Patriots

by A. J. Langguth

  The British ships had resumed firing, and cannonballs blazed through the air, raising dust clouds in the tall grass wherever they hit. Weighing his strategy, Gage decided not to take advice from Henry Clinton. The slope of Breed’s Hill was gentle and the fortress barely more than a mound of earth. He could send his men on a forward charge straight up the hill.

  Chatham’s gibe about Gage’s trusting to the spade had been especially stinging because the British Army despised digging in and huddling behind barricades. A direct assault would be more courageous and more satisfying. It was the gift Gage would give his troops.

  He chose William Howe to lead the soldiers who would sweep the Americans down. Like Clinton, Howe had pressed for an instant response, yet now he would have to wait still longer, because the spot where he wanted to ferry his troops was too shallow for landing; high tide would not reach the site, called Moulton’s Point, for nine or ten more hours. The landing would have to be put off until three in the afternoon. Howe tried to turn the delay into an advantage by having meat and bread prepared for his men. They were heading for a site barely two miles away, but General Howe loaded their knapsacks with supplies for three days.

  Even though the British couldn’t possibly lose, Thomas Gage remembered the lesson of Lexington and sent great numbers of his best men with Howe. Two thousand grenadiers and infantrymen would storm the hill, while battalions of marines on alert would wait for orders. As the troops got ready, Gage rode out to an advance headquarters for a closer look. With his lens, he watched the activity on Breed’s Hill and then passed the glass to an aide, Abijah Willard.

  Who was that tall man on the parapet who seemed to be in command? Gage asked. Willard studied the figure and announced that it was his brother-in-law, William Prescott.

  “Will he fight?” Gage asked.

  “I cannot answer for his men,” Willard said, “but Prescott will fight you to the gates of hell.”

  —

  Colonel Prescott had been using the hours of grace to prepare his troops for the bloodshed to come. They were deeply shocked when a cannonball tore off the head of a stocky farmboy named Asa Pollard as he was digging outside the fort. Prescott wanted to use this first casualty as a lesson. Bury him at once, he said; there would be no ceremony.

  His men wouldn’t agree to such callousness. They defied Prescott’s order to return to work and gathered around Pollard’s open grave while a clergyman offered prayers. The solemnity affected the survivors as Prescott had feared. Frightened men began wandering away and disappearing down the slope, headed for home.

  When Israel Putnam showed up with a corpulent colonel named Samuel Gerrish at his side, he told Prescott to send the tools the men had been using back to a safe place. Prescott warned him that if he sent men off the hill, he would never see them again.

  Putnam insisted. Every man of them will return, he said.

  The colonel did as the general ordered, and a large party of men left with the tools. Not one came back.

  Even before those defections, Prescott had appealed to headquarters for reinforcements, but his messenger found the army’s leaders in Cambridge suffering from distress of their own. General Artemas Ward was prostrate with a gallbladder attack. He had already ordered part of General John Stark’s New Hampshire regiment to join Prescott but was reluctant to part with any more men until the British response was clearer. There was nothing to stop Gage from ignoring Breed’s Hill and charging into Cambridge to seize the patriots’ food and ammunition.

  General Ward agreed, however, to take Prescott’s request to the Committee of Safety, which was in session. But its leading member, Dr. Joseph Warren, hadn’t been able to sleep all night and was now lying down, trying to overcome a throbbing headache. Meeting without him, the committee was more willing to take risks than General Ward had been. The rest of General Stark’s regiment was ordered to Breed’s Hill, along with James Reed’s men, who were also from New Hampshire. Stark was in Medford, about four miles away, when the order reached him. He lined up his troops and passed out what meager supplies he had—one cup of powder per soldier, fifteen musket balls, one flint. Since few of his men carried the same-caliber weapon, the balls had to be melted down and reshaped to their individual barrels. When that was done, they stuffed their ammunition into their pockets and rushed to the hill.

  —

  General Gage wasn’t going to let the rebels slink down from the hills, barricade themselves in deserted houses in Charlestown and pick off his men as the snipers had done along the Lexington road. When a few shots came from the town, Gage ordered his artillery to bombard all of Charlestown’s houses and its main church. They heated musket balls until they were red hot and also shot “carcasses”—hollow balls filled with burning pitch. By 2: 30 P.M., the entire ghost town was in flames.

  At Hancock’s Wharf, General Howe’s soldiers were massing to board the boats that would carry them to Moulton’s Point. So many troops required more than one trip, and the twenty-eight barges each ferried fifty men, crossing while guns on the British ships gave them a heavy cover. As soon as the troops vaulted from the boats at Moulton’s Point, the crews took up their long white oars for the return trip. When all of Howe’s soldiers had been rowed to the shore, they were ready at last to assault Breed’s Hill. Since British soldiers expected words of encouragement before a battle, Howe had them called to attention.

  “Gentlemen,” he began, “I am very happy in having the honor of commanding so fine a band of men. I do not in the least doubt that you will behave like Englishmen and as becometh good soldiers.”

  He went on, “If the enemy will not come out of their entrenchments, we must drive them out at all events. Otherwise, the town of Boston will be set on fire by them. I shall not desire one of you to go a step farther than where I go myself at your head.”

  Howe reminded them that more than a hill was at stake. “Remember, gentlemen, we have no recourse to any other resources if we lose Boston but to go on board our ships, which will be very disagreeable to us all.”

  —

  When John Stark and his troops reached Charlestown Neck, they found other reinforcements halted there because of the heavy bombardment from the Lively and other British guns in the harbor. General Stark sent Major Andrew McClary ahead to tell the reluctant officers that if they didn’t intend to move they should stand aside and let the New Hampshiremen through. McClary stood nearly six and a half feet tall. A path was cleared instantly.

  General Stark led his men out on the narrow spit of land while balls of nine and twelve pounds—even twenty-four—streamed through the sky and thudded or splashed around them. Stark moved very deliberately, and at his side a nervous aide named Henry Dearborn suggested that they might march faster to get out of the crossfire.

  General Stark slowed still more and looked at him calmly. “Dearborn,” he said, “one fresh man in action is worth ten fatigued men.” They advanced at the same pace to the top of Bunker Hill, where Israel Putnam had taken up his post. Resting there as he waited for his rear columns to join him, General Stark was at the highest point in the series of ridges. Below him he could see the outlines of Prescott’s fort and the British approaching across the water.

  But Stark also saw on his left that the American position was badly exposed right down to the Mystic River. The gap gave the British an opening for a successful flanking attack. Stark gathered his men around him for short but urgent instructions. Give three cheers, he said, and then run to that rail fence about forty yards from Prescott’s fort. The men were to patch up the fence and gather armloads of grass and hay to drape over its rails. The result would be a flimsy barricade that any cannonball, even a musket shot, could penetrate, but men could hide behind it, and it might look more substantial than it was.

  Stark told the men to pile stones from the point where the fence ended straight down to the edge of the Mystic. Behind that wall, which was rough but more substantial than the fence, he posted his best men three deep. The
newly commissioned American generals didn’t share the British disdain for entrenchments or breastworks. General Israel Putnam said that the average American fighting man was more afraid of an injury to his legs than of one to his head. Get him behind a trench, he said, and an American would fight forever.

  —

  At the primitive fort on Breed’s Hill, British shells continued to pound down on the American forces. When one ball burst the head of a lieutenant, Colonel Prescott was sprayed with the man’s brains and blood. But amid the hours of din and fear he had been marshaling his forces calmly. As the British completed their landing, the American desertions had ended, and his men were taking up their positions. On Bunker Hill, Israel Putnam and Samuel Gerrish were readying fifteen hundred milling and disorganized men to fight.

  By 3 P.M., smoke from the fires of Charlestown rose like a thundercloud around the fort. Through the haze, Colonel Prescott saw Joseph Warren riding toward him from Bunker Hill. Even before his headache Warren had felt a premonition, and the previous night he had mentioned it to Betsy Palmer, whose husband had joined the Tea Party and the battle at Lexington. Mrs. Palmer admired Dr. Warren above every other patriot and was especially taken with his handsome features and light-blue eyes. During dinner Warren had said, “Come, my little girl, drink a glass of wine with me for the last time, for I am going on the hill tomorrow and I shall never come off.”

  At the Committee of Safety that morning, Elbridge Gerry had tried to keep Warren from joining Colonel Prescott. “It would be madness for you to expose yourself,” Gerry had said. “As surely as you go there, you will be slain.” But at noon, with a book of poetry in his pocket, Warren borrowed a horse and a musket and sped out along Charlestown Neck.

  Warren wore an expensive light-blue coat and a satin waistcoat fringed with lace. But his manner was somber, and the men already on Breed’s Hill didn’t smile at his appearance. Prescott came to Warren’s side and greeted him by his new title. He had been named a major general, although his commission hadn’t arrived.

  I am happy to see you, General, Prescott said. I am relieved of command, and I will obey your orders.

  “I have no command here, Colonel Prescott,” Warren told him. “I have come to give what assistance I can and to let these damned rascals”—he gestured to the British gathering at the base of the hill—“see that the Yankees will fight.”

  Prescott persisted. I wish, then, you would look over the work we have thrown up and give your opinion, he said.

  Warren said, “You are better acquainted with military matters than I am.” He walked over to the fortress wall to see how it was constructed.

  —

  After the British ships had fired red-hot ball into Charlestown, soldiers went ashore and set the rest of the town on fire. The town became an inferno that couldn’t possibly shelter more snipers to harass the British troops. With reinforcements landing downshore from his main force, General Howe now had twenty-two hundred men and was deploying them cleverly. Because of the hectic activity by John Stark’s men, he knew that the Americans were vulnerable on their left flank. Howe sent his light-infantry companies down a path along the water’s edge toward Stark’s jerrybuilt stone wall. He ordered them to sweep away any opposition, climb the hill and storm the American fort from the rear. At the same time, other infantry companies, grenadiers and marines would attack the front, rushing the Americans and stabbing them with bayonets. Howe suspected that the Americans were badly equipped, but he didn’t know how few bayonets they had. If the British got close enough for hand-to-hand combat, the Americans would be lost.

  Howe’s infantry marched out four abreast led by the Welsh Fusiliers and moving slowly toward Stark’s stone wall and hayrack. The sun was hot, and the soldiers sweated in their woolen uniforms and under the weight of blankets, ammunition and the three-day rations strapped to their backs. They waded through grass above their knees and boosted themselves over the dozen low stone walls built to safeguard cattle. Whenever a wall or a fence broke the even line of their march, officers hurried over to correct the imperfection.

  General John Burgoyne stood among the British guns bombarding the hill and was thrilled by the panorama unfolding before him. A roar of cannon and mortar filled his ears as he watched Howe’s infantrymen make their way over the low fences and the other British wing climb steadily up Breed’s Hill. Straight ahead of him, Charlestown was ablaze, the wooden church steeples rising over the rest like fiery pyramids. Behind him, Boston’s rooftops swarmed with men and women who had come out to shudder at the spectacle or gloat over it. Burgoyne reflected that a defeat today could spell the loss of America to the British Empire.

  —

  With his men crouching behind their stones on the beach, John Stark knew exactly how little ammunition they had. Before Howe’s men came into sight, Stark had made a mark in the river-bank about forty yards from their hiding place. Don’t fire, he told them, until the British have reached that mark. Moving up to the men at the fence, who were peering out through holes in the hay, Stark calculated the rise to the ground and told them not to fire until they could see the enemy’s half gaiters. Israel Putnam had come down briefly from Bunker Hill to repeat a well-known phrase spoken by a Prussian prince thirty years earlier: “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”

  The British plodded forward, unaware of what lay behind the stones they could see in the distance.

  The fusiliers were the first to pass Stark’s line. A row of muskets rose on the stone wall, and blasts of ball tore into the British ranks and cut them down. Before they could escape, ninety-six British soldiers were killed. The survivors quickly backed out of range. Behind the fusiliers, the infantrymen formed for their own charge and marched over the fallen bodies until they were also driven back by fire from the wall. Once more the British officers urged their men forward. Again they were mowed down. To John Stark, the dead seemed to be lying as thick as sheep in a fold. The water at the edge of the beach was running red, and British corpses were being lifted out on the tide.

  There was no fourth attempt. The infantrymen were running back along the narrow strand to where they had landed. Some were trying to get into the landing boats, hoping to row to safety. Their officers were swearing and gesturing wildly with their swords to force the men back. General Howe’s strategy had failed.

  Howe’s only choice was to send all of his remaining forces head on against Prescott’s earthen fort. He decided to attack on three sides. The Forty-seventh Regiment and the Marine battalion would move to his left. The Fifth, Thirty-eighth and Forty-third Regiments would go to the center under Brigadier General Robert Pigot, who had helped to get the survivors of Lexington back safely to Charlestown. Howe would take the grenadiers and the Forty-second Regiment to the right. He would avoid the stone barricade that had been so lethal to the fusiliers, but his march would take him past the rail fence draped with hay.

  —

  Prescott and Stark had no joint battle plan. Each was fighting according to his own judgment. But Prescott had also urged his men to let the British get within close range before opening fire. Prescott had fewer than four hundred men in his fort and behind a sketchy breastwork. Stark had four to five hundred crouched behind the stones and the rail fence.

  When Howe’s men were within sixty yards of the fence, they halted to shoot. When the British stopped, the Americans opened fire from behind their curtain of hay and ripped through the British front line. Howe himself wasn’t struck, but the Americans were determined to hit every officer on the hill. Whenever someone spotted a British insignia, he shouted, “There!” or “See that officer!” Two or three others then rested their gun barrels on the rail fence and took aim. “Let us have a shot at him!” Since they all opened fire at once, they could usually drop their target.

  Inside the fort, dirt had been piled up three feet high and the best shot among Prescott’s men climbed to the top of the mound. He stood there exposed while the men below him remained p
rotected. One by one, he picked off his prey. As soon as he fired one musket, another loaded weapon was handed up to him. At last a grenadier took careful aim and brought him down, but not before Prescott’s lone marksman had killed or wounded twenty British regulars.

  William Howe couldn’t believe what was happening. It was a moment and an emotion he had never experienced. In the face of the most sustained fire his troops had ever confronted, they had broken and were running away through the high grass. Writhing and groaning among the dead, wounded British soldiers were trying to crawl from the line of fire. Howe saw his army in full retreat. Up and down the rail fence and inside the fortress, the Americans cheered loudly. Prescott and Stark moved among them, praising their skill and bravery but reminding them that the afternoon wasn’t over.

  General Howe needed about fifteen minutes to collect his troops and line them up for another charge. This time, General Pigot’s men would storm the fort, and Howe’s men would assault the rail fence. Once again, there was no fire from the Americans until the British were within a hundred feet. Then the Americans sprayed a hail of lead, driving the British front rank back into the men behind them. Three fourths—and as many as nine tenths—of each company fell to the ground. For the second time, Howe watched his army turn and run for their lives.

  —

  Despite their success, many American soldiers were feeling the same fear. A dozen men were helping to move the wounded to safety on Bunker Hill when only three or four could have done the job. Other Americans slipped away. When challenged, they claimed to have permission to go because they had been digging all night and firing all afternoon and were famished and parched and exhausted. One captain from Connecticut saw an American company retreating from the hill with its officers in the lead, and he ordered his own men to cock their muskets and drive the deserters back to Colonel Prescott.