Paul Revere's Ride

by David Hackett Fischer

  Colonel Leslie gave the order to advance, and the long red column went swinging into its march toward Salem, five miles away. The Regulars were confident that nothing could stand in their way, and decided to announce their presence. The fifes and drums of the 64th Foot suddenly shattered the stillness of the Sabbath with a raucous rendition of Yankee Doodle.

  The landing of the soldiers had already been observed by several men of Marblehead, who sprinted to their meetinghouse and sounded the alarm. Whig leader Major John Pedrick decided to warn Salem, but he could get there only by the road the Regulars had taken. Major Pedrick mounted his horse, and rode slowly past the Regulars, politely saluting Colonel Leslie, whom he had met before. Leslie returned the salute, and ordered his regiment to “file to the right and left and give Major Pedrick the pass.”

  When out of sight Pedrick put spurs to his horse, and galloped on to Salem. He went to the home of Colonel David Mason, who ran into the meetinghouse, where the congregation had gathered for the afternoon service, and shouted as he came down the aisle, “The Regulars are coming after the guns and are now near Mal-loon’s Mills!”

  Bells began to ring and drums beat “to arms” throughout the town. The people poured out of their churches and ran to save the guns. Baptists and Congregationalists forgot their differences and joined in a common effort. Even Quaker David Boyce hitched up his team and helped to haul away the heavy cannon. Some weapons were taken to an oak woodlot and hidden under the leaves. Others were carried to a remote part of town called Orne’s Point. 45

  Meanwhile, the British troops were on the march. To delay them a party of townsmen hurried to a bridge between Salem and Marblehead and frantically ripped up some of the planking to delay the Regulars. Colonel Leslie’s column was forced to halt while a party of soldiers repaired the structure. The Salem men won a few precious moments for the teams who were removing the cannon. But the Regulars soon improvised a surface over the bridge and crossed into Salem center, where they halted for a moment in Town House Square.

  The townspeople watched as several of their Tory neighbors came forward. One was seen “whispering in the Colonel’s ear.” Then the British column started off at a quick-march, straight toward the cannon, with a large crowd of Salem men and boys walking beside them.

  In their path was a drawbridge over an arm of the sea called North River. Just as the soldiers approached it, the men of Salem raised the drawbridge from the north side. There was no other way across. The troops were forced to halt at the bridge.

  Colonel Leslie hurried forward, and demanded to know why the men of Salem dared to obstruct the King’s highway. They replied that the road belonged to them. The British commander “stamped and swore and ordered the bridge to be lowered at once,” threatening to open fire if he was not obeyed. Militia captain John Felt warned him, “You had better be damned than fire! You have no right to fire without further orders! If you fire you’ll all be dead men.”

  The crowd began to grow. Several Salem men sat provocatively on the raised edge of the open drawbridge, dangling their feet and shouting defiantly at the Regulars, “Soldiers! Red Jackets! Lobster Coats! Cowards! Damnation to Your Government!”

  While the Salem men gathered at the head of the British column, the Marblehead Regiment was mustering behind its rear. These Marblehead men were a special breed. Many were cod fishermen—rugged, weatherbeaten, hard-handed seamen who earned their living in open boats on the dangerous waters of the North Atlantic. Some were veterans of the French wars. They were as stubborn and independent as their Boston cousins, and feared no mortal power on this earth—least of all the red-coated Regulars who had invaded their town. The men of Marblehead moved into strong positions along the Salem Road, and prepared to fight. 46

  It was a sharp wintry New England day. As the Regulars stood waiting in their ranks, some began to shiver in the damp cold. The men of Salem taunted them. One shouted across the river, “I should think you were all fiddlers, you shake so!” 47

  In the river near the bridge were three large sailing scows called “gundalows” in the old New England dialect. Colonel Leslie noticed the boats and ordered his troops to seize them. The Salem men moved more quickly. They jumped into the boats and smashed their bottoms to keep the Regulars from using them. The soldiers ran to stop them, threatening to use their bayonets. A Salem man named Joseph Whicher, the foreman of a distillery, rose up before them and defiantly tore open his shirt, daring the troops to attack. An infuriated British soldier lunged forward and “pricked” the American’s naked chest with his bayonet. 48

  The mood of the crowd began to change. They closed in around the soldiers, who pushed them back with bayonets. Suddenly, a man dressed in black moved through the throng toward Colonel Leslie, and spoke to him in a voice that demanded to be heard:

  “I desire you do not fire on these innocent people.”

  “Who are you?” said Colonel Leslie.

  “I am Thomas Barnard, a minister of the gospel, and my mission is peace,” the clergyman replied. The two men, one in black and the other in red, began to talk. The hour was growing late—five o’clock in the evening. The winter sun was going down, and wind was cruel in the damp salt air.

  Colonel Leslie had reason to be concerned, not merely for the success of his mission, but the safety of his force. Whig leader Benjamin Daland (today remembered as the Paul Revere of Salem) had galloped to Danvers with the news of the Regulars. Now he was back again, and many others with him. By five o’clock militia were streaming into Salem from as far as Amesbury, twenty-five miles to the north.

  As more men poured into the town, the Salem minister proposed to the British colonel a cunning Yankee compromise—the bridge would be lowered if the Regulars promised on their honor to march only to the forge about 100 yards beyond. If they found no cannon they were to turn around and go back to their ships. Colonel Leslie was willing to accept those terms, knowing that he could accomplish nothing more at that late hour. The people of Salem were happy to agree, knowing that the cannon were safely removed.

  The drawbridge came creaking down. The British soldiers marched solemnly across it, found nothing, and turned to march back again. As they started their retreat, a window flew open in a house by the road, and a young Salem woman named Sarah Tarrant thrust out her head. “Go home,” she screamed at the Regulars, “and tell your master he sent you on a fool’s errand, and has broken the peace of our Sabbath.” She added contemptuously, “Do you think we were born in the woods, to be frightened by owls?” An frustrated Regular raised his firelock and took aim at her head. Sarah Tarrant said defiantly, “Fire, if you have the courage, but I doubt it.” 49

  The British troops returned ignominiously to their ship, fifes and drums playing with empty bravado. They were escorted by a vast crowd of men from Salem and Danvers and many other towns. As the column crossed into Marblehead, and the men of that community also came out of their positions and joined the procession, marching in mock-cadence beside the British troops.

  As the Regulars boarded their transport and sailed away, American militiamen converged on Salem from many towns in Essex County—from Danvers and Marblehead, Beverly and Lynn End, Reading and Stoneham. When they learned that the Regulars had left empty-handed, many shared a sense of triumph that made the Imperial cause seem not evil but absurd. An American journalist commented, “It is regretted that an officer of Colonel Leslie’s worth should be obliged, in obedience to his orders, to come upon so pitiful an errand.” Even Loyalists were appalled by what had happened. Thomas Hutchinson wrote, “It is very uncertain whether he succeeded in the errand he went upon.” 50

  General Gage confessed in his candid way that the mission had been a “mistake.” Worse than merely a defeat, it was received by both sides as a disgrace to British arms. Something was happening in these alarms that meant more trouble for the Imperial cause than the loss of a few cannon. When Joseph Whicher exposed his naked breast to a British bayonet, and Sarah Tarrant dared a Re
gular to fire “if you have the courage,” a new spirit was rising in Massachusetts. Each side tested the other’s resolve in these encounters. One side repeatedly failed that test. 51

  Why it did so is a question of much importance in our story. Had General Gage been the tyrant that many New England Whigs believed him to be, the outcome might have been very different. But Thomas Gage was an English gentleman who believed in decency, moderation, liberty, and the rule of law. Here again was the agony of an old English Whig: he could not crush American resistance to British government without betraying the values which he believed that government to represent.

  On the other side, Paul Revere and the Whigs of New England faced no such dilemma. Their values were consistent with their interests and their acts. That inner harmony became their outward strength.

  MOUNTING TENSIONS

  Inevitability as an Act of Choice

  On both sides large preparations are making … bloodshed and desolation seem inevitable.”

  —Robert Auchmuty to Thomas Hutchinson, March 3, 1775, Hutchinson papers, BL

  It is certain both sides were ripe for it, and a single blow would have occasioned the commencement of hostilities,”

  —Lt. Frederick Mackenzie, Royal Welch Fusiliers, Boston, March 6, 1775

  ASSPRING APPROACHED in 1775, the atmosphere in Boston grew heavy with foreboding. “Things now every day begin JLJL to grow more and more serious,” Lord Percy wrote home on April 8. It was one of the few facts on which everyone could agree. Here was a curious phenomenon, rarely studied by historians of war, and yet always part of its antecedents. On both sides, men acquiesced in a growing sense that conflict was inevitable. Many adopted this idea of inevitability, as an act of choice. That expanding attitude rapidly became the father of the fact. 1

  The wretched weather did not help. A dreary season of mud and flood and drizzle that New England dignifies by the name of spring literally created a climate of despair. One British soldier wrote home that even springtime in New England was “cold and disagreeable, a kind of second winter.” 2

  After many months of frost, Boston larders were empty, and food was increasingly scarce. The price of fresh provisions rose so high in the crowded town that General Gage was forced to put his army on salt rations. One of his officers wrote privately, “Tommy feels no affection for his army, and is more attached to a paltry oeconomy.” 3

  Even the drinking water went foul. The 43rd Foot reported that the water in its reservoirs “smells so excessively strong that many of the men drop down in fits while they are pumping.” 4 The health of the garrison was not good. A “malignant spotted fever” (perhaps typhus) broke out among the Royal Irish. They were quarantined on a transport in the harbor. The “throat distemper” (possibly diphtheria) spread through the garrison, killing General Gage’s confidential secretary and many others. Sam Adams reported to his friends in Virginia, “The army has been sickly through the winter and continue so. Many have died. Many have deserted. Many I believe intend to desert.” 5

  The British infantry were kept busy drilling on the Common and shooting at floating marks in Boston harbor. Twice a day they were ordered to stand parade in rigid formation, and made to endure spit-and-polish inspections while gangs of ragged apprentices shouted insults from a safe distance. The men were increasingly bored, angry, and hungry—a recipe for disaster in any army.

  The common British soldier has rarely received his due in histories of the American Revolution. Many people regarded them as rough, unlettered, hard-drinking men—outcasts from civil society, a breed apart. They were reviled by civilians and despised even by their own commanders. But those who knew them as individuals formed a different opinion of their character and worth. William Cobbett, before becoming a political journalist of high eminence in the United States and Britain, enlisted in the 54th Foot near the end of the American Revolution and served nine years as a common soldier. Afterwards he remembered his comrades with affection and respect. “I like soldiers as a class in life, better than any other description of men,” he wrote. “Their conversation is more pleasing to me; they have generally seen more than other men; they have less vulgar prejudice about them.” 6

  The British Regulars bonded closely with one another against a hostile world. They spoke their own distinctive dialect—a form of speech related to the “flash language” of the 18th-century underworld. Among themselves they kept a soldier’s code of honesty, loyalty, and courage, and enforced it strictly upon one another in kangaroo courts that their officers knew nothing about. Cobbett recalled, “Amongst soldiers, less than amongst any other description of men, have I observed the vices of lying and hypocrisy.”

  These men were at their best on active service. But after a long winter in Boston garrison they were bored and restless. The supply of strong New England rum was cheap and abundant. “A man may get drunk for a copper or two,” wrote Lieutenant Barker of the King’s Own. In February, Major John Pitcairn of the British Marines told a friend, “We have lost seven by death, killed by drinking the cursed rum of this country. There are I believe several more [who] must die.” By March, Major Pitcairn was so concerned about drunkenness in his battalion that he wrote directly to the First Lord of the Admiralty, “I have lived almost night and day amongst the men in their barracks for these five or six weeks past, to keep them from that pernicious rum. I would not have your Lordship think from this that we are worse than the other battalions here. The rum is so cheap that it debauches both navy and army, and kills many of them. Depend on it, my Lord, it will destroy more of us than the Yankies will.” 7

  Several Regulars sold their muskets for drink. When a soldier in the King’s Own was caught “disposing of his arms to the townspeople,” he was trussed up like an animal on a tripod of sergeants’ halberds and given 500 lashes on his bare back—enough to kill an ordinary man. The conscience of New England was deeply shocked by this cruelty—not only by its inhumanity as we would be, but also in another way. The biblical statutes of Massachusetts restricted whipping to thirty-nine strokes; anything more was thought to be unscriptural, and forbidden by God’s express command. To the people of Boston, here was another Sign. 8

  In the British garrison, desertion rapidly increased. One of the best regiments, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, lost 27 men. Private Thomas Macfarlane of that unit enlisted on May 19,1774, deserted on July 19, returned on October 6, and deserted again on December 2, 1774. A detachment of the 8th Foot arrived in Boston, on their way to join their regiment in Quebec. The most direct route would have been west through Massachusetts by the Boston Post Road. But Gage wrote, “If I had marched them thro’ the country to Albany we should have lost half of them.” He sent them by sea to New York. 9

  General Gage doubled his guards around the town, more to keep his own men in than the “country people” out. In desperation he began to execute his own men. When a young private tried to desert for the third time he was dressed in a white shroud of repentence, taken to Boston Common, and shot by a firing squad while the town watched in shock and horror. In New England, corporal punishment was lawful for the violation of God’s Commandments, but not for the orders of General Gage. 10

  Another soldier in the 10th Regiment was shot on Christmas Eve, “the only thing done in remembrance of Christmas Day,” Barker noted bitterly. In March Private Robert Vaughan of the 52nd Foot was caught in act of deserting, and sentenced to death. He was pardoned the night before his execution, and promptly disappeared into the countryside, with much help from the town. General Gage was informed by a Loyalist agent that the people of Boston had organized a secret escape route for British deserters, who were spirited away by boat across the Charles River. One soldier was given four dollars and a suit of clothes by a Boston merchant and taken to the town of Andover, Massachusetts. Another, Private John Clancey in the 47th Foot, was promised that he “should be made a gentleman” if he chose to desert. Whig leaders passed the word that they would give 300 acres in New Hampshire to any
soldier who left his unit. 11

  Most of the Regulars refused these bribes, and stayed loyally with their comrades. They began to hate their commander in chief, who treated them as incipient felons, and punished them more severely then he did the Yankees. They equally despised the Bostonians who reviled them, and desperately wished for other duty. Even the officers of the garrison ran out of control. In late January, a party of subalterns viciously attacked the town watch. When the Dogberries defended themselves with their billhooks, the officers drew their swords. One watchman had his nose cut off; another lost his thumb. 12

  Other officers began to attack each other. Even senior officers joined in. At evening parade, Lieutenant-Colonel Walcott, commander of the 5th Foot, drew a sword on one of his junior officers, who was also his kinsman. General Gage ordered a court-martial for both men. 13

  The top commanders began to quarrel among themselves. General Gage and Admiral Graves were often at loggerheads. “It is a great misfortune to me,” Marine Major John Pitcairn wrote, “that the General and Admiral are not as cordial as I could wish.” In fact they hated and despised each other, and quarreled angrily over the Marine battalion that had been sent to reinforce the garrison. Graves refused to allow it to leave his ships unless he could continue to supply their rations, at a handsome profit. “The admiral can have no reason but to put money in the pursers’ pocket,” Major Pitcairn wrote. 14

  Both the army and the navy in Boston were at the end of a long logistical lifeline that functioned fitfully in the best of times. Major Pitcairn struggled incessantly with the Admiralty to supply his men with uniforms and equipment. They had been sent to New England in December without winter garments. Pitcairn had greatcoats, leggings and warm caps made in Boston for every man in his command. As Spring approached, he begged the Admiralty for campaigning equipment with little result. One letter sought swords for his grenadiers and drummers. Pitcairn wrote furiously, “the last have nothing to defend themselves but their drumsticks.” 15