1775 by Kevin Phillips

Author:Kevin Phillips [Phillips, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101601082
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

Maritime New England Strikes Back

Gage must have understood, despite the anger shown by yeomen farmers in the summer of 1774, that the alienation of maritime Massachusetts was older and deeper. Setting aside the disillusionments of much earlier wars, latter-day hostility had been building, layer upon emotional layer, since the first fury over general warrants in 1761, the Customs Enforcement Act of 1763 that enlisted the Royal Navy as a coastal police force, the Sugar Act of 1764 with its procedural harassments, and the stationing of British troops in Boston beginning in 1768. Anger came to a head between May 1774, when news of the Coercive Acts arrived, and spring 1775, when word came of the imminent New England Restraining Act, and Admiral Graves resumed local naval impressment.

Venom was hardly confined to Boston. Twenty-five miles north, Essex County, Massachusetts, played home to the thirteen colonies’ leading fisheries. Centered on three adjacent towns—Salem (population 5,300), Marblehead (4,400) and Beverly (2,800)—this seafaring complex had come to rival nearby Boston in size and importance.8 Weeks before Lexington and Concord, codfish-dependent Essex fumed at word that Parliament was at work on a restraining act that would bar New England vessels from offshore fishing and trading anywhere but within the empire. Had a war fuse not already been lit, these measures would have done so.

Lord North and his allies described the Restraining Act in Parliament as payback for the Continental Association’s own belligerent trade demands. However, parliamentarians sympathetic to America analyzed it in far more negative terms. Lord Camden, a former British attorney general, charged during debate that other previous laws were “by no means so violent in their operations as this.” He described the bill as “at once declaring war [against the colonies] and beginning hostilities in Great Britain.” In 1776, Lord Rockingham explained the consequences set in motion by the Restraining Act: colonial “seamen and fishermen being indiscriminately prohibited from the peaceable exercise of their occupations, and declared open enemies, must be expected, with a certain assurance, to betake themselves to plunder, and to wreak their revenge on the commerce of Great Britain.” The protests of Camden and other Whigs during the February-March debate were published in several colonial newspapers in May 1775, further inciting maritime hostility.9

After April 19, Patriots quickly targeted the fuel and provisions required by British troops in Boston. If fuel might seem an exaggerated priority for late spring and summer, firewood was essential for cooking and heating water to wash clothing. Wood was needed to bake bread. Salt pork and beef, from casks often years old, had to be boiled to be made (barely) edible.10 Expeditions for firewood frequently went as far as Maine and Nova Scotia. Having to be provisioned by sea, Gage and Admiral Graves understood, was an Achilles’ heel. The Royal Navy could keep transatlantic sea lanes open, but the New Englanders had the small, fast ships and skilled seamen to harass communications and make occupation duty unpleasant and ill fed.

Maritime capabilities made New England a foe to be taken seriously.

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