Paul Revere's Ride (13 page)

On both sides large preparations are making … bloodshed and desolation seem inevitable.”

—Robert Auchmuty to Thomas Hutchinson, March 3, 1775, Hutchinson papers, BL

It is certain both sides were ripe for it, and a single blow would have occasioned the commencement of hostilities,”

—Lt. Frederick Mackenzie, Royal Welch Fusiliers, Boston, March 6, 1775

ASSPRING APPROACHED in 1775, the atmosphere in Boston grew heavy with foreboding. “Things now every day begin
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to grow more and more serious,” Lord Percy wrote home on April 8. It was one of the few facts on which everyone could agree. Here was a curious phenomenon, rarely studied by historians of war, and yet always part of its antecedents. On both sides, men acquiesced in a growing sense that conflict was inevitable. Many adopted this idea of inevitability, as an act of choice. That expanding attitude rapidly became the father of the fact.
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The wretched weather did not help. A dreary season of mud and flood and drizzle that New England dignifies by the name of spring literally created a climate of despair. One British soldier wrote home that even springtime in New England was “cold and disagreeable, a kind of second winter.”
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After many months of frost, Boston larders were empty, and food was increasingly scarce. The price of fresh provisions rose so high in the crowded town that General Gage was forced to put his army on salt rations. One of his officers wrote privately, “Tommy
feels no affection for his army, and is more attached to a paltry oeconomy.”
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Even the drinking water went foul. The 43rd Foot reported that the water in its reservoirs “smells so excessively strong that many of the men drop down in fits while they are pumping.”
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The health of the garrison was not good. A “malignant spotted fever” (perhaps typhus) broke out among the Royal Irish. They were quarantined on a transport in the harbor. The “throat distemper” (possibly diphtheria) spread through the garrison, killing General Gage’s confidential secretary and many others. Sam Adams reported to his friends in Virginia, “The army has been sickly through the winter and continue so. Many have died. Many have deserted. Many I believe intend to desert.”
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The British infantry were kept busy drilling on the Common and shooting at floating marks in Boston harbor. Twice a day they were ordered to stand parade in rigid formation, and made to endure spit-and-polish inspections while gangs of ragged apprentices shouted insults from a safe distance. The men were increasingly bored, angry, and hungry—a recipe for disaster in any army.

The common British soldier has rarely received his due in histories of the American Revolution. Many people regarded them as rough, unlettered, hard-drinking men—outcasts from civil society, a breed apart. They were reviled by civilians and despised even by their own commanders. But those who knew them as individuals formed a different opinion of their character and worth. William Cobbett, before becoming a political journalist of high eminence in the United States and Britain, enlisted in the 54th Foot near the end of the American Revolution and served nine years as a common soldier. Afterwards he remembered his comrades with affection and respect. “I like soldiers as a class in life, better than any other description of men,” he wrote. “Their conversation is more pleasing to me; they have generally seen more than other men; they have less vulgar prejudice about them.”
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The British Regulars bonded closely with one another against a hostile world. They spoke their own distinctive dialect—a form of speech related to the “flash language” of the 18th-century underworld. Among themselves they kept a soldier’s code of honesty, loyalty, and courage, and enforced it strictly upon one another in kangaroo courts that their officers knew nothing about. Cobbett recalled, “Amongst soldiers, less than amongst any other description of men, have I observed the vices of lying and hypocrisy.”

These men were at their best on active service. But after a long winter in Boston garrison they were bored and restless. The supply of strong New England rum was cheap and abundant. “A man may get drunk for a copper or two,” wrote Lieutenant Barker of the King’s Own. In February, Major John Pitcairn of the British Marines told a friend, “We have lost seven by death, killed by drinking the cursed rum of this country. There are I believe several more [who] must die.” By March, Major Pitcairn was so concerned about drunkenness in his battalion that he wrote directly to the First Lord of the Admiralty, “I have lived almost night and day amongst the men in their barracks for these five or six weeks past, to keep them from that pernicious rum. I would not have your Lordship think from this that we are worse than the other battalions here. The rum is so cheap that it debauches both navy and army, and kills many of them. Depend on it, my Lord, it will destroy more of us than the Yankies will.”
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Several Regulars sold their muskets for drink. When a soldier in the King’s Own was caught “disposing of his arms to the townspeople,” he was trussed up like an animal on a tripod of sergeants’ halberds and given 500 lashes on his bare back—enough to kill an ordinary man. The conscience of New England was deeply shocked by this cruelty—not only by its inhumanity as we would be, but also in another way. The biblical statutes of Massachusetts restricted whipping to thirty-nine strokes; anything more was thought to be unscriptural, and forbidden by God’s express command. To the people of Boston, here was another Sign.
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In the British garrison, desertion rapidly increased. One of the best regiments, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, lost 27 men. Private Thomas Macfarlane of that unit enlisted on May 19,1774, deserted on July 19, returned on October 6, and deserted again on December 2, 1774. A detachment of the 8th Foot arrived in Boston, on their way to join their regiment in Quebec. The most direct route would have been west through Massachusetts by the Boston Post Road. But Gage wrote, “If I had marched them thro’ the country to Albany we should have lost half of them.” He sent them by sea to New York.
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General Gage doubled his guards around the town, more to keep his own men in than the “country people” out. In desperation he began to execute his own men. When a young private tried to desert for the third time he was dressed in a white shroud of repentence, taken to Boston Common, and shot by a firing squad while the town watched in shock and horror. In New England,
corporal punishment was lawful for the violation of God’s Commandments, but not for the orders of General Gage.
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Another soldier in the 10th Regiment was shot on Christmas Eve, “the only thing done in remembrance of Christmas Day,” Barker noted bitterly. In March Private Robert Vaughan of the 52nd Foot was caught in act of deserting, and sentenced to death. He was pardoned the night before his execution, and promptly disappeared into the countryside, with much help from the town. General Gage was informed by a Loyalist agent that the people of Boston had organized a secret escape route for British deserters, who were spirited away by boat across the Charles River. One soldier was given four dollars and a suit of clothes by a Boston merchant and taken to the town of Andover, Massachusetts. Another, Private John Clancey in the 47th Foot, was promised that he “should be made a gentleman” if he chose to desert. Whig leaders passed the word that they would give 300 acres in New Hampshire to any soldier who left his unit.
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Most of the Regulars refused these bribes, and stayed loyally with their comrades. They began to hate their commander in chief, who treated them as incipient felons, and punished them more severely then he did the Yankees. They equally despised the Bostonians who reviled them, and desperately wished for other duty. Even the officers of the garrison ran out of control. In late January, a party of subalterns viciously attacked the town watch. When the Dogberries defended themselves with their billhooks, the officers drew their swords. One watchman had his nose cut off; another lost his thumb.
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Other officers began to attack each other. Even senior officers joined in. At evening parade, Lieutenant-Colonel Walcott, commander of the 5th Foot, drew a sword on one of his junior officers, who was also his kinsman. General Gage ordered a court-martial for both men.
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The top commanders began to quarrel among themselves. General Gage and Admiral Graves were often at loggerheads. “It is a great misfortune to me,” Marine Major John Pitcairn wrote, “that the General and Admiral are not as cordial as I could wish.” In fact they hated and despised each other, and quarreled angrily over the Marine battalion that had been sent to reinforce the garrison. Graves refused to allow it to leave his ships unless he could continue to supply their rations, at a handsome profit. “The admiral can have no reason but to put money in the pursers’ pocket,” Major Pitcairn wrote.
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Both the army and the navy in Boston were at the end of a long logistical lifeline that functioned fitfully in the best of times. Major Pitcairn struggled incessantly with the Admiralty to supply his men with uniforms and equipment. They had been sent to New England in December without winter garments. Pitcairn had greatcoats, leggings and warm caps made in Boston for every man in his command. As Spring approached, he begged the Admiralty for campaigning equipment with little result. One letter sought swords for his grenadiers and drummers. Pitcairn wrote furiously, “the last have nothing to defend themselves but their drumsticks.”
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Many junior officers turned their frustration against the people of New England. Major Pitcairn went over the heads of his superiors, and dispatched an angry letter directly to the First Lord of the Admiralty, urging hard measures against the colonists. “One active campaign, a smart action, and burning two or three of their towns, will set everything to rights,” Pitcairn wrote, “Nothing now, I am afraid, but this will ever convince those foolish bad people that England is in earnest.”

This hard-bitten Marine officer had formed a complete contempt for the Americans. “I assure you,” he wrote from a Boston coffee house to a fellow Marine in Britain, “I have so despicable an opinion of the people of this country that I would not hesitate to march with the Marines I have with me to any part of the country, and do whatever I was inclined. I am satisfied they will never attack Regular troops.”
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On the other side, Bostonians were increasingly contemptuous of the British troops. The town itself became a tinderbox, and on March 6, 1775, a small spark nearly set it ablaze. That day a huge crowd squeezed into the Old South Meetinghouse to mark the fifth anniversary of the Boston Massacre. Paul Revere was probably there, along with John Hancock, the Adamses, the British spy Dr. Benjamin Church, and many others. Also in the audience were many bored and idle British officers who were looking for trouble. The meeting began with high solemnity. Dr. Joseph Warren rose into a pulpit that was hung with heavy black cloth, and delivered the major speech in a flowery provincial style that was much admired in Boston but little to the taste of English gentlemen. When he finished, Sam Adams rose to his feet in the pew where he was sitting with the Selectmen, and moved that “the thanks of the town should be presented to Dr. Warren for his elegant and spirited oration.”

Several British officers in the crowd began to hiss. One shouted, “Oh! fie! Oh! fie!”

The people of Boston did not understand that elegant imprecation of the new Imperial elite. In the New England dialect with its lost postvocalic r’s, “Fie! Fie!” sounded like “Fire! Fire!”

Panic broke out. Shouting men and screaming women pushed toward the doors. Several people hurled themselves from the windows into the street. At that unlucky moment the fifes and drums of the 43rd Regiment marched past the meetinghouse with a great rattle and crash of military music. The frightened townfolk saw the marching troops, heard the drums of the 43rd, and thought they were under attack. Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie, the cool-headed adjutant of the 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers, observed that “almost every man had a short stick or bludgeon in his hand, and … many of them were privately armed.” Any violent act, he believed, “would have been the signal for battle. Both sides were ripe for it, and a single blow would have occasioned the commencement of hostilities.”
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Britons and Bostonians alike were shocked by what had nearly happened. Whig leaders struggled to calm their neighbors, while senior British officers worked to keep their men in check. The town was quiet for a few days.

Then, on March 9, a Yankee pedlar named Thomas Ditson got into the quarters of the 47th Regiment. With more enterprise than judgment, Ditson offered to buy the soldiers’ uniforms, and even their weapons. Several were willing to sell, but others reported Ditson to their commander. The pedlar was seized by order of an officer, tarred and feathered “from head to foot” by the rank and file, and mounted in a chair on top of a cart, and paraded through the town to the Liberty Tree. A fife and drum played a raucous Rogues March, and the colonel of the regiment led the procession.

The parade passed directly under the window of the commander in chief, who heard the irregular beat of the drum, but thought (as he later explained) that the men were merely “drumming a Bad Woman through the streets.” When he found out what had happened, General Gage was infuriated. He severely chastised the 47th for lowering itself to the level of a Boston mob, “below the character of a soldier.”
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Other incidents followed. On March 16, Bostonians complained that a party of soldiers led by their officers had deliberately disrupted a solemn Fast Day called by the Congregational clergy. On March 17, the many Irish Catholic soldiers in the garrison celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with a Hibernian enthusiasm that appalled the Protestant town. Scarcely a day passed without an incident.