Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Everywhere the news was received, it caused a sensation. At Brunswick, North Carolina, word of the fighting at Lexington was forwarded to Charleston, South Carolina, with the note, “I request, for the good of our country and the welfare of our lives and liberties and fortunes, you will not lose a moment’s time.” By the first week in May the news had spread south to Georgia and west across the Blue Ridge into the Shenandoah Valley. When a group of frontiersmen camped on the middle fork of Elkhorn Creek heard about the militiamen’s deaths in Massachusetts, they decided to name their outpost for the historic event. That is why what was then a part of Virginia is known today as Lexington, Kentucky.

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  On Saturday, April 22, the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts convened for the first time since the outbreak of violence, meeting briefly at Concord before adjourning to Watertown so as to be closer to what was becoming the center of provincial activity in Cambridge. That afternoon the Congress formed a committee to take depositions “from which a full account of the transactions of the troops, under General Gage, in their route to and from Concord, on Wednesday the last, may be collected, to be sent to England, by the first ship from Salem.” General Gage was already preparing his own official account, which would soon be on its way to London. Massachusetts must prove that the British not only had fired the first shot but were now waging a most brutal and inhumane war against innocent New England citizens.

  Even though the next day was a Sunday, Congress convened at 7:00 a.m. With John Hancock about to head for Philadelphia, they needed a new president. That afternoon an election was held for a “president pro tempore,” and the committee appointed to count the ballots reported that “the vote was full for Doctor Warren.”

  That same day, even as Admiral Graves oversaw the construction of a battery of cannons amid the cemetery stones of Copp’s Hill in the North End, the fate of many of Boston’s still-remaining patriots was being decided at an emergency town meeting. Gage had offered the town’s inhabitants a proposal that had been approved by Warren and the Committee of Safety. If the Bostonians agreed to surrender their weapons, he would allow anyone who was so inclined to exit the city with whatever baggage they could take with them. It was humiliating to have to hand over their guns, but after a day-long town meeting in Faneuil Hall, they reluctantly agreed. In the days ahead a staggering 1,778 muskets, 634 pistols, 973 bayonets, and 38 blunderbusses were collected and labeled for eventual return.

  Gage appears to have initially offered the proposal in good faith. With no more foodstuffs coming into Boston from the country, the fewer mouths to feed the better. The loyalists in the city, however, saw it differently. They were convinced that the presence of a sizable number of patriots in Boston had prevented their rebellious brethren from mounting an attack. They needed what were in effect hostages to ensure that the ever-increasing hordes in Roxbury and Cambridge did not come rampaging across the Neck and kill them all. Bowing to the loyalists’ demands, Gage ultimately refused to honor the agreement he had made with the town’s inhabitants, one of the few instances during his tenure in Boston when he did not keep his word.

  Eventually Gage settled on a kind of compromise. A limited number of people were allowed to leave as long as they did not take any of their possessions with them. Those who were prepared to depart at all costs, such as John Andrews’s wife, Ruthy (who was as incapacitated by fear as Sarah Deming had been), eventually left the city. Her husband, however, decided to stay. If he left, there would be no one to watch over their home and personal effects, and he was, at least for now, unwilling to lose everything. Reverend Andrew Eliot was the minister of the New North Meeting; his wife and children and most of his congregation had already left the city, as had almost every other Congregational minister, but he resolved to stay. Someone, he decided, needed to look after the spiritual life of those few remaining residents. “I have been prevailed with to officiate to those who are still left to tarry,” he explained, “but my situation is uncomfortable to the last degree—friends perpetually coming to bid me adieu, much the greater parts of the inhabitants gone out of town—the rest following as fast as the general will give leave.” Patriots and loyalists alike found it both sad and terrifying to watch as the city was, in the words of Peter Oliver, “reduced to a perfect skeleton.”

  Over the course of the next few months more than nine thousand people left Boston as the provincial army that surrounded the city grew to the point that it came close to approaching Boston’s former population of fifteen thousand. A city had been turned inside out: flushed of its inhabitants and artificially stuffed, as if by a taxidermist, with a British army that, as military transports continued to arrive in Boston Harbor, eventually approached nine thousand men.

  With the economic life of the city having come to a standstill, Boston quickly became a ragged ghost of what it had once been. “Grass growing in the public walks and streets of this once populous and flourishing place,” the Reverend Andrew Eliot wrote, “shops and warehouses shut up. Business at an end and everyone in anxiety and distress. The provincial army at our doors. The [British] troops absolutely confined in this town which is almost an island and surrounded with ships which [are] its greatest security. . . . These things . . . keep us in perpetual alarm and make this a very unquiet habitation. I cannot stand it long.”

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  As Eliot observed, Boston was “almost an island,” actually one of dozens of islands dotting a huge harbor that was in many places dangerously shallow and difficult to navigate. And as he also observed, the British warships that lay anchored around the city were “its greatest security.” However, the sheer size of these ships meant that while their cannons provided plenty of protection, their depth of draft curtailed their mobility in this harbor of mudflats and lurking rocks to the point that smaller vessels—in particular those indigenous American watercraft such as schooners and the even smaller and rowable whaleboats—could literally sail circles around these ponderous men-of-war. The British were quick to see the advantage of the close-winded schooner, and Graves had added several of these vessels to his fleet, highlighted by the new and well-equipped Diana, commanded by Graves’s nephew, Lieutenant Thomas Graves.

  The provincials realized that if they were ever going to mount an assault on Boston, they must do it primarily by water. General Putnam had come up with the idea of storming Boston Neck behind bales of tightly packed hay, but most of the assault force must approach by boats—and small boats at that, given the shallowness of the immense Back Bay, which lay between Cambridge and Boston’s western shore. And so the call had gone out throughout coastal Massachusetts for whaleboats. Over the course of the next few weeks dozens upon dozens of these canoelike craft—some of them confiscated from the largely loyalist whaling port of Nantucket—headed toward Boston Harbor like a flock of migrating birds. Paul Litchfield lived in the coastal town of Scituate, and one day that spring he stopped to watch as “a number of whaleboats went along the shore from the southward for the use of our army.” Boat-building operations were begun in Cambridge to add to the fleet that was to include what were known as “fire boats,” raftlike vessels designed to transport an explosive blaze of devastating fire to the men-of-war anchored around Boston. When Gage learned of the provincials’ plans (a spy report claimed that as many as three hundred whaleboats had already been collected), he ordered Admiral Graves to take any small craft his officers might come across as they patrolled the reaches of Boston Harbor.

  Besides preparing for a possible provincial invasion, the most immediate concerns Gage had were not only providing his army with food but also procuring hay, which was used as bedding for his men. Since he no longer had access to the surrounding countryside, he was forced to look to the harbor’s grass-covered islands, many of which were dotted with unguarded herds of sheep and cattle. In the weeks to come, as the size of the army grew and the quantity of provisions diminished, the British forces found themselves in a
kind of nautical chess game as they competed with the provincials for access to these resource-rich islands.

  By Friday, April 28, the maritime focus of the provincial army had temporarily shifted to a single vessel—a little schooner of sixty or so feet named the Quero, captained by thirty-four-year-old John Derby of Salem. On Monday, April 24, Gage had sent his official account of Lexington and Concord to London aboard the Sukey. Since then the provincials had been hard at work collecting depositions that had been condensed into a report written, in part, by none other than Benjamin Church. Warren had addressed the cover letter to Benjamin Franklin (who, unknown to the patriots, had already left London for Philadelphia), and now the package was ready for transport to England. Four years before, a loyalist account of the Boston Massacre had been the first to reach London, putting the patriots at an immediate disadvantage. This time, the provincials vowed, their account would be the one to reach London first, even though Gage already had a four-day head start. The Quero might be less than a third of the displacement of the Sukey, but she was fast. To get the absolute most out of her performance, she was “in ballast,” which meant that instead of a cargo she carried nothing but ballast stones in her hold, carefully positioned by Captain Derby so as to optimize the schooner’s trim and speed through the water. In the early hours of Saturday, April 29, the Quero sneaked out of Salem Harbor, beginning a race that might very well change the course of history.

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  Almost lost in this furious rush of events was the arrival just three days before of a vessel from England bearing Josiah Quincy Jr. After his months in London observing the workings of the ministry and Parliament, combined with his many conversations with Benjamin Franklin and other Americans with a deep understanding of British policy, he felt he had information that was of immense importance to the future of Massachusetts. He must speak directly with either Samuel Adams or Joseph Warren.

  The passage had been long and miserable, made all the more agonizing by Quincy’s rapidly deteriorating health. By the time the vessel came within sight of land, Quincy knew he did not have long to live and expressed his last wishes to one of the ship’s sailors, who dutifully wrote a transcript of the young lawyer’s dying soliloquy. Quincy was convinced that what he had to tell Adams and Warren might have been of “great service to my country,” but he dared not commit his message to paper. We will never know what Quincy wanted to say. However, given the drastic changes that had occurred since Lexington and Concord, Quincy’s almost two-month-old insights were probably no longer relevant. In the end, Quincy, like virtually everyone who had attempted to improve relations between Great Britain and her rebellious colonies, was defeated by the sea.

  The following day, April 27, Joseph Warren wrote to their mutual friend Arthur Lee in London. “Our friend Quincy just lived to come on shore to die in his own country,” he wrote. “He expired yesterday morning. His virtues rendered him dear, and his abilities useful, to his country.” And that was it.

  Without a paragraph break, Warren launched into a description of New England at this critical juncture. “I think it probable,” he wrote, “that the rage of the people . . . will lead them to attack General Gage, and burn the ships in the harbor. . . . The next news from England must be conciliatory, or the connection between us ends, however fatal the consequences may be.”

  Despite the posturing that had so troubled Timothy Pickering on the day after Lexington and Concord, Warren still felt that a reconciliation was possible. “If anything is proposed that may be for the honor and safety of Great Britain and these colonies,” he wrote, “my utmost efforts shall not be wanting.” Warren ended this brief, hurriedly dashed-off expression of grief, resolve, anger, and hope—which appears to have been personally delivered to Lee by Captain Derby of the Quero—with a glimpse of himself amid the provincial army in Cambridge. He was, he wrote Lee, “in the utmost haste, surrounded by fifteen or twenty thousand men.”

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  Even before the outbreak of fighting, the provincial forces realized that the secret to ousting the British from Boston required something they did not have: a suitable number of cannons. They also realized that they needed officers with the artillery skills required to fire these cannons. Two Boston men fit the bill perfectly: Colonel Richard Gridley, sixty-five, a hero of the 1745 Siege of Louisbourg, and Lieutenant Colonel William Burbeck, fifty-nine, who had been serving at the Castle for a number of years. Both officers had already worked extensively with the British army; in fact, Gridley was one of the handful of Americans with a commission in that army—a prize that not even George Washington had been able to win. To secure these two valuable officers, the Provincial Congress offered Gridley and Burbeck not only salaries but lifetime annuities. But if the provincial army now had two experienced artillery officers, it still did not have a sufficient number of cannons.

  On Sunday, April 29, a new arrival from New Haven, Connecticut, named Benedict Arnold told Joseph Warren and the Committee of Safety exactly what they wanted to hear. At the poorly defended British stronghold of Fort Ticonderoga at the southern end of Lake Champlain there were “80 pieces of heavy cannon, 20 brass and 4 18-pounders and 10–12 mortars.” In retrospect it was an almost eerie moment of historical synchronicity. The weekend after the spy Benjamin Church had met not-so-secretly with General Gage in Boston, the man destined to become the Revolution’s most notorious traitor was in Cambridge convincing Joseph Warren to finance his genuinely patriotic bid to take Fort Ticonderoga.

  In 1775, Captain Benedict Arnold was a long way from betraying his country. A successful and self-made merchant captain with a specialty in trading horses, he had forced the New Haven selectmen, at virtual gunpoint, to provide his “Governor’s Footguards” with the powder and weapons they needed from the town’s arsenal and then marched his men to Cambridge. At thirty-four, he was almost exactly Warren’s age; he was bright, charismatic, and ambitious, and the two men seem to have struck up an almost instant friendship. Within a few days Warren had ordered Arnold to mount an attack on Fort Ticonderoga.

  Unknown to both Warren and Arnold, another group from Connecticut was at that very moment enlisting the aid of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys to do exactly the same thing, thus making the Massachusetts effort instantly redundant. There was also the question of jurisdiction. What gave Massachusetts—or Connecticut, for that matter—the right to attack a fort outside their colony, let alone confiscate the cannons from that fort? But the most serious strike against this misguided mission into the New York wilderness had to do with what was already a well-known deficiency in Massachusetts. More than anything else—more than cannons and mortars—the province needed gunpowder. On May 1, as Warren considered Arnold’s proposal, he wrote Committee of Supplies member Elbridge Gerry on this very issue. Without more powder, they might very well “trifle away this only moment we have to employ for the salvation of our country.” Even knowing this, Warren equipped Arnold with two hundred pounds of this valuable substance for his mission to Fort Ticonderoga.

  As it turned out, Arnold had no use for the gunpowder. Soon after learning of the rival expedition, he raced toward Lake Champlain and presented Ethan Allen with his orders from the Committee of Safety of Massachusetts. Since Allen had no official orders of his own, he reluctantly agreed to allow Arnold to serve with him as a coleader, and unopposed, the two men strode side by side through the entrance of the British fort.

  The two hundred pounds of Massachusetts gunpowder proved unnecessary at Fort Ticonderoga but might have changed the course of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Instead of an example of farsighted strategic planning, the decision to send Benedict Arnold to the Champlain Valley was the mistake that may have cost Joseph Warren his life.

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  By the first week of May, Warren had learned that Connecticut was sending a delegation to talk to General Gage about the possibility of “a cessation of hostilities.” Warren had been able to marg
inalize Timothy Pickering and the other equivocators among the provincial officer corps, but a rival colony from New England was something else altogether. If Connecticut should break ranks and negotiate its own separate agreement with the British, it would mean the end to a New England–wide army. Unlike Massachusetts, Connecticut had in Jonathan Trumbull a governor elected by the people of his colony rather than appointed by the king, making Connecticut’s potential defection all the more damaging. If a reconciliation was to happen, it had to be initiated not by the Americans but by the British. Until then, they must all agree to prepare for war. “We fear our brethren in Connecticut are not even yet convinced of the cruel designs of Administration against America . . . ,” Warren wrote Trumbull. “We have lost the town, and we greatly fear, the inhabitants of Boston, as we find the general is perpetually making new conditions, and forming the most unreasonable pretenses for retarding their removal from the garrison. . . . Our people have been barbarously murdered by an insidious enemy, who under cover of the night, have marched into the heart of the country, spreading destruction with fire and sword. No business but that of war is either done or thought of in this colony.”

  The Connecticut delegation met with Gage, who was quite persuasive in pointing out that with thousands of militiamen surrounding Boston, the British, not the provincials, were the ones on the defensive. In the end, however, Gage’s decision to renege on his original agreement with the townspeople of Boston was what brought Connecticut over to Massachusetts’s way of thinking. Having misled the poor beleaguered people of Boston, Gage was, a Connecticut officer in Cambridge wrote, “wicked, infamous, and base without parallel.” Governor Trumbull ultimately decided that he must stand by Massachusetts, and on May 4 he wrote Warren, assuring him of his colony’s support.

  As Warren moved from crisis to crisis, he was unable to fulfill his obligations to both the Committee of Safety and to the Provincial Congress, which often required him to be in two places at once. At one point, the Provincial Congress was forced to adjourn several times in a single day as its members impatiently waited for a report from the Committee of Safety “respecting the inhabitants of Boston.” Frustrations reached the point that on May 2, the Congress elected a new president—James Warren of Plymouth (no close relation to Joseph Warren). When that same day James Warren declined to serve, a committee was formed to go to Hastings House, home of the Committee of Safety, to see if Joseph Warren “can now attend the Congress.” On the back of a letter he’d just received from the Boston selectmen, Warren hurriedly drafted his reply, “Doct. Warren presents his respects to the honorable Provincial Congress; informs them that he will obey their order, and attend his duty in congress in the afternoon.” Despite the fact that he was spread dangerously thin, the consensus appeared to be that there was no one better suited to serve as president than Joseph Warren.