“Too deeply impressed with the melancholy Situation”

A few days back I mentioned fireworks at New York’s celebration of King George III’s birthday in June 1774. I thought the report of that event in John Holt’s New-York Journal was interesting.

Saturday, June 4, of that year was when the king “entered the 27th Year of his Age.” The newspaper started with a discussion of the British military’s actions under Gen. Frederick Haldimand and Cdr. James Ayscough. (Gov. William Tryon was in Britain or else he would probably have led the celebration.)

The item continued:

In the Evening some very curious Fireworks were exhibited, and a small Number of Houses were illuminated; but the Generality of the Inhabitants (though perfectly well affected to his Majesty’s Person and Family, and prefering the English Constitution to every other Form of Government) were too deeply impressed with the melancholy Situation of all the British Colonies, to assume the least Appearance of public rejoicing, while it remains in Suspense whether we shall remain Freeman by maintaining our Rights, or submit to be Slaves.

Hugh Gaine’s New York Gazette and [James] Rivington’s New York Gazetteer didn’t include any of the words after “illuminated.”

In Philadelphia the diarist Christopher Marshall reported even less visible enthusiasm on what was ordinarily a patriotic holiday:

4th. This being the birth day of King George III., scarcely, if any, notice was taken of it in this city, by way of rejoicing: not one of our bells suffered to ring, and but very few colours were shown by the shipping in the harbour; no, nor not one bonfire kindled.

The problem was the Boston Port Bill and other Coercive Acts. Americans Whigs like Marshall were alarmed by how Parliament was clamping down after the Tea Party and wanted to make their fellow colonists equally alarmed that the same could happen to them.

At the same time, Whig printer Holt wanted to assure readers in America and Britain that the colonists were still loyal to the king and constitution. They just differed with the ministers in London about what that constitution demanded.

Ethan Allen, Potential Loyalist

At Borealia, the blog about early Canadian history, Benjamin Anderson, a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh, shared some of his research on the Loyalists of Vermont.

More specifically, Anderson wrote on the question of whether Ethan Allen, conqueror of Fort Ticonderoga and then a prisoner of the Crown for three long years, was ready to fall into that category:

It was the summer of 1780 when Ethan Allen, Vermont’s self-proclaimed leader, was approached by a man on a dusty road to Arlington. Beverly Robinson, a Virginian Loyalist and friend of British Commander-in-Chief Henry Clinton, looked down at Allen from atop his horse and handed him a piece of paper. It was a proposal to Allen and Vermont: renounce their commitment to the Union, return to the British Empire, and they could potentially be rewarded with a “separate government under the king and constitution of England” with their lands validated.

Allen, and later his brother Ira and their friend Joseph Fay, tried to play the British and Americans off against each other for local advantage. Ultimately the Franco-American victory at Yorktown changed the equation.

Yet that was not the end of the matter for Ethan Allen. Throughout the 1780s, he maintained contact with the British and continued to push for Vermont rejoining the British Empire. He was “as rapacious as a wolf,” according to [Gen. Frederick] Haldimand. As late as 1788, he made overtures about a potential alliance or Vermont rejoining the empire as a means of protecting Vermont from a threatening United States, as well as its invaluable trade that was dependent on Quebec and the St. Lawrence River.

Allen’s fame grew from his 1779 Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity, which appeared before his negotiations with British commanders. His infamy in early America came out of publishing Reason: The Only Oracle of Man, the argument for deism he created with Dr. Thomas Young. As a result, Allen’s dance with Loyalism, and what that says about his status as an American hero, got lost in the shuffle until recent decades. 

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.

Looking at Ben’s Revolution

This spring brought us a new book from Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Bunker Hill and Valiant Ambition, and Wendell Minor, jacket designer for John Adams and 1776. Unlike those books, Ben’s Revolution is written for young readers.

In its format, Ben’s Revolution is a rarity among recent children’s books, almost a unicorn. It’s a “picture storybook.” At sixty-four pages it’s twice the length of a typical picture book today (through a lot of picture books used to be that length). That means the publisher invested in about twice as many illustrations, and paid twice the printing and paper costs. The book’s word count is similarly supersized, far above the 500 words aspiring picture-book authors are told to limit themselves to.

Penguin was no doubt willing to go beyond the normal parameters of a modern picture book because of the names involved: Philbrick, a bestselling author; Minor, a highly respected artist; and the Revolutionary War, a staple of American school curricula. In fact, that probably wasn’t a difficult calculation at all. But picture-book authors without such a track record shouldn’t take Ben’s Revolution as a model.

In content, Philbrick built this book around the experiences of Benjamin Russell, subject of several Boston 1775 postings. Young Ben starts the book as a schoolboy in Boston, serves time as an off-the-books clerk for a provincial military company in the first months of the war, and finishes as an apprentice to printer Isaiah Thomas. Russell actually witnessed some of the fighting on 19 April and 17 June 1775, and those stories provide the backbone of the book.

Philbrick also uses two anecdotes of unnamed boys from this time, casting Ben Russell as the protagonist. He becomes one of the boys who demanded that Gen. Frederick Haldimand preserve their coasting run down School Street. He’s the boy who hears Col. Percy’s musicians playing “Yankee Doodle” and tells the earl that he’ll dance to that tune by sundown. In addition, the book gives us a look at such events as the Tea Party, the shots on Lexington common, and the British evacuation of Boston without straining to put Ben on the scene.

All those moments are handsomely painted by Minor, who in addition to designing iconic jackets has also illustrated many children’s books, specializing in Americana and nature. A few years back Minor illustrated a biography of Henry Knox which I found beautiful but riddled with errors. This time my only big quibble about the art is that Minor depicts Ben and his young friends with the haircuts of today’s boys—a fairly common approach to portraying the period, whenever an artist works. As I’ve noted, the fashion for boys in the 1770s was suspiciously close to a mullet.

The nature of Ben Russell’s actions, and of how he and others through Philbrick and Minor chose to tell his story, means there are no female characters in the story. Even Ben’s mother is mentioned only from afar. And there are very few females visible in the art. Likewise, Russell didn’t say anything about the black or Native soldiers in the provincial camp, and I spotted only two darker faces in the pictures’ backgrounds, one in the redoubt on Breed’s Hill.

I should note that Nat Philbrick and I have shared conversations and manuscripts about Revolutionary Boston for a while. Ben’s Revolution therefore reflects the argument I made in The Road to Concord that Gen. Thomas Gage triggered the war by sending troops “on a secret mission to seize the cannon that the patriots had hidden in Concord.” I now have hopes that the next generation of Americans will grow up with that story instead of the assumption that the British were hunting John Hancock and Samuel Adams.

“Undoubted intelligence of hostilities being begun at Boston”

The 28 Apr 1775 Pennsylvania Mercury newspaper contained several letters about the fighting in Massachusetts nine days before. One that had just arrived in Philadelphia the previous evening began:

Hartford, April 23, 1775.

Dear Sir,

These are to inform you, that we have undoubted intelligence of hostilities being begun at Boston by the regular troops; the truth of which we are assured divers ways, and especially by Mr. Adams the post [rider]; the particulars of which, as nigh as I can recollect, are as follow:

General [Thomas] Gage, last Tuesday night, draughted out about 1000 or 1200 of his best troops in a secret manner, which he embarked on board transports, and carried and landed at Cambridge that night, and early Wednesday morning by day break they marched up to Lexington, where a number of the inhabitants were exercising before breakfast as usual, about 30 in number, upon whom the regulars fired without the least provocation about 15 minutes, without a single shot from our men, who retreated as fast as possible, in which fire they killed 6 of our men, and wounded several, from thence they proceeded to Concord;

on the road thither, they fired at, and killed a man on horseback, went to the house where Mr. [John] Hancock lodged, who, with Samuel Adams, luckily got out of their way by secret and speedy intelligence from Paul Revere, who is now missing, and nothing heard of him since;

when they searched the house for Mr. Hancock, and Adams, and not finding them there, killed the woman of the house and all the children, and set fire to the house; from thence they proceeded on their way to Concord, firing at, and killing hogs, geese, cattle and every thing that came in their way, and burning houses. 

The letter’s description continued through the action at Concord, the march of the British reinforcement, the capture of prisoners, and many other events. Interesting events like “the death of General [Frederick] Haldimand,” Lord Percy being “burnt with other dead bodies, by the troops in a barn,” and the 300-man British contingent at Marshfield “all killed and taken prisoners.”

Alexander McDougall, one of the Patriot leaders in New York, had endorsed this document as an accurate copy of the original letter. Sharing and copying such letters was a common way to spread news in a crisis.

Of course, much of the information in this letter was completely false. Ironically, it’s one of the few public reports of Paul Revere’s part in the Battle of Lexington and Concord, but he’s lost in a great fog of unfounded accusations about the royal troops and unfounded boasts about the damage the provincials had done.

Tomorrow night I’ll speak to the Lexington Historical Society about the Massachusetts Patriots’ efforts to spread news of the events of 19 Apr 1775 and win public sympathy for their actions. I’m not sure whether this letter would count in that campaign as a success or a failure.

“They Called Us Young Rebels.”

Back in November 2006, I quoted two letters from late January 1775, describing how Boston’s schoolboys had confronted Gen. Frederick Haldimand over their freedom to ride their sleds on an icy slope outside his house. Those letters weren’t published until the late 1800s, but Bostonians also passed on the anecdote orally between the Revolution and the 1840s.

As usually happens, without solid documentation the story became distorted over time. When Benson J. Lossing included a version of the tale in his volume Seventeen Hundred and Seventy-Six (1847), he evidently understood that it had happened in 1770 and involved Gen. Thomas Gage rather than his second-in-command.

This month, I found that Lossing had picked up his version of the dialogue between the boys and Gage from Samuel Griswold Goodrich’s school textbook The First Book of History, for Children and Youth. The edition available on Google Books is dated 1849, but the book was first published in Boston before 1845, and perhaps as early as the 1830s. (Goodrich had the annoying habit of giving the same title to different books and different editions.)

Here’s Goodrich’s version, with the paragraphs numbered for reading aloud in a classroom, I suspect:

15. Meanwhile, the jealousy of the people toward the soldiers continued to increase. Even the children caught the general feeling, as a story will show you. During the winter, before the Port Bill passed, the boys were in the habit of building hills of snow on the Common, and sliding down upon them to the pond. The English troops beat down these hills, merely to provoke the children. The boys complained of the injury, and set about repairing it. However, when they returned from school, they found the snow hills beat down again.

16. Several of the boys now waited upon the British captain, and informed him of the conduct of his soldiers; but he would have nothing to say to them; and the soldiers were more impudent than ever. At last, they called a meeting of the largest boys, and sent them to General Gage, commander-in-chief.

17. He asked why so many children had called upon him. “We came, sir,” said the tallest boy, “to demand satisfaction.” “What!” said the general; “have your fathers been teaching you rebellion, and sent you to show it here?” “Nobody sent us, sir,” answered the boy, while his cheek reddened and his eye flashed; “we have never injured or insulted your troops; but they have trodden down our snow hills, and broken the ice on our skating ground. We complained, and they called us young rebels, and told us to help ourselves if we could. We told the captain of this, and he laughed at us. Yesterday our works were destroyed for a third time; and, sir, we will bear it no longer.”

18. The general looked at them with admiration, and said to an officer at his side, “The very children draw in a love of liberty with the air they breathe.—You may go, my brave boys; and be assured, if my troops trouble you again, they shall be punished.

Goodrich had heard a tale with several errors. “The winter, before the Port Bill passed,” was the winter of 1773-74, when there were no British regiments patrolling Boston. The 1775 sledding site was down Beacon Hill onto School Street, not on the Common; that didn’t become the town’s main sledding area until the 1800s. The contemporaneous letters say nothing about “hills of snow” or a “skating ground.” But at heart it’s clearly the same story that Boston Patriots had enjoyed in 1775.

This image of the meeting between the schoolboys and a general comes from an 1878 schoolbook by Goodrich, one of several graphic depictions of the story from the late 1800s.

There might be an even earlier version of this story in print. In his memoir A New England Boyhood (first published 1893), Edward Everett Hale wrote:

Mrs. Child, in her Juvenile Miscellany, gave the impression that the coasting scene, in which the Latin School boys defied General Gage, began with coasting on the Common. But she was wholly wrong there. . . . The story was told me by Mr. Robins, the last survivor of the delegation, in the year 18—.

Hale, born in 1822, had enjoyed Lydia Maria Child’s magazine Juvenile Miscellany until she came out as an Abolitionist. Had she published a version of the sledding story? Or had Hale read it in Goodrich’s schoolbook but misremembered the source as Child’s magazine? (Hale was mistaken in trusting Jonathan Darby Robins on this story; that man had left the South Latin School well before 1775, and therefore was unlikely to have been “the last survivor of the delegation” to Gen. Haldimand.)

I’m still looking for a Juvenile Miscellany version of the sledding tale. Unfortunately, since that magazine was published for children (and edited by a woman, yet), there are few complete collections in libraries and no indexes. I’ve checked biographies of Child and books that she assembled from her magazine material. No luck yet.

The Lee Captures the Nancy

As engineer Col. Archibald Robertson prepared to leave London for the theater of war in Massachusetts in July 1775, he asked Viscount Townshend, Master-General of the Ordnance, to arrange for a convoy of warships to protect the “several Ordnance transports with Artillery stores and men” from rebel attacks at sea.

However, Gen. Frederick Haldimand, who was just back from Boston, assured his army superiors, including Gen. Jeffery Amherst, that there were no American cruisers to worry about and plenty of Royal Navy ships around Massachusetts Bay. So the British military added no special protection to this transport fleet. Robertson felt a little vindication when he spotted “a Rebel privateer” as he arrived in Boston on 8 November in a fleet of twelve ships.

That ship may or may not have been the Lee, commanded by Capt. John Manley (1733-1793) of Marblehead. Before the war it had been the schooner Two Brothers, owned by Thomas Stevens; it had been renamed in honor of Gen. Charles Lee.

In any event, on 29 Nov 1775, Capt. Manley’s Lee captured one of the ordnance brigs from London, the Nancy, off Cape Ann. Col. Robertson’s fear had been realized.

In January 1776, Manley was named commodore of the small fleet of privateers Gen. George Washington had urged New Englanders to create; later he received the third U.S. naval commission as captain when the Continental Congress got around to adopting the same idea. During the war Manley and his crews captured ten British vessels and helped in seizing five more, while being captured and imprisoned three times. The engraving above comes from the Surface Navy Association’s Hall of Fame. (We hope his sword was in its scabbard.)

TOMORROW: What the Nancy was carrying.

Colonial Boston Vocabulary: "coasting"

Today’s vocabulary word is "coasting," which is what Boston boys used to call sledding. Their "coast" was the slope they chose to sled on, which for the South Latin School students in the winter of 1774-75 meant down from part of Beacon Hill onto School Street.

John Andrews, a Boston merchant, wrote to a correspondent in Philadelphia on 29 Jan 1775:

Shall close this by giving you a small anecdote, relating to some of our school lads—who as formerly in this season improv’d the Coast from Sherburn’s hill down to School street. General [Frederick] Haldiman, improving the house that belongs to Old Cook, his servant took it upon him to cut up their coast and fling ashes upon it.

The lads made a muster, and chose a committee to wait upon the General, who admitted them, and heard their complaint, which was couch’d in very genteel terms, complaining that their fathers before ’em had improv’d it as a coast for time immemorial, &ca. He order’d his servant to repair the damage, and acquainted the Governor [Gen. Thomas Gage] with the affair, who observ’d that it was impossible to beat the notion of Liberty out of the people, as it was rooted in ’em from their Childhood.

John Elliott wrote out the same story for the Rev. Jeremy Belknap the next day:

You may remember there is a declivity from the lane opposite School Street, which is the winter season the boys make use of as a coasting-place. Here not long since a number of boys were assembled for the purpose aforesaid. A servant of General Haldiman’s (whose stables were in that lane), being displeas’d by the slippery walking their amusement occasioned, maugre their pleadings & threatnings, scattered ashes over the place, & spoiled their fun.

With the true spirit of the sons of Boston, they chose a committee to wait upon the General to remonstrate against the proceedings, & complain of the maltreatment they had received of his servant. When the servant came to the door, he asked their business; they replied it was with the General. The servant was ordered to wait upon them into the parlour. The chairman informed the General that they were a committee from the boys, sent to make complaint of the invasion of their rights made by one of his servants; that he had spoiled their sport by tossing a quantity of ashes over a spot of ground which they & their fathers before them had taken possession of for a coasting-place.

The General at first did not understand what they meant by the term coasting. When informed of its meaning, he called all his servants, and, being told which was the offender, ordered him to go & throw water on the place sufficient to rectify the damage caus’d by the ashes. He treated the committee with a glass of wine, & they took their leave.

General Haldiman with great good humour told the story at General Gage’s table, which afforded the company great diversion. The Governor observed that they had only caught the spirit of the times, & that what was bred in the bone would creep out in the flesh.

This anecdote was fondly, though not accurately, remembered in Boston for decades. There are some stirring mid-1800s depictions of the schoolboys' committee in books, paintings, and engravings, mostly with the wrong location, date, or general. The publication of these two letters by the Massachusetts Historical Society in the late 1800s provide our only contemporaneous sources for the incident.

As for "coast" and "coasting," my Oxford English Dictionary lists these letters as the first recorded uses of the words with this meaning. It remained Bostonians' term of choice for decades. In a paper on a New England boy of the mid-1800s delivered at the 2002 Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, Prof. Rebecca R. Noel reported that Ned Wright consistently described himself as "sledding" in Montpelier but "coasting" on Boston Common. And the usage survives in such terms as "roller coaster."