An Empire on the Edge

by Nick Bunker

  According to Lee, who had recently finished his term as sheriff of London, the Coercive Acts had amounted to what he called “the most open and explicit DECLARATION OF WAR … against your province.” Hitherto, Lord Dartmouth had largely escaped the insults and abuse the colonial press hurled at every other minister, but now Lee branded him a villain too. “You have not a friend in the whole administration,” he wrote. “Lord Dartmouth, notwithstanding his fawning and deceitful expressions to the Americans, is in the cabinet as determined and violent an enemy to you as any in this country.”

  Again, this was highly misleading—that very week, Dartmouth was privately telling friends that he might open talks with the Continental Congress—but in Massachusetts the time for negotiation and compromise had already passed. In the interior, a campaign of intimidation had begun against the mandamus councillors, with a few shots fired and many demonstrations in the streets. On the coast, the next move came from the Committee of Correspondence at Salem, with Gerry’s old college mate Timothy Pickering foremost among them. Apart from closing a courthouse, the most obvious way to annoy the British and subvert royal authority was to hold a town meeting in defiance of the law. Salem called such a meeting on the morning of August 24.

  At eight o’clock, an hour before it was due to convene, General Gage summoned Pickering and his comrades, told them the meeting was seditious, and ordered them to make the people disperse the moment they arrived. They refused. The general had redcoats standing by from the Fifty-Ninth Foot, and he sent them into town. With the soldiers on their way, the meeting assembled, swiftly did its business, and then adjourned. The troops marched back to camp, but twenty-four hours later Gage put the committee under arrest. That evening, armed men began to gather in the towns nearby, determined to free them by force if necessary.20

  All this time the weather had been foul, with heavy rain and thunderstorms. On the morning of Friday, August 26, at last the sun rose in a cloudless sky, shining down on farmers gathering in the last of the harvest, threshing their crops, or turning out their sheep to graze on the stubble. But to General Gage, hearing reports of unrest from all sides, the colony seemed to be collapsing into chaos, and he expected an imminent attack on his headquarters. At Danvers, Gage had two companies from Leslie’s regiment, the Sixty-Fourth; at Salem, the Fifty-Ninth was still in readiness; and a small detachment had gone to Marblehead. The general stood them all to arms. “If the attacks should be serious, that is made with firearms,” he wrote, “the 59th will march & disperse the rebels; and they will remark that the Committee of Correspondence are the sole authors … of every mischief that shall happen.”21

  It was the moment Alexander Leslie had been longing for. For the first time, the general had given his officers written permission to open fire. Not since the riots against the Stamp Act had Gage seen America so close to rebellion, but the general was looking for treason in the wrong place. While the redcoats waited in vain for trouble in Salem, remaining on the alert until night fell, the revolution was about to occur behind closed doors in Boston. Ten days after Worcester first proposed a conference, delegates assembled from the Committees of Correspondence of four counties—Timothy Bigelow from Worcester, Elbridge Gerry from Essex, and representatives from Middlesex and Suffolk—to plan a coordinated campaign of resistance.

  With Joseph Warren in the chair, they had only one item to discuss. If, as they all agreed, the courts of law had been transformed into vehicles of tyranny, then the conference had to create new institutions of government to take their place. They chose five men to form a subcommittee, including Gerry, Bigelow, and Dr. Young, the Tea Party veteran, and sent them off to produce a blueprint. At eleven in the morning on Saturday, August 27, the conference met again, heard their report, and then adjourned until the afternoon. At three o’clock they signed a declaration, carefully drafted and checked to ensure that their position was absolutely clear.

  At that moment the revolution began. “Every officer belonging to the courts aforesaid who shall attempt to exercise authority will be a traitor, cloaked with the pretext of law,” ran the declaration’s central paragraph, “and so are all others to be considered, whether officers or private persons, who shall attempt to execute the late acts of parliament for violating the constitution of this province.”

  To replace the courts, they called for a provincial congress, composed of members chosen by each county, which would meet in October to act as a provisional government. The document ended with an ominous clause in which the hand of Elbridge Gerry was plainly visible: “The Military Art according to the Norfolk Plan ought attentively to be prosecuted by the People of this Province, as a necessary means to secure their liberties.”22

  Although none of this would appear in the press—if it had, all those who attended the meeting could have been indicted for treason—the declaration went to every county to be put to a vote in the weeks that followed. Even before the conference ended, Worcester had already risen, with perhaps as many as three thousand men flocking to the town to compel one of the mandamus councillors to resign. By the evening of the twenty-seventh, Gage had written a long dispatch to Dartmouth, warning him that he would have to march on Worcester to protect the judges when they met in session in the town ten days later.

  “Popular fury was never greater,” he told the colonial secretary before hurrying down to Boston, where the situation was deteriorating by the hour. In the camp, he found four of his councillors taking shelter with the troops, two more were on their way, and from all across the province word arrived that town meetings were gathering illegally. Gage doubled the guard and gave orders for the army’s timber yard to be protected against incendiaries.

  The Sabbath passed quietly enough, but Monday, the twenty-ninth, brought another alarming development. A letter arrived from the elderly William Brattle, who practiced law and medicine in Cambridge. An old ally of Thomas Hutchinson, Brattle held the rank of major general in the colony’s militia, a post that gave him the keys to the province’s gunpowder store. Six miles north of Boston, it was housed in an old stone mill on a grassy knoll called Quarry Hill, amid the cornfields that sloped up from the Mystic River. It had not occurred to Gage to move the store to a place of safety or to put it under guard, using his legal powers as Brattle’s commander in chief. For weeks, said Brattle, towns had been quietly removing the quota of powder that each one was supposed to keep in the mill, until all that was left was a reserve supply of 250 half barrels. From all sides he was hearing rumors of local militia companies telling their men to be ready “at a minute’s notice.”23

  Indeed, by now the leaders of the rising were clearly preparing for bloodshed. Again, the Marblehead committee was one of the most outspoken when it wrote that week to its counterparts in Boston. The committee members hoped an armed struggle would be unnecessary; they urged their comrades to hold the people back, at least for a month or two, in case the government fell in London; but if it did not, and the shooting started, the colony had to be ready to fight. “When once the sword is drawn, we must expect a long and bloody war,” the letter continued. All of this was treason, and although Gage never saw that letter, and knew nothing about the Boston conference on August 26 and 27, he was hearing reports from Worcester that rebels were buying guns and making bullets. But even now he hesitated. After receiving Brattle’s letter, he waited some forty-eight hours before issuing his next set of orders at seven in the evening of August 31.24

  Clearly, he had to rescue the gunpowder together with two small cannon parked nearby at Cambridge. To undertake the mission, he took two hundred soldiers from the infantry, each one equipped with a day’s rations, and twenty gunners from his artillery. Instead of the fire-eating Alexander Leslie, he chose another lieutenant colonel to command the force, George Maddison, an older man recently arrived from England. At dawn the next morning, Maddison led them down from Boston Common to the longboats that would ferry them up the Mystic. They landed at a spot less than a mile from the magazi
ne and marched up the slope to Quarry Hill to meet the county sheriff. He handed over the keys and gave the gunners a train of horses borrowed from a local tavern keeper. While the gunners headed over to Cambridge for the cannon, the redcoats emptied the mill, loading the powder into wagons arranged by the sheriff. That afternoon they were back in Boston, with their mission a complete success.*3

  But in the meantime Gage had done nothing else, failing to anticipate the uproar that would follow his seizure of the powder. In the next twenty-four hours, he found himself thrown off balance by the pace at which intelligence could circulate in New England. By the morning of September 2, word of Maddison’s expedition had sped around the eastern half of the colony, setting off a chain reaction of rumor and alarm. It was said that the redcoats were on the rampage after shooting six Americans dead, a falsehood that brought insurgents flocking into Cambridge in their thousands. “A vast concourse of people assembled,” the general wrote, as he struggled to make sense of what happened that day.25

  Somehow the text of Brattle’s letter had been made public. The people mobbed his house, a few hundred yards from the Harvard campus, only to find that he had vanished. Because this was a popular rising, without a structure or a guiding hand, the precise sequence of events remains as confusing and obscure today as it was to General Gage at the time. Filled with people loyal to the British—even then, Cambridge served as a dormitory for Boston’s more affluent citizens—the town supplied a host of targets for attack by men and women convinced that the British were bent on imposing their authority by force.

  No servant of the empire was secure. It so happened that three of Gage’s most senior officials were in Cambridge on the second, and although they escaped unharmed, they were forced to flee to the protection of the army. The general’s lieutenant governor, Thomas Oliver, was a Cambridge resident, and so was Jonathan Sewall, the colony’s attorney general. By nightfall both of them were sheltering in the tents on Boston Common. The third man was Benjamin Hallowell, the commissioner of customs, who was en route from Salem armed with a pistol. Nine months earlier, Hallowell had refused to allow the tea to be sent back to England. As he passed through Cambridge, his carriage was spotted, and a crowd gave chase. With rebels on horseback close behind him, Hallowell narrowly escaped the fate that had befallen his junior officer John Malcolm.

  At six o’clock that evening, General Gage tried to assess the situation. After so many weeks of denial, he began to draft an abject letter to Lord Dartmouth that amounted to a confession of defeat. “Civil government is near its end, the courts of justice expiring one after the other,” he wrote. One by one, the new mandamus councillors were resigning, even the senior judges were too frightened to sit on the bench, and the flames of protest had spread to Connecticut and Rhode Island, where Nathanael Greene was among the officers leading a new independent militia pledged to come to Boston’s aid. And the following day, the position deteriorated still further. It was rumored that the navy had bombarded Boston. By noon on the third, militiamen running into tens of thousands were converging from all over the region to save the town from destruction.26

  When they saw that the alarm was false, they stood down, but again the speed and the scale of their mobilization took Gage entirely by surprise. In angry words that echoed those of Alexander Leslie, the general spoke of a “bloody crisis” looming up ahead, for which he would need a far larger army than the one he had so far assembled. “Conciliation, moderation, reasoning is over, nothing can be done but by forcible means,” he told the colonial secretary. By the time his dispatch to Lord Dartmouth was at sea, the people of Worcester County had risen again, six thousand strong, and forced the closure of their courthouse.

  This was the point at which the general lost his nerve, descending into a state of near panic in which his intellect deserted him even though his plight was far from desperate. While Graves’s naval squadron was still far too small to blockade the entire northeastern seaboard, it could sail where it pleased, and it gave the army mobility. The bases at Halifax and New York remained entirely safe, and more troops were on their way from home. Although Massachusetts had become ungovernable, this was hardly new: the riots of September merely set the seal on a history of disobedience that went back two years, to the Boston pamphlet of November 1772. It was clear that the British cabinet’s strategy had failed—except for the port act, the coercive laws could not be enforced—but that being so, it needed to be rethought and not pursued blindly until another catastrophe occurred.

  At this moment, Gage might have saved the day by temporarily letting Massachusetts go and withdrawing to New York and the Hudson valley. New England could have been recovered later, like Scotland after the rebellion of 1745, at a time when Gage had assembled a larger army and the Admiralty had sent a far stronger fleet. In order to change course so radically, first he would have had to convince the cabinet that it was necessary. This would have been difficult but not impossible, provided Gage mustered his evidence and set out a persuasive plan for the reestablishment of royal authority. But in fact the general made no serious attempt to devise an alternative strategy.

  Instead, Gage chose to remain all too preoccupied with Boston, a town that was more a symbol of the empire than a strategic asset. For the sake of preserving a semblance of authority, he felt that he had to remain to protect citizens loyal to Great Britain and to fly the flag. Again, he allowed his political mission to dictate his thinking even when it had already proved to be incapable of fulfillment. Forgetting about the rest of the continent, Gage chose to make Boston an American Singapore, a fortress supplied by sea but surrounded by a hinterland that he could neither defend nor control. In doing so, he more or less ensured that 1775 would be a year of calamity.

  On the evening of September 2, Gage told his engineers to fortify the Neck, the narrow strip of ground that connected Boston to the mainland. Redcoats would patrol the streets by night, while the fleet kept watch on the harbor. Counting all the soldiers in his seven regiments of foot, his artillery, and his headquarters staff, the general had about three thousand troops at his disposal. With that small force, outnumbered at least five to one by those the rebels could call out, Gage settled down to wait again. As he did so, Lord North was about to make yet another error of his own. His victory in Parliament had left him all too confident about the future.27

  * * *

  *1 Jack Rakove, in his book Revolutionaries (Boston, 2010).

  *2 A point made very clearly by a writer, who might have been Benjamin Franklin, in the newspapers in Boston and Pennsylvania that autumn.

  *3 Gage never gave Lord Dartmouth a full account of the mission to rescue the gunpowder. Doubtless he did not wish to raise questions about his failure to secure it in the first place.

  Chapter Fourteen

  AN ELECTION IN ARCADIA

  It was yesterday reported that General Gage was killed and two regiments of his revolted.

  —London Evening Post, OCTOBER 1, 1774

  In England the summer had begun with glamour and festivity. Even while Parliament was still in session, its members took a brief vacation for a party so exquisite that it filled the columns of the press. On the ninth of June, little more than a week after the British closed the port of Boston, Lord North hurried through a debate about Quebec and let his colleagues have an evening in the country south of London to celebrate the finest betrothal of the year. They were invited to the Oaks, a mansion in Surrey, for a masque, a banquet, and a ball.

  The event was a fête champêtre arranged in honor of a noble couple, the young Edward, Lord Stanley, and his bride-to-be, Lady Betty Hamilton, who came from the richest family in Scotland. Alas, in 1779 the match would end in tears, when Lady Betty ran off with a duke; but her engagement party at the Oaks was wonderful. Lord and Lady North attended, as did the rest of the cabinet; and the event had a choreographer, another soldier-cum-politician, Lord Stanley’s uncle John Burgoyne, the general who would lose at Saratoga, almost the worst defea
t the British would suffer in the war that was to come.

  To help him stage the party, Burgoyne enlisted the support of the ubiquitous Robert Adam, who designed the pavilion where the ball took place. Between them, Adam and Burgoyne created an occasion that caught Britain’s imagination and supplied a talking point for months. The event even made the papers in America, which reported sneering words from the opposition in the Commons. Later that year, while New England was in ferment, David Garrick turned the masque into a musical comedy, putting it on the London stage, where the king could enjoy it too. Like one of those parties that adorn the pages of Marcel Proust, the fête at the Oaks captured the mood of a ruling elite at a dangerous moment in its history.

  The supper room from Robert Adam’s pavilion for Lord Stanley’s party at the Oaks in June 1774, engraved from a painting by Antonio Zucchi. The Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge

  To their way of thinking, the British ruling class embodied all the virtues of which the human race was capable. They were elegant, they were erudite, but they were funny too; they lived in the best society that men and women could devise, where liberty and discipline existed side by side; and while they loved tradition and the past, they took delight as well in modern ingenuity. In the words of Burgoyne, in the script he wrote for the party at the Oaks, England was “a new Arcadia.” In the fête in Surrey he gave the kingdom a looking glass in which its rulers could admire the nation’s features and their own.