“To transport these Men to Kennibeck”

When Dr. Benjamin Church wrote his intelligence report on 24 Sept 1775, the latest big event along the Continental lines was the departure of volunteers heading north.

Those men were under the command of Col. Benedict Arnold (shown here), respected for his part in taking Fort Ticonderoga and other Crown positions along Lake Champlain.

Church knew Arnold. In fact, the doctor had been the ranking member of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety who had signed Arnold’s orders for that mission to Ticonderoga on 3 May. In August he headed the committee to review the colonel’s expenses, an interaction that didn’t go so smoothly. (Ironic moments, since Church was already supplying the Crown with secrets and Arnold would do so later.)

In late August, Arnold met with Gen. George Washington and gained approval for a quick thrust through Maine to Québec, meeting up with Gen. Richard Montgomery’s force advancing from New York. The commander’s general orders for 5 September called for “such Volunteers as are active woodsmen, and well acquainted with batteaus,” to march under Arnold’s command. About a thousand men responded, and most of them left Cambridge on 13 September.

Although the destination of that column was supposed to be secret, lots of people suspected. For example, on 13 September Jesse Lukens, a volunteer from Pennsylvania, wrote:

Col. Arnold having chosen one thousand effective men, consisting of two companies of riflemen, (about one hundred and forty,) the remainder musqueteers, set off for Quebec, as it is given out, and which I really believe to be their destination. I accompanied on foot as far as Lynn, nine miles.

Starting on 20 September, newspapers in New York and Philadelphia reported on Arnold’s departure for Québec, citing reports from Cambridge. New England newspapers were more cagy about his destination, but the secret was out.

Dr. Church mentioned the overall Canada campaign three times in his letter, starting with the second sentence and ending just before his request for money:

The fifteen hundred Men that you had news of going to Quebec are going to Halifax (I believe) to destroy that place, . . .

An Express from Ticondiroga, says that they had been Ambushed but foursed their way through with the loss of 13 Men and they on their advancing forward found on the ground ten Indians dead, that the Army was within one Mile and a half of St. Johns, on which they sent a party of Men to Cut of the Communication between Montreal and the Fort. . . .

The Vessells I mentioned that was fiting at Salem was to transport these Men to Kennibeck as I find since, I am not Certain they are gone to Halifax but it is thought and believed they are.

This letter shows that even the British commanders inside Boston had received word of “fifteen hundred Men…going to Quebec” and asked Church about it. But the doctor suspected they were headed to Nova Scotia. When he began this dispatch he was certain about that; by the end, he wasn’t so sure but still thought that was most likely.

In fact, the Continental generals had talked about an attack on Halifax. Immediately after hearing about the shortage of gunpowder on 3 August, Washington and his council of war discussed raiding Crown outposts with powder stores. Col. John Glover leased a schooner called the Hannah.

By mid-September, however, plans had changed. Washington had ordered the Hannah to try attacking British supply ships instead. He wrote to the merchant Nathaniel Tracy to arrange for several more ships to carry Arnold’s one thousand men from Newburyport up to the mouth of the Kennebeck River.

Church’s expectation of an attack on Halifax might have been accurate at one point, but not any longer.

COMING UP: More details from the Continental camp.

“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?

Tracking Down Diaries of the Québec Expedition

Earlier this week I mentioned Stephen Darley’s 2011 book Voices from a Wilderness Expedition, a bibliography of all known diaries and first-person accounts of Col. Benedict Arnold’s trek to Québec in 1775 and a listing of all the men on that march.

That book also included the transcripts of five diaries not previously published or noted in the last edition of Kenneth Roberts’s March to Quebec.

This year Darley published a new collection, Voices Waiting to Be Heard, with transcriptions of nineteen accounts of the expedition, some discovered in the last decade. The earliest actually appeared in the Pennsylvania Packet in March 1779.

In 2013, Darley and Stephen Burk published an article in Early American Review, which can be read here. It tackled the question of who wrote a diary of the expedition published in The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal in 1900 without a name, still anonymous at the time of Darley’s first book.

Burk and Darley wrote:

From the pages of his journal it is apparent that the anonymous author was a Massachusetts soldier and that he had been in a Captain Smith’s company prior to transferring to Captain Hubbard’s company for the March to Quebec. He also mentions having a brother on the March although it is not evident whether both men were in the same company. The journal states that the author’s brother died “with fever and flux” on Dec. 28, 1775 near Quebec. Also, journal entries make clear that the author was not among the many that were taken prisoner during the Dec. 31 assault on the walled city of Quebec.

Using the listing of men in Darley’s book, the researchers found three named Pierce (or Peirce) in Capt. Jonas Hubbard’s company. David Pierce died during the march. John and William Pierce avoided both death and capture. But did either of them keep a diary?

In fact, they both did. Ens. John Pierce’s journal was published in Roberts’s compilation. One entry reads: “David Peirce…was taken again all on a sudden and died in a few days he had no senses after he was taken the last time –Adiu to my Friend and Namesake.” That doesn’t sound like a brother, just a man with the same last name.

Furthermore, Ens. Pierce was from Worcester, but David and William Pierce enlisted together from Hadley. They both served in Capt. Eliakim Smith’s company starting with the Lexington Alarm.

Those details confirmed William Pierce as the anonymous diarist first published in 1900. Knowing his name, Burk and Darley could fill out more details of the brothers’ lives. William was born in 1752, David two years later. Their father, a Harvard graduate, represented Hadley in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress.

David Pierce died just before Gen. Richard Montgomery led his doomed attack on Québec. William Pierce was sick that day, thus unable to fight. He remained with the Continental Army during its withdrawal in 1776 and was back in Hadley that summer. Pierce never married, dying in Hadley in 1832. Burk and Darley even found his gravestone.

All told, there are now thirty-eight known first-person accounts of the Arnold expedition, making it one of the most individually documented campaigns of the war. All the more striking since we usually hear about it as an event that took place in the wilderness under conditions that don’t seem conducive for keeping a diary.

Capt. Samuel Lockwood at War

Samuel Lockwood (1737–1807, gravestone shown here courtesy of Find a Grave) of Greenwich, Connecticut, became a second lieutenant in the Continental Army in April 1775.

That fall, he joined Gen. Richard Montgomery’s invasion of Canada. On 5 November Lockwood’s commanders made him an assistant engineer with the rank of captain. The Continental Congress never recognized that rank but later voted to pay Lockwood a year’s salary as an engineer.

Lt. Lockwood’s specialty was really maneuvers on the water. He reconnoitered ahead of the army by boat during the march north and helped to capture eleven Crown vessels and Gen. Richard Prescott at Sorel.

The Battle of Québec didn’t work out so well for Lockwood, however. He was wounded, captured, and not released on parole until late in 1776.

As soon as Lockwood was formally exchanged in early 1777, the Congress commissioned him as a captain in Col. John Lamb’s artillery regiment. He served two years, resigning in 1779.

Capt. Lockwood was then done with the Continental Army, but he wasn’t done with the war. He remained active in his state’s military. In 1779 he commanded an armed vessel on Long Island Sound, attacking British ships in the Oyster Bay harbor in November.

On 17 Jan 1780, Capt. Samuel Lockwood led “forty volunteers from Greenwich” alongside Capt. Samuel Keeler and an equal number of Connecticut militiamen on a raid into New York. Their target was the home in Morrisania of Lt. Col. Isaac Hetfield, Loyalist commander of the Westchester County militia.

Gen. William Heath reported to New York’s Gov. (and Gen.) George Clinton about the Lockwood and Keeler raid a few days later:

they arrived at the place a little after one the next morning, attacked the picket, killed 3 and drove the others in, march’d to the House where Hatfield was, who, with his men took to the chambers [i.e., bedrooms] and kept up a fire down stairs and out at the windows; the militia behaved with great Bravery, call’d to Hatfield to Surrender or they would Set fire to the House…

TOMORROW: The view from inside Hatfield’s house.

“In daily expectation of Colonel Knox’s arrivall”

Yesterday I quoted the Boston businessman and court official Ezekiel Price about Col. Henry Knox and the artillery he brought from Lake Champlain in January 1776.

At that time Price was a war refugee living at Thomas Doty’s tavern in what was then Stoughton (shown here). That was also the home town of Col. Richard Gridley, Chief Engineer of the Continental Army and, until the previous fall, the commander of its artillery regiment. Price socialized with the Gridley family. He also gathered up rumors from other sources.

Price’s diary entries make clear that people like him knew about Knox’s mission to retrieve cannon and were eagerly awaiting the result.

Thursday, Jan. 11. — Went down to Milton. Could hear nothing remarkable from the American Army. It is reported that Colonel Henry Knox is on his return from Crown Point; got back as far as Worcester, and has with him a number of brass cannon and other ordnance-stores, and was expected at Cambridge last night with his artillery. Mr. William Bant [a business associate of John Hancock] called here on his way to the army, &c. Son Zek spent the day with us. Mrs. Price, Polly, &c, went home with Zek in the chaise. The weather threatens snow or rain soon.

Friday, Jan. 12.— A light snow fell in the night. The weather is moderate, and the morning agreeable for the season. Towards noon, it began to grow cold. Mrs. Gridley and daughter Beckey stopt here, in their way to Cambridge to visit Scar Gridley, who, they hear, is dangerously ill. A soldier from the army below says that nothing material has happened there within a day or two past, except that he heard Colonel Knox was on his return to Cambridge, and that a number of cannon had reached there, which Colonel Knox sent before him. It is cloudy, and has the appearance of more foul weather soon.

I’m skeptical about that “number of cannon” reaching Cambridge; no other sources confirm that secondhand information, and it looks to me like Knox went ahead of the guns instead of the other way around.

On 13 January, Gen. George Washington was still awaiting his artillery commander. He told Col. Alexander McDougall of New York, “I am in daily expectation of Colonel Knox’s arrivall.”

That same day, Price wrote, “By advices from Canada, I think Governor [Guy] Carlton’s head is pretty near the noose: so that we may hope to see him soon at headquarters.” He was expecting news of American triumph at Québec City.

In the evening Thomas Crane, representative from Stoughton to the Massachusetts General Court, told Price “that Knox, with the cannon, was at Springfield.” Which of course contradicted the earlier reports that the colonel was much closer. But Price was still optimistic.

Meanwhile, Washington kept waiting. On 16 January, he received a progress report from Gen. Philip Schuyler in Albany and wrote back: “I am much pleased, that the artillery was like to be got over the River, and am in Hopes, that Colonel Knox will arrive with it in a few Days—It is much wanted.”

Late the next day, Gen. Washington received bad news: Gen. Richard Montgomery had died in an unsuccessful assault on Québec. Washington called his generals together for a council of war the next morning to decide how many soldiers they could spare to bolster that effort against Canada. Knox, according to Gen. William Heath, finally arrived later on the 18th.

Sometime that same day, Ezekiel Price also heard about Montgomery’s death. He held out hope that that “melancholy and unfortunate” report was false. But on the 19th everyone connected with the army told Price the same bad news, and he had more detail by the 20th. For the next two days he described troops preparing to head north. Despite all his anticipation of Knox’s arrival, Price never actually recorded that event or mentioned the new artillery until late February. The disastrous news from Québec completely overshadowed it.

The End of Pope Night in Boston

As I’ve discussed under the label of Pope Night, the 5th of November was a big holiday in colonial Boston. That was when Boston’s young men and teen-aged boys showed their loyalty to Britain by parading through the streets with effigies of the Pope and the Devil, hanging the enemies of the year in effigy, and brawling after sundown.

That anti-Catholic pageant wasn’t any trouble until American Patriots started to seek to support of Catholics. One of the first people to recognize the potential problem was Gen. George Washington, who on 5 Nov 1775 chided his officers and troops for considering “that ridiculous and childish Custom of burning the Effigy of the pope.” At the time, Gen. Richard Montgomery and Col. Benedict Arnold were hoping to win over the French Catholics of Canada.

But that invasion fell apart, and by November 1776 Boston’s youth went back to their traditional Pope Night celebrations. Then in early 1778 the new U.S. of A.’s diplomats spoiled the fun by convincing the French government to enter the war. The French navy arrived off New England’s coast in the middle of the year. So suddenly Bostonians were supposed to be nice to Catholics again.

The joint American and French attempt to dislodge the British from Newport ended in failure, and then the fleet moved up to Boston. There was a lot of friction between those sailors and marines and the locals. As Christian McBurney describes in his recent Journal of the American Revolution article, “Why Did a Boston Mob Kill a French Officer?”, that conflict came to a head when, well, a Boston mob killed a French officer.

The local authorities quickly moved in to quell that fighting and repair relations with the French commanders. But the next 5th of November approached less than two months later. Those officials worried that Pope Night would rouse passions again. Therefore, they clamped down, at every level.

The Massachusetts Council, which was exercising executive power in the state in the absence of a governor, passed a resolve against Pope Night. Then the seven elected Boston selectmen, including John Scollay, Samuel Austin, and Harbottle Dorr, met on the 5th, and they invited the town’s magistrates in as well:

The Justices attended according to the invitation of the Selectmen to consult the best methods to prevent any Exhibitions this Evening agreable to a Resolve of the Council transmitted to the Selectmen, Yesterday.

All those branches of government working together managed to suppress Pope Night at last. And it doesn’t seem to have come back in Boston again. Some of the rituals resurfaced around Christmas, others on Halloween. But the next time Boston newspapers reported on “Pope’s Day,” it was as a quaint pre-Revolutionary custom.

“Our armament here was a great curiosity.”

A couple of Boston 1775 readers have asked me whether Col. Henry Knox took any precautions to hide the artillery he moved from New York to eastern Massachusetts in 1775-76. Did he guard against Loyalists or British spies watching those cannon?

I’ve seen no indication in Knox’s or Gen. George Washington’s papers that they worried about secrecy on this mission. At that time the American cause was very popular in the New England and northern New York countryside. Few people had experienced serious deprivations from the war, the British forces were almost all confined to Boston and Québec, and drastic steps like declaring independence and allying with the French Empire were off in the future.

Furthermore, western Massachusetts was especially radical. The farmers there had been the first in the province to close their courts in 1774 to protest the Massachusetts Government Act, and they kept them closed through the whole war. Local friends of the Crown had decamped for Boston or were keeping quiet.

Even if Loyalists did see the cannon on the move, it’s unclear what they could have done with that information. They would have had to carry the news through the winter landscape and across the siege lines into Boston, or up to Québec, or perhaps to Newport. The British garrison in Boston was already holding out against some cannon; would more old guns really make a difference?

Young teamster John P. Becker’s reminiscence indicates that, far from keeping their cargo secret, Knox’s men welcomed attention in the towns along the way. About Albany, for example, Becker recalled: “Our appearance excited the attention of the Burghers.”

And in Westfield:

We then reached Westfield, Massachusetts, and were much amused with what seemed the quaintness and honest simplicity of the people. Our armament here was a great curiosity. We found that very few, even among the oldest inhabitants, had ever seen a cannon. They were never tired of examining our desperate “big shooting irons,” and guessing how many tons they weighed; others of the scientific order, were measuring the dimensions of their muzzles, and the circumference at the breach. The handles, as they styled the trunnions, were reckoned rather too short, but they considered on the whole, that the guns must be pretty nice things at a long shot.

We were great gainers by this curiosity, for while they were employed in remarking upon our guns, we were, with equal pleasure, discussing the qualities of their cider and whiskey. These were generously brought out in great profusion, saying they would be darned, if it was not their treat.

One old mortar, well known during the revolution, as the old sow, and which not many years since, was the subject of eulogy on the floor of our own Legislature, by no less a personage than Gen. [Erastus] Root, was actually fired several times by the people of Westfield, for the novel pleasure of listening to its deep toned thunders.

Col. Knox was surrounded by visitors at the inn that evening. And the introductions that took place gave to his acquaintance, hosts of militia officers of every rank and degree. Every man seemed to be an officer. What a pity, said Colonel Knox to some of us who stood near him, what a pity it is that our soldiers are not as numerous as our officers.

That sounds like Knox, but it doesn’t sound like he was trying to keep stuff quiet.

As for Becker’s memory of the “old sow,” he might have mixed up a big mortar that Knox brought east with the big mortar of that nickname that Gen. Richard Montgomery was using in the invasion of Canada at the same time. Or there might have been two “old sows.”

TOMORROW: Col. Knox and Gen. Washington.

[The photograph above shows the Henry Knox Trail monument in the center of Westfield (look on the lower right side). The big stately building was a post office but is now a restaurant. The photograph, by Henry W. Ohlhous, comes courtesy of the Historical Marker Database.]

Running the Numbers in 1776

While I was confirming some figures in Charles H. Lesser’s The Sinews of Independence, a Bicentennial book collecting the best records of the size of the Continental Army throughout the Revolutionary War, I spotted a couple of curious trends.

We often think of the first American invasion of British Canada as coming to a spectacular end in the attack on Québec on 31 Dec 1775. Gen. Richard Montgomery was killed; Col. Benedict Arnold wounded; Capt. Daniel Morgan, Capt. Henry Dearborn, and many other men captured. (John Trumbull’s painting of Montgomery’s death above.)

But the Continental Congress actually ordered more troops north after that battle. In late February 1776, Arnold (now a brigadier general) reported having 1,290 soldiers under his command, of whom 964 were able to fight. The next month, that number had grown to 2,505 men, with 1,719 in shape. The invasion of Canada outlasted the siege of Boston. But it doesn’t have a good narrative shape, with a long, dreary second act.

Meanwhile, Col. Henry Knox was moving his artillery regiment south—and losing men. As of February 1776, he reported having 604 artillerists under his command outside Boston, with 563 ready to fight. As soon as the units left New England, where almost all those troops came from, they evidently began peeling off. In April, Knox could report only 421 men, of whom 358 were listed as available. Through October, he never had more than 500 soldiers assigned to him, and never was able to field even 400.

Lesser’s book, thorough as it is, isn’t a useful source for the strength of American armies in really bad times early in the war: when the invasion of Canada collapsed under the onslaught of smallpox, when the British forces drove Gen. George Washington and Knox out of New York and across New Jersey. In those hectic months, the army couldn’t collect and maintain systematic returns, so no total figures survive.

“We was asked who would scale the walls.”

Here are two views of the action outside the city of Québec 236 years ago. The first comes from the journal of an officer identified on the manuscript as Captain Durben (Dearborn?):

26th [Dec 1775]. A return was made of the men in Coloniel [Benedict] Arnold’s Detachment who were willing to storm the town; there were only three in my company consisting of sixty three, who dissented from it.

27th. Afternoon all the troops assembled at the place of rendezvous in very high spirits, and were ready to march to the attack, when an order came from the General [Richard Montgomery] to send them back to their quarters—because he thought the night too clear and calm for the attack—though the day had been windy with snow.

Here’s Pvt. Samuel Barney’s record of the same two days in Canada:

Tuesday, December the 26th. This morning arose some better. We was asked who would scale the walls. There was (17)? Turned out.

Wednesday, December the 27th. This morning arose well and it snowed, and we had orders to go into Quebec, and all paraded, but it cleared up and we did not go.

Both those quotations appear in print for the first time in a new book called Voices from a Wilderness Expedition, by Stephen Darley. More about that book tomorrow.

(Image above of Québec on a mild day in 1768 courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

“Which is the side that I must go withal?”

Thomas Gage, British army officer and younger son of a baronet, and Margaret Kemble, daughter of a wealthy New Jersey merchant, married in 1758. He was in North America to fight in the French and Indian War.

In the course of that conflict, Thomas rose to the rank of general, and afterward became the commander-in-chief of all British army forces on the continent. Over fifteen years Margaret had six children (at least—those six survived to adulthood).

Gen. Gage was on his first trip back to England in early 1774 when news of the Boston Tea Party reached London, and was summoned to court to share his expertise on America. For years he had sent letters recommending how to change colonial laws or constitutions to make life easier for the army. George III and his ministers liked what Gage told them and offered him the post of royal governor of Massachusetts. The general promised that he’d bring the obstreperous province to order.

The new governor arrived in May 1774, accompanied by the first of many regiments to be stationed in town. Among his top aides were Maj. Stephen Kemble, a deputy adjutant-general, and Samuel Kemble, confidential secretary; they were Margaret’s brothers. Some of the Gage children were also in Boston, but the oldest appear to have been at boarding schools in England.

On 26 February and then 18 Apr 1775, Gage sent troops out from Boston to search for the defiant Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s artillery and supplies. The provincial forces responded by besieging Boston. On 17 June the two armies fought over the heights of Charlestown, with the British securing the high ground of Bunker Hill in a Pyrrhic victory.

On 1 November, one of Margaret Gage’s friends wrote to her from Perth Amboy (in a letter opened by the British post office seeking intelligence and preserved in government records):

I recollect with horror the bloody scene at Charlestown. Poor Jennet [Montgomery]! I have been told that she charged [Richard] 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 and her family on opposite sides of a war. Evidently Margaret Gage also felt torn between the royal forces her husband led and the American colonists.

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?

Brook Watson: "worthy and steady friend"?

Last month I discussed Brook Watson (1735-1807), who was born in Boston, lost a leg to a shark in Havana, and went on to a very successful career in London as a merchant and politician. Because he was born in America and had a lot of business there, the British government viewed him as a bridge to the colonial leadership.

In January 1775 Watson sent the Earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the colonies, a handwritten essay recommending how the government should peacefully reform the colonial governments. The secretary’s secretaries noted this as “Mr. Watson’s Thoughts on American Affairs.” In fact, he had copied it from “Thoughts on the dispute between Great Britain and her Colonies,” an essay by Judge William Smith of New York. The author’s brother, Dr. James Smith, had sent a copy to the earl the year before, and Smith himself would send another in July, saying he had written it in 1767.

Around the same time, Watson testified in Parliament against the government’s bill to bar Massachusetts fisherman from the Newfoundland fishing grounds. He spoke for the whole empire’s merchants, who earned a lot from carrying the fish to Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Despite his argument, the bill passed, part of Parliament’s efforts to punish Boston for the Tea Party and general naughtiness.

Watson then sailed for New York, arriving in May 1775 to find that war had broken out. The Patriot party dominated the city at that time, though there were also many Loyalists and men who were genuinely undecided (such as William Smith). Whatever Watson told people convinced them that he sympathized with the Patriots and hoped for a reconciliation between the colonies and Great Britain that would resolve all their problems. He set out for Canada, where he had extensive business.

Later in 1775, a couple of American armies also set out north, planning a quick conquest. One contingent, under Ethan Allen, was captured outside Montreal at the Battle of Longue-Point on 24 Sept 1775. But after that the local militias lost faith in British commander Guy Carleton and disbanded, letting a larger American force under Gen. Richard Montgomery take Montreal unopposed the next month. By then Watson was sailing back to London—but he had left some letters behind.

On 13 Nov 1775, Montgomery wrote to Gen. Philip Schuyler back in New York:

I send some choice letters of that worthy and steady friend of the Colonies, Brook Watson, whose zeal is only to be equalled by his sincerity. You will think them of importance enough, I believe, to be communicated to General Washington and the Congress. Your friend, Mr. William Smith, has been pretty well humbugged by this gentleman.

Montgomery enclosed four captured letters which Watson had written the month before. Among them was one to William Franklin, Loyalist governor of New Jersey (and son of Benjamin Franklin), dated 19 Oct 1775 and describing the results of the Longue-Point battle:

such is the wretched state of this unhappy Province [Quebec], that Colonel Allen, with a few despicable wretches, would have taken this city on the 25th ultimo [i.e., last month], had not its inhabitants marched out to give them battle. They fought, conquered, and thereby saved the Province for a while. Allen and his banditti were mostly taken prisoners. He is now in chains on board the Gaspee. This little action has changed the face of things. The Canadians before were nine tenths for the Bostonians. They are now returned to their duty, many in arms for the King, and the parishes. who had been otherwise, are daily demanding their pardon, and taking arms for the Crown.

Watson actually took charge of conveying Allen to Britain as a prisoner of war; the Vermonter later called him “a man of malicious and cruel disposition.”

Before the end of the war, Watson gained some lucrative military supply contracts through his close relationship with Carleton. In the following decades he retired from business and devoted his full-time talents to politics. (Thumbnail of the one-legged merchant and Lord Mayor courtesy of Britain’s National Portrait Gallery.)