General Gage’s attitude toward John Hancock remained unclear. As winter approached, he had enlisted Hancock’s help in finding barracks for his men. But then, even though he couldn’t bring himself to arrest Hancock, Gage had stripped him of his title as commander of the cadets. The corps had disbanded in protest.
At last, life in Boston became too perilous for Lydia Hancock. She loaded up her carriage and set off for the Lexington parsonage where John Hancock had grown up. Mrs. Hancock’s niece and her husband, the Reverend Jonas Clark, occupied the manse, and they warmly received their aunt and her young friend, Dorothy Quincy.
John Hancock was now thirty-eight, and his aunt was impatient for him to marry. Years before, when he had visited London as a young man, reports had filtered back to Lydia Hancock about a compliant chambermaid, and later there had been rumors about a middle-aged mistress, Dorcas Griffith, who ran a grog shop near Hancock’s Wharf. That arrangement, if it existed, was entirely commercial. Mrs. Griffith welcomed upstairs any man with her price, including contingents of British soldiers. During those same years, Hancock had also called on Sally Jackson, the daughter of a respectable Boston family. But Hancock had sent her a letter ending the courtship, and soon afterward Miss Jackson married a Boston selectman named Henderson Inches.
Given the latitude of his tastes, John Hancock may well have been ready to marry Dorothy Quincy from the Sunday when he was first captivated by a glimpse of her shapely small foot as she stepped out of church. But despite his aunt’s connivance, the romance seemed stalled. For about four years Lydia Hancock had brought the couple into almost daily contact while she fended off all other suitors. Her nephew was handsome, stalwart, certainly rich, without question the most popular man of his day. Since the Provincial Congress was meeting only a few miles from Lexington at Concord, Hancock could still visit Miss Quincy regularly. Her twenty-seventh birthday was approaching when she allowed herself to be evacuated from Boston.
—
Virginia’s delegates to the Continental Congress returned home from Philadelphia with widely different predictions for the future. Richard Henry Lee was sure that their appeals to England, combined with the threat of a trade embargo, would lead the king’s ministers to send back their capitulation by the next ship. Patrick Henry was less hopeful, but he seemed to be in the minority. Virginia’s Revolutionary Convention met at St. John’s Church in Richmond on March 20, 1775, to approve what had been accomplished in Philadelphia, and the prevailing mood was self-satisfaction. The colony’s patriots were sure that Britain would bend.
The convention had been under way three days when Patrick Henry shattered their complacency. He proposed to prepare the Virginia militia to defend the colony in case of war, and Thomas Jefferson was forced to admire Henry’s foresight, although he still found the man something of a trial. Jefferson had been pleased to receive reports from Philadelphia that the committees there had considered Henry’s writing inadequate. But at this meeting in Richmond, Jefferson had to grant that Henry’s nerve was leaving the rest of them behind.
George Washington and the Lee brothers were with Jefferson at the church on the fine spring day when Henry waited in the third pew to defend his proposal. Peyton Randolph was presiding from the pulpit. The church windows had been opened, and since the hundred and twenty delegates filled most of the seats, the windows were crowded with spectators.
Preparing to speak, Patrick Henry felt his heart begin to pound, and the longer he waited the hotter his brow became. Few of the spectators knew that Henry’s tension was not entirely political. His wife, Sarah, the mother of his three daughters and three sons, was stricken with an affliction the family was trying to keep quiet. She had gone mad, and she threatened so often to kill herself that at last she had to be tied into a straitjacket.
When Henry was recognized, he began by praising the honor of those men who held a different opinion. But, he went on, “this is no time for ceremony. The question before the House is of awful moment to this country.” He said that if he did not speak he would consider himself guilty of treason to his country. Do not be lulled by an occasional smile from London, he added. Do not let yourself be betrayed with a kiss. Ask instead why British armies have come to your shores.
“Has Great Britain any enemy in this quarter of the world to call for all this accumulation of navies and armies? No, sir, she has none. They are meant for us; they can be meant for no other. They are sent over to find and rivet upon us those chains which the British Ministry has been so long forging. And what have we to oppose them? Shall we try argument? Sir, we have been trying that for the last ten years.
“Sir,” said Henry, addressing Peyton Randolph in the pulpit, “we have done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the Ministry and Parliament. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot of the throne.”
Henry had begun calmly, but as his voice rose, tendons in his neck were standing out white and rigid. He said that if the colonists wished to be free, they must fight. “I repeat, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of Hosts is all that is left to us.
“They tell us, sir, that we are weak—unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be next week, or next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house?”
They were not weak, Henry said. “Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible to any force which our enemy can send against us.” Besides that, they had no choice. “The war is inevitable. And let it come! I repeat, sir: Let it come!”
As Patrick Henry turned his eyes around the church, men leaned forward in their seats. “Gentlemen may cry peace, peace—but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why should we idle here? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have?”
Patrick Henry’s shoulders sank. He crossed his wrists as though he were the one in a straitjacket. “Is life so dear,” he asked, “or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” He paused, raised his eyes and lifted up his hands, still held together. “Forbid it, Almighty God!” Henry turned to stare at the men who opposed him. Slowly, he bowed his body down. “I know not what course others may take.” He rose and straightened to his full height, and his next words came from between clenched teeth: “But as for me, give me liberty—” He paused to let the word die away. His left hand fell to his side. His right hand formed a fist as though he held a dagger, and he struck that fist to his heart. “—or give me death.”
There was no applause, only silence.
Battle at Lexington
ALBANY INSTITUTE OF ART
Lexington
1775
ONE SATURDAY midnight in the middle of April 1775, Paul Revere suspected that General Gage was finally going to move against the patriot leaders. All the boats from the men-of-war in the harbor had been hauled to shore and repaired, and the grenadiers and the light infantry regiments had been taken off their regular duties. Because of the exodus of patriots from Boston and the Provincial Congress meeting in Concord, Revere found few leaders left in town to inform. Even Isaiah Thomas, the editor of the Massachusetts Spy, had packed up his press, his wife and their children and was heading for Watertown. Of the inner circle, only the two doctors had remained behind—Benjamin Church and Joseph Warren. Dr. Warren’s medical students were pleading with him not to make night calls, because they were sure he would be ambushed. But Warren was fearless, and Samuel Adams trust
ed him above his other young lieutenants. After his wife died two years earlier, Warren had turned over his four children to their grandmother and thrown himself headlong into the cause. When he heard British soldiers and their Tory sympathizers assuring one another that the colonials would always back down, he said, “These fellows say we won’t fight. By heavens, I hope I shall die up to my knees in blood.”
Paul Revere had stayed in Boston to serve as messenger when he was needed. After five months as a widower, he had married again. Although he was nearing his fortieth birthday and was raising five children, the eldest in her teens, he wasn’t ready to surrender his duties to younger men.
Revere’s family had come more recently to America than the Adamses or the Hutchinsons. Like the Faneuils and the Bowdoins, his father had been a Protestant Huguenot driven out of Catholic France. After several years in Massachusetts, Apollos Rivoire had changed his name to Paul Revere—“Merely on account that the bumpkins pronounce it easier,” he said—and had passed that name on to his son. The Reveres lived one block from Thomas Hutchinson, but the social distance was unbreachable. Young Paul had been sent to the crowded North Writing School rather than to North Latin. Instead of studying at Harvard, he learned his father’s trade of silversmith.
When the demand for silver goods flagged during bad times, the younger Revere made false teeth. That was always a reliable business in a town where a European traveler noted that Boston girls often had lost half their teeth before they were twenty. Advertising in the Boston Gazette, Revere pointed out that a lack of teeth affected not only a person’s appearance but also one’s ability to speak in public, and he promised to supply teeth that would pass for nature’s.
Revere was a veteran of the French and Indian War, a strong, swarthy man who was quick to smile with his own fine teeth and who never powdered his hair or wore a wig. Modeling himself after Samuel Adams, he provided a valuable link between the wealthier party leaders and the town’s craftsmen.
Joseph Warren was six years younger than Paul Revere, but Revere regarded him as both his leader and his friend. On this April Saturday night, Revere took his news of the British preparations directly to Warren’s house, which had become the patriots’ headquarters. Warren agreed that Gage was probably headed for Concord to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock and to seize any arms stored there.
On Sunday morning, Revere rode to the Lexington parsonage where Hancock had grown up. The Provincial Congress had adjourned the day before, and he found Adams and Hancock visiting there. They asked Revere to alert Concord, five miles to the west. Within hours, Concord’s men and boys were hiding their cannon and their flour. Sacks of bullets they stowed in the outlying swamps.
Returning to Boston, Paul Revere passed through Charlestown, where he met with William Conant, of the town’s Committee of Safety, to devise a set of signals since they couldn’t be sure which way Gage would march his troops. He could send them out along Boston Neck, the isthmus that connected the town with the mainland. But that route would be so conspicuous that he would have no hope of surprising Concord’s militia. Going by land also meant either making a great curve all around Back Bay or heading west to Waltham, north to Lexington and then on to Concord.
The fact that Gage had prepared the boats suggested he would exercise his better option. Boston had enjoyed its mildest winter in memory; the Charles River had not frozen over, and now April was balmy. The general could ferry his troops across the Charles, land in East Cambridge and march almost directly to Menotomy and then to Lexington. Going by land would mean a march of twenty-one miles; taking the river route could cut off five of them.
By keeping watch in Boston, Paul Revere could know within minutes which route Gage had chosen. But how would he get that information to Concord? The British had posted a guard on Boston Neck, and slipping across the Charles in a boat on a night of such tight security might be difficult. Revere told William Conant that he or an ally would go to Christ’s Church in Boston and flash a message to the patriots in Charlestown. If no one could get out of Boston, Conant’s men would be able to forward the alarm to Concord. They should watch the steeple across the Charles. One lantern would mean that Gage’s troops were coming by land, two that they were being rowed across the water.
As he prepared for his most ambitious foray out of Boston, Gage was determined to preserve absolute secrecy. He was ready to commit twenty-one companies of his tallest and best-armed grenadiers and infantrymen. Since companies averaged twenty-eight men, the general would be sending out nearly six hundred soldiers. That should be enough, since the rebels wouldn’t dare take up arms against His Majesty’s troops. He confided his battle plan to only two persons, his wife and Hugh, Earl Percy. Young and charming Lord Percy had been camping out on the Common near John Hancock’s house. Because he was an earl and attractive, he had often been invited in for dinner, and Dorothy Quincy had been especially taken with Percy’s commanding voice as he drilled his men each daybreak. Gage ordered Percy and his Fifth Regiment to be ready in the unlikely event that reserves should be needed.
Gage was entrusting the mission itself to Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, a heavy young officer who, ten days earlier on another spying expedition, had encountered the same black serving woman who had recognized Captain Brown. At Watertown, wearing his civilian disguise, Smith had tried to disarm her by asking where he and his companion could find employment.
The woman had looked him over. “Smith, you will find employment enough for you and all Gage’s men in a few months.”
Since D’Bernicre and Brown hadn’t mentioned their own humiliation, Colonel Smith was not prepared for that answer. He complained to the landlord about the woman’s sauciness and then sent his private to continue the mission while he stumbled through the bushes back to camp. Smith had vowed that if he ever returned with his regiment, he would kill the wench.
On Tuesday evening, April 18, Gage’s select British companies were ordered to gather at a rendezvous point, walking there in small numbers to avoid arousing suspicion. If challenged about their purpose, they were to answer, “Patrol.” Colonel Smith still had not been officially informed of the destination, but if he had not guessed it he was the only person in Boston who hadn’t. One Boston matron employed the wife of a British soldier as her maid, and when his sergeant couldn’t locate the soldier he came to the woman in confidence. Should she see him, would she please tell him to report at eight o’clock that evening at the bottom of the Common, equipped for an expedition? As soon as the sergeant left, the woman relayed his message to Dr. Benjamin Church. Around the town’s stables, British officers readied their horses and talked about tomorrow and the hell there would be to pay. Hearing them, a stableboy ran to Paul Revere, who said, “You are the third person who has brought me the same information.”
Hugh Percy had come to Boston a principled Whig, but despite John Hancock’s hospitality he soon found himself loathing these colonials who showed him every courtesy while plotting to betray him. “The people here are a set of sly, artful, hypocritical rascals, cruel and cowardly,” Percy wrote home after two months in America. “I must own that I cannot but despise them completely.”
As dusk fell on the night of the operation, Lord Percy walked undetected among the townfolk as they watched the soldiers lining up on the Common. A man at his elbow said, “The British troops will miss their aim.”
“What aim?” Percy asked.
“Why,” said the man, “the cannon at Concord.”
Percy hurried back to tell Gage their target had been discovered. But by that time the operation had already begun. The general could only hope to bottle up the news by forbidding anyone to leave Boston.
As the troops climbed into boats to be ferried across the Charles, Joseph Warren asked Paul Revere to leave at once for Lexington and warn Hancock and Samuel Adams that they were about to be arrested. Revere should try to get out of Boston on the river. Dr. Warren had already sent another messenger, William Dawes, to
attempt to reach the parsonage by the overland route.
Before he set out, Revere went to the house of Robert Newman across the street from Christ’s Church. Newman, the church’s twenty-three-year-old sexton, had agreed to hang the one or two lanterns in the steeple. But there was a complication. Newman’s mother rented rooms, and his house was filled with British soldiers. Newman had pretended to go to bed early, slipped out an upper window, dropped to the street and waited for Paul Revere at the church. With a vestryman standing guard outside, Newman took two lanterns from a closet and climbed to the highest window in the belfry.
He lighted his lanterns and hung them only long enough for the watchman in Charlestown to catch a glimpse. He didn’t want to alert any British officers at the harbor. The Somerset, a man-of-war with sixty-four guns, had moved to the mouth of the Charles to protect the British soldiers as they were rowed across. After extinguishing the lanterns, Newman lowered himself out a back window of the church, climbed to the roof of his mother’s house and went back to bed.
The first signal had been sent. Now Paul Revere had to reach Lexington—even Concord, if he could—with the details he and Warren had been collecting. He went to his own house in North Square to put on his heavy riding boots. He had made dozens of rides in the patriot cause but never one as dangerous as this. In his excitement, he forgot two necessities—his spurs and the cloth he normally used to muffle the sound of the oars if he was able to launch his rowboat.
Patriots Page 24