Dr. Hope and the Patriots’ “cruel oppressive sentiments”

Last month I wrote about a small collection of letters in the U.K. National Archives from army surgeon Richard Hope to relatives back home in England.

Among those letters is one dated 20 Aug 1775, which Dr. Hope sent with a page from the Boston News-Letter that printed three intercepted messages from Continental Congress delegates. That document is interesting in showing how that disclosure affected one observer inside Boston, and how he spread the word about evidence of the American Patriots’ true designs.

Hope wrote:

I inclose you a Boston news paper containing three letters there were intercepted in going from the Continental Congress at Philadelphia to the rebels headquarters at Cambridge in this province. The two last are from Mr. John Adams a violent son of liberty, an inflammatory seditious demagogue and leader of the infatuated people, and one of the Boston Delegates to the grand Congress.

I suspect the doctor had John Adams mixed up with his second cousin Samuel. In 1775 Samuel was known as an inflammatory popular leader while John’s profile was smaller. In fact, these intercepted letters probably went a long way to establishing John Adams’s reputation as a radical.

Hope continued:

The General [Thomas Gage] has above two hundred more of these letters in his hands which I suppose will be sent to the Ministry for their inspection; the two gentlemen who were bearing them we have prisoners. You will remark how cheap they hold poor old England, as she is not once mentioned; the universal opinion they entertain and propagate, is that Britain can not support the contest for six months, and look on the King’s troops here as their prisoners at will. I doubt not but they make a grand mistake in the reckoning, for should they attempt to force our lines, they will find so warm a reception and their losses so heavy as will make them heartily sick of the undertaking.

In the fifth paragraph of the last letter one may form a judgement of their cruel oppressive sentiments and resolves should success attend their arms.

That last comment referred to Adams’s questions to James Warren about a reestablished new Massachusetts government: “Will your new Legislative and Executive feel bold, or irresolute? Will your Judicial hang and whip, and fine and imprison, without Scruples?”

Decades later Adams (shown above about 1816) complained in his manuscript autobiography that this passage had been misread:

There were a few Expressions which hurt me, when I found the Ennemy either misunderstood them or willfully misrepresented them. The Expressions were Will your Judiciary Whip and hang without Scruple. This they construed to mean to excite Cruelty against the Tories, and get some of them punished with Severity. Nothing was farther from my Thoughts. I had no reference to Tories in this. But as the Exercise of Judicial Powers without Authority from the Crown, would be probably the most offensive Act of Government to Great Britain and the least willingly pardoned, my Question meant no more than “Will your Judges have fortitude enough to inflict the severe punishments when necessary as Death upon Murderers and other capital Criminals, and flaggellation upon such as deserve it.” Nothing could be more false and injurious to me, than the imputation of any sanguinary Zeal against the Tories, for I can truly declare that through the whole Revolution and from that time to this I never committed one Act of Severity against the Tories. On the contrary I was a constant Advocate for all the Mercy and Indulgence consistent with our Safety.

Of course, that line appeared in the same letter that said, “We ought…to have arrested every Friend to Government on the Continent and held them as Hostages for the poor Victims in Boston.” So one can see why Dr. Hope and others in 1775 didn’t perceive Adams to be full of “Mercy and Indulgence.”

TOMORROW: The fallout in Philadelphia.

Hope and Pain on Bunker Hill

Yesterday I quoted the start of a 12 July 1775 letter from Richard Hope, surgeon for the British army’s 52nd Regiment in Boston. That was actually Dr. Hope’s second report on the Battle of Bunker Hill to relatives back in England. He had sent another letter (probably now lost) immediately after the battle, and he had some corrections to make.

I doubt not but my Sister Sukey has given you and the rest of my friends a particular account of the action, to whom I wrote immediately after; but I erred very largely in my list of the killed and wounded on our side, as I only made it from my own conjecture and observation and no other returns had then been given on to the Commander in Chief of the losses of the several Regiments; I mentioned our having lost in killed and wounded five hundred men, sorry am I to contradict that report, for on a minute examination I find our numbers are more than double.

General [William] Howe who commanded that day had about two thousand men and six pieces of cannon; the rebels had upwards of six thousand in their Redoubt and breastworks; all the houses of Charlestown were lined with men, and during the engagement they received three different reliefs of a thousand each time; yet did our small army charge with so much bravery, as to gain a compleat victory: and put the rebels to a total rout in spite of their superior numbers, and advantageous situation, who left their cannon behind them and part of their wounded.

As the men posted in the houses began to fire on our troops which galled them horribly as they advanced, General Howe was obliged to send orders to our ships and a battery of twenty four pounders at Boston to burn the town; this was soon effected, and the enemy found the place too hot for them, so they joined their party in the redoubt, who pelted our men with such a continued heavy fire, that it was more like the report of thunder than of muskets.

The 52nd. Regiment had three Captains killed in the field, the Major and two Subalterns are since dead of their wounds, and three Captains and two Subalterns remain very badly wounded, three of them in much danger; We had about thirty killed on the spot of our private men, and eighty wounded, a fourth part of whom will die, forty seven of the worst cases with the whole sick of the Regiment were for want of room in the general Hospital forced on me; this is quite unpresidented to oblige a regimental Surgeon to bear the charge in time of war of wounded soldiers, and this injustice will be above forty pounds out of my pocket, a noble recompence for nineteen years service; then the fatigue is so great that I have not had five hours rest any night since the action; so that thro’ weakness of body, uneasiness of mind, and being half starved, I am brought low enough.

This victory is of important consequence, otherwise the enemy would have soon burnt Boston and annoyed our fleet, but we had too many men fell to be able to pursue the fugitives, or to thin them in their retreat, and the only advantage we have gained by the conquest is a spot of ground to encamp on which we have stronly [sic] fortified, about two miles from it the rebels have an amazing redoubt on the top of a very high hill with every kind of work for defence, that it would take twenty thousand to enable the General to attack it.

In short our little army is so much reduced by the two battles, that if Britain does not arouse from her lethargy and send out three parts of her fleet and a reinforcement of at least twenty thousand men, she may bid adieu to her empire in the western world, and we that are already here engaged in her cause, must fall victims to it; and I would not give a hundred pound for an estate of a thousand a year on the life of any man in this army. It would pierce a heart of stone to hear the daily shrieks and lamentations of the poor widows and fatherless left desolate and friendless three thousand miles from home in a land of wretches worse than savages, for even savages exceed them in humanity.

Like the 22 June letter from Loyalist Samuel Paine, Dr. Hope’s account provides a very high estimate of the number of provincials involved in the battle. Instead of two British advances stopped late by musket fire followed by a third successful charge, Hope described “a continued heavy fire” from the rebel positions.

Paine wrote of expecting the king’s troops to “advance into the country, laying waste & devastation wherever they go.” In contrast, Dr. Hope felt that the provincials’ new fortifications on Winter Hill and Prospect Hill were much too formidable to attack. In fact, he warned that Britain might soon lose its “empire in the western world.”

That difference between the Paine and Hope letters might be due to the time elapsing between them as the new situation became clear to the royal authorities. However, after reading several of the army surgeon’s letters, I think that his temperament was involved. Whether in Québec or Boston or New York, Dr. Hope always found something to complain about. His letters home express a lot of pain and very little hope.

Dr. Richard Hope’s “great contusion”

A month ago I was in London, visiting the British Library and the National Archives (as well as friends).

One set of documents I looked at in the latter institution was a collection of fifteen letters from Dr. Richard Hope, surgeon attached to His Majesty’s 52nd Regiment of Foot from 1756 to 1776.

These are private letters, and there’s no official reason for them to have been deposited in the National Archives. It looks like a man who worked in the Public Record Office from 1866 to 1912 once owned the letters and simply left them there. Their catalogue designation is PRO 30/39/1.

So far as I can tell from Google, only one author has cited Hope’s letters: Geoffrey L. Hudson in a study of British military medicine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This, therefore, might be the first time anyone’s quoted the doctor’s account of the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Almost a month after the fight, on 12 July, Dr. Hope sat down to write to one of his relatives “at Eastcot near Harrow on the Hill” in Ruislip. He began:

When you read in the Papers an account of the late battle on Charlestown hights it will give you satisfaction to get intelligence that I am in the land of the living. I could not escape quite scot free, but being obliged to advance in the very front of the works I had a hair breadth escape of being shot thro’ the thigh. Luckily for me the ball struck on a large bunch of keys that I had that day contrary to custom put into my breeches pocket, which changed the line of direction: one of the keys was almost buried in my thigh and occasioned a great contusion that makes me very lame; yet I quitted not the field nor missed any part of my duty.

TOMORROW: Dr. Richard Hope describes the battle.