An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  But as the suspense continued, men and women grew ever more accustomed to the thought of violence. This process can be seen in the diary of Lady Mary Coke. Several evenings a week, she would lose forty guineas at a time playing cards with Princess Amelia, the aunt of George III, and so her developing attitudes reflect those of the royal family and the people clustered around it. It was hard for Lady Mary to say which was the worst: the Somerset girl’s décolletage, the disorders in New England, or the wicked agitation by Charles Lennox. But on December 7, with her garden frozen solid and the papers full of blood, she resigned herself to what she feared was coming. “ ’Tis believed that there has actually been an engagement in America,” she told her diary. “I pity those who have relations in that part of the world, where there is beginning a civil war.”7

  These were dangerous words, the kind that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, but her intuition was correct. Since early summer, the colonies had captured the initiative, forging ahead while the British lay mired in hesitation. Even their divisions proved to be a source of strength, as debate between the different sections of American society helped to sharpen their thinking about the future. Six weeks before Lady Mary spoke of civil war, the Glenfinnan moment had already occurred.

  THE OCTOBER DAYS

  It took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 26. Six days earlier, after many weeks of debate, the Continental Congress had reached its own point of no return when it issued a document—the “Association”—that rejected compromise and called for unified resistance. Without waiting for the final text, Paul Revere had already ridden north with the news of what the Congress planned to do. He found John Hancock chairing a meeting of his colony’s provisional assembly, whose reaction was decisive. It passed a series of resolutions that amounted, in British eyes, to acts of unequivocal rebellion. With an audacity that appalled the cabinet in London, the rebels published their treachery in the press. With that, Massachusetts put itself beyond the pale, and war became inevitable.

  By the autumn of 1774, across much of North America the empire had come close to collapse. Everywhere we can find sedition: on the streets, in the pulpits, in the newspapers, and on the frontier. From the outset, the British had failed to understand the chemistry of protest and the speed with which it could spread and diversify. Although it began in August and in Boston, the revolution soon acquired many centers and a host of leaders. It might have different causes in each different place, and sometimes the sedition amounted to nothing but rhetoric. But in the aggregate its meaning was quite clear. By the middle of October, there were few counties in America where the British could speak and confidently expect a majority of the inhabitants to obey.

  With so few royal officials, no police, and a small army widely scattered, the British had always relied on local habits of deference to keep the empire in some semblance of submission. In Massachusetts, this customary loyalty to the Crown had been in decay for many years, and now it collapsed across the rest of the colonies as well. In Vermont, Ethan Allen was already up in arms, staging his own rebellion and making the Bennington area independent by the end of the year. In South Carolina and Maryland, the empire had ceased to exist in anything but name; at Annapolis, a crowd went all the way and forced the burning of a tea ship and its cargo, rather than merely dumping the stuff in the water; and on the streets of New York, the king became an object of open derision. “You now hear the very lowest orders call him a knave or a fool,” said one young citizen.8

  That was in early September, a week or so after the news arrived of the protests in London against the Quebec Act. Of all the new laws that Lord North had introduced, this was the one that caused the deepest anger in America, because it appeared to demonstrate a callous disregard for faith as well as freedom. The Quebec Act seemed to endanger the Protestant religion, and in the words of a man from Maryland it “raised a universal flame.” And then there came the reports from Boston, false though they were, of townspeople killed by the redcoats and the waterfront on fire. Spreading outward from New England, the stories reached all corners of the colonies and found an echo among men and women with other grievances of their own.9

  Before the Gaspée raid and the Tea Party, we saw how anger gave birth not only to protest but also to new and radical ideas with a philosophical cast. From a British point of view, this feature of the revolution seems all the more striking and original. In England, when the Wilkesites made their play for votes at an election, they tended to deal either in slogans—“No Popery” being the most frequent—or in a list of specifics. They called for annual Parliaments, or they demanded the exclusion of paid royal officials from the House of Commons. They rarely theorized about fundamentals or questioned the very basis of the British constitution. In America, men and women did exactly that.

  In the weeks that followed the powder alarm, the political debate in the colonies entered new, uncharted waters far deeper than those with which the British were familiar. Jefferson’s pamphlet had shown the way, but many other people went as far or even further. Take, for example, an anonymous writer in the Pennsylvania Packet who went to the very origins of law and government, which he found in the will of the people alone. “The history of kings,” he wrote, “is nothing but the history of folly and depravity.” The time was coming, and coming soon, when America would sever its connection with Great Britain. It would throw off the monarchy and strike out for its own independent future. The writer looked forward a hundred years and imagined how the nation would recall the events he saw unfolding all around him. “I almost wish to hear the triumphs of the jubilee in the year 1874,” he wrote. “To see the medals, pictures and fragments of writings that shall be displayed.” They would revere the memory of the Continental Congress, an assembly whose authority came from the highest source of all. “The American congress,” he went on, “derives all its power, wisdom and justice, not from scrolls of parchment signed by kings, but from the people.”

  Two members of the Continental Congress in a privy (or a “necessary”), with on the wall pictures of John Wilkes as lord mayor and Lord Chatham tarred and feathered, from a cartoon printed in London in 1775. One of the congressmen is reading Samuel Johnson’s anti-American pamphlet, Taxation No Tyranny. Library of Congress

  In saying this, the writer preempted Thomas Paine, who was just about to arrive from London and make the same point far more famously in his pamphlet Common Sense. In this excited atmosphere, filled with talk of revolution, the Continental Congress followed Massachusetts down the path of disobedience.

  Everything Joseph Galloway had told the British proved to be false. The Congress in Philadelphia sat for seven weeks, starting on September 5, and although its early sessions were confused and hesitant, the tone soon changed to one of staunch defiance of the king and Parliament. Samuel Adams won a crucial victory when, on the sixteenth, the delegates voted to endorse the Suffolk Resolves. Twelve days after that, Galloway went down to defeat when he made his own attempt to save the empire.

  Speaking of peace and moderation, he proposed a new Anglo-American deal that, he believed, would resolve the differences between the two nations. He called for a formal union of the colonies, with a parliament of their own, and a British lord lieutenant to represent the Crown. An interesting idea, it came a century too early. It would have made America resemble Australia and Canada as they were in 1914: self-governing dominions, managing their own affairs but united in allegiance to Great Britain and committed to supporting it in time of war. The Galloway plan has appealed to many modern scholars, who argue that it might have worked, but it did nothing for his colleagues at the time. The Congress let his motion die without debate.

  Among the delegates there were differences of emphasis and strategy, there were rivalries and squabbles, but we also see a high degree of unanimity. They held a common view about the king and his cabinet. With the Coercive Acts and with the new law for Quebec, the British had shown themselves in their true colors. Lord North and h
is friends had laid siege to American freedom, or so the Continental Congress believed. By revoking the charter of Massachusetts, the British had done away with popular government in that colony, and the rest might soon suffer the same fate. They had attacked the right to trial by jury, they wanted to close the wilderness to settlers, and they undermined the Christian faith. Parliament would tax the colonies, whenever it saw fit, and if Americans objected, the army would march in to make them pay.10

  In effect the Congress drew up a long indictment of the empire, clearly and carefully itemized. If there had been some international court of law, willing to hear both sides and rule impartially, Lord North could have offered a credible defense to many of the charges. He could certainly deny that the British intended to foist the Catholic faith on the colonies against their will. That accusation was entirely baseless. With regard to the western frontier, he could claim that the government did not wish to ban new settlements entirely, but simply to prevent headlong expansion that might cause an Indian war. Yes, Great Britain wished to change the charters in New England, but only because Massachusetts and Rhode Island had failed to propose reforms of their own. For evidence that reform was long overdue, the British could point to the Boston Tea Party, the Gaspée raid, and the tactics of intimidation the colonies had employed to prevent the culprits from being brought to trial.

  Before a fair-minded judge, the British government could have made a case along these lines to justify most of the steps that it had taken, however unconvincing Americans might find it. But no such tribunal existed; and even if it had, there remained one great, divisive question that even the wisest lawyers could not arbitrate. Above all the debates in Philadelphia, there loomed the British claim that Parliament was sovereign over every corner of the empire. For as long as the Declaratory Act remained in force, with its assertion that the British could make what laws for America they chose, their conflict with the colonies could not be resolved. But time and again during the debates at Westminster earlier that year, Lord North and his colleagues had insisted that the act would never be repealed. The delegates in Philadelphia knew that this was so, and it left them with only one option.

  On October 20 the Continental Congress issued a formal statement of its conclusions. Fifty-one men, coming from twelve colonies—only Georgia failed to sign—put their names to the Association. They demanded the abolition of all the Coercive Acts, the new law for Quebec, and every other statute for America that Great Britain had passed since the end of the last war with France, including the Declaratory Act. They amounted, said the Congress, to “a ruinous system,” created with the clear intention “of enslaving these colonies, and with them the British empire.” The system had to go, and if it did not, the colonies would force its demolition with a complete ban on trade with the mother country. Imports of British goods would end on December 1, 1774. From the following September the ban would extend to exports as well. Not a single cargo would sail from the colonies to the mother country.

  The export ban was utterly new, it went far beyond the trade boycotts used against the Stamp Act or the Townshend duties, and perhaps it might not stick. Even so, it was enough to scandalize Lord North and the cabinet when the news reached London two weeks before Christmas. The reaction it evoked from Massachusetts was equally outrageous. When Revere reached Cambridge on about October 17, without the Association but knowing what it would contain, the Provincial Congress had been in session for a week with Hancock as president. The assembly was unlawful, and to begin with it was also divided. While fifty-six men had come from Worcester County to call for the creation of an army, and their comrades from the Berkshires said the same, others held back, waiting for official word from Philadelphia. But soon enough the radicals gained the upper hand.

  The debates were held behind closed doors, and only the decisions were recorded. But they were quite enough to constitute acts of rebellion. A committee drew up a list of the weapons that Massachusetts would need to defend itself. On the twenty-fifth, the Provincial Congress voted to buy enough material to equip an army: twenty-two field guns, four wide-barreled mortars of the kind used to besiege a town, thirty-five tons of grapeshot, round shot, and bombshells, a thousand barrels of powder, five thousand muskets and rifles each with a bayonet, and seventy-five thousand flints. The following day, the members passed the crucial resolution creating the new militia that men like Elbridge Gerry had advocated for so long. The old colonial militia would cease to exist and be replaced by a new force consisting of local companies, each of which would elect its own officers.

  This was definitely treason, as any English judge would understand the word. Two days later, the Provincial Congress repeated the offense when, on October 28, it voted to withhold the local taxes due to the colonial treasurer, a staunch supporter of Great Britain who had held the post for twenty years. In the future, the money would go to a new fund created by the congress, with a treasurer of their own to oversee it. This was rebellion, too, and committed openly. A few days later the Boston Gazette printed the text of both resolutions, signed by the secretary who kept the minutes: an important detail. In an English court of law signed minutes would suffice to hang John Hancock and every other man at the meeting.11

  Meanwhile, the rest of the region was also preparing for war. In October the assembly in Rhode Island authorized each town to set up its own independent militia company and promised to march to the aid of Massachusetts, while Connecticut drilled in arms and doubled its own stocks of ammunition. But news of what was going on reached England unusually slowly, as the elements conspired to create still more delay.

  The bad weather that brought an early winter to Great Britain encompassed the whole of its western approaches. There were tales of shipwreck everywhere, with voyages across the Atlantic suddenly doubling in duration. The first reports about the Association and the votes in Cambridge did not arrive in London until about December 9, carried by a cargo ship from New York; but shocking though they were, these were only stories in the press that might be inaccurate. A few days later Attorney General Thurlow delivered his opinion that the insurgency at Worcester, Massachusetts, in late August had been an act of rebellion, but even this was not enough. The men he named as rebels, led by Joshua Bigelow, were small-fry, and perhaps they did not speak for the colony as a whole.

  For better or worse, the cabinet needed to hear officially from General Gage before it could take any new decisions. Immediately after the votes at Cambridge he assembled a bundle of incriminating papers, including the relevant issue of the Boston Gazette. To go with them, Gage wrote a dispatch saying that the rebels planned to put an army in the field against him. The packet traveled on a naval schooner, the St. Lawrence, which left Boston early in November but did not reach England until the new year. In the meantime, the newspapers jeered at the king’s chief minister for what seemed to be irresolution or even cowardice.

  Lord North had behaved like an amateur, said the Public Advertiser in a brief, dismissive profile of the premier: “He has achieved a degree of importance in politics, to which from his talents he is certainly not entitled.” The mood in Whitehall became brittle and fractious. With North still enjoying the support of George III, if not the press, his colleagues placed the blame for the debacle with Gage and Dartmouth. The colonial secretary was proposing a commission of inquiry to be sent to America to meet with people of goodwill, in the hope of finding some formula for reconciliation, but the idea had ceased to be feasible. A fact-finding mission might have served a useful purpose before the Coercive Acts were passed. Now the suggestion merely angered the rest of the cabinet, whose trust in Dartmouth and Gage reached an even lower ebb.

  And yet, ironically enough, in New England the British commander was at last adopting a hard line of his own. Despite his lack of communication, Gage had shaken off his spell of low morale. Even before the congress met in Cambridge, he had come to terms with the knowledge that his initial advice to the king had been deeply flawed. Gradually, his
mood had changed. The general ceased to be a politician, acting primarily as governor, and during the autumn he regained his nerve as a soldier.

  At the beginning of October, Gage had written at last to his friend Lord Barrington, telling him exactly what he required for New England’s reconquest. Faced with a rebellion in a region with close to half a million inhabitants, he would need twenty thousand troops and far more artillery. Belatedly, he mentioned cavalry—“three or four regiments of light horse”—to throw a screen of scouts around the front of a marching column. His demands were entirely unrealistic—with the army still at peacetime strength and with twenty battalions tied down in Ireland, the British had nothing like so many troops and horses available—but at least General Gage had begun to recognize the dimensions of the challenge he faced.

  He also began to listen to the hawks in his own ranks, such as Brigadier General Percy and Alexander Leslie. Less than a year had passed since Colonel Leslie had to stand by impotently while the tea was thrown into the harbor. By the late autumn of 1774, Gage had come to share his opinion that the colony must be subdued by force of arms. Scholars have read the general’s mind that winter in different ways, but only three sources of evidence survive: his letters to England; the government’s own papers, showing what it understood him to be saying; and—most revealing of all—Gage’s daily journals of his orders to his officers, preserved today in the Boston Public Library and the New York Historical Society. Taken together, the evidence shows that far from hoping for a truce or a deal, General Gage wished to be told to take the offensive against the Provincial Congress.

  “I hope you will be firm, and send me a sufficient force to command the country, by marching into it … to secure obedience through every part,” Gage wrote to Barrington on December 14. “Affairs are at a crisis, and if you give way it is forever.” For weeks his every move, even when he seemed to be appeasing the Bostonians, had been directed toward one end. A rebellion had occurred, and it would have to be suppressed. The general knew that he would have to take the field the following spring, even if the reinforcements he required had not yet arrived.