Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Alarm

  Each town in Massachusetts had its own militia. Historically these companies of amateur soldiers had defended New England’s settlements from attacks by Native Americans, which had climaxed a hundred years before with King Philip’s War and the destruction of a third of the region’s English settlements. Although that conflict remained the high-water mark of violence in New England, clashes with the Indians had persisted throughout the eighteenth century. “I have seen a vessel enter the harbor of Boston,” the loyalist Peter Oliver wrote, “with a long string of hairy Indian scalps strung to the rigging, and waving in the wind.” The Indians had been the New Englanders’ traditional foe, but by the middle of the century the militiamen’s attention had shifted.

  During the French and Indian War, colonial and British soldiers had fought side by side against a common enemy. But as Oliver also observed, “Savage is a convertible term.” Even before the Boston Massacre, the anger that had once been directed toward the Indians had been transferred to the British regulars. And it wasn’t just the army; the British navy, which had a history of abducting colonists for service on its warships, was also a perennial source of outrage and anxiety. In 1769 a harpoon-toting sailor on a vessel from Marblehead stabbed the leader of a British impressment gang in the neck. For a variety of reasons—not the least of which was the people’s hatred of impressment—the sailor was acquitted and released. Fears of the marauding British remained so high in coastal New England that townspeople who lived within twenty miles of the sea routinely brought the same muskets to Sunday meeting that their ancestors had once used against the Indians. The colonists were still fighting for their liberties, but now it was their supposed allies, the soldiers and sailors of the British Empire, who had become the enemy.

  By the end of August 1774, as the possibility of an armed conflict between the New Englanders and the British regulars became increasingly likely, attention turned to the black granular mixture of saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur known as gunpowder. Notoriously difficult to manufacture, gunpowder was almost exclusively produced in Europe. Assuming Britain was about to ban the exportation of gunpowder to Massachusetts (a ban that did, in fact, occur that fall), the militiamen’s firearms would be rendered useless if an alternative supply were not soon found. Gage, on the other hand, could depend on a steady supply of gunpowder from Britain. It was still in his best interests, however, to acquire all available stores in the province, and both sides began a desperate rush for gunpowder.

  By law, each town was allotted its own reserve of powder, which was stored in a regional magazine. In Boston, large quantities had already been taken from the powderhouse on the common as the many towns surrounding the city withdrew their reserves. For his part, Gage wanted to make sure that nothing happened to the powder that belonged to the crown and had begun to move those stocks to the security of the Castle. As part of this effort, he wrote William Brattle (who despite being a major general in the Cambridge militia was always referred to by his alliterative earlier rank as Brigadier Brattle) about the status of the reserves at a powderhouse on Quarry Hill in modern Somerville. Brattle reported that the only remaining powder at the arsenal was the 250 half-barrels belonging to the crown.

  If Brattle had simply answered Gage’s question, all might have remained well with the doughty brigadier. But Brattle, who like Daniel Leonard and Samuel Quincy had started out as a patriot but was now a committed loyalist, chose to relay a conversation he’d had with a militia officer from Concord. The officer, Brattle wrote, had complained of being pressured by local patriots to prepare his company “to meet at one minute’s warning equipped with arms and ammunition.” Brattle recounted how he’d warned the officer that to comply with this policy—which was clearly intended to hasten the militia’s response to a possible incursion by British regulars—was to risk being “hanged for a rebel.” Brattle ended the letter by assuring Gage that “the king’s powder . . . shall remain [at Quarry Hill] as a sacred depositum till ordered out by the Captain General.” The clear implication was that Gage should act quickly to prevent the patriots from stealing the powder.

  Four days later, on Wednesday, August 31, Gage was making his way up Boston’s Newbury Street toward the residence of an officer who lived in a house near the Liberty Tree. Whether it was by accident or (as John Andrews believed) by design, Brigadier Brattle’s unfortunately long-winded letter slipped from the governor’s pocket onto the surface of the street, where someone sympathetic to the patriot cause eventually discovered it.

  Bostonians had already noticed some unusual activity among the soldiers encamped on the common. Earlier that afternoon, a group of several hundred regulars had been culled from the various regiments. After being provided with a day’s provisions, the soldiers were told to be prepared to march early the next morning. “Various were the conjectures respecting their destination,” John Andrews wrote, but not even the regulars knew where they were headed.

  —

  Shortly after 4:00 a.m. in the predawn darkness of Thursday, September 1, a battalion of about three hundred soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Maddison was assembled on the common and marched to Long Wharf, where a fleet of thirteen boats was waiting for them. They were soon being rowed across the harbor to the mouth of the Mystic River along the northern edge of Charlestown.

  About three miles up the river, past the point where the Mystic was joined by the smaller Malden River, was Ten Hills Farm. Originally owned by Governor John Winthrop, this beautiful property had been named for the mini–mountain range that rose up along the Mystic River’s western shore, providing panoramic views of the harbor from Cobble, Winter, and the highest of them all, Prospect Hill. Just a mile west from the landing at Ten Hills Farm was the Quarry Hill arsenal, where Sheriff David Phipps had eight wagons waiting to be loaded with the king’s powder. Sprouting protectively from the top of the conical stone structure was one of Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rods.

  Gunpowder in the eighteenth century was much more volatile than it later became. Shoes with any metal on the soles that might cause a spark on the powderhouse’s stone floor had to be removed, and since a flame of any kind was forbidden, the soldiers were forced to wait for daybreak, when it was light enough to begin removing the barrels and loading up the wagons. As the powder was transported to the boats waiting on the Mystic River, Sheriff Phipps led a small detachment of soldiers to Cambridge. Once they’d borrowed some horses from a local tavern keeper, they hauled off two of the province’s fieldpieces and headed across the bridge at the Charles River and marched the eight miles through Roxbury to Boston. In the meantime, the rest of the regulars transported the gunpowder by boat down the Mystic River to the Castle in Boston Harbor.

  By then, word of Brigadier Brattle’s letter had already spread through Boston and beyond. As Gage perhaps intended, Brattle, not the governor, became the object of the people’s scorn once it became known that the king’s powder and some fieldpieces had been removed by several hundred British soldiers. A crowd began to assemble in Cambridge and soon made its way to the group of seven magnificent homes known as Tory Row. Situated about a mile from the Cambridge Common on the road to Watertown, these houses enjoyed grand views of the Charles River. The children of the original owners had intermarried to the point that Tory Row had become one of the most exclusive, closely knit communities in America. Brigadier Brattle lived in the house closest to the common, and it’s likely that even before the crowd arrived, he had mounted his horse and fled for Boston, where he quickly decided that he had no choice but to retreat all the way to the Castle.

  By that afternoon and evening, the crowd in Cambridge had surrounded the house of the province’s attorney general, Jonathan Sewall. Sewall had also left for Boston, but someone inside the house fired a warning shot. Some windows were broken, but for the most part the crowd, made up of “some boys and negroes,” according to one
account, showed little interest in pressing the matter and eventually disbanded.

  At some point, however, a rumor was started: when the British soldiers arrived in Cambridge to take the powder, it was claimed, the local militia had opposed them. A skirmish ensued, and the regulars killed six militiamen.

  —

  The news of six dead militiamen astounded everyone who heard it, and by midnight the rumor had reached almost forty miles west to Worcester. Even as the rumor headed west, it spread to the north and east to New Hampshire and to Maine; it also headed south to Rhode Island and Connecticut. By early that Friday morning, virtually every town within a fifty-mile radius of Boston was in a tumult as its militiamen prepared to march to the “relief of their brethren.” Soon about twenty thousand, some said as many as forty thousand, men were streaming toward Boston.

  On the night of September 1 a merchant named McNeil was staying at a tavern in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, about thirty-eight miles from Boston. Around midnight he was awakened by a violent rapping on the tavern door. He heard the tavern keeper being told “the doleful story that the powder was taken, six men killed, and all the people between there and Boston arming and marching down to the relief of their brethren.”

  Within a quarter of an hour, fifty men had assembled at the tavern in Shrewsbury. Those who weren’t writing messages to be sent on to towns even farther to the west were preparing their weapons and provisions. Soon they were all on their way to Boston. By the time McNeil set out that morning, the only man left in the entire town was the elderly tavern keeper.

  It took most of the day for McNeil to press on to Boston. “He said he never saw such a scene before,” recounted the minister Ezra Stiles, who spoke with McNeil several weeks later. “All along were armed men rushing forward, some on foot, some on horseback, at every house women and children making cartridges [paper packets of gunpowder], [casting] bullets, baking biscuit, crying and bemoaning and at the same time animating their husbands and sons to fight for their liberties, though not knowing whether they should ever see them again.” Just as their ancestors had once rallied to protect their families from the Indians, this new generation of New Englanders was preparing to confront the British regulars.

  Ezra Stiles asked McNeil whether any of the militiamen on the morning of September 2, 1774, “appeared to want [i.e., lack] courage.” “No, nothing of this,” McNeil replied, “but a firm intrepid ardor, [a] hardy, eager, and courageous spirit of enterprise, a spirit for revenging the blood of their brethren and rescu[ing] our liberties.” All along the road to Boston McNeil saw women who had already armed and supplied their own men now offering handfuls of cartridges and bullets to those who continued to pass by. McNeil claimed “the women surpassed the men for eagerness and spirit in the defense of liberty by arms. . . . They expected a bloody scene, but they doubted not success and victory.”

  Throughout the morning and afternoon McNeil rode in “the midst of the people” as they made their way to Boston. Over and over again, it was “positively affirmed” that six men had been killed by the regulars. Not until he was within two miles of Cambridge did he hear the first contradictory report. Soon he was approaching a crowd of several thousand people. Instead of confusion, there was, he remembered, “an awful stillness.”

  —

  Earlier that morning in Boston, Dr. Joseph Warren received word that “incredible numbers were in arms, and lined the roads from Sudbury to Cambridge.” Warren had taken over from Samuel Adams as leader of the Boston Committee of Correspondence, and citizens in both Charlestown and Cambridge asked that he do something “to prevent the people from coming to immediate acts of violence.”

  This was a different kind of role for the committee, whose previous activities had been limited to the written word. Warren was now needed, not as a writer, but as a mediator in what sounded like a highly volatile situation. As it turned out, this was just the leadership role to which Warren’s talents were suited.

  Whereas Samuel Adams was part political boss, part ideologue, Warren, close to two decades younger, possessed a swashbuckling personal magnetism. He’d been born in the nearby town of Roxbury, just across from Boston Neck, and as a boy he was often seen wandering the streets of Boston, selling milk from the family farm. The eldest of four brothers, Warren was recognized as an unusually gifted boy, and when he was fourteen he began his studies at Harvard. In the fall of that year his father was picking apples from the top of a tall ladder when he fell and broke his neck. Warren’s youngest brother, John, had been just two years old at the time of this tragic event, and one of his first memories was of watching his father’s lifeless body being carried away. With the financial help of family friends, Warren was able to continue at Harvard and later served as a kind of surrogate parent for his brothers, particularly for John, who had recently finished his medical apprenticeship with Warren and was now a doctor in Salem.

  At Harvard, Warren’s talent for pursuing a dizzying variety of extracurricular activities was soon evident. Early on, he staged several performances of the popular politically themed play Cato in his dorm room. The French and Indian War was then in full swing, and he joined the college’s militia company. A classmate later told the story of how Warren responded to being locked out of a meeting of fellow students in an upper-story dormitory room. Instead of pounding at the door, he made his way to the building’s roof, shimmied down a rainspout, and climbed in through an open window. Just as he was making his entrance, the rotted spout collapsed to the ground with a spectacular crash. Warren simply shrugged and commented that the spout had served its purpose. For a boy who had lost his father to a fatal fall, it was an illustrative bit of bravado. This was a young man who dared to do what should have, by all rights, terrified him.

  It was at Harvard that Warren showed an interest in medicine. The great challenge for medical students in the eighteenth century was finding human cadavers for dissection. It’s likely that Warren was a member of the Spunkers: a club of medical students (of which we know his younger brother John and Warren’s apprentice William Eustis were members) who regularly raided graveyards, jails, and poorhouses in search of bodies. Illegal, yet all in the name of a higher good, this grisly game of capture the corpse was the perfect training ground for a future revolutionary.

  In 1764 an epidemic of smallpox ravaged Boston. Warren, just twenty-three and a new doctor, served on a team of physicians that inoculated approximately five thousand people—a third of the entire population of Boston—who’d been quarantined on Castle William. Over an intense three-month period, Warren treated John Adams, the children of Thomas Hutchinson, the customs agent Benjamin Hallowell, the province’s secretary, Thomas Flucker, John Singleton Copley’s father-in-law, Richard Clarke, along with a host of the town’s poor, prostitutes, slaves, and sailors.

  Around this time, Warren burst on the political scene with several controversial newspaper articles about then governor Francis Bernard. Although Warren always looked to Samuel Adams for guidance, he quickly established his own identity as a political leader, becoming in 1772 the moving spirit behind the North End Caucus, a group quietly organized to handpick the candidates for key positions in town and provincial government. Warren had that rarest of talents: the ability to influence the course of events without appearing to assert his own will—what one contemporary described as “the wisdom to guide and the power to charm.” There were other patriot leaders who believed they were calling the shots, another contemporary later remembered, but it was really Warren through the North End Caucus—an organization that most Bostonians didn’t even know existed—who controlled “the secret springs that moved the great wheels.”

  Warren’s influence extended to the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Masons, the society that came to serve as the clandestine nerve center of the patriot cause. Warren was the lodge’s grand master and presided over meetings at the Green Dragon Tavern on upper Union Street near the Mill Pond in the
North End, where, it was claimed, the details of the Boston Tea Party had been worked out in December 1773. In the fall and winter to come, the Green Dragon was where Paul Revere and other lodge members oversaw the surveillance of the British troops, yet another patriot activity in which Warren was deeply involved. Whether it was as leader of the St. Andrew’s Masonic Lodge, the North End Caucus, or now the Boston Committee of Correspondence, Warren had become one of the most influential patriot leaders in Boston.

  On the morning of Friday, September 2, 1774, with thousands of militiamen gathering on the other side of the Charles River in Cambridge, he sent out a messenger to notify his fellow Boston Committee of Correspondence members that he needed them for an impromptu meeting. So as to prevent a possible panic in the occupied city, he chose not to inform the messenger of the reason for the meeting. As a consequence, committee members were in no great rush to attend to Warren’s summons, and once only a handful of members had assembled, Warren and his associates left for Cambridge.

  Instead of taking the longer land route through Roxbury, as Brigadier Brattle had done the previous afternoon, they made their way to Hudson’s Point in Boston’s North End, where they took the ferry to Charlestown, less than half a mile away. From there it was just four miles on a road that after passing Breed’s and Bunker’s Hills on the right and Charlestown’s Mill Pond on the left, skirted the edge of Charlestown Common (where the gibbeted remains of the slave Mark had once hung in chains) and headed west to Cambridge.