Early in April 1775, some Britons were still convinced that the continued protests in North America were the work of a few rabble rousers. In their view, protesting colonists were an infection that could be cured if cut out of the body politic. A show of military might would bring rebelling colonists to heel. The majority would see the dangers in store for them if they continued to resist and therefore would return to obeying Crown and Parliament. These actions would sting, but the infection would heal.
In England, George Cressener wrote to his friend William Knox, “I look on the Bostonians as Men in a high fever, bleeding will bring them to their senses.” Although he used a medical metaphor, the blood was far from metaphorical. In his mind, a quick and decisive military action was a form of heroic medicine that would scare the majority of the colonists back to mental health. This bleeding could force “the better sort” of New Englanders, sick and tired of “being governed by the rabble,” to realize how dangerous the situation had become, reject the leadership of the protesters, and restore law and order. Cressener, like so many others of his time, did not or could not understand the colonists’ deep-seated mistrust of the acts of Parliament; instead, he saw the colonists consumed by a fever that led to delusion and madness.
In the end, of course, military action begat military action and did not act at all as a cure for the disease of protest. If we apply Kinzinger’s metaphor to April 1775, what General Thomas Gage, the military governor of Massachusetts, thought would be medicine for inflammation only exacerbated it. His orders to capture John Hancock and Samuel Adams and to seize stockpiled weapons in Concord, Massachusetts brought British regulars and the colonial militia face to face on Lexington Green in the early morning hours of April 19, 1775 in what became the first battle in a long and protracted war. The policy of trying to cure the problem of colonial intractability by bleeding failed, and only deepened existing divisions.