“What a dreadful apprehension for a wife”

When the eminent historian George Bancroft discussed Thomas Gage’s April 1775 decision-making in 1860, he wrote that the general was just too wishy-washy to carry out his orders from London:

Gage was neither fit to reconcile nor to subdue. By his mild temper and love of society, he gained the good-will of his boon companions, and escaped personal enmities; but in earnest business he inspired neither confidence nor fear. Though his disposition was far from being malignant, he was so poor in spirit and so weak of will, so dull in his perceptions and so unsettled in his opinions, that he was sure to follow the worst advice, and vacillate between smooth words of concession and merciless severity.

He had promised the king that with four regiments he would play the “lion,” and troops beyond his requisition were hourly expected. His instructions enjoined upon him the seizure and condign punishment of Samuel Adams, [John] Hancock, Joseph Warren, and other leading patriots; but he stood in such dread of them that he never so much as attempted their arrest.

Bancroft didn’t suggest that Gen. Gage was lenient because he was influenced by his American wife, Margaret. 

(My own theory about Gage is that he aimed for the provincial artillery supplies rather than Patriot leaders in order to save himself from embarrassment before his superiors. See The Road to Concord for the full argument.)

In the decades that followed Bancroft’s magisterial history of the U.S. of A., more sources came into print, many of them from Britain. Those cast a different light on Gen. Gage. It turned out contemporary critics in both London and Boston thought he was being lenient. And we got more gossip about Margaret Gage. Here are those passages in order of their appearance in print.

Boston merchant John Andrews, writing a private letter in March 1775, published in 1866:

…it seems the officers and soldiers are a good deal disaffected towards the Governor, thinking, I suppose, that he is partial to the inhabitants, many of the latter have made no scruples to call him an Old Woman.

Capt. John Barker of the 4th Regiment was one of those officers who thought Gage was too accommodating to the locals. In his diary he called the commander “Tommy” a couple of times. Barker’s entry for 12 Jan 1775, as published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1877, was also snarky about the general’s wife:

Yesterday even. was a Ball by subscription; seven of each Corps was the number fix’d, and the Ladies were invited by the managers; this scheme was proposed by Mrs. G—e, and carried into execution by her favorites; by which she enjoyed a dance and an opportunity of seeing her friends at no expense.

Maj. James Wemyss of the British army assessed dozens of commanders in the war (Gage by reputation, not personal experience), and his comments were transcribed by historian Jared Sparks. This paragraph was published by 1879:

Lieut.-General Gage, a commander-in-chief of moderate abilities, but altogether deficient in military knowledge. Timid and undecided on every emergency, he was very unfit to command at a time of resistance and approaching rebellion to the mother country. He was governed by his wife, a handsome American; her brothers and relations held all the staff appointments in the army, and were, with less abilities, as weak characters as himself. To the great joy of the army, he went to England soon after the disastrous attack at Bunker Hill.

That’s the transcription published in a footnote in William Cullen Bryant and Sidney Howard Gay’s A Popular History of the United States in 1879, and two years later in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society. Gene Procknow, author of William Hunter - Finding Free Speech: A British Soldier’s Son Who Became an Early American, has looked at the original document in the Sparks Manuscripts and produced a more accurate transcription here. The basic sentiment remains the same.

The British engineer Capt. John Montresor (shown above) wrote this note during the war, as published by the New-York Historical Society in 1882:

Should the American Colonies (after all) be lost to Great Britain, it may be attributed to a variety of unfortunate circumstances and Blunders, &c., viz. General Gage having all his Cabinet papers, Ministers’ Letters, &c., and his Correspondence all stole out of a large Closet, or Wardrobe, up one pair of Stairs on the Landing at the Government House at Boston…1775.

Gage’s voluminous papers, apparently intact, sailed home with him and are now at the Clements Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Montresor’s complaint therefore reflects what he thought of Gage more than the actual whereabouts of the general’s papers.

Former Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson in his diary on 27 July 1775, published 1884:

Mr. Keene called: complains of Gage: says his lady has said she hoped her husband would never be the instrument of sacrificing the lives of her countrymen. I doubted it. He said he did not, but did not chuse to be quoted for it.

Whitshed Keene was a former British army officer, Member of Parliament, and a brother-in-law of Lord Dartmouth, the Secretary of State.

Finally, in 1899 the British government published text from an unsigned letter that someone in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, had sent to Margaret Gage on 1 Nov 1775. That mail had been intercepted by the British government back during the war and stored in the Home Office files. Gage’s friend or relative wrote:

I have heard some good news, which is that [Gen. Richard] Montgomery is with his whole army cut to pieces or taken by Genl. [Guy] Carleton. God grant it be true! and yet I shudder. I recollect with horror the bloody scene at Charlestown. Poor Jennet [Montgomery]! I have been told that she charged Montgomery to avoid, at any rate, being taken prisoner. A cord, I suppose, she apprehended would finish his exploits.

What a dreadful apprehension for a wife; let either side conquer, what heartfelt woe must it occasion! This puts me in mind of a conversation you and I had the day after that dreadful one, when you thought the lines so expressive:

The Sun’s o’ercast with blood; fair day, adieu!
Which is the side that I must go withal?
I am with both; each army hath a hand,
And in their rage,—I having hold of both,—
They whirl asunder, and dismember me.

And again:

Whoever wins, on that side shall I lose
Assured loss, before the match be played.

Those are lines from Shakespeare’s King John, spoken by Lady Blanch as she feels torn between her husband on one side of a war and her family on another.

Richard Montgomery was a retired British army officer who had joined the Continental Army and was leading the attack on Québec. He hadn’t been “cut to pieces” yet, but he would be. Janet Montgomery lived on for decades in New York as the celebrated widow of an American military martyr.

TOMORROW: What do we make of these sources?