Paul Revere's Ride (7 page)

Paul Revere did not think of that cause as we do today—not as the beginning of a new era. He regarded British Imperial measures as “newfangled” innovations, and believed that he was defending the inherited folk rights of New England: its ancient custom of self-government, its sacred idea of the covenant, and its traditional way of life.
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We misunderstand Paul Revere’s revolutionary thinking if we identify it with our modern ideas of individual freedom and tolerance that later spread through the world. Bostonians had very different attitudes in 1775. Samuel Adams often spoke of what he called the “publick liberty,” or the “liberty of America,” or sometimes the “liberty of Boston.” Their idea of liberty was both a corporate and an individual possession. It had a double meaning in New England, akin to the Puritan idea of a special and general calling and Cotton Mather’s two oars. It referred not only to the autonomy of each person’s rights, but also to the integrity of the group, and especially to the responsibility of a people to regulate their own affairs. We remember the individual rights and forget the collective responsibilities. We tend to interpret Thomas Jefferson’s ambiguous reference to the “pursuit of happiness” as an
individual quest, but in 1774 Paul Revere’s town meeting spoke of “social happiness” as its goal.”
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Also distinctive to this culture was its idea of equality. The motto of Boston’s Sons of Liberty was “Equality Before the Law.” They did not believe in equality of possessions, or even equality of esteem, but they thought that all people had an equal right to be judged according to their worth. Paul Revere’s business associate Nathaniel Ames wrote:

All men are by Nature equal

But differ greatly in the sequel.
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For Paul Revere and “town-born” Boston these principles did not derive from abstract premises, but from tradition and historical experience. In America it has always been so. Milan Kundera has recently reminded us that “the struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” This was Paul Revere’s road to revolution. It was also his message for our time.
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The Agony of an Imperial Whig

An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.

—Edmund Burke, 1775

ON THE HOT SUMMER AFTERNOON of August 27, 1774, while Paul Revere was preparing for yet another ride to Philadelphia, a senior British officer sat at his desk in Danvers, Massachusetts, seething with anger and frustration. Lieutenant-General the Honourable Thomas Gage was commander in chief of British forces in the New World. Mighty powers were his to command. A single stroke of his fine quill pen could start regiments marching from the Arctic to the Antipodes. The merest nod of his powdered head could cause fortresses to rise on the far frontier, and make roads appear in the trackless wilderness. In the late summer of 1774, General Thomas Gage was the most powerful man in North America.

And yet as he toiled over his endless correspondence in a borrowed country mansion on this sweltering August day, his letters overflowed with impotent rage. The source of his frustration was a political office that he had recently been given. In addition to his military duties, the King had appointed him Royal Governor of Massachusetts, with orders to reduce that restless province to obedience and peace. Parliament had armed him for that task with special powers such as no Royal Governor had possessed before. For months he had tried to act with firmness and restraint, but the
people of New England had stubbornly set all his efforts at defiance.

Thomas Gage thought of himself as a fair-minded and moderate man, a friend of liberty and a defender of what he was pleased to call the “common rights of mankind.” He rather liked Americans—at least, some Americans. He had married an American, and loved her dearly—his beautiful, headstrong Margaret. But even his wife was being difficult these days. She was away from him for long periods, and when they were together she lectured him about liberty and justice in that self-righteous American way.
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What was it, he wondered, about these impossible people? Was it something in the soil, or the American air? General Gage reminded himself that most of these infuriating provincials were British too—blood of his blood, flesh of his own freeborn nation. They had been allowed more liberties than any people on the face of the globe, yet they complained that he was trying to enslave them. They were taxed more lightly than the subjects of any European state, but refused even the trivial sums that Parliament had levied upon them. They professed loyalty to their rightful Sovereign, but tarred and feathered his Royal officers, and burned His Majesty’s ships to the water’s edge.

Now, on top of every other outrage, General Gage had just been told that some of these New England people were making threats against his own person. His Captain of Engineers John Montresor, an able but irritating officer, had informed him that he was no longer safe in the country and must move to Boston, under the guns of the British garrison.
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Boston! Thomas Gage had come to hate that town. A few months later he would write, “I wish this cursed place was burned.”
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Of all the Yankee race, General Gage believed that Bostonians were the worst. In 1770 he had written, “America is a mere bully, from one end to the other, and the Bostonians by far the greatest bullies.”
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Many British soldiers shared that same opinion. Gage’s able subordinate, Lord Percy, had arrived in the New World thinking well of America. A few weeks among the Bostonians had changed his mind, and persuaded him that they were “a set of sly, artful, hypocritical rascals, cruel, and cowards.”
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One of the most sly and artful of them all, in the opinion of these angry men, was a Boston silversmith who had become so familiar to them that he was identified in General Gage’s correspondence merely by his initials: “P. &---
R:---. &
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In origins and attitudes, Thomas Gage and Paul Revere were as far apart as two self-styled gentlemen could be, and still remain within the English-speaking world of the 18th century. Gage was the older of the two, having been born about the year 1720. He was the younger son of an aristocratic Anglo-Catholic family with its seat at Firle Place, Sussex, in the south of England.
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For many generations, Thomas Gage’s ancestors had shown a genius for embracing the great lost causes of British history. As early as 1215, several Sussex Gages were said to have backed King John against Magna Carta. When the Reformation came to England they sided with the Catholic party, and one of them became the jailor of the Protestant Princess Elizabeth, England’s future Queen.
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During the English Civil War, the Gages rallied to the Royalist cause of Charles I and suffered a heavy defeat. In the Glorious Revolution of 1688, they stood with James II and were defeated yet again. When the house of Hanover inherited the throne the Gages became Jacobites, stubbornly faithful to the hopeless cause of a Catholic King over the water. Through many generations, the Gages of Firle had remained steadfast to the cause of hierarchy, authority, and the Roman Catholic Church.
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In 1715, that pattern suddenly changed. Sir William Gage, the seventh baronet, decided to convert from Catholicism to the Protestant Church of England. According to the Anglo-Catholic poet Alexander Pope who knew him well, he did so not from high principle but because he wished to “have the use of horses, forbidden to all those who refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Church.” Whatever the reason, the Gages outwardly joined England’s Protestant establishment, while some of them inwardly retained their Catholic faith.
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The property of the Anglican convert Sir William Gage was inherited by our general’s father, Thomas Gage of Sherburne, who appears to have been a corrupt and dissolute man, not highly esteemed by some who knew him. One acquaintance described him as “a petulant, silly, busy, meddling, profligate fellow.” He spent much of his time at London’s gaming tables, while his beautiful wife became so notorious for her promiscuity that one fashionable Augustan rake offered to pay his debts “when Lady Gage grows chaste.”
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The Gages may not have been an admirable couple, but London found them amusing, and they were well connected at Court. In 1720, for no apparent merit, Thomas Gage of Sherburne was raised to the peerage as the first Viscount Gage. This improbable
pair became the parents of our General Thomas Gage. He was their second son.

Young Tom Gage, like his fictional contemporary Tom Jones whom he resembled in some respects, was raised on an idyllic West Country estate called Highmeadow in Gloucestershire. At about the age of nine he was sent to the Westminster School, and studied there for eight years. Away from home, he grew into a person very different from his parents—disciplined and hardworking, cautious and serious, not clever or witty, but upright, solid, and well-meaning.

The English education of Thomas Gage made a striking contrast with the American schooling of Boston boys such as Paul Revere. Both of them learned English as their mother tongue, but they were trained to speak in different dialects. When they came to their great dispute over the Massachusetts Charter, Paul Revere pronounced it
chaataa.
Thomas Gage said
chawhtawh.
Behind that superficial distinction of speech lay two profoundly different English-speaking cultures. Thomas Gage’s dialect had only recently developed as the linguistic property of Britain’s narrow ruling class. Its fluted tones and mellow cadences were the exclusive emblems of a small elite who claimed to rule the English-speaking world by right of birth and breeding.
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The dialect of England’s governing class was the outward expression of a culture as idiosyncratic as the folkways of New England. Thomas Gage and Paul Revere were both taught to cherish English law and liberties, but they understood that common heritage in very different ways. For Thomas Gage, the rule of law meant the absolute supremacy of that many-headed sovereign, the King-in-Parliament. For Paul Revere it meant the right of a free-born people to be governed by laws of its own making. Both were highly principled men, but their principles were worlds apart. The ideas they shared in common were the ethical foundation-stones of English-speaking society. Their differences were what the American Revolution was about.

Neither Thomas Gage nor Paul Revere was a man of learning. They did not attend college or university. While in their teens, both were required to make their own way in the world, but they did so in different ways. Where Paul Revere followed a calling, Thomas Gage found a career. The future British general had been born to aristocratic privilege, but he was disqualified by the order of his birth from inheriting the landed wealth on which it rested. Like many younger sons of aristocratic families, he was sent into
the army. A King’s commission was purchased for him at an early age in Cholmondeley’s Regiment of Foot.

Thomas Gage liked the army. He found pleasure in its pageantry, and comfort in its discipline. In combat he proved his courage many times on what his contemporaries called the field of honor. But he was a soldier who learned to hate war, with very good reason. It was his fate to witness the worst that 18th-century warfare could do. As a junior officer, he was present at the British defeat at Fontenoy (May 11, 1745), one of the bloodiest conflicts in the 18th century. This was the battle that began as if it were a ball, when a British Guardsman stepped forward, swept off his hat, and bowed gallantly to the French Guards only fifty yards away. According to a more doubtful tradition that officer also courteously invited the enemy to take first shot:
“Que Messieurs les enemis tirent les premiers.”
The battle of Fontenoy ended with 30,000 men fallen on a Flanders field, in scenes of horror and brutality beyond description.
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A year later Thomas Gage was in Scotland for another epic slaughter. This time he was on the winning side at the battle of Culloden (April 27, 1746) which broke the power of the Highland clans and left Drumossie Moor carpeted with corpses of kilted warriors. In later years Thomas Gage and his contemporaries liked to call themselves “Old Cullodeners.”

After Culloden, Gage returned to Flanders. A period of peacetime soldiering followed, on the staff of the Earl of Albemarle, father of an old school friend. Then, in 1755, he was posted to America with General Edward Braddock. It was Gage who commanded the vanguard on Braddock’s expedition against the French in the Ohio Valley. On July 9, 1755, that ill-fated force marched blindly into a forest ambush and was nearly annihilated. As always, Gage conducted himself bravely in combat. Wounded himself, he improvised a rear guard that allowed the escape of a few survivors, including George Washington.
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