“A daughter of liberty, unequally yoked in point of politics”?

In his 1788 history of the American Revolution, the Rev. William Gordon shared this anecdote about what led up to the British army march on Concord:

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.

Gordon was close to Adams, as other stories in his book indicate. Adams clearly knew the identity of this “daughter of liberty,” and Gordon might have known as well, but the book kept her name secret. Presumably she was still expected to appear loyal to a husband whose politics she didn’t share.

Some authors have taken this early statement as evidence that Margaret Gage might have leaked her husband’s plan for the march on Concord to Dr. Joseph Warren just before he dispatched William Dawes to Lexington. I don’t think that holds up to scrutiny, from several angles.

First, this “daughter of liberty” provided information to Adams, not Warren, and “a few days” before the march, not the evening it began. There’s no reason to believe those two informants were the same person—nor any indication that Warren’s source was a woman. (Once again, I think the doctor got the dope from William Jasper.)

Second, this “daughter of liberty” was worried that Hancock and Adams would be arrested, as was Warren, but someone truly privy to Gen. Thomas Gage’s plan would have known he was focused on the military supplies in Concord.

Third, while Margaret Gage expressed sadness at the prospect of war between Britain and the American colonies, she never showed any affinity for the Patriot cause. In fact, there doesn’t appear to be any evidence she ever even met Patriot leaders.

I think there are many stronger candidates to be this “daughter of liberty, unequally yoked in point of politics.” (Gordon took that phrase “unequally yoked” from Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians.)

In my talk to the Colonial Society of Massachusetts last week, now viewable online, I shared my current idea of the most likely candidate.

TOMORROW: Gosh, this is suspenseful, isn’t it?

Yesterday’s Posts

I’m home from Battle Road 250, at which I watched the Parker’s Revenge tactical demonstration, said hello to several excellent local reenactors, heard a fine talk by Matthew Keagle of Fort Ticonderoga, and chatted with the Emerging Revolutionary War crew.

I capped that off with dinner with Lee Wright of The Pursuit of History, discussing different possible future projects, including upcoming weekend events.

During the day I was gratified to see two big newspapers air two of my pet theories about the start of the Revolutionary War.

The Washington Post published David Kindy’s article “Who really fired the shot that started the American Revolution?” in its Retropolis section. That delves into the mysterious first shot at Lexington.

(I suspect Kindy’s editor was responsible for the subhead referring to that as “the shot heard round the world,” which was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s term for the first return fire at Concord.)

Following up on a tip from me, Kindy focused on young Lexington militia man Solomon Brown.

“It’s not that I think he is definitely the man who fired first,” states historian and author J.L. Bell, who writes the daily blog Boston 1775 about the American Revolution. “But if I could go back in time, he’s the first person on my list that I would want to interrogate.”

The previous day, the same Washington Post section ran “Was a woman the informant who helped launch the American Revolution?” by Petula Dvorak. That article went over the theory advanced in the newspaper’s editorial a century ago (and circulating at least sixty years before that): that Margaret Gage leaked her husband’s plans for the Concord march to Patriot leaders.

That article prompted Dana Kennedy to write “Inside one of the biggest conspiracy theories of the American Revolution: That a woman may have kick-started the whole thing” for the New York Post.

Kennedy gave me a chance to spout off on weak points in the theory:

“I don’t think anybody actually leaked it,” Bell, who also runs the blog Boston 1775, told The Post. He believes that Joseph Warren and others had been gleaning information about British troop movements from a variety of sources and events.

“For one thing, Gage’s plan was to send troops to Concord, but Warren told them to just go to Lexington. Revere and Dawes went on to Concord on their own accord.”

If anything, Bell thinks the spy might have well been a pragmatic British-born knifemaker named William Jasper. He was renting a room to a British sergeant who may have unwittingly trusted him with the army’s plans.

“Unfortunately, that story is a lot less sexy and about a person we’ve never heard of,” Bell said.

Kennedy also quotes Alexander Cain of Historical Nerdery and Emily Murphy of the Salem Maritime National Historical Site. Sensible people who, of course, are on the same side of the debate as me.

[The photo above shows a British army reenacting unit in the Lexington town parade and comes from the Pursuit of History Twitter feed.]

Afternoon Talks in Lexington and Boston

Next week I have two afternoon speaking engagements that will also be available online to people in the know.

Monday, 14 April, 1:15 P.M.
Secrets on the Road to Concord
Lexington Veterans Association

In April 1775, British general Thomas Gage drew up plans for his troops to march nineteen miles into unfriendly territory. The Massachusetts Patriots, meanwhile, prepared to thwart the general’s mission. There was one goal Gage and his enemies shared: for different reasons, they all wanted to keep secret just what those troops would look for in Concord.

This will be the latest variation of my talk on Gen. Gage’s fateful mission. I continue to investigate that event, particularly the identity of the spy in Concord who sent him very good intelligence in very bad French. Alas, I don’t have any new discoveries to debut here.

The Zoom link for this talk is on this page. Other speakers in this series appear here.

Thursday, 17 April, 3 P.M.
The Mystery of Joseph Warren’s Informants
Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 87 Mount Vernon Street, Boston

According to one early source, as the last step before sending William Dawes and Paul Revere off to Lexington, Dr. Joseph Warren consulted with one crucial informant. Was that Margaret Gage? William Jasper? Another individual? Or is that story simply unreliable?

I’ll retrace my thinking on those questions and discuss the historiography around that issue. When did historians begin to investigate that person? How did the campaign for women’s suffrage color the discussion? And what does it mean that Dr. Warren’s intelligence was wrong?

This talk can be watched online by following the instructions at the bottom of this page.

New Book on Revere’s Ride Arriving

For the Sestercentennial, Macmillan is publishing The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America, by Kostya Kennedy.

The publisher’s description says:

In The Ride, Kostya Kennedy presents a dramatic new narrative of the events of April 18 and 19, 1775, informed by fresh primary and secondary source research into archives, family letters and diaries, contemporary accounts, and more. Kennedy reveals Revere’s ride to be more complex than it is usually portrayed—a loosely coordinated series of rides by numerous men, near-disaster, capture by British forces, and finally success. While Revere was central to the ride and its plotting, Kennedy reveals the other men (and, perhaps, a woman with information about the movement of British forces) who helped to set in motion the events that would lead to America’s independence.

Kennedy’s background is in sports writing, with books on Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio, and Pete Rose.

Looking at how the industry advance notices of the book, I don’t see anything new mentioned. What those reviewers tout as news—that Revere made many rides besides the famous one, that there were many riders on that date besides Revere, and that Margaret Gage may have leaked news of the British march—were all in David Hackett Fischer’s book Paul Revere’s Ride, published in 1994. But the reviews praise Kennedy’s fast-paced and witty writing style.

Kennedy is doing a book tour in New England in the coming fortnight.

Monday, 24 March, 6 P.M.
Harvard Coop
Cambridge

Tuesday, 25 March, 7 P.M.
Papercuts Bookshop
Jamaica Plain
Reserve space here

Thursday, 27 March, 7 P.M.
RJ Julia
Madison, Connecticut
Reserve space here

Monday, 7 April, 6 P.M.
Griswold Memorial Library
Colrain

Battling Myths and Misinformation about 1775

As we reach the cusp of the Sestercentennial year of 2025, I’m highlighting some articles I’ve written for the Journal of the American Revolution discussing myths and mistaken beliefs about the events of 1775.

Some of these articles were published in the past year, some more than a decade ago.

Here are the tl;dr versions with links to the full-length originals.

American Patriots didn’t call the laws that Parliament passed in 1774 to reform Boston (and Massachusetts as a whole) the “Intolerable Acts.” That term arose decades later in U.S. history textbooks. George III’s blanket term for those laws was “Coercive Acts.” Full article.

Tarring and feathering was a painful and humiliating public punishment, but it wasn’t fatal. Full article.

Dr. Joseph Warren didn’t obtain inside information about the British army march to Concord in April 1775 from Margaret Gage, Gen. Thomas Gage’s wife. Instead, he consulted with a man we’ve never heard of: a knife-maker named William Jasper. Full article.

Israel Bissell didn’t carry news of the fighting at Lexington south, and no single courier rode went all the way to Philadelphia. The first rider was named Isaac Bissell, and he carried the news to Hartford, Connecticut. Full article.

There’s solid evidence that Col. Israel Putnam (not Col. William Prescott) issued the order “Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes” at the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775. That phrase didn’t come from the Prussian army but from the Royal Navy. Full article.

Maj. John Pitcairn wasn’t fatally shot as he topped the wall of the provincial redoubt at Bunker Hill. Of the many men credited with that fatal shot, the best evidence points to Salem Poor, but he probably shot a different British officer. Full article.

Gen. George Washington didn’t respond to news of a gunpowder shortage in August 1775 by creating a false rumor of an adequate supply and feeding it to the British inside Boston. That was a novelistic touch created by a biographer misreading his sources. Full article.

Finally, my article for Age of Revolutions on how the “Join Or Die” snake evolved into the “Don’t Tread on Me” snake remains one of that site’s most read. While this essay doesn’t refute a clearly mistaken belief, I argue that those were two different species of American snakes: the glass snake and the rattlesnake.

If more people avoid repeating those myths and errors in the coming year, then my work will have benefited the world. And we can all move on to repeating new myths and errors.

Looking Back on a Fun Month

I didn’t start this year planning to delve into the mystery of who told Dr. Joseph Warren about the British march to Concord.

After all, there’s so much of the Saga of the Brazen Head still to tell.

But I was intrigued by this essay at the American Revolution Institute about one of its recent acquisitions, an engraving titled “The Hero returned from Boston.”

That essay discussed the possibility that Warren’s informant was Margaret Gage, wife of the British commander. It also dismissed that idea as unlikely and unsupported. I wrote much the same years back, and didn’t think I had anything new to find out or share.

In its original form, however, that essay quoted a statement about the Gages I hadn’t seen before. That produced a jolting mix of emotions:

• A relevant source I’ve missed? How exciting!
• A relevant source I’ve missed? How embarrassing!

So a month ago I had to look into that source. I found it was actually an early-twentieth-century historian misquoted on a British website. (Phew!)

My posting about that prompted the director of the American Revolution Institute, Jack Warren, to revise the essay and to share thoughts in the comments of my posting on why that 1911 historian was so open to the idea of Mrs. Gage betraying her husband’s secrets.

Jack’s comments in turn prompted me to review all the evidence authors have used to point to Margaret Gage, starting in 1788, plus the milestones in the publication of that idea. To my surprise, I saw that for over a century almost every author who brought up that idea did so only to argue against it. So then I had to consider how the evidence came to appear stronger the further we were removed from the eighteenth century.

During that review I also came across a source that didn’t mention Margaret Gage, though it’s been used to bolster a case against her: the Rev. Jeremy Belknap’s diary from late 1775. And I was lucky enough to realize it could link to another source I discussed a couple of years ago, memories of tales told by Josiah Waters around 1800. If both those sources are reliable, they tell us exactly who Dr. Warren got information from and how: the completely overlooked knife-maker William Jasper.

All that, as I suggested above, was a pleasant surprise. It was the result of an intriguing artifact and essay, fortuitous timing, errors to be corrected (including my own), input from commenters, a new approach to the evidence, and the proliferation of digitized sources. 

And a bonus: This week Bob Gross alerted me that the Loyalists Commission claims are available digitized on Ancestry.com, so now I can go explore exactly what Thomas Beaman’s family said about him and a lot more. 

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 General himself in his wife’s cloaths”

Looking back over the sources about Thomas and Margaret Gage that came to light in the late 1800s, as quoted yesterday, reveals some clear patterns.

Some of Gen. Gage’s junior officers really didn’t like how he handled the crisis in Massachusetts. To be sure, Gage wasn’t the only commander in history to inspire such contempt. And he definitely didn’t manage the crisis successfully.

The letter from Margaret Gage’s friend makes it likely that she did express regret that a bloody civil war was breaking out in North America. Again, she was not unique in dreading that event. Almost everybody said a war would be horrible—with most adding that therefore the other side should back down.

Above all, it’s striking how much ideas of gender played into the criticism of the Gages. John Andrews wrote that army officers called Gen. Gage “an Old Woman” because he was too lenient on the locals. When Margaret Gage arrived in Portsmouth, England, in September 1775, the St. James’s Chronicle newspaper printed this snarky comment:

We are assured that it is not General Gage’s wife who is arrived from Boston, but the General himself in his wife’s cloaths. His wife is left behind, invested with the supreme command, and will prove a much more formidable enemy to the Americans than her husband, who has been beaten twice abroad and every day grows more and more contemptible at home.

I quote that from Herbert Hughes’s Chronicle of Chester (1975).

Some of the Gages’ critics complained that Margaret thrust herself into Thomas’s affairs. “He was governed by his wife,” groused Maj. James Wemyss. She “said she hoped her husband would never be the instrument of sacrificing the lives of her countrymen,” whispered Whitshed Keene. Her brothers and brother-in-law got positions on the general’s staff that could have gone to other officers (including those who passed on complaints about her).

But others criticized Mrs. Gage for showing too much feminine desire—encouraging her friends to organize a ball inside Boston, wearing a daring turquerie-style gown in her painting by Copley, which that anonymous engraver in 1776 appears to have caricatured by portraying her bare-breasted. As a woman, Margaret was vulnerable to criticism from both sides.

Another way gender played a role in this story is that being a woman probably did allow Margaret Gage to express her sadness about the coming conflict, to lament the big loss of life at Bunker Hill and sympathize with the divided loyalties of Janet Montgomery. An eighteenth-century gentleman like Thomas Gage, or like John Adams, was supposed to keep his emotions in check. Mrs. Gage was freer to say she wished her husband didn’t have to kill Americans than he was.

But no critical contemporaries accused Margaret Gage of betraying her husband and the Crown. No one said she befriended Massachusetts Patriots in the one year she lived in the province, much less forged close connections. 

Nonetheless, by the first decades of the twentieth century the idea developed that Margaret Gage had leaked her husband’s plan for the march to Concord to the Patriots. And of course, if she really did that, she would have kept it secret, so there would be very little evidence for us to find.

COMING UP: A treacherous hypothesis. 

“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?

“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.

A Closer Look at the Gages

The main thrust of the American Revolution Institute blog posting I pointed to yesterday concerns the subject of the engraving titled “The Hero returned from Boston.”

This print says it was published in London on 7 Sept 1776 by Thomas Hart. Hart didn’t exist, the image bears signs of having been produced in Augsburg, and there’s probably no way to confirm the date.

Regardless, someone went to the trouble of engraving this picture of a woman, her gown flowing and one breast bared, kissing a gentleman holding a sword. Which meant someone believed there would be public demand for such a print. And it all had something to do with Boston around 1776.

The blog post posits:

The man in the print bears a casual resemblance to General Thomas Gage as portrayed by John Singleton Copley in 1768. Gage had commissioned the portrait and when it was complete, sent it home to England. “The Generals Picture was received at home with universal applause,” one of Gage’s aides [John Small] reported to Copley in 1770, “and Looked on by real good Judges as a Masterly performance. It is placed in one of the Capital Apartments of Lord Gage’s house in Arlington Street.”

Gage then commissioned a portrait of his wife, Margaret. Copley painted her in an unusual pose and garments, probably evoking her family roots in eastern Europe. The blog post elaborates:

Part of the attraction of turquerie was that it was sexually suggestive without being lewd. In Copley’s portrait Mrs. Gage is not wearing a corset and reclines in her loose fitting clothes. Copley called it “beyond Compare the best Lady’s portrait I ever Drew.” Proud of the portrait, the Gages packed it off to London, where it created a mild sensation when it was displayed.

In January 1773, Benjamin West told Copley: “the portrait of Mrs Gage as a picture has received every praise from the lovers of arts. her Friends did not think the likeness so favourable as they could wish, but Honour’d it as a pice of art.”

Thus, people in London had seen and discussed the Gages’ portraits. They had seen the Gages themselves in 1774, when the general assured King George III that he could bring Massachusetts back under control. They had followed the news from Boston as the conflict got worse. They had seen Gov. Gage return defeated after the outbreak of war and the costly Battle of Bunker Hill, his wife preceding him by a few weeks.

I find that interpretation of “The Hero returned from Boston” as a lampoon of the Gages convincing. In addition to the points in the blog post, the man in the print grips his sword the same way Copley’s general grips his cane. The engraver didn’t show Gage in uniform, but that might have been a satirical step too far, and Gage no longer had a military command, anyway.

The last section of the blog post discusses the supposition that Margaret Gage sympathized with the rebels and even disclosed her husband’s plans to them. Ultimately the author discards that idea (citing some of my own writing on the subject). Along the way the essay acknowledges counterarguments, however, and this passage caught my eye:

A local guest at one of the Gage’s parties attended by British officers wrote in June 1775 that “Madam Gage presided with the social adroitness and tact of a lady of a high New Jersey family . . . Yet suspicion attended this lady as not being 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.”

I didn’t recognize that quotation. Had I missed a source so close to Gage? I had to track this “local guest” down. And here’s what I found.

That’s not a contemporaneous statement from someone who socialized with the Gages. Rather, the historian Henry Bentley Belcher wrote those words in The First American Civil War, published in 1911, summarizing how he perceived rumors and leaks swirling around the Gage household.

What’s the source of that misinterpretation? In 2016 Deborah Gage wrote on the website for Firle Castle, the Gage family seat:

It has long been rumoured that Margaret provided Dr. [Joseph] Warren with the information that the British troops would be moving out the evening of April 19th, 1774 bound for Lexington and Concord, for example as cited in this letter written by Dr. Belcher in June 1775 ‘Entertainment at Providence House, where Madam Gage presided with the social adroitness and tact of a lady of a high New Jersey family, were crowded with uniformed men from both fleet and camp. Yet suspicion attended this lady as not being 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. At any rate whatever was designed in Boston was, it is alleged, known within an hour or two at Medford, at Roxbury, at Cambridge, at Brookline and in every Boston tavern.’

That quotation introduced some big errors. The governor’s mansion, Province House, became “Providence House.” Dr. Henry Bentley became “Dr. Belcher.” And, most important, a statement by a historian in 1911 was put into the pen of someone in 1775.

“My beloved wife Margaret Gage“

One of Boston 1775’s long-running questions is how much evidence there is for the belief that Margaret Gage, American-born wife of Gen. Thomas Gage, betrayed her husband by leaking his plans about the march on 18-19 Apr 1775 to Dr. Joseph Warren. After David Hackett Fischer made a case for that hypothesis in Paul Revere’s Ride, the story was widely retold at Boston historic sites.

That theory rests on the conclusion that Thomas and Margaret Gage became estranged after April 1775, with the general sending her home to England and treating her coldly thereafter. But, as I noted back here, they continued to have children.

Asa Gage of Atlanta, who notes that Margaret was “a distant cousin,” sent some additional material related to the Gages’ later life. With his permission, I’m sharing portions of his transcription of the general’s will, proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury and obtained through the British National Archives.

Margaret had two children after she returned to England, both conceived after the possible estrangement:

• Emily Gage, b. 25 Apr 1776.
• William Hall Gage, b. 2 Oct 1777.

Further, in his 1786 will the general takes very good care of Margaret, and refers to her as “beloved” on several occasions. Again, he may be bowing to convention in his language, but it does raise a question. He also made her his executrix:

…first I give unto my beloved wife Margaret Gage all my linen plate china and books together with my horses and equipage and also all my liquors of every sort and also all my pictures except my two miniature pictures . . .

it is my desire that what I have herein before given to my said wife shall be at her disposal at her pleasure. . . .

In trust to permit and suffer my wife Margaret Gage to hold and enjoy my said house in Portland Place with the appurtenances and all the goods and household furniture therein and to receive the rents and profits thereof for her own use and benefit during her life . . .

my said trustees shall during the life of my said wife receive the rents and benefits of my said plantations and estates in the island of Montserrat and do and shall pay one moiety or half part of the clear yearly rents and profits thereof unto my said wife during her natural life . . .

if any surplus should remain after the payment of my debts and funeral expenses upon trust to pay one third part of such surplus unto my said wife for her own use . . .

lastly I do hereby nominate constitute and appoint my said dear brother William Hall Lord Viscount Gage and my beloved wife Margaret Gage executor and executrix of this my last will and guardians to my children until they attain their respective ages of twenty one years 

Finally, Margaret’s brother Samuel Kemble of Friday Hill, Essex County, was one of three trustees for the general’s house in Portland Place, his plantations and estates on the island of Montserrat, his 18,000 acres of land on the Mohawk River in the New York state in North America, and other miscellaneous properties.

All in all, I see evidences of a continued normal relationship between Thomas and Margaret, but haven’t found any indication of actual estrangement.

Thanks to Asa Gage for this additional information and sound analysis.

Capt. Gabriel Maturin’s “impenetrable Secrecy”

In late 2012, The Magazine Antiques [yes, I know] published an article by Christopher Bryant about a John Singleton Copley portrait he had recently identified.

In 1768, Gen. Thomas Gage came to Boston to oversee the arrival of troops patrolling the town, and while he was there Copley painted him. Evidently the general and his wife liked the result enough that they wanted the artist to visit New York in 1771 and paint her as well. So Gage’s officers went to work to make that happen, Bryant wrote:

While Captain John Small flattered and cajoled Copley to come to New York, Captain Stephen Kemble, Gage’s aide-de-camp and brother-in-law, went about the practical business of securing sufficient portrait commissions so that “Mr. Copely might be at a certainty” in making the trip. After friends and colleagues had been canvassed, Kemble sent Copley in April 1771 what survives as the only known contemporary list of Copley’s sitters, in this case fifteen indi­viduals who “subscribed” for a total of sixteen portraits of stated sizes.

Given its origins, the list naturally reflected the Anglo-American colonial administration centered in New York. Margaret Kemble Gage’s name appears first, while fourth down was the name “Captain Maturin.” Captain Gabriel Maturin, after having distinguished himself in action with his regiment at the Battle of Quebec, had been from 1760 General Gage’s military secretary and as such the general’s closest aide and effectively his chief of staff. As the grandson of a French Huguenot refugee to Ireland, Ga­briel Maturin had the requisite command of the French language required by Gage when he was appointed military governor of Montreal, but it was Maturin’s tact, charm, and discretion that made him an indispensible member of Gage’s command right up until Maturin’s death in Boston at the eve of the American Revolution.

Maturin had accompanied Gen. Gage to Massachusetts in 1774 (the same year that Copley left for Europe, never to return). The captain died on 15 December of a “throat distemper” or “Peripnenmony.” John Rowe described the funeral procession on the 17th:

first part of the 4th Regiment Under Arms
then the Band of Musick
then the Clergy—then the Corps
then the Generall & his Family
then the 4th Regiment without Arms
then the Officers of the Army & afterwards the Gentlemen of the Town.

The next month, Maturin’s New York obituary praised him as a military secretary: “eminent Abilities, unshaken Integrity, and impenetrable Secrecy.” Gage might have needed the last. That death notice also said, “a most amiable Wife is left to deplore her unspeakable Loss, in the Bereavement of the most affectionate, polite, tender and indulgent Husband.”

That wife was presumably back in New York, since Rowe hadn’t mentioned her, and presumably had the Copley portrait. But what happened to them then?

TOMORROW: Mr. Livingston, I presume?

Two Lectures in One Week

Thanks to the Friends of Minute Man National Park and their guests for coming out to my talk yesterday on Gen. George Washington’s espionage efforts and surprises in the first year of the Revolutionary War. It was gratifying to see such a turnout. (Nothing I like better than helping volunteers scramble to put out more chairs.)

The question-and-answer session was thought-provoking as usual. Among the topics we discussed were:

• Did Margaret Gage disclose her husband’s military secrets to Dr. Joseph Warren? (Check out the link to her name for my thoughts in detail.)
• How did New Englanders react to the signs of Dr. Benjamin Church’s treachery? (Patriots were astonished, Patriots’ wives less so since he had already betrayed his wife, and Bostonians rioted when it looked like he was going to be exchanged.)
• Did Maj. John André leave any descendants in the U.S. of A.? (He died a bachelor, and several modern authors have concluded that he was gay, so I’m guessing not.)

I’m always impressed by how well people in this area know Revolutionary history.

My next talk is this Thursday, 14 March, at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site in Cambridge at 6:00 P.M. The topic is “George Washington, Crisis Manager: The Shaky Start-Up of the Continental Army Headquarters.”

When Washington arrived in Massachusetts in July 1775, he took on responsibility for an army that was supposed to include 20,000 men. That was larger than any group he had administered before, larger by more than an order of magnitude. He had to find the right people and the right systems to manage that force. I plan to talk about the aides Washington ended up with, the methods they used, and the lessons they learned.

To reserve a space for that lecture, email the rangers at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters. Be aware that there’s very little public parking nearby, especially with the latest snow. (Photo above by Len Edgerly in 2006.)

New Paintings of the Gages

Although John Singleton Copley’s fellow artists praised his portrait of Margaret Gage, her friends didn’t think it did her justice. Or perhaps it just didn’t show her according to the latest English fashion.

In the mid-1770s, the Gage family commissioned two new portraits from the British painter David Martin (1737-1797). He portrayed Margaret and Gen. Thomas Gage at full length, rather than the three-quarters views that Copley supplied, and he posed them against pastoral landscapes.

Martin put more detail into the general’s uniform. He depicted Margaret with fashionably powdered and/or graying hair. Notably, she once again appeared in a loose gown, this time with a flowing red wrap.

Even as he made those changes, Martin borrowed the couple’s basic poses from the Copley paintings, particularly the one of Margaret. It’s hard to lounge languidly while standing up, but in Martin’s painting she’s trying.

The Gages kept all four paintings at the family seat, Firle Place. They remained there until the twentieth century, with few or no reproductions. Nineteenth-century Bostonians therefore had no easy way to know what Massachusetts’s last royal governor had looked like.

Old-timers pointed folks to a local Copley portrait of a man who they said looked like the general. That was, ironically, Samuel Adams.

Ann Edwards: “retained her Eastern habits until her death”

Back in my first posting about John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Margaret Gage, I noted that her father, the New Jersey merchant Peter Kemble, had been born in Smyrna, in the Ottoman Empire. (Shown here in a 1732 print, which Iscra of the Netherlands is selling.) Kemble’s father ran a trading house, and his mother was of Greek ancestry.

Boston 1775 reader John Beasley sent me an email adding that Margaret Gage had an even more direct connection to Turkey:

Margaret’s Greek grandmother had a sister who married the British consul to Smyrna named Edwards. The Kembles were in the trading business, and Mr. Edwards seems to have taken part in the trading business also. He is credited with introducing coffee in England. At some time, under circumstances unknown, the Edwards family died out, except for a daughter, Ann Edwards, six years older than Margaret.

The Kembles invited Ann to leave Turkey and live with them in New Jersey. She spent the rest of her life with the Kembles and [following her death in 1808] is buried in the Kemble family plot at Mount Kemble, N.J. In the Prefatory Notes for Volume II of the Stephen Kemble Papers (pg. xiv), Margaret’s brother (Stephen Kemble) writes: “She was highly educated, spoke Greek, Italian, French, and English.” But more importantly he adds that she was “a complete Greek, and retained her Eastern habits until her death.”

Thus Margaret grew up with a Greek/Turkish cousin living in the same house—a cousin who perhaps regularly wore a Turkish costume. It just might be Ann Edwards’ clothes that Margaret wears in the portrait.

If so, they had probably been altered to be closer to British-American norms, in the same way other aspects of culture get adapted. The “Turkish” style fashionable in late-eighteenth-century Britain apparently had little connection with actual Turkish dress.

Nevertheless, Margaret Gage clearly had more knowledge of and emotional ties to life in the Ottoman Empire than the average British aristocrat, and far more than the average North American lady. She might have chosen to be painted in that fashion as a statement of her heritage as well as her taste. Given how other Copley patrons had their pictures painted in similar dress, it’s also possible that Margaret Gage helped to promote the “turquerie” style in America.

TOMORROW: Remaking Copley’s portraits of the Gages.

The Painting of Margaret Gage

John Singleton Copley traveled to New York in June 1771, eager to find customers among that city’s elite. The first person on his list was Margaret Gage.

Copley had already made a portrait of her husband, Gen. Thomas Gage. Apparently he had started that canvas when the general was in Boston overseeing the arrival of four regiments in 1768, and finished it after Gage had gone home to New York; the uniform isn’t exact in all details.

Margaret Gage came to Copley’s rented New York studio only four days after he arrived in the city, and he went to work. The result was unlike any of Copley’s portraits of Massachusetts ladies. Gage appeared in an exotically styled turban, gown, and pearls, and her pose was almost languorous.

Later that year Copley told his half-brother, Henry Pelham, “it is I think beyand Compare the best Lady’s portrait I ever drew.” A fellow artist, Matthew Pratt, said, “every Part and line in it in Butifull.” Copley sent it to the Society of Artists exhibit in London in 1772, and it brought him many more customers in North America.

Some of those subsequent sitters had themselves painted in the same sort of loose “Turkish” gown that Copley showed Margaret Gage wearing. But according to scholar Aileen Ribeiro, the gown in the Gage portrait “seems real, as if it were painted from a studio property modeled by the sitter,” while those in paintings of Mary Hooper and Mary Morris “look like copies of that property.” Neither reclines like Gage, and Hooper even looks a bit self-conscious in the outfit.

Was “that property” the property of Copley, or did it belong to Gage and Copley kept repainting it from sketches? Did it actually exist, or did the artist and sitter choose the outfit from an engraving, as with some of Copley’s other portraits of fashionable ladies? I doubt we’ll ever know for sure. In John Singleton Copley in America, Ribeiro writes (somewhat contradicting the comments quoted above):

It is flattering to her dark curly hair, deep brown eyes, and ruddy complexion; on this ground and because Mrs. Gage would have wanted to follow the English fashion it represented, there is little reason to suggest that she did not own the costume.

Still, Ribeiro says, the gown “would not have been worn in real life and instead represents an artistic convention remotely related to a supposedly Turkish prototype and more closely related to fashionable ‘undress’ gowns worn en déshabillé.” Even that supposed style, however, might have had special meaning for Margaret Gage.

TOMORROW: The Turkish connection.

Margaret Gage “à la turque”

Last month I had occasion to display this portrait of Margaret Gage by John Singleton Copley, now at the Timken Museum in San Diego. It’s significant not just because it shows the general’s wife, but also because of what it depicts her as wearing.

This archived webpage about a 1999 exhibit explains:

The image of romantic fashionability, Mrs. Gage is depicted wearing an iridescent caftan over a lace trimmed chemise with a jeweled brooch at her breast and an embroidered belt at her waist. Pearls and a turban-like swath of drapery adorn her hair. Copley’s depiction of Mrs. Gage in turban and uncorseted caftan make this one of the most sexually charged portraits produced in colonial America.

Mrs. Gage’s wish to be portrayed in turquerie put her in the company of countless English women who were “going Turkish” to masquerade balls. Their American peers, however, who had no occasions to wear such costumes, participated in the exhilarating world of exotic disguise through portraiture. In the artist’s studio, clients had the chance to look more stylish than they could in real life. Copley offered his subjects the option of selecting poses, settings, costumes, and coiffures from English sources. In the space of the painted canvas, he created for them alternate or desired appearances.

There’s more discussion of this fashion phenomenon from Barbara Sarudy at 18th-Century American Women.

Margaret Gage may have been dressing up, but she had a genuine family connection to Turkey. As a youth her grandfather Richard Kemble worked for a Turkish merchant in London, then traveled to the Ottoman Empire to establish a trading house. While in Smyrna, Kemble married a woman from the Mavrocordato family, ethnically Greek merchants from the island of Scio. Later he was British consul at Salonica.

In 1704, Richard and his wife had a son named Peter, who was born and spent his first eight years in Smyrna. After an English education Peter Kemble did business in Rotterdam, Guinea, and London before settling in New Jersey. In 1734 Peter and his first wife Gertrude had the little girl they named Margaret.