Thomas Gage struck words and added notes in the margins, pressing his quill hard in some spots on the most consequential letter he would ever write. The British general finished his final draft and on April 18, 1775, dispatched the order launching the Concord Expedition.
It shall be done “with the utmost Expedition and secrecy,” Gage wrote, of his army’s plans to hobble the patriot militia by seizing their munitions and supplies in Concord.
Only, it wasn’t.
A spy leaked Gage’s order 250 years ago. That’s how the Americans knew the British were coming.
The spy, some historians have argued, was his American wife.
While one of the most rigorous debates about the start of the war centers on who fired the “shot heard round the world” on April 19 in Lexington, the reason the Americans knew to head to Lexington leads to a juicier argument.
Paul Revere and others knew to sound the alarm and send the militia to Lexington thanks to a supersecret source. Some historians say there is no clear evidence who tipped them off, and anyone who would know died early in the revolution. Others insist that circumstantial evidence is solid enough to offer only one conclusion: Margaret Kemble Gage was a mother of the American Revolution.
William Gordon, a pastor in Massachusetts, wrote at the time that the information had been leaked by “a daughter of liberty unequally yoked in politics.”
“To whom could that cryptic phrase apply more aptly than to the daughter of Peter Kemble, married to the British commander in chief?” read an editorial in The Washington Post 100 years ago, as the nation was about to celebrate its 150th birthday.
This debate, clearly, is an “old, old question,” that 1925 piece said.
At issue is who, exactly, disclosed her husband’s plans to Joseph Warren, a physician and the architect of a spy network throughout Boston.
The hive was thrumming in early April as British longboats were being prepared for something in Boston Harbor, Brandeis University history professor David Hackett Fischer wrote in his book, “Paul Revere’s Ride” — a popular contemporary account arguing that Kemble Gage was the one who filled in the details.
Warren had one informant, “a person very close to the upper levels of British command in Boston, a person only to be contacted with extreme care, and only as a last resort,” who provided the specifics of Gage’s orders, Fischer wrote.
The colonists knew something was afoot. But their small and scrappy militia needed to know where it was going down.
And because Warren was a practicing doctor, “he would have had a fair excuse for calling on Margaret in his medical capacity and coming away with the answer: the British were mounting an extensive expedition,” Fischer wrote.
A close look at Gage’s orders for an attack under good lighting on a broad, oak desk helps animate the emotion behind the words on paper, said Cheney J. Schopieray, curator of manuscripts at the University of Michigan’s William L. Clements Library.
“What you see is haste. You see the process of thinking as the commander in chief of the British army in North America is working through the language he wants to use in this important order,” Schopieray said.
Could that sentence urging for a gentler approach to the Americans be the influence of his wife, who was born into an influential American family and had never hidden her loyalty to the colonies over the crown?
Schopieray said he cannot point to anything in the more than 23,000 documents in the Gage collection that outs Kemble Gage as the spy and the major influencer.
“The documents tell us so much about what Gage knew at what time, and what his orders were and what his thought processes were,” he said.
But the role of his wife is left for others to sleuth out.
When Margaret Kemble and Gage married 17 years earlier, he was a dashing British officer and veteran of the French and Indian wars. The rift between the crown and the colonies hadn’t been so acrimonious, and the two were in the same elite social circles.
Gage had served alongside many of those patriots in the previous wars, and “his heart was never in the war against the colonists,” The Post wrote.
But when Gage was sent into “the storm center of the rising revolution in Boston,” his wife befriended the patriot leaders, including Warren. The Post reported in 1925 that Warren and Kemble Gage were at an afternoon tea together on April 18, only a few hours before the British troops headed to Lexington.
Warren was killed in the Battle of Bunker Hill just two months later, taking the secret of his informant with him to the grave.
By 1776, Gage sent his wife and children to England on a ship carrying military widows, orphans and about 170 badly wounded British soldiers.
Those who believed she was the informant saw that as a banishment and proof of her allegiance to the patriots.
An editorial cartoon published in London upon Gage’s return in 1776 gave a clue about the gossip of the time, that Gage was besotted and subservient to his wife.
It shows a gentleman with a sword in a luscious embrace with a bare-breasted woman wearing a Turkish-inspired dress similar to the one Kemble Gage wore in her famous portrait by John Singleton Copley. The etching said, “The Hero returned from Boston.”
The etching of the “reunion of husband and wife reveals Gage’s weakness and explains his failure and the army’s humiliation,” the American Revolution Institute wrote.
Pragmatists like Schopieray point out that Kemble Gage was pregnant and her move was about safety rather than banishment. When Gage was ultimately recalled by a crown furious for his flaccid response to the patriots, the couple reunited, had another child and lived the rest of their days in London.
Kemble Gage outlived her husband by 36 years and never publicly spoke about her role in the American Revolution. This has flummoxed historians, because “after a century and a half the question remains unanswered,” The Post wrote in 1925.
“But it will be just as well,” the editorial said, “to keep a warm corner in the patriotic heart for the memory of Margaret Kemble Gage.”
WASHINGTON POST