[93] Flick, Loyalism in New York, pp. 9-12.
[94] Sabine, The American Loyalists, pp. 51-55, 65.
[95] Corr. with North, i., 201.
[96] Burke to Flood, May 18, 1765, Works, i., 41.
[97] Dartmouth Papers, America, Hist. MSS. Comm. Rep., xiv., App. x., 251.
[98] The Border Warfare of the Revolution, in Narr. and Crit. Hist., vi., 612-14.
CHAPTER VIII.
Scarcely had the night passed after the skirmish at Lexington before the whole of Massachusetts was in arms. The provincial assembly voted that an army of 30,000 men should be raised in New England, fixed on Cambridge as its headquarters and sent to their neighbours for support. From New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island the answer was prompt. Numerous bands of volunteers marched to join the forces of Massachusetts, and an army of 16,000 men soon invested Boston from the Mystic river to Roxbury. It was an army without unity, for the troops of each colony acted under their own leaders; and its numbers varied from day to day, the Massachusetts volunteers, who formed its principal part, taking leave of absence whenever they chose. Many of the provincials had seen service against the French, and understood a soldier's work, and many more had received some training in the militia, but the mass of the volunteers had no military experience or discipline. Yet they were men well used to shoot and to handle the spade and axe, implements of first-rate importance in war; they belonged as a whole to a higher class than the privates of the British army, they were more resourceful and intelligent, and were able to obtain provisions and other supplies without difficulty. Such as they were, Gage judged them too formidable in number for him to attack. The neck of land which joins Boston to the continent had been fortified so strongly that the provincials could not hope to storm it, and he decided to remain behind it and await the arrival of the reinforcements which were already on their way. He made no effort to prevent the insurgents from shutting up his army on the landward side, and early in May they began to form entrenchments. At the same time they took measures to distress the beleaguered force by clearing off the live-stock, hay, and other supplies from the islands in the harbour. Gage tried in vain to stop them, and there were several skirmishes in the harbour, in which the British suffered more heavily than the provincials.