Bunker Hill

the habitual use of the firelock suppose themselves sure of their mark of 200 [yards].” These remarkably prophetic words were written a month and a half before the first shots were fired at Lexington Green.
    That Gage was reading these espionage reports, which included dispatches from several other spies, is indicated by the fact that in February he sent a battalion of troops under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Leslie to capture the cannons that were reported to be in Salem. As in the earlier Powder Alarm, the soldiers were transported by water, but unlike that operation, the effort of Leslie’s battalion was unsuccessful, not because of misinformation on the part of Church or the other informants, but because the quick-witted locals used a raised drawbridge to delay the regulars’ arrival in Salem until the armaments had been moved.
    Gage also employed his own soldiers as spies. At the end of February he sent out two officers disguised as surveyors to scout out the roads to Worcester. Equipped with reddish handkerchiefs, brown-colored clothes, and sketch pads, they created maps and drawings of the countryside. They observed the militia practicing on the town common in Framingham. They found occasional respite in the households of a handful of loyalists, but for the most part they were under almost constant scrutiny by the many suspicious patriots they encountered and in several instances were forced to flee for their lives. When they returned to Boston after a night at a loyalist’s tavern in Weston, some of the first British officers they saw were Generals Gage and Haldimand and their aides-de-camp, inspecting the fortifications on the Neck. The two spies had so effectively adapted themselves to the alien world of patriot New England that not until they had reintroduced themselves did Gage and even some of their close friends finally recognize who they were.
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    Josiah Quincy Jr. was engaged in another kind of reconnaissance. For most Americans, England was an abstraction: a mythical homeland that despite its geographic distance from America remained an almost obsessive part of their daily lives. Quincy, along with many other patriot leaders, had been under the impression that the mother country was bloated, dissolute, and weak with rot. Almost immediately upon his arrival in Plymouth, however, he was distressed to discover that he had completely underestimated the strength of the British Empire. “My ideas of the riches and powers of this great nation,” he wrote in his diary after a tour of the naval docks, “are increased to a degree I should not have believed if it had been predicted [to] me.” When he reached London on November 17, he wrote, “The numbers, opulence &c, of this great city far surpass all I had imagined. My ideas are upon the wreck, my astonishment amazing.”
    On November 19, after meeting Benjamin Franklin, who became an intimate friend over the course of the next few months, Quincy found himself in the presence of Lord North. Quincy was one of Boston’s foremost lawyers and had been part of the patriot inner circle for years, but he was an ingenue when it came to the British ministry. North was as seasoned and artful a politician as the Empire possessed, and he spoke with Quincy for two hours. Ingratiating and surprisingly respectful, North succeeded in getting Quincy to speak his mind even as the prime minister conveyed his determination “to effect the submission of the colonies.” When Quincy blamed the current problems on “gross misrepresentation and falsehood” on the part of former governor Thomas Hutchinson, North replied that “very honest [men] frequently gave a wrong state of matters through mistake, prejudice, prepossessions and bypasses of one kind or other.” Quincy, who wrote of how “much pleasure” his conversation with the prime minister gave him, seems to have failed to realize that North’s statement could also apply to himself. In a subsequent conversation with Hutchinson, who was also in London at the time, the prime minister described Quincy as “designing to be artful without abilities to conceal his design.”
    North seems to have underestimated the young American lawyer. Quincy may have lacked the polish of a ministry veteran, but he demonstrated a refreshing ability to listen and learn as he sometimes fumbled his way through the complex and essentially foreign world of the British political system. On November 24, he spoke for an