By then a growing band of Rebel militiamen was assembling near Leslie’s force. On the other side of the water stood armed men. Some climbed up on the leaf of the bridge and, dangling their feet, jeered at the soldiers. Among the men on the bridge was Capt. Richard Derby.
As a privateer during the French and Indian War, he had taken from a French ship many of the cannons now in Salem. “Find the cannon if you can,” Derby shouted. “Take them if you can. They will never be surrendered.”25
Militiamen were stationing themselves along the road to Marble-head, Leslie’s potential line of retreat. Militiamen from Marblehead, Danvers, and other nearby towns began heading for Salem. Many of these hard-eyed men were veterans of the French and Indian War and cod fishermen who had earned their strength and tenacity by defying the North Atlantic. Redcoats did not faze them.
Leslie, his sword drawn, threatened to clear the road with a volley of musketry. “You had better not fire,” a militia captain told him, “for there is a multitude, every man of whom is ready to die in this strife.” (Another version has the captain say, “Fire and be damned! You’ve no right to fire without further orders. If you fire, you’ll all be dead men!”)
Near the bridge Leslie noticed three flat-bottomed scows called gungalows, grounded by low tide. He ordered some soldiers to commandeer them for passage. Leslie’s men headed toward the gungalows, bayonet-tipped muskets at the ready. Several Salem men got there first, jumped into the scows, and smashed their bottoms with axes. A man bared his chest to the winter chill and defied the Redcoats to stab him. One did, pricking the Salem man’s chest. “He was very proud of this wound in after life and was fond of exhibiting it,” says an account, which also gives Salem the claim that this was “the first blood of the American Revolution.”
The Reverend Thomas Barnard, a former Loyalist and an Addresser who had later publicly begged forgiveness, stepped forward as a mediator. Facing Leslie, Barnard, in his deep, resonant voice, pleaded restraint. Accounts vary, but eventually the consecrated version was this: “You cannot commit this violation against innocent men, here, on this holy day without sinning against God and humanity! The blood of every murdered man will cry from the ground for vengeance upon yourself, and the nation which you represent! Let me entreat you to return!”26
Barnard probably came up with the idea that defused the face-off: The bridge leaf would be lowered so that Leslie and his men could cross the bridge in a pantomime of searching for the cannons. He would then march his men to a point about thirty rods (495 feet) beyond the bridge, turn, and march them back to their ship in Marble-head.
Leslie agreed. The bridge leaf was lowered. Leslie marched his men across the bridge and about five hundred feet beyond, where Robert Foster’s blacksmith shop—and a line of silent militiamen—stood. Leslie ordered his men to halt, face about, and march back across the bridge. There were shouts and an occasional catcall from opened windows as the Redcoats departed from Salem. They marched on to Marblehead, boarded their transport, and returned to Boston.
The Salem episode, which gleeful Patriots quickly dubbed “Leslie’s Retreat,” emboldened the Rebel cause and stunned the Loyalists, especially those who were seeking refuge in Boston. Gage, undaunted, continued his disarm-the-Rebels strategy. On February 22 he had ordered two officers, Capt. John Brown and Ens. Henry De Berniere, to disguise themselves as civilians and travel from Boston to Worcester, which, like Salem, had become a Patriot hive.
Gage seemed to be contemplating an attack on Worcester. Writing in August 1774 to Lord Dartmouth, Gage said the Rebels in Worcester “openly threaten resistance by arms, have been purchasing arms … and threaten to attack any troops who dare to oppose them… . I apprehend I shall soon be obliged to march a body of troops into that township.”27
Gage ordered Brown and De Berniere, an accomplished artist, to produce “a sketch of the country as you pass.” He wanted to know “distances from town to town” and entrances in and out of them. “The rivers also to be sketched out, remarking their breadth and depth and the nature of their banks on both sides, the fords, if any, and the nature of their bottoms.” Also, “You will remark the heights you meet with, whether the ascents are difficult or easy; as alsothe woods and mountains, with the height and nature of the latter, whether to be got round or easily past over… . whether the country admits of making roads for troops on the right or left of the main road, or on the sides,” and how much food and forage were available.28 Brown and De Berniere, donning plain brown suits and tying “reddish handkerchiefs round our necks,” thought they could pass as “country men” on their spy mission. But British officers were served by military valets called batmen, and the would-be spies brought one along. When they stopped for a meal at a tavern, they sent their batman to the kitchen to dine with the tavern servants. The officers’ dinner “was brought in by a black woman, at first she was very civil, but afterwards began to eye us very attentively; she then went out and a little after returned, when we observed to her that it was a very fine country, upon which she answered so it is, and we have got brave fellows to defend it.”29
The batman rushed out to the dining room, and suggested that they pay their bill and leave right away. The waitress, he said, had recognized Brown as a British officer from Boston. “This disconcerted us a good deal,” De Berniere later wrote, “and … we resolved not to sleep there that night.”
The two spies did better at their next stop, the Golden Ball Tavern on the Old Post Road in Weston, sixteen miles west of Boston. The owner, Isaac Jones, was such a stalwart Loyalist that he had named a son William Pitt Jones, after the British statesman who was a friend of the colonies but not of armed conflict. Not quite a year before, after accusing Jones of being a Tory, Patriots had raided the tavern and stolen liquor, along with two expensive delicacies, raisins and lemons. Only a month before, the Patriots’ anger had cooled and Jones was allowed to keep his tavern open. Jones would later switch allegiance still again and work hauling supplies for the Continental Army.30
Jones recommended a Tory inn in Worcester. “The landlord was very attentive to us,” De Berniere wrote, “and on our asking what he could give us for breakfast, he told us Tea or any thing else we chose—that was an open confession what he was.” The spies knew they had been watched by Patriot counterspies through most of theirjourney. In case they were stopped and searched, they sent their batman on ahead to Boston with their maps and sketches. But, with the aid of the Tory underground—and a snowstorm that covered their tracks—they got back to Boston without incident.31
The help that the officers received from Tories suggested that a British military force dispatched to Worcester might get partisan aid. But the detailed report also showed rivers, marshes, and potential ambush sites along the spies’ trek. This convinced Gage that a forty-four-mile march to Worcester could become a disaster.
Gage had an alternative. His leading spy, Dr. Church, had provided extensive intelligence about a Rebel arsenal much closer to Boston: in the town of Concord.32 On March 20 Gage sent Brown and De Berniere there, not only to study the terrain and roads but also to confirm the existence of arms caches that Church had reported. He most likely did not know about munitions stored in Congregational meetinghouses, among the most secret of Patriot hoards. Loyalists claimed that there were so many Congregational clergymen in Patriot ranks that they formed a “black regiment.”33
On this second mission the two spies were well supplied with knowledge about Rebel arms—and the names of Tory partisans. Of Concord’s 250 voters in 1774, town fathers estimated that 52 were Tories. When Patriots confronted them and demanded that they recant and apologize, the number dwindled to 44. The following year thirteen persons from the town’s most prominent families were added to the list of Tories.34
Untrained in espionage, Brown and De Berniere exposed one of their contacts when, within hearing of Concord Patriots, they asked for directions to the home of Daniel Bliss, a well-known Royalist. Rebels tracked down
the woman who directed the spies and threatened her with tarring and feathering.35
Bliss’s family, like so many others, was split. His father-in-law had been a British Army officer, as had a brother-in-law. Bliss’s two brothers were Patriots, and his sister was married to the Reverend William Emerson, pastor of the First Parish in Concord, who preached the Patriot cause and was chaplain to the Rebel-controlled militia.
The previous December, Bliss had spoken about the Boston Port Bill at a meeting in the Concord meetinghouse, criticizing the Patriots for “flouting your King.” The colonies, he said, “are England’s dependent children” and he warned that “England is a mighty nation” and “Rebellion will lead inevitably to crushing defeat.” Bliss, a Harvard graduate and a lawyer who had given counsel to Royal Governor Hutchinson, was not accustomed to having his opinions questioned. But one man at the meeting did speak up: thirty-nine-year-old Joseph Hosmer, an avowed Patriot and a lieutenant in the militia. Hosmer repudiated Bliss’s every word with an eloquence that astonished and annoyed Bliss. When another Loyalist asked Bliss who this upstart was, Bliss is said to have labeled Hosmer “the most dangerous man in Concord.”36
Brown and De Berniere dined with Bliss at his home, which happened to be near a storehouse containing arms. Believing they were under surveillance, the officers slipped out of Concord late at night and, taking a roundabout route, returned to Boston, escorted by Bliss. He was never again seen in Concord,37 and his family quietly moved to join him in Boston. Later, they went to Canada, where Bliss was commissioned as a British Army colonel and made assistant commissary general.38
The spies’ visit to Concord convinced Patriots that their town would be the target of a Gage raid. As for Gage, his options were quickly narrowing. For some time his immediate superior, Lord Dartmouth, had been urging action against the Rebels. Gage had responded with dire predictions that if Britain chose armed force the result would be the “horrors of civil war.”
But in March Gage wrote a “private letter” to Viscount Barrington, the secretary of war, saying, “It’s beyond my capacity to judge what ought to be done, but it appears to me that you are now making your final efforts respecting America; if you yield, I concede that you have not a spark of authority remaining over this country.” However, Gage went on, if Britain took the path to war, “it should be done with as little delay as possible, and as powerfully as you are able, for it’s easier to crush evils in their infancy than when grown to maturity.”39
What amounted to an order to go to war came from Dartmouth in the form of a letter he wrote on January 27. He allowed the letter to linger in London, while word of it circulated in Parliament and among ministerial officials and advisers. It finally left England on February 22, on board HMS Falcon. Two days later, a duplicate copy was given to Capt. Oliver De Lancey of the 17th Light Dragoons, who was sailing on HSM Nautilus. Local storms delayed the sailing of both ships. The Falcon did not arrive in Boston until April 12; the Nautilus, two days later.40
In the letter marked “Secret,” Dartmouth said, “Your Dispatches … shew a Determination in the People to commit themselves at all Events in open Rebellion. The King’s Dignity, & the Honor and Safety of the Empire, require, that, in such a Situation, Force should be repelled by Force.” A royal government must replace the illegal Continental Congress, Dartmouth said, and “the first & essential step to be taken towards re-establishing Government, would be to arrest and imprison the principal actors & abettors in the Provincial Congress (whose proceedings appear in every light to be acts of treason & rebellion).”41
Dartmouth wanted Gage to launch an offensive immediately rather than wait for promised reinforcements 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.”
“I understand,” Dartmouth added, “a Proposal has been made by Mr Ruggles for raising a Corps of Infantry from among the friends of Government in New England. Such a Proposal certainly ought to be encouraged, and it is the King’s Pleasure that you should carry it into effect upon such Plan as you shall judge most expedient.”42
Dartmouth apparently heard about the Ruggles plan from Israel Mauduit, a British political writer and brother of the Massachusetts agent, or lobbyist, in London. In October 1774 Ruggles had written Mauduit about mobilizing “friends of government.” Dartmouth’s papers show that in February 1775, after writing the Gage letter, he wasmindful that Ruggles believed he could raise a Loyalist force from “the majority in New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, and the Southern Colonies.” This is one of the earliest references to the belief, held by many Loyalists, that they were strong beyond the rebellious epicenter of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.43
Capt. Oliver De Lancey was an incarnation of that belief. The fact that Dartmouth entrusted such an important letter to a twenty-one-year-old cavalry officer showed the depth of the connection between royal officialdom and the powerful De Lancey family, the staunchest of New York’s Loyalists. Oliver was an American, but he had a partially British biography. Born in New York City in 1752, he was educated in England, where he was commissioned an officer in the British Army.
Oliver was a nephew of General Gage’s wife, the former Margaret Kemble, from East Brunswick, New Jersey, who adapted to British ways while clinging to her American identity. Gage’s official family included not only Stephen Kemble, Gage’s aide-de-camp for intelligence, but also Samuel Kemble, Gage’s confidential secretary. After his arrival on the Nautilus, Oliver De Lancey became another aidede-camp to Gage.44
The day after getting Dartmouth’s letter, Gage received a report from Dr. Church on arms hidden in Concord.45 Gage moved swiftly—and secretly. He knew that the Patriots in Boston had his troops under close observation. On the afternoon of April 18, Paul Revere and other Patriot leaders began getting reports from watchful Bostonians about signs of a major British operation. Revere had heard such rumors before, but this time he believed they were true. So did cautious Dr. Joseph Warren, a physician who was a member of the Committee of Correspondence and a confidant of Sam Adams. Warren decided to seek confirmation from his most trusted and confidential source, whose name he never revealed.
From that source, another Patriot later reported, Warren “got intelligence of their whole design; which was to seize Sam Adams and Hancock, who were at Lexington, and burn the stores at Concord. Two expresses were immediately despatched thither, who passed bythe guards on the Neck just before a sergeant arrived with orders to stop passengers.”46 One of the express riders was William Dawes, a Boston tanner; his business often took him through the Boston Neck checkpoint, where he knew the guards. The other rider was Paul Revere.47
We will never know for sure who that source was. But speculation has persisted that Warren’s spy was Margaret Kemble Gage. Only a circumstantial case exists. She is said to have told a friend that she felt herself as profoundly torn as Lady Blanche in Shakespeare’s King John. Blanche, niece of King John of England and daughter of the King of Castile, is caught in a web of power. She laments her divided loyalty, a lamentation that resounded in many a Loyalist heart after the deadly day of April 19:
The Sun’s o’ercast with blood: fair day, adieu!
Which is the side that I must go withal?
I am with both: each army hath a hand;
And in their rage, I having hold of both,
They swirl asunder and dismember me… .
Whoever wins, on that side shall I lose… .48
4
“TO SUBDUE THE BAD”
FROM CONCORD TO BUNKER HILL, APRIL-JUNE 1775
The … sanguinary measures adopted by the British Ministry … threatening to involve this Continent in all the horrors of a civil War, obliges us to call for the united aid a
nd council of the Colony, at this dangerous crisis.
—New York Provincial Congress1
Late on the night of April 18, 1775, a force of about nine hundred Redcoats and marines2 boarded Royal Navy longboats at a deserted Boston beach. They were rowed across Back Bay to an isolated point of Cambridge land, owned by a Tory, where a road led to the Rebel arms cache at Concord. Long before the next dawn the troops were on the march, heading for what would be the start of the Revolutionary War.3 Alongside some of the British forces during that long and bloody day were a number of Loyalists, anonymous comrades of the British soldiers.
Some Loyalists joined with the Regulars, straggling along, carrying muskets, wearing civilian clothes, and drawing taunts from people who would remember those Tory faces. Other Loyalists, referred to in accounts simply as “Tory guides,” served unseen and remain un-known.4 Those who are identified include Edward Winslow, well remembered in Plymouth as a founder of the Old Colony Club, and his childhood friend George Leonard.5
Three others known to have served the king that day were Thomas K. Beaman,6 Daniel Murray, and his brother Samuel. Beaman, who had been a captain of militia in the French and Indian War, lived in Petersham, about thirty miles north of Worcester. He was reported to be one of Gage’s intelligence agents; that would explain his presence as a “guide,” often used as a polite term for spy.7 Family tradition has Thomas Beaman’s only brother, Joseph, also heading for battle that day—as a minuteman.8 John Murray, a mandamus councillor whose home had been attacked in 1774, was the father of Daniel and Samuel. (Murray’s daughter was the wife of Daniel Bliss of Concord, who had aided Gage’s roaming officer-spies.)
For all five known Tory allies, their work that day began their military careers as Loyalists. Beaman would serve the British Army as a provincial officer handling supply-wagon trains. Daniel Murray would become the captain of a Loyalist volunteer company whose members included his two brothers; later he became a major in the King’s American Dragoons.9 Leonard took command of a small fleet of ships that raided New England seacoast towns,10 and Winslow would be commissioned as muster master general, responsible for keeping track of all the Loyalist armed forces in North America.11
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