It’s one of the biggest conspiracy theories surrounding the American Revolutionary War.
The most famous midnight ride in American history occurred 250 years ago Friday when Sons of Liberty members Paul Revere and William Dawes rode to Lexington to warn fellow “patriots” that the British Army was on the march.
(Fun fact: Revere and Dawes did not say “The British are coming, the British are coming!” They said, “The regulars are coming, the regulars are coming!” because almost everyone back then considered themselves British.)
A Founding Father and fellow patriot named Dr. Joseph Warren tipped Revere and Dawes off to the British Army’s plans, which included arresting Samuel Adams and John Hancock in Lexington. In addition, patriots feared the British would destroy the rebels’ munitions supply depot in Concord.
The most sensational rumor going back more than a century, however, is that Margaret Kemble Gage, the beautiful American wife of the British general who planned the strategic march on Lexington and Concord, was the revolution’s Deep Throat.
But no one knows for sure who leaked that crucial intel to Warren — intel that ultimately led to the “shot heard round the world” on April 19, 1775. It opened the battles of Lexington and Concord, which, in turn, ignited the American Revolutionary War and resulted in the creation of the United States.
Gen. Thomas Gage led the British Army in Massachusetts during the war and wrote his famous order launching what was known as the Concord Expedition on April 18, 1775.
It shall be done “with the utmost Expedition and secrecy,” Gage wrote of his army’s plans to stymie the patriot militia by taking over their munitions and supplies in Concord.
But his letter didn’t stay secret.
Margaret Kemble Gage was the well-connected American-born daughter of a Brit named Peter Kemble, who emigrated to America and became a wealthy merchant and landowner in what is now Morris County, NJ.
Her mother, Gertrude Bayard, was an American-born aristocrat with ties to the leading families of New York, such as the Van Cortlandts, de Lanceys, and the Van Rensselaers.
Margaret married Thomas Gage on her father’s 1200-acre Mount Kemble Plantation in New Jersey when she was 24 years old. Such was her presence that her husband’s officers sometimes shaded her by calling her “The Duchess” behind her back.
She sailed home to England in the summer of 1775 after the outbreak of the war and was joined by her husband a couple of months later. She would eventually outlive him by 36 years.
It’s believed that the rumor suggesting her role as the secret source stemmed from the writings of Reverend William Gordon, a friend of Joseph Warren who had observed some of the events of April 19, 1775.
In his written accounts, Gordon suggests that a true “Daughter of Liberty unequally yoked in politics” was the source who warned Warren of the British march to Concord, according to scholars at sites like the Boston Garrison.
“To whom could that cryptic phrase apply more aptly than to the daughter of Peter Kemble, married to the British commander in chief?” read an editorial in The Washington Post 100 years ago, as the nation was about to celebrate its 150th birthday.
Not so fast, say numerous contemporary historians who contend that the enduring rumor has the whiff of a slightly misogynistic fairytale.
“They wanted to create a myth of this fair maiden struggling between loyalty to the American side and to her husband and that she ultimately chose the country over him,” Alexander Cain, an expert on April 19, 1775, who blogs at Historical Nerdery and has authored books such as “We Stood Our Ground,” told The Post.
“But there’s no evidence that Margaret was disseminating information to Joseph Warren. It’s true there’s no evidence that she didn’t either,” Cain added. “But from what I know, I think it was an obscure Boston loyalist who was sitting on the fence and was struggling with loyalty to the crown and loyalty to the patriots. Who that was, we don’t know. But I do know Margaret was vilified for the rest of her life when she returned to England.”
The Margaret rumor was legitimized — some say unjustifiably — in the 1995 book “Paul Revere’s Ride” by David Hackett Fischer, a longtime Brandeis University history professor.
“Warren had one informant, “a person very close to the upper levels of British command in Boston, a person only to be contacted with extreme care, and only as a last resort,” who provided the specifics of Gage’s orders, Fischer wrote.
The colonists knew something was afoot, Fischer wrote, and because Warren was a practicing physician, “he would have had a fair excuse for calling on Margaret in his medical capacity and coming away with the answer: the British were mounting an extensive expedition.”
But J. L. Bell, a scholar who specializes in the start of the American Revolution and authored “The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War,” also gives a thumbs down to the Margaret theory.
“I don’t think anybody actually leaked it,” Bell, who also runs the blog Boston 1775, told The Post. He believes that Joseph Warren and others had been gleaning information about British troop movements from a variety of sources and events.
“For one thing, Gage’s plan was to send troops to Concord, but Warren told them to just go to Lexington. Revere and Dawes went on to Concord on their own accord.”
If anything, Bell thinks the spy might have well been a pragmatic British-born knifemaker named William Jasper. He was renting a room to a British sergeant who may have unwittingly trusted him with the army’s plans.
“Unfortunately, that story is a lot less sexy and about a person we’ve never heard of,” Bell said. “But I think the knifemaker, Jasper, was paid by the patriots as an informant.”
Dr. Emily Murphy, a curator for the Salem Maritime National Historic Site, isn’t having it either.
“In 18th-century Anglo-America, a lady of her social standing did not call on gentlemen, and certainly not on gentlemen she had not been introduced to,” she wrote for the Boston Garrison. “Had one of the Patriot leaders called on Mrs. Gage, it most certainly would have provoked comment.”