General Thomas Gage, Commander-in-Chief of North America at the outbreak of the Revolution, was married an American woman named Margaret Kemble, and by all accounts was fairly sympathetic to the continentals. Yet the continentals had no cause to be sympathetic to the British soldiers occupying the city.
Owing to this, Thomas Gage was not especially well-liked by anyone, even his own the troops. Lt. Barker‘s hilarious diary frequently disrespectfully refers to him as Tommy (underline in the original).
Still, Gage was a soldier and would do his duty… to a degree. And involving 4D chess at times. In summer 1774, for example, Gage contacted William Brattle of the Cambridge militia and convinced him to write back to Gage about Cambridge’s military supplies. Brattle was actually a former Patriot turned Loyalist, wrote back and essentially suggested that Gage seize Cambridge’s supplies.
What did Gage do? He either incompetently dropped Brattle’s letter out of his pocket in a bustling Bostonian street, or deliberately dropped it so that the people would blame Brattle when soldiers were sent in to Cambridge. The soldiers didn’t get very far.
You can see why his reputation wouldn’t be great.
When it came to Concord in April 1775, Gage supposedly told only two people about the secret plan to send the flank infantries on a march to seize the supplies. One was General Percy, whom he told at midnight the night everyone was set to march out. The other is unknown, and many people speculate (for drama’s sake) it may have been Margaret Gage, who was friendly with Dr. Joseph Warren.
In all honesty, though, that’s extremely unlikely. Not only because there are other, better candidates (there are), but also because the reality is that there wouldn’t have needed to be a singular mole ferreting out military secrets.
A few days prior to the march, Gage relieved the grenadiers and light infantry of their duties to prepare them. Doubtless townspeople noticed, and for that matter, the soldiers themselves knew something was about to happen (see, Lt. Barker’s diary, where he directly states this).
People are people everywhere, and speculation would have run rampant. Given the attempt to seize supplies in Cambridge and the fact that a lot of supplies were indeed stored in Concord, well, it would not have taken much for people to add 1+2 and come to 3.
In the camp of “Gage was just really bad at keeping this sort of thing a secret,” we have this amusing anecdote told by Nathaniel Philbrick in his excellent Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution. Apparently after Percy left his Top Secret Midnight Meeting with Gage, he almost immediately encountered ordinary citizens chatting on the Boston Common discussing the exact plan to seize the cannons at Concord.
So much for secrecy.
Next week, we return to 1770 and to John Adams’ law office, where we’ll discuss one of his two clerks–both of whom proved to be highly interesting fellows.
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