General Thomas Gage Quotes

This is also the story of two British generals. The first, Thomas Gage, was saddled with the impossible task of implementing his government’s unnecessarily punitive response to the Boston Tea Party in December 1773.

Yale was notorious for its politics. Afterwards, one fierce Loyalist, Thomas Jones, recalled bitterly of his alma mater that it was nothing but “a nursery of sedition, of faction, and republicanism,” while General Thomas Gage, commander of the British forces in North America, branded the place “a seminary of democracy” full of “pretended patriots.

The story became a clash between British tyranny and colonial liberty, scheming British officials and supplicating colonists, all culminating in the clash at Lexington and Concord between General Thomas Gage’s “ministerial army” and “the unsuspecting inhabitants” of Massachusetts. All this was conveyed in what we might call the sentimental style of the innocent victim.33 It is impossible to know how much of this cartoonlike version of the imperial crisis Jefferson actually believed and how much was a stylistic affectation.

Thomas Gage, especie de francotirador malévolo, nos habla de las comilonas abundantes y delicadas que los priores solían darse y dar a sus invitados, de la pasión por el juego de naipes o de dados, de la buena vida que había en los conventos. Nos habla de la ligereza de cascos de señoras y doncellas, de las damas de los prelados, de los confesores que encornudaban a los maridos de sus hijas de confesión; de entendimientos entre monjas y monjes, de negocios fraguados en las altas esferas civiles y religiosas, de cómo los párrocos se hacían de dinero extorsionando a los indios de su feligresía; de los vicios y corrupción existentes y de cómo se llegaba hasta el asesinato por cumplir un capricho.