The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson

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СКАЧАТЬ listed more than three dozen caches in his notebooks—including rice, ammunition, axes, oatmeal, and wood-bladed shovels rimmed with iron shoes. As ordered by the provincial Committee of Supply, he appointed “faithful men” to guard the stocks, with teams ready “by day and night, on the shortest notice” to haul the matériel away as required.

      The provincial congress also chose five militia generals and approved a system for alerting the colony with mounted couriers in moments of peril. Several dozen articles of war were adopted; the first two required soldiers to attend church and to avoid profane oaths, with a fine of four shillings per cuss for officers, less for privates. Virtually every white male from sixteen to sixty in Massachusetts was required to serve under arms. “The parson as well as the squire stands in the ranks with a firelock,” a Boston merchant wrote. Instead of exercising once every three months, many companies now met three times a week. An Essex County militia colonel, Timothy Pickering, simplified the manual of arms with his Easy Plan of Discipline for a Militia, which would be widely adopted. Muskets could be primed and loaded with one order and ten motions. “Lean the cheek against the butt of the firelock,” the Easy Plan instructed. “Shut the left eye, and look with the right along the barrel.”

      Each company elected its own officers, but at a militia gathering in March, Reverend Emerson drew from the Second Book of Chronicles to remind the men of Concord who really led them: “Behold, God himself is with us for our captain.”

      Boston’s natural beauty had once beguiled British soldiers. “The entrance to the harbor, and the view of the town of Boston from it, is the most charming thing I ever saw,” an officer wrote home in 1774. That enchantment had faded by the spring of 1775. “No such thing as a play house,” a lieutenant in the 23rd Foot complained. “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.” A captain in the 38th Foot told his brother in Ireland, “The people here and we are on bad terms, ready to cut one another’s throats.” Small insults bred seething resentments. All it took was an overbearing British customs official, mud flung at a fusilier on the street, or a fistfight over a girl between a “Jonathan”—a rebellious American, in British slang—and a lobstercoat.

      A Royal Navy officer described seeing miniature effigies of British soldiers hanging by nooses from roadside trees, each wearing a tiny red coat. In March, a marine lieutenant reported how passing Bostonians made coarse gestures with their hands on their backsides. For their part, devout colonists resented regulars dishonoring the Sabbath by ice-skating across a Roxbury pond; they also loathed British Army profanity, which dated at least to the Hundred Years’ War, when English bowmen were known as “Goddams.” 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.”

      The British garrison now exceeded five thousand, of whom more than four-fifths were soldiers, gunners, and marines in thirteen regiments. They crowded every corner of the town: artillerymen billeted in warehouses on Griffin’s Wharf, the 4th Regiment of Foot—known as the King’s Own—in a vacant distillery in West Boston, the 64th Foot in Castle William on a harbor island, the 43rd Foot on Back Street. Troops drilled in Brattle Square and on the Common, throwing stones to drive away the cows and avoiding the burial ground that held the graves of a hundred comrades dead from disease and mischance. Regiments took target practice on the wharves, six to ten rounds for each soldier, firing at river flotsam or at man-size figures cut from thin boards. A physician visiting from Virginia told his diary of watching light infantry exercises in late March, “young active fellows” who loaded firelocks while lying on their backs, then flipped over to fire from their bellies. “They run out in parties on the wings of the regiment,” he added. “They secure their retreat & defend their front while they are forming.”

      Ugly encounters between Jonathans and lobstercoats multiplied. Officers mocked the Old South oration with a parody delivered from a coffeehouse balcony in “the most vile, profane, blackguard language,” a witness reported. In mid-March, soldiers from the King’s Own pitched tents within ten yards of a meetinghouse and played drums and fifes throughout the worship service; troops later vandalized John Hancock’s elegant house facing the Common. A peddler from Billerica named Thomas Ditson, Jr., who was accused by British soldiers of trying to buy old uniforms and a musket from the 47th Regiment, was stripped, tarred, feathered, and paraded from Foster’s Wharf through King Street while a fifer played “The Rogue’s March.” A placard labeled “AMERICAN LIBERTY” was draped around his neck. “It gave great offense to the people of the town,” a British officer wrote, “and was much disapproved of by General Gage.”

      The indiscipline of a bored, anxious army weighed on Gage. Gambling had become so pernicious that he imposed wager limits and established the Anti-Gambling Club. Worse still was inebriation in a town awash with cheap liquor. Regulars preferred West Indies rum, although it was often contaminated with lead, but 140 American distilleries also produced almost five million gallons a year, which sold for less than two shillings a gallon. “The rum is so cheap that it debauches both navy and army, and kills many of them,” Major Pitcairn, the marine, warned the Admiralty in March. “It will destroy more of us than the Yankees will.” A 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. Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie of the 23rd Foot—the Royal Welch Fusiliers—recorded in his diary that many men “are intoxicated daily” and that two had died of alcohol poisoning in a single night. “When the soldiers are in a state of intoxication,” he added, “they are frequently induced to desert.”

      And desert they did. Drunk or sober, redcoats were lured by Americans who offered farm-smock disguises, escape horses, and three hundred acres to any absconding regular. Estimates of British Army desertions over the past year ranged from 120 to more than 200. Five-guinea rewards were advertised by company officers in the Boston Post-Boy for the likes of Private Will Gibbs, “about 5 feet 7 inches high, and of a fair complexion,” last seen wearing a round hat and a brown coat trimmed in blue. The problem was even worse for naval captains: more than twenty thousand British seamen had jumped ship in American ports since early in the century, and nearly another eighty thousand—almost 14 percent of all jack-tars who served—would abscond during the coming war, including those who deserted in home waters. Many had been forced into service by press gangs, while some detested the harsh life at sea; all resented the paltry nineteen shillings a month paid seamen since the reign of Charles II. Boston was particularly notorious for desertion, and the Royal Navy ships now blockading the harbor had remained at anchor through the winter with their gunports caulked and their topmasts housed against the weather, unable to berth for fear of mass defections.

      Floggings, and worse, had limited deterrence. Private Valentine Duckett, barely twenty-one, had been sentenced to die after a three-day trial for desertion in the fall. “I am now to finish a life, which by the equitable law of my country, I just forfeited,” he told his comrades while being lashed to a stake on the beach below the Common. A six-man firing squad botched the job even at eight yards’ range, but after a coup de grâce to the head, the entire army was ordered to march “in a slow, solemn step” to view Private Duckett in his coffin. Private William Ferguson of the 10th Foot, a former tailor now dressed in a white shroud, suffered a similar fate on December 24. The execution, a lieutenant observed, was “the only thing done in remembrance of Christmas.” On March 13, Gage commuted the death sentence of Private Robert Vaughan, but after more soldiers deserted the next day, the high command announced that this would be “the last man he will pardon.” Vaughan took advantage of his reprieve to flee again a month later, this time without getting caught.

      By contrast, many young British officers hankered for action. Among them was a tall, dark-eyed captain in the King’s Own, the eldest son of a vicar from County Antrim. William Glanville Evelyn, now thirty-three and still unmarried, СКАЧАТЬ