Hale’s “barrels of sand marked as powder”

Elkanah Watson told a nifty story about the Continental Army using barrels of sand to disguise its lack of gunpowder during the siege of Boston. Several authors in the late nineteenth century repeated the tale, despite the lack of supporting evidence.

The most interesting way that story resurfaced was in the books of the Boston chronicler Edward Everett Hale (shown here). This is from The Life of George Washington, Studied Anew (1888):

The history of those months is indeed dramatic. First of all, there comes in the terrible revelation that he [Washington] and his army were almost entirely without powder. It is said that he was silent for a long time after this revelation was made to him, and well may it have been that none of the gentlemen around him dared to break this silence.

It is not yet fully explained how the misunderstanding took place, by which he and the other officers in chief command had been deceived. It would appear that an effort had been made to conceal from the guards themselves, the small amount of powder in the storehouses. This was an effort dictated by the finest military insight and is highly creditable to [Artemas] Ward, or whoever carried it into effect. In the execution of this plan, barrels of sand marked as powder, had been delivered with the proper amount of parade, from time to time, and had been entered by the unconscious clerks in charge, as if they were the powder which they should have been. The secret was so well maintained that it deceived even those who ought not to have been deceived. And when, for his own use, Washington had an accurate statement of the amount of real powder and of the amount of sand, which he had in store, he was literally struck dumb by the revelation. He had not nine cartridges for each man in his army.

And from Memories of a Hundred Years (1902):

It is only a few years since the old stone powder-house was removed which stood, in Revolutionary days, surrounded with salt marsh, where the Cottage Farms bridge now crosses the Charles River. When General Washington was first making his rounds to the various posts of the Continental Army besieging Boston, he visited this powder-house. The day of the visit is to be found in the “American Archives.” As he came out, the officer in charge called him aside and said that he supposed he understood that the kegs of powder which they had been inspecting were filled with black sand. This had been one of the precautions of General Ward, who had deceived even his own staff as to the amount of what is called, in the letters of that time, “the essential article.” It is of this visit that the tradition is that Washington did not speak for an hour afterward.

This series started with a recent Atlantic article crediting Washington with knowingly using barrels of sand to hide his army’s gunpowder shortage from the British. Edward Everett Hale presented events the other way around, saying that the barrels of sand had confused Washington and led to that sudden shortage. (There’s a little irony in how Hale’s most famous piece of fiction appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1863.)

In fact, neither of Hale’s descriptions of events match the contemporaneous accounts of how Gen. Washington heard about the gunpowder shortage at a meeting with Massachusetts officials on 3 Aug 1775. Nor would it make the least sense for any commander to fill his powderhouses with barrels of sand marked as gunpowder and believed by the supply clerks to be gunpowder when there was a war on. The problem was a bureaucratic error, not a too-clever conspiracy.

TOMORROW: Contemporaneous rumors about sand and powder.