American Spring

by Walter R. Borneman

  But that did not mean that Lord North and his government were without critics in Parliament. On January 20, 1775, William Pitt, the great commoner who as prime minister had won Great Britain a global empire during the Seven Years’ War and who now sat in the House of Lords as the Earl of Chatham, introduced a resolution calling for the immediate removal of all British troops from Boston. It was a gutsy move, but Pitt followed it with an even gutsier speech.

  Listening in the gallery as Pitt’s specially invited guest was Benjamin Franklin. “The spirit which now resists your taxation in America,” Pitt told the assembled lords, “is the same… spirit which established the great fundamental, essential maxim of your liberties, that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent.” That was the crux of the matter: rebels in the colonies wanted equal standing in the British Empire. Then Pitt urged Lord North and his administration to take the step that it was increasingly clear they would never take: “With a dignity becoming your exalted situation, make the first advances to concord, to peace, and happiness.… That you should first concede is obvious, from sound and rational policy.”8

  The House of Lords overwhelmingly voted down Pitt’s troop-removal resolution by a margin of sixty-eight to eighteen. George III’s response to the man who had won him an empire when he was but a boy king was to hope for the man’s early earthly demise.

  Two months later, it was Edmund Burke’s moment to sound the same concerns in the House of Commons. He spoke passionately for hours and argued from numerous angles that the advantages of cooperation between Great Britain and its colonies far outweighed any advantages that might be derived from an intractable insistence on a right to tax them without due representation. “To prove that the Americans ought not to be free,” Burke bluntly noted, “we are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we never seem to gain a paltry advantage over them in debate, without attacking some of those principles, or deriding some of those feelings, for which our ancestors have shed their blood.”9

  Lord North’s government, Burke charged, had led them down the path of the Intolerable Acts, dispatched General Gage and more and more troops, and sought to punish at every turn, but all these things had only made matters worse. “When I see things in this situation,” said Burke, shaking his head in despair, “after such confident hopes, bold promises, and active exertions, I cannot, for my life, avoid a suspicion, that the plan itself is not correctly right.”10

  There was a growing spirit and greatness in America, Burke maintained, and “English privileges have made it all that it is; English privileges alone will make it all it can be.” Nearing his conclusion, he again urged Great Britain to take the first step, even as he leveled a dig at Lord North. “Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom,” concluded Burke, “and a great empire and little minds go ill together.”11

  But Burke’s words in the House of Commons fell on ears as unresponsive as Pitt’s pleas had in the House of Lords two months before. To implement his plan, Burke introduced six resolutions that he hoped would bring about reconciliation with the colonies. The first was supposed to be a plain statement of fact: essentially that the colonies of Great Britain in North America—including, by Burke’s count, Quebec—did not have “the liberty and privilege of electing and sending” representatives to Parliament. But even this was too much for Lord North and his hardliners. Who knew where such acknowledgment might lead? Burke’s speech was highly praised by Whigs of similar mind, but after this first attempt toward reconciliation was voted down 270–78, Burke held no hope for the passage of his remaining resolutions.12

  On the American side of the Atlantic, not yet knowing of Burke’s speech or resolutions, John Adams, writing as Novanglus, nonetheless offered thoughts that coincided with Burke’s views. Noting that Scotland and Wales sent representatives to the British Parliament even though they were originally conquered countries, Adams asserted “the extreme difficulty, the utter impracticability, of governing a people who have any sense, spirit, or love of liberty, without incorporating them into the state, or allowing them in some other way equal privileges.”13

  AS UNCERTAINTY OVER THE FUTURE continued to weigh on the leaders on both sides of the issue, it also affected men and women across all points of the social and economic spectrum. From Kensington, near Philadelphia, Eliza Farmar wrote her nephew, Jack Halroyd, who was a clerk for the East India Company in London. “Your wine is all unsold for there was no demand for it when it came,” she told him. Because of the nonimportation measures, “that sort is not so much drank here as Madeira.” As for herself, Mrs. Farmar admitted, “I never drank so little wine since I knew what it was.”

  As if to underscore that the economic situation for wine was unlikely to change, Farmar noted, “the Non Importation is Strictly adheard to and after this month No Tea is to be bought sold or drank and there are Committees chosen for every Town to see that the Resolves of Congress are strictly observed and those that dont are lookd on as Enimies to America.”14

  In the hills of Essex County, New Jersey (near present-day West Orange), twenty-year-old Jemima Condict was fighting a different battle. Having procrastinated for days over a troublesome toothache, she finally resolved one Monday morning “if Possible to have my toth out.” So down she went “to Dr. C. and he got his Cold iron ready.” But when he put his pliers in Jemima’s mouth, she quickly pulled them out, to the laughter of assembled onlookers. According to Jemima, they teased her and “Said if I dast not have A tooth Drawd I Never would be fit to marry. I told them I never Recond to be if twas as Bad as to have a toth Drawd.” Amid the ensuing laughter, the doctor gave a good yank, and Jemima “could put my Toth in my pocket & laugh with the Best of them.”15

  A week or two later, on a Monday that she called Training Day, Jemima went with her father to see several companies of militia drill together. Jemima wrote in her diary that it would have been “a mournful Sight to see if they had been fighting in earnest.” That was indeed an obvious possibility, although “how soon they will Be Calld forth to the feild of war we Cannot tell, for by What we Can hear the Quarrels are not like to be made up Without bloodshed.” Jemima had “jest Now heard Say that All hopes of Conciliation Between Briten & her colonies are at an end for Both the king & his Parliment have announced our Destruction.”16

  Across the ocean in London, Lord Dartmouth received a letter from William Franklin, the royal governor of New Jersey. Given the recent actions of the Continental Congress, William Franklin—inadvertently, perhaps—put his finger squarely on the heart of the matter when he implied that royal ego rather than the calls of Pitt and Burke for reconciliation seemed to be guiding British policy. “It seems apprehended by many sensible and moderate Men here,” Franklin, speaking for his loyalist friends, told Dartmouth, “that it will be the Opinion of the Mother Country that the Congress has left her no other alternative then either to consent to what must appear humiliating in the Eyes of all Europe, or to compel Obedience to her Laws by a Military Force.”17

  Benjamin Franklin, the royal governor’s father, was about to depart London and sail back into the American cauldron. His chess moves with Lord Howe and Howe’s sister had come to naught, in part because Franklin would not be drawn into a more moderate position than he knew many of his brethren held in North America. Given the delays in cross-Atlantic communications, Franklin was only now writing Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania a response to Galloway’s stillborn compromise plan for a “mini-American Parliament.” It had been voted down at the Continental Congress six months before. “I cannot but apprehend,” Franklin told Galloway, “more Mischief than Benefit from a closer Union.”18

  Joseph Galloway was a moderate who had strived for compromise but by now had irrevocably hung his hat with the loyalists. In the Pennsylvania Assembly, he spoke out strongly against the measures of the Continental Congress. His pro-loyalist resolution condemning its actions failed to pass, although more than one-third of the delegates—fourt
een out of thirty-eight members—voted with him, a clear sign how divided that province was on the issue of open rebellion.

  Galloway tried to put a positive spin on the outcome by telling William Franklin, “The People of this Province are altering their sentiments and conduct with amazing rapidity. We have been successful in baffling all the attempts of the violent Party to prevail on the People to prepare for war against the Mother Country.” That, of course, was unwarranted optimism. Galloway was an example of how difficult it was to know at what point, in the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, “the conflict between colonies and mother country became a war between America and Britain, and at what point, therefore, lack of enthusiasm for separation, or for war, became treason.”19

  DURING THE LATTER PART OF March 1775, the front pages of the competing rebel Boston Gazette and loyalist Massachusetts Gazette and the Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser were filled in their entirety with the writings of Novanglus and Massachusettensis, respectively. Novanglus continued his essays into April, but Massachusettensis published his last column on March 27—perhaps because he thought his arguments had run their course or been overtaken by mounting tensions as all awaited some definitive word from England. “There is an awful disparity,” Massachusettensis concluded, “between troops that fight the battles of their Sovereign and those what follow the standard of rebellion.”20

  But as Massachusettensis’s pen fell silent, others spoke for the loyalist cause while casting themselves as compromising moderates. One letter, dated April 7, from “A Friend to Both Countries” appeared in the Boston Evening-Post. Inadvertently, perhaps, the author’s choice for framing the debate—“Both Countries” as opposed to “both sides” or even “both factions”—suggested how deep the split had already become. “At a time when the hostile parade of these colonies portend the most disagreeable effects,” wrote the author, signing himself only as “A Customer,” “it is evidently the duty of the moderate of all parties to unite… as the only probable means of rescuing this country from all the tragical concomitants of a civil war.”21

  The truth of the matter was, as Joseph Galloway had learned, that it was too late for moderates. “A Customer’s” belief that “the first appearance of moderate measures adopted on our part, will be eagerly seiz’d by the ministry for accommodating this unnatural contest” was a belated hope. Parliament’s sweeping rejections of William Pitt’s and Edmund Burke’s reconciliation efforts were not yet known in America, but it would be only a matter of days before they were. And on the heels of this news, General Gage would receive instructions from Lord Dartmouth, dated January 27, 1775, as to how the general should proceed to deal with Massachusetts.

  Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress continued to meet in Concord into the first week of April. On Thursday, April 6, James Warren wrote from there to “My Dear Mercy.” He had hoped to be home with her in Plymouth that day, but the congress had narrowly voted to sit another week in the hope of news, “and News we have,” he told her. Unofficial reports from England indicated that Parliament had not extended even a hint of reconciliation despite the efforts of Pitt and Burke. “I dare say,” James Warren went on, “you would not desire to see me till I could tell you that I had done all in my power to secure and defend us and our Country. We are no longer at a loss [about] what is Intended us by our dear Mother. We have Ask’d for Bread and she gives us a Stone, and a serpent for a Fish.”22

  What orders were coming to General Gage could only be surmised, but there was strong evidence afoot, and, for the rebels, there were ominous warnings. The April 10 issue of the Massachusetts Gazette and the Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser carried a report from London dated “War Office, Feb. 24.” It went on to say: “It is his Majesty’s pleasure that all officers, absent from regiments in North-America, do join their respective corps without delay.”23 Likely the same ship that brought the report of Parliament’s recalcitrance also brought news that the sloop HMS Falcon, mistakenly reported as “the Faulkland,” had sailed from Spithead four days before the recently arrived ship “with dispatches for the General and Commander in chief.” Ninety-five feet in length, with a crew of 125, Falcon was nimble and quick. It could be expected any day. Among the rumors was the report that Lord Howe “was to come with two regiments of horse.” Regardless of such speculation, the rebel Massachusetts Spy reported, “The army in this town seem to be preparing for a matter & a considerable number of waggons are made and now ready for their use.”24

  If General Gage appeared to be showing great patience and restraint during this uncertain time, the same could not be said for most of his officers, particularly after informal word reached Boston that Parliament appeared resolved not to offer the colonies even a single leaf of an olive branch. “This has convinced the Rebels (for we may now legally call them so),” Lord Percy wrote a friend, “that there is no hopes for them but by submitting to Parliament.” The rebels remaining in Boston were evacuating, Percy claimed, and “have proposed in Congress, either to set it on Fire & attack the troops before a reinforcement comes, or to endeavour to starve us.” Which course they meant to adopt, only time would tell. “The Gen. however has received no Acc. whatever from Europe,” Percy concluded, “so that [on] our side no steps of any kind can be taken as yet.”25

  So, anticipating what increasingly seemed an inevitable clash of arms, partisans on both sides waited. Finally, the sloop HMS Falcon came into view off Boston Harbor. Many an eye fixed on the vessel with a sense of foreboding. Perhaps no one watching its arrival did so with more mixed emotions than General Thomas Gage. He was about to receive the orders a part of him had been dreading for almost fifteen years.26

  PART II

  “LET IT BEGIN HERE”

  April 1775

  The violences committed by those who have taken up arms in Massachusetts Bay, have appeared to me as the acts of a rude Rabble without plan, without concert, & without conduct, and therefore I think that a smaller Force now, if put to the Test, would be able to encounter them with greater probability of Success.

  —Lord Dartmouth to General Thomas Gage,

  received around April 16, 1775

  Chapter 8

  The General’s Dilemma

  Springtime in New England is usually something of a tease. One smells the coming season long before it arrives, then discovers bursting buds and blades of green only to turn about once and find them covered with a foot of wet snow or lashed by an icy wind. “The Weather here for the last three weeks has been cold & disagreable, a kind of second Winter,” Lord Percy wrote home to England in early April. “However as this day is remarkably warm & fine I flatter myself our good Weather is now beginning.” Roughly one hundred and fifty years later, an American expatriate who became a British subject characterized April as “the cruellest month,” but in 1775, April was destined to be among the most decisive months of the year.1

  Despite a warm fire and ample board, General Thomas Gage and his American-born wife, the former Margaret Kemble, had endured an uncomfortable winter. While no one questioned his loyalties as a British officer, Gage was having difficulty squaring the intransigence of Lord North’s government with his twenty years of experience in North America and his own personal beliefs about English liberty.

  On the one hand, Gage had issued the strictest orders to his soldiers to treat the inhabitants “with Lenity, Moderation and Justice” so they might “be permitted to enjoy unmolested, the common Rights of Mankind.”2 But on the other hand, Gage found that such “lenient Measures, and the cautious and legal Exertion of the coercive Powers of Government,” served only to make some colonists “more daring and licentious.”3

  The particular irony was that these instructions and Gage’s observations were not given in the spring of 1775 but seven long years before, during the Stamp Act crisis. The general had been wrestling with this dilemma for a long time. He well understood Edmund Burke’s statement in the House of Commons during his fruitless reconciliation ple
a. “An Englishman,” Burke noted, “is the unfittest person on earth, to argue another Englishman into slavery.”4

  Margaret Gage was vexed as well. Her father remained a wealthy New Jersey land baron, for the moment seemingly above the fray. Her brother Stephen was the general’s deputy adjutant general and perhaps his closest aide. Stephen had accompanied the Gages on their recent visit to England. Another of Margaret’s brothers, Samuel, served as Gage’s confidential secretary, and her distant cousin Captain Oliver De Lancey had lately arrived on the Nautilus with a backup copy of Lord Dartmouth’s most recent orders for her husband. Through these relationships, and indeed through her marriage to Gage, Margaret was well aware of the perks of belonging to the upper echelons of British society. But she had also enjoyed similar status as the daughter of one of New Jersey’s landed gentry. It was difficult for her to reconcile the differences between them.

  There is evidence in his letters and military directives that by the spring of 1775, Thomas Gage was tired of walking the tightrope between respecting the colonials’ English liberties and resisting the extremist acts of avowed rebels. For both the Gages, Boston in all its turmoil was a drudgery compared to their previous pleasant post in New York and particularly compared to what by all accounts were happy times during their recent respite in England. It seemed increasingly certain that either Gage or his children would inherit the Gage peerage and estates from his childless older brother. After twenty years in America fighting the French, Indians, and an increasingly angry horde of American rebels, the prospect of a quiet retirement to an English estate undoubtedly looked appealing. In his midfifties, Thomas Gage was simply worn out.

  THE ORIGINALS OF LORD DARTMOUTH’S orders of January 27, 1775, reached General Gage via HMS Falcon on April 16. They left little doubt that Dartmouth expected Gage to undertake prompt and decisive action. While Gage’s reports from the fall of 1774 presented the state of affairs in Massachusetts “in a very unfavourable light,” Dartmouth had not found any facts in them “tending to shew that the Outrages which had been committed were other than merely the Acts of a tumultuous Rabble.” But by the time Dartmouth received Gage’s letters of December 1774 and replied, he had changed his mind. The long-awaited answer to what Great Britain intended was now clear. “The King’s Dignity, & the Honor and Safety of the Empire, require,” Dartmouth asserted, “that, in such a Situation, Force should be repelled by Force.”