The Night Before the Guns

Samuel Freeman was town clerk of Falmouth, which meant that when Henry Mowat anchored in the harbor on October 17, 1775, and issued his ultimatum, Freeman was one of the men who had to go aboard the Canceaux and negotiate. He was not a soldier. He was an administrator, a keeper of records, a man whose job was to make civic life function. Now his job was to talk a Royal Navy officer out of destroying the town.

The ultimatum gave Falmouth two hours to surrender its arms and provide hostages. Freeman and the other committee members went back and forth, pleading for more time, arguing that the town was not a military target, attempting to communicate to Mowat that the people of Falmouth were not the same as the people who had humiliated him in May. Mowat was not persuaded, but he granted a postponement until morning. The delegation returned to shore.

What happened that night was the dispersal of everything that could be moved. Families packed what they could carry. Carts went out of town loaded with furniture, with food, with animals. Children and elderly people were sent to relatives in the countryside. The wharves were cleared of whatever could be removed in a few hours. Freeman himself would have been documenting, recording, doing what clerks do — and watching the town he had spent his career administering prepare to receive something he could not stop.

The negotiations resumed the next morning and failed. The guns opened at nine. Freeman survived. He later wrote accounts of the negotiation and the bombardment that constitute some of the most detailed documentary evidence of those days. He lived in Falmouth for decades afterward, watching the rebuilding, holding civic office in the renamed Portland.

He had done what he could. He had bought the town one night. For many families, that night was enough time to get clear.