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  The resulting hard cake was more resistant to moisture, would last far longer in storage, burn more quickly, and increase the ballistic power of weapons. Europeans utilized crushing devices to grind the ingredients into uniform grain sizes that helped shooters calibrate gunpowder to their weapons. Early musketeers, for example, often used medium-grain gunpowder to shoot and fine-grain gunpowder to prime their guns. Cannoneers, on the other hand, used large-grain powder, which took longer to ignite. A more standardized process made production more stable and provided big advances in quality control.

  Despite the improvements, gunpowder remained a perishable commodity in the best of circumstances, spoiled by dampness and clumping, or by agitation that turned grains to dust. The wooden barrels in which it was stored and shipped contributed to the problem. The saltpeter in the powder dried out the staves, opening seams and allowing moisture to penetrate. It was not uncommon that more powder was spoiled than was used.

  This is what gunpowder looked like to the would-be revolutionaries in North America: often dangerous, often ineffective, often difficult to procure, but always a necessity. During the French and Indian War of the 1750s, a number of frontier entrepreneurs began running low-production mills, but none of them survived long. Once hostilities against the French ended, the British dissuaded colonists from trading or making black powder, closely controlling its manufacturing and importation. Not that they needed to apply much pressure, since the British imported low-cost high-quality product to the colonies, rendering inefficient operations economically impractical. British gunpowder was cheap and it was good. The problem was that the colonists had to rely on their soon-to-be enemies to sell it to them.

  Before the Revolution broke out, there was really only one consequential producer of gunpowder in North America, the water-powered mill in Frankford Creek, north of Philadelphia. Oswald Eve, a prosperous English-born Quaker, had opened the mill only a few months before King George III banned exportation of gunpowder to the colonies in 1774. The place became something of a tourist attraction, as colonists visited to catch a peek of how gunpowder was made, often hoping to take back the secret of making it themselves.13

  The Provincial Congress in Watertown had asked the silversmith Paul Revere to visit the mill in 1774, for “in Philadelphia powder mills are Erected and the manufacturing of powder is carried on with Considerable dispatch and advantage.”14 Revere anticipated replicating the operation in Massachusetts, but Eve was less than helpful when the two met, perhaps realizing that facilitating a competing mill was bad for business. That didn’t stop the perceptive Revere from taking a good look around and sending detailed sketches to Sam Adams. A plant in Canton, Massachusetts, was soon opened. It would produce a modest quantity of powder—that is, before it blew up in 1779.

  The Americans also experimented with state-owned and-operated mills. In February 1776, with congressional approval, Pennsylvania began plans for the operation of mills that produced about a ton of powder weekly. By April 1776, the nascent government had built a gunpowder mill and a gun factory (added in December 1776) on the outskirts of Philadelphia. At its peak, the site was producing approximately two tons of gunpowder each week, and hundreds of locks for Continental muskets. Threatened by advancing British forces in late 1777, the majority of the military stores and supplies were removed from the site under orders from George Washington and moved inland to Lancaster County, the capital of American gunsmithing. Days later a detachment of Hessian Field Jäger Corps and British light infantry destroyed the buildings and remaining military stores.15

  American military leaders often groused about not only the lack of gunpowder but also its inferior quality. Washington sarcastically noted that “there must be roguery or gross ignorance” in colonial powder-making efforts. In truth, it’s unlikely to have been either corruption or stupidity. Unlike Europeans, who had been producing gunpowder for centuries, colonialists had little tradition in the craft, and it showed. Without the quality Indian saltpeter the British used, American powder was sure to remain inferior. Before the war, most saltpeter was procured from the limestone caves in Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky.16 This would not be nearly enough.

  To assist production, the Americans established depots in New York and Philadelphia for the collection of saltpeter and sulfur. In January 1776, the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety placed ads in Philadelphia newspapers announcing that “such persons as are willing to erect Powder Mills in this Province, within fifty Miles distance of this City, are desired to apply to the Committee of Safety, who will lend them Money, on Security, if required, for that purpose, and give them other Encouragement.”17 It received six proposals from Americans willing to build mills. Very little came of the projects.

  A Royal American Magazine piece in 1774 (illustrated by Revere) offered a step-by-step process of powder production at home. In the piece, the author claimed that saltpeter was “an effluvia of animal bodies. Pigeon houses, stables, and barns, but especially old walls, are full of it.”18 The Second Continental Congress, which also recruited French experts to teach Americans homebrew production methods, promised to buy up all saltpeter at half a dollar per pound. And once hostilities had begun, committees of safety in nearly every colony offered fiscal incentives to spur the production of saltpeter and pamphlets offering detailed instructions on its fabrication in hopes of spurring a local saltpeter industry. Yet this method could be an arduous process that yielded only small amounts of subpar saltpeter.

  Another way of obtaining gunpowder was to take it by force. The race for gunpowder propelled the other major colonial player toward open rebellion and would soon precipitate the start of the war. This was the reason Gage sent the men to the Provincial Powder House. “No Quantity, however Small, is beneath notice,” wrote George Washington from Cambridge in 1775.19 Even before Washington put out the call, local municipalities had taken it upon themselves to secure as much as they could, resorting to violence when necessary. Four months before Revere would make his famous “midnight ride,” he had journeyed to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to warn locals that two regiments of British were on their way via sea to collect the gunpowder and munitions held in Fort William and Mary. The fort, situated on Great Island, at the mouth of the harbor, was guarded by a mere handful of British soldiers.

  The reaction, which portended trouble for the British, was overwhelming. Led by John Langdon, a staunch revolutionary and later politician, hundreds took to beating drums and chanting on the street of the town, menacing the stronghold across the bay. The province’s chief justice, Theodore Atkinson Sr., confronted the crowd, warning them that “they were going about an Unlawfull Act to take away the Powder out of his Majestys Fort, and that it was the highest Act of Treason and Rebellion They could possibly commit.”

  Undaunted by the stark threat, groups of men numbering over four hundred launched boats into the Piscataqua River to obtain the booty. Captain John Cochran, the British commander, refused to hand over the cache and ordered his half-dozen soldiers “not to flinch on pain of death but to defend the fort to the last extremity.”20 At his command, they fired their muskets and three cannons at the patriots who had just landed, all of their shots missing their marks. The Americans immediately swamped the ramparts and took the garrison. “I did all in my power to defend the fort,” an unconvincing Cochran would later tell an inquiry into the event. The Americans had held the British soldiers prisoner for an hour and a half, Cochran later wrote to the governor of New Hampshire, “but all my efforts could not avail against so great a number.”21 So, on December 14, 1774, four months before any shots were fired in Lexington, the colonialists relieved the British garrison of around 10,000 pounds of powder. A plaque would be affixed to the fort, soon renamed Fort Constitution, declaring it the location of the “first victory of the American Revolution.”22 It wasn’t quite Bunker Hill, but similar raids followed across the colonies.

  In the end, neither confiscation nor domestic production would be enoug
h to properly supply Washington’s army. American gunpowder production would never take off due to a confluence of issues: inflation, reliance on imported ingredients, the accidental destruction of the few mills that did exist in North America, and then the purposeful destruction of other mills by the British.23 In the end, around 90 percent of the gunpowder used by the revolutionaries was imported, with most of it finding its way to the Americas through the French colonies of the West Indies. Eager to harm their archenemy, the French became the primary source of ammunition. The French had struggled with many of the same problems the Americans did—namely, finding a source of quality saltpeter. Starting in 1775, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, one of the leading chemists of the European “Chemical Revolution” of the day, would become director of France’s Gunpowder Administration and transform the nation not only into a self-sufficient gunpowder producer but an exporter of the much-needed chemical compound. Lavoisier recruited top chemists to develop procedures to help him increase both productivity and purity. Soon the Committee of Secret Correspondence, established by the Second Continental Congress to build relationships with friendly Europeans, was sending ships to France’s Mediterranean ports; they would bring back ten tons of powder per voyage and help save the Revolution.

  All that was to come later. Right now, as the British were preemptively attempting to disarm the populace, patriot leaders were more convinced than ever that it was imperative to secure gunpowder and weapons—and to do it quickly. While the so-called Powder Alarm had failed to blow up into open, widespread conflict, it was—inadvertently, perhaps—a dry run of the colonial warning system. The next time American militias were called on to repel British confiscatory measures, they would be better armed, more organized, more rapidly deployed, and much more dangerous.

  4

  “FIRE!”

  “Once committed to what they regarded as a just and necessary war, these sons of Puritans hardened their hearts and became the most implacable of foes.”

  —David Hackett Fischer

  The Battle of Lexington

  The uniforms of the men in the twenty-one companies of British grenadiers and light infantry who marched through the fields and forests of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, were still soggy. Their journey had begun the night before when they had been crammed into naval barges at Boston Common and when they disembarked in the dark of midnight near Cambridge into three feet of water. Nevertheless, they almost immediately proceeded on an eighteen-mile march toward the town of Concord, where they were to confiscate a cache of weapons and munitions. To do so, these irritated and weary British soldiers would be forced to pass through another American hamlet called Lexington.

  It was there, on April 19, 1775, in the triangular common at the center of town, that seven hundred British soldiers encountered seventy or so American militiamen. Most of the locals who showed up that day did so with muskets that had either been brought to the continent by the British military during the French and Indian War or were approximations of British guns that had been assembled by local blacksmiths. The preponderance of these muskets had been used for hunting deer or in militia drills, but little else. Some of the colonists had brought along a handful of homemade musket balls, assuming any interaction would end peacefully. Others, however, had brought hats filled with lead balls and flints, and were prepared for war.

  Once the Americans were alerted to the British advance, the militiamen scrambled to load their flintlocks and assemble into rudimentary military lines, two deep, just as they had practiced many times in drills. Facing the tight military columns of battle-tested redcoats was a wholly different experience, to say the least. Adrenaline, anger, and fear mingled to create a combustible situation as the two asymmetrical forces steadied themselves. Civilians, perhaps as many as eighty or ninety, peered from the surrounding houses and buildings as the Americans and British faced off less than one hundred yards apart—a distance that was close enough to kill but too far to take any real aim. Other colonists surely jumped onto horses to warn other towns of what was transpiring.

  “Disperse you Rebels—damn you. Throw down your Arms and disperse!” a British commander reportedly yelled at the rabble.1 Local American captain John Parker first instructed his men, “Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon. But if they want to have a war, let it begin here.” The British soldiers began their battle chants of “Huzzah!” as their officers screamed at the Americans to lay down their arms. Once the locals began to contemplate their odds, the bluster on the colonial side began to subside. Parker, considering the situation, reportedly ordered his men to go home. Some did, some did not, and some did so very slowly. John Robins, one of the militiamen, later wrote that it was in the midst of this confusion that a British officer gave the order to fire.2

  Thus began what is considered the first battle in United States history. One can imagine that the well-trained British line of musketeers had little problem unloading their deadly volleys of lead balls into a small rabble of militiamen, some of whom didn’t even bother to reload their muskets. The British, in fact, fired a number of volleys into the rebels before order was restored in Lexington that day. When the black smoke finally cleared, eight Americans lay dead and nine had been wounded. Only one British soldier was hurt in this first round of shooting.

  With this seemingly straightforward victory in hand, the redcoats then marched onward to Concord, where, after four hours of searching, they found very little of worth. But unbeknownst to the British, by the time they were prepared for the long march back to Boston, a few thousand American Minutemen—militiamen known for their ability to rapidly assemble and deploy for battle—were gathering.

  • • •

  The conflict in North America might have become inevitable the day the British fleet first sailed into Boston Harbor with its occupying army in 1768. Or perhaps it had become inevitable the day the Pilgrims first set their feet on the ground around Plymouth Bay. But however one views the underlying causes behind the violent confrontation that pitted the British against their subjects in North America, it was the policy of gun and powder confiscation that sealed the deal.

  In September 1768, when rumors of an impending occupation by British troops first hit Boston, hundreds of musket-carrying Bostonians turned up at Faneuil Hall to pass resolutions protecting their claim to self-rule. Moreover, if the right to self-defense had been good enough for the Britons, they argued, it would be good enough for them:

  Whereas, by an Act of Parliament, of the first of King William and Queen Mary, it is declared, that the Subjects being Protestants, may have Arms for their Defence; it is the Opinion of this town, that the said Declaration is founded in Nature, Reason and sound Policy, and is well adapted for the necessary Defence of the Community.3

  That same year an editorial in the Boston Gazette, the most influential newspaper in the colonies at the time, counting Sam Adams and Paul Revere among its contributors, noted that nothing was “more grievous to the people” than “that the inhabitants of this Province are to be disarmed.”4 This is why one of the persistent calls of Boston patriots in these years was the vital role of self-defense. “For it is certainly beyond human art and sophistry, to prove the British subjects, to whom the privilege of possessing arms is expressly recognized by the bill of Rights,” wrote Sam Adams, referring to the British codification of rights. As many of the colonists saw it, the aim of the British, no matter what justification they offered, was that of an invading army attempting to leave the inhabitants defenseless beneath their rule.

  There would be no way back after December 16, 1773, when Americans dressed as Indians, and probably led by the ardent Samuel Adams, boarded three British ships in Boston Harbor and threw 342 chests of tea overboard. In reaction, the Coercive Acts of 1774—what colonialists referred to as the Intolerable Acts—were enacted to punish rebellious New Englanders for this destruction of property. The acts effectively closed the port of Boston to trade, suspended colonial self-government, and coe
rced locals to house and quarter British troops on demand, sometimes in their private residences. Additionally, there was a ban on the import of gunpowder and arms to America, decreeing that all supplies be secured for the Crown.

  The king had ordered General Thomas Gage to “repel all force and violence by every means within his reach.” And so he tried, despite his misgivings. Married to an American heiress, the aristocratic Gage was well acquainted with colonial life. Gage had fought alongside General Edward Braddock in his disastrous 1755 campaign to clear the French from the Ohio Valley. It had been Gage, in fact, whose rearguard actions allowed thousands of American and British soldiers, including his soon-to-be nemesis George Washington, to elude capture. Hard-liners back home saw the hardworking Gage as a man out of his element dealing with the quick-witted radicals. He was “too honest,” one observer noted, “to deal with men who from their cradles had been educated in the wily arts of chicane.”5

  These men of chicanery soon pushed even further. In February 1774, the British appropriated 13,000 musket cartridges from a military store near Boston, abusing the Americans who were tasked with guarding it. At night “a party of officers, heated with liquor committed excesses in the streets and attacked the Providence coach. These insults irritated and inflamed the people,” one nineteenth-century historian wrote.6 When, in late 1774, Tory legislators in Boston proposed disarming the city, they backed off after an uproar among the people. In October, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, with John Hancock acting as its president, adopted a resolution that condemned the military occupation of Boston and called on private citizens to arm themselves and engage in military drills.

  Other intrusions tested colonial patience as well. The British hadn’t learned their lesson after the near-disastrous Powder Alarm. In early 1775, British regulars marched out of Boston to make their way to Salem and Jamaica Plain, south of town, inflicting relatively small damage as they searched for munitions. Dr. Joseph Warren warned with his typical bluster that “it is the opinion of many, that had they marched eight or ten miles, and attempted to destroy any magazines, or abuse the people, not a man of them would have returned to Boston.”7