Thomas Gage
Thomas Gage commanded the British army in America for eleven years and was recalled six months after starting the war. He was a younger son of an English viscount, served in Flanders and at Culloden, and came to America in 1755, where he was with Braddock's column when it was destroyed on the Monongahela. He raised and led a light infantry regiment, governed Montreal after the conquest of Canada, and in 1763 became commander-in-chief of all British forces in North America, based in New York. He married an American, Margaret Kemble of New Jersey, and spent longer in the colonies than most of the men who later fought him. He was appointed governor of Massachusetts in 1774 to enforce the Coercive Acts, which put a serving general in charge of a civilian government - a point the colonists made repeatedly and correctly. His own reporting was clear-eyed and ignored: he told London the resistance was general rather than a Boston faction, and that suppressing it would need a far larger army than he had. On 18 April 1775 he sent about seven hundred men to seize the stores at Concord, expecting to be back by evening, and started a war. At Bunker Hill in June he took the position by frontal assault and lost over a thousand men doing it, and wrote afterwards that the rebels were not the despicable rabble too many had supposed. He was recalled in October 1775 and never held a field command again. The judgement against him was that he had been too lenient to prevent the rising and too heavy-handed to avoid provoking it, which is the criticism a man in an impossible position usually attracts.
- Lived: 1718 CE – 1787 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: military, politician
