2
But, Oh! God bless our honest King The Lords and Commons, true. And if, next, Congress be the thing, Oh, bless that Congress, too!
—” A Poor Man’s Advice to His Poor Neighbors,” a ballad1
By 1774 Edward Winslow could not see any chance for compromise. To him the Sons of Liberty were enemies of his class—” Sons of Licentiousness,” a “sett of cursed, venal, worthless Raskalls.”2 His words earned him a severe rebuke from a radical new local authority, the Plymouth County Convention, which charged that he had “betrayed the trust reposed in him” because of his openly Loyalist sympathies.3 Winslow, fearing the end of the Plymouth that his dynasty had created and preserved, showed more than mere sympathy to Tory views. He believed that a civil war was breaking out and that Loyalists had to fight the Rebels (a label that the Sons of Liberty despised) to save the king’s colonies. Winslow met secretly with Governor Hutchinson, who authorized him to raise and maintain a “Tory Volunteer Company.”4
This was not yet a Loyalist call to arms. Winslow wanted a security force that could protect citizens from roaming mobs that Loyalistscalled Rebels even though they often were made up of hoodlums with no greater cause than mischief or anger directed at the upper class by the lower.
The Tory Volunteer Company kept Plymouth “in quiet long after all the towns in the neighborhood were in extreme confusion,” Winslow wrote.5 He credited Hutchinson with approving the idea of mobilizing Loyalists. But it was Hutchinson’s successor, Lt. Gen. Thomas Gage, who carried out the plan.
The arming of Loyalists was a reaction to a new wave of protests that had begun to roar across the colony on May 10, 1774, when Bostonians learned that Parliament had passed an act closing the Port of Boston.6 Three days later, Gage, who had been on leave in England during the Boston Tea Party, arrived in Boston. The city, at least on the surface, and at least on that day, appeared peaceable. He was escorted by the elegantly uniformed Boston Cadets, whose commander was Col. John Hancock, and he was given a noisy welcome that included three volleys of musketry and three rousing cheers.7
Gage brought with him new powers bestowed by the king and the Earl of Dartmouth, principal secretary of state for North America. Gage’s traditional titles—vice admiral, captain general, and governor in chief—now in reality added up to the implicit title of military governor, for he was simultaneously royal governor and commander of British forces in North America. With the aid of the four regiments of British Army Regulars and a fleet of Royal Navy warships, he would rule over a military occupation of the city.
Although Gage’s martial rule encompassed the entire colony, he focused his power on rebellious Boston while trying to keep close watch on the towns around the city. For this, he developed allies among leading Loyalists like Winslow. In early June, Gage moved the customs commissioners and their records from Boston to the relative safety of Plymouth, where Winslow was given a stipend for providing “an Office, fuel, and candles.”8 Winslow’s work for the customs bureaucracy earned him additional umbrage from the Patriots.
Gage knew that royal authority was rapidly waning, but he refrained from imposing harsh martial law. He saw no use in tryingto silence the Rebel newspapers. Freedom of the press had many defenders in Parliament, and nothing was to be gained by further inflaming the Rebels or giving Parliament another issue to debate. To prevent incidents he had ordered his officers not to wear sidearms. They thought that he was kowtowing to the Rebels. An officer, using the soldiers’ nickname for Gage, grumbled in his diary: “If a soldier errs in the least, who is more ready to complain than Tommy?”9
Loyalists waited expectantly for him to crack down on the Rebels. Peter Oliver, a wealthy landowner and chief justice of the colony, hoped Gage would swiftly end the incipient rebellion by arresting Rebel leaders on charges of high treason, a hanging offense. But, Oliver added, “unhappily for the Publick, the People were disappointed & the Traitors felt theirselves out of Danger.” The reason, Oliver said, was “Timidity, in Suppression of Rebellion.”10 Gage, a longtime soldier trying to be a governor, would try to govern by sheathing his sword and picking up a pen: There would be no immediate arrests, no curfew, no raids on Rebel meeting places.
Gage prorogued—discontinued without dissolving—the Great and General Court of Massachusetts and moved it from turbulent Boston to quieter Salem. Voters boldly responded by electing a provincial congress to replace the General Court. Gage canceled his call for a new legislative session. But the representatives kept meeting as a body. It was recognized by Patriots but not by Loyalists, although men of both persuasions were among the members.
Sam Adams, looking beyond protests and mob action, wanted the legislature to vote to send delegates to a congress2 that would take up the Patriot cause. He knew that Gage would dissolve the legislature if his Loyalist informers heard of Adams’s plan. On June 17, after secretly revealing his intentions to a few Patriot legislators, Adams moved that the legislature appoint a five-man delegation to a Continental Congress to meet in Philadelphia beginning on September*.
Before any Loyalists could dash for the door, Adams locked it and pocketed the key, only relenting when a Tory member claimed to be ill and needed to leave.
The suddenly cured delegate ran to find Gage, who immediately wrote an order dissolving the legislature and dispatched his secretary to the legislative chamber. When no one would admit him, the secretary read the order to some people standing in the outside hall. Behind the locked door the legislators voted 117 to 12 to send Sam Adams and John Adams to Philadelphia, along with Robert Treat Paine, a Patriot leader in Taunton, a Tory stronghold about thirty-five miles south of Boston; Thomas Cushing, a prominent Boston lawyer; and James Bowdoin, a wealthy Harvard graduate who shared with Ben Franklin an interest in electricity and the phosphorescence of the sea.11
The Virginia House of Burgesses in Williamsburg had also been officially shut down. But defiant members, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry, met at the nearby Raleigh Tavern and declared support for Massachusetts by agreeing not to import British goods. The declaration defied traditional British policy, which frowned on collaboration among colonies. In New York a committee consisting mostly of merchants also responded to Boston’s appeal. Committees of Correspondence kept the idea moving through the colonies. The result would be the First Continental Congress, attended by delegates from all the colonies except Georgia, the newest and least populous.12
Members of the Massachusetts General Court’s council, which served as a kind of upper house, had been elected in the past. Acting under the new law, Gage appointed members instead. The appointees were known as “mandamus councillors,” a reference to a royal writ of mandamus, from the Latin for “we command.” Gage nominated thirty-six councillors. Twelve immediately declined, and most of those who remained swiftly resigned, fearing retribution from the Sons of Liberty.13
Similarly, when Gage appointed royal judges, many declined to serve. And those who did agree to take the bench discovered that theycould not empanel juries because men who were summoned, including Paul Revere, would not even enter the courtroom. In some places people blockaded the courthouses.14 In Barnstable, on Cape Cod, for example, a crowd of about twelve hundred men gathered in front of the Court of Common Pleas and refused to allow the chief justice to enter after he demanded passage in the king’s name. The confrontation ended peacefully.15 But royal governance was disappearing from courthouses, just as it had from the legislature. All “civil Government, both Form & Substance,” had ended, Peter Oliver lamented. “The People now went upon modeling a new Form of Government, by Committees and Associations… . The wild Fire ran through all the Colonies.”16
The minutes of town meetings in Worcester, forty miles west of Boston, show how conflicts over the Intolerable Acts were turning neighbor against neighbor during that restive summer of 1774. Back in March, when Worcester held its annual meeting, townspeople voted to boycott tea until the tea tax was repealed. Twenty-six “Royalists” voted against the boycott. Shortly afterward forty-three people, all labeled Royalists, signed a petition to reconsider the vote. After a long and bitter debate in June, the petition was defeated.
Now, with Gage in the governor’s chair, the Worcester Royalists were emboldened. Determined to air their beliefs, they filed with the town clerk a long statement that began by lamenting how “sober, peaceable men” in their town had been “deceived, deluded and led astray by the artful, crafty and insidious practices of some evil-minded and ill-disposed persons.” The Royalists’ statement denounced the tea dumpers in Boston and attacked the Committees of Correspondence, whose “dark and pernicious” actions were leading people toward “sedition, civil war, and Rebellion.”
The town clerk, to the astonishment of the Worcester Patriots, allowed the statement to be treated like any other public document. The Boston Gazette learned of the statement and published it on July 4. The Worcester Patriots, enraged, plotted retaliation.17
On August 22 a large force of men from Worcester and area towns, unarmed but marching “in military order,” assembled on the towncommon. A committee called on Timothy Paine, a mandamus councillor and father of a notorious Tory.18 Paine, fearing violence, agreed to resign. The marchers—a history of the town puts their number at three thousand—then headed for Main Street and formed a gauntlet that extended from the courthouse to the meetinghouse. A crowd gathered, wondering what was going on. Patriots pulled Royalists out of the crowd and pushed them into the gauntlet with Paine, forcing them all to stop frequently to read aloud their “acknowledgment of error and repentance.”19
Next, a smaller force—about five hundred men, according to the town history—headed for nearby Rutland and demanded the resignation of another new councillor, James Putnam, a fifty-year-old fifth-generation American. A renowned lawyer, he had served as a major in the French and Indian War. John Adams had boarded in Putnam’s home and studied law under him for two years while teaching school in Worcester.20 Putnam had been the leader of the Worcester group that had signed the anti-Patriot statement. He was not home when the protesters arrived, so one of them handed a member of his family a letter ordering Putnam to publish his resignation in Boston newspapers.21
Another mob, armed with clubs and muskets and numbering some fifteen hundred, confronted Daniel Murray, a designated councillor from Rutland, and demanded his promise to resign. They menaced him at first. But he was surprised to see them disperse “without doing the least damage to any part of the estate.”22 Still, the roving mobs frightened area Loyalists, several of whom collected firearms, ammunition, and food and gathered at Stone House Hill in Worcester, setting up defenses and transforming the house into what became known as the Tory Fort. They stayed there for about three weeks, awaiting a Patriot attack that never came.23
Putnam and scores of other Loyalists were also reviled as “Addressers” because they had signed printed copies of flowery statements, called “addresses,” lauding Gage after his arrival on May 13, 1774, and Hutchinson, prior to his departure on June 1. One address to Hutchinson expressed “the entire satisfaction we feel at your wise, zealous, and faithful administration.”24 An equally flattering tribute was presented to Gage, hailing him for his “experience, wisdom and moderation, in these troublesome and difficult times.”25
A broadside published by the Patriots identified the 123 Addressers of Hutchinson, including relatives of placemen and artisans, such as jewelers and makers of chaises (open carriages, often with collapsible hoods), whose leading customers were Loyalists. Of the Addressers, 14 were officers of the Crown, and 63 were merchants.
Many Patriot tradesmen refused to serve Loyalists. Forty-three blacksmiths in Worcester County, for example, proclaimed that they would not do any work “for any person or persons commonly known by the name of tories.” The blacksmiths urged other Patriots “to shun their vineyards” and “withhold their commerce and supplies.”26
Some of the Addressers attempted to ward off trouble by apologizing for “that unguarded action of ours,” hoping that their acts of contrition would restore them as “Partakers of that inestimable blessing, the good Will of our Neighbours, and the whole Community.”27 Repentance did little good. They were all marked men; even those who rejected Gage’s offer were denounced or threatened.
The Patriots declared that no one should deal with mandamus councillors in any way. Jessie Dunbar, of Bridgewater, twenty miles west of Plymouth, defied the edict by buying livestock from Nathaniel Ray Thomas, a councillor and a leading Tory in Marshfield, thirty miles south of Boston. The original Edward Winslow had founded Marshfield in 1640. A road built then, connecting Plymouth with Marshfield, was probably America’s first; stretches of it still exist as the Pilgrim Trail.28 The original Winslow sold the original Thomas a large swath of Marshfield land, and the two families, generation after generation, remained connected there, by road and by heritage.
Dunbar drove the animals he had bought from Thomas to Plymouth, where he skinned an ox and hoisted the carcass up on a rack for sale. Men who identified themselves as Sons of Liberty soon appeared, cut down the carcass, put it in a cart, and forced Dunbar into the ox’s sliced-open belly. They “carted” him, as they called theordeal, for about four miles, charged him a dollar for the ride, and then handed him over to a new mob whose members carted him for several more miles, extracted another dollar from him, and passed him on to a third mob in Duxbury. There his tormentors yanked him from the ox’s belly, then reached in to pluck out the beast’s entrails, which they used to whip him about his body and face.29
Duxbury bordered on Plymouth and had been settled in 1632 by Mayflower passengers, including storied Miles Standish. Loyalists in Duxbury reported that the local militia had spawned a number of “Minute Men,” volunteers who vowed to be ready to go into battle at a minute’s warning. The First Massachusetts Provincial Congress had directed that one-third of each militia consist of men and officers ready and equipped to respond swiftly to an alarm. Other colonies copied the Massachusetts system in various ways.30
Until the Revolution militias were royal military units, usually commanded by wealthy and influential officers commissioned by the Crown. As Patriots began rising to power, they formed provisional governments whose revolutionary acts included the abolition of royal militias. Many militiamen became self-appointed enforcers, harassing Tories and policing boycotts. The First Continental Congress urged Patriot leaders to control local militias. The second went further, advocating the election of militia officers and suggesting that militia companies form themselves into regiments controlled by elected provincial governors and legislatures. Loyalists eventually reacted by forming their own military units.
Gage undoubtedly knew about the spreading minuteman movement through his intelligence network of Tory spies and informers. But, without disclosing his own knowledge, he politely replied to a letter of concern from Duxbury justices, promising that he would “take every step” in his power to “secure to them the peceable enjoyment of all their constitutional privileges.”31
• • •
One of the mandamus councillors who did not resign was Daniel Leonard, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer from Taunton. While representing Taunton in the legislature in the earlier 1770s, he had been an eloquent supporter of the Patriots, even though he was the son of a Loyalist judge. But Leonard the Patriot married an heiress and, as John Adams described Leonard’s metamorphosis, “He wore a broad gold lace round the rim of his hat, he had made his cloak glitter with laces still broader, he had set up his chariot and pair… . Not another lawyer in the province … presumed to ride in a coach or chariot.”32 By 1774 Leonard was a committed Loyalist.
“When I became satisfied that many innocent, unsuspecting persons were in danger of being seduced to their utter ruin, and the province of Massachusetts Bay in danger of being drenched with blood and carnage,” Leonard wrote to Gage, “I could restrain my emotions no longer.”33
Patriots in Taunton had tolerated Leonard until they learned that he had accepted Gage’s appointment as a councillor.34 A huge mob gathered near Leonard’s home and began shouting threats. Leonard’s father stepped outside the mansion. Saying his son was in Boston, he promised to try to talk Daniel into resigning. The mob dispersed. The next night a smaller group appeared and, seeing a light in a bedroom, believed that Daniel was home. Someone fired a gun. The shot shattered the window of the bedroom window, narrowly missing Daniel’s pregnant wife in her bed. When the Leonard baby was born mentally disabled, the family blamed the terrifying shot in the night.35
In western Massachusetts, Gage had selected Israel Williams, a longtime legislator, to be a mandamus councillor. He, too, had declined the appointment. Nevertheless, one night a mob kidnapped the sixty-five-year-old. They brought him to a house several miles away and confined him to a room with a fireplace, locked the doors, built a fire, and then blocked the chimney. His captors kept Williams gasping for air until morning, when he stumbled out of the smoke-filled room and signed a paper that pledged his opposition to British authority.36
Patriot mobs’ “smoking” treatment was so commonplace that John
Trumbull used the term in references to Murray and Williams in a poem. Trumbull, a lawyer who had practiced with John Adams, was a Patriot poet best known for M’Fingal, a long poem that satirized Loyalists. It included these lines:
Have you made Murray look less big, Or smoked old Williams to a Whig?37
Smoking and intimidation had mostly replaced tar and feathers, which had been the punishment of choice during Stamp Act days. The practice, which British torturers had been performing since the Crusades, was hurting the Patriot cause.38 “Americans were a strange sett of people,” a member of Parliament remarked in 1774, “… instead of making their claim by argument, they always chose to decide the matter by tarring and feathering.”39 After the Stamp Act protests died down, Patriot leaders tried to curb the mobs of Massachusetts; tarring and feathering dropped off, although one incident was well publicized.
John Malcolm, a notorious customs informer, had beaten a Boston man with a cane. On January 25, 1774, avengers put Malcolm “into a Cart, Tarr’d & feathered him—carrying thro’ the principal Streets of this Town with a halter about him, from thence to the Gallows & Returned thro’ the Main Street making Great Noise & Huzzaing.”40
Redcoats in Boston chose to use the punishment on a civilian caught in a sting operation when he accepted a soldier’s offer to sell his musket. The man was stripped naked, covered with tar and feathers, placed in a cart, and escorted by fifes, drums, and about thirty grenadiers to the Liberty Tree, a venerable elm around which Patriots had been rallying since the Stamp Act protests. A large crowd of scowling citizens gathered and rescued the man as the parade about-faced and rapidly headed back to the British barracks. A protest to Gage went unanswered.41
By the summer of 1774, tension between Bostonians and Redcoats was growing and violence was spreading. In July, Jonathan Sewall, the Massachusetts attorney general, talked about the crisis with hislongtime friend John Adams. Their legal duties happened to put them at the same time in the northern part of the colony that was called Maine. They climbed a hill in Falmouth (now Portland) and were buffeted by the breezes of Casco Bay as they spoke.
As one of the Massachusetts delegates to the Continental Congress, Adams would soon be off to Philadelphia. Sewall urged his friend not to go and to abandon the Patriot cause. “I answered,” Adams wrote in his diary, “that the die was now cast; I had passed the Rubicon. Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country was my unalterable determination.”42
Through the summer Rebel militiamen from several towns withdrew gunpowder from the Massachusetts Provincial Powder House about six miles northwest of Boston in what is now Somerville. The towerlike stone structure was topped by one of Ben Franklin’s lightning rods.
In some way—probably through a Tory informer—word of the gunpowder removal reached Maj. Gen. William Brattle, the highest-ranking officer of the colony’s royal militia.
Brattle, a remarkable man of many achievements, had not yet personally acted on the crisis. In one of John Singleton Copley’s earliest portraits, the large, imposing Brattle is presented in a dazzling gold-trimmed uniform. He lived a comfortable life in one of the mansions on a quiet street that curved along the Charles River in Cambridge, a street that became known as Tory Row.
In Cambridge the Tories were a people apart. About 90 percent of the fifteen hundred residents were descendants of Puritans. They worshipped in Congregational churches and clung to their opposition to the Anglican Church. The Tories of Cambridge, many of whom owned sugar plantations in Jamaica and Antigua, lived on large adjacent estates along Tory Row and entertained one another with lavish dinners. They were all Anglicans who had built their own Christ Church down the street, near Harvard College. Each Tory family purchased a pew, allotting space in the rear for slaves and servants.43
The church and Tory Row formed a little social world untouched by Boston. “Never had I chanced upon such an agreeable situation,” wrote the wife of a Hessian general who had lived nearby for a time. “Seven families, who were connected with each other, partly by the ties of relationship and partly by affection, had here farms, gardens, and magnificent houses, and not far off plantations of fruit. The owners of these were in the habit of daily meeting each other in the afternoons, now at the house of one, and now at another, and making themselves merry with music.”44
Brattle, who graduated from Harvard in 1722 at the age of seventeen, had had three successful careers—clergyman, physician, lawyer—in his public life. But when rebellion began to brew, he became best known as a military officer. Outwardly he tried to maintain neutrality between Loyalists and Patriots. But he was secretly informing General Gage about Rebel activity in Cambridge. After learning about the steady removal of gunpowder, he passed the information to Gage.
Gage moved quickly. In a smooth, predawn military operation, 260 Redcoats slipped out of Boston Harbor in longboats, were rowed to a landing near the powder house, got the key from a royal sheriff, and carried off 250 half barrels of gunpowder, which they transported through Cambridge, Roxbury, and Dorchester to military headquarters at Castle William on Castle Island in the harbor.45
On September 1, after learning what had happened, Patriots set off what became known as the Powder Alarm. Church bells tolled. Drums banged. Thousands of Rebel militiamen mobilized. Express riders carried wild rumors—warships are shelling Boston, Redcoats are on the march—as far as Connecticut, where more musket-carrying men assembled. A mob of four thousand men swarmed into Cambridge and marched to Tory Row.
Somehow Brattle’s letter to Gage had become public. In the words of John Rowe, a prominent Boston merchant, the letter “exasperated the country people against Brattle, so that he now takes refuge in Boston.”46 Brattle’s sudden desertion from Tory Row began an exodus of Loyalists to the protection of the Redcoats of Boston, establishing the city as a sancuary for Tories.
The mob swarmed down Tory Row, shattering the windows of
Jonathan Sewall’s mansion. His fast-thinking wife, Esther, talked the mob into leaving the house intact in exchange for the contents of Sewall’s well-stocked wine cellar.47 The next day mobs marched on the Cambridge courthouse in Harvard Square and successfully exacted resignations from two Tory judges serving as mandamus councillors. Later, Patriots stormed the mansion of Brattle’s good friend, Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver, demanding his resignation. Oliver picked up a quill pen and wrote, “My house at Cambridge being surrounded by about four thousand people, in compliance with their demand I sign my name.”48 Patriot mobs also hunted down Col. David Phips, the sheriff who had given up the powder house key, and forced him to promise he would not enforce the new anti-Patriot laws.
Patriots—” hoodlums,” the Loyalists called them—were openly asserting their power. Rowe’s diary tracks the swiftly growing crisis:
Sept. 2—. A great number of people from the country are collected at Waltham, Watertown, and Cambridge, occasioned as tis reported from the behaviour of Gen1 Brattle… . [General Gage] has reinforced the entrance at the Neck [the only approach to the city by land]. Commissioner [of Customs] Hallowell has been insulted in his way through Cambridge; he fled for shelter to this town [Boston]. Sept 3—[Gage] sent four field pieces to Boston Neck… . Sept. 7—[Gage] has doubled the guards at the Neck, and I believe designs to fortify it.”‘49
In October a red flag emblazoned with the words “Liberty and Union” was raised on the town green of Taunton. Enraged Loyalists reacted by claiming that hoodlums were threatening to take over the town. Taunton’s militia was no longer royal; it was commanded by Col. David Cobb, a Patriot. His brother-in-law, Robert Treat Paine, was in Philadelphia, serving in the Continental Congress.
Paine certainly was not a hoodlum. He had been a prosecuting attorney for the Crown in the Boston Massacre trial. Son of a minister and grandson of a Connecticut royal governor, he had graduated with honors from Harvard at the age of fourteen. He had served in the French and Indian War as a Congregationalist chaplain, Though hepossessed many of the attributes of a Loyalist, he had chosen the Patriot path.
To Ned Winslow and many angry and fearful Loyalists like him, that path was leading toward civil war. They believed that a stronger military presence was needed in the towns outside of Boston, and they wrote to Gage asking that a warship be sent to Plymouth Harbor to provide an emergency exit for Loyalists whose escape to Boston would be barred by towns “where inhabitants are notorious factions & malicious.”50
Gage was obviously aware of Patriot activity in the countryside. Two companies of Redcoats—about one hundred men—patrolled the area around his secondary residence, an estate in Danvers about twenty-five miles north of Boston.51 But Gage hesitated to commit more of his men to Tory protection duty.
Sometime around the beginning of 1775, two hundred of the “principal inhabitants” of Marshfield, asserting that they had been “insulted and intimidated by the licentious spirit that unhappily has been prevalent among the lower ranks of people in the Massachusetts Government,” asked Gage for troops “to assist in preserving the peace, and to check the insupportable insolence of the disaffected and turbulent.”52
Patriot selectmen from Plymouth and five other towns wrote to Gage protesting proposals to send troops out of Boston to protect Loyalists.53 Patriots in Plymouth threatened to march on Marshfield and drive the Loyalists from their farms. Marshfield Loyalists reacted by sending a horseman galloping off to Gage with an urgent plea for help. Gage ordered three officers and one hundred men of the Queen’s Guards to board two ships that sailed immediately to Marshfield. The ships also carried three hundred “stands of arms,” presumably for civilian soldiers. In those days a stand of arms usually consisted of a musket, a bayonet and a cartridge box, and belt.54
The Guards and their officers bivouacked on the vast Marshfield estate of Nathaniel Ray Thomas. “The King’s troops are very comfortably accommodated, and preserve the most exact discipline,” a Loyalist wrote, “and now every faithful subject to his King dare fullyutter his thoughts.” The commander of the unit, Capt. Nesbit Balfour, and other officers made themselves at home in Thomas’s mansion, even having a wine cellar built to Balfour’s specifications.55
When the Queen’s Guards marched into Marshfield, according to the Loyalists’ rollicking account of the Patriots’ panicky withdrawal, only about a dozen Rebel militiamen appeared—and then quickly disappeared. Gage sent the troops as a show of force against the socalled minutemen (a new, more frightening word than the old and familiar “militiamen”) who had begun to roam the country roads beyond the usual reach of his Boston Redcoats. Queen’s Guards escorted Loyalists when they set out on those roads. In one clash between the militiamen and a Redcoat patrol, a British sergeant threatened to shoot the militiamen if they failed to give up their arms. They had handed over their weapons.56
“Minutemen” became the Loyalists’ label for a new brand of Patriots—Rebels carrying muskets. In March 1775 a Loyalist had a harrowing encounter with three minutemen who pounded on his door and announced that they were going to carry him off to jail. When they refused to leave,
I then took down my gun from where it hung, and … all three Sprang upon me, Renched ye Gun out my hand, when my sick wife and all my children stood by, Screeching, Screaming & Crying, my wife begging, as if it was for her Life. I then Ran in to my Shop, and took my Sword… and Swore if they did not Leave the House I would Run them through… . I then told my little son to fetch me my horse and put on the saddle, which he did; I then, with my Every Day Clothes, went out of my house and mounted my Horse… . I Rode out, fast.57
In Marshfield, as in nearby Taunton, the Patriot-Loyalist conflict was tearing the town apart. Some three hundred townspeople, including members of the Winslow family, belonged to the Associated Loyalists of Marshfield. On January 31, 1774, at a town meeting, a majority approved a resolution pledging loyalty to the king. From a town meeting on February 14 came a counterdeclaration pledging that Patriot townspeople would contribute their “last mite for the cause of liberty in the province.”58
The arrival in Marshfield of Captain Balfour and his Queen’s Guards temporarily quieted the town. Balfour, making his acquaintance of prominent Loyalists in the neighborhood, became a frequent guest at Winslow’s home. During one visit he offered to station some of his Guards in Plymouth. Winslow declined the suggestion because, he said, local Rebels would be inflamed by the sight of Redcoats on the streets of his town.
When one of Balfour’s subordinates did stroll down a Plymouth street, a crowd surrounded him. He darted into an apothecary shop. Some people followed him in and demanded his sword. When he refused, they snatched it from him, broke it into pieces, and departed, satisfied with merely humiliating the officer.59
During a dinner at Winslow’s home, Winslow laid out to Balfour a plan to march some of the Guards from Marshfield to Plymouth to capture the Rebels who essentially ran free there. Balfour turned to one of the guests, John Watson, a member of the now-defunct Old Colony Club, and asked if the Rebels would fight back. “Yes, like devils,” Watson replied. Balfour politely turned down Winslow’s plan.60
Late one night in August 1774, a mob attacked Col. Thomas Gilbert of Freetown, about thirty-five miles south of Boston. Gilbert, a tough old soldier, fought off his assailants. Then the same mob fell upon Brig. Gen. Timothy Ruggles, who, “by his firm Resolution,” also emerged from a scuffle unharmed. But, said Tory chronicler Peter Oliver, “in Revenge” men in the mob cut off the tail and mane of one of Ruggles’s finest horses and painted the animal.61 Another account says that his cattle were maimed and poisoned.62 Gilbert himself later wrote that several attempts were made on his life.63
Gilbert and Ruggles separately began planning the creation of Loyalist military forces that would fight the Patriots and their minutemen without dependence on Gage and his Redcoats. As proudcomrades in battle during the French and Indian War, they preferred to be addressed by their wartime ranks. Gilbert, who lived in the Tory-dominated Assonet section of Freetown, in effect took command of armed Loyalists in southeastern Massachusetts. He seems to have become the quartermaster general of the stands of arms that had been shipped with the Queen’s Guards sent to Marshfield. With Gage’s approval, Gilbert stored muskets, powder, and bullets in his home and, in his words, “collected and armed about 300 Loyalists, trained and Exercised them.”64 This would be the first Loyalist military corps raised in the colonies.65
A fifth-generation American, Ruggles could claim, through his wife, a link going back to the beginning of the Plymouth Colony. President of the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, he had launched his career as a staunch Loyalist. But he had refused to sign the Declaration of Rights.66 He became a wealthy man, the owner or five farms. He kept thirty prized horses and maintained a deer park to entertain his hunting guests.67
Ruggles was distantly related to John Adams,68 who once wrote that Ruggles’s “grandeur consists in the quickness of his apprehension, steadiness of his attention, the boldness and strength of his thoughts and expressions, his strict honor, conscious superiority, contempt of meanness, &c.” After Ruggles became a militant Loyalist leader, Adams changed his assessment, condemning Ruggles’s behavior, accusing him of being governed by “pretended scruples and timidities,” and claiming that he was “held in utter contempt and derision by the whole continent.”69
All around him Ruggles saw that the Patriots—” a banditti, whose cruelties surpass those of savages”70—were organizing and uniting for war. Ruggles believed Loyalists should quickly do the same, forming a counterforce that he called the Loyal American Association. Its members would pledge, “with our lives and fortunes,” to “stand by and assist each other in the defence of life, liberty and property, whenever the same shall be attacked or endangered by any bodies of men, riotously assembled upon any pretence, or under any authority not warranted by the laws of the land.”71 (The First Continental Congressused similar language, resolving that Americans “are entitled to life, liberty & property.”)
Brigadier Ruggles was a stubborn, committed man. When he had been appointed a mandamus councillor and set off to Boston to be sworn in by Gates, he had to cross a bridge on the road out of Hardwick. At the head of a menacing crowd stood his Patriot brother Benjamin, the captain of a royal militia that was rapidly turning rebellious. Town tradition records the scene:
Benjamin quietly faced his older brother and said that if he crossed the bridge he would never be allowed to return.
“Brother Benjamin,” Timothy replied, “I shall come back—at the head of five hundred soldiers, if necessary.”
“Brother Timothy,” Benjamin replied, “if you cross that bridge, this morning, you will certainly never cross it again—alive.”
Timothy Ruggles turned, waved his hand to the crowd, and at a brisk military pace crossed the bridge.72
Ruggles’s proposed Loyal American Association would protect “the good people of the province.” Members of the association were to pledge that they would not submit to any rebellious assembly and would instead “enforce obedience” to the king and his laws; they would defend each other if imperiled by “any Committees, mobs, or unlawful Assemblies,” and, “if need be, will oppose and repel force with force.” Finally, if the person or property of any member of the association was injured and “full reparation” was refused, “we will have recourse to the natural law of Retaliation.”73 Within three weeks, according to an enthusiastic Loyalist, 150 men of Marshfield signed up for the association.74
Not long after Ruggles’s plan became public, a band of Loyalists in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, signed an agreement that they would “defend and Protect Each other from Mob Riots or any unlawful attacks … to the utmost Extremity.” Those Loyalists were reacting to the storming of William and Mary Castle, a crumbling fort about three miles offshore, by Portsmouth Patriots. After easily overpowering the British guards, the raiders carried off cannons, muskets, and one hundred barrels of gunpowder. John Wentworth, the New
Hampshire royal governor, appealed to Gage for help. Two Royal Navy warships soon appeared off Portsmouth, and from one of them the governor borrowed twenty stands of arms for his newly formed Loyalist Association.75 Wentworth boarded one of the warships and, with his wife and infant son, sailed away to Boston hoping in vain that he could persuade Gage to save New Hampshire from the Rebels.76
On village greens from New England to South Carolina, Rebel militias were drilling. Patriot couriers were carrying messages from town to town and colony to colony. Georgia, which managed to send only one delegate to the Second Continental Congress, finally showed its solidarity in May 1775, when Sons of Liberty broke into a royal magazine in Savannah, stole gunpowder, and then shared it with South Carolina Rebels.77 The authority of the Continental Congress was spreading and showing itself, through the creation of provincial congresses and through “resolves” that ranged from military matters to social behavior. In Wilmington, North Carolina, for example, the Committee of Safety decreed that “Balls and Dancing at Public Houses are contrary to the Resolves of the General Congress” and warned a known Tory to withdraw her plans for a ball at her house. She stubbornly went on with the ball, apparently after some negotiating. But the committee issued a general warning against future dancing.78
In Virginia delegates to the Virginia Convention met to approve acts of the Congress. To evade the royal governor—John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore—the delegates met in a church in Richmond instead of the royal capital of Williamsburg. On March 23 Patrick Henry proposed raising a Patriot militia and, to critics seeking conciliation, he declared:
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 stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What wouldthey have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!79
In London, Parliament debated conciliation and then voted against the idea, 270 to 78.80 War now seemed inevitable; indeed, as Patrick Henry said, it had actually begun. Ruggles’s Loyal Americans was only a proposal. And Gilbert’s three hundred armed Loyalists were not members of a trained armed force. But Ruggles’s and Gilbert’s plans posed a strategic question for Gage: Would the Loyalists fight against their countrymen?
* A convening of delegates who, while lacking legal powers, discussed and voted on resolutions describing their views.