Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  By the winter, as the once-raging fires of patriot anger began to die down, a backlash of sorts commenced. On December 22, 1774, Timothy Ruggles, a veteran of the French and Indian War and a mandamus councillor from Hardwick, sent a proclamation to the newspapers calling for a loyalist resistance movement among the patriot-dominated towns outside Boston. What he called the “Association” included the pledge, “We will upon all occasions, with our lives and fortunes, stand by and assist each other in the defense of life, liberty, and property whenever the same shall be attacked or endangered by any bodies of men, riotously assembled upon any pretence, or under any authority not warranted by the laws of the land.” The Taunton lawyer Daniel Leonard began a series of articles under the byline Massachusettensis that so effectively questioned the legitimacy of the patriot movement that John Adams, just back from the Continental Congress, felt compelled to respond as Novanglus. In a January 18, 1775, letter to Lord Dartmouth, Gage claimed that thanks to Leonard “the absurdity of the resolves of the Continental Congress [had been] exposed in a masterly manner.” Now that the people had had the “leisure of reflection and think seriously of their danger,” they had become, Gage reported, “terrified at what they have done.”

  Nine days later, Gage was pleased to inform Dartmouth “that the towns in this province become more divided, notwithstanding the endeavors used to keep up their enthusiasm.” In Marshfield, the home of Nathaniel Ray Thomas, the mandamus councillor who had sold Jesse Dunbar the ox, and one of the few towns in Massachusetts where there were more loyalists than patriots, the citizens requested that Gage send a battalion of regulars to defend them from the militiamen of the surrounding towns. Gage gladly dispatched one hundred soldiers under the command of Captain Nesbitt Balfour, who took up residence in the buildings associated with Thomas’s large estate, and Marshfield became one of the few loyalist outposts beyond Boston in Massachusetts.

  Even in once-belligerent Worcester, the patriot movement was showing distressing signs of infighting and waning momentum. “[We] are in a most lamentable situation . . . ,” Ephraim Doolittle wrote John Hancock. “Our Tory enemies using all their secret machinations to divide us and break us to pieces. . . . I fear if we are not soon called to action we shall be like a rope of sand and have no more strength.”

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  By the beginning of the new year, Gage had long since been joined by his wife Margaret and the rest of their extended family, which included his adjutant and brother-in-law Stephen Kemble. The extraordinarily capable engineer Captain John Montresor helped oversee the building of the fortifications at the town entrance, which by January had been finished off with a coat of whitewash. One of Gage’s most trusted associates was the Swiss-born General Frederick Haldimand, who had recently arrived from New York and taken up residence in a house near the common.

  In an incident that started in a way reminiscent of what had proved to be John Malcom’s undoing, Haldimand was approached by a “committee” of boys who complained that his servant had thrown ashes on the coasting, or sledding, path that ran past his house. Slipping into the patriot rhetoric of the day, the boys explained that “their fathers before them had improved it as a coast from time immemorial” and requested that the snow and ice in front of the general’s house be returned to its former state. Haldimand was happy to oblige, and when he later told Gage of the encounter, his commander wearily responded that “it was impossible to beat the notion of liberty out of the people, as it was rooted in ’em from their childhood.”

  Gage received much criticism that winter from both sides. Many of the patriots viewed him as the hated tool of the North administration, while his own officers dismissed him as “an old woman” who pandered unnecessarily to the townspeople. Gage realized that the simmering tension between the soldiers and Bostonians could explode at any moment into a bloody act of violence that might spark a war. Since he could always discipline his own troops, the townspeople were his chief concern, and he made every effort to address their demands, however irritating and seemingly inconsequential. Since this took up a disproportionate amount of his time, he proved less available to the many mandamus councillors who had been forced to take up residence in the city. John Andrews commented that while Gage was “always ready to attend to” the selectmen and other community leaders, “the poor refugee councilors are obliged to walk the entry [of Province House] for hours before they can be admitted to audience.” Inevitably contributing to Gage’s coolness to the councillors was their reluctance to testify against the patriot leaders, and Andrews was convinced that Gage secretly “despises them from his heart.”

  Gage’s relationship with Admiral Graves was also less than ideal. The frosty decorum that existed between the two commanders in the summer quickly degenerated in December with the arrival of several hundred marines under the command of Major John Pitcairn. The marines existed in a kind of jurisdictional netherworld between the army and the navy (John Andrews claimed they exemplified the worst attributes of both), and Graves, who was as volatile and outspoken as Gage was courteous, objected to the general’s insistence that the marines remain under his sole control. When later in the winter Graves’s blockade turned away a vessel with much-needed supplies for the soldiers stationed in Boston, even the mild-mannered Gage had difficulty controlling his temper.

  Some observers attributed the acrimony between the two leaders to their wives, who, like their husbands, vied for dominance within the increasingly circumscribed world of Boston. In addition to being beautiful, Margaret was reported to be strong-willed, and one British officer even claimed that Thomas Gage “was governed by his wife.” Another officer reported that a ball held on January 11 was the result of a subscription scheme “proposed by Mrs. Gage and carried into execution by her favorites by which she enjoyed a dance and opportunity of seeing her friends at no expense.” Despite the plight of thousands of British soldiers and sailors who suffered from insufficient supplies of food and terrible living conditions, the officers continued to enjoy the finer things in life.

  On February 27 both the Gages and the Graveses attended a ball to which “a great number of the gentlemen and ladies of the town” were also invited. This may have been the event described late in life by Bostonian Hannah Mather Crocker, who had vivid memories of the women’s sumptuous clothes as they glided across the dance floor to the rhythm of a minuet or rigadoon: “Two or three tiers of ruffles on the gown and works of lace and muslin, long ruffles double or triple, the hair powdered white. . . . And all was harmony and peace as the tiptoe step [of the ladies] was scarcely heard, so lightly did they skim along the floor. . . . The gentlemen’s dress . . . was neat and elegant: a white broadcloth coat with the silver basket button [and] silver vellum trimmed buttonhole on blue cloth with gold vellum, satin waistcoat and small cloths with gold or silver knee bands. . . . A handsome worked ruffle around the hand formed a fop complete.” For Crocker, who as a little girl had witnessed the destruction of her relative Thomas Hutchinson’s house in the North End, what she called “The Last Queen’s Ball” marked the sad and inevitable end of an era.

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  The previous fall, the Provincial Congress had formed the Committee of Safety, which in the absence of a governor assumed many of the province’s executive responsibilities as Massachusetts prepared for possible war. John Hancock was the committee’s chairman, but Joseph Warren quickly distinguished himself as its most active member. One of the committee’s immediate concerns was creating an adequate stockpile of military stores for a projected army of fifteen thousand men. That winter, large amounts of goods and materials made their way to the town of Concord: 4 brass fieldpieces, 2 mortars, 15,000 canteens, 1,000 tents, 10 tons of lead balls, 300 bushels of peas and beans, 20 hogsheads of rum, 20 hogsheads of molasses, 1,000 hogsheads of salt, 150 quintals of fish, 1,000 pounds of candles, 20 casks of raisins, 20 bushels of oatmeal, 1,500 yards of Russian linen, 15 chests of medicine, and 17,000 pounds of salt
cod. John Andrews ascribed the high food prices in Boston that winter to the incredible amount of provisions stored not just in Concord but “in every town in the country.”

  Since the colony’s inhabitants were not about to donate these supplies, funds had to be collected to finance their purchase. In the fall, the Provincial Congress had appointed a treasurer to collect the taxes that would have otherwise been paid to a crown-supported government. To no one’s surprise, the collection of funds lagged well behind what they had previously been. It was to be a persistent problem: everyone wanted liberty, it seemed, but far fewer were willing to pay for the army that might be required to win that liberty.

  In the winter of 1775, Joseph Warren was in desperate need of funds to purchase the provincial army’s medical supplies. Despite having a flourishing medical practice, he was, he admitted, “much in need of cash.” So he approached his three brothers about donating “a large portion of their small paternal estate” to the cause. That apparently not being enough, Warren had no qualms about approaching his younger brother John, who owed him money for his medical education. John had just started practicing medicine in Salem, and despite the fact that he was barely making ends meet, his older brother asked him to take out a loan for the not-inconsiderable sum of two hundred pounds. Unlike Joseph Warren, who had a history of running through vast sums of money, John had an “abhorrence of debt” and balked at the request. That did not prevent Warren from not so gently asking once again, and in April he purchased from the Boston apothecary John Greenleaf five chests of medical supplies at fifty pounds each with cash that may or may not have come from his younger brother John.

  Warren was not a man of moderation; everything in his astoundingly varied life—from his family and loved ones, to his medical practice, to being grand master of the St. Andrew’s Masonic Lodge—had become caught up in the push for American liberty. By that winter, what was already for Warren a somewhat injudicious intermingling of private and public worlds became even more complicated when it was revealed that one of the people they all trusted was a spy.

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  As early as November, Paul Revere was approached by someone whom he described as having “connections with the Tory party but was a Whig at heart.” This unnamed patriot with ties to the loyalists was, in all probability, the twenty-four-year-old bookseller Henry Knox, who had recently married the dark-haired and beautiful Lucy Flucker, daughter of the province’s secretary, Thomas Flucker. Knox’s marriage to a member of Boston’s loyalist aristocracy may have given him access to the inner workings of the Gage administration, but there was also his bookstore on Cornhill. Frequented by officers of both the British army and navy, the London Bookstore reflected Knox’s personal interest in military matters (he was an officer in the town’s artillery company), and Knox often found himself in conversation with some of Gage’s intimates. At one point he overheard a naval officer revealing that the sailors aboard His Majesty’s ships in Boston “were grown so uneasy and tumultuous, that it was with great difficulty they could govern them.” The army officer he was talking to responded that they were having, if anything, even more trouble with the soldiers. By January, this tidbit of information was being repeated by patriots throughout Boston and beyond.

  That fall, the patriots had formed a secret committee composed of around thirty men—mostly artisans and mechanics and including Paul Revere—who kept a watchful eye on the movements of the British. The mechanics met regularly at the Green Dragon Tavern and reported their findings to Warren, Hancock, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Church, and a handful of others. Knox informed Revere that the “meetings were discovered,” and as proof, repeated almost word for word what had been said during a meeting at the Green Dragon just the night before. Revere and the others tried changing the venue of their meetings, but soon discovered that “all our transactions were communicated to Governor Gage.”

  Knox also revealed that even the supposedly secret proceedings of the Provincial Congress were known to his father-in-law. “It was then a common opinion,” Revere wrote, “that there was a traitor in the Provincial Congress, and that Gage was possessed of all their secrets.” The question was who.

  By the winter of 1775 the core group of patriot leaders had spent an intense, emotionally exhausting decade together; they were markedly different sorts of people, but they were all part of a political brotherhood that had come to define their lives. None of them appears to have wanted to face the possibility that there was a Judas in their midst.

  They knew that Gage (as had Hutchinson before him) had made overtures to just about all of them. Joseph Warren appears to have genuinely liked the general, and in a letter written to Josiah Quincy in late November even admitted to having had several “private conversations” with Gage, whom he described as “a man of honest, upright principles, and one desirous of accommodating the difference between Great Britain and her colonies in a just and honorable way.” If this was true, wasn’t it possible to claim that leaking supposed secrets to the British might actually work to the patriots’ advantage if the information allowed the two sides to come to a mutually beneficial resolution?

  Back in 1768, as master of the St. Andrew’s Masonic Lodge, Warren had shown a willingness to reach out to the British regulars who had recently arrived in Boston. Up until that point, Warren’s efforts to elevate St. Andrew’s to grand lodge status had been stymied by Boston’s older and more well-to-do St. John’s Masonic Lodge, whose members had shown nothing but scorn for the upstart rival. By forming a temporary alliance with the British soldiers who were masons, Warren was able to gain the support he needed to put his own lodge on an equal footing with St. John’s. Never losing sight of his ultimate goal, Warren had forged a successful partnership with those who, by all rights, should have been his enemies.

  Eight years later, Warren demonstrated a similar pragmatism in his willingness to confide in Thomas Gage. In fact, after events came to a violent head at Lexington and Concord, Warren wrote to Gage and essentially apologized for not having told him more. “I have many things which I wish to say to your Excellency,” he wrote, “and most sincerely wish I had broken through the formalities which I thought due to your rank, and freely have told you all I knew or thought of public affairs; and I must ever confess, whatever may be the event, that you generously gave me such an opening as I now think I ought to have embraced.” In the winter of 1775 Gage and the patriots were not yet at war; they were in the midst of a most problematic swirl of ever-changing events, and no one knew where they were headed. For those such as Warren, who honestly wanted relations between the colonies and the mother country to be set right, speaking openly with the other side was not necessarily wrong, and this may have, in part, contributed to their unwillingness to identify the traitor among them.

  The fact remained, however, that there was a traitor, and his name was Dr. Benjamin Church.

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  Church’s profession was perfectly suited to being a spy. Only a doctor could meet with a nonstop parade of people from all walks of life without creating suspicion. He was one of the few physicians in New England who had been trained in Europe, and he possessed a cosmopolitan haughtiness that he seems to have used to good effect amid the stodgy provincials of Boston. When asked why he socialized with so many loyalists, he claimed to be using them for his own political purposes. The force of Church’s judgmental, often audacious personality seems to have put almost everyone on the defensive and allowed him to meet regularly with those who could have easily provided Gage with Church’s detailed reports.

  His father of the same name was one of Boston’s foremost auctioneers; his great grandfather of the same name had been a famous Indian fighter during King Philip’s War. The original Benjamin Church had mastered the strategy of using captured Indian warriors against their own people. In his narrative of the war, which had been recently reissued with engravings by Paul Revere, Church insisted that he’d followed the only
course that could have turned the conflict around for the English. He also admitted to having qualms about what he’d done. One wonders whether his great-grandson was ever troubled by similar concerns about the morality of his actions.

  Dr. Benjamin Church may not have been the most likable of men, but when one reads the reports he filed with Gage, one is impressed not by the cagey duplicity of the writer but by the objectivity—even honesty—of his observations. Indeed, he almost seems to have been performing the exact service that Joseph Warren later wished he had provided. And since no transcripts are known to exist of the debates of the Provincial Congress, Church’s reports, which remained among Gage’s personal papers for close to 150 years before they were finally discovered in the archives of the Clements Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, are the best record we have of what the patriots were thinking in the winter of 1775.

  On March 4, Church wrote, “A disposition to oppose the late parliamentary measures is become general. The parent of that disposition is a natural fondness for old custom and a jealousy [i.e., suspicion] of sinister designs on the part of the administration.” He attributed the “irresolute” workings of the Provincial Congress to “the discordant sentiments of their oracular leaders, partly from the weakness of the executive power of that body and partly from an inadequate knowledge in conducting their novel enterprise.” Various proposals to assume the old charter or form a military government had been rejected because “it would amount to a declaration of independency and revolt and thereby preclude the possibility of a peaceable accommodation.” The other concern was that such potentially radical actions “might produce a schism or rather give encouragement to some lukewarm brethren in other provinces to detach themselves from the present combination.” Church reported that the delegates had appointed generals to lead a possible provincial army and that if hostilities should commence, “the first opposition would be irregular, impetuous, and incessant from the numerous bodies that would swarm to the place of action and all actuated by an enthusiasm wild and ungovernable.” That said, the militiamen could be counted on, Church wrote, to fight with a lethal effectiveness: “The most natural and most eligible mode of attack on the part of the people is that of detached parties of bushmen who from their adroitness in the habitual use of the firelock suppose themselves sure of their mark of 200 [yards].” These remarkably prophetic words were written a month and a half before the first shots were fired at Lexington Green.