Why Must Margaret Gage Be the “One Person Only”?

As I wrote a couple of days back, since 1881 authors have discussed whether Margaret Gage might have divulged her husband’s plan for the April 1775 march to Concord to the Patriots, allowing them to send alerts into the countryside.

And the strongest piece of evidence for that hypothesis has remained an anecdote published in 1794, about Gen. Thomas Gage saying he’d revealed his plan to “one person only” before Col. Percy.

Why did it take a century for authors to interpret that story as pointing to Mrs. Gage? Why did it take another century before a major author argued that the story was more than jealous army officers sniping unfairly at the general’s wife?

One factor in the rise of this hypothesis might be Henry W. Longfellow’s publication of “Paul Revere’s Ride” in 1860. That poem was an enormous success, turning Paul Revere into a household name and making a fictionalized version of his activity on 18-19 Apr 1775 into a national myth. Details of that ride, including who alerted the Patriots to Gage’s plan, came to appear more significant.

Another factor was a shift from celebrating collective action to spotlighting individuals. Earlier histories of the Revolution took groups as their heroes: the Tea Party (at first a set of men, not an event), the Minutemen on Lexington common and at the North Bridge, and so on. Thinking of dozens of anonymous Bostonians observing clues about the British troops and combining that information fit the picture of collective action. But when our stories focus on crucial individuals, people want to know the identity of those individuals.

Most important, I now think, was the effect of feminism. The model of the companionate marriage promoted the assumption that a husband and wife would discuss important matters, even if those fell within the traditional male or female sphere of action. As the push for women’s rights and suffrage gained steam over the 1800s, it became clear that women were interested in politics. Even people who opposed granting women the vote described them as able to express themselves through discussion with their husbands, whose vote represented the whole family.

That environment meant there seemed to be a clear answer to the question of who the “one person only” Gen. Gage had discussed his secret plan with. Who else would that be but his wife Margaret? Who else could Percy and Charles Stedman, the former army officer who recorded that story, have been implying it was? The general’s closest confidante in all things, even military and political, must have been Margaret Gage.

In fact, we know people can have close, loving marriages and yet avoid sharing professional secrets. Today hundreds of thousands of people are preserving the confidentiality of their clients and patients when they tell their spouses about their workday. Lots of people toil deep in national security and other sensitive fields and don’t discuss details of their work at home, their loved ones understanding that that’s part of the job. Why must the Gages have been different?

Indeed, given what we know about expectations of male and female roles in the eighteenth-century British society, it was probably quicker for Thomas Gage to assume he wouldn’t discuss military strategy with his wife, and easier for Margaret Gage to accept that, than it was for authors of the late nineteenth century and later to picture such a relationship.

Furthermore, assuming that Margaret Gage was the only person Thomas discussed his expedition with requires believing he developed that plan and made all the arrangements for it without any staff help. The march to Concord involved 800 soldiers from eleven different regiments, supplemented by over a dozen scouts on horseback, equipped and supplied for a full day’s march, moved out of Boston in coordination with the navy. Did Gen. Gage write all those orders by himself?

We know that Gage didn’t tell his second-in-command, Gen. Frederick Haldimand, about the upcoming march; Haldimand learned about it the next day while being shaved. We know Gage didn’t tell his third-in-command, Col. Percy, until the evening of 18 April. But what about his adjutant, or chief administrative officer, Maj. Stephen Kemble (shown above)? That man’s job was to help the general carry out his military plans. What about Gage’s personal secretary, Samuel Kemble?

If that surname looks familiar, that’s because the Kembles were Margaret Gage’s brothers. The fact that the general gave his brothers-in-law high positions was one thing junior army officers complained about. But for Gen. Gage, keeping those arrangements within the family probably felt more secure. Stephen Kemble had worked closely with Gage since 1772, even traveling with him to Britain the following year. It looks like Samuel Kemble was a more recent addition to the staff, having been a merchant in New York.

In Spies, Patriots, and Traitors, Kenneth Daigler argues that the Kemble brothers’ positions actually support the idea that Margaret Gage was the most likely leaker. Even if the general’s “one person only” was one of those aides, Daigler writes, that Kemble could have told his sister, who could have told the Patriots. I think that skips over the more obvious suspects.

Let’s line up the usual points that people use to accuse Margaret Gage and consider all the Kemble siblings in Boston at the time.

• Born and raised in America—Margaret, Stephen, Samuel
• Expressed regret at the strife in North America—Margaret
• Said to exercise too much influence over Gen. Gage—Margaret, Stephen, Samuel
• Involved in making military plans—Stephen, maybe Samuel
• Estranged from Gage after the war began—no one (Margaret had two children and a long married life with the retired general; Stephen remained on duty in America but maintained a very friendly correspondence with his former boss)
• Settled in the U.S. of A. after the war—Stephen

That’s four items pointing to Stephen versus three to Margaret.

To be clear, I think it’s likely that Gen. Gage worked with Lt. Col. Stephen Kemble to prepare the march to Concord, but I don’t think Kemble informed the Patriots about that planning. I doubt the Boston Patriots needed a high-level source in the general’s household. They had been on edge about army raids for weapons since September 1774, and that April they were also already worried about arrests. It was impossible for the army to hide all its preparations for an expedition inside the crowded town. And out in the countryside Gage’s advance scouts, army officers dispatched to prevent alarm riders from getting through, ended up actually alerting locals along the march route that something was up.

Nonetheless, I am going to identify someone described as a crucial intelligence source in 1775.

COMING UP: The earliest source.

“Betrayed on this occasion and upon many other later ones”

So far as I can tell, no new evidence about Margaret Gage and her husband Gen. Thomas Gage’s secret plans came to light in the twentieth century, from either British or American sources.

In the 1940s John R. Alden examined the papers of Gen. Henry Clinton (shown here) for General Gage in America. Though he concluded that the theory of Margaret Gage’s betrayal was dead wrong, Alden acknowledged, “Henry Clinton positively asserts that Gage was betrayed on this occasion and upon many other later ones.”

Had Clinton named his commander’s wife or offered specific details about this first betrayer, Alden would surely have included that fact. But a broad complaint of betrayal is a far cry from evidence against any specific person.

In Paul Revere’s Ride, David Hackett Fischer listed Clinton among witnesses in favor of Margaret Gage being a crucial leaker. Fischer wrote:

Many British officers, including Lord Percy and General Henry Clinton, believed that General Gage was “betrayed on this occasion” by someone very dear to him. Some strongly suspected his wife.

The citation for those sentences is “Henry Clinton, note, n.d., Clinton Papers, WCL [Clements Library]; quoted in Alden, Gage, 244.”

That suggests the phase “betrayed on this occasion” came directly from an undated note in Clinton’s papers. In fact, despite the phrase “quoted in Alden,” those were actually Alden’s own words. Neither Percy, nor Clinton, nor any other army officer is on record as voicing suspicion that Margaret Gage or “someone very dear” to the commander leaked his plans.

There have been a couple of books about Clinton since Alden wrote, and the Clements Library is digitizing his papers. So it’s possible someone has found or will find more definite evidence in that source. Since Clinton didn’t arrive in Boston until May 1775, however, it wouldn’t be first-hand information.

Other material could come to light, of course. But for now, the strongest evidence pointing to Margaret Gage as the Patriots’ source is still that anecdote published by Charles Stedman back in 1794, Gen. Gage telling Percy he’d discussed the Concord expedition with “one person only.”

But why would that person be Margaret Gage?

TOMORROW: How assumptions changed.

“One of the flings of the time upon Mrs. Gage”

I went looking for the first author to argue that Margaret Gage betrayed her husband, Gen. Thomas Gage, by revealing his plan for the march to Concord in April 1775.

Instead, I found a series of authors, mostly American, denying the likelihood of that event and blaming the very idea on carping British army officers.

The earliest example I’ve seen so far is the Rev. Edward Everett Hale in The Memorial History of Boston (1881):

The General said that his confidence had been betrayed, for that he had communicated his design to only one person beside Lord Percy. This is one of the flings of the time upon Mrs. Gage, who was American born. The English officers who disliked Gage were fond of saying that she betrayed his secrets. But in this case, after eight hundred men were embarked for Cambridge, ten Boston men on the Common might well have known it; and the cannon at Concord were a very natural aim.

The Rev. Henry Belcher came closest to accepting the idea in The First American Civil War (1911):

Entertainments at Province House, where Madam Gage presided with the social adroitness and tact of a lady of high New Jersey family, were crowded with uniformed men from both fleet and camp. Yet suspicion attended this lady as being not too loyal to her husband’s party and to the King. It was hinted that the Governor was uxorious, and had no secrets from his wife, who passed word to the spies swarming outside.

After quoting local merchant John Andrews on officers complaining Gage was “partial to the inhabitants,” Belcher wrote, “The Governor’s partiality is alleged to have been largely due to his wife.” Belcher didn’t make any effort to refute those allegations, but he didn’t explicitly adopt them, either.

In the same year, Allen French’s The Siege of Boston echoed Hale while adding another motive for the officers to spread the rumor—to deny “Yankee shrewdness”:

The student of the time sees in this story a side-thrust at Mrs. Gage, on whom, as an American, the officers were ready to blame the knowledge of secrets which were gained by Yankee shrewdness alone. In this case we have seen that it was Gage that betrayed himself to the eyes of [Paul] Revere’s volunteer watch.

Fourteen years later, French wrote in his sesquicentennial The Day of Lexington and Concord:

It has been frequently said that the “one person only” was the general’s wife who told his plans to the Americans. A basis for this conjecture has been seen in the statement in Reverend William Gordon’s “History”, that “a daughter of liberty, unequally yoked in point of politics”, had previously sent warning to Adams in Lexington. But this was not necessarily Mrs. Gage, nor was Stedman’s “one person only” necessarily a woman. No other hint has come down that Mrs. Gage was untrue to her husband’s fortunes. It is wiser to leave such a speculation to those who like romance, and find the true explanation of the discovery of Gage’s plans in more natural causes.

Nonetheless, when Esther Forbes wrote Paul Revere and the World He Lived In in 1942, she uncritically repeated a basic premise of the theory, that Thomas Gage had shared his top-secret military plan with Margaret: “Only two people were told the destination of the regulars—Lord Percy and Gage’s own wife.”

In a note, Forbes explained: “The story is that Gage believed it was his American wife who had betrayed him, she being, as an early historian has it, ‘unequally yoked in point of politics’ to her famous husband. This version seems to be gossip started by Gage’s own officers, who did not like him and wanted to throw suspicion upon him and his wife.” She did not, however, cite specific examples.

The story was thus still in the air in 1948 when John R. Alden published General Gage in America. He wrote:

One question which has been posed again and again and which some writers have attempted to answer must be treated here, for it involves the loyalty of Margaret Gage to Britain and to her own husband. It has often been stated that Margaret Gage may have furnished information of the general’s plans for April 19 to the American leaders.

Alden provided the strongest counterargument yet, while also acknowledging that Gen. Henry Clinton, whose papers were yet unpublished, had written that Gage was betrayed in some way.

Unless another argument comes to light, the first historian to really point the finger at Mrs. Gage, not just to say that British army officers did so, was David H. Fischer in Paul Revere‘s Ride (1994). Even before that book, however, the idea of Margaret Gage as the Patriots’ source had endured for decades despite no one prominently speaking up for it.

TOMORROW: The curious appeal of a spurious idea.

“The attempt had for several weeks been expected”

In the first half of the nineteenth century, American historians continued to write about the start of the Revolutionary War, of course.

But those authors didn’t dig into the question of whether someone close to Gen. Thomas Gage had leaked his plan for a march to Concord, as hinted by the passage from Charles Stedman’s book that I quoted yesterday.

Around the fiftieth anniversary of the event, there was a back-and-forth between Elias Phinney of Lexington and Ezra Ripley of Concord over where militiamen returned the first significant fire at the redcoats. That dispute produced eyewitness testimony from aged veterans, revealing that both towns were on alert well before the Patriot alarm riders from Boston arrived because of previous reports about British activity and the sight of army officers on horseback.

Likewise, James T. Austin’s Life of Elbridge Gerry (1828) offered evidence that members of the committee of safety were watching for Gage to act. It included documents confirming how the British army officers that Gage sent out to stop alarm riders actually provoked an alarm.

In his History of the Siege of Boston (1849), the Charlestown historian Richard Frothingham published Richard Devens’s description of the committee’s activity and of the lights in Old North Church as seen from the opposite shore. That account lined up well with Revere’s.

Frothingham quoted Stedman’s story but not the detail of Gen. Gage telling only one other person besides Col. Percy about his plan. Instead, he emphasized how Massachusetts Patriots had gathered multiple signs that the army was about to act even as the general considered his planning secret.

As a result, the most authoritative American historian of the time, George Bancroft (shown above), presented events this way in his 1860 History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent:

On the afternoon of the day on which the provincial congress of Massachusetts adjourned, Gage took the light infantry and grenadiers off duty, and secretly prepared an expedition to destroy the colony’s stores at Concord. But the attempt had for several weeks been expected; a strict watch had been kept; and signals were concerted to announce the first movement of troops for the country. Samuel Adams and [John] Hancock, who had not yet left Lexington for Philadelphia, received a timely message from [Dr. Joseph] Warren, and in consequence, the committee of safety removed a part of the public stores and secreted the cannon.

On Tuesday the eighteenth, ten or more sergeants in disguise dispersed themselves through Cambridge and further west, to intercept all communication. In the following night, the grenadiers and light infantry, not less than eight hundred in number, the flower of the army at Boston, commanded by the incompetent Lieutenant Colonel [Francis] Smith, crossed in the boats of the transport ships from the foot of the common to East Cambridge. There they received a day’s provisions, and near midnight, after wading through wet marshes, that are now covered by a stately town, they took the road through West Cambridge to Concord.

“They will miss their aim,” said one of a party who observed their departure. “What aim?” asked Lord Percy, who overheard the remark. “Why, the cannon at Concord,” was the answer. Percy hastened to Gage, who instantly directed that no one should be suffered to leave the town. But Warren had already, at ten o’clock, despatched William Dawes through Roxbury to Lexington, and at the same time desired Paul Revere to set off by way of Charlestown.

Revere stopped only to engage a friend to raise the concerted signals, and five minutes before the sentinels received the order to prevent it, two friends rowed him past the Somerset man of war across Charles river. All was still, as suited the hour. The ship was winding with the young flood; the waning moon just peered above a clear horizon; while from a couple of lanterns in the tower of the North Church, the beacon streamed to the neighboring towns, as fast as light could travel.

Quite dramatically rendered, and Bancroft skipped right over the question of whether anyone leaked Gage’s orders.

TOMORROW: New sources and new suspicions.

“The general said that his confidence had been betrayed”

Earlier this month I noted the American Revolution Institute’s article about a likely caricature of Gen. Thomas and Margaret Gage published in London in 1776.

Comments on that post raised the question of when historians started to consider the possibility that Margaret Gage had betrayed her husband by leaking his plans for the 18 Apr 1775 expedition to Concord to the Patriots.

Not that anyone involved in that discussion believed that theory. Rather, we were just wondering when it arose and what evidence, if any, supported it.

By the end of the eighteenth century there were three readily available printed sources speaking to this question. The first was the Rev. William Gordon’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America, published in London in 1788. Gordon knew the Boston Whigs well and was particularly close to Samuel Adams. He wrote of April 1775:

The grenadier and light infantry companies were taken off duty, upon the plea of learning a new exercise, which made the Bostonians jealous that there was some scheme on foot. A daughter of liberty, unequally yoked in point of politics, sent word, by a trusty hand, to Mr. Samuel Adams, residing in company with Mr. [John] Hancock, at Lexington, about thirteen miles from Charlestown, that the troops were coming out in a few days. Upon this their friends at Boston were advised to move out their plate, &c. and the committee of safety voted [18 April], “that all the ammunition be deposited in nine different towns. . .”

Mr. Adams inferred from the number to be employed, that these [military stores] were the objects, and not himself and Mr. Hancock, who might more easily be seized in a private way, by a few armed individuals, than by a large body of troops, that must march for miles together under the eyes of the public. . . .

When the corps was nearly ready to proceed upon the expedition, Dr. [Joseph] Warren, by a mere accident, had notice of it just in time to send messengers over the Neck and across the ferry, on to Lexington, before the orders for preventing every person’s quitting the town were executed.

I quoted from the 1801 edition, which differs a little in punctuation but not wording from the original.

Gordon described two pieces of information reaching two different Patriots. First, Adams outside Boston heard from a sympathetic woman with a Loyalist husband that a march would happen “in a few days.” There’s no clear hint that woman had inside information; instead, Gordon pointed to the orders for the flank companies, which lots of people heard about.

The Patriot leadership had already acted on that advice when Warren “by a mere accident” heard the march was imminent just in time to send messengers—we now know these were William Dawes and Paul Revere—out to Lexington.

From the British side, former officer Charles Stedman’s 1794 History of the Origin, Progress, and Termination of the American War confirmed that Gen. Gage was focused on Concord and tried to keep the mission secret:

In war there is nothing that so much avails as secresy of design and celerity of execution: Nor, on the contrary, so hurtful as unnecessary openness and procrastination. General Gage on the evening of the eighteenth of April told lord Percy, that he intended to send a detachment to seize the stores at Concord, and to give the command to colonel [Francis] Smith, ”who knew that he was to go, but not where.” He meant it to be a secret expedition, and begged of lord Percy to keep it a profound secret.

As this nobleman was passing from the general’s quarters home to his own, perceiving eight or ten men conversing together on the common, he made up to them; when one of the men said—“The British troops have marched, but they will miss their aim.”

“What aim?“ said lord Percy.

“Why,” the man replied, ”the cannon at Concord.”

Lord Percy immediately returned on his steps, and acquainted general Gage, not without marks of surprize and disapprobation, of what he had just heard. The general said that his confidence had been betrayed, for that he had communicated his design to one person only besides his lordship.

I broke Stedman’s single long paragraph into shorter paragraphs for easier reading.

Clearly Col. Percy was Stedman’s source for this story. And clearly Percy believed Gage’s plans had leaked, presumably through that “one person” (or maybe Gage hadn’t been as circumspect as he claimed).

Gage and Percy might not have guessed correctly about a leak. The man speaking on the Common might have been speculating about what the British goal was, based on the number of soldiers who were departing. After all, Adams had reportedly made the same guess.

One more early printed source was Paul Revere’s letter to the Rev. Dr. Jeremy Belknap about the opening of the war, published in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Collections series in 1798:

The Saturday night preceding the 19th of April, about 12 o’clock at night, the boats belonging to the transports were all launched, and carried under the sterns of the men of war. (They had been previously hauled up and repaired.) We likewise found that the grenadiers and light Infantry were all taken off duty.

From these movements, we expected something serious was to be transacted. On Tuesday evening, the 18th, it was observed, that a number of soldiers were marching towards the bottom of the Common. About 10 o’clock, Dr. Warren sent in great haste for me, and begged that I would imediately set off for Lexington, where Messrs. Hancock and Adams were, and acquaint them of the movement, and that it was thought they were the objects. When I got to Dr. Warren’s house, I found he had sent an express by land to Lexington—a Mr. William Dawes.

Belknap cleaned up some of Revere’s spellings before publishing. See the original here. Revere’s letter was reprinted in the Worcester Magazine and Historical Journal in 1826 and in the New England Magazine in 1832.

Thus, before the turn of the nineteenth century historians had sources close to the action revealing that:

• The commander and second-in-command of the British troops thought the secret plan for the march had leaked, despite only three people knowing about it.
• Bostonians had actually been talking about the likely plan for days, based on publicly visible signs; Samuel Adams had deduced the general’s goal; and the committee of safety was acting on that warning.
• Warren sent Dawes and Revere to Lexington based on the mistaken idea that “the objects” of the march were Adams and Hancock; in other words, whatever last-minute information the doctor received “by a mere accident,” that source did not tell him that Gage was focused on Concord.

TOMORROW: The view from the mid-1800s.

Marching Over Twenty Miles through the Snow

On Friday, 2 Feb 1780, the British army holding New York City set out to attack a Continental outpost that had become troublesome.

Charles Stedman described the situation this way in 1794:

The enemy having established a post at [Joseph] Young’s House, in the neighbourhood of the White Plains, which greatly annoyed the provincial loyalists, as well as the British army, by the interception of cattle and provisions intended to be brought to New York, it became an object of importance with the governor [Lord Tryon] and commander of his majesty’s troops [Gen. Henry Clinton], if possible, to dislodge that party, consisting of about three hundred men.

Maj. Gen. Edward Mathew, who was in command at the forward position of King’s Bridge, assigned this mission to Lt. Col. Chapple Norton of the 2nd Foot Guards. Norton was given command of the grenadier and light infantry companies of the Guards’ 1st and 2nd regiments, two Hessian companies, two three-pounder cannon with their crews, a contingent of Jäger scouts, and forty horsemen from Col. James De Lancey’s Loyalist regiment, many of them familiar with the area. In all, the force consisted of well over 500 men.

Young’s house was a little more than twenty miles away across the snowy landscape. Gen. Mathew therefore arranged for sleighs to be brought to his base. Stedman wrote about Norton’s response:

The colonel, though highly gratified by this command, and unwilling to say any thing that might seem to retard the service, or throw difficulties in the way of the intended expedition, yet thought it his duty to point out the improbability of the sleighs answering the purpose

In response, Mathew gave Norton the freedom—and responsibility—to decide how to proceed based on conditions in the field.

According to Mathew’s nineteen-year-old nephew and aide-de-camp, Lt. George Mathew, the raiding party “left Kingsbridge at ten o’clock one night.” They set a course “across the country to avoid giving the alarm, which we should have done by going by the road.”

“The night was dark,” Ens. George Eld wrote in his diary. But as for the sleighs, “these conveyances were immediately quitted, for the cold was too intense to remain inactive, nor was it possible for the horses to get through the snow.”

The snow, up to two feet deep, also blocked the cannon carriages. According to Stedman, Norton “was therefore obliged to leave the guns and with them a guard sufficient to ensure their return.” The colonel estimated his troops ”were yet short of three Miles from Kingsbridge” in a report Todd W. Braisted quoted at the Journal of the American Revolution.

Lt. Mathew described another set of obstacles:

This being a very stony country, and the stones at this time being covered with snow, threw our men down often. Another thing, which tires very much on a long march, is getting over rails, which is the only fence used in this country. The pioneers took them down until they were tired, and were left behind.

The slow progress threw off Norton’s plan. As Lt. Mathew wrote, ”The intention was to have surprised them by night.” But, Stedman stated, “At sun rise they learned from the guides that they were yet seven miles short of the enemy’s post.”

Lt. Col. Norton reviewed the situation. Stedman wrote:

Their situation was, now, not a little embarrassing. As the guns, intended to open the doors of the stone house, were left behind, to surprise the enemy was impossible. To proceed, and not to carry the point, would be to expose the detachment, in their return, already fatigued with a long and toilsome march, to be harassed for the space of twenty miles, by an enemy in force, fresh, and with a perfect knowledge of the country.

In these circumstances, the colonel, unwilling to return without accomplishing some object that might answer the expectation of those who had placed their confidence in him, determined, at all events, to march to the enemy's post, and then act according to circumstances

In sum, the colonel saw all the difficulties and dangers ahead and decided to go forward anyway because it would have been too embarrassing to turn around.

About two miles from Young’s house, Norton ordered his cavalry to advance and surround the site, but the snow was too deep to allow that. The Crown forces arrived within sight of Young’s house “two hours after daybreak,” Mathew recalled. Since there was “a fine, open country about the house,” the Continentals spotted the British coming.

Some of the British, at least. Officers guessed that only about two hundred of the Crown soldiers were on the scene by this point. Almost half the guards and the Hessian companies had fallen behind.

And in front of them, the British saw a stone house, “strongly & advantageously situated,” and more than two hundred Continental soldiers, “judiciously disposed to annoy or prevent the attack.”

TOMORROW: Shots fired.

Unpacking Bunker Hill

Don Hagist has an interesting article about Bunker Hill at All Things Liberty: The Journal of the American Revolution. While framed [!] as a discussion of Howard Pyle’s famous (and still missing) painting of a doomed British advance, the essay is really a fine dissection of some myths and misconceptions about the battle.

For instance:

Although British soldiers did use knapsacks (that didn’t look anything like Pyle’s), they didn’t wear them on that day. Why would they? The knapsack carried nice things like spare shoes, shirts and socks, great for a long campaign but silly to lug along when attacking a fort only a mile away from your barracks.

In preparation for the assault, General [William] Howe explicitly ordered the troops to march with only “with their Arms, Ammunition, Blankets, and provisions;” the latter two items because he correctly anticipated that they’d spend the night camped under the stars after the attack. Knapsacks remained behind in barracks like they usually did, to be brought up later in wagons when an encampment was firmly established.

Pyle can’t be blamed too heavily, though; authors have for years written that British troops hauled their knapsacks up Bunker Hill, one even doing so after presenting the order to carry only blankets.

A footnote elaborates:

The error appears as early as 1794 when Charles Stedman wrote that the troops were “encumbered with three days provisions, their knapsacks on their backs” and estimated their total burden at 125 pounds. Although Stedman served in America (but not at Bunker Hill) and is in many ways reliable, his estimate of the soldier’s burden is nearly twice other estimates for a fully loaded soldier – and the men at Bunker Hill were not fully loaded.

I still love that painting, but Don’s essay forces me to look at its details in a new way.