American Tempest (32 page)

Patrick Henry. He called Americans to rebellion against
British rule in his famous “liberty-or-death” speech in St. John's Church, Richmond, Virginia, on March 20, 1775.
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On March 20, 1775, the delegates sidled into the pews—Washington, Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee, and other renowned Virginians. Henry took a seat in the third pew on the gospel, or left, side of the church facing the front. After the call to order, he stood to propose three resolutions. The first two echoed similar resolutions of the Maryland assembly: “That a well regulated militia, composed of gentlemen and yeomen, is the natural strength and only security of a free government; that such a
militia . . . would forever render it unnecessary for the mother country to keep among us, for the purpose of our defense, any standing army of mercenary soldiers . . . and would obviate the pretext of taxing us for their support.”
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Henry's third resolution, however, broke new ground, proposing, “That this colony be immediately put into a state of defense, and . . . prepare a plan for embodying, arming, and disciplining such a number of men, as may be sufficient for that purpose.”
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Spectators gasped—then began applauding as they realized Henry had called for armed rebellion. Richard Henry Lee seconded Henry, and in the debate that followed, many delegates insisted that Lord North's reconciliation plan had put peace within reach and that Henry's resolutions were premature. When debate ended, Henry rose again to speak, with what a clergyman at the scene called “an unearthly fire burning in his eye.”

“Mr. President,” Henry began, “it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope.

Henry paused, staring heavenward at the roof beams of the church, as if in prayer, as the tension in the audience increased.

He raised his arms toward heaven. “Forbid it, Almighty God!” he cried out. “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, Give me liberty! Or give me death.”
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After delegates had caught their collective breaths, the convention passed Henry's resolutions and appointed a committee to prepare a plan for “embodying, arming, and disciplining” the Virginia militia. Within weeks, men and boys in every county across the state had sewn the words “Liberty or death” on their shirt fronts and rode to their county courthouses to volunteer in local militias to fight the British.

In Boston, meanwhile, British troops, chafing under the constant, months-long barrage of epithets and missiles, seemed to snap. With no evident provocation, they seized a Patriot farmer at random in the marketplace and tarred and feathered him. Then, as the regimental band followed, its pipes and flutes squealing, the troops paraded their victim through town in a tumbrel while singing a tune that was new to Boston:

A second mob of troops then stomped across the Common to Beacon Hill, where they vandalized the fences and gardens of Patriot merchants.

“Colonel Hancock's elegant home . . . was attacked by a group of officers who, with their swords, cut and hacked the fence before his house in a most scandalous manner,” merchant John Andrews wrote to his brother-in-law. Two days later “four sergeants and as many men were sent to insult John Hancock under pretense of seeing if his stables would do for barracks.” Andrews said that when Hancock protested, the soldiers sneered and taunted the merchant, saying “his house, stables, etc., would soon be theirs, and then they would do as they pleased.” Hancock raged at General Gage, who, rather than ignite an incendiary situation, sent “one of his aides-de-camp to the officer of the guard at the bottom of the Common to seize any officer or private who should molest Colonel Hancock or any
inhabitant in their lawful calling.” Gage issued an abject apology and promised to “redress him . . . if he was in any ways insulted again,”
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but Hancock now recognized that he and his family were in great danger.

As Patrick Henry delivered his incendiary speech in Richmond, John Hancock left Boston for Concord, twenty miles away, where the Provincial Congress reconvened out of reach of Gage's forces. Hancock's Committee of Safety began purchasing medicines, canteens, “and all kinds of stores, sufficient for an army of fifteen thousand to take the field.”
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Some delegates worried that they had given Hancock and his committee too many war-making powers. They voted to restrict his authority to call out the militia until “the Army under command of General Gage, or any part thereof to the number of five hundred, shall march out of the town of Boston, with artillery and baggage.”
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With Hancock's duties as Committee of Safety chairman requiring increasing amounts of his time, he yielded the presidency of the Provincial Congress to his friend Dr. Joseph Warren while he, Hancock, rode back to Boston to see to the arming of the proposed Massachusetts army. Recognizing the new army's need for artillery, he ordered men from the Sons of Liberty to recover the provincial militia's four mounted cannons then in the hands of British troops. Two each stood in the New and Old Gun Houses by a school at the bottom of the Common. While the sergeant usually on guard was at roll call, Patriots entered a side door of the Old Gun House, removed the barrels from their carriages and hid them in a large chest in the school next door. British soldiers who searched the school ignored the chest, on which the schoolmaster was posed, calmly resting his lame foot while listening to students recite their lessons. As the soldiers searched the school in vain, the patriots stole the two other cannons in the New Gun House and acquired the first artillery of what would grow into the American army. They immediately named the first two cannons “Hancock” and “Adams.”
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On April 2, Hancock returned to the Provincial Congress at Concord, but recognizing the dangers of leaving his family in Boston, he arranged for his aunt and his fiancée and her father to flee to the manse in Lexington that had been his boyhood home and where he promised to join them. “I
am not at liberty to say what I know,” he wrote them, “but pray . . . remove immediately from Boston. . . . But pray do not make my name known abroad as to this advice. . . . Things will very soon be serious.”
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Hancock's relatives and friends joined a growing stream of other panic-stricken families who fled Boston fearing an imminent outbreak of hostilities between the Minutemen and British troops. As they crossed Boston Neck to what they hoped was safer ground, they left behind a residue of scavengers—some of them members of Boston street mobs, others British soldiers—who plundered vacant homes and stripped them of their treasures. Although looters approached Hancock House, Redcoats now stood guard outside the palatial residency, waiting for British General Thomas Gage to take possession.

Hancock and his family did not reach Lexington a moment too soon. A week later, on April 14, General Gage received the official documents from the king “to arrest the principal actors and abettors in the Provincial Congress,”
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and with additional troops on their way, Gage made plans to turn the trade war into an armed conflict.

Gage had planted enough spies within the various Patriot groups to learn that the Patriots had hidden their arsenal at Concord, that Hancock had fled to Lexington, and that Sam Adams had joined him. Gage ordered a two-stage assault, with the main force to march to Concord to destroy the Patriot arsenal while a detachment stopped in Lexington to capture the traitors Hancock and Adams. But the Patriots had spies of their own, along with so-called vigilance committees in almost every hamlet. In Boston, Dr. Joseph Warren had organized a spy network of thirty craftsmen such as Revere, whom the British troops allowed to move about the town freely with their apprentices, plying essential trades—and gathering intelligence on British troop movements. They learned that someone in the Patriot camp had alerted Gage to the secret arsenal at Concord and the whereabouts of Hancock and Sam Adams.

“We frequently took turns, two and two, to watch the soldiers patrolling the streets all night,” Revere wrote. “The boats belonging to the transports were all launched and carried under the sterns of the men-of-war. . . . On Tuesday evening . . . 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 immediately set off for Lexington, where Messrs. Hancock and Adams were, and acquaint them of the movements and that it was thought they were the objects.”
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Major General Dr. Joseph Warren. A renowned physician, he became speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and, as a major general in the Massachusetts militia, fought and died on Bunker's Hill.
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Gage dispatched small bands of soldiers to intercept Patriot spies on the Lexington and Concord road, but there were too few soldiers and too many
Patriots. Warren sent two of them—Revere and William Dawes—by different routes to warn Hancock and Adams. Revere set off on his famous midnight ride on Tuesday, April 18. Two friends rowed him across the Charles River to Charlestown, where he picked up a horse and rode toward Lexington, stopping at Medford to awaken the captain of the Minutemen. “I alarmed almost every house till I got to Lexington. I found Messrs. Hancock and Adams at the Reverend Mr. Clarke's. I told them my errand and inquired for Mr. Dawes. They said he had not been there. . . . After about half an hour Mr. Dawes came. We refreshed ourselves and set off for Concord to secure the stores.”
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Revere gave Hancock and Adams a letter from Warren “stating that a large body of British troops . . . were on their march to Lexington.”
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“Mr. Hancock gave the alarm immediately,” said Dorothy Quincy, then Hancock's fiancée and later his wife.

Revere and Dawes, meanwhile, rode off to warn Concord, joined by Dr. Samuel Prescott. On the way, a British patrol surprised them, but Prescott escaped and got through to Concord. The troops captured Revere, brought him back to Lexington, and released him.

The following day after nightfall, a force of seven hundred Redcoats began their march to Concord with orders “to seize and destroy . . . military stores.” Gage ordered the commander to “take care that the soldiers do not plunder the inhabitants, or hurt private property.”
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He sent “a small party
on horseback” to ride ahead “to stop all advice of your march getting to Concord before you,” but, of course, Revere, Dawes, and Prescott had already alerted the entire countryside.