Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

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  At noon on Tuesday, May 17, four days after his arrival at Castle Island, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage landed at Boston’s Long Wharf. A third of a mile long, lined with more than fifteen warehouses and shops (one of which had once been the boyhood home of the painter John Singleton Copley), Long Wharf was a wide and inviting platform of commerce that gestured toward the harbor and the ocean beyond like an opened hand.

  Five and a half years before, during the fall of 1768, Long Wharf had been the arrival point of the soldiers that had ultimately made the Boston Massacre an inevitability. Now, with the arrival of General Gage and the knowledge that at least four regiments of British soldiers were on the way, the town was being forced to relive that nightmare even as it prepared to suffer an altogether new ordeal.

  But there was at least one consolation. Governor Thomas Hutchinson, the most reviled man in all of Massachusetts, was to depart soon for England, and General Gage was said to be a most reasonable man, with an American wife.

  Gage was met at Long Wharf by a delegation that included the upper chamber of the General Court, known as His Majesty’s Council; the town selectmen; and a host of other officials, including the province’s secretary, Thomas Flucker. Preceding this august group were the Independent Company of Cadets, the elite of Boston’s militia, who were responsible for accompanying the royal governor at official functions. Dressed in red coats with blue facings, patterned on the uniforms worn by the British Foot Guards, the cadets were the governor’s official bodyguards and were commanded by John Hancock.

  If Samuel Adams was the guru of the patriot cause, Hancock, thirty-seven, was its uncrowned king. Handsome, with the stubble of a beard visible on his clean-shaven cheeks, he’d recently scored a major success in March with a surprisingly well-delivered Massacre Day Oration, an annual event held in the Old South Meetinghouse that provided Bostonians with a stirring reminder of the evils of a standing army. No one in America had lived a more privileged life than John Hancock, and yet there was a profound difference between him and the man whom it was now his sworn duty to protect, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage. Gage’s family had lived on their estate in the Sussex town of Firle since the fifteenth century. His status as British gentry was something that he and everyone he knew took for granted. Hancock’s wealth, on the other hand, was only a generation old. His uncle, who had adopted him when he was a boy, had amassed much of his fortune selling arms and provisions to the British army during the French and Indian War. John Hancock’s inherited wealth had provided him with a beautiful house on Beacon Hill, an ornate carriage, fashionable clothes, and a nasty case of gout, but it had not won him the sense of entitlement that the landed aristocracy in England enjoyed. As anyone in the colonies could see, fortunes could be lost even more quickly than they could be made, and as a consequence, the wealthy in America tended to be (relative to their counterparts in Britain, at least) an insecure and touchy lot.

  Much has been said in both his and our own time to malign Hancock’s intelligence and temper, but not even Samuel Adams proved as adept at responding to the mood swings of the American people. After his uncle’s death, he purposely changed the direction of the family business to include a variety of house and shipbuilding projects that came to employ, his lawyer John Adams estimated, at least one thousand Boston families. In the 1770s, as his wealthy peers throughout New England became the objects of envy, suspicion, and open ridicule, Hancock became ever more popular. He served diligently both as a selectman and as a moderator at town meetings. Whereas the idealistic fervor of Samuel Adams could rub even patriots the wrong way, Hancock had the charismatic flair required to attract a loyal popular following, and it was little wonder that Hutchinson had once tried to bring him into the loyalist fold. To the end, however, Hancock remained his own man. He declined to serve on Samuel Adams’s Boston Committee of Correspondence, and as Thomas Gage was about to discover, Hancock had a talent for the deftly delivered stab in the back.

  Cannons were fired from Admiral Montagu’s flagship, HMS Captain, and from the batteries in the North End and on Fort Hill to the south. Gage had brought with him both his chariot and his coach, and it’s more than likely that at least one of these vehicles was used to transport him and his retinue up Long Wharf to King Street. Here he received a standing salute from the companies of militia, artillery, and grenadiers before reaching the Town House, whose red bricks had recently been painted gray to resemble stone. Once he’d stepped from his carriage to the entrance of the Town House, he climbed the stairs to the council chamber, where he presented his commissions from the king to the upper house of the General Court. After taking the required oaths, he appeared on the balcony overlooking King Street and read a proclamation directing all militia officers to maintain their commissions until receiving further orders, which prompted three volleys from the companies on the street below. A vast crowd had assembled on the square that had formerly been the scene of the Boston Massacre and the tarring and feathering of John Malcom, and on that afternoon in May they gave their new governor three rousing cheers.

  Once he’d had a chance to be introduced to a large number of Boston’s leading citizens, Gage was again escorted by Hancock and the cadets, this time to Faneuil Hall, where he enjoyed what was described as an “elegant dinner,” even if his toast to his predecessor Governor Hutchinson elicited a prolonged hiss. At some point, Gage presented Hancock with his personal flag, featuring the Gage family coat of arms.

  Inevitably, Hancock, the young and arrogant darling of the patriot movement, ran afoul of Thomas Gage. Later in the summer, Gage accused Hancock of not paying the proper respect as he passed between the cadets’ lines at the entrance to the governor’s residence at Province House. When Gage angrily called for Hancock’s dismissal, the cadets responded by returning Gage’s flag and refusing to serve under another commander. Hancock had lost his command, but Gage had been robbed of his personal guards. Once again, Hancock had found a way to elevate his standing among the people of Boston.

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  On May 25, the new royal governor suffered through an Election Day sermon at the First Meeting based on the scriptural proverb “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.” Later that day he was presented with a slate of twenty-eight candidates for his own governor’s council that was filled with patriots. As was his right, he rejected thirteen of them, including John Adams and Harvard professor John Winthrop. He also reminded both houses of the General Court that as of June 1 they would be meeting not in Boston but, as the Port Act required, in Salem. Instead of living in Province House, Gage needed to be based near the new temporary capital, and over the course of the next few days he made arrangements to stay in a mansion in the little town of Danvers, just a few miles from Salem.

  On May 29, Admiral Montagu began setting up the blockade that would prevent all shipping from reaching or leaving Boston Harbor. Given the size of the anchorage, it was no easy matter. The Magdalen was placed at Point Shirley at the harbor’s extreme northeastern corner, the Mercury fourteen miles to the south at Point Allerton, and the Tamar hovered near the harbor entrance at the Brewsters. Six other vessels took up positions throughout the inner harbor, with the largest and most conspicuous of the warships, the admiral’s flagship Captain, placed between Long and Hancock’s wharves, the entire Boston waterfront comfortably in range of her guns.

  On June 1 John Rowe recorded in his diary, “This is the last day any vessel can enter this harbor until this fatal act of Parliament is repealed. Poor unhappy Boston. God knows only thy wretched fate. I see nothing but misery will attend thy inhabitants.”

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  But the Boston Port Act was only the beginning. The very next day, word reached the city that a vessel had arrived in Marblehead with a draft of another bill that would be referred to in the months ahead as the Massachusetts Government Act. Not content with sealing o
ff Boston, Parliament had decided to strip the colony of the essence of its royal charter, which dated back to 1692. With the exception of one pro forma annual gathering to elect town officials, regular town meetings, the lifeblood of the patriot movement, were to be forbidden. Instead of being nominated by the House of Representatives, subject to the governor’s veto, the upper chamber of the General Court was to be handpicked by the king through what was called a writ of mandamus (Latin for “we command”).

  It now seemed as if everything Samuel Adams had predicted was about to come true. By August, when the Government Act went into effect, every town in Massachusetts would be deprived of its liberties.

  John Rowe received the disturbing news while attending a meeting of fellow Boston merchants. Rowe was a moderate, a man doomed to see both sides of the situation and to reserve judgment; he loved the mother country, but he also cared deeply about the town of Boston. Back in December he appears to have gotten so caught up in the excitement surrounding the Tea Party that he was heard to shout, “Who knows how tea will mingle with salt water?” It was an exclamation he had come to regret as he struggled to play both sides of the political fence. “The people have done amiss [with the Tea Party],” he wrote in his diary, “and no sober man can vindicate their conduct, but the revenge of the ministry is too severe.”

  Samuel Adams seems to have taken the Government Act as a kind of goad. It was time, he and the Boston Committee of Correspondence decided, to circumvent the merchants and their attempts to pay for the tea and appeal directly to the farmers of the country towns. Since the merchants’ livelihood was based on trade with London, they would always be wary of anything that might endanger that profitable relationship. It was the “yeomanry” of the country—people like the farmers of Gorham who kept their muskets at the ready even when plowing their fields—who could be counted on to do the right thing. “Is it not necessary,” Samuel Adams wrote on May 30, “to push for a suspension of trade with Great Britain as far as it will go, and let the yeomanry (whose virtue must finally save this country) resolve to desert those altogether who will not come into the measure?” Perhaps if England’s merchants were made to suffer at least a portion of the economic misery inflicted on Boston, the British ministry might begin to see the error of their ways.

  On June 2, the committee began drafting what it melodramatically titled “The Solemn League and Covenant.” In the tradition of Joyce Junior, this was a startlingly direct reference to the English Civil War and the 1643 agreement by which Parliament combined with Scotland against the Royalists. As its title suggested, the Solemn League and Covenant was all about commitment and coercion. By signing this agreement, New Englanders were pledging not only to boycott all British goods but to spurn and vilify any of their countrymen who dared to do differently.

  On June 8 the committee quietly sent out copies of the Solemn League and Covenant to towns throughout Massachusetts over the signature of the town clerk, William Cooper. It took only a few days for word of the covenant to make its way back to the merchants in Boston. As was to be expected, they were outraged. In what was nothing less than a barefaced act of intimidation, the committee was attempting to precipitate a boycott by creating the false impression that Bostonians had already agreed to the measure and then, once they’d used that lie to get the country towns on their side, force the merchants into line.

  Like John Rowe, John Andrews was a merchant who had always been cautiously supportive of the patriot cause; but this underhanded move by Adams and his committee was simply too much. The patriots’ reckless disregard for the principles they were supposedly working to uphold might, in Andrews’s view, serve the purposes of the British ministry by fracturing the city into two warring factions. “Those who have governed the town for years past . . . seem determined to bring total destruction upon us . . . ,” he wrote his brother-in-law in Philadelphia. “I am afraid we shall experience the worst [of] evils, a civil war.”

  By this time, transports containing the promised regiments of soldiers had begun to arrive in the harbor. On June 14, Lieutenant Colonel George Maddison and the Fourth Regiment disembarked at Long Wharf and after marching up King Street pitched their tents on the Boston Common, near the livestock pound. John Rowe reported that there were “a number of spectators to see them.” The following day, the Fourth Regiment was joined by Major Clerk and the Forty-Third, who set up camp near the workhouse to the northeast. Traditionally, the common had been a bucolic oasis, where lovers liked to stroll at dusk along the tree-lined path known as the Mall; with the arrival of hundreds of soldiers, it was becoming an open-air barracks and training ground. The troops had displaced the town’s sizable herd of cows, many of which attempted to return to their old grazing grounds (“where the richest herbage I ever saw abounds,” marveled one officer) until driven away by stones thrown by the regiments’ sentries.

  In the meantime, the waterfront, normally a center of nonstop commotion, had grown eerily silent. Goods and provisions were still allowed to enter Boston, but because of the Port Bill they had to be first off-loaded at Salem then transported overland by wagon to Boston—a trip of almost thirty miles that one merchant claimed cost even more than the freight from England. Even worse, Boston’s stevedores, sailors, and mechanics—indeed, anyone who relied on the once-constant influx of shipping at the city’s docks—no longer had a way to support themselves.

  On Sunday, Rowe went for a walk along the wharves. In the past he would have seen ship after ship lined up along the waterfront with their sails drying in the late-spring sun as well as an anchorage full of coasting schooners and merchant ships. Boston Harbor was now shockingly empty; what vessels remained belonged, for the most part, to the British navy. “Tis impossible to describe the distressed situation of this poor town,” he wrote, “not one topsail merchantman to be seen.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Long Hot Summer

  By mid-June it seemed certain that an angry showdown between the merchants and the Boston Committee of Correspondence was about to erupt in Faneuil Hall. But matters were also coming to a head in Salem, where the province’s legislative body, the General Court, went into session on June 7. Reaction to Boston’s call for a boycott had been mixed, but sympathies for the town’s plight remained strong throughout the colonies. As indicated by letters received by the Boston Committee of Correspondence from committees in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia, the time was considered right for a meeting of representatives from all thirteen colonies to work out a coordinated response to the ministry’s attempts to limit colonial rights, for “an attack upon one colony was an attack on all.” It was time, Samuel Adams and his coterie of patriots decided, for the Massachusetts House of Representatives to select the delegates to represent the colony at what would come to be called the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia.

  Each year, the Massachusetts House chose a committee to draw up a report on the state of the province. This year it was secretly decided that the nine members of this committee should be the ones to come up with a slate of delegates for the Continental Congress. Unfortunately a loyalist had made his way onto the committee. Daniel Leonard was a lawyer descended from a family of Taunton ironmongers. Up until recently he had distinguished himself for his wit, style, and criticism of the administration; in fact, he had been the one who joked back in 1765 that Thomas Hutchinson’s house had been destroyed because of what Leonard judged to be his poorly written history of Massachusetts. That winter, however, Leonard had grown increasingly disaffected with the patriots. At some point in the spring he became a committed loyalist, a transformation that the residents of Taunton attributed to Thomas Hutchinson, who was seen speaking to Leonard on the town green beside what came to be known as the Tory Pear Tree.

  Whether or not Leonard had been seduced by Hutchinson, he was a most dangerous opponent to have on the committee. Not only was he still highly respected among the members of the House, but he
might report the committee’s discussions to General Gage. It was decided that two committee meetings must be held each evening after the adjournment of the General Court. The first was to be a sham meeting in which the committee pretended to discuss the Port Bill, with Samuel Adams giving the impression that he might be open to paying for the tea. One of the committee members was another Taunton lawyer named Robert Treat Paine, who counted Leonard as a good friend. Paine marveled at how convincingly Adams strung Leonard along at these meetings. “It would be hard to describe,” Paine later wrote, “the smooth and placid observations made by Mr. S. Adams, saying that it was an irritating affair, and must be handled cautiously; that the people must have time to think and form their minds, and that hurrying the matter would certainly create such an opposition that would defeat the matter and many observations of this kind, all tending to induce Mr. Leonard . . . to think that matters would terminate in obedience to the Port Bill.” Each meeting ended quite abruptly, with Adams insisting that since it was so hot and they had been attending court all day, “it was unprofitable to sit any longer” and time to go to bed. Once the meeting had been adjourned, however, all the members except Leonard “immediately repaired to a retired room . . . , shut their doors and entered freely and fully on all the subjects of grievances.”