Independence (25 page)

War created a new set of political problems for Samuel Adams. For one thing, he feared that some Americans, including the most conservative congressmen, might be swayed by Lord Chatham’s February peace proposal. Chatham, after all, was lionized in America, and his plan for saving the empire could be distilled to a simple and possibly attractive means of avoiding war: The colonies would recognize parliamentary sovereignty in return for Parliament’s renunciation of American taxation. Adams went on the offensive, writing some of his congressional colleagues to implore them to “take Care lest America in Lieu of a Thorn in the Foot should have a Dagger in her heart.”
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Notwithstanding what his cousin John had written in excitement, Samuel Adams, and the coterie of radical leaders who surrounded him, realized that the pen, as well as the sword, was an essential weapon in this war. They rapidly set out to convince colonists throughout America that the British regulars, acting on orders from London, had been responsible for firing the first shot. They also wished to persuade both colonists and residents in the mother country that the American militiamen had bravely stood up to the British regulars and, in fact, had defeated them.

On the day after the fighting, Revere saddled up again. This time he rode at the behest of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, which from the Hastings House in Cambridge directed day-to-day activities for the defiant rebel government in Massachusetts. Revere spent seventeen days on the road disseminating the committee’s account of what had occurred on Lexington Green and the North Bridge in Concord. One Boston firebrand called the story that Revere broadcast an “authentick account of this inhuman proceeding.” In fact, the purpose of the Committee of Safety was to wage what historian David Hackett Fischer has called “the second battle of Lexington and Concord”: the battle for public opinion. It moved quickly to tell its version of the events of that historic day, dispatching numerous riders to committees of correspondence inside Massachusetts and beyond. The Committee of Safety also published a broadside—a single-page handbill—with a description of the attack on Captain Parker’s militiamen under the screaming headline BARBAROUS MURDERS. It additionally subsidized the
Massachusetts Spy
, whose editor had wisely removed his printing press from Boston to the safety of Worcester just three days before the fighting. In the days following, that newspaper ran repeated hyperbolic accounts of the engagements. Its motto was “Americans! Liberty or Death: Join or Die!”
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As the Massachusetts Committee of Safety hoped would be the case, newspapers across America promptly ran accounts of the events of April 19, virtually all of them utilizing materials distributed through the committees of correspondence. Within seventy-two hours the story was in print in every New England colony, and in less than a week residents of New York and Philadelphia could read a narrative of what had transpired. The newspaper accounts played on a few simple themes: “his
Brittanick
Majesty commenced Hostilities upon the People” of America; the tragedy was the result of the “sanguinary Measures of a wicked Ministry”; the citizens of Lexington and Concord, and the residents along Battle Road, had suffered cruelties no “less brutal than what our venerable Ancestors received from the vilest Savages of the Wilderness”; and by day’s end the British regulars had been “decisively defeated.”
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Some newspapers ran their stories inside black borders. One ran the headline: BLOODY NEWS. A New England broadside depicted a row of coffins beneath the headline BLOODY BUTCHERY BY THE BRITISH TROOPS. The
New-York Journal
told its readers that “our good mother [country is] … at last revealed to all the world … a vile imposter—an old abandoned prostitute—crimsoned oe’r with every abominable crime, shocking to humanity.”
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These lurid though vague accounts of what had occurred were augmented by the publication of depositions taken from more than one hundred civilians and militiamen—and even captured British regulars—who had been in Lexington or Concord or somewhere along Battle Road on April 19. Within four days of the fighting, representatives of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety began taking sworn statements, which were rushed into print. Needless to say, these accounts stated that the regulars had fired the first shots in both Lexington and Concord. There were slight differences in the various accounts of the historic instant when the first shot was fired on Lexington Green, but all fixed the blame on the redcoats:

A British officer shouted “damn them, we will have them,” and immediately the regulars “shouted aloud, run, and fired on the
Lexington
Company, which did not fire a gun before.”

The regulars’ commander “flourishing his sword and with a loud voice giving the word fire; which was instantly followed by a discharge of arms by said Regular Troops.”

The regulars’ commander ordered his men, saying “Fire, by
God
, Fire; at which moment we received a very heavy and close fire from them.”

“[W]hilst our backs were turned on the Troops we were fired on by them … Not a Gun was fired by any person in our Company.”

“[S]ome of our Company were coming to the parade with their backs towards the Troops, and others on the parade began to disperse, when the Regulars fired … before a gun was fired by any our Company on them.”

The commander of the regulars shouted “ ‘Fire! Fire, damn you, fire!’ and immediately they fired before any of Captain Parker’s Company fired.”
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The Massachusetts Committee of Safety additionally published several letters that it claimed had been written by captured or killed British soldiers. On encountering the “peasants” in Lexington, wrote one redcoat, his commander “ordered us to rush them with our bayonets fixed … and the engagement began.” Another divulged that “We … burnt some of their houses.” Several mentioned the suffering of Boston’s residents. As there “is no market in
Boston
, the inhabitants [are] all starving,” one reported, while a comrade wrote that the “people in Boston are in great trouble, for General Gage will not let the Town’s people go out” to gather provisions.
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On April 25 the Committee of Safety learned that General Gage’s report of the battle was to be conveyed to London that same day by the
Sukey
, a two-hundred-ton brig loaded with cargo and owned by a Boston merchant. Knowing the importance of first impressions, the committee moved hurriedly to present its version to London before the
Sukey
crossed the Atlantic. It chose as its courier Captain John Derby of Salem, owner of the
Quero
, a lean and speedy sixty-ton vessel with a schooner’s rigging. He departed from Salem four days after the
Sukey
weighed anchor in Boston. To hasten his voyage, Derby sailed without cargo. He did not even carry any correspondence, save for that provided by the committee: copies of the hastily transcribed eyewitness depositions; two issues of the
Salem Gazette
, each of which carried accounts of the April 19 engagements; and a letter from the committee addressed “To the Inhabitants of Great Britain.” Written by Dr. Joseph Warren, the letter declared that the regulars had started hostilities by firing on the Lexington and Concord militiamen, acts that he characterized as a premeditated mark of “ministerial vengeance against this Colony.” Warren vowed that Americans “will not tamely submit … we determine to die or be free.”
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Derby won the race. In a day when Atlantic crossings often took six weeks or more, the
Quero
sped across the white-capped ocean in thirty days. Despite his rival’s head start, Derby outpaced the
Sukey
by nearly two weeks. Within forty-eight hours of the docking of the
Quero
, Arthur Lee, Richard Henry Lee’s brother, who lived in the English metropolis, put a note in a London newspaper revealing that the depositions were available for public perusal at the office of the lord mayor of London. Edward Gibbon, a member of Parliament who later achieved greater renown as a historian, was one of many who read Lee’s squib and hurried to the mayor’s Mansion House to read what Derby had brought. Gibbon’s reaction was not untypical. “This looks serious,” he exclaimed, but Gibbon was less startled by the bloodshed on April 19 than by the news that the “next day the Country rose” to besiege Boston.

During the next few days it was apparent that the Massachusetts Committee of Safety had won at least the initial battle of public opinion in London. Several newspapers printed accounts of atrocities supposedly committed by Gage’s soldiers, and one cried out against the “cruel and inhuman proceedings of our army there,” adding that the conduct of the redcoats had “as never before disgraced the character of British soldiery.” A week after the
Quero
arrived, a despondent friend of the administration wrote in a London newspaper that the Yankees had persuaded many in England of American blamelessness. “The Bostonians are now the favourites of all the people of good hearts and weak heads in the kingdom,” he said, adding that the New Englanders “saint-like account of the skirmish at Concord, has been read with avidity … [and] believed.”
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Within two weeks of the fighting, delegates from throughout America began their trek to Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress. They found a country in the grip of war fever. Great Britain’s unsparing callousness, said one congressman, had “roused a universal Military spirit.” Companies of soldiers greeted the congressmen on the edge of many towns and, with flags waving and often a small martial band playing spirited tunes, escorted them into the village. Sometimes the delegates reviewed the troops—the volunteers “go thro their Exercises extremely Clever,” gushed one deputy—and in the larger cities they were often part of a substantial parade, riding through downtown flanked by proudly marching soldiers and gaudily clad cavalrymen astride sleek mounts. (As the Massachusetts delegates rode through New York City, the sounds of the martial band spooked the horse pulling John Adams’s carriage, causing the vehicle to overturn and be dragged for several yards; its driver was badly banged up in the accident, but only moments before, Adams had fortunately shifted to another carriage.) The grandest reception was the one that Philadelphia threw for the Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York delegations, which approached the city together. The congressmen were escorted into Philadelphia by nearly three hundred city officials and soldiers, many bearing fearsome-looking swords. As they entered the city, the congressmen found the “Bells all ringing, and the air rent with Shouts and huzza’s” from the large crowds that lined the streets.
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John Adams, who had anguished after discovering that a majority at the First Congress abhorred the thought of war, exulted at the militant spirit that he encountered en route to Philadelphia. He was especially happy to see the pugnacity on exhibit in Manhattan, whose delegates the previous autumn had been Galloway’s greatest supporters. “The Tories are put to Flight here,” Adams rejoiced as he passed through New York City. By the time he reached Philadelphia, Adams was confident that every colony would join the war effort, and he was hopeful that the colonies could replace their lost British trade with commerce from Europe, for he was certain that America’s “cause … interests the whole Globe.”
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Before it had adjourned in October, the First Congress had set Wednesday, May 10, as the day for reconvening. However, given the woeful state of America’s roads, which were made worse by heavy spring rains, not every delegate reached Philadelphia on time. Congress began anyway. As the Massachusetts delegates circulated among their colleagues, recounting treacheries allegedly committed by the British soldiers and spreading the falsehood that Captain Parker’s men had not returned the regulars’ fire on that fateful morning, Congress spent a couple of days tending to housekeeping.
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The delegates presented their credentials, reelected Peyton Randolph as president of Congress and Charles Thomson as secretary, agreed once again to meet in secret, and—with Galloway not in attendance—voted to meet in the capacious Pennsylvania State House rather than Carpenters’ Hall. With sixty-five members expected, ten more than had attended in the fall, the delegates needed a larger space. “We have a very full Congress,” Washington noted, and when the Pennsylvania assembly once again offered to surrender its downstairs chamber and move upstairs, he and his fellow delegates readily accepted.
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Though larger than its predecessor, this Congress had a familiar look. Fifty of the delegates who had sat in the First Congress returned. They were joined by a delegate from Georgia, the only colony that had not been represented at the earlier meeting, and by congressmen from four colonies that had expanded their delegations. Two of the newcomers were already widely known: John Hancock had been added to the Massachusetts contingent and Benjamin Franklin, safely home from London, was elected to Pennsylvania’s delegation shortly after he disembarked at the Philadelphia docks.