1775 (41 page)

W
ith New England at a boil, little about the confrontation at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, should have been surprising, save perhaps the remarkable success of Patriot leaders in compiling, circulating, and selling their own preemptive tale of what happened. This story—in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s version, of “how the British regulars fired and fled”—was not beyond dispute.
¹
Centuries later, who actually shot first is less clear.

For Massachusetts Patriots, the stakes of fixing blame could not have been higher. Convincing documentation was necessary for Massachusetts to meet the precondition for support set six months earlier by the First
Continental Congress: that first blood in a major confrontation had to be shed by the British. By April 22, the Provincial Congress had an eight-man committee busying itself with eyewitness depositions. But even earlier, on April 20, a veteran post rider, Isaac Bissell, had begun a five-day trip that outdid even Paul Revere. He rode from Watertown outside Boston to Philadelphia, changing horses and history as he delivered his stark message in town after town—British soldiers had fired on Americans and killed some.
²

British General Gage, waiting in his headquarters during the day’s tumult of the nineteenth, had not thought ahead so well. He kept his troops armed and available in their barracks on the chance that a rising might also flare up within Boston—or that the aroused New England militia, after tasting blood, might carry their attack to the city. In other ways, Gage fumbled, not least in the contest for public opinion.
³
On the Patriot side, even in March and early April, “the certainty of fighting” was leading a steady stream of Whig activists to exit Boston. Gage’s many informers presumably told him that, too, among their other details on the Patriot munitions supplies at Concord, the Provincial Congress’s adoption of war plans, and the possibility being discussed of a New England-wide Army of Observation.
⁴
By April 19, no major leader remained in the city; the last, Dr. Joseph Warren, had departed that morning.
⁵
We must assume that Patriot strategists gave advance consideration to how the news would be disseminated.

The “powder alarm” in September 1774, which saw 15,000 to 20,000 militiamen from Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire begin marching, aroused by false rumors of fighting in Boston, was an earlier event in which communication outweighed reality. John Adams, hearing the first rumor in Philadelphia during the opening days of the First Continental Congress, had exulted in the delegates’ bellicose response. Paul Revere then brought clarification. After the Congress concluded with a belligerent position in October, Connecticut, Rhode island, and New Hampshire all endorsed its combative language. To merchants and shippers, the Continental Association plan for nonimportation and nonexportation took top billing. Political activists, though, probably paid greatest attention to Congress’s endorsement of Massachusetts’s fiery Suffolk Resolves. War preparations elsewhere in New England went ahead only thinly disguised, as Gage had advised Lord Dartmouth. Before 1774 ended, as we have seen, New Hampshiremen and Rhode Islanders had seized royal forts to obtain ordnance and munitions. Patriots in New London, Connecticut, had removed harborside cannon and trundled them inland.

Historians taken with July 1776 as a pivot tend to ignore how the colonies had essentially opted for war a year or more earlier. In actuality, the thirteen could not “declare war” because Britain was a parent, not a foreign nation. Nor could the mother country declare war on colonists, especially ones who still styled themselves as subjects of the empire. After a progression of trade ultimatums and restraints—winter 1774–1775 months, during which British officials seriously entertained prosecution under treason statutes—both sides let themselves slip beyond imperial commercial disagreements into an increasingly military confrontation. On July 6, 1775, not quite three weeks after the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Second Continental Congress recognized as much by issuing its not very famous
Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms,
largely penned by Thomas Jefferson. Those paragraphs, now all but forgotten, justified resort to force by the impossibility of unconditional submission to Great Britain.

By the legal yardsticks of that era, a rebellion had begun in Massachusetts at least ten months earlier. In late September 1774, Lord North told former Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson, now a prominent Loyalist, that “if they [the Colonials] refused to trade with Great Britain, Great Britain would take care they should trade nowhere else.” In November, Lord Dartmouth said privately that if the report of the Congress’s endorsement of the Suffolk Resolves was true, “they [the Americans] have declared war against us.” On November 18, in a letter to Lord North, the king had described the four New England governments as in a state of revolt.
⁶
As we will see in
Chapter 9
, during the winter of 1774–1775 the principal British response to the American challenge to empire came in two major parliamentary decisions to restrain trade, first of the four New England colonies and then of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, because they, too, had joined the Continental Association and embraced its ultimatum. By April 12, a week before Lexington and Concord, nine colonies had been given their blunt answer to the challenge thrown down in Philadelphia.

The next retribution, applying to all thirteen colonies, came on August 23, 1775, several weeks after news of the fighting at Bunker Hill had reached London. Drawn in much the same language used back in 1745 to proclaim (parts of) Scotland in rebellion under Charles Edward Stuart, all thirteen were now denounced. Like its predecessor, the 1775 proclamation demanded that all good men help to suppress the rebellion and desist from any communication with rebels.
⁷

“Milestones of Rebellion,” below, lists the critical speeches, denunciations, proclamations, and milestones of 1774 and 1775 that marked the road to civil war. The intensification of British anger was steady and unmistakable, but the wintertime lag in communication delayed knowledge on both sides of what was being decided.

Milestones of Rebellion: Reactions to the American Revolution by British Leaders, September 1774 to December 1775

Proclamations of rebellion were no mere political scoldings. Some three decades earlier, many of the Scottish and English rebels captured—not just officers, but enlisted men, pipers, and even three lawyers—had been hung. George Washington, on taking command of the army besieging the king’s troops in Boston, presumably knew the name and fate of Lord George Murray, who had commanded Prince Charles’s army from 1745 to 1746. Murray had not been among the 120 rebels executed for treason—most of them hung, drawn, and quartered—only because he fled to France, as did other senior Scottish participants. In keeping with medieval precedents, the skulls
of some of those killed, spiked above the gates of the cities in which they were executed, “were still grinning down on the streets” even as Washington took up his American command.
⁸

The clash that came on April 19 could have come on March 19 or February 19. The situation across much of Massachusetts had already become explosive. Confrontation in Salem had barely been avoided on February 26 when elements of the 64th Regiment withdrew after failing to seize cannon held there. Twenty miles south of Boston, in what had been the old Plymouth Colony, coastal Marshfield, a wealthy, conservative town dominated by
Mayflower
descendants, had organized a Loyalist association in late 1774. In January, after 200 residents had petitioned Gage for protection, he sent two small vessels with 114 redcoats of the King’s Own Regiment under a capable captain.
⁹

Near the Rhode Island border, Assonet, another venerable Plymouth Colony town, had been Tory enough in 1774 to petition against the Boston Tea Party. In March, Gage requested a conservative officeholder and French and Indian War hero, Colonel Thomas Gilbert, to raise a local Loyalist force. He then sent Gilbert small arms and ammunition. Tensions rose, and on April 9–10, more than one thousand Bristol County Patriot militia mustered, some of whom raided Gilbert’s home, broke up a Loyalist assemblage, and took 35 muskets, two case bottles of gunpowder, and a basket of bullets. The colonel himself fled to the nearby British frigate
Rose.
¹⁰
Bristol County Revolutionary War reenactors, interviewed two centuries later, fairly argued that had anyone been killed, that confrontation, not Lexington and Concord a week later, might have triggered war.

Naval officers were also on edge. On April 5, Gage requested Admiral Graves to send a vessel and another detachment from the 64th Regiment to Fort Pownall, on the Penobscot River in the Maine district. Their orders were to dismantle the fort and take the ordnance and ammunition stored there, a job completed on April 15. On April 11, the admiral ordered the 64-gun
Somerset
to take position to block any attack on Boston across the water from Charlestown. Two days later the four large men-of-war in Boston Harbor, already victualed, were ordered to rig “a month sooner than usual.”
¹¹

On April 20, the Lexington and Concord “morning after,” Gage remained cautious, but Graves vented, at least briefly. In his journal, he recalled urging “the burning of Charlestown and Roxbury, and the seizing
of the Heights of Roxbury and Bunkers Hill.” He had also argued that “we ought to act hostilely from this time forward by burning and laying waste the whole country.”
¹²
The admiral’s advice regarding Bunker Hill was certainly sound.