Revolution! America – Chapter 4 – The Brick Chronicle

On April 14, 1775, General Gage received orders from Britain to disarm the rebels and arrest their leaders, including Samuel Adams and John Hancock. A few days later, seven hundred infantry crossed by boat from Boston Common to Cambridge, planning for an all-night march to Lexington, Massachusetts, where Adams and Hancock were staying, and then farther on to Concord where a rebel arsenal was housed.

But rebel spies had intercepted the British plans, and that same night Paul Revere and William Dawes slipped out of Boston, each taking separate routes on horseback, spreading the word along the way that Redcoats were on the march to Lexington. Their warnings prompted other riders to join them in alerting militiamen throughout the surrounding towns. Upon reaching Adams and Hancock with the news, Revere and Dawes were sent on to Concord while the rebel leaders fled to safety.

At sunrise on April 19, an advance guard of four hundred Redcoats approached the village common at Lexington and were met by about eighty local militiamen, who ranged in age from sixteen to sixty-five, and included eight father- son pairs. Many townspeople had gathered to observe the confrontation. “Lay down your arms, you damned rebels, and disperse!” shouted the British commander. The rebels refused to disarm.

As the British began repeated shouts of “huzzah!” to intimidate the colonists and muster their battle courage, a few of the rebels ran for cover behind nearby stone walls. In the confusion, a shot rang out, but who had fired? It didn’t appear to have come from either line of troops, but taking no chances, the Redcoats responded with a volley against the rebels followed by a bayonet charge. With all the smoke of discharged arms, the rebels could hardly take aim to fire back. Eight militiamen were killed and ten wounded.

The Redcoats regrouped and marched two more hours west to Concord where they found the village deserted of men of fighting age. One elder villager, infuriated by the news from Lexington, attacked the British commander with his fists. Obeying orders to show restraint toward the populace, the Redcoats split up their forces to search the town for munitions and to guard the bridges leading into the town.

Meanwhile, militias from surrounding towns arrived. They joined forces with the men of Concord who had retreated to the surrounding hills. At the edge of town, four hundred rebel militiamen marched toward the North Bridge guarded by ninety Redcoats. As they approached, British soldiers fired without orders to do so, but this time the rebels had the advantage in numbers and position. Seven Redcoats fell dead, including four officers, and the rest fled in a confused panic. Revolution_

One young rebel then crossed the bridge on his own. Coming upon a wounded Redcoat struggling to stand, he smashed the man’s skull with a hatchet, exposing his brain, and leaving him to die a slow, agonizing death. British soldiers later came across their fallen comrade’s body and word quickly spread among the Redcoats, the details of the atrocity growing with each telling until it was said to be four men who had been scalped and that their ears and noses had been cut off.

As the British troops marched back to Lexington in search of Adams and Hancock, the number of rebel militiamen arriving from surrounding towns grew and grew. They took up positions behind trees and stone walls and used sniper fire to devastating effect. Now vastly outnumbered, the British were forced to abandon their mission and retreat to Boston utterly exhausted, having marched seventeen miles out to Concord, and now facing a return trip under heavy fire.

From Lexington to Boston, fresh rebel militiamen kept arriving, and it is estimated that a total of seventy-five thousand rounds were fired at the British during their retreat. Some of it came from private houses along the route, and Redcoats were forced to go house to house, clearing them of snipers. The infuriated troops bayoneted anyone they came across, military or civilian.

At the end of the first day of hostilities between the British army and the rebel colonists, three hundred Redcoats were dead, wounded, or missing compared to ninety-three of the militiamen. General Gage now found himself besieged as fifteen thousand armed rebels from across New England gathered to surround Boston. He did not, however, put the city under martial law and allowed those citizens who wished to leave the city to do so. He even sent out medical supplies with them to help the colonists treat their wounded.

At dawn on May 10, acting of their own volition, rebel militia officers Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold led a small band of men to capture the all- but-undefended Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain in New York before British reinforcements could arrive to protect its dozens of heavy artillery and stockpiles of musket ammunition and gunpowder. The single sentry on duty surrendered.

The commander of the fort had just awoken and was still getting dressed in his chambers when Allen shouted to him through the door, “Come out of there, you damned old rat!” When the commander asked him under whose authority he was acting, the foul-mouthed deist Allen replied, “In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!” Ticonderoga and two nearby forts were taken without a fight.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, the Continental Congress was gathered for a second time with many of the same delegates, but also new faces such as John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin (returned from representing the colonies in England), and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. By mid-June, they had approved a plan to raise a unified Continental Army to assist the New England militias at Boston and selected fortythree- year-old Washington as its commander in chief.

Washington would not manage to join the troops in time, however, to be part of the bloodiest battle of the Revolutionary War. On the night of June 16, 1775, rebel forces moved to occupy and build earthen defenses on Breed’s Hill just across the river to the north of Boston after having received intelligence that the British were preparing to do the same. By first light of day, their position was discovered and General Gage prepared an attack. After reinforcements arrived that afternoon, their number included more than a third of the 6,500 Redcoats now stationed in Boston.

The British made two frontal assaults against the rebels, seeking to overwhelm them with superior numbers. But the rebels showed unexpected discipline, their officers having commanded them to conserve ammunition with the adage “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!” Piles of dead and groaning wounded men soon impeded the advance of those behind them, with the British suffering more than a thousand casualties.

By their third assault up the hill, the rebels had run out of gunpowder and musket balls and were forced to retreat to nearby Bunker Hill and from there back to Cambridge. Most of the rebels’ 450 casualties came during this withdrawal, including many of the last defenders of the hill who were overrun by furious Redcoats seeking vengeance for their fallen comrades with their sharpened bayonets. The British had taken the ground, but at a terrible cost.

Washington arrived in Massachusetts in early July and, upon review of the army, was aghast by the disorder and unsanitary conditions in the camps. He considered the New Englanders “an exceedingly dirty and nasty people” with an “unaccountable kind of stupidity.” He bristled at the egalitarian nature of the militias, with elected officers fraternizing among their subordinates.

The commander in chief took up residence in a three-story mansion in Cambridge that had been abandoned by a rich loyalist who had fled to Boston. The slave family that served the house was left behind, and when Washington noticed a boy from that family in the front yard, he expressed interest in taking him into his service. The boy asked him what his pay would be, and at that Washington lost his interest.

Seeking to instill the discipline of a competent army into his men, Washington immediately instituted harsh measures against swearing, drunkenness, thieving, slacking, or desertion. Thirty-nine lashes with a whip was the most common punishment. Others were put in a stockade or tied up and emasculated by being forced to ride a “wooden horse” with weights attached to their feet.

The onset of violence and bloodshed deepened divisive sentiments among colonists, and soon outspoken loyalists found themselves harassed and threatened by their neighbors, or worse. In New York, a shoemaker named Tweedy who had spoken out against the Continental Congress was seized by a mob, tarred and feathered, and forced to pray on his knees for the success of George Washington and the destruction of General Gage and his “traitors.”

In Connecticut, Dr. Abner Beebe, who had spoken freely in support of the king, was assaulted at his farm by a band of young men. Dragged out of his home in front of his family, he was stripped naked, had hot tar poured on him, was covered in feathers, and then had pig feces thrown at him and forced down his throat. Throughout Massachusetts, throngs of loyalists who could afford to do so abandoned their homes and took shelter in Boston to avoid such treatment.

Independence from Great Britain was still not a stated goal among the rebels or their leadership, and in July, the Continental Congress sent King George III an Olive Branch Petition, seeking reconciliation. But the king refused to read the petition from an illegitimate body representing those colonists bent on killing his soldiers and harming his loyal subjects. By October, he declared all the provinces in open rebellion and announced his intent to hire German mercenaries to assist the army in forcibly subduing the colonies.

At Boston, although Washington despaired that the size of his army was thousands fewer than he thought he would need in order to retake the city, he refused to allow blacks to join the Continental Army. Meanwhile, the royal governor Lord Dunmore of Virginia, who had fled to the safety of a British warship off the coast, issued a proclamation offering freedom to any slave who ran away from his rebel master to enlist with royalist forces. For this, Washington styled him an “arch traitor to the rights of humanity.”

Many other southerners who had previously felt loyalty to the crown were outraged by Dunmore’s act and now turned to the rebel cause. Fearful white plantation owners increased their vigilance and took extreme measures to discourage slave revolt. In Maryland, three slaves who had killed a white man during their attempt to join Lord Dunmore were sentenced to have their right hands cut off, then be hung until dead, their bodies then quartered and displayed in public.

In November 1775, the rebel troops of New England were preparing to celebrate the annual anti-Catholic festivities of Pope’s Day, during which they planned to sing songs and burn an effigy of the Pope. Washington, upon discovering this custom, put an immediate stop to it lest they offend the Catholic French Canadians whom the Continental Congress hoped to win over to their side against the British.

The previous month, Washington had sent out 1,100 of his troops under the command of Benedict Arnold to liberate the city of Quebec from the British. During their arduous 6-week trek through 350 miles of wilderness, Arnold’s men were beset by harsh terrain, freezing weather, starvation, and disease. They were reduced at points to eating soap, candles, dogs, and boiled moccasins. Five hundred of the men died en route or turned back in desperation.

The six hundred who survived included nineteen-year-old Aaron Burr, who was sent to meet with Major General Richard Montgomery, whose rebel forces from Ticonderoga had recently captured an undefended Montreal. The two combined forces of 1,400 men assaulted Quebec City during a blizzard on December 31, 1775. Fighting their way through the streets of the lower city, they then attempted to scale the walls of the upper city on ladders.

But the defenders outnumbered them and inflicted heavy casualties. Montgomery and several others were instantly killed when a loyalist from Boston who had fled to Quebec fired a cannon full of grapeshot at the attackers from pointblank range. Young Burr distinguished himself with his bravery, even attempting to drag the fallen general with him in retreat. Benedict Arnold was shot in the leg and incapacitated. It was the Continental Army’s first defeat with fifty killed and three hundred captured.

By the end of December, so many of Washington’s men chose to return to their homes rather than re-enlist for another year that he was forced to reevaluate his policy barring black freedmen from serving in the Continental Army. Eventually about five thousand blacks would serve, comprising between 6 and 12 percent of Washington’s army, making it the most integrated American military force until the Vietnam War.

On New Year’s Day 1776, Lord Dunmore ordered his warships to bombard and set fire to Norfolk, Virginia, which had been a loyalist stronghold but was now occupied by rebel militias. After hours of cannon blasts, the rebels responded by looting and burning the homes of loyalists, and soon most of the city was in ruins. That the rebels had caused more damage to the city than the British, however, was kept secret by the Continental Congress, and the incident was reported as a British atrocity, furthering the call for independence.

That same month, the shift of popular opinion toward a political break from the mother country was helped along immeasurably by the publication of a forty-eight page pamphlet titled Common Sense. Written by Thomas Paine, who had emigrated from Britain to Philadelphia just fourteen months before, it made the argument for American independence and the establishment of a new republican form of government, doing so in a language and tone that struck a chord with the common man.

It was an immediate success with 150,000 copies printed in the first three months, and half a million by the end of the Revolution, making it, relative to the size of the population, the most widely read book ever published in America. Paine published Common Sense anonymously and donated all his profits from its sales to the Continental Army. He later released his copyright over the pamphlet to aid its distribution. It was published in part or in full by many colonial newspapers and read aloud in taverns and meeting places.

Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were among those influenced by the popular pamphlet, and the latter had it read to his troops. But Paine’s vision of universal male suffrage and a single legislative body with no “upper house” rankled some, with John Adams criticizing it as “so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter-poise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work.” He would later call Common Sense a “poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass.”

Washington grew impatient to capture Boston and had considered several plans of attack, but his senior officers had advised against them, fearing a slaughter of their men against a well-entrenched enemy. Finally at the end of January, spirits were lifted when Colonel Henry Knox arrived from Fort Ticonderoga having hauled sixty tons of artillery three hundred miles over treacherous terrain covered in snow and ice. Washington was now ready to, in his words, “bring on a rumpus” with the Redcoats.

Opening Quote

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Opening Quote