Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution Part 7

By the beginning of the new year, Gage had long since been joined by his wife Margaret and the rest of their extended family, which included his adjutant and brother-in-law Stephen Kemble. The extraordinarily capable engineer Captain John Montresor helped oversee the building of the fortifications at the town entrance, which by January had been finished off with a coat of whitewash. One of Gage's most trusted a.s.sociates was the Swiss-born General Frederick Haldimand, who had recently arrived from New York and taken up residence in a house near the common.

In an incident that started in a way reminiscent of what had proved to be John Malcom's undoing, Haldimand was approached by a "committee" of boys who complained that his servant had thrown ashes on the coasting, or sledding, path that ran past his house. Slipping into the patriot rhetoric of the day, the boys explained that "their fathers before them had improved it as a coast from time immemorial" and requested that the snow and ice in front of the general's house be returned to its former state. Haldimand was happy to oblige, and when he later told Gage of the encounter, his commander wearily responded that "it was impossible to beat the notion of liberty out of the people, as it was rooted in 'em from their childhood."

Gage received much criticism that winter from both sides. Many of the patriots viewed him as the hated tool of the North administration, while his own officers dismissed him as "an old woman" who pandered unnecessarily to the townspeople. Gage realized that the simmering tension between the soldiers and Bostonians could explode at any moment into a b.l.o.o.d.y act of violence that might spark a war. Since he could always discipline his own troops, the townspeople were his chief concern, and he made every effort to address their demands, however irritating and seemingly inconsequential. Since this took up a disproportionate amount of his time, he proved less available to the many mandamus councillors who had been forced to take up residence in the city. John Andrews commented that while Gage was "always ready to attend to" the selectmen and other community leaders, "the poor refugee councilors are obliged to walk the entry [of Province House] for hours before they can be admitted to audience." Inevitably contributing to Gage's coolness to the councillors was their reluctance to testify against the patriot leaders, and Andrews was convinced that Gage secretly "despises them from his heart."

Gage's relations.h.i.+p with Admiral Graves was also less than ideal. The frosty decorum that existed between the two commanders in the summer quickly degenerated in December with the arrival of several hundred marines under the command of Major John Pitcairn. The marines existed in a kind of jurisdictional netherworld between the army and the navy (John Andrews claimed they exemplified the worst attributes of both), and Graves, who was as volatile and outspoken as Gage was courteous, objected to the general's insistence that the marines remain under his sole control. When later in the winter Graves's blockade turned away a vessel with much-needed supplies for the soldiers stationed in Boston, even the mild-mannered Gage had difficulty controlling his temper.

Some observers attributed the acrimony between the two leaders to their wives, who, like their husbands, vied for dominance within the increasingly circ.u.mscribed world of Boston. In addition to being beautiful, Margaret was reported to be strong-willed, and one British officer even claimed that Thomas Gage "was governed by his wife." Another officer reported that a ball held on January 11 was the result of a subscription scheme "proposed by Mrs. Gage and carried into execution by her favorites by which she enjoyed a dance and opportunity of seeing her friends at no expense." Despite the plight of thousands of British soldiers and sailors who suffered from insufficient supplies of food and terrible living conditions, the officers continued to enjoy the finer things in life.

On February 27 both the Gages and the Graveses attended a ball to which "a great number of the gentlemen and ladies of the town" were also invited. This may have been the event described late in life by Bostonian Hannah Mather Crocker, who had vivid memories of the women's sumptuous clothes as they glided across the dance floor to the rhythm of a minuet or rigadoon: "Two or three tiers of ruffles on the gown and works of lace and muslin, long ruffles double or triple, the hair powdered white... . And all was harmony and peace as the tiptoe step [of the ladies] was scarcely heard, so lightly did they skim along the floor... . The gentlemen's dress ... was neat and elegant: a white broadcloth coat with the silver basket b.u.t.ton [and] silver vellum trimmed b.u.t.tonhole on blue cloth with gold vellum, satin waistcoat and small cloths with gold or silver knee bands... . A handsome worked ruffle around the hand formed a fop complete." For Crocker, who as a little girl had witnessed the destruction of her relative Thomas Hutchinson's house in the North End, what she called "The Last Queen's Ball" marked the sad and inevitable end of an era.

The previous fall, the Provincial Congress had formed the Committee of Safety, which in the absence of a governor a.s.sumed many of the province's executive responsibilities as Ma.s.sachusetts prepared for possible war. John Hanc.o.c.k was the committee's chairman, but Joseph Warren quickly distinguished himself as its most active member. One of the committee's immediate concerns was creating an adequate stockpile of military stores for a projected army of fifteen thousand men. That winter, large amounts of goods and materials made their way to the town of Concord: 4 bra.s.s fieldpieces, 2 mortars, 15,000 canteens, 1,000 tents, 10 tons of lead b.a.l.l.s, 300 bushels of peas and beans, 20 hogsheads of rum, 20 hogsheads of mola.s.ses, 1,000 hogsheads of salt, 150 quintals of fish, 1,000 pounds of candles, 20 casks of raisins, 20 bushels of oatmeal, 1,500 yards of Russian linen, 15 chests of medicine, and 17,000 pounds of salt cod. John Andrews ascribed the high food prices in Boston that winter to the incredible amount of provisions stored not just in Concord but "in every town in the country."

Since the colony's inhabitants were not about to donate these supplies, funds had to be collected to finance their purchase. In the fall, the Provincial Congress had appointed a treasurer to collect the taxes that would have otherwise been paid to a crown-supported government. To no one's surprise, the collection of funds lagged well behind what they had previously been. It was to be a persistent problem: everyone wanted liberty, it seemed, but far fewer were willing to pay for the army that might be required to win that liberty.

In the winter of 1775, Joseph Warren was in desperate need of funds to purchase the provincial army's medical supplies. Despite having a flouris.h.i.+ng medical practice, he was, he admitted, "much in need of cash." So he approached his three brothers about donating "a large portion of their small paternal estate" to the cause. That apparently not being enough, Warren had no qualms about approaching his younger brother John, who owed him money for his medical education. John had just started practicing medicine in Salem, and despite the fact that he was barely making ends meet, his older brother asked him to take out a loan for the not-inconsiderable sum of two hundred pounds. Unlike Joseph Warren, who had a history of running through vast sums of money, John had an "abhorrence of debt" and balked at the request. That did not prevent Warren from not so gently asking once again, and in April he purchased from the Boston apothecary John Greenleaf five chests of medical supplies at fifty pounds each with cash that may or may not have come from his younger brother John.

Warren was not a man of moderation; everything in his astoundingly varied life-from his family and loved ones, to his medical practice, to being grand master of the St. Andrew's Masonic Lodge-had become caught up in the push for American liberty. By that winter, what was already for Warren a somewhat injudicious intermingling of private and public worlds became even more complicated when it was revealed that one of the people they all trusted was a spy.

As early as November, Paul Revere was approached by someone whom he described as having "connections with the Tory party but was a Whig at heart." This unnamed patriot with ties to the loyalists was, in all probability, the twenty-four-year-old bookseller Henry Knox, who had recently married the dark-haired and beautiful Lucy Flucker, daughter of the province's secretary, Thomas Flucker. Knox's marriage to a member of Boston's loyalist aristocracy may have given him access to the inner workings of the Gage administration, but there was also his bookstore on Cornhill. Frequented by officers of both the British army and navy, the London Bookstore reflected Knox's personal interest in military matters (he was an officer in the town's artillery company), and Knox often found himself in conversation with some of Gage's intimates. At one point he overheard a naval officer revealing that the sailors aboard His Majesty's s.h.i.+ps in Boston "were grown so uneasy and tumultuous, that it was with great difficulty they could govern them." The army officer he was talking to responded that they were having, if anything, even more trouble with the soldiers. By January, this tidbit of information was being repeated by patriots throughout Boston and beyond.

That fall, the patriots had formed a secret committee composed of around thirty men-mostly artisans and mechanics and including Paul Revere-who kept a watchful eye on the movements of the British. The mechanics met regularly at the Green Dragon Tavern and reported their findings to Warren, Hanc.o.c.k, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Church, and a handful of others. Knox informed Revere that the "meetings were discovered," and as proof, repeated almost word for word what had been said during a meeting at the Green Dragon just the night before. Revere and the others tried changing the venue of their meetings, but soon discovered that "all our transactions were communicated to Governor Gage."

Knox also revealed that even the supposedly secret proceedings of the Provincial Congress were known to his father-in-law. "It was then a common opinion," Revere wrote, "that there was a traitor in the Provincial Congress, and that Gage was possessed of all their secrets." The question was who.

By the winter of 1775 the core group of patriot leaders had spent an intense, emotionally exhausting decade together; they were markedly different sorts of people, but they were all part of a political brotherhood that had come to define their lives. None of them appears to have wanted to face the possibility that there was a Judas in their midst.

They knew that Gage (as had Hutchinson before him) had made overtures to just about all of them. Joseph Warren appears to have genuinely liked the general, and in a letter written to Josiah Quincy in late November even admitted to having had several "private conversations" with Gage, whom he described as "a man of honest, upright principles, and one desirous of accommodating the difference between Great Britain and her colonies in a just and honorable way." If this was true, wasn't it possible to claim that leaking supposed secrets to the British might actually work to the patriots' advantage if the information allowed the two sides to come to a mutually beneficial resolution?

Back in 1768, as master of the St. Andrew's Masonic Lodge, Warren had shown a willingness to reach out to the British regulars who had recently arrived in Boston. Up until that point, Warren's efforts to elevate St. Andrew's to grand lodge status had been stymied by Boston's older and more well-to-do St. John's Masonic Lodge, whose members had shown nothing but scorn for the upstart rival. By forming a temporary alliance with the British soldiers who were masons, Warren was able to gain the support he needed to put his own lodge on an equal footing with St. John's. Never losing sight of his ultimate goal, Warren had forged a successful partners.h.i.+p with those who, by all rights, should have been his enemies.

Eight years later, Warren demonstrated a similar pragmatism in his willingness to confide in Thomas Gage. In fact, after events came to a violent head at Lexington and Concord, Warren wrote to Gage and essentially apologized for not having told him more. "I have many things which I wish to say to your Excellency," he wrote, "and most sincerely wish I had broken through the formalities which I thought due to your rank, and freely have told you all I knew or thought of public affairs; and I must ever confess, whatever may be the event, that you generously gave me such an opening as I now think I ought to have embraced." In the winter of 1775 Gage and the patriots were not yet at war; they were in the midst of a most problematic swirl of ever-changing events, and no one knew where they were headed. For those such as Warren, who honestly wanted relations between the colonies and the mother country to be set right, speaking openly with the other side was not necessarily wrong, and this may have, in part, contributed to their unwillingness to identify the traitor among them.

The fact remained, however, that there was a traitor, and his name was Dr. Benjamin Church.

Church's profession was perfectly suited to being a spy. Only a doctor could meet with a nonstop parade of people from all walks of life without creating suspicion. He was one of the few physicians in New England who had been trained in Europe, and he possessed a cosmopolitan haughtiness that he seems to have used to good effect amid the stodgy provincials of Boston. When asked why he socialized with so many loyalists, he claimed to be using them for his own political purposes. The force of Church's judgmental, often audacious personality seems to have put almost everyone on the defensive and allowed him to meet regularly with those who could have easily provided Gage with Church's detailed reports.

His father of the same name was one of Boston's foremost auctioneers; his great grandfather of the same name had been a famous Indian fighter during King Philip's War. The original Benjamin Church had mastered the strategy of using captured Indian warriors against their own people. In his narrative of the war, which had been recently reissued with engravings by Paul Revere, Church insisted that he'd followed the only course that could have turned the conflict around for the English. He also admitted to having qualms about what he'd done. One wonders whether his great-grandson was ever troubled by similar concerns about the morality of his actions.

Dr. Benjamin Church may not have been the most likable of men, but when one reads the reports he filed with Gage, one is impressed not by the cagey duplicity of the writer but by the objectivity-even honesty-of his observations. Indeed, he almost seems to have been performing the exact service that Joseph Warren later wished he had provided. And since no transcripts are known to exist of the debates of the Provincial Congress, Church's reports, which remained among Gage's personal papers for close to 150 years before they were finally discovered in the archives of the Clements Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, are the best record we have of what the patriots were thinking in the winter of 1775.

On March 4, Church wrote, "A disposition to oppose the late parliamentary measures is become general. The parent of that disposition is a natural fondness for old custom and a jealousy [i.e., suspicion] of sinister designs on the part of the administration." He attributed the "irresolute" workings of the Provincial Congress to "the discordant sentiments of their oracular leaders, partly from the weakness of the executive power of that body and partly from an inadequate knowledge in conducting their novel enterprise." Various proposals to a.s.sume the old charter or form a military government had been rejected because "it would amount to a declaration of independency and revolt and thereby preclude the possibility of a peaceable accommodation." The other concern was that such potentially radical actions "might produce a schism or rather give encouragement to some lukewarm brethren in other provinces to detach themselves from the present combination." Church reported that the delegates had appointed generals to lead a possible provincial army and that if hostilities should commence, "the first opposition would be irregular, impetuous, and incessant from the numerous bodies that would swarm to the place of action and all actuated by an enthusiasm wild and ungovernable." That said, the militiamen could be counted on, Church wrote, to fight with a lethal effectiveness: "The most natural and most eligible mode of attack on the part of the people is that of detached parties of bushmen who from their adroitness in the habitual use of the firelock suppose themselves sure of their mark of 200 [yards]." These remarkably prophetic words were written a month and a half before the first shots were fired at Lexington Green.

That Gage was reading these espionage reports, which included dispatches from several other spies, is indicated by the fact that in February he sent a battalion of troops under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Leslie to capture the cannons that were reported to be in Salem. As in the earlier Powder Alarm, the soldiers were transported by water, but unlike that operation, the effort of Leslie's battalion was unsuccessful, not because of misinformation on the part of Church or the other informants, but because the quick-witted locals used a raised drawbridge to delay the regulars' arrival in Salem until the armaments had been moved.

Gage also employed his own soldiers as spies. At the end of February he sent out two officers disguised as surveyors to scout out the roads to Worcester. Equipped with reddish handkerchiefs, brown-colored clothes, and sketch pads, they created maps and drawings of the countryside. They observed the militia practicing on the town common in Framingham. They found occasional respite in the households of a handful of loyalists, but for the most part they were under almost constant scrutiny by the many suspicious patriots they encountered and in several instances were forced to flee for their lives. When they returned to Boston after a night at a loyalist's tavern in Weston, some of the first British officers they saw were Generals Gage and Haldimand and their aides-de-camp, inspecting the fortifications on the Neck. The two spies had so effectively adapted themselves to the alien world of patriot New England that not until they had reintroduced themselves did Gage and even some of their close friends finally recognize who they were.

Josiah Quincy Jr. was engaged in another kind of reconnaissance. For most Americans, England was an abstraction: a mythical homeland that despite its geographic distance from America remained an almost obsessive part of their daily lives. Quincy, along with many other patriot leaders, had been under the impression that the mother country was bloated, dissolute, and weak with rot. Almost immediately upon his arrival in Plymouth, however, he was distressed to discover that he had completely underestimated the strength of the British Empire. "My ideas of the riches and powers of this great nation," he wrote in his diary after a tour of the naval docks, "are increased to a degree I should not have believed if it had been predicted [to] me." When he reached London on November 17, he wrote, "The numbers, opulence &c, of this great city far surpa.s.s all I had imagined. My ideas are upon the wreck, my astonishment amazing."

On November 19, after meeting Benjamin Franklin, who became an intimate friend over the course of the next few months, Quincy found himself in the presence of Lord North. Quincy was one of Boston's foremost lawyers and had been part of the patriot inner circle for years, but he was an ingenue when it came to the British ministry. North was as seasoned and artful a politician as the Empire possessed, and he spoke with Quincy for two hours. Ingratiating and surprisingly respectful, North succeeded in getting Quincy to speak his mind even as the prime minister conveyed his determination "to effect the submission of the colonies." When Quincy blamed the current problems on "gross misrepresentation and falsehood" on the part of former governor Thomas Hutchinson, North replied that "very honest [men] frequently gave a wrong state of matters through mistake, prejudice, prepossessions and bypa.s.ses of one kind or other." Quincy, who wrote of how "much pleasure" his conversation with the prime minister gave him, seems to have failed to realize that North's statement could also apply to himself. In a subsequent conversation with Hutchinson, who was also in London at the time, the prime minister described Quincy as "designing to be artful without abilities to conceal his design."

North seems to have underestimated the young American lawyer. Quincy may have lacked the polish of a ministry veteran, but he demonstrated a refres.h.i.+ng ability to listen and learn as he sometimes fumbled his way through the complex and essentially foreign world of the British political system. On November 24, he spoke for an hour and a half with Lord Dartmouth; on November 29, he witnessed the grand procession of the king ("I was not awestruck with the pomp," he wrote); on December 16, he went to the House of Commons (where he "heard Lord North explain what he meant when he said he would have America at his feet"); on January 1, he conversed with Colonel Isaac Barre, who despite being a friend to America had voted for the Port Bill and was offended by some of Quincy's remarks; and on January 20, in what proved to be the highlight of his trip to London, he attended the debates in the House of Lords and watched as Lord Chatham (whom Quincy compared to "an old Roman Senator") spoke eloquently on the colonies' behalf. All the while, Quincy was in discussions with a host of patriot-sympathizers, many of whom insisted that it was time for Ma.s.sachusetts to act.

Quincy, along with just about all political observers of the time, including Benjamin Franklin, was unaware of the extent to which Lord North had moved beyond the hard-line posturing of the last few months. It was true that on February 2, he had declared in Parliament that Ma.s.sachusetts was now in a state of rebellion. He was also pus.h.i.+ng forward yet another Coercive Act directed at shutting down the coastal fishery upon which New England depended. But he also had hit upon a seemingly counterintuitive idea that he believed would solve everything. Britain should refrain altogether from directly taxing America and allow each colony to determine on its own how to pay for the costs a.s.sociated with its defense and civil government. Known as his "Conciliatory Proposition," this plan represented a way for Britain to offer America an important concession without completely compromising its own authority. Thomas Hutchinson was so encouraged by the proposal that on February 22 he wrote his son back in Ma.s.sachusetts, "I hope peace and order will return to you before the summer is over, and that I shall return before winter."

Parliament, however, was in no mood for conciliation. Many members were confused and frustrated by North's sudden change of direction and gave the proposal little credence. But perhaps the biggest obstacle to finding a solution was the communication lag between Britain and her colonies. A s.h.i.+p took about a month to cross the Atlantic with news from America. When combined with the time required for the king and his ministry to work out a Parliament-approved response to each new development in Ma.s.sachusetts, plus the extra month required to get that response back to America, misunderstandings between the British Empire and her increasingly indignant colonies were unavoidable. After a decade of building tension, Britain and Ma.s.sachusetts had been reduced to shouting at each other across a vast and storm-tossed sea.

By the end of February, Quincy had decided that he must return home to Boston and communicate everything he had learned to Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren. Back in December, he had begun to spit up blood, and Franklin feared that his "zeal for the public ... will eat him up." Franklin was also troubled by Quincy's growing conviction that war had become the only alternative. In early March, after the two talked long into the night, Franklin succeeded in convincing Quincy that caution, not a reckless need for action, was the best policy. "I was charmed," Quincy recorded. "I renounced my own opinion. I became a convert to his... . This interview may be a means of preventing much calamity and producing much good to Boston and the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, and in the end to all America." Although more than three thousand miles away in London, Quincy was being whipsawed by the same opposing opinions that were then being voiced on the floor of the Provincial Congress in Concord.

The day before his departure, Quincy had one last interview with Franklin, who a.s.serted, "By no means take any step of great consequence (unless on a sudden emergency) without advice of the Continental Congress." As long as Ma.s.sachusetts was able to avoid outright violence for the next year and a half and America adhered to the nonimportation agreement, Franklin believed that Parliament must be forced to relent and "the day is won."

On March 4, suffering from "fever and spasms" and still spitting up blood, Quincy sailed for New England. Throughout his stay in London he had been writing to his wife Abigail, who had given birth to a daughter just before he left for England. Their son Josiah had turned three in February. If all went well, Quincy would be in Boston by the middle of April.

March 5, the fifth anniversary of the Boston Ma.s.sacre, was a Sunday, so the annual oration was delayed to Monday. Almost everyone in Boston-including Gage, who put the regiments on alert that day-expected trouble. The already hara.s.sed regulars were inevitably going to resent an oration whose very purpose was, in the words of Samuel Adams, "to commemorate a ma.s.sacre perpetuated by soldiers and to show the danger of standing armies." Even though he had already delivered a Ma.s.sacre Day Oration three years ago, Dr. Joseph Warren was asked to do it again. If there was trouble, Samuel Adams wanted someone of Warren's experience and resolve in the pulpit.

March 6 was exceptionally warm, with the temperature in the mid-fifties. At 10:00 a.m., Bostonians began to file into the Old South Meetinghouse, and before long the pews were crowded with people, some of them British officers. Expecting them "to beat up a breeze," Adams invited the officers to sit in the pews directly in front of the pulpit so that they "might have no pretence to behave ill, for it is a good maxim in politics as well as war to put and keep the enemy in the wrong." This put the soldiers uncomfortably close to the many leading patriots in attendance, which included Samuel Adams (the meeting's moderator), John Hanc.o.c.k, Benjamin Church, town clerk William Cooper (brother of the minister Samuel Cooper), and the Boston selectmen. The estimated thirty to forty British officers were not only sitting in pews; some, it was said, were seated on the steps leading up to the pulpit, which had been draped in black cloth. Surrounding the officers and town dignitaries were at least five thousand townspeople. A soldier claimed that every man in this immense crowd held "a short stick or bludgeon in his hand." "It is certain both sides were ripe for it," First Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie recorded in his diary, "and a single blow would have occasioned the commencement of hostilities." "Every person was silent," another witness remembered, "and every countenance seemed to denote that some event of consequence might be expected."

Around eleven o'clock, a one-horse chaise containing Warren and a servant could be heard clattering down Cornhill to Marlborough Street. Rather than immediately entering the meetinghouse, they disappeared into the apothecary's across the street. One observer noticed that the servant held a bundle in his hands.

A few minutes later, Warren emerged, dressed in what was described as a "Ciceronian toga." It was an outrageous act of dramatic symbolism. A toga-a twenty-foot-long piece of cloth that is folded and wrapped around the wearer's body, its outer edge draped over the left shoulder-was what was worn by a citizen of Rome and distinguished him from a soldier and a slave. At Harvard, Warren had performed the play Cato with his cla.s.smates. In that play, Cato, the devout republican who courageously opposes Caesar's tyranny, speaks inspiringly of the sacredness of liberty. On March 6, 1775, Warren, clad in a toga, was about to perform before both his fellow townspeople and the soldiers who had made Boston a city of occupation.

Since the aisles of the meetinghouse were jammed with people, Warren was taken around to the back of the building, where he was able to access the pulpit from a rear window, making an entrance almost as dramatic as when he had burst through the open window of a Harvard dorm room. He stood before his audience in "a Demosthenian posture," a loyalist reported, "with a white handkerchief in his right hand, and his left hand in his breeches." For the vast majority of those present, Warren's evocative histrionics intensified the already surging emotions of the moment. For those who did not share in his point of view, however, Warren's antics were downright juvenile, and he was, the loyalist wrote, "groaned at by people of understanding." Warren began to speak with the high-pitched nasal delivery that had been a staple of New England ministers since the early seventeenth century, and one loyalist commented derisively on his "true puritanical whine."

But the speech that might have been an incendiary taunt directed at the British soldiers turned out to be surprisingly respectful of all those present. When Warren talked about what had happened on March 5, 1770, he did not dwell on the savagery of the soldiers; instead he focused on the agony and despair of the families who had lost loved ones that night. As many of those gathered there in the Old South Meetinghouse knew, Warren had lost a father in his youth, and he seems to have drawn upon the traumatic memories of his younger brothers when he told of a widow and her children witnessing the final death throes of a husband and parent. "Come widowed mourner," Warren melodramatically intoned, "here satiate thy grief; behold the murdered husband gasping on the ground, and to complete the pompous show of wretchedness, bring in each hand thy infant children to bewail their father's fate. Take heed, ye orphan babes, lest, whilst your streaming eyes are fixed upon the ghastly corpse, your feet glide on the stones bespattered with your father's brain." This was a scene made not from the empty political rhetoric of the day but from the darkest collective memories of the Warren family.

When he did mention the soldiers, he was sure to offer them a backhanded compliment that also served as a kind of warning. Just as Peter the Great had learned "the art of war" from King Charles of Sweden, only to use that knowledge to defeat his former mentor, so were the people of Boston taking careful note of the soldiers' exercises on the common. "The exactness and beauty of their discipline," he said, no doubt with a nod to the officers a.s.sembled around him, "inspire our youth with ardor in the pursuit of military knowledge."

At one point during the speech, a captain of the Royal Welch Fusiliers who was seated on the stairs near the pulpit responded with a warning of his own. He held up his hand; arranged on his open palm were several lead bullets. Not missing a beat, Warren dropped his white handkerchief onto the officer's hand.

It was the ideal time for Warren to launch into a paragraph he appears to have added at the last minute. "An independence of Great Britain is not our aim," he insisted. "No, our wish is that Britain and the colonies may, like the oak and the ivy, grow and increase in strength together." What they all wanted was that this "unnatural contest between a parent honored and a child beloved" result in long-lasting peace. "But if these pacific measures are ineffectual," Warren cautioned, "and it appears that the only way to safety is through fields of blood, I know you will not turn your faces from your foes, but will, undauntedly, press forward, until tyranny is trodden under foot, and you have fixed your adored G.o.ddess Liberty ... on the American throne."

Not until after Warren had finished did the excitement begin. Once the applause had died down, Samuel Adams rose from his seat and, standing beside the pulpit, proclaimed that the thanks of the town should be extended to Warren "for his elegant and spirited oration and that another oration should be delivered on the fifth of March next to commemorate the b.l.o.o.d.y ma.s.sacre of the fifth of March 1770." The use of the word ma.s.sacre immediately drew a response from the officers, many of whom began to hiss while others shouted, "Oh fie! Oh fie!"

Bostonians in the eighteenth century had a decidedly different accent from the British, especially when it came to the p.r.o.nunciation of the letter r. Instead of "Fie!" they heard the officers shouting "Fire!" Mistakenly fearing that the meetinghouse was about to be consumed in flames, they began to run for the doors as others leaped out the first-story windows. Adding to the "great bustle" inside the church was the sudden appearance of the Forty-Third Regiment, its fife and drums blaring, outside the front door. Many of the patriot leaders gathered around the podium became convinced that the regulars had come to arrest them and hurriedly joined the general exodus out of the meetinghouse.

As it turned out, the soldiers had just returned from a brief march into the countryside and had no interest in what was going on inside the Old South. As the regiment continued down the street and the people inside the meetinghouse came to the realization that there was no fire, Samuel Adams called them back to order. After conducting what little business remained, the meeting was adjourned.

As had occurred in Cambridge during the Powder Alarm in September, at Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth in December, and in Salem as recently as February, when Lieutenant Colonel Leslie attempted to seize the patriots' cannons, an outbreak of deadly violence had somehow been averted. One could only wonder when and where the next crisis might arise.

Instead of bloodshed, the British officers chose to respond to Warren's Ma.s.sacre Day Oration with ridicule. On Thursday, March 9, Thomas Ditson, a farmer from the town of Billerica, tried to buy a musket from one of the soldiers. After cheating him out of his money, the regulars did unto the patriot yokel what the patriots had been doing to the loyalists. They seized Ditson, coated him with tar and feathers, and to the outrage of the inhabitants, paraded him through the streets of town. Soon after, a delegation from Billerica complained to Gage, who pretended, at least, to be equally upset.

Almost a week later, on Wednesday, March 15, the day of the much-ballyhooed publication of Warren's speech, the regulars countered with an oration of their own. What John Andrews described as "a vast number of officers" a.s.sembled on King Street, where they conducted a mock town meeting that chose a moderator and seven selectmen. This group of dignitaries then proceeded into the nearby British Coffee House, where they soon appeared on the balcony overlooking the street. Among them was the orator, who instead of a white toga, wore "a black gown with a rusty grey wig and fox tail hanging to it." This was the loyalist physician Thomas Bolton from Salem, who began to read an oration that may have been written by the turncoat Benjamin Church, who is one of the handful of patriot leaders not mentioned in this biting and contemptuous screed.

Where Warren had started his oration by insisting that his own words could not match those of the previous Ma.s.sacre Day orators-"You will not now expect the elegance, the learning, the fire, the enrapturing strains of eloquence which charmed you when a Lovell, a Church, or a Hanc.o.c.k spake," he had humbly begun-Bolton immediately went for the jugular. "I cannot boast the ignorance of Hanc.o.c.k," he sardonically insisted, "the insolence of Adams, the absurdity of Rowe, the arrogance of Lee, the vicious life and untimely death of Molineux, the turgid bombast of Warren, the treason of Quincy, the hypocrisy of Cooper, nor the principles of Young."

The oration was a masterwork of character a.s.sa.s.sination. Hanc.o.c.k was "resolved to make a public attempt to become a monarch." He was also a notorious ladies' man, whose numerous paramours included the "cook maid Betty Price." William Molineux, Bolton claimed, had "through the strength of his own villainy and the laudanum of Doctor Warren ... quitted this planet and went to a secondary one in search of liberty." Warren was such a boring speaker, Bolton insisted, that most of his listeners were asleep by the time he had finished his oration. Thomas Young was an atheist, and Dr. Samuel Cooper, besides "prost.i.tuting his religion" by preaching rebellion instead of "holy writ," was guilty of adultery. The patriots might claim they were on the side of righteousness, but in actuality they were conniving, carnal, and egotistical.

Bolton lampooned John Rowe for having speculated about how tea and salt water might mix, and Rowe was indignant. "This day an oration was delivered by a dirty scoundrel ... ," he recorded in his diary, "wherein many characters were unfairly represented and much abused and mine among the rest." Even normally even-tempered John Andrews was miffed: "A person must [be] more than a stoic to prevent his irascibility rising."