The British Are Coming

The assembly broke for a late lunch. After a chicken wing and a mug of flip at Coolidge’s Tavern, Church resumed his defense at three-thirty p.m. “Is it criminal, sir, to alarm them with a parade of our strength and preparation?” he asked. “If this is the work of an enemy, where are we to look for a friend?” Invoking his long service to the cause, he added, “Weigh the labors of an active life against the indiscretion of an hour.… To your wisdom, gentlemen, to your justice, to your tenderness, I cheerfully submit my fate.”

That fate was sealed. The House promptly expelled him for what James Warren called “the wickedness of his heart.” Under orders from Congress, Washington sent him with a nine-man prisoner escort to Connecticut, where Church complained of being confined in a “close, dark, and noisome cell”; Congress specifically denied him “the use of pen, ink, and paper.” Not for more than 150 years, after scholars sifted through General Gage’s private papers, would Church’s guilt be irrefutably confirmed: he had been a British spy at least since early 1775, for cash, and had likely provided information about hidden weapons in Concord, among other rebel secrets.

During Church’s lifetime, he was briefly paroled after several physicians reported that asthmatic conditions in the Connecticut dungeon endangered his health. But angry rioters sacked his Boston house and forced him back to jail for his own protection; efforts to exchange him for American prisoners held by the British provoked more riots. His wife and children made their way to London, where the king gave her a £150 pension. In 1778, Church would finally be allowed to go into exile, but the sloop carrying him to Martinique vanished without a trace. He was never heard from again, although his grieving father, a Boston deacon, refused to give up hope to his own dying day. In 1780, he bequeathed £5 and a shelf of books to his son Benjamin, “whether living or dead, God only knows.”

All through the fall, bored, mischievous, and gullible American soldiers spread fantastic rumors: that the British had been ordered back to England, that a French fleet had put to sea on America’s behalf, that the Spanish had besieged Gibraltar, that eight German generals—or three German princes—would soon arrive with an ammunition ship to help Washington, that Holland had called in debts and forced Britain to declare bankruptcy. It was said on the best authority that a London mob had destroyed the Parliament building and chased Lord North to France.

Autumn sickness crept through the camps, and although the American force exceeded 20,000 by early November, those present and fit for duty remained below 14,000. The officer corps now comprised 60 colonels and lieutenant colonels, 30 majors, 290 captains, 558 lieutenants, and 65 ensigns. Washington’s host also included 21 chaplains, 31 surgeons, 1,238 sergeants, and 690 drummers and fifers. All games of chance, including pitch and hustle, which involved a halfpence coin, were forbidden by his order, so to build morale, wrestling matches were staged in late October between the brigades on Winter and Prospect Hills. Men foraged for chestnuts, apples, and turnips; they sang camp songs accompanied by German flutes. Weather forecasters studied the “upper side of the moon” for clues, though no one doubted that winter was coming. The army would need ten thousand cords of firewood in the next few months, and Washington was already fretting over “a most mortifying scarcity” that hindered recruiting and could force his regiments to disperse or risk freezing.

Every day British fire drubbed the bivouacs, sometimes forty or fifty cannonballs for each American shot. “At about 9 a.m. we flung two 18-lb. balls into Boston from the lower fort, just to let them know where to find us, for which the enemy returned 90 shots,” a soldier told his diary in October. A comrade wrote of the same incident, “One man had his arm shot off there and two cows killed. Nothing new.” Local newspapers carried dozens of reward offers for deserters, including “one Jonathan Hantley, a well-set fellow, about five feet nine inches in height … talks with a brogue, pretends to doctor, professes to have great skill in curing cancers”; and Simeon Smith, “about 5 feet 4 inches high, had on a blue coat and black vest … his voice in the hermaphrodite fashion”; and “Matthias Smith, a small smart fellow, is apt to say, ‘I swear, I swear!’ and between his words will spit smart.”

For more than twenty years Washington had doubted that amateur citizen soldiers could form what he called “a respectable army,” capable of defeating trained, disciplined professionals. Nothing he had seen in Cambridge changed his mind. Militiamen called to arms for a few weeks or months “will never answer your expectations,” he had once written. “No dependence is to be placed upon them. They are obstinate and perverse.” With most enlistments due to expire in December and January, Washington told Hancock on October 30 that perhaps half of all the junior officers were likely to leave the army and “I fear will communicate the infection” to the enlisted ranks. “I confess,” he added, “I have great anxieties upon the subject.”

All the more reason to strike the British before winter arrived and his army drifted away. Yet his wish for “a speedy finish of the dispute” found little support among his generals. A proposed amphibious assault on Boston, supported by artillery and a frontal attack at the Neck, was unanimously rejected by his war council for fear that Boston would share Charlestown’s charred fate. Washington suggested another plan and it, too, was rejected, to a man, on October 18. “Too great a risk,” General Lee advised. “Not practicable under all circumstances,” General Greene added.

He had little recourse but to husband his gunpowder, stockpile firewood, and launch an occasional raid or sniping sortie with the ten companies of riflemen Congress had sent from Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Unlike muskets, rifle barrels were grooved to spin bullets for greater stability and accuracy. A capable marksman might hit a bull’s-eye at two hundred yards, although the weapon was slower to load; the projectile had to be wrapped in a greased linen patch and painstakingly “wanged” down the tighter bore. Moreover, no bayonet had yet been invented that would fit over a rifle muzzle. Riflemen were lethal and exotic, happily demonstrating their sharpshooting prowess while firing from their backs, or while running, or with trusting comrades holding targets between their knees. Many wore fringed hunting shirts, moccasins, and even Indian paint. Throngs of admiring civilians turned out to cheer them as the long-striding companies made their way toward Cambridge. They also proved maddening to their commanders, their boorish or insubordinate behavior sometimes leading to arrests and shackles. “Washington has said he wished they had never come,” General Ward told John Adams on October 30. Lee called them “damned riff-raff—dirty, mutinous, and disaffected.” Still, a Washington aide reported that rifle fire so unnerved the British “that nothing is to be seen over the breastwork but a hat.” A Yankee newspaper warned, “General Gage, take care of your nose.”

But General Gage had gone, and he took his nose with him. In late September, Scarborough arrived in Boston with orders summoning Gage home, a decision made soon after the news of Bunker Hill reached London. The king had insisted that the general’s feelings be spared by pretending that he was being recalled to plan the 1776 campaign. Gage packed his personal papers in white pine boxes and, after a flurry of salutes, sailed aboard the transport Pallas at nine p.m. on October 11. He was soon forgotten, both in America and in England, though he continued to draw a salary as the Crown’s governor of Massachusetts. Horace Walpole joked that he might be hanged for the errors of his masters.

William Howe moved into Province House as the new “general and commander-in-chief of all His Majesty’s forces within the colonies laying on the Atlantic Ocean from Nova Scotia to West Florida inclusive, etc., etc., etc.” Major General Howe’s sentiments on the occasion could not be discerned, for he remained relentlessly taciturn—“never wastes a monosyllable,” Walpole quipped—the better to hide his indecision. Now forty-six and thickset, with bulging eyes and a heavy brow, he bore an uncanny resemblance to his monarch, perhaps because his mother was widely rumored to be the illegitimate daughter of George I. His father, a viscount and the governor of Barbados, had died young in 1735. William Howe’s eldest brother, George, deemed “the best officer in the British Army,” had also died young, from a French bullet at Fort Carillon in 1758; in gratitude, Massachusetts paid £250 for a monument to his memory in Westminster Abbey. A second brother, Richard, succeeded to the viscount’s title and was now an admiral. William emerged belaureled from the French war, not least for his celebrated climb up a St. Lawrence River bluff to reach the Plains of Abraham—“laying hold of stumps and boughs of trees,” a witness reported—during Britain’s capture of Quebec. Family lore held that he returned to England clad in buckskin and moccasins, to be known thereafter to his siblings as “the Savage.”

Elected to Parliament from Nottingham, the Savage advocated restraint in colonial policy and vowed never to take up arms against his American kinsmen—even as he privately advised Lords North and Dartmouth that he was willing to do precisely that. When orders came to report to Boston, he told a constituent that he “could not refuse without incurring the odious name of backwardness to serving my country in a day of distress.” He added assurances that “the insurgents are very few in comparison to the whole of the people.” Although he rarely spoke, was often wrong when he did, and seemed averse to advice, the manly if morose Howe was a welcome change within the ranks after Old Woman Gage. “He is much beloved by the whole army,” a captain wrote. “They feel a confidence in him.”

Howe now had some eleven thousand mouths to feed, and little to feed them. “What in God’s name are ye all about in England?” an officer wrote in a letter published at home. “Have you forgot us?” Hospitals remained jammed with men suffering from wounds, scurvy, dysentery, and other maladies. “I have eat fresh meat but three times in six weeks,” a lieutenant wrote. Rebel whaleboats chased loyalist fishing smacks from coastal waters, severing supplies of cod, haddock, and terrapin. Bad mutton cost a shilling a pound; a skinny goose, twenty shillings. Salt meat was the inevitable staple, though said to be “as hard as wood, as lean as carrion, and as rusty as the devil.” General Percy reportedly killed and roasted a foal for his table, while one Winifried McCowen, a camp retainer, took a hundred lashes across her back for stealing and butchering the town bull. A Boston man wrote that he had been “invited by two gentlemen to dine upon rats.”

With each passing day, the blockade grew more oppressive. “They are burrowing like rabbits all around us,” wrote Captain Glanville Evelyn, now commanding a light infantry company encamped in leaky tents on Bunker Hill. “There’s nothing reconciles being shot at … so much as being paid for it.” General Burgoyne was in high dudgeon. “Our present situation is a consummation of inertness and disgrace,” he wrote. “Driven from one hill, you will see the enemy continually retrenched upon the next.… Could we at last penetrate ten miles, perhaps we should not attain a single sheep or an ounce of flour, for they remove every article of provisions as they go.” By Howe’s calculations, to move 32 regiments beyond Boston would require 3,662 horses—plus nearly 50 tons of hay and oats daily to feed them—and 540 wagons. That was almost 3,000 horses and 500 wagons more than he had.

Shifting the army by sea from Boston to New York had been discussed since midsummer. Burgoyne listed eight good reasons to make the move, including the large trove of loyalists there, access to food and forage on Long Island, and control of the Hudson valley corridor to Canada. But permission from London had been late in arriving, as usual, and now the season was too far advanced for a safe passage, given stormy weather, rebel pirates, and the lack of a single secure harbor between Boston and New York. Howe did some more arithmetic: unless five thousand regulars were left to hold Boston, complementing the twelve thousand needed in New York, at least a thousand Crown officials and loyalists would also have to be transported, along with £300,000 in goods, which, Burgoyne urged, “ought on no account to be left to the enemy.” Such an exodus would require far more British shipping than was currently available. Inevitably they would have to winter in Boston, as one private wrote, “like birds in a cage.”

Badly fed birds, at that. “Starve them out” had been a Yankee rallying cry since April. Britain had never maintained a large army several thousand miles from home without buying local food and fodder; living off the land by plunder was generally impossible for armies in the eighteenth century, even when the land was accessible. To sustain the fleet, in the coming months the Navy and Victualling Boards would hire far more transport tonnage than in the last French war, and that did not include ships needed by the Treasury and Ordnance Board bureaucracies responsible for feeding army troops abroad. As Cardinal Richelieu, the great French statesman during the Thirty Years’ War, had warned, “History knows many more armies ruined by want and disorder than by the efforts of their enemies.”

British supply contractors were supposed to stockpile at least a six-month food reserve in Boston, yet when Howe took command, the larder held less than a thirty-day supply, including just two dozen bushels of peas. Five storeships from England and Ireland arrived, but most of the 5,200 barrels of flour aboard proved rancid. Regulars composed an impious parody: “Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our not eating it.”

Strongboxes stuffed with cash were shipped from London to Boston aboard Centurion, Greyhound, and other warships; by late fall, more than £300,000 had been requisitioned. But rebels often thwarted British efforts to buy supplies in New York, Baltimore, and elsewhere. Moreover, transaction fees had risen to a staggering 23 percent of the sums spent. Shortages of fodder required slaughtering milk cows in Boston for meat; more than three dozen vessels sailed to Quebec and the Bay of Fundy in search of hay and oats, an unfortunate, if necessary, use of precious shipping. In mid-November, Howe sent London another set of beautiful charts, with exquisite clerical calligraphy and precise double lines drawn in red pencil to separate the columns, all to demonstrate that “there are not provisions for the army in store to serve longer than the beginning of March 1776.” Lieutenant William Feilding of the British marines wrote home, “Nothing but a desire of scouring the insolent rebels of our country keeps up the soldiers’ spirit.”

Alcohol helped, too. American rum was deemed “new and unwholesome,” so in September the British government signed an initial contract for 100,000 gallons of West Indies rum to be delivered to the army, complementing 375,000 gallons of porter to help combat scurvy. By spring a half million gallons of rum would be purchased for the Boston garrison at three to five shillings a gallon, the largest single item of expense among government provisions; ten times more was spent on rum than on medicines. The Treasury Board also saw to it that British officials in America received hydrometers—each composed of a glass cylinder, a thermometer, and various weights carefully marked for Jamaica, Grenada, St. Vincent, and other sources of West Indies rum—along with three pages of instructions on how to test each lot to ensure that contractors delivered “the usual and proper proof.” Rum had long been a reward for difficult military duty; Howe quietly made it part of the regular ration, issued at a daily rate of a quart for every six men.

Four small British warships and a storeship rounded the Casco Bay headland off Falmouth, Maine, on the mild, breezy morning of Monday, October 16. Nearly two thousand souls lived in remote Falmouth, a hundred miles upcoast from Boston, the men scratching out a living as fishermen, millers, and timberjacks. For more than half a century, Royal Navy agents had routinely come to collect enormous white pines, some of them three feet in diameter and blazed with the king’s proprietary broad-arrow insignia. After felling, the great sticks were twitched into the water by twenty yokes of oxen, then lashed into rafts or winched onto ships and hauled across the Atlantic to Portsmouth and other shipyards to be shaped and stepped as the towering masts on the king’s biggest men-of-war. To the lament of British shipwrights, that mast trade all but ended with the gunplay at Lexington. Felled timber had been hidden upriver from Falmouth, and after armed rebels twice thwarted British efforts to secure the masts, Royal Navy officers threatened “to beat the town down about their ears.”

As the five vessels carefully warped into the harbor the following afternoon, a rumor spread that the intruders simply intended to rustle livestock along the bay. Militiamen hurried off to shoo the flocks and herds to safety. That delusion vanished at four p.m., when a British naval officer with a marine escort rowed to the King Street dock, marched to the crowded town hall in Greele’s Lane, and with a flourish delivered a written ultimatum, “full of bad English and worse spelling,” one witness complained. Read aloud twice by a local lawyer who was said to have “a tremor in his voice,” the decree warned that in the name of “the best of sovereigns … you have been guilty of the most unpardonable rebellion.” The flotilla had orders to administer “a just punishment”: Falmouth was given two hours to evacuate “the human species out of the said town.” “Every heart,” a clergyman wrote, “was seized with terror, every countenance changed color, and a profound silence ensued.” A three-man delegation rowed out to Canceaux, an eight-gun former merchantman, to beg mercy of Lieutenant Henry Mowat, the flotilla commander.

Few sailors knew the upper New England coast better than Mowat, a forty-one-year-old Scot who for more than a decade had surveyed every cove, island, and inlet for Admiralty charts. One senior officer described him as “the most useful person perhaps in America for the service we are engaged in.” Mowat held a grudge against Maine militiamen, who had briefly taken him prisoner during a skirmish over the contested masts in Falmouth five months earlier. But his instructions from Admiral Graves went far beyond personal revenge: Graves had been ordered by Lord Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty, to “show the rebels the weight of an English fleet.… You may be blamed for doing little but can never be censured for doing too much.” Graves had taken the hint. In early October, he’d told Mowat to “burn, destroy, and lay waste” nine maritime towns northeast of Boston.

So far the chastisement had gone badly. Gales nearly wrecked two of Mowat’s ships off Gloucester. Houses in a couple of targeted towns were judged by his gunnery experts to be too scattered to be worth his limited supply of incendiary carcasses. Contrary winds kept the flotilla from reaching Machias, another town two hundred miles up the coast, where a British midshipman and several sailors had been killed in a bloody scrap in June. Falmouth would have to do.

The town “had not the least right to expect any lenity,” Mowat told the emissaries. His orders were unequivocal. But because of “the known humanity of the British nation,” he would hold his fire if by eight a.m. all small arms, ammunition, and the five carriage guns known to be in Falmouth were surrendered.

All night long the townsfolk debated, fretted, wailed, and debated some more. Horse and ox teams plodded through Queen, Fish, and Middle Streets, hauling away furniture, shop goods, and the infirm. Hothead militiamen vowed to incinerate the town themselves if Falmouth complied with Mowat’s demand. A few old muskets were sculled out to the Canceaux to buy time, but at dawn the people of Falmouth screwed up their courage and sent another delegation to inform Mowat that they had “resolved by no means to deliver up the cannon and other arms.” “Perceiving women and children still in the town,” Mowat later told Graves, “I made it forty minutes after nine before the signal was hoisted.”

A red flag appeared on Canceaux’s main topgallant masthead. Tongues of smoke and flame abruptly licked from the ships’ gun decks. “The firing began from all the vessels,” a witness later wrote, “a horrible shower of balls from three to nine pounds weight, bombs, carcasses, live shells, grapeshot, and musketballs”—eventually more than three thousand projectiles. The crash of shattered glass and splintered wood echoed along the waterfront, where a dozen merchant coasters also came under bombardment. For three hours fires blazed up only to be swatted out by homeowners and shopkeepers, although some militiamen looted their neighbors while pretending to fight fires. “The oxen, terrified at the smoke and report of the guns, ran with precipitation over the rocks, dashing everything to pieces,” another resident wrote.

“At noon,” Canceaux’s log recorded, “the fire began to be general both in the town and vessels, but being calm the fire did not spread as wished for.” Concussion and recoil also fractured several gun carriages on the British ships—the sloop Spitfire was “much shattered,” Mowat reported—so thirty marines and sailors went ashore to toss torches through windows and doorways. The breeze picked up at two p.m., and by late afternoon Falmouth “presented a broad sheet of flame” from Parsons Lane to Fore Street.

Britain had murdered another Yankee town. The Essex Gazette tallied 416 buildings destroyed, including 136 houses, the Episcopal church, various barns, the meetinghouse, the customs house, the library, and the new courthouse. Many of the hundred structures still standing were thoroughly ventilated by balls and shells, and the three-day rain that began at ten p.m. ruined furnishings that had failed to burn. Mowat counted eleven American vessels sunk or burned, four others captured, and a distillery, wharves, and warehouses “all laid into ashes.” With his ammunition nearly spent and the flotilla badly in need of repairs, he anchored overnight in ten fathoms, then sailed for Boston. The remaining eight towns on Admiral Graves’s chastisement list would be spared.

The admiral claimed to have administered “a severe stroke to the rebels,” but he soon took a stroke himself when a letter from London arrived relieving him of command. Graves had done both too little and too much in six months of war; the Admiralty had grown weary of his excuses and the army’s complaints. He would be missed by no one except perhaps his nephews. As an act of vengeance, the razing of Falmouth may have brought brief satisfaction, but it made little sense tactically or strategically. While nearly two thousand residents sought shelter at the beginning of a Maine winter, couriers carried the news to the outside world. “It cannot be true,” the Gentleman’s Magazine opined when reports reached London. The French foreign minister called the attack “absurd as well as barbaric.” In Cambridge, General Lee denounced “the tragedy acted by these hell hounds of an execrable ministry” and recommended seizing British hostages in New York. “This is savage and barbarous,” James Warren wrote John Adams. “What more can we want to justify any step to take, kill, and destroy?”

The wolf had risen in the heart. Enraged and unified, Americans demanded revenge. Coastal towns fortified themselves and organized early warning systems with beacons and express riders. The Yale College library became an armory. Some colonial governments had already authorized privateers—merchantmen converted into warships—to attack enemy shipping, and Congress would soon follow suit. Such patriot marauders collected from a third to the entire value of a captured ship, with severe consequences in the coming years for several thousand British vessels.

Few were angrier than General Washington. He rejected Falmouth’s plea for ammunition and men—the commander in chief could hardly disperse his modest army among coastal enclaves—but in a pale fury he denounced British “cruelty and barbarity.” More clearly than ever he saw the war as a moral crusade, a death struggle between good and evil. In general orders to the troops he fulminated against “a brutal, savage enemy.” Many Americans now agreed with the sentiment published in the New-England Chronicle a month after Falmouth’s immolation: “We expect soon to break off all kinds of connections with Britain, and form into a grand republic of the American colonies.”