Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  After three nights of these clandestine meetings, Adams and his fellow committee members had come up with a slate of candidates for the Continental Congress that included Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Robert Treat Paine. But they still had a problem. When it came time to make their report to the House of Representatives, Leonard would instantly know that he had been tricked. He might even succeed in blocking their efforts to elect representatives to the Continental Congress. He must not attend the meeting of the House on Friday, June 17. But how to get him out of Salem?

  Paine had an idea. The Court of Common Pleas was to sit in Taunton on Tuesday, June 14. He would convince Leonard that the two of them should attend that session with the understanding that they would get back to Salem in time “to attend all important business.” So on Saturday, June 11, the two lawyers set out on the fifty-five-mile journey to Taunton. A week later on Saturday, June 18, they were on the road back to Salem when they heard the news that forever ended their friendship.

  With Leonard out of the way, the committee had been free to make their report, but not before a motion was heard to clear the galleries and lock the House chamber doors. By this time Gage had gotten word that something treasonous was afoot, and he immediately dispatched the provincial secretary Thomas Flucker with a proclamation dissolving the General Court. Finding the door locked, Flucker had no choice but to read the proclamation from the courthouse steps, a brief two-sentence directive that ended with the words, “God Save the King.” By that time, the House of Representatives was in the midst of approving the delegates for the First Continental Congress. Samuel Adams and the other committee members were jubilant, and that night a celebratory dinner was held in Boston at the home of Dr. Joseph Warren on Hanover Street.

  —

  Warren had a most unusual household. A recent widower with four children between the ages of two and eight, he was not only a leading patriot but also had one of the busiest medical practices in Boston. He had two apprentices living with him on Hanover Street, and he sometimes saw as many as twenty patients a day. His practice ran the gamut, from little boys with broken bones, like John Quincy Adams, to prostitutes on aptly named Damnation Alley, to his good friend the tubercular Josiah Quincy. He was so frequently asked to visit the sick—even on a Sunday, when the normally busy streets of Boston were almost completely deserted—that he’d chosen a pew at the Reverend Samuel Cooper’s Brattle Street Meeting opposite a side door, “for the prevention of disturbance when abruptly called on for medical aid.” He had what doctors call “the touch,” that ability to put patients at ease—a particular challenge in the eighteenth century, since many of the accepted medical treatments of the day did more physiological harm than good.

  Warren’s portrait by John Singleton Copley presents a man with gray-blue eyes; a full, sensuous mouth; and an aura of vivacious engagement. According to one account, “The ladies judged him handsome,” and his first child seems to have been conceived well before he and his wife, Elizabeth Hooten, just seventeen, were married. Elizabeth died in 1772, and by the spring of 1774 Warren, thirty-three, was one of the most eligible widowers in Boston. The night after the election of the delegates to the First Continental Congress, amid a euphoric assemblage of the city’s leading patriots, Warren may have struck up the romantic relationship that was to be the most important of what remained of his abbreviated life.

  Warren recorded in his ledger book that just the month before he had seen a patient named Mercy Scollay. Thanks to a poem that appeared in a magazine edited by Isaiah Thomas, publisher of the notoriously radical newspaper the Massachusetts Spy, we have reason to suspect that Scollay was at Warren’s house on June 17.

  Mercy Scollay was thirty-three and dangerously close to becoming a spinster. She was later described by a Warren family member as “a woman of great energy and depth of character.” If the painting by Copley that has been associated with her is indeed Mercy Scollay, she had penetrating and intelligent eyes and an ironic twist to the mouth, not unlike that of her forceful father, John, who was also painted by Copley, and as chair of the town’s selectmen was about to lead Boston through some of its most difficult days.

  In a prefatory paragraph to a poem that appeared in the June 1774 issue of the Royal American Magazine, Isaiah Thomas recounted how he had recently attended a patriot social gathering during which a gentleman asked a lady what she considered to be “the necessaries of life” given the demands of the boycott associated with the Solemn League and Covenant. The woman responded a day or so later with a flirtatious poem of 114 lines titled “On Female Vanity” that Thomas published anonymously. In the poem, the woman argues that character and intellect, not physical beauty, are what really matter in a woman, particularly in such challenging times. According to the poet, “those modest antiquated charms that lur’d a Brutus to a Portia’s arms” will always trump the “gauze and tassels” of a younger, extravagantly dressed woman. Expertly combining private and political spheres, “On Female Vanity” reads like a love letter cloaked in the issues of the day.

  Sixteen years later, the noted patriot author Mercy Otis Warren claimed credit for writing the poem at the prompting of Harvard professor John Winthrop. But that was not what Bostonians chose to believe in 1774. According to John Winthrop’s wife, Hannah, the gossipmongers insisted that the author was “Miss Mercy Scollay and the gentleman who requested [the poem] Dr. Warren.” In the summer of 1774, Scollay and Warren were, apparently, the couple to watch.

  —

  By the end of June, letters of support were pouring in to the Boston Committee of Correspondence from all over America. With the prospect of the Continental Congress in September, Samuel Adams’s attention was already beginning to shift from Boston to Philadelphia. But first he and the other members of the Committee of Correspondence had to face the furor created by their handling of the Solemn League and Covenant.

  The morning of Monday, June 27, the day of the town meeting that was to address these issues, proved to be quite hot, and “with many people just idle enough to attend,” Faneuil Hall was filled to overflowing. Samuel Adams was once again chosen moderator of the meeting. It was moved that all the letters written by the committee since the receipt of the Port Bill be read aloud. Faneuil Hall was so crowded that those standing at the back of the room had difficulty hearing what was being said and kept shouting, “A little louder!” Finally it was decided that given the heat and the crowd, they needed to move to the much larger Old South Meetinghouse.

  They reconvened at 3:00 p.m. with the reading of the many letters written by the committee, culminating in the Solemn League and Covenant. Once the controversial document had been read, the loyalist John Amory launched into a prepared speech that concluded with a motion to “censure and annihilate” the Committee of Correspondence, which was immediately seconded. Samuel Adams responded by moving that he be replaced as moderator so that he could defend himself and the committee. With the patriot Thomas Cushing taking over as moderator, the debate began.

  Speaking on behalf of the committee were not only Adams but also fellow members Joseph Warren, Josiah Quincy, Dr. Thomas Young, and William Molineux. The merchants were represented by the province’s treasurer, Harrison Gray, the same elderly loyalist who had objected to Josiah Quincy’s treasonous words prior to the Tea Party back in December, along with a host of others. But it was Samuel Eliot who most impressed fellow merchant and brother-in-law John Andrews. Speaking with a “freedom and manliness peculiar only to himself,” Eliot explained that since New York, Rhode Island, and Philadelphia had so far proved reluctant to join the boycott, it made no sense to punish Boston’s own merchants, who were already reeling from the effects of the Port Bill and its insistence that their imported goods come via Salem. Many of these merchants were expecting shipments from England that would not arrive in Salem until after August 31, the date by which the Solemn League and Covenant insisted that all trade must stop. Not only would th
e covenant ruin the local merchants, it would serve no greater purpose. By attacking the covenant rather than the committee, Eliot kept the focus on the issues instead of the personalities, and his remarks received, Andrews wrote, “a universal clap.” The debates continued until long past 8:00 p.m., and as it was growing dark, the meeting was adjourned until the next morning.

  Bells were ringing throughout the town when the meeting reconvened at Old South. After more still-heated debate, it was finally moved to vote on the motion “for censuring and annihilating” the Committee of Correspondence. If, like Samuel Eliot, the merchants had kept to the covenant rather than the committee, they might have succeeded. But they had, like Samuel Adams before them, overreached. The motion was defeated by “a great majority.” But this wasn’t enough for the Committee of Correspondence. A motion was then made that the town “approve the honest zeal of the Committee of Correspondence and desire that they would persevere with their usual activity and firmness, continuing steadfast.” John Rowe estimated that the motion carried by a margin of at least four to one.

  Samuel Adams and his committee had prevailed on the town floor, but their Solemn League and Covenant ultimately proved a failure. Bostonians never approved the measure, which was adopted by only half a dozen or so towns throughout the province. A lesson had been learned: the committee worked well when spreading news and generating public opinion, but the committee could not set policy—that was up to the people of Massachusetts. And as the long hot summer ahead would prove, the people, 95 percent of whom lived in the country towns beyond Boston, had minds of their own.

  —

  Gage had had such high hopes for the loyalists of Boston. With regiments of soldiers arriving on an almost weekly basis throughout the month of June, he had anticipated that supporters of government in Boston and other towns in Massachusetts would gladly step forward with the evidence he needed to round up the most notorious of the patriots and try them for treason. But this did not prove to be the case. In a letter to Lord Dartmouth, he told of hearing “many things against this and that person, yet when I descend to particular points and want people to stand forth in order to bring crimes home to individuals by clear and full evidence, I am at a loss.” This “timidity and backwardness” on the part of the loyalists was attributed to the fear that the British ministry would soon do as it had always done after a crisis in America: repeal the offending acts and leave the loyalists “to the mercy of their opponents and their mobs.” Given what had happened to John Malcom and others, you could hardly blame them.

  Even Gage’s own soldiers were already giving him problems. Occasional confrontations between the regulars and the locals, particularly at night, were to be expected. What Gage hadn’t anticipated was how quickly his men began to desert, encouraged by a series of broadsheets that began to appear in June. “The country people are determined to protect you and screen you from any that may attempt to betray you to your present slavery . . . ,” one tract promised. “Being in a country now where all are upon a level you may by one push lay the foundation of your own good living in a land of freedom and plenty and may make the fortunes of your posterity.”

  The British army had been succumbing to this siren song for decades. Even Gage, with his American wife, had partially surrendered to the pull that the continent exerted on an Englishman: a beckoning promise of new beginnings combined with a sense of the old, almost primeval Britain of their ancestors. Over the course of the next two months, the regiments stationed in Boston would lose more than two hundred soldiers to desertion. Gage seems to have quickly realized that despite his assurances to the king back in February, his mission was doomed from the start. He should never have accepted this wretched post.

  By the beginning of summer, he’d decided that his current misery was his wife’s fault. On June 26 he wrote Margaret that he was “ready to wish he had never known her.” Thomas Hutchinson was visiting the Gage estate in Sussex when this extraordinary letter arrived in August. By that time, Margaret had long since left to join her husband in America, but this did not apparently prevent other family members from reading the letter and sharing its contents. “[Gage] laments,” Hutchinson recorded in his diary, “his hard fate in being torn from his friends after the difficulty of crossing the Atlantic in the short time of nine months [in England], and put upon a service in so disagreeable a place, which, though he had been used to difficult service, he seemed to consider as peculiarly disagreeable; wishes Mrs. Gage had stayed in England as he advised her; for though it was natural she should desire to see her friends at New York, etc., yet she could have no sort of satisfaction in New England amidst riots, disorders, etc.” Hutchinson knew firsthand what the patriots of Boston could do to a magistrate trying to uphold the sovereignty of the crown, and he was deeply troubled by the revelation. “The whole letter,” he wrote, “discovers [i.e., discloses] greater anxiety and distress of mind than what appears from all the accounts we have received concerning him.”

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  On July 1 Gage learned that Admiral Montagu’s replacement, Admiral Samuel Graves, had arrived in Boston Harbor in his flagship Preston along with several transports bearing the Fifth and Thirty-Eighth Regiments. Commanding the Fifth was Earl Hugh Percy, the future second Duke of Northumberland, and on July 6, Gage returned to Boston to meet with Percy at Province House.

  Percy, just thirty-one years old, had served in Europe during the Seven Years War. He was cadaverously thin, nearsighted, and had a big bulbous nose. But he was also impeccably bred, immensely wealthy, and a talented soldier, and Gage entrusted the young general with stewardship of the forces gathered in Boston while he attended his duties in Salem.

  Boston was known for its love of liberty, its piety, and its prostitutes. In the town’s hilly northwestern corner was a lightly settled neighborhood that the soldiers dubbed Mount Whoredom. One afternoon at the end of July at an establishment known as “Miss Erskine’s,” fifteen British officers “committed,” John Andrews wrote, “all manner of enormous indecencies by exposing their anteriors, as well as their posteriors, at the open windows and doors, to the full view of the people . . . that happened to pass by.” By dusk, the party at Miss Erskine’s had begun to break up. Andrews, who happened to be walking nearby, saw two of the officers make their rampaging way through an old woman’s apple shop, “turning over all [her] things,” before assaulting two men with “their fists in their faces and damning them.” A few minutes later a group of five officers, all of them with their small swords drawn, came upon the wine cooper Abra Hunt and his wife. Abra was, according to Andrews, whose letters provide a rich and detailed portrait of a city under occupation, “a well-built, nervous fellow,” and when the soldiers began to comment on his wife, Abra took up his hickory walking stick and laid open one of the officers’ heads. A small crowd gathered, and before he could kill the officer with another blow, several of his fellow citizens restrained him. In the meantime, the rest of the soldiers began flourishing their swords and soon cleared the street of pedestrians, with the exception of Samuel Jarvis, Samuel Pitts, a chair maker named Fullerton, and “a negro fellow.” Pitts found himself fending off two of the officers with his cane, and might have been seriously wounded if a sword hadn’t struck the fence he was standing against. As it was, three of his knuckles were bloodied before he subdued the two soldiers, and the other Bostonians succeeded in disarming the remaining three officers.

  When informed of the disturbance, Percy was quick to promise the town’s selectmen that all the offending officers would be held accountable for their actions. For their part, Bostonians knew that it was important that they, too, do everything they could to keep their fellow citizens in line. Many of the soldiers looked to bait the townspeople into doing something that might be interpreted as an act of insurrection. “I hope the strict observance of a steady and peaceable conduct will disappoint their views,” John Andrews wrote, “for [I] am persuaded there is nothing they wish f
or more than an opportunity to deem us rebels; but God forbid they should ever be gratified.”

  With so many people put out of work by the Port Bill, the town selectmen worried that many of Boston’s poorer residents would no longer be able to feed themselves. But by early August, donations from across the country began to flood into the city. Eleven carts of fish came from Marblehead; two cargoes of rice from Charleston, South Carolina; and one thousand bushels of grain from Weathersfield, Connecticut. A Committee of Donations was formed to thank the towns for their gifts, and the letters, many written by Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren, followed the pattern established by the Committee of Correspondence in establishing personal lines of communication among the communities.

  The Bostonians had objected to paying a tax on British tea, but they were more than willing to fund an expensive public works project if it helped the town get through the crisis. Under the direction of the town’s selectmen, municipal funds were used to hire jobless mechanics, artisans, and dockworkers to build ships, clean up the wharves, and repair roads. John Andrews complained that while the poor had the town to relieve them and the rich had their savings and rents, small merchants such as himself had nothing. “[The] burden falls heaviest, if not entirely, upon the middle people among us,” he wrote. And yet, despite all these anxieties, Andrews was amazed by how well his fellow citizens were holding up. “[There is] ease, contentment, and perfect composure in the countenance of almost every person you meet in the streets,” he marveled, which “much perplexes the governor and others.”

  —

  On August 6, the Scarborough arrived with the much-anticipated Massachusetts Government Act. Gage’s already tormented world suddenly became much worse. As part of the act, the king and the ministry had named thirty-six mandamus councillors—all of them loyalists—and on August 8, Gage assembled as many of them as he could in Salem. A disturbing number either did not respond to the summons or downright refused to accept their positions on the council, knowing that to be a mandamus councillor was to invite the kinds of abuses that the patriots had formerly directed against the tea consignees and John Malcom. The Massachusetts Government Act also made provisions for the selection of jurors in the superior courts, and talk was already circulating through the western parts of the province about preventing the courts from sitting. And then there was the issue of town meetings, which had been declared all but illegal.