For months, the Massachusetts Governor’s allies plotted to strip citizens of their arms. Legislators said they sought only to enhance public safety. But they labored as far from the public eye as possible. Then revealing, “debating,” and passing their legislation in the space of one day, they hurried it to the Governor for signature. The Governor not only signed it, but when outraged citizens started the process to overturn the act by popular referendum, the haughty chief executive threatened to put it into immediate effect as an “emergency measure.”
Is this yet another installment of the National Association of Scholars’ series of articles on the run-up to the American Revolution, recalling moments from that struggle of 250 years ago? Yes, it is, but the events described are taking place in Massachusetts right now.
The Governor in question is Maura Healey. Trampling on citizens’ civil rights is a long-standing passion of hers. In 2016, when she was Massachusetts Attorney General, she attempted to ban most modern rifles via a mere letter published in the Boston Globe. Now, lackeys in the Massachusetts House and Senate, such as Michael Day of Somerville and Cynthia Creem of Newton, have given her diktats the force of law.
It was not always thus in the so-called “cradle of liberty.”
On September 1, 1774 there occurred the “Powder Alarm” whose epicenter was Michael Day’s own backyard. As recounted in previous installments in this series, tensions had been running high in Massachusetts for some time. The Boston Massacre of 1770, the famous Tea Party of late 1773, and the “Intolerable Acts” earlier in 1774 had put the Bay-Staters on high alert.
British officials were on edge, too.
Under the leadership of Healey’s predecessor, Governor General Thomas Gage, they began confiscating colonists’ weapons and the black powder required to fire those guns and rifles. In late August, the British commander of the state militia, Colonel William Brattle, warned Gage of a large quantity of black powder located in the communal powder house in Sommerville. Gage ordered it seized.
Before cartridges were mass-produced, shooters needed to pour powder into a weapon to prepare it to fire a ball. As a result, individuals kept a daily supply of powder in their homes while storing a reserve in a safe, central location. This practice reduced the chance of accidental fires, especially in urban areas.[1]
Following Gage’s order, on the morning of September 1, 1774, about 250 British soldiers marched to Sommerville, seized the powder, and brought it back to Boston. To the British, the threat seemed defused.
The colonists, however, were just getting started.
Once they learned of the British troops’ movements, rumors began to swirl that the British had started a fight, that they had seized a huge amount of powder, and that they were planning to occupy Boston Harbor. In the proverbial “minute,” 4,000 men from around eastern Massachusetts converged on Cambridge, ready to protect their rights. William Brattle and other Loyalists fled to Boston.
No fighting took place, but just as the British revealed their intent to disarm the colonists, the colonists revealed their ability to mobilize effectively upon a moment’s notice. The British began to fortify Boston, while the colonists moved their powder further away from the city, such as to storehouses in Concord and Lexington.
Revisionist histories treat the Powder Alarm as something of a joke.
Weren’t the “Committees of Correspondence”—the colonists’ social media of the day—just spreading “misinformation” about the British actions? No fleet occupied Boston. The powder was largely owned by the British. And who needs all that powder anyway? How different were British actions than a mandatory gun “buyback”? Nobody got hurt. It was all a big nothingburger.
But this minimizes the Powder Alarm as an event that galvanized colonists’ cohesion and resolve. And it ignores that the colonists’ “conspiracy theories”—alas, like so many others these days—turned out to be right. It also ignores the parallels to General Gage’s actions throughout history. To take just recent examples, in 2012 Venezuela outlawed private gun sales. Its dictatorship has proven unshakeable since. In 1996, Australia made most semi-automatic rifles and shotguns illegal; in 2019, Canada made it illegal to buy or transfer most pistols. By the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, both “Commonwealth” countries were placing dissident citizens in prison camps. And in Great Britain, where private pistol and rifle ownership is rare, recent unrest has led officials to threaten “keyboard warriors”—even in America!—with jail time just for posting memes critical of government immigration policy.
Will the same thing happen in Massachusetts now? Will the State Policy go door-to-door trying to confiscate AR-15s? Will lawful citizens be arrested for merely possessing unserialized, unregistered weapons—which were all guns in 1774—while violent criminals continue to be released without bail? Healey, Creem, and Day seem to believe that they can out-Gage Gage. It’s high time for the rest of the citizenry of the Commonwealth to learn from their American forebears.
[1] Ironically some states today, including Massachusetts, argue against private ownership of so-called “large capacity” magazines by trying to use the analogy of a few colonial restrictions on private black powder storage. They conveniently omit the fact that magazines, large or small, do not blow up houses and that such bans only put law-abiding citizens at a disadvantage against criminals—who famously don’t care about large-capacity magazine bans—and thereby undermine public safety.
Art by Beck & Stone
There are three important points to be made here.
First Black Powder is an explosive while modern gunpowder (Smokeless Powder) is a progressively burning propellant. This does two things — first it gives the round a greater velocity while also only requiring about a third the volume of powder to fire the round. This two-third reduction adds up quickly when you are storing gunpowder in any significant quantity, e.g. one (100 lb) keg of Smokeless Powder instead of three (100 lb) kegs of Black Powder, which is what they had and how it was imported.
Second, Black Powder is highly sensitive to static electricity — a random spark can touch it off, and the fear was more one of explosions than fire itself. A quantity of modern Smokeless Powder is a concern in a fire, much as gasoline would be, but Black Powder would explode, sending flaming debris raining down on the neighboring houses, making a fire into a whole lot worse fire. There was good reason to have powder houses in isolated areas.
(Fireworks still use Black Powder and the fire code regulations for fireworks stores are quite strict…)
Third, there were only three powder mills in all the colonies, none north of New Jersey, and there also was a shortage of saltpeter — most gunpowder was imported and would be throughout the entire Revolution. The only reason the British were eventually able to capture Bunker Hill was the Americans running out of gunpowder — this gunpowder they likely would have used.
Thank you for these excellent additions!