Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  That Gage was reading these espionage reports, which included dispatches from several other spies, is indicated by the fact that in February he sent a battalion of troops under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Leslie to capture the cannons that were reported to be in Salem. As in the earlier Powder Alarm, the soldiers were transported by water, but unlike that operation, the effort of Leslie’s battalion was unsuccessful, not because of misinformation on the part of Church or the other informants, but because the quick-witted locals used a raised drawbridge to delay the regulars’ arrival in Salem until the armaments had been moved.

  Gage also employed his own soldiers as spies. At the end of February he sent out two officers disguised as surveyors to scout out the roads to Worcester. Equipped with reddish handkerchiefs, brown-colored clothes, and sketch pads, they created maps and drawings of the countryside. They observed the militia practicing on the town common in Framingham. They found occasional respite in the households of a handful of loyalists, but for the most part they were under almost constant scrutiny by the many suspicious patriots they encountered and in several instances were forced to flee for their lives. When they returned to Boston after a night at a loyalist’s tavern in Weston, some of the first British officers they saw were Generals Gage and Haldimand and their aides-de-camp, inspecting the fortifications on the Neck. The two spies had so effectively adapted themselves to the alien world of patriot New England that not until they had reintroduced themselves did Gage and even some of their close friends finally recognize who they were.

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  Josiah Quincy Jr. was engaged in another kind of reconnaissance. For most Americans, England was an abstraction: a mythical homeland that despite its geographic distance from America remained an almost obsessive part of their daily lives. Quincy, along with many other patriot leaders, had been under the impression that the mother country was bloated, dissolute, and weak with rot. Almost immediately upon his arrival in Plymouth, however, he was distressed to discover that he had completely underestimated the strength of the British Empire. “My ideas of the riches and powers of this great nation,” he wrote in his diary after a tour of the naval docks, “are increased to a degree I should not have believed if it had been predicted [to] me.” When he reached London on November 17, he wrote, “The numbers, opulence &c, of this great city far surpass all I had imagined. My ideas are upon the wreck, my astonishment amazing.”

  On November 19, after meeting Benjamin Franklin, who became an intimate friend over the course of the next few months, Quincy found himself in the presence of Lord North. Quincy was one of Boston’s foremost lawyers and had been part of the patriot inner circle for years, but he was an ingenue when it came to the British ministry. North was as seasoned and artful a politician as the Empire possessed, and he spoke with Quincy for two hours. Ingratiating and surprisingly respectful, North succeeded in getting Quincy to speak his mind even as the prime minister conveyed his determination “to effect the submission of the colonies.” When Quincy blamed the current problems on “gross misrepresentation and falsehood” on the part of former governor Thomas Hutchinson, North replied that “very honest [men] frequently gave a wrong state of matters through mistake, prejudice, prepossessions and bypasses of one kind or other.” Quincy, who wrote of how “much pleasure” his conversation with the prime minister gave him, seems to have failed to realize that North’s statement could also apply to himself. In a subsequent conversation with Hutchinson, who was also in London at the time, the prime minister described Quincy as “designing to be artful without abilities to conceal his design.”

  North seems to have underestimated the young American lawyer. Quincy may have lacked the polish of a ministry veteran, but he demonstrated a refreshing ability to listen and learn as he sometimes fumbled his way through the complex and essentially foreign world of the British political system. On November 24, he spoke for an hour and a half with Lord Dartmouth; on November 29, he witnessed the grand procession of the king (“I was not awestruck with the pomp,” he wrote); on December 16, he went to the House of Commons (where he “heard Lord North explain what he meant when he said he would have America at his feet”); on January 1, he conversed with Colonel Isaac Barré, who despite being a friend to America had voted for the Port Bill and was offended by some of Quincy’s remarks; and on January 20, in what proved to be the highlight of his trip to London, he attended the debates in the House of Lords and watched as Lord Chatham (whom Quincy compared to “an old Roman Senator”) spoke eloquently on the colonies’ behalf. All the while, Quincy was in discussions with a host of patriot-sympathizers, many of whom insisted that it was time for Massachusetts to act.

  Quincy, along with just about all political observers of the time, including Benjamin Franklin, was unaware of the extent to which Lord North had moved beyond the hard-line posturing of the last few months. It was true that on February 2, he had declared in Parliament that Massachusetts was now in a state of rebellion. He was also pushing forward yet another Coercive Act directed at shutting down the coastal fishery upon which New England depended. But he also had hit upon a seemingly counterintuitive idea that he believed would solve everything. Britain should refrain altogether from directly taxing America and allow each colony to determine on its own how to pay for the costs associated with its defense and civil government. Known as his “Conciliatory Proposition,” this plan represented a way for Britain to offer America an important concession without completely compromising its own authority. Thomas Hutchinson was so encouraged by the proposal that on February 22 he wrote his son back in Massachusetts, “I hope peace and order will return to you before the summer is over, and that I shall return before winter.”

  Parliament, however, was in no mood for conciliation. Many members were confused and frustrated by North’s sudden change of direction and gave the proposal little credence. But perhaps the biggest obstacle to finding a solution was the communication lag between Britain and her colonies. A ship took about a month to cross the Atlantic with news from America. When combined with the time required for the king and his ministry to work out a Parliament-approved response to each new development in Massachusetts, plus the extra month required to get that response back to America, misunderstandings between the British Empire and her increasingly indignant colonies were unavoidable. After a decade of building tension, Britain and Massachusetts had been reduced to shouting at each other across a vast and storm-tossed sea.

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  By the end of February, Quincy had decided that he must return home to Boston and communicate everything he had learned to Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren. Back in December, he had begun to spit up blood, and Franklin feared that his “zeal for the public . . . will eat him up.” Franklin was also troubled by Quincy’s growing conviction that war had become the only alternative. In early March, after the two talked long into the night, Franklin succeeded in convincing Quincy that caution, not a reckless need for action, was the best policy. “I was charmed,” Quincy recorded. “I renounced my own opinion. I became a convert to his. . . . This interview may be a means of preventing much calamity and producing much good to Boston and the Massachusetts Bay, and in the end to all America.” Although more than three thousand miles away in London, Quincy was being whipsawed by the same opposing opinions that were then being voiced on the floor of the Provincial Congress in Concord.

  The day before his departure, Quincy had one last interview with Franklin, who asserted, “By no means take any step of great consequence (unless on a sudden emergency) without advice of the Continental Congress.” As long as Massachusetts was able to avoid outright violence for the next year and a half and America adhered to the nonimportation agreement, Franklin believed that Parliament must be forced to relent and “the day is won.”

  On March 4, suffering from “fever and spasms” and still spitting up blood, Quincy sailed for New England. Throughout his stay in London he had been writing to his wife Ab
igail, who had given birth to a daughter just before he left for England. Their son Josiah had turned three in February. If all went well, Quincy would be in Boston by the middle of April.

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  March 5, the fifth anniversary of the Boston Massacre, was a Sunday, so the annual oration was delayed to Monday. Almost everyone in Boston—including Gage, who put the regiments on alert that day—expected trouble. The already harassed regulars were inevitably going to resent an oration whose very purpose was, in the words of Samuel Adams, “to commemorate a massacre perpetuated by soldiers and to show the danger of standing armies.” Even though he had already delivered a Massacre Day Oration three years ago, Dr. Joseph Warren was asked to do it again. If there was trouble, Samuel Adams wanted someone of Warren’s experience and resolve in the pulpit.

  March 6 was exceptionally warm, with the temperature in the mid-fifties. At 10:00 a.m., Bostonians began to file into the Old South Meetinghouse, and before long the pews were crowded with people, some of them British officers. Expecting them “to beat up a breeze,” Adams invited the officers to sit in the pews directly in front of the pulpit so that they “might have no pretence to behave ill, for it is a good maxim in politics as well as war to put and keep the enemy in the wrong.” This put the soldiers uncomfortably close to the many leading patriots in attendance, which included Samuel Adams (the meeting’s moderator), John Hancock, Benjamin Church, town clerk William Cooper (brother of the minister Samuel Cooper), and the Boston selectmen. The estimated thirty to forty British officers were not only sitting in pews; some, it was said, were seated on the steps leading up to the pulpit, which had been draped in black cloth. Surrounding the officers and town dignitaries were at least five thousand townspeople. A soldier claimed that every man in this immense crowd held “a short stick or bludgeon in his hand.” “It is certain both sides were ripe for it,” First Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie recorded in his diary, “and a single blow would have occasioned the commencement of hostilities.” “Every person was silent,” another witness remembered, “and every countenance seemed to denote that some event of consequence might be expected.”

  Around eleven o’clock, a one-horse chaise containing Warren and a servant could be heard clattering down Cornhill to Marlborough Street. Rather than immediately entering the meetinghouse, they disappeared into the apothecary’s across the street. One observer noticed that the servant held a bundle in his hands.

  A few minutes later, Warren emerged, dressed in what was described as a “Ciceronian toga.” It was an outrageous act of dramatic symbolism. A toga—a twenty-foot-long piece of cloth that is folded and wrapped around the wearer’s body, its outer edge draped over the left shoulder—was what was worn by a citizen of Rome and distinguished him from a soldier and a slave. At Harvard, Warren had performed the play Cato with his classmates. In that play, Cato, the devout republican who courageously opposes Caesar’s tyranny, speaks inspiringly of the sacredness of liberty. On March 6, 1775, Warren, clad in a toga, was about to perform before both his fellow townspeople and the soldiers who had made Boston a city of occupation.

  Since the aisles of the meetinghouse were jammed with people, Warren was taken around to the back of the building, where he was able to access the pulpit from a rear window, making an entrance almost as dramatic as when he had burst through the open window of a Harvard dorm room. He stood before his audience in “a Demosthenian posture,” a loyalist reported, “with a white handkerchief in his right hand, and his left hand in his breeches.” For the vast majority of those present, Warren’s evocative histrionics intensified the already surging emotions of the moment. For those who did not share in his point of view, however, Warren’s antics were downright juvenile, and he was, the loyalist wrote, “groaned at by people of understanding.” Warren began to speak with the high-pitched nasal delivery that had been a staple of New England ministers since the early seventeenth century, and one loyalist commented derisively on his “true puritanical whine.”

  But the speech that might have been an incendiary taunt directed at the British soldiers turned out to be surprisingly respectful of all those present. When Warren talked about what had happened on March 5, 1770, he did not dwell on the savagery of the soldiers; instead he focused on the agony and despair of the families who had lost loved ones that night. As many of those gathered there in the Old South Meetinghouse knew, Warren had lost a father in his youth, and he seems to have drawn upon the traumatic memories of his younger brothers when he told of a widow and her children witnessing the final death throes of a husband and parent. “Come widowed mourner,” Warren melodramatically intoned, “here satiate thy grief; behold the murdered husband gasping on the ground, and to complete the pompous show of wretchedness, bring in each hand thy infant children to bewail their father’s fate. Take heed, ye orphan babes, lest, whilst your streaming eyes are fixed upon the ghastly corpse, your feet glide on the stones bespattered with your father’s brain.” This was a scene made not from the empty political rhetoric of the day but from the darkest collective memories of the Warren family.

  When he did mention the soldiers, he was sure to offer them a backhanded compliment that also served as a kind of warning. Just as Peter the Great had learned “the art of war” from King Charles of Sweden, only to use that knowledge to defeat his former mentor, so were the people of Boston taking careful note of the soldiers’ exercises on the common. “The exactness and beauty of their discipline,” he said, no doubt with a nod to the officers assembled around him, “inspire our youth with ardor in the pursuit of military knowledge.”

  At one point during the speech, a captain of the Royal Welch Fusiliers who was seated on the stairs near the pulpit responded with a warning of his own. He held up his hand; arranged on his open palm were several lead bullets. Not missing a beat, Warren dropped his white handkerchief onto the officer’s hand.

  It was the ideal time for Warren to launch into a paragraph he appears to have added at the last minute. “An independence of Great Britain is not our aim,” he insisted. “No, our wish is that Britain and the colonies may, like the oak and the ivy, grow and increase in strength together.” What they all wanted was that this “unnatural contest between a parent honored and a child beloved” result in long-lasting peace. “But if these pacific measures are ineffectual,” Warren cautioned, “and it appears that the only way to safety is through fields of blood, I know you will not turn your faces from your foes, but will, undauntedly, press forward, until tyranny is trodden under foot, and you have fixed your adored goddess Liberty . . . on the American throne.”

  Not until after Warren had finished did the excitement begin. Once the applause had died down, Samuel Adams rose from his seat and, standing beside the pulpit, proclaimed that the thanks of the town should be extended to Warren “for his elegant and spirited oration and that another oration should be delivered on the fifth of March next to commemorate the bloody massacre of the fifth of March 1770.” The use of the word massacre immediately drew a response from the officers, many of whom began to hiss while others shouted, “Oh fie! Oh fie!”

  Bostonians in the eighteenth century had a decidedly different accent from the British, especially when it came to the pronunciation of the letter r. Instead of “Fie!” they heard the officers shouting “Fire!” Mistakenly fearing that the meetinghouse was about to be consumed in flames, they began to run for the doors as others leaped out the first-story windows. Adding to the “great bustle” inside the church was the sudden appearance of the Forty-Third Regiment, its fife and drums blaring, outside the front door. Many of the patriot leaders gathered around the podium became convinced that the regulars had come to arrest them and hurriedly joined the general exodus out of the meetinghouse.

  As it turned out, the soldiers had just returned from a brief march into the countryside and had no interest in what was going on inside the Old South. As the regiment continued down the street and the people inside the meetin
ghouse came to the realization that there was no fire, Samuel Adams called them back to order. After conducting what little business remained, the meeting was adjourned.

  As had occurred in Cambridge during the Powder Alarm in September, at Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth in December, and in Salem as recently as February, when Lieutenant Colonel Leslie attempted to seize the patriots’ cannons, an outbreak of deadly violence had somehow been averted. One could only wonder when and where the next crisis might arise.

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  Instead of bloodshed, the British officers chose to respond to Warren’s Massacre Day Oration with ridicule. On Thursday, March 9, Thomas Ditson, a farmer from the town of Billerica, tried to buy a musket from one of the soldiers. After cheating him out of his money, the regulars did unto the patriot yokel what the patriots had been doing to the loyalists. They seized Ditson, coated him with tar and feathers, and to the outrage of the inhabitants, paraded him through the streets of town. Soon after, a delegation from Billerica complained to Gage, who pretended, at least, to be equally upset.

  Almost a week later, on Wednesday, March 15, the day of the much-ballyhooed publication of Warren’s speech, the regulars countered with an oration of their own. What John Andrews described as “a vast number of officers” assembled on King Street, where they conducted a mock town meeting that chose a moderator and seven selectmen. This group of dignitaries then proceeded into the nearby British Coffee House, where they soon appeared on the balcony overlooking the street. Among them was the orator, who instead of a white toga, wore “a black gown with a rusty grey wig and fox tail hanging to it.” This was the loyalist physician Thomas Bolton from Salem, who began to read an oration that may have been written by the turncoat Benjamin Church, who is one of the handful of patriot leaders not mentioned in this biting and contemptuous screed.