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July 19 - July 28, 2020
twenty ships of the line moored in two facing ranks along five miles of roadstead. Each wore new paint, their bowsprits steeved at a pugnacious tilt of thirty-six degrees above the horizon, their sterns boasting names like Royal Oak, Centaur, Terrible, and Triumph. Some six thousand crewmen crowded their decks, and as the king drew near, fourteen hundred guns opened in another thunderous salute, salvo upon salvo.
At thirty-five, George had the round chin and long nose of his German forebears, with fine white teeth and blue eyes that bulged from their orbits.
Not for another fifteen years would he be stricken with the first extended symptoms—perhaps caused by porphyria, a hereditary affliction—that included abdominal pain, neuritis, incoherence, paranoia, and delirium.
in what would also be called the Great War for the Empire. British forces routed the French in the Caribbean, Africa, India, and especially North America, with help from American colonists. “Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories,” one happy Briton reported. Spoils under the Treaty of Paris in 1763 were among the greatest ever won by force of arms.
More than two thousand mature oaks had been felled to build a ship like this, the biggest, most complex machine in the eighteenth-century world,
Twenty or more miles of rope had been rigged in a loom of shrouds, ratlines, stays, braces, and halyards. Masts, yards, spars, tops, and crosstrees rose overhead in geometric elegance.
The smells of tar, hemp, pine pitch, and varnish mingled with the brine of bilgewater and vinegar fumigant and the hog-lard pomade sailors used to grease their queues. All in all, it was the precise odor of empire.
Britain now owned thirty separate colonies in the New World alone, with almost two thousand slave plantations growing sugarcane in the West Indies. Emigration from the British Isles, higher this year than ever, had become “epidemical amongst the most useful of our people,” an official warned; in just fifteen years, 3 percent of Scotland’s population and almost as many Irish had bolted for the New World in what one Scot called “America madness.”
After the treaty was signed, Britain would remain bereft of European allies for a quarter century.
Americans benefited from eradication of the French and Spanish threats, from the protection of trade by the Royal Navy, and from British regiments keeping peace along the Indian frontier at a cost that soon exceeded £400,000 a year.
To maintain order, in 1768 the government dispatched four regiments to fractious Boston;
in March 1770, when skittish troops fired into a street mob, killing five. Two soldiers were convicted of manslaughter
That spring, Britain repealed all Townshend duties except for the trifling tax on tea, left intact to affirm Parliament’s fiscal authority.
“We have troublesome times a-coming for there is a great disturbance abroad in the earth & they say it is tea that caused it.”
The Tea Act restructured the East India Company and gave it a monopoly on tea sold in America. The company could appoint its own American agents, eliminating the expense of British wholesalers; the tax of three pence per pound imposed under the Townshend Acts would be retained to again affirm Parliament’s authority, but other export duties were eliminated. The price of tea in America would drop by more than a third, selling for less than the smuggled Dutch, Danish, and Portuguese tea popular in the American market.
implied Parliament’s authority to create monopolies for other commodities and reawakened the fraught issue of taxation without representation. The cynical manipulation of colonial markets on behalf of British mercantile interests nudged American moderates toward common cause with radicals who deplored all British meddling in American affairs.
three merchant ships moored at Griffin’s Wharf. Prying open the hatches, they used block and tackle to hoist from the holds hundreds of heavy chests containing forty-five tons of Bohea, Congou, Singlo, Souchong, and Hyson tea. For three hours they methodically smashed the lids and scooped the leaves into the harbor.
by morning almost £10,000 worth of soggy brown flakes drifted in windrows from the wharf to Castle Island and the Dorchester shore.
“Rally, Mohawks, bring out your axes, / And tell King George we’ll pay no taxes / On his foreign tea.” “I am much hurt,” King George confessed when news of this outrage reached him in mid-January 1774. Sorrow soon yielded to anger. An American in London described “a great wrath” sweeping Britain, not least because although thousands had watched or participated at Griffin’s Wharf on the night of December 16, only one witness agreed to testify in court, and then only if the trial convened in London.
essayist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, known without affection as Dictionary Johnson, had already denounced the Americans as “a race of convicts, [who] ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.” Now Dr. Johnson “breathed out threatenings and slaughter, calling them rascals, robbers, pirates, and exclaiming that he’d burn and destroy them,” his companion James Boswell recorded.
The colonists bought up to 20 percent of British manufactured goods, but the market for certain commodities was much bigger—a quarter of British white salt and wrought brass, a third of refined sugar, tin, and worsted socks, half of wrought copper, glassware, and silk goods, and two-thirds to three-quarters of iron nails, English cordage, and beaver hats.
“my deluded subjects,” who, according to a new legal opinion by the British attorney general, were committing “the crime of high treason.” The troubles in Boston threatened “anarchy, the most terrible of all evils.”
The Coercive Acts and the Quebec Act galvanized American resistance, empowering the radicals and further converting neutrals and moderates to a cause now touched with fire.
the Continental Congress. Not only did they endorse resistance to the Coercive Acts, the delegates also agreed to halt trade with the British Empire over the coming months. Imports and exports would be forbidden in an escalating economic campaign intended to pressure London by hurting British merchants, manufacturers, and consumers.
At the same time, American militia leaders had begun stockpiling gunpowder and other munitions. “A most daring spirit of resistance and disobedience” had infected the colonies, George told Parliament that November, with “fresh violences of a very criminal nature.”
Lord Frederick North,
he was fated to be a war minister, with his king’s empire in the balance. He could talk tough, as in his claim that “America must fear you before they will love you” or his assurance to the Commons that “four or five frigates” could close Boston Harbor because “the militia of Boston were no match for the force of this country.”
It was North, after all, who in 1770 had said, “I can never acquiesce in the absurd notion that all men are equal.” Now, with his stack of 149 documents as proof of American perfidy, he would seek Parliament’s agreement to force submission.
William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham,
“All attempts to impose servitude upon such men, to establish despotism over such a mighty continental nation must be in vain,” he warned. “We shall be forced, ultimately, to retract. Let us retract while we can, not when we must.” France and Spain, he told the peers, “are watching your conduct, and waiting for the maturity of your errors.” He continued:
House of Commons proved no less bellicose. American insurgents were “an enemy in the bowels of the kingdom,”
Americans, “of a pusillanimous disposition, and utterly incapable of any sort of order or discipline,” would “never dare to face an English army.”
Edward Gibbon. “We have both the right and the power on our side,” he had told a friend a week earlier. “We are now arrived at the decisive moment of preserving, or of losing forever, both our trade and empire.”
We find that a part of your Majesty’s subjects in the province of the Massachusetts Bay have proceeded so far to resist the authority of the supreme legislature, that a rebellion at this time actually exists.… We consider it as our indispensable duty, humbly to beseech your Majesty that you will take the most effectual measures to enforce due obedience to the laws and authority of the supreme legislature. George was nearsighted, and some faces around the room were blurry as he read his brief reply, composed with North’s help: You may depend on my taking the most speedy and effectual measures
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London newspaper reported that a light cavalry regiment preparing to deploy had inscribed “DEATH OR GLORY” on its caps, with an embroidered skull. Seven regiments of foot bound for America were brought to strength by drafting soldiers from units left behind.
Horace Walpole. “It is that kind of war in which even victory may ruin us.”
the American War of Independence would last 3,059 days. Or that the struggle would be marked by more than 1,300 actions, mostly small and bloody, with a few large and bloody, plus 241 naval engagements in a theater initially bounded by the Atlantic seaboard, the St. Lawrence and Mississippi Rivers, and the Gulf of Mexico, before expanding to other lands and other waters.
“an abridgement of what are called English liberties.”
Even in better days, Boston had known ample misery—smallpox and measles epidemics, Quaker and witch hangings. For the past three decades the population had stagnated at fifteen thousand people, all of them wedged into a pear-shaped, thousand-acre peninsula with seventeen churches, no banks, no theaters, and a single concert hall, in a room above a shop. Puritan severity was not far removed.
Dr. Joseph Warren, a prominent local physician, intended to deliver a speech titled “The Baleful Influence of Standing Armies in Time of Peace.”
Other colonies were unlikely to support Massachusetts; southerners especially “talk very high,” but the fear of slave rebellions and Indian attacks “will always keep them quiet.” The thirteen colonies seemed too geographically scattered and too riven by diverse interests to collaborate effectively.
In mid-August, fifteen hundred insurgents prevented royal judges and magistrates from taking the bench in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts. Two weeks later, Gage sent foot troops to seize munitions from the provincial powder house, six miles northwest of Boston; rumors spread that the king’s soldiers and sailors were butchering Bostonians. At least twenty thousand rebels marched toward the town with firelocks, cudgels, and plowshares beaten into edged weapons. “For about fifty miles each way round, there was an almost universal ferment, rising, seizing arms,” wrote one clergyman.
the “Powder Alarm” emboldened the Americans, demonstrated the militancy of bumpkins in farms and villages across the colony, and revealed how crippled the Crown’s authority had become. “Popular rage has appeared,” Gage advised London.
In December, rebel raiders seized forty-four British cannons on Fort Island in Rhode Island. Two days later, several hundred men stormed a fortress in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, overpowered the six-man garrison, snatched nearly a hundred barrels of powder from the magazine, and lowered the
day later they returned to haul away sixteen cannons and sixty muskets.
In obedience to the Continental Congress’s declared boycott of British goods, thousands of provincials would soon serve on local committees throughout the colonies, enforcing the ban and rooting out “enemies of American liberty” with threats, public scoldings, and violence.
“Go home,” a young nurse named Sarah Tarrant barked from an open window, and “tell your master he has sent you on a fool’s errand.”
Major John Pitcairn, the marine commander in Boston, advised the Admiralty in March, “One active campaign, a smart action, and burning two or three of their towns, will set everything to rights. Nothing now, I am convinced, but this will ever convince these foolish bad people that England is in earnest.”
soldier caught trading his musket for a jug of New England Kill-Devil could draw five hundred lashes with a nine-cord cat, enough to lay bare the ribs and kidneys.
April 15, and formed into a makeshift brigade with twenty-one companies—eleven of grenadiers and ten of light infantry,
