An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  If the Quebec Act had never been passed, perhaps Gage would have been proved right; but as it was, the waiting game was doomed to end in failure. Behind his back, Alexander Leslie was already accusing him of something close to cowardice. Writing home in early July to his family, the lieutenant colonel boiled over with anger and frustration at Gage’s inactivity. Several times—“for fear he forgets, or does not know them as well as I”—he had dropped hints to the general about the need for harsher measures, especially against “that most artful clever fellow Adams, who has nothing to lose.” Leslie remembered a Spanish commander who could teach the British how to deal with traitors. In 1769, General Alejandro O’Reilly—otherwise known as Bloody O’Reilly—had crushed an uprising in New Orleans by executing five rebels by firing squad. It was, according to Leslie, the only language Americans could understand. “If half-a-dozen that I could name were sent home to garnish Tyburn Tree, it would be better than shutting up the port,” he wrote. “Nothing but hanging or shooting will do now, the child is already spoilt, gentle correction is of no use.”12

  If Gage had followed this wise counsel, he would merely have started the war nine months early, but the lieutenant colonel made a fair point about the closure of the port. Although the measure was far too severe, for the reasons given by Josiah Quincy, it might have been worth the risk of arousing a backlash across America if Boston had been isolated entirely. But the navy had grave doubts about its capacity to do so. By now, John Montagu had ended his tour of duty, to be replaced by the sixty-one-year-old admiral Samuel Graves. The new commander remembered the arduous blockade against the coast of France in 1758 and 1759, which had stretched the fleet close to its breaking point. While the waters off New England were less hazardous and the enemy less awesome, Graves knew how hard it was to seal the approaches to a port tightly week after week.

  When he reached America on June 30, Graves found that his squadron consisted of just nineteen ships, of which only nine—mostly frigates or schooners of the Gaspée class—were on station in Cape Cod Bay. Soon he was writing home for more, not only to deal with Boston, but also to police the smuggling coast from Nantucket to New York, which otherwise would lie unguarded. But Lord Sandwich had few resources to spare. In May, the old king of France had succumbed to smallpox, Louis XVI had come to the throne, and again reports arrived of naval rearmament at Brest and Toulon. Until the new monarch’s intentions were clear, Graves would have to wait for reinforcements. Only three more frigates were sent before year’s end, while Sandwich kept a close watch on the English Channel.

  Meanwhile, General Gage had entirely lost his way. Hearing vague rumors about armed resistance, which he passed on to London in early July, he could think of only one course of action. He decided to cram as many battalions as he could into his camp on Boston Common. Late in June, the first detachments had arrived from another regiment of foot, the Fifth. Two weeks later, Gage began to strip his military resources from New York and Nova Scotia, sending for more infantry, the Forty-Third and the Fifty-Ninth, and another three companies of field guns. On their arrival, they had no clear mission to fulfill. An urban uprising was highly unlikely—in the recent past, the few outright insurrections in America had been rural, in North Carolina or in up-country New York—but if that was Gage’s greatest fear, he should have begun to fortify the high ground around the peninsula, from Dorchester Heights to Charlestown. The general did no such thing, and his army merely idled away the summer.

  Once his regiments were all in Boston, two thousand men in tents with their wives and children, surrounded by unfriendly neighbors, they became a problem of their own. Supplies had to be found; sooner or later despite his earlier optimism, winter quarters and clothing would have to be provided; and in the meantime his officers had to keep the camp safe and hygienic. They fought a constant battle with squalor and indiscipline. There were no latrines other than holes in the ground or straw in the tents. While the Common had few wells for drinking water, liquor was everywhere, on sale at stalls set up by people from the town. Close at hand the whores of Boston, “infamous and obnoxious,” lay in wait for any redcoat on a spree.13

  As the temperature rose, the general saw no reason to sweat it out alongside his troops in a town that was sullen but outwardly peaceful. On July 20, just before he left for what amounted to a vacation at Danvers, near Salem, Gage wrote another letter to Lord Dartmouth, urging him not to worry. While Massachusetts remained its surly, uncooperative self, everywhere else the colonies were quiet. “The virulent party at New York is routed, and Philadelphia is moderate,” the general said. Six weeks after the port act came into force, Boston was starting to suffer as traders ran short of stock and prices rose for rum and molasses. Otherwise all was quiet, here and in New York. Gage still saw little sign of a continental congress. It was “talk and noise only,” he told the colonial secretary.14

  In fact, the Congress was already scheduled to meet early in September in Philadelphia, and in the meantime the southern colonies were moving ever closer to rebellion. Widely reprinted, Quincy’s brilliant dissection of the port act had left no room for doubt that the measure was tyrannical. His pamphlet was soon followed by a more famous work by Thomas Jefferson that plainly contradicted Gage’s complacent appraisal of the situation. Jefferson’s essay—A Summary View of the Rights of British America—took a line more radical than any other writer before him. For years, it had been commonplace for Americans to deny Parliament’s right to make laws for the colonies, but the southerner went further and questioned the entire apparatus of the empire and the very concept of loyalty to the Crown.

  Like the rioters who mobbed the royal carriage at Westminster, Jefferson displayed a new personal animosity toward the king. “His majesty has no right to land a single armed man on our shores,” he wrote; George III was merely a “chief magistrate,” with only those powers in America that Americans saw fit to give him; and if the empire were to survive, the empire had to become a free and equal union with the mother country, designed according to some new plan agreed by both sides. During the debates in Parliament, this idea had been alluded to, but only briefly and in passing. Given the prevailing views within the British cabinet, it had no realistic prospect of coming to fruition. Jefferson was being very radical indeed, but leaving aside political philosophy, his tract was significant for something else. The Summary View showed just how swiftly attitudes were hardening in the South, that old Achilles’ heel, a region about which Whitehall knew even less than it did about New England.

  By early July, the essential points of all the Coercive Acts were widely known in the South, and even some vague reports of the measure for Quebec had reached Maryland and Virginia. Far from being merely talk and noise, the Continental Congress was already having a profound effect, as the southern colonies began to debate the line they wished it to take when it assembled. By July 8, South Carolina had held a three-day convention, uniting all the elements within the province: backcountry farmers, artisans from Charleston, and the richest planters from the coast. They chose their delegates for Philadelphia and set up a committee to run the colony’s affairs, creating a provisional government in all but name. Three weeks later, the lieutenant governor was speaking of “a universal spirit of jealousy against Great Britain.” It was “catching like wildfire,” he said, not only there, but throughout America. His dispatch reached London only in September, when the Continental Congress had already assembled. In the meantime, some thirty counties in Virginia had already voted for a total boycott of trade with Great Britain.15

  Unseen by the authorities, Jefferson’s Summary View circulated privately in the tobacco country; it appeared in print in America in late August; and suddenly it hit the streets of London on November 5, at a price of one and sixpence, with a fanfare of publicity in the London Evening Post. No one in Whitehall seems to have read it, but even if they had, it was too late to prevent the revolution. By that time, the people of Massachusetts had been in open rebellion for two
months.

  THE POWDER ALARM

  “A throne cannot be established on unrighteousness,” wrote the Marblehead Committee of Correspondence on July 28, with the same new antipathy toward the king. With the heat so extreme that the army could not exercise, only a few days remained before Gage would receive the text of the Massachusetts Government Act. Everywhere around him the language of resistance was reaching a new peak of truculence.

  From his summer home at Danvers, Gage began to grow uneasy, scanning the press for clues about the nature of the opposition the act might arouse. Early in August, a story surfaced in the local paper, the Essex Gazette, about a letter sent out from Boston that the general took to be a coded signal intended to incite an insurrection across New England as a whole. It began to dawn on him that perhaps Alexander Leslie had been correct, and at last the tone of the general’s dispatches began to change.16

  Until now, Gage had clung to the idea that Hancock and Adams led only a faction, but all the time it seemed to grow more numerous and powerful. Supplies of rice, grain, and fish were flowing in to feed the people of Boston from as far afield as Charleston. From the pulpit, even at Harvard, the clergy were spouting sedition, decrying the British as agents of the Roman Catholic Antichrist. As for the Continental Congress, it had left the realm of the merely possible to become a certainty. Samuel Adams and his fellow delegates were due to leave for Philadelphia within the week.

  “I hope the acts may soon arrive, which will be a kind of test of people’s conduct,” Gage wrote home to Lord Dartmouth. As though to raise the stakes, he dismissed John Hancock from his post as colonel of cadets, a step long overdue, and then, on August 6, the general’s wish was granted. In sailed a frigate, the Scarborough, carrying £10,000 in silver—by now, the army was very short of cash—and a bundle of dispatches, including the official text of the regulating act. With it came his final orders from Whitehall, drawn up nine weeks previously.

  The waiting was over. The general summoned the king’s chosen councillors to Salem to be sworn in. Out of thirty-six Massachusetts worthies named in his orders, only twenty-four turned up, and their arrival heightened his anxieties about the colony’s mood. Traveling in from all corners of the province, they brought word of what Gage called “a frenzy … of Popular rage” running wild in every county, leaving them in fear for their lives and property.17

  Months earlier, Thomas Hutchinson had warned that the Berkshires were restless, but now the general heard of trouble not only there but in Springfield, in Worcester, and spilling over the border into Connecticut. It was what he had feared might happen after he read the Essex Gazette: Boston had rallied the countryside against him. And so the general returned to the town with three purposes in mind. On August 13 he convened the Boston selectmen to read them the law, to prohibit town meetings without his approval, and to warn them against any more opposition. Then, in the cool of the evening, he went to the Common to meet his deputy, Hugh Percy, recently given the rank of brigadier. An old Etonian of thirty-two, the sort of officer the British call hard but fair, kind to his troops but severe with any who stepped out of line, Percy had sealed the camp more tightly, banning outsiders and cracking down hard on shirkers and privates absent without leave.

  He and Gage toured the camp together, closely inspecting the corporals and sergeants who would form the backbone of the army in the field. Seven months before the war began, it was already clear that they might have to take the offensive and march out of Boston to quell disorder in the interior. That night, they ordered each unit to set up a baggage store to hold equipment too heavy to be carried. As the week went on, at last the weather broke, showers of rain began to fall, and the exercises could resume but with far more vigor than before.

  With the prospect now before them of a battle in the open, Percy hurried to prepare the artillery for action. By now, two more infantry regiments had arrived, giving the British seven altogether, one in Salem and six in Boston, mostly on the Common but also in a makeshift camp beside the harbor. On the seventeenth, Percy took twenty men from each one to be trained as extra gunners. Every morning they turned out to practice, firing at a mark on the slopes above Back Bay.

  During the ten days after the Scarborough arrived, the general held the initiative, and he had the firepower to retain it, but then it began to slip away in the face of opposition from every part of the colony. Like the Boston Port Act, a measure too broad and too draconian to be effective, the regulating act for Massachusetts was simply too ambitious. Far too widely drawn and too intrusive, it created a kind of rolling insurgency throughout the province, a movement so extensive that the general could not hope to stand in its way.

  “We are indeed in a most critical situation, and what the grand event may be, heaven only knows,” Samuel Cooper wrote to Benjamin Franklin from Boston on August 15, but even before he posted the letter, the revolution was already near at hand. Because of the way the officials in Whitehall had drafted the regulating act, the British had given the colony an obvious weapon of resistance. It would be used the first time the following day in the depths of Berkshire County, nearly 100 miles inland.18

  Yet again, the British had failed to understand the internal dynamics of New England. If the cabinet had confined the new regulating act to the central offices of state in Massachusetts, merely giving additional powers to the governor, his council, and the most senior judges, the new law might have stood a fighting chance of success. Instead, the regulating act reached down to the very lowest levels of local administration, threatening to end democracy across the board. In the future, all the jurors in every court, even the most junior, would be appointed by the county sheriff rather than chosen by the people. With town meetings virtually banned as well, the act struck a blow at every adult male, depriving him of rights of self-government dating back more than a century. Every county had an Inferior Court of Common Pleas, which met each month to settle minor disputes, license taverns, enforce debts, and issue writs against delinquents who failed to pay their taxes. If the people simply closed the courts when next they met, then the governor would lose the means to enforce the law. The new regime would be stillborn.

  On August 16, the farmers of the Berkshire Hills struck first. It was harvesttime, the busiest period of the year, but they turned out in their hundreds to fill the streets around the courthouse at Great Barrington, barring the way of the judges as they tried to take their seats. Led by a blacksmith, Timothy Bigelow, the patriots to the east in Worcester County met and made plans to do the same, writing to Boston to call for a conference to ensure that every other county followed suit. The meeting would convene in the town on the twenty-sixth and last for two days. By the time it ended, the American Revolution had begun.

  In the meantime, more news arrived from England and threw more fuel on the fire of protest. One of Marblehead’s sea captains, Benjamin Calley, sailed back and forth between America and Spain and often called at Falmouth, in the far west of England, a haven used by fast packet boats that carried official mail. As a result, Calley and his ship the Molly had a knack of being first with any sensational story from Europe.

  On Saturday, August 20, the Molly docked in Marblehead with newspapers as recent as early July, running stories about the riot against the king at Westminster. According to Calley, Lord North was about to fall from power, swept away by a rising tide of popular anger against the Quebec Act. In London, public opinion had swung behind the American cause, and with a general election just around the corner gamblers were laying bets at five to one that the government would be gone by Christmas. That evening, Elbridge Gerry sent these stories to Boston, where they appeared in the press on Monday. On the twenty-first another ship reached New York with the same reports from London. A week after that they arrived in Charleston, where they filled the columns of the South Carolina Gazette.19

  It was all wild exaggeration; but the stories tallied with what Samuel Adams had been telling his friends for months. Fed with misinformation fr
om the Lees, Adams had come to believe that the British were too weak, too disunited, and too scared of the French to stand and fight against a solid front of colonial disobedience. Actually, Lord North had never been stronger, the French had not the slightest intention of sending their navy to sea, and the press reports that sailed with Calley came only from the Wilkesite papers in the capital. They gave an entirely false impression of the prevailing mood in the mother country. But as it was, the news brought on the Molly screwed up the tension in New England to such a degree that it could only end in outright insurrection.

  On the morning of Monday, the twenty-second, with the British still firing their guns on the Common, the Boston Gazette printed two full pages of reports from the heart of the empire. Opening with a diatribe from the Duke of Richmond, in which he condemned the Coercive Acts, and then going on to report Lord Chatham’s unsuccessful speech as though it had been a matter of great significance, they painted a picture of a ruling class in turmoil. The Gazette also ran a letter from William Lee, which left no doubt about the path the Bostonians should follow.