But Prescott faced a shortage more serious than defections. If Howe asked his men to make a third charge, Prescott’s troops had almost no powder left to drive them back.
Howe was weighing his next move. Some officers were begging him not to charge the American line again. His wounded were being carried to boats to be ferried back to Boston. Many of his dead still lay in front of the American fort, too near the rebel muskets to drag away. But Howe had reinforcements to draw upon. Henry Clinton had joined those troops who had only feinted at the left side of the fort while Howe led the main charge. Clinton’s men hadn’t taken many casualties, and if Howe chose to try again, he could count on them.
Colonel Prescott thought he also had available reinforcements among the hundreds of men wandering aimlessly on Bunker Hill. Israel Putnam was trying to get them into fighting ranks, but he was short of officers and even those he had weren’t all willing to face a new attack. At the first sight of the redcoats advancing, Colonel Samuel Gerrish had trembled and cried, “Retreat! Retreat! Or you’ll all be cut off!” His men had followed him to the safe side of the hill. Now Gerrish lay flat on the ground, fat and immobile, claiming he was too exhausted to go on. Putnam tried cajoling him and slapped some of Gerrish’s more hysterical men with the flat of his sword. It was no use. Colonel Prescott’s troops would not receive reinforcements.
Meantime, William Howe had made his choice. His drummers beat the tattoo to rally the men. Many were bleeding or bandaged, but again they formed a line twelve feet apart and moved toward the breastwork and the redoubt. Behind that front line, the British were massed in files that looked impossibly deep to the Americans inside the fort. The gallantry of the British in their beautiful, impractical uniforms—and memories of fighting alongside such men in past battles—stirred profound feelings among the Americans. One rebel from Ipswich thought they were too handsome to fire at. All the same, he raised his musket.
This time, pride or desperation kept Howe’s ranks intact. As a man fell in front, the man behind him stepped over his body as though it were a log in the meadow and took his place. But once more the American fire was so accurate that the line could only move forward very slowly. At last a British captain, George Harris, got close enough to lead his grenadiers in a rush up the slope between the breastwork and the fort. Twice they had to fall back. On the third charge, a musket ball scraped the top of Harris’ head. Four soldiers leaped forward to carry him out of range, but when three were hit Harris snapped, “For God’s sake, let me die in peace.” The men ignored him and got him to a boat for Boston.
Major Pitcairn, who had damned the Americans on the Lexington green, led a unit of marines up the hill. The burning houses at Charlestown were sending up waves of intense heat, the afternoon sun was unbearable, and the fire from the fort was worse than anything one of Pitcairn’s young captains had imagined. When he complained of feeling hot, Pitcairn offered no sympathy. Soldiers must inure themselves to any hardship, he said. They shouldn’t even recognize heat or cold. Pitcairn added that doing his duty took all of his attention.
Behind his walls, Colonel Prescott sent a series of messengers to the rear, appealing to General Putnam for reinforcements. Putnam, who was riding around Bunker Hill with entrenchment tools slung across his horse, could hear the battle roaring on the next hill but didn’t join it. By now, Prescott and his men were out of ammunition. Some fired nails or other bits of metal they could pick up from the ground. Others tried to hold back the approaching line of bayonets by hurling rocks from the top of the fortress wall.
The American desperation goaded the British. Howe’s men stormed the fort with cries of “Push on!” One last blaze of muskets cut into their ranks, but by then they were scrambling up the ditch and over the wall. Some Americans raised their heads to fire even as the British were on top of them. Prescott thought one more round of ammunition could have repelled them, but he didn’t even have that. Bellowing with frustration and revenge, the British soldiers swarmed over the fort, stabbing with their bayonets. Through thick black smoke from the final rounds, the Americans groped along the walls for the single narrow exit at the rear of the fort. In the murk, the British didn’t dare fire for fear of hitting their own men. Colonel Prescott was able to beat back the bayonets with his sword and retreat from his fortress with only slashes in his coat.
But as the Americans escaped from the fort, they found themselves trapped between British soldiers on both sides. The rebels behind the rail fence provided their only cover as they stumbled toward Bunker Hill with the British pursuing them. Thirty of John Stark’s men managed to save one cannon, dragging it up the hill and down to Charlestown Neck. A fresh American regiment from Charlestown was firing to keep the British at bay. A few kegs of powder arrived from Portsmouth, and the Americans were covered long enough to gather up many of their wounded as they retreated. The British were exhausted and, with their dead strewn around them, not pressing their advantage. Every one of General Howe’s aides was killed or wounded. Working his way to Howe’s side, Henry Clinton thought he had never seen such confusion. British officers complained that even in victory their men weren’t obeying them.
On Bunker Hill, Israel Putnam made the same report to Colonel Prescott about the Americans. Prescott knew that Putnam’s disorganized reinforcements, only about six hundred yards from the battle site, might have given him a victory and reminded Putnam of his agreement to come to the fort’s defense. “Why,” Prescott demanded, “did you not support me, General, with your men?”
Putnam said, “I could not drive the dogs up.”
But Prescott was in no mood for alibis. “If you could not drive them up,” he said, mimicking Old Put, “you might have led them up.”
—
The shooting had lasted less than an hour. Entering the fort in the final moments, Major Pitcairn was shot in the head by a black American named Salem Prince. The Committee of Safety had forbidden enlisting slaves into the army, but several freed blacks fought that day on the hill. Fatally wounded, Pitcairn fell into the arms of his son, who carried him to a boat, kissed him farewell and went back to fight. Henry Clinton led a force chasing after the Americans. He expected them to make a last stand on Bunker Hill, but by the time he got there the rebels had gone.
When he went out to make sure that the British had left the scene, Andrew McClary, the American major who had bulled his way through Charlestown Neck five hours earlier, was struck dead by a last random cannonball from the harbor. Outside the fort, a British soldier came upon the body of Joseph Warren lying in a trench. America’s newest general was dead before he could receive formal notice of his commission. Warren had been one of the last men to leave the fort. When a bullet struck the back of his head, a reflex jerked his hand to the wound. But he had been killed instantly. The British soldier cursed his corpse and said Warren had done more mischief than anyone else in the colonies. Later, when General Gage heard the news, he agreed and said that Warren’s death was worth five hundred men to him. On the hill, the soldier stripped Warren of his coat, his satin waistcoat and his white breeches with silver loops. Walter Sloane Laurie, the British captain who had been forced to back his men across the North Bridge at Concord, was also present. Laurie ordered a grave dug and took pleasure in seeing Warren wrapped in a farmer’s coat and stuffed into the ground along with another dead rebel.
Dr. Warren had been Samuel Adams’ most diligent student. But he hadn’t mastered the lesson of secrecy and had carried to the hill letters from James Lovell in Boston that revealed information about British troop strength and deployment. Lovell’s father was the loyalist schoolmaster who had dismissed his class on the morning Percy’s troops marched on Lexington. His son was such a dependable patriot that in 1771 Samuel Adams had chosen him as the first orator to commemorate the Boston Massacre. Because of Dr. Warren’s indiscretion, James Lovell was arrested and locked in the Boston jail.
A half hour after Prescott’s men had been dislodged from the fort, a Br
itish officer, Lieutenant John Dutton of the Thirty-eighth Regiment, sat down on the grass. He suffered from gout and wanted to change his stockings. Dutton’s orderly saw two men moving toward them, carrying muskets. He knew from the crudeness of their clothes that they weren’t British soldiers and ran to warn Dutton. The lieutenant scoffed at him. The Americans were coming to surrender and give up their arms, Dutton said. After all, an entire British unit was only fifty yards away. But the men raised their weapons and shot the lieutenant and his servant dead. John Dutton became the last British soldier to die that day on Breed’s Hill.
—
James Otis, in and out of asylums since 1771, had been passing his days lethargically at his sister’s house in Watertown. When he heard rumors of war that morning, Otis roused himself, borrowed a musket from a nearby farmer and set off to join in the excitement. His brain was still disordered, but he escaped the British guns and returned home that evening about ten o’clock. He had apparently spent the day with American snipers near Charlestown.
By now, any threats James Otis might have made fifteen years ago were irrelevant. In the shadow of Breed’s Hill, Otis had seen the province in flames, but the best part of him had perished long before the fire.
George Washington at the battle of Princeton, by Charles Willson Peale
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Washington
1775
GEORGE WASHINGTON was still in Philadelphia when he heard reports of the battle on Breed’s Hill. He had been confirmed by the Congress and was preparing to take up his command in Cambridge. From the casualty figures, he could tell that the British had paid an exorbitant price for their victory. A British colonel who was dying from his wounds had said, “A few such victories would ruin the Army.” Another British veteran of the battle wrote home, “We have got a little elbow room, but I think we have paid too dearly for it.” Nathanael Greene, an American commander from Rhode Island, said, “I wish we could sell them another hill at the same price.”
Nearly one third of the British soldiers sent from Boston had been killed or wounded—more than eleven hundred casualties. British losses at the rail fence had run to seventy percent. And yet William Howe remained extremely popular with the men who had survived his three assaults. The day after the battle, he congratulated them on their bravery. As they repaired their gear and cared for the wounded, Howe’s men went about their duties with good humor.
For all the heroism on Breed’s Hill, the American camp was filled with accusations and reprisals. Colonel Prescott wanted Israel Putnam court-martialed, but Putnam was too well liked for that. General Artemas Ward was severely criticized for not bestirring himself during the engagement. Had he provided coherent tactics, his men said, the Americans could have held the hill. When the Congress debated whether to appoint George Washington as commander in chief, some members had worried that they might be slighting General Ward, given how esteemed he was by his men. By the morning of June 18, three days after Washington was unanimously elected, Ward’s popularity was no longer an obstacle.
—
That same day, Washington wrote to his wife to inform her of the honor being conferred upon him. He seemed eager to reassure her of his devotion: “I should enjoy more real happiness and felicity in one month with you, at home, than I have the most distant prospect of reaping abroad if my stay was to be seven times seven years.” Washington promised to return safely to her in the fall. But he enclosed a will. He allowed himself more candor with his favorite brother, John Augustine. “For a while,” Washington wrote, “I am embarked on a wide ocean, boundless in its prospect and from whence, perhaps, no safe harbor is to be found.”
One of Washington’s traits that had impressed the Congress in Philadelphia was his modesty. He seldom joined in their debates; his education had been limited, and he wasn’t a fluent speaker. He asked his fellow Virginian Edmund Pendleton to draft his acceptance speech, but the tenor and sincerity of his words were his own. He spoke as frankly to members of the Congress as he would to his brother.
Washington said he was distressed that his abilities and his military experience might not be adequate for the trust they were conferring upon him. Still, he promised to exert his every power in the glorious cause. But if—here Washington revealed a lifelong dread—he failed, if his reputation lay in ruins, the Congress should remember that he had warned them on this day that he wasn’t equal to the command. In concluding, Washington refused the monthly salary that the Congress had voted for him. Instead, he promised to keep an exact account of his expenses and be reimbursed only for them.
His brief speech was favorably received. John Adams thought it was noble, particularly the part about renouncing his pay.
Washington’s candor to the Congress had not been mere humility. At the age of forty-three, he was honest with himself. He knew that he was not a master of military strategy. He didn’t disagree that he could perform better in this new post than either John Hancock or his rival from Virginia, Colonel William Byrd, but his country was asking him to defeat men who had given their lives to the art and science of war.
—
Washington had been raised for the ambiguous life of a Virginia gentleman with a limited fortune. He wasn’t the eldest son in his family, nor had he been born to his father’s first wife, who had died after giving Augustine Washington two sons and a daughter. Three years later, the widower married an orphan, Mary Ball, who was twenty-three and a little past the usual age for marriage. She gave birth to a boy on February 11, 1732, a date that would be moved forward to February 22 when the calendar was revised. That first son of Augustine’s second family was named George to honor Mary Ball’s guardian, a lawyer named George Eskridge. Three more sons and a daughter survived.
Augustine Washington prospered as a planter. He was no Byrd or Lee or Randolph, but he acquired more than ten thousand acres of land and fifty slaves. He sent his two older sons to his old school in England. He might have intended to provide the same education and social finishing for the sons of his second marriage, but he died when George was eleven, making a British education impossible. Although Augustine Washington’s will favored his first family, George was not ignored. At twenty-one he was to inherit the family house at Ferry Farm, along with ten slaves and twenty-five hundred acres of not especially fertile land. Until that time, his property would be controlled by his mother. As a widow, however, Mary Ball Washington seemed to combine an enthusiasm for money with an indifference to the way it was managed. In her thirty-five years Mary Washington had lost both of her parents and her husband; now she was determined to cling to her oldest son. Under the terms of the will, she and her other children were to live with George at Ferry Farm. But within a year or two George began to mature rapidly and cast about for an avenue of escape.
The young man’s Latin was sketchy and his spelling uncertain. He had grown into a remarkably fine horseman, however, and a fair shot. Early in his teens it was clear he would have an impressive physique and would stand well over six feet. His face was square, with a thrusting jaw and a florid fair skin that was often regarded as the English ideal. But what set George apart from other tall and robust Virginians was the intensity of his determination to better himself. He copied rules into a notebook that would guide him in making his way in the world. When speaking to men of quality, for example, he was not to look them full in the face. At meals, he shouldn’t clean his teeth on the tablecloth. The easiest rule for George to observe was a warning against biting humor. Life with Mary Washington had left him a serious young man.
For a time, he considered becoming a lawyer and filled pages with drafts of legal papers. He also copied out several verses on true happiness from an author who defined it as a good estate on healthy soil and a quiet wife.
At the age of fourteen George tried to break away from Ferry Farm. His half brother Lawrence suggested that George could make his fortune by shipping out on a tobacco freighter and tried to cajole Mary Washington out
of her opposition to the idea. Lawrence, who was twice George’s age, had already sailed to the West Indies to fight in Admiral Edward Vernon’s expedition against the Spanish fleet. Many of Vernon’s men died of yellow fever, but Lawrence came back to Virginia with stories of adventure at sea and named his estate for his commander—Mount Vernon. Mary Washington’s self-absorption was well known to her neighbors, and her coldness terrified their children. No appeal could move her now. George could not go to sea. But two years later, when he turned sixteen, she began allowing him to spend many of his days at Mount Vernon.
There George met Lawrence’s brother-in-law, George William Fairfax, who was seven years older than George and living nearby at Belvoir, his family’s plantation. Through the Fairfaxes, George Washington was introduced to a grander life than anything at Ferry Farm. At Belvoir he learned to play billiards and whist and became addicted to dancing. Lawrence Washington had become an amiable substitute for George’s father and was already living a squire’s life at Mount Vernon on land that included the four thousand acres his wife had brought him in marriage. To have a similar estate George would have to earn it—or marry it—for himself. Like many Virginians of his background, he ached to buy land, but that took money.
At Belvoir he came to know Lord Fairfax, an Oxford graduate in his midfifties, who had come to Virginia to look after his far-flung properties. Young Washington made an engaging companion for riding and hunting, and Fairfax asked him to travel beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains and help survey the Fairfax forest land there. At sixteen, George Washington took his first job, running lines for his lordship’s estate.
Even for a hardy young man, frontier life was rigorous. During that first trip, George usually made terse entries in his diary—“Nothing remarkable happen’d”—but he recognized a joke when it was on him. The first night out, he had stripped off his clothes for bed, as though he were a house guest at Belvoir. But his bed was only matted straw with no sheets and a threadbare blanket heavy with lice and fleas. George jumped up in the dark, dressed again and settled down to sleep in his clothes like the more experienced surveyors. He wrote to a friend that most nights he bunked on a little hay or on a bearskin, along with a frontier family huddling together like dogs and cats. Happy, George said, was the man who got the berth nearest the fire. But he considered his pay generous—a doubloon a day. In time he earned enough to take a claim on four hundred and fifty-three acres of wild land in Frederick County.
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