CHAPTER VII
MILITARY PREPARATIONS
As the spring of 1775 advanced, matters took on a constantly more threatening aspect. The governor's force in Boston was steadily increasing, and was approaching a total of four thousand men. Vessels of war were with equal steadiness being added to the little fleet in the harbor. With each budget of news from England it became evident that Parliament would not yield, and at last came word that Lord North had offered a joint resolution that New England was in a state of rebellion, which both houses pledged their lives and fortunes to suppress. With such a military force at his command, and with such moral support from King and Parliament, Gage was in a position to take decided action.
No one could doubt what that action would be. Since September the province had been gathering its meagre military supplies. It was but common sense to seize them before they could be used. Soon after the new year Gage began his measures. "Genl. Orders," writes disgruntled Lieutenant Barker. "If any officers of the different Regts. are capable of taking sketches of a Country, they will send their names to the Dep. Adj. Genl ... that is an extraordinary method of wording the order; it might at least have been in a more genteel way; at present it looks as if he doubted whether there were any such." However, there were such, and in February the governor chose Captain Brown and Ensign De Berniere (or Bernicre, as the name is sometimes spelled) and sent them out to map the roads.
The little expedition was somewhat absurd, for the disguise which the officers wore was sufficient to conceal them only from their friends. When, at the first tavern at which they stopped, they remarked that it was a very fine country, the black woman who waited on them answered, "So it is, and we have got brave fellows to defend it, and if you go any higher you will find it so." "This," admits Ensign De Berniere, whose account of the expedition was left in Boston at the evacuation, and was "printed for the information and amusement of the curious," "this disconcerted us a good deal." From that time on, any one who took the trouble to "eye them attentively" was in no doubt as to their real character.
They went first to Worcester, where it was possible that the governor might wish to send troops, to protect the courts as well as to seize stores. The weather was rough and snowy, and the officers' task correspondingly difficult; the countrymen, by persevering sociability, kept them in an uneasy state of mind. After roughly mapping roads concerning which the general should long before have had accurate information, the two officers made their way to Sudbury, where they hoped to rest with a sympathizer, after walking in a snow-storm for hours. But the town doctor, though long a stranger at the house, came to call, and the townspeople showed their host various other undesirable attentions, so that in twenty minutes the two officers were glad to leave the place. They arrived again safely at Worcester, "very much fatigued, after walking thirty-two miles between two o'clock and half-after ten at night, through a road that every step we sunk up to the ankles, and it blowing and drifting snow all the way."
In spite of this experience, the two officers, a month later, undertook a similar journey to Concord. In this they succeeded, returning with a rough sketch of the roads, but bringing also their Concord host, who did not think it safe to remain after entertaining them. They brought information that in Concord there were "fourteen cannon (ten iron and four brass) and two cohorns," with "a store of flour, fish, salt, and rice; and a magazine of powder and cartridges."
They might, in their two journeys, have brought better information than that the Concord Whigs "fired their morning gun, and mounted a guard of ten men at night." The stores at Concord had far better protection than these, as the two officers should have learned at Framingham, where they watched the drill of the militia company. "After they had done their exercise, one of their commanders spoke a very eloquent speech, recommending patience, coolness, and bravery (which indeed they very much wanted), particularly told them they would always conquer if they did not break, and recommended them to charge us coolly, and wait for our fire, and everything would succeed with them—quoted Cæsar and Pompey, brigadiers Putnam and Ward, and all such great men; put them in mind of Cape Breton, and all the battles they had gained for his majesty in the last war, and observed that the regulars must have been ruined but for them."
Had the two officers known it, every town in the province had just such a militia company, which at set seasons met, and drilled, and listened to good old-fashioned exhortations to valor. It would not take long, therefore, for the neighboring towns to send their companies to reinforce the guard of ten men which Concord set over its stores every night. And yet the province was not satisfied with this ancient militia organization, for it had set up another to strengthen it.