Independence (22 page)

The events in Lexington and Concord made it apparent that London would not back down. Washington was convinced that the colonists must not give in. A “Brother's Sword has been sheathed in a Brother's breast,” he immediately declared when word of the carnage in Massachusetts reached Mount Vernon late in April. He added that the “once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with blood, or Inhabited by Slaves.” His choice was never in doubt. Indeed, he emphasized that no “virtuous Man” could “hesitate in his choice.”
57

Washington departed Mount Vernon for Philadelphia and the Second Continental Congress on May 4, 1775, taking with him his military uniform. He was going to war. Unlike Dartmouth and North, Washington harbored no illusions that this would be an easy war. “[M]ore blood will be spilt” in the coming conflict, he predicted, “than history has ever yet furnished instances of in the annals of North America.”
58

CHAPTER 5

“A R
ESCRIPT
W
RITTEN IN
B
LOOD
”

J
OHN
D
ICKINSON AND THE
A
PPEAL OF
R
ECONCILIATION

IT TURNED COLD AND RAINY
overnight in Boston, but all through the jet-black evening that followed the battle-scarred day in Lexington and Concord, armed men from throughout New England had descended on the city. Some had abandoned workbenches and farms on a moment's notice to take up arms. Israel Putnam, for instance, a fifty-seven-year-old yeoman who had endured a lifetime of adventure while soldiering in the French and Indian War, literally dropped his plow in his field in Pomfret, Connecticut, picked up his sword and musket, and headed for the scene of action, ready to serve yet again. One company of exhausted minutemen from Nottingham, New Hampshire, arrived outside Boston at daybreak on April 20, having made an incredible fifty-five-mile march in twenty hours.
1

By morning's gray dawn on April 20, thousands of armed men had congregated on Boston's doorstep. They came as four separate armies, one from each of the New England colonies. But as they were on Massachusetts soil, the highest-ranking officer in the Bay Colony, General Artemas Ward, a forty-seven-year-old Shrewsbury farmer, businessman, and judge with two degrees from Harvard College, was in overall command. His army swelled rapidly. Men arrived all through April 20 and the days that followed, until, after a week, some sixteen thousand Yankee soldiers were present. While the rage for soldiering prevailed, Ward wisely had the men take an oath to serve for the remainder of the year. Impassioned and eager for heroics—and confronted with incredible peer pressure—most of the men signed on. A few thought better of it and went home, in many instances fearing that their farms and families would suffer during their prolonged absence. Some, however, may have suspected that the chaos all about them was an augury of miseries ahead. After all, the newborn army lacked tents, hygienic conditions were deplorable, and a thousand and one logistical details were yet to be worked out.

(Gary J. Antonetti, Ortelius Design)

Nevertheless, after a few days Ward knew that he had an army of roughly twelve thousand men, more than double the number that Gage was thought to possess. Yet Ward never considered attacking the British. At least until the Continental Congress reconvened as scheduled on May 10, nearly three weeks in the future, Ward saw his army's mission as one of containing the British army within Boston. New England newspapers quickly dubbed the siege army the “Grand American Army,” and General Ward just as rapidly deployed his men all along the periphery of Boston in a twelve-mile arc that stretched from east of the Mystic River to the north to Roxbury and Dorchester to the south of the city.
2

Those who had been chosen to sit in the Second Congress were preparing to leave for Philadelphia, and their responses to the outbreak of hostilities differed wildly. Galloway, though reelected, had decided to resign his seat and quit the Pennsylvania assembly as well. He did not wish to be part of any government that was at war with the mother country. Galloway also feared for his safety. It was bad enough to be regarded as an “apostate” by the other congressmen, but he was badly unnerved when someone sent a box to his home containing a noose and a note asking that he kill himself and “rid the World of a Damned Scoundrel.”
3
New York's Robert R. Livingston, who was every bit as conservative as Galloway, was elected to Congress on the day before word of the Lexington and Concord battles reached Manhattan. Friends urged him not to attend the Congress, but he refused to listen. “My property is here [and] I cannot remove it,” he told them. “I am resolved to stand or fall with my country.”
4
John Dickinson, who charged London with having started an “impious War of Tyranny against Innocence,” was eager to be part of this congress.
5
So too was Richard Henry Lee, who raged that General Gage had launched “a wanton and cruel Attack on unarmed people … brutally [killing] Old Men, Women, & Children.”
6

John Adams declared that Britain's use of force had “changed the Instruments of Warfare from the Penn to the Sword.” He laid aside his quill, mercifully bringing to an end his Novanglus essays, and hurried to Lexington, wishing to speak with witnesses to the incident on Lexington Green, as well as to residents along what was now and ever after called Battle Road. He found that his fellow colonists were ready for war. The “Die was cast, the Rubicon passed,” they told him, adding that they had fought on April 19 because “if We did not defend ourselves they would kill Us.” He saw abundant evidence of the recent engagement. Adams rode down Battle Road, still littered with the rotting corpses of horses and other residue of the bloody clash, and he spoke with civilians and militiamen, some with ghastly wounds. It was a profoundly disturbing experience. Aside from any haunting questions that might have troubled him regarding his accountability for having brought on hostilities, Adams was anxious for the well-being of his wife and four children, who lived even closer to Boston than did the inhabitants of Lexington and Concord. Would they, too, face similar horrors? Overwrought by his day at the scene of suffering, Adams fell ill that evening “with alarming Symptoms.”
7

War created a new set of political problems for Samuel Adams. For one thing, he feared that some Americans, including the most conservative congressmen, might be swayed by Lord Chatham's February peace proposal. Chatham, after all, was lionized in America, and his plan for saving the empire could be distilled to a simple and possibly attractive means of avoiding war: The colonies would recognize parliamentary sovereignty in return for Parliament's renunciation of American taxation. Adams went on the offensive, writing some of his congressional colleagues to implore them to “take Care lest America in Lieu of a Thorn in the Foot should have a Dagger in her heart.”
8

Notwithstanding what his cousin John had written in excitement, Samuel Adams, and the coterie of radical leaders who surrounded him, realized that the pen, as well as the sword, was an essential weapon in this war. They rapidly set out to convince colonists throughout America that the British regulars, acting on orders from London, had been responsible for firing the first shot. They also wished to persuade both colonists and residents in the mother country that the American militiamen had bravely stood up to the British regulars and, in fact, had defeated them.

On the day after the fighting, Revere saddled up again. This time he rode at the behest of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, which from the Hastings House in Cambridge directed day-to-day activities for the defiant rebel government in Massachusetts. Revere spent seventeen days on the road disseminating the committee's account of what had occurred on Lexington Green and the North Bridge in Concord. One Boston firebrand called the story that Revere broadcast an “authentick account of this inhuman proceeding.” In fact, the purpose of the Committee of Safety was to wage what historian David Hackett Fischer has called “the second battle of Lexington and Concord”: the battle for public opinion. It moved quickly to tell its version of the events of that historic day, dispatching numerous riders to committees of correspondence inside Massachusetts and beyond. The Committee of Safety also published a broadside—a single-page handbill—with a description of the attack on Captain Parker's militiamen under the screaming headline BARBAROUS MURDERS. It additionally subsidized the
Massachusetts Spy
, whose editor had wisely removed his printing press from Boston to the safety of Worcester just three days before the fighting. In the days following, that newspaper ran repeated hyperbolic accounts of the engagements. Its motto was “Americans! Liberty or Death: Join or Die!”
9

As the Massachusetts Committee of Safety hoped would be the case, newspapers across America promptly ran accounts of the events of April 19, virtually all of them utilizing materials distributed through the committees of correspondence. Within seventy-two hours the story was in print in every New England colony, and in less than a week residents of New York and Philadelphia could read a narrative of what had transpired. The newspaper accounts played on a few simple themes: “his
Brittanick
Majesty commenced Hostilities upon the People” of America; the tragedy was the result of the “sanguinary Measures of a wicked Ministry”; the citizens of Lexington and Concord, and the residents along Battle Road, had suffered cruelties no “less brutal than what our venerable Ancestors received from the vilest Savages of the Wilderness”; and by day's end the British regulars had been “decisively defeated.”
10
Some newspapers ran their stories inside black borders. One ran the headline: BLOODY NEWS. A New England broadside depicted a row of coffins beneath the headline BLOODY BUTCHERY BY THE BRITISH TROOPS. The
New-York Journal
told its readers that “our good mother [country is] … at last revealed to all the world … a vile imposter—an old abandoned prostitute—crimsoned oe'r with every abominable crime, shocking to humanity.”
11

These lurid though vague accounts of what had occurred were augmented by the publication of depositions taken from more than one hundred civilians and militiamen—and even captured British regulars—who had been in Lexington or Concord or somewhere along Battle Road on April 19. Within four days of the fighting, representatives of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety began taking sworn statements, which were rushed into print. Needless to say, these accounts stated that the regulars had fired the first shots in both Lexington and Concord. There were slight differences in the various accounts of the historic instant when the first shot was fired on Lexington Green, but all fixed the blame on the redcoats:

A British officer shouted “damn them, we will have them,” and immediately the regulars “shouted aloud, run, and fired on the
Lexington
Company, which did not fire a gun before.”

The regulars' commander “flourishing his sword and with a loud voice giving the word fire; which was instantly followed by a discharge of arms by said Regular Troops.”

The regulars' commander ordered his men, saying “Fire, by
God
, Fire; at which moment we received a very heavy and close fire from them.”

“[W]hilst our backs were turned on the Troops we were fired on by them … Not a Gun was fired by any person in our Company.”

“[S]ome of our Company were coming to the parade with their backs towards the Troops, and others on the parade began to disperse, when the Regulars fired … before a gun was fired by any our Company on them.”

The commander of the regulars shouted “ ‘Fire! Fire, damn you, fire!' and immediately they fired before any of Captain Parker's Company fired.”
12

The Massachusetts Committee of Safety additionally published several letters that it claimed had been written by captured or killed British soldiers. On encountering the “peasants” in Lexington, wrote one redcoat, his commander “ordered us to rush them with our bayonets fixed … and the engagement began.” Another divulged that “We … burnt some of their houses.” Several mentioned the suffering of Boston's residents. As there “is no market in
Boston
, the inhabitants [are] all starving,” one reported, while a comrade wrote that the “people in Boston are in great trouble, for General Gage will not let the Town's people go out” to gather provisions.
13

On April 25 the Committee of Safety learned that General Gage's report of the battle was to be conveyed to London that same day by the
Sukey
, a two-hundred-ton brig loaded with cargo and owned by a Boston merchant. Knowing the importance of first impressions, the committee moved hurriedly to present its version to London before the
Sukey
crossed the Atlantic. It chose as its courier Captain John Derby of Salem, owner of the
Quero
, a lean and speedy sixty-ton vessel with a schooner's rigging. He departed from Salem four days after the
Sukey
weighed anchor in Boston. To hasten his voyage, Derby sailed without cargo. He did not even carry any correspondence, save for that provided by the committee: copies of the hastily transcribed eyewitness depositions; two issues of the
Salem Gazette
, each of which carried accounts of the April 19 engagements; and a letter from the committee addressed “To the Inhabitants of Great Britain.” Written by Dr. Joseph Warren, the letter declared that the regulars had started hostilities by firing on the Lexington and Concord militiamen, acts that he characterized as a premeditated mark of “ministerial vengeance against this Colony.” Warren vowed that Americans “will not tamely submit … we determine to die or be free.”
14