by Nick Bunker
Meanwhile, Yorke’s agents had obtained more intelligence. It was said that Page had purchased swivel guns for use at sea and hid them beneath coils of rope in the bow of his ship. A dispatch arrived from Hamburg about a craft from New York loading ammunition, and then new reports came in from Amsterdam about more sloops from Rhode Island doing the same thing. Sir Joseph asked the Dutch authorities to search the Smack, which they refused to do. The evidence collected by the spies amounted to hearsay and nothing more. So the cutter Wells remained on watch while Yorke tried to persuade the Dutch to cooperate.
The affair was very murky. It took another four months for the British to obtain the proof they needed that Rhode Islanders were running guns from Holland, and the records that survive remain open to more than one interpretation. But of one thing there can be no doubt. By the end of October the king and his ministers believed that Americans were arming themselves for war. The intelligence from Sir Joseph Yorke convinced them that this was so. It hardened British attitudes and made the outbreak of hostilities all the more likely. But if that is the case, then the affair raises important questions about colonial responsibility for the bloodshed that occurred.
Were these American ships acting on behalf of the patriot movement in New England? Were the arms they bought intended to supply the militia in Massachusetts or Rhode Island? If they were, what did that imply? A spring campaign against General Gage—or merely a defensive action if the redcoats tried to march out of Boston and subdue the interior? Or had Benjamin Page and the other skippers sailed to Europe freelance, purely in the hope of making money? Whatever lay in store in 1775, the price of gunpowder was hardly likely to fall, and any guns they bought would find ready takers in America on one side or the other of the political divide.
These questions cannot be answered conclusively, for the obvious reason: gun runners try not to leave a paper trail. But their significance is more than merely academic. If the Smack and the other ships sailed with the knowledge and the blessing of John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and their allies, then Hancock and the New England patriots were clearly committing an act of provocation. While the Americans had every right to defend themselves, they must also have known how furious the British would be if and when they discovered what was going on. The king and his ministers would have to take preemptive action to forestall the arming of America, and if they did so—by arresting colonial ships or searching for hidden caches of weapons in the Boston area—then lives were bound to be lost as a result.
From the fragmentary evidence available, it would appear that Benjamin Page did indeed belong to an organized conspiracy to arm and equip a force to fight the Crown. Ostensibly, the American ships planned to sail from Amsterdam to the Caribbean island of St. Eustatius, which was Dutch, or to the Danish colony at St. Croix. This would have been perfectly legal, even though everyone knew that both were used by American traders in smuggled tea and molasses. But it seems more likely that Page actually intended to take the guns straight to New England.
Significantly, the Smack had left Rhode Island on August 22, at a moment when the papers in Boston and Providence were full of stories about the Quebec Act and the protests it had aroused in Great Britain. The press was claiming that the British had, in effect, declared war on the colonies, and already volunteers were drilling with their arms in Worcester, Massachusetts, and other towns, including Providence. As for Benjamin Page, a young Rhode Islander of that name took part in the attack on the Gaspée and went on to fight at sea against the British during the Revolutionary War. In 1818, at the age of sixty-five, Page applied for a pension from the United States, setting out his record in detail. He had served under the command of Captain Abraham Whipple, the man from Providence who led the Gaspée raid.3
Conceivably, the skipper of the Smack might have been another Benjamin Page—the name is hardly unusual—and the date of the Smack’s departure for Europe might have been coincidental. But while the evidence might not be enough to convince a jury, it looks very much as though the men who burned the Gaspée took the decision to arm a navy of their own, complete with swivel guns, at a time—August 1774—when the British had no plans for war of any kind. Of course this raises another question: were the Rhode Islanders acting alone, or did they share their plans with their comrades in Massachusetts? All one can say is this: that for years Samuel Adams had been exchanging letters with like-minded friends in Providence, including Darius Sessions, who was Rhode Island’s deputy governor and the officer commanding its militia.
Wherever the truth might lie, the dispatches from Sir Joseph Yorke changed the atmosphere in London. The cabinet ministers began to think seriously about the use of force. In the final week of October, with the reports from The Hague still fresh in their minds, they received another shocking piece of news from America that pushed them further in the same direction. The news came not from Boston—nothing more had arrived from General Gage—but from the Congress assembled in Philadelphia.
Until now the British had remained almost entirely in the dark about its discussions, and what little they did know suggested that it might opt for compromise. Lord Dartmouth had read some letters from a friendly delegate, Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania, who struck a note of cautious optimism. According to him, writing just before the proceedings began early in September, the Continental Congress would behave with “temper and moderation.” While he expected angry words from Boston and Virginia, calling for a sweeping boycott of trade, he hoped the majority would see sense. They might even agree to send envoys to England, said Galloway, in an attempt to settle their differences with the empire.
Although he knew it would be hard to reach a deal of any kind, Lord Dartmouth was certainly willing to talk. But on October 28 a report arrived that seemed to dash all his hopes for peace.
To its horror, the cabinet learned that far from being moderate, the Congress had thrown its weight behind the worst extremists in New England. Again the London newspapers had the story first, from a cargo ship that docked in the Mersey, while the ministers were left to flounder with no sources of their own.
Six weeks earlier, with not one voice raised in dissent, the Congress had approved a startling document known as the Suffolk Resolves. Coming from Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which included Boston, it blazed with outrage at the British seizure of the powder store. Like every other county in the province, Suffolk had received the revolutionary manifesto drawn up in Boston on August 27 by Joseph Warren, Elbridge Gerry, and their comrades. After inserting some furious invective of its own, the Suffolk County meeting endorsed all their proposals, including a new militia and a provisional government to be created by the Provincial Congress due to meet in Concord.
When it voted for the Suffolk Resolves, it seems that the Continental Congress merely intended to make a gesture of solidarity with Massachusetts. The vote came at an early stage of its proceedings, when it had not yet decided what form a national movement of resistance should take. But when it appeared in London in late October, the story left the cabinet “thunderstruck,” said Thomas Hutchinson. “Why, if these resolves are to be depended on, they have already declared war against us,” Dartmouth told the former governor. In the days that followed, the cabinet found itself in disarray once more, stricken with fear that America was being lost but unable to conceive of any strategy to save it. Its confidence in General Gage began to disappear entirely.4
A week or so later Jefferson’s Summary View became available in London, followed in the middle of November by Quincy’s pamphlet about the port act. But still the cabinet had no word from the general. Unable to spare a sloop from Admiral Graves’s naval squadron, Gage had sent his most recent dispatch on a merchant ship so slow that the letter took seven weeks to reach Whitehall, a fortnight longer than it should have. And when at last it arrived on November 18, it damaged his reputation almost beyond repair. Even George III lost patience with the soldier who had been so certain of success.
It was a brief and fatuous
dispatch, devoid of hard facts and equally lacking in analysis. Dated three weeks after the powder alarm, Gage’s letter failed to give an estimate of the military resources of Massachusetts, something the cabinet urgently required. General Gage said next to nothing about the rest of the region, about New York, or about the busy goings-on in Philadelphia. What little he did say was deeply worrying. He could hold Boston and Salem, but that was all: the remainder of the province was beyond his control. To enforce the Coercive Acts, the army would have to recapture New England, an enterprise for which he would need far more troops than he had. In a separate, private letter Gage suggested suspending the new laws, but he could not say when they might be restored or what alternative might take their place.
The very idea was absurd, said the king: to do as Gage proposed would make a mockery of Parliament, exposing its claim to sovereignty as nothing but a hollow sham. Lord North agreed entirely. By the third week of November, the king and his premier had decided that a rebellion had begun, leaving them little option but the use of force. From that moment, the scales began to tilt in the direction of war: a limited war against the rebels in New England, but a war nonetheless. “Blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent,” wrote the king on November 19, with the full agreement of a clear majority in the cabinet. Reluctantly, Lord Dartmouth had reached the same conclusion: the army must suppress the insurgency.
This was easily said but far from easily done. It would take nearly three more months for the government to issue the decisive orders telling Gage to take the offensive. For a host of reasons, most of them aired at great length in the press and then in Parliament, it had to act slowly and with deliberation. The government would need to talk to its lawyers, it would have to make one last, futile effort at diplomacy, and, as we shall see, it would even have to wait for the weather to change in the Atlantic.
Above all, the cabinet feared that if it acted too hastily, it might drive the other colonies into the arms of Massachusetts. As yet the British did not know the final outcome of the Continental Congress. Despite the vote in favor of the Suffolk Resolves, perhaps Joseph Galloway might still be proved right. What if the delegates backed away from confrontation and left some room for a peaceful compromise? However pessimistic he might be about the rebel towns of New England, Lord Dartmouth remained open to negotiation with moderates elsewhere. It was always possible—or so he thought—that a silent majority of loyalists would emerge, from the Hudson valley, rural Connecticut, or the backcountry of the South. If so, then they needed encouragement from London, but it was hard to say what form it ought to take.
Despite their strategic importance, the tobacco colonies remained the region the British found hardest to call. Lord Dunmore had still failed to report from Virginia, while in Maryland the empire now had no representative at all. In theory, the province fell under the supervision of a British governor, a young man of thirty-two named Robert Eden, married to a lady from the Calvert family, the colony’s ancient proprietors. In practice, Eden had already chosen the path of abdication. When the colony’s assembly finished its annual session at the end of May, he promptly sailed for England with his wife for a long holiday, pausing only to pay his wine bill and enter a horse for the local races. On arrival he failed to visit the ministers in Whitehall, and he wrote them not a line. The Maryland file remained empty.5
With Eden acting on its behalf, it was scarcely surprising that the empire lost touch with the tobacco country. To the extent that he thought about anything at all, Eden’s reasoning seems to have been as follows: however unhappy the South might be, the landowning class of the region would never renounce its allegiance to the Crown. An economy based on slavery produced its own local elite, composed of wealthy planters very different from the northern radicals. Like those of the West Indies, they relied on the British for a market for their produce and for protection if the slaves rose in revolt. This idea—that Maryland and Virginia were inherently loyal—cast its spell in London too, where John Pownall said as much to Lord Dartmouth. And yet, as the autumn wore on, it became apparent that the opposite was true. The planters were veering away toward a rebellion of their own.
Along with the alarming news about the Smack, the letters from The Hague had revealed that tobacco farmers from Virginia were planning to sell their next year’s crop in Holland. This was illegal, but what did it signify? It might be a sign that the planters were falling in alongside the rebels in Massachusetts. Or perhaps they were simply trying to forestall a British ban on colonial tobacco, a measure that North might impose as a means to pressure the Continental Congress. Here was another riddle that the cabinet could not solve, though a glance at Jefferson’s Summary View might have helped it make up its mind.
And while they pondered that conundrum, Lord North and his colleagues also had to think about the law of treason. It was one thing to form a private opinion that John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Joseph Warren, and the rest were rebels. It was quite another to arrest them, hang them, or shoot them dead without firm evidence of specific acts of treachery. Unwilling to cede the moral high ground, especially with the powers of Europe looking on, the cabinet needed more proof before it could act against them.
As a way to overcome this obstacle, the king and his ministers began to consider another option: a formal declaration, issued by Parliament, proclaiming that a state of rebellion existed in Massachusetts. This would legally justify the use of force. As November drew to a close, this idea began to circulate in Whitehall, but it posed problems of its own that led to further delays. The last great rebellion had been the 1745 uprising, when Charles Edward Stuart branded himself a traitor by raising his banner beside the loch at Glenfinnan. Before Parliament could vote, the rebels led by Hancock and Adams would have to produce their own Glenfinnan moment: they would have to attach their names to an act of treason so visible and blatant that no one could doubt their guilt or the need for military action.
All the time, the critics of General Gage became more strident, as it became ever clearer that he lay beleaguered in Boston, unable or unwilling to venture beyond a tight perimeter. Doubts were cast on his courage as well as his powers of analysis. Why had he done so little? Why had he failed to quell the insurgency at Worcester? As early as November 22, Lord Suffolk called for his dismissal. “It is idle to do things by halves,” Suffolk said. Although North and the king did not go so far, they agreed that Gage needed help from new major generals sent from England to bolster his resolve. And meanwhile, even his closest friend at the War Office was questioning the wisdom of occupying Boston.
For many years, Gage had shared his private thoughts with the secretary at war, Lord Barrington. Loyal and efficient, with nearly two decades behind him in his post, Barrington could see how pointless it was to wedge the army so tightly into the town, where it would be condemned to what he called “a disgraceful inaction.” Aware of the general’s earlier view that the Hudson held the key to North America, Barrington urged his colleagues to remove the redcoats from Massachusetts, leaving only a small garrison to hold Castle William and sweep the harbor with its artillery.6
Barrington wrote those words on November 12, but his advice came too late, with not a chance of being listened to. Despite his title, his high intelligence, and his years of service, Barrington did not rank as a member of the cabinet. His influence was limited, and if accepted his proposal would throw a still heavier burden on his opposite number at the Admiralty. The task of ending the rebellion would fall primarily to the navy, at a time when Lord Sandwich still wanted to keep the vast bulk of the fleet in the British Isles to deter the French from any act of aggression.
And so the weeks passed, with still no word from Philadelphia about the outcome of the Continental Congress. War seemed ever more likely, but the cabinet could form no definite plan of action until it knew what the Congress had decided. Even the weather changed for the worse again, with gales in the Channel and weeks of bitter cold and rain turning
to early snow. All around the capital the crime wave continued, with burglary rife in the suburbs and robbers stalking the lanes that led across the fields to Piccadilly. With more than its usual panache the London season began, with at its heart a great new beauty, Lady Mary Somerset, eighteen years old and outrageously chic in clothes and a hairstyle fresh from Paris. At Drury Lane, Garrick put on The Maid of the Oaks, with as a companion piece a satire, The Lottery, making fun of the gambling craze. But when Parliament reassembled, its mood was anxious and subdued.
On November 30, George III opened the session with a grim assessment of the situation. In Massachusetts he beheld “a most daring spirit of resistance to the law.” His speech promised firm measures to reassert British authority, but the king gave not a shred of detail about the form that they might take. The following day, in private the cabinet formally decided to seek a declaration of rebellion. As a preliminary, it asked Attorney General Thurlow to study the dispatches from General Gage and give a legal opinion: Could he see clear evidence of acts of treason? Apart from that, the government’s paralysis continued.
As always, the Commons had to discuss the king’s speech, but although Lord North won the debate by nearly two hundred votes, his eloquence had deserted him. Embarrassed by his own inaction, he could offer only lame excuses when he rose to speak on December 5. Of course he wanted reconciliation with America, but the Congress had yet to offer any terms. Until it did, matters remained in what he called “a state of suspense.” In the House of Lords the Duke of Richmond rebelled again, leading thirteen peers in a motion of dissent from what the king had said, but this was only a skirmish. The next great battle in Parliament was still eight weeks away. With its timetable choked by election disputes, it would be late January before it could vote on the declaration the cabinet required.