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“We have troublesome times a-coming for there is a great disturbance abroad in the earth & they say it is tea that caused it.”
“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.”
“They [are] too puritanical to admit such lewd diversions, though there’s perhaps no town of its size could turn out more whores than this could.”
Yet his contempt for the Americans had increased week by week. “There does not exist so great a set of rascals and poltroons,”
Across the colony, in an image that would endure for centuries, solemn men grabbed their firelocks and stalked off in search of danger, leaving the plow in the furrow, the hoe in the garden, the hammer on the anvil, the bucket at the well sweep. This day would be famous before it dawned.
Some militia units were little more than armed rabble, saluting unsuspecting officers by firing blank charges at their feet or sneaking up on young women before shooting into the air in a weird courtship ritual.
British survivors emerged from the maelstrom with a new respect for American fighters. “Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob will find himself very much mistaken,”
One writer, upon viewing this homecoming, concluded that “60,000 men would not be able to bring the Americans under subjection.”
Another American advance on the fort turned to fiasco when strange noises spooked the men, who “ran like sheep,”
A French writer once observed that “in the new colonies, the Spanish start by building a church, the English a tavern, and the French a fort.”
Still, the British Army and the Royal Navy had been driven off by a rabblement of farmers and shopkeeps, led by low-born, ascendant men like the plowman Israel Putnam, the anchorsmith Greene, and the book vendor Knox.
Raiders aboard the Lady Catherine and Savannah Pacquet sailed to Bermuda, waited until the British governor and his fourteen children were asleep, then lowered a confederate through a roof vent into the magazine, so that he could unlock the door from within. The men rolled a ton of powder in barrels down the lawn to their waiting boats without even waking the watchdogs.
John Adams, who took a keen interest in fireship design, had acknowledged that “there seems to be something infernal in this art. But … when it is to combat evil, ’tis lawful to employ the devil.”
The American fireship survivors returned to camp as heroes Saturday morning. At ten a.m., Washington himself arrived to applaud their valor and to give each a $40 reward, plus an extra $10 to “those who stayed last and were somewhat burnt.”
When word spread in London of Franklin’s advance on Paris, British stocks fell.
His request for other curiosities to pique French interest in America led to discussions in Philadelphia of sending rattlesnakes, woodchucks, flying squirrels, and a moose.
“Perseverance accomplished what at first seemed impossible.”
Providentially, as Washington would acknowledge, a cold front had arrived from the west early in the evening, driving the temperature down nearly twenty degrees in a few hours; by Friday morning, thermometers in Philadelphia read twenty-one Fahrenheit.
Nassau Hall, formerly revered as “a seat of learning and politeness” but now a seat of gunplay.
