Bunker Hill

British soldiers stationed there were quickly subdued, and soon the fort’s powder was in patriot hands. Just to make sure, the next day another group returned to take the fort’s cannons. As soon as he heard of the theft, Gage ordered Admiral Graves to dispatch two ships for Portsmouth, which after pounding through a brutal winter storm, arrived too late to be of any help.
    But as it turned out, the patriots had been misinformed. Gage had not yet decided to provoke another powder alarm in Portsmouth. If New Hampshire governor Wentworth was to be believed, many local patriots began to regret the haste with which they’d responded to Revere’s alarm as the magnitude of what they’d done started to sink in. If Gage had been so inclined, the two warships now anchored beside Portsmouth could have destroyed the town with their cannons.
    It was a change of heart that was detectable throughout New England in the early winter of 1775. All fall the patriots had been on a violent spree as angry crowds forced mandamus councillors to renounce their crown-appointed positions. To be fair, some of the crowds’ actions were largely symbolic. In the town founded by the Pilgrims in 1620, the famed Plymouth Rock (or at least a piece of it) was extracted from the waterfront and placed in a spot of honor on the town’s main street. In Taunton, a flag that read “Liberty and Union” was hoisted on a 112-foot liberty pole (a branchless alternative to Boston’s Liberty Tree that had become popular throughout the colonies). But there were also more than a few instances of needless cruelty.
    In the fall of 1774, a thirty-one-year-old farmer named Jesse Dunbar made the mistake of buying an ox from a mandamus councillor in Marshfield named Nathaniel Ray Thomas. Soon after Dunbar had slaughtered the ox at his farm in Plymouth, he was visited by a committee of patriots. Claiming that he had violated the boycott against buying British goods, the patriots loaded the dead ox on a cart and stuffed Dunbar into its eviscerated body. The patriots proceeded to take Dunbar and the ox on a tour of the surrounding towns. By the time they reached Kingston, Dunbar was having difficulty breathing inside the fetid carcass. When he was allowed to walk beside the cart, however, the crowd accused him of intentionally tripping a child and stuffed him back into the ox. In Duxbury, the crowd pushed the animal’s slippery innards in Dunbar’s face before finally dumping him and the ox in front of Thomas’s house in Marshfield.
    By the winter, as the once-raging fires of patriot anger began to die down, a backlash of sorts commenced. On December 22, 1774, Timothy Ruggles, a veteran of the French and Indian War and a mandamus councillor from Hardwick, sent a proclamation to the newspapers calling for a loyalist resistance movement among the patriot-dominated towns outside Boston. What he called the “Association” included the pledge, “We will upon all occasions, with our lives and fortunes, stand by and assist each other in the defense of life, liberty, and property whenever the same shall be attacked or endangered by any bodies of men, riotously assembled upon any pretence, or under any authority not warranted by the laws of the land.” The Taunton lawyer Daniel Leonard began a series of articles under the byline Massachusettensis that so effectively questioned the legitimacy of the patriot movement that John Adams, just back from the Continental Congress, felt compelled to respond as Novanglus. In a January 18, 1775, letter to Lord Dartmouth, Gage claimed that thanks to Leonard “the absurdity of the resolves of the Continental Congress [had been] exposed in a masterly manner.” Now that the people had had the “leisure of reflection and think seriously of their danger,” they had become, Gage reported, “terrified at what they have done.”
    Nine days later, Gage was pleased to inform Dartmouth “that the towns in this province become more divided, notwithstanding the endeavors used to keep up their enthusiasm.” In Marshfield, the home of Nathaniel Ray Thomas, the mandamus councillor who had sold Jesse Dunbar the ox, and one of the few towns in Massachusetts where there were more loyalists than patriots, the citizens requested that Gage send a battalion of regulars to defend them from the militiamen of the surrounding towns. Gage gladly dispatched one hundred soldiers under the command of Captain Nesbitt Balfour, who took up residence in