Volume 3, Chapter 67, Massachusetts, Nearing the Final Conflict
The continental association and the mass boycott were all very well. These measures served
to radicalize the entire continent and to build an intricate network of spontaneous
grass-roots, revolutionary institutions, often virtually replacing constituted authority
with quasi-anarchic leadership. But none of these measures dealt directly with the really
acute focus of conflict, Boston. It was Boston, and Massachusetts, after all, that were being
punished, oppressed, and militarily occupied. Massachusetts necessarily had to be the focal
center of struggle. The moral and material support of the other provinces was most welcome.
But would they join if armed support were necessary?
At the Congress, Christopher Gadsden had urged initiating armed struggle against the British
troops in Boston, but it was clear to the sagacious radical strategist of Massachusetts
that the rest of America would not support such an effort.
As the Continental Congress made clear, only defensive efforts would be supported against
outright aggression by British troops. Furthermore, most of the radicals naively thought that
the Continental Association would suffice to bring Britain to reason. They did not see
as clearly as the Adamses and the Massachusetts radicals that Britain would not be deflected
from All-Out Suppression. They would soon learn. Meanwhile, the radicals could only
wait for that lesson and tell each other in the words of John Adams, I expect no redress
but increased resentment and double vengeance. We must fight. Even those who expected armed
conflict did not go so far as to anticipate actual American independence. Conflict was
to induce Britain to back down from its coercive imperialist policy. Indeed, the Massachusetts
delegation to the Congress had to reassure even the Virginians that their aim was not
independence. All the delegation, that is, except for Sam Adams, whose silence on the
matter was eloquent in itself. Soon after the opening of the Continental Congress, the
Provincial Congress of Massachusetts assembled in a fateful meeting.
General Gage had called for a meeting of the General Court in early October, but dared
not lead the newly appointed mandamus counselors out from under the wings of the British troops.
It was, furthermore, clear from town instructions to their representatives that the assembly
would hardly agree to the changes imposed by the Massachusetts Government Act.
The most radical and frantically revolutionary were the instructions from the town of Worcester.
These counseled the immediate return to the old Massachusetts Charter of the 17th century,
the presumably forcible opening of the port and removal of British troops, and a trial
of the mandamus councillors for treason. In the light of this atmosphere of militancy,
George Gage called off the meeting of the General Court, but the Americans were prepared,
and towns sent delegates to the extralegal Provincial Congress that met at Concord on
October 11, and later in the month at Watertown, the delegates faced a province without ports
or judges or executives or legislature.
One daunted, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress made as its operating executive John
Hancock President, and created a steering committee of fifteen, the Committee on the
State of the Province, which included Hancock, Dr. Joseph Warren, and such leading radicals
as Joseph Hawley of Northampton, James Warren of Plymouth, and Elbridge Jerry of Marblehead.
Later, the four Massachusetts delegates to the Continental Congress were added to the
province's steering committee.
As a continuing operating organization, the provincial congress selected a smaller 11-man
committee of safety, with John Hancock, chairman, and Dr. Joseph Warren among its members.
The committee was authorized to call out the provincial militia and to collect munitions
and Supplies in Preparation for Meeting Any Future Aggression by the British Armed Forces.
Concord and Worcester were selected as the principal depots for military supplies.
The militia officers, furthermore, were directed to recruit the best-qualified 25 percent of
the militia, mainly veterans of the French and Indian War, into a ginger group known
known as MINUTEMEN, so called because they were expected to answer the committee's call
at a moment's notice.
The MINUTEMEN were formed into emergency companies of 15 men each, and the men of each company
had the power of freely electing their own officers, subject to the overall direction
of the Committee of Safety.
This project was based on the precedent of emergency units used as early as King Philip's
War in the mid-1670s. The Committee of Safety proceeded with dispatch and efficiency to
organized and armed militia to repel any aggressive acts of the British troops. The aim was to
raise a potential army of 12,000 men in Massachusetts and 20,000 additional troops at the ready
were requested from the other colonies in New England. Officers were to be democratically
The Militia Trained Hard This time in contrast to their unpreparedness
when British troops earlier occupied Boston, the people of Massachusetts would be ready
to counter any further invasion.
All the militia of the colony were soon directed to train according to Colonel Timothy Pickering's
New Book, Easy Plan of Discipline for a Militia, 1775.
From Salem, Pickering imaginatively simplified the stodgy and ritualistic rules of British
Army drill and emphasized the American woodsman's habit of individual marksmanship, a practice
particularly suited to an armed people's guerrilla war.
Special philosophy and military tactics blended as one, for Pickering stressed that the American
soldier was an individualist, a freeman, and a property owner, in contrast to professional
European soldiers trained as obedient machines. Pickering wrote that men must see the reason
and the use of any action or movement, tis the boast of European commanders that their
A circular letter sent throughout the colony by the Committee of Safety asked the clergy
to help raise a volunteer army. The committee, an anarchistic institution without coercive
governmental powers to tax or to conscript militia, had to rely on volunteers and voluntary
The Second Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, meeting at Cambridge on February 1, 1775,
rapidly advanced these measures of defense. It also authorized the militia to collect
military stores rapidly, either by purchase or by assuming jurisdiction over the stores
of the Massachusetts government. Consequently, during March and early April, large stores
were collected by the Americans at Concord. The Congress, consistent with its devotion
to Liberty refused to levy taxes on the people. It recommended that they voluntarily pay the
provincial tax to the new revolutionary institutions instead. Addressing the citizens of Massachusetts,
the Congress exhorted, resistance to tyranny becomes the Christian and social duty of each
individual, fleets, troops and every implement of war are sent into the province to rest
from you that freedom which it is your duty even at the risk of your lives to hand in
violet to posterity. Continue steadfast and defend those rights which heaven gave and
no man ought to take from us. The Congregational Ministry of Massachusetts was eager to take
make up the task offered it by the Provincial Congress.
Eminent ministers like the veteran Charles Chauncey, William Gordon, and Peter Thatcher
of Boston, Peter Whitney of Northborough, and Timothy Hilliard of Barnstable led the
clergy in exhorting the right of resistance to the British.
Eloquent were the calls to rise up and wield the sword of the Lord against oppression and
and Slavery in Militia Mustering Sermons. In Boothbay, now Maine, the Reverend John
Murray, a Presbyterian, urged the right and duty of resistance to defend natural, God-given
and constitutional rights. The Reverend Samuel Eaton of Harpswell, Maine, went so far as
to declaim at a militia muster, Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood.
One of the most important expressions of congregational support for the rebel cause came at a convention
in radical Worcester County in the interior of Massachusetts in late March 1775.
At this meeting a delegate, the Reverend Ebenezer Chaplain of Sutton, pleaded for liberty and
separation of church and state.
And in a widely printed and distributed speech, the Reverend Elisha Fish of Upton defended
With the right of property as unalienable by man, the right of each individual to enjoy
his own earnings, Fisch declared, was a corollary of his God-given rights of life and liberty.
Similar preachments were made by Congregational ministers throughout New England, especially
New Hampshire and Eastern Connecticut. Termed by Lieutenant Governor Oliver, gutters of
of Sedition, The Congregational Clergy of New England led the revolutionary cause and
provided a stark contrast to the relatively non-political clergy of New York and Philadelphia,
the lukewarm support of the Baptists and the Tory views of the Anglican clergy.
As tension mounted between the British troops and the swiftly preparing people of Massachusetts
During the winter of 1774-75, several incidents brought the two sides inextricably closer
to overt military conflict.
On December 13, the noted courier and messenger of the Boston leadership, Paul Revere, warned
the New Hampshire radicals of a British plan to garrison troops at Portsmouth.
The very next day, a band of troops led by the prominent young lawyer Major John Sullivan
and the young merchant John Langdon swooped down on the British fort at Portsmouth and
carried away cannons, small arms and a hundred barrels of powder. Sullivan, a delegate to
the Continental Congress, was now the major political figure in New Hampshire and leader
of the Popular Radical Forces there. Soon after the raid, Sullivan and Langdon were
chosen by the Provincial Congress to be New Hampshire's delegates to the Second Continental
Congress. The next clash also inflicted humiliation
upon the proud British troops. On February 26, several hundred British soldiers were
were shipped clandestinely to Salem to seize military stores from the Americans. Not finding
them there, the British marched to the stores at Danvers, but there they were forced by
a larger number of Americans to wait while the stores were removed and then to retreat
back to their ships. In Boston, another clash occurred soon afterward when Dr. Joseph Warren
Warren delivered the annual oration in commemoration of the Boston Massacre.
Gathered illegally at a town meeting moderated by Sam Adams, the townspeople heard Warren
eloquently champion the liberty of Americans and Englishmen and attack the sending of British
troops to occupy Boston.
Then Warren declared, An independence of Great Britain is not our aim, but if pacific measures
are ineffectual and it appears that the only way to safety is through fields of blood,
I know you will undauntedly press forward until tyranny is trodden underfoot.
As Warren concluded, British officers who had been courteously welcomed to the meeting
began to hiss. In an obvious attempt to provoke the Americans into physical attack, which
might not carry the support of the other colonies, the troops arrested a man for illegally buying
a firearm offered by a British soldier. The next day the British arrogantly tarred and
feathered the man, pinned on his back the label American Liberty or Specimen of Democracy,
and paraded him through the streets of Boston with an armed guard and military band.