Patriots (32 page)

Over the rest of the journey, they fared no better. Finally, in a house in Marlborough, they were trapped by patriots and asked their host, a Mr. Barnet, what was likely to happen if they were captured. He seemed reluctant to answer. When they pressed him, Barnet said that he knew his townsmen very well, and that they should expect the worst. They slipped out a back door, left their horses and walked the thirty-two miles to safety through snow.

Their commander didn’t consider the mission a failure. After several more expeditions, Gage thought that he had the military intelligence he needed: The town of Concord lay between hills that commanded it entirely. The town was spread out over a wide area, and a river with two bridges ran through its center. The houses were not close together. Tory informants said the town had fourteen pieces of cannon—ten of iron, four of brass. The Lexington road was open for six miles on the way to Concord, but some of it was lined with houses. And for troops marching down it, there was one patch that could be somewhat dangerous.

—

The British soldiers who hadn’t got their hands on John Hancock were venting their frustration on his property. In the weeks after the memorial service, Hancock returned to preside over Massachusetts’ renegade Provincial Congress, which was now meeting at Concord. The Continental Congress seemed likely to meet again in Philadelphia later in the spring, and Hancock was voted a delegate to that second session. Meanwhile, British soldiers hacked at the fences of his mansion on the Common with their swords and lobbed rocks through the windows. One night he went outside to put a stop to the destruction, but the soldiers refused to leave. They told him that since both the house and the stables would soon be theirs, they could do as they pleased.

General Gage’s attitude toward John Hancock remained unclear. As winter approached, he had enlisted Hancock’s help in finding barracks for his men. But then, even though he couldn’t bring himself to arrest Hancock, Gage had stripped him of his title as commander of the cadets. The corps had disbanded in protest.

At last, life in Boston became too perilous for Lydia Hancock.
She loaded up her carriage and set off for the Lexington parsonage where John Hancock had grown up. Mrs. Hancock’s niece and her husband, the Reverend Jonas Clark, occupied the manse, and they warmly received their aunt and her young friend,
Dorothy Quincy.

John Hancock was now thirty-eight, and his aunt was impatient for him to marry. Years before, when he had visited London as a young man, reports had filtered back to Lydia Hancock about a compliant chambermaid, and later there had been rumors about a middle-aged mistress,
Dorcas Griffith, who ran a grog shop near Hancock’s Wharf. That arrangement, if it existed, was entirely commercial. Mrs. Griffith welcomed upstairs any man with her price, including contingents of British soldiers. During those same years, Hancock had also called on
Sally Jackson, the daughter of a respectable Boston family. But Hancock had sent her a letter ending the courtship, and soon afterward Miss Jackson married a Boston selectman named Henderson Inches.

Given the latitude of his tastes, John Hancock may well have been ready to marry Dorothy Quincy from the Sunday when he was first captivated by a glimpse of her shapely small foot as she stepped out of church. But despite his aunt’s connivance, the romance seemed stalled. For about four years Lydia Hancock had brought the couple into almost daily contact while she fended off all other suitors. Her nephew was handsome, stalwart, certainly rich, without question the most popular man of his day. Since the Provincial Congress was meeting only a few miles from Lexington at Concord, Hancock could still visit Miss Quincy regularly. Her twenty-seventh birthday was approaching when she allowed herself to be evacuated from Boston.

—

Virginia’s delegates to the Continental Congress returned home from Philadelphia with widely different predictions for the future. Richard Henry Lee was sure that their appeals to England, combined with the threat of a trade embargo, would lead the king’s ministers to send back their capitulation by the next ship. Patrick Henry was less hopeful, but he seemed to be in the minority. Virginia’s Revolutionary Convention met at St. John’s Church in Richmond on March 20, 1775, to approve what had been accomplished in Philadelphia, and the prevailing mood was self-satisfaction. The colony’s patriots were sure that Britain would bend.

The convention had been under way three days when Patrick
Henry shattered their complacency. He proposed to prepare the Virginia militia to defend the colony in case of war, and Thomas Jefferson was forced to admire Henry’s foresight, although he still found the man something of a trial. Jefferson had been pleased to receive reports from Philadelphia that the committees there had considered Henry’s writing inadequate. But at this meeting in Richmond, Jefferson had to grant that Henry’s nerve was leaving the rest of them behind.

George Washington and the Lee brothers were with Jefferson at the church on the fine spring day when Henry waited in the third pew to defend his proposal. Peyton Randolph was presiding from the pulpit. The church windows had been opened, and since the hundred and twenty delegates filled most of the seats, the windows were crowded with spectators.

Preparing to speak, Patrick Henry felt his heart begin to pound, and the longer he waited the hotter his brow became. Few of the spectators knew that Henry’s tension was not entirely political. His wife, Sarah, the mother of his three daughters and three sons, was stricken with an affliction the family was trying to keep quiet. She had gone mad, and she threatened so often to kill herself that at last she had to be tied into a straitjacket.

When Henry was recognized, he began by praising the honor of those men who held a different opinion. But, he went on, “this is no time for ceremony. The question before the House is of awful moment to this country.” He said that if he did not speak he would consider himself guilty of treason to his country. Do not be lulled by an occasional smile from London, he added. Do not let yourself be betrayed with a kiss. Ask instead why British armies have come to your shores.

“Has Great Britain any enemy in this quarter of the world to call for all this accumulation of navies and armies? No, sir, she has none. They are meant for us; they can be meant for no other. They are sent over to find and rivet upon us those chains which the British Ministry has been so long forging. And what have we to oppose them? Shall we try argument? Sir, we have been trying that for the last ten years.

“Sir,” said Henry, addressing Peyton Randolph in the pulpit, “we have done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before
the throne and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the Ministry and Parliament. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot of the throne.”

Henry had begun calmly, but as his voice rose, tendons in his neck were standing out white and rigid. He said that if the colonists wished to be free, they must fight. “I repeat, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of Hosts is all that is left to us.

“They tell us, sir, that we are weak—unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be next week, or next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house?”

They were not weak, Henry said. “Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible to any force which our enemy can send against us.” Besides that, they had no choice. “The war is inevitable. And let it come! I repeat, sir: Let it come!”

As Patrick Henry turned his eyes around the church, men leaned forward in their seats. “Gentlemen may cry peace, peace—but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why should we idle here? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have?”

Patrick Henry’s shoulders sank. He crossed his wrists as though he were the one in a straitjacket. “Is life so dear,” he asked, “or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” He paused, raised his eyes and lifted up his hands, still held together. “Forbid it, Almighty God!” Henry turned to stare at the men who opposed him. Slowly, he bowed his body down. “I know not what course others may take.” He rose and straightened to his full height, and his next words came from between clenched teeth: “But as for me, give me liberty—” He paused to let the word die away. His left hand fell to his side. His right hand formed a fist as though he held a dagger, and he struck that fist to his heart. “—or give me death.”

There was no applause, only silence.

Battle at Lexington

ALBANY INSTITUTE OF ART

O
NE
S
ATURDAY
midnight in the middle of April 1775, Paul Revere suspected that General Gage was finally going to move against the patriot leaders. All the boats from the men-of-war in the harbor had been hauled to shore and repaired, and the grenadiers and the light infantry regiments had been taken off their regular duties. Because of the exodus of patriots from Boston and the Provincial Congress meeting in Concord, Revere found few leaders
left in town to inform. Even
Isaiah Thomas, the editor of the
Massachusetts Spy
, had packed up his press, his wife and their children and was heading for Watertown. Of the inner circle, only the two doctors had remained behind—Benjamin Church and Joseph Warren. Dr. Warren’s medical students were pleading with him not to make night calls, because they were sure he would be ambushed. But Warren was fearless, and Samuel Adams trusted
him above his other young lieutenants. After his wife died two years earlier, Warren had turned over his four children to their grandmother and thrown himself headlong into the cause. When he heard British soldiers and their Tory sympathizers assuring one another that the colonials would always back down, he said, “These fellows say we won’t fight. By heavens, I hope I shall
die up to my knees in blood.”

Paul Revere had stayed in Boston to serve as messenger when he was needed. After five months as a widower, he had married again. Although he was nearing his fortieth birthday and was raising five children, the eldest in her teens, he wasn’t ready to surrender his duties to younger men.

Revere’s family had come more recently to America than the Adamses or the Hutchinsons. Like the Faneuils and the Bowdoins, his father had been a Protestant Huguenot driven out of Catholic France. After several years in Massachusetts, Apollos Rivoire had changed his name to Paul Revere—“Merely on account that
the bumpkins pronounce it easier,” he said—and had passed that name on to his son. The Reveres lived one block from Thomas Hutchinson, but the social distance was unbreachable. Young Paul had been sent to the crowded North Writing School rather than to North Latin. Instead of studying at Harvard, he learned his father’s trade of silversmith.

When the demand for silver goods flagged during bad times, the younger Revere made false teeth. That was always a reliable business in a town where a European traveler noted that Boston girls often had lost half their teeth before they were twenty. Advertising in the
Boston Gazette
, Revere pointed out that a lack of teeth affected not only a person’s appearance but also one’s ability to speak in public, and he promised to supply teeth that would pass for nature’s.

Revere was a veteran of the French and Indian War, a strong, swarthy man who was quick to smile with his own fine teeth and who never powdered his hair or wore a wig. Modeling himself after Samuel Adams, he provided a valuable link between the wealthier party leaders and the town’s craftsmen.

Joseph Warren was six years younger than Paul Revere, but Revere regarded him as both his leader and his friend. On this April Saturday night, Revere took his news of the British preparations directly to Warren’s house, which had become the patriots’
headquarters. Warren agreed that Gage was probably headed for Concord to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock and to seize any arms stored there.

On Sunday morning, Revere rode to the Lexington parsonage where Hancock had grown up. The Provincial Congress had adjourned the day before, and he found Adams and Hancock visiting there. They asked Revere to alert Concord, five miles to the west. Within hours, Concord’s men and boys were hiding their cannon and their flour. Sacks of bullets they stowed in the outlying swamps.

Returning to Boston, Paul Revere passed through Charlestown, where he met with William Conant, of the town’s Committee of Safety, to devise a set of signals since they couldn’t be sure which way Gage would march his troops. He could send them out along Boston Neck, the isthmus that connected the town with the mainland. But that route would be so conspicuous that he would have no hope of surprising Concord’s militia. Going by land also meant either making a great curve all around Back Bay or heading west to Waltham, north to Lexington and then on to Concord.