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.

Why Did Gage “order their muzzles to be beat in”?

When I spoke to the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati in February, a descendant of artillerist William Burbeck asked me a provocative question about The Road to Concord.

After the Boston militia train’s four brass cannon after they disappeared in September 1774, Gen. Thomas Gage expended a lot of effort on locating them. In February 1775 he may have sent Capt. William Browne and Ens. Henry DeBerniere to Worcester to hunt for them.

Gage definitely sent Lt. Col. Alexander Leslie and his troops to Salem to seize them. He sent Browne and DeBerniere to Concord to confirm they were in that town, and then he organized the fatal expedition on 18–19 April to grab them.

Gage’s final orders for the commander of that April expedition, Lt. Col. Francis Smith, said: “If you meet any Brass Artillery, you will order their muzzles to be beat in so as to render them useless.”

After all that hunting, why didn’t Gage order those guns to be returned to Boston?

Here’s my analysis of the general’s thinking and why he’d have been happy to hear that those four cannon were destroyed. (As it happened, Patriots had already moved them beyond Concord, perhaps to Stow, by the time the redcoats arrived at James Barrett’s farm.)

First of all, those four cannon didn’t pose a big military threat. They were two- and three-pounders, fine for training on but not the biggest force in battle. The Royal Artillery had many more and bigger weapons. Furthermore, intelligence suggested that the Patriots hadn’t succeeded in mounting them well.

Rather, I posit, those field-pieces posed a bigger threat to Gage’s standing with his superiors in London. He had put sentries in front of the armories, patrols on the Boston streets, and guards at the town’s only gate—and yet those four guns had disappeared. Gage had reasons to suspect they had also been slipped past Leslie’s reach in Salem before being moved to Concord. (In fact, they arrived in Concord from Dorchester, but he didn’t know that.) In sum, those four brass cannon made him look utterly incompetent.

The general never reported the disappearance of those guns to Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State, or Lord Barrington, Secretary of War. In fact, in describing the Salem mission, he suggested that he had intelligence about cannon being smuggled in from Dutch territory; there’s no such report in his file. As each month ticked by, Gage may have felt more pressure to resolve this problem before his bosses learned about it.

Thus, Gen. Gage’s top goal for the Concord expedition wasn’t to recover those guns—it was to make their potential to embarrass him go away. Turning the four cannon into useless hunks of bronze out in the countryside looked like the most efficient way to do that. Then he could report to London that his men had succeeded in destroying all the artillery they found without raising many questions.

In contrast, carting those field-pieces back to Boston would have prompted questions about where they had come from. Country folk would have seen them, as would the soldiers themselves. Boston militia leaders might have demanded them back (playing dumb about who stole them). The ministers in London may have become curious. All that would have made it harder to keep the embarrassing story of the cannon thefts quiet.

Gage was also concerned for his soldiers. Hauling several hundred pounds of metal along the road to Boston would have required a wagon and horses, plus men guarding that transport, all moving more slowly than soldiers on the march. The general didn’t send Lt. Col. Smith out with wagons because he wanted the troops to move fast—expeditiously, in fact. Even if they had confiscated a wagon and draft horses in Concord, their return trip would be slower if they brought the cannon along.

Gage actually gave orders for the regulars not to weigh themselves down too much:

You will order a Trunion to be knocked off each Gun, but if its found impracticable on any, they must be spiked, and the Carriages destroyed. The Powder and flower must be shook out of the Barrels into the River, the Tents burnt, Pork or Beef destroyed in the best way you can devise. And the Men may put Balls of lead in their pockets, throwing them by degrees into Ponds, Ditches &c., but no Quantity together, so that they may be recovered afterwards.

The goal was to destroy the provincials’ military supplies as quickly as possible and then get back to safety. He hoped Smith’s men would be able to meet up with Col. Earl Percy’s relief column before the rebels organized a military response. That didn’t happen. But the situation would probably have been even worse if the troops were withdrawing from Concord at wagon speed.

“Secrets on the Road to Concord” in Scituate, 15 May

On Saturday I attended the “Spies Among Us” event in Concord, described back here.

Top highlights:

• Seeing the Wright Tavern sprucing up as it prepares to reopen to the public next month, including the Pursuit of History weekend on “The Outbreak of War” that I’m helping to organize there (a couple of seats may still be available).
• Enjoying all the special touches the National Park Service staff and volunteers brought to this event, including a full-size replica of Ens. Henry DeBerniere’s map from the Library of Congress and a Concord role-playing game.
• Hearing details about what brought the British troops to Concord and remembering back during the 2000 commemoration when many of those were still little beads I was trying to string together into a narrative that became The Road to Concord.

So I’m eager to keep spreading the word at my upcoming speaking engagement for the Scituate Historical Society. [This event was originally scheduled for March and postponed.]

Thursday, 15 May, 7–8:30 P.M.
Secrets on the Road to Concord
G.A.R. Hall, 353 Country Way, Scituate

Early in the spring of 1775, British army spies located four brass cannon belonging to Boston’s colonial militia that had gone missing months before. British general Thomas Gage devised plans to regain the cannon. Massachusetts Patriots prepared to thwart the general’s hopes. Each side wanted control of those weapons, but each also had reasons to keep their existence a secret. That conflict would end with blood on the road to Concord.

Admission is $15, or $10 for society members. Reservations are recommended, but payment will be accepted at the door.

I look forward to meeting more folks in shoreside Plymouth County.

(The picture above is a page from one of Scituate Historical Society’s artifacts of the 1770s: Caleb Litchfield’s notebook from when he was a teenager studying mathematics and navigation. Litchfield served in the Continental forces on land and sea during the war. After a brief time as a merchant ship’s master, he retired inland to Milton and then Weathersfield, Vermont.)

“Secrets on the Road to Concord” via Fort Ti, 9 Feb.

On Sunday, 9 February, at 2:00 P.M., I’ll deliver an online talk about “Secrets on the Road to Concord” in Fort Ticonderoga’s Author Series.

The event description says:

The British march to Concord in April 1775 set off the Revolutionary War, but what exactly were the redcoats looking for? Looking at General Thomas Gage’s papers reveals that his main goal was to destroy four brass cannon that Patriots had spirited out of Boston months before. In the early months of 1775, while the provincials worked to build an artillery force, General Gage used military spies and paid agents to locate those weapons. Those maneuvers led to a fatal clash on the road to Concord.

This event is free for Fort Ti members, $10 for others. The webpage asks people to register by 5:00 P.M. on Friday, 7 February, in order to receive the link.

Fort Ticonderoga has a long history, but many people know it as the source of artillery pieces that Col. Henry Knox brought back to the siege of Boston in 1776. (He also collected cannon from Crown Point and other sites along Lake Champlain.)

Years later, as secretary of war, Knox returned two of Boston’s four brass cannon to Massachusetts. But first he had them engraved with the names “HANCOCK” and “ADAMS,” and this story:

Sacred to Liberty.
This is one of four cannon,
which constituted the whole train
of Field Artillery,
possessed by the British colonies of
North America,
at the commencement of the war.
on the 19th of april 1775.

This cannon
and its fellow
belonging to a number of citizens of
Boston,
were used in many engagements
during the war.

The other two, the property of the
Government of Massachusetts
were taken by the enemy.
By order of the United States
in Congress assembled
May 19th, 1788.

Those engravings made those two cannon unique and easily traceable, which helped my research immensely. At the same time, the words promulgated a false picture of the provincials’ artillery force.

The Massachusetts committee of safety had far more than “four cannon” under its control in April 1775—more than three dozen, in fact. It had only four small brass (bronze) cannon, but it had a bunch of iron guns suitable as “Field Artillery.” Six of those cannon went onto Bunker Hill, and five were lost.

In addition, if we’re talking about “the British colonies of North America,” Rhode Island sent brass field-pieces to the siege under Capt. John Crane—who became one of Knox’s top artillery officers. New Hampshire had artillery from the raid on Fort William and Mary. And I’m not even bothering to count what other colonies had for their militia companies and shore fortifications.

I’m not sure why Knox told the history that way, especially since his audience included veterans and insiders like himself who knew the whole story. That telling does enhance the importance of his own mission to New York.

I also don’t get the distinction Knox made between one pair owned by “a number of citizens of Boston” and the other by “the Government of Massachusetts” since they were all considered Massachusetts militia guns and he was returning the “citizens” guns to the state.

Helping to Shape Two Gifts for Revolutionary History Fans

I autograph copies of my book The Road to Concord for people who order through The History List. Sometimes I also help out polishing the details of its products for fans of the American Revolution.

One of the recent items I advised on is this handsome portrait of the handsome Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia by artist and calligrapher Larry Stuart. It’s available as a print, a tea towel, and a magnet.

Two hundred fifty years ago this year, Carpenters’ Hall hosted the Continental Congress. That body was later renamed the First Continental Congress since a follow-up gathering at the nearby Pennsylvania State House ended up lasting for years and overshadowing its namesake. (So much so that that building is now Independence Hall.)

That created a challenge for how to explain the historic significance of what happened in Carpenters’ Hall in 1774. Conveying the mindset of that year meant not reading the First Continental Congress through the lens of the Second. Thus, we usually think the first Congress had delegates from twelve of the “thirteen colonies,” but there were open invitations to more than thirteen, and thirteen didn’t become a meaningful number for another few years.

Likewise, it seemed important to describe the First Continental Congress not as laying the groundwork for independence but as trying to resolve the dispute with Britain while avoiding independence and/or war. I found a quotation from the Congress’s address to the people of Great Britain which summed up the message of 1774:

Permit us to be as free as yourselves, and we shall ever esteem a union with you to be our greatest glory and our greatest happiness

(Of course, in the original eighteenth-century prose, that’s only a fragment of a much longer sentence.)

In addition, The History List just announced its advent calendar, conceived by proprietor Lee Wright.

This calendar counts down the days to 25 December because that was the night Gen. George Washington launched the attack on the Crown forces at Trenton, crossing the Delaware as depicted in the main image. Each window in that picture opens to a new image of some object associated with that event.

For this item, I drafted a brief description of how December 1776 was going for Washington. (Not well.) 

I don’t see any money from my little contributions to History List products, but every so often I do get ice cream.

The Broad Base of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress

The main point I make about the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, convened 250 years ago this month, is that it had more support and participation from the men of Massachusetts than the colony’s chartered legislature.

The provincial census of 1765 listed 186 towns and districts, and more were formed in the following decade. Here’s what I wrote in The Road to Concord about how those towns usually made up the legislature:

Under Massachusetts’s official charter, most towns were invited to send two representatives to each General Court. Very small towns, with fewer than 120 voters, could send only one and did not have to send any. In many places, especially those farthest from Boston, the inhabitants might have trouble convincing a gentleman to leave his farm, or balk at paying that gentleman’s expenses.

Most towns therefore sent a single representative. If a town of moderate size sent no one at all, it was supposed to pay a fine, but that penalty was never levied. As a result, only about two-thirds of the towns participated in a typical General Court before the Revolutionary turmoil.

In contrast, over 180 Massachusetts towns were represented at the first meeting of the Provincial Congress in Salem on October 7, 1774, with only 21 towns listing as having sent no delegate. There was no cap on the number of men who might represent a town in the Provincial Congress, so several towns sent three or more delegates. All told, there were 293 men at the first congress, about twice the legislature’s usual number.

In other words, even though towns had been legally obligated to represent themselves in the General Court, many chose not to. Even though towns had no legal obligation to this new Provincial Congress, many more chose to participate, in defiance of the law, the general, and Parliament. The Provincial Congress was thus a more representative, broader-based body than the preceding legislatures.

Looking back, I’d revise that passage to say that we don’t know how many towns had elected representatives in Salem on 7 October. The newspapers of the time said there were ninety men in all, so the count of towns must have been lower.

However, after the Provincial Congress got down to business in Concord four days later, its official record listed 180 towns. It’s likely that not all elected representatives made it to that start of that session, so that list could have grown a bit over time to that number. Nonetheless, it’s obvious that the congress had a broad popular base and thus, for democrats, more legitimacy.

“Behold, the Guns Were Gone” Commemoration at Minute Man Park, 14 Sept.

On Saturday, 14 September, Minute Man National Historical Park will host a special event called “‘Behold, The Guns Were Gone’: 250th commemoration of stolen cannon and political turmoil in September 1774.”

This has been in my calendar for a long time as “cannon fun day.” But the formal event description is:

Enjoy a day of lectures, artillery firing demonstrations, and interactive ranger programs focused around cannons and the politics of 1774. Today, Minute Man National Historical Park proudly displays the original “Hancock” 3pdr cannon in our North Bridge Visitor Center. This cannon was one of four recovered by Patriots from British-controlled Boston in September 1774 and smuggled to Concord in early 1775.

And here’s the schedule of events.

10:00 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.
Informal Living History
North Bridge Visitor Center, parking at 174 Liberty Street, Concord

10:30 A.M.
A September to Remember: The Powder Alarm and Court Closures
Park Ranger Jim Hollister explores how the events of September 1774 put Massachusetts on the path to war in 1775.
North Bridge Visitor Center

11:00 A.M., 2:30 P.M., and 3:30 P.M.
Artillery Firing Demonstration
Park Living Historians demonstrate the safe firing of a 3pdr artillery piece. (30 Minutes)
North Bridge Visitor Center

11:30 A.M., 3:00 P.M., and 4:00 P.M.
Join the Artillery!
See if you have what it takes to be an 18th-century artillerist in this non-firing hands-on experience. Join a Park Ranger for an interactive program about 18th century cannons and their use on the battlefield. (30 minutes)
North Bridge Visitor Center

1:00 P.M.
The Gunhouse Heists and the New England Arms Race
Join historian J. L. Bell at Minute Man Visitor Center for a lecture about September 1774 and how patriot forces managed to steal cannon from their safehouses guarded by British soldiers in Boston. (60 minutes)
Lexington Visitor Center, parking at 210 North Great Road in Lincoln (allow five minutes to walk to the visitor center)

My talk will of course draw from The Road to Concord—and from what I’ve learned since writing that book.

“A ball came thru the Meeting house near my head”

Yesterday we left Maj. Loammi Baldwin and his Woburn militiamen skedaddling east from Brooks Hill in Concord with the withdrawing British column on their tail.

Baldwin’s account in his diary, as transcribed in this copy with line breaks for easier reading, continues:

we came to Tanner Brooks at Lincoln Bridge & then we concluded to scatter & make use of the trees & walls for to defend us & attack them—We did so & pursued on flanking them—(Mr Daniel Thompson was killed & others[)]. till we came to Lexington. I had several good shots—

“Tanner Brooks” referred to the tannery owned by the Brooks family. Analysts of the battle say the Woburn companies engaged the British troops somewhere around the Hartwell Tavern within the borders of Lincoln.

The Enemy marched very fast & left many dead & wounded and a few tired I proceeded on till coming between the meeting house and Mr Buckmans Tavern with a Prisoner before me when the Cannon begun to play the Balls flew near me I judged not more than 2 yards off.

I immediately retreated back behind the Meeting house and had not been there 10 seconds before a ball came thru the Meeting house near my head.

I retreated back towards the meadow North of the Meeting house & lay & heard the ball in the air & saw them strike the ground I judged about 15 or 20 was fired but not one man killed with them. They were fired from the crook in the road by Easterbrooks—

The picture above, courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society, shows a “small cannon ball, said to have been found on the side of the road near Lexington” at some point. The webpage for this artifact says: “It is made of lead and was the type of projectile fired from a smooth-bored cannon.”

In The Road to Concord I argue that the presence of cannon in Concord, and particularly the brass cannon of the Boston militia train, was crucial to Gen. Thomas Gage’s decision to order an expedition there.

But the provincials moved most of those cannon further west in the days before that march. They probably weren’t all equipped for use, anyway. On the British side, the expedition under Lt. Col. Francis Smith marched with no artillery for maximum speed.

But Col. Percy’s reinforcement column did come out with field-pieces, and those were the cannon that Loammi Baldwin and his Woburnites ran into. By deploying heavy weapons for the first time that day, Percy was able to make time for the combined British forces to regroup in Lexington, tend their wounded, and set off for Boston.

As for Maj. Baldwin, his diary stops as quoted above. The transcripts don’t resume until May, when he was an officer in the provincial army. Baldwin probably decided that having marched into Concord and back, fired “several good shots,” and taken a prisoner, his unit had done their dangerous duty for the day. He and his men may have followed the British column east for some more miles, but they stayed out of cannon range.

Catching Up on the Audiobook Edition

An exchange with a friend from high school brought my attention to the audiobook edition of The Road to Concord.

It’s available through Audible and through Apple, and perhaps other channels.

I started to wonder about the audiobook narrator, Douglas R. Pratt. And it turned out there’s an interview with him from FangirlNation. That page not only lays out Pratt’s varied career but also how he made himself an audiobook narrator:

Audible opened a service called ACX, the Audible Creators Exchange. Essentially, if you own the rights to a book and want it narrated, you can list it with ACX. Narrators can search the listings and submit auditions to books that they would like to narrate.

Again, most of the time you send in an audition and nothing happens, but if the rights holder likes your audition they offer you a contract to produce the book. I got an offer after a couple of months of trying, a self-published self-help book. After a couple of those I attracted the attention of an actual publisher. Now I am in the happy position of getting lists of titles from a couple of publishers to pick and choose from. . . .

I look through the Amazon listings of titles that I’ve been offered, and I usually buy a copy. Authors need royalties. If I get the contract I generally get a gratis copy on Kindle or PDF as part of that, but I don’t consider buying books a waste of money. Anyway, I will read the first few chapters, and if my initial impression was correct I’ll ask for the chance to narrate it.

If I get the contract I read the whole thing, making notes as I go as to words that might be hard to pronounce (usually names). I usually get the author’s email address so I can verify those words, or I look them up on the Internet. . . .

It takes about three hours to produce an hour of finished audio. I record the book, usually a chapter or two at a time, and do an edit pass to cut out the mistakes. I re-record and edit in any sections that need it; I’ve gotten pretty good at making edits seamless. Finally, I give the whole thing one more listen to make sure I haven’t missed anything. I have enjoyed learning to do my own editing and post production.

It’s striking how much technology has changed the audiobook industry from just a few decades ago, when I was in book publishing and also making long drives with binders full of cassettes from the library. Digitization has spread out not just the distribution and consumption but also the production.

Pratt’s other narrations on Audible include Gary Wheeler Stone and Mark Lender’s Fatal Sunday, John S. Pancake’s This Destructive War, Patrick Spero’s Frontier Country, Kevin T. Barksdale’s The Lost State of Franklin, and Ian Macpherson McCulloch’s John Bradstreet's Raid, 1758, if you’re eager to hear some eighteenth-century American history.

Where Have You Gone, Colonel Robinson?

After Boston’s first anti-Stamp Act protest in 1765, Lemuel Robinson changed the sign outside the tavern he owned in Dorchester (shown above) to show Liberty Tree.

The Sign of the Liberty Tree hosted the big banquet of the Boston Sons of Liberty in August 1769.

Robinson was captain of a Suffolk County artillery company under Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, then a colonel after the Massachusetts Provincial Congress called on Patriots to reorganize their militia structure.

By January 1775 Robinson was hiding two of the Boston train’s small cannon on his property under dung heaps. Two more cannon, plus two mortars, were moved out there soon after. Committee of safety records hint that it took some prodding before Robinson turned those weapons over to provincial agents to be moved further out to Concord.

During the Battle of Lexington and Concord, Robinson made his tavern a center for feeding militiamen arriving outside Boston from the southwest. He became an officer in the New England army, but also stepped on other officers’ toes with his aggressive recruiting tactics.

Robinson then shifted to representing Dorchester in the Massachusetts General Court.

The British military wasn’t the only danger that year. Smallpox was spreading as well. After the king’s troops sailed away, there was a major effort to inoculate people.

On 3 Aug 1776 Elbridge Gerry wrote to his colleagues in Philadelphia about how a number of people they knew had come through that treatment:

Generals [James] Warren, [Benjamin] Lincoln Mrs. [Elizabeth] Bodwoin and a Number of our other Friends are recovered. Mrs. [Mercy] Warren in a good Way, poor Colo. Lem. Robinson dyed by imprudently pumping Cold Water on his Arm after getting well of the Distemper.

So how should we classify Lemuel Robinson’s death? As a result of smallpox? During the smallpox epidemic? Or that more obscure cause, “imprudently pumping Cold Water on his Arm”?

Obelisks Being Repaired

The National Park Service is preparing for the Sestercentennial, which means sites with Revolutionary roots are being spruced up.

The agency maintains a list of “deferred maintenance” projects with a total cost that’s now more than $22 billion.

The 250th anniversary of the Revolution, and the crowds that’s expected to bring to those parks, has sent some money toward those maintenance projects. That’s a Good Thing.

There is an immediate downside, however: In the next couple of years that work might affect access to or views of some sites.

At Minute Man National Historical Park, for instance, the obelisk erected at the site of Concord’s North Bridge in 1863 and the nearby Minute Man Statue were recently conserved, shrouding them briefly.

A larger and longer project has started at the Bunker Hill Monument. Restoring the upper exterior of that stone tower means putting up lots of scaffolding, which will surround the monument and affect the views from its windows.

For safety, the area immediately around the tower and lodge are fenced off, though both buildings are still open to the public. I believe one of the small cannon traced in The Road to Concord is still on display in the lodge.

That work is scheduled to be done by the end of this year, keeping the tower in good shape for its spotlight in 2025.

Folks eager to see a towering Revolutionary obelisk this summer and fall might instead take a trip to the Saratoga Monument in Victory, New York. It will be open on weekends from 12 August to 15 October.

The Saratoga Monument is 155 feet tall, with 188 steps, compared to the Bunker Hill Monument’s 221 feet and 294 steps. However, it also offers more decoration to look at, including statues of Continental leaders Horatio Gates, Philip Schuyler, and Daniel Morgan on three of its four sides.

“Arms (deliver’d by the Inhabitants in April 1775)”

On 27 Apr 1775, Boston’s selectmen and designated committee members delivered to the royal governor, Gen. Thomas Gage, “the return made to them by the constables of the town relative to the delivery of arms in their respective wards.”

In other words, the count of how many weapons people had turned over to town officials in exchange for being allowed to leave the besieged town.

The next day, one member of that committee, former selectman Henderson Inches, left Boston and went to where the Massachusetts committee of safety was meeting in Cambridge. He brought the same data:

Mr. Henderson Inches, who left Boston this day, attended, and informed the committee, that the inhabitants of Boston had agreed with the general, to have liberty to leave Boston with their effects, provided that they lodged their arms with the selectmen of that town, to be by them kept during the present dispute, and that, agreeably to said agreement, the inhabitants had, on yesterday, lodged 1778 fire-arms, 634 pistols, 973 bayonets, and 38 blunderbusses, with their selectmen.

In 1900, Boston published an inventory of these weapons with the owners’ names attached (and somewhat different figures from Inches’s). The date on this record is 24 April, the first full day after the town voted to start collecting weapons, but that process took three days at least. It’s notable that this count of weapons “in the Town House” includes guns owned by the town itself. 

Recently Caitlin G. DeAngelis reported finding another inventory of “Arms (deliver’d by the Inhabitants in April 1775) in the Town House Chambers,” dated 1 March 1776, as the British military was slowly preparing to depart. (That process sped up considerably a few days later.) This list comes from Francis Green’s file submitted to the Loyalists Commission, preserved in the British National Archives, series AO 13 (Massachusetts). The photo above from DeAngelis shows the totals, including a note that most of the weapons were in poor repair.

Over the last twenty years I’ve mentioned the published list in a few history forums, hinting that it might provide useful data for a study of gun ownership in occupied Boston. The Green list, which differs slightly in what’s counted and in the totals, could add to that data. No one’s taken up that challenge so far.

The publications that discuss Gage’s demand that Bostonians lodge their firearms with the town are by and large those arguing that a significant factor in the American Revolution was the royal government’s attempts to confiscate individuals’ guns, with implications for modern political conflicts.

Now I’ve written a book about the competition between Gage’s government and the Patriot underground for artillery pieces in 1774 and 1775. I argue that was a precipitating factor in how the war began. But I don’t see evidence for a similar conflict over muskets, pistols, and other individually owned and operated weapons.

Gen. Gage arrived in Boston in May 1774. The “Powder Alarm” in September made both sides shift to military preparations. Samuel Dyer tried to assassinate two British officers with pistols in October. A small British army squad and the New Hampshire militia exchanged fire at Fort William and Mary in December. And at no time before 19 April 1775 did Gage try to confiscate people’s muskets or pistols.

Only after the war had started, the redcoats had suffered hundreds of casualties, and thousands of militiamen were besieging his base did Gen. Gage seek to disarm the civilians all around him. Until then, he’d respected private property and the province’s militia law. And even after he took this step to protect his soldiers from an armed uprising, Gage asked elected town officials to collect and store the weapons, not his army or appointees. This was a wartime measure, not a peacetime policy.

COMING UP: The bargain collapses.

A Few More Tidbits from Along the Way

Here are a few more observations on the sources I examined in my hunt for traces of Dr. Samuel Prescott this month.

First, in 1835 Lemuel Shattuck, probably relying on local and family traditions in Concord, wrote that when Prescott met Paul Revere and William Dawes, he “had spent the evening at Lexington,…and having been alarmed, was hastening his return home.”

In other words, Dr. Prescott had left his fiancée, Lydia Mulliken, because he had heard about the approaching regulars. Given the timing, that news had probably reached Lexington when the Boston men arrived at the Lexington parsonage. By the time the riders met on the road, Revere and Dawes didn’t need to tell Prescott.

If Dr. Prescott had indeed already heard the alarm, that helps to explain two details:

• why he left the Mulliken house—because he wanted to get back to his home town and prepare for any necessary military or medical action. He may therefore have planned to spend the night.
• how Revere and Dawes quickly learned that Prescott was a “high Son of Liberty.” They were probably all talking about what the army might be up to.

Second, in The Road to Concord, I wrote that James Barrett’s family and friends probably took the four cannon stolen from Boston to Stow and hid them near the house of Henry Gardner, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s reciever-general (equivalent of treasurer).

I based that on a statement in a Bicentennial-era history of Stow citing a local tradition. I wished I had a stronger source, but I presented it only as a possibility.

In the 24 Apr 1824 Concord Gazette and Middlesex Yeoman article I quoted this month I spotted this sentence:

Five pieces of cannon, a quantity of ammunition had been previously conveyed to Stow, and put under the care of Mr. GARDNER.

That’s still an unsourced statement from a newspaper story published forty-nine years after the event. Nonetheless, it’s gratifying to find people in Concord believed that was true.


Finally, in the 14 Feb 1778 article from the Providence Gazette where I found Dr. Prescott’s name among the men who had died in Halifax prison, another name is “Samuel Dyre.”

Samuel Dyer (whose name was spelled other ways as well) was the subject of the two articles I wrote for the Journal of the American Revolution published earlier this month.

Early in those articles I noted how hard it is to trace that Samuel Dyer since he was a sailor, thus transient and unlikely to leave a mark on institutional records, and since there were other men with the same or similar names.

Therefore, I resist the temptation to say that sailor Samuel Dyer from 1774–75 was the same man who died in Halifax in late 1776 or early 1777, most likely after being captured on a privateer.

After all, the last time my Samuel Dyer definitely appears in the historical record, he had been working for the royal authorities as a trustie inside the Boston jail. Would he really have enlisted aboard an American privateer after that?

All I can say is, given my Samuel Dyer’s habit of switching sides and telling powerful men what they wanted to hear, I can’t rule out that possibility.

“General Gage and the Guns” Tonight

Tonight, April 12, I’ll deliver an online talk for the Army Heritage Center Foundation in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on “General Gage and the Guns of the Boston Train.”

This is one of several talks I’ve developed from The Road to Concord. This one looks at events through Gen. Thomas Gage’s eyes, examining how he tried to stymie the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s effort to build a military force.

Here’s Gage reporting to Viscount Barrington, the longtime British secretary of war, on 25 Sept 1774:

I write to your Lordship by a private Ship fearing the Post to New York which must convey my Letters from hence for the Packet not quite safe, tho’ it has not yet been stopped; but People have been so questioned, and impeded on the Road, there is no knowing how soon the Post may be examined, for there seems no Respect for any Thing.

Affairs here are worse that even in the Time of the Stamp-Act, I don’t mean in Boston, for throughout the Country. The New England Provinces, except part of New Hampshire, are I may say in Arms, and the Question is now not whether you shall quell Disturbances in Boston, but whether those Provinces shall be conquered, and I find it is the General Resolution of all the Continent to support the Massachusett’s Bay in their Opposition to the late Acts. From Appearances no People are more determined for a Civil War, the whole Country from hence to New York armed, training and providing Military Stores.

Every Man supposed averse to their Measures so molest’d & oppressed, that if he can get out of the Country, which is not an easy Matter, he takes Shelter in Boston.

Clearly, Gen. Gage warned his superiors that in Massachusetts the Crown government was facing opposition that was widespread, armed, and militant. He didn’t even trust the royal mail. Neighboring colonies were joining the rebels. He was losing potential allies in the countryside as they sought safety in Boston.

When Gage’s messages reached London, however, Lord North and his ministers viewed them as alarmist. They didn’t accept his reports as factual. They lost faith in him.

Ironically, some later historians have judged Gage to be too cautious. He was indeed reluctant to act until the secretary of state, Lord Dartmouth, told him he had to—but that was in large part because he knew how strong his opponents could be. In the fall of 1774 and winter of 1775, Gage was cautious because the situation warranted it.

Exploring the Story of Samuel Dyer

This week I have two articles up on the Journal of the American Revolution:

• “The Return of Samuel Dyer: An Attempted Assassination in Revolutionary Boston”
• “The Secrets of Samuel Dyer”

These are two parts of the same research project. To borrow the summary from the second article:

in October 1774 a sailor named Samuel Dyer returned to Boston, accusing high officers of the British army of holding him captive, interrogating him about the Boston Tea Party, and shipping him off to London in irons. Unable to file a lawsuit for damages, Dyer attacked two army officers on the town’s main street, cutting one and nearly shooting another—the first gunshot aimed at royal authorities in Boston in the whole Revolution. Those actions alarmed both sides of the political divide, and Dyer was soon locked up in the Boston jail. Everyone seemed to agree the man was insane.

But there was a lot more going on than Bostonians could see. And Dyer resurfaced in an unexpected way.

Originally I wrote up this story for The Road to Concord, but it has only a passing connection to that book’s focus, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s cannon. Still, the events involved many of the same players and further raised tensions in October 1774. Dyer’s attack could even have started the war in a way quite different from how we remember it.

To spread the word about this project, I’ll do a couple of audio interviews in the next few days.

On the morning of Friday, 7 April, starting at 10:00 A.M., I’ll be Jimmy Mack’s guest on the Dave Nemo show on Sirius XM, discussing the months leading up to April 1775. This will be part of the show’s “Revolution Road” segment featuring writers from the Journal of the American Revolution.

On Sunday, I’ll discuss these articles with Brady Crytzer for the Dispatches podcast. That episode will drop later this month.

“I shou’d loose my life if it was known by these people”

In the before times, not only before the pandemic but before I launched Boston 1775, I looked at the 24 Sept 1775 letter from Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr., that I’ve started analyzing.

It’s in the Thomas Gage Papers at the Clements Library in Michigan. I was there doing some of the research that eventually became The Road to Concord.

At the time I wasn’t so interested in events after the war had started, so I didn’t transcribe the letter. I merely noted that this document was in the same handwriting as other letters from Church.

That was before cell phones had cameras in them. These days, many researchers spend more time in archive reading rooms photographing than reading, taking home lots of images to decipher later.

Fortunately for me, Henry Belcher transcribed the letter and published it in The First American Civil War (1911), and that’s now available for everyone. He called the document only “An American Spy’s Report,” not recognizing Church as the spy.

Allan French’s General Gage’s Informers (1932), which confirmed Church (and Benjamin Thompson) as secret agents for Gage, didn’t discuss this letter. Neither did John Nagy’s 2013 biography of Church.

I’m sorry if I’ve missed another study, but as far as I know yesterday’s posting was the first discussion of this letter in the context of Church’s espionage career. So over several days I’m going to analyze all the parts of this letter.

Toward the end is a passage that reveals something of Church’s spycraft:

If I am to Continue in your Service Major be so good to send me out a little Cash, Charly the ferry Man if you can trust him may give it me—Slyly—by heavens Major I shou’d loose my life if it was known by these people.

I attempted some time ago to write you, over Chalsey ferry but the Committy would not let me go down to the ferry ways so as to see Charls. After that I did not try but went to Newport and from thence wrote. I am forced to act with the greatest Caution in this Matter, but now Sir I think a way is open by which I can let you know how matters go with us if you Requist it, If you do not, I am very much obliged to you for your kindness and friendship attested toward me & am Yrs &c. &c.

The “Major” whom Church wrote to was almost certainly Maj. Edward Cane of the 43rd Regiment. He was the addressee on Church’s ciphered letter that I discussed in the last couple of days. Back in June, Cane had participated in the arrest of a couple of suspected spies within Boston.

Almost all of Church’s surviving spy reports include a plea for money, like this one. That pattern strongly suggests that money motivated Church’s betrayal of the Patriot cause.

The passage above also shows the doctor clearly knew he was committing a hanging offense. Yet from the moment of his arrest to when he was sent into exile, Church denied being a spy.

TOMORROW: The ferrymen.

When the Lights Went Out in Boston

The latest episode of the fine HUB History podcast focused on how Boston installed its first street lamps in 1773 and 1774, the effort hampered by the equipment being wrecked on Cape Cod along with some East India Company tea.

The discussion doesn’t end with those whale-oil lamps but traces the changes in illumination technology to today. Along the way, we learn that the “historic” street lamps now decorating certain Boston neighborhoods are far younger than most people assume.

The podcast’s story of the first street lamps draws heavily on the records of Boston’s town meeting and the journal of John Rowe, the merchant put in charge of the lamp committee.

Here’s another aspect of the story, preserved in the records of Boston’s selectmen. Each year’s first town meeting chose those seven officials to carry out ordinary business and deal directly with contractors.

On 1 March, those officials recorded:

It was agreed with Edward Smyth to have £40— Sterg. for one year, for overseeing the Lamps & Lamplighters & delivering the Oyle & Wicks & other necessary.

Smith (as the name was more often written) got paid £13.6.8 for the first quarter of the year, March through May. (No, I don’t know why the town paid Smith a third of his annual salary to cover a quarter of the year.)

Three months later, on 1 June, the selectmen met with the lamplighters themselves, named as “Messrs. Barker, Fowle, Stevens, Wm. & Thomas Sharp, Hoadly, & Ayres.” Those men “agreed with the Selectmen that they would continue Lamp Lighters thro’ the Winter.”

But bigger questions were roiling the town. On 13 May there was a meeting to hear the new Boston Port Bill and formulate a response to it. That discussion continued through meeting after meeting all summer. Almost everyone agreed that the Port Bill was a constitutional affront and an economic disaster. And, of course, alongside Parliament’s new law, companies of British army regulars were once again marching on Boston streets.

One response to the law was not to light those new street lamps after all. There’s no record of a decision, nor report in the newspapers. But on 24 August Edward Smith “apply’d to the Selectmen and acquainted them he expected to be paid according to Agreement although the Lamps had not been lighted the last Quarter.”

At the end of the month the selectmen’s records confirmed: “by reason of the distress occasioned by the Boston Port Bill, the Lamps have not been light the last Quarter.”

As the HUB History episode recounts, although the town governed the process of installing and maintaining the street lamps, it didn’t undertake to pay for them through taxes. Instead, Boston asked wealthy citizens to donate money for that effort. Enough money had come in the buy the lamps, install them, and hire staff to maintain them.

But with the Port Bill straining the town’s trade with Britain and other colonies, those wealthy citizens might have felt they couldn’t afford to pay for street lamps after all. Or perhaps people felt the illumination clashed with the somber, resentful mood of a town protesting arbitrary law and military occupation. Maybe the longer days of midyear made it easier to do without street lighting. With no visible decision point, it’s impossible to know for sure why the lamps weren’t lit and who made that choice.

(We do know that, since the lamps went dark in June, that decision had nothing to do with the ‘arms race’ that broke out in September, with Patriots trying to smuggle artillery and other weapons of war out of Boston and the British military trying to stop them. When I wrote about that conflict in The Road to Concord, I wondered if dark streets made moving cannon around at night easier, but that could only be conjecture.)

TOMORROW: Making choices in the dark.

Speaking of William Molineux

The Patriot leader William Molineux died unexpectedly on 22 Oct 1774. That news came as the long political confrontation between Boston and royal officials was turning into a military confrontation between Massachusetts and the Crown.

Molineux had been one of the most visible of the Boston Whigs since the non-importation movement. He was always at the front of the crowd during outdoor protests, pushing for harder responses in meetings. In 1774 alone Molineux:

• was defying a judicial order to serve on a jury as a protest against the judges accepting salaries from the tea tariff.
• led Bostonians in booing the Customs Commissioners at a banquet in May. 
• addressed the crowd in Cambridge during the Powder Alarm in September.
• helped to collect cannon for the resistance in October. 

And then Molineux was dead. His sudden disappearance from the scene raised tensions and sparked rumors. It also caused his memory to fade since he wasn’t around for the Revolutionary War or the new federal government.

For The Road to Concord I wrote a long chapter about Molineux leading up to his death, what I thought would be the most detailed study of him yet published. And then, because the manuscript was too long, I cut that chapter and another that weren’t tightly tied to the main narrative about stolen cannon.

Last month Bob Allison and Jonathan Lane of Revolution 250 invited me to come onto the coalition’s podcast. They suggested I might have something to say about Molineux. Well, I had a lot to say about Molineux!

You can listen to that conversation through Buzzsprout and other major podcast platforms.

[I’ve provided a link to the audio podcast. If you watch the video on YouTube or Facebook, it’s not just that that camera performs poorly in dim light. Right now I really do have a beard.]

“General Gage’s Spies” via the Golden Ball Tavern, 15 Sept.

On Thursday, 15 September, I’ll deliver an online lecture for the Golden Ball Tavern Museum in Weston.

The talk will be titled “General Gage’s Spies,” and here’s our event description:

On February 23, 1775, three men arrived at Isaac Jones’s tavern in Weston, saying they were surveyors from Boston. They were actually two officers and a private from the king’s army. The royal governor, General Thomas Gage, had assigned them to find cannons and other military supplies that the rebel Massachusetts government was collecting outside of Boston. Drawn from new research, this talk discusses who those men were, the crucial role they played in the Battle of Lexington and Concord, and what happened to them after the Revolutionary War.

The spies’ visit to Jones’s Golden Ball Tavern is fairly well known. In The Road to Concord I showed how their mission fit into Gen. Gage’s larger strategy to locate and neutralize the artillery that rural Patriots were hiding. Since then I’ve gathered some more information about the two army officers, which will be part of this talk.

Yet another new wrinkle is that even as those spies were staying at the Golden Ball on their way to Worcester, people elsewhere in Weston were preparing two cannon for battle. Braddyll Smith, recently chosen to be both Weston’s representative to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and colonel of the local militia regiment, knew about that effort and was probably in charge.

Smith’s predecessor in those posts was Elisha Jones, a Loyalist who had left for Boston around the turn of the year. Presumably Smith and his Patriot neighbors made sure that Elisha’s cousin Isaac, proprietor at the Golden Ball, never heard about their two cannon. After all, you didn’t know who might come through town.

My talk is scheduled to start at 6:00 P.M. Here’s the link to register. This event is free, thanks to support from the Weston Cultural Council, and folks can also join or donate to the Golden Ball Tavern Museum to support and learn about more such events.

“Admiral Graves foresaw a great likelihood…”

The Road to Concord describes the Boston militia artillery company’s theft of their own cannon in September 1774, and how Gen. Thomas Gage reacted to that.

Robert Beatson’s Naval and Military Memoirs of Great Britain, from 1727 to 1783, published in 1804, includes a passage describing how Gage’s counterpart in the Royal Navy, Adm. Samuel Graves, reacted to events in and around Boston that month.

This recounting of events was very characteristic of Graves’s own reports home:

The rebellious designs of the people became every day more evident, and a mob attempted to remove some pieces of cannon during the night from Boston; and actually carried some from Charlestown [on 7 September], which place may be regarded as a suburb of that town. The disaffected gave out at the same time, that their intention was to fortify a camp in the country; and soon after, the boats of the Lively and Preston seized a flat-boat belonging to the Americans [on 20 September], with six very good guns, six pounders, which they were carrying up Charlestown river, and were supposed to be destined for the same service.

From the disposition of the people, Admiral Graves foresaw a great likelihood, that there would soon be a want of artificers to work for Government, although Boston abounded with shipwrights, sailmakers, caulkers, &c. He therefore wrote, in the most pressing terms, to Captain [James] Ayscough of his Majesty’s sloop the Swan, then at New York, but under orders to return to Boston, to procure such work-people as might be necessary to keep the ships under his command in proper repair, lest those at Boston should refuse their assistance. This precaution eventually proved of great service; for after the skirmish at Lexington, none of the Americans durst work for the King, either in the navy or army departments, but at the hazard of their lives.

In sum:

• The Bostonians were a criminal mob deteremined on rebellion.
• By implication, Gen. Gage and the army couldn’t handle that problem.
• In contrast, Adm. Graves was far-sighted and realistic, and more people should have listened to him. 

As I said, characteristic.

This passage also strongly suggests that Gage never informed the admiral about the disappearance of the militia field-pieces. Otherwise, the admiral would surely have mentioned that embarrassing fact in London, as another thing that was by no means his fault.