house1 and forced him to resign. Joseph Warren, in Boston, heard of the tumult and hastened to the spot. His influence prevailed, and the sun went down without the shedding of blood. It was ominous, however, to Gage, and he set to work rebuilding the old lines across Boston Neck, and constructing barracks. He soon encountered difficulties. Somehow laborers could not be hired, nor provisions be bought. Somehow his freight GENTLEMEN, T BOSTON, September, 27, 1774 HE committees of correfpondence of this and feveral of the neighbouring towns, having taken into confideration the vaft importance of withholding from the troops now here, labour, flraw, timber, flitwork, boards, and in fort every article excepting provifions neceflary for their fubfiftance; and being under a neceffity from their conduct of confidering them as real enemies, we are fully fatisfied that it is our bounden duty to withhold from them every thing but what meer humanity requires; and therefore we must beg your clole and ferious attention to the inclofed refolves which were paffed unanimously; and as unanimity in all our meatures in this day of fevere trial, is of the utmost confequence, we do earnestly recommend your co-operation in this meafure, as conducive to the good of the whole. We are, Your Friends and Fellow Countrymen, Signed by Order of the joint Committee, Willion Loupes NOTICE OF THE COMMITTEE OF CORRESPONDENCE. 2 Clerk. barges sunk, his carts of straw got on fire, his wagons were sloughed; and somehow, with all his vigilance, a few young men made up for the loss of the powder-house pieces by stealthily carrying off by night some cannon. from Boston, besides some others from an old battery in Charlestown. It 1 This is the house still standing, belonging tions, etc., in the library of the Mass. Hist. Soto James Russell Lowell. Mem. Hist. Boston, ciety. 8 Loring's Hundred Orators, p. 89; Mem. Hist. iii. 114. 2 From an original in the volume of Proclama- Boston, iii. 62; Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., vi. 261. was soon found that the men on the Neck lines needed protection, and Admiral Graves tried to send up a sloop of war into the South bay to enfilade the road from Roxbury, if occasion came; but her draught was too much, and so he employed an armed schooner. By November the works were finished. Warren thought them as formidable as Gage could make them, but the old Louisbourg soldiers laughed at them and called them mud walls. Meanwhile, in October, the military spirit was taking shape throughout the province. On the 5th the legislative assembly, which had met at Salem on Gage's call, though he sought to outlaw them by rescinding (September 28) his precept, had declared his attempted revocation without warrant in law, and had resolved itself into a provincial congress. The body then adjourned to meet in Concord, where, under John Hancock's presidency, they appointed a Committee of Safety to act as the executive of the province, and chose three general officers, - Preble,1 Ward, and Pomeroy. The militia was organized, and minute-men were everywhere forming into companies. Gordon tells how the country was astir with preparations. Connecticut was not far behind in ordering her militia to be officered, and in directing her towns to double their stock of ammunition, while she voted to issue £15,000 in paper money, the first of the war. "An armed truce," wrote Benjamin Church, "is the sole tenure by which the inhabitants of Boston possess life, liberty, and property." Away from Boston, the towns made common cause. Liberty and Union" was to be read on a flag flying in Taunton. When news of these and similar events reached England, Lord North told Hutchinson that, for aught he could see, it must come to violence, with consequent subjection for the province. When such tidings reached Virginia it found her officers just sheathing their swords after their conflict with the Indians in the mountains, and resolving next to turn their weapons against the oppressors of America. Gage, in Boston, whom Warren really felt to be honest and desirous of an accommodation, was awaking to a juster measure of the task of the ministry, which might, he said, require 20,000 troops to begin with. As he pondered on such views, he might have heard, on the evening of the 9th of November, 1774, the ringing of the bells which greeted the return of Sam. Adams and his colleagues from the Philadelphia congress. Shortly after the middle of the month the British in Boston went into winter quarters. So November passed; the Committee of Safety had ar 1 For an account of Preble, see N. E. Hist. and Gen. Reg., 1868, pp. 404, 421. He, as well Jedidiah Preble ... ing, October 27, 1774, from the camp in Boston: "Our affairs here are in the most critical situation imaginable. Nothing less than the total loss or conquest of the colonies must be the end of it. We have got together a clever little army here." Percy MSS. in Boston Public Library. 3 Percy MSS., Nov. 25, 1774: "I really begin now to think that it will come to blows at last, for they are most amazingly encouraged by our 2 P. O. Hutchinson, 293, 297. Percy was writ- having done nothing as yet. The people here as Ward and Pomeroy, had been in the French wars. rangea to raise and support an army, and the recommendation of the Continental Congress had been approved. December came. Boston was not yet burned, as some in London believed it was, when Quincy heard them laying wagers in the coffee-houses,1 and if Sam. Adams was not the first politician in the world, as others told the same ardent young Bostonian, he was sharing conspicuous honors at home, with his distant kinsman, John Adams. The latter, as Novanglus, in his public controversy with the unknown Massachusettensis, was just attracting renewed attention. But that sturdy patriot, while he was arguing in public, was comforting himself in private by reckoning that Massachusetts could put 25,000 men in the field in a week; and New England, he counted, had 200,000 fighing men, "not exact soldiers," he confessed, "but all used to arms." 2 Tidings were coming in which told how this warlike spirit might be tested. Governor Wanton, of Rhode Island, had spirited away from the reach of the British naval officers forty-four cannon, which were at Newport. Paul Revere had gone down to Portsmouth and harangued the Sons of Liberty, till they invaded Fort William and Mary and (December 14, 1774) carried off the powder and cannon.3 From Maryland, where they had lately been burning a tea-ship, the word was that its convention had ordered the militia to be enrolled. From Pennsylvania it appeared that Thomas Mifflin was conspicuous among the Quakers in advocating the measure of non-intercourse. From South Carolina the news was halting. Could her rice-planters succeed in getting their product excepted from such a plan? They did. Gage had some time before written to Dartmouth that they were as mad in the southern Charlestown as in northern Boston; and when one of their Tory parsons had intimated that clowns should not meddle with politics, they had been as fiery as they could have been in Massachusetts.6 Gordon, of Jamaica Plain, in appending notes to a sermon which he had just preached on the Provincial Thanksgiving of December 15, 1774, refers to the brave lead of Virginia in the present time, as nine years before she had been foremost in the stamp-act time. Governor Dunmore was reporting to Dartmouth (December, 1774) that every county in Virginia was arming a company of men, to be ready as occasion required. John Adams, at Philadelphia, read to Patrick Henry from a paper of Joseph Hawley, that the result of the action of the ministry rendered it necessary to fight. "I am of that man's opinion," replied the ardent Vir are the most artful, designing villains in the world." 1 Mem. of Quincy, p. 216. 2 Letters, Dec. 12 and 28, 1774. The census or estimate by congress in 1775 gave New England 800,000 souls. 8 N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., 1868, p. 337 ; letters of Gov. Wentworth in Ibid., 1869, p. 274; Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xiv. 450; Force's Am. Archives; Belknap's New Hampshire; T. C. Amory's General Sullivan, 295; N. H. Rev. 4 E. S. Riley, Jr., in Southern Monthly, xiv. 537. 6 Sept. 30, 1774. 6 Gibbes' Doc. Hist. of the Amer. Rev. ginian.1 With the new year (1775) that opinion was becoming wide-spread. Ames' Almanac (1775), published in Boston, was printing, for almost every family in New England to read, "a method for making gun-powder," so that every person "may easily supply himself with a sufficiency of that commodity." Day by day news came to Boston from every direction of the indorsement of Congress, and of the wild-fire speed of the dispersion of the military spirit. Those who remembered the 40,000 men who marched towards Boston at the time of the D'Anville scare, thirty years before, said the enthusiasm then was nothing like the present. Somehow Gage began to feel more confident. He had in January 3,500 men in his Boston garrison, and almost as many more were expected, and he did not hesitate to send (January 23) Captain Balfour and a hundred men, with two cannon, to Marshfield, to protect the two hundred loyalists there, who had signed the articles by which Timothy Ruggles was hoping to band the friends of government together, and the reports which Balfour sent back seemed to satisfy the governor that the measure was effective.2 On the first of February, 1775, the second provincial congress assembled at Cambridge, and they soon issued a solemn address to the people, deprecating a rupture, but counselling preparations for it. It was not then known that Gage had won over Dr. Church, and that through this professing patriot the British headquarters in Boston were informed of the doings of congress. Church's defection encouraged the tories, and on the 6th, handbills appeared in Boston, reminding the patriots of the fate of Wat Tyler. A few days later Cambridge was alarmed by the report that troops were coming out of Boston to disperse them; but the day passed without the proof of it. The Committee of Safety were anxious, for they knew that the other colonies and their friends in England were fearful that the conflict would be precipitated without the consent of congress; and the authority of congress was now so dominant that its cognizance of such measures was essential to the continuance of the sympathy with Massachusetts which now existed. No one at this time was more solicitous for this prudent measure than Joseph Hawley, and no one in Massachusetts had a steadier head. On the 18th Peter Oliver wrote from Boston to London : "Great preparations on both sides for an engagement, and the sooner it comes the better.” 5 "Every day, every hour widens the breach!" wrote Warren to Arthur Lee, two days later. Already the provincial congress had conferred on the Committee of Safety (February 9) the power to as 1 The paper which excited Patrick Henry was the "Broken Hints" of Joseph Hawley, which of the Revolution; and since in John Adams' Works, ix. p. 641. Preph Harley was first printed in Niles's Principles and Acts 2 See documents in Force's Amer. Archives; Frank Moore's Diary of the Rev. olution, i. 15. 3 Frothingham's Warren, p. 416. 4 Ibid., p. 413. 5 P. O. Hutchinson, p. 371. 6 Frothingham's Warren, p. 418. semble the militia, and John Thomas and William Heath had been added to the general officers. The committee, on the 21st, had voted to buy supplies for 15,000 men, including twenty hogsheads of rum. On the same day Sam. Adams and Warren signed a letter to the friends of liberty in Canada, and secret messengers were already passing that way. Presently, on the 26th, the impending conflict was once more averted. Colonel David Mason, of Salem, had been commissioned by the Committee of Safety as an engineer, and was now at work in that town mounting some old cannon which had been taken from the French. Gage heard of it, and by his orders a transport appeared at Marblehead, with about 300 men under Lieutenant-Colonel Leslie, who rapidly landed and marched his men to Salem. Their purpose was seasonably divined; the town was aroused, and, in the presence of a mob, the commander thought it safer to turn upon his steps.1 A British officer, Colonel Smith, with one John Howe, was at about the same time sent out in disguise to scour the country towards Worcester, and pick up news for Gage; 2 and two others, Brown and Bernière, were a few weeks later prowling about Concord. The patriots did not scour for news. It came in like the wind, -now of county meetings, now of drills, now of Colonel Washington's ardor in Virginia, and now of Judge Drayton's charge to the grand jury in Carolina. Early in March came the anniversary of the Boston massacre. Two days before, Judge Auchmuty, in Boston, wrote to Hutchinson: "I don't see any reason to expect peace and order until the fatal experiment of arms is tried. . . . Bloodshed and desolation seem inevitable." While this tory was writing thus, the patriots, in a spirit that somewhat belied their professed wish to avoid a conflict, were arranging for a public commemoration of the massacre. It could have been omitted without any detriment to the cause, and to observe it could easily have begotten trouble amid the inflamed passions of both sides. "We may possibly be attacked in our trenches," said Sam. Adams. It little conduced to peace that Joseph Warren was selected to deliver the address, which, as the fifth came on Sunday, was delivered on Monday, the sixth. The concourse of people suggested to Warren to enter the Old South meeting-house, where the crowd was assembled, by a ladder put against a window in the rear of the pulpit. Forty British officers were present, and the moderator offered them front seats, and some of the officers placed themselves on the pulpit stairs. A contemporary story says that it was a set purpose of the officers to break up the meeting,5 1 Gage seems to have reported to the War Office that the information was erroneous which induced him to send out this expedition. P. O. Hutchinson's Gov. Hutchinson, 432. Cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xiv. 348. 2 They started April 5th. Howe's record appears in A Journal kept by Mr. John Howe, while he was employed as a British Spy during the Revolutionary War; also while he was engaged in the smuggling business during the late war. (Con cord, N. H., 1827.) The only copy known is in the library of the New Hampshire Hist. Soc. Extracts from it are printed in the Boston Daily Advertiser, Apr. 20, 1886. 3 Their reports to Gage are in Force's Amer. Archives. 4 P. O. Hutchinson, p. 397. Ibid., p. 529; Joshua Green's diary in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xiv. 101. |