“Not to repel Force by Force, unless in case of absolute Necessity”

Earlier this month the Clements Library in Ann Arbor announced that it had started posting digital images from the Papers of Gen. Thomas Gage.

Specifically:

The William L. Clements Library has made available volumes 1-11 of the English Series of the Thomas Gage Papers from a famed British commander-in-chief in the decade leading up to the American Revolution and who also was governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay from 1774 to 1775.

The papers are being digitized through a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize more than 23,000 items from one of the Clements Library’s largest and most utilized collections.

These first volumes cover the dates from October 1754 to April 1768. They contain Gage’s “correspondence with military officers and politicians in England, including Secretaries of State, Secretaries at War, the Treasury, the Board of Trade, the Board of Ordnance, the paymaster general, commanders-in-chief, and others.” (Correspondence with North American officials, officers stationed in North America, and civilians are in the separate American Series.)

Gage’s letters back and forth with his main bosses, the Secretary of State for North America (different men over time) and the Secretary at War (always Viscount Barrington, shown here), were transcribed and published in two volumes back in 1931. The full series contains many more documents.

Here’s the meat of one letter written on 24 Oct 1765 by Christopher D’Oyly (1717–1795), deputy secretary in the War Office:

In the Absence of my Lord Barrington, who is now at a Distance in the Country, it falls upon me as a Duty to transmit to you His Majesty’s Commands upon a Matter of the highest Importance to the Tranquility of the Colonies of North America…

It having been represented to His Majesty in Council, that violent & dangerous Riots have arisen in the Town of Boston…with a View to prevent the Execution of an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain, for levying a Stamp Duty…you do forthwith issue your Orders to the several Officers commanding all the Regiments Posts & Detachments under your Command in America, that, in case by the Exigency of Affairs in any of the Provinces in America it should be necessary to procure the Aid of the Military in support of the Civil Power, and that, for that Purpose the Governor of the Province where that may happen, should apply to the Commanders of His Majesty’s Land Forces in America, the said Commanding Officers should, upon such Requisition made by the Governor of the Province to them give the said Governor their concurrence & Assistance for the Purpose abovementioned.

Having thus for signified to you the King’s Pleasure, in the strictest conformity to the abovementioned Order in Council, permit me to apprize you of the Precautions constantly observed by the Secretary at War, in every Case, wherein he had found himself obliged by the urgent solicitation of the Civil Magistrates in the Mother Country to grant them the Assistance of a Military Force, to aid them in the suppression of any Riots & Disturbances which have occasionally happened here.

In the first place the commanding Officer hath always been directed to take no step whatever, either with respect to the Marching, or quartering the Troops under his Command, but at the express requisition of the Civil Magistrate.

Secondly, that when so marched & quartered, the Forces are to take no Step whatever towards opposing the Rioters, but at the same Requisition; and Thirdly, that they are not to repel Force by Force, unless in case of absolute Necessity and being thereunto required by the Civil Magistrate.

In sum, Viscount Barrington was happy to pass on the government’s orders that the army help out in enforcing the law, but local civil authorities had to take the lead—and thus the heat. That restraint reflected the values of the British constitution as top officials in London saw it.

D’Oyly’s letter ended up playing no part in the Stamp Act crisis. Gage didn’t receive it in New York until six months later, on 3 May 1766. By that time the city had already suffered its own Stamp Act riot, the law was dead on the continent, and the new ministry in London was moving to scrap it.

I see that John Phillip Reid quoted these orders in In Defiance of the Law: The Standing-army Controversy, the Two Constitutions, and the Coming of the American Revolution (1981). Back then a researcher had to travel to Ann Arbor or London to read this letter. But now we can see D’Oyly’s words from the comforts of our own homes.

“General Gage and the Guns” Tonight

Tonight, April 12, I’ll deliver an online talk for the Army Heritage Center Foundation in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on “General Gage and the Guns of the Boston Train.”

This is one of several talks I’ve developed from The Road to Concord. This one looks at events through Gen. Thomas Gage’s eyes, examining how he tried to stymie the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s effort to build a military force.

Here’s Gage reporting to Viscount Barrington, the longtime British secretary of war, on 25 Sept 1774:

I write to your Lordship by a private Ship fearing the Post to New York which must convey my Letters from hence for the Packet not quite safe, tho’ it has not yet been stopped; but People have been so questioned, and impeded on the Road, there is no knowing how soon the Post may be examined, for there seems no Respect for any Thing.

Affairs here are worse that even in the Time of the Stamp-Act, I don’t mean in Boston, for throughout the Country. The New England Provinces, except part of New Hampshire, are I may say in Arms, and the Question is now not whether you shall quell Disturbances in Boston, but whether those Provinces shall be conquered, and I find it is the General Resolution of all the Continent to support the Massachusett’s Bay in their Opposition to the late Acts. From Appearances no People are more determined for a Civil War, the whole Country from hence to New York armed, training and providing Military Stores.

Every Man supposed averse to their Measures so molest’d & oppressed, that if he can get out of the Country, which is not an easy Matter, he takes Shelter in Boston.

Clearly, Gen. Gage warned his superiors that in Massachusetts the Crown government was facing opposition that was widespread, armed, and militant. He didn’t even trust the royal mail. Neighboring colonies were joining the rebels. He was losing potential allies in the countryside as they sought safety in Boston.

When Gage’s messages reached London, however, Lord North and his ministers viewed them as alarmist. They didn’t accept his reports as factual. They lost faith in him.

Ironically, some later historians have judged Gage to be too cautious. He was indeed reluctant to act until the secretary of state, Lord Dartmouth, told him he had to—but that was in large part because he knew how strong his opponents could be. In the fall of 1774 and winter of 1775, Gage was cautious because the situation warranted it.

Paying for the Defense in the Massacre Trials

On 12 Nov 1770, after receiving word that Capt. Thomas Preston had been found innocent of the Boston Massacre, Gen. Thomas Gage wrote to him from New York.

Gage was pleased Preston was no longer “oppressed by the most malicious Prosecution” and able to help the enlisted men to go on trial next. “I readily Consent to your going home when all is over,” he wrote. He also addressed Preston’s expenses:

I Flatter myself that Government will readily comply with an Application in your Behalf, to reimburse the unavoidable Expence you have been put to. A Packet sails tomorrow, and I shall write to Lord Barrington on the Subject, In the mean time send me an Account of the Expences the Prosecution has cost you, and have a Copy Ready to produce when you arrive in England. . . .

If you are in want of Money I shall with the greatest Pleasure assist you, with any Sum my private Purse will afford, and will answer your Draught.

Gage expected Preston and, apparently, himself to have to dip into personal funds. There was no budget line for defending soldiers against criminal charges.

Preston sailed from Boston on 7 December, the day after the verdict in the men’s trials. (He thus didn’t wait around for the sentencing and punishment of Pvts. Mathew Kilroy and Edward Montgomery.)

Lt. Col. William Dalrymple of the 14th Regiment (shown above later, during his political career) sent Gen. Gage a list of expenses on 17 December:

To a retaining fee to C: Prestons Lawyers – £10.10
To Do: to the mens D[itt]o: – £10.10
To a fee for pleading at the tryal to C: Prestons Lawyers – £63
To Do: to the Mens Do: – £42
To an Attorney to assist at their tryal – £10.10
To an Attorney for taking some affidavits – £3.12
To certain people employed to enquire about town and collect Affidavits and Evidences [witnesses] – £25.10
To Summons’s and serving them on 93 Evidences – £13.19
To Evidences for the time they waited in Court before examin:n – £5.19
To Joalers fees – £15
To Turnkeys fees and Civility money – £21
To a Clerk at several times – £15.7.6
To small presents to particular people in Boston – £21
To postage of Letters – £2.5
[subtotal] £260.2.6
To extra: expences in coming express from Portsmouth to London with Governour [Thomas] Hutchinsons and Comodore [James] Gambiers dispatchs to Government – £4.4.6
[total] £264.7

The four defense lawyers involved in the two cases thus split more than £140.

On 5 Mar 1771, exactly one year after the shooting on King Street, Secretary of War Barrington assured Gage that “Captain Preston has had all his expences paid and a Pension of £200 a Year bestowed upon him.” In fact, the pension didn’t become official for another year, perhaps time to let Preston sell his commission.

Isaac Smith, Jr., a young cousin of Abigail Adams, was in London that spring, and he wrote to John Adams: “It is said that Capt. Preston will be reimbursed in the expences of his prosecution and meet with some further compensation for his confinement.”

Adams replied: “If Preston is to be reimbursed his Expences, I wish his Expences, at least to his Council, had been greater.” In other words, if Adams had known that he was working for the Crown government, and not just an army officer paying out of pocket, he would have charged more.

There’s no way to know how much of the legal fees came to Adams. However, it’s very hard to reconcile the figures from 1770 with what Adams wrote in his autobiography decades later:

[James] Forrest offered me a single Guinea [worth £1.1] as a retaining fee and I readily accepted it. From first to last I never said a Word about fees, in any of those Cases, and I should have said nothing about them here, if Calumnies and Insinuations had not been propagated that I was tempted by great fees and enormous sums of Money. Before or after the Tryal, Preston sent me ten Guineas and at the Tryal of the Soldiers afterwards Eight Guineas more, which were all the fees I ever received or were offered to me, and I should not have said any thing on the subject to my Clients if they had never offered me any Thing.

This was all the pecuniary Reward I ever had for fourteen or fifteen days labour, in the most exhausting and fatiguing Causes I ever tried: for hazarding a Popularity very general and very hardly earned: and for incurring a Clamour and popular Suspicions and prejudices, which are not yet worn out and never will be forgotten as long as History of this Period is read.

This is of course another of John Adams’s stories about doing the right thing and not being appreciated for it.

Alarming News from Across the Atlantic

On 21 June 1770, 250 years ago today, the Boston News-Letter reported startling news from London. So startling that Richard Draper added a two-page “Extraordinary” sheet to his newspaper.

On Monday the 18th, Capt. James Hall had arrived from England with copies of the London Public Advertiser describing how the imperial capital had reacted to receiving news of the Boston Massacre back on 5 March.

The first word had reached London on 22 April. The next day, the Earl of Hillsborough, Secretary of State for North America, summoned Sir Francis Bernard, still officially the royal governor of Massachusetts, for consultation.

That evening the London newspapers published the Boston Gazette’s account of the killing, a statement from the Boston town meeting, and a letter from the Whigs to former governor Thomas Pownall. All of those sources of course blamed the royal authorities.

On 23 April, a Sunday night, there was a “Cabinet Council” about the news. The next day, Lord Hillsborough met with colonial governors and agents in a “grand levée at his house.” Those meetings gave rise to several rumors about what the government might do next: appoint Sir Jeffery Amherst commander-in-chief in North America, send more troops to Boston, repeal the tea tax before resigning? The tea tax was the last of the Townshend duties, and ending it would have been a total victory for the non-importation movement. (None of those things happened.)

Parliament met on 26 April. Member Barlow Trecothick, also a London alderman with close links to the Boston business community, formally asked the ministry to share all communications about Boston. Reportedly Hillsborough and Lord North had promised him a formal vote would not be necessary, but he “did not chuse to trust their assurances.” The ensuing debate included Edmund Burke, Isaac Barré, George Grenville, and others. It ended with agreement that the government would share the information with names redacted.

As part of that discussion, the London newspapers (still dashing out most names because it wasn’t clearly legal yet to report parliamentary debates) quoted Viscount Barrington, Secretary of War, as saying that Boston magistrates didn’t support the troops, and:

That the Government is a Democracy, and all civil Officers chosen by the People,—that the Council is a democratical Part of that Democracy,—that in his Opinion a Royal Council is necessary for a more proper Division of Powers of Government.

Such a Council appointed in London would be part of the Massachusetts Government Act of 1774.

Then on 28 April more documents arrived from Boston. Some were in the same vein as before. A letter from Lt. Col. William Dalrymple reportedly said Bostonians “had absolutely DETERMINED to risk their lives in an Attack upon the Military; in order to revenge the cruel and wanton Massacre of their Countrymen”—which is not what that army colonel would have ever written.

But the bombshell printed in the 28 April Public Advertiser, and reprinted in the 21 June Boston News-Letter after it went back across the Atlantic, was the “Case of Capt. Thomas Preston of the 29th Regiment.” This 2,000-word account of the Massacre started with complaints of Bostonians being mean the soldiers, proceeded through a detailed account of the shooting on King Street that blamed the violent crowd, and concluded with warnings of the slanted local press. (The London newspapers, and thus the News-Letter, omitted Preston’s final paragraphs asking for a pardon.)

The Boston Whigs were upset because back in March Preston had sent the Boston Gazette a short letter thanking the town and praising its justice system. Even as he did so, those politicians realized, the captain must have been preparing this very different message for Customs Commissioner John Robinson to carry to London.

TOMORROW: The anger of the people.

Capt. Thomas Preston in Retirement

I’ve been considering this statement about the Boston Massacre, which Caleb Bates, born in Hingham in 1780, gave to the librarian of Harvard University in 1856:

He said he was well acquainted with Miss Troutbeck who resided in Hingham, daughter of the clergyman in Boston, & that they went to Halifax at the evacuation of Boston by the British & that he had many of her letters.

She told him many times that she knew Capt. [Thomas] Preston well when in Halifax, that as newspapers from Boston often came, containing very severe reflections on his conduct on the evening of the 5th of March 1770, he repeatedly said that the Bostonians “wronged” him, he never gave the order to “Fire,” that when the riot broke out he was in his loose gown & slippers sitting by his fire, that he immediately went, at the peril of his life, & did all he could to suppress it, that the truth was there was a great tumult among the people, the rabble calling the troops damned lobster-backs & other hard names, & from the mass went out the word “Fire”, by whom given it was not known, & such was the noise that it could not be known where it originated, some supposing it was given by one person, others by another, & that he had nothing to do with it.

The Troutbeck family did go to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1776, before moving on to Britain. And they did live in Hingham in the early 1800s. Yesterday I discussed two sisters in that family. The most likely informant was Sarah Troutbeck (1760-1840), who was in her mid-teens during the evacuation.

But was Capt. Thomas Preston in Halifax in 1776? He’s not easy to track after he left Boston, but there’s no sign he was ever in Nova Scotia.

Preston was acquitted of ordering the shooting in the fall of 1770. In the first week of December, Boston newspapers reported, he sailed for London on H.M.S. Glasgow. On 5 Mar 1771, the first anniversary of the Massacre, Secretary of War Barrington wrote to Gen. Thomas Gage, “Captain Preston has had all his expences paid and a Pension of £200 a Year bestowed upon him. He is a perfectly satisfied Man, which is a thing not to be found every Day.”

That might simply have been a promise of a pension since the Parliamentary Register dates Preston’s annual payments (“during pleasure”) from 29 Sept 1772. Edmund E. Everard’s history of the 29th Regiment echoed that figure: “In November [1772] Captain Thomas Preston was granted a pension of £200 a year upon the military establishment of Ireland, in consideration of his faithful services.” Everard also stated that Preston was Irish in origin, aged 43 in December 1773 with eighteen years of army service.

Preston continued to be listed on British Army Lists as a captain in the 29th Regiment until 1774, but by then he must have sold his rank and retired. And he probably retired to Ireland. Sometime between 1783 and 1787 Preston submitted testimony to the Loyalists Commission on behalf of the Boston merchant Gilbert Deblois; at that time he was living on Merrion Street in Dublin.

“Captain Preston” was still receiving £200 per year on the Irish establishment in January 1790, according to a list published in Walker’s Hibernian Magazine.

In 1822, speaking to descendants of Josiah Quincy, Jr., John Adams said that he had once passed Preston on the street in London. That would have been in the 1780s, when Adams was an American diplomat. However, Adams didn’t say that Preston spoke to him about their earlier acquaintance, so the former President could have been mistaken about whom he saw. Adams never mentioned such a meeting in his own writings.

In any event, there’s no evidence to corroborate that Preston was in Halifax during the short period when the Troutbeck family was there, or ever. Perhaps Troutbeck heard these statements from someone else, perhaps she met Preston somewhere else, perhaps Bates’s memory wasn’t as accurate as he thought. But the provenance of this information doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Furthermore, the internal evidence of the Troutbeck story renders it dubious. Capt. Preston was “captain of the day” on 5 March 1770, and thus on duty. He would not have been “in his loose gown & slippers sitting by his fire” that evening.

(In addition, the term “lobster-backs” doesn’t appear in authentic sources from Revolutionary America, so far as I can tell. It became popular in histories written in the mid-1800s.)

The basic political points of the Troutbeck anecdote are true: There was fighting between locals and soldiers earlier that night. Capt. Preston did arrive on King Street to find another violent confrontation. He didn’t give the soldiers any order to fire. (After the trial, Pvt. Edward Montgomery reportedly admitted he yelled out the order.) The “loose gown & slippers” is the only aspect of this anecdote that’s new, and that’s the most dubious detail.