1775 (78 page)

Summer brought the occupiers little comfort. Congress issued its
Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.
The besieged troops in Boston suffered from lack of food. And while raiding islands along the New England coast for cattle, sheep, and hay was necessary, failure was frequent.

Gage sent several realistic evaluations to Lord Dartmouth. The rebels, he said, made strong stands behind cover, entrenched quickly and effectively, and took good advantage of the hilly New England terrain. They also benefited from a dense population, committed enough to keep provincial militiamen on hand for a lengthy siege. He saw better prospects in regions with more favorable terrain and more loyal subjects.
²

General Howe, after replacing Gage, wrote to the adjutant general in London that he had too few troops to attack fortified rebel positions at great cost. He favored simply holding Boston until the men could be moved elsewhere. “To attack the Rebels from Boston would be hazardous,” he advised Lord Dartmouth on October 9.
³

The other British generals in Boston more or less concurred. Burgoyne described New England topography as natural fortification.
⁴
Clinton concluded that “the disadvantages of our staying here [Boston] are many and great…Distemper has already seized us. Confinement is hard duty, and
want of fresh meat will increase it, and we shall in the course of a long winter, moulder away to nothing.”
⁵

The Royal Navy shared the discontent with Boston. Gage commented in June that “the only use is its Harbour, which may be said to be Material; but in all other respects its the worst place either to act Offensively from, or defensively.”
⁶
Admiral Graves, headquartered on HMS
Preston,
was unable even to control the harbor and was recalled shortly after Gage.

The navy had its own stages of embarrassment and defeat. From the start, Graves was unable to establish control over the many islands in Boston Harbor, so that rebel small craft moved with near impunity. The besieged army was desperate for meat and forage, although in peacetime livestock and hay had abounded on the offshore islands. The Royal Navy brought back so little that General Burgoyne, an amateur playwright, wrote letters mocking the admiral’s ineffectiveness. Of the 35 transports and supply ships sent to Boston during 1775, only eight arrived there.
⁷
Come autumn, George Washington, manning a half dozen armed schooners with army personnel (from regiments full of Massachusetts fishermen), took some important prizes. The biggest catch, the munitions-laden
Nancy,
was taken almost within sight of Boston Harbor. Nor could the world’s foremost navy deal with fast Yankee whaleboats rowed by mariners able to strike where and when clumsy British men-of-war were unable to sail. As
Chapter 23
will pursue, Graves at one point feared that 20 to 30 large whaleboats (carrying 400 to 500 men) might capture the 70-gun ship
Boyne,
its crew having been reduced to only 325 men. By summer, several huge two-deckers had been sent elsewhere.

Boston had become the center of British military activity in North America. The army command was there. And once the Port Act went into effect, Boston became the Royal Navy’s North American headquarters. The number of vessels under Graves’s command grew from 25 in February 1775 to 29 in late June and 51 by year’s end.
⁸
The city was no more a sideshow for the Royal Navy than it was for a half dozen crack army regiments, including the King’s Own and the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

Army officers regularly bemoaned unfavorable military geography: hills, heights, twisting roads, and stone walls perfect for lurking marksmen. However, naval officers could match them with the drawbacks of Boston Harbor and Massachusetts Bay: difficult channels, shoals, confusing tides, and too many inlets through which the harbor could be entered. Even the climate seemed to conspire: fog and gales, and a brutal winter. In the words
of one British officer, “The running ropes freeze in the Blocks; the sails are stiff like Sheets of Tin; and the men cannot expose their Hands long enough to the cold to do their duty aloft.”
⁹

According to early-twentieth-century historian Allen French, Gage began mentioning departure for New York to Lord Dartmouth on June 12, returning to the possibility on July 24 and August 20.
¹⁰
By August, a consensus seemed to be at hand.

Moving had obvious benefits. The city of New York sat astride the Hudson-Champlain corridor, dominion over which could split New England from the other colonies. The city’s deepwater harbor was wide open to naval might. Provisioning would be much easier. And New York had a reputation as the colony most inclined to loyalism. But as summer turned to autumn, transportation became an obstacle, yielding a reluctant decision: no move until spring. Howe, taking command, was told that too few transports were available to relocate the army, together with the supplies needed, and the several thousand Massachusetts Loyalists who could not be abandoned.
¹¹

As
Chapter 12
discussed, logistics were a weakness in initial British military preparedness. Unfortunately for Howe, the shortfall of transports in autumn 1775 recurred in March 1776. His request was made on minimal notice, after Washington received heavy artillery brought overland from Fort Ticonderoga and quickly positioned those cannon on Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston Harbor. Once the batteries were reinforced, Howe was obliged to evacuate. But too few transports and escorts were available to carry the army and dependent Loyalists for a landing in New York against potentially strong American opposition. Instead, a course had to be set for Halifax, Nova Scotia, a town of 5,000 whose bleak remoteness only accentuated the forced departure. This British embarrassment offered a welcome counterpoint for Americans about to be chased from a Canada they had expected to claim months earlier.

Not every Royal Navy ship left Massachusetts Bay in late March with Howe. Captain Banks of the
Renown,
50 guns, was left with four other ships to keep watch off Nantasket Roads in Boston Harbor. He was to intercept and send to Halifax transports headed to Boston without knowledge of Howe’s departure. But Banks’s force left in June after Massachusetts artillerymen constructed a new battery on Long Island. Three more arriving transports thereupon fell into rebel hands.
¹²
By and large, British strategists were finished with Massachusetts. There would be raids and burnings: Nantucket
had British visitors from time to time; and for several years between 1779 and 1782, British forces occupied Maine’s lower Penobscot Valley. But broadly speaking, the state of Massachusetts was left alone.

A question rarely posed, but suggested by the sequence of mounting British frustration, is this: How did Parliament, the Cabinet, and King George so misjudge Boston, Massachusetts, and North America, and how did that misjudgment affect the first years of the American Revolution?

Samuel Adams: A Massachusetts Machiavel?

In the pantheon of Revolutionary Ascetics, a remembrance of influential true believers from Citizen Robespierre to Comrade Lenin, Samuel Adams is one of the few qualified Americans. James Rivington, the Loyalist New York printer, unflatteringly likened him to Machiavelli, as did Adams’s Massachusetts archfoe, Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson.
¹³
To Thomas Jefferson, the elder of the two Adams cousins was “truly the
Man of the Revolution.
” In the Europe of the mid- and late 1770s, it was the elder cousin, not the younger one, who was
le fameux Adams,
the principal mover of Revolutionary America. In London, reported Josiah Quincy, Samuel Adams was considered “the first politician in the world.”
¹⁴

So was this Yankee Machiavelli responsible for more of the Revolution taking place in Boston than might have otherwise occurred? Did he bait the British into a strategic trap that their generals only belatedly understood? Maybe so—we will consider the arguments—but there will never be proof (or for that matter, disproof).

Over the years, American historians have delivered widely divergent judgments on the elder Adams. He gains approval from most of those willing to describe the events of 1775–1783 in bold revolutionary terms but draws criticism from conservatives eager to portray a gentry-led War of American Independence and loath to hail a shabby backroom political operator.
¹⁵
In fact, Adams combined undoubted backroom capabilities with rarely acknowledged scholarship, having returned to Harvard after the usual four years to add a master of arts degree in 1743. His subject, appropriately, was applied political theory. After framing the issue—“Whether it be lawful to resist the Supreme Magistrate, if the Commonwealth cannot be otherwise preserved?”—Adams answered as vehemently as he would in his later prime.
¹⁶

Let us be in no doubt that Adams often manipulated public opinion,
employing sharp elbows and manufacturing public frustration above and beyond what already existed. In 1936, historian John C. Miller published a volume entitled
Sam Adams: Pioneer in Propaganda,
arguing that Adams sometimes misrepresented opponents’ views, breached political ethics, and sometimes used his position to expunge embarrassing insistences and details from the legislative record.
¹⁷
But this critique largely omits how Adams orchestrated great events and outcomes, going far beyond mere propaganda. Proof of this larger accomplishment is limited, though, because the careful Bostonian destroyed many of his papers.

We can begin in 1768, a year when popular restiveness in Massachusetts first provoked the British military occupations that would continue right up through Evacuation Day in 1776. Adams, a member of the state House of Representatives but more powerful in a second role as its clerk, pushed through a so-called Circular Letter to the other colonies, which acquainted them with the abuses of Parliament’s Townshend duties and hinted the need for a Congress. When the British government formally demanded the letter’s retraction, the House refused by a 91 to 17 vote. This stark refusal, and some rioting, led to four army regiments being ordered to Boston. A popular convention was called, but Adams joined the moderates and cooled any confrontation just before the troops landed.
¹⁸
If Tories mocked him for backsliding, he now had his issue—public arousal over military coercion. Both Governor Francis Bernard and conservative leader Thomas Hutchinson acknowledged the year’s unprecedented lurch toward extralegal institutions and revolution.
¹⁹
Adams’s fingerprints were everywhere.

The Boston Massacre of 1770, in which British soldiers fired into an unruly mob, killing five, brought out Adams’s Machiavellian side. On one hand, he led the Patriotic faction calling for the soldiers’ removal from the city. However, to ensure that the soldiers’ trial struck a balance and did not present Boston in an unfavorable light, he enlisted his lawyer cousin to handle their defense.
²⁰

That same year Adams also took the lead in urging his fellow legislators to improve and strengthen the militia. He understood that in any future emergency or confrontation, it would side with the people, because only a few ranking officers were Loyalists.
²¹

In 1770, the many-fingered Adams had also considered a scheme for organizing committees of correspondence in America to inform and coordinate resistance. At that time he put it aside. But in October 1772, with even some political allies skeptical, he launched the Boston Committee of
Correspondence. Its nominal task was to communicate and exchange views with the Bay Colony’s several hundred other towns. Three thousand miles away, Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn accused Adams of telling New Englanders of “a hundred rights of which they had never heard before and a hundred grievances which they never before had felt.” But the network caught on, with Plymouth, Cambridge, and Marblehead first to join. By 1774, most Massachusetts towns had committees. According to chronicler Miller, Adams and his associates “proceeded to make the committee of correspondence the most formidable revolutionary machine that was created during the American Revolution.”
²²

The Virginia House of Burgesses followed suit in 1773, inaugurating its own committee of correspondence to keep in touch with the other colonies. Not coincidentally, two of the chief Virginia architects, Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry, were part of Adams’s radical network.
²³
In practical terms, Massachusetts’s town-by-town communications system aided the radicals to take control of the province in mid-1774 following the Coercive Acts, while Virginia’s colony-to-colony structure played a vital part in encouraging support for a Continental Congress and promoting approval of Boston and the fire-breathing Suffolk Resolves. Sam Adams was hardly alone. Related key roles in Massachusetts were played by Dr. Joseph Warren, Adams’s principal associate, and Paul Revere, who ran a major caucus and surveillance group in Boston, in addition to his important express riding.

A second essential prop of Boston’s move to the forefront in 1774 was local Patriots’ willingness in December 1773 to gamble on the political sagacity of dumping £13,000 worth of tea into Boston Harbor. Tea strategy, by this point, was dominating the rivalry between the radical factions in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York over who could take the boldest positions. However, Samuel Adams wanted Boston out front for larger reasons. Not for nothing did foes like Governor Hutchinson disparage him as the Chief or Great Incendiary; now greatness required Boston, not Philadelphia or New York, to host the political fireworks.

Here a bit of comparison is in order. Philadelphia Patriots, also in December, turned back the local tea ships before they landed any tea, although they coupled this action with a strong endorsement of Boston’s tea party. This was law-abiding enough not to stir any notable retribution by the conservative Pennsylvania Assembly or Philadelphia’s ambivalent commercial elites. New York’s tea ships came late, in mid-April 1775. One was turned
back, and the second had some of its tea dumped by “Mohawks,” but five months after the Boston Tea Party, local authorities looked the other way.
²⁴