Kind Heaven Avert the Storm!

Winter Comes to Boston  ∙The Storming of Fort William and Mary  ∙  A Sleeping and Confounded Ministry  ∙  American Clowns∙  Showdown at Salem  ∙  Dividing Lines: Patriots vs. Tories  ∙  The Marshfield Adventures  ∙  Franklin Comes Home  ∙  Gage’s Green Light

Winter Comes to Boston

A mild winter settled over Boston towards the end of 1774. The town had increasingly grown into a military encampment, given the fortifications on the Neck, the patrols of British redcoats, the withdrawal of patriot citizens to more favorable climes (met on their departure with loyalists coming the opposite way to seek sanctuary among the redcoats), the warships ringing the harbor, and the unremitting arrival of more regiments; by the end of the year, eleven battalions – around 4000 troops – were sequestered in Boston. The dearth of new soldiers required more living quarters, so Gage operated under the revised Quartering Act and forced citizens to house officers in their homes. Though these measures were necessary to keep the redcoats from freezing in their canvas tents on the Common, they nevertheless increased tensions among the soldiers and citizenry. The fortifications on the Neck – known colloquially as ‘The Lines’ – and reports of Massachusetts militia arming and drilling in the countryside only added to peoples’ nervousness. Hannah Winthrop wrote in a letter to Mercy Warren that ‘the dissolution of all government gives a dreadful prospect, the fortifying of Boston Neck, the huge cannon now mounted there, the busy preparation, the agility of troops, give a horrid prospect of an intended battle. Kind heaven avert the storm!’ Her husband wrote to John Adams that soon he would be forced to ‘beat my plowshares into swords, and pruning hooks into spears.’ The soldiers cooped up in Boston – whose only ‘escape’ from the town’s confines were in heavily-armed patrols in the nearby countryside where they marched under the sullen glares and muttered curses of the citizenry – itched for a confrontation; they saw it as the epitome of ludicrousness to continue ‘to suffer the treason and rebellion of these villains to go unpunished.’ The urge for a bloody clash was no dealt exacerbated by the innate desire of a trapped animal to kick its way free: despite their gleaming equipment, professional training, and well-kept weaponry, the soldiers knew that, for all intents and purposes, they were ‘besieged’ inside Boston: the populace outside the gates was arming itself and preparing for war, and even in the streets it wasn’t safe for a lone redcoat to be caught unawares. When Gage traveled to his secondary residence in Danvers twenty-five miles north of Boston, he had to travel with a heavily-armed escort, and even when he wasn’t there, two redcoat companies occupied the estate to prevent its being looted and torched by brigands. Though the redcoats didn’t fear a rebel attack on the town – the harbor was well-stocked with British warships, after all, and the only landward route into town was by the Neck where an attacking army would be slaughtered by cannon, musketry, and bayonets – they knew that the rebels, if coordinated and numerous enough, could take the high grounds of Dorchester and Charlestown – and if they had cannon at their disposal, they could shell the town. 

Stuck in Boston, redcoats had little to do. In such a situation, it’s unremarkable that drinking and gambling became the prominent pastimes. One British officer remarked that the drunkenness among soldiers ‘is now at a very great pitch; owing to the cheapness of the liquor, a man may get drunk for a copper or two.’ Drunken soldiers had a tendency to squabble with the citizen-run town watch, leading to increased hostilities. Gage tried to curb the gambling among the troops by forming an Anti-Gambling League. Meanwhile, patriots encouraged bored and listless soldiers to desert; one handbill passed out to soldiers read, ‘Friends and Brothers… you may have Liberty and by a Little Industry may obtain Property… March up either Singly or in Companys… The Country People are Determined to Protect you and Screen you…’ Most redcoats had no liberty nor property, and the allure of gaining both in America enticed many to desert to the patriots, who promised to protect and hide them (some deserters even became employed as ‘drill sergeants’ for the newly-formed militias, tasked with teaching them the arts of war). Gage ordered deserters to endure a slow, agonizing death: one deserter was sentenced to a thousand lashes, 250 given each week for a month. Most men can’t survive such treatment, and few did. 

Though some redcoats were tempted by the colonists, most held them in contempt. Captain Evelyn gauged them as ‘utterly devoid of every sentiment of truth or common honesty; [they] possess no other human qualities but such as are the shame and reproach of humanity.’ The colonists had performed ‘many horrid villanies,’ and for this reason ‘fire and sword’ should be their diet. No doubt he was incensed when, under the cover of night, rebel conspirators stole off with the militia fieldpieces kept guarded in a gun-shed in the middle of the street that stood opposite the 4th Regiment. Not all relations between redcoats and citizenry were embittered, however: Lord Hugh Percy was encamped along the edge of Beacon Street, and he became a common figure around John Hancock’s table. Major John Pitcairn of the Royal Marines was lodged with Paul Revere’s neighbor, Francis Shaw; Shaw complained to Revere that he had to give room and board to the commander of the Marines, but over time he came to like Pitcairn, discovering him to be a ‘gentle and understanding man.’ Pitcairn – despite soon fighting against the rebels tooth-and-nail – won both the trust and affection of Boston’s high-ranking Sons of Liberty. 

Gage prorogued the Massachusetts Assembly, but that didn’t stop the members from meeting in the so-called Massachusetts Provincial Congress – and they met in Cambridge, in full view of the redcoats across the Charles River. They voted to call up twelve thousand militia men for service and invited New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut to commission levies of their own to act in Boston’s defense. They then voted to buy twenty fieldpieces and four mortars, twenty tons of grapeshot and round shot, and five thousand muskets and bayonets (though how these would be found and purchased remained a mystery; rumor has it that underhanded dealings procured weaponry from foreign nations). A Committee of Public Safety was formed under the leadership of Hancock; the Committee was given the authority to summon the reformed, reinvigorated militia, of whom every fourth man was to be ready to march ‘at a moment’s notice’; these ‘minutemen’ were the next phase of the minutemen originally established in the Suffolk Resolves. In November the Committee reported that it’d managed to acquire much ordinance along with 350 spades and pickaxes. The Provincial Congress ordered ‘the Militia in general, as well as the detached part of it in Minute-men, in obedience to the great law of self-preservation,’ to be industrious in their drills. John Adams, tasked with bringing friendly native Americans into the minutemen companies, signed up the Stockbridge Indians. 

Massachusetts didn’t stand alone in preparing for armed conflict with Great Britain. In Rhode Island, citizens of Newport stormed Fort George overlooking the harbor and seized forty-four cannon among other military stores; much of this military accoutrement was supplied to Rhode Island militias. New Hampshire patriots, upon learning of Gage’s theft of Massachusetts military stores in Charlestown, sought to preempt a similar theft in their colony by staging a coup on the crumbling Fort William and Mary. On 14 December drums beat throughout Portsmouth; the royal Governor Wentworth dispatched the colony’s chief justice to explain to hundreds of gathering militia ‘the nature of the offense they proposed to commit.’ He told them that what they were about to do was ‘not short of rebellion’ and ordered them to return to their homes. The patriots didn’t listen, of course, and as compatriots streamed in from nearby Newcastle and Rye, their numbers swelled to over four hundred. They marched on the aged fort, from whence the token garrison of just six soldiers could only watch with dry mouths and anxious trigger fingers. The royal commander, Captain Cochrane, fired the fort’s cannon at the swarming patriots, but they scaled the crumbling walls and leapt down into the fort. Cochrane put up a spirited fight, succumbing only after a man leapt on top of him from the battlements, sending him sprawling to the ground. Governor Wentworth wrote to Lord Dartmouth of what happened next: ‘After they entered the fort, they seized upon the captain, triumphantly gave three huzzas, and hauled down the King’s Colours. [They] broke open the gunpowder magazine and carried off about 1000 barrels of gunpowder.’ They also stole four cannon and burned lots of East India Company tea. Wentworth lamented to Dartmouth that he couldn’t bring justice against the perpetrators, despite their names being well-known: ‘The country is so much inflamed especially since the return of the delegates from the Congress, that many magistrates and militia officers who ought to have given their aid and assistance in restraining and suppressing this uproar, were active to promote and encourage it.’ He requested two redcoat regiments to keep the lid on patriot schemes in Portsmouth, but Gage couldn’t spare any men; all Wentworth received was a frigate and sloop dispatched by Admiral Graves. The warships delivered supplies that included twenty ‘stands of arms’ (a ‘stand of arms’ included a musket, a bayonet, and a cartridge box) that Wentworth gladly received and gave to his newly-formed Loyalist Association, a counter-patriot Tory militia that served as a counterweight to the rebel militias drilling in the New Hampshire countryside. The first seeds of a true ‘civil war’ were already planted and taking root.

A Sleeping and Confounded Ministry

News of the Continental Congress hadn’t prompted Parliament to back down from their ham-fisted measures against Massachusetts; instead, it only seemed to bolster their resolve. Massachusetts was declared to be in a state of rebellion, and most Parliamentarians licked their lips awaiting news of a fierce American battle in which the much-loathed patriots were bloodied into the mud. Not all Parliamentarians thought such a conclusion was foregone, however, and the aging Earl of Chatham was among them. He reached out to Benjamin Franklin, hoping that the Massachusetts representative could help him forge a path out of the mess. When he and Franklin met, Chatham praised the Continental Congress as ‘the most honorable assembly of statesmen since those of the ancient Greeks and Romans, in the most virtuous times.’ Franklin comforted Chatham that reconciliation between America and the mother country was possible, but in order for it to happen, Gage and his redcoats needed to be pulled from Boston posthaste. Chatham agreed, believing that such accommodation would prove England’s desire for harmony. Meanwhile Franklin met with other Parliamentarians, often in secret, for to deal openly with Franklin could be a political shot in the foot. Franklin met with Vice-admiral Richard Viscount Howe and his younger brother Major General William Howe. Admiral Howe moved first to meet with Franklin, and to do so in secret he concocted a scheme in which his sister Caroline would invite Franklin to her place for a cordial game of chess, and once behind closed doors, Admiral Howe would be present to talk American strategy. Though no headway towards reconciliation came from these meetings, Franklin didn’t consider them a waste: he came to grow fond of Lady Caroline, and the two of them developed a friendship (if not a romance).

When Parliament resumed on 20 January 1775, Chatham stood in the House of Lords and took a stab at promoting American harmony. He condemned the Coercive Acts as ‘violent, precipitate and vindictive’ whilst defending the Americans as an ‘injured, unhappy, traduced people.’ North’s ministry had succeeded not in subduing a continent but uniting one, and all they could boast for their measures was ‘an impotent general and a dishonored army.’ He pictured Great Britain as a drunk staggering to ruin, and he saw himself as a sober passerby with the duty of rescuing her king from ‘the misadvise of his present ministers.’ If Parliament remained steadfast in its resolve – which Chatham saw as a fancy word for ‘pride’ – then nothing but disaster awaited. ‘I will not desert for a moment the conduct of this weighty business from the first to the last,’ he vowed, ‘unless nailed to my bed by the extremity of sickness: I will give it unremitting attention; I will knock at the door of this sleeping and confounded ministry, and rouse them to a sense of their imminent danger.’ He was careful to agree that the colonists owed obedience ‘to our ordinance of Trade and Navigation,’ but he rejected the idea that Parliament could levy internal taxes. The colonial resistance to unjust, illegal taxation wasn’t only just but also necessary; Parliament’s declarations of ‘imperious doctrines of the necessity of submission [are] equally impotent to convince or enslave.’ Parliament’s actions were ‘tyranny… intolerable to British subjects.’ He then proposed to empty Boston of royal troops immediately before the first ‘inexpiable drop of blood is shed in an impious war with a people contending in the great cause of public liberty.’ For himself, he could never a permit one of his sons to ‘draw his sword upon his fellow subjects.’ He tried to make it clear to the Lords that the Americans preferred ‘poverty with liberty to golden chains and sordid affluence’ and that they ‘would die in defense of their rights as men – as freemen.’ When all was said and done, regardless of the road Parliament walked, Great Britain would have no choice but to back down, so ‘let us retreat whilst we can, not when we must. I say we must necessarily undo these violent and repressive acts; they must be repealed; I pledge myself for it, that you will in the end repeal them; I stake my reputation on it; I will consent to be taken for an idiot if they are not finally repealed.’ He ended with a grave prediction: if Parliament refused to deal justly with the colonies, ‘I shall not say that the King is betrayed; but I will pronounce that the Kingdom is undone.’

Chatham had support from the Lords Shelburne, Richmond, and Rockingham, but Chatham and his ilk were in the minority: his measure was ousted by a vote of 68 to 18. The attitudes of most of the Lords is encapsulated by Suffolk’s response to Chatham’s speech: he condemned it as improper and divisive, for Parliament must be obeyed. He upbraided the Continental Congress, affirmed Parliament’s coercive policies, and declared that any concessions to the American rebels would be ‘to the last degree impolitic, pusillanimous and absurd.’ Suffolk resolved to pursue ‘the object of subduing the refractory, rebellious Americans’ and ‘to enforce obedience by arms.’  

Chatham didn’t shy away: he and Franklin went back to the drawing board, and Chatham put another bill before the House of Lords. He sought to soften the blow by affirming Parliament’s authority ‘to bind the people of the British colonies in America in all matters touching the general weal of the whole Dominion of the Imperial Crown.’ Acts regulating trade were binding, for such regulations went beyond the abilities of the colonies. Again he tried to force the removal of redcoats from Boston, insisting that troops couldn’t be stationed in any colony without that colony’s assent, and he argued that internal taxes could only be levied by a vote of provincial assemblies. Furthermore, the Coercive Acts were to be repealed and the inviolability of colonial charters affirmed. Even before the clerk reading the bill could sit down, Lord Sandwich rose to denounce it; he accused Chatham’s proposed concessions of being nonsensical, given that the colonists ‘had formed the most traitorous and hostile intentions’ and were in a state of rebellion. The English weren’t keen on negotiating with terrorists (as we would put it today); terrorists needed to be buried six feet deep. Sandwich moved to reject the bill, and he had support from the Lord President of the Council, who insisted that Great Britain must assert and enforce her ‘legislative supremacy entire and undiminished.’ At these words the chamber resounded with shouts and heated back-and-forth; when order was restored, the Lord President determined ‘in the most unreserved terms’ that the cantankerous colonists must be ‘reduced to submission.’ Chatham stood to reply to the Lord President, claiming that Parliament’s conduct in the colonies had been ‘one continued series of weakness, temerity, despotism, ignorance, futility, negligence, blunder and the most notorious servility, incapacity, and corruption.’ He certainly wasn’t winning any friends with such vindictive, but he knew as well as anyone that the bill would fail: he stood not as a preacher seeking converts but as a prophet raining coal on sinners’ heads. He unveiled the ministers’ real motivations: if his bill of reconciliation were passed, it would undercut their coveted power and rob them of their party-favors, reducing them ‘to that state of insignificance for which God and nature’ had designed them. The straight-edged Parliamentarians weren’t standing on patriotism but on pride. The Lord President countered that Chatham was attempting ‘to influence the people both here and in America,’ and he vowed he was happy ‘to perish in the ruins’ so long as he never conceded a single right to the Americans. Chatham’s Plan of Reconciliation was rejected by a vote of 61 to 32.

Chatham’s Plan of Reconciliation never stood a chance of seeing the light of day, for it undercut the convictions not only of most Parliamentarians but of the rebel colonists, as well. As historian Robert Middlekauff notes, ‘It was a daring and hopeless proposal. It presumed to recast imperial relations in such fundamental ways as to imply that members of Parliament were creatures utterly without pride, that they would admit errors without a blush once they were exposed, and act speedily to correct them. It also assumed that the Americans had not really meant to reject Parliament’s sovereignty and that they would back off if Parliament repealed disagreeable statutes and promised not to exercise its legitimate right to tax them.’ The historian Samuel B. Griffith III hones in on Parliament’s resolutions against reconciliation with the colonies; it was, as a matter of course, a matter of pride: ‘Parents did not confer with obstinate and recalcitrant children. They chastised them. Any adolescent who attempted to assert a position of equality with adults would have been looked upon as singularly deluded and sadly in need of correction. Nor would the political mores of the time have countenanced a meeting, on a basis of equality, of the King’s “confidential servants” with colonists. This idea would have been dismissed as ludicrous. Gentlemen did not marry their mistresses, nor did superior beings parley with their social inferiors. Colonists were inferior beings; they were supposed to take orders, not give them. The parent-child relationship as between Great Britain and her American colonies was a concept that to a great degree dictated the reaction of the British Establishment to the behavior of the Americans. When George III referred to England as “the Mother Country,” as he so frequently did, he meant the term in its literal sense.’

'American Clowns'

While Parliament wrangled over how to best deal with the defiant colonies, Massachusetts militia drilled on town greens while wagons of gunpowder and cannon rumbled down countryside roads towards hidden depots. Colonial militias had been a staple feature in each colony prior to the colonial crisis; these militia would be called to action against native Americans or even other hostile colonies, but the Suffolk Resolves reconfigured these militias so that they were reconstituted around patriot lines with firebrand officers who trained for warfare against the mother country. This reconstitution of the militia involved the purging of loyalist members, and the most hotheaded patriots were elected to lead the men. The Suffolk Resolves ordered that the militia be organized in companies of ‘fifty privates, at the least, who shall equip and hold themselves in readiness, on the shortest notice, to march to the place of rendezvous.’ These were the first ‘minutemen,’ though the term was ironically coined not by patriots but scoffing Tories. In many towns these militia companies were supplemented by ‘Alarm Companies’ comprised of boys and older men (‘our aged sires,’ as one militia officer put it) tasked with turning out to defend their homes in case the militia were occupied elsewhere. As Massachusetts towns and counties reformed their militias – most were armed with muskets, but a few carried the much more accurate Pennsylvania rifles – other colonies did so, as well. Connecticut paved the way in reforming their militia, boasting twenty thousand enlisted men broken down into eighteen regiments ‘with a Troop of Horse to each, and to some, Two Troops.’ The Connecticut Assembly ordered that militia regiments begin drilling and training, and towns were required to ‘double the quantity of Powder, Balls and Flints, that they were before by law obliged to Provide’ (to make the acquisition of military provisions easier, the Farmer’s Almanac carried instructions for homegrown gunpowder). Many towns enlisted redcoat deserters to serve as drill sergeants tasked with getting the roughshod colonists into fighting shape. 

The redcoats, who had seen early Boston militia drilling in full view of the Common, and who regularly encountered militia forces shadowing them on their countryside marches, couldn’t help but snicker at the awkward homegrown troops. Many older veterans had served alongside provincial troops during the French and Indian War, and they had nothing but contempt for the ‘fighting prowess’ of their colonial counterparts. The ‘wisest’ redcoats believed – and promulgated the belief – that when the homespun militias faced concentrated fire from British volleys for the first time, they would run helter-skelter to those ‘extensive woods which they are too lazy or feeble to cut down.’ Any courage they had came not from principle but from copious amounts of rum: ‘Without rum they could neither fight nor say their prayers,’ one soldier quipped; another added that there were ‘no meaner whimpering wretches in this universe’ than tee-total New Englanders. An officer watching the Boston militia at drill wrote, ‘It is a curious masquerade scene to see grave sober citizens, barbers and tailors, who never looked fierce before in their lives, but at their wives, children, or apprentices, strutting about in their Sunday wigs in stiff buckles with their muskets on their shoulders, struggling to put on a martial countenance. If ever you saw a goose assume an air of consequence, you may catch some faint idea of the foolish, awkward, puffed-up stare of our tradesmen: the wig, indeed, is the most frightful thing about them, for its very hairs seem to bristle in defiance of the soldiers.’ Another officer wrote a friend in England,  ‘As to what you hear of their taking arms, it is mere bullying, and will go no further than words. Whenever it comes to blows, he that can run fastest will think himself best off. And any two regiments here ought to be decimated if they did not beat in the field the whole force of the Massachusetts province: for though they are numerous, they are but a mere mob without order or discipline, and very awkward in handling their arms.’ An English woman traveling through South Carolina had the fortune to watch a southern militia of two thousand men at drill on a field of scrub oak: she observed that the ‘American clowns’ were ‘tall and lean, with short waists and long limbs, sallow complexions and languid eyes, when not enflamed by spirits. Their feet are flat, their joints loose and their walk uneven.’ Their drills were ‘that of bush-fighting,’ and they were ‘heated with rum till capable of committing the most shocking outrages. I really must laugh while I recollect their figures: 2000 men in their shirts and trousers, preceded by a very ill-beat drum and fiddler… who played with all his might. They made indeed a most unmartial appearance.’ But for all her mirth, she had a note of pension which many redcoats didn’t share: ‘But the worst figure there can shoot from behind a bush and kill even a General Wolfe.’ 

The derision of the ‘American clowns’ playing at war stemmed not only from biased experiences during the French and Indian War but also from a form of classism: the militia were comprised of lower-class men and boys who lacked good blood and good training. It was inconceivable in the late 18th century that men of ‘bad blood’ and ‘poor upbringing’ could stand toe-to-toe with the privileged class on the battlefield. Major Pitcairn, who’d befriended many of the Sons of Liberty, wrote to Lord Sandwich that ‘vigorous measures at present would soon put an end to this rebellion. The deluded people are made [to] believe that they are invincible… When this army is ordered to act against them, they will soon be convinced that they are very insignificant when opposed to regular troops.’ He added, ‘I am satisfied that one active campaign, a smart action, and burning two or three of their owns, will set everything to rights.’ The redcoats were craving action against the ‘hypocritical patriots’ who professed allegiance to the king while arming themselves and drilling for war against their Sovereign; the redcoats’ only fear wasn’t the militia amassing at the gates but that the colonists would ‘avail themselves of the clemency and generosity of the English, and by some abject submission evade the chastisement due to unexampled villainy, and which we are so impatiently waiting to inflict.’ The worst possible outcome was peace, for the redcoats were blood-thirsty: they wanted the rebels who had for so long derided and mistreated them to feel the full blunt of British soldiery. 

The derision British soldiers felt towards the patriot militia was mirrored in the patriots’ view of the redcoats. Redcoat privates were mocked as the ‘scum of the earth,’ since the bulk of army recruitment dredged up men from the lowest tiers of society. One colonist joked that your run-of-the-mill redcoats were ‘the most debauched weavers apprentices, the scum of the Irish Roman Catholics, who desert upon every occasion, and a few, a very few Scotch, who are not strong enough to carry packs.’ The officers, who hailed from ‘good blood’ and ‘proper upbringing,’ were seen as ‘effeminate fops’ renowned not for their bravery but for their debauchery: they were far more concerned with chic balls and the wooing of women than in Guts and Glory: as one colonist put it, rather than ‘seeking glory on the blood stained field,’ British officers saved their triumphs for the bedroom, summoning all energy and effort to ‘captivate the softer sex, and triumph over virtue.’ One Bostonian saw the redcoats as ‘sickly, and extremely addicted to desertion,’ adding, ‘Do you think such an army would march through our woods and thickets and country villages to cut the throats of honest people contending for liberty?’ While the British thought the patriot militia would scatter with the first volley of musketry, the patriots believed they could push the redcoats back into the sea from whence they came; as one colonist gloated, ‘We can bush fight them and cut off their officers very easily and in this way we can subdue them with very little loss.’ A Tory, hearing the proud boasting of the undisciplined militia, scoffed that if you told Americans that British veterans would flee before ‘an undisciplined multitude of New England squirrel hunters… they will swallow it without a hiccough.’ When it came down to who would prevail in a force of arms, perhaps Benjamin Franklin had the most sensible reason for betting on the colonies: Americans were breeding faster than the redcoats could kill them off.

Gage, shut up in Boston at the turn of the year and tasked with bringing Massachusetts to heel, didn’t share the buoyant optimism of his charges. Day after day he received news of the militia drilling and arming themselves and knew they were spoiling for a fight. Each day that passed was a day that added more men to the rebel numbers, and he feared he didn’t have anywhere near enough soldiers to put an end to the colony’s rebellion. He wrote to Lord Dartmouth, ‘If you think ten thousand men sufficient [to put an end to the rebellion], send twenty; if one million is enough, give two; you will save both blood and treasure in the end.’ 

He hoped to prevent the outbreak of war by preventing the patriot militias from getting their hands on military supplies, and so he kept his ears attuned to reports of rebel depots and the shuttling of arms, dispatching columns to seize them when possible. He sent regular patrols into the nearby communities, hoping to make overzealous citizens think twice about their resolves when faced with rank upon rank of bayonet-tipped soldiers. Because minutemen dominated the hinterlands, the Queen’s Guards were tasked with escorting loyalists on their travels. Gage ordered his soldiers to stay sharp with regular target practice, in which they fired at floating targets from the Boston wharves. He maintained constant communication with Dartmouth, emphasizing the rising tensions and the increasing threat of open conflict. Though his orders vaguely authorized him to use armed force at his discretion, he didn’t want to provoke spilled blood without point-blank authorization: if things went south, he didn’t want to be caught in the lurch. His soldiers, keen for the confrontation that had been budding for years, could only shake their heads at Gage’s dallying. They wanted to ‘scourge [the rebels] with rods of iron,’ but they were like prize-fighting pit-bulls chained in a cage. Major General Frederick Haldimand, Gage’s second-in-command just arrived from New York, wrote, ‘It is useless to hope to recover the New England provinces by any kind of accommodation. They tend toward independence. The evil is great and only a violent remedy can cure it.’ – but Gage was unwilling to administer the remedy, and so the atmosphere could only thicken.

In such an environment, hostile encounters couldn’t be avoided. Early in the new year, a butcher carrying a piece of beef tripped and spluttered into the street. Nearby soldiers buckled over with laughter at the butcher’s embarrassment, but the butcher had friends who came to his defense, and the soldiers were surrounded by butchers. A brawl of bayonets and meat cleavers would’ve made headlines in the Boston Gazette if it weren’t for the intervention of a British officer ordering the soldiers to their barracks. He then grabbed the loudest-mouthed butcher by the shirt and tried to haul him to the guardhouse. A Bostonian named Ned Gray, who’d been present at the Boston Massacre five years earlier, persuaded the officer to instead take his charge to Miss Foster’s store and then to call the sheriff if he wanted to press charges against him – such matters needed to be handled by civil law. The officer, knowing he’d find himself in hot water if he provoked further encounters, saw sense and relented. A few days later, on 20 January, Lieutenant Myers of the 38th Regiment was walking to his billet when a group of Bostonians encircled him, hissing epithets and deriding him as a ‘bloody-backed Irish dog.’ Myers stood his ground, and when he didn’t cow to their taunts, they moved in for the kill, knocking him to the ground and kicking him in the street. The Boston night watch, drawn by the scuffle, rushed to see what was happening, and they were joined by a cadre of British officers who’d  been drinking at the nearby Ingersol’s Tavern. When the night watch moved to arrest Myers rather than his assailants, the officers barred their way. The town watch didn’t back down, and a small brawl ensued in which an officer’s head was laid open by a billhook and another was nearly run through with a sword. As a small crowd gathered, a patrol from the Main Guard arrived. As the bloodied brawlers rounded one another, the crowd screamed, ‘Fire! Fire!’ in an apparent attempt to provoke another massacre. Captain Gore, the senior officer present, hollered himself hoarse shouting over the citizenry, commanding the redcoats to fire on no account. In such an atmosphere as that building in Boston in early 1775, an outburst of musketry against the citizens would’ve no doubt provoked a greater conflict, and the American War of Independence likely would’ve started months earlier than it did.

Prelude to Revolution: Showdown at Salem

Patriot and Royalist spy networks spread their webs through Boston. While Gage piddled about and the sullen redcoats yearned for a brawl, the Boston chapter of the Sons of Liberty continued their clandestine operations right under their noses. They worked from the Green Dragon Tavern (pictured here), a location chosen by Joseph Warren, a Grand Master in the Boston Masonic Lodge: both the Masons and the Sons of Liberty called the Green Dragon their headquarters. Paul Revere and Joseph Warren orchestrated a spy ring of thirty-odd ‘mechanics’ who moved freely about the town, listening for word of British patrols across the Neck and recording troop movements. Information was gleaned through informants, ‘loose lips,’ and closet patriots housing British soldiers; though the non-commissioned soldiers were generally housed in barracks and tents, many of the officers took quarters in houses by way of the Quartering Act; still others lived with loyalists who were more than happy to receive them. It takes no leap of the imagination to deduce that some of these so-called loyalists were actually patriot spies, dining with and sleeping near their enemies. The spying mechanics reported their findings to Revere, and he forwarded these reports to Warren, who in turn sent them further up the ladder to the Committee of Public Safety. Gage’s spy network consisted mainly of Tory sympathizers keeping tabs on the Sons of Liberty and reporting the comings-and-goings in the countryside, but he had an ace up his sleeve with Dr. Benjamin Church. Church was a well-known Boston physician as well as a top-tier Son of Liberty, a member of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, and a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress; though he wrote bountiful patriot prose and poetry and stood on the front lines of the patriot movement, rubbing shoulders with the Adams cousins, John Hancock, Thomas Cushing, and others, he was in fact a closeted Tory and Gage’s premier spy. Church was, in the words of the historian Thomas Allen, ‘an operative that a modern spymaster would call a mole or penetration agent.’ 

When Church sent word to Gage that more than twenty cannon were being gathered in the town of Salem, Massachusetts, just 25 miles from Boston, the British commander decided to act. 

While stealing muskets, shot, and powder were important, the cannon gave him pause: if the militia were able to implant them on the Dorchester or Charlestown heights, they could bombard the town. He ordered Colonel Alexander Leslie of the 64th Regiment garrisoning Castle William to spearhead the requisition of rebel cannon. The 64th were the obvious choice for such a mission: because rebel spies in town would doubtless send word of a large column marching across the Neck and into the countryside, the 64th could board transports and slip out of the harbor to disembark elsewhere on the coast without (Gage hoped) the rebels learning of it. Leslie – known as ‘an amiable and good man distinguished by his humanity and affability’ – loaded 250 redcoats onto transport ships and sailed on Saturday night, 26 February, towards Marblehead. Despite their precautions, Revere’s ‘mechanics’ got word of the march and dispatched three observes in a boat to spy on Castle William. The three boatmen were caught and held until Monday, 28 February, so that they couldn’t warn their compatriots in the countryside. Thus the expedition began with secrecy intact, but once the soldiers disembarked near Marblehead and began marching towards Salem, they threw secrecy to the dogs: the full regimental bland played ‘Yankee Doodle’ to mock the patriots as they neared their target. This song was an English soldier’s song of the Seven Years’ War that mocked the colonial provincials who had been their voluntary (but unreliable) allies. British bands traditionally blared the long note of ‘Dandy’ in derision, so as it make it sound like a raspberry.

John Pederick of Marblehead was coming down the road when he met Colonel Leslie’s force head-on. Leslie and Pederick knew one another, for Pederick had been a militia officer who’d been ousted from his position because of his Tory sympathies. For all Leslie knew, Pederick remained a steadfast loyalist, but unbeknownst to him, Pederick had been persuaded to the patriot cause. The two of them exchanged pleasantries, and the redcoat column parted to let Pederickpass. As the rear of the redcoat column closed up behind him, he drew a deep breath, waited a few moments, and then dashed down a by-road towards Salem. The first colonist he came across was Colonel David Mason, who commanded the Salem militia.  Mason had been a captain of British artillery in the French and Indian War and currently served as the chief engineer for the Massachusetts Committee of Public Safety. It was he who’d somehow procured a dozen twelve-pounders from an old French fortress in Canada; these were in Salem along with more cannon that had been ‘won’ by Captain Richard Derby during the French and Indian War; Derby had acquired them while serving as a privateer against the French. Mason spearheaded the transformation of the old French fortress cannons into field cannons, enlisting the help of Robert Foster, another militia captain and a blacksmith whose Salem workshop had been working ‘round-the-clock reshaping the cannons’ ironwork and adding carriages to give them mobility. Mason’s wife and daughters did their part in sewing over five thousand flannel powder bags that could be used to fire the artillery. 

Pederick breathlessly warned Mason of the marching redcoats, and Mason rushed to the Salem meetinghouse where the citizens were gathered for Sunday afternoon worship. He burst through the doors, forcing the stunned minister to stop his sermon. The worshippers craned their necks in their pews as the red-faced Mason shouted, ‘The regulars are coming after the guns and are now near Kelloon’s Mills!’ The worship service came to a screeching halt as the congregants leapt out of their pews to do their duty. The church bells tolled and militia drums thundered the call to arms. Mason and a Quaker named David Boyce orchestrated the hiding of the cannon: some were hauled into the woods and buried under a carpet of leaves while others were loaded into wagons and wheeled into Danvers where they were hidden buried in a gravel pit. News of the redcoats’ approach rippled down the country roads, and militiamen began assembling as far north as Amesbury. Billy Gavett was just a boy on that Sunday morning, but he remembered how his father returned from church long before the appointed time. Little Billy followed his father into the kitchen; his father told his wife, ‘The regulars are come and are marching as fast as they can towards the Northfields bridge. I don’t know what will be the consequence, but something very serious, and I wish you keep the children home.’ As he finished speaking, Little Billy remembered hearing the tramping of feet on the road outside the house. He went to the front window and saw the column of redcoats marching past, their white piping pristine, their coats a brilliant red, their bayonets glistening in the afternoon sun. He could only stare jaw-dropped as hundreds of soldiers of the 64th Regiment filed past his house.

When Leslie’s redcoats reached a bridge spanning a tributary between Marblehead and the southern end of Salem, they found the patriots had beaten them to it and had ripped up the span’s planks. Leslie’s force halted while soldiers repaired the bridge, but they lost prized time in which the Salem rebels were able to hide the cannon. With the bridge repaired, the column continued across the tributary and into Salem proper. The column halted before the courthouse in the town’s square. Three loyalists came out to receive them, and they exchanged words with Leslie while patriot women and children glowered from home windows lining the square. The loyalists ratted on their neighbors, informing him that the patriots had hidden the cannon. Leslie was intent on rooting them out, so he marched his men onwards, out through the northern end of town and towards another arm of the sea named the North River. As they marched, citizens began trotting alongside them; there were men, women, and children from all walks of life, all of them taunting the redcoats. A drawbridge spanned the North River, and the patriots controlled it: just as the vanguard of Leslie’s column neared the bridge, the patriots raised its northern leaf, cutting them off from the far bank. Some patriots climbed atop the raised leaf, dangled their feet, and joined the taunts against the soldiers. One of them, Captain Richard Derby (the same who’d procured multiple cannon while warring against the French), jeered, ‘Find the cannon if you can! Take them if you can! They will never be surrendered!’ 

Townspeople crowded the far side of the North River, property of the town of Northfield, and Leslie threatened to fire on them if they didn’t lower the drawbridge; as these threats carried across the narrow but swift-running channel, wary redcoats eyed citizens encircling them on the southern end of the waterway; redcoats near the back of the column reported that militiamen could be seen in the trees behind them, lining the road back towards Salem, potentially cutting off their retreat. Leslie marched to the rear of the column and saw rebel militia gathering on the road behind them; he drew his sword and threatened to clear them with a volley of musketry. One of the militia captains, Captain Felt, strode forward and boldly warned the colonel that he’d better not fire, ‘for there is a multitude, every man of whom is ready to die in this strife.’ Felt later said that if Leslie had ordered his men to fire, he planned on tackling him into the channel, where both of them – laden down with arms and equipment – would drown; ‘I would willingly be drowned myself to be the death of one Englishmen,’ he boasted (but such boasts are easy in the company of friends and beer and a warm fireside hearth). 

Colonists on the redcoats’ side of the channel spied a pair of flat-bottomed scows called gungalows that had been stranded by the low tide; they rushed to dismantle them, since the soldiers might use them to cross the North River. Leslie, seeing what they were about, ordered a detachment of redcoats to intercept them and secure the boats. A distillery foreman named Joseph Whicher was the first on the scene; wielding a hatchet, he hacked at the boats’ bottoms. The redcoats closed in on him, ordering him to stop at once. Whicher stood tall, bared his chest, and dared them to stop him. One of the soldiers took him up on the offer and jabbed him in the chest, drawing blood. A contemporaneous account records him being ‘very proud of this wound [and] fond of exhibiting it.’ Whicher’s injury is why Salem likes to claim that she saw the first blood of the American Revolution. As Whicher gaped at the blood trickling down his bare chest, the crowd began shouting vitriol at the soldiers. One man shrieked, ‘Soldiers! Red-jackets! Lobster-coats! Cowards! Damnation to your government!’ Other townspeople tried to talk the hotheaded patriot down, for they feared provoking the redcoats beyond what was appropriate.

The Reverend Bernard, a former loyalist, was wearing his clerical attire as he approached Colonel Leslie. The British officer hissed, ‘I will get over this bridge before I return to Boston, even if I have to stay here until next autumn!’

‘Pray, Sir,’ the reverend begged, ‘that there will be no collision between the people and the troops.’

Leslie chewed this over and thumbed at a pair of nearby stores on his side of the river. ‘I’ll break into those buildings and make barracks of them until I can get over the river.’ He turned from the reverend and rounded on Captain Felt, snarling, ‘By God! I will not be defeated!’

Felt maintained his smugness. ‘You must acknowledge that you’ve already been baffled.’

‘This is the King’s Highway that passes over the bridge,’ Leslie retorted, ‘and I will not be prevented from crossing it.’

An aged colonist named James Barr joined the discussion: ‘It is not the King’s Highway. It’s 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 growled, tightening his grip on his sword.

‘Egad!’ Barr exclaimed. ‘I think it will be the best way for you to conclude that the king has nothing to do with it.’

As the crowds around the British column grew, Leslie knew that to force a crossing of the channel would be to invite bloodshed. The outbreak of violence would force him to beat a hasty retreat before his men were overwhelmed by the constantly-growing numbers of armed militia, and there’d be no way he could root out and obtain the rebel cannon, least of all transport it back to Boston. At the same time, he knew that to do an about-face and march back the way he’d come in the face of a mob of farmers, tavern-keepers, and storekeepers – not to mention their wives – would shame his reputation. He chewed his lip and proposed a compromise: if the patriots agreed to lower the bridge, he’d lead his soldiers across to the opposite bank, and once there, they’d reform and march back the way they’d come. This way he could save face and report to Gage that he didn’t dare start a war in Salem. Captain Felt mulled over the proposal and felt it workable, but he had a damned time convincing the drawbridge’s guardians to lower it. Reverend Bernard persuaded the patriots to allow the redcoats to pass given their word of turning right back around. The bridge’s leaf was wheeled into place, the redcoats marched across in parade fashion under the grueling stares of the armed militia, and then they did an about-face and headed back the way they came. As they marched back through the warrens of Salem, townspeople mocked them from the streets and from the windows. Sarah Tarrant opened a window of her home and shouted, ‘Go home and tell your master he has sent you on a fool’s errand and broken the peace of our Sabbath! What do you think? We were born in the woods to be frightened by owls?’ When one of the soldiers broke formation and aimed his musket into her window, she refused to budge. ‘Fire if you have courage! But I doubt it!’

Leslie and his redcoats returned to the boats near Marblehead and sailed back to Castle William empty-handed. The rebel cannon remained in rebel hands. Though the Salem Showdown – known to historians as ‘Leslie’s Retreat’ – was technically a draw, it was a strategic victory for the patriots; as the historian Page Smith notes, ‘The incident may have been a trivial one, but only because it did not result in the first open engagement between Americans and British troops. The moral was clear enough. British soldiers, marching out on a mission, had been frustrated in their purpose by a group of determined inhabitants in the little town of Northfield. They had, in effect, been forced to retreat under the cover of a patently face-saving formula. They had marched up with their band playing “Yankee Doodle”; they withdrew playing “The World Turned Upside Down.”’

Patriots vs. Tories

As tensions cranked up in Massachusetts, elsewhere they were simmering down; by February 1775, moderate Americans who had inched towards radicalism in the wake of last autumn’s Continental Congress were more inclined to slide back towards a rugged, loyalist-esque conservatism. This was especially the case in Pennsylvania and New York, where loyalist factions retained a significant hedge. In Pennsylvania Joseph Galloway testified to New Jersey’s Governor Franklin that ‘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… The Tories (as they are called) make it a point to visit the coffee house daily and maintain their ground, while the violent independents are less bold and insolent as their adherents are greatly admonished.’ Galloway stood before the Pennsylvania Assembly and condemned ‘the measures of the Congress in everything’ and declared that the actions of the delegates ‘all tended to incite America to sedition and terminate in independence.’ He argued for the ‘necessity [of] Parliamentary jurisdiction over the colonies in all cases whatsoever.’ Galloway’s censuring of the Congress was opposed by Pennsylvania’s chief incendiaries – such as John Dickinson, who remained proudly in the ‘radical’ fold – and it ultimately failed when put to a vote: only fourteen of the Assembly’s thirty-eight members took Galloway’s side. Nevertheless, the fourteen votes showcased a slow shift in sentiment as moderates began tiptoeing towards the conservative aisle. 

No doubt Galloway savored this comeback following his disastrous motions in the Congress, but though he might consider these advances across stolen ground to be the work of good politics from his hand, the reality was that they were the product of forces beyond his control. In the first instance, the Association Committees established by the Congress were sliding towards tyrannical and arbitrary rule. Moderates couldn’t veil their disgust at wonton tarring and feathering and decried how rumors of loyalist sympathies were treated as fact without evidence – it was often the case that the accused were guilty until proven innocent, and sometimes there wasn’t even an opportunity for one’s innocence before the tar buckets and goose feathers came out. Corruption within Associations was evident as leading members used their newfound power to seek vengeance against rivals, settling old scores in the name of patriotic virtue. That the Association became ‘judge, jury, and executioner’ didn’t sit well with most people. 

In the second instance, the Congress had ended with a bang that seemed to be fizzling out: it’d been months since the Congress came to a close, and nothing much had come of it. The radical spirit that engulfed the colonies in late autumn last year could only sputter without the fuel necessary to keep it going. Page Smith writes, ‘The more time that passed without an outbreak of open warfare, the more inclined the faint-hearted, the irresolute, and the uncertain were to recant the heresies that their hotheaded neighbors had hurried them into. The Tories, observing this wavering, plucked up their spirits and grew bolder in denouncing that combination of treason and tyranny that, as it seemed to them, the patriots were trying to foist upon all Americans. If only armed hostilities could be prevented or delayed, the patriot faction must, sooner or later, molder away, its self-assumed authority eroded, its ranks split by quarrels and jealousies.’

Another factor contributing to the shift of many moderates to the more conservative side was the fact that Great Britain remained intractable and was beefing up its ‘security forces’ in the colonies; it became apparent that Parliament was determined to resolve the colonial crisis by bloodshed, putting the rebels to the bayonet and torching their homes and property. Most moderates, conscious of the threats to their family and property, dreaded the waste a war could lay to their livelihoods and their children’s futures. In Pennsylvania particularly, the large pacifist Quaker population tended towards conservatism: to take up arms against the mother country would be nothing short of sin. 

Pennsylvania’s waning patriotism was also matched in parts of North Carolina, where Tories were growing more numerous. The royal Governor Josiah Martin wrote Gage, ‘The people in some parts [of the colony] begin to open their eyes and see through the artifice and delusions by which they have been misled and they discover good dispositions to renounce the powers and authority of the [Association] Committees that have been appointed by the recommendation of Congress… Many of the inhabitants in several counties of the Province have already by their addresses to me disclaimed all obedience to these illegal tribunals.’ The same held true for New York: both New York and Pennsylvania housed large segments of non-English citizens who’d come from the fractured nations of Europe, and since many of these immigrants had fled war in their old countries, they weren’t keen on one breaking out in their new one. Foreign immigrants also lacked the English concern for constitutional liberties: they were used to more capricious and despotic forms of government, and when all was said and done, their current state-of-affairs in the colonies was leaps and bounds better than that which they’d endured across the Atlantic. If something isn’t broken, they figured, why fix it? New York’s conservative faction overwhelmed the radicals in refusing to adopt the Association’s policies, and they also refused to elect delegates for a second Congress planned in May. The British ministry, sensing the shifting affections especially in the Middle Colonies, which included Pennsylvania and New York, sought to win those colonies’ favor. North’s ministry curried favor with New Yorkers, for example, by exempting them from commercial restrictions placed upon crabbier colonies and by affirming its ownership of territory that belonged to the territory of Vermont.

Historians have long debated how many Americans became patriots, how many became Tories, and how many didn’t have a foot in either camp; John Adams is often quoted as saying that a ‘full one third were averse to the Revolution… An opposite third conceived a hatred of the English… The middle third were rather lukewarm.’ The conclusion drawn is that a third of the colonists supported the Revolution, a third stood staunch against it, and another third shrugged their shoulders and went about their lives. While Adams certainly said this, he didn’t say it about the American Revolution but about the French Revolution. His full statement, in a letter to James Lloyd in January 1815, goes like this:

If I were called to calculate the divisions among the people of America, as Mr. [Edmund] Burke did those of the people of England, I should say that full one third were averse to the revolution. These, retaining that overweening fondness, in which they had been educated, for the English, could not cordially like the French; indeed, they most heartily detested them. An opposite third conceived a hatred of the English, and gave themselves up to an enthusiastic gratitude to France. The middle third, composed principally of the yeomanry, the soundest part of the nation, and always averse to war, were rather lukewarm both to England and France; and sometimes stragglers from them, and sometimes the whole body, united with the first or the last third, according to circumstances.

Adams’ ‘partitioning’ of the American public’s sentiments towards the French Revolution tell us nothing about society’s political makeup thirty years earlier. The unfortunate fact is that no one knows just how many Americans became patriots nor how many stood behind Parliament. This hasn’t stopped historians from trying to deduce the numbers, often by complicated algorithms rife with assumptions; in this manner, the historian Paul Smith calculated that around twenty percent of Americans could be identified as loyalists – but at the same time, how is one to define the term ‘loyalist’? A simplistic definition is that a loyalist was anyone who continued in allegiance to King George III, but this excludes a number of people who, despite their misgivings about their monarch, supported Tories for self-serving reasons. Many colonists labeled ‘loyalists’ or ‘Tories’ claimed neutrality in the colonial crisis, but they were labeled as pro-Parliament simply because they refused to support the Revolution. Many patriots and loyalists chose their side outside the bounds of philosophical or idealistic convictions; often it boiled down to what was most expedient or beneficial at the moment. However, this doesn’t mean that there weren’t general trends that, in broad, sweeping strokes, could differentiate the rival camps. In a general sense, Tories tended towards conservatism, a lot of them belonged to Anglican churches managed by bishops with loose ties to the Church of England, and many were of the wealthier class or enjoyed crown favor. Patriots tended to be more liberal, and because they promoted an overhaul of society, they tended to be supported by the less-well-off who would benefit from a change in the status quo. A good number of the leading patriots were Presbyterians whose churches were run by local elders rather than by bishops; Presbyterian congregations had far more autonomy than their Anglican counterparts.

While some colonists remained loyal to the British government due to religious or ideological convictions, historians speculate that most loyalists remained loyal out of survival or self-interest. Merchants who traded within the British Empire feared being cut off from British trade and thus being financially strangled; some people sided with the king simply because their rivals sided with the patriots; and minority groups – such as French-speaking Huguenots and Scottish immigrants – lost no love for the king but feared the intolerance of the patriots. Historian William Nelson explains, ‘Taking all the groups and factions, sects, classes, and inhabitants of regions that seem to have been Tory, they have but one thing in common: they represented conscious minorities, people who felt weak and threatened… Almost all the Loyalists were, in one way or another, more afraid of America than they were of Britain. Almost all of them had interests that they felt needed protection from an American majority. Being fairly certain that they would be in a permanent minority (as Quakers or oligarchs or frontiersmen or Dutchmen) they could not find much comfort in a theory of government [based] on the ‘common good’ if the common good was to be defined by a numerical majority.’ Ray Raphael sums it up well: ‘Whether tenant farmers seeking their own land or cultural minorities fearful of persecution, many groups of Americans, upon surveying the political landscape of the Revolution, sided with the British for reasons that had little or nothing to do with political philosophy.’ Historian Ronald Hoffman, writing about the political makeup of Maryland during the American Revolution, notes, ‘People in the lower orders, possibly the majority in some Eastern Shore communities, having lived with the economic and psychological disadvantages of being a subordinate class, now lashed out in anger at those figures dominating their immediate lives.’ Just as we saw with the Carolina Regulators who’d been run over the coals by the local governments, some colonists stood with the king simply because their traditional oppressors – namely, the colonial aristocratic governments – had taken up arms against him. Neither the Regulators nor their mirrored cousins in other colonies stood behind the king because they were fond of him; rather, they stood behind him because he stood against the aristocrats who’d stomped them into the mud just years before.  

Many Americans tried to stay out of the crisis altogether. Religious pacifists such as the Quakers and Mennonites were often considered loyalists simply because they refused to support or take up arms with the rebels. As one contemporary remembered, ‘The mad rabble said: “If we must march to the field of battle, he who will not take up arms must first be treated as an enemy.”’ As the Revolution got underway and the colonies lurched onto a wartime footing, pacifists who were exempt from wartime services were often required to find substitutes for the draft. Those who refused to provide substitutes were fined, and if they refused to pay the fine, they were often jailed. Religious dissidents were forced to sign oaths of allegiance to the burgeoning American government, and if they refused to do so, they suffered persecution. Ray Raphael writes, “In 1774 the colonial rebels, in defense of liberty and property, had refused to submit to the arbitrary authority of the British Parliament. Only three years later the new state governments harassed, intimidated, and imprisoned people who were highly unlikely to stage the kind of revolt which they themselves had undertaken. It did not take long for the oppressed to become the oppressors. The intrusions upon the civil liberties of religious pacifists in the American Revolution revealed an ironic twist: the rebels who professed to carry the torch of freedom did their best to extinguish it, while those they accused of demonstrating a “destructive tendency” to subvert “freedom and independence” were the ones who kept that torch ablaze.’

When armed revolution swept up and down the colonies, Tories ceased being political detractors and became outright enemies of the patriot cause who were subject to harassment from roving patriot bands and the Association Committees. Vigilant patriots excelled at persecuting loyalists, and for this reason they were decried as ‘more savage and cruel than heathens or any other creatures.’ One Tory snarled that he ‘wanted to see the blood streaming from the hearts of the [patriot] leaders.’ For this reason many, such as John Adams’ late friend Jonathan Sewall, fled to England; by the end of the War of Independence, more than seven thousand loyalists sought safer and more secure lives in the mother country. The famed portrait painter John Singleton Copley moved to London where he became a member of the Loyalist Club. Many loyalists who couldn’t afford to migrate to England sought sanctuary with Gage’s redcoats in Boston or in New York, and many crossed into Canada and settled among the French Canadians who, because of the Quebec Act, were favorable towards England and hostile towards the intolerant Protestant rebels. Other Tories, such as Gideon White Jr., enlisted as redcoats in the British ranks or joined Loyalist Regiments operating alongside the regulars.

The Marshfield Adventures

Massachusetts exemplified the divisions between Patriots and Tories. Loyalists weren’t as outspoken in Massachusetts as in other colonies, but Captain Evelyn believed that there was ‘a very large party in our favor’ and other ‘thousands’ supporting Great Britain who wouldn’t ‘openly declare themselves [Tories] from an apprehension that Government may leave them in the lurch.’ Patriots mocked, insulted, and threatened known loyalists, and while there was no widespread looting or burning like that which had been seen during the Stamp Act Crisis, property continued to be vandalized: loyalists’ livestock were often driven off or stolen, their farm buildings hewn down, fences torn apart, and windows smashed. The patriots knew better than to physically assault or murder loyalists, but that didn’t stop them from threatening it. In March 1775 a loyalist recounted how three minutemen hammered on his door and ordered him to surrender himself so he could be taken to jail. He ordered them to leave him and his family alone, but they kept knocking and demanding his surrender. He recounted what happened next: ‘I then took down my gun from where it hung, and… all three sprang upon me, wrenched my gun out of my hand, when my sick wife and all my children stood by, screeching, screaming and crying, my wife begging, as if it was for her life. I then ran into my shop, and took my sword, [and] swore that if they did not leave the house I would run them through… I then told my little son to fetch me my horse and put on the saddle, which he did; I then, with my everyday clothes, went out of my house and mounted my horse, [and] I rode out fast.’ His tale was a shared experience for many loyalists, many of whom – according to Captain Evelyn – were ‘men of the best property in the country.’

Many of those propertied men hailed from the Massachusetts town of Marshfield, where in early 1775 two hundred of the town’s citizens sent an entreaty to Gage in Boston, recounting how they’d been ‘insulted and intimidated by the licentious spirit that unhappily has been prevalent among the lower ranks of people in the Massachusetts Government.’ They requested he send troops ‘to assist in preserving the peace, and to check the insupportable insolence of the disaffected and turbulent.’ Gage received similar appeals from six other loyalist-dominated towns facing patriot harassment. When Plymouth patriots threatened to abscond on Marshfield and force the loyalists from their homes, the loyalists sent a hurried messenger to Gage with an urgent plea for help. This time Gage couldn’t write them off: he ordered three officers and a hundred of the Queen’s Guards to garrison Marshfield. The soldiers duly packed three hundred ‘stands of arms’ and boarded two transports bound for the town, and upon arrival they set up camp on the estate of the loyalist Nathaniel Ray Thomas. Captain Balfour, in charge of the men, and his two subordinate officers were quartered in Thomas’ mansion. The grateful Thomas even commissioned a wine cellar built for Balfour’s use. While garrisoning Marshfield, the officers regularly dined with the high-ranking Tory Winslow family. During one dinner, Senior Winslow told Balfour he should take some of his Guards to Plymouth to capture the rebels who thrived there. Balfour asked another guest, John Watson, if the rebels would fight back. ‘Yes,’ Watson replied, ‘like devils.’ Balfour politely turned down Winslow’s suggestion. 

It was in Massachusetts that some of the first ‘Tory Militias’ came together to counteract patriot militias. The first two leaders of these loyalist militias were Thomas Gilbert of Freetown and Timothy Ruggles. Gilbert took command of armed Tories in the southeastern part of the colony, and with Gage’s assent he stored stands of arms in his home. He boasted that he ‘collected and armed about 300 Loyalists, trained and exercised them.’ His was the first loyalist military corps of the colonies. Timothy Ruggles had been the President of the 1765 Stamp Act Congress and was a hardcore Tory; a wealthy man, he owned five farms, thirty prize-winning horses, and a deer park for hunting. He formed the Loyal American Association, whose members vowed with their ‘lives and fortunes’ to ‘stand by and assist each other in the defense of life, liberty and property, whenever the same shall be attacked or endangered by any bodies of men, riotously assembled upon any pretence, or under any authority not warranted by the laws of the land.’ Within a mere three weeks, one hundred fifty Marshfield loyalists signed up for the Loyal American Association. Gilbert and Ruggles’ militias were but the first loyalist militias to sprout across the colonies; when the time for fighting came, the Revolution would in many ways be a ‘civil war’ with numerous battles and skirmishes fought between patriot and loyalist militias with nary a redcoat in sight. The formation of loyalist militias was but another chess move bringing the colonial crisis towards a checkmate.

Gage's Green Light

Across the great pond in England, George III expressed optimism about the state-of-affairs between Parliament and the rebellious colonies: ‘The more I resolve in my mind the line adopted in the American affairs, the more I am convinced of the rectitude, the candor, and becoming firmness, and if properly attended to, [it] must be crowned with success.’ His optimism was shared by most Parliamentarians, but he had his detractors. On 22 March Edmund Burke gave a long-winded, three-hour speech before the House of Commons; his speech, titled ‘On Conciliation,’ is viewed by many historians as his magnum opus, despite the fact that it swayed no one. A few days after his speech, another Parliamentarian named David Hartley took the floor in the Commons. ‘We hear of nothing now but the protection which we have given to [the colonists]; of the immense expense incurred on their account. We are told that they have done nothing for themselves; that they pay no taxes; in short, everything is asserted about America to serve the present turn without the least regard for truth.’ He laid out a host of contributions the colonists had made for the Empire: they had ‘turned the success of [the French and Indian War] at both ends of the line,’ fighting side-by-side with the redcoats ‘in Nova Scotia and in the Floridas, at Havana and Martinique. During the preceding war, they were at the siege of Carthagena, but what was Carthagena to them?’ They had triumphed over Louisbourg only to weep as it was handed back to the French on a silver platter. ‘Whenever Great Britain has declared war they have taken their part. They were engaged in King William’s Wars, and Queen Anne’s, even in their infancy… They have been engaged in more than one expedition to Canada, ever foremost to partake of honor and danger with the mother country.’ Having outlined American contributions to the British Empire, he turned the tables: ‘Well, sir, what have we done for them? Have we conquered the country for them from the Indians? Have we cleared it? Have we made it habitable? What have we done for them? I believe precisely nothing at all… What towns have we built for them? What [wilderness] have we cleared?’ Despite the balance of scales tilting in the Americans’ favor insofar as contributions, Parliament continued to accuse the colonists of ingratitude ‘without the least regard for truth.’ He then said that if the colonists couldn’t see British policy for what it truly was, they were ‘insane’ – but Britons were ‘more insane and blind’ if they failed to comprehend what ‘the sovereignty, property and possessions of North America, with every military and despotic power, vested solely in the King’s hands, augured for their own liberties.’

Hartley had a point: England’s populace was shifting in favor towards the colonists. This goodwill found fresh impetus in the shocking barbarity of the Coercive Acts: most run-of-the-mill Englishmen saw in the colonial crisis their own plight under heavy-handed taxation and Parliamentary oppression. The ‘American Cause’ in defense of God-given liberties was a cause that burned in their hearts, as well. The colonists’ fight was their fight; in the patriots they could vicariously stand against Parliament. This shifting stance is evident in the fact that an underground Committee of Correspondence formed in London, and it pasted handbills around the city lambasting ‘the present arbitrary ministry and their attempt to subvert the Constitution.’ They prophesied that the ‘ruinous consequences’ of British policy would be the diet not only of the Americans but also of the homegrown English. George III was taken aback when he received an ‘Address, Remonstrance and Petition’ from London’s lord mayor, alderman, and livery – along with the sheriffs – in which they made clear their ‘Abhorrence’ of the measures leveled against the Americans. They wrote that these measures ‘originate in the secret advice of men who are enemies equal to your Majesty’s Title and the Liberties of your People; that your Majesty’s Ministers carry them into execution by the same fatal Corruption which has enabled them to wound the Peace and violate the Constitution of the Country.’ The Address charged the king’s ministers with ‘poisoning the fountain of public security’ and twisting Parliament – formerly the ‘bastion of peoples’ liberties’ – into a fortress of arbitrary power intent on installing despotic rule ‘over all America.’ The fact that George was shocked by the Address only goes to show how out-of-touch he was with the people under his wing. 

Hartley directed his next words to Lord North: ‘The eyes of all this country and America, too, are turned toward the Noble Lord, as the ostensible and responsible Minister, to receive his final determination as to the measures which are to decide the safety or ruin of this Empire. The ways of peace are still before him.’ North wasn’t swayed: he replied that retreating from the crisis by seeking conciliation with the American rebels went against British ‘dignity and superiority.’ It was clear now more than ever that Parliament had chosen its course: it couldn’t back down, couldn’t retreat, and would never ship the redcoats out of Boston or repeal the Coercive Acts. The colonists and Parliament were at an impasse that could only be resolved by feats of arms. Benjamin Franklin read the writing on the wall: there was nothing more he could do but support his brethren. At the end of March, he packed his bags and boarded a ship for America. The late historian John Fiske writes, ‘Franklin’s return [to America] was not, in form, like that customary withdrawal of an ambassador which heralds and proclaims a state of war. But practically it was the snapping of the last diplomatic link between the colonies and the mother-country.’

In Virginia the disbanded Assembly met at Saint John’s Church in Richmond rather than Williamsburg so as to escape the reach of Lord Dunmore. Patrick Henry, ever the fiery orator, took the floor and proposed the creation of an independent militia. The moderates denounced him forpromoting treason, to which he responded with an ardent plea for action: ‘Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gales that sweep from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms. Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that the gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death.’ The moderates were overruled: the Assembly voted that each Virginia county raise a company of infantry and a troop of horse.

Far to the north in Boston, the citizens and redcoats held their breath as the fifth anniversary of the Boston Massacre approached. Gage feared a confrontation, so he ordered most of his troops to stand by on active duty and commanded the officers to temporarily abandon their quarters in private homes to be with their men. Several officers had declared that anyone who dared give a speech memorializing the Boston Massacre would surely lose their life, so tensions were cranked up: armed militia and armed officers rubbed shoulders, and many trembled to see what might transpire. When Joseph Warren got word of the officers’ threats, he proudly claimed the honor of being the keynote speaker. He had no wife at home to dissuade him from such brash actions, for his wife had died two years earlier, leaving him a widower with four children. He was the most famous bachelor in Boston, and sa he approached the Old South Church, the crowd was so vast that he couldn’t get in; he moved to the back of the church and used a ladder to scale up the wall and through a window located behind the pulpit. Around forty British officers were present in the church, several of them sitting upon the pulpit steps as if they were Warren’s most attentive pupils. Warren, dressed in a ‘Ciceronian toga,’ paid the officers no mind: he wouldn’t be intimidated. He gave a rousing speech on ‘the baleful influence of standing armies in times of peace,’ all throughout which the British officers doused him with cinematic groans and hisses; according to one Tory present, the officers ‘frequently interrupted [him] by laughing at the most ludicrous parts, and coughing and hemming at the most seditious, to the great discomfort of the devoted citizens.’ When Warren’s speech concluded, Samuel Adams proposed that a speaker be chosen for next year. The British officers leapt to their feet, cupped their hands around their mouths, and began yelling, ‘Fie! Shame! Fie! Shame!’ As the words carried through the dense throngs of the church, many far from the front thought a fire alarm was being shouted. The church windows were thrown open, and panicked colonists leapt out of the high windows to escape a fiery death – much to the gut-buckling laughter of the prankster officers. Such ‘pranks’ continued: when on 8 March the Sons of Liberty commissioned a day of prayer and fasting for Boston’s lost liberties, Gage responded to the call by issuing a ‘Proclamation Against Hypocrisy;’ when the somber day arrived, redcoats of the King’s Own Regiment pitched two marquee tents under the windows of a church and played their fifes and drums throughout the service. A few days later John Hancock’s residence on Beacon Hill was targeted by a group of officers who smashed his windows and cut up his fence with their swords.

Meanwhile, Gage hoped to bring Samuel Adams to the imperial side. It was common knowledge that Adams’ finances had taken a hit when the Massachusetts Assembly was disbanded, and he was far behind on his bills and struggling to provide his family’s needs. Gage hoped Adams’ innate desire for self-preservation and the good of his family might tempt him to take a bribe to cease and desist his rebellious activities. He sent Colonel Fenton to Adams’ home with a message. Upon being let into the parlor, Fenton politely said that ‘an adjustment of the existing disputes was very desirable; that he was authorized by Governor Gage to assure him that he had been empowered to confer upon him such benefits as would be satisfactory, upon the condition that he would engage to cease in his opposition to the measures of government, and that it was the advice of Governor Gage to him not to incur the further displeasure of his Majesty; that his conduct had been such as made him liable to the penalties of an act of Henry VIII, by which persons could be sent to England for trial, and, by changing his course, he would not only receive great personal advantages, but would thereby make his peace with the king.’ Adams listened with a quirked eyebrow and a sly smile, but when Fenton finished speaking, Adams ‘glowed with indignation,’ replying, ‘Sir, I trust I have long since made my peace with the King of kings. No personal consideration shall induce me to abandon the righteous cause of my country. Tell Governor Gage it is the advice of Samuel Adams to him to no longer to insult the feelings of an exasperated people.’

Those very feelings were soon exacerbated not by Gage but by news of more Parliamentary high-handedness from across the Atlantic: Parliament ruled that all New England colonies were now forbidden from trading anywhere save England or the British West Indies, and furthermore they were banned from fishing in the North Atlantic. The Massachusetts Provincial Congress had relocated to Concord towards the end of March to avoid the ‘sneaking spies’ of the redcoats (though unbeknownst to them, their deliberations were duly reported to Gage by the secret spy Dr. Benjamin Church). They declared that their ‘implacable enemies are unremitting in their endeavors, by fraud and artifice, as well as by open force, to subjugate the people.’ They insisted that citizens ‘be ready to oppose with firmness and resolution, at the utmost hazard, every attempt for that purpose.’ The Provincial Congress was debating what to do about the new trade restrictions when they received news from Warren’s dispatch rider that a brigade of redcoats led by Lord Percy were on a march in the countryside. Their line of march would take them through Watertown and Cambridge. The incensed Congress resolved that whenever British troops ‘to the number of five hundred shall march out of Boston [it] ought to be deemed a design to carry into execution by force the late Acts of Parliament [and] therefore the military forces of this province ought to be assembled and an Army of Observation immediately formed, to act solely on the defensive so long as it can be justified on the Principles of Reason and Self-Preservation and no longer.’ They then appointed five generals to command the Massachusetts militia: Jedediah Preble, Artemas Ward, Seth Pomeroy, John Thomas, and William Heath. Most of these had military experience in the French and Indian War, and some of the ‘old timers’ had even fought for Louisbourg back in 1745.

While the Provincial Congress was setting the stage for a direct confrontation with Gage’s regulars, Dr. Church reported to the British commander that the rebels had built up a heavy military depot in the town of Concord. Gage dispatched spies to determine if this was accurate, and their appearance – for they were not very good spies - alerted the patriots to the fact that their depot was no longer secret. They accurately believed Concord would be on Gage’s list of proposed targets for a raid. On 14 April Gage finally received what he’d been waiting for: a dispatch of new orders from Lord Dartmouth. The letter, stamped ‘Secret,’ read:

Your dispatches show a determination in the people to commit themselves at all events in open rebellion. The King’s dignity, and the honor and safety of the Empire, require that, in such a situation, force should be repelled by force… The first and essential step to be taken towards reestablishing Government, would be to arrest and imprison the principal actors and abettors in the Provincial Congress (whose proceedings appear in every light to be acts of treason and rebellion)… [Act immediately, because] the people, unprepared to encounter with a regular force, cannot be very formidable; and though such a proceeding should be, according to your own idea of it, a signal for hostilities; yet, for the reasons I have already given, it will surely be better that the conflict should be brought on, upon such ground, than in a riper state of rebellion.

Gage had gotten the Green Light to make an armed move against the patriots.

What better place to begin squashing the rebellion than with the rebel depot at Concord?

He called his top officers together, and they hammered out a plan.

The war against the rebels would begin on the night of 18 April 1775.

The time had come for the rebels to experience the long-awaited ‘scourge of hot iron.’