1776

by David McCullough

  Years later, recalling the morning of March 5 on Dorchester Heights, John Trumbull would write, “We saw distinctly the preparations which the enemy were making to dislodge us. The entire waterfront of Boston lay open to our observation, and we saw the embarkation of troops from the various wharves…. We were in high spirits, well prepared to receive the threatened attack.”

  Dr. Thacher, setting events down in his journal as they unfolded that “anxious” day on the Heights, wrote of the swarms of spectators covering the nearby hills, waiting to see a bloody battle.

  Sometime in the course of the day (the exact hour is not known), Washington arrived to survey the defenses and the panorama below. “His Excellency General Washington is present animating and encouraging the soldiers,” recorded Thacher, “and they in return manifest their joy, and express a warm desire for the approach of the enemy.”

  Each man knows his place, and is resolute to execute his duty [he continued]. Our breastworks are strengthened, and among the means of defense are a great number of barrels, filled with stone and sand, arranged in front of our works, which are to be put in motion and made to roll down the hill, to break the ranks and legs of assailants as they advance. These are the preparations for blood and slaughter! Gracious God! If it be determined in thy Providence that thousands of our fellow creatures shall this day be slain, let thy wrath be appeased, and in mercy grant that victory be on the side of our suffering, bleeding country.

  According to the Reverend William Gordon, Washington called on those within the sound of his voice to “ ‘remember it is the fifth of March, and avenge the death of your brethren.’ It was immediately asked what the general said by those that were not near enough to hear, and as soon answered. And so from one to another through all the troops, which added fresh fuel to the martial fire before kindled.”

  Describing the troops drawn up at Cambridge, waiting for the order to attack, Washington himself said he “never saw spirits higher.”

  It was about noon when the first of the British troop transports pushed off for Castle Island and proceeded down the harbor with increasing difficulty against strong headwinds. For by early afternoon, what had been an abnormally warm, pleasant day had changed dramatically. The wind had turned southeasterly, blowing “pretty fresh.” Then, as foreseen in no one’s calculations, the elements took over.

  By nightfall, a storm raged, with hail mixed with snow and sleet. By midnight, “the wind blew almost a hurricane.” Windows were smashed, fences blown over. Two of the transports bound for Castle Island were blown ashore. The American lieutenant Isaac Bangs, who was among those freezing at their posts on the high ground of Dorchester, called it the worst storm “that ever I was exposed to.” Clearly there would be no British assault that night.

  The morning after, the winds continued to blow with a fury. The snow and sleet had changed to driving rain. General Heath concluded that “kind Heaven” had stepped in to intervene. As so it seemed to many on both sides, when, that morning, Howe called off the attack and gave orders to prepare to evacuate Boston.

  Possibly it was not the storm alone that caused Howe’s change of mind. According to Captain Robertson, his pleas to cancel the attack, and the influence of the other officers to whom he had made his case, and John Montresor in particular, had had the desired effect even before the storm reached full force. From what Robertson wrote in the final lines of his diary entry for the day, it would seem that the storm had merely given Howe an easy out.

  It is now eight o’clock in the evening. [We] went to headquarters at seven. After waiting some time Captain Montresor came down from the general [and] told me he had been in council and had advised the going off [embarking] altogether, that Lord [General Hugh] Percy and some others seconded him, and that the general said it was his own sentiments from the first, but thought the honor of the troops concerned. So it is agreed immediately to embark everything.

  Interestingly, Isaac Bangs, in his account of the day, wondered whether the intent of the whole British expedition to Castle Island was never anything “more than to make a parade” and if the storm was only a “good excuse.”

  In the view of General James Grant, however, there was never a doubt of Howe’s desire to attack. “Indeed, we had often talked over the subject and agreed that if the rebels made that move to their right [to Dorchester], we must either drive them from that post or leave Boston.” According to Grant, everything had been prepared, and the plan to attack was “immediately formed, the redoubts to be stormed by the troops in column [and] not to load, that they might be under an absolute necessity of making use of their bayonets.”

  Howe, in his own official account, was to say, “I determined upon an immediate attack with all the force I could transport.” He added, “The ardor of the troops encouraged me in this hazardous enterprise,” and this could be the explanation, though an American who saw the British troops waiting on the wharf to embark, commented that “they looked in general pale and dejected, and said to one another it would be another Bunker Hill or worse.”

  Howe made no mention in his official account of the council of war convened at seven o’clock, or of any second thoughts on his part. The “contrary” winds of the afternoon of March 5, the storm that followed that night, and the “weather continuing boisterous the next day and night” were the deciding factors, Howe wrote, in that they gave the enemy still more time to improve their defenses of the Heights. “I could promise myself little success by attacking them under all the disadvantages I had to encounter; wherefore I judged it most advisable to prepare for the evacuation of the town.”

  III

  NO ONE WHO WAS IN BOSTON would forget the days that followed. In less than forty-eight hours, the supposedly invulnerable security of the town had dissolved. Howe’s army and the fleet at anchor were in danger of being destroyed at any time. The very survival of the town itself was in question.

  In conference and in dispatches to London, the general had stated repeatedly his confidence that the rebels would make no move. Now he and his vaunted regulars had been outsmarted by “the rabble in arms,” whom they had so long disparaged and despised. Instead of victory, they faced the humiliation of ignominious retreat.

  “Never [were] troops in so disgraceful a situation,” wrote one officer. “I pity General Howe from my soul.”

  Almost from the moment Howe made his announcement the morning of March 6, ordering the army and fleet to prepare to leave, Boston became a scene of utmost frenzy. “Nothing but hurry and confusion, every person striving to get out of this place,” wrote an American merchant, John Rowe.

  Deacon Timothy Newell, who, like John Rowe, was a patriotic American, had been forbidden, as a town selectman, to leave Boston. “This day,” he wrote on March 6, “the utmost distress and anxiety among the refugees and associators [Loyalists]…. Blessed by God, our redemption draws near.”

  Howe, who had received no orders—no word of any kind—from London since October, had no long-standing plan for a withdrawal of such magnitude, or any comparable past experience to draw upon. “I told General Howe,” wrote James Grant, “that I had been in many scrapes but that I never was in so thick a wood with all the branches [like] thorns, but that we must look forward and get out.”

  It was not just that there were thousands of troops and military stores to transport, but the hundreds of women and children who were with the army. Further, Howe intended to take every Loyalist who chose to go.

  The necessary care of the women, sick, and wounded required every assistance that could be given [one man wrote]. It was not like the breaking up of a camp, where every man knows his duty. It was like departing your country, with your wives, your servants, your household furniture, and all your encumbrances.

  It seemed everyone had his own dire needs or urgent special request, someone or something to complain about, someone or something to blame for his plight.

  There were a sufficient number of transports and other ships at hand, but
these all had to be supplied with provisions and water. Equipment of all kinds had to be put aboard. In the meantime, there was very little to eat. Continued storms at sea had prevented nearly all supply ships from even approaching the coast. When a single sloop from the West Indies did make it into the harbor, it was learned that more than seventy food transports, “victualers,” and store ships that had been blown off course that winter were tied up and refitting at Antigua. According to some rumors, there was not enough food left in Boston to last three weeks.

  High winds kept blowing, churning the harbor, and the rebel guns remained silent. But while the rebels held their fire, they could be seen in plain view on Dorchester Heights, steadily strengthening their position.

  All was still comparatively quiet on Friday, March 8, when Deacon Newell and three other selectmen crossed the lines at the Neck under a white flag carrying an unsigned paper stating that General Howe had “no intention of destroying the town, unless the troops under his command are molested during the embarkation.” Though clearly intended for Washington, this declaration was not addressed to him, and so it was given no reply. But the word had been passed—if allowed to depart peacefully, the British would spare the town.

  Then, the night of March 9, when the rebels were seen moving on to Nook’s Hill on Dorchester, a high point of land only a quarter of a mile from the British lines at the Neck, Howe ordered a thunderous all-night bombardment. “Such a firing was never before heard in New England,” wrote Isaac Bangs. Four men were killed by a single ball. But that was the only damage done. The next day the men on the hill gathered up 700 cannonballs that had been fired at them.

  In town the pell-mell rush and confusion grew worse. The “cathartic” was drastic, as Loyalist Peter Oliver observed. Hogsheads of sugar and salt, barrels of flour for which there was no room on the ships, were being dumped into the harbor, along with smashed-up furniture, wagons, wheelbarrows, even the commander’s elegant coach. Cannon for which there was no room were spiked or dumped in the harbor.

  Americans watching from a dozen hillsides and promontories around the town could see, as Washington wrote, streets full of “great movements and confusion among the troops night and day…in hurrying down their cannon, artillery, and other stores to the wharves with utmost precipitation.” Washington was convinced that Howe was making ready to sail for New York.

  ***

  THE ALARM AND ANXIETY among the Loyalists was extreme. Leave they must, but no one knew how many there were, or whether there would be room for all, or where they were heading. Not until the morning of March 10 were they told they could begin coming aboard. There was no time for deliberation. Virtually all they owned would have to be left behind.

  Those who were already refugees—those who had earlier fled Cambridge, Roxbury, or Milton for the presumed safety of Boston—knew what it was to abandon everything and find themselves dependent on charity. Now Bostonians, too, faced the prospect of forsaking lifelong associations and treasured belongings—indeed, their very homeland and entire way of life.

  “It is not easy to paint the distress and confusion of the inhabitants on the occasion. I had but six or seven hours allowed to prepare for this measure, being obliged to embark the same day,” wrote the Reverend Henry Caner.

  As rector of King’s Chapel, the first Anglican church in Boston, the Reverend Caner was the leading Church of England clergyman in Massachusetts and a greatly respected figure among all denominations. He had been rector for nearly thirty years and lived alone in a small frame house close to King’s Chapel, at the corner of School and Tremont streets. In his account of “goods left in my house at Boston, March 10, 1776,” he listed, among other items: “a handsome clock,” two mahogany tables, teacups and saucers, “one rich carved mahogany desk and book case [with] glass doors,” pictures of the King and Queen “under glass with rich frames,” a pair of brass andirons, “a fine harpsichord,” 1,000 books, a barn and “appurtenances,” a cow and a calf.

  The great majority of the Loyalists had never lived anywhere else, or ever expected to live anywhere else. They were disillusioned, disoriented, and not a little resentful. In their allegiance to the King and to the rule of law, they saw themselves as the true American patriots. They had wanted no part of the rebellion—“the horrid crime of rebellion;” Justice Oliver called it—and had trusted, not unrealistically, in the wealth and power of the British nation to protect them and put a quick end to what, by their lights, had become mob rule.

  A Boston merchant named Theophilus Lillie, who owned a store on Middle Street specializing in English dry goods and groceries, had expressed his views in print in the aftermath of the mob assault on British soldiers that erupted into the Boston Massacre.

  Upon the whole, I cannot help saying—although I have never entered into the mysteries of government, having applied myself to my shop and my business—that it always seemed strange to me that people who contend so much for civil and religious liberty should be so ready to deprive others of their natural liberty….

  If one set of private subjects may at any time take upon themselves to punish another set of private subjects just when they please, it’s such a sort of government as I never heard of before; and according to my poor notion of government, this is one of the principle things which government is designed to prevent.

  Dr. Sylvester Gardiner, one of the best-known men in town, would write to a son-in-law:

  I found I could not stay in Boston and trust my person with a set of lawless rebels whose actions have disgraced human nature and who have treated all the King’s loyal subjects that have fallen in their hands with great cruelty and for no other crime than for their loyalty to the best of Kings and a peaceable submission to the best constituted government on earth. I don’t believe there ever was a people in any age or part of the world that enjoyed so much liberty as the people of America did under the mild indulgent government (God bless it) of England and never was a people under a worser state of tyranny than we are at present.

  It was said the fleet was bound for Halifax in Nova Scotia, but no one could say for certain. And who knew, in any event, what miseries lay in store for them at sea?

  Many who wanted desperately to escape had “families they were loath should be separated.” Many who chose to stay did so knowing they could expect “ill-usage” at the hands of the rebels.

  Conspicuous among those who began crowding the wharves, and who took their turns going aboard the ships on March 10 and in the days that followed, were many who had once figured prominently in the government of the province and in its professional and commercial life. There were leading churchmen like Henry Caner, jurists like Peter Oliver, physicians, educators, and successful merchants. The elderly Nathaniel Perkins was Boston’s foremost physician. John Lovell was headmaster of the Boston Latin School. Attorney James Putnam of Worcester had been John Adams’s mentor in the law. Foster Hutchinson, jurist and merchant, was the brother of the former royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson. General Timothy Ruggles, a veteran of the French and Indian War, was a wealthy landowner and outspoken Tory who had been put in command of three companies of Loyal American Associators, as they were known, who had helped patrol the streets during the siege. John Murray and Harrison Gray were prosperous merchants.

  A score or more were Harvard graduates, and many were fourth- or fifth-generation Americans bearing some of the oldest names in the province, such as Coffin and Chandler. Benjamin Faneuil, who was departing with a family of three, was the nephew of wealthy Peter Faneuil, whose many benefactions to Boston had included Faneuil Hall.

  These were people of wealth and position among the conservative element of Massachusetts, people of distinction by and large, as well as power. But prominent though they were, they were not the majority of those departing with the fleet. Ultimately, 1,100 Loyalists went aboard the ships, and the greater part were from every walk of life—shopkeepers, clerks, minor customs officials, artisans and tradesmen, and the
ir families. According to one study, 382 heads of families were farmers, mechanics, and ordinary tradesmen. William MacAlpine, printer and bookbinder, declared his “first and chief objective was to convey his wife in safety to Scotland.”

  Among the women listed as heads of families was Hannah Flucker, the mother of Henry Knox’s wife Lucy, with a household of six. (Thomas Flucker, Lucy’s father, appears to have departed earlier.) Margaret Draper, who joined the exodus with a family of five, had continued to publish the Loyalist newspaper the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston Newsletter, after her husband’s death in 1774. It was the only newspaper available in Boston during the siege.

  Also listed was Dorcas Griffith, who ran a notorious waterfront grog shop and was known to be John Hancock’s “discarded” mistress.

  Joshua Loring, Jr., was another of those departing, along with the rebel prisoners he was charged with looking after. But his handsome wife Elizabeth is not accounted for, suggesting she may have been provided with more comfortable accommodations aboard the flagshipChatham with General Howe.