by Nick Bunker
In fact, the town was far from unanimous, with more than a hundred of its leading citizens openly willing to strike a deal with Great Britain and pay compensation for the destruction of the tea. Nor could Revere be sure of a friendly reception from merchants and farmers in colonies where that year’s crop of rice, wheat, and tobacco was already rising in the fields and the harbors remained open. But in Boston, the crisis was about to deepen still further. That same Friday afternoon, the townspeople heard a salvo of gunfire from across the harbor. The cannon were fired at the order of Lieutenant Colonel Leslie, welcoming HMS Lively with the new governor on board. From the town, Hutchinson hurried out to Castle William to join the welcoming party and hear directly from General Gage the details of Lord North’s package of reprisals.
THE PERFECT CRISIS
Thomas Gage set foot in Boston filled with preconceptions about its citizens. “America is a mere bully, from one end to the other,” the general had said in 1770. “And the Bostonians are by far the greatest bullies.” Four years later, at the age of fifty-five or so—his exact date of birth is unknown—finally the new dictator of Massachusetts found his opportunity to teach them the error of their ways. In his official correspondence, which runs to many hundreds of pages, Gage often struck a note of exasperation, like the headmaster of some unruly private school where the pupils seemed impervious to discipline. In his eyes, Americans behaved like irritating juveniles, always devising new forms of disobedience with which to torment their tutors.
More than two centuries after his death it serves little purpose to heap personal blame on the general for the poor decisions he made as the war approached. At the time, some of his own officers did so all too readily. According to one veteran of Bunker Hill, a Scottish major named James Wemyss, the general was unfit for his command: he described Gage as an officer “of moderate abilities, altogether deficient in military knowledge.” But Wemyss wrote those words with hindsight, after the war was lost. And while Gage was certainly a failure, it is hard to see how in the spring of 1774 any British officer available to take his place would have acted differently. In Boston, Gage was obliged to play two different roles—as a soldier and as a politician—which in reality were incompatible. His mission was hopeless from the moment it began.
Major General Thomas Gage in about 1768, by John Singleton Copley. Bridgeman Art Library
Of course, Gage had brought this plight upon himself, with his misguided briefing of George III in January. But his colleagues and political masters at Westminster were equally responsible for the fiasco that occurred in New England. His dismissive views about Americans were widely held in London; when his colleagues in the army criticized him, they usually accused him of being too cautious, rather than too hotheaded; and the navy, in the person of Lord Sandwich, remained bitterly angry about the Gaspée as well as the Tea Party. In the spring and summer of that year, no one in authority in Great Britain had any doubts that retribution was required or that Thomas Gage was the right party to deliver it.
Gage’s career had been as busy as any to which a soldier could aspire. A veteran of Culloden, where he stood beside the Duke of Albemarle, a butcher of the Highland clans almost as bloody as the Duke of Cumberland, Gage had seen rebels before. Nor did he lack experience in combat in America, against the French and the Ohio tribes. In theory, he knew its people and its problems. Since 1755, Gage had made the continent his vocation, marrying a charming beauty from New Jersey, Margaret Kemble, and building a circle of friends in New York. His affection for the country extended to the ownership of land, eighteen thousand acres up toward Lake Erie, as well as a slave plantation on the West Indian island of Montserrat. In military science, Gage had even been an innovator for a while, raising a regiment of light infantry suitable for warfare in the wilderness, made up of soldiers trained to spy out the land and fight on the run.
Only one incident tarnished his record. In 1759, when the British were advancing into Canada against the French, Gage had been in command of a column based at Niagara. The town of Quebec had already fallen to General Wolfe, and Gage was supposed to sail up Lake Ontario, take the French fort at La Galette, and then head for Montreal to trap the enemy in the jaws of a pincer. But the winter drew near, and Gage worried about his supplies and his line of retreat. To the dismay of his superiors, he stayed where he was, and the chance was missed to end the war that year. But although the affair was embarrassing, by the time of the Tea Party it had largely been forgotten. In due course, his critics revived the charge that General Gage was a ditherer—according to Wemyss, he was “timid and undecided in every path of duty”—but again this was said with hindsight, and Wemyss might have had some personal ax to grind.
In 1774, Gage certainly vacillated, occasionally losing his nerve, but his mistakes arose not from character defects but from the same cultural handicaps and prejudices that beset the cabinet in Whitehall. Despite his long career in the colonies, Gage still knew far too little about America, and what he did know was shaped by ideology. Like Alexander Leslie, Gage had come to view the old New England charters as anachronistic and dangerous, a relic from a distant, alien period when dark Puritans ran wild. He did not really care for New York either, where the mob was just as bad and the local politicians tiresome and self-serving. Even so, he might have gathered information and laid plans for forestalling any insurrection. But in the British army at this period, no one expected a peacetime commander to demonstrate that degree of forethought.
A bureaucrat in scarlet, happy in his office or the salon of his wife, Gage worked hard at what crossed his desk, but he felt no need to put his ear close to the ground. He rarely left New York, and he did not study maps with the care a general needs. Gage had a poor eye for terrain, he collected no statistics, and he gave no time to the study of colonial trade and finance. As a result, he lacked the information required to assess the resources his enemy might muster if it ever came to rebellion or to war. His ignorance about the South was especially damaging. He scarcely mentioned Virginia in his letters home. He left its military affairs entirely to the ludicrous Lord Dunmore. As a result, in 1774–75 it came as a complete surprise to General Gage when Virginia joined the insurgency.
During his long, sedate years in command in Manhattan, Gage also lost his taste for military science. While light infantry were essential in America, with its vast distances and its forests, a general really needed light cavalry as well. In any future conflict, hussars or light dragoons would be invaluable, as scouts for reconnaissance or to form a mobile reserve, which could move swiftly across country and fight dismounted on arrival. During the Seven Years’ War, the British had created regiments of light dragoons to serve these purposes in Germany. But in his letters to London during the decade before the revolution, Gage never once referred to cavalry. It did not occur to him to ask for light horse until it was already too late, even though they might have saved the day at Concord.
However, again it would be unfair to lay all the blame upon General Gage for the military failures that occurred. When he was appointed governor of Massachusetts, he found himself in an impossible situation, obliged to take decisions of a kind for which his training had not prepared him. In the later history of the British Empire, especially in Asia in the twentieth century, other professional soldiers far more competent than Gage would experience a similar predicament when they were compelled to double as statesmen. Their reputations rarely survived intact. In Gage’s case, the dilemmas he faced were especially acute. Even before he left England, he allowed political considerations to undermine a strategic principle that he had laid down himself many years earlier.
As far back as 1766, Gage had realized that if New England rose in revolt, the key to its defeat would lie along the Hudson valley. This was obvious even to him, despite his lack of interest in mapmaking and topography. The valley created a formidable barrier between the northern colonies and their potential allies to the south. At all costs, the British had to hold the river cros
sings between the Bronx and the high ground near West Point. It was also essential to control the trails that led north to Canada. With the Hudson valley secure, and the navy safely based in New York Harbor and at Halifax, the British could isolate New England, placing a line of denial between it and the rest of the continent.7
In a letter to the War Office written soon after the Stamp Act riots, Gage had put the case for such a strategy. Crucially, it would have required the bulk of his forces to remain in Manhattan. If this course of action had been pursued in 1774, the American Revolution would still have occurred, but its opening phase would have taken a very different shape. Worn down by blockade and unable to obtain arms and ammunition, the rebels in New England might have been forced to back down. But once it had been decided that Gage would go to Massachusetts as governor, he had little choice but to ignore his earlier advice and occupy its principal seaport. This was a dreadful mistake.
After the war was lost, the general’s chief engineer, Colonel John Montresor, drew up a list of reasons for the debacle. Right at the top, he placed what he called the “blunder in sending General Gage with four regiments to Boston.” Located a long way from the principal lines of communication, the town had no military value. Its site on a peninsula overlooked by high ground rendered it indefensible, and so it became nothing but a trap for the British army. Before he boarded HMS Lively, Gage should have pointed this out to the politicians, but even if he had, it is unlikely that they would have listened. In view of the anti-American fervor among Lord North’s supporters, the soldiers had to be sent to Boston to uphold the empire’s authority. But once the redcoats were ashore, it would be very hard to get them out again.8
As the spring and summer unfolded, Gage permitted Boston to become an obsession. Betrayed by the promise he had made to the king, he let his political mission dictate the way he distributed his forces. He began to make a series of mistakes, starting in April. With only the Sixty-Fourth Regiment of Foot available at Castle William, he ordered his deputy in New York, Major General Frederick Haldimand, to send sixty men and eight field guns up to join them. While this might have seemed a sensible thing to do, the general’s rationale was very dubious. Although Lieutenant Colonel Leslie needed more artillery at the fort, Gage planned merely to park the cannon on Boston Common, along with the extra regiments of infantry due in from the British Isles.
In other words, he intended to make a show of strength. He would overawe the town in the hope that moderates would take heart and recover the initiative from John Hancock and Samuel Adams. It was a queer sort of plan, given its previous failure during the occupation that led to the massacre of 1770. It seems all the more strange when we think about the winding streets of Boston, along which a cannon could not shoot without destroying loyal property as well as rioters.
Clearly, Gage never expected that his guns would be fired at all. Since he made no attempt to find quarters other than tents for his troops, he seems to have believed that the port act would put a stop to Boston’s insolence long before winter set in. Indeed, at first he met with something less than outright hostility. At noon on May 17, a cold and windy day with heavy rain, he landed at the Long Wharf, inspected the militia, and took the oath as governor. He even received a few cheers.9
Dinner followed at Faneuil Hall, with a loyal toast, and within the week Gage was writing to Lord Dartmouth with quiet confidence. Hutchinson was just about to leave, heading for England at last, while the port was due to close in two weeks’ time. Although the newly elected assembly was ready to meet, he proposed to make them wait until June, when Salem became the capital. At about the same time two more regiments, the Fourth Foot and the Forty-Third, were due to arrive from England. The port act had already taught the radicals a lesson, Gage told His Lordship, “but minds so inflamed cannot cool at once, so it may be better to give the shock time to operate, and I may find the assembly in a better temper.”10
He intended to play a waiting game until the Massachusetts assembly and the town of Boston came cap in hand to apologize for destroying the tea. To be fair to the general, at first he had little choice. He had not yet received the text of all the Coercive Acts or Dartmouth’s final orders for their implementation. Nor was he supposed to provoke a confrontation that might end in violence. Gage soon discovered that nobody would testify in court against the Tea Party’s organizers, and so he chose not to haul Hancock and Adams in for questioning, however obvious such a step might have seemed in London. But he failed to understand that a waiting game played directly into the hands of his opponents. Confined to Boston, days or even weeks away from larger cities to the south, he did not realize that time was on the American side, as it would remain for the rest of that year.
A trade boycott was the strongest weapon the Boston radicals could deploy; but if it were to be effective, it would have to be intercolonial. At the very least, they needed New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston to join, but ideally they also required the cooperation of Virginia and Maryland. Only a stoppage of tobacco and naval stores—tar from the Carolinas—would hurt the British enough to make them think again about their plans for Massachusetts.*2 All of this would take time to organize, because each of the colonies had its own sectional reasons for objecting to a sweeping ban on exports to the mother country. But the longer the port of Boston remained shut to traffic, the more resentful the other American seaports would become, and the more opportunity Samuel Adams and his allies would have to put the case for a boycott. Although the closure of the port had seemed to be a clever strategy, it had a fatal flaw. It was open-ended, which meant that it gave the radicals all the time they needed.
Published in London just before Parliament reassembled in November 1774, a cartoon showing the Royal Navy surrounding Boston and redcoats laying siege to the Liberty Tree while supplies of cod arrive to feed the town. Library of Congress
By the end of May, Josiah Quincy Jr. had already produced a pamphlet making this very point. As befits a Bostonian, Quincy had a lawyer’s eye for detail. He focused on one especially sensitive clause in the Boston Port Act. Instead of setting a limit on the closure of the port or giving the governor the discretion to end it, Parliament had said that the port would remain shut “until it shall sufficiently appear to his Majesty” that Boston had made amends to everybody it had harmed, not only the East India Company for the loss of the tea, but anyone else with a claim for damages, including the consignees, the customs officers, the shipowners, and the sea captains they employed. Whatever Boston offered by way of restitution, only the king could say if it was full and fair. Months might go by—or even years—while the town waited for an answer from His Majesty. All the while the harbor would stay closed by what amounted to an arbitrary royal decree that also tied the hands of General Gage.11
In a later era, Quincy would have excelled as a constitutional lawyer. His analysis was irrefutable. But even before his pamphlet appeared, the port act had antagonized the other colonies, where political activists had reached similar conclusions. By the end of May, the Chesapeake was rallying to Boston’s aid. At the tobacco harbor of Annapolis, a town meeting on the twenty-fifth urged Maryland to join the boycott, calling for reprisals against any colony that failed to follow suit. And in Virginia, the British suffered another stroke of bad luck when news of the port act reached Williamsburg just as the House of Burgesses was meeting in its yearly session.
“We cooked up a resolution,” Thomas Jefferson remembered, opposing the act and calling for a day of prayer and fasting in support of Boston. Soon afterward, Governor Dunmore dissolved the assembly, and then, on May 27, at the Raleigh Tavern, eighty-nine burgesses called for a continental congress to organize an anti-British movement. But as late as the last week of June, a month after the meetings at Annapolis and Williamsburg, Gage still had no idea of their significance. His negligent counterpart Lord Dunmore did little to help. After sending a brief letter to England about the meeting at the Raleigh Tavern, the governor of Virginia took off
for the frontier on a punitive expedition against the Shawnee, an affair that kept him out of touch until the winter.
The general was almost as ignorant about the discontent abroad in Pennsylvania and New York. As always, in both these provinces the politics were complex, with the people split into factions, and their response to the Coercive Acts was hard to call. The merchants were divided, but mostly afraid of the damage a trade boycott might cause. Even so, any British officer who took a walk on the Manhattan waterfront would have encountered intense hostility. On June 15, a crowd running into thousands built a gallows and burned more effigies of Wedderburn, Hutchinson, and Lord North. And this demonstration took place long before anyone in America had an inkling of the legislation for Quebec, which would arouse so much more resentment.
Gage must have known what the Quebec Act contained, at least in outline, since it had been through two drafts even before he left England. And if he did, he should have foreseen the hostility that it would arouse far beyond the borders of Massachusetts. But instead he focused all his attention narrowly on Boston and the towns nearby. For Gage, so ignorant about so much, it was all too easy to believe that Boston’s call for help from the other colonies would go unheeded. In his opinion, New York and Philadelphia would never join the boycott, and the Continental Congress might never even happen. “Boston may get little more than fair words,” the general wrote to Lord Dartmouth on June 26, with an almost breathtaking degree of complacency.
And so Gage simply went on waiting, with scarcely a trace of a strategic plan. Long before the end of the month he gave up on the House of Representatives, which had met in Salem on the seventh in an uncompromising mood. With Elbridge Gerry to the fore, the assembly did nothing but agitate, voting behind closed doors to send delegates to the Continental Congress that Virginia proposed. Ten days later, Gage dissolved the house and set no date to reconvene, but even this was a mistake, serving as an open invitation to the delegates to reconvene illegally whenever they saw fit. He also read too much into a tactical setback suffered by Samuel Adams. For weeks, Adams’s Committee of Correspondence had been trying to build support for a document called the Solemn League and Covenant, which called on every town and county to ban the consumption of British goods. Fiercely opposed by the mercantile community, it failed to win widespread support, but from this Gage leaped to the conclusion that public opinion was turning in his favor. Privately, the general was already tired and frustrated, worn down by the constant slander of Great Britain in the press, but his letters home to Dartmouth in midsummer still struck a note of self-assurance. It would take time, but the people would gradually see reason. If he remained calm and waited for the closure of the port to take effect, the agitators would slowly lose their grip, people of goodwill would reemerge to take the lead, and the likes of Hancock would be brought to justice.