Free 1775 by Kevin Phillips Page B

of the 1770s, so to speak. Whether or not “the American Revolution” continued to manifest itself in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address or in the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein is an entirely separate debate for an altogether different book. But first, this introduction requires one more essential preview.
    The Global Competition for Munitions, Weaponry, and Mercenaries, 1774–1776
    Despite his mistakes as a ruler, George III hardly overreacted on October 19, 1774, when he characterized Massachusetts as being in a state of rebellion and approved a Privy Council order prohibiting the unauthorized export of war supplies from Britain to America. Nor was it premature that colonial governors were quickly instructed to “take the most effectual Measures for arresting, detaining and securing, any Gunpowder, or any sort of Arms or Ammunition, which may be attempted to be imported into the colonies.” 40 These strictures set off the late 1774 and early 1775 expeditions and seizures in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, as well as the actions in Virginia and South Carolina that occurred before news of Lexington and Concord. The provincial powder encounters were as much consequences of a widening chasm as causations, and even the trigger status of Lexington and Concord is not unqualified.
    The American munitions crisis was already global. The Admiralty, for its part, sent implementing orders to the Royal Navy. The undersecretary of state dispatched candid alerts to British secret agents.
King George’s Correspondence,
edited by Sir John Fortescue, a military historian, confirms that agents’ reports on gunpowder and munitions smuggling were often forwarded to the king, who was a fascinated reader. 41 He should have been: the trafficking reached from the Baltic to the Bay of Biscay, from Haiti to the West African Slave Coast, where inferior-grade muskets were a staple easily come by. If the global gunpowder confrontation was clearly a prelude to the Revolution, it could also be called a first stage or opening round.
    It was just days after October 19 that the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, with no knowledge of the Privy Council order, established a Committee of Safety and a Committee of Supply. The two groups were charged to work with each other, and to cooperate with individual towns across theBay Colony in order to monitor British troop movements, suppress Tories, purchase and distribute ordnance and supplies, and prepare a well-armed militia to protect the public safety. A month later the Committee of Safety took a more hurried view, telling agents to buy up what weaponry and munitions they could find anywhere else in New England. 42 The clock on effective preparation for a likely war was already running.
    Through the summer of 1775, responsibility for obtaining gunpowder and arms lay with the thirteen colonies and whatever private individuals they might commission. However, between July and October, the Second Continental Congress became active in urging the individual colonies to get into the munitions trade. Then between September and November 1775, the Congress established both a Committee of Secret Correspondence, charged with obtaining and distributing military supplies, and a Secret Committee, which was to employ agents overseas, gather intelligence about ammunition stores, and arrange their purchase through intermediaries (to conceal that Congress was the true buyer). There is no record that the First Continental Congress had taken kindred measures in the autumn of 1774, but it is all too easy to imagine secret discussions and activities.
    Philadelphia quickly became the nerve center. To begin with, it played home to Congress—bringing together the key plotters and orchestrators from New England, Philadelphia, Virginia, and the Carolinas. But the Philadelphia of the 1770s had also become North America’s leading mercantile city and a major shipbuilding center. Two of its major merchant firms, Willing &