Homegrown Terror. Eric D. Lehman
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away, our private as well as public Interest invaded, and our lives at the Mercy of a General and his army!”42 He was swiftly elected by his peers to serve in the upcoming Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The Massachusetts delegation, with Samuel and John Adams, reached Hartford in August 1774, on their way to Philadelphia. Deane and his stepson Samuel Webb rode up to meet them, and the following day they visited his house, where his wife Elizabeth served punch and coffee. A few days later, after settling his business affairs, Deane followed the delegation to Philadelphia, the second-largest city in the English-speaking world, to debate a course of action.43
Some in Connecticut could not wait for the results of the new Congress. Delegates from Windham and New London counties met in Norwich, condemning the “unconstitutional acts” and presence of General Thomas Gage’s standing army in Boston, which was “too great to be given to any Person in a free Country … an Army not under the Control of the civil Magistrate! What Country? What State?” They lamented the possible “disagreeable necessity of defending our sacred and invaluable Rights … for, we could not entertain a thought that any American would or possibly could be dragoon’d into Slavery.” Among the men at the Norwich meeting were Samuel Huntington, Nathaniel Shaw, William Ledyard, Jonathan Trumbull, and Israel Putnam. They all signed their names to this radical protest, two years before delegates from the entire country would sign a similar document, putting reputations and lives on the line for liberty.44
Not everyone was ready for rebellion. The reverend Samuel Peters of Hebron wrote a proclamation urging his flock not to take up arms, “it being high treason.” The result, he wrote, was that “riots and mobs … have attended me and my house…. The clergy of Connecticut must fall a sacrifice, with the several churches, very soon to the rage of the puritan nobility.” He pleaded for the Lord to “deliver us from anarchy.”45 The proclamation was not well received by the majority of the townspeople. A number of men arrived at Peters’s house and found it full of his armed followers. They held a meeting outside, in which they argued about his use of tea, and during the argument Peters claimed there were no weapons in the house. The reverend started to “harangue” the crowd, when suddenly a gun went off inside. The men rushed inside to find loaded guns and pistols, swords, and two dozen large wooden clubs. After confiscating these, they let Peters go back inside to write a confession of what happened. He was not cooperative and the crowd grew “exasperated.” Finally, the people seized him, took him to the green at the center of town, and forced him to sign a confession.46
According to Peters, admittedly not the most reliable witness, when he fled Windham County’s mob rule to New Haven, he was met with more of the same from the local Sons of Liberty, including Benedict Arnold. At ten o’clock “Arnold and his mob came to the gate,” and after Peters said he would not come out, supposedly “holding a musket” in his hand, Arnold told the mob to “bring an axe, and split down the gate.” Peters replied, “Arnold, so sure as you split the gate, I will blow your brains out, and all that enter this yard to-night!” When Arnold retreated, the mob called him a coward, but he said, “I am no coward; but I know Dr. Peters’ disposition and temper, and he will fulfill every promise he makes; and I have no wish for death at present.” According to Peters, David Wooster showed up with another mob a half hour later, and these and other threats encouraged him to leave Connecticut altogether, heading for Boston.47
That autumn of 1774 people around the state quietly began to arm for a war many suspected would come, even though the first shots had not yet been fired. New military companies were commissioned, artillery was inventoried, weapons were repaired, and militia was trained. Connecticut called for a meeting of all the colonies to join forces and protest the Coercive Acts and even at this early date called for a more permanent union. The same year the monarchist Tories met in Middletown and tried to remove the radical Governor Trumbull from office. They were a dwindling minority, though, and failed. The council under Trumbull asked Nathaniel Shaw to send ships to the Caribbean to covertly buy powder and shot from the French. Arnold himself tried to gather muskets equipped with bayonets.48
In early 1775 a group of Tories in Stamford found out about a large shipment of gunpowder secretly entering Connecticut. They told a sympathetic customs officer, who seized the powder and kept it at his house. But the next day a large group of Revolutionaries, having heard of this incident, “proceeded in an orderly manner to the house where the powder was lodged, which they entered without opposition, and having found it, rode off with the casks.” The Tories and their informers “hid themselves until all was over.”49
Trumbull and the assembly also joined the new Continental Association. Every town but Ridgefield and Newtown publicly accepted their actions. These holdouts were promptly shunned by the rest of the towns in Fairfield County, who suspended all commerce dealings and connections from the inhabitants of these two villages.50 In March 1775 Trumbull stood in front of the assembly and called the Tories “depraved, malignant, avaricious, and haughty,” rallying for “Manly action against those who by Force and Violence seek your ruin and destruction.”51 By April Shaw had obtained powder and was trying to stock up on lead from Philadelphia.52 He wrote on April 1 that “matters seem to draw near where the longest sword must decide the controversy.”53
He was right. The first shots were fired at Lexington on April 19, and swift riders carried the word west across Connecticut. Hour by hour each town heard the news and sprang into action. In Brooklyn veteran Israel Putnam supposedly set down his plow and galloped to Boston.54 When the news reached New Haven, class exercises were suspended, and Ezra Stiles’s son, who had followed in his father’s footsteps at Yale, left for Newport and arrived on April 26, surprising his father.55 Norwich’s Ebenezer Huntington, a senior at Yale, left class and marched directly to Boston to meet his brother Jedediah, who had graduated from Harvard a decade earlier. They and the other volunteers began to surround the city.
Twenty-one-year-old Jonathan Mix Jr., whose father had arrested Benedict Arnold nine years earlier, was a member of the New Haven Cadets and had recently joined the Governor’s Foot Guard under Captain Arnold. On April 21 a herald sent by Arnold banged on his door and called him out to the green, where he and forty others gathered and heard the news. They voted unanimously to march to Boston. The following morning when they gathered to leave, Arnold asked the Board of Selectmen for the keys to the powder house, since his small troop lacked gunpowder. Fellow mason David Wooster put up a cautious resistance, saying that they should wait for proper authorization, probably from Governor Trumbull. Arnold told him that they could give him the keys or he and his men would break in. Wooster gave him the keys. Arnold left his three sons and his sickly wife and marched to war, leading Mix and the small band of dedicated militia toward Boston.56 Resistance had become revolution.
Meanwhile, the only colonial governor who supported that revolution, Jonathan Trumbull, called together his Council of Safety and began to form six regiments under new articles of war.57 Few in the colonies were as ready as Trumbull and his allies for this moment. Men carrying letters and messages galloped around the state—between Trumbull in Lebanon, Samuel Huntington in Norwich, Nathaniel Shaw in New London, Thomas Mumford, Daniel Lathrop, Eliphalet Dyer, Benjamin Tallmadge, and William Ledyard—and circulated further on to those who had joined the army or were serving in the Continental Congress, such as William Williams, Oliver Wolcott, Roger Sherman, Jeremiah Wadsworth, Gold Selleck Silliman, Silas Deane, and Benedict Arnold. Shaw asked the Huntingtons for powder for the Oliver Cromwell. The Huntingtons sent flour and salt pork to the Trumbulls.58 Forts were occupied, Tory assets were seized, and military plans were put into action. They had long since planted the seeds, and the grass had finally broken through the soil.
Resist Even Unto Blood
BENEDICT ARNOLD and his New Haven militia got as far as Massachusetts before they ran into a Connecticut patriot named Samuel Parsons. A member of the General Assembly, Parsons had ridden to Boston early and was coming back to report on the conflict. Arnold mentioned the cannon at Fort Ticonderoga at the southern end of New York’s