could both intimidate and placate the unruly citizens of New England. But speaking privately of his colonies that autumn, King George III conceded his fear that “blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.”
Most in Britain were sure of the outcome. Benjamin Franklin, serving as a colonial envoy in London, had overheard an army general claim “that with a thousand British grenadiers he would undertake to go from one end of America to the other and geld all the males, partly by force and partly with a little coaxing.” Gage was not so sanguine. He felt that the inhabitants of America had been infected by the “Disease” of rebellion. “Now it’s so universal there is no knowing where to apply a Remedy.” He wrote to London for reinforcements. “If you think ten thousand men sufficient, send twenty.”10
In September 1774, he set out to secure Crown gunpowder supplies so that they could not fall into the hands of the seething colonists. He sent 260 British redcoats rowing up the Mystic River from Boston to remove a large supply of the explosive from a powder house north of the city. They faced no opposition.
But Gage had batted a hornet’s nest. The action incited wild rumors up and down the colony: War was at hand. Six militiamen had been slaughtered. British ships were bombarding Boston. In response, thousands of armed men took to the roads. The rumors stunned the delegates at the First Continental Congress, then meeting in Philadelphia. “War! war! war! was the cry,” John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail back in Boston. He imagined “scenes of Distress and Terror.”
The armed men, and later the Congressional delegates, soon found that the rumors were false. But for General Gage the instantaneous mobilization was an ominous sign.
In October, the government forbade the importation of gunpowder and weapons into the colonies. New Hampshire patriots promptly broke into a local fort and removed ninety-seven barrels of gunpowder and fifteen light cannon. Rebels grabbed royal armaments in other cities up and down the New England coast. In February 1775, Gage sent troops to Salem, Massachusetts, to confiscate yet more war supplies. Forty armed militiamen and a crowd of tough fishermen from nearby Marblehead stood in their way. Tense negotiations narrowly averted violence.
“Civil government is near its end,” Gage wrote. “Furthermore, conciliation, moderation, reason is over; nothing can be done but by forcible means.” Yet Honest Tom’s actions remained tentative. “Timid and undecided,” a subordinate wrote of him. “Unfit to command at a time of resistance, and approaching Rebellion.”11
* * *
On April 19, 1775, the spring breeze brought to Henry Knox’s ears the distinctive, ominous rumble of cannon fire from the west. Word quickly reached Boston of an outbreak of violence at the villages of Lexington and Concord, about fifteen miles northwest of the city. That evening, a parade of bloody redcoats limped into town. The fight that Henry Knox, Nathanael Greene, and thousands of others had dreaded and prepared for had arrived.
It had begun as another powder raid. Gage sent a brigade of grenadiers and light infantrymen into the countryside to confiscate war supplies at Concord. He also instructed them to arrest the notorious rabble-rousers Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who were correctly reported to be in the area. They were preparing to attend the Second Continental Congress.
Reaching the village of Lexington, the seven-hundred-man British force encountered fifty armed patriots assembled on the Common. The militia captain, farmer John Parker, wisely ordered his men to disperse. The next instant, shots rang out. “Without any order or regularity, the light infantry began a scattered fire,” a British officer reported.12 Eight Americans died, most shot in the back. Nine lay wounded. In this casual manner, on a bright spring morning, a war began.
The British troops marched on to Concord, where patriots had already removed most of the arms. Three British companies tried to secure North Bridge over the Concord River. Hundreds of angry militiamen confronted them. A sudden firefight left six patriots and a dozen regulars dead or wounded. To the surprise of the militiamen, the vaunted British redcoats ran back toward Concord village.
The British commander, the fat, slow-thinking lieutenant colonel
Francis Smith, showed “great fickleness and inconstancy of mind.” He marched his men pointlessly around Concord, then took time out for brandy and food at a local tavern. After lunch, he put his troops on the road for the perilous return march to Boston. As the tired troops stepped warily along the dirt road, militiamen kept up a hot fire from behind trees and walls. “Cowardly,” a British officer called them. “Concealed villains.” However, the patriots made up in initiative what they lacked in discipline, and for the British, the march turned into a desperate scramble to reach safety.
As a veteran of the Monongahela debacle, Gage must have felt a sickening sense of déjà vu when he received reports of the fighting. He sent out a relief column under General Hugh Percy, who met Smith’s beleaguered force east of Lexington. The energetic Percy got most of the troops back to Boston. The British suffered 73 men killed and more than 170 wounded. Percy noted of his opponents that day, “Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself much mistaken.”13
* * *
General Gage had long known of Henry Knox’s Whig sympathies. Early in 1775, he had given orders that the young bookseller was not to be allowed to leave the city. Boston’s location on a peninsula connected to the mainland by a 120-yard-wide, fortified isthmus simplified control. Getting out presented a problem for Knox, who was well known and, at 260 pounds, conspicuous.
But the conflict had now turned serious, and Knox knew that if he was to contribute to the patriot effort he had to leave Boston. Shortly after the outbreak at Lexington, Lucy sewed Henry’s sword, an emblem of his militia command, into the lining of her cloak. The couple escaped in a small boat, risking prison or hanging if they were discovered fleeing the city. Henry’s brother William, then nineteen, took over the bookshop. Lucy fretted that she might never see her family again.
The excitement outside Boston more than matched the apprehension inside the city. Militiamen from all over New England, a total of twenty thousand, were camping in surrounding towns. Military matters were no longer questions of theory and drill. This was real. Men’s lives would hang on decisions made by inexperienced officers. Yet it was the age of amateurs. In a time when a retired printer like Benjamin Franklin could make breakthrough discoveries in science, it didn’t seem impossible that soldiers armed with book learning could challenge an empire.
Knox was astounded to see his friend Nathanael Greene ride into the bustling bivouac at Cambridge at the head of 1,500 Rhode Island soldiers, his troops among the best dressed and most disciplined of any of those gathering around Boston. Some mysterious alchemy had transformed Greene, a militia private a few weeks earlier, into the commanding general of his colony’s “Army of Observation.” Was it his political influence? His calm confidence? His book knowledge? No matter. Greene, whose limp had barred his way in the militia, would soon be appointed the youngest brigadier general in the Continental Army. From private to general in a month—his dizzying ascent was a sign of the desperate times.
Moving with energy, Knox designed fortifications to protect the growing patriot army should the British decide to rush out and attack in force. Men set to work piling earthen breastworks and constructing small forts, known as redoubts, in the village of Roxbury, directly opposite Boston Neck. They fortified their camp in Cambridge, on the far side of the Charles River. Knox began training gunners to operate the twelve cannon that Rhode Island patriots had sent.
On June 12, General Gage commanded all the rebels to lay down their arms and swear allegiance to their king or be branded traitors. The zealots outside the city ignored the threat. Charged with an electric sense of anticipation and possibility, they steeled themselves for war. Now blows would indeed decide.