Bunker Hill

that at one point Hallowell even pulled the trigger, but the pistol failed to fire.
    The road to Boston took them through several different villages in Roxbury, and Bradshaw kept repeating the cry, “Stop the murderer, the Tory murderer, he has killed a man!” “This hue and cry,” Hallowell wrote, “occasioned a sallying forth of the people from the houses . . . ; others upon the road joined in the cry—all endeavoring to stop me.”
    After about a mile of this frenzy, the horse pulling the chaise began to give out. Hallowell ordered his servant to give him his saddled horse, which turned out to be “a fleet one,” and after tying the reins together and dropping them on the horse’s neck, Hallowell continued on with a pistol in each hand. By the time he approached Boston Neck, he estimated that he was surrounded by about a hundred people, “all endeavoring to seize me,” as he “ran the gauntlet” toward the town gate. Just as he reached the guard at the entrance, his horse began to fail. Hallowell leaped to the ground and ran the rest of the way into Boston.
    —
    The city was soon alive with rumors of its own. The country people, it was said, planned to “fling in about 15,000 by the way of the Neck, and as many more over the ferry.” Once the provincials secured a foothold in the city, they would, John Andrews reported, “come in like locusts and rid the town of every soldier.”
    Gage placed a guard at the powderhouse on the common; he also doubled the guard on the Neck while dispatching soldiers dressed as sailors to gain intelligence of what was really happening across the river in Cambridge. To his credit, he did not send any armed regulars. “Had the troops marched only five miles out of Boston,” Joseph Warren wrote, “I doubt whether a man would have been saved of their whole number.”
    —
    The hurly-burly with Hallowell also had an inevitable effect on the country people gathered in Cambridge. Anticipating a possible attack by the regulars, some of them rushed back to Watertown to retrieve their muskets and swords. Soon they were converging on the home of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Oliver. It was time to make the magistrate admit the full magnitude of his sins against the people.
    Oliver, forty, had been born in Antigua, where the family’s sugar plantation helped fund the huge mansion called Elmwood he had built at the end of Tory Row. Up until his recent appointment to lieutenant governor, Oliver had steered clear of politics and was well respected throughout the province. Even the notorious patriot firebrand Josiah Quincy Jr. counted him as a friend, and if not for Gage’s impatient insistence that he accept the posts, Oliver would have declined the appointments to both the lieutenant governorship and the governor’s council. The patriots weren’t angered that he’d accepted his position as lieutenant governor; it was that he had agreed to serve as a mandamus councillor. Just as Lee and Danforth had been forced to disavow their commissions, Lieutenant Governor Oliver must resign as a mandamus councillor.
    Earlier in the day, Oliver had succeeded in convincing the crowd gathered around his house that it would be in their best interests if he traveled to Boston, spoke with Governor Gage, and reported back to them later in the day. True to his word, he had returned to his house on Tory Row. However, as Gage had predicted, it now looked as if he was about to fall into “the snare.” The people were becoming “unmanageable,” and Oliver, perhaps remembering what had happened to the house of former Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, decided that he had better get himself back to Boston. He had just climbed into his carriage when “a vast crowd advanced and in a short time my house was surrounded by 4,000 people, and one-quarter of them in arms.” He retreated back into his house, unsure of what to do next.
    Oliver reluctantly agreed to allow Warren and four other members of the Boston Committee of Correspondence inside his house, where they informed him that they had been delegated to “demand my resignation as councillor.” Oliver refused. In the meantime, people began to “press up to my windows,” Oliver wrote, “calling for vengeance.” He could hear his wife and children crying in the next room. “I cast about to find some means of preserving my reputation,” he wrote to Lord Dartmouth, and “proposed that the people should take me by force.” The