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.
Many families have removed from it, & the inhabitants are divided.
Some appear desponding, others full of rage.
Town selectmen launched projects to employ the unemployed street paving, well digging, building a new brickyard.
Even in better days, Boston had known ample misery smallpox and measles epidemics, Quaker and witch hangings.
Puritan severity was not far removed.
Counterfeiters who escaped a scorching C might be nailed to the pillory by their ears.
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.
By eleven a.m., five thousand packed the place to the double rafters and cambered tie beams.
An upper gallery with benches wrapped around the second floor.
“People’s expectations are alive for the oration, the lawyer John Adams had recently written.
Samuel Adams was ready for them.
The crowd hushed when Dr. Warren appeared at the pulpit after sidling through the congested aisles.
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.
… 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.
Then came the Coercive Acts, insult upon injury.
Several British officers hissed and rapped their sticks on the floor in disapproval.
They were, a Boston writer concluded, panting for an explosion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The risible stampede came as a relief.
It was Gage’s misfortune to live in turbulent times.
He evinced little sympathy for American political experiments.
The tea party had pushed his lower lip out a bit more.
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.
He imposed neither martial law nor press censorship.
The Coercive Acts, including the abrogation of colonial government in Massachusetts, had inflamed the insurrection.
One ugly incident followed another.
Popular rage has appeared, Gage advised London.
Of more than two hundred Massachusetts communities, only twenty-one failed to send delegates.
In December, rebel raiders seized forty-four British cannons on Fort Island in Rhode Island.
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.
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.
Connecticut had ordered six militia regiments equipped for active service.
As local assemblies and committees of safety grew stronger, royal governors grew weaker.
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.
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.
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.
The new year brought only new troubles.
Every day, every hour, widens the breach, Dr. Warren warned.
A militia colonel burst into the North Meeting House, shouting, The regulars are coming!
Gage could only agree.
The troops must march into the country.
American bushmen, he added, had demonstrated their patience and cunning in forming ambushments.
London promised to send him a hospital, on a large scale.
Yet daily life plodded on.
Greenleaf’s Auction Room sold German serges, Irish linens, and Kippen’s snuff by the cask.
A vendor near Swing Bridge offered fish hooks, cod lines, and nails of all sorts.
Freeholders gathered for meetings, as usual, in Faneuil Hall.
The town agreed to borrow 600 to buy grain for the almshouse poor.
For those intent on inoculation, newspapers advertised the services of a private hospital in New York.
Friction between patriots and loyalists intensified.
The once happy town was now a cage for every unclean bird, in Mrs. Samuel Adams’s estimation.
Small wonder that a Falmouth minister believed the colony was suffering a discontent bordering on madness.
The Simsbury Iron Works in Connecticut cast cannonballs.
Salem women secretly cut and stitched five thousand flannel powder cartridges for field guns.
Dr. Warren would distribute the chests among seven towns by mid-April, including two sent to Concord.
But most shipments went undiscovered.
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 relock, a Boston merchant wrote.
Instead of exercising once every three months, many companies now met three times a week.
Muskets could be primed and loaded with one order and ten motions.
Lean the cheek against the butt of the relock, theEasy Planinstructed.
Shut the left eye, and look with the right along the barrel.
Boston’s natural beauty had once beguiled British soldiers.
That enchantment had faded by the spring of 1775.
No such thing as a play house, a lieutenant in the 23rd Foot complained.
Small insults bred seething resentments.
In March, a marine lieutenant reported how passing Bostonians made coarse gestures with their hands on their backsides.
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.
A placard labeled american liberty was draped around his neck.
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.
It will destroy more of us than the Yankees will.
When the soldiers are in a state of intoxication, he added, they are frequently induced to desert.
And desert they did.
Estimates of British Army desertions over the past year ranged from 120 to more than 200.
Floggings, and worse, had limited deterrence.
The execution, a lieutenant observed, was the only thing done in remembrance of Christmas.
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.
(A lieutenant colonelcy in a foot regiment might cost 3,500.)
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.
With the early arrival of spring, the chances of a pernicious peace faded.
Captain Evelyn was glad.
Blood had risen in his gorge.
… 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.
Further weeks passed while ill-tempered westerly gales keptNautilusand her companion sloop Falcon pinned to the south coast of England.
There was more: reinforcements were en route, though hardly the twenty thousand that Gage thought necessary.
Any efforts on their part to encounter a regular force cannot be very formidable.
Although clear enough, this dispatch from Dartmouth was actually a duplicate.
Meanwhile, there was plenty to do, and orders flew from Province House.
Rumors were afoot that insurgents intended to burn Boston before British reinforcements arrived.
Gage had no cavalry for a quick, bold strike into the countryside.
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?
Gage also had dispatched officers capable of taking sketches of a country.
Gage also had a clandestine espionage online grid.
Through American spies on the British payroll, he knew that militia generals had been appointed.
The Americans, too, had informants.
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.
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.
Now Gage could complete his preparations.
Opposition seemed unlikely except perhaps from scattered parties of bushmen.
If corpulent and edging toward retirement, Smith was mature, experienced, and prudent.
But you will take care that the soldiers do not plunder the inhabitants, or hurt private property.
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.
And now, as one loyalist wrote, The war began to redden.
The iron was quite hot enough to be hammered.
Published by Henry Holt and Company.
Copyright 2020 by Rick Atkinson.
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