Kitabı oku: «The British Are Coming», sayfa 4
He was proud, perhaps prideful. The ink-stained printer became Dr. Franklin, thanks to the honorary degrees from Oxford and St. Andrews, and he was not above snickering at American provincialism. “Learned and ingenious foreigners that come to England almost all make a point of visiting me,” he had written in 1772 to his son William, who, thanks to Franklin’s influence, was the royal governor of New Jersey. “The K[ing] too has lately been heard to speak of me with great regard.” If esteemed and clubbable, he still at times seemed opaque. A man of masks and personas, he was Poor Richard, after the pseudonym adopted for the almanac he’d first published in 1732; he was also, thanks to his many whimsical pen names, Silence Dogood, Cecilia Shortface, and Obadiah Plainman. Since moving to London at age fifty-one to represent Pennsylvania, and then other colonies, he had used forty-two different signatures on his published articles.
So, too, was he a creature of contradiction. An advocate for the rights of man, he had owned slaves for thirty years, complaining that most of them were thieves. A man of temperance and discretion, he enjoyed “intrigues with low women that fell in my way” and took a common-law wife in 1730. Perhaps most confounding, he had been a zealous citizen of the empire, so exuberant in his Anglophilia that in September 1761 he curtailed a trip to the Continent to attend George III’s coronation. He had long favored excluding Germans and other non-English émigrés from the colonies. Americans “love and honor the name of Englishman,” Franklin had written in the London Chronicle in 1770; aping “English manners, fashions, and manufacturers, they have no desire of breaking the connections between the two countries.” Yet in the past year he had become so hostile to Britain that now he could fulminate like a Boston radical, his face white with rage. Franklin, these days, was a few steps ahead of an arrest warrant.
His good friend Priestley, beak-nosed and thin-lipped, offered a sympathetic ear. As librarian and companion to the Earl of Shelburne, Priestley lived in the earl’s sprawling mansion just off Berkeley Square. The son of a Calvinist cloth dresser, he, too, was a universal genius, one who, it was said, wrote books faster than people could read them. The previous August he had discovered the gas called oxygen, and he would be credited with identifying nitrogen, ammonia, carbon monoxide, and other gases, as well as photosynthesis, the principles of combustion, and the recipe for soda water. On this Monday he and Franklin pondered electricity and sundry scientific mysteries, as they had for years. Then the conversation turned to politics and what Franklin called “the impending calamities.” “Much of the time was employed in reading American newspapers,” Priestley later wrote of that day with Franklin, “especially accounts of the reception which the Boston Port Bill met with in America. And as he read … the tears trickled down his cheeks.” The coming war would likely last ten years, Franklin predicted, and he would “not live to see the end of it.”
He wept, not least, for his own shortcomings. For decades he had championed a greater Great Britain, an Anglo-American union of “mutual strength and mutual advantage.” As political upheaval strained those blood ties, he sought “to palliate matters” with various compromises, including an offer to pay for Boston’s drowned tea from his own pocket. Even now he considered the schism to be “a matter of punctilio, which two or three reasonable people might settle in half an hour.” But by degree he had grown vexed, then angry at what he called the “insolence, contempt, and abuse” of arrogant British officials toward his countrymen; the condescending reference to Americans as “foreigners” infuriated him. His writings turned acerbic: he proposed to answer the British practice of shipping convicts to America by exporting rattlesnakes to England, and his Swiftian essay, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,” postulated that “a great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edge.”
Then, two years ago, disaster had struck when a wise man did a foolish thing. Someone whose identity remained obscure gave Franklin a sheaf of private letters written by a Crown official in Massachusetts to a British undersecretary, urging stern measures by the government against New England troublemakers. One passage even advocated “an abridgement of what are called English liberties.” In December 1772, Franklin sent the letters to Boston as confidential intelligence for patriot leaders, but six months later they were published, causing an uproar in New England, and then in Britain. Franklin eventually placed a notice in the London Chronicle, disclosing his responsibility. British newspapers vilified him as “this old snake,” “old Doubleface,” and a “base, ungrateful, cunning, upstart thing.”
On January 29, 1774, he appeared before the king’s council in the Cockpit, a Whitehall amphitheater once used for cockfights. For more than an hour, Franklin was pelted with invective, denounced as a “man without honor” and a “hoary-headed traitor” who had “forfeited all the respect of societies and men.” The packed gallery jeered while he stood as still as statuary, wearing a fine blue suit of spotted Manchester velvet. It was the greatest humiliation of his life, and a day later he was sacked as deputy postmaster general for North America. He had made a serious error of judgment, but so had Britain, by demeaning the Crown’s best American ally in promoting imperial harmony.
In the months since that wretched day, he had shrugged off the ordeal to continue mediating between Crown and colonies. He took meetings, public and private, enduring endless palaver with men of influence and no influence, men of goodwill and ill will, men with potential remedies and men spouting nonsense. Franklin admitted to growing “irritated and heated”; he insisted on repealing the Coercive Acts, withdrawing the fleet from Boston, and removing British soldiers to Quebec or Florida. “The true art of governing the colonies,” he believed, “lies in … only letting them alone.” The government secretly intercepted and read his mail, carefully repairing the seals and making copies with a cover note that labeled him “this arch traitor.” Public hopes for reconciliation ascended, then subsided, only to rise again. The stock market jumped in late December on false news that he and Lord North had reached a peace deal.
But there would be no peace. These febrile efforts, he wrote, “availed no more than the whistling of the winds.” While government officials considered him the “great director” of New England radicals, the radicals themselves wondered if he was “too much of an Englishman.” He felt “like a thing out of its place, and useless because it is out of its place.” Like many Americans, he found that the middle ground was narrow and perilous; he, too, gradually chose insurrection. Britain, he concluded, had become “this old rotten state.” He was reduced to quoting from Horace’s Odes: “What is bad now may not always be.”
Franklin spent his final night on Craven Street. The last of his books, papers, and scientific instruments packed, he caught the post coach for Portsmouth on March 21. Beyond the political turmoil, two personal matters gnawed at him as he rolled through Surrey on a route similar to that taken by the king to the dockyards twenty-one months earlier. In New Jersey, Governor William Franklin, the great man’s son, seemed intent on remaining loyal to the Crown. “You, who are a thorough courtier,” Franklin wrote in a letter, “see everything with government eyes.” And in Philadelphia, his common-law wife of forty-four years, Deborah, had died in December after a long decline. Although a faithful correspondent, Franklin had not seen her in a decade. Regret and perhaps guilt dogged him up the gangplank onto the Pennsylvania Packet, moored along the Portsmouth waterfront.
Franklin never went to sea without vowing never to go again. Yet here he was in his seventieth year, a large man in a small cabin on a small ship. He had resolved to stay busy during the passage, scrutinizing the heavens with his telescope and frequently measuring ocean temperatures with a thermometer suspended on a long rope, as part of his perpetual study of the Gulf Stream. He promptly started a letter to William, which began, “Dear Son” and grew to twenty thousand words on 250 foolscap pages, as it became a detailed account of his failed diplomacy in Britain. That failure had taught him lessons in patience, tact, intrigue, and power—lessons that would prove useful, since his best days as a diplomat, perhaps the greatest America ever produced, still lay ahead of him.
The bells of Philadelphia would ring for joy upon his arrival six weeks hence. The man who had felt “like a thing out of place” would find his rightful place. Among the slurs hurled at him in the Cockpit was the accusation of being a “true incendiary.” That much was certain, as befitted the American Prometheus. He was the best of his breed, this kite flier, this almanac maker, this lightning tamer. The Pennsylvania Packet shrugged off her moorings and crowded on sail, bearing him home, where he belonged.
Part One
1.
God Himself Our Captain
BOSTON, MARCH 6—APRIL 17, 1775
The mildest winter in living memory had yielded to an early spring. Not once had the Charles River iced over, and even now whispers of green could be seen on the Common sward and across the tumbling hills to the north. By reducing the need for firewood, this “extraordinary weather for warlike preparations,” as one pugnacious clergyman called it, had preserved Boston from even greater suffering in the nine months since British warships had closed the port. Still, warehouses stood vacant, shipyards idle, wharves deserted, shop shelves barren. The only topsail vessels in view were the eight Royal Navy men-of-war plugging the harbor approaches. “It is now a very gloomy place, the streets almost empty,” a woman wrote an English friend in early March 1775. “Many families have removed from it, & the inhabitants are divided.… Some appear desponding, others full of rage.”
Only a bountiful local crop of lambs and charity from other colonies preserved Boston from hunger: fish and flour from elsewhere in New England, rice from the Carolinas, rye from Baltimore, a thousand bushels of wheat from Quebec, cash from Delaware and Montreal. By British decree, provisions arriving by sea were unloaded in Marblehead and carted twenty miles to Boston, an expensive, tedious detour. Town selectmen launched projects to employ the unemployed—street paving, well digging, building a new brickyard. But gangs of idle sailors, longshoremen, ropemakers, riggers, and carpenters could often be found loitering by the docks or in the town’s ninety taverns.
Even in better days, Boston had known ample misery—smallpox and measles epidemics, Quaker and witch hangings. For the past three decades the population had stagnated at fifteen thousand people, all of them wedged into a pear-shaped, thousand-acre peninsula with seventeen churches, no banks, no theaters, and a single concert hall, in a room above a shop. Puritan severity was not far removed. A generation earlier, both actors and theatergoers could be fined for “immorality, impiety, and a contempt for religion”; other miscreants were branded alphabetically—“A” for adulterers, “B” for burglars, “F” for forgers. Counterfeiters who escaped a scorching “C” might be nailed to the pillory by their ears. But never had the town seemed more abject or more menacing; these days there were as many British soldiers in Boston as adult male civilians. One resident watching the regiments at drill lamented that the Common “glows with warlike red.”
On Monday morning, March 6, the “gloomy place” abruptly sprang to life. Hundreds and then thousands filled the streets, most of them walking, since by ordinance no carriage or wagon could be driven at speeds faster than “foot pace” without risk of a ten-shilling fine. The annual commemoration of the 1770 Boston Massacre would be held a day late this year to avoid profaning the Sabbath, and Dr. Joseph Warren, a prominent local physician, intended to deliver a speech titled “The Baleful Influence of Standing Armies in Time of Peace.” An “immense concourse of people,” as one witness described it, made for Milk and Marlborough Streets, where an octagonal steeple rose 180 feet above the Old South Meeting House, with its distinctive Flemish-bond brick walls, enormous clock, and split-banner weathervane. By eleven a.m., five thousand packed the place to the double rafters and cambered tie beams. More than a hundred box pews filled Old South’s floor, with high paneled sides to block chilly drafts and wooden writing arms for those inclined to take notes on the day’s sermon. An upper gallery with benches wrapped around the second floor. Between the arched compass-headed windows rose a high pulpit, now draped in black and crowned with a sounding board.
“People’s expectations are alive for the oration,” the lawyer John Adams had recently written. An uneasy murmur rose from the congregants, along with the smell of damp wool, perspiration, and badly tanned shoe leather. It was rumored that mass arrests were likely this morning, and that British officers had agreed that if the king were insulted they would draw swords and slaughter the offenders. “We may possibly be attacked in our trenches,” Samuel Adams had warned, and a witness reported that almost every man in attendance “had a short stick, or bludgeon in his hand.” The murmur in Old South grew louder when several dozen red-coated officers clumped through the door and stood in the aisles.
Samuel Adams was ready for them. An undistinguished petty official who had squandered a family malthouse fortune, Adams ran an impressive political organization, deftly shaping public opinion through a newspaper syndicate that for years had told other colonies—often with lurid hyperbole—what life was like in a free town occupied by combat troops. “He eats little, drinks little, sleeps little, thinks much,” an adversary later wrote, “and is most decisive and indefatigable.” Now fifty-two and afflicted with a pronounced tremor in his head and hands, he often stood on his toes when excited, and surely he was on his toes now. He quickly cleared the front pews and beckoned the officers so that, as he later explained, they “might have no pretense to behave ill.” About forty eventually took seats on the forward benches or the pulpit stairs, while Adams settled into a deacon’s chair, within sword thrust.
The crowd hushed when Dr. Warren appeared at the pulpit after sidling through the congested aisles. He was handsome and young, just thirty-three, pitied for having recently lost his wife, who’d left him four young children, yet much admired for his kindness, grace, and medical skill; more than a few of those in the audience had been inoculated by him during the smallpox outbreak a decade before. He was also a ringleader. As chairman of the extralegal Committee of Safety, he proved to be a capable organizer and insurgent strategist. John Adams, the previous day, had praised his “undaunted spirit and fire.”
Later accounts would depict Warren wearing a white toga over his breeches, symbolic of antique virtues—simplicity, industry, probity, civic good over private interest. Although the doctor was likely dressed more conventionally, he did affect what was described as a “Demosthenian posture,” with a handkerchief in his right hand, as he addressed “my ever honored fellow citizens”:
Unhappily for us, unhappily for Britain, the madness of an avaricious minister … has brought upon the stage discord, envy, hatred, and revenge, with civil war close in their rear.… Our streets are again filled with armed men. Our harbor is crowded with ships of war. But these cannot intimidate us. Our liberty must be preserved. It is far dearer than life.
Warren invoked the long struggle to carve a country from the New England wilderness. He described Britain’s recent efforts to assert hegemony over that country, and the shootings five years before that left “the stones bespattered with your father’s brains.” Then came the Coercive Acts, insult upon injury. “Our wish is that Britain and the colonies may, like the oak and the ivy, grow and increase in strength together,” Warren said. “But if these pacific measures are ineffectual, and it appears that the only way to safety is through fields of blood, I know you will not turn your faces from your foes.”
Several British officers hissed and rapped their sticks on the floor in disapproval. A captain sitting on the pulpit steps allegedly held up several lead bullets in his open palm, a menacing gesture.
Although one skeptic would describe the oration as “true puritanical whine,” Dr. Warren knew his audience: farmers and merchants, seamen and artisans, with their queued hair, knee buckles, and linen shirts ruffled at the cuff, their pale, upturned faces watching him intently. They were a borderland people, living on the far rim of empire, where in six or seven generations the American clay had grown sturdy and tall. They were patriots—if that term implied political affiliation rather than a moral state of grace—who were disputatious and litigious, given to violence on the frontier and in the street: a gentle people they were not. Their disgruntlement now approached despair, with seething resentments and a conviction that designing, corrupt men in London—the king’s men, if not the king himself—conspired to deprive them of what they and their ancestors had wrenched from this hard land. They were, a Boston writer concluded, “panting for an explosion.”
Reasonably democratic, reasonably egalitarian, wary of privilege and outsiders, they were accustomed to tending their own affairs, choosing their own ministers, militia officers, and political leaders. Convinced that their elected assemblies were equal in stature and authority to Parliament, they believed that governance by consent was paramount. They had not consented to being taxed, to being occupied, to seeing their councils dismissed and their port sealed like a graveyard crypt. They were godly, of course, placed here by the Almighty to do His will. Sometimes political strife was also a moral contest between right and wrong, good and evil. This struggle, as the historian Gordon S. Wood later wrote, would prove their blessedness.
Warren circled round to that very point:
Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of. Our enemies are numerous and powerful, but we have many friends, determining to be free.… On you depend the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important question, on which rest the happiness and liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves.
Applause rocked Old South. One British lieutenant would denounce “a most seditious, inflammatory harangue,” although another concluded that the speech “contained nothing so violent as was expected.” Swords remained sheathed. But when Samuel Adams heaved himself from his chair to move that “the thanks of the town should be presented to Dr. Warren for his elegant and spirited oration,” the officers answered with more hisses, more stick rapping, and shouts of “Oh, fie! Fie!”
That was but a consonant removed from “fire.” Panic swept the meetinghouse, “a scene of the greatest confusion imaginable,” Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie told his diary. Women shrieked, men shouted, “Fire!,” sniffing for smoke. Others thought a command to shoot had been issued, an error compounded by the trill and rap of fifes and drums from the 43rd Regiment, which happened to be passing in the street outside. Five thousand people tried “getting out as fast as they could by the doors and windows,” wrote Lieutenant John Barker of the 4th Regiment of Foot. The nimbler congregants in the galleries “swarmed down gutters like rats,” then hied through Coopers Alley, Cow Lane, and Queen Street.
A tense calm finally returned to a tense town. “To be sure,” Ensign Jeremy Lister of the 10th Foot later wrote, “the scene was quite laughable.”
Across the street from Old South, in the three-story brick mansion called Province House, Lieutenant General Gage was not laughing. Worried that the morning’s oration would turn violent, he had placed his regiments under arms and on alert. The risible stampede came as a relief.
Thomas Gage was a mild, sensible man with a mild, sensible countenance; only a slight protrusion of his lower lip suggested truculence. Now in his mid-fifties, with thinning gray hair and a fixed gaze, he was the most powerful authority in North America as both military commander in chief and the royal governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Comrades knew him as “Honest Tom,” and even an adversary conceded that he was “a good and wise man surrounded with difficulties.” As a young officer he had seen ghastly combat in the British defeat by the French at Fontenoy in 1745 and in the British victory over rebellious Highlanders at Culloden a year later. In 1755, he led the vanguard of General Edward Braddock’s expedition against the French in western Pennsylvania, where a disastrous ambush at the Monongahela River killed his commander and several hundred comrades; swarming bullets grazed Gage’s belly and eyebrow, ventilated his coat, and twice wounded his horse. Three years later, Gage was a senior commander when the French battered a British expedition in New York at Fort Carillon, subsequently renamed Ticonderoga. These actions revealed a soldier without conspicuous gifts as a combat leader, a man perhaps meant to administer rather than command. It was Gage’s misfortune to live in turbulent times.
Even so, twenty years of American service had been good to him, providing Gage with high rank, a comely American wife—the New Jersey heiress Margaret Kemble—and vast tracts of land in New York, Canada, and the West Indies. He evinced little sympathy for American political experiments. “Democracy is too prevalent in America,” he had declared in 1772, when his headquarters was in New York.
The tea party had pushed his lower lip out a bit more. In an uncharacteristic fit of bravado during a return visit to London in February 1774, he assured King George that four regiments in Boston should suffice—perhaps two thousand men—since the Americans would be “lions whilst we are lambs” but would turn “very meek” in the face of British resolve. Other colonies were unlikely to support Massachusetts; southerners especially “talk very high,” but the fear of slave rebellions and Indian attacks “will always keep them quiet.” The thirteen colonies seemed too geographically scattered and too riven by diverse interests to collaborate effectively. Promises of suppression on the cheap appealed to the shilling pinchers in Lord North’s government. Gage’s views had also helped shape the Coercive Acts by feeding the pleasant delusion in Britain that insurrection was mostly a Boston phenomenon, organized by a small cabal of ambitious cynics able to gull the masses.
Gage’s report so encouraged the king and his court that the general was dispatched to Massachusetts as both governor of the colony and military chief of the continent. Respectful Bostonians had greeted him with an honor guard, banners, and toasts in Faneuil Hall, although two weeks later he shifted his headquarters to Salem, upon closing Boston Harbor at noon on June 1, 1774. His marching orders from the government urged him “to quiet the minds of the people, to remove their prejudices, and, by mild and gentle persuasion to induce … submission on their part.” He imposed neither martial law nor press censorship. Troublemakers were permitted to assemble, to travel, to drill their militias, to fling bellicose insults at the king’s regulars.
Gage had evidently learned little on the Monongahela or at Fort Carillon about the hazard of underestimating his adversaries; precisely what he had absorbed from two decades in America was unclear. But within weeks of planting his flag in Salem, he recognized that he had misjudged both the depth and the breadth of rebellion. The Coercive Acts, including the abrogation of colonial government in Massachusetts, had inflamed the insurrection. One ugly incident followed another. In mid-August, fifteen hundred insurgents prevented royal judges and magistrates from taking the bench in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts. Two weeks later, Gage sent foot troops to seize munitions from the provincial powder house, six miles northwest of Boston; rumors spread that the king’s soldiers and sailors were butchering Bostonians. At least twenty thousand rebels marched toward the town with firelocks, cudgels, and plowshares beaten into edged weapons. “For about fifty miles each way round, there was an almost universal ferment, rising, seizing arms,” wrote one clergyman. An Irish merchant described how “at every house women & children [were] making cartridges” and pouring molten lead into bullet molds. The insurgents found Boston unbruised and the British regulars back in their fortified camps, but the “Powder Alarm” emboldened the Americans, demonstrated the militancy of bumpkins in farms and villages across the colony, and revealed how crippled the Crown’s authority had become. “Popular rage has appeared,” Gage advised London.
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.”
