Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

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  Not content with sending a cannon ball through the Lexington meetinghouse, General Percy ordered that several houses just to the east of the green be set on fire. The militiamen were shooting at his regulars from those houses, and the structures must be destroyed. “We set [the houses] on fire,” one soldier wrote, “and they ran to the woods like devils.” The stone walls were also harboring militiamen, and during the next hour the regulars pushed over more than one thousand yards of Deacon Joseph Loring’s wall.

  About a quarter mile behind Percy’s front line was the Munroe Tavern, which in addition to providing the officers with food and drink served as a hospital. It was here that surgeon’s mate Simms extracted a musket ball from Lieutenant Jeremy Lister’s elbow. By the time the brigade began to head back to Boston, Lister was suffering from both a loss of blood and a lack of food. Too faint to walk, he asked Colonel Smith if he might borrow his horse. The previous night on Boston Common, when one of Smith’s officers claimed to be too sick to participate in the expedition, Lister had volunteered to take his place. Back then, Smith had urged Lister to “return to town . . . and not go into danger for others,” but Lister had felt that the honor of the regiment depended on his participation. Now that Lister’s life appeared to be in the balance, Smith gladly gave him his horse, even though the colonel was suffering from a painful leg wound and was, in the words of Lieutenant Barker, “a very fat heavy man.” A soldier offered Lister a bit of biscuit; another offered him a hatful of water from a horse pond. Feeling much better, Lister and the approximately two thousand men under General Percy’s command left Lexington at about three in the afternoon. Now that the column stretched for almost half a mile, it took a full thirty minutes before they were all under way. The march back to Boston would take all the discipline and courage the British regulars could muster. About two miles to the southeast lay the town of Menotomy.

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  Heath and Warren arrived at Lexington just about the same time as Percy’s brigade. Heath did what he could to pull together the scattered companies of militia into the makings of a proper regiment. The plan—if it could be called a plan—was to surround the British column with what Percy later described as “a moving circle . . . of incessant fire [that] followed us wherever we went.” Given the danger of the flank guards, the best place for the militiamen to harass the column was from behind, and in anticipation of this, Percy appointed a battalion from one of his most experienced regiments, the Welch Fusiliers, to be the rear guard. Adding to the difficulties encountered by the rear guard as they turned to defend the column from the militiamen gathered behind was the direction of the ever-increasing wind. Since it was blowing out of the west and they were headed east toward Boston, the regulars were continually blanketed in the powder smoke generated by their own muskets, “covering them,” one colonist wrote, “with such a cloud that blinded them yet [still left them] . . . a plain mark for the militia.”

  As the fighting raged on and the fusiliers ran out of ammunition and men, Percy was forced to replace them with another battalion; over the course of the next fifteen miles, three different battalions served as the rear guard. In the meantime, the exhausted men of Colonel Smith’s original expeditionary force marched in what was supposed to be the relative safety of the head of the column. But as they discovered, “the fire was nearly as severe [there] as in the rear.”

  Lieutenant Jeremy Lister, the wounded officer who’d been given Colonel Smith’s horse, soon learned that a saddle was also not the best place to be. “I found the balls whistled so smartly around my ears,” he wrote, “I thought it more prudent to dismount.” Lister then used the horse as a shield, shifting from side to side so as to put the animal between him and the militiamen’s fire. When a nearby horse with one wounded man on the saddle and three men cowering beside it was shot dead, Lister offered his horse to the now defenseless soldiers and decided to take his chances with the rest of the column. Other wounded soldiers hitched rides on the two fieldpieces, which were towed by horses. Whenever Percy ordered the cannons to be put to use, the soldiers who had been clinging to the weapons were sent tumbling to the ground as the fieldpieces were turned toward the column’s rear and fired.

  Some have claimed that, based on Heath’s own account of his activities, he provided important tactical leadership during this portion of the fighting. However, given the chaotic realities of that afternoon, the effectiveness of the provincial fire had more to do with there being close to four thousand militiamen on the field that day than anything else. If an organizational element was responsible for the success of the provincials, it had been provided that winter by the Committee of Safety. What was happening that afternoon on what came to be known as the Battle Road was, for the most part, highly fluid and spontaneous. It also didn’t hurt that many of the militia companies contained veterans of the French and Indian War who, unlike Heath, had experience in just this kind of guerilla-style fighting.

  “Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob,” Percy later begrudgingly admitted, “will find himself much mistaken. They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about, having [been] employed as rangers against the Indians and Canadians and this country being much covered with wood and hills is very advantageous for their method of fighting.” But what most impressed Percy was the personal courage these militiamen demonstrated as they methodically hunted the British officers in the column. Unlike the enlisted men, whose cheaply dyed red coats quickly faded to a pinkish orange, the officers’ coats were made with a more expensive and long-lasting crimson dye and were easily distinguished from the washed-out uniforms of the rank and file. For the militiamen, the vivid red of the officers’ coats presented a target that was too tempting to resist. “Many of [the provincials] . . . advanced within ten yards to fire at me and the other officers,” Percy marveled, “though they were morally certain of being put to death themselves in an instant.”

  Lieutenant Mackenzie of the Welch Fusiliers made special note of those provincials who used horses to increase their effectiveness against the British column. “Numbers of them were mounted,” he wrote, “and when they had fastened their horses at some little distance from the road, they crept down near enough to have a shot. As soon as the column had passed, they mounted again, and rode round until they got ahead of the column and found some convenient place from whence they might fire again.” Just as the colonial veterans of the French and Indian War were relying on their own considerable experience and judgment as they joined in on the fighting, so were these lone riders acting on their own initiative.

  What Heath provided that afternoon and evening was not tactical and strategic brilliance but legitimacy. Simply by being there, he, as a general in the provincial army, made what happened along the road to Boston something more than a backyard skirmish between some irate farmers and the regulars of the British Empire. With Heath and his companion Dr. Joseph Warren standing there on the hip of the column’s rear guard, the provincials were beginning to have, in a very crude and inchoate form, the trappings of a command structure.

  They were a most unlikely pair. Heath was fat and bald. Warren was tallish and handsome, his hair pinned up on the sides of his head in stylish horizontal rolls. There is no mention of Heath taking any extraordinary risks that day, but Warren was, according to one contemporary, “perhaps the most active man in the field.” At a section of Menotomy known as Foot of the Rocks, Warren put himself so squarely in harm’s way that a British musket ball struck out one of the pins that was holding up his curled hair. “The people were delighted with his cool, collected bravery and already considered him as a leader,” one commentator wrote.

  As a military novice, Warren clearly didn’t have much expertise to offer. What he did have was a charismatic talent for inspiring people. And he was learning.

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  Warren wasn’t the only one who tried to look his best that day. Before leaving Acton,
many of the town’s militiamen carefully powdered their hair with flour. Jotham Webb was a brickmaker from Lynn. He’d recently gotten married, and before leaving that morning, he put on the wedding suit he’d worn just a few days before. “If I die,” he told his new wife, “I will die in my best clothes.”

  That afternoon Jotham and the rest of his company from Lynn decided to position themselves ahead of the British column near the house of Jason Russell in Menotomy. Russell, fifty-eight, had been about to reshingle his house, and using the bales of cedar shingles to create a kind of breastworks in his front yard, he, with the help of the militiamen, resolved to defend his property against the approaching British. Some of the militiamen were posted behind the shingles; others assembled on the hillside behind the house, where an orchard provided some cover. On the other side of the road, Gideon Foster and some militiamen from Danvers put together the makings of what they hoped would be an ambush. As the vanguard of the British column became visible coming down the road from Lexington, Russell’s neighbor Ammi Cutter warned him that he was much too close to the road for his own safety. Russell, who was lame and apparently quite stubborn, waved him off with the words, “An Englishman’s home is his castle.”

  The British hit them like a thunderbolt—not from the road, but from behind. As the militiamen looked eagerly for the column, flankers came at them from seemingly nowhere, flushing the provincials out of the orchard and toward the house. Since the column was coming at them from the road, they were trapped between the hammer and anvil of the flankers and the advance guard. The would-be ambushers had been outflanked, and one of the first killed was Jotham Webb in his new bridal suit, soon followed by his twenty-five-year-old friend Abednego Ramsdell.

  The desperate survivors of the initial British onslaught fled for the safety of Jason Russell’s house. Russell was killed on his own doorstep, shot twice and stabbed an estimated eleven times by British bayonets. The Russell house was a typical, very humble colonial structure—two rooms on the ground floor and two rooms upstairs, with a cellar down below. Anything but a castle, the home of Jason Russell was about to become a slaughterhouse.

  Eight men from Danvers, Beverly, and Lynn hurried into the darkness of the cellar. They proved to be the lucky ones. By blasting away at any regular who dared to approach the cellar entrance, they were able to hold off the soldiers even as they filled the beams of the house with bullet holes that can still be seen today. The militiamen who remained up above found themselves in the greatest trouble as the regulars poured into the house. Soon the rooms were filled with the ear-splitting boom of muskets and choking clouds of powdersmoke. In desperation, Daniel Townsend and Timothy Munroe jumped through the windows. Townsend took out the entire window sash and was dead when he hit the ground. Somehow Munroe was still alive when he tumbled from the window; he staggered to his feet and began to run. Regulars fired at him repeatedly but to no effect. “Damn him!” one was heard to cry. “He is bullet proof, let him go.” Munroe, who received just a wound in the leg, later found thirty-two bullet holes in his clothes and hat; even his buttons had been shot off. Outside the house Dennison Wallis was taken captive. He quickly realized that the British were executing their prisoners. So he decided to run for it. He ultimately received twelve wounds and was left for dead, but somehow he survived.

  A total of twelve provincials and two regulars were killed at the Jason Russell house. Later that day the dozen bodies were laid out in the south room. According to Jason Russell’s wife, the blood was “almost ankle deep” when she returned to find her husband dead and her house “riddled with bullets.” Two days later, the bodies were piled on a sled and dragged by oxen to the cemetery. The townspeople dug a trench and laid the bodies “head to point” in a single grave.

  Several more harrowing incidents occurred along the road through Menotomy, all of them within hearing, if not seeing, distance of each other. Seventy-eight-year-old Samuel Whittemore decided to make a stand not far from his house. After killing several regulars, he took a musket ball to the jaw and was bayoneted repeatedly before being left for dead. He lived for another eleven years. Prior to Whittemore’s encounter, Deacon Joseph Adams had run for the safety of the hay barn, leaving his wife and children (among them a newborn baby) hiding in his house’s bedroom. Fortunately, Adams’s nine-year-old son showed a bit more pluck than his father, and after admonishing the regulars for stealing the family silver, the boy used some newly brewed beer to put out a fire that might have otherwise destroyed the house.

  At Cooper’s Tavern, two townspeople insisted on enjoying a rum drink known as a flip even as the regulars approached. The tavern keeper and his wife fled for the cellar, leaving their customers to have their brains literally bashed out by the soldiers. Just outside Menotomy in the outskirts of Cambridge, at a house on Watson’s Corner, yet another group of novice militiamen, many of them from the town of Brookline, were “scooped up” by the British flank guard and killed. It’s estimated that approximately half the total deaths that occurred that day (forty-nine for the provincials, sixty-eight for the British) happened in and around Menotomy.

  Soon after the incident at Watson’s Corner, with sunset approaching, General Percy made the decision that saved his command. Rather than push on through Cambridge and return to Boston via the bridge, he veered left and headed for Charlestown, just a few miles away on the other side of a narrow, defensible neck and under the protective guns of the navy. This seems to have caught General Heath completely by surprise. In his memoirs Heath was quite proud of the fact that prior to heading for Lexington, he instructed the Watertown militia to dismantle, once again, the bridge. He appears to have also sent instructions to prepare an ambush for the British. What he had not anticipated was this last-minute decision on the part of Percy to make what was, in retrospect, a quite predictable move given what Percy had earlier encountered when crossing the bridge into Cambridge.

  But as it turned out, the provincials had, unknown to Heath, a trick up their sleeve. Marching south from Salem were militia captain Timothy Pickering Jr. and several hundred men. Instead of taking the road through Menotomy, the Salem men were well to the east in Medford. If they pushed on, they just might cut off the British before they reached Charlestown.

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  As Pickering marched south and the British continued to fight their way, house by house, toward Charlestown, John Andrews looked out from the hills of Boston. He could see, he wrote, “the engagement very plain. It was very bloody for seven hours.” Benjamin Franklin’s sister Jane Mecom later wrote to her brother of “the horror the town was in when the battle approached within hearing,” especially since it was expected that the fighting “would proceed quite in to town.” Similar fears were felt in communities throughout the region. Like Andrews in Boston, the Reverend Samuel West watched the fighting from Needham. “We could easily trace the march of the troops from the smoke which arose over them,” he wrote, “and could hear from my house the report of the cannon and the platoons [i.e., volleys] fired by the British.” Even worse for the residents of Needham, who lost five that day, were “the infinitely more distressing scenes which we expected would follow. We even anticipated the enemy enraged as they were at our doors and in our houses acting over all the horrors which usually attend the progress of a victorious exasperated army especially in civil wars like this.”

  In Menotomy, where the women and children had gathered in houses safely removed from the firing, the rumor began to circulate that the town’s slaves were about to launch a revolt of their own and “finish what the British had begun by murdering the defenseless women and children.” When Ishmael, an enslaved man belonging to the Cutler family, approached the house of George Prentiss, one of the many terrified women gathered inside asked, “Are you going to kill us, Ishmael?” No, Ishmael replied; he wasn’t there to kill them; he was there to see whether his owner’s wife, Mrs. Cutler, was safe.

  A similar fear overtook the
women of Framingham, who armed themselves with “axes and pitchforks and clubs” and assembled in the Edgell house, convinced that “the Negroes were coming to massacre them all.” One resident later attributed this “strange panic” to “a lingering memory of the earlier Indian alarms . . . , aided by the feeling of terror awakened by their defenseless condition and the uncertainty of the issue of the pending fight.”

  Whatever the source of this terrible fright might have been, it marked a disturbing transformation among the citizens of Massachusetts. Reverend West of Needham claimed that prior to Lexington and Concord, his parishioners had been “mild and gentle.” Once their loved ones began to die, however, these same parishioners became “ferocious and cruel—at least towards all those they suspected as unfriendly to their cause.” In town after town, the battle lines were being drawn.

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  Around seven in the evening, Percy and his column reached the safety of Charlestown, where a height of land known as Bunker Hill provided the defensive ground they needed to convince the provincials to discontinue the pursuit. It was dusk, dark enough, William Heath remembered, “as to render the flashes of the muskets very visible.”

  Heath later came to the conclusion that there could have been a very different result that evening. If only Captain Timothy Pickering and his men from Salem had “arrived a few minutes sooner,” Heath wrote, “the left flank of the British must have been greatly exposed and suffered considerably; perhaps their retreat would have been cut off.” In other words, if Pickering had only shown the proper spirit, April 19, 1775, might have ended with a decisive American victory.