1775 (6 page)

The triumph achieved by Patriot propaganda in London was equally spectacular. The hapless Gage contented himself with penning a defensive account of what had taken place on April 19, which he sent off with other official papers on the British ship
Sukey.
His further instructions were only that any mail to the Massachusetts agents in London was to be seized. However, using the British mails was not what Adams and Warren had in mind. Four days after the unimpressive
Sukey
set sail, the fast schooner
Quero,
owned by the Derbys of Salem, left on a single-purpose mission: bringing the first and most persuasive explanation of Lexington and Concord to Britain. Twenty-eight days later, the
Quero
slipped into a quiet English inlet on the Isle of Wight, across from Southampton, and Captain John Derby, making his personal way through Britain’s naval heartland, quickly delivered his documents and affidavits to the agents who represented Massachusetts in London. They in turn took them to the office of the (pro-American) Lord Mayor of London and to sympathetic, even friendly newspapers. The
Sukey
took two more weeks to arrive, further embarrassing Gage and the American secretary, Lord Dartmouth.

If
Quero
was no ordinary schooner, John Derby was no ordinary sea captain. The Derbys were the foremost shipowning family in heavily maritime Salem and also the town’s leading Patriots, deeply involved with the Sons of Liberty and Salem Committee of Correspondence. During the war years to come, the fast privateer ships built or bonded by the
Derbys—boasting names like the
Oliver Cromwell,
the
Hampden,
and the
Tyrannicide
—were the port’s most successful. All told, Derby privateers captured 144 prizes for a profit of almost $1 million, and by the late 1780s, Elias Hasket Derby, John’s brother, became the first American millionaire.
¹³
Samuel Adams had known where to turn.

Distance itself was usually a friend to the Patriot cause. With British ports as much as 5,000 miles away, when distances were lengthened by routes and winds, connections to Boston and New York could be drawn out and erratic. Going east, the average sailing time was four to six weeks, but the westward voyage usually took six to eight weeks. The Derbys could do better, but for the British, official communications were slow, instructions too often out of date, and reinforcements promised by London typically months late.

During 1775 British military logistics also suffered from undependability and overreach. General William Howe, taking command from Gage in October, was kept in Boston for nine months after Bunker Hill by London’s inability to provide supplies and the transports needed to evacuate his soldiers. They did not depart for Halifax, Nova Scotia, until March 1776. In the interim, the Boston garrison was penned up—hungry, cold for want of fuel, and with ships of the wrong size to be effective in New England waters. These months, during which British power was all but wasted, provided vital time for the Revolution to deepen its thirteen-colony roots.

Preoccupation with Boston and New England hindered Whitehall’s ability to take a larger political and economic view of trouble also unfolding from Chesapeake Bay south to the Savannah River. British historians, in particular, have also paid too little attention to the Continental Association, set up by the Philadelphia Congress in October 1774 to manage and enforce its phased-in suspension of trade with Britain. Close to 1,000 committees of all kinds were launched on the township, city, and county levels between the summer of 1774 and the summer of 1775, and through them Patriot-faction activists gained powerful control over grassroots economic activities and frequently much else.

Many of these associations also became political auxiliaries. Military historians like Walter Millis, John Shy, and Don Higginbotham make a parallel case for a second dimension of 1774–1775 Patriot takeover—the use of provincial congresses and various committees to purge and reconstitute local militias. These served to bind the loyalty of civilians when no countervailing British troops were on hand. In Millis’s words, “repeatedly it was the militia which met the critical emergency or, in less formal operations,
kept control of the country, cut off foragers, captured British agents, intimidated the war-weary and disaffected, or tarred and feathered the notorious Tories. The patriots’ success in infiltrating and capturing the old militia organizations…was perhaps as important to the outcome as any of their purely political achievements.”
¹⁴

At sea, New England was Britain’s first target. The Royal Navy, with some 30 ships on the American station, exasperated by its inability to adequately protect British seaborne supply lines, soon vented frustration by island raiding and town shelling. In September 1775, Vice Admiral Samuel Graves, acting on instructions from home, ordered his ship captains to “proceed along the [New England] Coast, and lay waste, burn and destroy such seaport towns as are accessible to His Majesty’s ships.”
¹⁵
As we will see in
Chapter 14
, coastal residents were shocked, and in some areas they panicked. During these months, Patriot leaders wisely began to jettison earlier rhetoric that had blamed Parliament’s army or the “ministerial navy.” Increasingly, they began placing the onus squarely on George III, an unjust king willing to tyrannize his American subjects. In August, King George had proclaimed subjects in the thirteen colonies rebels, tidings that arrived in November more or less at the same time as news of the October bombardment and burning of Falmouth, now Portland, Maine.

The contemporary map reproduced on
page 5
shows the tight 1775–1776 patriotic siege lines encircling fortified Boston, itself almost an island. It also shows the multiple islands of Boston Harbor, several garrisoned by British troop detachments. Most have long since been swallowed up by the expanding city, but in 1775, a half dozen—Hog Island, Noddle’s, Deer, Snake, Peddock’s, and Great Brewster—saw intermittent battles during the four months after April 19. Several of these involved 500 to 1,000 men. As the king’s soldiers and sailors searched for sheep, cattle, timber, and firewood, colonial forces sought to remove them from the islands and deny the British occupiers food and forage. Yankee rebels also burned down the old lighthouse on Great Brewster, vital to British nighttime navigation because Boston Harbor was full of tricky shoals, tides, and fog banks.

After Bunker Hill, much of the 1775 fighting in New England took place on coastal waters rather than on land. As a maritime battleground, Massachusetts Bay—the shoal- and inlet-studded crescent from Cape Cod on the south to Cape Ann in the north—favored the rebels. Yankee ship captains and pilots knew its channels and sandbars; the British did not, and few local pilots dared aid them. Moreover, the large 50-, 60-, and 70-gun
British warships were of little use in such shoal-ridden waters. However, small British vessels, more mobile, were also vulnerable to capture. By June, Massachusetts seamen had captured a half dozen British sloops, tenders, and barges. Up and down the Atlantic coast, the most effective American tactics relied on small craft. As we will see in
Chapter 23
, this universe included canoes, swift and silent enough to scout Castle William, the British island headquarters; New Hampshire gundalows; speed-rigged Chesapeake pilot boats; Pennsylvania row galleys; and small flotillas of 15-to-30-foot whaleboats, oar driven by skilled fishermen and capable of moving 200 to 300 men for a quick strike. September and October also saw a half dozen light (40-to-75-ton) and handy schooners ordered into action against British supply ships by George Washington—unsurprisingly they were nicknamed “Washington’s navy.”

The other New England provinces were allies of Massachusetts and had also begun their arms buildup in late 1774. After Lexington and Concord, the Connecticut legislature voted 6,000 soldiers to support the siege of Boston, established a provincial navy (July 1), and set up a “War Office” in secure, inland Lebanon, the home town of feisty Governor Jonathan Trumbull. That small frame building, just off the town’s huge green, would manage the state’s regional and national war effort for eight straight years until peace came in 1783. On April 22, the Rhode Island legislature approved sending 1,500 men to help Massachusetts, and seven weeks later it authorized the war’s first provincial navy. On June 18, the provincial sloop
Katy
captured the Royal Navy tender
Diana
in Narragansett Bay. New Hampshire, in turn, had militia drilling by April 23, and on May 17 its Fourth Provincial Congress met to enact legislation for the “common defense,” including a standing army of 2,000 men.
¹⁶

By the summer of 1775, in short, mobilization and at least minor confrontation was New England wide. Seaports from the Maine district, then part of Massachusetts, south to New London and New Haven, Connecticut, fortified their approaches. Kittery and Portsmouth put a log boom across the Piscataqua Harbor that the two towns shared and emplaced coastal batteries. Salem, Massachusetts’s second city, decided to sink hulks to block the harbor channel and erect forts on Juniper Point and Winter Island.
¹⁷
Such precautions were sound. Between May and December, British warships burned Falmouth, torched parts of Newport and Jamestown (R.I.), and shelled six other New England towns. Threats were made against
Portsmouth. New England was indeed the first front line. However, by August and September, confrontation was spreading.

The South’s Revolutionary Summer

The scattered armed encounters of April and May, mostly confined to Massachusetts, including its Maine district, might still have been isolated and kept from interfering with serious political negotiations. Not so Bunker Hill on June 17, which hardened attitudes on both sides. Colonial newspapers printed in some detail King George’s own warlike assessments, although it would be November before word arrived of his August proclamation naming the Americans rebels. By August, the Royal Navy was seizing growing numbers of American vessels under Parliament’s spring Restraining Act, especially in New England waters. Autumn saw colonial belligerence crystallize over the multiple burnings and bombardments, over reports of the king hiring mercenaries, and over British ministers’ blunt comments that Americans must be treated like foreign enemies. Lord Dartmouth, a relative moderate, confided to a summer visitor that the government had decided that the same force would be employed “in America as if the inhabitants were French or Spanish enemies.”
¹⁸
The Patriots, equally militant, had expelled royal governors, captured Ticonderoga and Crown Point, and then pushed on into British-ruled Canada, aiming to take Montreal. Although news was slow to arrive, neither side was leaving much room for reconciliation.

Confrontation soon spread farther afield. By autumn, ships from New England, Virginia, and South Carolina together had paid armed visits to take or seize munitions in four loyal British colonies in the hemisphere: Bermuda, East Florida, Nova Scotia, and St. John’s (now Prince Edward Island). South Carolina had scrapped a munitions-gathering excursion to the Bahamas, but the Continental Navy went there for gunpowder and cannon in early 1776. King George and Parliament could fairly judge in August 1775 that Britain faced a full-scale thirteen-province rebellion showing unmistakable momentum toward independence. The autumn months became a turning point for many Americans, although conservatives in the middle colonies—New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Maryland—still cherished hopes of reconciliation.

By year’s end, a few square miles of Boston represented the sole
remaining seat of British occupation, authority, and might—and this applied to the length and breadth of the thirteen colonies.
¹⁹
The rapid spread of insurrection in the plantation colonies during the spring and summer of 1775 came as a particular shock to British officials, given their supposedly high ratios of Loyalists. Nevertheless, by late summer, the coast from Chesapeake Bay to Georgia’s Sea Islands had become the second theater of armed disaffection. Besides provincial gunpowder magazines, Patriots that summer seized a series of military installations—Fort Charlotte on the Savannah River, Fort Johnston in North Carolina, and Fort Johnson on Charleston Harbor.

In Virginia, most populous of the provinces, the royal governor, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, shaken by a politically harrowing April and May in the capital of Williamsburg, bolted on June 8 to Yorktown and the protective safety of HMS
Fowey.
Hostilities commenced in August when HMS
Otter,
a naval sloop within Dunmore’s command, began raiding plantations. Then in October, a small flotilla led by
Otter
tried to burn the town and port of Hampton but was driven off by Virginia riflemen. November saw Dunmore and British forces occupy the port of Norfolk. However, they withdrew to ships in mid-December after Patriot troops defeated a combined force of British regulars, local Loyalists, and armed black ex-slaves at Great Bridge, fifteen miles to the south. On New Year’s Day, Dunmore’s small fleet began a bombardment of Norfolk, which caught fire and burned. Patriots, who regarded the seaport as a nest of Loyalists, completed the burning and destruction.

North Carolina’s Josiah Martin became the second southern royal governor to run on July 16, 1775, fleeing to the sloop of war
Cruizer
just hours after Patriots captured and burned Fort Johnston near the entrance to the Cape Fear River and Wilmington, the province’s principal town. On board
Cruizer,
Martin kept in contact with inland settlements of Loyalist Scottish Highlanders and Piedmont dissidents he had politically befriended. Despite months of planning, the planned Loyalist rising fizzled out in February when a combined force en route to the coast was defeated in battle at Moore’s Creek Bridge.

Lord William Campbell, South Carolina’s new governor, had just arrived from Britain in June 1775. But on September 15, after Patriot militia followed up their July capture of outlying Fort Charlotte by seizing Fort Johnson, the principal Charleston Harbor installation, Lord William fled. He took refuge in HMS
Tamar,
a “worm-eaten” navy sloop patrolling off
the coast. Open hostilities commenced in the autumn, when the South Carolina naval vessel
Defence,
sinking hulks to block the Hog Island Channel near Charleston, exchanged cannon fire with the British sloops
Tamar
and
Cherokee.
²⁰