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as well as Madrid, Gibraltar, Mediterranean Minorca, and West Africa’s Slave Coast. Intrigue even reached the St. Petersburg palace of Catherine the Great, Russia’s czarina, who scoffed at King George’s Russian troop-hire request. All were venues where British or Americans, publicly or privately, sought critical assistance—mercenaries, munitions, or both. Competition and then confrontation were global.
    Another essential subject is rebellion’s political geography—the different degrees of involvement and intensity within the insurgent thirteen. New England’s other three provinces, for example, were scarcely less motivated than Massachusetts. Self-governing Connecticut and Rhode Island, only nominal “colonies,” were in Patriot political hands from the start. In New Hampshire, the royal governor, John Wentworth, soon took refuge in harborside Fort William and Mary. Then in August 1775, he sailed away to Boston on HMS
Scarborough,
which six months later also became home to Georgia’s fugitive executive. In the South, despite the speed shown in driving out royal governors, important divisions lingered. As for the middle colonies—the future states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware—overall they included the highest ratio of doubters and temporizers. Their indecision during the winter of 1775–1776 worried commander in chief George Washington as well as pro-independence strategists in the Continental Congress. Part of our tale of 1775 involves the often-bitter backstage battle for political allegiance.
    Massachusetts: The Coercive Acts as a Seedbed of Revolution
    As the North American rampart of the militant Protestantism so involved in England’s two earlier revolutions, New England stood to be—arguably
had
to be—the epicenter of the British imperial crisis of the 1770s. Where King George and his ministers erred was in underestimating the
American
nationalism growing in the other colonies, generated less by Boston’s provocative tea dumping than by the Crown’s overreaction. To many Patriot leaders, the Coercive Acts—in colonial parlance, the Intolerable Acts—reiterated the prerevolutionary arrogance and practices of Charles I before the English Civil War and of James II before the Glorious Revolution of 1688. But with or without the analogy, the result, as it had been in the previous century, was a growing revolutionary mindset.
    On September 12, 1774, the military governor of Massachusetts,Lieutenant-General Thomas Gage, unnerved by summer militia rallies and huge public demonstrations, shared his foreboding in a letter to the American secretary in London, Lord Dartmouth: “It is needless to trouble your Lordship with daily Publications of determined [local] resolutions not to obey the Late Acts of Parliament…The Country People are exercising in Arms in this Province, Connecticut and Rhode Island, and getting Magazines of Arms and Ammunition…and such Artillery as they can procure, good or bad…People are resorting to this town [Boston] for Protection…even [from] Places always esteemed well affected…and Sedition flows copiously from the Pulpits. The Commissioners of Customs have thought it no longer safe or prudent to remain at Salem…and are amongst others come into the Town [Boston], where I am obliged likewise now to reside on many accounts.” 6 Intermittently optimistic in late spring and early summer, Gage now admitted the truth: New England was all but out of control.
    The Bay Colony, proud of its early self-government and charters dating back to 1629, had since May been occupied by four additional regiments of British troops sent to enforce the Boston Port Act and the companion Massachusetts Government Act. These two statutes stood out among the five acts urged by George III and enacted by Parliament between March and June 1774. * Designed not just as punishment for December’s Boston Tea Party, these measures were also expected to caution and humble