by Ray Raphael
Across from the courthouse, at the home of blacksmith Timothy Bigelow, the Worcester County Committees of Correspondence tried to coordinate the day’s activities, but members soon adjourned “to attend the body of the people†outside.22 Each of the thirty-seven militia companies, which had recently elected a new military captain, now selected a political representative as well, to serve for one day only—the ultimate in term limits. These men appointed a smaller committee, which visited the court officials to work out the details of their resignations. But the plan they settled on had to make its way back to the thirty-seven representatives, and through them to the “body of the people,†who rejected the first draft. The process then began anew. The apparatus was democratic but cumbersome, heavily weighted at the bottom. Things moved slowly. People became impatient.
Finally, by midafternoon, the stage was set. The militiamen arranged themselves along Main Street, half on the Mill Brook side and the other half under the embankment to the west. The lines stretched for a quarter mile between the courthouse and Heywood’s tavern, each company in formation, Uxbridge in front of the courthouse, Westborough next, and so on, down to Upton and Templeton, stationed outside Heywood’s tavern. When all were in place, each of the two dozen court officials emerged from the tavern with his hat in his hand, reversing the traditional order of deference, and recited his disavowal of British authority to the first company of militiamen, then walked to the next to repeat his recantation there, and in this manner made his way slowly through the gauntlet, all the way to the courthouse. Over thirty times apiece, so all the militiamen could hear, the judges, justices of the peace, court attorneys, and others whose power had been sanctioned by the Crown pledged “that all judicial proceeding be stayed . . . on account of the unconstitutional act of Parliament . . . which, if effected, will reduce the inhabitants to mere arbitrary power.â€23 With this humiliating act of submission, all British authority disappeared from Worcester County, never to return.
As in Great Barrington, Springfield, and Worcester, patriots shut down the governmental apparatus in Salem, Concord, Barnstable, Taunton, and Plymouth—in every county seat outside Boston, where garrisoned British soldiers could protect the judges. From the time the Massachusetts Government Act was supposed to take effect, the county courts, which also functioned as the administrative arms of the local governments, were powerless. According to merchant John Andrews, rebels in Plymouth were so excited by their victory that they
attempted to remove a Rock (the one on which their fore-fathers first landed, when they came to this country) which lay buried in a wharfe five feet deep, up into the center of the town, near the court house. The way being up hill, they found it impracticable, as after they had dug it up, they found it to weigh ten tons at least.24
Meanwhile, all thirty-six Crown-appointed Council members were told by their angry neighbors to resign. Those who refused were driven from their homes and forced to flee to Boston, where they sought protection from the British army.
In direct violation of the new law, the people continued to gather in their town meetings. When Governor Gage arrested seven men in the temporary capital of Salem for calling a town meeting, three thousand farmers immediately marched on the jail to set the prisoners free. Rather than initiate a bloodbath, Gage ordered two companies of British soldiers to retreat. Throughout Massachusetts, town meetings continued to convene. As John Andrews reported,
Notwithstanding all the parade the governor made at Salem on account of their meeting, they had another one directly under his nose at Danvers, and continued it two or three howers longer than was necessary, to see if he would interrupt ’em. He was acquainted with it, but reply’d—“Damn ’em! I won’t do any thing about it unless his Majesty sends me more troops.â€25
More than half a year before the “shot heard ’round the world†at Lexington, Massachusetts patriots had seized all military authority outside Boston. On September 21, the Worcester County Convention took it upon itself to reorganize the county militia into seven new regiments and urged each town “to enlist one third of the men . . . between sixteen and sixty years of age, to be ready to act at a minute’s warning.â€26 These were the famous “minute men,†formed half a year before they would respond to the call at Lexington. Other counties did the same. The story of the minute men does not begin at Lexington, where we normally put it; it is part and parcel of the Revolution of 1774.
By early October patriots had seized all political authority from British officials and vested it in their town meetings, county conventions, and a Provincial Congress. Throughout the preceding decade, patriots had written petitions, staged boycotts, and burnt effigies—but this was something new. In the late summer and early fall of 1774, patriots did not simply protest government, they overthrew it. In his diary, one disgruntled Tory from Southampton summed it all up: “Government has now devolved upon the people, and they seem to be for using it.â€27
Many patriots at that point were ready to formalize the end of British rule and create an entirely new government, based not on royal authority but on the will of the people. On October 4, 1774—a full twenty-one months before the Continental Congress approved the document prepared by Thomas Jefferson—citizens of Worcester, Massachusetts, declared that they were ready for independence. Four weeks earlier, on September 6, they had toppled British authority; now they were ready to replace the old government with a new one. In a set of instructions for its representative to the forthcoming Provincial Congress, which was about to meet in defiance of Governor Gage’s orders, the town meeting told Timothy Bigelow:
You are to consider the people of this province absolved, on their part, from the obligation therein contained [the 1691 Massachusetts charter], and to all intents and purposes reduced to a state of nature; and you are to exert yourself in devising ways and means to raise from the dissolution of the old constitution, as from the ashes of the Phenix, a new form, wherein all officers shall be dependent on the suffrages of the people for their existence as such, whatever unfavorable constructions our enemies may put upon such procedure. The exigency of our public affairs leaves us no other alternative from a state of anarchy or slavery.28
Patriots in Worcester had a word for their dramatic move: “independency.†For the British and the Tories, any mention of “independency†was considered treasonous—and even patriot leaders shied away. Samuel Adams wrote from the Continental Congress to his comrades back home, cautioning them not to “set up another form of government.â€29 John Adams, also a member of Congress, wrote that “Absolute Independency . . . Startle[s] People here.†Most congressional delegates, he warned, were horrified by “The Proposal of Setting up a new Form of Government of our own.â€30 Perhaps Samuel and John Adams were right, for if Massachusetts moved too quickly, other colonies might balk and not come to their aid. But right or wrong, this was a revolution by and for the people of Massachusetts; even the most radical members of Congress could not keep pace.
PREPARATIONS FOR DEFENSE
The most pressing duties of the new Provincial Congress were to collect taxes and prepare for war. On October 26 delegates listed exactly what they would need to defend against a British invasion:31
All the political and military maneuvers of the next several months would focus on how to procure these armaments and how to keep arms and powder the patriots already possessed out of the hands of the British.
On December 14, four months before Lexington, patriots in nearby New Hampshire made the first offensive move of the war: four hundred local militiamen stormed Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth, took down the king’s colors, and carried away approximately one hundred barrels of the king’s gunpowder (some of which was later put to use during the Battle of Bunker Hill). The following day, one thousand patriots marched again on the fort, t
his time removing all the muskets and sixteen cannon. This armed attack on a British fortress was not merely a prelude to war, it was an act of war: cannons and muskets were fired. Emerson’s “shot heard ’round the world†was not the first shot of the American Revolution.32
Although the offensive against Fort William and Mary was the first frontal military assault, it was not the first time patriots removed British arms and ammunition. Using stealth, cunning, and insider information, patriots had already taken cannon and munitions from British magazines in Boston, Providence, Newport, and New London.33
On February 24, 1775, almost two months before Lexington, British intelligence reported that 15,000 “Minute Men†were “all properly armed.†The report noted: “There are in the Country thirty-eight Field pieces and Nineteen Companies of Artillery most of which are in Worcester, a few at Concord, and a few at Watertown,†as well as ninety to a hundred barrels of powder at Concord. Further, the Provincial Congress’s Committee of Supply was trying to procure more arms yet, “to be deposited at Concord and Worcester.†If British soldiers tried to seize any of this cache, they were likely to trigger a massive mobilization of angry patriots.34
The spies also reported, though, that there were “eight Field pieces in an old Store or Barn, near the landing place at Salem,†which were to be removed shortly. “The seizure of them would greatly disconcert their schemes,†it concluded—and General Gage acted accordingly. On Sunday, February 26, he ordered 240 soldiers to find and remove eight field pieces and a supply of powder that patriots were hiding at Salem. Local citizens, gathered together in church, learned of the invasion in time to remove the arms and ammunition to a safer location. To stop the British advance, they simply raised a drawbridge that lay on the route of the marching troops.35 When the British invaded Lexington seven weeks later, they would avoid the mistakes they had made in Salem: they marched by night, not on the Sabbath, and they chose a route that did not have a drawbridge.
On April 2, over two weeks before the march of Lexington, news from London arrived in Boston that set off a firestorm. Vowing to starve the errant colonists into submission, Lord North was closing the Newfoundland fisheries to Americans, cutting off all trade with anyone but the British, and mobilizing two thousand additional seamen and “a proper number of frigates†to enforce this embargo. Further, the king had dispatched four additional regiments from Ireland to Boston. Everybody in town knew immediately what this meant. Governor Thomas Gage, who was also commander in chief of the British forces in North America, had been ridiculed through the winter by his own soldiers—“Old Woman,†they called him—for sitting by and letting the patriots take charge of Massachusetts without fighting back. His excuse, he said, was that he did not have sufficient troops to take the offensive. Now, with reinforcements imminent, he would certainly make a move.36
But where would he strike? Could he possibly attack Worcester, the very heart of resistance? There, according to a spy report written in French, patriots had accumulated fifteen tons of powder (hidden in places unknown), thirteen small cannon (proudly displayed but poorly mounted in front of the meetinghouse on Main Street), and various munitions (in the hands of a merchant named Salisbury and “un grand chef†named Bigelow). But the road there was rough, the journey arduous, and the patriots numerous, vigilant, and excessively hostile. Gage’s soldiers would likely be ambushed and possibly annihilated.37
Concord offered better prospects, for it was much more accessible. Unlike the forty-mile trek to Worcester, this twenty-mile jaunt could be accomplished in a single night, which allowed the possibility of a surprise attack. It wouldn’t be much of a surprise, however, because patriots easily surmised that Concord would be the likely target. On April 7, working with Dr. Joseph Warren and the Boston committee of correspondence, Paul Revere traveled from Boston to Concord with an urgent message: British Regulars would soon march to seize the patriots’ cannons and other military stores, possibly the very next day. Even that message was not really necessary, however, because patriots in Concord, where the Provincial Congress was sitting, had figured it out themselves. Two days earlier, James Warren had informed his wife, Mercy Otis Warren: “This town [Concord] is full of cannon, ammunition, stores, etc., and the [British] Army long for them and they want nothing but strength to induce an attempt on them. The people are ready and determine to defend this country inch by inch.â€38
Ready they were, thirteen days before the Redcoats showed up. Patriots by then had been preparing for half a year for this counteroffensive by the British army, yet they continued to refine their intelligence network. On the morning of April 16, Paul Revere made a second ride westward, to Lexington this time, to confer with Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who had sought refuge there, about how to respond to Gage’s imminent move. On his way back, Revere met also with patriots in Cambridge and Charlestown to fine-tune their warning systems, including the now-famous signal lantern ploy. When the big moment arrived, the minute men who had been training for months needed to get the word.
By dawn of April 19, 1775, when Regulars finally showed up at the Lexington Green, and later that morning, when they continued their march to Concord, patriot militias were as prepared as they could ever expect to be. They were willing partners in this war-in-the-making. They knew the likely consequences, and they were ready to face those consequences.
LOST IN HISTORY
The Massachusetts Revolution of 1774 was the most successful and enduring popular uprising in the nation’s history, the only one to permanently remove existing authority, yet this momentous event is never highlighted and rarely even mentioned in our textbooks. A logical question to ask of any revolution would be: Where, when, and how did political and military authority first transfer from one group to another? Strangely, though, we don’t ask this of our own Revolution, the very founding of our nation. If we did posit that fundamental question, the answer would be obvious and the Massachusetts Revolution of 1774 would become a standard and indispensable part of our national narrative, featured on every timeline and included on many a test.
Our most triumphant rebellion did not always suffer such neglect.
The British Annual Register, written immediately in the wake of the 1774 revolution, gave considerable attention to the forced resignations, court closures, and preparations for war throughout the countryside of Massachusetts.39 Early American historians—William Gordon in 1788, David Ramsay in 1789, and Mercy Otis Warren in 1805—covered the response to the Boston Port Act, but they highlighted the Massachusetts Government Act as the major catalyst leading to the American Revolution. According to Ramsay, the Massachusetts Government Act
excited a greater alarm than the port act. The one effected only the metropolis, the other the whole province. . . . Had the parliament stopped short with the Boston port act, the motives to union and to make a common cause with that metropolis, would have been feeble, perhaps ineffectual to have roused the other provinces; but the arbitrary mutilation of the important privileges . . . by the will of parliament, convinced the most moderate that the cause of Massachusetts was the cause of all the provinces.40
Gordon described the popular uprising in considerable and vivid detail. In response to the “obnoxious alteration†dictated by the Massachusetts Government Act, “the people at large†prepared “to defend their rights with the point of a sword,†and even the moderates “became resolute and resentful.â€41
Warren went even further, calling the 1774 rebellion “one of the most extraordinary eras in the history of man: the exertions of spirit awakened by the severe hand of power had led to that most alarming experiment of leveling of all ranks, and destroying all subordination.â€42
This was too much of a revolution for conservative historians and schoolbook writers of the next generation, who argue
d that the “American Revolution†was not really revolutionary and that patriots were not to be construed as “rebels.†Paul Allen, writing in 1819, devoted seventeen pages to the aid sent to Boston, while he assigned less than a paragraph to the resistance triggered by the Massachusetts Government Act.43 Salma Hale’s 1822 school text emphasized the themes of sympathy and solidarity, with nary a word about the overthrow of British authority.44 The following year Charles Goodrich, in his popular History of the United States of America, wrote about Virginia’s “expression of sympathy†with Boston, while ignoring altogether the people’s rebellion in Massachusetts.45
The Good Samaritan approach certainly played better to children. Stories featuring neighbor helping neighbor conformed to educational goals, while those showing bullying crowds did not. Richard Snowden’s school history, written in biblical style, made the events of 1774 sound like the story of the three wise men at the nativity: “Now it came to pass, when the people of the provinces had heard that their brethren in town were in a great strait, they sent to speak comfortable words unto them, and gave them worldly gifts.â€46
By midcentury, the patriotic historian George Bancroft was comfortable enough with the idea of a people’s revolution to pay some respect to the uprising of 1774. Although Bancroft spoke of “sympathy†for Boston, he also devoted the better part of three chapters to the dramatic resistance to the Massachusetts Government Act. He did not, however, embrace its democratic character: it was under the direction of Boston’s Joseph Warren, he claimed, who was told what to do by an absent Samuel Adams.47 With this imaginary chain of command, Bancroft placed the first overthrow of the British firmly in the hands of America’s favorite revolutionary (see chapter 2).