Twin hills comprised the Heights of the Dorchester peninsula, and the distance from these summits to the nearest British lines at Boston Neck was a mile and a half, well within range of a 12- or 18-pound cannon. The distance to where most of the British fleet lay off Long Wharf was greater, almost two miles, which was also within range, though barely.
The plan was to occupy the Heights on a single night, before the British knew what was happening, just as had been done at Bunker Hill. This time, however, there were the guns from Ticonderoga to haul in place, and the Heights of Dorchester were considerably steeper than at Bunker Hill and, at an elevation of 112 feet, nearly twice as high. More seriously, the frozen ground on top was “impenetrable as a rock,” in Washington’s words, which meant that digging trenches and throwing up breastworks in the usual fashion would be impossible, at least in one night and with no noise.
The solution was a highly sophisticated scheme whereby the fortifications would be fabricated elsewhere out of sight, then, with massed manpower and oxen, hauled, along with the heavy cannon, to the Heights of Dorchester, where all would have to be in place and ready for action before daylight.
A resourceful lieutenant colonel who had directed the work on the fortifications at Roxbury, Rufus Putnam—a farmer and surveyor in normal times, and a cousin of Israel Putnam—had suggested the idea after seeing an unfamiliar term in a text on artillery, Muller’s Field Engineer, by a British professor named John Muller. Putnam had taken his plan to his superior officer, Colonel Richard Gridley, and to Henry Knox. In turn, the three had gone to see Washington, and in no time hundreds of men were at work building chandeliers, great timber frames that could be filled with “screwed hay” (hay twisted into bales) or compact bundles of branches and brushwood called fascines.
Washington also wanted barrels filled with earth set in rows in front of the parapets, to add to the appearance of strength, but more importantly to stand ready to be rolled down the steep slopes on the advancing enemy. He had “a very high opinion of the defense which may be made with barrels,” he told Artemus Ward, stressing that the hoops should be well nailed so the barrels would not break to pieces.
To divert the enemy and drown out the noise of the work parties, Washington planned to precede the operation with night barrages of artillery fire from Roxbury, Cobble Hill, and Lechmere Point, where a number of the guns from Ticonderoga had been newly emplaced.
As critical and dangerous as any part of the operation would be the crossing of the low-lying causeway of the Dorchester peninsula, which stood in plain view of the British lines at the Boston Neck, less than a mile away. To conceal all movement over the causeway, an extended barrier of hay bales was to be thrown up.
Three thousand men under General Thomas were to take part in fortifying the Heights. Another 4,000 were to stand by at Cambridge for an amphibious attack on Boston, once the British launched their assault on the Heights—amphibious because milder weather had returned and the bay was again largely open water. General Putnam had overall command of the Boston attack. Generals Greene and Sullivan would lead the crossing. On the Charles River at Cambridge, sixty flatboats stood ready.
To bring the army to maximum strength, 2,000 Massachusetts militia were called out, while work details were dispatched to round up wagons, carts, and 800 oxen. At the army’s hospital in Cambridge, thousands of bandages were being prepared, and additional beds made ready. Notices in the Boston Gazette (published in Watertown since the start of the siege) called for volunteer nurses.
For miles around Boston everybody seemed to know someone, or someone who knew someone, who was in the know about what to expect. Bets were wagered on what would happen and when. In the surrounding towns tension and fear grew by the day.
“It is generally thought that there will be something done amongst you very soon,” Sarah Hodgkins wrote from Ipswich to her husband Joseph.
“The preparations increase and something is daily expected, something terrible it will be,” wrote Abigail Adams to her “Dearest Friend,” who had since returned to Philadelphia. “I have been in a continual state of anxiety and expectation…it has been said ‘tomorrow’ and ‘tomorrow’ for this [past] month, but when the dreadful tomorrow will be I know not.”
As he had often before in his life, Washington eased the stress of waiting by catching up with his correspondence, writing again to Joseph Reed and to a young black poet, Phillis Wheatley, then living in Providence, who had sent him a poem written in his honor: “Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side / Thy every action let the goddess guide.”
The country had no poets as yet, and Washington was not known to be inclined to poetry or poetic musings. Yet he, a soldier and planter—a slave master—despite all that bore heavily on his mind, took time now to write to her in his own hand.
“I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me,” Washington wrote, “and however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyrick, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your great poetical talents.” Should she ever come to Cambridge, he would be “happy to see a person so favored by the muses.”
In a letter to a Virginia friend, Washington wrote almost lightly of preparing to “bring on a rumpus” with the redcoats.
THE DATE HAD BEEN SETTLED. The move on Dorchester would begin after dark on March 4 and be completed by first light the morning of March 5, the anniversary of the Boston Massacre.
How many hundreds, perhaps thousands, understood what was unfolding, even in some detail, no one knew. Yet success depended on secrecy. To this end Washington ordered a stop to all communication with Boston. Generals Heath and Sullivan personally inspected the lines to verify the vigilance of the guards on duty. On the chance that the enemy got wind of what was happening and moved first to occupy the Heights, certain regiments stood ready to march at a moment’s notice.
One of the closest observers of the situation within Boston, Loyalist Peter Oliver, would later write that there was not the least suspicion of what the rebels were up to. But according to the diary of one British officer, a few of the British did find out as early as February 29, from deserters and from a spy referred to only as “Junius,” that the rebels intended to “bombard the town from Dorchester.” The warnings, however, were not taken seriously.
Washington issued orders to the troops clarifying how very serious the moment was and what was expected of them:
As the season is now fast approaching when every man must expect to be drawn into the field of action, it is highly necessary that he should prepare his mind, as well as everything necessary for it. It is a noble cause we are engaged in, it is the cause of virtue and mankind, every temporal advantage and comfort to us, and our posterity depends upon the vigor of our exertions…. But it may not be amiss for the troops to know that if any man in action shall presume to skulk, hide himself, or retreat from the enemy, without the orders of his commanding officer, he will be instantly shot down, as an example of cowardice.
On Saturday evening, March 2, Washington wrote in haste to Artemus Ward that everything must be set and ready to go as planned on Monday night, March 4. After folding and sealing the note, he scrawled on the back, “Remember barrels.”
THE BOMBARDMENT of Boston began at midnight Saturday and continued at intervals until morning. The British answered at once with a heavier, louder cannonade. “The house shakes…with the roar of the cannon,” wrote Abigail Adams at her home ten miles away. “No sleep for me tonight.”
Little damage was done by the exchange. It was nearly all noise, just as Washington wished, and the night would have been reckoned a complete success were it not that three of the big mortars burst, due apparently to the inexperience of Henry Knox and his artillerymen.
Sunday night the firing resumed and again the British responded with full crescendo. On the third and crucial night of Monday, March 4, the roar of the guns from both sides became more furious by far.
British captain Charles Stuart described
sheets of fire filling the sky. But as he also recorded, “The inhabitants were in a horrid situation, particularly the women, who were several times drove from their houses by shot, and crying for protection.” Watching from the American lines, Lieutenant Samuel Webb wrote, “Our shells raked the houses and the cries of the poor women and children frequently reached our ears.”
At the first crash of the guns, General Thomas and 2,000 men started across the Dorchester causeway, moving rapidly and silently, shielded from view by the long barrier of hay bales. An advance guard of 800 men, a “covering party” made up largely of riflemen, went first, to fan out along the Dorchester shores in case the British made any attempt to investigate during the night. The main work party of 1,200 men followed immediately after, and then came hundreds of carts and heavy wagons loaded with chandeliers, fascines, hay bales, barrels, and most important of all, the guns from Ticonderoga.
“The whole procession moved on in solemn silence, and with perfect order and regularity, while the continued roar of cannon serves to engage the attention and divert the enemy,” wrote Dr. Thacher, who, crossing the causeway with the troops, noted with gratitude the “vast number of large bundles of screwed hay arranged in a line next [to] the enemy…to which we should have been greatly exposed while passing.”
Progress up the steep, smooth slopes was extremely difficult, yet numbers of the ox teams and wagons made three and four trips.
The night was unseasonably mild—indeed, perfectly beautiful with a full moon—ideal conditions for the work, as if the hand of the Almighty were directing things, which the Reverend William Gordon, like many others, felt certain it was. “A finer [night] for working could not have been taken out of the whole 365,” he wrote. “It was hazy below [the Heights] so that our people could not be seen, though it was a bright moonlight night above on the hills.”
At Cambridge, on the moonlit Common, Generals Greene and Sullivan paraded with 4,000 troops in front of the college buildings, ready to move to the river and the shallow draft boats in the event of a signal from the Roxbury church steeple.
Recounting the night’s events later, General Thomas would say it was as early as ten o’clock when the fortifications on the Heights were sufficiently ready to defend against small arms and grapeshot. It was also about ten when a British lieutenant colonel, Sir John Campbell, reported to Brigadier General Francis Smith that the “rebels were at work on Dorchester Heights.” It was news that called for immediate action. But Smith, a stout, slow-moving, slow-thinking veteran of thirty years’ service, chose to ignore it; and from that point on, the work proceeded unnoticed by any other British officers or troops on guard, or by any of the Loyalists in Boston who served as willing eyes and ears for the British.
On the Heights the men toiled steadily with picks and shovels, breaking the frozen ground for earth and stone to fill the chandeliers and barrels. At three in the morning a relief force of 3,000 men moved in, and an additional five regiments of riflemen took up positions near the shore. By the first faint light before dawn, everything was ready, with at least 20 cannon in place.
It was an utterly phenomenal achievement. General Heath was hardly exaggerating when he wrote, “Perhaps there never was so much work done in so short a space of time.”
At daybreak, the British commanders looking up at the Heights could scarcely believe their eyes. The hoped-for, all-important surprise was total. General Howe was said to have exclaimed, “My God, these fellows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months.”
The British engineering officer, Archibald Robertson, calculated that to have carried everything into place as the rebels had—“a most astonishing night’s work”—must have required at least 15,000 to 20,000 men. Howe, in his official account, would be more conservative and put the number at 14,000.
Later that spring, one of the London papers would carry portions of a letter attributed to an unnamed “officer of distinction at Boston”:
5th March. This is, I believe, likely to prove as important a day to the British empire as any in our annals. We underwent last night a very severe cannonade, which damaged a number of houses, and killed some men. This morning at day break we discovered two redoubts on the hills of Dorchester Point, and two smaller works on their flanks. They were all raised during the night, with an expedition equal to that of the genie belonging to Aladdin’s wonderful lamp. From these hills they command the whole town, so that we must drive them from their post, or desert the place.
THE SHOCK OF DISCOVERY threw the British into “utmost consternation.” Their immediate response, a thunderous two-hour cannonade, proved nothing, as their guns could not be elevated sufficiently to strike a target so high. Meantime, from his flagship, Admiral Molyneux Shuldham (who had replaced Admiral Graves) sent an urgent, unequivocal message to William Howe: not a ship in the harbor could remain unless the rebels were removed from their position.
It was not that the ships were directly “under the guns” on the Heights, as some later accounts gave the impression. At such a distance of nearly two miles, a direct hit would be a lucky shot. Still the ships were theoretically within range, and lucky shots were known to happen.
Howe could dally no longer. With his generals gathered at the Province House at midmorning, he made his decision: he would attack, as he had vowed he would—and as his pride and honor demanded. He had no intention of staying in Boston, but that now seemed beside the point. Being who he was, he could not possibly accept the prospect of being outdone by the ragtag enemy, even if the carnage that had resulted from such an attack at Bunker Hill was as well known to him as to any man alive.
Two thousand troops were ordered to proceed by ship down the harbor to Castle Island, from where the attack on Dorchester would be launched at nightfall.
Captain Archibald Robertson thought the plan little short of madness and said so to others. Writing in his diary during the course of the day, he called it “the most serious step ever an army of this strength in such a situation took, considering the state the rebels’ works are in and the number of men they appear to have under arms.” The fate of the whole town was at stake, “not to say the fate of America.” These were his sentiments, he declared, and he listed the names of the officers he had spoken to, hoping they could persuade Howe to change his mind and embark from Boston as quickly as possible. But starting about noon, the big transports loaded with troops began pushing off from Long Wharf.
Years later, recalling the morning of March 5 on Dorchester Heights, John Trumbull would write, “We saw distinctly the preparations which the enemy were making to dislodge us. The entire waterfront of Boston lay open to our observation, and we saw the embarkation of troops from the various wharves…. We were in high spirits, well prepared to receive the threatened attack.”
Dr. Thacher, setting events down in his journal as they unfolded that “anxious” day on the Heights, wrote of the swarms of spectators covering the nearby hills, waiting to see a bloody battle.
Sometime in the course of the day (the exact hour is not known), Washington arrived to survey the defenses and the panorama below. “His Excellency General Washington is present animating and encouraging the soldiers,” recorded Thacher, “and they in return manifest their joy, and express a warm desire for the approach of the enemy.”
Each man knows his place, and is resolute to execute his duty [he continued]. Our breastworks are strengthened, and among the means of defense are a great number of barrels, filled with stone and sand, arranged in front of our works, which are to be put in motion and made to roll down the hill, to break the ranks and legs of assailants as they advance. These are the preparations for blood and slaughter! Gracious God! If it be determined in thy Providence that thousands of our fellow creatures shall this day be slain, let thy wrath be appeased, and in mercy grant that victory be on the side of our suffering, bleeding country.
According to the Reverend William Gordon, Washington called on those within the
sound of his voice to “ ‘remember it is the fifth of March, and avenge the death of your brethren.’ It was immediately asked what the general said by those that were not near enough to hear, and as soon answered. And so from one to another through all the troops, which added fresh fuel to the martial fire before kindled.”
Describing the troops drawn up at Cambridge, waiting for the order to attack, Washington himself said he “never saw spirits higher.”
It was about noon when the first of the British troop transports pushed off for Castle Island and proceeded down the harbor with increasing difficulty against strong headwinds. For by early afternoon, what had been an abnormally warm, pleasant day had changed dramatically. The wind had turned southeasterly, blowing “pretty fresh.” Then, as foreseen in no one’s calculations, the elements took over.
By nightfall, a storm raged, with hail mixed with snow and sleet. By midnight, “the wind blew almost a hurricane.” Windows were smashed, fences blown over. Two of the transports bound for Castle Island were blown ashore. The American lieutenant Isaac Bangs, who was among those freezing at their posts on the high ground of Dorchester, called it the worst storm “that ever I was exposed to.” Clearly there would be no British assault that night.
The morning after, the winds continued to blow with a fury. The snow and sleet had changed to driving rain. General Heath concluded that “kind Heaven” had stepped in to intervene. As so it seemed to many on both sides, when, that morning, Howe called off the attack and gave orders to prepare to evacuate Boston.
Possibly it was not the storm alone that caused Howe’s change of mind. According to Captain Robertson, his pleas to cancel the attack, and the influence of the other officers to whom he had made his case, and John Montresor in particular, had had the desired effect even before the storm reached full force. From what Robertson wrote in the final lines of his diary entry for the day, it would seem that the storm had merely given Howe an easy out.
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