2
BOSTON, May 17, 1774
Rain driven by a sharp sea wind lashed the warehouses on Boston’s crowded Long Wharf as the Lively, with lines slung ashore from her bows and stern, was eased gently alongside the crowded quay.1
It was exactly five months to the day since Admiral Montagu had growled to a group of Bostonians:2 “Well, boys, you’ve had your Indian caper, haven’t you? But mind, you’ve got to pay the fiddler yet.”
That wet May morning was the day of reckoning.
With drums rolling and bosun’s pipes shrilling, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, the man entrusted with the task of punishing Boston and placing an iron grip on Massachusetts, stepped on deck.
The scene before him bore no signs of the turbulent background that lay behind his arrival in the port. The people and officials of Boston had assembled to greet him with the formal ceremony that they always gave to a new royal governor. The wharf and streets through which the procession would pass were crowded with Bostonians. Massachusetts provincial troops lined the route.
On the wharf itself the reception was marked with irony. For standing stiffly at attention in front of Gage was the Independent Corps of Cadets, the governor’s guard of honor who, to the disgust of Colonel Leslie in Castle William, had taken possession of the tea ships.
There, too, in front of the crowd was a VIP committee waiting to greet the general. They included representatives of the Council and of the General Assembly—both of which, in the session that was just about to end, had openly defied the King’s governor.
The general, in his long scarlet coat decorated lavishly with gold, descended the gangplank. The crowd yelled; the guns of the warships anchored in the harbor thundered in salute; the church bells of Boston pealed.
At the statehouse, Gage presented his commission and was sworn in by the president of the Council. From the balcony, the high sheriff read the proclamation as cheers came from the people jammed in the streets below. There was a roar from three brass cannon manned by the local Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company. It was a day of truce, a day of forgetting, a day of lip service to the British crown whose rule was now more than a century old. But as Gage and the Massachusetts leaders knew, it did not alter anything. It did not even signify anything.
The Lively had, in fact, sailed into the harbor four days before. Since then, Gage had been in the island fortress of Castle William in briefing sessions—with Hutchinson, with the naval and military commanders, with the commissioners of customs—planning the closing of the port. By now more regiments of troops, destined for Massachusetts, were boarding transports in British ports. Unlike the soldiers at Hutchinson’s disposal, these men would not be kept discreetly out of sight in Castle William, they would be in Boston itself, a constant reminder to the citizens of the port that the King and Parliament meant business.
Meanwhile, as Gage was in conference on the island, the reaction in the town was crystallizing. The Committee of Correspondence was promoting a campaign to combat the new British policy; Gage was quickly informed, for it was no secret.
The Committees of Correspondence existed now in many towns in every American province and had been set up years back to coordinate united resistance against Britain’s colonial tax laws. By 1774 the committees with their communication link system of express riders had become well established and hardened into a practical working structure.
Boston’s committee, probably the most active in the whole of America, was led by the man whom Governor Hutchinson referred to in his letters home as “the Chief Incendiary”—Samuel Adams, a tough, cunning, full-time professional politician of the Assembly.3
Rugged, stern, puritanical, as were most of Boston’s leaders, fifty-one-year-old Adams was the first of the new school of eighteenth-century revolutionaries, the man who drew the blueprint for the French holocaust twenty-five years later. Though he had not grown up in a poor family—his father had left him some capital which he had quickly spent—material possessions seemed to have little meaning for him. His suits were old and stained. His little house in Purchase Street needed repair. Often, there was not enough cash even for food, a fact that did not seem to worry this strange dedicated ascetic.
“Samuel Adams eats little, drinks little, sleeps little,” commented Joseph Galloway, a political contemporary, “and is . . . indefatigable in the pursuit of his objects.”
Politics consumed all his energies. He was head of the radical political Caucus Club. For years he had written scathing bitter articles in the Boston press, castigating the Massachusetts power structure and warning the people of a secret conspiracy to enslave them.
As clerk to the General Assembly, he had ample opportunity for antiadministration maneuvering on the floor of the house, but his most important flair lay in his skill at exploiting public opinion through campaigning newspaper articles and in his “operations.”
Adams controlled two Boston mobs, and he could organize a riot whenever he chose, as he had on the day of the tea party. Then, having created the news, he could spread it fast—in a form that was often untrue and always emotionally loaded—through his correspondence network.
But he seemed to know his limitations. In John Hancock, a rich young Boston merchant, Adams had a front man and a standing answer to his critics, who were always accusing him of rabble-rousing. For since the death of his father, Hancock was head of one of the top families in the town. Socially, he could not be challenged.
Boston’s two chief revolutionaries were a strange and even comic couple. Thirty-seven-year-old Hancock was vain and immaculate with a taste for beautifully tailored and elaborate clothes. He was quite a contrast with Adams, with his stained cloak, who was a main influence on his policies and speeches.
The British saw Adams as a fortune hunter, exploiting the militant patriot movement for personal gain, a motive with which they could at least sympathize. His “political existence,” Captain William Evelyn was to write a few months later, “depends on the continuance of the present dispute and [he] must sink into insignificance and beggary the moment it ceases.”
Even though Adams pretended that he did not seek a formal break with the King, aiming only to change British policy, his aims were nothing less than outright revolution; he was far more extreme than most members of the Massachusetts Assembly, which, elected democratically, reflected all shades of political view. But Parliament’s strong reaction to the tea party had swayed many of the moderate representatives at least some of the way toward supporting Adams.
By the time Gage arrived in America Adams had already made his initial plans for the confrontation he knew would come after the tea party he had organized; at his urging, the Assembly had ordered the commissary general to buy 500 barrels of gunpowder to be stored in Boston and Charlestown just across the mouth of the Charles River to the north of the port. Ostensibly the purpose was for “His Majesty’s safety in the service of the Province.” But the British knew the real reason. Throughout Massachusetts, as a result of Adam’s rebellious activities, the people in the country towns had been learning to use firearms. Military companies were being organized.
The Boston Port Bill, which the town press had published on May 10, flared the crisis. Even Adams was said to be astonished by the severity of the act and its effective potential for punishment. Many of the city’s inhabitants were clearly going to starve unless he could develop some kind of emergency plan.
Watched carefully by the administration, the politician moved fast. As soon as he heard the news, he summoned meetings of the selectmen, the elected officials who ran Boston, and the Committees of Correspondence of eight nearby towns to consider how they could retaliate against the “injustice and cruelty” of the Port Act.
On Friday, May 13, the day that Lively sailed into the harbor to anchor off Castle William, Adams took the chair at two meetings held one after the other in a public building named Faneuil Hall.
Plans materialized fast, but Adams did not have everything his own way. He was challenged by a group of Tories.
Both in politics and in religion, America was divided—as Britain was divided, in a slightly different way—into Whigs and Tories. The divisions were subtle, and the nature of each party varied greatly in different colonies. The distinction, already the cause of bitter enmity that was soon to grow into impassioned and vicious hatred, was more a matter of philosophy, an attitude of mind, than basic policy.
For there was remarkably little disagreement at this time between the two on the fundamental colonial political issues. Virtually all Americans were both loyal to the Crown—their quarrel being with Parliament rather than the King—and opposed to British taxation in the colonies. The dispute arose not so much in the argument itself as in the way it should be handled.
By and large, the Tories were conservative in their views and worshiped in the Anglican churches that were run by an organized hierarchy of bishops with loose links to the Church of England. Many Tories were wealthy; many held Crown appointments. They were not all rich. But intellectually and emotionally they supported the colonial government. There was a tendency for them to fashion their lives around a British pattern.
The Whigs, on the other hand, were progressives. Because they favored change, they inevitably attracted the less affluent, who would be likely to benefit from such change. But they also had many wealthy men among their supporters—such as the powerful Livingstone family in New York and John Hancock in Boston. And not by chance were most Whigs nonconformist Presbyterians who, unlike the centralized near-British Anglican system, ran their own houses of worship through local elders.
From the start, when the Sons of Liberty, the radical extremist end of the Whigs, began to promote trade embargoes to make Britain to change its policies, it was the Tories who had to be “persuaded” to cooperate. As a result, they had learned by painful practical experience that in any plans to oppose the views of the Sons of Liberty it was wise to move with caution. The political situation in Boston, however, was changing fast. The British had clearly decided to act at last against the Faction, as Adams’ revolutionary group was known. Shiploads of British troops were on the Atlantic. The Tories could now afford to be bolder.
On that emotional Friday the thirteenth, however, they did not get far with their move to oppose Adams at the meetings in Boston. Their proposal that the town should solve the whole problem by paying the EIC for the destroyed tea—which conformed with the views of quite a number of “patriotic” Americans, including Benjamin Franklin—was soundly rejected. “It was,” according to a resolve, “unworthy even to notice the humiliating offer.”
Instead, the meetings decided that the tactics which had been successful in the past should be employed once more, though this time on a much wider scale: a combined ban by the colonies of all trade with Britain.
Riders rode off to the Committees of Correspondence in all the provinces from New Hampshire in the north to Pennsylvania to the south. The letters they carried asked for aggressive cooperation in the ban on commerce.
That night, while Adams’ messengers were hurrying to the other colonies, General Gage at Castle William was still considering his plans. He was not the best candidate for the appointment that the King could have chosen. With his tall military figure and a round face featured by a small weak mouth, he was a good-natured, unimaginative professional soldier. Everybody liked him. Even most of the Faction liked him. But he lacked the subtlety and the strength and the sense of fast maneuver that the situation would soon demand. Worse, in crises he vacillated, and Boston at this time needed firm and careful control.
When he arrived, he had been in some doubt about the way he should interpret his instructions. But his advisers, who had now been enduring insults from the Boston mob for years, were all hard-liners. They urged him to execute his orders to the letter, and this is what he did.
By royal command, he announced that Massachusetts’ two legislative houses would meet until further notice outside Boston, at Salem, a town near the sea about 10 miles up the coast. He employed his power as royal governor of the province to veto no fewer than thirteen members of the Council, the executive body that ruled the colony. Since Council appointments were drawn in the main from the elected Massachusetts Assembly, with this one autocratic stroke he removed all the troublesome members of Adams’ Faction from the government.
Then he ordered the real punishment for the audacious raid on the tea ships in December, the measures that would really bite on the people of Boston: At noon on June 1, with the bells of the town tolling protest, the port was closed formally. The commissioners of customs moved to Salem. The warships took up their stations. No vessels were allowed to enter the harbor, and those there already were given two weeks’ notice to leave.
Boston Harbor, serving as an estuary for several rivers, was a large bay, protected to the north and to the south by curling promontories of land. For centuries, the shores had been beaten by Atlantic seas and eroded by rivers flooding down from the hills of New Hampshire and Vermont. Now it was rugged and broken, scarred with inlets, splintered away into islands and near islands. The town itself was on a small peninsula connected to the mainland only by a narrow neck of land. So, too, was Charles-town.
Gage ruled that the act applied to all traffic within the harbor. No boats, except the ferry, could operate between Charlestown and Boston. No goods could be transported to the islands.
Boston became a ghost port. “Our wharfs,” wrote Bostonian John Andréws a few days later, “are entirely deserted; not a topsail to be seen, save the ships of war. . . .”
Against this show of sheer force, there was little the angry Samuel Adams could do for the time being. “The violent party seems to break and people fall off from them . . . ,” Gage had written jauntily to Dartmouth two days earlier. “Many are impatient for the arrival of the troops and I am told that people will then speak and act openly, which they dare not do now.”
The request for cooperation carried by Adams’ messengers to the other provinces had not been entirely successful. There had been plenty of sympathy, but, as Gage reported home happily, the trade embargo, which would, of course, hurt American merchants, too, had met opposition. Philadelphia had declared a day of mourning on June 1, with a stoppage of business and a muffled tolling of bells. But it had sent back Adams’ messenger, a man named Paul Revere; why not pay for the tea? suggested the Committee of Correspondence. New York, too, decided not to go along with the radical suggestions from Boston.
However, the response to the starvation threat resulting from the closing of the port was universal. Food and money were dispatched to Boston from all over the American colonies to help the thousands who were now unemployed. Hundreds of wagons lumbered into the town. Sheep, cattle, rice, corn, flour and potatoes arrived in the port to be distributed by the Faction-controlled Committee of Ways and Means that sat daily at Faneuil Hall.
Meanwhile, Adams, as clerk to the Assembly, won a big move. He lulled Gage into believing that he was conceding that the power of the King was too great for him; then, when the governor was least expecting it, he had the door of the house locked, so that no member could leave, and proposed a motion that all the American provinces should be invited to join Massachusetts in a general congress.
Gage, receiving an urgent warning while the Assembly was still in session, promptly sent his secretary to dissolve it. But the locked door kept him out, and the motion was passed and five delegates were appointed to represent the province. Among them were Samuel Adams and his distant cousin John Adams, an affluent Boston attorney who was destined to become a leader of the revolutionary movement.
On June 14 the first of the troop convoys from Britain sailed into the harbor. Under the sullen stares of Boston’s unemployed, scarlet-coated British soldiers, with their standards fluttering in the wind and their bands playing, marched once more through the streets of the town. Their tents were pitched in lines on Boston Common. Teams of horses hauled artillery and ammunition wagons over the cobbled roads of the port.
Other transports were not far away. British soldiers were converging on Boston from New York, from Canada and from Britain. Almost every week new lines of tents were pegged out on Boston Common.
Early in July, Hugh, Earl Percy, son of the powerful Duke of Northumberland, arrived at the port to act as second-in-command of the troops under General Gage. A new admiral came, too. Samuel Graves, bombastic, touchy, blinkered, sailed into the bay in a big new flagship, HMS Preston, to replace John Montagu.
Inevitably, there were incidents between the British troops, strolling through the streets of the town in their off-duty hours, and the Bostonians. The town citizens taunted the “bloodybacks,” and the soldiers sneered back. Fights were frequent.
Gage and his commanders, who believed that most of the people of Massachusetts were loyal to the King but frightened of the Faction, did their utmost to damp down the sparks in a situation that was clearly inflammable. Complaints were received with courtesy; soldiers were punished when they seemed at fault.
Despite these placatory efforts, the tension in Boston rose. Cautiously, Gage ordered all transports to stay in the harbor instead of returning to England and warned General Frederick Haldimand, British C in C in New York, that he might send them down to him for more reinforcements.
At the same time, Admiral Graves had all the small boats collected from the Boston shores and kept them moored around his flagship.
As the numbers of troops encamped on the Common were growing, the rumors that the governor would soon order the arrest of Adams and Hancock spread. Defiantly, the Committee of Correspondence announced that it would continue to attend to business unless “prevented by brute force.” Gage was indeed considering arresting them, but the chief justice advised that the time was not yet suitable. In the taut climate of Boston, it would be certain to spark off a massive riot that could well spread beyond the town. There were still only 3,000 troops in the port, relatively few to handle trouble on any scale.
Since arrests seemed inadvisable, Gage tried to bribe Adams. Hutchinson had already attempted this and explained incredulously to friends in London, where political horse trading was not unusual, that “such is the obstinacy and inflexible disposition of the man that he never would be conciliated by any office or gift whatever.”
Gage had no better response. When the colonel he sent offered Adams anything “that would be satisfactory to him”—and warned that his conduct made him liable to transportation to England to stand trial—the demagogue snarled at him that the governor should cease insulting “the feelings of an exasperated people.”4
Gage was forced to resort to more regular measures to control the situation that was fast deteriorating. For Adams was pressing ahead fast with his plans to enforce the embargo on British trade throughout Massachusetts and had developed a highly emotive way of so doing. Throughout the province, bands of men directed by the Committees of Correspondence were demanding that everyone should sign a “solemn League and Covenant” not to buy or consume any merchandise imported from Britain—or to allow anyone else to. It took a brave man to refuse.
The moment the governor heard about Adams’ tactics, he rushed out a proclamation condemning the covenant as criminal and ordered all magistrates to bring to trial anyone who signed it. But by then the magistrates were already having enough difficulty in conducting the normal business of the courts, without the added burden of organizing what would inevitably be thousands of arrests.
On August 6 the warship HMS Scarborough had sailed into Boston Harbor from England. Its captain carried formal instructions to the Governor designed to bring Massachusetts under direct British control.
Under the new acts of Parliament, the province was to be ruled under a new system. The Assembly was still to be elected by vote, but its powers, already curbed by the sharp use of the governor’s veto, had been emasculated. The Council, appointed heretofore by the Assembly, would now be nominated directly by the King. Rioters would be sent back to England for trial. Town meetings, which were essential to Adams, were banned unless prior permission had been given by the governor.
Among the documents brought to Gage by the captain of the Scarborough was the list of the members of the new Council appointed by the throne.
Promptly, the Committee of Correspondence took action. As soon as the governor’s messengers had ridden off to inform the new councillors of the honor the King had done them, large groups of angry men marched on their homes to persuade them it would be healthy to reject the new commissions.
Immediately, eleven of the men on the King’s list explained to the governor why they could not accept seats on the Council. During the next few weeks, the rest were forced to do the same—or to accept round-the-clock protection of British troops.
In the lawcourts the situation was no better. Mobs moved into the courtrooms. Trials were stopped. Judges and sheriffs were forced to sign documents agreeing to conduct no business. At Great Barrington, angry men hurled the judges from the bench. Even in Boston, where British soldiers ensured there was no violence, the jurors at the High Court refused to be sworn.
Propaganda against the British and the new acts was poured out constantly. Cartoons lampooned “Tom Gage.” “Rule Britannia” was rewritten with patriot verses. The Whig press maintained a running harangue. Even the Presbyterian pulpits were exploited in the cause, some ministers threatening damnation to those of their congregation who did not sign the Solemn League and Covenant.
Meanwhile, on August 10, in full view of the regiments on Boston Common, the five delegates of the Massachusetts Assembly to the General Congress that Samuel Adams had proposed climbed into an elegant coach they had been lent for the trip. With four armed outriders and two black servants in livery traveling on the back of the coach, they clattered along the mall that skirted the Common on their way toward the mainland—and Philadelphia, which had been selected as the meeting place. The Congress was, of course, illegal, but Gage took no action to stop the coach from leaving; it would have been almost as provocative as arresting Samuel Adams himself.
Massachusetts was in a state of anarchy. There was no effective Council and few courts. Everyone was waiting for the inevitable clash. Gage continued to carry out his instructions as well as he could. He tried to replace those Council members who had been forced to refuse their seats; he made a determined attempt to stop the now-illegal town meetings. The day before leaving for Philadelphia, Samuel Adams had presided at a town meeting in Faneuil Hall. Gage sent for the selectmen and warned them this had been against the law. They argued that it was not a new meeting, but an old one—started but not adjourned before the act was effective.
This was typical Adams—and far too technical for the governor. He bought time and referred the matter to his law officers. When a meeting was held right under his nose at Danvers, his countryseat near Salem, and kept sitting long after its business was completed in the hope he would break it up, Gage is reported to have said, “Damn them, I won’t do anything about it until His Majesty sends me some more troops.”
Meanwhile, other meetings were taking place throughout Massachusetts at every level from the villages to the country towns, all planning resistance to the new acts. Express riders were constantly on the move across the province with messages from one committee to another.
Gradually, the local meetings escalated toward a central assembly of delegates from all Massachusetts. On August 26 the Committees of Correspondence of four counties met in Faneuil Hall in Boston. They decreed that “since no power on earth had the right, without the consent of this province, to alter the minutest tittle of its charter,” Parliament’s new laws were unconstitutional. For this reason, it was resolved, a provincial congress should take over the government of the colony. Until then, the courts should be opposed, and any officer attempting to hold them, or anyone attempting to execute the new acts, should be declared a traitor and ostracized. Finally, “to secure the rights of the people . . . the military arts should be attentively practiced.”
If there were any doubts that the country was on the verge of revolution, these resolves removed them. Throughout Massachusetts, they came to be regarded as a basis for action.
Wearily, Gage reported home to Lord Dartmouth about his impossible situation. His early buoyant optimism had vanished. “It is agreed,” he wrote, “that popular fury has never been greater in this province than at this time, and it has taken its rise from the old source at Boston. . . . Those demagogues trust their safety in the long forbearance of Government. . . . They chicane, elude, openly violate, or passively resist the laws as opportunities serve. . . .”
He also warned that “commotions” had spread to Connecticut and emphasized that if matters became any worse, they would be faced with the problem of controlling two colonies, not just Massachusetts.
The confrontation came faster than even he expected—within days, in fact, of his letter home. On the last day in August he was tipped off by a Tory in Cambridge that powder stored in Charlestown, and owned by the people of Massachusetts, was being distributed through the country.
At dawn the next morning 260 British soldiers marched from the common, down Queen Street and King Street, to the Long Wharf and onto thirteen landing barges. The boats headed north for Charlestown. By that afternoon the soldiers had loaded them with 250 barrels of powder—all that remained in the magazine on Charlestown’s Quarry Hill. Meanwhile, troops had marched to Cambridge, taken possession of two cannon that had just arrived in the town and returned to Boston.
Both operations had been quietly and efficiently conducted. There had been no resistance. No shots had been fired. By that night, however, to the surprise of the governor, signal bonfires were burning on the hilltops. He soon heard of the rumors outside the town. The troops’ little expeditions had been exaggerated wildly into something far more serious: Boston had been bombarded by the warships in the harbor.
And he knew that the beacons on the hills would be signaling the alert—ahead of the express riders—through a Connecticut that was already turbulent and on to New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where the delegates were gathering from all over America for the General Congress.
A crowd was collecting at Cambridge as the alarm, based on the false information, spread through the county. By the next morning there were 3,000 men on the common, and an additional 10,000 were reported to be on their way from the backcountry of Massachusetts.
Restless and tense, keen for action, the growing mob waited on the common uncertain what to do. Two judges, nominated by the King for the Council, were spotted passing by and surrounded—but released when they insisted that they had resigned their posts on the Council.
The crowd surged on the nearby home of Peter Oliver,5 chief justice and the new lieutenant governor. Oliver saw the danger and dispatched a rider at full speed to the governor, urging him on no account to send any troops to Cambridge. The mob was big and impatient. Any kind of military move against it would spark off a violent conflict.
Then he did what they asked. He signed a paper resigning from the Council. He even offered to give up his lieutenant governorship if they wanted him to. But this was declined. “We don’t want a better man than you,” mocked one of them.
Benjamin Hallowell, a commissioner of customs, was passing in his chaise, accompanied by a mounted black servant, on his way from Salem to his home in Roxbury, a Boston suburb, and made a derogatory comment about the rabble.
His remark was heard, and promptly a group was after him. Seeing the danger, Hallowell yelled to his servant to dismount, leaped on the horse and galloped desperately for Boston. When one of his pursuers drew level, he drew a pistol and fired. He missed, but as always, the incident was exaggerated as the story spread through that enormous crowd. A shot had been fired.
Meanwhile, anxious selectmen from both Boston and Charlestown were hurrying to Cambridge to quell the rumor that had started it all—that Boston had been bombarded. Already the crowd was far bigger than it had been in the morning; by night, according to advance reports of marching men, it would have grown to 50,000. Crude plans were developing to advance on Boston “like locusts and rid the town of every soldier.”
The selectmen calmed the crowd, but they did not disperse immediately. They sought out the local sheriffs and made them sign documents agreeing to serve no writs and call no juries. The idea, born in the meeting a week before in Faneuil Hall when the first plan of action was resolved, spread as at last they all went home. In other towns, too, the sheriffs were forced to sign undertakings that they would do no business.
But the men who had massed at Cambridge were only part of a total call to arms that was enveloping New England. The news of Boston’s bombardment was still being rushed south, uncorrected. Men, as Gage was fully aware, were marching north—reacting to the false news in exactly the same way as those who had assembled on Cambridge Common.
The governor of Massachusetts and the captain general of British forces in North America faced the facts. “The disease,” Gage was soon to write to Dartmouth, “was believed to have been confined to the town of Boston . . . but now it’s so universal there is no knowing where to apply a remedy.” He had been disturbed, too, by Oliver’s report that the men who massed at Cambridge were not all rabble but included farmers and property owners.
The last remnants of Gage’s civil administration were fast disappearing. His problems now were primarily military: how best to use his 3,000 soldiers. He decided on retrenchment. By concentrating his forces, he stood a good chance of defending Boston until, as he urged in a letter home, the King “resolved to stem the torrent” and put “a very respectable force” in the field.
So the government and the commissioners of customs moved back to Boston. So, too, did many of the leading Tories.
There Gage prepared for war. British guards were placed on all ammunition and guns of the Boston militia in the town. Teams of horses dragged cannon noisily through the cobbled streets to the narrow neck that joined Boston to the mainland—two big 24-pounders and eight 9-pounders that the gunners set up in a battery, so that they could fight off any advance on the town from the mainland. A regiment marched from the common to camp near the battery, and 200 soldiers began to erect fortifications. At night, military patrols toured the streets.
The warships were hauled in close to the town on all sides where depth permitted. Lines were run through their stern ports to the forward anchor cables, so that they could fast be swung around for the guns to bear.
The governor dispatched a message to New York: Nearly all regiments based there were to sail for Boston. Then he asked Governor Sir Guy Carleton in Quebec to send two regiments down from the St. Lawrence, which, with the natural protection of the hard Canadian winter about to set in, he should now be able to spare.
Meanwhile, alarming reports were flowing into the port from the South. In Connecticut,6 100,000 men were reported to be marching on Boston. Colonel Israel Putnam, one of the most celebrated soldiers in America, was riding at the head of 15,000. Among them were two sons of the colony’s governor.
Two days later, as a sense of crisis gripped the town, two soldiers from the Connecticut Light Horse rode slowly and dramatically across the neck, passed unchallenged by the battery, eyed the British soldiers on guard, and walked their horses through the town. They were reconnoitering for a cavalry regiment of 500. After satisfying themselves that there had been no bombardment, they rode quietly back to the mainland to report the news to their units.
Gradually, the news spread through the advancing men from Connecticut that they had been alerted by a false alarm, and they returned home. Even so, conflict had only just been avoided, and nothing in New England was ever the same again. It had been a kind of dress rehearsal. Men had mobilized in thousands against the British. The militant patriot movement had progressed beyond riots and impassioned speeches. It had created an army.
Psychologically, the alarm and the enormous response to it had produced a new situation. It had proved it could happen. Now resistance to the British became more aggressive.
This was true especially in Boston. For the next few days, the tension was so great that the smallest incident could have flared into fighting. Every time British soldiers marched away from the common, express messengers on round-the-clock intelligence duty rode the news into the country.
When Boston’s Honorable and Ancient Artillery Company marched innocently down Copp’s Hill near the Lively on her moorings close inshore, it caused a sudden flurry of alarm aboard the frigate. The crew went to battle stations. The gunports opened. The marines lined the upper deck with loaded muskets.
In a long and alarmed dispatch sent to London on board the Scarborough on September 9 Gage reported his new situation to Dartmouth. It would be months before he could receive any new orders or even any more troops. Meanwhile, he tried to retain what little control he still had by playing a waiting game. He was excessively cordial to the Boston selectmen and even the Faction members who came to see him, although he continued accusing them in his letters home of every kind of trickery to maintain anti-British resentment among the public.
Writing home to his friend Lord Barrington, the Secretary for War, Gage urged him to press the government to repeal the new acts—not because this would remove the cause of the revolt but because it would provide time to raise the big army he was convinced was necessary.
For all the governor’s efforts to be pleasant to them, the selectmen pressed him angrily to remove the battery and fortifications on Boston Neck. He was, they complained, turning the port into a garrison, and they appealed to Philadelphia, where delegates to the General Congress from all the American provinces except Georgia were still in secret session, for support in their quarrel with the governor. In October, Randolph Peyton, president of the Congress, wrote to Gage. Boston’s inhabitants, he said, suspected him of planning to “overthrow the liberties of America.” If he would remove the fortifications on the neck, it would “quiet the minds . . . and reasonable jealousies of the people.”
Gage realized that as usual the situation had been exaggerated by the skilled publicists of the Faction. Peyton’s complaint was phrased in a way that suggested that the guns on the neck were threatening the Boston citizens. He sent back a spirited reply, colored by poetic touches. Insisting that “there is not a single gun planted against the town,” he attacked the Faction. “I ardently hope . . . ,” he said, “that the common enemies to both countries may see to their disappointment that these disputes between the mother country and the colonies have terminated like the quarrels of lovers. . . .”
As a hope, it was as romantic as its language. The General Congress passed his letter to the very men he was attacking.
As it had planned in August, the Massachusetts Assembly had turned itself into a Provincial Congress and had moved from Salem to Concord, 18 miles inland from Boston. Its president was the elegant revolutionary, John Hancock.
In a furious answer to the governor’s letter to Randolph Peyton, Hancock accused him of “imprisoning the many thousands of inhabitants of Boston” and of perverting his powers as governor “to ruin and enslave the Province.”
It was all pure Adams, designed to keep public emotions roused when it was published in the press and to justify the actions of the Congress. For they were now concerned with far more spectacular matters—such as reorganizing the militia, raising funds to set up magazines to supply it and mounting emergency plans: One-quarter of the force, the Minutemen, was to be ready to mobilize within hours of the call to arms.
A Committee of Safety was formed to take fast executive action if there was no time to summon a meeting of Congress.
This was the most organized challenge that Gage had yet encountered, and he was impotent to meet it. He sent out a proclamation ordering all “His Majesty’s liege subjects” to disobey the resolves of the “unlawful assembly,” but nobody took any notice. The drilling continued on village greens throughout Massachusetts—and Connecticut and Rhode Island.
Under this new surge of militancy, the new danger of a military clash grew far more imminent. Regularly, regiments of British troops marched across the neck and into the country, then turned about and marched right back again. Gage wanted the presence of British soldiers to be a normal sight in the villages. Then if ever he had to send them out for a specific purpose, at least it would not seem unusual.
And every time the troops moved out of Boston on these innocent forays, they were shadowed constantly. Expresses rode ahead of them—just in case the time had come.
Meanwhile, news of trouble from other New England colonies came streaming into Province House. The governor of New Hampshire reported that, following the arrival of a messenger named Paul Revere from Boston, 400 men had assaulted Castle William and Mary, the royal fortress at Portsmouth. All the ammunition, cannon and small arms were seized. Another raid at New Castle on the Piscataqua River was stopped only by the arrival of a British ship; even so, some of the cannon were taken. From Rhode Island came a report of an attack on Fort Island at Newport and the capture of its guns.
At the same time, in Boston, so Admiral Graves reported to London, the Sons of Liberty were making open plans to assault Castle William as soon as the water froze between the island and mainland, and to take it by sheer numbers. He suspected that attempts might also be made on the King’s ships.
It was December. The cold Massachusetts winter was setting in. There was nothing Gage could do but wait—and take action as the crisis flared. It was obvious that the whole of New England was on the verge of armed revolt. He had already reported the worsening situation to London in a series of urgent letters.
A schooner, named the St. Lawrence, was at that moment battling through the Atlantic gales carrying to England the rebellious resolves of the Provincial Congress and a dispatch from the governor that put the issue very clearly: If the King wanted to stop the revolt, then Gage needed an army of 20,000 men.