Gage, Thomas

GAGE, THOMAS. (1719 or 1720–1787). British general and colonial governor. The second son of an Irish peer and Sussex gentleman, Thomas Gage was born late in 1719 or early in 1720, probably in Wye, Gloucestershire. Although the family had long been Roman Catholic, his father had converted to Anglicanism in 1715 (which allowed him to become member of Parliament for Tewkesbury in 1721) and his sons were brought up in that faith. Lord Hervey described young Thomas's father as "a petulant, silly, busy, meddling, profligate fellow," while Lord Wharton promised to pay his debts "when Lady Gage grows chaste." With such parents Thomas did well to develop a character noted for honesty, generosity, and decency.

From 1728 to 1736 he was at Westminster School, where he became acquainted with Francis Bernard, John Burgoyne, William Legge (Lord Dartmouth), George and Richard Howe, and George Sackville, later Lord George Germain. In 1741 he obtained a lieutenancy in the Forty-eighth Foot (Cholmondeley's) and by 1743 was a captain. He was aide-de-camp to William Anne Keppel, Lord Albemarle, at Fontenoy in 1745 and fought at Culloden in 1746 before returning to the Netherlands for the campaigns of 1747 and 1748. After the War of the Austrian Succession ended, having purchased the rank of major in 1748, he served in Ireland with the Fifty-fifth Foot (soon renumbered the Forty-fourth) and became its lieutenant colonel on 2 March 1751.

In late 1754 the Forty-fourth was ordered to America as part of Edward Braddock's expedition against Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio River. Braddock's soldiers were unused to forest warfare, he had few native scouts and he was short of time. Nevertheless he took effective measures to screen his front and flanks, and Gage, in charge of the advance guard, was careful and systematic. Yet Gage's one slip was fatal: his failure on 9 July 1755 to secure a commanding hillock led to the humiliating defeat at the Monongahela River. Braddock and Gage's colonel, Peter Hackett, were killed, and Gage, who displayed great courage, stubbornness, and coolness under fire, was slightly wounded. Gage took command of the regiment when Hackett fell, but afterward was not allowed to succeed to the colonelcy. He was second in command of an unsuccessful expedition to the Mohawk River in 1756 and in 1757 served with Lord Loudoun's abortive attempt on Louisburg.

Braddock's defeat had demonstrated the need for infantry properly trained in light infantry tactics, and in this need Gage saw his chance to achieve his long-coveted colonelcy. In December 1757 he was allowed to form a light infantry regiment, the Eightieth Foot, the first specifically light infantry battalion in the British army. Although even John Forbes, who commanded the successful 1758 expedition to capture Fort Duquesne, thought it a "most flagrant jobb," designed more to advance Gage's career than the army's efficiency, this was a mould-breaking move. From the first the Eightieth was intended to provide a better-disciplined and more reliable alternative to North American rangers; at least five of the Eightieth's first ensigns had learned their business under Robert Rogers. Woodland-trained infantry rapidly became a major arm of the British army in North America.

Unfortunately for Gage, his new command did not produce the expected opportunities for distinction. He was wounded again at Ticonderoga in 1758 while leading James Abercromby's advance guard. The following year, promoted brigadier general, he was sent to replace brigadier general John Prideaux in command of the British forces on Lake Ontario. Ordered to advance down the St. Lawrence toward Montreal, and so relieve the pressure on James Wolfe at Quebec, Gage decided that the French forces in his path were too strong for him to challenge. Jeffery Amherst was displeased, and in the final advance on Montreal Gage found himself in charge of the rearguard. Gage, however, was unlucky rather than incompetent: he was a popular officer and widely regarded as able, conscientious, and brave.

Promoted major general in 1761, he was the military governor of Montreal from 1760 until 1763. Here he proved himself as an administrator, becoming popular for his sensitive dealings with the French inhabitants and British settlers, while keeping his soldiery under strict control. When the outbreak of Pontiac's War discredited Amherst's Indian policy and sent him home in disgrace, Gage became the acting British commander in chief throughout North America. He took up his new duties in New York on 16 November and in November 1764 his tenure was confirmed.

In many ways he was an excellent choice. His attitude to Indians was ambivalent rather than (as in Amherst's case) contemptuous. It is true that on the ground his frontier policy was curiously passive, allowing provincial and local interests to nibble away at the principle of a fixed boundary line and a regulated adequate supply of trade goods; yet he never forgot the lessons of Pontiac's War, and much of his correspondence concerned questions of Indian policy. He was honest and tactful with colonists and managed his army effectively. Through his marriage in 1758 to Margaret Kemble of Brunswick, New Jersey, he had access to an important, if limited, circle of American contacts. More clearly than anyone else, he recognized the deteriorating, possibly hopeless, political situation in America. He also saw the utter inadequacy of the small garrisons he was able to put into New York and Philadelphia to deal with revolt; even the withdrawal from all but three of the western posts in 1768, and the garrisoning of Boston, would make little difference. On the other hand, he was curiously reticent about his insights in his official correspondence, although his private letters to his friend Lord Barrington, the secretary at war, reveal a deep disquiet. Though privately angry at American affronts to royal authority from 1765 onward, his principal aim was to stay out of the conflict.

He let his habitual caution drop after he went home on leave in 1773. In February 1774 George III consulted him about the proper response to the Boston Tea Party. The king understood him to recommend resolute action, though later Gage claimed he had been misunderstood. Perhaps he was misled by ministerial promises of adequate troops. Whatever really happened, Gage soon found himself with the governorship of Massachusetts and orders to enforce the Coercive Acts. In fact he quickly discovered that his writ did not run farther than Boston itself and that in the countryside thousands of militia were preparing to resist. Now at last he informed the home government that military action was out of the question, only to be over-ruled. On 14 April he received an unequivocal order from Dartmouth, the colonial secretary, to seize the principal leaders of the rebellion.

Gage knew perfectly well that any such attempt outside Boston was beyond his powers, but he could not completely ignore his instructions. However, a swift strike against a strictly limited military objective might succeed and even satisfy London. He chose as his target Concord, a town only twenty miles away, where the militia were known to be collecting arms and stores. At the same time he wanted to keep most of his soldiers in reserve in Boston. He employed sixteen companies of grenadiers and light infantry—probably enough for safety but only a small proportion of his total force—and equipped them lightly for rapid movement. He tried (unsuccessfully) to keep the movement secret and gave the command to an officer unlikely to do anything rash. The expedition got under way at dusk on 18 April, but its purpose had already leaked out, perhaps betrayed by Gage's own wife. Next day Gage's forces skirmished with local militia at Lexington and marched on to Concord to destroy the stores. After a sharp battle with militia the column marched back, harassed all the way and suffering 30 percent casualties, until it met a relief column led by Lord Percy. No significant American leaders had been taken, and the long-feared general revolt was now a reality. By 19 April Gage found himself besieged in Boston.

On 25 May three major generals—William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne—arrived with reinforcements, which brought Gage's force to 6,500 men. This, however, was little more than a third of the force assembled outside the city. All Gage could do was to couple his declaration of martial law—again, in obedience to orders—with a last-ditch effort at conciliation. His proclamation, drawn up for him in extravagant language by the literary Burgoyne, offered a royal pardon to all who would lay down their arms, Samuel Adams and John Hancock excepted. When this failed Gage planned to seize Dorchester Heights, from which point artillery could command the outer harbor, making the city untenable to a garrison dependent on seaborne supplies and succor. However, he was forestalled. On 13 June, five days before the operation was to begin, the Americans learned of the British plan, and on the night of 16-17 June they moved to fortify the Charlestown peninsula on the other side of the harbor. The position was too far away to threaten the main anchorage, and in retrospect Gage might have been better off ignoring it and occupying Dorchester Heights as planned.

At the time, however, the Americans' move seemed to demand a response. Perhaps, too, Gage sensed from the arrival of the three major generals that the ministry meant to replace him: he needed to demonstrate speed and aggression and to score a dramatic success. Gage and his subordinate generals considered a landing on Charlestown Neck, behind the enemy position, but rejected it because of the state of the tides. That, combined with Gage's limited knowledge of his opponents' dispositions and powers of resistance, dictated a landing by Howe and 2,500 men at undefended Moulton's Point. From there Howe could combine a frontal attack with an envelopment between Breed's Hill and the Mystic River. Neither Gage nor Howe could have known that the ragged Americans, once behind their field fortifications on the hilltops, would fight with as much determination as they did. It cost the regulars three assaults and well over 1,000 casualties before they carried the American works. Between the losses and the need to garrison the captured hills, Dorchester Heights were effectively forgotten until March, when their occupation by George Washington forced Howe to evacuate the city.

Gage, being the man on the spot, was about to suffer for the truth of his own predictions. At the very time he was attacking Bunker Hill, Germain was beginning the process of dislodging him for showing insufficient energy and enthusiasm. On 25 September he was ordered home, although he was not formally deprived of the post of commander in chief until 18 April 1776. He handed over to William Howe on 10 October 1775 and arrived in London on 14 November. Thereafter he was punished by neglect. Although he remained the official governor of Massachusetts and kept his military rank, his income was sharply reduced. He was finally appointed to Amherst's staff in April 1781 and briefly given the task of organizing the Kent militia to resist French invasion. Only the fall of the North ministry allowed his promotion to full general on 20 November 1782. By then his health was in serious decline, and he died at his home at Portland Place, London, on 2 April 1787. He was buried at Firle Place, Sussex, the family home.

Gage has never quite shaken off his reputation as the slow, blundering commander in chief responsible for the military humiliations of 1775. The truth, of course, is that the North ministry consistently failed to recognize the scale of the American rebellion, and saw Massachusetts as the heart of the trouble whereas in fact resistance infected every colony from Georgia to New Hampshire. Within Massachusetts, the trouble appeared to be primarily in Boston, not throughout the countryside. Consequently, the North administration ignored Gage's pleas to the contrary, gave him far too few troops, and ordered him to do too much with them. Gage must be partly to blame for not speaking up clearly and persistently long before 1774. Although he may have relied too much on a small, unrepresentative, lofty circle of American contacts—mainly his wife's wider family who, unlike that good lady, had little sympathy for the rebellion—he was well aware of the dangers. It is true that he did not keep up early friendly contacts with men such as Benjamin Franklin and Washington, whom he met on Braddock's expedition, but given the length of time concerned and the subsequent lack of contact, a cooling was perhaps inevitable. In any case, his principal task was military, not political, and the fundamental error was not his. Although he had little or no opportunity to prove himself a brilliant field commander, his military decisions in 1775 were fundamentally sound, with the sole and serious exception of the failure to occupy Dorchester Heights. From first to last Gage was the unluckiest of officers.

SEE ALSO Amherst, Jeffery (1717–1797); Braddock, Edward; Bunker Hill, Massachusetts; Burgoyne, John; Clinton, Henry; Dartmouth, William Legge, second earl of; Dorchester Heights, Massachusetts; Germain, George Sackville; Howe, Richard; Howe, William; Pontiac's War; Ticonderoga, New York (1755–1759).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brumwell, Stephen. Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–1763. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Fischer, David Hackett. Paul Revere's Ride. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Shy, John. Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965.

                        revised by John Oliphant