1775 (5 page)

As the North American rampart of the militant Protestantism so involved in England’s two earlier revolutions, New England stood to be—arguably
had
to be—the epicenter of the British imperial crisis of the 1770s. Where King George and his ministers erred was in underestimating the
American
nationalism growing in the other colonies, generated less by Boston’s provocative tea dumping than by the Crown’s overreaction. To many Patriot leaders, the Coercive Acts—in colonial parlance, the Intolerable Acts—reiterated the prerevolutionary arrogance and practices of Charles I before the English Civil War and of James II before the Glorious Revolution of 1688. But with or without the analogy, the result, as it had been in the previous century, was a growing revolutionary mindset.

On September 12, 1774, the military governor of Massachusetts,
Lieutenant-General Thomas Gage, unnerved by summer militia rallies and huge public demonstrations, shared his foreboding in a letter to the American secretary in London, Lord Dartmouth: “It is needless to trouble your Lordship with daily Publications of determined [local] resolutions not to obey the Late Acts of Parliament…The Country People are exercising in Arms in this Province, Connecticut and Rhode Island, and getting Magazines of Arms and Ammunition…and such Artillery as they can procure, good or bad…People are resorting to this town [Boston] for Protection…even [from] Places always esteemed well affected…and Sedition flows copiously from the Pulpits. The Commissioners of Customs have thought it no longer safe or prudent to remain at Salem…and are amongst others come into the Town [Boston], where I am obliged likewise now to reside on many accounts.”
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Intermittently optimistic in late spring and early summer, Gage now admitted the truth: New England was all but out of control.

The Bay Colony, proud of its early self-government and charters dating back to 1629, had since May been occupied by four additional regiments of British troops sent to enforce the Boston Port Act and the companion Massachusetts Government Act. These two statutes stood out among the five acts urged by George III and enacted by Parliament between March and June 1774.
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Designed not just as punishment for December’s Boston Tea Party, these measures were also expected to caution and humble the other colonies. Instead, the prevalent response was radicalization.

Although the punishment of Massachusetts included installing army commander Gage as governor, by winter neither office gave him any real punitive reach. The farmers of the colony’s interior, less concerned about tea or even the Boston Port Act—this closed Boston harbor to shipping until the dumped tea was paid for—reacted quickly on learning of the colonywide scope of penalties imposed by the Massachusetts Government Act. The Massachusetts Charter of 1691 was eviscerated. Key provisions of the new statute all but eliminated town meetings, ended locally chosen juries, gave the governor sole power to appoint and remove judges, and transferred the selection of the Governor’s Council, the upper legislative house, from elected representatives to Crown appointees.

A third new statute, the Justice Act, inflamed matters further by interfering with traditional British concepts of trial by jury. Under this legislation, someone acting under Crown authority—customs officer, naval
captain, soldier, or county sheriff—who was charged with committing a capital crime in performance of his duty could have his trial moved from the province in which the act had been committed. The governor need only decide that no fair trial could be had locally. Concluding that soldiers could shoot and escape punishment, people in Massachusetts called it the “Murder Act,” an epithet echoed by George Washington and other conservative Virginians.
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The fourth statute, another Quartering Act, imposed soldiers on unwilling civilians.

The Quebec Act, unrelated but enacted more or less simultaneously, established the Catholic Church in French Canada, while also extending Quebec’s boundaries south to the Ohio River. This was a particular blow to the western territorial claims maintained by Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia under their seventeenth-century charters. Its religious dimension will be examined in
Chapter 3
; however, the enactment of new constraining and insulting borders was also a frontal challenge to incipient American manifest destiny.

As details crossed the Atlantic in June and July, indignation in Massachusetts deepened into confrontation. From Pittsfield in the western hills to Plymouth in the east, huge crowds in the 3,000-to-5,000-person range rallied in the colony’s principal shire towns to shut down what were now seen as corrupted and compromised local governments, courts in particular. In Worcester, the local militia—some arrayed in company formation and led by uniformed officers—paraded in support. Two thousand protesters thronged Worcester Common on August 26, and some 6,000, many armed, assembled on September 6, the day the court was to convene.
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What stunned Gage was that these were not a city mob but family men—farmers and yeomen. He and his councilors decided it would be too dangerous to send troops; those soldiers, indeed, might be needed to protect Boston. The huge demonstrations, besides closing the county courts, also frightened royal appointees singled out by the people into resigning their offices. Some fled to England. Lexington was still seven months away.

New England: The First Front Line

By October, an aroused Provincial Congress and the Committee of Safety, its executive arm, had taken de facto control throughout the colony save for occupied Boston. Military preparations were barely disguised. For his part, Gage had begun new fortifications. The eighteenth-century city was
virtually an island, connected to the mainland only by a thin neck of land, 30 yards wide at high tide. There the British built a fortified gate, emplaced cannon, and constructed minor outerworks. By the time they evacuated eighteen months later, the once-scrawny neck had turned into a miniature fortress.
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Both sides were ramping up.

Through early 1775, the embattled British general remained able to ferry or march troops within a 30-to-40-mile range. Two schooners were employed in January to send a company of regulars to Marshfield in the old Plymouth Colony. There they protected a fearful assemblage of Tories, to whom Gage had earlier sent arms. Then in February, 240 redcoats under Colonel Alexander Leslie quietly took ship to Marblehead, disembarked, and marched north to capture cannon and munitions stored in Salem, the province’s second seaport.

The outcome smacked of comic opera. Once the British column was spotted in Marblehead, Salem residents were warned just in time to move the sought-after cannon. When Leslie neared the town center, he found a drawbridge raised and behind it a considerable body of county militia. A local parson, advising the colonel that the cannon had already been dispersed, arranged an unusual bargain: Leslie agreed that if the bridge was lowered so that he could march across, fulfilling that part of his orders, he would in fact proceed only 50 rods. Then he would look around and march back, which is what he did.

By late March, with war in the unseasonably springlike air, Gage sent out scouting officers in civilian clothes. They reported back that any major expedition—plans had again focused on Worcester, the Patriots’ main arms depot 48 miles west of Boston—would be surrounded and overwhelmed, probably meaning war. In any event, hostilities began three weeks later on April 19, when a mixed force of 700 infantry and royal marines marched just sixteen miles west, acting under orders to take or destroy military stores closer at hand in Concord. Instead, after eight militiamen were killed on Lexington Green and a small quantity of stores and powder destroyed in Concord, the redcoats came under attack by thousands of swarming minutemen. They were, as every schoolchild knows, chased back to Boston with heavy casualties. War was beginning.

Little about these great events was altogether spontaneous. Several decades ago General John R. Galvin, former U.S. supreme commander in Europe and a skilled military analyst, published a volume about the Massachusetts forces entitled
The Minutemen.
Dismissing the “mythology” that
had “depicted them as a small but courageous band of farmers who responded to a spontaneous call to arms, an untrained and poorly armed rabble,” he set out different premises. Fourteen thousand Bay Colony men were “under arms in the militia and Minute Man regiments. They were alerted by organized alarm riders via a system that dated back to the 17th century wars. They had trained intensively for a year and were armed with the same type weapons as the British.”
¹⁰
One military historian has suggested that Massachusetts had the best-trained militia in British North America.
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Within days of Lexington and Concord, 20,000 Patriot militia from Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, as well as Massachusetts, encircled Boston. Then eight weeks later, on June 17, a second encounter, bloodier still, followed on the Charlestown peninsula across from Boston. The fighting actually took place on Breed’s Hill, but it was mislabeled for the ages with the name of nearby Bunker Hill, more elevated and slightly farther from Boston. The choice might have been made by Connecticut General Israel Putnam, who in the darkness of the previous night decided to fortify the lower-lying and less-advantageous position. But whether or not the motive of such in-your-face entrenchment was to bait the British into a frontal attack, that is what happened, as General Howe declined the flanking move that might have brought easy victory. With Breed’s only 800 yards across the Charles River from the city, large crowds watched from both Beacon Hill and Cobb’s Hill, site of the British artillery. Carefully dressed ranks of scarlet-clad infantry, grenadiers, and royal marines paraded uphill into withering fire from New Englanders with muskets and ancient fowling pieces, although not nearly enough gunpowder. After failing twice to overcome well-entrenched rebels, the king’s troops prevailed in a third advance only when the colonials ran out of ammunition. Even untouched British soldiers—a minority that day—returned to their boats with gaiters and leggings reddened to the knees by the hillside’s gore-spattered tall grass and weeds. Officer deaths, in particular, put grim black edges on survivors’ letters home. The number of British officers killed and wounded on June 17 represented a quarter of those officers killed and wounded during the entire Revolutionary War.

True, this is a familiar tale, the outline having long since entered American folklore. What the familiar tale generally omits is how much resentment had been building and over so long a time. Boston had been occupied by British regulars since 1768. As we will see in more detail, New England
by 1775 had become a sullen townscape of cannon hidden in hay barns and root cellars half filled with powder kegs. Its coast was a harborscape of sloops and schooners with crews long skilled at smuggling back desirable goods from the French, Spanish, and Dutch West Indies. Now gunpowder, flints, and muskets had replaced tea and taffetas. Town greens, for their part, had become muster grounds for the best-organized trained bands and militia since the men of Oliver Cromwell and England’s Eastern Association, many of whose great-great-grandsons and cousins three times removed now lived in New England.

Part of the April 19 legend is that Massachusetts militiamen, not British regulars, fired first on that fateful morning. Even some captured British officers, subsequently deposed for evidence, gave their own side the blame. That part of the legend is probably true, but either way, what exactly happened cannot be recreated. What we do know is that top Revolutionary leaders like Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren, president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, quickly implemented a domestic and foreign information-cum-propaganda campaign little short of brilliant.

In retrospect, Samuel Adams was essential to putting Massachusetts at the center of 1775’s Revolutionary universe. His fame produced comparisons in other colonies—Christopher Gadsden was the Sam Adams of South Carolina, Cornelius Harnett the Sam Adams of North Carolina, and Charles Thomson of Pennsylvania. Yet there was only one full-fledged arch-manipulator: Sam Adams. Silversmith Paul Revere became horseback herald to this puritan Machiavel and rode into immortality. Between 1773 and 1775, a handful of men coordinated, connected, and unfolded an insurgency that still cries out for an American Shakespeare. In later chapters, we will watch the dramatic sequence of connected acts—the Boston Tea Party, the huge 1774 civil rights demonstrations (for so they were) in the shire towns, that September’s great Powder Alarm, the Suffolk Resolves, Revere’s ride to Philadelphia, the Resolves’ not-so-coincidental embrace by the First Continental Congress, the ensuing mobilization of New England, April’s hallowed militiamen, and the immortalization of Lexington and Concord into the shot heard round the world.

It was a triumph of communications as much as Revolutionary ideology. We must remember that the First Continental Congress, during the autumn of 1774, had specified that the other colonies’ support for Boston, if and when blows came, would depend on the British being the aggressors and having fired first; Adams and Warren both knew that irrefutable proof
would be essential. So within a few days of the shots that had not yet been heard around the other colonies, no less the world, local justices of the peace had taken statements from roughly 100 eyewitnesses, including captured British soldiers. Warren then prefaced and packaged them for maximum effect, and the reins passed to a Massachusetts-to-Georgia chain of couriers and fresh horses. One especially vivid description captured the speed: “The newspapers, all of them weeklies, published their stories, borrowing liberally from each other and embroidering the apocryphal details of atrocities. On the Monday after the battle, accounts were in the Connecticut and New York papers; on Wednesday, in the Pennsylvania papers; on Thursday, in those of Maryland; on Saturday, in Dixon & Hunter’s
Virginia Gazette;
and on through to the Carolinas, until the news reached the
Georgia Gazette
in Savannah. Many of the papers, unwilling to wait for their weekly publication date, got out handbills as soon as the news was received.”
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We will come back to the ripple effect of
rage militaire
in a few pages.