In the same issue, by order of General Gage, the News-Letter reminded Boston residents that “certain persons stiling themselves Delegates of several of his Majesty’s Colonies in America” were assembling in Philadelphia, “without his Majesty’s Authority,” and all concerned were directed “to use your utmost Endeavours, to prevent such Appointment.”10
Among other newspapers to report was the Essex Gazette of April 25. Editors Samuel and Ebenezer Hall were staunch Whigs, and they wasted no ink softening the rebel rhetoric. “Last Wednesday, the 19th of April, the Troops of his Britannick Majesty commenced Hostilities upon the People of this Province,” the Gazette announced, “attended with Circumstances of Cruelty not less brutal than what our venerable Ancestors received from the vilest Savages of the Wilderness.” The situation had introduced to the colonies “all the Horrors of a civil War,” the paper declared.
While admitting to a “present confused State of Affairs,” the Gazette nonetheless did not hesitate to describe atrocities, both real and imagined. “They pillaged almost every House they passed by, breaking and destroying Doors, Windows, Glasses, &c. and carrying off Cloathing and other valuable Effects.” That much was true enough along the return route from Lexington through Menotomy, but “the savage Barbarity” reported to have been “exercised upon the Bodies of our unfortunate Brethren” was mostly a gross distortion—the civilian deaths at Cooper’s Tavern notwithstanding. “Not content with shooting down the unarmed, aged and infirm,” the paper claimed, “they disregarded the Cries of the wounded, killing them without Mercy, and mangling their Bodies in the most shocking Manner.”
Forgetting (or unaware of) the hatchet incident at the North Bridge, the Gazette then boasted on behalf of the rebels, “We have the Pleasure to say, that, notwithstanding the highest Provocations given by the Enemy, not one Instance of Cruelty, that we have heard of, was committed by our victorious Militia.”11
War, however, was not good for the newspaper business in Boston. Of five newspapers published in the city on April 1, 1775, only one was left in business six weeks later. Tory Thomas Fleet Jr.’s Boston Evening-Post reported on April 24: “The unhappy Transactions of last week are so variously related that we shall not at present undertake to give any particular Account thereof.”12 Nor did he ever. It was his last issue.
With similar sympathies, the Boston Post-Boy published its last issue on April 10. It wasn’t that there was no news to report in and around Boston, but rather that so many of these newspapers’ subscribers were unreachable beyond the siege lines of the growing rebel army. Only the Tory mouthpiece the Boston News-Letter survived, but even its proprietor, Margaret Green Draper, printed no paper between April 20 and May 19.13
On the rebel side, Isaiah Thomas closed up his Massachusetts Spy after the April 6 issue and moved his press to the safety of Worcester, quite presciently anticipating the chaos to come. By May 3, Thomas was up and running again, publishing no explanation for either the interruption of service or his change of venue. The situation at the Boston Gazette was more complicated. The Gazette’s copublishers, Benjamin Edes and John Gill, had been the newsprint godfathers of every moment of rebel dissent in Boston since the Boston Tea Party was planned in the paper’s back room. Edes and Gill published their last issue in Boston on April 17. While Edes loaded their press into a boat and rowed up the Charles River to Watertown, Gill remained in town and was arrested for treason. Edes was able to start publishing again on June 5.14
VIA CIRCULARS AND NEWSPAPERS, MORE news and rumors spread outward from Massachusetts. Some of these reports were purely propaganda and not even close to the truth. A circular dated April 28, 1775, addressed “To the Inhabitants of New York,” was as incendiary as it was false. Signed only “An American,” it claimed that in marching from Lexington to Concord, the British troops had “killed a man on horseback, and killed geese, hogs, cattle, and every living creature they came across.” Before the regulars left Lexington, they reportedly surrounded the parsonage where Adams and Hancock had been staying and then “searched the house, and when they could not find them, these barbarians killed the woman of the house and all the children in cool blood, and then set the house on fire.”15 All this was untrue, save the escape by Adams and Hancock. In fact, British regulars had never appeared at the Clarke house—unless one counts Lieutenant Sutherland’s solo bolt on his runaway horse.
But then came more provocative incriminations: “Alas!” the writer continued, “would not the heathen in all their savage barbarity and cruelty, blush at such horrid murder, and worse than brutal rage?” The answer was a call to arms that “every American hear and abhor; let every inhabitant consider what he is likely to suffer if he falls into the hands of such cruel and merciless wretches.” The message was clear: hesitate to rally to the side of the rebels at your peril.16
But even the de facto government of Massachusetts—and the Provincial Congress was indeed now being looked to for leadership throughout the province, outside occupied Boston—was not above waving a bloody shirt to accomplish its goals. “The barbarous murders committed on our innocent brethren on Wednesday the 19th instant,” the committee of safety stressed in a message to Massachusetts towns, “have made it absolutely necessary that we immediately raise an Army to defend our wives and children from the butcherying hands of an inhuman soldiery.” Then, foreshadowing words that would soon appear on another document, the committee concluded, “We conjure, therefore, by all that is dear, by all that is sacred, that you give all assistance possible in forming the Army. Our all is at stake.”17
NOWHERE WAS THAT STAKE JUDGED to be higher than in communications with moderates in Great Britain who were sympathetic to the rebel cause. The two dozen affidavits from the approximately one hundred participants and eyewitnesses whom the Provincial Congress scurried to assemble within days of the Lexington battles were distributed and published at least in part in numerous newspapers around the country, but the most important set was copied in total and put in a packet with a cover letter from congress president Joseph Warren.18 This was entrusted to thirty-three-year-old Captain John Derby of Salem. His destination was England.
John Derby was the youngest son of Richard Derby Sr., a longtime Salem merchant and patriarch of a successful shipping firm (and the man who had sold the cannons that had been the aim of Colonel Leslie’s raid). John’s older brother, Richard junior, was soon to be a member of the third Provincial Congress. When the current congress resolved to report its side of the Lexington episode as quickly and directly to the English people as possible, all thoughts turned to the Derby family’s fleet of ships.
On April 27, with the ink on the various affidavits and the cover letter barely dry, the committee of safety directed the junior Richard Derby “to make for Dublin or any other good port in Ireland, and from thence to cross to Scotland or England and hasten to London.” This circuitous route was necessary, the orders explained, so Derby might elude “all cruisers that may be in the chops of the channel” to stop these communications from reaching the colonies’ agent in London. As if Derby needed to be told the obvious, the committee added a postscript: “You are to keep this order a profound secret from every person on earth.”19
Richard Derby gave this delicate assignment to his brother, John, who would prove more than a little daring in accomplishing it. The family ship that the brothers chose to outfit for the hurried voyage was the sixty-two-ton schooner Quero. Not much is known about the vessel, but in contrast to the heavy merchantman Sukey, via which General Gage had sent his dispatches to England, the Quero was light and fast, a veritable will-o’-the-wisp. With time of the essence and the Provincial Congress footing the bill, John Derby did not linger to load an outbound commercial cargo. Instead, he sailed with an empty hold, save for the requisite ballast.
Just how the Quero managed to slip out of Salem Harbor untouched by patrolling British ships is something of a mystery. The twenty-gun sixth-rate frigate HMS Lively was stationed off Marblehea
d Harbor, just to the south, immediately after April 19, and its duties included keeping a watch on nearby Salem and Beverly Harbors. In any event, no one knew these waters better than John Derby, and he seems to have made the most of his knowledge, probably slipping out of Salem on the night of April 28, four days after the Sukey sailed carrying Gage’s rendition of events.20
The cover letter that Captain Derby carried from Joseph Warren, president of the Provincial Congress, was hardly a plea for reconciliation. Rather, despite its announced purpose to deliver “an early, true and authentic account of this inhuman proceeding,” it read more like a partisan press release. After recounting the basic facts of Colonel Smith’s advance and the rebel response, Warren and his coauthors acknowledged that giving “a particular account of the ravages of the troops… would be very difficult, if not impracticable.” But then they proceeded to do just that, sometimes with a flagrant disregard for the truth.
“A great number of the houses on the road were plundered,” Warren wrote. This was true, although perhaps what might be considered “a great number” was subjective. But when it came to asserting that “women in childbed were driven, by the soldiery, naked into the streets; [and] old men, peaceably in their houses, were shot dead,” Warren’s letter strained credulity.21 Whom was he referring to?
Hannah Adams, while perhaps still weak from childbirth several weeks before, was, by her own daughter’s account, fully clothed when she took her newborn from her house in the face of British troops.22 If the “old men” shot dead in their homes were in fact the middle-aged Jason Winship and Jabez Wyman, who were unwilling to interrupt their afternoon pints at Cooper’s Tavern despite the approaching sounds of gunfire, some might say they deserved the outcome. As for any other “old men,” Samuel Whittemore, for one, was doing his best to shoot first.
But indeed there was no equivocation in these reports, and every measure of exaggeration was deployed on behalf of the rebels. With the letter and evidence dispatched, Joseph Warren and the Provincial Congress were counting on their colonial agent in London to distribute their version of events as quickly and widely as possible to the public in England. The man to whom John Derby was directed to deliver his package was Benjamin Franklin.
Since his chess-playing flirtations with Caroline Howe over the Christmas holidays, Franklin had grown increasingly exasperated by the state of affairs between Great Britain and its colonies. To be sure, there were many in England who sympathized politically with the plight of their American cousins and many others of the merchant and shipping classes who had economic reasons to worry. They feared what an open conflict with their best trading partner might do to their fortunes.
But to Franklin’s chagrin, these were not the people making decisions of policy. The people calling the tune were among the close-minded, self-important inner circle of George III. Indeed, the nearer one was to the king, the more strident seemed to be his view about the audacity of colonials questioning anything His Majesty might ordain. They simply could not fathom that a viable threat to British power could come from upstarts an ocean away. France they feared, or at least respected after three centuries of dueling for dominance of Europe, but among King George’s closest confidants, there was little or no respect for the abilities and resolve of the opposition in the colonies. In the end, that lack of respect and the arrogance that it bred would be their downfall.
But in the spring of 1775, Benjamin Franklin could do little more than sigh at this intransigence. Via Captain Derby, his friends in Massachusetts had again conveyed their confidence in his “faithfulness and abilities” and now asked him to publish and disperse the Lexington reports “throughout England to sway public opinion.” In his heart, Franklin knew that their plea was genuine and correct: only “the united efforts of both Englands [Britain and North America] can save either,” but that unity was not going to happen. Those with the power to make decisions in England were as unbending as those in North America were firm in their resolve. “Whatever price our breathren in the one [England] may be pleased to put on their constitutional liberties,” the Provincial Congress wrote Franklin, “we are authorized to assure you, that the inhabitants of the other, with the greatest unanimity, are inflexibly resolved to sell theirs only at the price of their lives.”23
There was one other problem. Benjamin Franklin was no longer in England. After considerable procrastination, he had finally sailed west from Portsmouth in the company of his fifteen-year-old grandson, Temple, on March 21. Somewhere off the coast of North America, inbound to Philadelphia, their ship, the Pennsylvania Packet, crossed paths with the outbound Quero.
Knowing quite well the importance and timeliness of his mission, John Derby now showed a full measure of Yankee brass. Rather than make for Dublin and undertake a clandestine journey by land across Scotland and England, as his instructions advised, Derby put the Quero on a direct course for the English Channel. After a speedy crossing, the Quero slipped unreported into a quiet anchorage on the Isle of Wight near the port of Southampton. Derby bundled up his dispatches, took the public ferry across to Southampton, and continued overland some seventy-five miles to London, arriving there on Sunday evening, May 28. Because it likely took Derby two or three days en route between the Isle of Wight and London, Quero’s crossing may have been as speedy as twenty-eight days. After that, the Quero became something of a ghost ship.
Once in London, Derby found Franklin absent and delivered his urgent dispatches, along with a copy of the April 25 issue of the Essex Gazette, to Arthur Lee, Samuel Adams’s frequent correspondent and a ready stand-in for Franklin. Together, Derby and Lee enlisted the aid of John Wilkes, described as an “eccentric and fearless radical,” who was the Lord Mayor of London and a strong supporter of the colonies. London was a rumor mill, and by the following day—thanks in part to some well-placed whispers by Wilkes—most informed citizens knew of the contest at Lexington and Concord and had been introduced to the rebel version of events.
Lord Dartmouth may have heard the news in some earlier fashion, but it is certain that Thomas Hutchinson, the ex-governor of Massachusetts so despised by Samuel Adams, carried the information to Dartmouth sometime on May 29. Having been effectively run out of Massachusetts for what many considered double-dealing, Hutchinson was nonetheless a darling of George III’s inner circle and an unofficial adviser on North American affairs. Given Hutchinson’s haughty personality and his unsuccessful tenure in Massachusetts, he was undoubtedly a poor choice for this role, but his presence was indicative of the less-than-balanced advice the king was receiving.
Hutchinson confided to his diary that Dartmouth was “much struck” with the news and that the first accounts “were very unfavourable” until they realized “that they all came from one side.” There was little they could do except “wait with a greater degree of calmness for the accounts from the other side.”24 They could, however, question the veracity of the messenger and question not only the speed with which he had appeared in England but the whereabouts of his transport.
Horace Walpole, alluding to Derby’s mysterious arrival, referred to him as the “Accidental Captain,” and Dartmouth immediately began a search for the Quero both in the harbor at Southampton and among the coves of the Isle of Wight. Surprisingly enough, however, Dartmouth did not order Derby’s arrest—suggesting that cherished principles of English law were still in place in England even as they were being bent in North America.25
What Dartmouth did do, however, was to issue an official statement on May 30 to inform the public that, recent reports from Massachusetts via Derby notwithstanding, Dartmouth had had no official communication from General Gage about the matter. Everyone should remain calm and without judgment until he had received Gage’s report. That brought a salvo from Arthur Lee in the rebel-friendly newspapers the next day wherein Lee challenged anyone who doubted the veracity of Derby’s account to inspect the affidavits in the custody of the Lord Mayor.26
Meanwhile, despite Derby’s ass
ertion that the Sukey had preceded him out of Boston by four days, there was no sign of the vessel and, with it, General Gage’s account of events. Derby’s mission in delivering the rebel version accomplished, the captain chose not to linger in London and risk a change in Dartmouth’s adherence to English law. It might be better that he be long gone before Gage’s official dispatches arrived. Accordingly, Derby left his lodgings in London on June 1 and melted into the countryside as stealthily as he had come. Some said they had heard that he was sailing for Spain with a cargo of fish, perhaps to buy arms and ammunition; others that he was going for a load of mules. Further inquiries into his whereabouts or those of the Quero at Southampton produced no information, and the collector of the port there disavowed any knowledge of the ship.27
That General Gage’s account was not at hand caused more than a little apprehension with each passing day. Hutchinson, always a good friend of Gage, wrote him on May 31. “It is unfortunate to have the first impression made from that quarter,” Hutchinson noted, referring to Derby’s widely circulated account. “It is said your dispatches are on board Cap. Brown, who sailed some days before Darby [sic]. I hope they are at hand, and will afford us some relief.”28
Dartmouth was even more perplexed about the delay, but all that he, too, could do was vent his frustrations in a letter to Gage the next day. Dartmouth did his best to speculate that Derby’s reports must be wrong or, at the very least, greatly exaggerated: “There is the greatest Probability that the whole amounts to no more than that a Detachment sent by you to destroy Cannon and Stores collected at Concord for the purpose of aiding Rebellion, were fired upon, at different times, by the People of the Country in small Bodies from behind Trees and Houses, but that the Party effected the Service they went upon, & returned to Boston.”
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