But there were also other writers—besides the small group that might be called “the usual suspects”: white, male, and upper-class—dipping their pens for the rebel cause and their own individual agendas. History’s shorthand has long spoken of April 1775 in decidedly masculine terms: minutemen, alarm riders, armed men and boys. But in an era when women could neither vote nor own property without restrictions, women shared the heady dangers of revolution as rebels or bemoaned the upheaval of their lifestyle as loyalists.
The writer Mercy Otis Warren was a strong-willed woman whom one would not want on an opposing side. Warren’s diminutive frame and gentle features belied the determination that burned behind her dark eyes when they focused on a mission. She was born in West Barnstable, on Cape Cod, on September 25, 1728, the third child and first daughter of James and Mary Otis. Her father was a merchant, attorney, and local judge who had prospered enough to own a substantial house with three dormers crowning the second story and employ laborers and indentured servants to look after the surrounding fields. Among the help were at least one African American and several Native American slaves.
Mercy’s mother was dour, reserved, and frequently depressed. There seems little doubt that having thirteen children over twenty years, only seven of whom survived, may have had something to do with her outlook. James Otis, on the other hand, was outgoing, gregarious, and an affable host. He had a keen wit and a penchant for ideas that he passed on to his children. His only regret was that he lacked a formal education. This he determined to remedy in his eldest sons, and in due course James Jr.—known as Jemmy—and Joseph were sent off to Harvard. Such a path was unthinkable in that day for Mercy, but she learned to read and write and sharpened her intellect in father-daughter discussions that went well beyond domestic conversations. She also joined her brother Jemmy’s tutoring sessions with the local minister as he prepared for college.
At Harvard, Jemmy Otis met James Warren, two years his junior. Warren’s father was the high sheriff of Plymouth County and well acquainted with Jemmy’s father, but exactly when James Warren first met Mercy Otis is uncertain. What is certain is that their marriage in a civil ceremony on November 14, 1754, found Mercy at twenty-six almost an old maid by the standards of the day and James at twenty-eight an aspiring merchant and farmer with political ambitions.14
James Otis dispatched one of his domestic servants to help Mercy and James in the Warrens’ saltbox-style home in Plymouth. And Mercy soon needed that help, as beginning in 1757 she bore five healthy sons over the next nine years. Her focus was what was expected of colonial women: home, hearth, and husband, but by their own accounts, Mercy and James adored one another. “I again tell you that on your happiness depends mine,” he wrote her during an absence nine years into their marriage. “I am uneasy without you… [and]… wish for the time that I am to return… everything appears so different without you.” Years later, her own ardor had not cooled. He was “the center of my early wishes,” Mercy told James, and he continued to be “the star which attracts my attention.”15
The Warrens’ circle of friends came to include John Adams and his wife, Abigail. Mercy Warren was sixteen years Abigail Adams’s senior, and Abigail found an intellectual mentor in her. “You, Madam,” Abigail wrote Mercy just before the Boston Tea Party, “are so sincere a Lover of your Country, and so Hearty a Mourner in all her Misfortunes that it will greatly aggravate your anxiety to hear how much she is now oppressed and insulted.” Abigail called tea “this weed of Slavery.”16
By now, Mercy Warren’s youngest was seven, and she was increasingly turning her pen to political issues. Mercy herself had found a mentor in Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay, a British historian who flouted strictures against feminine intellectual engagement. Beginning in 1763, Macaulay published a liberal Whig history of England in eight volumes, essentially arguing the importance of personal liberty. Mercy’s brother had maintained a correspondence with Macaulay, but after Jemmy Otis deteriorated mentally, Mercy assumed his role. When asked by Mercy “whether the genius of Liberty has entirely forsaken our devoted isle [England],” Macaulay replied that Parliament’s regrettable Intolerable Acts were “a complete answer,” but encouraged Mercy not to lose hope. There were still liberal Whigs in Great Britain “who strenuously and zealously defended the injured rights of your countrymen.”17
Mercy Warren hoped so but was dubious about their ability to carry the American cause in Parliament. “America stands armed with resolution and virtue,” Warren told Macaulay as 1774 came to an end, “but she still recoils at the idea of drawing the sword against the nation from whence she derived her origin. Yet Britain, like an unnatural parent, is ready to plunge her dagger into the bosom of her affectionate offspring.”18
But Mercy Warren desired a broader audience for her political thoughts. To publish openly as a woman in Puritan Massachusetts would have been regarded as scandalous at best. Her first anonymously published work, a play entitled The Adulateur, which satirized the administration of Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson, had been published in Isaiah Thomas’s rebel-friendly Massachusetts Spy in the spring of 1772. Political commentary thinly disguised as a fictitious play was a generally safe vehicle, particularly as plays in Puritan society were read by individuals at home rather than acted out.19
The Adulateur was well received and particularly championed by Mercy’s husband, James, who, like Samuel Adams and many others, thought Governor Hutchinson a two-faced scoundrel, serving Great Britain while giving lip service to Massachusetts interests. When Benjamin Franklin leaked Hutchinson’s personal letters favoring a stronger role for the governor to the press in 1773, Adams seized on them to prove the point. The disclosures were perfectly timed to coincide with the publication of Warren’s second play, The Defeat, which portrayed Hutchinson as the diabolical Rapatio and ended with his gubernatorial downfall.20
A rather convoluted poem about the Boston Tea Party, entitled “The Squabble of the Sea Nymphs; or the Sacrifice of the Tuscararoes,” followed. It was written with the encouragement of John Adams, but Mercy nonetheless told Abigail that she would not be upset if John told her to stop writing and “lay aside the pen of the poet (which ought perhaps to have been done sooner).” Instead, Adams arranged the poem’s publication in the Boston Gazette.21
A few months later, after James Warren was elected to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, Mercy wrote Abigail Adams of her increasing apprehensions about the looming rebellion. “No one has at stake a larger share of Domestic Felicity than myself,” she told her younger admirer. “I see no Less than five sons who must Buckle on the Harness And perhaps fall a sacrifice to the Manes of Liberty.”22
It was during this period of heightened anxiety that Warren committed her fears to parchment and anonymously published The Group. Characters reappeared from her earlier plays, and she gave voice to the difficulty of choosing a side and sticking with it. One character named Beau Trumps, who loudly espoused loyalty to the king, was assumed by alert readers to be modeled after Daniel Leonard, the king’s attorney for Bristol County who was then safely ensconced in Boston writing as Massachusettensis. A character named Simple Sapling—before accepting a royal bribe—took note that the opposing rebels were “Resolv’d to die, or see their country free.”23
But there was more to The Group than the bashing of mandamus councilors. A strong secondary theme, according to Warren biographer Nancy Rubin Stuart, carried “a pro-female message that lamented the personal hardships of war forced upon women married to greedy husbands.”24
Here Warren was publicly espousing political views about the status of women that went back to early conversations with her father and brothers about basic liberties. Before his mental breakdown kept him from writing, Mercy’s brother Jemmy Otis had asked the bombshell question quite pointedly in a 1764 pamphlet: “Are not women born as free as men?” If that was indeed so, he continued, should not they also have “a natural and equitable right to be consulted… in the format
ion of new original compact or government?”25 Mercy Otis Warren and her confidante Abigail Adams thought so, but both their husbands, adoring of their wives though they were, were not so sure.
While striking this chord of equal rights and liberty, Mercy Warren still sought reassurance from men about the worth of her writing. Husband James was perhaps too biased in his effusive praise, but Mercy coyly expressed her doubts to others that “it has sufficient merit for the public eye.” John Adams, for one, demurred and once more arranged publication in the Boston Gazette of the first two acts of The Group, which appeared in the same issue as Adams’s first missive as Novanglus.26 By February of 1775, The Group and its anonymous author were the talk of rebel Boston.
THERE WAS ANOTHER WRITER WHO published his views on liberty and freedom but who brought a vastly different perspective to the issues and framed the debate in even more inclusive terms than did Mercy Otis Warren. His name was Caesar Sarter, and he was a black former slave of about fifty years of age. Sarter had been captured in Africa and brought to Massachusetts as a youth. His exact ownership is a mystery, but by 1774, after twenty years in bondage, he was living as a freeman in Newburyport, just north of Boston.
There was a strong Quaker influence among freed blacks at the time because of the Religious Society of Friends’ pioneering stance in favor of abolition, and much of what Sarter had to say carried strong biblical overtones. Whether or not Sarter had help drafting his letter is open to question, but there can be no question that the agony of Sarter’s personal experience flowed through his words. It must have taken courage to put his thoughts on paper and perhaps even more courage for the printers of the Essex Journal and Merimack Packet of Newburyport to publish them.
Sarter began by reminding readers that the political climate in which they lived was “a time of great anxiety and distress among you, on account of the infringement… of the natural rights and privileges of freeborn men. [Permit me] to tell you, and that from experience,” Sarter went on, “that as Slavery is the greatest, and consequently most to be dreaded of all temporal calamities; so its opposite, Liberty, is the greatest temporal good, with which you can be blest!” Surely, he wrote, the freemen of Massachusetts recognized this because they were engaged in “struggles to preserve it.”
Like others in the fight, Sarter harked back to the quest for freedom that had prompted so many Europeans to come to America in the first place. Unlike his own experience of being brought to America against his will, those white forefathers had fled England because of strong feelings about the “worth of Liberty” as well as “their utmost abhorrence of that curse of curses, slavery.” As for those who piously thought Africans happier in America, “every man,” wrote Sarter, “is the best judge of his own happiness, and every heart best knows its own bitterness.”
The first step in any quest for freedom from Great Britain, Sarter maintained, was for Americans to “let the oppressed Africans be liberated.” Not until then could rebels look “with consistency of conduct” for a blessing on their own endeavors to cast off the shackles of British rule. “I need not point out,” Sarter concluded, “the absurdity of your exertions for liberty, when you have slaves in your houses.”27
One of those who heartily agreed with Caesar Sarter was Abigail Adams. While John was attending the First Continental Congress in the fall of 1774, there had been what Abigail termed “a conspiracy of negroes,” the first major indication that slaves in Boston were asking to fight for General Gage on the loyalist side in exchange for their freedom. The entire episode was “kept pretty private,” according to Abigail, but she did not refrain from telling John her wish that “there was not a slave in the province.”
Then Abigail, who had had her own conversations with Mercy Warren about women’s rights, echoed Caesar Sarter’s incredulity. “It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me,” Abigail wrote John, “to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”28
Truth be told, however, most of the rebels firing off volleys of words about liberty and freedom reserved them for a limited group of white males from the middle and upper classes. Equality was a cherished word, but one not widely or freely shared. To apply it universally to include females and black and Indian slaves was as yet unthinkable.
Chapter 5
“Fire, If You Have the Courage”
General Thomas Gage was certainly no stranger to North America. In fact, he had spent the better part of twenty years there. In the spring of 1775, Gage was fifty-five or fifty-six years old, the exact date of his birth being of some question. His father was the first Viscount Gage and for a time a member of Parliament. As the second son in the family, Thomas went into the military while his older brother, William, inherited the peerage. William used his contacts with Thomas Pelham-Holles, the first Duke of Newcastle, to further his younger brother’s military career. By 1751, Thomas had fought without apparent distinction at Fontenoy in Flanders (1745) and Culloden in Scotland (1746) and was a lieutenant colonel with the Forty-Fourth Regiment of Foot.1
When the Duke of Newcastle, as de facto prime minister, decided to counter French expansion in the Ohio River valley, the Forty-Fourth Foot was ordered to North America late in 1754 to serve under Major General Edward Braddock. The following spring, with an expedition that included George Washington as the general’s aide-de-camp, Braddock attempted to drive the French from Fort Duquesne (modern-day Pittsburgh).
Gage’s military acumen now came under harsh criticism. On the morning of July 9, 1755, Braddock’s column forded the low waters of the Monongahela River just below Turtle Creek. Gage was in the lead, commanding an advance guard of some three hundred regulars. When French troops and their Indian allies appeared across his line of march and began to encircle his force, Gage ordered a retreat back toward Braddock’s main column of about one thousand men.
Hearing the sounds of this initial action, Braddock, instead of standing firm with his main force until the full extent of Gage’s contact with the enemy could be determined, elected to advance in column along the narrow path. The result was that Gage’s retreating troops and Braddock’s advancing forces telescoped inward upon one another in a tangle of confusion. The French and Indians quickly seized a hilltop to the right of the British advance that Gage had failed to secure and poured deadly fire into the massed British troops. Gage abandoned two six-pound cannons in his hasty retreat, and the French turned them against the head of the British column. More than five hundred men from Braddock’s command, including the general himself, were killed. Gage was slightly wounded.
Three years later, Gage was to have an even worse combat experience on the shores of Lake Champlain. In the wake of the Monongahela disaster, he received permission to organize a regiment of light infantry. Critics said the new regiment was an easy way for Gage to obtain a full colonelcy, but Braddock’s defeat clearly argued for more agile tactics. Light infantry was designed to be more mobile and more rapidly deployed than regular British units and was an answer to the tactics being employed successfully by colonial frontiersman Robert Rogers. Indeed, it was Rogers’ Rangers and the colonials’ favorite general, Lord George Howe, who led an advance guard that included Gage’s regiment during Lord Abercromby’s attack against Fort Carillon, later renamed Ticonderoga.
When Abercromby inexplicably ordered Rogers’ Rangers, who knew the ground better than anyone, to detour some distance away from the main force, Howe and Gage continued the advance and met with initial French resistance. This time, the British advance guard prevailed, but not before the likable Lord Howe lay dead with a bullet through his chest. Suddenly Colonel Gage was Abercromby’s second in command.
Two days later, Abercromby ordered Gage to lead a massive frontal assault against a maze of fortifications spread across the slopes below Fort Carillon. The result was as predictable as it was catastrophic and proved to be the French and Indian War version of the Charge of the Light Briga
de. By nightfall, the British had suffered almost two thousand casualties in front of a French force they outnumbered four to one, though Gage himself survived.2
Gage’s star remained undimmed—both personally and professionally. On December 8, 1758, he married the quite eligible Margaret Kemble in an Anglican ceremony in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She was twenty-four and, if a later portrait is any indication, quite a beauty, with thick dark hair and pensive, some might even say moody, brown eyes. Margaret’s father, Peter Kemble, was well settled in New Jersey and had been appointed to the governor’s council of the province by George II in 1745. Her brother Stephen was a young infantry officer who first served under Gage at Ticonderoga and may have arranged Gage’s introduction to his sister. About fifteen years older than Margaret, Thomas Gage was a good catch. Along with his high forehead, long, angular nose, and rounded chin, his drooping brown eyes conveyed stability if not daring, comfort if not dash. Together they would have nine children.3
At the beginning of 1759, the commander in chief in North America, Jeffery Amherst, gave Gage command of the western outposts on the Great Lakes, and a year later Gage led a force down the Saint Lawrence River to complement Amherst’s attack on Montreal. His reward was a promotion to major general and the military governorship of Montreal. Amherst, worn out from five years of war, finally returned to England in 1763, when peace was signed with France, and Thomas Gage succeeded him as commander in chief of British forces in North America with headquarters in New York City.
In the wake of the French and Indian War, Gage was initially concerned with maintaining security along the western frontier. Despite the prohibitions of the Proclamation of 1763, which drew colonial borders along the crest of the Appalachians, continuing cross-Appalachian trade and limited settlement demanded his attention. But in 1768, ministers in London ordered Gage to withdraw British troops from most western forts and post them instead along the Eastern Seaboard, in part to garrison key cities where opposition was growing to Parliament’s various taxing schemes.
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