Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution Part 4

With Leonard out of the way, the committee had been free to make their report, but not before a motion was heard to clear the galleries and lock the House chamber doors. By this time Gage had gotten word that something treasonous was afoot, and he immediately dispatched the provincial secretary Thomas Flucker with a proclamation dissolving the General Court. Finding the door locked, Flucker had no choice but to read the proclamation from the courthouse steps, a brief two-sentence directive that ended with the words, "G.o.d Save the King." By that time, the House of Representatives was in the midst of approving the delegates for the First Continental Congress. Samuel Adams and the other committee members were jubilant, and that night a celebratory dinner was held in Boston at the home of Dr. Joseph Warren on Hanover Street.

Warren had a most unusual household. A recent widower with four children between the ages of two and eight, he was not only a leading patriot but also had one of the busiest medical practices in Boston. He had two apprentices living with him on Hanover Street, and he sometimes saw as many as twenty patients a day. His practice ran the gamut, from little boys with broken bones, like John Quincy Adams, to prost.i.tutes on aptly named d.a.m.nation Alley, to his good friend the tubercular Josiah Quincy. He was so frequently asked to visit the sick-even on a Sunday, when the normally busy streets of Boston were almost completely deserted-that he'd chosen a pew at the Reverend Samuel Cooper's Brattle Street Meeting opposite a side door, "for the prevention of disturbance when abruptly called on for medical aid." He had what doctors call "the touch," that ability to put patients at ease-a particular challenge in the eighteenth century, since many of the accepted medical treatments of the day did more physiological harm than good.

Warren's portrait by John Singleton Copley presents a man with gray-blue eyes; a full, sensuous mouth; and an aura of vivacious engagement. According to one account, "The ladies judged him handsome," and his first child seems to have been conceived well before he and his wife, Elizabeth Hooten, just seventeen, were married. Elizabeth died in 1772, and by the spring of 1774 Warren, thirty-three, was one of the most eligible widowers in Boston. The night after the election of the delegates to the First Continental Congress, amid a euphoric a.s.semblage of the city's leading patriots, Warren may have struck up the romantic relations.h.i.+p that was to be the most important of what remained of his abbreviated life.

Warren recorded in his ledger book that just the month before he had seen a patient named Mercy Scollay. Thanks to a poem that appeared in a magazine edited by Isaiah Thomas, publisher of the notoriously radical newspaper the Ma.s.sachusetts Spy, we have reason to suspect that Scollay was at Warren's house on June 17.

Mercy Scollay was thirty-three and dangerously close to becoming a spinster. She was later described by a Warren family member as "a woman of great energy and depth of character." If the painting by Copley that has been a.s.sociated with her is indeed Mercy Scollay, she had penetrating and intelligent eyes and an ironic twist to the mouth, not unlike that of her forceful father, John, who was also painted by Copley, and as chair of the town's selectmen was about to lead Boston through some of its most difficult days.

In a prefatory paragraph to a poem that appeared in the June 1774 issue of the Royal American Magazine, Isaiah Thomas recounted how he had recently attended a patriot social gathering during which a gentleman asked a lady what she considered to be "the necessaries of life" given the demands of the boycott a.s.sociated with the Solemn League and Covenant. The woman responded a day or so later with a flirtatious poem of 114 lines t.i.tled "On Female Vanity" that Thomas published anonymously. In the poem, the woman argues that character and intellect, not physical beauty, are what really matter in a woman, particularly in such challenging times. According to the poet, "those modest antiquated charms that lur'd a Brutus to a Portia's arms" will always trump the "gauze and ta.s.sels" of a younger, extravagantly dressed woman. Expertly combining private and political spheres, "On Female Vanity" reads like a love letter cloaked in the issues of the day.

Sixteen years later, the noted patriot author Mercy Otis Warren claimed credit for writing the poem at the prompting of Harvard professor John Winthrop. But that was not what Bostonians chose to believe in 1774. According to John Winthrop's wife, Hannah, the gossipmongers insisted that the author was "Miss Mercy Scollay and the gentleman who requested [the poem] Dr. Warren." In the summer of 1774, Scollay and Warren were, apparently, the couple to watch.

By the end of June, letters of support were pouring in to the Boston Committee of Correspondence from all over America. With the prospect of the Continental Congress in September, Samuel Adams's attention was already beginning to s.h.i.+ft from Boston to Philadelphia. But first he and the other members of the Committee of Correspondence had to face the furor created by their handling of the Solemn League and Covenant.

The morning of Monday, June 27, the day of the town meeting that was to address these issues, proved to be quite hot, and "with many people just idle enough to attend," Faneuil Hall was filled to overflowing. Samuel Adams was once again chosen moderator of the meeting. It was moved that all the letters written by the committee since the receipt of the Port Bill be read aloud. Faneuil Hall was so crowded that those standing at the back of the room had difficulty hearing what was being said and kept shouting, "A little louder!" Finally it was decided that given the heat and the crowd, they needed to move to the much larger Old South Meetinghouse.

They reconvened at 3:00 p.m. with the reading of the many letters written by the committee, culminating in the Solemn League and Covenant. Once the controversial doc.u.ment had been read, the loyalist John Amory launched into a prepared speech that concluded with a motion to "censure and annihilate" the Committee of Correspondence, which was immediately seconded. Samuel Adams responded by moving that he be replaced as moderator so that he could defend himself and the committee. With the patriot Thomas Cus.h.i.+ng taking over as moderator, the debate began.

Speaking on behalf of the committee were not only Adams but also fellow members Joseph Warren, Josiah Quincy, Dr. Thomas Young, and William Molineux. The merchants were represented by the province's treasurer, Harrison Gray, the same elderly loyalist who had objected to Josiah Quincy's treasonous words prior to the Tea Party back in December, along with a host of others. But it was Samuel Eliot who most impressed fellow merchant and brother-in-law John Andrews. Speaking with a "freedom and manliness peculiar only to himself," Eliot explained that since New York, Rhode Island, and Philadelphia had so far proved reluctant to join the boycott, it made no sense to punish Boston's own merchants, who were already reeling from the effects of the Port Bill and its insistence that their imported goods come via Salem. Many of these merchants were expecting s.h.i.+pments from England that would not arrive in Salem until after August 31, the date by which the Solemn League and Covenant insisted that all trade must stop. Not only would the covenant ruin the local merchants, it would serve no greater purpose. By attacking the covenant rather than the committee, Eliot kept the focus on the issues instead of the personalities, and his remarks received, Andrews wrote, "a universal clap." The debates continued until long past 8:00 p.m., and as it was growing dark, the meeting was adjourned until the next morning.

Bells were ringing throughout the town when the meeting reconvened at Old South. After more still-heated debate, it was finally moved to vote on the motion "for censuring and annihilating" the Committee of Correspondence. If, like Samuel Eliot, the merchants had kept to the covenant rather than the committee, they might have succeeded. But they had, like Samuel Adams before them, overreached. The motion was defeated by "a great majority." But this wasn't enough for the Committee of Correspondence. A motion was then made that the town "approve the honest zeal of the Committee of Correspondence and desire that they would persevere with their usual activity and firmness, continuing steadfast." John Rowe estimated that the motion carried by a margin of at least four to one.

Samuel Adams and his committee had prevailed on the town floor, but their Solemn League and Covenant ultimately proved a failure. Bostonians never approved the measure, which was adopted by only half a dozen or so towns throughout the province. A lesson had been learned: the committee worked well when spreading news and generating public opinion, but the committee could not set policy-that was up to the people of Ma.s.sachusetts. And as the long hot summer ahead would prove, the people, 95 percent of whom lived in the country towns beyond Boston, had minds of their own.

Gage had had such high hopes for the loyalists of Boston. With regiments of soldiers arriving on an almost weekly basis throughout the month of June, he had antic.i.p.ated that supporters of government in Boston and other towns in Ma.s.sachusetts would gladly step forward with the evidence he needed to round up the most notorious of the patriots and try them for treason. But this did not prove to be the case. In a letter to Lord Dartmouth, he told of hearing "many things against this and that person, yet when I descend to particular points and want people to stand forth in order to bring crimes home to individuals by clear and full evidence, I am at a loss." This "timidity and backwardness" on the part of the loyalists was attributed to the fear that the British ministry would soon do as it had always done after a crisis in America: repeal the offending acts and leave the loyalists "to the mercy of their opponents and their mobs." Given what had happened to John Malcom and others, you could hardly blame them.

Even Gage's own soldiers were already giving him problems. Occasional confrontations between the regulars and the locals, particularly at night, were to be expected. What Gage hadn't antic.i.p.ated was how quickly his men began to desert, encouraged by a series of broadsheets that began to appear in June. "The country people are determined to protect you and screen you from any that may attempt to betray you to your present slavery ... ," one tract promised. "Being in a country now where all are upon a level you may by one push lay the foundation of your own good living in a land of freedom and plenty and may make the fortunes of your posterity."

The British army had been succ.u.mbing to this siren song for decades. Even Gage, with his American wife, had partially surrendered to the pull that the continent exerted on an Englishman: a beckoning promise of new beginnings combined with a sense of the old, almost primeval Britain of their ancestors. Over the course of the next two months, the regiments stationed in Boston would lose more than two hundred soldiers to desertion. Gage seems to have quickly realized that despite his a.s.surances to the king back in February, his mission was doomed from the start. He should never have accepted this wretched post.

By the beginning of summer, he'd decided that his current misery was his wife's fault. On June 26 he wrote Margaret that he was "ready to wish he had never known her." Thomas Hutchinson was visiting the Gage estate in Suss.e.x when this extraordinary letter arrived in August. By that time, Margaret had long since left to join her husband in America, but this did not apparently prevent other family members from reading the letter and sharing its contents. "[Gage] laments," Hutchinson recorded in his diary, "his hard fate in being torn from his friends after the difficulty of crossing the Atlantic in the short time of nine months [in England], and put upon a service in so disagreeable a place, which, though he had been used to difficult service, he seemed to consider as peculiarly disagreeable; wishes Mrs. Gage had stayed in England as he advised her; for though it was natural she should desire to see her friends at New York, etc., yet she could have no sort of satisfaction in New England amidst riots, disorders, etc." Hutchinson knew firsthand what the patriots of Boston could do to a magistrate trying to uphold the sovereignty of the crown, and he was deeply troubled by the revelation. "The whole letter," he wrote, "discovers [i.e., discloses] greater anxiety and distress of mind than what appears from all the accounts we have received concerning him."

On July 1 Gage learned that Admiral Montagu's replacement, Admiral Samuel Graves, had arrived in Boston Harbor in his flags.h.i.+p Preston along with several transports bearing the Fifth and Thirty-Eighth Regiments. Commanding the Fifth was Earl Hugh Percy, the future second Duke of Northumberland, and on July 6, Gage returned to Boston to meet with Percy at Province House.

Percy, just thirty-one years old, had served in Europe during the Seven Years War. He was cadaverously thin, nearsighted, and had a big bulbous nose. But he was also impeccably bred, immensely wealthy, and a talented soldier, and Gage entrusted the young general with stewards.h.i.+p of the forces gathered in Boston while he attended his duties in Salem.

Boston was known for its love of liberty, its piety, and its prost.i.tutes. In the town's hilly northwestern corner was a lightly settled neighborhood that the soldiers dubbed Mount Wh.o.r.edom. One afternoon at the end of July at an establishment known as "Miss Erskine's," fifteen British officers "committed," John Andrews wrote, "all manner of enormous indecencies by exposing their anteriors, as well as their posteriors, at the open windows and doors, to the full view of the people ... that happened to pa.s.s by." By dusk, the party at Miss Erskine's had begun to break up. Andrews, who happened to be walking nearby, saw two of the officers make their rampaging way through an old woman's apple shop, "turning over all [her] things," before a.s.saulting two men with "their fists in their faces and d.a.m.ning them." A few minutes later a group of five officers, all of them with their small swords drawn, came upon the wine cooper Abra Hunt and his wife. Abra was, according to Andrews, whose letters provide a rich and detailed portrait of a city under occupation, "a well-built, nervous fellow," and when the soldiers began to comment on his wife, Abra took up his hickory walking stick and laid open one of the officers' heads. A small crowd gathered, and before he could kill the officer with another blow, several of his fellow citizens restrained him. In the meantime, the rest of the soldiers began flouris.h.i.+ng their swords and soon cleared the street of pedestrians, with the exception of Samuel Jarvis, Samuel Pitts, a chair maker named Fullerton, and "a negro fellow." Pitts found himself fending off two of the officers with his cane, and might have been seriously wounded if a sword hadn't struck the fence he was standing against. As it was, three of his knuckles were bloodied before he subdued the two soldiers, and the other Bostonians succeeded in disarming the remaining three officers.

When informed of the disturbance, Percy was quick to promise the town's selectmen that all the offending officers would be held accountable for their actions. For their part, Bostonians knew that it was important that they, too, do everything they could to keep their fellow citizens in line. Many of the soldiers looked to bait the townspeople into doing something that might be interpreted as an act of insurrection. "I hope the strict observance of a steady and peaceable conduct will disappoint their views," John Andrews wrote, "for [I] am persuaded there is nothing they wish for more than an opportunity to deem us rebels; but G.o.d forbid they should ever be gratified."

With so many people put out of work by the Port Bill, the town selectmen worried that many of Boston's poorer residents would no longer be able to feed themselves. But by early August, donations from across the country began to flood into the city. Eleven carts of fish came from Marblehead; two cargoes of rice from Charleston, South Carolina; and one thousand bushels of grain from Weathersfield, Connecticut. A Committee of Donations was formed to thank the towns for their gifts, and the letters, many written by Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren, followed the pattern established by the Committee of Correspondence in establis.h.i.+ng personal lines of communication among the communities.

The Bostonians had objected to paying a tax on British tea, but they were more than willing to fund an expensive public works project if it helped the town get through the crisis. Under the direction of the town's selectmen, munic.i.p.al funds were used to hire jobless mechanics, artisans, and dockworkers to build s.h.i.+ps, clean up the wharves, and repair roads. John Andrews complained that while the poor had the town to relieve them and the rich had their savings and rents, small merchants such as himself had nothing. "[The] burden falls heaviest, if not entirely, upon the middle people among us," he wrote. And yet, despite all these anxieties, Andrews was amazed by how well his fellow citizens were holding up. "[There is] ease, contentment, and perfect composure in the countenance of almost every person you meet in the streets," he marveled, which "much perplexes the governor and others."

On August 6, the Scarborough arrived with the much-antic.i.p.ated Ma.s.sachusetts Government Act. Gage's already tormented world suddenly became much worse. As part of the act, the king and the ministry had named thirty-six mandamus councillors-all of them loyalists-and on August 8, Gage a.s.sembled as many of them as he could in Salem. A disturbing number either did not respond to the summons or downright refused to accept their positions on the council, knowing that to be a mandamus councillor was to invite the kinds of abuses that the patriots had formerly directed against the tea consignees and John Malcom. The Ma.s.sachusetts Government Act also made provisions for the selection of jurors in the superior courts, and talk was already circulating through the western parts of the province about preventing the courts from sitting. And then there was the issue of town meetings, which had been declared all but illegal.

As if the Government Act wasn't enough, Parliament had pa.s.sed three additional pieces of legislation: the Administration of Justice Act, which the patriots branded "the Murderer's Act" because it allowed governors to move the trials of royal officials accused of a crime to a venue outside their own colony (and thus "get away with murder"); the Quartering Act, which provided for housing British soldiers in a colony's unoccupied buildings; and finally the Quebec Act, which, besides allowing French Canadians to practice Catholicism (not a popular provision among New England's papist-hating Congregationalists), expanded that province all the way to the Ohio River to the south and to the Mississippi to the west. Many leading colonists, especially in Pennsylvania and Virginia, such as Benjamin Franklin and George Was.h.i.+ngton, had applied for land grants in this huge swath of territory, which included modern Ohio and Illinois. By effectively prohibiting western expansion, Parliament had found a way-unrelated to the unrest in Boston-to anger and frustrate not just the citizens of Ma.s.sachusetts but virtually all of colonial America.

Instead of making the colonists think about repentance, what were collectively referred to as the Coercive Acts had the opposite effect. Ma.s.sachusetts's patriots were more resolved than ever to persevere in their insistence on liberty while the loyalists were finding it increasingly difficult to defend the ministry's overbearing measures. In the meantime, the undecided, whom John Andrews described as "the lukewarm that were staggering," were moving ever closer to becoming confirmed patriots. But no matter what camp they were in, all agreed that the ministry had made a mess of the situation. Everywhere in Boston, Andrews claimed, Lord North was cursed "morn to noon and from noon to morn by every denomination of people."

Joseph Warren was about as busy as a doctor could be in Boston, but that did not prevent him and his fellow Committee of Correspondence members from composing countless letters to towns throughout New England and beyond, thanking them for their donations or their letters and resolutions of support. Thirteen of these letters were received in a single day, and Thomas Young reported that he and the others convened "every day or two" to make sure all the correspondence was answered in a timely manner.

From the first, Warren saw himself and all New England in a mythic quest that united the here and now of the present generation with the travails of their glorious ancestors. As far back as 1765 he had distinguished himself as an effective political writer when he began writing newspaper articles under a variety of pseudonyms. He had the polemicist's talent for emotional overstatement. Instead of Joyce Junior's sneering insistence on submission, Warren saw himself as part of a rapturous convergence of past, present, and future that required everything a person could give: "When I perceive the impending evil ... , I cannot hold my peace. In such a case no vehemence is excessive, no zeal too ardent... . Trace the renown of your progenitors and recollect the stands, the glorious stands they have often made against the yoke of thralldom." In the spring of 1774 he composed a song that served as a rousing anthem for the patriot movement, and that summer, as he wrote letter after letter, his was one of the most recognizable and unabashedly pa.s.sionate voices coming out of Boston.

He was bright, articulate, and multifaceted, but Warren was also something of a spendthrift. His now deceased wife had reportedly been worth a considerable amount of money at the time of their marriage, but by her death in 1772, Warren seems to have worked his way through most, if not all, of those resources. His straitened circ.u.mstances may have contributed to the intense activity of his medical practice in 1774 and 1775. Financial considerations also probably influenced his decision to embark that summer on what appears to have been his version of a get-rich scheme: a twenty-one-year partners.h.i.+p with a group of physicians (which included a surgeon with one of the regiments currently stationed in Boston) to build smallpox hospitals in Boston and Philadelphia.

That Warren entered into a long-term agreement with a British army surgeon in July 1774 might seem incredible, given what we know today about what was to occur in the coming months. The evidence seems clear, however, that in the summer of 1774 not even Warren's farsighted mentor, Samuel Adams, was convinced that war was imminent. The patriots had been opposing Britain's policies for the last decade, but this did not mean they antic.i.p.ated a permanent rupture. "Nothing is more foreign from our hearts," Warren had written that spring, "than a spirit of rebellion. Would to G.o.d they all, even our enemies, knew the warm attachment we have for Great Britain, notwithstanding we have been contending these ten years with them for our rights!" Boston's patriots (who still referred to England as "home") were not trying to reinvent the world as they then knew it; they were attempting to get back to the way it had been when they were free from imperial restraint.

In the meantime, Warren's relations.h.i.+p with Mercy Scollay appears to have progressed. That month, Mercy's sister Priscilla, who at nineteen was fourteen years younger than Mercy, married the merchant and Tea Party partic.i.p.ant Thomas Melvill, twenty-four. Thomas Melvill and Warren traveled in the same patriot circles, and it's possible that the wedding helped to bring Warren and Melvill's new sister-in-law ever closer. We will never know the details of how matters stood between the two of them, but we do know that Scollay became increasingly intimate with Warren's children and that by the spring of the following year, she and Warren had, according to several accounts, agreed to marry. This did not mean, however, that their private lives settled into a comfortable and predictable course. In this time of tumultuous, often catastrophic change, nothing could be counted on for long.

Almost two months before, the delegates to the Continental Congress had been chosen behind locked doors at the courthouse in Salem. On August 10, those four delegates gathered in the home of Thomas Cus.h.i.+ng on Bromfield Street in Boston. Over the course of the previous weeks, the patriots had taken it upon themselves to ensure that their famously threadbare leader, Samuel Adams, was properly prepared for his trip to Philadelphia. Arrangements were made to repair his house and barn; he'd been measured for a new suit of clothes; he'd received a new wig, a new hat, six pairs of shoes, and some spending money. Back in June, many in Boston had been embittered by Adams's handling of the Solemn League and Covenant, but now, thanks in large part to the Coercive Acts, he was once again viewed as the stalwart defender of the colony's rights. There had been rumors circulating throughout July and August that he was about to be arrested and sent to England for trial. Despite being urged "to keep out of the way," Adams had continued to walk the streets of Boston and write his letters in the Selectmen's Office, which served as headquarters for the Committee of Correspondence, and the people loved him for it. "They value him for his good sense, great abilities, amazing fort.i.tude, n.o.ble resolution, and undaunted courage," John Andrews wrote to his brother-in-law.

Cus.h.i.+ng, Samuel Adams, his cousin John Adams, and Robert Treat Paine boarded a yellow coach pulled by four horses with two white servants in front and four African Americans in back. Even though five British regiments were encamped in plain view, the delegates made a point of making "a very respectable parade" along the periphery of the common as they headed out that morning toward Watertown and, ultimately, Philadelphia.

It was a proud and exciting moment for Boston's patriots, but a disturbing one as well. How could they possibly fill the void left by even the temporary absence of Samuel Adams?

In early August, a celebrity arrived in Boston. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Lee, forty-two, was not only a famous British army officer who, in addition to serving with distinction in America during the French and Indian War, had fought in both the Polish and Portuguese armies; he was one of Lord North's most virulent critics. Although still technically a member of the British army, he had grown disillusioned with his professional prospects and was considering a permanent move to Virginia. He was now in the midst of a kind of exploratory tour of the Atlantic seaboard. Everywhere he went he praised the colonies as "the last asylum" of British liberty while leaving the distinct impression that if ever, G.o.d forbid, there should be a war between the mother country and her colonies, he was the natural choice to lead the Americans to victory.

Lee decided to stay at the wooden two-story tavern on School Street called the Cromwell's Head. In addition to being a notorious patriot gathering place, it was where, almost twenty years before, the young George Was.h.i.+ngton had stayed during his one and only trip to Boston. Was.h.i.+ngton had served with both Gage and Lee during the Braddock campaign back in 1755, and if Lee had a native-born rival for command of the colonial forces, it was George Was.h.i.+ngton.

Winningly uncouth and eccentric, Lee was also highly intelligent and impulsive. He considered the novelist Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, a good friend but had also spent several years amid the wilds of Pennsylvania and New York. The Indians had given him the name "Boiling Water," and he was reported to have had two children by the daughter of a Mohawk chief. This was just the military figure to capture the imaginations of the city's patriot leaders, and on August 6 Lee sent his old friend Thomas Gage a letter.

Lee made the paradoxical claim that it was the "warm zeal and ardor" of his affection for Gage that had prevented him from making any effort to visit him. He then proceeded to inform the new royal governor that he had been duped by the British government.

I believe, Sir, I have had an opportunity of knowing the way and tricks of the cabinet better than you. I make no doubt but they have been all played off upon you. May fortune or some G.o.d extricate you from ... their clutches. I cannot pretend to say whether or not the Americans will be successful in their struggles for liberty, but from what I have seen in my progress through the colonies, from the n.o.ble spirit pervading all orders of men from the first estate and gentlemen to the poorest planters, I am almost persuaded they must be victorious and most devoutly wish they may; for if the machinations of their enemies prevail, the bright G.o.ddess liberty must fly off from the face of the Earth.

For Gage, who was then trying to implement the Coercive Acts from his temporary seat in Salem, it must have been maddening to know that Lee was in Boston doing everything he could to make him look like a fool. And then, on August 15, yet another colorful veteran of the French and Indian War, Colonel Israel Putnam, fifty-six, from Pomfret, Connecticut, arrived in Boston with a herd of 130 sheep for the town's poor. Like Lee, Putnam was an outsize, almost mythological character. The citizens of Pomfret told the story of how he had rid the town of its last remaining wolf. With a musket in one hand and a torch in the other and with a rope tied around his feet in case he needed to be quickly extricated, he had climbed into the wolf's den and dispatched the snarling mother and her cubs. During the war with France, he had been a member of the famed Rogers's Rangers and might have been burned to death by the Caughnawaga Indians if not for a fortuitous shower of rain.

Charles Lee was delighted to see the old warrior, and the two of them had the temerity to visit the regiments camped on the common, where they traded stories with friends. Inevitably the British officers asked whether Lee and Putnam had come to Boston to fight. The patriot Thomas Young a.s.sured Samuel Adams that both soldiers left the impression that should matters come to a head, the colonials-not the British regulars-could count on their support. Young also reported that when Lee finally left Boston on August 17, "Never man parted from us with a more general regret than General Lee."

By the end of August, Gage was getting unsettling reports from the western portion of the province. Safely removed from the regiments collected in Boston and Salem, the country towns were making sure that the Coercive Acts were, in the words of John Andrews, "a blank piece of paper and not more." It had started as early as June, when sixty representatives from several towns in Berks.h.i.+re County met at Stockbridge and came up with a series of resolutions that became the model for counties throughout the province. In addition to demanding a boycott of British goods, the delegates meeting at Stockbridge drew up a declaration of rights along with a pledge to maintain their own form of local government. A month later, Worcester held a similar convention. Whereas the people of the Berks.h.i.+res had emphasized the need for maintaining order, those in Worcester County were more concerned that each town maintain a company of well-trained and well-armed militia.

Instead of the Port Bill, it was the arrival of the Ma.s.sachusetts Government Act in August that pushed the province into a state of what Gage deemed open rebellion. One after the other, in town after town, mandamus councillors were forced to either resign or flee to the safety of Boston. On August 23, Daniel Leonard began to realize that it was no longer safe for him in Taunton and quietly slipped away for Boston. The following day two thousand men a.s.sembled on the Taunton town green and would have pulled down Leonard's house if not for the pathetic pleas of his aged father. In Great Barrington, 120 miles to the west, citizens shut down the local courts. In Salem, Gage found himself in a standoff with the Committee of Correspondence, which had dared to call a town meeting even though the gathering was now, according to the Government Act, illegal. Gage had the offending committee members arrested and threatened to jail those who refused to put up bail. When it began to look as if about three thousand militiamen might forcibly "rescue the committee," Gage had no choice but to call off his regulars and forget the matter.

A few days later, the residents of Danvers, which now served as Gage's adopted home, also called a town meeting. John Andrews gleefully reported that the meeting was continued for several needless hours just "to see if [the governor] would interrupt them." When Gage was told of the town's outrageous behavior, he was reported to have cried, "d.a.m.n 'em! I won't do anything about it unless his Majesty sends me more troops."

The following day, Gage traveled to Boston to ensure that the superior court was allowed to sit. Although the judges made an appearance, the jurors refused to cooperate, and the session proved an embarra.s.sing failure. "Civil government is nearly [at] its end," Gage wrote Lord Dartmouth, "the courts of justice expiring one after the other... . We shall shortly be without either law or legislative power... . Nothing that is said at present can palliate. Conciliating, moderation, reasoning [are] over."

In just about every town outside Boston it had become impossible to support, publicly at least, the British government. A unanimity unlike anything ever experienced in the previous hundred years had swept across Ma.s.sachusetts. Up until this point, internal division and unrest had been a long-standing part of colonial life. The Salem witch trials were only the most notorious example of how rumor, superst.i.tion, and personal animosities could overtake a town. Disagreements over monetary policy, banking schemes, and smallpox inoculation had divided the colonists. As the province's population continued to climb, many towns, particularly those surrounding Boston, had begun to run out of land, creating tensions within families that forced many younger inhabitants to relocate to the hinterlands to the west, north, and east to what we now know as Maine. And then there was the perennial issue of religion.

In the 1740s the itinerant English minister George Whitefield had aroused an evangelical fervor throughout the colonies that emphasized the individual's emotional experience of G.o.d. Later referred to as the Great Awakening, this upsurge of religious feeling divided communities across Ma.s.sachusetts into two groups: the "old lights," who dismissed Whitefield as a sensationalist, and the "new lights," who embraced the sense of the dramatic that Whitefield and his followers brought to the pulpit. In 1750 the future patriot leader Joseph Hawley led a bitter battle to remove the brilliant and controversial new-light minister Jonathan Edwards from the meeting at Northampton. In the years after Edwards's ouster, pa.s.sions remained so high in Northampton that Hawley felt compelled to issue a public apology for having sought the minister's dismissal. That had been in 1760, and now, almost a decade and a half later, all these old divisions had been largely forgotten as colonists united in their opposition to the policies of the British ministry. It was more than a little ironic: an incipient rebellion had pulled these once-warring New Englanders together.

There were exceptions, of course. All across the province there were those who chose to remain faithful to the crown. Financial considerations motivated many of the loyalists, particularly those who were employed by the king or had won commissions for their military services during the French and Indian War. Some were simply contrarians who couldn't help but object to the patriots' coercive demand for unity. Others, such as Daniel Leonard, had been lied to once too often to see much n.o.bility in the clarion call for liberty. Josiah Quincy's older and much less volatile brother, Samuel, shared Leonard's disillusion with the patriot leaders. But that did not prevent him from loving his outspoken brother. "Our notions both of government and religion may be variant," he wrote Josiah, "but perhaps are not altogether discordant." Neither of them suffered from "a defect of conscience or uprightness of intention," he insisted. They simply had different views of what was best for their country.

On the evening of August 30, John Andrews went for a walk along the mall of Boston Common. He spotted Governor Gage coming up a nearby street surrounded by a retinue of six officers, three aides-de-camp, and eight orderly sergeants. Gage's entourage was stopped by a recently arrived mandamus councillor from Bridgewater, "a mere plow-jogger to look at," scoffed Andrews. Once the governor had conferred with the newly exiled councillor, he continued to the head of Winter Street, where Brigadier Percy had rented a home beside the common. The two officers had matters to discuss, and "while [Gage] went in," Andrews wrote, "his attendants of high and low rank stood in waiting at the gate like so many menial slaves." Unknown to Andrews, and to just about everyone else in Boston, Gage had a plan that would soon have the entire province in an uproar.