Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Provincial officials now knew that the British were about to attack the redoubt, but what about Roxbury and Cambridge? The Committee of Safety sent a desperate message to General Thomas. “The troops are now landing at Charlestown from Boston,” it read. “You are to judge whether this is designed to deceive or not. In haste [we] leave you to judge of the necessity of your movements.” Handwringing and paralysis had gripped the command center in Cambridge. Making this hesitancy all the more frustrating was the ambiguity of many of the orders issued from Hastings House. A series of three entrenchments had been built beginning at the Cambridge shore of the Charles River. For some reason, Putnam’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Experience Storrs, was sent up the river to Fort No. 1, the farthest from the action at Charlestown. By the time Storrs realized where he was needed most, it was too late to be of any help. To the bafflement of the provincial soldiers already stationed there, Colonel James Scammon and his men from Maine ended up at Lechmere’s Point. Not till three that afternoon would Captain John Chester and his soldiers, already overheated in their double-layered clothes, be on their way to Charlestown.

  —

  Howe had ordered his troops to land at the tip of Morton’s Point, far to the east of Prescott’s position atop Breed’s Hill. There were only enough boats to transport half the regulars, and Howe and Brigadier Robert Pigot, who was to command the left wing, arrived with the second wave of troops, which brought the total to about sixteen hundred soldiers. Standing atop Morton’s Hill, Howe could see the earthen redoubt and breastwork to his left, but there was also something else. To the right, back a bit from the American fort, was a new line of provincial soldiers.

  It was as if they had read his mind. Anticipating a British flanking movement from their own left, they were now busily constructing an obstruction of some sort that would extend their lines across the width of the peninsula to the Mystic River. This was disturbing. Howe decided to call up his seven-hundred-man reserve. The regulars already assembled on the Charlestown peninsula broke ranks, sat down to eat some dinner, and waited for the reserves.

  —

  Soon after Howe’s troops set out by boat from Boston, Prescott decided to make an attempt, even if it was a halfhearted one, to oppose the enemy’s landing—and the way to do that was with cannons. So far, however, the provincial artillery had proven to be shockingly ineffectual.

  Firing a cannon was an admittedly complex operation. It took at least seven trained men to fire one of these carriage-mounted fieldpieces. You had to jam the cartridge (a flannel bag full of powder) down the bore with a long-handled rammer and compress it with a clump of cotton rags known as the wad; then came the iron cannonball, which had to be free of any dust or dirt; otherwise it might jam in the barrel and blow the fieldpiece to smithereens. But that was only the beginning. Powder had to be poured in the vent at the rear of the gun, known as the touchhole, before another man shoved a pick down the vent and pierced the cartridge to ensure that it would ignite. Only then did the artillery officer introduce a burning match to the touchhole with a long stick known as a linstock, firing off the cannon.

  The provincial army’s lack of gunpowder meant that there had been precious few opportunities for rehearsing this complicated procedure. As a consequence, the rudiments of actually firing a cannon remained a challenge for the provincial artillerymen, especially since the cartridges contained in the cannons’ side boxes proved to be too large to fit down the bore. The gunners had to tear open the cartridges and transfer the powder from the bag to the cannon barrel with an elongated ladle. And then there was the just as tricky matter of aiming the fieldpiece with any accuracy. The few balls successfully fired had buried themselves inoffensively in the side of Copp’s Hill. Peter Brown recounted how after this pitiful display of marksmanship, during which the cannon was “fired but a few times,” the artillery officer “swang his hat round three times to the enemy, then ceased fire.”

  Prescott undoubtedly felt that he had little use for the fieldpieces at the redoubt and even less for the artillery officers and their men. For as had also become clear, being able to fire a cannon did not necessarily mean that you had any familiarity with being fired at by a cannon. After several hours of enduring the British artillery onslaught, Prescott’s men had become relatively inured to the cannonballs that kept raining down on them, even the ones that skipped menacingly along the hillside, sometimes veering in unexpected directions (one man lost a leg to one of these erratically bouncing balls of iron) before they buried themselves in the dirt or simply rolled to a gradual stop. Since the earthen walls of the redoubt and breastwork were able to absorb the impact of the cannonballs, the structures provided surprisingly good protection from the onslaught, and by the early afternoon, the men had developed a routine whenever they knew another cannonball was headed in their direction. “We could plainly see them fall down,” a spectator in Boston wrote, “and mount again as soon as the shot was passed, without appearing to be the least disconcerted.” This did not apply, apparently, to the artillery officers and their men, most of whom had already fled for the relative safety of Bunker Hill.

  One artillery officer, however, was eager for action. Unlike the others—whose chief qualification, in at least two instances, was that they were related to the artillery regiment’s commander Colonel Gridley—Captain Samuel Trevett appears to have known what he was about. Prescott ordered Trevett to move two of his fieldpieces in the direction of Morton’s Hill and fire on the British soldiers as they disembarked from the boats. He also ordered Captain Thomas Knowlton and his two hundred soldiers from Connecticut to provide Trevett with whatever protection he might need as he opened up on the regulars.

  Once they had left the redoubt, Prescott never saw Trevett and Knowlton again and assumed that, like the men who had accompanied Putnam with the entrenching tools, they had abandoned him for the high ground to the north. This, however, was anything but the case. Instead of deserting his commander, Knowlton hit upon a way to fix, at least in part, the mess Prescott had created by building his redoubt on Breed’s Hill.

  —

  About two hundred yards behind the fort, Knowlton came across a ditch. Just ahead of the ditch was a fence made of stone at the bottom and rails of wood at the top that ran parallel to the ditch as it extended across the width of the peninsula to the Mystic River. All it took were a few modifications to make the fence at least look like a sturdy, if hardly bulletproof, defensive structure. The surrounding field had been divided by the residents of Charlestown into a series of thin east-to-west-running strips. Fences had been built along each property line, so that the southeastern-facing slope of the hill was ribbed with wooden rails, and Knowlton and his men used these rails to build a second fence just ahead of the one that ran alongside the ditch. Stuffing some recently mowed and still-green grass in between the two fences, along with whatever rocks and pieces of wood they could find, they made a stout and serviceable barricade—a kind of wood-and-grass sandwich—that became known as the rail fence.

  All of this took time, but thanks to Howe’s decision to wait for the reserve, Knowlton and his men had the opportunity they needed to build a structure that looked, at least to Howe’s eye, “cannon proof.” What they didn’t have, however, were enough soldiers to man this new expanse of fence. But help was on the way.

  —

  If ever there was a man who embodied the flinty frontier spirit of backwoods New Hampshire, it was Colonel John Stark. At forty-six, he was a lean, less voluble version of Israel Putnam. Two decades earlier, while trapping in the northern wilderness, he had been taken captive by the Abenakis, who had been so impressed by his bravery that they’d adopted him into the tribe. During the French and Indian War, he’d fought with Rogers’s Rangers alongside British regulars, so he knew their ways well. Now he was fighting against the New Hampshire legislature, whose members were outraged by his refusal to curry favor for a commission. But no m
atter what the politicians thought, his men adored him, and with thirteen companies, Stark had the largest regiment in the provincial army. His major, Andrew McClary, was six foot six and “of an athletic frame.” McClary was now marching proudly with Stark, whose bushy eyebrows seemed locked in a perpetual scowl, toward the Charlestown Neck.

  The fire of the gunboats and warships clustered around the causeway of the Mill Pond had turned the Neck into a terrifying war zone. Cannonballs kept flying across this narrow strip of land, some of them tearing the dirt into ragged furrows. The ships were also firing bar shot, evil-looking dumbbells of metal designed to take down the rigging of a sailing vessel but which also did devastating things to a human body. A soldier recounted how one of these murderous projectiles “cut off three men in two.” What with the smoke, dust, and bloody chunks of torn flesh—not to mention the deafening roar—it was hardly a surprise that a crowd of fearful provincial soldiers was now blocking the approach to the Neck. In his deep and booming voice, Major McClary requested that the officers and their men immediately step aside so that Colonel Stark and his regiment could march across to Bunker Hill.

  Captain Henry Dearborn was twenty-three and a doctor, and he was at the head of the column beside Colonel Stark. Despite the fact that cannonballs and bar shot were tearing up the ground all around them, they were marching, Dearborn remembered, “at a very deliberate pace.” He made the mistake of suggesting to his commander that they might march a little faster. “With a look peculiar to himself,” Dearborn wrote, “[Stark] fixed his eyes upon me, and observed with great composure, ‘Dearborn, one fresh man in action is worth ten fatigued ones.’ ” Needless to say, they did not pick up the pace.

  Stark was not impressed by what he found on Bunker Hill. Putnam sat atop his white horse in what was called his “summer dress”: a sleeveless waistcoat (as opposed to the long-sleeved coat an officer was expected to wear) that was more in keeping, one soldier claimed, with the leader of “a band of sicklemen or ditchers, than musketeers.” Putnam seems to have devoted most of his energies that afternoon to fulminating at the crowd of more than a thousand mostly idle soldiers that had assembled around the peak of Bunker Hill. Part of the problem was that no one seemed sure what Putnam wanted them to do. Were they to build the fortifications he had started, or were they to march to the rail fence and fight? Instead of prioritizing what needed to be done to support Prescott and the line of defense that was emerging to the left of the redoubt, Putnam seems to have bounced from distraction to distraction with increasing futility. All agreed that Putnam was as brave and inspiring a fighter as you could find, but focus and strategic thinking had never been his strong suits. He was, an observer wrote, “one to whom constant motion was almost a necessity,” and the Battle of Bunker Hill was not to be his finest hour. “Had Putnam done his duty,” Stark was reputed to say, “he would have decided the fate of his country in the first action.”

  Stark led his regiment into the valley to the south. The British had begun directing their artillery fire toward the swarm of provincial soldiers atop Bunker Hill, and as a consequence, the march south proved to be almost as hot as anything Stark’s men had encountered on the Neck. Up ahead and to his right, Stark could see the redoubt and the breastwork; directly in front, he could see Knowlton and his men building the rail fence; to the left was the Mystic River. Beyond this jagged, uncertain line, about half a mile to the south, were more than two thousand British regulars. Stark could not understand what Prescott had been thinking when he built what looked to be a very puny and poorly sited redoubt and was heard to speak of “the want of judgment in the works,” which he dismissively referred to as “the pen.” Knowlton’s rail fence provided the beginning of a solution to the problem created by Prescott’s redoubt, but it was only a beginning. There were still two glaring weaknesses. Between the end of the breastwork and the beginning of the rail fence was a diagonal gap of several hundred yards. Luckily, the ground in this section was quite swampy, which provided something of an obstacle to the regulars, but more needed to be done. Whether or not Stark suggested it, someone began building three fleches—Vs made of either fence rails or a combination of rails, fascines, and dirt—positioned along the space between the breastwork and the rail fence. In addition to plugging the gap, the fleches would allow provincial soldiers and even Captain Trevett’s cannons to fire on the left flank of any regulars who tried to attack the rail fence.

  It was the other end of the rail fence to which Colonel Stark turned most of his attention. The fence went as far as it had to go to keep a sheep or a cow from straying into the fields above and below it, but it did not extend all the way to the water’s edge, where a steep bank went down to a narrow beach. All General Howe had to do was send a column of soldiers along the beach (where they would be hidden from the provincials by the bank), and he would have rendered useless all their efforts with the breastwork and rail fence. Stark later walked over this same ground with a fellow officer and told how “he cast his eyes down upon the beach and . . . thought it was so plain a way that the enemy could not miss it; he therefore ordered a number of his boys to jump down the bank and with stones from the adjacent walls, they soon threw up a strong breastwork to the water’s edge behind which he posted triple ranks of his choice men.” As Stark plugged up this gap, his subordinates worked to fortify the rail fence to the west with fistfuls of hay. Each soldier made sure to create “an aperture in the grassy rampart, through which . . . he could take deliberate aim” with his musket.

  Stark, Prescott, and Putnam were part of the same army, but as far as all three of them were concerned, they were each going to fight this particular battle on their own. With Prescott confined to the redoubt, Putnam preoccupied with building a fortification atop Bunker Hill, and Stark supervising at least the eastern portion of the rail fence, there was no one to synchronize the three of them into a single cohesive unit. Adding to the difficulty of getting these three commanders to work together were preexisting personal animosities. Stark didn’t like Putnam—a feeling that was probably mutual—and as had already been made clear by the interchange about the entrenching tools, Prescott and Putnam didn’t exactly see eye to eye.

  It also didn’t help that the three of them were from different colonies. At this point a continental army did not yet exist, and in the absence of a unifying “generalissimo,” a quite considerable intercolonial rivalry had developed. General Ward might be the head of the provincial army, but only the soldiers from Massachusetts and New Hampshire were officially a part of that army; Connecticut had not yet formally placed its soldiers under Ward’s control. What had been true in Cambridge a few hours before was true now on the hills overlooking Charlestown: no one seemed to be in charge.

  But that wasn’t necessarily all bad. There might be, in essence, three different commanders on the American lines, but as far as General Howe was concerned they amounted to a single, very difficult-to-read enemy. In just the last hour he had watched as the provincial fortifications organically evolved in ways of which not even he was entirely aware. Howe wasn’t up against a leader with a plan to implement; he was watching three different leaders try to correct the mistakes of the other two. The workings of this strange amalgam of desperation and internal one-upmanship were baffling and a bit bizarre, but as Howe was about to discover, the end result was surprisingly formidable.

  —

  Around three in the afternoon, David Townsend arrived at Hastings House in Cambridge. Townsend, twenty-two, was one of Joseph Warren’s apprentices, and while visiting the Carnes family, formerly of Boston and now living in Brighton, he’d learned that the British “were firing very heavy on our men at Bunker Hill.” Townsend announced that he “must go and work for Dr. Warren,” and set out on foot for Cambridge.

  As he approached the town common, he could hear the distant firing from the battery in Boston and from the ships positioned around the Charlestown peninsula. Cambridge, however, was �
�quiet as the Sabbath—all the troops gone, and no one at Hastings House,” except, he soon learned, for Dr. Joseph Warren.

  “[He] was sick with one of his oppressive nervous headaches,” Townsend remembered, “and had retired to rest and taken some chamomile tea for relief.” Chamomile was recognized in the eighteenth century as a way to dissipate the black bile and thus reduce melancholy. No doubt rubbing his eyes, Warren said that if Townsend would wait to have a cup of tea with him, they could go together to Bunker Hill.

  The night before, Warren had told his roommate and fellow Committee of Safety member Elbridge Gerry that he intended to join the soldiers on Bunker Hill. “As sure as you go,” Gerry had said, “you will be slain.” Warren admitted that Gerry was probably right but insisted that it would be impossible for him to remain in Cambridge “while my fellow citizens are shedding their blood for me.”

  We know that Townsend found Warren in Hastings House in the middle of the afternoon on June 17, but Warren’s whereabouts earlier in the day are unknown. He may have, as Townsend seems to suggest, spent the morning holed up at Hastings House. According to another account, he “pretended that he was going to Roxbury” so as “to deceive” his colleagues into thinking that he had decided not to go to Bunker Hill. But there is another possibility. Instead of Roxbury, he may have gone all the way to Nathaniel Ames’s tavern in Dedham.