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.

Howe's first object is, partly by threats and partly by promises, to terrify or seduce the people to deliver up their arms and receive mercy. The ministry recommended the same plan to Gage, and this is what the tories call making their peace, "a peace which passeth all understanding" indeed! A peace which would be the immediate forerunner of a worse ruin than any we have yet thought of. Ye men of Pennsylvania, do reason upon these things! Were the back counties to give up their arms, they would fall an easy prey to the Indians, who are all armed: this perhaps is what some Tories would not be sorry for. Were the home counties to deliver up their arms, they would be exposed to the resentment of the back counties who would then have it in their power to chastise their defection at pleasure. And were any one state to give up its arms, that state must be garrisoned by all Howe's army of Britons and Hessians to preserve it from the anger of the rest. Mutual fear is the principal link in the chain of mutual love, and woe be to that state that breaks the compact. Howe is mercifully inviting you to barbarous destruction, and men must be either rogues or fools that will not see it. I dwell not upon the vapors of imagination; I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as A, B, C, hold up truth to your eyes.

Two hours later, Revere trotted into Lexington, his mount thoroughly lathered after outgalloping a pair of Gage’s equestrian sentinels near Charlestown. Veering north toward the Mystic River to avoid further trouble, Revere had alerted almost every farmstead and minute captain within shouting distance. Popular lore later credited him with a stirring battle cry—“The British are coming!”—but a witness quoted him as warning, more prosaically, “The regulars are coming out.” Now he carried the alarm to the Reverend Jonas Clarke’s parsonage, just up the road from Lexington Common. Here Clarke had written three thousand sermons in twenty years; here he called up the stairs each morning to rouse his ten children—“Polly, Betsey, Lucy, Liddy, Patty, Sally, Thomas, Jonas, William, Peter, get up!” And here he had given sanctuary, in a bedroom to the left of the front door, to the renegades Hancock and Samuel Adams. A squad of militiamen stood guard at the house as Revere dismounted, spurs clanking. Two warnings had already come from the east: as many as nine mounted British officers had been seen patrolling the Middlesex roads, perhaps “upon some evil design.” At the door, a suspicious orderly sergeant challenged Revere, and Clarke blocked his path until Hancock reportedly called out, “Come in, Revere, we’re not afraid of you.” The herald delivered his message: British regulars by the hundreds were coming out, first by boat, then on foot. There was not a moment to lose.

MEXICAN PURPLE Although the source of this exclusive dye was long a Phoenician trade secret, by the time of the classical Greeks it was known to be manufactured from a gland of the murex sea snail. Surprisingly, while traveling in Mexico in the 1830s, Thomas Gage observed that traditional purple dye manufacture there used the same techniques to create dye from the same sea snails.95

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.

The perpetrators of the Crown's repressive measures were referred to as the "imperial Divan" and as "his most exalted Highness, the most potent, the most omnipotent Bashaw Thomas [Gage], lately appointed by the illustrious Sultan Selim [George] III to the subduction of the military province of B [Boston].

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.