Convinced of the inefficiency of Gage, and alarmed at the progress of the rebellion, the king summoned that officer to England to make a personal explanation of the state of affairs at Boston. Gage sailed on the 10th of October, leaving affairs in the hands of General Howe. * Before his departure, the Mandamus Council, a number of the prin-
* Thomas Gage, the last royal governor of Massachusetts, was a native of England, and was an active officer during the Seven Years' War. He was appointed Governor of Montreal in 1760, and, at the departure of Amherst from America, in 1763, was commissioned commander-in-chief of the British forces in America. He superseded Hutchinson as Governor of Massachusetts, and had the misfortune to enter upon the duties of his office at a time when it became necessary for him, as a faithful servant of his king, to execute laws framed expressly for the infliction of chastisement upon the people of the capital of the colony over which he was placed. From that date his public acts are interwoven with the history of the times. He possessed a naturally amiable disposition, and his benevolence often outweighed his justice in the scale of duty. Under other circumstances his name might have been sweet in the recollection of the Americans; now it is identified with oppression and hatred of freedom. He went to England in the autumn of 1775, where he died in April, 1787. Gage expected to return to America and resume the command of the army; but ministers determined otherwise, and appointed General Howe in his place. The situation was offered to the veteran Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, but as he would not accept the commission unless he could go to the Americans with assurances from government that strict justice should be done them, the post was assigned to Howe. This was a tacit admission, on the part of ministers, that justice to the Americans formed no part of their scheme.
Loyal Address to Gage.—Superiority of Howe.—Fortifications in Boston.—The "Old South" desecrated.—Officers frightened.
cipal inhabitants of Boston, and several who had taken refuge in the country, in all about seventy persons, addressed him in terms of loyal affection, amounting to panegyric. It was certainly unmerited; for his civil administration had been weak, and his military operations exceedingly inefficient.
This was felt by all parties. His departure was popular with the army; and the provincials, remembering the spirit displayed by General Howe in the battle on Breed's Hill, anticipated a speedy collision. Howe was superior to Gage in every particular, and possessed more caution, which was generally founded upon logical deductions from fact. Governed by that caution, he was quite as unwilling as Gage to attack the Americans. He remembered the disparity in numbers on the 17th of June, and the bravery of the provincials while fighting behind breast-works cast up in a single night. He properly argued that an army of the same sort of men, fifteen thousand strong, intrenched behind breast-works constructed by the labor of weeks, was more than a match for even his disciplined troops of like number, and prudently resolved to await expected re-enforcements from Ireland before he should attempt to procure that "elbow-room" which he coveted. * In the mean while, he strengthened his defenses, and prepared to put his troops into comfortable winter quarters. He built a strong fort on Bunker Hill, ** and employed six hundred men in making additional fortifications upon Boston Neck. In the neighborhood of the hay-market, at the south end of the city, many buildings were pulled down, and works erected in their places. Strong redoubts were raised upon the different eminences in Boston, and the old South meeting-house was stripped of its pews and converted into a riding-school for the disciplining of the cavalry. *** This last act took place on the 19th of October, and the desecration greatly shocked the feelings of the religious community. On October,1775 the 28th Howe issued three proclamations, which created much indignation, and drew forth retaliatory
* It is said that both officers and soldiers regarded the Americans with a degree of superstitious fear, for many highly exaggerated tales of their power had been related. Dr. Thatcher says (Journal, p. 38) that, according to letters written by British officers from Boston, some of them, while walking on Beacon Hill in the evening, soon after the arrival of Gage, were frightened by noises in the air, which they took to be the whizzing of bullets. They left the hill with great precipitation, and reported that they were shot at with air-guns. The whizzing noise which so much alarmed these valiant officers was no other than the whizzing of bugs and beetles while flying in the air. Trumbull, in his M'Fingall, thus alludes to this ludicrous circumstance: