Occupied America

British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution

Donald F. Johnson

• Editorial: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780812297454
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia americana temprana

Occupied America chronicles the everyday experience of ordinary people living under military occupation during the American Revolution. In Occupied America, Donald F. Johnson chronicles the everyday experience of ordinary people living under military occupation during the American Revolution. Focusing on day-to-day life in port cities held by the British Army, Johnson recounts how men and women from a variety of backgrounds navigated harsh conditions, mitigated threats to their families and livelihoods, took advantage of new opportunities, and balanced precariously between revolutionary and royal attempts to secure their allegiance.Between 1775 and 1783, every large port city along the Eastern seaboard fell under British rule at one time or another. As centers of population and commerce, these cities—Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Savannah, Charleston—should have been bastions from which the empire could restore order and inspire loyalty. Military rule's exceptional social atmosphere initially did provide opportunities for many people—especially women and the enslaved, but also free men both rich and poor—to reinvent their lives, and while these opportunities came with risks, the hope of social betterment inspired thousands to embrace military rule. Nevertheless, as Johnson demonstrates, occupation failed to bring about a restoration of imperial authority, as harsh material circumstances forced even the most loyal subjects to turn to illicit means to feed and shelter themselves, while many maintained ties to rebel camps for the same reasons. As occupations dragged on, most residents no longer viewed restored royal rule as a viable option.As Johnson argues, the experiences of these citizens reveal that the process of political change during the Revolution occurred not in a single instant but gradually, over the course of years of hardship under military rule that forced Americans to grapple with their allegiance in intensely personal and highly contingent ways. Thus, according to Johnson, the quotidian experience of military occupation directly affected the outcome of the American Revolution.

CHAPTER 1

Revolutionary Occupations

Before British troops arrived in North American towns, revolutionary authorities from Massachusetts to Georgia had already asserted military force to coerce locals to support the insurgent cause. Most of these actions took place between the summers of 1775 and 1776, and they influenced both the nature of later British occupation and its results. In each city, revolutionary violence divided neighbors and created exiles, a development the royal army would use to its advantage by cultivating the loyalty of disenfranchised loyalists and displaced imperial officials. In the short term, these schisms made the process of British military rule easier; however, in the long run, these persistent tensions prevented the restored colonial regimes from ever completely uniting city dwellers behind the royal standard.

For a year after the outbreak of violence at Lexington and Concord, local committees, councils, and congresses seized the reins of power and displaced former colonial officials and their supporters.¹ As insurgents in communities across British North America overthrew their former rulers, they invariably seized the port cities, which had been the political and economic capitals of most of the colonies, and which became power centers for the new regimes. Taking possession of provincial records, controlling government buildings, and possessing the trappings of royal rule—all of which resided in the provincial capitals—proved essential to establishing the legitimacy of the new state regimes.² The coups in which revolutionaries seized power could be both subtle and overt, but they were rarely couched in the terms of formal occupation. Still, all involved the use of military force to suppress dissent and ensure control over the populations of these vital political and commercial centers, even as the revolutionaries sought to legitimize their new governments by directing attention away from the violence that undergirded them. The effect was unmistakable. When British troops arrived in each of the six cities during the war, they found a political landscape marred by violence and coercion.

The process of establishing control at the local level was intensely personal. At seven o’clock in the morning on a late January day in 1776, Henry Preston of Savannah received a sharp knock on his door. Preston, the Clerk of the Crown for His Majesty’s Province of Georgia, opened it to find his neighbor, Adam Trick, sent by Savannah’s revolutionary Committee of Safety to retrieve the keys to Savannah’s courthouse for the use of Georgia’s insurgent Provincial Congress. Preston refused, citing his oath of allegiance to the royal government and his duty to safeguard the records of the colony. Later in the morning, three more men arrived at Preston’s house, again demanding the keys to the courthouse and, now, the clerk’s office within it. Upon Preston’s adamant refusal to betray his oath to the king, the men became irate, searching the first floor of his house and threatening, according to Preston’s later account, to call forth “a file of Muskiteers [sic]” to “take me into Confinement.” Nonetheless, Preston refused to hand over his keys.

A few hours later, Trick knocked once more, this time to summon Preston to the courthouse. Upon arriving at the courthouse, the royal clerk found the doors broken open and the building guarded by armed men. When he entered the building, a committee member approached the frightened bureaucrat, explaining that “they had sent for [him] as a privat[e] Gentleman” to organize the records found in the clerk’s office, which the insurgents had also burglarized. This proposition Preston agreed to, viewing it his duty “to see them as much taken care of as I possibly could,” even as the revolutionaries appropriated the provincial records. As he directed the emptying out of his own office, he recalled that the revolutionaries “behaved very politely, & gave me every paper & other matter I asked for that either belonged to my self or P. P. [Preston’s wife].” Still, it must have been a bizarre experience to index and explain to the usurpers how to organize the land deeds, legislative records, and official letters that had, until that morning, been his sacred responsibility. After he packed the records into trunks for safekeeping, the Committee of Safety sent the now-deposed clerk home. Still, perhaps sensing the official’s alienation, a neighbor returned later that night warning him “not to go without the limits of the town” without permission from the new revolutionary authorities.³ After a day spent in abject humiliation and terror, Preston still had to live among those who had both dispossessed him of his livelihood and forced him to abrogate his sacred duty to his sovereign.

On the streets of port cities, the struggle for authority took place within close-knit communities. As revolutionaries seized power, they often had to reckon with supporters of the old regime whom they had known all of their lives. Preston certainly recognized the members and associates of the committee who came to his house, and he likely knew the militiamen guarding the courthouse as well. Revolutionary committees and councils also often kept those they suspected of loyalism under close supervision and often even imprisoned or exiled them to prevent potential challenges to the new regimes. As revolutionaries seized the trappings of power and persecuted rivals, though, they did so among neighbors, family members, and old friends, many of whom did not share their fervor. With the exception of Boston, occupied by the British Army from 1768 to 1770 and then again in 1774, in each port city from Newport to Savannah, revolutionary authorities asserted power with the type of odd, intimate violence reflected in Henry Preston’s experience.

Formal British military occupation thus came on the heels of an unspoken yet unmistakable occupation of port cities by insurgents, one that was contested in many places until the day the British arrived. When imperial troops decamped later, the structure of their military rule built upon already existing tensions within towns that were already at least partially under martial law. In nearly every context, British commanders relied on people like Henry Preston—former officials and prominent loyalists disenfranchised by the revolutionary regimes—to provide information and, in some cases, help to govern the cities’ populations. With officers usually preferring to devote their attention to strategic and logistical concerns, civilians took advantage of their willful ignorance of local politics to seek vengeance on revolutionaries and to settle scores from earlier insults. While commanders and loyalist officials in their service sought to rally urban populations behind the king, factionalism caused by years of revolutionary strife and violence persisted just beneath the surface.

As occupations wore on, Americans living in occupied ports experienced these divisions in their day-to-day lives, even as British and loyalist authorities sought to unite urbanites behind the royal standard. As military officials took advantage of preexisting conflicts to assert their authority and maintain governing structures, everyday interactions between the royal army and local populations increasingly became fraught with conflict. Largely because these officials did not know how deep tensions ran, earlier struggles reemerged, and authorities proved either powerless to stop them or did not care to, so long as their rule was secure. As a result, ordinary citizens were left to their own devices, unable to rely on the royally sanctioned government to resolve what should have been routine issues and, as conditions deteriorated, to survive on a day-to-day basis.

The city of Boston had perhaps the longest and most contested history of armed conflict among the major North American ports. By the time Massachusetts militiamen and British soldiers first clashed twenty miles outside of the city in April 1775, imperial troops and gangs of protesters had been vying for authority for seven long and often bloody years. Boston’s waterfront—always a rowdy scene where tradesmen, laborers, and sailors drank, swore, and participated in a rough-and-tumble mob politics—grew out of control during the riots following the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765. These armed clashes pitted protesters against customs officials and their supporters. In their midst, prominent merchants like John Hancock and Samuel Adams, members of an organized protest group known as the Sons of Liberty, rallied the waterfront crowds to loot the house of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson and intimidate the city’s royally appointed stamp inspector into renouncing his post. While such violence subsided after the act’s repeal in 1766—in large part due to street violence not only in Boston but also in port cities as far south as the West Indies—it flared up again after the passage of a new set of duties in 1767, culminating a riot in June 1768 with the seizure of Hancock’s merchant sloop Liberty for customs violations. After a crowd failed to prevent the Liberty’s impoundment by the Royal Navy, a mob of several thousand rampaged through the city, assaulting customs officials and other representatives of the Crown, until one o’clock in the morning.⁴

This violence led to the imposition of direct military rule for the first time during the imperial crisis. In response to the Liberty riots, Massachusetts’s royal governor, Francis Bernard, requested the presence of British troops to keep order in Boston. In mid-September 1768, two regiments from Halifax, Nova Scotia, encamped on Boston Common. For the next two years, these soldiers lived among the city’s populace, guarding key government buildings and protecting royal officials. Still, the investiture of troops did not stop the contest for authority in the city. Even with the army in place, gangs supporting the protest movement continued to intimidate traders who sided with the government and customs officials who followed their duty too scrupulously. The two sides clashed perhaps most vividly in March 1770 when a detachment of British troops opened fire on a group of civilians armed with clubs and rocks in front of the royal customs house—an event that quickly became notorious throughout the colonies thanks to engravings distributed by the insurgent silversmith Paul Revere. Three years later, the conflict remained in full flush as the Sons of Liberty organized the destruction of 342 chests of tea to protest the newly passed Tea Act. In response, the British Parliament passed a series of laws known as the Coercive Acts to punish the city and intimidate would-be rebels in other colonies. These laws closed the port of Boston to all trade, changed laws in the colonies to make it easier to forcibly quell protests in America, and, significantly, rescinded civil government in Massachusetts Bay.⁵

Even after the revocation of civilian authority, the contest for authority continued for nearly a year. In May 1774, six months after the destruction of the tea and three months after the passage of the Coercive Acts, General Thomas Gage arrived in Boston to take up the military governorship of Massachusetts Bay. The capital, a city of approximately sixteen thousand people, now played host to four thousand British soldiers, along with several hundred military families who travelled with the army. Even with British troops quartered on Boston Common and their families living among the population, insurgents continued to mobilize street gangs and sailors. In the face of this resistance, Gage proved reluctant to turn to naked military force as a means of government, preferring to work with Boston’s town council and the city’s loyalist elite in his attempts to maintain order. Upon taking office, Gage attempted to summon the colony’s executive council as a civil governor, but many councilors declined to serve under the general, fearing reprisals from the extralegal committees and councils that ruled the streets. As loyalist official Peter Oliver recalled, the Massachusetts Assembly itself “locked their Selves into their Apartment, to pass some seditious Resolves,” forcing Gage to dissolve their meeting. As a result, “the people began now to arm with Powder and Ball, and to discipline their militia,” and Gage made similar preparations among his troops. Although tensions persisted, however, the new governor continued to pursue his duties as both civil governor and military commander.⁶

Full-fledged military rule still did not take firm shape until after the outbreak of violence at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. Between that clash and the Battle of Bunker Hill in June, what had been a punitive yet restrained occupation by British troops transformed into a formal military government. As nearly twenty thousand colonial militiamen from across New England shouldered their muskets and marched on the city of Boston, Gage fortified the town’s defenses, drafting citizens and using his heavily outnumbered force to construct redoubts and siege barriers across Boston Neck, tightly controlling movement in an out of the city with checkpoints and armed guards. In late May, more officers and men arrived, including renowned Generals William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne, along with seven hundred more troops. On June 10, Gage received reinforcements from Canada, bringing his forces to nearly six thousand British soldiers and marines. On June 12, conceding the obvious, he declared martial law, marking the official imposition of a military rule that had existed for at least two months prior. This move, and not the 1768 imposition of troops or the 1774 abolition of Massachusetts’s civil government, marked the beginning of the occupation of the city as well as the British war effort against the rebels. From June 12, 1775, undisguised military force would be employed to coerce citizens to submit to authority on both sides.⁷

Meanwhile, insurgent New England militias made swift preparations for armed conflict, forming siege lines around Boston—establishing guard posts and digging trenches around the town—and fortifying nearby islands and towns to deprive the British Army of supplies from the countryside. As soldiers continued to arrive, bolstering the colonial force to nearly sixteen thousand by June 1775, the siege lines proved a formidable sight from within the city. Although not as well trained as the king’s forces, the provincial militias effectively defended their positions against British foraging expeditions to nearby islands and contemplated storming the city, although lack of cannon prevented a direct assault.⁸ Still, the New Englanders bottled Gage’s forces inside the town of Boston and, by preventing their resupply from the countryside, sat ready to starve them out of the city.

The British Army’s actions during the siege of Boston presaged many of the strategies deployed by future commanders in other occupied zones, as well as some of the problems that would continue to plague British efforts. As the siege developed outside the lines of the city, General Gage took several measures to secure his authority within the town and on the siege lines. An early priority was purging the city of potential insurgents within. To do so, he negotiated with the leaders of Massachusetts’s Committee of Safety to allow those who wished to leave occupied Boston to go out of the military lines of the city with their belongings intact, provided they gave up their arms, in exchange for insurgent forces’ allowing loyalists in the countryside to enter the city. In the weeks after the battles of Lexington and Concord, the British Army seized more than 2,300 muskets and pistols, along with nearly a thousand bayonets and other weapons of war from the city’s townspeople. Ultimately, however, Gage reneged on his promise to allow townspeople to leave with their property, instead forcing them to leave their belongings behind to succor the army and discourage the provincial militia from a full-on assault. Still, over the next two months nearly nine thousand people left the city, leaving the once-vibrant port with a ...