Propaganda broadsheets compared life for Rebel sentries on Prospect Hill in Charlestown with life for British sentries on Bunker Hill:26
PROSPECT HILL BUNKER HILL
I Seven dollars a month.* I Three pence a day
II Fresh provisions and in plenty. II Rotten salt pork.
III Health. III The scurvy
IV Freedom, ease, affluence, IV Slavery, beggary, and want. and a good farm.
Management of the Massachusetts militiamen was shifting to Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress voted to create the Continental Army—and, shortly after, adopted the “Olive Branch Petition.” The document was so effusive in its homage to the “Most Gracious Sovereign” from “your Majesty’s faithful subjects” that it could have been written by a Loyalist.
The delegates said they felt “required by indispensable obligations to Almighty God, to your Majesty, to our fellow subjects, and to ourselves, immediately to use all the means in our power not incompatible with our safety, for stopping the further effusion of blood… . We therefore beseech your Majesty, that your royal authority and influence may be graciously interposed to procure us relief from our afflicting fears and jealousies.” The king ignored the olive branch, declaring that the colonies were in “an open and avowed rebellion” and that “all our Officers, civil and military, are obliged to exert their utmost endeavours to suppress such rebellion.”27
While waving the olive branch, however, Congress asked Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania to raise ten companies of riflemen. They would be the first soldiers to be mustered into the new army, and they would be carrying a marksman’s weapon. The rifleman’s gun, unlike a militiaman’s smoothbore musket, was rifled—long spiral grooves inside the barrel engaged the ball, starting it spinning along an axis at right angles to the direction it was shot. Stabilized instead of tumbling, the bullet could fly straighter and farther.
Congress next selected George Washington, a Virginia plantation owner, as commander in chief of the Continental Army. He was still remembered as a hero in the French and Indian War, when he had been a fearless twenty-three-year-old Virginia militia officer—”4 bullets through my Coat, and two Horses shot under me” in one battle.28 And his appointment gave to the South military power that would offset New England political power.
Traveling northward from his Virginia home, he took the Alexandria ferry across the Potomac River. A ferry going in the opposite direction carried an old friend, the Reverend Jonathan Boucher, an Anglican clergyman. “Some patriots in our boat huzzaed,” Boucherlater wrote, “and gave three cheers.” He confined himself to doffing his hat. Washington asked the ferries to stop, and he spoke for a few minutes to Boucher. Washington knew him not as an avowed Tory but as the learned man who had tutored Washington’s stepson and often dined at Mount Vernon. Boucher bluntly told Washington that Americans would soon declare for independence. Washington denied that he was “joining in any such measures,” Boucher recalled. Like most of his supporters, the new general believed that the colonies were seeking a redress of grievances, not independence.
Soon Boucher would be committed to his own civil war, preaching with a pair of loaded pistols resting on a cushion in his pulpit. He had “given notice that if any man, or body of men, could possibly be so lost to all sense of decency … to drag me out of my own pulpit, I should think myself justified before God and man in repelling violence by violence”—stating what was the moral basis for the Loyalists’ decision to arm themselves. Boucher would sail for exile in England nine months later, before the Continental Congress declared the independence that Washington had not yet realized he was actually fighting for.29
The first armed Loyalists to patrol the streets of Boston were members of General Ruggles’s Loyal American Association. Ruggles’s men did not have uniforms; a patroller simply identified himself by tying a white scarf around his left arm. They patrolled “the District about Liberty Tree & the Lanes, Alleys & Wharves adjacent” from sunset to sunrise to “prevent all disorders within the district by either Signals, Fires, Thieves, Robers, house breakers or Rioters.”30 Included among them were Edward Winslow and George Leonard, veterans of the Lexington-Concord expedition.
One patroller, Job Williams, led an attack on the Liberty Tree, a great elm on which Sons of Liberty had been hanging effigies of Tory officials since Stamp Act days. Williams and his cohorts chopped down the tree. By one account one man was killed in a fall while attempting to cut off a limb of the tree. Williams went on to become a captain in a Loyalist regiment.31
An early muster roll of the patrollers lists several men who represented the upper ranks of Massachusetts society.32 Richard Saltonstall, Harvard ‘51, whose family had lived in Massachusetts for six generations, had been a superior court judge and a colonel in the French and Indian War. After a short term of service in the association, he decided he could not take sides in the war and sailed to England, never to return.33 Thomas Aston Coffin, Harvard ‘72, came from a similarly illustrious family whose members included the holder of one of the most lucrative of royal posts: Receiver General and Cashier of His Majesty’s Customs.34 John Lindall Borland, Harvard ‘72, was born and bred on Tory Row. He went from patrolling Boston to serving as a lieutenant colonel in the British Army.35 Zebedee Terry later joined a Loyalist regiment,36 as did Benjamin Pollard.37
The chaplain of the Loyal American Association was the Reverend John Troutbeck, who in 1753 had been sent to America as a missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. He became the assistant rector of King’s Chapel, Boston’s oldest Anglican church.38 Harried as an Addresser, he left for England in 1776. He was remembered, in Rebel doggerel, as having been both a clergyman and a distiller:
His Sunday aim is to reclaim Those that in vice are sunk, When Monday’s come he selleth rum, And gets them plaguey drunk39
Although Ruggles was one of the most militant Loyalists, Patriot neighbors treated him with restraint. After confiscating the arms and ammunition found in his home, the Patriots confined him to one of his farms, about ninety miles west of Boston, allowing him to leave only on Sundays, “fast days, or some other public days,” and charging him for the pay of his guards. After a short time members of thetown meeting voted to allow him “to go to Boston, and live there, if he pleases.”40 He did, arriving in time to give Gage advice prior to the battle of Bunker Hill. His association became a model for two other Loyalist groups later formed in Boston: the Royal North British Volunteers Formation, made up of “North British Merchants,”7 and the Loyal Irish Volunteers, consisting mostly of Irish merchants.
Royal North British Volunteers, each wearing a blue hat bearing a Saint Andrew’s Cross (the blue-and-white emblem of Scotland), were to “take into Custody all Suspicious & Disorderly Persons found in the Streets at improper Hours.” Similar duties were assigned to the Loyal Irish, who attached white cockades (rosettes or knots of ribbon) to their hats as badges.41
Gage did not bring the volunteers into the regular military establishment because that was not the way the British Army worked at that time. Officers came from the noble ruling class. They purchased and sold their commissions. Americans had become aware of this practice during the French and Indian War, when “provincial” regiments went into battle side by side with British forces but were not integrated, and American officers were not given equal treatment with their British counterparts. One of the provincials who discovered this was Col. George Washington of the Virginia Regiment. After learning that he could not be given a British Army commission higher than captain, he resigned.42
When Washington arrived in Cambridge, he first boarded at the home of the president of Harvard, who was a Son of Liberty. Washington then moved, setting up his headquarters in the Tory Row mansion that General Ward had taken over.43 In Cambridge and Boston, Washington found not warfare but stalemate. Loyalists fled to Boston and Patriots left, all seeking safety. Soldiers fought spasmodically. The British made thrusts across the
Neck or tried to drive the Rebels off Prospect Hill. The Rebels slipped into enemy territory to burn a barn or kill a Redcoat. In the Rebel ranks were snipers and Indians armed with bows and arrows. On one June day, two Indians killed four Regulars.44
The Indians, members of the Stockbridge tribe of Massachusetts, joined the Patriots’ ranks after a propaganda drive aimed at gaining allies from several eastern tribes.45 The Massachusetts Provincial Congress sent a letter to Indian leaders, telling them that the British “want to get all our money … and prevent us from having guns and powder to use and kill deer, wolves and other game with or to send to you for you to kill your game and to get skins and furs to trade with us for what you want.”46 Gage reacted by telling Lord Dartmouth in a letter that “we need not be tender of calling upon the Savages, as the Rebels have shewn us the Example.”47 Gage’s remark foreshadowed the British use of Indians as allies, especially along the New York—Canadian border.
The arrival of riflemen sharpened the close combat along the lines. The British were stunned by the way their sentries were picked off by these backwoods marksmen. A British newspaper, quoting a letter from Norfolk, Virginia, described their uniforms as “something like a shirt, double caped over the shoulder, in imitation of the Indians; and on the breast, in capital letters, is their motto, ‘Liberty or Death!’” One captured rifleman was taken to England as a curio, much like the American Indians displayed in previous times.48
“Never had the British Army so ungenerous an enemy to oppose,” a British officer complained. They “send their riflemen (five or six at a time), who conceal themselves behind trees, &c., till an opportunity presents itself of taking a shot at our advanced sentries; which done, they immediately retreat.”49
The British Army did not yet see its ungenerous enemy as soldiers worthy of decent treatment as prisoners. Washington, who knew Gage from the French and Indian War, viewed him at first as an honorable opponent playing by the accepted rules of war. But when Washington learned that Americans captured in the Bunker Hill battle were notbeing treated as prisoners of war, he wrote to Gage saying he was shocked that the men had been “thrown indiscriminately into a common jail appropriated for felons” and that some of them, “languishing with wounds and sickness,” had undergone amputations in the jail. Gage responded by saying that he viewed the captives as criminals “whose lives by the laws of the land are destined to the cord”—the noose.50
Gage, representing British authority, believed he was dealing with a rebellion and a civil war. He saw local Loyalists as counterrebels who could aid him. Gage had a limited view, for militant Loyalists looked beyond Boston. They saw themselves as having more to contribute to the war than service as a home guard for the British garrison. Tory civilians were beginning to realize they were caught in an unforeseen war. “We are in the strangest state in the world, surrounded on all sides,” wrote a Tory woman in Boston. “The whole country is in arms, and intrenched. We are deprived of fresh provisions, subject to continual alarms and cannonadings, the provincials being very audacious, and advancing near to our lines.”51
Gage called on the Royal Navy to help feed his hungry soldiers and civilian wards. The British Army had grown to about six thousand men. Its supply line, which stretched to England, was menaced by Patriot privateers. Adm. Samuel Graves, commander of the Royal Navy’s North American Squadron, judged that the rebellious acts of colonists had “rendered our dependance for Fuel and fresh provisions very precarious.”52
Capt. Sir James Wallace, commanding officer of the Rose, on station off Newport, Rhode Island, gathered provisions by having his sailors and marines go ashore and take what they needed. When farmers moved their livestock inland, Wallace sailed to Bristol, Rhode Island, where he sent an officer ashore in a longboat. When it came alongside the wharf, the officer demanded that a small delegation of town officials accompany him back to the Rose to meet with Wallace. A magistrate gruffly told him that if his captain wanted to talk, he should come ashore himself.
The officer returned to the Rose and reported to Wallace. Back in March, Wallace had had experience with cheeky Rebels, who had intercepted a letter sent to him by Col. Thomas Gilbert, leader of the Tory militia in Freetown. Now, infuriated by another act of disrespect, Wallace opened fire on the town.
After a few cannonballs struck, the town leaders agreed to go aboard the Rose. Wallace demanded two hundred sheep and thirty head of cattle. The townsmen balked, saying that much livestock was unavailable. Negotiations ended when Wallace made his final offer: “If you will promise to supply me with forty sheep, at or before twelve o’clock, I will assure you that another gun shall not be discharged.” The townsmen agreed. Rose crewmen loaded the sheep on board, and Wallace sailed off with his fleet to Boston.53
A few days later Admiral Graves issued an order to Lt. Henry Mowatt, captain of HMS Canceaux and recent victim of abduction by Falmouth Patriots. “My Design,” Graves wrote, “is to chastize Mar-blehead, Salem, Newbury Port, Cape Anne Harbour, Portsmouth [New Hampshire], Ipswich, Falmouth in Casco Bay, and particularly Mechias where the Margaretta was taken … and where preparations I am informed are now making to invade the Province of Nova Scotia.”54 Graves was right. Machias was the secret headquarters of American Rebels and anti-British Nova Scotians who were planning an invasion. One of the planners was the Reverend James Lyon, the Presbyterian clergyman who had been a confederate of the Machias captors of the Margaretta.55
The Canceaux and three other warships left Boston on October 8, 1775. Supposedly, bad weather forced Mowatt to change course and as a result Falmouth became the first port he would “chastise.” But Mowatt obviously had a personal reason for picking Falmouth. On October 17 he sent an officer ashore with a warning that he would bombard the town in two hours. He also invited local Loyalists to come aboard the Canceaux. None did, fearing that they would be shot as they rowed to the warship.
A committee that included a leading Loyalist won a delay until the next morning, when Mowatt ordered all five ships to begin a cannonade with shells and the incendiary balls called carcasses. The bombardment, in his words, “continued till six, by that hour the body of the town was in one flame.” Then Mowatt sent some men ashore to finish the mission by setting fire “to the vessels, wharfs, storehouses, as well as to many parts of the town that escaped from the shells and carcasses.”56 The bombardment destroyed about three-quarters of the town’s buildings, including about 130 dwellings, many of them housing two or three families; a church, the courthouse, the library, and almost every store and warehouse. Sheriff Tyng’s mansion was spared, spotlighting his Tory status and guaranteeing his self-exile.57 Fourteen ships were burned and several others seized.58
As autumn settled on Boston, Gage made one of his last decisions in America, for he was scheduled to sail to England on October 10. Knowing that his successor, General Howe, would soon go into winter quarters, Gage wanted his soldiers—many of them living in tents—to have decent shelter by occupying some of Boston’s many abandoned houses. To find someone to supervise the emptying of the houses and the storing of their contents, he reached beyond Massachusetts to the Tory stronghold of New York. He chose Crean Brush, a striving, self-promoting Dublin-born Loyalist.
In the words of Gage’s commission, Brush would become the official receiver of “large quantities of Goods, Wares, and Merchandize, Chattles and Effects of considerable value left in the Town of Boston by persons who have thought proper to depart therefrom.” To give the looting a veneer of legitimacy, Gage ordered townspeople to provide Urquhart, the town major, with their names and addresses so that someday their property could be returned. Then, in a conflicting proclamation, he made a leading Loyalist the sole auctioneer for selling off the goods to the highest bidder.59
Brush affected a military-style wardrobe and, claiming to be a former British Army officer, demanded to be addressed as “Colonel.” He had arrived in northeastern New York about a dozen years before. As a favored Loyalist in New York, he
became wealthy by simultaneouslyserving in placeman posts, becoming a member of the legislature, and acquiring land.
Most of Brush’s holdings were in disputed territory claimed by New York, New Hampshire, and a land speculator named Ethan Allen. Brush solved the dispute by introducing a bill that outlawed Allen and his lieutenants in the Green Mountain Boys, a guerrila force originally formed to fight for disputed land bordering on Vermont. By 1775 he was the owner of twenty thousand acres. But Patriots took over the New York legislature, which wiped out Brush’s claims and made him a public enemy.60 In 1777 most of his New York land would become part of the Republic of Vermont.
In Boston, Brush used his newfound connection with Gage to ask a favor: When the general arrived in London, would he please present a petition to King George III? The petition asked royal approval of Brush’s plan to “raise a Body of Volunteers,” a three-hundred-man unit modeled on the Royal Fencible Americans, an early Loyalist regiment formed in Nova Scotia.* Brush promised that he and his men would “open a Line of communication” from the Connecticut River westward toward Lake Champlain.
Brush said his “intimate Knowledge of that Frontier” would enable him to track down the “dangerous Gang of Lawless Banditti, who, without the least pretext of Title, have, by Violence, possessed themselves of a large Tract of Interior Territory.” That territory, of course, was land that Brush claimed.61 On the New York frontier, British officials did depend on Loyalist allies but did not need any help from Crean Brush.
Brush’s emptying of houses was only part of the British pillaging of Boston. Dragoons turned the Old South Church into a riding school, hacking and carrying away the pulpit and pews and spreading dirt and gravel on the floor. An exquisitely carved pew, with silk seats, was taken off to become a hog-sty. A stove was installed, thechurch library’s books and manuscripts providing the kindling. Another church became a barracks, and its steeple was dismantled for firewood, as was the entire church. More than one hundred houses were torn down for firewood. Some of the work was done by members of Ruggles’s Loyal American Association.62
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