Tories

by Thomas B. Allen

  The attackers took the muskets, powder, and bullets stored in Gilbert’s house and seized twenty-nine of Gilbert’s men, who were later released. Some fled to Boston, but most of the Loyalists remained in Assonet to await whatever was going to happen next.44

  The Gilbert raid was inspired by a letter that he had written in March 1775 to Capt. Sir James Wallace, commanding officer of HMS Rose, on station off Newport, Rhode Island. In the letter, which was somehow intercepted by the Patriots and made public, Gilbert said he feared an attack by “thousands of the Rebels” and asked Wallace to dispatch some of his small boats, called tenders, up the Taunton River as rescue vessels if the Gilbert men needed to evacuate.

  The Massachusetts Provincial Congress responded to the letter by declaring that Gilbert was “an inveterate enemy to his country, to reason, to justice, and the common rights of mankind” and that “whoever had knowingly espoused his cause, or taken up arms for its support, does, in common with himself, deserve to be instantly cut off from the benefit of commerce with, or countenance of, any friend of virtue, America, or the human race.” This withering declaration foreshadowed the campaign to drive the Loyalists from, if not the human race, at least Massachusetts.

  After the declaration was published, Gilbert disappeared and made his way to sanctuary aboard the Rose. He had not been at home during the raid, which focused on his son-in-law, who had hidden ina kitchen oven. He was hauled out, placed backwards on his horse, and led off to the Taunton jail. Before the procession reached the jail, Thomas Gilbert and his slave Pompey appeared. Gilbert, who had hurried back to Assonet when he got word of a looming attack, faced down the crowd and demanded the release of his son-in-law. The crowd, cowed by the old soldier, let his son-in-law go.45 Gilbert and his family soon joined the growing Tory community in Boston.

  The militiamen in Marshfield and Taunton, like those who had responded to the Concord Alarm, acted on the orders—often preceded by a democratic vote—of local commanders. Now that a war had begun, there was no overall strategy, no plans for continuing to resist British troops, no policy for dealing with Loyalists, who overnight had become belligerents in a war. The Committee of Safety, the de facto executive branch of the Massachusetts provincial congress, immediately decided that the militias should be drawn together into an army.

  The committee also chartered the Quero, a swift American schooner, to race across the Atlantic and secretly deliver the Patriots’ version of events to the British public before Gage’s official report reached the king’s ministers. Fearing that Tory spies would learn of the Quero‘s mission, Dr. James Warren, chairman of the Committee of Safety, told the ship’s captain to sail evasively to “escape all enemies that may be in the chops of the channel,” adding: “You are to keep this order a profound secret from every person on earth.”46 The captain, Richard Derby, Jr., was the son of the Salem mariner who had refused to hand over his cannons to British troops in February 1775.47

  The Quero, sailing without cargo, crossed speedily. It boldly passed the Royal Navy base at Portsmouth and slipped into an Isle of Wight harbor. Derby secretly made his way to London on May 28. A letter accompanying Warren’s report was addressed to Ben Franklin, who for many years had been acting as an agent for Massachusetts and other colonies. The letter asked Franklin to spread the news. But Franklin had left London and sailed for Philadelphia on March 25; he would arrive in Philadelphia on May 5.48 Nevertheless the news didspread. English newspapers published the report; the London Evening Post even reprinted the Gazette’s account. Gage’s terse report, dated April 22 and borne by a heavily laden merchant ship, arrived in London two weeks later.49 Many British readers of Gage’s official report gave more credence to the Patriot version, which made Britain the instigator of the attacks.

  Back in Massachusetts, the militiamen assembling in Cambridge, Roxbury, and Charlestown got an overall commander selected by the Committee of Safety: Maj. Gen. Artemas Ward, a big rugged man who owned a prosperous farm in Shrewsbury. He was a classic citizen soldier. After graduating from Harvard in 1748, he entered politics, serving in the General Court and for a time appearing to be on the Tory path. During the French and Indian War, he became a lieutenant colonel in a regiment that took part in a campaign to capture Fort Ticonderoga. After the war he was appointed colonel of his royal militia regiment and a judge in the Court of Common Pleas.

  As soon as Ward joined the opposition to the Stamp Act, Massachusetts royal governor Francis Bernard revoked his militia commission. Ward later said that he told Bernard, “I consider myself twice honored, but more in being superseded, than in having been commissioned … since the motive that dictated it is evidence that I am, what he is not, a friend to my country.”50 Bernard’s successor, Governor Thomas Hutchinson, called Ward “a very sulky fellow, who I thought I could bring over by giving him a commission in the provincial forces … but I was mistaken.”51

  When an express rider arrived with the news that the British were on their way to Concord, Ward was in bed, suffering from bladder stones. At daybreak he painfully eased himself out of bed and rode thirty-five miles to Cambridge.52 Within days he was in command of an army of about twenty thousand armed men from all over New England.53

  There was no way to know how long any of the sudden soldiers would stay. Although they were not able to launch an attack on the British, geography made them into besiegers of a city that was a near-island, linked to the rest of Massachusetts by Boston Neck. Militiamen in Cambridge confronted Gage’s troops across the Neck; those in Charlestown faced the British across a narrow stretch of water. Rebel troops formed a semicircle around the city.

  On Gage’s fortified and garrisoned Boston Neck, Patriots hastily raised their own fortifications. The Neck became the border between the king’s friends and the king’s foes. Tories fled into Boston and Patriots poured out, driven not so much by fear of neighbors as by fear of war or by a desire to join other Patriots.

  Notorious Tories who had tarried too long sped toward Gage’s protection. On the day of the attacks on Lexington and Concord, Dr. Josiah Sturtevant of Halifax galloped the six miles to Boston so fast that it was said he lost his saddlebags. He was commissioned a British Army captain and put in charge of a military hospital.54 Abijah Willard, a mandamus councillor who had been attacked and imprisoned, entered Boston after the Battle of Lexington, offered his services to Gage, and was commissioned a captain in the first company of Brigadier Ruggles’s paramilitary Loyal American Association.

  Cambridge became the nerve center of the Patriots. Huge vacated homes along Tory Row filled with Patriot officers and their men. The colonnaded mansion of John Vassall, who had already lost his hay and stables to the Patriots, became the headquarters of General Ward. Here was Tory Row at its grandest: The vestibule’s massive mahogany doors, “studded with silver,” opened into a wide hall, “where tessellated floors sparkled under the light of a lofty dome of richly painted glass,” a peacetime visitor wrote. “Underneath the dome two cherubs carved in wood extended their wings, and so formed the center, from which an immense chandelier of cut glass depended. Upon the floor beneath the dome there stood a marble column, and around it ran a divan formed of cushions covered with satin of Damascus of gorgeous coloring… . All the paneling and woodwork consisted of elaborate carving done abroad.”55

  Troops set up tents and shelters on the greensward of Cambridge Common. They occupied the brick buildings of Harvard, whoseclasses would soon be suspended to make room for militiamen, by order of the Committee of Safety. Militiamen also made a barracks of Christ Church, abandoned by its fleeing Loyalist congregation.

  Ward’s makeshift army had little artillery and consisted of men who had come to fight a battle, not a war. Many of his soldiers had been summoned by a piece of paper handed out by twenty-three-year-old Israel Bissell of East Windsor, Connecticut, who rode off from Watertown, near Boston. Tradition has him shouting “To arms, to arms, the war has begun!” on his four-day journey. He carried a concis
e report written on the morning of the battles by a member of the Committee of Safety; the report politely requested that the news be spread and that people supply Bissell with fresh horses.

  After alerting General Ward in Shrewsbury, Bissell kept on riding down the Boston Post Road. His first horse died in Worcester. He got another horse and galloped on. At each stop he handed the report to a Patriot leader, who quickly hand copied it and distributed more copies in his area. The ritual continued in town after town until Bissell got to Philadelphia, where a bell, soon to be called the Liberty Bell, pealed, drawing thousands to assemble and learn the news.56

  When Bissell had reached New Haven, Connecticut, early on the afternoon of April 21, a town meeting was hastily called. The majority, which included a number of suspected Loyalists, voted against sending armed aid to the Massachusetts Committee of Safety. This did not go down well with Benedict Arnold, the thirty-four-year-old captain of an elite Connecticut militia, the Governor’s Second Company of Foot. He immediately sent runners off to round up members and volunteers for a march to Cambridge. On the morning of Saturday, April 22, before a large crowd, Arnold paraded his men, resplendent in uniforms of scarlet coats with buff facings, white breeches and stockings, and black half leggings.

  Arnold sent an aide to the town selectmen, who were meeting in Hunt’s Tavern. In Arnold’s name the aide asked for gunpowder and bullets from the town magazine. When the selectmen refused, Arnold marched his company to the tavern and sent in a messenger for the keys. Rebuffed again, he said that if he did not get the keys hewould order his men to break down the door to the magazine. Arnold got the keys, supplied his men with ammunition, and marched them north to Cambridge.57

  In 1758 Arnold had been a militiaman in the futile British-American attack on Fort Ticonderoga, which commanded the strip of land between Lake Champlain and Lake George on the route to Canada. Artemas Ward had also fought at Ticonderoga, and when Arnold reached Cambridge, he suggested an attack on Ticonderoga to seize its cannons. Ward approved the plan. The Massachusetts provincial congress commissioned Arnold as a colonel for “a secret service,” provided him a small amount of money and supplies, and on May 3 he was off. Seven days later, after an odyssey that brought Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys into the war, Ticonderoga fell without a shot, as did Crown Point, a smaller fort a few miles north.

  Arnold’s bold move extended the war into New York and its disputed northern frontier—without any authority beyond the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and the Committee of Safety. Coincidentally, Ti-conderoga fell on the same day that the Second Continental Congress assembled in the State House in Philadelphia with delegations from every colony but Georgia. The delegates did not learn about Ticonderoga until May 18, and the reaction was more embarrassment than joy. The New York and Connecticut delegations denied responsibility. Congress, uneasy about the sudden warfare, ordered Arnold and Allen to keep the king’s cannons and other property safe until that time when “the former harmony with Great Britain and these colonies so ardently wished for” is restored.58

  In Boston there was no hint of harmony. In early May, British soldiers, beginning to feel the paranoia of a siege, heard rumors of a Rebel plot to slip assassins into the city. According to the rumor, the Rebels would stage a feint that would sound an alarm, officers would rush from their lodgings—and be shot. Gage may have believed the rumor because he ordered officers to move into barracks, an order that violated a long tradition of separate quartering for officers and enlisted men. Civilians were also growing fearful. “Numbers of People are quitting the Town every day with their families and Effects,” a

  British lieutenant wrote; “it’s a distressing thing to see them, for half of ‘em don’t know where to go to, and in all probability must starve.”59 On May 25 HMS Cererbus arrived in Boston, delivering three major generals: William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne. Gage was still officially the field commander, but he now had the three generals looking over his shoulder and urging action. Burgoyne, a flamboyant part-time playwright whose nickname was “Gentleman Johnny,” made a comment that was widely circulated: “What! Ten thousand peasants keep five thousand king’s troops shut up? Well, let us in, and we’ll soon find elbow room!” The remark became so well known that Burgoyne got the additional nickname “Elbow Room.”60 The siege was well into the month of June when Gage, in his role as royal governor, issued an excessively wordy proclamation, written by Burgoyne, declaring martial law and offering pardons to “those in arms and their abettors” who should lay down their weapons. The only Rebels ineligible for a pardon were Sam Adams and John Hancock, “whose offences are of too flagitious a nature to admit of any other consideration than that of condign punishment.” Left unsaid was the fact that the fitting punishment for treason was execution.61

  The Patriots’ intelligence network had yet to discover that Dr. Benjamin Church was spying for the British. On May 12, as chairman of a subcommittee of the Committee of Safety, he signed a report recommending that a defensive system be established at several places on Charlestown Neck, including Bunker Hill.62 Oddly, Church seems not to have reported this to Gage because the British apparently had no knowledge of the Patriots’ imminent plans. Patriot agents had learned that Gates, goaded by Howe, was about to break out a force that would occupy the heights on the mile-long Charlestown Peninsula, separated from Boston by a narrow stretch of water.63 In a preemptive move the Committee of Safety authorized the taking of Bunker Hill, the peninsula’s 110-foot high point.

  Walking alone on the moonlit night of June 16, Major General Clinton was reconnoitering, looking across the dark water to the peninsula where British troops would soon be landing. He thought he heard some odd noises drifting across the water. He came upona British sentry. Yes, the sentry said, he had also heard what Clinton himself thought he had heard: unusual muffled sounds on those hills that loomed over Boston. From those heights, both general and sentry knew, the Rebels could fire down on British ships and British troops. Clinton hurried back to headquarters and told Howe and Gage that he was sure the Rebels were moving onto the high ground. He urged Gage to land a force next morning. But Gage wanted to wait until dawn, when he could see what the Rebels were doing.64

  The first British eyes to see what the Rebels were doing belonged to a lookout aboard HMS Lively, anchored off the southern shore of the peninsula. In the light of dawn he saw a large number of Rebels building a redoubt atop seventy-five-foot Breed’s Hill. Lively quickly opened fire. Soon, on the orders of Adm. Samuel Graves aboard HMS Somerset, all the British ships in the harbor began firing. But the broadsides had little effect on the Americans because the warships had trouble elevating their guns at a high-enough angle to reach the hilltop.65

  The lookout had spotted a few of the thousand militiamen who had assembled in Cambridge the night before. Their original orders had sent them off, silently and by lantern light, to Bunker Hill under the command of Col. William Prescott. There, throughout the night, they were to dig and build a redoubt. But at the last minute the objective was changed: Breed’s Hill, which was more accessible, would be fortified first. (Confusion over the hills’ names stems from the fact that both together were often called “Bunker Hill” while the southern slope was locally known as “Breed’s Hill.”)

  Col. Richard Gridley, chief engineer of the Massachusetts forces, objected and was overruled. He then laid out a plan for a redoubt on Breed’s Hill; it would be about forty yards square, with a six-foot parapet on which gun platforms would be mounted. Two flanking entrenchments were designed so that attackers would be hit with enfilading fire about twenty yards beyond the face of the redoubt.

  The soldiers grabbed spades and began digging into soil still hardened by frost.66 “Cannon shot are continually rolling and rebounding over the hill,” wrote an American officer, “and it is astonishing to observe how little our soldiers are terrified by them.”67

  In Boston after the cannonading, Gage, his aides, and a Loyalist ad
viser went to Beacon Hill for a better view. Gage picked up his telescope and studied the redoubt that was emerging from Breed’s Hill. “Who appears to be in command?” he asked, handing the telescope to Col. Abijah Willard, the wealthiest landowner in Lancaster, forty-seven miles northwest of Boston. Willard had been commissioned a colonel during the French and Indian War, when he led a regiment in three major campaigns. Willard recognized Colonel Prescott, a tall man whose head and shoulders jutted from the rampart. He was a friend, a fellow officer in the previous war, and the husband of Willard’s sister Elizabeth.

  “Will he fight?” asked Gage.

  “I cannot answer for his men,” said Willard. “But Prescott will fight you to the gates of hell! “68

  It was a poignant moment for Willard. He had been made a mandamus councillor, had publicly recanted his appointment, had kept his own beliefs private, and had remained out of the strife. By his wealth and social position he was a Loyalist, just as Prescott could have been. But Prescott had chosen sides. So, finally and obliquely, had Willard. On the morning of April 19, he had filled his saddlebags with seeds for his farm in Beverly, north of Boston, and ridden along a route that would have taken him through Concord. When he came upon long columns of militiamen heading for Concord and Lexington, he realized he could not join them and had to oppose them. He turned toward Boston and sought refuge with Gage.69

  In the morning’s light Gage saw fortifications that had, in a British officer’s words, “appeared more like majick than the work of human beings.”70 But still Gage did not believe the motley American army was a match for the two thousand men he would send on a frontal assault up Breed’s Hill, with General Howe leading the attack.

  Early on the afternoon of June 17, Howe landed on the southern shore of the peninsula and first hit what appeared to be a weak spot along a narrow beach. Americans waited until the British were within fifty yards and, in a burst of fire, riddled the line of Redcoats, killing ninety-six. The rest of the attackers pulled back. Howecalled up soldiers and marines held in reserve. A second assault was also turned back. Dueling against snipers in houses in Charlestown, British artillery in Boston fired red-hot cannonballs and balls called “carcasses,” which were full of burning pitch. Much of the town went up in flames.