The British Are Coming - Rick Atkinson

Скачать книгу

alt=""/>

      Additional episodes followed. More than four thousand militiamen lined the main street in Worcester in early September, closing the royal courts and requiring two dozen officials to walk a quarter-mile gantlet, hats in hand, each recanting his loyalty to the Crown thirty times, aloud. A Massachusetts Provincial Congress convened in Salem in early October 1774 to elect the wealthy merchant John Hancock as president—a vain, petulant “empty barrel,” in John Adams’s estimation. Of more than two hundred Massachusetts communities, only twenty-one failed to send delegates. Like similar congresses soon established in other colonies, this extralegal assembly acted as a provisional government to circumvent British authority by passing resolutions, collecting revenue, and coordinating colonial affairs with the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

      Amassing military supplies and making other martial preparations were entrusted to the Committee of Safety, led by Dr. Warren. Such committees in Massachusetts and other colonies enforced loyalty oaths, stigmatized ideological opponents, and compelled fence straddlers to make hard choices. In December, rebel raiders seized forty-four British cannons on Fort Island in Rhode Island. Two days later, several hundred men stormed a fortress in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, overpowered the six-man garrison, snatched nearly a hundred barrels of powder from the magazine, and lowered the British flag. A day later they returned to haul away sixteen cannons and sixty muskets.

      Fearing for his own safety, Gage had abandoned Salem for Province House in Boston in late summer. Set back from Marlborough Street, with broad stone steps and the royal coat of arms affixed over the front door, the house featured wall tapestries, an iron fence, and ancient shade trees. Atop the eight-sided cupola swiveled a weathervane of hammered copper—a glass-eyed Indian in a feathered bonnet, drawing his bow and “bedazzling the eyes of those who looked upward, like an angel of the sun,” as a local author named Nathaniel Hawthorne would later write.

      From his high-ceilinged study, Gage had sent a volley of gloomy dispatches to London that fall. “Civil government is near its end,” he warned in September, revoking his earlier optimism. “Conciliating, moderation, reasoning is over. Nothing can be done but by forcible means.” To Lord Dartmouth, the colonial secretary, he expressed shock “that the country people could have been raised to such a pitch of phrenzy.” American farmers for the past decade had generally been more restrained than their urban brethren in protesting British rule, but they now seemed just as bellicose; the imperial insult of closing the Boston port had proved especially offensive to them. Militia companies were training intensely; some had formed quick-reaction units called “minute men,” who reportedly carried their muskets even to church. The “disease” of insurrection, Gage wrote, had become “so universal there is no knowing where to apply a remedy.” Connecticut had ordered six militia regiments equipped for active service. Companies were drilling in New Hampshire and Rhode Island, and every county in Virginia was said to be arming soldiers. In obedience to the Continental Congress’s declared boycott of British goods, thousands of provincials would soon serve on local committees throughout the colonies, enforcing the ban and rooting out “enemies of American liberty” with threats, public scoldings, and violence. As local assemblies and committees of safety grew stronger, royal governors grew weaker. To Barrington, the secretary at war, Gage pleaded in November, “If you think ten thousand men sufficient, send twenty. If one million is thought enough, give two. You will save both blood and treasure in the end.”

      Perhaps, he advised London, the Coercive Acts should be lifted as a conciliatory gesture. The king, appalled, replied that the “idea of suspending the acts appears to me the most absurd that can be suggested.” Lord North insisted that “the acts must and should be carried into execution.” While the government assembled reinforcements for Boston, including more generals, Gage’s reputation sagged. There was muttering in England about the “lukewarm coward” in Massachusetts. His king referred to him as “the mild general,” and his own soldiers now called him “Old Woman” behind his back. A senior officer concluded that “his disposition and manners are too gentle for the rough, republican fanatic people.” Certainly there would be no more toasts and honor guards from those rough Americans. Instead, Gage effigies burned in bonfires. He was accused of papism, drunkenness, and even pederasty, as in a lewd verse that ended, “I’m informed by the innkeepers, / He’ll bung with shoeboys, chimney sweepers.” On the last day of 1774, Barrington wrote, “I pity, dear sir, the situation you are in.”

      The new year brought only new troubles. “Every day, every hour, widens the breach,” Dr. Warren warned. On Sunday, February 26, barely a week before the Old South oration, Gage sent 240 regulars by naval transport from Boston across Massachusetts Bay to Marblehead, where they marched in a red column four miles northwest to Salem in search of rebel cannons while most local citizens were in church. A militia colonel burst into the North Meeting House, shouting, “The regulars are coming!” A raised drawbridge over the North River delayed the column; insurgents perched on the uptilted span like roosting chickens as “a vast multitude” soon assembled to heckle the troops as “lobstercoats” and to vow that “if you fire you will all be dead men.” After ninety minutes, a compromise ended the standoff: the bridge was lowered, the troops tramped across, and after precisely 30 rods—165 yards—they made a smart about-face, as agreed, and returned to Boston empty-handed. “Go home,” a young nurse named Sarah Tarrant barked from an open window, and “tell your master he has sent you on a fool’s errand.”

      Gage could only agree. His governance reached no farther than could be seen through the glass eyes of the weathervane Indian above him, and his command was limited to the troops assembled within the sound of his voice on the Common. He expected imminent orders from London “to act offensively” since, as he readily acknowledged, “to keep quiet in the town of Boston only will not terminate affairs. The troops must march into the country.” But in a dispatch written in early March, he warned the government of insurgent legions “actuated by an enthusiasm wild and ungovernable.” American “bushmen,” he added, had demonstrated “their patience and cunning in forming ambushments.”

      London promised to send him a hospital, “on a large scale.”

      The six weeks following Dr. Warren’s oration were suffused with “dread suspense,” as the Reverend William Emerson of Concord later wrote. Yet daily life plodded on. Goods smuggled or stockpiled before the port closing could be found for a price, including candles for five shillings a pound in the Faneuil Hall market, along with indigo and a few hogsheads of sugar. Greenleaf’s Auction Room sold German serges, Irish linens, and Kippen’s snuff by the cask. Harbottle Dorr’s shop in Union Street advertised spades, Smith’s anvils, and brass kettles, “none of which have been imported since the port was shut up.” A vendor near Swing Bridge offered fish hooks, cod lines, and “nails of all sorts.” With spring coming on fast, W. P. Bartlett’s shop in Salem sold seeds for crimson radishes, yellow Spanish onions, tennisball lettuce, and several kinds of peas, including black-eyed, sugar, blue union, and speckled. “Choice cayenne cocoa” could be found on Hancock’s Wharf, and pearl dentifrice—reputedly invented by the queen’s dentist “for the preservation of the teeth”—was peddled in a shop on Ann Street. The London Book-Store in Cornhill, owned by gregarious young Henry Knox, offered lottery tickets and globes showing the reach of that empire on which the sun never set. For four pence on Marlborough Street, those desperate to glimpse a brighter tomorrow could buy a calculator that displayed the projected annual increase of colonial populations in America.

      Auction houses sold the furniture of distraught residents determined to move—to England, to Halifax, deeper into New England, or just away. Mahogany tables, featherbeds, and looking glasses went for a song. For those who preferred to dance away their troubles, an unlikely new school in Boston offered lessons in minuets, hornpipes, and English country steps “in the most improved taste.” The Boston Gazette, known to loyalists as “the Weekly Dung Barge,” reminded readers that lofty talk of freedom had limits: a March 6 advertisement touted “a healthy Negro girl, about 20 years of age.… She is remarkably good-natured and fond of children.… Her price is £40.” Another ad offered a reward for a runaway “servant for life,” using the Massachusetts euphemism for a slave; this one, named Caesar, “is supposed to be strolling about in some of

Скачать книгу