Bunker Hill

still-heated debate, it was finally moved to vote on the motion “for censuring and annihilating” the Committee of Correspondence. If, like Samuel Eliot, the merchants had kept to the covenant rather than the committee, they might have succeeded. But they had, like Samuel Adams before them, overreached. The motion was defeated by “a great majority.” But this wasn’t enough for the Committee of Correspondence. A motion was then made that the town “approve the honest zeal of the Committee of Correspondence and desire that they would persevere with their usual activity and firmness, continuing steadfast.” John Rowe estimated that the motion carried by a margin of at least four to one.
    Samuel Adams and his committee had prevailed on the town floor, but their Solemn League and Covenant ultimately proved a failure. Bostonians never approved the measure, which was adopted by only half a dozen or so towns throughout the province. A lesson had been learned: the committee worked well when spreading news and generating public opinion, but the committee could not set policy—that was up to the people of Massachusetts. And as the long hot summer ahead would prove, the people, 95 percent of whom lived in the country towns beyond Boston, had minds of their own.
    —
    Gage had had such high hopes for the loyalists of Boston. With regiments of soldiers arriving on an almost weekly basis throughout the month of June, he had anticipated that supporters of government in Boston and other towns in Massachusetts would gladly step forward with the evidence he needed to round up the most notorious of the patriots and try them for treason. But this did not prove to be the case. In a letter to Lord Dartmouth, he told of hearing “many things against this and that person, yet when I descend to particular points and want people to stand forth in order to bring crimes home to individuals by clear and full evidence, I am at a loss.” This “timidity and backwardness” on the part of the loyalists was attributed to the fear that the British ministry would soon do as it had always done after a crisis in America: repeal the offending acts and leave the loyalists “to the mercy of their opponents and their mobs.” Given what had happened to John Malcom and others, you could hardly blame them.
    Even Gage’s own soldiers were already giving him problems. Occasional confrontations between the regulars and the locals, particularly at night, were to be expected. What Gage hadn’t anticipated was how quickly his men began to desert, encouraged by a series of broadsheets that began to appear in June. “The country people are determined to protect you and screen you from any that may attempt to betray you to your present slavery . . . ,” one tract promised. “Being in a country now where all are upon a level you may by one push lay the foundation of your own good living in a land of freedom and plenty and may make the fortunes of your posterity.”
    The British army had been succumbing to this siren song for decades. Even Gage, with his American wife, had partially surrendered to the pull that the continent exerted on an Englishman: a beckoning promise of new beginnings combined with a sense of the old, almost primeval Britain of their ancestors. Over the course of the next two months, the regiments stationed in Boston would lose more than two hundred soldiers to desertion. Gage seems to have quickly realized that despite his assurances to the king back in February, his mission was doomed from the start. He should never have accepted this wretched post.
    By the beginning of summer, he’d decided that his current misery was his wife’s fault. On June 26 he wrote Margaret that he was “ready to wish he had never known her.” Thomas Hutchinson was visiting the Gage estate in Sussex when this extraordinary letter arrived in August. By that time, Margaret had long since left to join her husband in America, but this did not apparently prevent other family members from reading the letter and sharing its contents. “[Gage] laments,” Hutchinson recorded in his diary, “his hard fate in being torn from his friends after the difficulty of crossing the Atlantic in the short time of nine months [in England], and put upon a service in so disagreeable a place, which, though he had been used to difficult service, he seemed to consider as peculiarly disagreeable; wishes Mrs. Gage had stayed in England as he advised her; for though it was