America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (17 page)

Each heavy-handed British reaction only seemed to strengthen pa-

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triot resolve. Parliament’s vindictiveness also heightened sympathy for Massachusetts among the other colonies, which began shipping food and supplies to beleaguered Boston in a show of solidarity. When news of this reached England, King George and Parliament simply ratch-eted up the tensions by extending the Quartering Act to all of the colonies in June 1774 and shutting other colonial ports. It was the news of these royal reactions reaching Virginia’s legislature that prompted delegate Patrick Henry to rise and proclaim, “Give me liberty, or give me death.”

The draconian British response to the Tea Party had also been one reason the First Continental Congress had convened in Philadelphia in September 1774, a meeting largely inspired by Samuel Adams.

Taking his lead, the Continental Congress approved an embargo resolution, halting all trade with Great Britain, Ireland, and the West Indies. All but the most radical Americans still hoped that an economic war could avert a shooting war.

But the point was moot. Plans for a shooting war were already being laid. Well before the Egg Plot had fizzled on that March 1775 night, a Committee of Safety, formed by Adams and other patriot leaders, was training an extralegal militia under the direction of wealthy merchant John Hancock. Calling themselves “minutemen,” the best of these militia fighters were prepared to be ready for action in sixty seconds. Across Massachusetts and in other New England colonies, other groups of militiamen began stockpiling weapons and gunpowder.

In a daring provocation to British power, hundreds of New Hampshire men had descended on Fort William and Mary, in Portsmouth Harbor, and seized muskets, cannons, shot, and a hundred barrels of gunpowder on December 14, 1774, nearly a year to the day after the Tea Party. Warned by patriot rider and spymaster Paul Revere that a | 136 \

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large British force was moving to secure the munitions, the four hundred New Hampshire militiamen assaulted the fort, garrisoned by a handful of invalid British soldiers, too ill or injured for regular duty, in what might truly be called the first battle of the American Revolution, albeit a bloodless one. There were no casualties more severe than a bloodied nose and some bruised British egos.

As word of this audacious attack on British might and sovereignty spread, thousands more minutemen descended on New Hampshire’s chief port, to the astonishment of the British. Patriot militias in several other New England towns and ports soon did the same, attacking and confiscating powder and guns from British armories. To General Gage, New England was essentially in open rebellion. Urgently requesting reinforcements, he wrote late in 1774 to surprised officials in London, “If you think ten thousand men sufficient, send twenty; if one million is thought enough, give two; you save both blood and treasure in the end.” This was a far cry from the easy assurances that had earlier been voiced in Parliament, when it was scoffingly suggested that a few British regulars would quickly send any ill-trained and inexperienced Americans flying from the field at the first cannon shot.

Lost powder and the volunteers flocking to join the American insurgency were not General Gage’s only vexing problems. Gage, who had been back in England when word of the Boston Tea Party reached London, thought he knew America. And even if he didn’t especially like a great many Americans, he had married one, a beautiful New Jersey heiress, Margaret Kemble. Having invested wisely in property in the North American colonies and the West Indies, Thomas Gage had become a wealthy man, and he believed that peace and prosperity went hand in hand. Hoping to avoid war, Gage had recommended most of the Coercive Laws, believing that a stiff show of resolve would | 137 \

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break the insurgency. With this stick in one hand, Gage also held out the carrots of bribes and titles to anyone who would betray or desert the patriot cause.

In the wake of the Tea Party crisis, Gage was dispatched to Boston as military governor in 1774. As the city struggled under the British embargo Gage himself had recommended, British forces and their Tory sympathizers were also forced to do without. With fresh supplies slowed to a trickle and fewer American farmers willing to sell to the British occupiers, Gage’s troops suffered as their rations were cut. The British soldiers were also constantly taunted; daily barrages of salty insults sailed down from the ranks of the unemployed fishermen, dockworkers, and sailors hanging around the harbor.

Food supplies may have been low, but rum flowed freely. Drinking was about the only entertainment available to the troops, and one English officer reported alarmingly about the situation to London: “The rum is so cheap that it debauches both navy and army, and kills many of them,” wrote Major John Pitcairn, soon to acquire notoriety on Lexington Green. “Depend on it, my Lord, it will destroy more of us than the Yankies will.”11

As the winter of 1774–75 approached, infectious diseases swept the city, and neither smallpox, diphtheria, nor any of a host of other deadly illnesses showed any regard for uniforms. Morale among the British troops—malnourished and lacking proper winter clothing, with New England’s weather showing no mercy—was even darker than that of the townspeople. As David Hackett Fischer described it, “The men were increasingly bored, angry, and hungry—a recipe for disaster in any army.”12

Some of the British soldiers had sold their guns, and many others had begun to desert. General Gage was facing a crisis of daily losses | 138 \

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severe enough for him to double the guards around town to keep his soldiers from leaving. In many cases, they were encouraged by patriots, as word of help—a sort of Underground Railroad for deserters— spread through the British ranks. Plots of farmland in New Hampshire were also offered as an inducement for deserters. Ultimately, Gage was forced to resort to public lashings and finally executions. A private who had attempted to desert three different times was shot in the public square, to the shock of Bostonians. Another was shot on Christmas Eve.

Through Boston’s bleak winter months in 1775, Gage watched and waited. He was doing his best to avoid the bloodshed of all-out war, but increasingly he expected trouble. A few weeks after the failed Egg Plot in March, General Gage received a letter from Lord William Dartmouth, King George’s secretary responsible for American affairs.

Alarmed at the reports of growing stockpiles of patriot powder and guns and the swelling ranks of militias in Massachusetts and other colonies, Lord Dartmouth ordered a preemptive strike. General Gage was ordered to arrest the ringleaders of the rebellion and disarm the colonists.

On April 15, the day after Gage received Lord Dartmouth’s letter, he was also given a report from his most useful, industrious, and well-placed spy that the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had voted to send delegates to the other New England provinces to discuss the creation of a New England militia army. The spy confided, “A sudden blow struck now would overset all their plans.”13

The information came from one of the most trusted members of the patriot inner circle, Dr. Benjamin Church. Grandson of his name-sake Colonel Benjamin Church, the famed hero of King Philip’s War, Church was privy to the most sensitive information about patriot plans | 139 \

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and strategy. As a physician, he moved easily between patriot meetings, Tory patients, and the lodgings of his mistress. His motive for betraying the cause was simple and as old as history: he was being amply bribed by Gage. The British commander was more than willing to spread royal silver around in hopes of averting war. He had offered Samuel Adams similar inducements in the summer of 1774, including an annual salary and a patent of nobility in the American peerage that England was planning to establish. But Adams had flatly rejected the temptation. 14

From other loyalist spies, Gage learned that the patriots had hidden approximately one hundred barrels of gunpowder in nearby Concord.

It was a laughably small amount for an army that the New Englanders hoped would soon number fifteen thousand men. But Gage thought that by capturing both powder and patriot provocateurs, he could put an end to the rebellion before it really began.

General Gage’s planned sally into Concord would not be his first attempt to disarm the rebels. Six months earlier, on September 1, 1774, the British commander had ordered the seizure of an arsenal of weapons stored in Charlestown, just north of Boston. After the British successfully removed 250 barrels of powder to Boston, thousands of armed Massachusetts and other New England militiamen had descended on the city, quickly responding to the rapid alarm system and expecting a fight that never came. In the aftermath of this event, known as the Powder Alarm, wild rumors spread all the way to Philadelphia, where the First Continental Congress was in session, that war had begun, and Americans were dying as British guns leveled Boston.

In February 1775, after learning that carriages for cannons were being built in the Salem forge, General Gage sent twelve hundred men to the port town, just north of Boston. To Gage, such expeditions and | 140 \

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seizures of stores not only reduced the rebel militia’s ability to fight but also familiarized his troops with the terrain over which they might eventually be forced to campaign. Gage knew that minuteman companies kept the British under close observation. Using large troop movements, Gage hoped to intimidate the minutemen—or at least make them tired of responding to false alarms. Instead, these forays by the British amounted to valuable war games, exercises that increased rebel confidence that they could muster large numbers of fighting men on short notice.

Landing at Marblehead, Massachusetts, on a Sunday in February 1775, while most townspeople were in church, the British troops marched toward Salem. By the time they approached the town, however, the alarm had been spread. The British found themselves confronted by a large and growing crowd of men and women who had raised the drawbridge over the North River to prevent the British from reaching their target. Soon hundreds of militiamen streamed into Salem from all directions, and the long-expected confrontation seemed set to begin.

When Colonel Leslie, the British commander, ordered the townspeople to allow his men to travel on “the King’s Highway,” a feisty old transplanted Englishman, James Barr, replied, “It is not the King’s Highway; it is a road built by the owners of the lots on the other side, and no king, country or town has anything to do with it.”15 Barr’s simple declaration was as ringing a statement of the American mood and what average Americans were ready to fight for—the primacy of individual and property rights—as any document now stored in the National Archives.

Faced down by the old man, and responding to a local minister’s appeal not to fire on the civilian crowd even as armed militiamen con-

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tinued to surge onto the scene, Colonel Leslie agreed to a compromise.

Acknowledging that it was too late in the day to carry out the search, Leslie asked to be allowed to march across the bridge about a hundred yards into Salem and then march out again so he could fulfill the letter of his orders, if not his actual mission. As the British troops trooped back to their transport ship, they were taunted at every step by an army of mocking militiamen and townspeople. Having forced a British retreat without firing a shot, the Salem militia not only preserved its munitions and cannon carriages but achieved another propaganda coup. The story of Salem’s people turning back a large detachment of British soldiers further emboldened the patriots with the belief that they could face down British regulars, who would not fire on them.

By mid-April 1775, with direct orders from London to end the insurgency, Gage was of a different mind. The search and seizure raid aimed at Lexington, where his spies had reported that Adams and Hancock were staying in the parsonage of Reverend Jonas Clarke, and neighboring Concord, where the munitions were supposedly hidden, was not a dry run for show. Gage chose his best troops—light infantry, grenadier companies, and Royal Marines. He also selected Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, an experienced officer, to command. Second in command was Major John Pitcairn, a battle-toughened Scot with nineteen years of service and little sympathy for the “Yankies.”

“Within twenty-four hours the expedition was the poorest-kept military secret in history,” Thomas Fleming writes of this legendary night in Boston. “Dozens, possibly hundreds, of Bostonians, noticed that the light infantrymen and grenadiers had been relived from routine duty. They also noted that the British had collected numerous longboats from the fleet and tied them up to a man-of-war near the shore, suggesting that Gage was going to send his men across the Back | 142 \

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Bay to Cambridge instead of marching across Boston Neck. While Gage knew that these plans would not remain secret, he believed that he could keep the expedition’s aims and destination from being leaked, along with its departure time: a night march.”16

Not only were Gage’s secrets leaking, but his entire ship of state was about to run aground. Historians have long known that the spy game was far from one-sided. Gage had his sources, but it has been widely speculated that Dr. Joseph Warren also was receiving regular reports from a secret ally inside General Gage’s headquarters. Most likely the spy was Margaret Kemble Gage, the general’s beautiful American wife. Given to lecturing her husband on liberty, Mrs. Gage was suspected of patriot sympathies by several officers on Gage’s staff.

Others hold that there was no need for Mrs. Gage to betray her husband, as thousands of eyes around Boston were focused on every move the British made.

At 9:30 P.M. on April 18, 1775, the British assembled at the foot of Boston Common for the boat trip across Back Bay. After receiving word of the troop movements, Dr. Warren directed Paul Revere and tanner William Dawes to ride to Lexington and warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams that Gage had ordered their arrest and was preparing to march on Concord. He gave them both written messages: “A large body of the King’s troops (supposed to be a brigade of about 12, or 1500) were embarked in boats from Boston, and gone to land at Lechmere’s point.”17