Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

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  They found about four thousand people—almost three times Cambridge’s entire population—gathered in the large open field that served as the town’s common. Once the farmers heard that the rumors about the six dead militiamen were false, they had agreed to leave their weapons in Watertown before proceeding to Cambridge. With no regulars to fight, they turned their attention to making sure Cambridge’s mandamus councillors renounced their posts. At that moment, all eyes were turned to the steps of the courthouse, where two of the councillors stood in the hot summer sun. One of these was the physician and alchemist Samuel Danforth, who previously claimed to have discovered the secret to immortality known as the philosopher’s stone. The discovery had apparently not enabled the seventy-eight-year-old councillor to speak in anything other than a barely audible rasp, and Warren’s fellow committee member Thomas Young marveled that “not a whisper interrupted the low voice of that feeble old man from being heard by the whole body.” Judge Joseph Lee also renounced his position as mandamus councillor and later remarked that “he never saw so large a number of people together and preserve so peaceable order before in his life.” But the quiet was not to last.

  Around noon, a gentleman in a chaise came upon the crowd gathered on the Cambridge Common. He was on his way from Salem to Boston, and since the road along the common was filled with people, he was forced to pause before continuing on to the bridge across the Charles River. This happened to be Benjamin Hallowell, fifty-four, a member of the customs board who was almost as despised as former governor Thomas Hutchinson. Hallowell had insisted, it was said, that ships with provisions for Boston’s poor be banned from entering the harbor, even though the Port Act did not technically forbid them to. In his youth he’d been a noted privateer captain and had accumulated enough prize money during the French and Indian War that he’d built a big and sumptuous house on Hanover Street. He’d married into the well-to-do Boylston family, and as his role as customs officer made it dangerous to live in Boston, his wife Mary used some of her inheritance to purchase a house in the portion of Roxbury known as Jamaica Plain. Brash and hotheaded (John Adams described him as a “Hotspur”), he believed it was time Gage used the regulars to teach these seditious people a lesson. But even Hallowell seems to have been taken aback by the prospect of passing through a crowd of four thousand patriot militiamen.

  He soon realized that these were mostly farmers from the outlying country towns and therefore unaware of his reputation in Boston. He became hopeful of making it to the river without incident. But then someone recognized him.

  Isaiah Thomas, the patriot writer and editor who in June had published the poem attributed to Mercy Scollay, was in Cambridge that day. According to Hallowell, Thomas cried out, “Damn you, how do you like us now, you Tory son of a bitch” as he made it known to anyone who would listen that Hallowell was “an enemy to the country.” Soon about 160 men on horseback were on his trail, “having taken,” Hallowell wrote, “a resolution to destroy me.”

  Joseph Warren and his fellow committee members realized that the pursuit of Hallowell could very well ruin what had so far been an exemplary demonstration of the people’s “patience, temperance, and fortitude.” Thomas Young and others jumped on their own horses and did their best to dissuade those at the head of the posse that “the shedding of one man’s blood would answer no good purpose.” Most of the riders gave up the chase, but a group of eight or ten refused to turn back.

  Hallowell had succeeded in crossing the Charles and putting about three miles between him and Cambridge when the group of enraged horsemen caught up to him and his black servant, who was following the chaise on a horse. A man named Bradshaw was in the lead and told him to stop so that he could speak with him. When Hallowell refused, Bradshaw rode up beside the horse that was pulling the chaise and began to beat the animal over the head as he tried to grab its reins. By this time, Hallowell had a pistol in his hand, and whenever Bradshaw or the others approached, he aimed the weapon at them till they moved away. Bradshaw later claimed that at one point Hallowell even pulled the trigger, but the pistol failed to fire.

  The road to Boston took them through several different villages in Roxbury, and Bradshaw kept repeating the cry, “Stop the murderer, the Tory murderer, he has killed a man!” “This hue and cry,” Hallowell wrote, “occasioned a sallying forth of the people from the houses . . . ; others upon the road joined in the cry—all endeavoring to stop me.”

  After about a mile of this frenzy, the horse pulling the chaise began to give out. Hallowell ordered his servant to give him his saddled horse, which turned out to be “a fleet one,” and after tying the reins together and dropping them on the horse’s neck, Hallowell continued on with a pistol in each hand. By the time he approached Boston Neck, he estimated that he was surrounded by about a hundred people, “all endeavoring to seize me,” as he “ran the gauntlet” toward the town gate. Just as he reached the guard at the entrance, his horse began to fail. Hallowell leaped to the ground and ran the rest of the way into Boston.

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  The city was soon alive with rumors of its own. The country people, it was said, planned to “fling in about 15,000 by the way of the Neck, and as many more over the ferry.” Once the provincials secured a foothold in the city, they would, John Andrews reported, “come in like locusts and rid the town of every soldier.”

  Gage placed a guard at the powderhouse on the common; he also doubled the guard on the Neck while dispatching soldiers dressed as sailors to gain intelligence of what was really happening across the river in Cambridge. To his credit, he did not send any armed regulars. “Had the troops marched only five miles out of Boston,” Joseph Warren wrote, “I doubt whether a man would have been saved of their whole number.”

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  The hurly-burly with Hallowell also had an inevitable effect on the country people gathered in Cambridge. Anticipating a possible attack by the regulars, some of them rushed back to Watertown to retrieve their muskets and swords. Soon they were converging on the home of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Oliver. It was time to make the magistrate admit the full magnitude of his sins against the people.

  Oliver, forty, had been born in Antigua, where the family’s sugar plantation helped fund the huge mansion called Elmwood he had built at the end of Tory Row. Up until his recent appointment to lieutenant governor, Oliver had steered clear of politics and was well respected throughout the province. Even the notorious patriot firebrand Josiah Quincy Jr. counted him as a friend, and if not for Gage’s impatient insistence that he accept the posts, Oliver would have declined the appointments to both the lieutenant governorship and the governor’s council. The patriots weren’t angered that he’d accepted his position as lieutenant governor; it was that he had agreed to serve as a mandamus councillor. Just as Lee and Danforth had been forced to disavow their commissions, Lieutenant Governor Oliver must resign as a mandamus councillor.

  Earlier in the day, Oliver had succeeded in convincing the crowd gathered around his house that it would be in their best interests if he traveled to Boston, spoke with Governor Gage, and reported back to them later in the day. True to his word, he had returned to his house on Tory Row. However, as Gage had predicted, it now looked as if he was about to fall into “the snare.” The people were becoming “unmanageable,” and Oliver, perhaps remembering what had happened to the house of former Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, decided that he had better get himself back to Boston. He had just climbed into his carriage when “a vast crowd advanced and in a short time my house was surrounded by 4,000 people, and one-quarter of them in arms.” He retreated back into his house, unsure of what to do next.

  Oliver reluctantly agreed to allow Warren and four other members of the Boston Committee of Correspondence inside his house, where they informed him that they had been delegated to “demand my resignation as councillor.” Oliver refused. In the meantime, people began to “press up to my
windows,” Oliver wrote, “calling for vengeance.” He could hear his wife and children crying in the next room. “I cast about to find some means of preserving my reputation,” he wrote to Lord Dartmouth, and “proposed that the people should take me by force.” The committee advised against it, and Oliver finally scribbled on the resignation letter they thrust before him, “My house being surrounded by 4,000 people, in compliance with their commands I sign my name Thomas Oliver.”

  McNeil, the trader from Connecticut who had spent the previous night in Shrewsbury, watched as Oliver’s signed declaration was “handed along the lines and read publicly at proper distances till the whole body of the people were made to hear it.” Soon, McNeil recalled, “the solemn silence” was replaced by “a cheerful murmur or general universal voice of joy.” It was about six in the evening, an hour before sunset, and as the people scattered in various directions, the thunder rolled and it began to rain.

  That what came to be called the Powder Alarm did not live up to the rumors it inspired stands as a tribute to Warren’s ability to mediate a most challenging and potentially explosive situation as well as to the steadiness of the country people who traveled to Cambridge on that Friday in September 1774. Their refusal to indulge in violence, and the almost surreal sense of courtesy that underlay that resolve, speaks to the complexity of the emotions that the events of the past spring and summer had evoked among them. At least at this stage, they were not willing to fire the first shot.

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  As became clear in the weeks ahead, much remained to be done if the provincials had any hope of successfully meeting the threat presented by Gage’s ever-growing army in Boston. They needed a better intelligence network so that they could anticipate the regulars’ next move before it happened. They also needed to restructure the militia. Many of the older officers were loyalists who had no interest in opposing the British regulars. Changes needed to be made in the officer corps in almost every town’s militia; new systems for training and outfitting the militiamen also had to be implemented.

  But perhaps the most important lesson learned in the aftermath of the Powder Alarm was that even if Boston had first opposed British tyranny, the country people outside the city were the ones now leading the resistance movement. Instead of feeling as if the resolute crowd had threatened his own authority as a political leader, Joseph Warren embraced this most recent development as evidence of a new and exciting era. In a letter to Samuel Adams at the Continental Congress, Warren reported that what he’d witnessed at Cambridge had inspired in him “the most exalted idea of the resolution and intrepidity of the inhabitants.” This ability to maintain his poise within the ineluctable pull of seemingly chaotic events would serve him well in the months ahead.

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  Samuel Adams and the other three delegates from Massachusetts quickly realized that many at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia did not trust them. New Englanders, it was said, were “intemperate and rash,” and secretly lusted for “a total independency”—not just from Great Britain but from the rest of the colonies as well. Once the mother country had been defeated, it was asserted, the New Englanders would then declare war on the colonies to the south and establish themselves as the brutal sovereigns of all America. To counteract this concern, Samuel Adams realized that it was absolutely essential that his colony remain on the defensive. Massachusetts must remain the victim, no matter what.

  And then, on Tuesday, September 6, came word of the Powder Alarm. Traveling from town to town along the eastern seaboard, the rumor had made it to Philadelphia in a mere five days. In Connecticut, a letter written by Israel Putnam falsely claiming that in addition to the six provincials killed, Boston was being bombarded by British artillery as tens of thousands of colonial militiamen marched toward the burning city, was copied and carried all the way to Philadelphia.

  Philadelphians reacted much as the New Englanders had done. “All is confusion,” reported Silas Deane, a delegate from Connecticut. “Every tongue pronounces revenge. The bells toll muffled, and the people run as in a case of extremity, they know not where or why.” Delegates who had been divided into two camps—those who wanted to repair the breach with Britain and those who favored the continued push for colonial liberties—found themselves speaking with a single voice. “War! war! war! was the cry,” John Adams wrote, “and it was pronounced in a tone which would have done honor to the oratory of a Briton or a Roman.”

  It took two days, but eventually the delegates learned the truth. Boston was not under attack. The regulars had taken some powder, but no one had been killed. It was back to the business of deciding how to respond to the Coercive Acts. And then, a week later, on September 17, Paul Revere arrived from Boston with a document known as the Suffolk Resolves.

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  The Government Act had made town meetings illegal in Massachusetts, but it had said nothing about the counties. Throughout the summer and fall, town representatives gathered at county conventions all across Massachusetts, and on September 9, 1774, at Vose’s Tavern in Milton, Joseph Warren stood before the delegates of Suffolk County (which included Boston and towns to the west and south and included modern Norfolk County) and read them what he’d been working on for the last three days: nineteen resolves in which he had tried to capture the sense of their previous two meetings. Not only did Warren declare that “no obedience is due” to the Coercive Acts, since they were “the attempts of a wicked administration to enslave America”; he set forth a blueprint by which Massachusetts might successfully win back her liberties. Each town must elect militia officers, who should muster the militia at least once a week; that said, the militia was “to act merely upon the defensive, so long as such conduct may be vindicated by reason and the principles of self-preservation, but no longer.” If, as threatened, Gage were to seize any patriot leaders, they would respond by taking loyalist hostages of their own. Following the lead of the Solemn League and Covenant, they vowed to “abstain from the consumption of British merchandise and manufactures.” In order to fill the void left by Gage’s dismissal of the General Court, a “provincial congress” was to convene in Concord in October that would “pay all due respect and submission” to anything passed by the Continental Congress. During these perilous times, all “routs, riots, and licentious attacks” must cease at once. Lastly, it was determined to create a system of couriers by which the towns might be alerted “should our enemies, by any sudden maneuvers, render it necessary to ask the aid and assistance of our brethren in the country.”

  That day at Vose’s Tavern, Warren read each resolve several times so that all the delegates knew exactly what they were voting on. It must have been a scene of intense excitement as the delegates gave their unanimous consent “paragraph by paragraph.” Resolve 17 insisted that “renewing harmony and union between Great Britain and the colonies [is] earnestly wished for by all good men.” Overall, however, this was a radical document—but not uniquely so, given what other conventions had already or were about to produce—by which the inhabitants of Suffolk County declared their intention to make preparations for possible war.

  What made the Suffolk Resolves ultimately so significant was the impact the document had on the Continental Congress in Philadelphia on September 17 and 18. Warren had appended a preamble that poetically evoked the historical importance of the present moment. Before launching into a passionate account of the colony’s hazardous situation, he told how Massachusetts had witnessed “the power but not the justice, the vengeance but not the wisdom of Great Britain.” The surging rhythms of Warren’s prose gave the document an emotional force that succeeded in cutting across the cultural and ideological differences of those gathered in Philadelphia, who voted unanimously to endorse the Suffolk Resolves. John Adams was ecstatic. “The esteem, the affection, and the admiration for the people of Boston and . . . Massachusetts which were expressed yesterday,” he wrote, “and the fixed determination that they should be support
ed, were enough to melt a heart of stone. I saw tears gush into the eyes of the old grave pacific Quakers of Pennsylvania.”

  Owing to the combined effects of the Powder Alarm and the Suffolk Resolves, the Continental Congress had gotten off to a surprisingly militant start. In the weeks and months ahead, a certain amount of retrenchment inevitably occurred as passions began to cool among the delegates. But if nothing else, the endorsement of the Suffolk Resolves proved that, contrary to what the North administration had predicted, the disparate colonies of British North America could indeed act as one.

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  By September 24, Paul Revere was back in Boston with the good news from Philadelphia about the endorsement of the Suffolk Resolves. In an age when communication between the colonies could take days and even weeks, Revere provided the patriots with a decided advantage over the less nimble British. But the peripatetic silversmith was much more than the colonial equivalent of a Pony Express rider. Since he was a close friend of Joseph Warren and others, he knew as much as anyone about the patriot movement in Boston and as a consequence could speak with some authority when he carried messages to Philadelphia or, in the months ahead, to towns closer to home.

  Revere soon learned that in the two weeks since he departed for Philadelphia, Gage had been working steadily to prepare the town for a possible onslaught from the country. For reasons of safety, all vestiges of the provincial government that had formerly been in Salem (as well as Gage’s personal headquarters in Danvers) were moved back to Boston, which was now, for all intents and purposes, a city under siege. Six fieldpieces were rolled out to the Neck, and a dozen larger cannons planted at the town entrance. Warships were repositioned around the city. A more long-term project was the transformation of the crumbling fortifications at the town gate into what the patriots complained was an unnecessary “fortress.” The Fifty-Ninth Regiment, formerly stationed in Salem, was ordered to entrench themselves on either side of the Neck, where they provided a daunting gauntlet for anyone coming into or out of Boston.