American Spring

by Walter R. Borneman

  Captain Felt of the local militia, to whom this remark was particularly addressed, answered that “nobody would care for that,” upon which Colonel Leslie, “nettled no doubt by this expression of contempt,” replied, “By God I will not be defeated.” To which Felt coolly responded, “You must acknowledge that you have been already baffled.”20

  By another recollection, in the midst of this standoff, Colonel Leslie pompously exclaimed that he was upon the King’s Highway and would not be deterred from crossing over the drawbridge. That wasn’t so, replied a gutsy old man named James Barr. “It is not the King’s highway, it is a road built by the owners of the lots on the other side, and no king, country or town has anything to do with it.”

  “There may be two words to that,” Leslie replied.

  “Egad,” Mr. Barr responded. “I think that will be the best way for you to conclude the King has nothing to do with it.”21

  What seems to have become clear, however, is that most of the British column stood shivering in the cold in the fading afternoon light of a wintry day. They might have been better served if they had brought their overcoats instead of fife and drums. Numbed by the cold, they endured the taunts of a growing group of townspeople: “Soldiers, red-jackets, lobster-coats, cowards, damnation to your government!” In addition, members of militia from neighboring towns were beginning to appear and could be seen taking up positions behind nearby buildings. Many more militiamen were on the way, and to Leslie’s rear, the hardened Marblehead fishermen were preparing to block his line of retreat.

  Leslie was in a box, and he knew it. Had he pushed the issue, leveled arms, and fired, he might well have put Salem—instead of the green at Lexington—on the map as the tinderbox of the American Revolution. In desperation, he proposed a win-win. If the Salem folk would lower the bridge, Leslie promised to march his troops across it no more than about five hundred feet and not disturb anything or anyone. He would then turn them about and march them back again, à la the Duke of York in a certain nursery rhyme.

  The objects of Leslie’s quest had likely been stored in Robert Foster’s blacksmith shop on the northern shore, but the delay at the drawbridge of “about an Hour and an Half” had given locals time to have “every Thing… secured.” By one account, a Quaker named David Boyce lent his team of horses to the effort, and the cannons were moved farther out of town. With the cannons thus secure, David Mason, sitting atop the open drawbridge, gave the decisive order. His men on the northern shore lowered the drawbridge, and Leslie ordered his freezing troops to march across.22

  But there was to be one more moment of tension—at least it was remembered as tense in hindsight. As Leslie’s regulars reached their promised turnabout point, Sarah Tarrant, a woman of about thirty, stuck her head out of an open window and shouted at them, “Go home and tell your master he has sent you on a fool’s errand and broken the peace of our Sabbath.” By one account, one of the soldiers aimed his firearm at her, but that only made her more defiant. “Fire, if you have the courage,” Tarrant shouted. “But I doubt it.”23

  The tale of Sarah Tarrant aside, Leslie led his men back over the drawbridge to the waiting ship at Marblehead and returned to Boston. There he was able to report to General Gage that he had indeed marched the length of Salem but found no arms. Gage may have taken the entire Salem incident as proof that he could send troops into the countryside with impunity. But had Leslie’s troops opened fire at the drawbridge, there is little doubt that their retreat would have been met with considerable return fire—if not immediately then upon their homeward trek.

  The lesson of the Salem raid to the rebels was that their local militias could quickly be warned, assembled, and dispatched to the point of a contest. One company of armed men arrived in Salem from Danvers, about five miles away, just as Colonel Leslie’s force was departing. Had a stand-down message not been circulated on the heels of the initial warnings, the Essex Gazette estimated that “not less than 12 or 15,000 men would have been assembled in this town within 24 hours after the alarm.” As it was, Salem “immediately dispatched Messengers to the neighbouring Towns to save them the Trouble of coming in; but the Alarm flew like Lightening so that great Numbers were in Arms, and some on the March, before our [recall] Messengers arrived.”24

  Just how General Gage and the British learned about the cache of Salem cannons in the first place was a matter of great debate. In Salem, as in every town in America, all were not on the same side. But when fingers were pointed, at least one suspect just as quickly took it upon himself to deny any involvement. “As it is reported about this Town, much to my Injury,” Andrew Dalgleish professed in an advertisement two days after Leslie’s raid, “that I gave Information of certain Pieces of Artillery, which was the Occasion of a Regiment’s marching to this Place Yesterday;—I take this public Method of acquainting the good People, that the Character of an Informer, is of all Characters the most odious to me; that I was in no Way instrumental in bringing Troops hither, and shall be ready to satisfy any one, who will call upon me, of my intire Innocence.”25

  “Col. Leslie’s ridiculous expedition,” as the Essex Gazette termed it, was given mention in John Trumbull’s epic poem of the Revolution, M’Fingal.

  Thro’ Salem straight without delay,

  The bold battalion took its way,

  March’d o’er a bridge, in open sight

  Of sev’ral Yankees arm’d for fight,

  Then, without loss of time, or men,

  Veer’d round for Boston back again;

  And found so well their projects thrive,

  That ev’ry soul got home alive.26

  By yet another anecdotal account, fifers in Leslie’s column supposedly played “The World Turned Upside Down” as they returned to their ship off Marblehead.27 The irony, of course, is that if the story is true, this is the same tune that the British would play after the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown at the end of the American Revolution. But as it was, the British raid on Salem was not even the beginning, much less the end.

  Chapter 6

  Boston in the Bull’s-Eye

  Boston was long accustomed to being the focal point of both American rebellion and British resolve. News of the Salem raid made headlines there just as the town prepared to commemorate the five-year anniversary of one of its most infamous events. The catalyst for that event had been jobs—more precisely, the lack of them. At the time, Boston was still feeling the economic pinch of the nonimportation boycott promoted in the wake of the Stamp Act crisis. Compounding the unemployment problem, British soldiers stationed in town were permitted to moonlight with part-time jobs. The result was competition for much-sought-after openings in the workforce, and it also increased friction with locals as soldiers came into daily interactions with Bostonians—and, inevitably, flirted with local women.

  Monday evening, March 5, 1770, was a bitterly cold night. It had not been a peaceful weekend. On the previous Friday, there had been a bloody brawl between local workers and about forty off-duty soldiers looking for work at John Gray’s ropewalk. Higher-ups on both sides quickly got control of the situation, but groups of workers and soldiers, fueled by ample amounts of brew from various taverns, roamed the streets over the weekend, looking to restart the trouble.

  No confrontations occurred on Saturday or Sunday, but that Monday evening a wig maker’s apprentice attempting to collect an overdue bill from a British officer got into a squabble with a lone sentry at the door of the Custom House on King Street near Boston’s Long Wharf. The sentry struck the apprentice with the butt of his musket. A small group of locals quickly appeared to support the apprentice, and the sentry called for assistance from Captain Thomas Preston, the officer of the watch. Someone sounded a downtown Boston alarm bell, usually reserved for fires or other great calamities, and men on both sides poured into the streets. With more bells ringing, about three hundred locals converged on the Custom House. They took up positions in front of Preston’s small detachment of eigh
t British regulars who had been hastily dispatched to reinforce the building.

  The crowd taunted the soldiers with angry words, including ill-advised shouts of “Fire, Fire!” Next they started throwing snowballs, rocks, and chunks of ice. When one soldier—greatly outnumbered as he and his fellow soldiers were—was knocked down by such a missile, he got to his feet and, undoubtedly partly in fear for what might happen next and perhaps partly in rage, fired one shot into the crowd. At the sound of his musket discharging, other soldiers fired as well. As the crowd surged forward, more shots—perhaps as many as a dozen or more—rang out before Captain Preston got control of his troops. But it was too late. Four Bostonians lay dead, and several others were badly wounded, one of whom died early the next morning. For Boston, what locals would call the Boston Massacre immediately became that generation’s Kent State shooting.1

  Blame was laid on both sides. General Gage placed it squarely on Samuel Adams and his cohorts. Gage claimed that the entire provocation had been “contrived by one Party,” meaning Adams’s radical leadership of Boston’s rebels.2 On the other side, the Boston Gazette was quick to call the incident “a recent and melancholy Demonstration of the destructive Consequences of quartering Troops among Citizens in a Time of Peace.”3

  But in a demonstration that civil law was still supreme in Boston, General Gage agreed to permit the soldiers who had fired to stand trial in a Massachusetts court. Given local sentiments, they would need one of the best lawyers in Boston to defend them. Despite his growing rebel beliefs, John Adams agreed to do so. Captain Preston, who had never given an order to fire, was acquitted, as were six of his soldiers. Two others were convicted only of manslaughter, not murder.

  Certainly John Adams took a risk by representing such unpopular clients, but on the third anniversary of the shootings, while Adams acknowledged such representation had caused him great “anxiety,” he nonetheless called it “one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.” Condemning those soldiers to death for murder would, Adams believed, have been “as foul a stain upon this country as the executions of the quakers or witches anciently.”4 What, after all, was his cousin Samuel Adams agitating for if not an unalienable system of justice?

  Samuel Adams used the Boston Massacre as a rallying cry to denounce every act of British occupation and oppression. Illustrations and editorials in the Boston Gazette and the Massachusetts Spy and a number of privately published pamphlets spread the Adams version of events throughout the colonies: despicable British regulars had fired on unarmed Americans without provocation. For his part, General Gage appears not even to have attempted to counter this stream of rebel propaganda, though his chances of success had he tried are open to question.

  After the trial of the soldiers, tempers on both sides eased for a time. In the broadest sense, this period of relatively calm occupation lasted for almost three and one-half years, until the next flash point—the Boston Tea Party. But these were hardly quiet years for Samuel Adams, who was instrumental during this interlude in keeping up a torrent of political opposition in correspondence and editorials. In particular, Adams went to great pains to commemorate the tragedy of the Boston Massacre with annual memorials and speeches. Given the events of the previous six months, the fifth anniversary commemoration, on March 5, 1775, was to be one of his finest efforts.

  THE KEYNOTE SPEAKER FOR THE gathering in the Old South Church was Dr. Joseph Warren, frequently confused with Mercy Warren’s husband, James, but in fact there was no connection between them other than their shared passion for the rebel cause. Joseph Warren was a medical doctor who had been the principal author of the Suffolk Resolves and was a member of Samuel Adams’s inner circle on Boston’s committee of safety, essentially an executive committee charged with military preparedness.

  Joseph Warren was definitely one to command attention. Even among a relatively young generation of rebel leaders, Warren was younger than most, still only thirty-three years old that March. He was five years younger than John Hancock and nineteen years younger than Samuel Adams. He was an articulate writer and polished public speaker, and he had also been invited to give the 1772 commemoration address. Men on both sides of the issue listened to his words with attention, and it was generally acknowledged that his handsome good looks gave women cause to fixate on him as well.

  Born in nearby Roxbury, where his father had been a farmer, Joseph Warren graduated from Harvard in 1759 and began his medical apprenticeship after a year of teaching school. In 1764, at age twenty-three, he married eighteen-year-old Elizabeth “Betsy” Hooton, who even by the standards of the day was something of a child bride. Betsy’s merchant father had just died, and their wedding announcement in the Boston Gazette described her as “an accomplished young Lady with a handsome Fortune.”5

  The couple’s first child, also named Elizabeth, was born at some vague date in the spring of 1765, quite probably less than nine months after their wedding. Over the next eight years, Joseph and Betsy Warren had three more children, but Betsy died suddenly in May of 1773, leaving Joseph a widower with four small children between the ages of ten and three. Neither his medical practice nor his family responsibilities, however, kept Warren from a consuming participation in the rebel cause. Commenting two days before on Warren’s scheduled speech, Samuel Adams noted, “It was thought best to have an experiencd officer in the political field on this occasion, as we may possibly be attackd in our Trenches.”6

  Because the March 5 anniversary fell on a Sunday in 1775, the memorial service was held on the following Monday. The church was packed to the limit. Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Joseph Warren, and other members of Boston’s revolutionary council occupied seats near the pulpit, but there was also a good showing of British officers in attendance near the front of the church. After preliminaries, Warren was introduced. Graciously saying that his audience should not expect “the enrapturing strains of eloquence which charmed you” from prior years’ speakers, including John Hancock, Warren nonetheless assured his audience that “with a sincerity, equal to theirs, I mourn over my bleeding country.”7

  As always, Adams and Warren had scripted both a strong political message of the wrongs of British rule and an equally strong emotional reminder of images of their fellow citizens bleeding red on the white snow. “The baleful images of terror crowd around me,” Warren intoned, “and discontented ghosts with hollow groans, appear to solemnize the anniversary of the fifth of March.”8

  By one Tory account, soon sent to the loyalist Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, the British officers present “frequently interrupted Warren, by laughing loudly at the most ludicrous parts… to the great discontent of the devoted citizens.”9 Undeterred, Warren forged ahead. Independence from Great Britain was not their aim, Warren maintained, but he acknowledged to his listeners, “However difficult the combat, you never will decline it when freedom is the prize.”10

  After Warren was finished, Samuel Adams rose to move the appointment of an orator for the following year’s commemoration. As usual, he did not mince words in describing the event to be honored as a “Bloody Massacre,” words that even Warren had avoided. This was too much for the assembled British officers, and they took up cries of “Fie! Fie!” and “To Shame!”11

  To the assembled audience, especially to those in the balconies some distance from the pulpit, this came across and was repeated as “Fire! Fire!” and thinking the building ablaze, by one Tory report, they “bounced out of the windows, and swarmed down the gutters, like rats into the street.” By apparent coincidence, the Forty-Third Regiment of Foot, “returning accidentally from exercise,” was marching by with drums beating, and its appearance “threw the whole body into the utmost consternation.”12

  At least one officer exchanged heated words with Adams at the pulpit, but by then the audience had largely made for the exits. Had a confrontation taken place, one British officer later speculated, it “wou’d in all probability have proved fatal to Hancock, Adams, Warren, and
the rest of those Villains, as they were all up in the Pulpit together.” But the officer claimed he was glad that such had not occurred, because “it wou’d indeed have been pity for them to have made their exit in that way, as I hope we shall have the pleasure before long of seeing them do it by the hands of the Hangman.”13 Clearly, neither side took these annual rites as an opportunity for reconciliation.

  MEANWHILE, BOSTON REMAINED IN THE bull’s-eye. General Gage had some four thousand soldiers under his command in Boston, roughly one for every four Bostonians. But he was surrounded by dozens of rural towns inhabited by tens of thousands of musket-toting rebels who seemed quite willing and able to rally great numbers of militia at a moment’s notice. No doubt Gage was inclined to agree with a London traveler who a few months before opined of British forces in North America: “They are too numerous indeed for ambassadors, and too few for soldiers.”14

  Two of Gage’s regiments were quartered at Castle William, in the harbor, but ten other regiments and Major Pitcairn’s marines were quartered in encampments, makeshift barracks, and private dwellings throughout the town. The population of Boston had been steadily declining as rebels opted to evacuate to the countryside, but the loyalist population had been increasing to balance this exodus as mandamus councilors and other loyalists took shelter there. Samuel Adams boasted two days before the Boston Massacre anniversary, “We have almost every Tory of Note in the province, in this Town, to which they have fled for the Generals protection.”15