1775 (61 page)

The fight at Lexington and Concord had not seen any deliberate town burning. Piled-up supplies had been torched in Concord, giving off thick smoke, but the town had not been fired. A few houses had been individually burned in Lexington.
⁷
British officers, Graves included, had talked of torching Cambridge, a rebel headquarters, but did not. Charlestown in June was the first pyre, and tens of thousands of civilians saw the fire and smoke. Abigail Adams could watch from Braintree. Major Pitcairn died on the slopes just east of Charlestown on June 17, possibly with soot and cinder burns on his uniform. But all was not set to right; the Revolution survived and grew.

Tensions were almost as high in Rhode Island. Angry colonials protesting customs practices had attacked three British vessels during the prior decade: in 1764, provincial gunners fired on the
St. John,
a Royal Navy cutter; five years later, the revenue sloop
Liberty
was seized and burned by
a crowd in Newport; and in 1772, the naval cutter
Gaspee
was captured and set afire near Providence. The British government named a commission of Crown-appointed judges from New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts to investigate the
Gaspee
episode, but public opinion was so inflamed that no witnesses could be found.

In 1774, instead of subjecting troublesome Rhode Island to a smaller version of the Coercive Acts applied next door, the Admiralty sent a no-nonsense Royal Navy captain, James Wallace, to Newport. Presumably the captain had instructions not to spare the rod or cannon. By early 1775, he commanded a small flotilla—his own 20-gun frigate
Rose
and the 20-gun sloop
Swan,
along with five or six smaller schooners and cutters. These were enough to keep a more effective lid on Narragansett Bay than Gage and Graves managed on Boston Harbor.

For a month after April 19, Graves cautioned Wallace to hold back.
⁸
Through June and July, as rebellion simmered, the captain harassed Newport (located on Aquidneck Island), nearby Conanicut Island (Jamestown), and other bayside stretches. Roughly half of the colony’s population lived on islands large or small, which put many thousands within range of Wallace’s guns. The result verged on terrorism, but Rhode Island had been extremely provocative.

The captain repeatedly threatened Newport, then the fifth most populous city in the thirteen colonies, with burning if residents let Patriot troops into town; if they declined to provide his vessels with supplies; or if they interfered with his men. Late one night he opened fire, panicking women and children. By one account, “The men of the
Rose
allegedly told the townspeople that they intended to burn down the city the following morning. Wallace did not burn down the city the next day, or the day after that. But he continually threatened to do so, and sporadically fired on the town.” Wallace himself summed up: “The Destruction of a Great Town…is a serious matter; however something must be done for the King’s service.”
⁹
Five months later, the Newport
Mercury
reported that the captain intended to celebrate Christmas by ordering the destruction of Newport. Much of the city, however, had already been destroyed. Minister Ezra Stiles noted in his diary on January 2, 1776, that “more than three-quarters of the Inhabitants are removed.”
¹⁰

To fight back, Acting Governor Nicholas Cooke, a strong Patriot, and the General Assembly on June 12 created what became the first provincial navy. Its first vessel, the sloop
Katy,
captained by Abraham Whipple, spent
the summer of 1775 in company with her smaller consort
Washington,
playing a game of cat and mouse with Wallace up and down Narragansett Bay, “brazenly removing cattle from islands within sight of the frigate and even recapturing a prize taken by the
Rose.
”
¹¹

But this barely slowed the British flotilla, and Rhode Island that summer became the first colony to urge the creation of a United Colonies navy.
¹²
Late August saw Wallace take his vessels to make a brief landing near New London, Connecticut, and then raid Gardiner’s, Fisher’s, and Block islands for livestock and hay. He concluded by visiting the small Connecticut seaport of Stonington, where the
Rose
for several hours bombarded the long, narrow, and exposed town.

Likewise wary of Wallace, Connecticut in July had become the second colony to set up a provincial navy when legislators authorized the governor and Council to procure, fit out, and employ two vessels to defend the Connecticut seacoast. By October, both were ready for sea—the 108-ton brig
Minerva,
intended to intercept British supply ships, and the 50-ton
Spy,
conceived of as “a spy-vessel, to run and course from place to place, to discover the enemy, and carry intelligence.” A third, the brigantine
Defence,
was authorized in December 1775 and ready for sea by April.
¹³

Elsewhere in New England, the great Piscataqua Harbor shared by Portsmouth and Newcastle (New Hampshire) and Kittery (Maine) also became a bone of contention. In August a tenuous truce broke down between Patriots in Portsmouth and Captain Andrew Barkley of HMS
Scarborough,
20 guns, in the harbor. The Portsmouth Committee of Safety cut off supplies to the ship; Barkley cut off all shipping in and out of the port and threatened vengeance on Portsmouth. On August 22, out of provisions, Barkley decided to sail for Boston.
¹⁴
Kittery had received some cannon fire, but not Portsmouth.

In what could have been a bloody night in New York but surprisingly proved not to be, the 64-gun line-of-battle ship HMS
Asia,
lying off Wall Street in the East River on August 23, fired a 32-gun broadside of solid shot—9-, 18-, and 24-pound balls—into nearby lower Manhattan. Officers on the
Asia,
seeing rebel John Lamb’s artillery company at work removing two dozen cannon from the Grand Battery and dragging them north along Broadway, sent a barge of marines and these exchanged shots with Lamb’s men. The
Asia’
s captain considered his full broadside, aimed at Fort George, as a warning.
¹⁵

No one was killed, nor was any great damage done. However, as New
York historians point out, thousands of scared residents exited the city during the next few weeks. Merely having to live under the
Asia
’s guns was unnerving. Moravian minister Gustavus Shewkirk wrote on August 28 that “the city looks in some streets as if the plague had been in it, so many houses being shut up.”
¹⁶

Just as spring had seen refugees flee from occupied Boston and the potentially devastating firepower of its British men-of-war at anchor, residents in Newport and New York behaved similarly. Historian Bruce Bliven took note by entitling his book about the period
Under the Guns, New York: 1775-1776.
¹⁷
By the end of 1775, over 40 percent of the city’s population of 25,000 had departed.
¹⁸
In Newport, Patriot leaders recommended evacuation. After an especially menacing threat by Wallace in October, “large numbers of people began the slow journey northward seeking places of refuge. Carts, wagons, chaises and trucks jammed the highways. Streams of people and goods lined the roads in a general migration from the town and off the island. By early November, Moses Brown estimated that more than half of the inhabitants—mostly women and children—had moved out.”
¹⁹

Before turning to autumn events, it is appropriate to note earlier Massachusetts bombardment and burning scares affecting a trio of seaports: Weymouth, Marblehead, and Gloucester. The Bay Colony was the prime target.

On May 20, four British vessels sailed from Boston to an island near Weymouth to take on a large quantity of hay, but were repulsed by a gondola full of local residents who burned the supply, giving off great clouds of smoke. The
Providence Gazette
reported that “the Firing and burning of the Hay occasioned an Alarm through the Country and vast Bodies of Provincials were on their March towards Weymouth.”
²⁰

In late April and May, Captain Thomas Bishop of HMS
Lively
used his cannon to obtain provisions from Marblehead and cautioned residents against helping the rebels “upon pain” of their town’s destruction. Many fled inland from both Marblehead and Salem.
²¹
Marblehead was threatened again in December, because of British frustration with its strong artillery battery, which included two eighteen-pound guns. Admiral Graves advised General Howe that he would have to take the town with troops. “Three hundred soldiers with two good frigates,” he advised, would be enough to overcome the battery, and the town could then be burned.
²²

Gloucester, the principal port on Cape Ann, north of Boston, was visited several times. Captain John Linzee, in the sloop of war HMS
Falcon,
was
instructed by Admiral Graves to cruise in the area, and on August 8 the
Falcon
followed a rebel schooner into Gloucester Harbor, where it had run aground. Two of Linzee’s barges tried to pull the potential prize clear, with no success. Thereupon the
Falcon’s
six-pounders delivered several broadsides into the town, with little effect. Militiamen and townspeople gathered, shooting back from wharves, rocks, and coves with muskets and employing a pair of swivel guns mounted on carriages. A frustrated Linzee then sent a boat ashore to set fire to the village, but the charge misfired and blew off the hand of the
Falcon
’s unlucky boatswain. Next, the hapless captain sent in a captured schooner and a small cutter to try to rescue the two barges and whaleboat he had already sent in. After six hours, all five small British or captured vessels in the harbor surrendered, leaving only the sloop of war, which sailed back to Boston.
²³
Two months later, the Royal Navy came back for revenge but decided that the houses were too spread out for effective bombardment.

Beyond these events, New England had experienced what worried officials in late April 1775 had called the “Ipswich Fright”—a panicky willingness on the part of coast dwellers to believe that British regulars had just landed somewhere north of Boston and were burning and killing all before them. According to one local historian, “people’s actions in the Newbury area reached fantastic proportions. Roads were filled with masses of people riding horses and vehicles of every description, and crowds of pedestrians, all fleeing northward as speedily as possible.”
²⁴

Coastal defense became a priority in all four New England colonies. In August, when talk had the British leaving Boston for New York, Washington agreed to Connecticut governor Trumbull keeping one regiment for protection of that colony’s lengthy coast.
²⁵
Massachusetts, the principal target, faced the greatest challenge. On June 28, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress passed a resolution to establish guard “companies on the seacoast.” Thirty-five such units, each with 50 men, were recruited locally to protect port towns stretching from Plymouth County north to Cumberland County in the district of Maine. In December and January, near the peak of seaport burnings, this force, the nation’s first coast guard, was enlarged to 2,650 men.
²⁶

Threatened burning or bombardment was not confined to the northern colonies. Summer events also worsened relations between coastal Virginians and South Carolinians and patrolling British naval vessels. The South Carolina Council of Safety had been active during the summer in sending
vessels to capture or transport gunpowder, but the first actual combat in Charleston Harbor came in early November. The Council ordered the provincial armed sloop
Defence
to escort and then scuttle six hulks in the ship channel, blocking British warships from a New England–style bombardment of the city. The sloops-of-war
Tamar
and
Cherokee
sought to stop the
Defence,
and cannon fire was exchanged on November 11 and 12. Patriots hailed this skirmish as the first battle of the Revolution in South Carolina.
²⁷

In Virginia, British Captain George Montagu of the
Fowey
had threatened in early May to open fire on York, soon to become famous as Yorktown.
²⁸
Governor Dunmore several times threatened to burn or bombard Williamsburg. In late October, the nearby port of Hampton—best known for the Civil War naval battle at Hampton Roads, nine decades later—became the first Virginia town to come under actual bombardment. In November, Captain Montagu fired on Jamestown.
²⁹

Graves: “I purpose to lay Waste such Seaport Towns…”

In choosing towns that deserved a broadside of carcasses—the incendiary shells of that era—Admiral Graves drew up a purely New England list. By late August, his May and June caution had given way to more of the belligerence he had briefly voiced in April: “We ought to act hostilely from this time forward by burning and laying waste the whole country.”
³⁰

On August 26, he noted in his journal how he had hoped for—and had proposed in “secret Confidential letters”—a “policy of making Descents within the New England Governments and destroying the towns on the Seacoasts and the Shipping in the Harbours and Rivers” with the help of “800 or 1000 Marines or Soldiers.”
³¹
On September 1, he told General Gage that “I purpose to lay Waste such Seaport Towns in the New England Governments as not likely to be useful to His Majesty’s Stores and to destroy all the Vessels within the Harbours.”
³²

To this end, he added that he would also need soldiers, artillery, and a refitting of the armed transports
Symmetry
and
Spitfire
so that they could receive howitzers and mortars. Gage agreed in part on September 4, and the refitting of the two transports began.
³³