Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  As if the Government Act wasn’t enough, Parliament had passed three additional pieces of legislation: the Administration of Justice Act, which the patriots branded “the Murderer’s Act” because it allowed governors to move the trials of royal officials accused of a crime to a venue outside their own colony (and thus “get away with murder”); the Quartering Act, which provided for housing British soldiers in a colony’s unoccupied buildings; and finally the Quebec Act, which, besides allowing French Canadians to practice Catholicism (not a popular provision among New England’s papist-hating Congregationalists), expanded that province all the way to the Ohio River to the south and to the Mississippi to the west. Many leading colonists, especially in Pennsylvania and Virginia, such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, had applied for land grants in this huge swath of territory, which included modern Ohio and Illinois. By effectively prohibiting western expansion, Parliament had found a way—unrelated to the unrest in Boston—to anger and frustrate not just the citizens of Massachusetts but virtually all of colonial America.

  Instead of making the colonists think about repentance, what were collectively referred to as the Coercive Acts had the opposite effect. Massachusetts’s patriots were more resolved than ever to persevere in their insistence on liberty while the loyalists were finding it increasingly difficult to defend the ministry’s overbearing measures. In the meantime, the undecided, whom John Andrews described as “the lukewarm that were staggering,” were moving ever closer to becoming confirmed patriots. But no matter what camp they were in, all agreed that the ministry had made a mess of the situation. Everywhere in Boston, Andrews claimed, Lord North was cursed “morn to noon and from noon to morn by every denomination of people.”

  —

  Joseph Warren was about as busy as a doctor could be in Boston, but that did not prevent him and his fellow Committee of Correspondence members from composing countless letters to towns throughout New England and beyond, thanking them for their donations or their letters and resolutions of support. Thirteen of these letters were received in a single day, and Thomas Young reported that he and the others convened “every day or two” to make sure all the correspondence was answered in a timely manner.

  From the first, Warren saw himself and all New England in a mythic quest that united the here and now of the present generation with the travails of their glorious ancestors. As far back as 1765 he had distinguished himself as an effective political writer when he began writing newspaper articles under a variety of pseudonyms. He had the polemicist’s talent for emotional overstatement. Instead of Joyce Junior’s sneering insistence on submission, Warren saw himself as part of a rapturous convergence of past, present, and future that required everything a person could give: “When I perceive the impending evil . . . , I cannot hold my peace. In such a case no vehemence is excessive, no zeal too ardent. . . . Trace the renown of your progenitors and recollect the stands, the glorious stands they have often made against the yoke of thralldom.” In the spring of 1774 he composed a song that served as a rousing anthem for the patriot movement, and that summer, as he wrote letter after letter, his was one of the most recognizable and unabashedly passionate voices coming out of Boston.

  He was bright, articulate, and multifaceted, but Warren was also something of a spendthrift. His now deceased wife had reportedly been worth a considerable amount of money at the time of their marriage, but by her death in 1772, Warren seems to have worked his way through most, if not all, of those resources. His straitened circumstances may have contributed to the intense activity of his medical practice in 1774 and 1775. Financial considerations also probably influenced his decision to embark that summer on what appears to have been his version of a get-rich scheme: a twenty-one-year partnership with a group of physicians (which included a surgeon with one of the regiments currently stationed in Boston) to build smallpox hospitals in Boston and Philadelphia.

  That Warren entered into a long-term agreement with a British army surgeon in July 1774 might seem incredible, given what we know today about what was to occur in the coming months. The evidence seems clear, however, that in the summer of 1774 not even Warren’s farsighted mentor, Samuel Adams, was convinced that war was imminent. The patriots had been opposing Britain’s policies for the last decade, but this did not mean they anticipated a permanent rupture. “Nothing is more foreign from our hearts,” Warren had written that spring, “than a spirit of rebellion. Would to God they all, even our enemies, knew the warm attachment we have for Great Britain, notwithstanding we have been contending these ten years with them for our rights!” Boston’s patriots (who still referred to England as “home”) were not trying to reinvent the world as they then knew it; they were attempting to get back to the way it had been when they were free from imperial restraint.

  In the meantime, Warren’s relationship with Mercy Scollay appears to have progressed. That month, Mercy’s sister Priscilla, who at nineteen was fourteen years younger than Mercy, married the merchant and Tea Party participant Thomas Melvill, twenty-four. Thomas Melvill and Warren traveled in the same patriot circles, and it’s possible that the wedding helped to bring Warren and Melvill’s new sister-in-law ever closer. We will never know the details of how matters stood between the two of them, but we do know that Scollay became increasingly intimate with Warren’s children and that by the spring of the following year, she and Warren had, according to several accounts, agreed to marry. This did not mean, however, that their private lives settled into a comfortable and predictable course. In this time of tumultuous, often catastrophic change, nothing could be counted on for long.

  —

  Almost two months before, the delegates to the Continental Congress had been chosen behind locked doors at the courthouse in Salem. On August 10, those four delegates gathered in the home of Thomas Cushing on Bromfield Street in Boston. Over the course of the previous weeks, the patriots had taken it upon themselves to ensure that their famously threadbare leader, Samuel Adams, was properly prepared for his trip to Philadelphia. Arrangements were made to repair his house and barn; he’d been measured for a new suit of clothes; he’d received a new wig, a new hat, six pairs of shoes, and some spending money. Back in June, many in Boston had been embittered by Adams’s handling of the Solemn League and Covenant, but now, thanks in large part to the Coercive Acts, he was once again viewed as the stalwart defender of the colony’s rights. There had been rumors circulating throughout July and August that he was about to be arrested and sent to England for trial. Despite being urged “to keep out of the way,” Adams had continued to walk the streets of Boston and write his letters in the Selectmen’s Office, which served as headquarters for the Committee of Correspondence, and the people loved him for it. “They value him for his good sense, great abilities, amazing fortitude, noble resolution, and undaunted courage,” John Andrews wrote to his brother-in-law.

  Cushing, Samuel Adams, his cousin John Adams, and Robert Treat Paine boarded a yellow coach pulled by four horses with two white servants in front and four African Americans in back. Even though five British regiments were encamped in plain view, the delegates made a point of making “a very respectable parade” along the periphery of the common as they headed out that morning toward Watertown and, ultimately, Philadelphia.

  It was a proud and exciting moment for Boston’s patriots, but a disturbing one as well. How could they possibly fill the void left by even the temporary absence of Samuel Adams?

  —

  In early August, a celebrity arrived in Boston. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Lee, forty-two, was not only a famous British army officer who, in addition to serving with distinction in America during the French and Indian War, had fought in both the Polish and Portuguese armies; he was one of Lord North’s most virulent critics. Although still technically a member of the British army, he had grown disillusioned with his professional prospects and was considering a permanent move to Virginia. He was now in the midst o
f a kind of exploratory tour of the Atlantic seaboard. Everywhere he went he praised the colonies as “the last asylum” of British liberty while leaving the distinct impression that if ever, God forbid, there should be a war between the mother country and her colonies, he was the natural choice to lead the Americans to victory.

  Lee decided to stay at the wooden two-story tavern on School Street called the Cromwell’s Head. In addition to being a notorious patriot gathering place, it was where, almost twenty years before, the young George Washington had stayed during his one and only trip to Boston. Washington had served with both Gage and Lee during the Braddock campaign back in 1755, and if Lee had a native-born rival for command of the colonial forces, it was George Washington.

  Winningly uncouth and eccentric, Lee was also highly intelligent and impulsive. He considered the novelist Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, a good friend but had also spent several years amid the wilds of Pennsylvania and New York. The Indians had given him the name “Boiling Water,” and he was reported to have had two children by the daughter of a Mohawk chief. This was just the military figure to capture the imaginations of the city’s patriot leaders, and on August 6 Lee sent his old friend Thomas Gage a letter.

  Lee made the paradoxical claim that it was the “warm zeal and ardor” of his affection for Gage that had prevented him from making any effort to visit him. He then proceeded to inform the new royal governor that he had been duped by the British government.

  I believe, Sir, I have had an opportunity of knowing the way and tricks of the cabinet better than you. I make no doubt but they have been all played off upon you. May fortune or some God extricate you from . . . their clutches. I cannot pretend to say whether or not the Americans will be successful in their struggles for liberty, but from what I have seen in my progress through the colonies, from the noble spirit pervading all orders of men from the first estate and gentlemen to the poorest planters, I am almost persuaded they must be victorious and most devoutly wish they may; for if the machinations of their enemies prevail, the bright goddess liberty must fly off from the face of the Earth.

  For Gage, who was then trying to implement the Coercive Acts from his temporary seat in Salem, it must have been maddening to know that Lee was in Boston doing everything he could to make him look like a fool. And then, on August 15, yet another colorful veteran of the French and Indian War, Colonel Israel Putnam, fifty-six, from Pomfret, Connecticut, arrived in Boston with a herd of 130 sheep for the town’s poor. Like Lee, Putnam was an outsize, almost mythological character. The citizens of Pomfret told the story of how he had rid the town of its last remaining wolf. With a musket in one hand and a torch in the other and with a rope tied around his feet in case he needed to be quickly extricated, he had climbed into the wolf’s den and dispatched the snarling mother and her cubs. During the war with France, he had been a member of the famed Rogers’s Rangers and might have been burned to death by the Caughnawaga Indians if not for a fortuitous shower of rain.

  Charles Lee was delighted to see the old warrior, and the two of them had the temerity to visit the regiments camped on the common, where they traded stories with friends. Inevitably the British officers asked whether Lee and Putnam had come to Boston to fight. The patriot Thomas Young assured Samuel Adams that both soldiers left the impression that should matters come to a head, the colonials—not the British regulars—could count on their support. Young also reported that when Lee finally left Boston on August 17, “Never man parted from us with a more general regret than General Lee.”

  —

  By the end of August, Gage was getting unsettling reports from the western portion of the province. Safely removed from the regiments collected in Boston and Salem, the country towns were making sure that the Coercive Acts were, in the words of John Andrews, “a blank piece of paper and not more.” It had started as early as June, when sixty representatives from several towns in Berkshire County met at Stockbridge and came up with a series of resolutions that became the model for counties throughout the province. In addition to demanding a boycott of British goods, the delegates meeting at Stockbridge drew up a declaration of rights along with a pledge to maintain their own form of local government. A month later, Worcester held a similar convention. Whereas the people of the Berkshires had emphasized the need for maintaining order, those in Worcester County were more concerned that each town maintain a company of well-trained and well-armed militia.

  Instead of the Port Bill, it was the arrival of the Massachusetts Government Act in August that pushed the province into a state of what Gage deemed open rebellion. One after the other, in town after town, mandamus councillors were forced to either resign or flee to the safety of Boston. On August 23, Daniel Leonard began to realize that it was no longer safe for him in Taunton and quietly slipped away for Boston. The following day two thousand men assembled on the Taunton town green and would have pulled down Leonard’s house if not for the pathetic pleas of his aged father. In Great Barrington, 120 miles to the west, citizens shut down the local courts. In Salem, Gage found himself in a standoff with the Committee of Correspondence, which had dared to call a town meeting even though the gathering was now, according to the Government Act, illegal. Gage had the offending committee members arrested and threatened to jail those who refused to put up bail. When it began to look as if about three thousand militiamen might forcibly “rescue the committee,” Gage had no choice but to call off his regulars and forget the matter.

  A few days later, the residents of Danvers, which now served as Gage’s adopted home, also called a town meeting. John Andrews gleefully reported that the meeting was continued for several needless hours just “to see if [the governor] would interrupt them.” When Gage was told of the town’s outrageous behavior, he was reported to have cried, “Damn ’em! I won’t do anything about it unless his Majesty sends me more troops.”

  The following day, Gage traveled to Boston to ensure that the superior court was allowed to sit. Although the judges made an appearance, the jurors refused to cooperate, and the session proved an embarrassing failure. “Civil government is nearly [at] its end,” Gage wrote Lord Dartmouth, “the courts of justice expiring one after the other. . . . We shall shortly be without either law or legislative power. . . . Nothing that is said at present can palliate. Conciliating, moderation, reasoning [are] over.”

  In just about every town outside Boston it had become impossible to support, publicly at least, the British government. A unanimity unlike anything ever experienced in the previous hundred years had swept across Massachusetts. Up until this point, internal division and unrest had been a long-standing part of colonial life. The Salem witch trials were only the most notorious example of how rumor, superstition, and personal animosities could overtake a town. Disagreements over monetary policy, banking schemes, and smallpox inoculation had divided the colonists. As the province’s population continued to climb, many towns, particularly those surrounding Boston, had begun to run out of land, creating tensions within families that forced many younger inhabitants to relocate to the hinterlands to the west, north, and east to what we now know as Maine. And then there was the perennial issue of religion.

  In the 1740s the itinerant English minister George Whitefield had aroused an evangelical fervor throughout the colonies that emphasized the individual’s emotional experience of God. Later referred to as the Great Awakening, this upsurge of religious feeling divided communities across Massachusetts into two groups: the “old lights,” who dismissed Whitefield as a sensationalist, and the “new lights,” who embraced the sense of the dramatic that Whitefield and his followers brought to the pulpit. In 1750 the future patriot leader Joseph Hawley led a bitter battle to remove the brilliant and controversial new-light minister Jonathan Edwards from the meeting at Northampton. In the years after Edwards’s ouster, passions remained so high in Northampton that Hawley felt compelled to issue a public apology for having sought the minister’s di
smissal. That had been in 1760, and now, almost a decade and a half later, all these old divisions had been largely forgotten as colonists united in their opposition to the policies of the British ministry. It was more than a little ironic: an incipient rebellion had pulled these once-warring New Englanders together.

  There were exceptions, of course. All across the province there were those who chose to remain faithful to the crown. Financial considerations motivated many of the loyalists, particularly those who were employed by the king or had won commissions for their military services during the French and Indian War. Some were simply contrarians who couldn’t help but object to the patriots’ coercive demand for unity. Others, such as Daniel Leonard, had been lied to once too often to see much nobility in the clarion call for liberty. Josiah Quincy’s older and much less volatile brother, Samuel, shared Leonard’s disillusion with the patriot leaders. But that did not prevent him from loving his outspoken brother. “Our notions both of government and religion may be variant,” he wrote Josiah, “but perhaps are not altogether discordant.” Neither of them suffered from “a defect of conscience or uprightness of intention,” he insisted. They simply had different views of what was best for their country.

  —

  On the evening of August 30, John Andrews went for a walk along the mall of Boston Common. He spotted Governor Gage coming up a nearby street surrounded by a retinue of six officers, three aides-de-camp, and eight orderly sergeants. Gage’s entourage was stopped by a recently arrived mandamus councillor from Bridgewater, “a mere plow-jogger to look at,” scoffed Andrews. Once the governor had conferred with the newly exiled councillor, he continued to the head of Winter Street, where Brigadier Percy had rented a home beside the common. The two officers had matters to discuss, and “while [Gage] went in,” Andrews wrote, “his attendants of high and low rank stood in waiting at the gate like so many menial slaves.” Unknown to Andrews, and to just about everyone else in Boston, Gage had a plan that would soon have the entire province in an uproar.