1775 (12 page)

Trumbull’s role was unique in yet another way. Having spent many earlier years in the Connecticut House of Representatives, he worked easily and comfortably with both it and the Council. As the Revolution took hold, both bodies delegated much of their military supervisory power to Trumbull, facilitating a highly effective war leadership that extended through 1783. By the time Washington had spent a summer besieging Boston, Trumbull was among the general’s closest collaborators. He could make quick decisions, and a well-run Connecticut regime was geographically positioned to speed militia regiments to Boston, New York, Lake Champlain, and eventually Canada.

Back in June 1774, when the Connecticut House had become the first elected North American assembly to urge all the colonies to meet and collaborate against the Coercive Acts, its resolution had also included a call for union.
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More than in other colonies, authorities in Connecticut, especially Trumbull, looked beyond immediate provincial concerns. This was partly because of a religious precursor of American manifest destiny: Puritan belief in the new nation as the Chosen of the Lord. Even sympathetic biographers admit that Trumbull’s biblical language produced snickers in some circles; however, his efficiency was widely respected.

Given the colony’s radical politics, during 1774 Connecticut’s small
Loyalist
minority, not the Patriot majority, was forced into an extralegal maneuver: the Middletown Convention. Its organizers sought to reverse the
colony’s commitment to westward expansion, to remove Trumbull, and to change the manner of selecting the Council, but they failed. The governor had no difficulty retaining his office. After news of the Coercive Acts began arriving in the spring and summer, Connecticut emoted with Massachusetts. If the latter’s 1691 charter could be torn up, Connecticut’s might be next. General Gage and some in the Cabinet hoped as much.
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Just like Massachusetts, Connecticut moved early for military preparedness. According to historian Richard Buel, the General Assembly, in its autumn 1774 session, “commissioned two independent military companies, organized two new militia regiments, and ordered an inventory of the colony’s artillery.” Next, in an even greater break with precedent, “the legislators ordered the militia to train for twelve half-days before May 1, 1775, each non-commissioned officer and private to be paid six shillings for his time. They organized four more militia regiments, provided for a general inventory and repair of weapons, ordered the mounting of cannon at New London, and required the colony’s entire armed force to muster at the end of November.”
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“Connecticut was practically in a state of war in the first months of 1775,” noted another historian, “even before the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord plunged America into full-scale hostilities with England.”
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As the winter of 1774–1775 brought war ever closer, authorities concluded that for towns to double their powder and shot as advised would require outside sources of supply. Therefore the Council, acting alone, commissioned Nathaniel Shaw, a Patriot merchant and shipowner of New London, to send fast vessels to friendly West Indian ports.
²⁸
Connecticut men had plenty of the needed smuggling skills.

After April 19, Trumbull and his legislative allies, in an emergency session, ordered 6,000 men, or one fourth of the militia, on immediate service, embargoed any export of the province’s food products (to ensure close control), and ordered the purchase of more munitions, including 3,000 stands of arms. Follow-up actions in May included adoption of articles of war for Connecticut soldiers like those drawn up by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, as well as enactment of a statute promoting the local production of “Fire-Arms and Military Stores.” By May’s end, six regiments had been formed, each of roughly 1,000 men. Finally, to assist the governor in military management when the legislature was not in session, a Council of Safety was established.
²⁹
This was Trumbull’s war cabinet.

The further importance lay in Trumbull’s ability to speedily commit troops. With Massachusetts regiments mostly deployed around Boston, Connecticut became the United Colonies’ northeastern reserve armory. By autumn, the province had 2,300 soldiers participating in the siege of Boston, over 1,000 in northern New York garrisoning Ticonderoga or marching to Canada, and three regiments camped in southwestern Connecticut, just over the provincial border from New York. From time to time, men were sent at Washington’s request into the next-door province to keep order or suppress Tories.
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With British warships based in Rhode Island occasionally prowling Connecticut’s adjacent waters, Trumbull told Washington that he was obliged to station a seacoast force to protect New London, Norwich, Groton, and Stonington.
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By the end of 1775, Connecticut was defending or attacking on four fronts, meanwhile serving as a principal supplier of meat, wheat, and flour for American armies around Boston or heading into Canada.
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It was an extraordinary dual role, facilitated by Trumbull’s prior commissary experience and Connecticut’s central geography.

Besides being the only serving governor of 1774–1775 to continue on in wartime, he had been a prominent Connecticut merchant during King George’s War and the French and Indian War, holding contracts to supply “flintlocks, cutlasses, cartouchboxes and belts” for a previous invasion of Canada. Later he provisioned provincial troops at Lake George. He also represented Connecticut at intercolonial conferences on war strategy, including meetings with Massachusetts governor William Shirley and Lord Loudon, the British commander in chief. Trumbull’s principal weakness as a merchant was that being most of all a political figure, he let too many customers run up too much credit. However, as governor he seems to have been careful with provincial finances, making enemies with high wartime taxes.
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These pages have paired South Carolina and Connecticut with Virginia and Massachusetts in terms of 1774–1775 patriotism and preparedness. Now it is essential to note further vanguard colony characteristics—a strong commitment to outward territorial expansion, a willingness to press other colonies with migrations, incursions, and border controversies, a taste for small-scale foreign policy, a record of enthusiastic participation in invasions of French and Spanish colonies, considerable experience in regional military collaboration, and a far-flung circle of mercantile, smuggling, and political contacts. Elites in New York and Pennsylvania might dream of leadership in a future British Empire if North American growth favored the middle colonies, but southern plantation elites and New Englanders had no such
illusions. Neither slave owners nor “Oliverian” Puritans could expect any leading role in British metropolitanism. Those two sections needed independence and a self-guided American westward expansion.

The Geography of Power: Territorial, Economic, and Cultural Expansionism

Simple, straightforward maps of the boundaries of the colonies in 1750 or 1775 do little justice to the expansionism of the four—their territoriality, regional settlement outreach, and demographic imperialism. Born out of the Westward Ho! religious, commercial, and cultural legacy of Elizabethan England, these colonies, Puritan and Anglican alike, inherited that drive and expansionist mentality and made it American.
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If the four vanguards contained roughly half of the population of the full thirteen and somewhat more of the wealth, their political and cultural influence was more disproportionate. Beyond New England, something like 20 to 25 percent of the population of both New York and New Jersey had Massachusetts or Connecticut ancestry, which showed in their local politics. Emigrants from Virginia spread not just southward and westward but northward into southwestern Pennsylvania. Much of Georgia, as well as the lower Cape Fear section of North Carolina, were commercial and cultural outliers of South Carolina.

These attributes show best on a quartet of portraits—maps 2 to 5—designed to show for each province its charter-based claims to western territory, its earlier out-of-colony migrations and forts, the districts it once included, and its persisting land claims. Virginia and Massachusetts display the farthest outward reach. However, even in 1776 and 1777, settlers of two contested areas that hoped for statehood—one in Vermont, the other in northeastern Pennsylvania—competed for the name “New Connecticut” to display their origins. Neither happened, but New York and Pennsylvania could testify to Yankee territorialism.

Massachusetts, dominant in New England both geographically and culturally, is the place to start. In 1775, its boundaries included most of what is now Maine, which did not manage to separate until 1820. Next-door New Hampshire had shared a governor with Massachusetts from the 1690s to 1740, and the boundary remained ill defined until 1741. Indeed, much of southern New Hampshire had been settled from Massachusetts, and many of its towns took shape under a Boston grant.

During the Revolution, New Hampshire several times seemed on the verge of coming unglued. If its Merrimack Valley settlements looked south to Massachusetts, scores of townships farther west favored seceding to join nearby towns west of the Connecticut River in what later became Vermont. In 1775, the future Vermont was disputed between New Hampshire, New York, and independent-government advocates, but in May Massachusetts and Connecticut officials made the decisions to attack nearby Fort Ticonderoga.

Through much of the eighteenth century, maritime and fishing-dependent Massachusetts had designs farther northeast than Maine. The several Massachusetts-led military assaults on French-held Nova Scotia between the 1690s and the 1740s partly reflected fishery-related objectives. In the early 1760s, emigrants from Massachusetts by the thousands settled along the western coast of lower Nova Scotia. Until the sixties, a determined Massachusetts—a painted wooden replica of the sacred cod still hangs in the Boston statehouse—looked to what are now Canada’s maritime provinces for commercial expansion and British control of North Atlantic fishing rights.

Map 2
shows the geographic and demographic reach of “Greater Massachusetts” in 1775. Some of this represented former glories. Like Boston’s earlier lead among American cities, Massachusetts’s prospects for northward expansion had peaked. The exception, of course, lay in the tantalizing possibility of a regime change in Canada. Memories of earlier expeditions and captures helped to explain the ongoing interest of Massachusetts leaders in Nova Scotia, the Bay of Fundy, and the Champlain-Hudson corridor, as
Chapter 10
will amplify.

Bay Colony settlements in the middle and southern colonies, by contrast, were relatively few—a handful in New York along its border with Massachusetts, and another handful in New Jersey. The latter clumped in the northern section around Morristown and along the southern coast stretching from Greenwich, the site of New Jersey’s own December 1774 Presbyterian-led Tea Party, to Cape May and its whaling enterprise. In 1775 some New Jerseyans overestimated half of the population as being of New England stock, but a third of the active Patriots might have been.

Land speculation in the district of Maine by Massachusetts investors continued after the Revolution, as did commitment to the fisheries, but the conquest of Canada never materialized. For Yankees, the post-Revolutionary population movement would be a great westward, rather than northern, advance. Between 1783 and 1830, Massachusetts and the rest of New
England, unable to clip off bits of New York in 1775–1776, sent a vast Yankee settlement wave across its upstate counties, all but submerging the Mohawk Valley Palatines, retired Scottish soldiers, and old Dutch Tories of Kinderhook and Hoosic in a tide of Ebenezers, Jonathans, Abigails, and Patiences. This, of course, did nothing at all to change the politics of 1775. The combativeness of Massachusetts expressed its past glory and pride, its cagey Yankee plotting, and the now-burgeoning millennial belief that God had picked a New England–led America as the next Chosen Nation.