American Spring

by Walter R. Borneman

  Faced with the collapse of the light infantry’s flanking attack, Howe’s advance of the grenadiers and supporting regiments indeed took on the look of an ill-advised frontal attack. Their now-ragged lines were subjected to rebel fire from the breastworks extending from the redoubt and all along the main rail fence. There was apparently also rebel fire from a trio of hastily erected fleches, or angled fieldworks, that were constructed by unknown troops—perhaps part of Knowlton’s command—between the redoubt breastworks and the rail fence. In the face of this concentrated fire, the British lines ground to a halt and then broke and fled back toward Moulton’s Hill. Their officers tried in vain to halt the retreat. “Many of our men,” recalled one rebel report, “were for pursuing, [but by] the prudence of the officers they were prevented leaving so advantageous a post.”6

  General Howe now faced a crucial decision. He could withdraw his troops and avoid more slaughter, or he could re-form his command and attack again. In practice, there was really no decision to be made. Howe’s next act was preordained and unequivocal. He had no alternative but to order his men back up the hill to dislodge the rebels. To do anything less—particularly with Clinton and Burgoyne watching his every movement from Copp’s Hill—would have been unthinkable. Howe was less than enthusiastic about taking on his American cousins, but once he embarked from Boston and became committed to the field on this mission, he had no choice—short of utter shame—than to prosecute it to a decisive conclusion.

  SO THE BRITISH LINES MOVED forward once again. Whether this was a completely new assault separated in time and space or merely a continuation of the first advance after some regrouping has always been a matter of debate. On the field itself, it was difficult if not impossible to get a clear picture of what was happening. Events tended to telescope together in the observer’s mind. The best view and tactical understanding may have been with Generals Clinton and Burgoyne as they watched this drama unfold from the battery on Copp’s Hill. Even Clinton and Burgoyne, however, could not see far enough around Moulton’s Point to observe the complete disaster of the light infantry companies on the Mystic beach. Nonetheless, what they could see of Pigot’s unsuccessful advance left little doubt that this was a disaster in the making.

  As the third-ranking major general on the scene, John Burgoyne indeed had little to do except mind the artillery and form the mental picture from which he would write his vivid description of the battle. General Gage had charged Henry Clinton, however, with hastening Howe’s reserve—the Forty-Seventh Regiment and First Marines—into action from the North Battery should Howe call for it or should Clinton “observe the smallest occasion to reinforce him.”7 This Clinton had done before the first assault, but seeing the attack collapse, he now determined to join the battle personally.

  “On seeing our left give totally away,” Clinton recalled, “I desired G[eneral] B[urgoyne] who was with me to save me harmless to G[eneral] G[age] for going without his orders and went over to join with H[owe].”8 At some point, Clinton also acknowledged Howe’s request for reinforcements—as opposed merely for his reserve, which was already committed—and dispatched the Sixty-Third Regiment and the Second Marines from the North Battery, although neither would arrive in time for much action. Clinton, however, would soon be in the thick of things.

  Meanwhile, the Americans in Prescott’s redoubt could not afford even the hint of a victory celebration. To be sure, they had as yet lost few men and had broken the British advance, but they had done so with repeated firings. Their gunpowder supply was nearly as exhausted as they were after a sleepless night of digging and a hot day under frequent bombardment. From Colonel Prescott down to the greenest private, the men remaining in the redoubt and adjacent breastworks alternated glances between the British lines massed to their front and the conglomeration of fresh colonial troops waiting expectantly at their rear. Who would be the first to reach their position? Where was Colonel Putnam? Where was General Ward?

  At best, history would pay Artemas Ward little mind, and he would be the largely unknown and unsung commander in chief of the rebels. At worst, Ward would be remembered as the general who never left his headquarters in Cambridge—which is probably not true—while all hell broke loose around Bunker Hill. That Ward didn’t provide adequate command and control to Putnam and Prescott is a certainty, but whether he should have ridden to the sound of the guns, as Joseph Warren did, is debatable. The Massachusetts committee of safety charged General Ward with protecting the rebels’ encirclement of Boston, including their supply center in Cambridge. Given the uncertainty about the number of troops Howe had deployed against Charlestown, Ward’s broader mission was to guard against simultaneous attacks at Roxbury via Boston Neck—should Lord Percy do more in that direction than exercise his cannons—or directly across the Charles River at Lechmere Point, as Colonel Smith had done on the night of April 18. Indeed, Ward had no way of knowing the full extent of the British attack until quite late on the afternoon of June 17. Whatever happened on the heights above Charlestown, Ward’s first duty was to keep Cambridge secure.9

  That said, Ward seems to have conferred with Putnam at least once that morning as Putnam dashed back and forth between Cambridge and Bunker Hill. These conversations, or Ward’s independent actions, resulted in Stark’s New Hampshire men eventually making their way to the rail fence. What Ward evidently didn’t do was provide Putnam much direction as to whether he should reinforce Prescott in force on Breed’s Hill, hold Bunker Hill itself, or organize a withdrawal from the entire Charlestown peninsula.

  Artemas Ward has long been a convenient scapegoat. But from his plans on the evening of June 16 for rotating troops to relieve Prescott’s command to his sending additional regiments to the Charlestown peninsula—as the number of Howe’s attacking troops suggested that his was to be the one and only thrust of the day—Ward acted with some degree of operational clarity and competence. The weak link was his inability to implement his directives at the regimental level. In great measure this was because Ward had very little staff and no brigade or division command structure between his headquarters and the individual regiments. (Such a hierarchy would not be formally established until George Washington arrived on the scene.) Regiments of three or four hundred men attempting to maneuver as units over narrow roads and unfamiliar terrain further muddied the situation.10

  This chaos aside, what was Colonel Putnam doing with the troops he did have in the field? Exhorting them to fight, to be sure, but again, any measure of command and control over the disparate regiments and their fragmented companies was fleeting at best. Then, too, there is evidence that Putnam became occupied with the continuing saga of the rebel artillery. Certainly he pushed at least several pieces into the critical gap between the breastwork extending from the redoubt and the rail fence. Some reports even have him stopping to lend a hand with placement and firing. It was an example of selflessly doing what needed to be done, but in the broader view, this did little to reinforce Prescott or deploy arriving troops.

  Captain John Chester’s company of Spencer’s Connecticut Regiment made it into the field, but their experience was indicative of the broader command problems. Early that afternoon, Colonel Putnam’s son Daniel galloped into Cambridge with shouts that the British were landing at Charlestown and told Chester, “Father says you must all meet, and march immediately to Bunker Hill to oppose the enemy.” Chester roused his men from the church where they were billeted and then stopped short as his eyes beheld their splendid blue uniforms with red facings. His company was one of the few among the continentals even to have uniforms. Such a display wouldn’t do, Chester decided, and he ordered his men to put their “frocks and trowsers” on over their uniforms because “we were loath to expose ourselves by our dress.”

  Chester then led his men at a fast march across the neck and up to the crest of Bunker Hill. It was chaos—that was one thing upon which all reports agree. “When we arrived,” Chester recalled, “there was not a company with us in any ki
nd of order, although, when we first set out, perhaps three regiments were by our side.” All around them, men were scattered behind rocks and small hay piles; thirty men clustered behind an apple tree. Others, to Chester’s chagrin, were retreating, “seemingly without any excuse.” Chester asked why and was given a lengthy list of reasons, from lack of “officers to head them” to the fact that “they had been all night and day on fatigue, without sleep, victuals, or drink.”

  But then Chester spied an entire company marching along in rank and file bound away from the British advance. He accosted the officer in command and asked why he was retreating. When the officer made no answer, Chester halted his own men “and told him if he went on it should be at his peril.” Chester ordered his own company to make ready and declared to this flighty bunch that his men would fire if he so ordered. “Upon that they stopped short, tried to excuse themselves,” but Chester ordered them to about-face, and momentarily they followed his company down off the crest of Bunker Hill toward Prescott’s redoubt.11

  Another of those rushing into action was fifteen-year-old John Greenwood, a fifer with Captain Theodore Bliss’s company of Patterson’s Massachusetts Regiment. Having had permission to be in Cambridge earlier that day, Greenwood crossed the neck and hastened up Bunker Hill, looking for his company. Uneasy without his comrades, Greenwood was petrified by the scene and recalled that he “could positively feel my hair stand on end.” As he got near the crest, he met a black man who was wounded in the back of his neck coming toward him. Greenwood “saw the wound quite plainly and the blood running down his back.” He asked the man if it hurt, and “he said no, that he was going to get a plaster put on it, and meant to return.” That show of resolve gave young Greenwood a shot of encouragement, and he “began to feel brave and like a soldier from that moment.” Greenwood went on to find his company and went into action with them “on the road in sight of the battle, with two field-pieces.”12

  On the slopes below, Howe and Pigot were preparing for yet another assault. Their second attempt—or perhaps it was a grim continuation of the first advance—had also fallen short. Seeing the absolute carnage that Stark’s men had visited on his grenadiers and light infantry, Howe now angled his right flank toward the redoubt and its breastworks in an attempt to take them directly and avoid coming within deadly range of the rail fence. His battered companies of light infantry made a feint in Stark’s direction to hold the colonel’s troops in position, but the bulk of Howe’s next advance was in concert with Pigot against Prescott’s positions in and around the redoubt.13

  Given the slow but steady withdrawal of his troops, Colonel Prescott was down to about 150 men in the redoubt. “The enemy advanced and fired very hotly on the fort,” Prescott reported to John Adams afterward, “and meeting a warm reception, there was a very smart firing on both sides.” Finding their gunpowder and musket balls “almost spent,” Prescott ordered a short pause in the firing from the redoubt. If this momentary silence heartened the advancing regulars, they were soon blasted by the fury of Prescott’s remaining volleys.14

  Now the British front ranks were at the base of the redoubt. John Waller, the adjutant of Pitcairn’s marines, reported that they encountered “the severe fire of the enemy, but did not retreat an inch.” Major John Pitcairn, twenty-nine-year veteran of His Majesty’s service and recent participant in the Concord raid, had been hoping that this campaign in North America would be his last. It was. As he led his men at the redoubt, he was shot in the head.

  Legend has it that he fell into the arms of his son William. Certainly it was William Pitcairn who tended to his father as he was evacuated to Boston, where he died soon afterward. The other piece of the legend of the Pitcairn death is that Peter Salem, the black freeman from Framingham who had been at Concord, fired the shot that killed him. Perhaps. It was simply impossible to tell, but the fact that Salem’s role was captured in John Trumbull’s painting of Pitcairn’s death—however dramatized the moment—is a testament to the hundred-some African Americans estimated to have fought on the rebel side. On Bunker and Breed’s Hills that day, there was equality—for a fleeting moment.

  With Pitcairn struck down close by, and a captain, a subaltern, and a sergeant also slain, Adjutant Waller ran across the hillside and commanded the men to stop firing so that they might advance into the redoubt with bayonets. “Had we stopped there much longer,” Waller maintained, “the enemy would have picked us all off.” Instead he got his men into “tolerable order,” and they “rushed on, leaped the ditch, and climbed the parapet, under a most sore and heavy fire.”15 Confessed Waller, “I did not think, at one time, that I should ever have been able to write this, though in the heat of the action I thought nothing of the matter.”16

  As Major Pitcairn fell, Joseph Warren became the high-profile casualty on the American side. Warren’s actions that day would also become the stuff of legend, but one must wonder if he did not harbor some fixation on having a martyr’s death. There would be many who would give their lives for the rebel cause unselfishly and without much thought in the years ahead, but Warren seems to have been at the other extreme—one who made a needless sacrifice to satisfy no cause but his own desire to be in the thick of the action.

  Joseph Warren’s presence on Breed’s Hill, however praised in patriotic telling, seems only to have confused the rebel chain of command. Particularly with Samuel Adams and John Hancock occupied in Philadelphia, one cannot help but wonder if Warren’s higher duty lay in keeping a steady hand on the work of the committee of safety in Cambridge. So high were the contemporary compliments of his skills that had Warren survived he might well have come to occupy an even greater position in the republic born from his efforts. But Warren rushed to the field and was struck down by a British musket ball in the last bloody fighting at the redoubt.

  Having turned the front of his assault away from the rail fence and aimed it squarely toward the redoubt, Howe was now able to aim his bogged-down cannons to the left and fire down the line of the breastworks below the redoubt. This use of artillery and the advancing ranks of infantry drove the American defenders from that line. Most of these men retreated toward the higher end of the rail fence. A few unlucky ones sought shelter in the redoubt.17

  What ended the American resistance in the redoubt was neither a lack of courage nor unstoppable British resolve but rather the absence of rebel gunpowder. The acute awareness of dwindling powder supplies had hastened the exodus from Prescott’s ranks as Pigot’s troops advanced yet again. Prescott directed his men to hold steady for one final fusillade, but with few bayonets and spears among the remaining defenders, once their gunpowder was expended there was nothing they could do but flee.

  British bayonets ran through those who did not do so with enough dispatch. After the rebels were surrounded, it was over in seconds. Even Lieutenant Waller admitted that the bayonet work of the regulars was shocking. “I cannot pretend to describe the Horror of the Scene within the Redoubt when we enter’d it,” he wrote a friend four days later. “ ’Twas streaming with Blood & strew’d with dead & dying Men the Soldiers stabbing some and dashing out the Brains of others was a sight too dreadful for me to dwell any longer on.”18

  According to a British history written soon after the war, “the British soldiers, stung with the reflection of having given way before an enemy whom they despised, now returned with irresistible impetuosity, forced the intrenchments with fixed bayonets, and drove the provincials from their works.”19 General Howe merely noted that after the burning of Charlestown “relieved Pigot from the difficulty upon his left… he carried the Redoubt in a very handsome manner, at the second onset, tho’ it was most obstinately defended to the last, thirty of the rebels having been killed by bayonets within it.”20

  Peter Brown, who had stood firm all day despite misgivings, was one of the lucky ones who escaped the redoubt. “I was not suffered to be toutched,” Brown reassured his mother, “altho I was in the fort when the Enemy came in, and jumped over
the walls, and ran half a mile where Balls flew like Hailstones, and Canons roared like Thunder.”21

  This rapid rout from the redoubt did not, however, signal panic or a mass retreat along the rebel lines—far from it. Captain John Chester’s company of Connecticut men had taken up a position at a stone wall somewhere below the crest of Bunker Hill overlooking the redoubt. “Here,” Chester reported, “we lost our regularity, as every company had done before us, and fought as they did, every man loading and firing as fast as he could.” The stone wall was only two or three feet high, and bullets came through it with ease. “Good God, how the Balls flew,” remembered Chester’s lieutenant, Samuel Blachley Webb; “I freely Acknowledge I never had such a tremor come over me before.” But for about six minutes, Chester’s company stood firm and covered Prescott’s retreat “till they came up with us by a brisk fire.”22

  And so the redoubt and main rebel breastworks were carried by the regulars’ attack, but far from jubilation, there spread through the British ranks a dazed sense of disbelief. The carnage was almost unpalatable. The slope below the redoubt was a field littered with the red uniforms of the dead and the dying. From officers to the lowest private, no one appeared more dazed than General Howe himself. To his great credit, Howe had not hunkered down in the rear but led from the front. Somehow, despite a disproportionately high loss of officers, Howe came through without a physical scratch. His emotional toll would take some time to determine. The blood of his troops streaked his white gaiters, and the red of his uniform hid the dark blotches of much more.

  Henry Clinton, after scurrying up the hill behind Pigot’s troops, found Howe in this state and offered to take the lead in pressing the attack home toward Cambridge. “All was in Confusion,” according to Clinton. “Officers told me that they could not command their men and I never saw so great a want of order.” Howe thanked Clinton for his service in crossing from Boston to join the battle and appeared to acquiesce to Clinton’s advance. But then he called Clinton back and told him to make dispositions for the night and to protect the neck but not advance across it.