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Once again for Marlene
LIST OF MAPS
Chapter 1. British North America, 1775, here
Chapter 1. Boston and Vicinity, 1775, here
Chapter 5. Salem and the Route of Colonel Leslie’s Raid, here
Chapter 9. Routes to Concord, here
Chapter 10. Lexington Green, here
Chapter 11. Concord and North Bridge, here
Chapter 13. Battle Road, here
Chapter 18. Attack on Fort Ticonderoga, here
Chapter 20. Battles of Grape and Noddle’s Islands, here
Chapter 23. Battle of Bunker Hill, here
Patriots’ Day
Present!” Red-coated British regulars in precise formation level their muskets across the expanse of green grass. Fifty yards to their front, colonials in dark homespun wait with a mixture of trepidation and resolve. How has it come to this? Several late arrivals, muskets in hand, run, panting, to join the ragged line of locals. As they do so, a shrill command fills the morning air from behind the Redcoat ranks. “Fire!” A thundering retort rings out. The line of leveled muskets disappears in a cloud of white smoke, and the smell of gunpowder quickly wafts across the field.
Among the local militia, several men are down, blood oozing from their garments. Others are moving toward the shelter of adjacent buildings and a nearby stand of trees. But most of the militiamen stand their ground and dare to return fire—a cacophony of sporadic shots that crisscross the field in front of them. Into this void, the British regulars move forward at the quickstep with glistening bayonets fixed. In seconds, they will sweep the militiamen before them.
Then, from the crowd of spectators gathered around, come the sounds of cameras clicking and a chorus of oohs and aahs. And it is over. The regulars halt their advance, and a cheer goes up from both sides. The “wounded” effortlessly rise to their feet. Hats and caps are doffed on both sides, and handshakes all around are the order of the day.
ON THE THIRD MONDAY OF every April, the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts celebrate. Around the towns of Lexington and Concord and in between, along what is called Battle Road, the sounds of fifes and drums and the rattle of reenactors’ muskets fill the spring air. Individuals in period costumes tell stories, march in military formations, and pose for photographs. Tour buses line the routes to Lexington Green and Concord’s North Bridge, and parking spots of any size are highly prized for miles in every direction. Down the road in Boston, the annual marathon is under way. The Patriots are a football team, Samuel Adams is a beer, and John Hancock is an insurance company.
The celebration is Patriots’ Day, and who now would not be a patriot? The outcome of what began in earnest that long-ago morning on Lexington Green seems preordained and inevitable. But in the spring of 1775, the central issue—blind obedience to Great Britain, no matter how oppressive its rule, versus independence and the freedom to form a more representative government—was very much in doubt and the opposing sides not yet irrevocably defined. Who were the rebels? Who were the loyalists? Who were those caught in the middle? Liberty and independence were noble concepts, but how far across the populace would their bounty be spread?
Boston and the surrounding villages and towns of Massachusetts had long been flash points in relations between Great Britain and its North American colonies. New England’s hardy lifestyle, both on sea and on land, had put a stubborn streak of independent thought into its inhabitants. Given the abundance of trade flowing in and out of Boston Harbor, taxes, duties, and royal decrees tended to fall more onerously here and be met with stiff opposition. But while events in the spring of 1775 focused on Boston and its environs, the fundamental questions vexing its inhabitants—loyalty or rebellion, servitude or freedom—were no less trying to residents in front of the statehouse in Philadelphia, on the streets of Williamsburg, Virginia, or on the wharves at Charleston, South Carolina.
In history’s shorthand, and from an American viewpoint, the Redcoats were the bad guys and the “embattled farmers” of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s epic poem the good guys. But it was hardly that simple. There were neighbors on opposite sides, and, surprising to some, there was significant support in Great Britain for colonists’ rights. Some who had liberal political leanings supported the colonists, feeling that the rights they cherished should apply to all Englishmen—at least those who were white and male. Others in England supported the colonists because they wanted to preserve the lucrative trade between the ports of the British Isles and North America.
Whether one had loyalist or rebel leanings or was intractably resolved toward one side or the other, the first six months of 1775 were a critical transition period—a spring of uncertainty, a spring of change, a spring of hope. Only in retrospect—after a long seven years that would come to be filled with names such as Saratoga, Valley Forge, and Yorktown—could it be said that this six-month period was truly an American spring. But after the spring of 1775, there was no question that both sides would fight fiercely to achieve or defeat the goal of independence from Great Britain.
The spring of 1775 was filled with a rush of decisive events that ultimately brought a war no one had planned to fight. Yet men and women on both sides determined to do so before compromising their beliefs in either the prerogative of king and Parliament or representative government. None knew how the conflict would play out. After Lexington and Concord, it brought horror to both sides. After Bunker Hill, the only certainty was that this battle had turned the struggle into a deadly confrontation between confirmed adversaries.
It is particularly powerful and insightful to return to the original affidavits, correspondence, and remembrances of the participants in these events and see history from their perspective—before two centuries of interpretation clouded their words. It is equally interesting to explore the roles of women, American loyalists, and African Americans, who were given little notice in many earlier histories. As sweeping as the cries for liberty and equality sounded to some, not all were to be the beneficiaries. This narrative strives to provide an immediacy to these events through the words of the participants, show that there were far more kinds of people involved than white males in three-cornered hats, and mark the spring of 1775 as one of the most decisive periods in American history. The conflict could have gone either way, and that we would be celebrating Patriots’ Day generations hence was not a certainty.
Today, amid the cacophony of Patriots’ Day sights and sounds, there is—if one listens closely—a background quiet that filters down to the present. Some of the buildings that stood more than 240 years ago still stand about Lexington Green, throughout Concord, and along Battle Road. The steeple of the Old North Church looks out across the Charles River to the granite spire honoring those who fought on the slopes around Bunker Hill. One can walk past Parker’s Revenge, Merriam’s Corner, and the spot where a messenger named Paul Revere was captured. But look deeper. Who were those who once walked these same streets, endured great anxiety and hardship, and ultimately made a choice? Who were those at risk in the spring of 1775?
Prologue
Tuesday, December 13, 1774
Lashed by a bitterly cold northeast wind, a
lone horseman galloped along the Post Road north of Boston. He moved in broad daylight, though the heavy gray clouds of a New England winter dimmed the low-angled sun. Galloped is perhaps too ambitious a word. A deep snowfall a few weeks before had first turned mushy and then solidified as the temperature dropped to sixteen degrees Fahrenheit at sunrise, leaving the road a jagged obstacle course of icy ruts and rock-hard ridges.
But onward the rider pressed. From his start early that morning in Boston, it had been twenty-four miles to Topsfield, then fourteen miles more to cross the Merrimack River at Newburyport. As the day waned, and with twenty-two miles still to go, the rider grew weary, but he was no stranger to such hardship. The horseman’s name was Paul Revere, and he was determined to reach Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and spread the alarm: “The regulars are coming!”
In the fleeting light of this short December afternoon, Revere rode into Portsmouth and went straight to the home of Samuel Cutts, a prosperous merchant whose substantial residence stood opposite his wharf and warehouse on the Piscataqua River. Cutts was a member of Portsmouth’s committee of correspondence, one of many such associations throughout Great Britain’s thirteen colonies that were increasingly trading information and voicing grievances against the British Crown. Put more bluntly, Cutts and the half-frozen messenger who knocked at his door were rebels.
The reason for Paul Revere’s urgency was that George III’s government had recently banned the importation of arms and gunpowder into North America in an effort to restrain this rebel faction in its deeds if not its words. Existing stores of arms and ammunition had immediately become highly prized. The principal New Hampshire cache was housed in aging Fort William and Mary on New Castle Island, several miles off Portsmouth Harbor.
Technically, these munitions were the king’s, kept in storage for use by both British regulars and colonial militia for their mutual self-defense. But as rebels exerted increasing influence over provincial legislatures, the distinction between Crown property and that of the individual provinces deepened. In response, General Thomas Gage, the British commander in chief in North America, had begun to exercise strict control over these stores for the Crown. The gist of Revere’s warning was that New Hampshire rebels should seize these weapons before British regulars en route from Boston could do so.
As Revere warmed himself by the hearth, members of Portsmouth’s committee of correspondence answered the summons to the Cutts residence. Some voiced concern that Revere had acted precipitously in delivering a warning from “only two or three of the Committee of Correspondence at Boston” when no fewer than seven were empowered to act. Lacking a quorum, the Portsmouth committee deferred action until a full meeting could be held the next day. But several committee members shared Revere’s sense of urgency. Rather than another meeting, daylight on Wednesday, December 14, was greeted by the beating of drums to summon volunteers to march on the fort.
By the time these Portsmouth men rowed to New Castle Island and joined inhabitants of New Castle, the resulting force numbered some four hundred. To oppose these local insurgents, Captain John Cochran commanded a total garrison of five men. But more than the soldiers under his command, Cochran was relying on the Union Jack flying from the fort’s flagpole to dissuade an attack. What better symbol of the power of his post? What colonial would dare assail it? To do so would be treason.
But that charge seemed of little concern to the local men who ignored Cochran’s refusal to open the gates, swarming over the walls despite the defenders’ discharge of several small cannons. The attackers quickly overpowered Cochran and his meager garrison. They “struck the King’s colours, with three cheers, broke open the Powder House, and carried off one hundred and three barrels of Powder, leaving only one behind.”1
By nightfall, it was New Hampshire royal governor John Wentworth’s turn to send a hasty message in the opposite direction of Revere’s ride. Briefly recounting the “most unhappy affair perpetrated here this day,” Wentworth warned General Gage that with the gunpowder seized, another rebel force was forming “to carry away all the Cannon and Arms belonging to the Castle… unless some assistance should arrive from Boston in time to prevent it.” Far from taking responsibility for this occurrence, Wentworth went on to complain: “This event too plainly proves the imbecility of this Government to carry into execution his Majesty’s Order in Council, for seizing and detaining Arms and Ammunition imported into this Province, without some strong Ships-of-War in this Harbour.”2
The British regulars were indeed coming, but they were taking their time about it. On this particular ride, Paul Revere’s warning—based on rebel intelligence in Boston—proved a bit premature. In fact, while General Gage had contemplated the possibility of a raid, he did not start troops northward from Boston to Portsmouth on board the sloop HMS Canceaux until December 17, the day after receiving Governor Wentworth’s anguished plea for assistance. By then it was too late. On the morning after the first raid, Wentworth issued an order to assemble thirty local men from the First Regiment of Militia—supposedly loyal to the king—to assist Cochran’s garrison in withstanding another round of pilfering. As his officers later reported to the governor, they “caused the Drums to be Beat, & Proclamation to be made at all the Publick corners, & on the Place of Parade,” but no person appeared “to Enlist.”3
That same afternoon of December 15, another band of rebels rowed out to Fort William and Mary and made off with small arms, “fifteen 4-pounders, and one 9-pounder, and a quantity of twelve and four and twenty pound shot.” Waiting for the tide to come in, they then spirited their prizes away by boat up the estuary of the Piscataqua River to Durham. According to one loyalist, “a few flaming demagogues” had persuaded the good people of New Hampshire “to commit a most outrageous overt act of treason and rebellion.”4
British regulars finally arrived in Portsmouth on board the Canceaux late on December 17, and another contingent disembarked from the frigate HMS Scarborough two days later. By then, the rebel cause in New Hampshire was safe and well supplied, but the Redcoats would march again.
PART I
AN IRREPRESSIBLE
TIDE
January–March 1775
It seams we have troublesome times a Coming for there is a great Disturbance a Broad in the earth & they say it is tea that caused it.
—Diary of Jemima Condict, October 1774
Chapter 1
New Year’s Day 1775
Throughout Great Britain’s thirteen American colonies, New Year’s Day 1775 dawned with grave feelings of anxiety and uncertainty. Relations with the colonies’ mother country had grown increasingly strained over the last decade—too many taxes; Crown troops quartered in colonists’ homes; intransigence at every turn when some measure of compromise might have better served both sides. And no matter which side one was on, there was an uncomfortable feeling of sitting on a powder keg and watching a fiery fuse burn ever shorter.
The thirteen colonies stretched more than one thousand miles along the Atlantic Seaboard from Georgia northward to Massachusetts, which still claimed Maine as its own. The many ranges of the Appalachian Mountains generally marked the colonies’ western boundaries, although a few frontier outposts had long been established beyond the mountains. The first complete census of these provinces would not be taken until 1790, but in 1775, the population was an estimated 2.5 million. About a fifth of them were enslaved.
The white population was descended largely from ancestors in the British Isles—England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales—though a Dutch population remained from the days when New York was New Amsterdam, Germans were concentrated in Pennsylvania, and French Huguenots resided in parts of Virginia and the Carolinas. Most slaves traced their roots to Africa or the West Indies, but particularly in New England, some came from subjugated Native American tribes. The bulk of the slave population worked in agriculture in the middle and southern colonies, but it was common to find both field and domestic slaves owned by upper-income families throug
hout New England and in metropolitan areas such as New York City and Philadelphia.
These urban areas were definitely the exception, as the colonies were largely agrarian and the countryside was filled with small villages, hamlets, and farms. The principal towns were Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with a booming population of thirty-five thousand inhabitants; New York City, New York (at the time including only Manhattan Island), with twenty-five thousand; and Charleston, South Carolina, supporting about twelve thousand. New Haven (Connecticut), Newport (Rhode Island), and Baltimore (Maryland) were smaller but growing in both size and influence. Boston’s population in 1775 has been estimated at sixteen thousand, but increasing friction between British regulars stationed in the city and its inhabitants had contributed to a steady exodus of its citizenry as many fled the town for the countryside.1
While there was a great measure of self-sufficiency among local farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers, the colonies were also a vital part of the trading network of the greater British Empire. New England shipwrights built oceangoing sailing ships from fine stands of hardwood forests. Southern planters shipped rice and tobacco to Europe. A ready supply of sugar, often in liquid form as molasses, went from the West Indies to New England or Europe, where it was distilled into rum. Textiles and manufactured goods were transported back across the Atlantic to North America or Africa. The shipment of slaves from the latter formed another leg of these trading triangles.
London merchants who sold finished goods to the North American colonies were among those profiting the most from this trading network. Despite a certain degree of self-sufficiency, many colonists—particularly in urban areas—were grateful for their ability to purchase these finished goods from colonial importers who were only too glad to make their own profits on the transactions.
American Spring Page 1