The British Are Coming

Freeholders gathered for meetings, as usual, in Faneuil Hall. The town agreed to borrow £600 to buy grain for the almshouse poor. A report in late March noted that thirty-eight smallpox patients were quarantined on a hospital scow in the Charles River, “some distance from the wharf.” Freeholders voted to continue a recent ban on inoculation; many now feared that it posed a greater risk of epidemic than natural infection. Any household with sick inhabitants was required to display a large red flag on a six-foot pole or incur a £50 fine. For those intent on inoculation, newspapers advertised the services of a private hospital in New York.

Friction between patriots and loyalists intensified. Hundreds of Tories, as they often were called with a sneer, arrived from the provinces to seek the king’s protection in Boston. The “once happy town” was now “a cage for every unclean bird,” in Mrs. Samuel Adams’s estimation. “Humbling the Tories” had become a blood sport in Massachusetts Bay, with excrement smeared on houses or dumped through open windows, with severed sheep’s heads tossed into open chaises, or with loyalists locked in smokehouses—the chimney flues obstructed—until they renounced the Crown. A tavern keeper in South Danvers was forced to recite in public, “I, Isaac Wilson, a Tory I be, / I, Isaac Wilson, I sells tea.” A radical Presbyterian cleric thanked God from the pulpit for “sufficient hemp in the colonies to hang all the Tories,” while a loyalist woman hoped someday soon to be riding through rebel blood to the hubs of her carriage wheels. Small wonder that a Falmouth minister believed the colony was suffering “a discontent bordering on madness.”

A Calvinist people marinated in the doctrine of predestination braced for the inevitable, and preparations for war continued apace. Clandestine military cargo had arrived all winter from Hamburg, Holland, even London, smuggled through a hundred coves and stored in a thousand barns. The Simsbury Iron Works in Connecticut cast cannonballs. Salem women secretly cut and stitched five thousand flannel powder cartridges for field guns. The provincial congress, meeting first in Cambridge and then in Concord, ordered enough military stores amassed for fifteen thousand militiamen: canteens, bell tents, field tents, Russian linen, wooden spoons. By April, the provincial stockpile included 21,549 firelocks, nine tons of gunpowder, eleven tons of cannonballs, ten thousand bayonets, 145,000 flints. Fifteen medicine chests, purchased for £500 from Boston apothecaries, contained opium, liquid laudanum, emetics, mercurial ointments, tourniquets, and a trepan for boring holes in a skull to relieve pressure from an injured brain. Dr. Warren would distribute the chests among seven towns by mid-April, including two sent to Concord.

Farm carts hauled ammunition and powder kegs down country lanes, to be hidden in attics or buried in new-plowed furrows, along with those radish and onion seeds. British soldiers searching a countryman’s wagon in mid-March seized more than a ton of musket balls and over thirteen thousand musket cartridges stacked in candle boxes; the teamster insisted that the munitions were for his private use. But most shipments went undiscovered. In Concord a militia colonel, James Barrett, listed more than three dozen caches in his notebooks—including rice, ammunition, axes, oatmeal, and wood-bladed shovels rimmed with iron shoes. As ordered by the provincial Committee of Supply, he appointed “faithful men” to guard the stocks, with teams ready “by day and night, on the shortest notice” to haul the matériel away as required.

The provincial congress also chose five militia generals and approved a system for alerting the colony with mounted couriers in moments of peril. Several dozen articles of war were adopted; the first two required soldiers to attend church and to avoid profane oaths, with a fine of four shillings per cuss for officers, less for privates. Virtually every white male from sixteen to sixty in Massachusetts was required to serve under arms. “The parson as well as the squire stands in the ranks with a firelock,” a Boston merchant wrote. Instead of exercising once every three months, many companies now met three times a week. An Essex County militia colonel, Timothy Pickering, simplified the manual of arms with his Easy Plan of Discipline for a Militia, which would be widely adopted. Muskets could be primed and loaded with one order and ten motions. “Lean the cheek against the butt of the firelock,” the Easy Plan instructed. “Shut the left eye, and look with the right along the barrel.”

Each company elected its own officers, but at a militia gathering in March, Reverend Emerson drew from the Second Book of Chronicles to remind the men of Concord who really led them: “Behold, God himself is with us for our captain.”

Boston’s natural beauty had once beguiled British soldiers. “The entrance to the harbor, and the view of the town of Boston from it, is the most charming thing I ever saw,” an officer wrote home in 1774. That enchantment had faded by the spring of 1775. “No such thing as a play house,” a lieutenant in the 23rd Foot complained. “They [are] too puritanical to admit such lewd diversions, though there’s perhaps no town of its size could turn out more whores than this could.” A captain in the 38th Foot told his brother in Ireland, “The people here and we are on bad terms, ready to cut one another’s throats.” Small insults bred seething resentments. All it took was an overbearing British customs official, mud flung at a fusilier on the street, or a fistfight over a girl between a “Jonathan”—a rebellious American, in British slang—and a lobstercoat.

A Royal Navy officer described seeing miniature effigies of British soldiers hanging by nooses from roadside trees, each wearing a tiny red coat. In March, a marine lieutenant reported how passing Bostonians made coarse gestures with their hands on their backsides. For their part, devout colonists resented regulars dishonoring the Sabbath by ice-skating across a Roxbury pond; they also loathed British Army profanity, which dated at least to the Hundred Years’ War, when English bowmen were known as “Goddams.” Major John Pitcairn, the marine commander in Boston, advised the Admiralty in March, “One active campaign, a smart action, and burning two or three of their towns, will set everything to rights. Nothing now, I am convinced, but this will ever convince these foolish bad people that England is in earnest.”

The British garrison now exceeded five thousand, of whom more than four-fifths were soldiers, gunners, and marines in thirteen regiments. They crowded every corner of the town: artillerymen billeted in warehouses on Griffin’s Wharf, the 4th Regiment of Foot—known as the King’s Own—in a vacant distillery in West Boston, the 64th Foot in Castle William on a harbor island, the 43rd Foot on Back Street. Troops drilled in Brattle Square and on the Common, throwing stones to drive away the cows and avoiding the burial ground that held the graves of a hundred comrades dead from disease and mischance. Regiments took target practice on the wharves, six to ten rounds for each soldier, firing at river flotsam or at man-size figures cut from thin boards. A physician visiting from Virginia told his diary of watching light infantry exercises in late March, “young active fellows” who loaded firelocks while lying on their backs, then flipped over to fire from their bellies. “They run out in parties on the wings of the regiment,” he added. “They secure their retreat & defend their front while they are forming.”

Ugly encounters between Jonathans and lobstercoats multiplied. Officers mocked the Old South oration with a parody delivered from a coffeehouse balcony in “the most vile, profane, blackguard language,” a witness reported. In mid-March, soldiers from the King’s Own pitched tents within ten yards of a meetinghouse and played drums and fifes throughout the worship service; troops later vandalized John Hancock’s elegant house facing the Common. A peddler from Billerica named Thomas Ditson, Jr., who was accused by British soldiers of trying to buy old uniforms and a musket from the 47th Regiment, was stripped, tarred, feathered, and paraded from Foster’s Wharf through King Street while a fifer played “The Rogue’s March.” A placard labeled “AMERICAN LIBERTY” was draped around his neck. “It gave great offense to the people of the town,” a British officer wrote, “and was much disapproved of by General Gage.”

The indiscipline of a bored, anxious army weighed on Gage. Gambling had become so pernicious that he imposed wager limits and established the Anti-Gambling Club. Worse still was inebriation in a town awash with cheap liquor. Regulars preferred West Indies rum, although it was often contaminated with lead, but 140 American distilleries also produced almost five million gallons a year, which sold for less than two shillings a gallon. “The rum is so cheap that it debauches both navy and army, and kills many of them,” Major Pitcairn, the marine, warned the Admiralty in March. “It will destroy more of us than the Yankees will.” A soldier caught trading his musket for a jug of New England Kill-Devil could draw five hundred lashes with a nine-cord cat, enough to lay bare the ribs and kidneys. Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie of the 23rd Foot—the Royal Welch Fusiliers—recorded in his diary that many men “are intoxicated daily” and that two had died of alcohol poisoning in a single night. “When the soldiers are in a state of intoxication,” he added, “they are frequently induced to desert.”

And desert they did. Drunk or sober, redcoats were lured by Americans who offered farm-smock disguises, escape horses, and three hundred acres to any absconding regular. Estimates of British Army desertions over the past year ranged from 120 to more than 200. Five-guinea rewards were advertised by company officers in the Boston Post-Boy for the likes of Private Will Gibbs, “about 5 feet 7 inches high, and of a fair complexion,” last seen wearing a round hat and a brown coat trimmed in blue. The problem was even worse for naval captains: more than twenty thousand British seamen had jumped ship in American ports since early in the century, and nearly another eighty thousand—almost 14 percent of all jack-tars who served—would abscond during the coming war, including those who deserted in home waters. Many had been forced into service by press gangs, while some detested the harsh life at sea; all resented the paltry nineteen shillings a month paid seamen since the reign of Charles II. Boston was particularly notorious for desertion, and the Royal Navy ships now blockading the harbor had remained at anchor through the winter with their gunports caulked and their topmasts housed against the weather, unable to berth for fear of mass defections.

Floggings, and worse, had limited deterrence. Private Valentine Duckett, barely twenty-one, had been sentenced to die after a three-day trial for desertion in the fall. “I am now to finish a life, which by the equitable law of my country, I just forfeited,” he told his comrades while being lashed to a stake on the beach below the Common. A six-man firing squad botched the job even at eight yards’ range, but after a coup de grâce to the head, the entire army was ordered to march “in a slow, solemn step” to view Private Duckett in his coffin. Private William Ferguson of the 10th Foot, a former tailor now dressed in a white shroud, suffered a similar fate on December 24. The execution, a lieutenant observed, was “the only thing done in remembrance of Christmas.” On March 13, Gage commuted the death sentence of Private Robert Vaughan, but after more soldiers deserted the next day, the high command announced that this would be “the last man he will pardon.” Vaughan took advantage of his reprieve to flee again a month later, this time without getting caught.

By contrast, many young British officers hankered for action. Among them was a tall, dark-eyed captain in the King’s Own, the eldest son of a vicar from County Antrim. William Glanville Evelyn, now thirty-three and still unmarried, had a shark-fin nose, a dimpled chin, and the faint spatter of smallpox scars across his cheeks. He had soldiered for the king since the age of eighteen and was ever alert for the patron and cash needed to secure his next promotion; most army commissions came with a price tag, ensuring that only the better sort filled the officer ranks. (A lieutenant colonelcy in a foot regiment might cost £3,500.) In one of the sixteen surviving letters he would write from America, Evelyn assured his father that he was “pretty well known” to General Gage and that other senior officers in Boston had been “very civil to me.” The 4th Foot—raised a century earlier and designated the King’s Own to honor George I in 1714—was serving the empire at a critical moment in a vital place. To properly dress the part, Evelyn had asked that a Bedford Street cloth merchant in London send out scarlet, white, and blue material for two new uniforms, plus “the proper quantity of regimental buttons,” a pair of epaulettes, and two hats “with silver buttons.”

Nine months of duty in Boston had showed young Glanville Evelyn that a New England posting was not all hardship and tedium. “We get plenty of turtle, pineapple, and Madeira,” he wrote. “The weather is delightful beyond description.” Yet his contempt for the Americans had increased week by week. “There does not exist so great a set of rascals and poltroons,” he told his father a month after arriving in Boston. By October 1774, he had concluded that “a civil war must inevitably happen in the course of a few months, or Great Britain might forever give up America.” By December he fully shared his government’s conviction that “a few enterprising, ambitious demagogues” had incited the insurrection; moreover, he believed that many thousands of loyalists were “inclined to our side,” though they would not “openly declare themselves” until the Crown asserted its full authority. “Never,” he wrote, “did any nation so much deserve to be made an example of to future ages.” As his soldiers practiced their sharpshooting and beat their drums to annoy the Jonathans, Evelyn’s greatest worry was that “unsteadiness” in Lord North’s ministry might lead to a political settlement that spared the Americans from imperial wrath. “We only fear they will avail themselves of the clemency and generosity of the English,” he wrote a cousin in London, “and evade the chastisement due to unexampled villainy, and which we are so impatiently waiting to inflict.”

With the early arrival of spring, the chances of a pernicious peace faded. Captain Evelyn was glad. Blood had risen in his gorge. “The hour is now very nigh in which this affair will be brought to a crisis,” he told his father. “The resolutions we expect are by this time upon the water, which are to determine the fate of Great Britain and America.… We shall shortly receive such orders as will authorize us to scourge the rebellion with rods of iron.” As usual, he signed his letter, “Yours ever affectionate, W.G.E.”

The expected orders arrived on Friday, April 14, when a burly, flush-faced dragoon captain bounded into Boston from the Nautilus. He had been sent ahead to Massachusetts to buy mounts for his regiment, now following on the high seas from Ireland, but his first task was to deliver a sealed dispatch marked “SECRET” to Province House. Striding past the budding elms and up the broad front steps beneath the gaze of the copper Indian on the roof, the captain handed over the document, saluted, and wandered off to look at horseflesh.

Upon breaking the seal, Gage found a twenty-four-paragraph letter from Lord Dartmouth, the Psalm Singer, written with the cocksure clarity of a man who slept in his own bed every night three thousand miles from trouble. Drafted on January 27, in consultation with the king and North’s cabinet, the order had remained in Dartmouth’s desk for weeks while events played out in London, including those futile conversations with Dr. Franklin, Parliament’s minuet with the monarch at St. James’s Palace, and the introduction of more punitive legislation. Further weeks passed while ill-tempered westerly gales kept Nautilus and her companion sloop Falcon pinned to the south coast of England. But at last the fatal command had arrived:

The violences committed by those who have taken up arms in Massachusetts have appeared to me as the acts of a rude rabble, without concert, without conduct; and therefore I think that a small force now, if put to the test, would be able to conquer them.… It is the opinion of the King’s servants, in which His Majesty concurs, that the essential step to be taken toward reestablishing government would be to arrest and imprison the principal actors and abettors in the provincial congress, whose proceedings appear in every light to be acts of treason and rebellion.

There was more: reinforcements were en route, though hardly the twenty thousand that Gage thought necessary. Twice Dartmouth conceded that “your own judgment and discretion” must shape any operation; yet, with proper preparation and secrecy, “it can hardly fail of success, and will perhaps be accomplished without bloodshed.… Any efforts on their part to encounter a regular force cannot be very formidable.” It was agreed in London that Gage had demonstrated restraint to the point of lamentable indulgence; now he must be firm, come what may. “The king’s dignity and the honor and safety of the empire require that in such a situation, force should be repelled by force.”

Although clear enough, this dispatch from Dartmouth was actually a duplicate. The original, with appended documents, was aboard the Falcon, and Gage, ever scrupulous, ever cautious, would await that vessel’s arrival in Boston before striking. Meanwhile, there was plenty to do, and orders flew from Province House. Newly repaired navy longboats were to be lashed to the sterns of the Somerset, Boyne, and Asia for quick repositioning. The fortifications at Boston Neck, the slender isthmus leading into the town from Roxbury, would be double-checked for strength and security. Rumors were afoot that insurgents intended to burn Boston before British reinforcements arrived. A moat now stretched across the Neck, filled by each rising tide, and the defenses included a drawbridge, mud breastworks with walls twelve feet thick, wooden blockhouses, and more than twenty cannons.

Gage had no cavalry for a quick, bold strike into the countryside. Few enlisted regulars had ever heard a shot fired in anger, although a substantial number had been in uniform for five to ten years, or longer. The most agile and many of the strongest were grouped into elite light infantry and grenadier companies; regiments usually had one of each, typically with three dozen soldiers apiece. Forced to rely on infantry plodders, Gage ordered these elite troops relieved of their regular duties on Saturday, April 15, and formed into a makeshift brigade with twenty-one companies—eleven of grenadiers and ten of light infantry, some eight hundred men altogether. Gage, the man who had formed the Anti-Gambling Club, was betting that the advantage of concentrating these companies—with their skirmishing skills, marksmanship, and ferocity—would outweigh the disadvantage of severing them from their accustomed regiments and senior officers. Word of this improvisation quickly spread through Boston. “I dare say they have something for them to do,” Lieutenant Barker told his diary.

But what, and where? Small, daylong expeditions had marched beyond Boston repeatedly in recent weeks—five regiments here, two there, trampling grain fields, toppling fences, gathering intelligence, and, not least, spooking the Jonathans. Gage also had dispatched officers “capable of taking sketches of a country.” Dressed in country clothes—the disguises fooled no one—British scouts wandered into Suffolk and Middlesex Counties with instructions to “mark out the roads and distances from town to town.” They also were to note the depth and breadth of rivers, to determine the steepness of creek banks, and to assess whether various churchyards “are advantageous spots to take post in, and capable of being made defensible.”

Gage also had a clandestine espionage network. Through American spies on the British payroll, he knew that militia generals had been appointed. He knew that several dozen men, mostly artisans and mechanics, routinely met at the Green Dragon Tavern, a two-story brick building with symmetrical chimneys, to coordinate surveillance of British troop movements; at each meeting they swore themselves to secrecy on a Bible. Further, Gage had been told that mounted rebel couriers could quickly rouse 7,500 minutemen, and that caches of military stores were hidden in Worcester, Watertown, and other settlements. Even so, he doubted the Americans had a field marshal “capable of taking the command or directing the motions of an army.”

That steady gaze of his had fixed on Concord, said to be the first village founded in Massachusetts Bay “beyond the sight and sound of the sea.” Eighteen miles from Boston and now home to 265 families, it was a place where church attendance was compulsory, where the provincial congress sometimes met, and where, according to Gage’s spies, munitions and other war supplies had been secreted in bulk. He even had a hand-drawn map, crude but detailed, showing the houses, outbuildings, and other hiding places where caches could be found.

The Americans, too, had informants. Gage would complain that the rebels collected “good, full, and expeditious intelligence on all matters transacting in England.” Reports sent from London to patriot leaders warned of regiments preparing for deployment and of the blunt new instructions sent Gage. Since early April, many families had fled Boston for country refuges. Among the most prominent patriot leaders, only Dr. Warren remained in town. Samuel Adams and John Hancock had retired to Lexington, east of Concord. The provincial congress adjourned on April 15 for three weeks—entrusting the Committee of Safety to oversee military matters—and various false alarms kept the province on edge. Gage’s concentration of longboats, grenadiers, and light infantry companies hardly passed unremarked. “Some secret expedition,” one merchant noted, was no doubt afoot.

On Sunday, April 16, the Falcon glided into Boston Harbor. “In want of many men and stores, and very leaky” after her rough passage, as the Royal Navy reported, the sloop nonetheless carried Dartmouth’s original orders. Now Gage could complete his preparations. Using the discretion permitted him, he chose to ignore Dartmouth’s proposal of targeting “actors and abettors” like Hancock and Adams; chasing such scoundrels across the province seemed futile, if not capricious. A hard strike against the depot in Concord would be more fruitful, although disappointing late intelligence indicated that the cagey rebels had evacuated at least some military stocks to other sites. Opposition seemed unlikely except perhaps from scattered “parties of bushmen.”

Gage drafted a 319-word order for Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith of the 10th Foot, appointed to lead the strike brigade. If corpulent and edging toward retirement, Smith was mature, experienced, and prudent. He was to march “with the utmost expedition and secrecy to Concord,” Gage noted, adding,

You will seize and destroy all artillery, ammunition, provisions, tents, small arms, and all military stores whatever. But you will take care that the soldiers do not plunder the inhabitants, or hurt private property.

The map enclosed with the order illustrated Gage’s demand that two bridges over the Concord River be secured by an advance “party of the best marchers.” Captured gunpowder and flour were to be dumped into the river, tents burned, salt pork and beef supplies destroyed. Enemy field guns should be spiked or ruined with sledgehammers. The expedition would carry a single day’s rations and no artillery; speed and surprise were essential. Sentries on horseback would be positioned to prevent rebel couriers from sounding an alarm.

Gage concluded his order without sentiment: “You will open your business and return with the troops as soon as possible.”

And now, as one loyalist wrote, “The war began to redden.… The iron was quite hot enough to be hammered.”

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