Founding Myths (12 page)

Most of this account is correct—as far as it goes. Colonists did help Boston and form a Continental Congress, and British soldiers did march. But why did Britain take the offensive? Was it because other colonies came to the aid of Boston or because Congress complained? Do acts of charity or written protests, in the absence of stronger forms of resistance, generally lead to war? The beleaguered Boston story does not explain why British officials used military force against British citizens living in Massachusetts in April 1775. Something critical is missing here. We need to see how political tensions resulted in actual warfare.

The problem begins with one false statement in the Boston-based narrative—namely, that closing Boston Harbor was “the final insult to a long list of abuses.”
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In fact, it wasn't so much the Boston Port Act that set one colony aflame and triggered the American Revolution, but the second of the offensive bills, the Massachusetts Government
Act. In this measure, Parliament unilaterally gutted the 1691 Charter for Massachusetts, the people's constitution. No longer could citizens call town meetings except with permission of the royal governor, and once they met, they could not discuss any items the governor had not approved. No longer could the people's representatives choose the powerful Council, which functioned as the upper house of the legislature, the governor's cabinet, and the administrative arm of provincial government. No longer could the people have any say in choosing judges, juries, or justices of the peace—local officials with the power to put citizens in jail or take away their property.

The people of Massachusetts, accustomed to home rule in local matters through their town meetings and a representative structure of government for a century and a half, were thoroughly disenfranchised by the Massachusetts Government Act. Try to imagine, today, that our Constitution was suddenly declared obsolete—not slowly eroded, but actually yanked away. This would spark considerable protest, and it did so then. Outraged citizens rose as a body to say, “No way!”

THE FIRST AMERICAN REVOLUTION

When the Boston Port Act took effect, other colonists passed the hat for relief, held days of prayer and fasting, embarked on another round of boycotts like those of the 1760s, and called for conferences to talk things over.
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These were common forms of political action in British North America. But when the Massachusetts Government Act took effect shortly afterward, the people of that colony actually shut down the government and prepared for war. This was the stuff of revolution. Citizens of Massachusetts forcibly shed the old regime and began to replace it with their own.
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In June 1774, upon hearing news of the Massachusetts Government Act, patriots sprung to action. In Worcester, on July 4, members of the radical American Political Society (APS) pledged to arm themselves with “Two Pounds of Gun Powder each 12 Flints and Led
Answerable thereunto.”
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Stephen Salisbury, a local merchant, sold so much gunpowder over the next few weeks that he contemplated building his own powder house.
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They hadn't yet figured out exactly what actions they would take to resist the Massachusetts Government Act, but they did know they would not submit to it, and they reasoned—correctly, as it turned out—that it would come to blows at some point.

The Massachusetts Government Act was due to take effect on August 1, 1774, and the first court to sit under the new provisions was scheduled to sit in remote Berkshire County, on the western edge of the province, on August 16. That court never convened. When the Crown-appointed officials showed up for work, they found themselves locked out of the Great Barrington courthouse and face-to-face with 1,500 patriots, who told them the court was closed.
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The next court on the schedule was to meet in Springfield on August 30, but on that day, three to four thousand patriots, marching “with staves and musick,” again shut it down. “Amidst the Crowd in a sandy, sultry place, exposed to the sun,” wrote one firsthand observer, the judges were forced to renounce “in the most express terms any commission which should be given out to them under the new arrangement.”
¹⁴

Patriots who closed the courts in Great Barrington and Springfield proceeded unopposed, but General Thomas Gage, the newly appointed military governor of Massachusetts, vowed to take a stand in Worcester, where the court was supposed to meet on September 6. “In Worcester, they keep no Terms, openly threaten Resistance by Arms, have been purchasing Arms, preparing them, casting Ball, and providing Powder, and threaten to attack any Troops who dare to oppose them,” he wrote on August 27. “I shall soon be obliged to march a Body of Troops into that Township, and perhaps into others, as occasion happens, to preserve the peace.”
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Peace? If Gage did make good on his promise, it would look more like war—and this was more than seven months
before
Lexington and Concord.

But events soon took a dramatic turn. On September 1, taking the offensive in a rapidly escalating arms race, General Gage ordered
British troops to seize powder stored in a magazine in nearby Somerville, not far from Boston. As news spread, the story of British troops on the march took on a life of its own, and soon, across the Massachusetts countryside and proximate points of neighboring colonies, an estimated twenty to a hundred thousand angry men (this is the range of contemporary estimates, perhaps also a bit exaggerated), believing that the British Redcoats had killed six patriots and set fire to Boston, headed toward Boston to confront them.
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In some towns, nearly every male of fighting age participated in the “Powder Alarm,” as people soon called it. One firsthand observer described the frenzy of the moment:

[A]ll along were armed men rushing forward some on foot some on horseback, at every house women & children making cartridges, running bullets, making wallets, baking biscuit, crying & bemoaning & at the same time animating their husbands & sons to fight for their liberties, tho' not knowing whether they should ever see them again.
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Alas, it was a false alarm. “The people seemed really disappointed,” one man told John Adams two months later, “when the news was contradicted.”
¹⁸

After the patriots' showing in the Powder Alarm, Gage reasoned that his troops would be vastly outnumbered if he sent them to Worcester. “The flames of sedition,” he conceded to British secretary of state Lord Dartmouth, had “spread universally throughout the country beyond conception.”
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Gage had little choice but to let the judges fend for themselves, but judges alone could not uphold the power of the Crown and Parliament against such odds. The battle was won before it raged. The day before the court was slated to meet, the APS “Voted, not to bring our Fire-arms into Town the 6 Day of Sept.” Guns would not be needed; sheer numbers would suffice.
²⁰

At dawn on September, 6, 1774, militiamen from across the county of Worcester started marching into the town of Worcester. By ten
o'clock, as the day grew hotter, 4,622 men from 37 different towns stood at the ready. (We know the numbers because Breck Parkman, one of the participants, counted the men in each militia company.
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) Approximately half the adult male population of a county that ranged from the Rhode Island to the New Hampshire borders had mustered in force to topple British rule at the local level.

When two dozen Crown-appointed court officials showed up to work in their black suits and wigs, they found the courthouse doors barricaded. Locked out, they huddled instead in Daniel Heywood's tavern, halfway between the courthouse and the town common. There they waited, waiting for the throngs to determine their fates.

Across from the courthouse, at the home of blacksmith Timothy Bigelow, the Worcester County Committees of Correspondence tried to coordinate the day's activities, but members soon adjourned “to attend the body of the people” outside.
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Each of the thirty-seven militia companies, which had recently elected a new military captain, now selected a political representative as well, to serve for one day only—the ultimate in term limits. These men appointed a smaller committee, which visited the court officials to work out the details of their resignations. But the plan they settled on had to make its way back to the thirty-seven representatives, and through them to the “body of the people,” who rejected the first draft. The process then began anew. The apparatus was democratic but cumbersome, heavily weighted at the bottom. Things moved slowly. People became impatient.

Finally, by midafternoon, the stage was set. The militiamen arranged themselves along Main Street, half on the Mill Brook side and the other half under the embankment to the west. The lines stretched for a quarter mile between the courthouse and Heywood's tavern, each company in formation, Uxbridge in front of the courthouse, Westborough next, and so on, down to Upton and Templeton, stationed outside Heywood's tavern. When all were in place, each of the two dozen court officials emerged from the tavern with his hat in his hand, reversing the traditional order of deference, and recited his disavowal of British authority to the first company of militiamen,
then walked to the next to repeat his recantation there, and in this manner made his way slowly through the gauntlet, all the way to the courthouse. Over thirty times apiece, so all the militiamen could hear, the judges, justices of the peace, court attorneys, and others whose power had been sanctioned by the Crown pledged “that all judicial proceeding be stayed . . . on account of the unconstitutional act of Parliament . . . which, if effected, will reduce the inhabitants to mere arbitrary power.”
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With this humiliating act of submission, all British authority disappeared from Worcester County, never to return.

As in Great Barrington, Springfield, and Worcester, patriots shut down the governmental apparatus in Salem, Concord, Barnstable, Taunton, and Plymouth—in every county seat outside Boston, where garrisoned British soldiers could protect the judges. From the time the Massachusetts Government Act was supposed to take effect, the county courts, which also functioned as the administrative arms of the local governments, were powerless. According to merchant John Andrews, rebels in Plymouth were so excited by their victory that they

attempted to remove a Rock (the one on which their fore-fathers first landed, when they came to this country) which lay buried in a wharfe five feet deep, up into the center of the town, near the court house. The way being up hill, they found it impracticable, as after they had dug it up, they found it to weigh ten tons at least.
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Meanwhile, all thirty-six Crown-appointed Council members were told by their angry neighbors to resign. Those who refused were driven from their homes and forced to flee to Boston, where they sought protection from the British army.

In direct violation of the new law, the people continued to gather in their town meetings. When Governor Gage arrested seven men in the temporary capital of Salem for calling a town meeting, three thousand farmers immediately marched on the jail to set the prisoners
free. Rather than initiate a bloodbath, Gage ordered two companies of British soldiers to retreat. Throughout Massachusetts, town meetings continued to convene. As John Andrews reported,

Notwithstanding all the parade the governor made at Salem on account of their meeting, they had another one directly under his nose at Danvers, and continued it two or three howers longer than was necessary, to see if he would interrupt 'em. He was acquainted with it, but reply'd—“Damn 'em! I won't do any thing about it unless his Majesty sends me more troops.”
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More than half a year before the “shot heard 'round the world” at Lexington, Massachusetts patriots had seized all military authority outside Boston. On September 21, the Worcester County Convention took it upon itself to reorganize the county militia into seven new regiments and urged each town “to enlist one third of the men . . . between sixteen and sixty years of age, to be ready to act at a minute's warning.”
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These were the famous “minute men,” formed half a year before they would respond to the call at Lexington. Other counties did the same. The story of the minute men does not begin at Lexington, where we normally put it; it is part and parcel of the Revolution of 1774.

By early October patriots had seized all political authority from British officials and vested it in their town meetings, county conventions, and a Provincial Congress. Throughout the preceding decade, patriots had written petitions, staged boycotts, and burnt effigies—but this was something new. In the late summer and early fall of 1774, patriots did not simply
protest
government, they
overthrew
it. In his diary, one disgruntled Tory from Southampton summed it all up: “Government has now devolved upon the people, and they seem to be for using it.”
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Many patriots at that point were ready to formalize the end of British rule and create an entirely new government, based not on royal authority but on the will of the people. On October 4, 1774—a full
twenty-one months before the Continental Congress approved the document prepared by Thomas Jefferson—citizens of Worcester, Massachusetts, declared that they were ready for independence. Four weeks earlier, on September 6, they had toppled British authority; now they were ready to replace the old government with a new one. In a set of instructions for its representative to the forthcoming Provincial Congress, which was about to meet in defiance of Governor Gage's orders, the town meeting told Timothy Bigelow: