1775 (55 page)

Gunpowder, in retrospect, seems to have transcended its usual wartime role to become a touchstone of American patriotic fulfillment and hoped-for nationhood. In February or March 1774, there had been no such preoccupation, even in tense Massachusetts. In early September, though, the first emergency rallying of Patriot militia powerful enough to cross provincial lines followed the famous “powder alarm”—the false rumors of a British attack on Boston that somehow grew out of General Gage’s sending troops to remove the last supply, all “king’s powder,” from the provincial magazine in Charlestown. The First Continental Congress had just convened, and the overblown “alarm” excited warlike psychologies—“war, war, war was the cry,” recalled John Adams, and “if it had been true, you would have heard the thunder of an American Congress.”
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The belligerence coalescing in Philadelphia further supported the Privy Council action of October 19 to curb war matériel exports to America and the British naval and diplomatic implementations that followed. When
news of the council’s edict reached America in December, New Englanders responded in kind—Patriots in both New Hampshire and Rhode Island broke into royal forts and magazines to take powder, arms, and cannon.

Orders from Lord Dartmouth kept gunpowder front and center. The redcoats obliged to retreat from Lexington and Concord had marched to seize military stores there. In early 1775, the American secretary had told the governors under his department to “take the most effectual measures to arresting, detaining and securing any Gunpowder, or any sort of Arms or Ammunitions which may be attempted to be imported into the province under your government.”
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Like New England, the plantation colonies smelled repression in the air. On April 21, as we have seen, a secret committee of the South Carolina Provincial Congress ordered the seizure of magazines in the Charleston area. A day earlier, Lord Dunmore’s nighttime use of a naval landing party to remove local gunpowder stores caused a small riot in Williamsburg. Independent companies in nearby Virginia counties gathered to march on the capital.

Note the confrontational overlap: April 19 in Massachusetts, April 20 in Virginia, and April 21 in South Carolina, with no colony aware of what had taken place in the other two. Chests and bags of unwanted English tea were no longer the focus; barrels and bags of powder were supplanting them.

Less publicized but related events took place elsewhere in the South. Liberty Boys in Savannah took 600 pounds of powder from that town’s magazine, while North Carolina Patriots demanded the cannon mounted in front of the governor’s palace.
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On July 10, as we have seen, Georgia and South Carolina colluded to capture a British supply vessel with eight tons of gunpowder, and in August South Carolinians, borrowing a convenient ship, ambushed another British supply ship off St. Augustine in Loyalist East Florida. This yielded another six tons of the
unum necessarium.

Although munitions alone did not explain the seizure of Ticonderoga and Crown Point, ordnance played a role. As
Chapter 21
will amplify, the first plans laid in Hartford and Boston cited cannon in particular. Quebec and Montreal drew related attention. For some weeks, General Washington thought that Quebec might provide the munitions, mortars, and 24-pound and 32-pound cannon he needed to drive the British out of Boston. In addition to Generals Montgomery and Schuyler mentioning the powder stocks at Fort Niagara, Samuel Adams noted in a September letter that the surrender of Fort Chambly near Montreal, a minor post, had resulted in the acquisition of 124 barrels.
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Besides Canada, two other early expeditions targeted powder supplies elsewhere in the empire. Patriot sympathizers in Bermuda, which required provisions from America, struck a bargain, and on August 14, 1775, the island’s powder magazine was reported “broken into.” About 100 barrels of powder were ferried to vessels from Virginia and South Carolina conveniently waiting off shore. As for the Bahamas, after a summer expedition from South Carolina had been postponed, eight vessels of the new American navy under Captain Esek Hopkins of Rhode Island finally reached New Providence on March 1, 1776, and captured 71 cannon, 15 mortars, substantial ordnance equipment, and 24 casks of gunpowder, missing more than 100 casks that Governor Montfort Brown had been able to move.
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The efforts by Congress and a half dozen provinces to produce the saltpeter needed for gunpowder were less rewarding. The delegates in Philadelphia during those hectic May and June days, heeding advice from Virginians and Marylanders, sent out printed recommendations that encouraged the retrieval of “nitrous salt” from the earthen floors of buildings and yards where tobacco had been stored. John Adams was more taken with Pennsylvania methods: “Germans and others here have an opinion that every stable, Dove house, Cellar, Vault, etc., is a Mine of Salt Petre…The mold under stables, etc., may be boiled into salt Petre it is said. Numbers are about it here.”
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Massachusetts had begun production in December 1774; Virginia started in March 1775. Then Connecticut began in May, followed in June by New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. In the two and a half years after Lexington and Concord, Americans produced some 115,000 pounds of gunpowder from saltpeter extracted locally, or somewhat over 55 tons.
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These numbers were not impressive, and so little was produced during the spring and summer of 1775 that the scientifically minded Benjamin Franklin grew discouraged enough to contemplate a resort to bows and arrows.
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Considering what English longbow men did to advancing French knights and foot soldiers in battles like Crécy and Agincourt, serious damage might have been done to the advancing British at Bunker Hill—albeit not by unskilled Americans who lacked the necessary years of training. Parenthetically, the dearth of bayonets among the rebels at Bunker Hill led to suggestions that they might be issued spears or halberds—medieval pole arms. General Artemas Ward ordered 1,500 spears, and many were kept ready for use in the trenches around Boston. Generals Charles Lee and
Horatio Gates were reported “very fond of a Project for procuring Pikes and Pike Men.”
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By June and July 1775, impatience to obtain gunpowder (or saltpeter) converged on Congress from every direction. Whatever might eventually be scraped out of Virginia tobacco warehouses or Pennsylvania dovecotes, the Revolution’s immediate needs were clear: gunpowder and saltpeter would have to be imported.

By a resolution dated July 15 but not publicized until October, Congress authorized for nine months a partial suspension of the nonexportation agreement hammered out the previous autumn. This was to permit individuals and firms to ship American produce—tobacco, rice, provisions, and the like—to purchase and import munitions. Historians have further interpreted this to authorize any vessel bringing war stores to the United Colonies to take away their worth in prime crops and goods.
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However, as the munitions crisis worsened during July and August, even bolder measures became necessary. On September 18, 1775, as British-versus-American encounters at sea grew, the Congress established a nineteen-member Committee of Secret Correspondence empowered to import 1 million pounds of powder, 10,000 muskets, and 40 brass six-pounder field pieces, all to be paid for with funds drawn on the Continental treasury.
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Congress also appointed scores of commercial agents in Europe and the West Indies to drum up trade. Many members of the Secret Committee were merchants, and many of the contracts went to their friends, to relatives—and indeed, to themselves. But within months, gunpowder started to flow in larger quantities.

On October 26, Congress asked the individual colonies to arrange shipments of salable products overseas in exchange for “arms, ammunition, sulphur and salt-petre.” Samuel Adams explained the new guidelines to a friend: “No Provisions or Produce is to be exported from any of the united colonies to any part of the World till the first of March [1776] except for the Importation of the
Unum Necessarium
and for supplys from one Colony to another.”
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In fact, some colonies like Maryland and Pennsylvania had already embarked on such activities—sending agents to Nantes and Caribbean ports like Cap Français and St. Eustatius.
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By 1776, according to one analysis, Virginia had some seven vessels making “powder cruises,” North Carolina traded produce for munitions from Bermuda to Martinique, and Massachusetts had 32 ships—some sporting French names—carrying munitions to Europe and the West Indies.
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Connecticut had begun similar
voyages in late 1774 under the aegis of New London merchant Nathaniel Shaw, Jr., who later became the state’s naval agent.

The munitions trade was big business. By 1776, the Dutch powder mills in Middleburg and the Zaan industrial district were running at full production to meet the needs of the Americans and orders from France and Spain. British officials vented their frustration over lack of interception by the Royal Navy and ineffectual diplomatic pressures by suggesting innovative pressure tactics. One was to cut off the essential water supplies provided to bone-dry St. Eustatius by nearby British St. Kitts. A second would end the saltpeter exports to Holland from British Bengal.
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In France, as a few historians have elaborated, support for America came from many sources and arrangements long before Beaumarchais’s overt activities bore fruit in 1776.
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The firm of Montaudouin in Nantes was especially prominent. It had close relations with Americans, partly through the city’s importance in the slave trade. Two other merchants of Nantes, Pierre Penet and Emanuel Pliarne, visited Washington in Cambridge in late 1775 and produced arms by the shipload in 1776. Jean-François Delaville in Nantes was second only to Montaudouin in that seaport’s fast-growing American trade.

Two other Frenchmen are mentioned with some frequency. Scholar Jacques Barbeau-Dubourg, a close friend of Franklin’s, based in Paris, was in frequent touch with Vergennes in 1774 and 1775 and may have arranged many of Montaudouin’s shipments.
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Donatien Le Rey de Chaumont, also based in Paris, was a principal supplier to the French army and a confidant of Vergennes’s. He and Dubourg are the two mostly widely described within France, along with Beaumarchais, as “French Fathers of the American Revolution.”

A vital behind-the-scenes contribution was made by Philippe Tronson de Coudray, an artillery officer detailed by the war ministry in 1775 to go through France’s ten or so arsenals. His task was to decide what munitions and arms could be earmarked for America if and when the time came.
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And dozens of individual Frenchmen were enticed by Congress’s summer-1775 decision to offer shiploads of American produce to those who brought a shipload of war matériel.

False papers were widely used. Scores of ships from the thirteen colonies put in at French or French colonial ports in 1775, received munitions on board, and then made quick changes of nationality. They took on French masters, who had bills of sale conveying the vessel in question. Sometimes
the crews were also French. These practices infuriated British naval officers, and formal complaints were sent to the French governor of Guadeloupe in 1775. The French, in turn, were angered when British warships improperly entered French waters.

Many of these efforts achieved important results well before Beaumarchais’s much-noted 1776 success in helping persuade Louis XVI to fund Roderigue, Hortalez et Cie and enlarge the flow of munitions and armaments across the Atlantic. Still, Beaumarchais’s 1776–1777 contribution was huge. According to one calculation, by September 1777 he had provided arms and uniforms for 30,000 men, 300,000 muskets (fusils), and 100 tons of powder, as well as 200 brass cannon.
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It is appropriate to conclude with a gunpowder statistic. From April 19, 1775, through the autumn of 1777, roughly 90 percent of the 2.35 million pounds of powder available to the American rebels was imported or made from imported saltpeter.
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By contrast, only 195,000 pounds were either on hand when the Revolution began or were manufactured from internal sources of saltpeter. As we have seen, the thirteen did better during those early years in forging (or capturing) cannon. Small-arms production fell in between. Still, at one point in 1775, Pennsylvania was desperate enough to run newspaper advertising offering to buy muskets.

Few portions of the Revolution have been less saluted, but obtaining gunpowder from European governments and merchants, a global quest that ranged from the Baltic to Africa, from coastal Maine to Spanish New Orleans, was the unsung battle that had to be fought before the Revolution itself could be undertaken and won.