Bunker Hill

reinforcements from England should . . . overset all their plans.” On April 9, he reported that despite the fact that the “people without doors are clamorous for an immediate commencement of hostilities,” Congress appeared incapable of taking any “decisive measures.” On Saturday, April 15, he reported that the deadlock continued and that the one item the Congress could agree on was that they should officially encourage the inhabitants of Boston to leave the city. On Tuesday, April 18, he reported that Congress was now in recess until May and that with Samuel Adams soon to leave for the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, Adams had left “particular directions” with Joseph Warren on “how to act.”
    Whether or not Church’s April 7 suggestion lay behind it, Gage had begun to make preparations “for a sudden blow” as early as April 11, when the warship
Somerset
was moved up the harbor so that she lay between Boston and Charlestown, “exactly in the ferry way between the two towns.” And then, on April 14, Gage finally received the long-awaited orders from Secretary of State Lord Dartmouth.

    The letter had been written back on January 27, when the saber rattling of the North administration had been at its height. Although Dartmouth qualified his statements in half a dozen ways, his overall message was clear: the time had come for Gage to
do
something, since “the king’s dignity and honor and safety of the empire require that . . . force should be repelled by force.” If a conflict was inevitable, let it begin now, before Massachusetts entered “a riper state of rebellion.” Dartmouth reported that both the king and the ministry felt that “the first and essential step” was to “arrest and imprison the principal actors and abettors” in the Provincial Congress. That said, he realized that “in a situation where everything depends so much upon the events of the day and upon local circumstances your conduct must be governed very much by your own judgment and discretion.”
    The irony is that by the time Gage received Dartmouth’s letter, the anger of the ministry, along with that of many Massachusetts patriots, had cooled. If Gage had done nothing that spring, the patriot leaders, already beset by growing discord within their own ranks, would have had even more trouble maintaining a united front. The ministry had played perfectly into the radicals’ hands when Gage finally chose to act on a letter based on information and instructions that were several months old.
    But perhaps the greatest irony was that a suggestion from a British spy, not the letter from Dartmouth, seems to have initiated the series of decisions that was to have such a momentous historical impact. In the end, Gage didn’t do as Dartmouth had recommended and arrest the leaders of the Provincial Congress, which would have almost certainly led to the seizure of many loyalist leaders (a response recommended in the Suffolk Resolves drafted by Joseph Warren back in September). Instead, Gage proceeded with plans to secure and destroy the military stores in Concord, which had become, thanks to being a town at the crossroads between Boston and the many settlements to the west and north, a major gathering point for patriot weapons and provisions. Church and Gage’s other spies assured him that large amounts of military supplies (including the valuable brass cannons that had been spirited out of Boston back in the fall) had been accumulated in Concord; the town, about twenty miles outside of Boston, was also close enough for a detachment of regulars to march there and back in a single day—an important consideration, given the hostility of the country people. And besides, the likelihood that a company of poorly trained militiamen had the gumption to stand up to the regulars—let alone fire on them—seemed remote at best.
    On April 15, the day the Provincial Congress adjourned, Gage ordered that the two elite companies of his regiments—the grenadiers (the bigger and more powerful men) and the light infantry (who were faster and more agile)—be relieved of their duties “till further orders.” The supposed reason for the order was so that the soldiers might learn new “exercises and evolutions,” but Lieutenant John Barker rightly guessed that “this . . . is by way of a blind. I dare say they have something for them to do.”
    Gage’s officers were not the only ones to take notice. The patriots had