Gage and Graves’s feuding over the marines is chronicled in NDAR, pp. 123–27; Gage’s March 6, 1775, letter to Graves complaining of how his naval blockade turned away provisions intended for the troops is also in NDAR, p. 128. A December 13, 1775, letter published in the January 17, 1776, issue of London’s Morning Post and Daily Advertiser claims that the feud between Gage and Graves “first originated with their wives; both of whom led their husbands,” in Letters on the American Revolution (LAR), edited by Margaret Willard, p. 238. Major James Wemyss claimed that Gage “was governed by his wife, a handsome American,” in “Character Sketches of Gage, Percy and Others,” Sparks Papers, Harvard University, xxii, 214. In his Diary, Lieutenant John Barker tells of Margaret Gage’s subscription “scheme” for the ball in January as well as the February ball attended by both the Gages and the Graveses, pp. 19–24; he also writes of the Gage-Graves squabble over the marines, p. 15. Hannah Mather Crocker writes nostalgically of “The Last Queen’s Ball” in Observation on the Real Rights of Women and Other Writings, pp. 161–62.
Frothingham writes of Joseph Warren’s role on the Committee of Safety in LJW, pp. 389–91. The huge numbers of supplies deposited in Concord are listed in Diaries and Letters of William Emerson, edited by Amelia Forbes Emerson, p. 60. John Andrews reports on how the “quantities that are barreled up” have contributed to the “dearness of provisions among us” in Boston, in LJA, pp. 394–95. Edward Warren in Life of John Warren claimed that Joseph Warren “induced his brothers Eben and John to appropriate a large portion of their small paternal estate” to help purchase gunpowder for the provincial army (p. 33); he includes the letters between Joseph and John during January and February 1775 in which Joseph attempts to convince his younger brother to take out a note of 200 pounds to Dr. Greenleaf (pp. 34–36, 41–42), and comments, “Like other people of ardent disposition, [Joseph Warren] does not look forward to what might happen even within six months” (p. 42). Samuel Forman in DJW documents Warren’s April 4, 1775, purchase of medical supplies from Greenleaf with 20 percent in cash (p. 266). Paul Revere tells of “a gentleman who had connections with the tory part but was a whig at heart” and who acquainted him with the existence of a spy, in “A Letter . . . to the Corresponding Secretary,” p. 106. On Henry Knox and his involvement in patriot spying efforts, see Mark Puls, Henry Knox, pp. 20–23. The January 3, 1775, letter in which Josiah Quincy writes to his son Josiah Jr. in England recounting the intelligence concerning the miserable morale of the British soldiers and sailors is in Memoir of Josiah Quincy, pp. 212–15. Paul Revere writes of the spy network he was involved with that met regularly at the Green Dragon Tavern in “A Letter . . . to the Corresponding Secretary,” p. 106.
Joseph Warren describes Gage being of “honest, upright principles” in a November 21, 1774, letter to Josiah Quincy Jr. in Frothingham’s LJW, p. 395. Samuel Forman writes of how Warren formed an alliance with British traveling masonic lodges so that his own St. Andrew’s could achieve grand lodge status (DJW, pp. 116–25). Joseph Warren’s April 20, 1775, letter to Gage, in which he wishes he had “told you all I knew or thought of public affairs,” is in PIR, 3:1925–26.
On Benjamin Church, see Clifford Shipton’s essay in SHG, 13:380–98; and Revere’s “Letter to . . . the Corresponding Secretary,” pp. 110–11. In just about every issue of the Boston Gazette in 1774 Benjamin Church’s auctioneer father ran an advertisement. On Benjamin Church as the Indian fighter in King Philip’s War, see my Mayflower, especially p. 358. Alan French was the first to document Dr. Benjamin Church’s role as a spy; see General Gage’s Informers, pp. 147–201. French writes that when it came to Gage’s decision to send troops to Salem in February, he “was strongly influenced by his secret information” (p. 25). Although Church does not identify himself as the source of each specific report, his role as a delegate in the Provincial Congress and stylistic similarities to his earlier and later writings have led me to identify him as the author of the reports that are attributed to him in the text. The March 4, 1775, “Intelligence of Military Preparations in Massachusetts” is reprinted in DAR, 8:63–66. The report filed by Brown and DeBerniere is in an appendix to “The Diary of Lieutenant John Barker,” in Journal of the Society of Army Historical Research, pp. 170–74. George Nash, in “From Radicalism to Revolution: The Political Career of Josiah Quincy, Jr.,” writes of Quincy’s ever-changing views when in London during the fall and winter of 1774–1775 (pp. 266–85), as do Daniel Coquillette and Neil Longley York in Portrait of a Patriot (1:35–76), which contains the edition of Quincy’s London Journal from which I quote in the text (1:223–69). Concerning North’s “Conciliatory Proposition,” Peter Thomas in Tea Party to Independence writes that “North evidently believed that he had found a permanent solution to the imperial crisis” (pp. 199–200); Thomas also cites Thomas Hutchinson’s optimistic letter to his son (p. 218). Dartmouth’s January 27, 1775, letter to Gage is in DAR, 3:37–41.
My account of Joseph Warren’s Massacre Day Oration is based on the following sources: two letters written by Samuel Adams on March 12 and 21, 1775, in Writings, 3:154–55, 160–62; Thomas Hutchinson’s conversation with Colonel James, who attended the oration, as recorded in Hutchinson’s Diary for Sept. 6, 1775, 1:528–29; Lieutenant John Barker’s Diary, March 6, 1775, pp. 25–26; Frederick Mackenzie’s Diary, March 6, 1775, pp. 36–39; the March 16, 1775, issue of Rivington’s New York Gazetteer; and J. P. Jewett’s biography of Joseph Warren in The Hundred Boston Orators, pp. 59–60. Eran Shalev’s “Dr. Warren’s Ciceronian Toga: Performing Rebellion in Revolutionary Boston” provides a useful analysis of the classical resonances of Warren’s oration; the manuscript version is in the John Collins Warren Papers at MHS. The reference to Warren’s “true puritanical whine” is in Thomas Bolton’s “Oration.” Samuel Forman in DJW writes that Warren’s description of the fallen husband and father was “recalled for him from his father’s untimely death” (p. 62); Forman also points out that the dramatic paragraph in which Warren refers to “fields of blood” was “written as an insertion on a separate piece of paper” (p. 234). According to David Hackett Fischer in Paul Revere’s Ride, “In the New England dialect with its lost postvocalic r’s, ‘Fie! Fie!’ sounded like ‘Fire! Fire!’ ” (p. 70).
Thomas Ditson’s account of the events leading up to and including his tarring and feathering by the soldiers appears as a footnote in JEPC, pp. 131–33. When it came to the complaints about Ditson, John Andrews recorded that Gage was “greatly disgusted with their remonstrance (being a very spirited one) but finally dismissed them with every assurance of protection from danger”; March 18, 1775, letter in LJA, p. 400, which also contains Andrews’s description of Bolton’s oration. A manuscript version of Bolton’s “Oration” is at MHS. Bolton wasn’t the only one pointing out the moral duplicity of the patriots; in Bodies Politics: Negotiating Race in the American North, John Wood Sweet cites a British play performed during the Boston occupation in which a black prostitute named Fanfan “rebukes ostensibly chaste Sons of Liberty, for their hypocrisy: ‘Tho’ in public you scoff, / I see many a spark, / Would tink me sweet pretty / Girl in the Dark’ ” (p. 149). John Rowe complains of being mentioned in Bolton’s “Oration” in a March 15, 1775, entry of his Diary, p. 290. John Andrews writes of his “irascibility rising” in a March 18, 1775, letter in LJA, p. 401. Sanborn C. Brown writes about Mary Dill Thomas’s affair with Benjamin Thompson and quotes her claim that “she would roast in hell rather than give him up” in Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, pp. 35–36.
Robert Brand Hanson, editor of Nathaniel Ames’s Diary, published in 1998, was the first to make the link between Warren’s “incognita pregnans” and Sally Edwards (p. 278). Samuel Forman in DJW expands upon that identification by noting that Mercy Scollay later referred to Sally Edwards as a “little hussy” and “vixen” in letters written to Mrs. Dix on July 27, 1776, and November 26, 1776 (CHS, pp. 185, 189). Having independently identified that a Sally E
dwards who turned thirteen in 1774 later married the eldest son of Paul Revere (which is not mentioned in Forman’s book), I asked Forman if he had explored that connection, and he generously shared with me that he had indeed made the possible identification, in a personal communication, February 23, 2012. Whether or not she was the same Sally Edwards who eventually married a son of Paul Revere, it appears almost certain that at some point in September 1774, Joseph Warren got a young woman named Sally Edwards pregnant. An alternative explanation could be that Warren had arranged obstetrical care for a friend. Maintaining the unwed mother and child on Warren’s account after his death might have been a way to shield the identity of the true father, who was not Warren. My description of medical practices in the colonial era depends on Lester King, The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century, and Forman in DJW, pp. 45–53. Forman points out that ipecac had uses in the eighteenth century beyond treatment for poisoning, since it was “a common prescription for reducing pathologic levels of the humor choler by way of the gastrointestinal tract” (p. 49). When it comes to why Warren prescribed ipecac to Scollay in September 1774, he writes, “I cannot identify the disease entity in modern terms, though it involved close follow-up and hands-on care” (p. 394), including the application of a neck plaster the day after Scollay visited Warren twice in a single day.
John Barker writes of the March 30 expedition with Percy’s brigade in his Diary, pp. 27–28. Frothingham tells of the reaction to Percy’s expedition in LJW, pp. 446–47. Joseph Warren tells of the incident in an April 3, 1775, letter to Arthur Lee, LJW, pp. 447–48. The Provincial Congress’s March 30 resolve regarding “artillery and baggage” is cited in John H. Scheide, “The Lexington Alarm,” p. 60. As early as March 30, 1775, Gage was receiving intelligence reports about “several grand debates . . . in this committee such as fixing a criterion for assembling the militia together, the manner how the alarm is to be given, and the place where the counties are to assemble” (PIR, 3:1976); on April 3 he learned that “should any body of troops, with artillery and baggage march out of Boston, the country would instantly be alarmed and called together to oppose their march to the last extremity” (p. 1977).
Chapter Six—The Trick to See It
Joseph Warren’s April 8, 1775, letter to Arthur Lee, in which he recounts how he used the information in Lee’s December 21, 1774, letter to shake the Provincial Congress out of the “state of security into which many have endeavored to lull them,” is in LJW, pp. 447–48. Samuel Knapp in Biographical Sketches writes of how Warren had been preparing himself “for several years . . . to take a conspicuous rank in the military” (pp. 115–16). Edward Warren in Life of John Warren tells of how Warren’s father insisted that his son Joseph not be “a coward” (p. 2). Knapp writes of Warren choosing “to be where wounds were to be made rather than where they were to be healed,” in Biographical Sketches, p. 117; Knapp also writes of Warren’s “versatility” (p. 111). J. P. Jewett in Boston Orators relates William Eustis’s account of Warren’s outraged response to the taunts of the British soldiers as well as their nighttime visit to Cornhill (pp. 48–49). Thomas Hutchinson writes of Warren’s ambition to “become the Cromwell of North America” in “Additions to Thomas Hutchinson’s ‘History of Massachusetts Bay,’ ” edited by Catherine Barton Mayo, Proceedings of the AAS 59, pt. 1 (1949): 45. Peter Oliver in OPAR writes of Warren’s determination to “mount the last round of the ladder or die in the attempt” (p. 128). General Hugh Percy tells of the provincials’ determination “either to set [Boston] on fire . . . or to . . . starve us out” in an April 8, 1775, letter to Thomas Percy, in his Letters, p. 48.
John Andrews writes of how Boston’s residents were “afraid, mad, crazy, or infatuated” and began leaving the city in droves in LJA, p. 402. Thomas Hutchinson records the account of Samuel Cooper’s tense meeting with Joseph Warren during a Sunday service in April 1775 (which had been told him by Harrison Gray) in the August 15, 1777, entry of his Diary, 2:156. According to Cooper’s own Diary, he was in Weston by April 10, “having received several menaces and insults, particularly at Mrs. Davis, having a scurrilous song offered me by an officer,” cited by Charles Akers in The Divine Politician, p. 195. Clifford Shipton writes of Joseph Warren “knowing that a warrant for his arrest was in Gage’s pocket” in SHG, 14:521; Shipton also writes of how Warren assisted Isaiah Thomas in getting his printing press and type out of Boston (p. 520). A transcript of Warren’s brief April 10, 1775, letter about moving his family and personal effects to Worcester appeared in a lot description in a June 9, 1999, Christie’s auction cited by Samuel Forman in DJW, pp. 394–95. Robert Hanson in a note to The Diary of Dr. Nathaniel Ames records that Ames began billing Joseph Warren’s account on April 8, 1775 (p. 278). Daniel Leonard’s comparison of patriot leaders to a “false guide” who leads a traveler to the brink of an abyss first appeared in December 19, 1774, and is reprinted in Tracts of the American Revolution, edited by Merrill Jensen, p. 279. King George’s November 18, 1774, letter to Lord North insisting that “blows must decide” whether the American colonies “are to be subject to this country or independent” is in CKG, p. 153. As Peter Thomas writes in Tea Party to Independence, both sides read each other incorrectly when it came to the outbreak of the American Revolution: “Congress was bluffing, confident that Britain would again back down, as in 1766 and 1770. . . . This time Britain did not do so, and called the colonial bluff. . . . The War of Independence was not a heroic enterprise but the result of a political miscalculation” (pp. 174–75). John Andrews tells of General Percy’s praise of his wife’s drawing in an April 11, 1775, letter in LJA, p. 403. Percy writes of the weather in Boston in an April 8, 1775, letter in Letters, p. 49.
The April 7, 9, 15, and 18, 1775, espionage reports addressed to General Gage appear in PIR, 3:1978–83. Allen French discusses the contents of these letters and the fact that they were written by an insider in the Provincial Congress (who was proven to be Benjamin Church by subsequent letters he wrote to Gage), as well as how the letters influenced the general’s decision making relative to the expedition to Concord, in General Gage’s Informers, pp. 18–33. Many historians cite an account by the British spy John Howe (History of Middlesex County, vol. 2, edited by D. Hamilton Hurd, pp. 579–84), who claimed to have advised Gage to send troops to Concord instead of Worcester, but I have doubts about the reliability of the Howe narrative and have therefore not cited it; see D. Michael Ryan’s argument that the Howe account is nothing but an “embellished ‘plagiarism’ ” in Concord and the Dawn of Revolution, p. 53. Admiral Samuel Graves writes of moving the Somerset “exactly in the ferry way between the two towns,” in his “Narrative” in NDAR, 1:179. Dartmouth’s January 27, 1775, letter to Gage is in DAR, 8:37–41. Allen French carefully analyzes Gage’s orders to Colonel Francis Smith, the originals of which (including an early draft) are at the Clements Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and concludes that “Gage did not plan to seize Hancock and Adams,” in General Gage’s Secret Informers, p. 33. Lieutenant Barker writes of Gage’s April 15 orders to the grenadiers and light infantry being “by way of a blind” in his Diary, p. 29. Paul Revere writes of how on the “Saturday night preceding the 19 April, about 12 o’clock at night, the boats belonging to the transports were all launched, and carried under the sterns of the men of war,” as well as other events preceding and including his famous ride to Lexington, in “A Letter . . . to the Corresponding Secretary,” pp. 106–10. Ellen Chase in The Beginnings of the American Revolution (BAR), vol. 2, lists the height of the steeple of Christ Church as 191 feet (p. 326). The detailed description of the military stores in Concord made on April 18, 1775, is in PIR, 3:1982–83.
According to William Gordon, Warren learned of Gage’s expedition to Concord “by a mere accident . . . just in time to send messengers over the neck and across the ferry,” in his History of the American Revolution, p. 477; Gordon’s reference to “a daughter of liberty, unequally yoked in point of politics” (p. 476)
is often cited as a possible reference to Margaret Gage as Warren’s informer; however, the unnamed female informant Gordon refers to sent a message not to Warren but to Samuel Adams—several days before April 19. Charles Stedman tells of Percy overhearing the townspeople gathered on Boston Common talking about the impending expedition to Concord in his History of the American War, 1:119. In an interview with me at the Gage estate in Firle, Sussex, in March 2011, Lord Nicholas Gage (a direct descendant of Thomas and Margaret Gage) insisted that there was no family tradition concerning an estrangement between the Gages—an assertion that seems borne out by the portraits of Thomas and Margaret, painted after their return to England from Boston in 1775, that still bracket a fireplace mantel at the Gage estate. J. L. Bell in his blog “Boston 1775” does a masterful job of demonstrating why it’s highly unlikely that Margaret Gage revealed any secrets about her husband’s planned expedition to Concord; see postings for April 12 and 13, 2011, http://boston1775.blogspot.com/2011/04/marriage-of-thomas-and-margaret-gage.html. Another possibility is that Warren’s informant was none other than Benjamin Church. In the weeks ahead, Warren would turn a blind eye to some highly suspicious behavior on the part of Church, perhaps because the doctor had earned Warren’s trust by acting as a double agent on the night of April 18.