Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  The country people, however, remained defiant after their staggering show of strength during the Powder Alarm. John Andrews told of the huge farmer who marched proudly into Boston between the ranks of soldiers lining the Neck, “looking very sly and contemptuously on one side and the other, which attracted the notice of the whole regiment.” The giant farmer stopped and addressed the regulars around him. “Ay, ay,” he crowed, “you don’t know what boys we have got in the country. I am near nine feet high and one of the smallest among ’em.” Another visiting farmer joined a group of soldiers engaged in target practice on the common. After astonishing them with his accuracy, he bragged, “I have got a boy at home that will toss up an apple and shoot out all the seeds as it’s coming down.”

  The country people were having their fun with the soldiers, but their bravado was not without a basis in truth. Native New Englanders (thanks to a healthier diet and living conditions) were statistically two inches taller than their European counterparts. For the regulars, confined to a mile-square island that had recently been surrounded by thousands upon thousands of militiamen, the ministry’s confident talk of the overwhelming power of the British military must have seemed more than a little hollow.

  The regulars represented one of the greatest armies in Europe, but this did not change the fact that the last time any of them had been in combat was more than twelve years before; indeed, most of them had never seen any action. It was true that the New England militia was made up, for the most part, of farmers, but many of them were farmers who knew how to fight. One patriot told of how two veterans of the 1745 Siege of Louisbourg dismissed the new fortifications on the Neck as “mud-walls in comparison with what they have subdued.” If at some point the country people had to storm the ramparts Gage had constructed at the town gate, these old-timers claimed that “they would regard them no more than a beaver-dam.”

  —

  With an army of several thousand British regulars holding Boston, the town of Worcester, forty miles to the west, became the unofficial center of the provincial resistance movement. A county convention had emphasized the need to strengthen the preexisting system of town militias, which were soon mustering once, sometimes twice a week. What were known as “Minute Men”—elite groups culled from the towns’ militias—were created to be ready for battle in a minute’s notice. Not a new concept, the Minute Men dated back to the French and Indian War and were just one example of how the colonists’ experience in that earlier conflict had prepared them for what would become the American Revolution.

  Along with gunpowder, the provincial militiamen needed guns, and it was to Boston, where local merchants and gunsmiths possessed large stockpiles of weapons, that many of the country people came to secure muskets and other small arms. Since martial law had not yet been declared in Massachusetts, there were limits to what Thomas Gage could legally do to oppose the patriots’ efforts to prepare for war, and in the weeks after the Powder Alarm, John Andrews estimated the outflow of muskets and pistols from Boston to be no less than a hundred per day.

  What the patriots really needed if they had any hope of one day opposing the British army and navy were cannons similar to the ones that currently loomed from the fortifications and ships in and around Boston. However, many town militias did not yet have adequate supplies of muskets, let alone fieldpieces and larger artillery. The one exception was Boston’s “train,” an artillery company within its militia regiment, under the command of Major Adino Paddock, a loyalist who was not about to let the company’s brass fieldpieces fall into patriot hands.

  Two of the brass cannons were stored in a newly built British gun house at the edge of the common. On September 16, several Bostonians had the audacity to approach the house in broad daylight and, as the guards stepped outside, liberate the cannons, each weighing around five hundred pounds. After being lugged across a small yard, the artillery pieces were temporarily hidden in the wood bin of the nearby South Writing School before being smuggled out of the city. The British sergeant guarding the gun house was overheard to exclaim, “I’ll be damned if these people won’t steal the teeth out of your head while you’re on guard!”

  One of the Bostonians who helped carry the cannons was the tanner William Dawes, who had a button on the cuff of his shirt jammed deep into his wrist by the weight of the brass barrel. After attempting to ignore the increasingly painful injury for several days, he finally visited Dr. Joseph Warren.

  “Dawes,” Warren asked, “how and when was this done?”

  When Dawes proved reluctant to answer him, Warren said, “You are right not to tell me. I had better not know.”

  One night later that fall, several old and very rusty iron cannons were secretly placed on a flat-bottomed boat and floated into the North End’s Mill Pond. The plan was to row them out into the harbor and up into a creek in Cambridge, where they could be transported into the interior of the province. Unfortunately the boat became trapped by the outgoing tide and was abandoned on the mudflats. The next morning, Admiral Graves confiscated the cannons, but this did not prevent the patriot owner from suing for their return, and in a surprise decision, the Admiralty Court determined that the navy “had no right by virtue of the Port Bill to stop or molest any boats carrying merchandise.”

  For Gage, the patriots’ complaints about British tyranny seemed utterly absurd since British law was what allowed them to work so assiduously at preparing themselves for a revolution. Never before (and perhaps since) had the inhabitants of a city under military occupation enjoyed as much freedom as the patriots of Boston.

  —

  One of Gage’s biggest concerns was providing winter quarters for an army that by the end of the fall was approaching three thousand men. He had originally planned to build barracks on the common. At first the town selectmen had approved of the idea, since the barracks would mean the soldiers did not have to take over houses in town, while the building project would provide much-needed work for the city’s carpenters. What the selectmen had not taken into account were the country people.

  As had become clear during the Powder Alarm, the most radical patriots were no longer in Boston; they were in the towns outside the city. Many of these country people believed that Boston should be abandoned by its inhabitants so that they could attack the soldiers and loyalists who remained. Perhaps not surprisingly, the country people did not agree with the Boston selectmen’s decision to cooperate with General Gage in the building of barracks, and a committee of representatives from the outlying towns convinced both the Boston selectmen and the Committee of Correspondence that the barracks should not be built. Andrews reported that Gage was heard to complain that “he can do very well with the Boston Selectmen but the damn country committees plague his soul out.”

  In desperation, the general was forced to reach out to John Hancock for help in convincing Boston’s carpenters to ignore the dictates of the various committees and resume work on the barracks on the common. For Gage, it was the ultimate humiliation. After having dismissed the arrogant merchant for the disrespect he had shown him as commander of the cadets, he was now reduced to pleading for Hancock’s assistance, which the patriot leader quite gladly refused.

  Making Gage’s position all the more untenable was the distressing lack of living quarters in Boston. Many patriot families had already left the city, but with the arrival of so many loyalist refugees, there were, Andrews judged, not even half the number of homes needed to house the soldiers and their families. Out of desperation, empty warehouses on the wharves and even rum distilleries, filled with the awful stench of the decaying organic matter left after fermenting molasses, were converted into barracks.

  As the fall turned to winter, those still confined to their tents on Boston Common, which included many of the soldiers’ wives and children, began to die. A new graveyard was established at the far corner of the common, and in only a few months’ time more than one hundred people had been b
uried. By December the soldiers had moved into their winter quarters, but that did not prevent disease from taking a terrible toll, and by January the regulars were dying at the rate of three to four a day. The ready availability of cheap rum, which the patriots were happy to foist on the regulars, was also killing its share of men. “Depend on it . . . ,” wrote one British commander, “[rum] will destroy more of us than the Yankees will.”

  Desertion had always been a problem, but now outright mutiny had become a genuine possibility. Already, one deserter had been executed on the common, his bullet-riddled body laid out on top of his coffin for all the regulars to see, and many soldiers were so brutally flogged that their ribs were laid bare—a horribly painful injury that often led to kidney problems and death. A cannon was moved into the center of town in the event, John Andrews claimed, of an uprising on the part of the troops—an irony that was not lost on anyone in this city, where the Boston Massacre was still vividly remembered.

  Gage now realized that his earlier claim that he could contain Massachusetts with a mere four regiments had been nothing but a deluded boast. By the end of October, he was writing Lord Dartmouth that no less than twenty thousand soldiers were required to retake New England. He knew this might seem like an absurd figure to the ministry back in London, but he assured Dartmouth that such a large army “will in the end save Great Britain both blood and treasure.”

  —

  The country people had succeeded in shutting down the colony’s legislature and courts. Trapped in Boston, Gage was powerless to exert any control beyond the borders of the city. Each town had its own selectmen to manage local affairs, but some kind of colony-wide political body had to be created, or the patriot movement would grind to a disorganized halt. If Gage decided to break out of Boston and seize more of their munitions, it might be necessary to defend themselves from the British soldiers. Each town had its own militia, but at some point the colony might need to raise its own provincial army. The soldiers would need to be paid; provisions and equipment would need to be purchased, and for that to happen taxes needed to be collected. An extralegal government of some sort must be created, and in October a new era arrived in Massachusetts with the sitting of the first Provincial Congress in Concord.

  Representatives from throughout the province, many of them former members of the General Court, traveled to Concord, where they convened at the town’s meetinghouse. “You would have thought yourself in an assembly of Spartans or ancient Romans,” Joseph Warren enthused in a letter to a patriot friend, “had you been a witness to the ardor which inspired those who spoke upon the important business they were transacting.”

  In truth, however, the 260 members of the Provincial Congress were deeply divided. Some thought they should revert to Massachusetts’s original charter from 1629, which would allow them to elect their own governor. It would be a way to get the colony functioning again without declaring independence from Britain. Others saw this as a needless ruse—why not simply create a new government out of whole cloth and get on with it? The debates were kept in secret, so there is no direct evidence of what was being said, but we do know that Warren and the other Boston delegates (which included John Hancock, who served as the Congress’s president) found themselves “by far the most moderate men.” In several letters to Samuel Adams in Philadelphia, Warren asked for his mentor’s advice. They must, Adams responded in so many words, refrain from doing much of anything; otherwise they ran the danger of causing the other colonies to think twice about supporting Massachusetts. In the meantime, Warren remained “rapacious for the intelligence” that might provide the guidance he so desperately needed.

  Warren’s sense of isolation only increased when his good friend Josiah Quincy left at the end of September for London. It was time that a patriot from Boston challenged the version of events that former governor Thomas Hutchinson and other loyalists were promulgating in England, and Quincy was just the man to do it. There was, however, the issue of Quincy’s health. Back in February 1773, Warren had witnessed his friend’s most recent will and testament, and with both the patient and his doctor hoping for the best, Quincy departed in secret from Salem.

  Quincy’s was just one of several departures by noted patriots that fall. Dr. Thomas Young, a transplant from Albany, New York, was one of Boston’s most passionate patriots, and he had already suffered two near-fatal beatings in the streets of Boston. The physician seemed unfazed by the incidents, but it was another matter for his wife, who began to weep whenever Young left the house. When Gage began building the fortifications at the town gate, she became so “enveloped [in] constant terrors” that she took to her bed and appeared, Young wrote to Samuel Adams, “as inanimate as a corpse.” Young decided he must “seek an asylum for her,” and in the middle of September he abruptly moved his family to Providence, Rhode Island.

  About a month later, the patriot William Molineux, whom John Rowe described as “the first leader of dirty matters,” died after a brief illness. The loyalists gossiped that Molineux had actually killed himself (with laudanum provided by Joseph Warren) when it was discovered that he’d been embezzling money from the owner of the wharf he managed. In any event, Warren was suddenly without three of the movement’s most active members.

  He inevitably began to rely more on the physician and Committee of Correspondence member Dr. Benjamin Church. Whereas Warren was known for his openhearted pursuit of liberty, Church had a talent for withering sarcasm. Like Warren, he had composed at least one patriot song, but unlike Warren he had also written a loyalist parody of his own composition. That Church got away with such unsettling behavior was a tribute to his arrogant brilliance, and Paul Revere later maintained that since the patriots “needed every strength, they feared, as well as courted him.” For his part, Warren “had not the greatest affection for [Church],” according to Revere. One wonders, however, if Warren had had much enthusiasm for the dirty trickster Molineux. Then as now, just because two people were of the same political affiliation did not mean that they necessarily liked each other.

  —

  On November 9, the delegates from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia finally returned to Boston, and the church bells were ringing till midnight. The Congress had agreed to an intercolonial commercial boycott of British goods, but in the interests of maintaining unanimity among the colonies at this critical moment, the delegates had refrained from sanctioning the creation of a full-fledged alternative government in Massachusetts. Any additional measures would have to wait until the second Continental Congress in the spring. Until then, the province must remain in a tense state of limbo—unless, of course, someone, whether it be Gage or the patriots, made the first move.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Unnatural Contest

  During the second week in December, the Boston Committee of Correspondence learned that Gage was about to retrieve the powder stored in New Hampshire’s version of the Castle—Fort William and Mary, situated on a small island near Portsmouth. Paul Revere was sent to warn the town’s citizens, and on December 14 several hundred men assaulted the poorly defended fort. The handful of British soldiers stationed there were quickly subdued, and soon the fort’s powder was in patriot hands. Just to make sure, the next day another group returned to take the fort’s cannons. As soon as he heard of the theft, Gage ordered Admiral Graves to dispatch two ships for Portsmouth, which after pounding through a brutal winter storm, arrived too late to be of any help.

  But as it turned out, the patriots had been misinformed. Gage had not yet decided to provoke another powder alarm in Portsmouth. If New Hampshire governor Wentworth was to be believed, many local patriots began to regret the haste with which they’d responded to Revere’s alarm as the magnitude of what they’d done started to sink in. If Gage had been so inclined, the two warships now anchored beside Portsmouth could have destroyed the town with their cannons.

  It was a change of heart that was detectable through
out New England in the early winter of 1775. All fall the patriots had been on a violent spree as angry crowds forced mandamus councillors to renounce their crown-appointed positions. To be fair, some of the crowds’ actions were largely symbolic. In the town founded by the Pilgrims in 1620, the famed Plymouth Rock (or at least a piece of it) was extracted from the waterfront and placed in a spot of honor on the town’s main street. In Taunton, a flag that read “Liberty and Union” was hoisted on a 112-foot liberty pole (a branchless alternative to Boston’s Liberty Tree that had become popular throughout the colonies). But there were also more than a few instances of needless cruelty.

  In the fall of 1774, a thirty-one-year-old farmer named Jesse Dunbar made the mistake of buying an ox from a mandamus councillor in Marshfield named Nathaniel Ray Thomas. Soon after Dunbar had slaughtered the ox at his farm in Plymouth, he was visited by a committee of patriots. Claiming that he had violated the boycott against buying British goods, the patriots loaded the dead ox on a cart and stuffed Dunbar into its eviscerated body. The patriots proceeded to take Dunbar and the ox on a tour of the surrounding towns. By the time they reached Kingston, Dunbar was having difficulty breathing inside the fetid carcass. When he was allowed to walk beside the cart, however, the crowd accused him of intentionally tripping a child and stuffed him back into the ox. In Duxbury, the crowd pushed the animal’s slippery innards in Dunbar’s face before finally dumping him and the ox in front of Thomas’s house in Marshfield.