1775 (9 page)

It was just days after October 19 that the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, with no knowledge of the Privy Council order, established a Committee of Safety and a Committee of Supply. The two groups were charged to work with each other, and to cooperate with individual towns across the
Bay Colony in order to monitor British troop movements, suppress Tories, purchase and distribute ordnance and supplies, and prepare a well-armed militia to protect the public safety. A month later the Committee of Safety took a more hurried view, telling agents to buy up what weaponry and munitions they could find anywhere else in New England.
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The clock on effective preparation for a likely war was already running.

Through the summer of 1775, responsibility for obtaining gunpowder and arms lay with the thirteen colonies and whatever private individuals they might commission. However, between July and October, the Second Continental Congress became active in urging the individual colonies to get into the munitions trade. Then between September and November 1775, the Congress established both a Committee of Secret Correspondence, charged with obtaining and distributing military supplies, and a Secret Committee, which was to employ agents overseas, gather intelligence about ammunition stores, and arrange their purchase through intermediaries (to conceal that Congress was the true buyer). There is no record that the First Continental Congress had taken kindred measures in the autumn of 1774, but it is all too easy to imagine secret discussions and activities.

Philadelphia quickly became the nerve center. To begin with, it played home to Congress—bringing together the key plotters and orchestrators from New England, Philadelphia, Virginia, and the Carolinas. But the Philadelphia of the 1770s had also become North America’s leading mercantile city and a major shipbuilding center. Two of its major merchant firms, Willing & Morris and Nesbit & Conyngham, quickly came to the fore in the 1775 munitions trade. Much speculation has also attached to Franklin’s own role, even while he was in London during the winter of 1774–1775. To at least one French historian, Franklin was the linchpin.
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A twentieth-century chronicler mused about the vital wartime role of a “commercial-maritime-diplomatic complex” that has since “dropped out of sight…suppressed by the generation which bequeathed to us the Parson Weems attitude.”
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By late 1774, as we have seen, New England’s preparations were overt. Thomas Cushing, a Massachusetts delegate to the Continental Congress, wrote to London on December 30, 1774, to tell Benjamin Franklin that Patriots, wise to the Privy Council’s “political manoevre,” were “therefore adopting the most Effectual Methods to defend themselves against any Hostile invasions of the Enemies to America.” He further advised Franklin that in December (after news of the council’s order had arrived), both Rhode Islanders and New Hampshiremen, under instructions,
had raided royal forts to seize substantial stores of cannon, arms, and munitions.
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Secret agents and secret committees proliferated on both sides. Paul Revere, for example, was not just Samuel Adams’s bearer of great news—or even “the Winged Mercury of the Revolution.” He also led an association of 30 or so Patriots, mostly mechanics and artisans, who kept watch in Boston over the movements of British troops and active Tories.
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General Gage had his own spies and agents reporting on Patriot weapons, gunpowder purchases, and storage depots.
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William Eden, the young undersecretary of state who also ran the British Secret Service, began a rise that during the Napoleonic years would put him into the Cabinet and the peerage as Lord Auckland.

Weaponry, we must remember, had become a major item of world commerce. Europe’s frequent seventeenth- and eighteenth-century wars had spawned a large continental armaments industry—cannon forged in Liège, powder and small arms from Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Maastricht, the best fine-milled gunpowder from France, and a wide variety of war matériel from France’s military and naval arsenals. Bayonets, for example, took their name from the facility in Bayonne. By 1774, munitions makers in France, Spain, Holland, and the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) were alert to the potential market opportunities of a major conflict in North America. This runs contrary to the widely held American view that the flow of European munitions and weaponry to the colonies began only in 1776, with the French and Spanish shipments arranged by playwright Caron de Beaumarchais and others working for the Comte de Vergennes, the French foreign minister.

Newspapers in Boston, New York, London, and continental Europe made frequent reference to earlier traffic. During the winter of 1774–1775, British diplomats pressed the governments of France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, and Holland to issue prohibitions against shipping arms to the British colonies.
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Several did, but pressure from London often went beyond diplomacy. On January 5, 1775, the
New York Journal
reported that to implement the king’s October Order in Council prohibiting arms exports, “two [British] men of war were ordered to the Texel in Holland, in order to prevent the transportation of those articles in English bottoms to America.”
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More common practice, though, was for arms and munitions to travel in French, Spanish, Dutch, and Danish vessels to the Caribbean colonies of those same nations—French Martinique or Cap Français in
Saint-Domingue, Spanish Hispaniola, Dutch St. Eustatius (“Statia,” the famous Golden Rock), or Danish St. Croix. All of these ports were familiar to American smugglers; all were entrepôts to which American agents or purchasers now flocked. Sometimes the foreign vessels would clear for those legitimate destinations, but then make instead for some small port or quiet harbor in the rebellious North American provinces. In early 1775, a frustrated Admiralty broadened its stop-and-search instructions to British naval commanders. Now they were also to inspect and seize such foreign ships as approached—or “hovered” near—the thirteen rebellious provinces. On the high seas, however, Royal Navy officers were told to stop and search foreign vessels only based on well-founded information. Neutral nations found such practices infuriating, but the British government correctly understood both the infractions and the stakes.

Such was the backstairs munitions struggle that accompanied and literally enabled the overt war of 1775—Lexington and Concord, the siege of Boston, Bunker Hill, the capture of the Carolina forts, Ninety Six, Lake Champlain, St. John, Montreal, Hampton, Great Bridge, Norfolk, et al. Neither the British nor the colonials were prepared for a shooting war until the possibility became real in the aftermath of the Coercive Acts. The rebels’ potentially crippling deficiency lay in lack of muskets, cannon, and powder. Not only had North American gunpowder makers generally shut down after the French and Indian War, but the American Department in London periodically queried royal governors on the supplies at forts, magazines, and storehouses in their respective provinces. By the spring of 1775, these were dangerously low. When George Washington took command of the army besieging Boston in late July, he was told there were 308 barrels of gunpowder. Most of that turned out to have been used at Bunker Hill. In truth, the army was down to 36 barrels.

The situation briefly improved in August, with considerable credit belonging to South Carolina. Official state archives tell the tale. In February 1775, the Secret Committee of the South Carolina Provincial Congress began planning a seizure of the Charleston armory and two powder magazines, carried out on April 21. In June, the South Carolina congressional delegation in Philadelphia reported that powder was badly needed for the siege of Boston. The next eight weeks proved fruitful. Patriots operating out of the port of Beaufort, near Port Royal Sound, teamed up with the Georgia Provincial Congress to seize the
Philippa,
a British ship with 15,000 pounds of powder, just outside of Savannah. Then in August, a South Carolina
armed vessel under orders for New Providence in the Bahamas was diverted to capture the
Betsy,
an ordnance brig with 111 barrels, en route to East Florida to supply the British garrison at Fort St. Mark. Much of this was hurried north to Washington’s army.
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Wealthy Charleston also had the funds and location for large-scale smuggling. According to state annals, “Charlestown’s extralegal government was conducting a substantial illicit arms trade with the French and Dutch islands by demanding payment in arms and ammunition for the rice it exported. One such exchange—a transaction with the island of Hispaniola during July [1775]—required three schooners to transport the cargo. Lacking the British military or naval presence they needed to suppress such traffic, the Crown officers in South Carolina could only watch helplessly while the leaders of the Patriot faction turned their colony into a veritable arsenal of revolution.”
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How important Charleston’s flow was to Washington’s first summer is hard to say, but it could have made the August-September difference.

One must wonder why gunpowder machinations haven’t become a prime Revolutionary topic of inquiry. We will see, for example, just how many 1774–1775 Patriot raids, captures of forts, seizures of arsenals and magazines, land battles, and maritime confrontations had as their dominant or supporting motivation the procurement of gunpowder, along with muskets, flints, and cannon. If the Patriot forces at Bunker Hill had possessed adequate powder, they would have hurled back the third British wave of attackers, not just the first two. One commander, Colonel William Prescott, publicly said so and heard no rebuttal.

The king, his Cabinet, the royal governors, and British military commanders manifestly shared this concern well before the Privy Council order. In August 1774, correspondence with Lord Dartmouth, General Gage wrote that he was planning “a series of missions against the arsenals and powderhouses of New England, designed to remove as many munitions as possible—enough to make it impossible for the people of that region to make a determined stand.”
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Both men must have understood the gravity. Even three years later, discussions of General Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga took note of how French powder, muskets, cannon, and military support were now flowing openly—indeed copiously—to the American rebels.

In a sense, the global munitions contest—on a scale far beyond its conspicuous manifestation at Lexington and Concord—was the opening grand battle of the American Revolution.

A
mid the turbulence of late 1774, even the haughtier among the thirteen colonies came to accept the need for equal voices—one province, one vote—in the deliberations of the new Continental Congress. Any more complicated insistence would have set off a diversionary and possibly dangerous political squabble.

The thirteen were not equal, of course—not remotely. And this was especially true with respect to individual political stature—size, history, reputation, experience in government, and recent prominence in upholding liberty and American rights, all of these critical pre-Revolutionary attributes. So in describing how 1775, the long year, actually unfolded, four provinces move front and center—Virginia, Massachusetts, South Carolina, and Connecticut. Their leadership was vital, at first politically but soon militarily.

The first to be settled (1607), the most populous, and the most widely esteemed, Virginia led the pre-Revolutionary pecking order. When the Old Dominion spoke, younger colonies listened. Committees of correspondence in nearby Delaware and Maryland, wondering in mid-1774 about the wisdom of an all-colony conference to oppose the Coercive Acts, began by seeking their senior neighbor’s counsel.
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Virginia then took the lead. And when that First Continental Congress deliberated in September and October, its central blueprint for exerting political leverage on Britain by suspending imports and exports followed the “Virginia Association.” This was the model Virginians had drawn up in August during their own provincial first convention.

Come 1775, more of the actual fighting between British and colonial troops took place in Massachusetts than in Virginia. This upheld the New England colony’s more combative history, as well as the British focus on punishing Boston. Second to Virginia in its founding (1629) and third among the thirteen in population circa 1775, the Bay Colony had spent the prior decade out front—provoking military occupation in 1768, pioneering the first major committee of correspondence in 1772 (Samuel Adams’s Boston-based system for distributing information to other Massachusetts towns), and daring the Boston Tea Party in late 1773. In March of that year, though, Virginia had issued the first call for each colony to establish a committee of correspondence in order to keep in close touch with the others, a crisis-hour boon to Massachusetts. By 1774, all thirteen were loosely networked.