Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Unfortunately, Ammi did not succeed in immediately killing the infantryman. For more than an hour the soldier lay on the ground, his head chopped into a mess of splintered bone and brains, as both the British and the provincials waited for the return of Captain Parsons from Barrett Farm. Neither side knew what to do next. Smith apparently feared that any attempt on his part to cover Parsons’s retreat across the bridge might incite yet another attack from the provincials. So he returned to Concord’s village center and did nothing, which meant that Colonel Barrett on Punkatasset Hill was free to annihilate the British detachment when it returned to the North Bridge. But would Barrett be willing to resume hostilities?

  In this strange netherworld of paralysis and doubt, Parsons and his men finally made their way back toward the river. They knew nothing of what had occurred just an hour or so before and were disturbed to see that there were no longer any British troops at the bridge. As Parsons and his men glanced worriedly from hill to militia-covered hill, they inevitably picked up the pace until they were virtually running by the time they crossed over the river. The speed of their retreat did not prevent them from noticing, however, the horribly injured soldier, whom they assumed had been scalped.

  By noon, when Colonel Smith finally ordered the regulars to begin the march back to Boston, a rumor was working its way up and down the column: instead of just one, four soldiers had been “scalped, their eyes gouged, their noses and ears cut off.” What’s more, the colonists were likely to do the same to anyone else “they get alive, that are wounded and cannot get off the ground.”

  As far as the regulars were concerned, the militiamen were no longer fellow Englishmen. By butchering the soldiers’ fallen comrade beside the North Bridge, the provincials had revealed themselves to be anything but civilized members of the British Empire; they were, one soldier angrily insisted, “full as bad as the Indians.”

  Gone was the uncertainty of the morning’s march to Concord. From here on in, this was war.

  —

  Throughout what proved to be a very long, if only six-mile, march back to Lexington, Colonel Smith made use of flank guards—groups of between eighty and one hundred light infantrymen—who were sent out on either side of the road in an attempt to rid the countryside of militiamen who might threaten the column. As long as the country was relatively open, the flank guards proved quite effective. The trouble came when stone walls, swamps, rocky hills, and especially woodlands hindered the flank guards’ passage even as these natural features provided their enemies with the cover they needed to fire upon the column. Houses were both a threat and a lure. Not only could the provincials use them for cover but they were also a source of temptation for the flank guards, since each house contained food and drink as well as valuables that could be pawned in Boston to augment the soldiers’ meager pay.

  About a mile outside Concord, the British troops were approaching Meriam’s Hill, the same hill from which the local militia had watched them in the morning. So far the flanking parties had succeeded in keeping the surrounding countryside fairly free of snipers. At Meriam’s Hill, however, an intervening brook required that the light infantrymen on the left flank temporarily return to the road so that they could pass over a bridge.

  By this time, militia companies from several nearby towns, including Billerica (the home of Thomas Ditson, who had been tarred and feathered by the regulars back in March and was there that day, eager for revenge), Tewksbury, and Reading had recently arrived and taken up positions overlooking the road.

  Unlike the morning, when the regulars had arrived in Concord accompanied by fife and drum, no music was played that afternoon. Edmund Foster was serving as a volunteer with a minuteman company from Reading, and he remembered how “silence reigned on both sides” as the light infantrymen of the left flank guard returned to the road “without music or word being spoken that could be heard.”

  The regulars marched across the bridge. Somewhere a musket fired. The soldiers wheeled to their left and unleashed a volley. Their muskets fired high and missed their mark. The militiamen, having had time to take up positions behind stone walls and rocks, fired with more effectiveness, and Foster watched as “two British soldiers fell dead at a little distance from each other, in the road near the brook.” Lieutenant Jeremy Lister, one of the handful of officers to remain unscathed during the encounter at the North Bridge, took a musket ball in the right elbow. “The battle now began,” Foster remembered, “and was carried on with little or no military discipline and order, on the part of the Americans.”

  The provincials may have been improvising as they took up positions along the sometimes winding road to Lexington, but that did not prevent them from maintaining a deadly volume of fire. “We were fired on from houses and behind trees . . . [and] from all sides,” Lieutenant John Barker recorded in his diary, “but mostly from the rear, where people had hid themselves in houses till we had passed then fired.” What had seemed like just another country road in New England as they marched toward Concord earlier in the morning was now bristling with the muskets of militiamen that the regulars could not even see. Safely hidden behind walls, trees, and rocks, the provincials were revealed only by the telltale cloud of powder smoke as their musket balls rained down on the grenadiers with fatal effect.

  The militiamen used the stone walls to their advantage, but so did the British. These rugged partitions of granite boulders were often chest-high and topped with the trunks and branches of trees, and whenever the regulars marching along the road found themselves besieged on either side, they would, one Woburn militiaman remembered, “stoop for shelter from the stone walls as they ran by the ambush.”

  For the flanking parties, the fighting was less anonymous. Several times, the light infantrymen were able to surprise the militiamen, who were either too inexperienced to anticipate their presence or too preoccupied with firing at the column to notice that the soldiers were coming at them with their bayonets fixed. One New Englander later said it was the sound of the infantrymen running through the fresh spring grass, a predatory “swish, swish,” that he remembered most vividly about that terrible day. Some militiamen were able to escape the flankers with their lives, but others were less lucky. Bedford’s Captain Jonathan Wilson had predicted, “We’ll have every dog of [the British] before night.” Near the Hartwell farm (where a few hours before Mary Hartwell had admired the beauty of the passing column in the early morning light), Wilson was surprised from behind by some flankers and killed, as was Daniel Thompson from Woburn. By the time the fighting reached the Fiske farm outside Lexington, Isaac Davis’s Acton friend James Hayward had fired so many times that he had almost finished off an entire pound of gunpowder. Desperate for something to drink, he ran for a well, only to discover that a regular had the same idea. Both raised their muskets and fired. The regular was killed, but not before his musket ball fractured Hayward’s nearly empty powder horn into deadly splinters that pierced his abdomen and left him mortally wounded.

  It was a ruthless kind of fighting that even the experienced soldiers on both sides found profoundly troubling. Instead of a proper battlefield to contain the horror, they were fighting amid homes and farms. Both sides felt violated, and both sides found it necessary to regard the other as brutal and inhuman. Ever since the atrocity at the North Bridge, the regulars had viewed the provincials as tomahawk-wielding savages. For the New Englanders, this was King Philip’s War redux. “The people say,” the Reverend William Gordon reported, “that the soldiers are worse than the Indians.”

  Sergeant John Ford of Chelmsford had fought in the French and Indian War; so had Charles Furbush of Andover. At one point they came upon a regular stealing valuables from a roadside home, and together they rushed into the house and killed the soldier. Ford would kill a total of five regulars that day, but the fighting brought neither him nor Furbush any joy or satisfaction. “Our men seemed maddened with the sight of British blood and infuriated
to wreak vengeance on the wounded and helpless,” Furbush later told his grandson. At one point they came upon a fallen grenadier who’d been “stabbed again and again” by passing militiamen. “Remembering the day when they had called these men companions-in-arms,” the two veterans lifted up the dying soldier and gave him a drink of water.

  —

  On a hill outside Lexington, Captain John Parker and the remnants of his militia company waited for the British column. Earlier that morning their town, which had a total of 208 males over the age of sixteen in 1775, had lost 18 to death or injury. By this point, Colonel Smith and his regulars had been reduced to a similar state of suffering. They had just endured a series of ambushes that had killed and wounded more than two dozen men. They had long since given up any hope of reinforcements coming from Gage in Boston. They were running out of ammunition. It was on this hill that Parker’s company let forth their own devastating volley. “We were totally surrounded with such an incessant fire,” Lieutenant Barker wrote, “as it’s impossible to conceive.” Captain Parsons, the leader of the battalion that had searched the Barrett farm in Concord, was wounded, as was Colonel Smith, who was shot in the thigh. The regulars eventually cleared the hill, costing fifty-four-year-old militiaman Jedidiah Munroe, who’d been wounded on Lexington Green, his life. But the damage to Colonel Smith’s little army had been done. In the minutes ahead, during which Major Pitcairn was thrown from his horse amid yet another provincial onslaught, the British column fell into serious disarray. Today the rocky rise of land where the company from Lexington helped to initiate the collapse of Smith’s command is known as Parker’s Revenge.

  Soon after, at what was known as Concord Hill and is the last piece of high ground before Lexington Green, the British officers lost control of their men. “Our ammunition began to fail,” Ensign DeBerniere explained, “and the light companies were so fatigued with flanking they were scarce able to act, and a great number of wounded scarce able to get forward, made a great confusion.” With Smith and Pitcairn injured and with the bodies of the British dead strewn along the bloody road behind them, the soldiers started to run for the town green. The triangle of grass where the events of this long and disquieting day had begun was now looked to as a possible sanctuary. At least there were no stands of trees out of which yet another ambush might erupt. Perhaps here, on this wide stretch of open grass, they might be able to surrender. “We began to run rather than retreat in order . . . ,” DeBerniere remembered, “[the officers] attempted to stop the men and form them two deep, but to no purpose, the confusion increased rather than lessened.”

  Just as Lieutenant Barker, one of the few uninjured officers, resigned himself to either laying “down our arms or [being] picked off by the rebels at their pleasure,” the miraculous occurred. Up ahead, beyond the Lexington Meetinghouse, stretching across the road to Boston, was a long line of British regulars—more than 1,350 members of Hugh Percy’s First Brigade, assembled in what the weary and bleeding Lieutenant Sutherland claimed was “one of the best dispositions ever I saw.” What’s more, they had artillery with them, and as Smith’s ragged and exhausted column made its way toward Percy’s brigade, a cannonball ripped through the walls of the Lexington Meetinghouse and sent the provincials scurrying for cover. Sutherland remembered, “We began to entertain very sanguine hopes of our returning in safety to Boston.”

  But as they were soon to discover, the fighting had just begun.

  —

  Before leaving Boston, Percy’s brigade of almost fifteen hundred men had assembled on Tremont Street. The long line of regulars stretched all the way from the common’s elm-lined mall to the Queen Street Writing School, at least a quarter mile away, where thirteen-year-old Benjamin Russell was in his final year. The entire city, Russell remembered, was “in agitation.” For the boys of the Queen Street School, which was the poor man’s alternative to Boston Latin, these were tremendously exciting times, especially when Master Carter dismissed class that morning with the phrase, “Boys, the war’s begun, and you may run.”

  They were words that Russell and his compatriots took literally. When Percy’s brigade left Boston around nine that morning, the Queen Street boys followed close behind. Once in Roxbury, Percy’s fifers started playing “Yankee Doodle,” a song from the French and Indian War that mocked the provincials’ lack of social sophistication. But as it turned out, the boys would get the last laugh.

  As the British fifers had their fun with “Yankee Doodle,” a boy (who may or may not have been part of Russell’s entourage) began “jumping and laughing” to the point that Percy asked “at what he was laughing so heartily.” “To think,” the boy responded, “how you will dance by and by to ‘Chevy Chase.’” For hundreds of years, “Chevy Chase” had been one of the most popular ballads in Britain, and as it so happened, the song had a disturbing connection to Lord Percy’s family. In the ballad, Percy, Earl of Northumberland, leads an ill-advised hunting trip across the Scottish border that results in a bloody clash between Percy and his Scottish counterpart the Earl of Douglas, both of whom are ultimately killed. What had begun as a lighthearted march into the New England countryside had been darkened by the mention of an ancient act of bloodshed. According to the Roxbury minister William Gordon, the boy’s “repartee stuck by his lordship the whole day.”

  —

  Earlier that morning, a messenger arrived at Joseph Warren’s house on Hanover Street and told him of what had happened at Lexington. “His soul beat to arms,” a contemporary remembered, “as soon as he learned the intention of the British troops.” He woke up his medical assistant William Eustis and announced that it was time for him to take over the practice. By eight o’clock Warren had mounted his horse and was on his way out of Boston.

  Instead of going by way of the Neck, Joseph Warren went by boat to Charlestown accompanied by his friend the printer Isaiah Thomas. While boarding the boat, Warren was overheard telling another acquaintance, “Keep up a brave heart! They have begun it—that either party can do; and we’ll end it—that only one can do.”

  A meeting had been scheduled of the Committee of Safety at the Black Horse Tavern in Menotomy, where earlier that morning committee members Orne, Lee, and Gerry had evaded the British troops by lying in a cornfield. Warren came upon Percy’s brigade in Cambridge as the troops made their way to Menotomy. The provincials had pulled up the planks of the bridge across the Charles in an attempt to prevent the regulars from entering the town. However, they’d left the planks stacked in plain sight, enabling Percy’s soldiers to quickly repair the bridge, and the brigade had marched unhindered into Cambridge.

  The road was filled with British regulars, and after helping drive away two soldiers who were attempting to confiscate a townsman’s horse, Warren managed, with some difficulty, to make his way to the tavern in Menotomy. Also in attendance at the meeting that morning was William Heath, a thirty-eight-year-old farmer from Roxbury. As a boy, Heath had been, in his own words, “remarkably fond of military exercises,” and had subsequently devoted himself to “the theory of war,” and had bought and read “every military treatise in the English language which was obtainable.” By 1772 he was colonel of the Suffolk County Militia; by the winter of 1775, he’d been appointed a general in the new provincial “army of observation.”

  There were generals who outranked Heath, but they all lived too far away to reach the scene of the fighting that day, and Heath resolved that he must get himself to Lexington as soon as possible. To avoid the British troops on the road to that town, he took the indirect route via Watertown, and at some point he met up with Joseph Warren. Given Warren’s ambition to one day serve in a “high military capacity,” he’d decided, an early biographer wrote, “that he should share the dangers of the field as a common soldier with his fellow citizens, that his reputation for bravery might be put beyond the possibility of suspicion.” Heath was willing to let Warren accompany him as a volunteer, and over
the course of the afternoon to come, the two seem to have been almost inseparable. For both men war was more a theoretical undertaking than a thing of blood and horror, but that was about to change.

  —

  Earlier that morning, the women of Acton had put together provisions for their husbands. It fell to their teenage sons to get the food to Concord. Francis Faulkner, sixteen, was one of these young men, but when he and his friends arrived at the North Bridge, they learned that not only had three of their townsmen been killed, but the British regulars—and the fighting—had moved east toward Boston. So the boys started down the road to Lexington. Not far from Meriam’s Hill, they saw a man, wounded or dead, they couldn’t tell for sure, lying beside a wall in a field. “That is my father!” Francis cried and, slipping off his horse, ran toward the fallen militiaman. “It was,” his grandson later wrote, “a dreadful sight. . . . He had never seen death in such a bloody and ghastly form before. But it was not his father.”

  The boys from Acton continued on. The houses were all deserted. The bodies of dead soldiers littered the road. As the boys approached the town of Lexington they were filled with “fear and trembling.” And then they heard the boom of a cannon.

  Militiamen from towns all over New England had gathered on Lexington Green, their sweaty faces blackened by powder blasts, their knees and elbows stained by the mud and grass. The boys went from group to group, looking for their fathers, and finally they found them. To their astonishment, the Acton men were “in the highest spirits.” They proudly informed their sons that they had avenged the deaths of their fellow Acton men “tenfold and would destroy all [the regulars] before they could get to Boston.” Instead of being terrorized, these middle-aged husbands and fathers were having the time of their lives. Faulkner was relieved, in a way, to see his father so “full of confidence and fight.” But he was also troubled by the determination of the Acton men. “Indignation,” Faulkner remembered, “filled every heart.”