Two days after the evacuation, the British saw fit to destroy the fortifications at the Castle with a spectacular series of explosions. The resulting fire raged throughout the night with such intensity that a lieutenant from Connecticut discovered that even though he was several miles away he was able to read a letter from his wife by the light of the burning fortress. The fate of the Castle served as a fresh reminder of the devastation that had been avoided through the occupation of Dorchester Heights. Washington, however, continued “lamenting the disappointment” of not having been able to implement what he described in a letter to a friend in Virginia as his “premeditated plan” to attack Boston, “as we were prepared for them at all points.”
Even though he still wished he had been given the chance to attack Boston—an assault that would have surely laid much of the city to waste and probably destroyed his army—Washington was now perceived as the general who had rescued Boston from ruin. On March 28, the day after the British evacuation fleet finally departed the Nantasket Roads for Halifax, the Boston selectmen formally thanked him for having “saved a large, elegant, and once populous city from total destruction.” His Excellency responded in kind, claiming that “what greatly adds to my happiness [is] that this desirable event has been effected with so little effusion of human blood.”
There is no reason to doubt the genuineness of Washington’s remarks. One of his greatest gifts was his ability to learn from a situation, and by the end of March—three weeks after the taking of Dorchester Heights—he had, with considerable reluctance, started to reconcile himself to the fact that what he wanted to happen in any given situation was ultimately beside the point. “I will not lament or repine at any act of Providence,” he wrote Reed, “because I am in a great measure a convert to [the poet] Mr. Pope’s opinion that whatever is, is right.” This did not prevent him from once again rehashing in his letter all the reasons why his plan to attack the city would have worked, but the evidence was nonetheless clear: Washington had begun to recognize that his role as commander in chief was not all about winning glory on the battlefield. If he had failed to head off a coming war with one brilliant and bloody stroke, he had accomplished something far more difficult. He had forged the beginning of an army that might—just might—lay the groundwork for a new American society.
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On the morning of April 4, Washington left his headquarters in Cambridge and began what proved to be a ten-day march to New York. Soon after, John Warren and his brother Eben located their older brother’s body in its shallow grave on Breed’s Hill. The remains were badly decomposed, but the same false teeth that had allowed Dr. Jeffries to make the identification soon after the Battle of Bunker Hill also enabled John and Eben to verify that this was indeed their brother. A funeral service was held at King’s Chapel, which, being an Anglican church and made of stone, had suffered no damage during the British occupation.
Warren was buried with all the honors due a former grand master of the St. Andrew’s Masonic Lodge. One prominent mason, however, was unable to attend the service. The merchant John Rowe had spent much of the last year and a half not sure of where he stood when it came to the tug-of-war between patriot and loyalist interests. But when Rowe arrived at King’s Chapel on April 8 “to attend and walk in procession with the lodges under my jurisdiction with our proper jewels and clothing,” he was—to his “great mortification”—“very much insulted by some furious and hot persons without the least provocation.” One of his fellow masons thought it “most prudent for me to retire.” That evening, Rowe was plagued by “some uneasy reflections in my mind as I am not conscious to myself of doing anything prejudicial to the cause of America either by will or deed.”
In June, Benjamin Church was returned to Boston from his confinement in Connecticut. The General Court’s plans to exchange him for an American prisoner inspired what Church’s wife described as “a riot.” The town’s inhabitants wanted to see the hated spy suitably punished. Once tempers eventually cooled, Church was allowed to board a ship for Martinique in January 1778. When the ship was lost in a storm with all hands, Bostonians could rest assured that justice had finally been served.
For a variety of reasons, hundreds of loyalists had decided to remain in Boston. The Reverend Mather Byles, sixty-nine, was the minister of the Hollis Street Meeting. When a member of his congregation asked how he could possibly remain a “brainless Tory,” he replied, “Tell me, which is better, to be ruled by one tyrant 3,000 miles away, or by 3,000 tyrants not a mile away?” By the time Byles had been stripped of his ministry and confined to his house under an armed guard (a noted punster, he referred to the sentinel as his “observe-a-Tory”), Boston had been revisited by the legendary Joyce Junior, the fabled “chairman of the committee for tarring and feathering.” In an advertisement in the Boston Gazette, Joyce announced that he had returned “after almost two years absence” to rid the city of “those shameless brass faced Tories, who have the audaciousness to remain among this much abused and insulted people.” A few days later, Joyce Junior and his minions rounded up five loyalists and, after loading them in a cart, proceeded out of town. Joyce was, according to Abigail Adams, “mounted on horseback with a red coat, a white wig, and a drawn sword, with drum and fife following. A concourse of people to the amount of 500 followed.” Once over the Roxbury line, Joyce “ordered the cart to be tipped up,” Adams recounted, “then told them if they were ever caught in town again it should be at the expense of their lives.”
George Washington had little patience with the loyalists, but during the Siege of Boston he had acted decisively to stop the kind of tribal acts of intolerance that were Joyce Junior’s stock-in-trade. On November 5, 1775, the day when Bostonians traditionally held anti-Catholic demonstrations, the general had issued an order forbidding what he called “that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the effigy of the Pope.” Now that Canada and all its French Catholics were their potential allies, it was “void of common sense . . . to be insulting their religion.” With the help of Washington (who had already begun to rethink his relationship to African Americans), the New Englanders in his army could not help but begin to reconsider some of their old prejudices.
It was perhaps not surprising that the new Continental Army was almost devoid of the Bostonians who had been at the forefront of the revolutionary movement over the course of the last decade. As Paul Revere observed to a friend in New York, “I find but few of the Sons of Liberty in the army.” Men who had relished dumping tea into Boston Harbor and tarring and feathering reprobate loyalists like John Malcom apparently had trouble fitting into the army of His Excellency George Washington.
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The Revolution had begun as a profoundly conservative movement. The patriots had not wanted to create something new; they had wanted to preserve the status quo—the essentially autonomous community they had inherited from their ancestors—in the face of British attempts to forge a modern empire. Enlightenment rhetoric from England had provided them with new ideological grist, but what they had really been about, particularly when it came to the yeoman farmers of the country towns, was defending the way of life their forefathers had secured after more than a century of struggle with the French and Indians. But something had shifted with the arrival of the new general from Virginia. As Washington had made clear in his orders of November 5, 1775, his army was already moving in directions that would have been unthinkable to the New Englanders of old.
With the approach of the summer of 1776, Bostonians began to emerge from the dark doldrums of the siege. Howe’s fleet of almost 150 vessels had sailed for Halifax at the end of March, but a few naval warships continued to linger near the Boston lighthouse to warn supply ships arriving from Britain that the army had removed to Nova Scotia. On June 13, the last of the men-of-war was finally forced to depart when cannons were installed on one of the harbor’s outlying islands. By the middle of July, word had reached the city of the signin
g of the Declaration of Independence.
They were no longer fighting simply to preserve their ancient liberties; they were fighting to create a new nation. The officers of Washington’s army had begun to talk in these terms as early as the fall of 1775, but not until the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in January 1776 did the goal of independence begin to look like an inevitability. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” Paine wrote. “A situation similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.”
On July 18, the Declaration of Independence was made public for the first time in Boston. As sheriff, William Greenleaf was supposed to read all official proclamations. But the fifty-six-year-old Greenleaf had a weak voice. So he asked Thomas Crafts, the same man who had objected to the promotion of Henry Knox to colonel of the army’s artillery regiment, to “act as his herald.” A big man with a fiery red face, Crafts was now a colonel in Massachusetts’s artillery regiment, and he and Greenleaf stood together on the balcony of the Town House. Ahead of them was not only a large crowd but an unobstructed view of Long Wharf, where more than two years before General Gage and his regulars had first disembarked.
Greenleaf read a passage from the declaration; Crafts repeated the words in his own booming voice, and so it went. According to Abigail Adams, who was in the crowd that day, “great attention was given to every word.” As soon as Crafts had finished, “the cry from the balcony was,” Abigail wrote, “God Save our American States and then three cheers which rended the air, the bells rang, the privateers fired, the forts and batteries, the cannon were discharged, the platoons followed and every face appeared joyful.”
Later that evening the ornate figures of the lion and the unicorn (representing England and Scotland) that bracketed the gable at the front of what Adams now called the State House were taken down and burned in a bonfire along with the king’s arms from the courthouse. Boston had survived, but “every vestige” of the king was destroyed that night. “Thus ends royal authority . . . ,” Abigail wrote, “and all the people shall say Amen.”
Epilogue—Character Alone
On the evening of June 17, 1843, the seventy-five-year-old John Quincy Adams stood in front of his son’s house in Quincy (formerly a part of Braintree), Massachusetts. It was the sixty-eighth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, and despite the fact that an immense celebration had occurred in Charlestown honoring the completion of a new 221-foot-high granite obelisk, Adams had as always spent the day at home, where he “visited my seedling trees” and attended to his correspondence.
The festivities had begun early that morning on Boston Common, where soldiers, veterans, freemasons, firemen, and many others had assembled for a parade that extended for two miles as it made its way through the city and across the Warren Bridge to Charlestown. The hundred or so veterans of the American Revolution had traveled in twenty-six different carriages, one of which had even contained a “miniature monument” in tribute to what was called the Battle of Lexington. Also present was no less a personage than the president of the United States, John Tyler, who traveled with his two sons in a barouche drawn by six black horses and flanked by a detachment of lancers.
But perhaps the most noted attendee was the legendary Daniel Webster, the U.S. senator and renowned speaker. By all accounts it was a stirring scene in Charlestown once Tyler and the other dignitaries had settled in their seats and Webster had begun to speak. “In front of the orator and upon either side of him was a dense and countless mass of human beings . . . ,” a reporter for the Daily Atlas wrote. “Crowning all, and raising its lofty head to the clouds in calm sublimity, stood the majestic monument, glistening in the rays of the bright sun.”
But John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States and now a lowly but very active member of the U.S. House of Representatives, was having none of it. “What a name in the annals of mankind is Bunker Hill?” he recorded in his diary. “What a day was that 17th June 1775? And what a burlesque upon both is an oration upon them by Daniel Webster, and a pilgrimage of John Tyler . . . to desecrate the solemnity by their presence!”
Now, in the twilight of a long political career, Adams had emerged as what one Virginia legislator described as “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed.” Two years before, Adams had argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on the behalf of the slaves who had led a bloody revolt aboard the schooner Amistad. Much as the lawyer James Otis had done back in 1761, when he insisted that the writs of assistance violated the British constitution (the legal case that John Quincy’s father had claimed initiated the series of events that became the American Revolution), he had insisted before the Supreme Court that maritime law and property rights did not apply when a human being’s fundamental freedoms had been violated. And unlike Otis, John Quincy had won his case.
Just the winter before he had so infuriated his congressional colleagues from the South with his insistence that all petitions regarding slavery must be read before the House that they had moved to censure him. The resulting two-week hearing had given Adams exactly the forum he wanted (it is “a trial,” he rather immodestly wrote at the time, “[in] which the liberties of my country are enduring in my person”), and best of all, the ouster attempt had failed. When his family and friends suggested it might be time for him to retire, he responded, “The world will retire from me before I shall retire from the world.”
From Adams’s perspective, both Webster and Tyler were guilty of turning their backs on the all-important issue of slavery. Webster was, he wrote in his diary, “a heartless traitor to the cause of human freedom,” while the president was “a slave monger.” Adams’s sixty-eight-year-old memories of the Battle of Bunker Hill were too personal, too vivid, to be contaminated by the politicians’ presence. In his diary he imagined the scene in front of the monument with “Webster spouting with a Negro holding an umbrella over his head and John Tyler’s nose with a shadow outstretching that of the monumental column.” “How could I have witnessed all this,” he wrote, “without an unbecoming burst of indignation or of laughter?” No, it was best that he had remained at home.
John Quincy Adams had a history of refusing to attend celebrations associated with the Battle of Bunker Hill, which had proven to be the bloodiest engagement of the eight years of fighting that followed. In 1786, as a student at Harvard, he had not accompanied his fellow classmates on a trip to Breed’s Hill to enjoy a memorial dinner where the head of the table was “placed on the very spot where the immortal Warren fell.” “I passed the day in the solitude of my study,” he remembered, “and dined almost alone in the hall.” He owed the fact that he could hold a pen with his once-broken right hand to Dr. Warren, and for John Quincy, who, like his father, had kept a diary for almost all his life, the act of writing was essential to his very being.
Other Adams family members shared his reverence for the memory of Joseph Warren. In 1786, the same year that John Quincy declined to attend the dinner at Breed’s Hill, his mother had seen a new painting by George Washington’s former aide John Trumbull titled Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill. Although full of historical inaccuracies, the painting, in which Warren is shown dying in the arms of a fellow provincial soldier as a British regular threatens to stab him with a bayonet, had an immense impact on Abigail Adams when she first saw it in London. “I can only say,” she wrote, “that in looking at it, my whole frame contracted, my blood shivered and I felt a faintness at my heart.” She predicted that Trumbull’s painting “will not only secure his own fame, but transmit to posterity characters and actions which will command the admiration of future ages and prevent the period which gave birth to them from ever passing away into the dark abyss of time whilst he teaches mankind that it is not rank or titles, but character alone, which interests posterity.”
This, according to Abigail, was the me
aning of the Revolution—that it was “character alone” that mattered. It was a conviction that as early as March 1776 prompted her to insist that her husband in his capacity as a delegate to the Continental Congress “remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands . . . [since],” she wrote, “your sex are naturally tyrannical.” It was a conviction that also prompted her to wonder, despite her immense respect for the slave owner George Washington, whether “the passion for liberty cannot be equally strong in the breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow creatures of theirs. Of this I am certain that it is not founded upon that generous and Christian principle of doing to others as we would that others should do unto us.”
Abigail Adams had hit upon the unappreciated radicalism that lay within the Declaration of Independence—“that all men are created equal.” For most Americans in 1776 this was largely a rhetorical flourish, a claim of innate equality that did not apply to women and enslaved African Americans. But as the years unfolded and the words of the Declaration acquired a renewed and largely unanticipated relevance, many Americans began to realize that the work of the Revolution was far from over.
And so on the evening of June 17, 1843, as John Quincy Adams looked toward Charlestown, his appreciation of what he’d witnessed sixty-eight years earlier was accompanied by an invigorating sense of righteous anger. In the distance, he could see the monument’s pyramid-shaped top rising out of the smoke that wafted from “the cannonade salute of the closing day.” Then came, he wrote, “in forcible impulse to my memory the cannonade and the smoke and the fire of the 17th of June 1775.”
Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution Page 37
