Meanwhile, the situation of Georgia’s stubborn Sir James Wright offers quite a contrast. Wright was a dedicated man who loyally resisted Patriot pressures for years. While his powers were gradually whittled away, Wright repeatedly begged his superiors in England to send troops, send ships…send help! Little did he know that at one point his Patriot enemies had made him the victim of a “disinformation” ploy: a forged letter supposedly sent by Royal Governor Wright to British Vice Admiral Samuel Graves to say no help needed after all.
After more than fifteen years of faithful service to the Crown, Sir James finally, in 1776, had to flee his royal seat at Savannah, taking refuge aboard the twenty-gun British warship Scarborough—the same vessel, oddly, that would provide New Hampshire’s refugee Governor Wentworth his sanctuary as well (different time, different place, of course). Wright would be back for a brief interregnum after the British seized Savannah at the end of 1778, only to abandon their prize in 1782.
In South Carolina, meanwhile, two British lords took turns as royal governor, with native-born William Bull II temporarily serving between them as acting governor. To wit: Lord Charles Montagu, leaving the office in 1773, was followed by Lord William Campbell—whose departure months later, in 1775, was somewhat ignominious. After raising Patriot hackles by a series of actions, especially the favoritism he showed toward backcountry Loyalists, Campbell secretly slipped out of his house one night. He crossed his rear garden to a creek where he boarded a small rowboat that carried him quietly along the waterway into Charleston Harbor to the awaiting British sloop of war Tamar.
His predecessor, Lord Montagu, in the meantime, had not abandoned his own royal governorship all that willingly either. He was forced to resign while on a visit to England—in effect, on a visit to the home office. It seems he was considered a bit incompetent.
Inept or not, Montagu would have the last laugh. Possibly a Patriot sympathizer all along, he now won many a Patriot heart when ordered to recruit both Loyalists and American prisoners for British military units based in the Caribbean and poised for action, if needed, in Central America. The net result was salvation for Patriots who might have died if left aboard foul British prison ships in the Charleston and New York harbors.
After the Revolution, Montagu and many of the onetime Patriot prisoners resettled in Nova Scotia, better known as a sanctuary for dispossessed Loyalists. When Montagu died there in 1784, the Patriots marked his grave with a monument recalling his efforts rescuing so many of them from illness or death aboard the dreaded British prison hulks just a few years before.
How Far Would They Have Gone?
“WHEN HE FELL, LIBERTY WEPT.” SO WROTE ABIGAIL ADAMS TO HER HUSBAND John in Philadelphia in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Bunker Hill.
The British had suffered more casualties by far than the Americans, but the Patriot leadership of Massachusetts found one loss especially difficult to bear… for Dr. Joseph Warren had been one of their most active, most dedicated, most inspiring leaders from the beginning. Typical of this Patriot propagandist and political organizer, too, he had gone to a hero’s death in battle.
Who knows, in that difficult birthing period of a great nation, how far he might have gone in helping to bring Patriot ideals to fruition; what ranking he might have attained in the Pantheon of Founding Fathers?
As in the case of many others who fell before the revolutionary storm, however, the promise of his presence was no longer…was gone. Irrevocably. “Not all the havoc and devastation they [the British] have made has wounded me like the death of Warren,” lamented Abigail. “We want him in the senate; we want him in his profession; we want him in the field. We mourn for the citizen, the senator, the physician and the warrior.”
Only thirty-four (and a widower at that) when he died, Warren had emerged from a Harvard education and brief career as a schoolteacher to become a widely respected doctor in Boston in the early 1760s. By the 1770s, he was spending more and more time with the Boston area’s Patriot leaders. Among his friends were both John and Samuel Adams, James Otis, John Hancock, and Paul Revere.
After bearing their four children, his wife of just nine years, the former Elizabeth Hooten, died in 1773. By this time, Warren himself was a recognized leader of the Patriot cause in the highly restive Boston area. Indeed, he may have taken part in the Boston Tea Party in late 1773, and it is a matter of record that earlier, both before and after the “Boston Massacre” of 1770, he made speeches protesting the presence of British troops. A leading member of the Committee of Correspondence, he worked with Samuel Adams to communicate with other colonies about the Patriot cause. And it was Doctor Warren, his medical practice all but abandoned, who drafted the Suffolk Resolves that electrified members of the First Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia in the fall of 1774.
It also was Doctor Warren who sent Paul Revere and William Dawes on their way to Lexington the night of April 18, 1775, to warn that the British would be on the march from Boston that very night.
The next day, he rode to the scenes of battle between the militia and redcoats to treat the wounded—and to help organize harassing militia attacks on the British. It again was Doctor Warren who, in a real propaganda coup, composed a narrative of the events on that fateful April 19, combined it with sworn statements from participants and local newspaper articles, then somehow managed to deliver the entire pro-Patriot package to England for public dissemination two weeks before the official report arrived from British authorities in Boston.
Soon elected president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, Warren was at the center of the entire colony’s post-Lexington activities and was instrumental in organizing the siege of Boston by an army of New England militia. Although he had no military experience, the Boston physician accepted appointment as a major general of the militia just three days before the Battle of Bunker Hill. He favored that role over a far less risky choice of serving as the besieging army’s physician general.
When the British challenged the American occupation of Bunker Hill and adjoining Breed’s Hill on the Charlestown peninsula on June 17, 1775, Warren hurried to both battle sites to volunteer his services. He wound up in the American redoubt on Breed’s Hill, fighting alongside militiamen of all ranks as the British mounted their three frontal assaults that afternoon. The last march up the hill, ending in hand-to-hand combat, finally carried the day.
Doctor Joseph Warren, among the last to relinquish the redoubt, bleeding from a bayonet wound in one arm, tried to rally his compatriots for yet another stand. Who knows what else he might have accomplished? The fatal bullet took him behind the ear.
As Abigail Adams said, Liberty no doubt wept over this loss, especially.
***
It was the night before Christmas, 1776, that George Washington’s good friend Hugh Mercer had his unsettling nightmare of a ferocious bear taking him apart piece by piece. The hulking Scot, himself a bit bearlike, fought off the creature as best he could, but it was too big, too strong, too vicious.
The next night, of course, there was no dreaming—no sleeping—for George Washington’s coterie of key officers—nor for the disheartened troops of his crumbling army. Christmas night 1776 was for crossing the icy Delaware, and that following morning of December 26, 1776, for attacking the Hessians at Trenton, New Jersey…all of which Hugh Mercer survived, despite his ominous dream on Christmas Eve.
He, in fact, had another week of life left to him before he would suffer a succession of bayonet wounds in battle with the British—one vicious thrust after the other, and seven in all, much like the succession of bites by the bear of his nightmare.
Revolutionary America and George Washington lost a good and reliable friend in the death of Hugh Mercer, fifty-one, a Scots Highlander who had emigrated to the colonies some years before the Revolution. Like many another Highlander, he had taken the part of Bonnie Prince Charlie in the revolt of 1745. As a young military doctor he had been present for the Battle of Culloden, a disas
ter for the Highlanders marked by brutal English use of the bayonet against the Scottish rebels.
The recent graduate of the University of Aberdeen found early use for his medical training—he personally treated many of the bayonet victims before going into hiding from the English as they hunted down the last remnants of the Highlander army.
Mercer, still a very young man, crossed the Atlantic in 1747 to join the frontier settlers of western Pennsylvania. Unlike many of his fellow Highlanders, he ultimately would fight rather than defend the British in colonial America, but first he emerged a steady hand in the French and Indian War of the 1750s… on the side of the English. It was during this frontier war that he met and formed a lasting friendship with fellow militia commander George Washington of Virginia.
Mercer moved to Washington’s boyhood hometown of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1761, after the frontier troubles had died down. Still a physician, he also shared the operation of an apothecary shop with partners. In 1772, he bought George Washington’s boyhood home, the nearby Ferry Farm, from the Virginian himself.
It was only natural that such a good friend and esteemed military veteran would find himself at Washington’s side in the Revolutionary War—first in New York, then on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River as Christmas approached.
There still was time—brief time—to share in the heady reversal of Patriot fortunes and victory for the Continental Army at Trenton on the morning after Christmas…after, of course, crossing the Delaware. Mercer distinguished himself as a steady brigade commander in the defeat of the Hessians at Trenton, then was a wise and able adviser to Washington in the flanking move to Princeton that produced fresh victory for the Americans, this one against the British themselves.
It was at Princeton, however, that these two old compatriots would part company. Mercer’s horse was shot in William Clark’s orchard outside the college town. Mercer quickly was surrounded by British infantrymen brandishing ugly bayonets. He refused to surrender. They moved in, stabbing. One blade penetrated his body under his sword arm but left only a small wound. Carried to a private home, he told those attempting to treat him that the innocuous-looking wound under his arm would prove to be fatal.
In nine days, on January 12, 1777, he died, despite the care he received at his temporary refuge in the Thomas Clark home. There is no telling what counsel, companionship, or comfort Hugh Mercer might have afforded his old friend George Washington or their still-abirthing nation in the years ahead, given the chance.
Menace to All
THEY TOOK A COW WITH THEM TO SUPPLY MILK AND DUCKED OUT OF SIGHT FOR seven weeks. Father, mother, and four children—all six isolated themselves inside a house in Boston. And sick? You bet! The children “puke every morning but after are comfortable,” reported the mother.
One unfortunate child didn’t respond too well. He had to be inoculated three times before he caught it, broke out in ugly spots, and became delirious from raging fever for two entire days.
Once they experienced—and survived—the preventative “cure,” however, the people of the eighteenth century were immune to one of mankind’s worst scourges: smallpox. Never mind that the primitive “inoculation” methods of the day made the recipient pretty darn sick (and contagious to others), the cure still was better than catching the disease itself.
For the leaders—and soldiers—of the American Revolution, “the smallpox” was both a deadly threat and a vexing problem. Disease of all kinds was especially common among the young men gathered in military camps, often in unsanitary conditions, after years spent in isolated rural communities and thus lacking in immunity. Among the illnesses they now suffered, the dreaded “pox” was a real killer. And if anyone needed convincing, the proof came early in the fighting—smallpox, rather than the British enemy, took the greatest toll among the American rebels sent to attack Quebec in late 1775. Of the hundreds sent to fight the British, a fourth or more contracted smallpox.
All told, more than five thousand were lost to combat, desertion, and disease, but it was the smallpox epidemic that John Adams, for one, bemoaned the loudest. “The smallpox is ten times more terrible than the British, Canadians, and Indians together,” he wrote after a visit with still-ill veterans of the Canadian campaign. “The smallpox, the smallpox, what shall we do with it!”
Adams, himself, incidentally, had undergone the risky inoculation procedure earlier—at the hands of Dr. John Warren, the Patriot leader killed at Breed’s Hill in June 1775. As future President John Adams asked, his own acquired immunity aside, what were the revolutionary leaders to do?
None other than George Washington—himself the survivor of a teenage bout with the deadly pox—had to grapple with the issue from the day he assumed command of the fledgling Continental Army encamped around British-held Boston in 1775. Indeed, the smallpox incidence in Boston was one reason he held back on storming the city. “If we escape the smallpox in this camp and the country around about,” he said at one point, “it will be miraculous.”
The miracle he needed, of course, was inoculation preventing onset of the dread disease—but the inoculation method of Washington’s day was primitive, dangerous, and most controversial. It was in Boston, in fact, that the famous colonial-era minister Cotton Mather had espoused inoculation as a means of avoiding the smallpox epidemics that repeatedly swept through the American colonies. So controversial was the preventative measure, however, that one critic tossed a bomb through his window, while another set a cooperating physician’s house on fire.
All that was during the smallpox epidemic of 1721, which laid low an estimated 5,000 persons and killed 844 of them. Among the 286 who had braved the inoculation method, on the other hand, only 6 died.
The unappealing method of inoculation was to scrape up some pus from the blisters on a smallpox victim and insert the ugly stuff directly into the willing patient’s bloodstream, usually through a small cut. The result in most cases would be a mild form of the disease—and afterward, blessed immunity for life!
To some critics, it was a “heathen,” unnatural, immoral practice. To some patients, it was dangerous—in the extreme, even a killer. Indeed, there is reason to suspect self-inoculations as a cause of the epidemic among the soldiers engaged in the Canadian campaign of 1775–1776. No surprise, then, that the inoculation’s opponents blamed the preventative practice itself for spreading the disease even more widely among the population.
Some colonies had gone so far as to enact laws forbidding the inoculation practice. Marblehead, Massachusetts, had gone through a “smallpox war” on the eve of the Revolution, with townspeople so fearful of the inoculation method that they burned down a smallpox hospital quarantined on an offshore island.
George Washington had insisted on inoculation for his wife, Martha, but as newly named commander of the Continental Army he at first bowed to local bans such as New York’s 1747 prohibition of inoculations. From his New York headquarters in May 1776, in fact, he issued a fiat saying, “No person whatever, belonging to the Army, is to be inoculated for the smallpox.” He soon followed up with still another, rather violent decree: “Any officer in the Continental Army, who shall suffer himself to be inoculated, will be cashiered and turned out of the Army…as an enemy and traitor to his country.”
Fortunately for both his army and his future country, Washington reversed himself when in winter quarters at Morristown, New Jersey, just months later. Now on the opposite side of the years-long debate, he ordered wholesale inoculation of his troops. “Finding the smallpox to be spreading much and fearing that no precaution can prevent it from running thro’ the whole of our Army,” he explained in a letter to army doctor William Shippen Jr., “I have determined that the troops shall be inoculated.”
It wouldn’t be an easy road to travel, the commander in chief acknowledged. “This Expedient may be attended with some inconveniences and some disadvantages, but yet I trust in its consequences will have the most happy effects.”
By n
ow George Washington was so convinced that drastic steps were in order he also said, “we should have more to dread from it [smallpox] than the Sword of the enemy.” He urged mass inoculation of his men, to begin “without delay.”
Until now, the mortality rate in his army was 160 dead for every 1,000 soldiers. After his fiat of Morristown, however, the Continental Army’s mortality rate associated with the ancient disease would drop to an astonishingly low 3 deaths for every 1,000 men.
George Washington had made the right decision, the wise decision, while setting precedence, historically, as instigator of the first command-wide immunization program adopted for military operations in either Europe or North America. Most important, he had guaranteed a pox-free future for many thousands of troops. Just as important, by ensuring his army a healthier future, he had taken a giant step toward final victory in the revolutionary cause itself.
Players for the Crown
AT THE TOP OF THE ORGANIZATIONAL CHART, OF COURSE, WAS THE KING, GEORGE III. But who else were the chief players on behalf of the British in the great drama known as the American Revolution?
***
Among others, there were: William Legge, Second Earl of Dartmouth, philanthropist, evangelical Anglican, secretary of state for the American colonies, and stepbrother of Prime Minister Lord North. Born in 1731, Lord Dartmouth served as first lord of trade under the first Rockingham Administration of 1765– 1766. He returned to high government office with the ascension of Lord North in 1770. An early proponent of repealing the hated Stamp Act, Dartmouth also sought means of compromise and reconciliation with Americans while preserving the principles of Parliamentary authority. It was by his instruction to seize rebel leaders in Massachusetts, however, that General Thomas Gage in Boston mounted his flashpoint raid on Lexington and Concord in 1775. Dartmouth didn’t feel equipped to oversee the military operations that then erupted and stepped aside late in 1775 in favor of Lord George Germain. All this did not change the decision of officials at an “Indian school” in Hanover, New Hampshire, who several years beforehand (1769) had renamed their school Dartmouth College in gratitude for his generosity to the school.
Best Little Stories from the American Revolution Page 14