3
The flame of Civil War is now broke out in America, and … it will rage with a Violence equil to what it has ever done in any other Country… . I think that the people … will adopt the proverb, which says, when the Sword of Rebellion is Drawn, the Sheath should be thrown away; Ocians of blood will be shed.
—John Singleton Copley1
Residents of Cambridge’s Tory Row who were harassed during the September Powder Alarm—William Brattle, Col. David Phips, Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver, and others—fled to Boston, Gage’s garrisoned city. The exodus from towns near Boston had begun around the time that Governor Hutchinson sailed away and General Gage arrived. Those events had produced the “Addresser” phenomenon, which identified leading Loyalists, made them certified objects of Patriot wrath, and inspired John Trumbull to give them notoriety in M’Fingal—
And look our list of placemen all over,
Did heaven appoint our chief Judge Oliver,
Fill that high bench with ignoramus,
Or has it councils by mandamus?
Who made that wit of water-gruel
A judge of admiralty, Sewall?
And were they not mere earthly struggles,
That raised up Murray, say, and Ruggles?
… Or by election pick out from us
That Marshfield blunderer, Nat. Ray Thomas…?2
Some fled from real or imagined mobs, taking their families with them, and some fled alone, all hoping that the rising storm soon would pass, that the Redcoats would prevail, that they could return to their homes and reclaim their lives. Israel Williams—the Tory who had been smoked—choose to sail to England, as did Jonathan Sewall, the former Massachusetts attorney general, and, after a sojourn in Philadelphia, former judge Samuel Curwen.
Mrs. Curwen, a descendant of the Winslows of Plymouth, chose to stay in America, because, Curwen archly observed, “her apprehensions of danger from an incensed soldiery, a people licentious and enthusiastically mad and broken loose from all the restraints of law or religion being less terrible to her than a short passage on the ocean.”3 In London, Curwen found “an army of New Englanders.” But, he added, “… My distress and anxiety for my friends and countrymen embitter every hour.”4
John Singleton Copley, painter of Patriots and Loyalists, also sailed away, first to Italy for a tour through churches and galleries of great art, and then to London, where he became a member of the newly formed Loyalist Club. His wife sailed later. Copley, an Addresser, followed the family of his wealthy tea merchant father-in-law, who had been driven out of Boston by a mob. His half-brother, Henry Pelham, a committed Loyalist, remained awhile in Boston and started spying for Gage. “My hand trembles while I inform you that [the] Sword of Civil War is now unsheathd,” Pelham wrote in a letter to Copley. Soon after, Pelham joined Copley in London. Like many who chose refuge in England, Copley and Pelham never returned to America.5 Eventually more than seven thousand Loyalists moved to England.6 By the early spring of 1775, hundreds of Massachusetts refugees, along with some from New Hampshire,7 were living in Boston. Most of them thought that Gates and his Redcoats would quickly put down any armed rebellion that might arise. Others, like the recruits for Ruggles’s Loyal American Association, believed that Gage would need the aid of armed volunteers. And some spewed invective. One refugee described the Patriots as “more savage and cruel than heathens or any other creatures and it is generally thought than devils.” Another “wanted to see the blood streaming from the hearts of the leaders.”8
Most of the refugees moved their families into the homes of Boston friends. Others rented houses that had been vacated by jittery Bostonians—Loyalists, Patriots, and the undeclared—who had headed elsewhere, hoping that the move was temporary. Some men, such as former Old Colony Club member Gideon White, Jr., struck up social acquaintances with British officers and eventually joined the British Army.
Loyalists who fraternized with British officers put themselves at risk. One was Thomas Amory. Although an Addresser of Gage, Amory was well liked and kept his Loyalist sympathies to himself. For a time he was not harassed. A merchant like his namesake father and grandfather, he lived in Milton, bordering on Boston, in the imposing house of a former royal governor. One night word reached the Patriots that Amory was entertaining some British officers. A brick-throwing mob attacked the house. One of the bricks smashed a windowpane in his young daughter’s room and landed on her bed. Amory stepped out to his porch and tried to calm the mob while the officers slipped out the back door and in the darkness made their way down a garden path that ended at the shore of the Neponset River estuary. They boarded a boat tied up at Amory’s pier, rowed to Boston Harbor, and went to their lodgings. Amory later moved to Watertown, about eight miles west of Boston.9
The well-documented flight of the placemen, the Addressers, and other eminent Loyalists produced for posterity a distorted image of the refugees. Many ordinary families also sought the protection of General Gage’s Redcoats and marines. But documentation is scant about these lesser Loyalists.
John Nutting of Cambridge is an exception. Born in 1739 to a mother who was soon to become a widow, he was apprenticed to a “housewright” in Reading, Massachusetts. After serving in a royal militia during the French and Indian War, he married his master’s daughter, built a house—” two story high, three rooms on a floor”—in Cambridge, and started a family. He prospered as a builder and an entrepreneur, importing to Boston timber from land he had bought in the Maine wilderness.
Nutting had become a Tory, and when General Gage decided to empty the Massachusetts Provincial Powder House in September 1774, Nutting somehow helped, perhaps as an informer and guide. This, in his words, “raised the resentment of the populace against him to such a Degree as obliged him to quit his House & Family, & take refuge in Boston.”10 He moved, followed shortly by his wife and six children, at a propitious time, for the chill of autumn was sweeping through the tented bivouacs of the British forces. Bostonians were not about to billet the shivering soldiers. So barracks had to be built, and few carpenters would sign on for the work.
Nutting volunteered to serve as General Gage’s master carpenter, becoming, as he later wrote, “the first person of an American that entered into the King’s service when the troubles began.” Nutting recruited forty or so carpenters from other places, inspiring a Patriot warning that such work would “deem them as enemies to the rights and liberties of America.” Taking the warning seriously, the builders walked off the job.11
Carpenters imported from Canada and New Hampshire worked on the most crucially needed barracks, which housed the troops assigned to fortifications built on Boston Neck. Boston was then a near-island, attached to the mainland by a slender peninsula. Boston Harbor lay to the east and south, the Charles River on the north and west. Across the river rose the heights of Charlestown, and to the southeast loomed Dorchester Heights.
By November the Boston Neck guardrooms “were not half finished, having neither fire places or Stoves fixed,” Lt. John Barker wrote in his diary. But after their stove was repaired, “we were pretty comfortable.”12 The post at the Neck, called “the Lines,” was a choke-point for people entering and leaving Boston. Gates and his troops could control the city. But Gates realized that if the Patriots started a war and managed to muster a large-enough army, they could take the high ground of Charlestown and Dorchester and lay an effective siege.
Gage’s basic strategy was simple: Deprive the Patriots of an army by depriving them of gunpowder, muskets, and cannons. In October the king had ordered that no gunpowder or arms be exported to America. Patriots learned of this in December and stepped up their efforts to arm their militias.13 Responding quickly, Patriots in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, attacked Fort William and Mary and made off with its store of gunpowder. Patriots in Rhode Island snatched forty-four guns from Fort George at Newport and openly began supplying arms to militiamen.14
Gage reacted slowly. Following up on his September seizure that touched off the Powder Alarm, he ordered a strike against the Rebels of Salem, about twenty-five miles north of Boston. Gage was well informed about Rebel activities by Loyalist spies controlled by his principal intelligence officer, his brother-in-law Maj. Stephen Kemble. Like Mrs. Gage, Kemble was born in New Jersey and was more knowledgeable about Americans than typical British-born officers. Gage’s intelligence network served him well. Many of his agents were never identified.15
Dr. Benjamin Church, a Boston physician and member of the Patriots’ Committee of Correspondence, frequently wrote Patriot prose and poetry. A native of Newport, Rhode Island, he graduated from Harvard in 1754. He later studied medicine at the London Medical College and returned to America with an English wife. He was a member of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts and the Sons of Liberty. He was also a secret Tory and Gage’s best-placed spy, an operative that a modern spymaster would call a mole or penetration agent.16
From Church or one of his other agents, Gage learned about the Rebel arsenal in Salem, where, by February 1775, work was ending on a bold project to arm Patriots with cannons. Col. David Mason, as engineer for the Massachusetts Committee of Public Safety, had been a captain of British artillery in the French and Indian War. Somehow he had acquired about a dozen twelve-pounders, which had originally been emplaced at a French fortress in Canada. Now he was supervising their conversion to field cannons. Mason was the Renaissance man of Salem. He gilded and varnished carriages, painted portraits, tinkered with machinery, and gave paid lectures on electricity—a phenomenon he had discussed with his old friend Benjamin Franklin. Mason’s interests included the science of explosives.17
Mason had turned the fortress cannons and some others over to Robert Foster, a militia captain and a blacksmith. In his Salem workshop, Foster added carriages and modified the cannons with ironwork to Mason’s specifications. Mason’s wife and daughters were meanwhile sewing five thousand flannel powder bags for the cannons.18
Work on the cannons was almost completed when General Gage ordered a raid to seize the arms. He gave the mission to the 64th Infantry Regiment, which was stationed at Castle William. Members of that regiment could avoid being seen on the streets of Boston because they could directly be boarded onto a transport off Castle Island. About 250 men of the 64th sailed off on the night of Saturday, February 26, under the command of Lt. Col. Alexander Leslie.19
The troops were to sail to Marblehead, land there, march to nearby Salem, and confiscate the cannons. Paul Revere’s counterspies heard rumors of an expedition and sent three men to the waters near Castle Island to investigate. They were spotted, seized, and confined until Monday, so that, a Patriot report said, no warning could be sent “to our brethren at Marblehead and Salem.”20
The secrecy held until Leslie and his men began their march to Salem on Sunday, the fifes and drums playing “Yankee Doodle,” a tune that the British often played to mock the Rebels.”21 John Pederick, a Marble-head man, came upon Leslie on the road. They saluted each other and Leslie courteously parted the marching files to let Pederick through.
Leslie had known Pederick as a royal militia officer who had been cashiered because of his Tory views when Patriots took over the militia.
Pederick had found redemption in the Patriot cause and, when he saw the troops arriving in Marblehead, he knew he had to get past Leslie and warn Salem. After their friendly meeting, Pederick rode slowly past the troops. Then, out of sight, he galloped down the road to Salem. The first man he met was Mason, the cannons’ owner. Many people of Salem were at afternoon worship in a meetinghouse when Mason burst through the door and ran down the aisle shouting that the Regulars were coming.22
As church bells rang and militia drums thundered a call to arms, Mason rode off to supervise the hiding of the cannons. Men hauled some of them into a dense wood and buried them under a deep carpet of leaves. The bulky carriages were taken elsewhere. Patriots loaded other cannons onto horse-drawn wagons that headed down the road to Danvers, where they were buried in a gravel pit.23
By the time the men of Leslie’s advance guard reached a bridge between Marblehead and the southern end of Salem, they found the planks ripped up. Soldiers quickly repaired the bridge, but the men hiding the cannons had won a few minutes. The Redcoats marched on, colors flying and drums beating, until they reached the courthouse in the town square. Leslie was soon in muted conversation with three local Loyalists. One was an Addresser. Another was the half-brother of Col. William Browne, a mandamus councillor and one of the notorious “Seventeen Rescinders” of 1768.24
Now informed where the cannons were most likely hidden, Leslie led his troops toward an arm of the sea called the North River. Arching over the ship channel was a drawbridge. The troops—and a large, unruly escort of shouting, taunting Salem men, women, and children—were nearing the bridge when the northern leaf of the draw was raised. Everyone stopped at the southern end of the bridge.
By then a growing band of Rebel militiamen was assembling near Leslie’s force. On the other side of the water stood armed men. Some climbed up on the leaf of the bridge and, dangling their feet, jeered at the soldiers. Among the men on the bridge was Capt. Richard Derby.
As a privateer during the French and Indian War, he had taken from a French ship many of the cannons now in Salem. “Find the cannon if you can,” Derby shouted. “Take them if you can. They will never be surrendered.”25
Militiamen were stationing themselves along the road to Marble-head, Leslie’s potential line of retreat. Militiamen from Marblehead, Danvers, and other nearby towns began heading for Salem. Many of these hard-eyed men were veterans of the French and Indian War and cod fishermen who had earned their strength and tenacity by defying the North Atlantic. Redcoats did not faze them.
Leslie, his sword drawn, threatened to clear the road with a volley of musketry. “You had better not fire,” a militia captain told him, “for there is a multitude, every man of whom is ready to die in this strife.” (Another version has the captain say, “Fire and be damned! You’ve no right to fire without further orders. If you fire, you’ll all be dead men!”)
Near the bridge Leslie noticed three flat-bottomed scows called gungalows, grounded by low tide. He ordered some soldiers to commandeer them for passage. Leslie’s men headed toward the gungalows, bayonet-tipped muskets at the ready. Several Salem men got there first, jumped into the scows, and smashed their bottoms with axes. A man bared his chest to the winter chill and defied the Redcoats to stab him. One did, pricking the Salem man’s chest. “He was very proud of this wound in after life and was fond of exhibiting it,” says an account, which also gives Salem the claim that this was “the first blood of the American Revolution.”
The Reverend Thomas Barnard, a former Loyalist and an Addresser who had later publicly begged forgiveness, stepped forward as a mediator. Facing Leslie, Barnard, in his deep, resonant voice, pleaded restraint. Accounts vary, but eventually the consecrated version was this: “You cannot commit this violation against innocent men, here, on this holy day without sinning against God and humanity! The blood of every murdered man will cry from the ground for vengeance upon yourself, and the nation which you represent! Let me entreat you to return!”26
Barnard probably came up with the idea that defused the face-off: The bridge leaf would be lowered so that Leslie and his men could cross the bridge in a pantomime of searching for the cannons. He would then march his men to a point about thirty rods (495 feet) beyond the bridge, turn, and march them back to their ship in Marble-head.
Leslie agreed. The bridge leaf was lowered. Leslie marched his men across the bridge and about five hundred feet beyond, where Robert Foster’s blacksmith shop—and a line of silent militiamen—stood. Leslie ordered his men to halt, face about, and march back across the bridge. There were shouts and an occasional catcall from opened windows as the Redcoats departed from Salem. They marched on to Marblehead, boarded their transport, and returned to Boston.
The Salem episode, which gleeful Patriots quickly dubbed “Leslie’s Retreat,” emboldened the Rebel cause and stunned the Loyalists, especially those who were seeking refuge in Boston. Gage, undaunted, continued his disarm-the-Rebels strategy. On February 22 he had ordered two officers, Capt. John Brown and Ens. Henry De Berniere, to disguise themselves as civilians and travel from Boston to Worcester, which, like Salem, had become a Patriot hive.
Gage seemed to be contemplating an attack on Worcester. Writing in August 1774 to Lord Dartmouth, Gage said the Rebels in Worcester “openly threaten resistance by arms, have been purchasing arms … and threaten to attack any troops who dare to oppose them… . I apprehend I shall soon be obliged to march a body of troops into that township.”27
Gage ordered Brown and De Berniere, an accomplished artist, to produce “a sketch of the country as you pass.” He wanted to know “distances from town to town” and entrances in and out of them. “The rivers also to be sketched out, remarking their breadth and depth and the nature of their banks on both sides, the fords, if any, and the nature of their bottoms.” Also, “You will remark the heights you meet with, whether the ascents are difficult or easy; as alsothe woods and mountains, with the height and nature of the latter, whether to be got round or easily past over… . whether the country admits of making roads for troops on the right or left of the main road, or on the sides,” and how much food and forage were available.28 Brown and De Berniere, donning plain brown suits and tying “reddish handkerchiefs round our necks,” thought they could pass as “country men” on their spy mission. But British officers were served by military valets called batmen, and the would-be spies brought one along. When they stopped for a meal at a tavern, they sent their batman to the kitchen to dine with the tavern servants. The officers’ dinner “was brought in by a black woman, at first she was very civil, but afterwards began to eye us very attentively; she then went out and a little after returned, when we observed to her that it was a very fine country, upon which she answered so it is, and we have got brave fellows to defend it.”29
The batman rushed out to the dining room, and suggested that they pay their bill and leave right away. The waitress, he said, had recognized Brown as a British officer from Boston. “This disconcerted us a good deal,” De Berniere later wrote, “and … we resolved not to sleep there that night.”
The two spies did better at their next stop, the Golden Ball Tavern on the Old Post Road in Weston, sixteen miles west of Boston. The owner, Isaac Jones, was such a stalwart Loyalist that he had named a son William Pitt Jones, after the British statesman who was a friend of the colonies but not of armed conflict. Not quite a year before, after accusing Jones of being a Tory, Patriots had raided the tavern and stolen liquor, along with two expensive delicacies, raisins and lemons. Only a month before, the Patriots’ anger had cooled and Jones was allowed to keep his tavern open. Jones would later switch allegiance still again and work hauling supplies for the Continental Army.30
Jones recommended a Tory inn in Worcester. “The landlord was very attentive to us,” De Berniere wrote, “and on our asking what he could give us for breakfast, he told us Tea or any thing else we chose—that was an open confession what he was.” The spies knew they had been watched by Patriot counterspies through most of theirjourney. In case they were stopped and searched, they sent their batman on ahead to Boston with their maps and sketches. But, with the aid of the Tory underground—and a snowstorm that covered their tracks—they got back to Boston without incident.31
The help that the officers received from Tories suggested that a British military force dispatched to Worcester might get partisan aid. But the detailed report also showed rivers, marshes, and potential ambush sites along the spies’ trek. This convinced Gage that a forty-four-mile march to Worcester could become a disaster.
Gage had an alternative. His leading spy, Dr. Church, had provided extensive intelligence about a Rebel arsenal much closer to Boston: in the town of Concord.32 On March 20 Gage sent Brown and De Berniere there, not only to study the terrain and roads but also to confirm the existence of arms caches that Church had reported. He most likely did not know about munitions stored in Congregational meetinghouses, among the most secret of Patriot hoards. Loyalists claimed that there were so many Congregational clergymen in Patriot ranks that they formed a “black regiment.”33
On this second mission the two spies were well supplied with knowledge about Rebel arms—and the names of Tory partisans. Of Concord’s 250 voters in 1774, town fathers estimated that 52 were Tories. When Patriots confronted them and demanded that they recant and apologize, the number dwindled to 44. The following year thirteen persons from the town’s most prominent families were added to the list of Tories.34
Untrained in espionage, Brown and De Berniere exposed one of their contacts when, within hearing of Concord Patriots, they asked for directions to the home of Daniel Bliss, a well-known Royalist. Rebels tracked down the woman who directed the spies and threatened her with tarring and feathering.35
Bliss’s family, like so many others, was split. His father-in-law had been a British Army officer, as had a brother-in-law. Bliss’s two brothers were Patriots, and his sister was married to the Reverend William Emerson, pastor of the First Parish in Concord, who preached the Patriot cause and was chaplain to the Rebel-controlled militia.
The previous December, Bliss had spoken about the Boston Port Bill at a meeting in the Concord meetinghouse, criticizing the Patriots for “flouting your King.” The colonies, he said, “are England’s dependent children” and he warned that “England is a mighty nation” and “Rebellion will lead inevitably to crushing defeat.” Bliss, a Harvard graduate and a lawyer who had given counsel to Royal Governor Hutchinson, was not accustomed to having his opinions questioned. But one man at the meeting did speak up: thirty-nine-year-old Joseph Hosmer, an avowed Patriot and a lieutenant in the militia. Hosmer repudiated Bliss’s every word with an eloquence that astonished and annoyed Bliss. When another Loyalist asked Bliss who this upstart was, Bliss is said to have labeled Hosmer “the most dangerous man in Concord.”36
Brown and De Berniere dined with Bliss at his home, which happened to be near a storehouse containing arms. Believing they were under surveillance, the officers slipped out of Concord late at night and, taking a roundabout route, returned to Boston, escorted by Bliss. He was never again seen in Concord,37 and his family quietly moved to join him in Boston. Later, they went to Canada, where Bliss was commissioned as a British Army colonel and made assistant commissary general.38
The spies’ visit to Concord convinced Patriots that their town would be the target of a Gage raid. As for Gage, his options were quickly narrowing. For some time his immediate superior, Lord Dartmouth, had been urging action against the Rebels. Gage had responded with dire predictions that if Britain chose armed force the result would be the “horrors of civil war.”
But in March Gage wrote a “private letter” to Viscount Barrington, the secretary of war, saying, “It’s beyond my capacity to judge what ought to be done, but it appears to me that you are now making your final efforts respecting America; if you yield, I concede that you have not a spark of authority remaining over this country.” However, Gage went on, if Britain took the path to war, “it should be done with as little delay as possible, and as powerfully as you are able, for it’s easier to crush evils in their infancy than when grown to maturity.”39
What amounted to an order to go to war came from Dartmouth in the form of a letter he wrote on January 27. He allowed the letter to linger in London, while word of it circulated in Parliament and among ministerial officials and advisers. It finally left England on February 22, on board HMS Falcon. Two days later, a duplicate copy was given to Capt. Oliver De Lancey of the 17th Light Dragoons, who was sailing on HSM Nautilus. Local storms delayed the sailing of both ships. The Falcon did not arrive in Boston until April 12; the Nautilus, two days later.40
In the letter marked “Secret,” Dartmouth said, “Your Dispatches … shew a Determination in the People to commit themselves at all Events in open Rebellion. The King’s Dignity, & the Honor and Safety of the Empire, require, that, in such a Situation, Force should be repelled by Force.” A royal government must replace the illegal Continental Congress, Dartmouth said, and “the first & essential step to be taken towards re-establishing Government, would be to arrest and imprison the principal actors & abettors in the Provincial Congress (whose proceedings appear in every light to be acts of treason & rebellion).”41
Dartmouth wanted Gage to launch an offensive immediately rather than wait for promised reinforcements because “the People, unprepared to encounter with a regular force, cannot be very formidable; and though such a proceeding should be, according to your own idea of it, a Signal for Hostilities; yet, for the reasons I have already given, it will surely be better that the Conflict should be brought on, upon such ground, than in a riper state of Rebellion.”
“I understand,” Dartmouth added, “a Proposal has been made by Mr Ruggles for raising a Corps of Infantry from among the friends of Government in New England. Such a Proposal certainly ought to be encouraged, and it is the King’s Pleasure that you should carry it into effect upon such Plan as you shall judge most expedient.”42
Dartmouth apparently heard about the Ruggles plan from Israel Mauduit, a British political writer and brother of the Massachusetts agent, or lobbyist, in London. In October 1774 Ruggles had written Mauduit about mobilizing “friends of government.” Dartmouth’s papers show that in February 1775, after writing the Gage letter, he wasmindful that Ruggles believed he could raise a Loyalist force from “the majority in New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, and the Southern Colonies.” This is one of the earliest references to the belief, held by many Loyalists, that they were strong beyond the rebellious epicenter of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.43
Capt. Oliver De Lancey was an incarnation of that belief. The fact that Dartmouth entrusted such an important letter to a twenty-one-year-old cavalry officer showed the depth of the connection between royal officialdom and the powerful De Lancey family, the staunchest of New York’s Loyalists. Oliver was an American, but he had a partially British biography. Born in New York City in 1752, he was educated in England, where he was commissioned an officer in the British Army.
Oliver was a nephew of General Gage’s wife, the former Margaret Kemble, from East Brunswick, New Jersey, who adapted to British ways while clinging to her American identity. Gage’s official family included not only Stephen Kemble, Gage’s aide-de-camp for intelligence, but also Samuel Kemble, Gage’s confidential secretary. After his arrival on the Nautilus, Oliver De Lancey became another aidede-camp to Gage.44
The day after getting Dartmouth’s letter, Gage received a report from Dr. Church on arms hidden in Concord.45 Gage moved swiftly—and secretly. He knew that the Patriots in Boston had his troops under close observation. On the afternoon of April 18, Paul Revere and other Patriot leaders began getting reports from watchful Bostonians about signs of a major British operation. Revere had heard such rumors before, but this time he believed they were true. So did cautious Dr. Joseph Warren, a physician who was a member of the Committee of Correspondence and a confidant of Sam Adams. Warren decided to seek confirmation from his most trusted and confidential source, whose name he never revealed.
From that source, another Patriot later reported, Warren “got intelligence of their whole design; which was to seize Sam Adams and Hancock, who were at Lexington, and burn the stores at Concord. Two expresses were immediately despatched thither, who passed bythe guards on the Neck just before a sergeant arrived with orders to stop passengers.”46 One of the express riders was William Dawes, a Boston tanner; his business often took him through the Boston Neck checkpoint, where he knew the guards. The other rider was Paul Revere.47
We will never know for sure who that source was. But speculation has persisted that Warren’s spy was Margaret Kemble Gage. Only a circumstantial case exists. She is said to have told a friend that she felt herself as profoundly torn as Lady Blanche in Shakespeare’s King John. Blanche, niece of King John of England and daughter of the King of Castile, is caught in a web of power. She laments her divided loyalty, a lamentation that resounded in many a Loyalist heart after the deadly day of April 19:
The Sun’s o’ercast with blood: fair day, adieu!
Which is the side that I must go withal?
I am with both: each army hath a hand;
And in their rage, I having hold of both,
They swirl asunder and dismember me… .
Whoever wins, on that side shall I lose… .48