USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Celebration of the centennial anniversary of the evacuation of Boston by the British Army, March 17th, 1776 > Part 4
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held, as royalists, to what they trusted was to be the win- ning side, - straitened for the usual supplies of life, and reasonably apprehensive of pestilence and famine within, and of a full share in the perils of an assault from their friends outside.
REMOVAL OF THE INHABITANTS OF BOSTON.
Before the battle in Charlestown the distress and the dreads of most of the 17,000 inhabitants of the town in- duced them to make an appeal to Gen. Gage for liberty to leave it, as the fortifications on the Neck were rigidly guarded, the ferry-ways were closed, and not even a fishing- boat could leave the wharves. The alternative of leaving or remaining was an embarrassing and cruel one for the people themselves; and the granting or refusing permission was an equally perplexed and balanced alternative to the General. A protracted town-meeting in Faneuil Hall, including the whole of a Sunday, presided over by James Bowdoin, with prayer by Dr. Eliot, was excitedly given to the matter. The result was a covenant, by which the General agreed that such citizens, with their families, as wished to go out, on depositing their arms, and agreeing not to take part in an. assault on the town, should have passes, and facilities by boat or carriage, for leaving with their effects. Those who sought the liberty surrendered their weapons, and were prepared to desert their homes and warehouses, yielding them to risks of plunder, fire and destruction, to give up their occupations for a liveli- hood, and to take their chance, as dependents on their country friends. But the General faltered in his part of the covenant, alleging that arms and even cannon had been
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carted out of the town, hidden under loads of manure and by other tricks. The loyalists in the town protested against a measure which, in depriving it of all who sympathized with the rebels outside, strengthened their cause and in- terest, and would make them more inclined to bombard the garrison and all who were left in it. Under their outeries, backed by the advice of some of his remaining councillors, Gage withheld the promised facilities for exit, made it difficult for any to obtain passes, positively forbade them to some applicants, limited the meaning of the word effects to clothing and household furniture, excluding goods, food, and even medicines, and thus aggravated at once anxiety for escape from the town, and the difficulty of securing it. The exigencies of the case, however, compelled him to allow the exit of a large proportion of the people, while he forbade the selectmen, and individuals of whom he was jealous, to join them. Gladly did he rid himself of the infirm and poor, the sick, women and children.
It was estimated that before the battle in Charlestown 10,000 of the inhabitants had left the two peninsulas. All such of the exiles as had not friends willing and able to receive them were provided for by the province, with a tenderly-guarded condition that they were not to be held to be paupers, but sustained by a fixed weekly allowance. In many cases, one or more members of a family, or agents of merchants, remained in town to guard interests or prop- erty at risk, and others, as just stated, were compelled to stay. So it happened that households were cruelly sep- arated during the whole siege, never seeing their several members, imagining and foreboding all forms of evil; and if occasionally communicating at the lines, or by letters,
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being deprived of all privacy, as interviews were watched, and letters were opened on both sides. There was not then, nor is there to-day, a community of the same size on this peopled earth that would have been, or could be, more grievously racked and shattered, more distracted and riven in wretchedness and ruin, than were the town and people of Boston under these rueful ex- periences. Trade, industry, security, all paralyzed; school and family discipline, Sunday ways, habits of order, obedience and reverence at once discredited; sickness unsolaced; death hung over with deeper shadows, and every bitter drop, not yet in the cup of miseries, reasonably anticipated as about to mingle in it, - all these were the beginning of sorrows. It was characteristic alike of the descent and the habits and principles of the people, that arrested apprenticeships, closed schools, and defiled churches and prostrate family altars, were often first and most mournfully spoken of as deepening the gloom of the siege. It is also a matter of authentic and suggestive meaning that even the poorest mechanics and carpenters, of the native stock left in the town, refused the tempta- tion of high wages to work on the construction of bar- racks for the British soldiers, as the cold weather was coming on. The provincial authorities, at the request of General Gage, reciprocated his allowance of the de- parture of unsympathizing inhabitants from Boston, by permitting certain country tories to seek a refuge in the town, among congenial fellowships. As the event proved, it would have been far wiser for them to have re- mained outside, debating their variances and making their
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peace. A bitter destiny of misery, exile and poverty was before them.
In the battle at Charlestown the British forces gained one square mile of the territory of the continent they were to sweep, and lost a thousand men. Nor was this their whole loss, nor the most enfeebling element in it. In that conflict they parted with their conceit and assurance that they had before them only the inglorious, though casy, task of dealing with mobs of poltroons and cowards, who could bluster, but would not fight, even in self-defence. The revelations made in the abounding reports and letters which have since come to light, as sent to England after that engagement, offer impressive, and often amusing, evi- dence that officers and men had been roused to a sense of the seriousness of the task before them, and would readily have given over alike its glory and its risk. They had now two little sea-washed peninsulas to hold and guard for summer and winter quarters. The patriots, griping them at both necks, pestered them with many annoyances, planning mischief also for the ships in the bay, and making bold raids on the crops and flocks of the islands. The besiegers began to look less and less like a gypsy encamp- ment, or a picnic. They themselves came from four provinces, from which also, in some mysterious way, unaided by magazines or a commissariat, they drew such abundant supplies of food that there was even waste of it. After a certain fashion, too, they had officers. Such of them as were not housed in the college buildings and in neighboring dwellings erected shelters near the hills which they fortified.
Three distinct themes of separate, though of related and
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absorbing interest, present themselves, as requiring thought and notice in rehearsing the Siege of Boston, viz., the work of civilians in providing and administering a government; the training of the patriot forces in camp, and also of their commander; and the experiences of the beleaguered town.
CIVILIANS CONSTRUCTING A GOVERNMENT DURING THIE SIEGE.
It is to be remembered that, during the whole siege, Massachusetts was still, at best, but one first of Twelve, then of Thirteen United British Colonies, not yet United States. The bond of allegiance was not severed, nor the pride and love for a foreign fealty yielded up, though hostile forces of the realm had shed blood and were at open war on field and camp. There was an element of the humorous and the grotesque in the situation, if one had heart to trace it out amid the sterner conditions. Curious, perplexing, mystifying it is to the mousing reader to scan the public and private papers of those times. One can easily prove from them that nothing short of rebellion and independence was seen in the vista by those who first opened the debate with the mother-country; and, as easily, that the same men, or their doubles, denied the charge even of sedition, and expressed amazement and dread of the very idea of an as- sertion of independence. And yet every country town, as well as the capital, was from the first committed, in speech and writing, to claims, and covenants which could not possibly stop at any stage short of it. The bird of free- dom had got out of its nest and taken wing. Our village orators and nascent politicians became masters in all ob-
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jurgatory rhetoric, and in all the ebullitions of patriotism. The dictionaries of those days had been ransacked for all the opprobrious adjectives they could furnish to be at- tached to the single commodity of Tea, and the most sting- ing terms were drawn upon in dealing with the measures connected with the decoction that had been made of it in our harbor. The philippics and rallying cries and burn- ing appeals of those days will never lose their latent heat. True, we did not then maintain an eagle at the public ex- pense. But we were in training to use him, with claw and beak, spread-wing and scream, when we should adopt him. It was the birth-time of what has been called American oratory, or Fourth of July eloquence. A writhing patriot embarrassed the digestion of his fellow-citizens by the outburst, "The martial standard of war is erected in the very bowels of your town!" The eagle has now attained his maturity, and we shall approve that he henceforward assume the calm dignity of age.
But during the siege of Boston the pens of sagacious and able men were engaged in more deliberate and tem- pered efforts than those of the tongues of some ardent orators. They were providing for that most urgent of all social securities, whether in times of peace or of war, the supremacy of the civil over the military power. The royal mandate, in riding over the charter of Massachusetts, had destroyed one branch of its Legislature and subverted its judicial courts. General Gage, by his proclamation of June 12, declaring the province in rebellion, and establish- ing martial law, with the proscription of patriot leaders, was held to have vacated his civil authority over the prov- Since that he might hold military sway over Boston. The
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province, therefore, was without a legislature and an exec- utive, without a magistracy and a judiciary. Government was undermined and annulled. The old royal sanction and method of it could not be revived, and it was for the people to decide whether they would dispense with gov- ernment, or avert anarchy by constituting it. The Provin- cial Congress, on May 5, accepted the gauge which the garrisoned Governor had thrown down, put their own interpretation upon it, and resolved, "that General Gage had disqualified himself for serving the colony in any ca- pacity; that no obedience was in future due to him; that he ought to be guarded against as an unnatural and invet- erate enemy." With a view to an instant provision for the emergency, the Provincial Congress had the ready re- source of reverting to their old and honored forms of self- administration, but wisely waited, as did other provinces, for advice from the Continental Congress, about "taking up and exercising the powers of civil government." The Provincial Congress at Watertown had occasion, on May 18, 1775, to say that they "were determined to preserve their dignity and power over the military"-their own military.
It was a sublime triumph of the traditions, principles and spirit which had trained the people of Massachusetts, that, at a temporary and alarming crisis, when the powers of magistrates and the functions of judges were suspend- ed, there should have been the least need of them in out- bursts of local disorder, or even in controversies of man with man. The alternative of a popular government, in- stituted and ratified by forms familiar from the long past, and sure of the approval and obedience of those whose
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free-will created and sanctioned them, was at once availed of. Cautiously, but firmly, and with daily advances over a course which opened for its own successive stages, this and the other provinces engaged in the needful work of being their own legislators. Advice, recommendations, requests, urgent appeals, steadily led on to the bold ven- tures of requisition, till popular assent and approval, en- forced by the stern necessities of the case, warranted the assumption and exercise of a coercive power. The Conti- nental Congress, still addressing and petitioning the king of Great Britain, as still the sovereign of this part of his realm, were hesitating, undecisive, temporizing, about giving the explicit instructions which the provinces had asked for the establishment of government. But still, according to the saying which repeats the homeliest, as well as the profoundest wisdom, "one thing came after another," and in due time the instructions came, with an indorsement.
No undue encomiums, though they have been warm and lavish, especially from the other side of the ocean, have been passed upon what we may call the State papers of this and the other provinces and of the Continental Congress of those troubled years. There is a tone and character common to them all. In them civilians guided and directed in due subordination the swords of officers and soldiers. Beginning with writings from the Select- men of Boston and the papers covering the altercations of Representatives of Massachusetts with the three Gov- ernors, Bernard, Hutchinson and Gage, then proceeding with those of the Committee of Correspondence, of the Council of War, of the Committee of Safety, the resolu-
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tions of Town-Meetings, the instructions to delegates, the documents of the Provincial Congresses, and ending with the formal papers of the Continental Congress at Philadelphia, we cannot but marvel to-day over the mod- eration, the discretion, the acumen, the aptness and co- gency of their tone, method and contents. They have the exactness, pith and directness most desirable and effective in the best class of legal and official doc- uments, without verbiage, complication or mere in- genuity in word fence. Whether these papers are merely appointments or recommendations of occasions for days of Fasting and Thanksgiving according to the revered New England usage, for a single province, or for the continent, or relate to provisions for a paper currency, or concern matters in which a local might conflict with a general direction of common interests, we note the same admirable qualities in them. The most formal of the manifestoes and declarations designed to be read abroad, were written with such power and pertinency as to be efficient pleaders of our cause. The following are the words of the Earl of Chatham in the House of Lords : -
" When your lordships look at the papers transmitted us from America, when you consider their decency, firm- ness and wisdom, you cannot but respect their cause, and wish to make it your own. For myself I must avow, that in all my readings, - and I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master States of the world, -for solidity of reason, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation or body of men can stand in preference to the General Congress at Philadelphia."
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In one class of those State papers, such as addresses and petitions to the king, and those declaratory of princi- ples and purposes, preceding that of Independence, the reader of our day is struck by a certain adroit, subtle, acute skill, sometimes almost suggestive of art or disin- genuousness, in plea, remonstrance, avowal or profession. It was the que, so to speak, of their writers, to distinguish broadly between the mind, intent and inclination of the King on his throne and in his privacy, and the purposes and measures of his Parliament and Cabinet. Notorious is it now that the stiff and unyielding obstinacy of the King, his almost insane perversity and persistency against the advice of his ministers, and even their desire to lay down their office, goaded on the strife from stage to stage; while Lord North was a tool, and hardly an agent. Of course our fathers did not know, or perhaps even imagine, the facts in the case.
But we can hardly conceive they were, at the same time, so stolid, and yet so ingenious, as this class of their papers would make them appear. Their avowals of love, and loyalty and devoted allegiance to his Majesty, and of their desire to comply in all things with what were, or - as they understood it - what ought to be his reasonable expectations from his subjects here, were most profuse and ardent, sometimes excessive and hardly masculine. But they fairly offset this mode and tone of addressing him by the most defiant, objurgatory and denunciatory way of dealing with his advisers. They wrote to and of the ministry and parliament with an admirable effrontery, as if they were really thwarting his Majesty's kind inten- tions and purposes. So, while the patriot forces were
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cooping up the king's troops in Boston, and plundering his store-ships, the Congress at Philadelphia was inserib- ing to him addresses and petitions of such a temper and profession, that one might almost infer that they would have welcomed him to cross the sea and take a seat in their assembly, or accept from them a commission to head their army in driving off his own soldiers. They had motive, if not reason, for thus professing love for their monarch, while denouncing his ministers. So his troops here were spoken of as "the vile and contemptible agents of a vengeful and wicked ministry "; or, as Washington phrased it, "a diabolical ministry."
This was the sting of the letters addressed by him to Generals Gage and Howe, on the treatment and exchange of prisoners, and which they so sharply resented. It was a keen mortification and provocation to British officers and soldiers to be uniformly spoken of and dealt with as this policy of the so-called rebels dictated. Gage called it, on the part of Washington, an "insinuation; " and Howe re- plied to it as an "invective against his superiors, so insult- ing to himself as to obstruct any further intercourse."
A similar character is noticeable in these State papers in their professions of loyalty and willingness to recognize the royal, and even the parliamentary and ministerial au- thority within certain limits - very cloudily defined, how- ever. But every way and form in which it was proposed that that authority should be exercised was pronounced a grievance. It is impossible for us to trace, distinctly, any practicable theory by which the patriots would adjust their relations to their mother-country, so that they might still be subjects, as they said they were willing to be, and
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yet not be in subjection, as they resolved they would not be. The controversy was constantly shifting its grounds, and changing shape, color and substance. It seemed to some in England as if we were tricking and trifling with them. On the first arrival of the troops, one of the votes passed at a Boston town-meeting, Sept. 13, 1768, was, "As there is at this time a prevailing apprehension of approach- ing war with France, every inhabitant is requested to provide himself with a well-fixed fire-lock, musket, accou- trements and ammunition." There was no more prospect of such a war with France, than of her then bombarding Boston with a fleet of iron-clad steam monitors. At first we protested against being taxed by Parliament, because not represented in it; the implication being that, if we were represented in it, we would assume our share in par- liamentary levies and subsidies. Afterwards, when rep- resentation was offered us, we replied that it would be inconvenient to avail ourselves of it.
The simple truth is, our civilians, as petitioners, remon- strants and pleaders, did not reach to the tap-root of the controversy, till successful resistance by actual fighting laid it open to the light, viz., that distance, lapse of time, divergence of interests, and our own growth to self-man- agement, made it preposterous altogether that America should be a fief of Great Britain. It was but a practice in casuistry for us to be complaining of grievances in the infraction of the royal charter. The supreme grievance was that our life, liberty and property were any way in- volved in a charter.
We must trace to the utterances of tongue and pen in those days, full as much as to weapons of war, the embit-
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terment of feeling, jealousies and mutual antipathies be- tween the people of Great Britain and her colonies, which, with a latent persistency in their transmission, and occa- sionally intensely aggravated in their manifestation, were yielding to time and reason, till they were revived in the complications of our civil war. Obliviousness of the people in her American colonies, and utter indifference to- wards them, as a decayed or barbarized branch of the old ancestral stock, were the prevailing feelings of English- men as the storm was gathering. An astounding amaze- ment that these people should have a word to say for themselves as being still, and still claiming the rights of, Englishmen, came with the first threat of resistance. This feeling passed successively through the phases of hauteur, scorn, contempt, passionate hate and vengeful malice. True, we had ardent friends among various classes of the British people, and bold and eloquent cham- pions of some portion of our whole cause in Parliament. But even the most discerning and forecasting of this party in opposition, while two or three among them dared to forebode that our complete severance and independence might ensue on our resistance to tyranny, did not venture to define a consistent policy towards us which would practically reconcile us to any method of foreign rule. The qualities which Englishmen then, and ever since, have most disliked in us are conceit, boastfulness, self- sufficiency and self-complacency, - the very traits which, by blood and lineage, we derive from our English an- cestry, and which, though somewhat mellowed by a livelier humor and good nature, are none the less exhibited almost as offensively by the progeny as by the parent stock.
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Such was the work which the civilians of province and continent were doing discreetly and with fidelity, as they cautiously felt their way on to the construction of a nation, during those eleven months through which old Boston was a British garrison, and a patriot host en- vironed it, first to confine, then to annoy it, and finally to drive it away.
THE PATRIOT CAMP AND ARMY.
We cannot call those swarms and groups of country- men an army, even until a long time after Washington took command, on July 3d. The province had mustered, enrolled and officered her own militia and volunteers, and the other New England provinces had sent forces simi- larly organized - loosely - yet, as it proved, they met the emergency. They were enlisted for very short terms: knew little of subordination or discipline: were apt to come and go at their own wills: clung to their own local associations: and preferred to allot titles and rank as colonels, majors, captains, and so on, to the men whom they had known on their village commons, at town-meet- ings, and in the taverns on muster days. Some of these officers and men had seen service in the French and Indian wars. Gen. Ward was their commander. After a fashion, they held the environs of Boston, through a circuit of hill, valley and marsh, of nearly twenty miles, including guards at outposts, with military works, of their own fashion, too, on some prominent and some exposed points. They had nothing to be called ordnance, but few muskets, and those very poor ones, fewer bayonets, and scarce a scattering of powder. Yet they did not part with
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a single square foot of the soil on which they had planted themselves. Though almost incessantly can- nonaded from the British works on both peninsulas and from the gunboats, not a score of them were killed during the whole siege. The scene, as slightly sketched by a few persons who had an eye for nature as well as for human- ity, was suggestive and impressive, if not beautiful. In the glorious summer months of foliage and herbage over that splendid panorama, the excited groups wrought busily by day, and kept watch by night, turning the hill-tops into citadels, and tramping the tilled fields, the sustenance of their households and cattle. An encampment of about fifty friendly Stockbridge Indians nestled in a grove on the present site of the Watertown Arsenal. The riflemen from Virginia and Maryland lurked venturesomely in the nearest hiding-places, and were a serious annoyance to the enemy in picking off any who were exposed as marks. The remnant of the native forest was cut away in the severities of the following winter, and it was long before nature recovered her sway over the scene. Two grand and fruitful studies in the portraiture of character and the development of a mighty task would offer themselves in the attempt to delineate the camp of the patriots. One would be the self-training of the august commander; the other would be the formation and organization of an army disciplined and made effective from crude, extemporized, fluctuating, and even resisting materials: and this, too, under perplexities and disabilities such as were never before encountered by a General in ancient or modern warfare.
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