Knollenberg Bernhard. Growth of the American Revolution: 1766-1775
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
sachusetts, the delegations from these colonies joined with those from
the others in voting for war measures. Presumably they shared the feel-
ing of James Duane, one of the New York delegates, who, in justifying
his support of war measures at the Second Congress, said, “It is suffi-
cient ground for my conduct that the sword of ministerial vengeance
has been drawn against our Brethren in the Massachusetts Bay and
their innocent blood been shed...in our common cause....”³¹ In-
structions given before the day of Lexington and Concord had become
obsolete.
MASSACHUSETTS PREPARES FOR
WAR
:
OCTOBER, 1774–APRIL, 1775
D
, Massachusetts Whigs, as we saw in
Chapter , successfully opposed the execution of the Massachu-
setts Regulating Act of . Town meetings were held without permis-
sion from Governor General Gage; all the newly appointed mandamus
councilors living outside Boston who accepted and retained their ap-
pointments were compelled to seek safety in Boston; and judges through-
out the province, while suffered to retain office, were prevented from hold-
ing court under the Regulating Act. Furthermore, assuming that Gage,
when reinforced, would attempt to execute the act by military force,
Whig leaders throughout Massachusetts took steps to prepare for war.
As early as August , a convention of delegates from most of the
towns of Worcester County in central Massachusetts proposed a pro-
vincial convention to adopt measures to prevent execution of the Reg-
ulating Act. Several other Massachusetts county conventions repeated
the proposal and the project was brought to a head by a resolution of
Middlesex County, supported by the Suffolk County Resolves (de-
scribed in Chapter ), calling for the assembling of a provincial con-
vention at Concord on October .¹
Delegates from most towns of the province assembled at Concord on
the appointed day.² John Hancock was elected President and Benjamin
Lincoln of Hingham, Secretary of the Congress, and a steering commit-
tee of fifteen was chosen. This committee, called the Committee on the
State of the Province, consisted of Hancock, Joseph Warren, and Ben-
jamin Church of Boston and twelve leading Whigs from other parts of
the province, including Joseph Hawley of Northampton, Artemas Ward
of Shrewsbury, James Warren of Plymouth, William Heath of Roxbury,
and Elbridge Gerry of Marblehead. On their return from Philadelphia,
the Massachusetts delegates to the First Continental Congress, Samuel
and John Adams, Thomas Cushing, and Robert Treat Paine, were
added to this important committee.³
Though dealing with a variety of other matters, the Congress, which
sat (with an adjournment of a few weeks) until December ,⁴ was oc-
cupied chiefly in preparing for defense.
The first step was to secure funds to finance a projected army by call-
ing up all officials responsible for the collection of provincial taxes to
turn over their collections to a Receiver-General, elected by the Con-
gress, instead of to the provincial treasurer, a Tory.⁵
The second was to call for the election of officers of the provincial
militia to replace existing officers, many of whom, appointed by suc-
cessive royal Governors, were Tories. The new system was to be demo-
cratic. The company officers were to be elected by the men of the com-
pany, and the field (battalion) officers by the company officers. Only the
general officers, Jedediah Preble of Falmouth, Ward, Seth Pomeroy of
Northampton, John Thomas of Kingston, and Heath (in this order of
rank), were appointed by the Congress.⁶
The third was to provide for a special body of “minute men,” en-
listed to the number of “one quarter at least,” of each company of mili-
tia, who were “to equip and hold themselves in readiness on the short-
est notice...to march to the place of rendezvous.” They were to be
organized into companies of fifty privates each and battalions of nine
companies each, the officers to be elected in the same way as those of
the ordinary militia. The minute men were to be drilled “three times a
week and oftener as opportunity may offer.” The Congress made no
provision for their pay, but recommended that the several towns from
which they come pay the men “a reasonable consideration” for their
services and furnish each with “an effective fire arm, bayonet, pouch,
knapsack, thirty rounds of cartridges and balls.”⁷
The fourth step was to elect a Committee of Safety of nine members
“to continue in office until the further order of this or some other Con-
gress or house of representatives of the province,” with authority to call
out as many men as they thought best “whenever they shall judge it
necessary for the safety and defence of the inhabitants of this province.”
Presumably because this important committee would have to meet fre-
quently and, in an emergency, very quickly, its membership was limited
to residents of Boston and near-by towns. The Boston members were the
same as those on the Committee on the State of the Province, Hancock,
Warren, and Church; the others were Richard Devens of Charlestown,
Benjamin White of Brookline, Joseph Palmer and Norton Quincy of
Braintree, Abraham Watson of Cambridge, Azor Orne of Marblehead,
John Pigeon of Newton, and General Heath.⁸
Various other provisions for an army of defense were adopted, in-
cluding the establishment of a Committee of Supplies. The committee
was to provide for “the reception and support” of men in the field when
called into service by the Committee of Safety and to procure immedi-
ately, at a cost not to exceed £,, pieces of field artillery, car-
riages for battering cannon, mortars, tons of grape and round
shot, tons of bombshells, tons of lead balls, , barrels of powder,
, arms and bayonets, and , flints.⁹
The Congress also protested to Gage against the fortification of Bos-
ton Neck, elected delegates to the forthcoming Second Continental Con-
gress, and, before rising on December , called for the election of a
second provincial congress to meet at Cambridge on February , .¹⁰
One other proceeding of this Congress must be noted. This was a
motion for the appointment of a committee to consider a letter submit-
ted to the Congress proposing that “while we are attempting to . . .
preserve ourselves from slavery, that we also take into consideration
the state and circumstances of the negro slaves in this province.”¹¹ The
irony of colonial Whigs clamoring against Great Britain’s attempted
“enslavement” of British North America, while they themselves took no
steps even to mitigate the actual slavery of the blacks held by so many
of them, is discussed in an appendix to this chapter. Suffice to say here
that the journals of the Massachusetts Congress record, “After some de-
bate thereon, the question was put whether the matter now subside,
and it passed the affirmative.”¹²*
The Second Massachusetts Congress called for by the First Con-
gress met at the scheduled time and place. Gage wrote Lord Dart-
mouth that many of the delegates were “Sent by their Towns to oppose
the violent Party.”¹³ But the journals of this Congress record measures
no less spirited than those of the First, with one exception, discussed
later in this chapter.
These measures included an appeal to the people of the province to
prevent anyone from furnishing Gage with lumber, wagons, horses, or
other articles of military use; election of a committee to prepare rules
necessary for the good order of “the constitutional army which may be
raised in this province”; and a resolution to continue the Committee of
Safety, with authority to call into the field “so many of the militia of this
province as they shall judge necessary” to oppose any attempt by Gage
to execute the Regulating Act “by force.”¹⁴
On February , the Congress adjourned until March , to recon-
vene at Concord instead of Cambridge.¹⁵ The journals give no hint as
to why Concord, which had fewer facilities than Cambridge for hous-
ing the delegates, was chosen as the place of meeting. But a letter of
January , , from James Warren to John Adams suggests that the
danger of the delegates being seized while attending the Congress in a
town so near Boston as Cambridge, was the reason for the change.¹⁶
The existence of such danger is clear from letters of January from
Gage to Dartmouth suggesting that the Ministry order “the most obnox-
ious of the Leaders seized,” and February from Major John Pitcairn
to Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, stating, “I often wish to
have orders to march to Cambridge and seize those impudent rascals
[in the Massachusetts Congress]...and send them to England.”¹⁷
* David Brion David, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution – (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, ); Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the
Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, );
Duncan J. McLeod, Slavery, Race and the American Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, ); Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revo-
lution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ). [B.W.S.]
On receipt, soon after the Congress adjourned, of a report that more
troops were being sent to Gage,¹⁸ the Committee of Safety and the
Committee of Supplies became very active. At joint sessions held daily
February –, they voted to purchase medicines, canteens, and “all
kinds of warlike stores, sufficient for an army of fifteen thousand men to
take the field,” move all the colony’s arms at Boston and Roxbury to
Worcester, and send two pieces of field artillery to Colonels Ward of
Shrewsbury, Heath of Roxbury, Thomas Gardner of Cambridge, Ed-
ward Mitchell of Bridgewater, James Warren of Plymouth, Jedediah
Foster of Brookfield, and Lemuel Robinson of Dorchester.¹⁹
The great and dangerous power conferred by the Congress on the
Committee of Safety evidently troubled Joseph Hawley, a leading dele-
gate from western Massachusetts to both the First and Second provin-
cial Congresses and a member of the important Committee on the
State of the Province.
On returning to his home in Northampton during the recess of the
Congress, Hawley wrote Cushing, a fellow member of this committee,
pointing out, “If we, by order of our Committee of Safety, should begin
the attack and so bring on hostilities before the general consent of the
Colonies that hostilities were altogether unavoidable...,there will
be infinite hazard that the other governments will say that we have un-
necessarily and madly plunged into war, and therefore must get out of
the scrape as we can....”²⁰
The impact of Hawley’s letter is reflected in a resolution adopted by
the Congress, soon after it reassembled on March , virtually ordering
the Committee of Safety not to call out the militia unless “the Army un-
der command of General Gage, or any part thereof to the Number of
Five Hundred, shall march out of the Town of Boston, with Artillery
and Baggage....”²¹
Having passed this resolution and several others of less importance,
nearly half the members of the Congress favored another adjournment;
but the majority voted (April ) to remain sitting for a few days longer in
the expectation of receiving news from England.²²
The very next day, two vessels sailed into Marblehead from Falmouth,
England, with news from London up to February , which, as James
Warren wrote his wife, left the people of Massachusetts “no longer at a
loss what is intended for us by our dear Mother: We have ask’d for
Bread and she gives us a Stone, and a serpent for a Fish.”²³
The news included the text of the Address of both Houses of Parlia-
ment to the King, quoted in Chapter , declaring Massachusetts to be
in rebellion and asking him to take effectual measures to suppress the
rebellion, and the King’s answer that he would take the most speedy
means of doing so. There was also a report under a London dateline of
January that the Cabinet had just decided to send six more regiments
to Gage immediately and another report that the government was plan-
ning to send at some unstated time , additional troops to Boston
and , additional sailors to man the ships stationed there.²⁴
The news galvanized the Congress into intense activity, evidenced
by its journals of April –.
Appeals were published for all towns that had not elected delegates
to the Congress to do so and for absent delegates from Hampshire,
Berkshire, Worcester, and Bristol Counties to attend immediately.
Preparations were made to embody Indian volunteers at Stock-
bridge, Massachusetts, into a company of rangers, and a message was
sent to the Mohawks and other tribes of the Six Nations in the province
of New York promising to supply them with powder and guns and invit-
ing them to “whet your hatchet and be prepared with us to defend our
liberties and lives.”²⁵*
Rules for the regulation of the proposed Massachusetts army and a
resolution to enlist and pay six companies of artillerymen to be “con-
stantly in exercize” were adopted. Also a resolution, offered by the
Committee on the State of the Province, to establish a New England
army and send committees to Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New
Hampshire to secure their cooperation was adopted (April ) by a vote
of to .²⁶
One of the most interesting of the resolutions of this period indicates
that the plan for a corps of minute men to enlist on their own initiative
* Barbara Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University
Press, ); James H. O’Donnell, III, Southern Indians in the American Revolution (Knoxville: Univer-
sity of Tennessee Press, ); Colin Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Di-
versity in Native American Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, ); Richard White,
The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, – (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, ). [B.W.S.]
and elect their officers had been disappointing.²⁷ This resolution
(April ) provided for a reversion to the method of recruiting employed
in earlier wars in which officers were appointed and made responsible
for drumming up recruits to the units they were to command.²⁸
It is notable that even in the intense excitement of this period, the
Congress evidently was determined to adhere to its recent resolution
to avoid precipitating hostilities. In a circular letter to all the towns in
Bristol County, they were advised to get into “the best posture of de-
fence,” but to “act on the defensive only, until the further direction of
this Congress.”²⁹
On April , the Congress adjourned until May , but with the pre-
caution of authorizing the members of the Congress from Charlestown,
Cambridge, Brookline, Roxbury, and Dorchester to order an earlier
meeting of the Congress at Concord in case of emergency.³⁰
In writing Dartmouth concerning the consternation of “the Fac-
tion” in Boston over the news received on April , Gage reported that
“the most active left Town before the Night,” and James Warren wrote
his wife on April , that “H and A [Hancock and Samuel Adams] go no
more into that Garrison.”³¹ Thus, when Dartmouth’s fateful letter of
January , quoted in Chapter , finally reached Gage on April , the
two foremost rebel leaders in Massachusetts³² were beyond easy reach.
GAGE’S MILITARY ACTIVITIES
WHILE AWAITING ORDERS
FROM ENGLAND
W
G G G arrived at Boston in May,
, he had only one regiment under his immediate command,
the Sixty-fourth Regiment of infantry stationed at Castle William near
the entrance of Boston harbor. In June and July, the administration sent
him four more regiments
—the Fourth, Fifth, Thirty-eighth, and Forty-
third
—from England and Ireland.¹ But Gage’s greatest accession of
strength came from dipping into the mass of British troops sent to North
America during the Seven Years’ War and, in large part, kept there ever
since.²
Exercising his authority as Commander-in-Chief of the British Army
in North America, Gage, from August to November, moved regiment
after regiment of these troops from various posts in the east to Boston.
He drew the Twenty-third from New York City, the Fifty-ninth from
Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Forty-seventh from New Jersey, the Tenth and
Fifty-second from Quebec, several companies of the Eighteenth from
Philadelphia, and three companies of the Sixty-fifth from Newfound-
land.³ He also collected a sizable park of artillery⁴ and men to serve it.
On November , Gage wrote Secretary of State Lord Dartmouth
that on the accession of the Tenth and Fifty-second Regiments, which
were just coming into Boston harbor from Quebec, he would have “a
Force of near Three Thousand Men exclusive of a regiment [the Sixty-
fourth] for the Defence of Castle William.”⁵ In December he was fur-
ther strengthened by the addition of nearly marines.⁶ Thus, by the
end of the year Gage must have had over , men in or near Boston.
A considerable squadron of warships under the command of Admi-
ral Samuel Graves had also by this time assembled there.⁷
This combined force had been able to enforce rigorously the Boston
Port Act. But Gage, while awaiting further instructions from the admin-
istration, made no effort to enforce the Massachusetts Regulating Act
outside Boston.⁸
He explained his policy in a letter to Lord Dartmouth, dated Sep-
tember , stating, “I mean, my Lord to...avoid any bloody Crisis as
long as possible, unless forced into it by [the rebels] themselves....His
Majesty will in the mean Time Judge what is best to be done, but your
Lordship will permit me to mention that...if it will be resolved to stem
the Torrent...We shou’d...be strong and proceed on a good Foun-
dation before any thing decisive is tried....”
He wrote again in similar vein on October , “Affairs are at such a
Pitch thro’ a general union of the whole, that I am obliged to use more
caution than would otherwise be necessary, least all the Continent
should unite in hostile Proceedings against us, which I apprehend His
Majesty would by all Means wish to avoid unless driven to it by their
own Conduct.”⁹
Gage, however, was not idle while awaiting his expected instructions
from London.
On September , with the cooperation of Admiral Graves, he shipped
a detachment of men from the regiment at Castle William to a point
on the Mystic River a short march from the provincial powderhouse at
Quarry Hill in Charlestown. Striking quickly, the detachment carried
away from there a large store of powder before the rebel forces could
gather to prevent the seizure or attack the detachment on its return.¹⁰
Gage’s next step was to ensure himself against attack by strongly for-
tifying Boston neck,¹¹ the only entrance to Boston by land
—a measure
prompted by the gathering at Cambridge of several thousand men
aroused by word of the seizure of the powder at nearby Charlestown.¹²
Having completed the fortification of Boston in December,¹³ Gage,
with Graves’ cooperation, carried out several further operations de-