An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  By way of evidence, all we have to go on are the words written or spoken at the time; and in this case they survive in their thousands. We have not only the text of the letter—which is unambiguous—but also debates in Parliament, diaries, private correspondence, and official papers that set out the political context in which the fatal dispatch was composed. The reality is this: the British—both General Gage and the politicians—had made a conscious choice to put down the rebellion by force in the spring, by breaking up the next session of the Provincial Congress. Gage had requested orders permitting him to take the field, sending Prescott as his emissary, and the cabinet ministers responded as he wished.

  They knew—Lord Dartmouth said as much—that direct action against the Provincial Congress might be regarded as what he called “a signal for hostilities”; but if a civil war was looming in New England, then it was better to begin it now, before the rebels were fully armed, trained, and organized. All the time, the British were keeping close watch on the Americans trying to buy weapons and gunpowder in Holland.

  Dartmouth’s dispatch began by rapping the general’s knuckles. Long before, when he sent word on the Scarborough about the events of late August, Gage had failed to show that they amounted to more than merely local incidents of riot. But that was history and the news received in early January had cast everything in a fresh light. There had been “proceedings”—by which Lord Dartmouth meant the votes at Cambridge—that amounted to outright rebellion.

  “The king’s dignity, & the honour and safety of the Empire, require,” he wrote, “that, in such a situation, force should be repelled by force.” Nothing could be clearer. If the rebels dispersed or surrendered, all well and good—the government hoped that they would—but if not, they had to be fought. And so Gage would be sent the regiments the British could spare. For the cavalry, the general was told to find two hundred horses as remounts.

  With these reinforcements, Gage could take “a more active & determined part,” Lord Dartmouth wrote. Not only in Massachusetts, but also in Rhode Island and Connecticut if necessary: Dartmouth said that too. He could not give Gage all his twenty thousand men, but then why should he? For the moment, the militia remained “a rude rabble,” the cabinet believed. If it were hit soon and hard, then no larger army would be required. As for the Continental Congress and its boycott of trade, that challenge would be left to the navy, which would protect any loyal ships that ignored the ban. Gage was told to arrest the leaders of the Provincial Congress if and when it met again. They should be tried for treason, or if that proved impossible, they could be held without trial. As governor, Gage had the power to declare martial law. Of course Dartmouth gave the general the discretion to decide exactly how to execute his orders, since only the commander in the field could draw up a precise plan of action. But in every other respect, the dispatch was explicit, leaving not the slightest room for hesitation: the army must restore the colony to order.

  Hundreds of letters survive from Lord Dartmouth, both private and official. Very few of them resemble this one. Mostly inclined to leave room for doubt where worldly matters were concerned, and always aware of the frailty of the human soul—whether the souls were those of poets, whores, or politicians—Dartmouth rarely wrote in terms so categorical. But his Christian faith had always been a compound of different elements, and on this occasion, its authoritarian side came to the fore. Coupled with his loyalty to his colleagues, it triumphed over his compassion.

  But while Lord Dartmouth had to draft the letter, there remained a political battle to be waged before it could be sent. Before the dispatch could sail on the Falcon, Parliament had to agree that a state of rebellion existed in Massachusetts. The lawyers had yet to give their view in writing; but when they did, North would be ready to face the House of Commons.

  THE FINAL ACT

  In the closing days of January, as though the nation were staging a scene from King Lear, the wind began to rise and a storm swept in from the west. The tide came surging up beneath the fleet at Portsmouth, flooding the streets of the town, while in London chimneys fell on passersby. The Thames rose as well, so that the water appeared to steam as if it were boiling. To mark the anniversary on January 30 of the execution of King Charles I, Bishop Brownlow North gave a platitudinous sermon in Westminster Abbey on the evils of political discord. The following day his half brother read another of the endless letters about turmoil in America.

  At a different place called Portsmouth, this time in New Hampshire, the rebels had struck again, under the leadership of Paul Revere, seizing a fort and a magazine full of gunpowder. On December 14, under the cover of falling snow, four hundred militiamen had come up the river and brushed aside the six redcoats on guard. Hauling down the British flag, they hid the powder safely miles inland. In the eyes of the king, this insult to the colors was the most outrageous incident of all, but each day brought forth some wretched new development. A belated dispatch even arrived from Maryland, from which so little had been heard, warning that radicals were stockpiling arms in that colony as well.

  By now, many Londoners were convinced that a war had already commenced. The mood of Parliament became more somber but also more determined, with every sign that Lord North would win its support for the firmest measures of retribution. From out of the shadows, people emerged whose careers might benefit from an escalation of the crisis. The language of debate became ever harsher and more violent.

  The previous year, when Charles Van called for Boston to be destroyed, he had stood out as a lonely extremist. But now he found new allies among more distinguished politicians with years of military service behind them. They included George Sackville Germain, who would, at the end of 1775, replace Lord Dartmouth as colonial secretary. In 1746, during the purge of the Highland clans after Culloden, Germain had led a regiment of foot, burning his way across the glens behind Ben Nevis, where his soldiers dealt in rape and murder. On January 26, as Parliament voted down the petition from the London merchants, he intervened, speaking up for the Coercive Acts, and calling for their enforcement with “a Roman severity.” A close friend of Wedderburn’s, Germain evidently knew the contents of the legal opinion on its way from the Scottish lawyer and from Thurlow.12

  Before it arrived, first the government had another obstacle to clear: Lord Chatham again, ready to reveal his own proposals for pacifying America. On February 1, after some discussions with Benjamin Franklin, whose own secret talks with Whitehall had all but broken down completely, Chatham took his plan to the House of Lords. He called on Parliament to recognize the Continental Congress, preserve the old colonial charters, and renounce the use of force. The peers chose not to debate his proposals.

  And then, on February 2, with the newspapers still full of war, and with more floods and storms across the south of England, the attorney general and his deputy came back with their advice. Yes, said Thurlow and Wedderburn, the Provincial Congress had committed treason. At last Lord North had everything he needed. At a little after 4:00 p.m., with the chamber overflowing and the lobby and the corridor outside crammed with spectators, he rose to address the Commons, speaking for two hours.

  The quarrel had begun with a protest against taxation, and so North gave the house the relevant figures. How much tax did the British pay to the Treasury? Twenty-five shillings per annum, per head. And the Americans? Just sixpence each. The cabinet had already placed before the house another great bundle of papers, including the letters from General Gage, and Lord North went through them, painting a picture of willful treachery in Massachusetts and then setting out the government’s position. The army would be reinforced, and a new law would be passed to ban New England from any overseas trade and from the fishing grounds of Newfoundland. He would also ask the house to send an address to the king, declaring that the colony was in revolt. Soon afterward Wedderburn spoke, calling the rebels “an enemy in the bowels of the kingdom.”

  It was only the first of three debates, two in the Commons and one in the
Lords, spread over a week while the Falcon strained at its anchor at Spithead. Although they lacked the eloquence seen the previous year, even so these were sessions of high drama, for which perhaps only one equivalent exists: the great parliamentary debate on the Munich Agreement in October 1938, when the question at issue was also one of war or peace. Although Lord North was bound to win the vote, just as Neville Chamberlain was sure to be victorious, the debate itself was far from one-sided. More than a hundred members of the Commons went through the lobby to vote against the government. They included the Rockinghams of course, the Wilkesites, and the friends of Chatham, but also dozens of independents fearful of the cost of war or the damage it would inflict on the economy, or opposed to the principles on which it would be fought.

  Whether inside Parliament or on the streets, no one could doubt the gravity of what Lord North was proposing. The nation was plunging, said Edmund Burke, toward “a dreadful abyss.” In poor health, he failed to shine at the first encounter: but with unaccustomed courage his fellow Rockinghams picked up the baton. In the words of Lord John Cavendish, the address to the king would constitute “a declaration of civil war,” since it would leave General Gage no choice but to march against the rebels. With the phrase reechoing around the capital, Franklin came hurrying down to the Commons. There he was seen in the lobby, in a state close to desperation, trying in vain to gain admittance to the chamber.

  Among the officials in Whitehall, these were days of high anxiety, not because they feared the loss of the debates, but because, if they won, they would have to find more troops and warships and then piece together a new order in the colonies after whatever transpired in Boston. Thomas Hutchinson spent an hour with John Pownall, whom he found a deeply worried man, poring over the history of Virginia, looking for precedents for dealing with the aftermath of a rebellion. At the Treasury another problem arose: the urgent need to find more money for the army as the cost of food and stores rose sharply in America.

  Only George III seemed to be calm. Appalled by the theft of powder in New Hampshire—he urged Lord North to put this affront center stage—the king would hear no talk of compromise. In what he called “every candid and rational mind,” the steps his cabinet was taking would be thought entirely right and proper. With this moral support from his sovereign, North won the two long debates in the Commons, on February 2 and 6, with three separate votes all taken after midnight. His majority varied slightly in each one, but even his narrowest victory saw him succeed by 288 to 106.13

  For the opposition, the problem had been simply this: that in the debates in the spring and summer of 1774, the great question of British supremacy had already been discussed at great length and apparently settled for good. Unequivocally, Parliament had decided in favor of its right to make laws for America. How could it retreat now, when Americans challenged that right by force of arms? This left the opposition with only two alternatives. On the one hand, it might follow Lord Chatham—as John Wilkes did, branding Lord North a man “of injustice and cruelty”—and opt for a complete reversal of British policy. But this was something the Rockinghams simply could not do. For them it was out of the question, since they had drawn up the Declaratory Act and passed it into law nine years earlier.

  On the other hand, they might argue that the general was to blame for the unrest. They could dispute his dispatches from the front and claim that no rebellion had actually occurred. The point was clearly made by George Johnstone on February 6: “It appears that General Gage has regularly deceived the administration. No event has turned out as he foretold.” If, said Johnstone, the colonies were all now deeply disaffected, it was because they were victims, not rebels. If they were up in arms, Great Britain had to take the blame. The use of force would be wicked and doomed to fail.

  The debates reached their climax in the House of Lords on February 7, with five hours of argument dominated by the Duke of Richmond. He made the same case as George Johnstone, added his own dire prediction of a war with France, and tried one last tactic, a personal attack on the bishops who sat in the chamber. Their white sleeves, he said, would be stained with American blood. Then he too went down to defeat. By ninety votes to twenty-four, the Lords declared that a rebellion had begun.

  With that, the government had almost everything it needed. Lord North had still to produce his bill to ban New England from maritime trade, and soon he would also have to announce his Conciliatory Proposition. While he took the first bill to Parliament immediately, the latter could wait a week or so. In the meantime, the cabinet drifted along in a strange, unsettled state of mind, determined but also despondent. North sank into another fit of melancholy—he seemed “overborne with the weight of affairs,” said Thomas Hutchinson—while Dartmouth’s spirits also declined. While every new letter from America served to justify their actions, each story made the task ahead of them appear more daunting.

  On February 10 a dispatch arrived at last from Lord Dunmore in Williamsburg. It was as bleak as it could be. Keen to defend his conduct in taking off to chastise the Shawnee, he wrote at enormous length. On his return to the provincial capital, he had found every county angry and disobedient, openly arming an independent militia. Blockade the Chesapeake, said the governor: no other option remained. And so early in March, North widened the scope of his bill to bar New England from overseas trade to encompass five more colonies. They would include Virginia and Maryland.14

  Little remains to be said. There could be no turning back, and the cabinet net made no attempt to do so.* On February 20, North went to Parliament to present his conciliatory bill proposing a new deal for the taxation of the colonies. Even though it was clearly intended to improve British chances of success against New England, he found the Commons in no mood for concessions to America. The house voted to approve the bill, but only after backbench protests by members calling for still more punitive measures against the colonists.

  George III driving Britain over the wreckage of the constitution and toward a chasm, while America burns in the distance and Lord Sandwich bribes the public with a bag of cash, from the Westminster Magazine, May 1775, before news arrived of the fighting at Lexington and Concord. Library of Congress

  Everything pointed to war; the papers were convinced of it, and the government had decided to stiffen the resolve of General Gage by sending out three generals to help him: William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne. And then, on February 26, off the coast of Holland the naval cutter Speedwell finally obtained the proof that Dutch and American ships were leaving Amsterdam filled with gunpowder for the rebels. Her commander sent a message straight to Lord Suffolk.

  Nine days later Benjamin Franklin drew a line beneath his confidential talks with Fothergill, Barclay, and the Howes. Despite the memory of his shameful treatment at the Cockpit, Franklin had clung on and on, hoping for a change of heart in Whitehall. When the Conciliatory Proposition was published, it became obvious that further discussion would be futile. After one last conversation with Mrs. Howe, he began to pack his bags. On March 20, the cleverest man in England left for home. Quincy had already set sail, only to die at sea before he reached America.15

  Meanwhile, the fatal dispatch from Lord Dartmouth was also crossing the ocean, but five weeks later than the government intended. Time and again as the war approached, the weather had played its influential part, sometimes accelerating the rhythm of events and sometimes slowing them down and creating a long hiatus. Early in February, the sloop Falcon had been entrusted with the dispatch and the opinion from the lawyers that Massachusetts was in rebellion. After the storms of late January, a gale had continued to blow up the English Channel from the west, leaving the Falcon trapped in the shallows off the Isle of Wight. She made it into the open sea on February 14, struggled and had to come back, and then she tried again, inching her way for weeks toward Land’s End.

  Not until the middle of March did the wind swing around to come from the east, allowing the Falcon to enter the Atlantic. Given the importance o
f the papers she carried, Dartmouth had made copies and placed them on another naval sloop, the Nautilus, which had fought the same battle with the elements. With the weather now firmly on their side, the two ships ran an ocean race to Massachusetts, with the Nautilus emerging as the victor. She sighted the tip of Cape Cod on April 14. At noon two days later, with a breeze blowing off the land, she came into Boston, where she saw the naval squadron and the flag of Admiral Graves. The dispatches had already gone ashore, carried by another boat while the Nautilus waited for a pilot.16

  Every detail of the violence that followed has been chronicled at length, with all the sad accoutrements of slaughter and long debates about which side fired first and who showed greater efficiency in the violation of the sixth commandment. In the preceding weeks General Gage had made forays outside the town, gathered what intelligence he could, and come to the conclusion that Concord was the place to aim for. There, he believed, the rebels had concealed a cache of arms. Nearby his troops might also find Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Having first made the error of occupying Boston, he blundered again by trying to break out of it.

  Equipped with orders that obliged him to take the offensive, General Gage sent his soldiers out on the highway that led through Lexington. On April 19 they met the rebels, and somebody pulled a trigger. Knowing far too little about the terrain, and without a screen of cavalry ahead of them—the light dragoons had yet to arrive—the British marched on to Concord regardless. They entered a trap laid by a topography that Gage had failed to survey in full. On they went, into the bend of a river that they could not ford, with hills to their right above the road providing ample cover for an enemy all too ready for a skirmish. Down through the woods came the militia, in numbers and at a speed that Gage did not anticipate. The battle followed at Concord Bridge, small but bloody, and then came a still more bloody retreat to Boston. And so the war began. At the end of May the news would reach England, where no one could honestly claim to be surprised, and yet they were, and horrified as well.