Thousands came for the powder

What happened

General Gage had spent the summer watching Massachusetts govern itself around him. On 1 September he tried to tip the balance by force: about two hundred and sixty troops rowed up the Mystic River at dawn, carried off two hundred and fifty half-barrels of the province's powder from the province powder house, and took two field guns from Cambridge. By evening a false report had spread that the soldiers had killed civilians and that warships were bombarding Boston, and farmers from across the countryside took down their muskets and walked. Some thousands reached Cambridge by the morning of the 2nd. They had come to fight, but what they did was political: they demanded that the men Gage had named to his new council resign, and the judges did so on the court house steps. Lieutenant Governor Thomas Oliver, with his house surrounded by about four thousand people, signed his name that day. Rothbard sees Gage taking the classic road of a minority in power, from nonviolent resistance to state violence, and sees the crowd talked out of a march on Boston by cooler heads who knew American unity was not yet strong enough. His own figure for the gathering is twenty thousand; contemporaries put the crowd at Cambridge at about four thousand, with many more on the road.