Conceived in Liberty (211 page)

To my first mentor in the field of American history, Joseph Dorfman, now Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, I owe in particular the rigorous training that is typical of that keen and thorough scholar.

But my greatest debt is to Leonard P. Liggio, editor of
The Literature of Liberty,
San Francisco, whose truly phenomenal breadth of knowledge and insight into numerous fields and areas of history are an inspiration to all who know him.

Over the years in which this manuscript took shape, I was fortunate in having several congenial typists—in particular, Willette Murphy Klausner
of Los Angeles, and the now distinguished intellectual historian and social philosopher, Dr. Ronald Hamowy of the University of Alberta. I would particularly like to thank Louise Williams and Joanne Ebeling of New York City for their often heroic services in typing this manuscript.

The responsibility for the final product is, of course, wholly my own.

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

November 1978

The news of the victorious battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, hit the world like a thunderclap; they were truly a “shot heard round the world,” and it was the first order of the day for the Massachusetts radicals to make sure that the news spread—especially to the other colonies—in the right way. They needed to present a picture of events that would evoke sympathy and solidarity for the revolutionary cause. The basic outlines of the case were there in reality: proud British troops had invaded the countryside outside Boston; they had launched an armed conflict by shooting down a brave, heavily outnumbered troop at Lexington; and finally, they were smashed by a triumphant array of enthusiastic, individualistic, American farmers on the retreat from Concord. As historian Arthur Tourtellot has put it:

The British had marched out of Boston in force.... The British had fired to kill first. The British had destroyed property. There had been bloodshed and death.... All this established beyond any doubt that the Americans had been the victims. At the same time—and this was equally important—the Americans were also the victors. The half-believed argument... that the American colonists would never stand up to British regulars was thoroughly shattered.
*

But the facts had to be dressed up for popular consumption, especially before the British could turn on
their
engines of propaganda. There was
little need at first to whip up Massachusetts, whose armed farmers were on fire and beginning to pour in to aid the militia; but it was essential and much more difficult to try to command the support of the other colonies for the Revolution, colonies whose leadership had always been suspicious of the radicalism and individualism of the bay colony.

When John Hancock, John Adams, and Sam Adams departed for the crucial meeting of the Second Continental Congress scheduled for May 10, the leadership of radicalism in Massachusetts was left in the capable hands of Dr. Joseph Warren. A brilliant young man educated in liberty under Edward (“Guts”) Holyoke at Harvard, Warren had been the only political leader to participate in the first line of fighting over the whole course of the flight from Concord. Now the toast of Massachusetts, Warren set up civil headquarters at Cambridge on the day after the Concord battle, and was made acting chairman of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety. Less than twenty-four hours after the end of the battle of Concord, he issued the first circular on the events of April 19. In the name of the Committee of Safety, Warren directed the circular to the prime immediate task: to raise an army of the Massachusetts militia. His circular therefore went to the Massachusetts towns and beat a drumfire of flaming warning against the British:

The barbarous murders committed upon our innocent brethren... have made it absolutely necessary, that we immediately raise an army to defend our wives and children from the butchering hands of an inhuman soldiery, who,... enraged at being repulsed from the field of slaughter, will, without the least doubt, take the first opportunity in their power, to ravage this devoted country with fire and sword.... Our all is at stake. Death and devastation are the certain consequences of delay.... An hour lost may deluge your country in blood, and entail perpetual slavery upon the few... who may survive the carnage.

He concluded by urging the speediest possible enlistment in a Massachusetts army.

The British troops had scurried from the Charlestown penninsula back to the safety of Boston across the river; and so the first task of the rebels was to raise an army to lay siege to Boston and contain the British forces within that city. That army sprang up literally overnight as, during April 20, militia from all over the province poured into Cambridge, where Artemas Ward and others, appointed as generals by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, now made their headquarters. Militia also poured in rapidly from Connecticut and New Hampshire, and in a few days many thousands arrived from these two colonies. As a result, in an incredibly
brief time 20,000 eager militiamen formed an army laying siege to Boston. The provincial army which the radicals had sought and which the provincial congress had failed to raise only a week before Concord was now in being. Although it had a leader, Artemas Ward, it was as yet a force of individualists, each coming and leaving on his own responsibility.

The Massachusetts Provincial Congress met quickly on April 22. Now that an army—albeit an individualistic army—could at least temporarily hem in the British force at Boston, Joseph Warren, the new president of the Congress, turned to the vital barrage of education and propaganda directed to the other American colonies. Warren and the radicals realized the vital importance of public support and enthusiasm—and hence of agitation and propaganda—in this new type of war. Here was not a usual war begun by one government against another; here was a people’s war of revolution waged against the existing state apparatus, begun without benefit of governmental or even organized direction. To continue demanded public support throughout the colonies for the Massachusetts cause.

Virtually the first act of the Massachusetts congress, therefore, was to appoint two committees, one to investigate the facts of Lexington and Concord, the other to draw up a narrative of what had happened there. Interestingly enough, while the Committee of Inquiry was making a careful investigation of the facts, the Narrative Committee was already writing its rather distorted report, and with little reference to the inquiry. Its chairman was none other than Dr. Benjamin Church, later discovered to be a secret traitor and informer, who felt he had to go out of the way to proclaim his devotion to the revolutionary cause. Church’s report, issued on April 26, revelled in fake atrocity stories—always an effective device for whipping up hatred of the enemy. Dr. Warren, when editing the report, added further touches to the manufactured atrocities in an appeal to the people of Boston.

Special teams of couriers swiftly carried the Church report throughout the colonies and the newspaper press hastened to publish the story, liberally adding further atrocity tales of their own. Many papers, refusing to wait for their weekly publication date, issued handbills as extra editions as soon as the news arrived. Often, the printed account was edged in heavy black borders, and headlines such as “Bloody News” and “Bloody Butchery by the British Troops” abounded. Isaiah Thomas, editor of the fiery, radical
Massachusetts Spy,
had moved his press from Boston to Worcester. From there he fired off a blast that was reprinted in newspapers throughout the colonies. Thomas called on Americans to “forever bear in mind the BATTLE OF LEXINGTON! where British Troops, unmolested and
unprovoked, wantonly... fired upon and killed a number of our countrymen.” No piteous cries, thundered Thomas, could divert the British troops “from their DESIGN of MURDER and ROBBERY.” And the radical
New York Journal
mocked bitterly that “the kind intentions of our good mother—our tender, indulgent mother—are at last revealed to all the world”; for this mother was “a vile imposter—an old, abandoned prostitute—crimsoned o’er with every abominable crime, shocking to humanity!”

The Tory press, in the face of the intensity of popular feeling, was extremely circumspect about the events at Lexington and Concord. In Boston it ceased publication altogether, and the papers in New York refused to carry the British side of the case.

*
Arthur B. Tourtellot,
Lexington and Concord
(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1963), p. 211.

So zealous and skillful were the American radicals at spreading their account of Lexington and Concord that, by a feat of seamanship and enterprise, the American version reached Britain two full weeks before the official dispatches of Gen. Thomas Gage! Dr. Warren dispatched the skillful young mariner Capt. John Derby to England from Salem. Derby reached London before the end of May, quickly placing the papers in the custody of the radical John Wilkes, by then lord mayor of London. The next day, the American version of the affair hit the English press with great impact. The Reverend John Horne, a leading radical of London, promptly issued an appeal for funds to aid the widows and orphans of Americans murdered at Lexington, funds to help “our beloved American fellow-subjects, who, faithful to the character of Englishmen, preferring death to slavery, were, for that reason only, inhumanly murdered by the King’s Troops....” For sending the money thus raised to Benjamin Franklin, who had already sailed for America earlier that year, Home was imprisoned by the crown. For its part, the British government, bereft of information for two critical weeks, could only deny that such battles had taken place—a denial that made it a laughingstock when Gage’s dispatches finally arrived.

The outbreak of war had a great and critical impact upon the liberal Whigs, many of whom were high-ranking officers in the British armed forces. Some refused outright to serve in war against the Americans, including Adm. Augustus Keppel and Lord Effingham. Rather than lead the war against the Americans, Effingham published his resignation from
the army in September, for which he received public thanks from London, Dublin, Newcastle, and other cities. The British army was hit by numerous other resignations of conscience-stricken Whigs. Lord Chatham publicly refused to allow his son, William Pitt the Younger, to fight against the Americans. A typical Whig defection among leading Englishmen was that of Granville Sharp, the man chiefly responsible three years earlier for the legal action that had outlawed slavery within England. When the American Revolution broke out, Sharp was assistant to the secretary of ordnance and was in charge of ordering the munitions for the British army in the colonies. By midsummer, he obtained extended leave from his duties, because “I cannot return to my ordnance duty whilst a bloody war is carried on, unjustly as I conceive, against my fellow-subjects.” As the war dragged on, Sharp finally resigned his post, winning public applause for his courageous act.

Many merchants joined the Whig leaders in opposition to war against the Americans. The Common Council of London petitioned the king to end the harsh measures against the Americans, and the Livery Company of London declared that the Americans were dutybound to resist invasion of their rights. This American victory for the minds of the British people was never entirely erased by the government, especially since Warren had been careful to appeal to the English as “fellow-subjects” in natural alliance against the crown and its armed forces.

The crown, of course, in the manner of hardliners throughout history, refused to acknowledge that its policy of coercion had failed. Instead, so much the more did the Americans need to be suppressed, and the “rebels” and “villains” to be taught a lesson. For the moment six regiments from the Mediterranean were to be sent to Boston and more enlistments were hoped for—enlistments that failed to materialize. Neither was the North ministry at all apologetic about the failure to cow the Americans. Instead, blame was put on subversive Whigs who had put ideas of liberty and revolution into the heads of the Americans, and, more specifically, on the supposed incompetence of General Gage, who had, however, been essentially acting on crown orders.

After their humiliating defeat at Concord, many leading British officers acknowledged their error in being contemptuous of American military prowess. But others accused the Americans of not fighting fairly, according to the rules of conventional warfare. Instead of marching out on the open field in an extended line to fire volleys at a similarly aligned enemy, the “cowardly” rascals persisted in hiding inside and behind houses, trees, and stone walls, picking off English soldiers with accurate individual rifle fire. To the European military mind of the day, such actions were sheer murder and therefore dishonorable.

Behind the almost blatant idiocy of such an attitude, there lay the hard core of an extremely important problem. For certainly here had been warfare that upset all the “rules” of organized European warfare, in which the armies of the various states were sent out to kill each other in formal massed array. The tactics employed by the Americans at Concord reflected a new type of war: revolutionary war by a people in arms, a war that would naturally take the course—unless deflected by conscious purpose—of guerrilla warfare, in which individuals among the masses, familiar with the terrain, employed their advantage of knowledge and mass support to achieve mobility and surprise against an army possessed of superior firepower.

The Americans, at the very outset, were therefore faced with a choice of extreme importance in conducting their revolution. Unfortunately, they saw their alternatives but dimly, although here and there leaders
could see the vital issues with piercing clarity. Their choice not only determined the outcome and duration of the war; it also determined the permanent complexion and structure of any independent America that might emerge.