Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution Part 6

As became clear in the weeks ahead, much remained to be done if the provincials had any hope of successfully meeting the threat presented by Gage's ever-growing army in Boston. They needed a better intelligence network so that they could antic.i.p.ate the regulars' next move before it happened. They also needed to restructure the militia. Many of the older officers were loyalists who had no interest in opposing the British regulars. Changes needed to be made in the officer corps in almost every town's militia; new systems for training and outfitting the militiamen also had to be implemented.

But perhaps the most important lesson learned in the aftermath of the Powder Alarm was that even if Boston had first opposed British tyranny, the country people outside the city were the ones now leading the resistance movement. Instead of feeling as if the resolute crowd had threatened his own authority as a political leader, Joseph Warren embraced this most recent development as evidence of a new and exciting era. In a letter to Samuel Adams at the Continental Congress, Warren reported that what he'd witnessed at Cambridge had inspired in him "the most exalted idea of the resolution and intrepidity of the inhabitants." This ability to maintain his poise within the ineluctable pull of seemingly chaotic events would serve him well in the months ahead.

Samuel Adams and the other three delegates from Ma.s.sachusetts quickly realized that many at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia did not trust them. New Englanders, it was said, were "intemperate and rash," and secretly l.u.s.ted for "a total independency"-not just from Great Britain but from the rest of the colonies as well. Once the mother country had been defeated, it was a.s.serted, the New Englanders would then declare war on the colonies to the south and establish themselves as the brutal sovereigns of all America. To counteract this concern, Samuel Adams realized that it was absolutely essential that his colony remain on the defensive. Ma.s.sachusetts must remain the victim, no matter what.

And then, on Tuesday, September 6, came word of the Powder Alarm. Traveling from town to town along the eastern seaboard, the rumor had made it to Philadelphia in a mere five days. In Connecticut, a letter written by Israel Putnam falsely claiming that in addition to the six provincials killed, Boston was being bombarded by British artillery as tens of thousands of colonial militiamen marched toward the burning city, was copied and carried all the way to Philadelphia.

Philadelphians reacted much as the New Englanders had done. "All is confusion," reported Silas Deane, a delegate from Connecticut. "Every tongue p.r.o.nounces revenge. The bells toll m.u.f.fled, and the people run as in a case of extremity, they know not where or why." Delegates who had been divided into two camps-those who wanted to repair the breach with Britain and those who favored the continued push for colonial liberties-found themselves speaking with a single voice. "War! war! war! was the cry," John Adams wrote, "and it was p.r.o.nounced in a tone which would have done honor to the oratory of a Briton or a Roman."

It took two days, but eventually the delegates learned the truth. Boston was not under attack. The regulars had taken some powder, but no one had been killed. It was back to the business of deciding how to respond to the Coercive Acts. And then, a week later, on September 17, Paul Revere arrived from Boston with a doc.u.ment known as the Suffolk Resolves.

The Government Act had made town meetings illegal in Ma.s.sachusetts, but it had said nothing about the counties. Throughout the summer and fall, town representatives gathered at county conventions all across Ma.s.sachusetts, and on September 9, 1774, at Vose's Tavern in Milton, Joseph Warren stood before the delegates of Suffolk County (which included Boston and towns to the west and south and included modern Norfolk County) and read them what he'd been working on for the last three days: nineteen resolves in which he had tried to capture the sense of their previous two meetings. Not only did Warren declare that "no obedience is due" to the Coercive Acts, since they were "the attempts of a wicked administration to enslave America"; he set forth a blueprint by which Ma.s.sachusetts might successfully win back her liberties. Each town must elect militia officers, who should muster the militia at least once a week; that said, the militia was "to act merely upon the defensive, so long as such conduct may be vindicated by reason and the principles of self-preservation, but no longer." If, as threatened, Gage were to seize any patriot leaders, they would respond by taking loyalist hostages of their own. Following the lead of the Solemn League and Covenant, they vowed to "abstain from the consumption of British merchandise and manufactures." In order to fill the void left by Gage's dismissal of the General Court, a "provincial congress" was to convene in Concord in October that would "pay all due respect and submission" to anything pa.s.sed by the Continental Congress. During these perilous times, all "routs, riots, and licentious attacks" must cease at once. Lastly, it was determined to create a system of couriers by which the towns might be alerted "should our enemies, by any sudden maneuvers, render it necessary to ask the aid and a.s.sistance of our brethren in the country."

That day at Vose's Tavern, Warren read each resolve several times so that all the delegates knew exactly what they were voting on. It must have been a scene of intense excitement as the delegates gave their unanimous consent "paragraph by paragraph." Resolve 17 insisted that "renewing harmony and union between Great Britain and the colonies [is] earnestly wished for by all good men." Overall, however, this was a radical doc.u.ment-but not uniquely so, given what other conventions had already or were about to produce-by which the inhabitants of Suffolk County declared their intention to make preparations for possible war.

What made the Suffolk Resolves ultimately so significant was the impact the doc.u.ment had on the Continental Congress in Philadelphia on September 17 and 18. Warren had appended a preamble that poetically evoked the historical importance of the present moment. Before launching into a pa.s.sionate account of the colony's hazardous situation, he told how Ma.s.sachusetts had witnessed "the power but not the justice, the vengeance but not the wisdom of Great Britain." The surging rhythms of Warren's prose gave the doc.u.ment an emotional force that succeeded in cutting across the cultural and ideological differences of those gathered in Philadelphia, who voted unanimously to endorse the Suffolk Resolves. John Adams was ecstatic. "The esteem, the affection, and the admiration for the people of Boston and ... Ma.s.sachusetts which were expressed yesterday," he wrote, "and the fixed determination that they should be supported, were enough to melt a heart of stone. I saw tears gush into the eyes of the old grave pacific Quakers of Pennsylvania."

Owing to the combined effects of the Powder Alarm and the Suffolk Resolves, the Continental Congress had gotten off to a surprisingly militant start. In the weeks and months ahead, a certain amount of retrenchment inevitably occurred as pa.s.sions began to cool among the delegates. But if nothing else, the endors.e.m.e.nt of the Suffolk Resolves proved that, contrary to what the North administration had predicted, the disparate colonies of British North America could indeed act as one.

By September 24, Paul Revere was back in Boston with the good news from Philadelphia about the endors.e.m.e.nt of the Suffolk Resolves. In an age when communication between the colonies could take days and even weeks, Revere provided the patriots with a decided advantage over the less nimble British. But the peripatetic silversmith was much more than the colonial equivalent of a Pony Express rider. Since he was a close friend of Joseph Warren and others, he knew as much as anyone about the patriot movement in Boston and as a consequence could speak with some authority when he carried messages to Philadelphia or, in the months ahead, to towns closer to home.

Revere soon learned that in the two weeks since he departed for Philadelphia, Gage had been working steadily to prepare the town for a possible onslaught from the country. For reasons of safety, all vestiges of the provincial government that had formerly been in Salem (as well as Gage's personal headquarters in Danvers) were moved back to Boston, which was now, for all intents and purposes, a city under siege. Six fieldpieces were rolled out to the Neck, and a dozen larger cannons planted at the town entrance. Wars.h.i.+ps were repositioned around the city. A more long-term project was the transformation of the crumbling fortifications at the town gate into what the patriots complained was an unnecessary "fortress." The Fifty-Ninth Regiment, formerly stationed in Salem, was ordered to entrench themselves on either side of the Neck, where they provided a daunting gauntlet for anyone coming into or out of Boston.

The country people, however, remained defiant after their staggering show of strength during the Powder Alarm. John Andrews told of the huge farmer who marched proudly into Boston between the ranks of soldiers lining the Neck, "looking very sly and contemptuously on one side and the other, which attracted the notice of the whole regiment." The giant farmer stopped and addressed the regulars around him. "Ay, ay," he crowed, "you don't know what boys we have got in the country. I am near nine feet high and one of the smallest among 'em." Another visiting farmer joined a group of soldiers engaged in target practice on the common. After astonis.h.i.+ng them with his accuracy, he bragged, "I have got a boy at home that will toss up an apple and shoot out all the seeds as it's coming down."

The country people were having their fun with the soldiers, but their bravado was not without a basis in truth. Native New Englanders (thanks to a healthier diet and living conditions) were statistically two inches taller than their European counterparts. For the regulars, confined to a mile-square island that had recently been surrounded by thousands upon thousands of militiamen, the ministry's confident talk of the overwhelming power of the British military must have seemed more than a little hollow.

The regulars represented one of the greatest armies in Europe, but this did not change the fact that the last time any of them had been in combat was more than twelve years before; indeed, most of them had never seen any action. It was true that the New England militia was made up, for the most part, of farmers, but many of them were farmers who knew how to fight. One patriot told of how two veterans of the 1745 Siege of Louisbourg dismissed the new fortifications on the Neck as "mud-walls in comparison with what they have subdued." If at some point the country people had to storm the ramparts Gage had constructed at the town gate, these old-timers claimed that "they would regard them no more than a beaver-dam."

With an army of several thousand British regulars holding Boston, the town of Worcester, forty miles to the west, became the unofficial center of the provincial resistance movement. A county convention had emphasized the need to strengthen the preexisting system of town militias, which were soon mustering once, sometimes twice a week. What were known as "Minute Men"-elite groups culled from the towns' militias-were created to be ready for battle in a minute's notice. Not a new concept, the Minute Men dated back to the French and Indian War and were just one example of how the colonists' experience in that earlier conflict had prepared them for what would become the American Revolution.

Along with gunpowder, the provincial militiamen needed guns, and it was to Boston, where local merchants and gunsmiths possessed large stockpiles of weapons, that many of the country people came to secure muskets and other small arms. Since martial law had not yet been declared in Ma.s.sachusetts, there were limits to what Thomas Gage could legally do to oppose the patriots' efforts to prepare for war, and in the weeks after the Powder Alarm, John Andrews estimated the outflow of muskets and pistols from Boston to be no less than a hundred per day.

What the patriots really needed if they had any hope of one day opposing the British army and navy were cannons similar to the ones that currently loomed from the fortifications and s.h.i.+ps in and around Boston. However, many town militias did not yet have adequate supplies of muskets, let alone fieldpieces and larger artillery. The one exception was Boston's "train," an artillery company within its militia regiment, under the command of Major Adino Paddock, a loyalist who was not about to let the company's bra.s.s fieldpieces fall into patriot hands.

Two of the bra.s.s cannons were stored in a newly built British gun house at the edge of the common. On September 16, several Bostonians had the audacity to approach the house in broad daylight and, as the guards stepped outside, liberate the cannons, each weighing around five hundred pounds. After being lugged across a small yard, the artillery pieces were temporarily hidden in the wood bin of the nearby South Writing School before being smuggled out of the city. The British sergeant guarding the gun house was overheard to exclaim, "I'll be d.a.m.ned if these people won't steal the teeth out of your head while you're on guard!"

One of the Bostonians who helped carry the cannons was the tanner William Dawes, who had a b.u.t.ton on the cuff of his s.h.i.+rt jammed deep into his wrist by the weight of the bra.s.s barrel. After attempting to ignore the increasingly painful injury for several days, he finally visited Dr. Joseph Warren.

"Dawes," Warren asked, "how and when was this done?"

When Dawes proved reluctant to answer him, Warren said, "You are right not to tell me. I had better not know."

One night later that fall, several old and very rusty iron cannons were secretly placed on a flat-bottomed boat and floated into the North End's Mill Pond. The plan was to row them out into the harbor and up into a creek in Cambridge, where they could be transported into the interior of the province. Unfortunately the boat became trapped by the outgoing tide and was abandoned on the mudflats. The next morning, Admiral Graves confiscated the cannons, but this did not prevent the patriot owner from suing for their return, and in a surprise decision, the Admiralty Court determined that the navy "had no right by virtue of the Port Bill to stop or molest any boats carrying merchandise."

For Gage, the patriots' complaints about British tyranny seemed utterly absurd since British law was what allowed them to work so a.s.siduously at preparing themselves for a revolution. Never before (and perhaps since) had the inhabitants of a city under military occupation enjoyed as much freedom as the patriots of Boston.

One of Gage's biggest concerns was providing winter quarters for an army that by the end of the fall was approaching three thousand men. He had originally planned to build barracks on the common. At first the town selectmen had approved of the idea, since the barracks would mean the soldiers did not have to take over houses in town, while the building project would provide much-needed work for the city's carpenters. What the selectmen had not taken into account were the country people.

As had become clear during the Powder Alarm, the most radical patriots were no longer in Boston; they were in the towns outside the city. Many of these country people believed that Boston should be abandoned by its inhabitants so that they could attack the soldiers and loyalists who remained. Perhaps not surprisingly, the country people did not agree with the Boston selectmen's decision to cooperate with General Gage in the building of barracks, and a committee of representatives from the outlying towns convinced both the Boston selectmen and the Committee of Correspondence that the barracks should not be built. Andrews reported that Gage was heard to complain that "he can do very well with the Boston Selectmen but the d.a.m.n country committees plague his soul out."

In desperation, the general was forced to reach out to John Hanc.o.c.k for help in convincing Boston's carpenters to ignore the dictates of the various committees and resume work on the barracks on the common. For Gage, it was the ultimate humiliation. After having dismissed the arrogant merchant for the disrespect he had shown him as commander of the cadets, he was now reduced to pleading for Hanc.o.c.k's a.s.sistance, which the patriot leader quite gladly refused.

Making Gage's position all the more untenable was the distressing lack of living quarters in Boston. Many patriot families had already left the city, but with the arrival of so many loyalist refugees, there were, Andrews judged, not even half the number of homes needed to house the soldiers and their families. Out of desperation, empty warehouses on the wharves and even rum distilleries, filled with the awful stench of the decaying organic matter left after fermenting mola.s.ses, were converted into barracks.

As the fall turned to winter, those still confined to their tents on Boston Common, which included many of the soldiers' wives and children, began to die. A new graveyard was established at the far corner of the common, and in only a few months' time more than one hundred people had been buried. By December the soldiers had moved into their winter quarters, but that did not prevent disease from taking a terrible toll, and by January the regulars were dying at the rate of three to four a day. The ready availability of cheap rum, which the patriots were happy to foist on the regulars, was also killing its share of men. "Depend on it ... ," wrote one British commander, "[rum] will destroy more of us than the Yankees will."

Desertion had always been a problem, but now outright mutiny had become a genuine possibility. Already, one deserter had been executed on the common, his bullet-riddled body laid out on top of his coffin for all the regulars to see, and many soldiers were so brutally flogged that their ribs were laid bare-a horribly painful injury that often led to kidney problems and death. A cannon was moved into the center of town in the event, John Andrews claimed, of an uprising on the part of the troops-an irony that was not lost on anyone in this city, where the Boston Ma.s.sacre was still vividly remembered.

Gage now realized that his earlier claim that he could contain Ma.s.sachusetts with a mere four regiments had been nothing but a deluded boast. By the end of October, he was writing Lord Dartmouth that no less than twenty thousand soldiers were required to retake New England. He knew this might seem like an absurd figure to the ministry back in London, but he a.s.sured Dartmouth that such a large army "will in the end save Great Britain both blood and treasure."

The country people had succeeded in shutting down the colony's legislature and courts. Trapped in Boston, Gage was powerless to exert any control beyond the borders of the city. Each town had its own selectmen to manage local affairs, but some kind of colony-wide political body had to be created, or the patriot movement would grind to a disorganized halt. If Gage decided to break out of Boston and seize more of their munitions, it might be necessary to defend themselves from the British soldiers. Each town had its own militia, but at some point the colony might need to raise its own provincial army. The soldiers would need to be paid; provisions and equipment would need to be purchased, and for that to happen taxes needed to be collected. An extralegal government of some sort must be created, and in October a new era arrived in Ma.s.sachusetts with the sitting of the first Provincial Congress in Concord.

Representatives from throughout the province, many of them former members of the General Court, traveled to Concord, where they convened at the town's meetinghouse. "You would have thought yourself in an a.s.sembly of Spartans or ancient Romans," Joseph Warren enthused in a letter to a patriot friend, "had you been a witness to the ardor which inspired those who spoke upon the important business they were transacting."

In truth, however, the 260 members of the Provincial Congress were deeply divided. Some thought they should revert to Ma.s.sachusetts's original charter from 1629, which would allow them to elect their own governor. It would be a way to get the colony functioning again without declaring independence from Britain. Others saw this as a needless ruse-why not simply create a new government out of whole cloth and get on with it? The debates were kept in secret, so there is no direct evidence of what was being said, but we do know that Warren and the other Boston delegates (which included John Hanc.o.c.k, who served as the Congress's president) found themselves "by far the most moderate men." In several letters to Samuel Adams in Philadelphia, Warren asked for his mentor's advice. They must, Adams responded in so many words, refrain from doing much of anything; otherwise they ran the danger of causing the other colonies to think twice about supporting Ma.s.sachusetts. In the meantime, Warren remained "rapacious for the intelligence" that might provide the guidance he so desperately needed.

Warren's sense of isolation only increased when his good friend Josiah Quincy left at the end of September for London. It was time that a patriot from Boston challenged the version of events that former governor Thomas Hutchinson and other loyalists were promulgating in England, and Quincy was just the man to do it. There was, however, the issue of Quincy's health. Back in February 1773, Warren had witnessed his friend's most recent will and testament, and with both the patient and his doctor hoping for the best, Quincy departed in secret from Salem.

Quincy's was just one of several departures by noted patriots that fall. Dr. Thomas Young, a transplant from Albany, New York, was one of Boston's most pa.s.sionate patriots, and he had already suffered two near-fatal beatings in the streets of Boston. The physician seemed unfazed by the incidents, but it was another matter for his wife, who began to weep whenever Young left the house. When Gage began building the fortifications at the town gate, she became so "enveloped [in] constant terrors" that she took to her bed and appeared, Young wrote to Samuel Adams, "as inanimate as a corpse." Young decided he must "seek an asylum for her," and in the middle of September he abruptly moved his family to Providence, Rhode Island.

About a month later, the patriot William Molineux, whom John Rowe described as "the first leader of dirty matters," died after a brief illness. The loyalists gossiped that Molineux had actually killed himself (with laudanum provided by Joseph Warren) when it was discovered that he'd been embezzling money from the owner of the wharf he managed. In any event, Warren was suddenly without three of the movement's most active members.

He inevitably began to rely more on the physician and Committee of Correspondence member Dr. Benjamin Church. Whereas Warren was known for his openhearted pursuit of liberty, Church had a talent for withering sarcasm. Like Warren, he had composed at least one patriot song, but unlike Warren he had also written a loyalist parody of his own composition. That Church got away with such unsettling behavior was a tribute to his arrogant brilliance, and Paul Revere later maintained that since the patriots "needed every strength, they feared, as well as courted him." For his part, Warren "had not the greatest affection for [Church]," according to Revere. One wonders, however, if Warren had had much enthusiasm for the dirty trickster Molineux. Then as now, just because two people were of the same political affiliation did not mean that they necessarily liked each other.

On November 9, the delegates from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia finally returned to Boston, and the church bells were ringing till midnight. The Congress had agreed to an intercolonial commercial boycott of British goods, but in the interests of maintaining unanimity among the colonies at this critical moment, the delegates had refrained from sanctioning the creation of a full-fledged alternative government in Ma.s.sachusetts. Any additional measures would have to wait until the second Continental Congress in the spring. Until then, the province must remain in a tense state of limbo-unless, of course, someone, whether it be Gage or the patriots, made the first move.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Unnatural Contest

During the second week in December, the Boston Committee of Correspondence learned that Gage was about to retrieve the powder stored in New Hamps.h.i.+re's version of the Castle-Fort William and Mary, situated on a small island near Portsmouth. Paul Revere was sent to warn the town's citizens, and on December 14 several hundred men a.s.saulted the poorly defended fort. The handful of British soldiers stationed there were quickly subdued, and soon the fort's powder was in patriot hands. Just to make sure, the next day another group returned to take the fort's cannons. As soon as he heard of the theft, Gage ordered Admiral Graves to dispatch two s.h.i.+ps for Portsmouth, which after pounding through a brutal winter storm, arrived too late to be of any help.

But as it turned out, the patriots had been misinformed. Gage had not yet decided to provoke another powder alarm in Portsmouth. If New Hamps.h.i.+re governor Wentworth was to be believed, many local patriots began to regret the haste with which they'd responded to Revere's alarm as the magnitude of what they'd done started to sink in. If Gage had been so inclined, the two wars.h.i.+ps now anch.o.r.ed beside Portsmouth could have destroyed the town with their cannons.

It was a change of heart that was detectable throughout New England in the early winter of 1775. All fall the patriots had been on a violent spree as angry crowds forced mandamus councillors to renounce their crown-appointed positions. To be fair, some of the crowds' actions were largely symbolic. In the town founded by the Pilgrims in 1620, the famed Plymouth Rock (or at least a piece of it) was extracted from the waterfront and placed in a spot of honor on the town's main street. In Taunton, a flag that read "Liberty and Union" was hoisted on a 112-foot liberty pole (a branchless alternative to Boston's Liberty Tree that had become popular throughout the colonies). But there were also more than a few instances of needless cruelty.

In the fall of 1774, a thirty-one-year-old farmer named Jesse Dunbar made the mistake of buying an ox from a mandamus councillor in Marshfield named Nathaniel Ray Thomas. Soon after Dunbar had slaughtered the ox at his farm in Plymouth, he was visited by a committee of patriots. Claiming that he had violated the boycott against buying British goods, the patriots loaded the dead ox on a cart and stuffed Dunbar into its eviscerated body. The patriots proceeded to take Dunbar and the ox on a tour of the surrounding towns. By the time they reached Kingston, Dunbar was having difficulty breathing inside the fetid carca.s.s. When he was allowed to walk beside the cart, however, the crowd accused him of intentionally tripping a child and stuffed him back into the ox. In Duxbury, the crowd pushed the animal's slippery innards in Dunbar's face before finally dumping him and the ox in front of Thomas's house in Marshfield.

By the winter, as the once-raging fires of patriot anger began to die down, a backlash of sorts commenced. On December 22, 1774, Timothy Ruggles, a veteran of the French and Indian War and a mandamus councillor from Hardwick, sent a proclamation to the newspapers calling for a loyalist resistance movement among the patriot-dominated towns outside Boston. What he called the "a.s.sociation" included the pledge, "We will upon all occasions, with our lives and fortunes, stand by and a.s.sist each other in the defense of life, liberty, and property whenever the same shall be attacked or endangered by any bodies of men, riotously a.s.sembled upon any pretence, or under any authority not warranted by the laws of the land." The Taunton lawyer Daniel Leonard began a series of articles under the byline Ma.s.sachusettensis that so effectively questioned the legitimacy of the patriot movement that John Adams, just back from the Continental Congress, felt compelled to respond as Novanglus. In a January 18, 1775, letter to Lord Dartmouth, Gage claimed that thanks to Leonard "the absurdity of the resolves of the Continental Congress [had been] exposed in a masterly manner." Now that the people had had the "leisure of reflection and think seriously of their danger," they had become, Gage reported, "terrified at what they have done."

Nine days later, Gage was pleased to inform Dartmouth "that the towns in this province become more divided, notwithstanding the endeavors used to keep up their enthusiasm." In Marshfield, the home of Nathaniel Ray Thomas, the mandamus councillor who had sold Jesse Dunbar the ox, and one of the few towns in Ma.s.sachusetts where there were more loyalists than patriots, the citizens requested that Gage send a battalion of regulars to defend them from the militiamen of the surrounding towns. Gage gladly dispatched one hundred soldiers under the command of Captain Nesbitt Balfour, who took up residence in the buildings a.s.sociated with Thomas's large estate, and Marshfield became one of the few loyalist outposts beyond Boston in Ma.s.sachusetts.

Even in once-belligerent Worcester, the patriot movement was showing distressing signs of infighting and waning momentum. "[We] are in a most lamentable situation ... ," Ephraim Doolittle wrote John Hanc.o.c.k. "Our Tory enemies using all their secret machinations to divide us and break us to pieces... . I fear if we are not soon called to action we shall be like a rope of sand and have no more strength."