Founding Myths (13 page)

You are to consider the people of this province absolved, on their part, from the obligation therein contained [the 1691 Massachusetts charter], and to all intents and purposes reduced to a state of nature; and you are to exert yourself in devising ways and means to raise from the dissolution of the old constitution, as from the ashes of the Phenix, a new form, wherein all officers shall be dependent on the suffrages of the people for their existence as such, whatever unfavorable constructions our enemies may put upon such procedure. The exigency of our public affairs leaves us no other alternative from a state of anarchy or slavery.
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Patriots in Worcester had a word for their dramatic move: “independency.” For the British and the Tories, any mention of “independency” was considered treasonous—and even patriot leaders shied away. Samuel Adams wrote from the Continental Congress to his comrades back home, cautioning them not to “set up another form of government.”
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John Adams, also a member of Congress, wrote that “Absolute Independency . . . Startle[s] People here.” Most congressional delegates, he warned, were horrified by “The Proposal of Setting up a new Form of Government of our own.”
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Perhaps Samuel and John Adams were right, for if Massachusetts moved too quickly, other colonies might balk and not come to their aid. But right or wrong, this was a revolution by and for the people of Massachusetts; even the most radical members of Congress could not keep pace.

PREPARATIONS FOR DEFENSE

The most pressing duties of the new Provincial Congress were to collect taxes and prepare for war. On October 26 delegates listed exactly what they would need to defend against a British invasion:
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All the political and military maneuvers of the next several months would focus on how to procure these armaments and how to keep arms and powder the patriots already possessed out of the hands of the British.

On December 14, four months before Lexington, patriots in nearby New Hampshire made the first offensive move of the war: four hundred local militiamen stormed Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth, took down the king's colors, and carried away approximately one hundred barrels of the king's gunpowder (some of which was later put to use during the Battle of Bunker Hill). The following day, one thousand patriots marched again on the fort, this time removing all the muskets and sixteen cannon. This armed attack on a British fortress
was not merely a prelude to war, it was an act of war: cannons and muskets were fired. Emerson's “shot heard 'round the world” was not the first shot of the American Revolution.
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Although the offensive against Fort William and Mary was the first frontal military assault, it was not the first time patriots removed British arms and ammunition. Using stealth, cunning, and insider information, patriots had already taken cannon and munitions from British magazines in Boston, Providence, Newport, and New London.
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On February 24, 1775, almost two months before Lexington, British intelligence reported that 15,000 “Minute Men” were “all properly armed.” The report noted: “There are in the Country thirty-eight Field pieces and Nineteen Companies of Artillery most of which are in Worcester, a few at Concord, and a few at Watertown,” as well as ninety to a hundred barrels of powder at Concord. Further, the Provincial Congress's Committee of Supply was trying to procure more arms yet, “to be deposited at Concord and Worcester.” If British soldiers tried to seize any of this cache, they were likely to trigger a massive mobilization of angry patriots.
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The spies also reported, though, that there were “eight Field pieces in an old Store or Barn, near the landing place at Salem,” which were to be removed shortly. “The seizure of them would greatly disconcert their schemes,” it concluded—and General Gage acted accordingly. On Sunday, February 26, he ordered 240 soldiers to find and remove eight field pieces and a supply of powder that patriots were hiding at Salem. Local citizens, gathered together in church, learned of the invasion in time to remove the arms and ammunition to a safer location. To stop the British advance, they simply raised a drawbridge that lay on the route of the marching troops.
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When the British invaded Lexington seven weeks later, they would avoid the mistakes they had made in Salem: they marched by night, not on the Sabbath, and they chose a route that did not have a drawbridge.

On April 2, over two weeks before the march of Lexington, news from London arrived in Boston that set off a firestorm. Vowing to starve the errant colonists into submission, Lord North was closing
the Newfoundland fisheries to Americans, cutting off all trade with anyone but the British, and mobilizing two thousand additional seamen and “a proper number of frigates” to enforce this embargo. Further, the king had dispatched four additional regiments from Ireland to Boston. Everybody in town knew immediately what this meant. Governor Thomas Gage, who was also commander in chief of the British forces in North America, had been ridiculed through the winter by his own soldiers—“Old Woman,” they called him—for sitting by and letting the patriots take charge of Massachusetts without fighting back. His excuse, he said, was that he did not have sufficient troops to take the offensive. Now, with reinforcements imminent, he would certainly make a move.
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But where would he strike? Could he possibly attack Worcester, the very heart of resistance? There, according to a spy report written in French, patriots had accumulated fifteen tons of powder (hidden in places unknown), thirteen small cannon (proudly displayed but poorly mounted in front of the meetinghouse on Main Street), and various munitions (in the hands of a merchant named Salisbury and “un grand chef” named Bigelow). But the road there was rough, the journey arduous, and the patriots numerous, vigilant, and excessively hostile. Gage's soldiers would likely be ambushed and possibly annihilated.
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Concord offered better prospects, for it was much more accessible. Unlike the forty-mile trek to Worcester, this twenty-mile jaunt could be accomplished in a single night, which allowed the possibility of a surprise attack. It wouldn't be much of a surprise, however, because patriots easily surmised that Concord would be the likely target. On April 7, working with Dr. Joseph Warren and the Boston committee of correspondence, Paul Revere traveled from Boston to Concord with an urgent message: British Regulars would soon march to seize the patriots' cannons and other military stores, possibly the very next day. Even that message was not really necessary, however, because patriots in Concord, where the Provincial Congress was sitting, had figured it out themselves. Two days earlier, James Warren had informed
his wife, Mercy Otis Warren: “This town [Concord] is full of cannon, ammunition, stores, etc., and the [British] Army long for them and they want nothing but strength to induce an attempt on them. The people are ready and determine to defend this country inch by inch.”
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Ready they were, thirteen days before the Redcoats showed up. Patriots by then had been preparing for half a year for this counteroffensive by the British army, yet they continued to refine their intelligence network. On the morning of April 16, Paul Revere made a second ride westward, to Lexington this time, to confer with Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who had sought refuge there, about how to respond to Gage's imminent move. On his way back, Revere met also with patriots in Cambridge and Charlestown to fine-tune their warning systems, including the now-famous signal lantern ploy. When the big moment arrived, the minute men who had been training for months needed to get the word.

By dawn of April 19, 1775, when Regulars finally showed up at the Lexington Green, and later that morning, when they continued their march to Concord, patriot militias were as prepared as they could ever expect to be. They were willing partners in this war-in-the-making. They knew the likely consequences, and they were ready to face those consequences.

LOST IN HISTORY

The Massachusetts Revolution of 1774 was the most successful and enduring popular uprising in the nation's history, the only one to permanently remove existing authority, yet this momentous event is never highlighted and rarely even mentioned in our textbooks. A logical question to ask of any revolution would be: Where, when, and how did political and military authority first transfer from one group to another? Strangely, though, we don't ask this of our own Revolution, the very founding of our nation. If we
did
posit that fundamental question, the answer would be obvious and the Massachusetts Revolution of 1774 would become a standard and indispensable part of our
national narrative, featured on every timeline and included on many a test.

Our most triumphant rebellion did not always suffer such neglect.

The British
Annual Register
, written immediately in the wake of the 1774 revolution, gave considerable attention to the forced resignations, court closures, and preparations for war throughout the countryside of Massachusetts.
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Early American historians—William Gordon in 1788, David Ramsay in 1789, and Mercy Otis Warren in 1805—covered the response to the Boston Port Act, but they highlighted the Massachusetts Government Act as the major catalyst leading to the American Revolution. According to Ramsay, the Massachusetts Government Act

excited a greater alarm than the port act. The one effected only the metropolis, the other the whole province. . . . Had the parliament stopped short with the Boston port act, the motives to union and to make a common cause with that metropolis, would have been feeble, perhaps ineffectual to have roused the other provinces; but the arbitrary mutilation of the important privileges . . . by the will of parliament, convinced the most moderate that the cause of Massachusetts was the cause of all the provinces.
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Gordon described the popular uprising in considerable and vivid detail. In response to the “obnoxious alteration” dictated by the Massachusetts Government Act, “the people at large” prepared “to defend their rights with the point of a sword,” and even the moderates “became resolute and resentful.”
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Warren went even further, calling the 1774 rebellion “one of the most extraordinary eras in the history of man: the exertions of spirit awakened by the severe hand of power had led to that most alarming experiment of leveling of all ranks, and destroying all subordination.”
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This was too much of a revolution for conservative historians
and schoolbook writers of the next generation, who argued that the “American Revolution” was not really revolutionary and that patriots were not to be construed as “rebels.” Paul Allen, writing in 1819, devoted seventeen pages to the aid sent to Boston, while he assigned less than a paragraph to the resistance triggered by the Massachusetts Government Act.
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Salma Hale's 1822 school text emphasized the themes of sympathy and solidarity, with nary a word about the overthrow of British authority.
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The following year Charles Goodrich, in his popular
History of the United States of America
, wrote about Virginia's “expression of sympathy” with Boston, while ignoring altogether the people's rebellion in Massachusetts.
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The Good Samaritan approach certainly played better to children. Stories featuring neighbor helping neighbor conformed to educational goals, while those showing bullying crowds did not. Richard Snowden's school history, written in biblical style, made the events of 1774 sound like the story of the three wise men at the nativity: “Now it came to pass, when the people of the provinces had heard that their brethren in town were in a great strait, they sent to speak comfortable words unto them, and gave them worldly gifts.”
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By midcentury, the patriotic historian George Bancroft was comfortable enough with the idea of a people's revolution to pay some respect to the uprising of 1774. Although Bancroft spoke of “sympathy” for Boston, he also devoted the better part of three chapters to the dramatic resistance to the Massachusetts Government Act. He did not, however, embrace its democratic character: it was under the direction of Boston's Joseph Warren, he claimed, who was told what to do by an absent Samuel Adams.
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With this imaginary chain of command, Bancroft placed the first overthrow of the British firmly in the hands of America's favorite revolutionary (see
chapter 2
).

In 1865 William Wells followed Bancroft in placing Adams at the forefront of affairs in Boston, even though he was in Philadelphia at the time. But with no credible evidence linking Adams to the revolution in the countryside, Wells simply ignored those events. For Wells and most subsequent writers, Samuel Adams had to be the prime
mover of all crowd actions—and if Adams was not present, the tale was not told. Most historians since that time have unwittingly followed the lead of British officials like Secretary of State for the Colonies Lord Dartmouth, who simply could not believe that authority had been overturned by “a tumultuous Rabble, without any Appearance of general Concert, or without any Head to advise, or Leader to Conduct.”
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