More troops were on the way, and still others were to be dispatched. Gage was to encourage the recruitment of loyalists “from among the friends of Government” and “take a more active & determined part” not only “to keep possession of Boston” but also to extend the protection of His Majesty’s government. The “first & essential step to be taken towards re-establishing Government,” Dartmouth instructed, “would be to arrest and imprison the principal actors & abettors in the Provincial Congress” should they again assemble despite Gage’s proclamation forbidding it. Dartmouth termed the proceedings “in every light to be acts of treason and rebellion.” Dartmouth did not mention them by name, but Samuel Adams and John Hancock would have been understood to be at the top of the list of “principal actors & abettors.”
While Dartmouth left the timing and details to Gage’s “own Discretion,” his letter was also filled with specific suggestions about troop dispositions and fortifications. The implication was clear and well known to a soldier of Gage’s long standing. If Gage succeeded in quashing the uprising, Lord Dartmouth and George III’s government would take the credit. If Gage failed, Dartmouth had given him just enough room that the failure would be the general’s fault in execution.
As if to bring home this point, Dartmouth closed his instructions with a less-than-subtle admonishment. “Be more than ever on your guard,” he told Gage, and warned him not to permit the inhabitants “of at least the Town of Boston, to assemble themselves in arms on any pretense.” If those instructions seemed unnecessary to someone who was supposed to be the firm hand of the king, Dartmouth rather snidely added, “I rather mention this, as a Report prevails that you have not only indulged [the rebels] in having such a Guard, but have also allowed their Militia to train and discipline in Faneuil Hall.” If Gage needed any more of a prodding than that, Dartmouth concluded with a by-the-way observation that there was a clause in the Massachusetts charter that empowered the governor to declare martial law “in time of actual War, Invasion, or Rebellion.”5
WHILE AWAITING THESE SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS from London, General Gage had certainly not been idle. In late February, he had dispatched Colonel Leslie to Salem, looking for cannons, and sent officers Brown and De Berniere snooping around the countryside as far west as Worcester. In mid-March, Gage had sent Brown and De Berniere on another clandestine outing, this time northwestward to Concord. They left Boston once again in their country-folk disguises and walked through Roxbury and Brookline along the direct road to Concord. Despite its straightforward approach, they found the route “woody in most places, and very close and commanded by hills,” making it susceptible to surprise and ambush.
In Concord, their appearance was greeted with more open hostility than they encountered on their visit to Worcester several weeks before. They were directed to the home of Daniel Bliss, one of the few loyalist lawyers not hunkering down in Boston. But the woman who gave them directions soon pounded on Bliss’s door seeking refuge from rebels who, she claimed, “swore if she did not leave town, they would tar and feather her for directing Tories in their road.” Scarcely had she left when Bliss received an ominous warning that “they would not let him go out of town alive that morning.”
Brown and De Berniere offered their protection, and Bliss left for Boston with them via a slightly circuitous but “very open and good” road that took them first to Lexington and then through Menotomy (present-day Arlington) en route back to Cambridge and Boston. When the two British officers reported this reconnaissance to General Gage, they may well have recommended their return route as the safest approach to Concord.6
During these weeks, General Gage was also receiving intelligence from other loyalist sources throughout the countryside. What would become clear only in hindsight is that Gage also had the benefit of a well-placed informant among the rebels’ innermost circle. Whoever this spy was, he had an intimate knowledge of the disposition of rebel arms and supplies at Concord. Indeed, beginning on March 8, Gage received no less than eight letters from this source, two in poorly written French, which was probably meant to disguise the sender. These communications described the exact locations of the hiding places of munitions and provisions and disclosed in detail the secret deliberations of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress—the illegally convened body whose leaders Dartmouth had ordered him to arrest.
Given this inside information, it is probable that Gage’s informant was himself not only a member of the Provincial Congress but also one of the handful of operatives to whom Samuel Adams and John Hancock entrusted their very lives. “The stricktest secrecy is enjoined to every member of the Congress,” this mole wrote Gage on March 30, “& it is therefore necessary that none of this intelligence should be mentioned to any person whatever.”7
Perhaps most disconcerting to Gage was the informer’s report that the numbers of militia available on call throughout the province might far exceed previous estimates. There was still great uncertainty about how these numbers would be integrated into anything approaching a formal army, but the fact that earnest discussions were taking place about doing so and that instructions had been given for the remittance of funds into a common treasury to pay for its support were definite signs of an organized opposition government.
There were also reports of disagreements within the Provincial Congress. Some members opposed the organization of a formal New England army, which would be seen as an offensive posture in contrast to the defensive character of the local militias. Others wanted to solicit opinions from their constituents, and many delegates were concerned that the other colonies, particularly their neighbors in New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, would not follow their lead and assemble troops in the field to assist Massachusetts.
All this meant that time was of the essence if the British were to make a preemptive strike against the rebel cause. Gage knew that the rebels were proceeding to raise an army; he had specific information about the locations of key munitions and stores invaluable to that effort, and he also knew that there was still some division of opinion among the provincial delegates. On April 11, a few days before Gage received his firm orders from Dartmouth, the general’s informer noted the obvious: “A sudden blow struck now or immediately on the arrival of the reinforcements from England should they come within a fortnight would oversett all their plans.”8
BASED ON THIS STREAM OF intelligence, General Gage began to draft operational orders. With great specificity, the first draft repeated almost verbatim the information Gage had learned in his informant’s letter of March 9. For example: “Four Brass Cannon and two Mortars or Cohorns with a Number of small arms in the Cellar or out Houses of Mr. Barrett a little on the other side the Bridge where is also lodged a Quantity of Powder & Lead.” But by the time Gage received a missive from his Concord spy dated April 18, most of the cannons—“four excepted which are now in Concord Town House”—and all but “a few Barrels” of powder had been removed to nearby towns in anticipation of just the sort of strike Gage was planning. The principal remaining prize appeared to be great quantities of beef and flour, as well as “a Quantity of [musket] Balls.”9
As will be seen, April 18 was a rather hectic day for the British in Boston. In moving quickly to provide a final set of orders to his field commander, Gage chose to condense the intelligence information about specific cache locations onto a map of Concord—which, unfortunately, has been lost to history—rather than include them in his written orders. Sometime during the afternoon of the eighteenth, Gage handed these instructions and the map to Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith of the Tenth Regiment of Foot to carry them out. Given the events of the next thirty-six hours, they are of interest in their entirety:
Having received Intelligence, that a Quantity of Ammunition, Provision, Artillery, Tents and small Arms, have been collected at Concord, for the Avowed Purpose of raising and supporting a Rebellion against His Majesty, you will March with the Corps of Grenadiers and Light Infantry, put under your command, with the u
tmost expedition and Secrecy to Concord, where you will seize and destroy all the Artillery, Ammunition, Provisions, Tents, Small Arms, and all Military Stores whatever. But you will take care that the Soldiers do not plunder the Inhabitants, or hurt private property.
You have a Draught [map] of Concord, on which is marked, the Houses, Barns, &c., which contain the above Military Stores. You will order a Trunion to be knocked off each Gun, but if its found impracticable on any, they must be spiked, and the Carriages destroyed. The Powder and flower, must be shook out of the Barrells into the River, the Tents burnt, Pork or Beef destroyed in the best way you can devise, And the Men may put Balls or lead in their pockets, throwing them by degrees into Ponds, Ditches &c., but no Quantity together, so that they may be recovered afterwards.
If you meet with any Brass Artillery, you will order their Muzzles to be beat in so as to render them useless.
You will observe by the Draught that it will be necessary to secure the two Bridges as soon as possible, you will therefore Order a party of the best Marchers, to go on with the expedition for that purpose.
A small party on Horseback is ordered out to stop all advice of your March getting to Concord before you, and a small number of Artillery go out in Chaises to wait for you on the Road, with Sledge Hammers, Spikes &c.
You will open your business, and return with the Troops, as soon as possible, which I must leave to your own Judgment and Discretion.10
What additional verbal instructions Gage gave Smith, if any, will never be known. The one glaring omission that differentiated these orders from Lord Dartmouth’s instructions to Gage was that Gage made no mention of arresting provincial leaders—Adams, Hancock, or anyone else. Whether Gage made this omission on purpose, perhaps fearing that such arrests would only make martyrs out of a few who would likely be quickly replaced in the evolving rebel hierarchy, or whether, given his leanings on individual liberties, he simply focused on the military purpose of the expedition is open to speculation. The pressing question at that moment, however, was whether or not the rebel leaders in Concord knew that British regulars were about to march.
Gage wasn’t the only one with spies. The strength of the rebel intelligence network came from the eyes and ears of Adams’s and Hancock’s band of tradesmen and skilled workers who frequented the Green Dragon and other Boston taverns. These Sons of Liberty took note of troop movements, ship arrivals and departures, and anything out of the ordinary and reported the same along a clandestine network that ultimately led to the committee of safety of the Provincial Congress. And in the first two weeks of April, there was plenty going on in Boston to report. On Friday, April 7—even before Gage had received his action orders from Dartmouth—rebels observed longboats being moored under the sterns of British men-of-war in the harbor for ready access and concluded that an attack somewhere was imminent. Perhaps it would even come on a quiet Sunday morning, as had Colonel Leslie’s Salem raid.
Paul Revere once again saddled up and the next day carried a message of alarm to Concord—the likely target, given its stockpiles of munitions and supplies and the Provincial Congress then meeting there. It proved a little premature, considering Gage’s timetable, but this warning was the impetus for removing much of the rebel cannons and gunpowder from Concord, as was subsequently reported to General Gage by his informer. Certainly Revere’s message heightened the state of alert in Concord. “We daily expect a Tumult,” wrote a local resident to a friend. “There came up a post [Revere’s warning] to Concord Saturday night [April 8] which informs them that the regulars are coming up to Concord the next day, and if they come I believe there will be bloody work.”11
This alarm to Concord and the subsequent report from Gage’s informer about the disposition of the rebels’ heavy ordnance and gunpowder should have made Gage question the secrecy and effectiveness of his operation. Certainly it raises the question of why Gage continued with his plans if indeed he had strong intelligence that the most important pieces of the rebels’ armaments had been moved from Concord to other locations. The last thing the general wanted was to come up empty-handed again, as Colonel Leslie had done at Salem. But instead of altering his target, Gage—no doubt feeling pressure from Dartmouth’s recently received orders—chose to strike as planned to secure the rebel munitions remaining in Concord. To ensure the expedition’s success, Gage attempted to impede the rebel warning system between Boston and Concord.
Accordingly, early on Tuesday, April 18, a patrol of about twenty men, commanded by Major Edward Mitchell of the Fifth Regiment and heavy with junior officers from other regiments, departed Boston via Boston Neck. They soon fanned out toward the key intersections on the roads leading to Concord. This was the “small party on Horseback” that was “ordered out to stop all advice of your March getting to Concord before you,” of which Gage so confidently assured Colonel Smith in his orders. But it didn’t work out that way.
Mitchell’s men rode with no apparent haste, but this in itself caused a stir among locals. Their actions were in sharp contrast to the hurry-scurry of previous British maneuvers into the countryside. They appeared in no rush to return to Boston by nightfall. Then, too, these were not casually dressed men out for exercise but fully uniformed troops with regimental cockades in their hats and sidearms and swords plainly visible beneath their riding coats.
The greatest number of these soldiers, about eight or nine, drifted toward Lexington. In Menotomy, about halfway between Lexington and Cambridge, the Massachusetts committees of safety and supply had just adjourned after an all-day meeting at Weatherby’s Black Horse Tavern. As committee members Richard Devens and Abraham Watson rode eastward in a chaise toward Charlestown, they encountered “a great number of British officers and their servants on horseback.” With jaunty waves, Devens and Watson passed by and then casually turned their buggy around and rode back westward, passing the officers again.
Once out of sight of the officers, the two hurried back to Menotomy to warn several committee members who had intended to spend the night at the Black Horse Tavern. Among them was Elbridge Gerry. He immediately scribbled a hasty note of warning to Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who were staying at the home of Jonas Clarke in Lexington, and dispatched it via a messenger who was instructed to keep to the back roads and avoid encountering the British patrol.12
Later that evening, Elijah Sanderson, a cabinetmaker from Lexington, “saw a party of officers pass up from Boston, all dressed in blue wrappers.” Given the late hour, “their passing, excited the attention of the citizens,” and Sanderson took his gun and cartridge box and, “thinking something must be going on more than common, walked up to John Buckman’s tavern, near the meeting-house.”13
Ironically, the warning that General Gage tried to stem was thus spread through the Massachusetts countryside by his own men even before Paul Revere yet again saddled his horse. And if news of British regulars riding about was not enough to raise the alarm that something was afoot, the daylight hours of April 18 in Boston offered plenty of other evidence. The shrill whistles of boatswains’ pipes and the creaking of block and tackle told all who cared to look across Boston Harbor that the longboats moored to the sterns of the men-of-war were about to get under way. “The town was a good deal agitated and alarmed at this Movement,” noted Frederick Mackenzie, the adjutant of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, officially the Twenty-Third Regiment of Foot, “as it was pretty generally known, by means of Seamen who came on shore from the Ships, about 2 o’clock, that the boats were ordered to be in readiness.”14
There were other signs as well. The grenadier and light infantry companies were conspicuously absent from their regular duties around town with their regiments. “I dare say,” Lieutenant John Barker of the Fourth Regiment of Foot noted in his diary, “they have something for them to do.” By evening, British longboats were moving about like so many water bugs and congregating around HMS Boyne.15
With Adams and Hancock first in Concord for the Provincial Congress and later a
t Lexington, command of the rebel intelligence network in Boston devolved upon Dr. Joseph Warren, to whom Adams had entrusted the Boston Massacre commemorative oration six weeks before. Dr. Warren was also a member of the Provincial Congress, but at some point during the previous days he had chosen to return to Boston. Perhaps because of his valuable medical expertise, Warren was one of the few rebel leaders who still felt secure from British harassment there. Warren may also have stayed in Boston because of his concern for his motherless children, although by now they were under the care of a housekeeper, Mercy Scollay, who aspired to become the second Mrs. Warren.16
All afternoon and into the evening of April 18, reports flowed into Warren’s medical office about British activity. Paul Revere received similar intelligence throughout the day, but before Warren would dispatch Revere to ride once again to Concord, the doctor had to be certain that this time an attack was not only imminent but in fact under way. And so into the story intrudes speculation about a minor episode that nonetheless has mushroomed into one of the purported great historical mysteries of those April days.
The speculation—magnified in some quarters into a bald assertion—is that Dr. Warren had a secret informant close to General Gage upon whom he relied to confirm the general’s plan of attack. In the words of one eminent historian, “circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that it was none other than Margaret Kemble Gage,” the general’s American-born wife.17
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