Powder Keg
Rehearsal for Revolution, September 1774
This is an installment of “Sestercenntenial Moments,” marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and its memory in our national life. For more on the background of the series, see here.
There were two indispensable prerequisites for the American Revolution. The first was a large population of people who knew how to read: in a fundamental way, the Revolution was a war of ideas whose libertarian seeds were sown a century and a half earlier in the most literate place on earth. The second was a large number of people who owned guns. It is a truism of political science that stable states have a monopoly on violence. But the British Empire in America—an empire in many respects run on the cheap—depended on subjects whom it could call upon in successful quests to defeat their enemies. By 1763, those enemies had been decisively beaten in the French and Indian War. And that’s when, from a revolutionary perspective, things got interesting. A dozen-year fuse got lit.
Like cars, computers, and other forms of technology, guns require maintenance and supplemental equipment. In the case of the smooth-bore muskets with which wars of the time were waged and won, one crucial ingredient was powder: a calibrated mixture of saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulfur, and charcoal that powered the controlled explosions necessary to project bullets. The colonists had manufactured powder themselves at various points in their history, but like so many products of mercantile empires, the Brits manufactured the best stuff. Which they stored in stone or brick “houses” to be accessed in times of war.
Massachusetts in September of 1774 was not actually at war, but it seemed inevitable that an armed conflict was at hand—one that would pit the colonists against the mother country. By this point, Massachusetts had essentially created ad-hoc parallel town governments that existed alongside the imperial one: various localities across the colony had elected representatives, set up tax collection systems, and organized militias (soon to become immortalized as Minutemen). The rebel governments were still localized, improvisatory, and lacked functioning courts. Those who worked for the official imperial government were either ignored or intimidated into resigning. Tensions were running high.
The great exception to these congeries de facto independence was the city of Boston, placed under martial law and governed by General Thomas Gage. He had supporters around the colony, including in neighboring Cambridge. One key ally for Gage was the elderly William Brattle (for whom Brattle Street, which runs into Harvard Square is named), still a major general in the Loyalist militia. In a letter to Gage on August 27, 1774, Brattle noted that there was a large powder house in nearby Medford—the site is still known as Powderhouse Circle, on the edge of the Tufts University campus—from which various Massachusetts towns had been withdrawing powder they considered theirs. Brattle warned Gage he should do something about that. Gage did, dispatching a successful operation to procure the powder and place it more securely under British control.
And that might have been the end of the matter—except that Brattle’s letter got leaked a few days later, and on September 2 provoked street protests that forced a series of colonial officials who resided in what remains a tony neighborhood in Cambridge to flee to safety in Boston. Meanwhile, rumors began to abound: the British navy was bombarding Boston! Colonists had been killed by Redcoats! War was underway!
This “news” went viral, thanks to what was now a dense and well-organized communications network. Once it did, thousands of militiamen from around the colony began to descend on Boston. So did supporters from Rhode Island and Connecticut. The machinery of the American Revolution was triggered.
But it was not to be. Desperate colonial officials collaborated with rebel leaders to dispel factually incorrect rumors. They succeeded in getting the rebels to stand down. Crisis averted—for now.
This was cold comfort to Gage. “Civil government is near its end,” he wrote to Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies in London. (Dartmouth College is named for him.) Gage still controlled Boston, but it was now an imperial island surrounded by a rebellious sea. The coming winter would chill passions for military action. (For one thing, powder doesn’t fire in snow.) But as many people on all sides sensed, gunfire was only a matter of time. The following spring, Gage would act on intelligence to capture revolutionary ringleaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who were hanging out in a nearby tavern, and this not-so-secret operation once again triggered the massive response we have come to know as the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
This of course would mark what most of us consider the actual start of the American Revolution, which would be waged over the course of the next eight years. But in an important sense, this could only happen because a large and determined body of people in Massachusetts already considered themselves independent in 1774, and had the will—and the weapons—to act on that belief. The right to bear arms got threaded into the Constitution, where it remains explosive.