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appears the only way to safety is through fields of blood, I know you will not turn your faces from your foes, but will undauntedly press forward until tyranny is trodden under foot.
     
    Warren stepped down, having somehow harangued his divided audience without the expected riot. Sam Adams stood up and thanked him for the speech before proposing a vote on who should deliver the 1776 oration commemorating the ‘Bloody Massacre’. At this, several British officers signalled their disgust at this language by shouting ‘Fie!’ A general commotion ensued, as some of the congregation could hear the fifes and drums of a regiment marching nearby and thought the officers inside had called out ‘Fire!’
    One British officer approached Adams to remonstrate that the captain commanding the soldiers in 1770 had been tried and acquitted. Adams tried to brush him off by saying he would settle the matter with General Gage. ‘You and I must settle it first,’ replied the determined redcoat, and at this moment violence might easily have broken out. Adams, however, backed down and made his way out ofthe Meeting House. People dispersed and, for a matter of weeks at least, the sword remained sheathed.
    Even during these fateful weeks, officers like Earl Percy remained on good terms with men such as Adams and Hancock, sharing dinner with them sometimes. It may be that they hoped to play upon the earl’s political sympathies, for they knew that, as Member of Parliament for Westminster, he had aligned himself with the Whig opposition that questioned the Ministry’s policy of sending troops to enforce the British writ in America.
    If the Select Men – the colonists’ senior representatives at Boston – hoped that calling themselves Whigs and allying themselves with those who wanted to the limit the King’s powers in Britain or Ireland would help them divide the army and win their argument, they were mistaken. While it is true that quite a few officers in Boston in 1775 might have considered themselves, like Earl Percy, to be Whigs, they did not feel they had anything in common with those whom Dr Warren urged into ‘fields of blood’. Indeed, Percy’s familiarity with the likes of Warren, Hancock and Adams produced contempt for them, as he wrote home in blistering fashion: ‘The people here are a set of sly, artful, hypocritical rascals, cruel, and cowards. I must own I cannot but despise them completely.’ Indeed a suspicion of dishonesty on the part of the Americans tainted the views of many a British officer who might otherwise have been sympathetic.
    Dr Warren had, during his oration on the 6 March, insisted that ‘an independence of Great Britain is not our aim’. Nonsense, thought Lieutenant Williams of the 23rd, an educated young officer with a lively interest in history who had toured Europe and painted well with watercolours in quieter moments. He believed the very origins of the Massachusetts colony, as a haven for religious zealots who had disturbed the peace of England in the seventeenth century, meant that ‘these people have not in the least deviated from the steps of their ancestors, always grumbling and unwilling to acknowledge the authority of any power but what originated among them. They certainly have long looked forward to the day of independency.’
    One thing, though, could be divined clearly from Dr Warren’s words or those of his foes in British uniform. Violent language and vigorous debate would define the coming conflict because the protagonists were united by a common tongue. It would be a war of words from the outset, one of unending argument between those within each camp aswell as continuous attempts to convince those who tried to take a middle way.
    In March 1775 Gage’s view about dealing with the increasing verbal violence of the King’s foes prevailed. The commander-in-chief pursued a policy of trying to persuade the colonists even as some prepared for armed rebellion. Earl Percy and many