Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  In his defense, Pickering claimed that he had marched his men from Salem as quickly as was reasonably possible. But like James Nichols, the Englishman from Lincoln who decided that he could not fire a musket in anger at the North Bridge in Concord, Pickering had his reasons to avoid a confrontation. Even though he had been instrumental in organizing the militia not only in Salem but throughout New England, he was not part of the patriot inner circle. For one thing, his father, Timothy Pickering Sr., was an outspoken loyalist. But Timothy Pickering Jr. was too “assuming . . . and headstrong” to let even his own father influence what he decided to do. In the future, Pickering would become one of George Washington’s most trusted officers, and he eventually served as secretary of state under both Washington and John Adams. But on the evening of April 19 he still believed, he wrote a friend, that “a pacification upon honorable terms is practicable.”

  Rather than charging into Cambridge and cutting Percy off, Pickering lingered on Winter Hill, more than a mile away, where he stood at the head of his men and looked toward Charlestown in the deepening twilight. Pickering was so nearsighted that if he didn’t wear his glasses, “the smallest object he could discern . . . was a regiment.” One of his officers later remembered seeing him “riding along at night with the light of the campfires flashing on his spectacles.” Playing across the lenses of his glasses that evening on Winter Hill were the muzzle flashes of British and provincial muskets. Pickering looked through those pieces of glittering glass and saw not a war to be won but a reason to talk.

  He was, it turned out, in the minority.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  No Business but That of War

  By the morning of Thursday, April 20, hundreds if not thousands of militiamen had flooded into Cambridge and Roxbury, with thousands more on the way from towns across Massachusetts. With the exception of the harbor, which was dominated by Admiral Graves’s warships, British-occupied Boston had been effectively surrounded by militiamen from the country. All the while, terrified noncombatants began to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the British regulars stationed inside Boston.

  That morning, after a day and a night listening to the distant firing of guns, the Bostonian Sarah Winslow Deming was shaking so uncontrollably that she had trouble standing, as did her two female houseguests, one of whom she expected to “fall into hysteric fits every minute,” while the other clung desperately to “anything she could grasp.” They must, Deming wrote in a diary account of her ordeal, flee this “city of destruction” and take their chances in the country. Deming’s husband insisted on remaining, at least temporarily, in Boston, but he was willing to drive his wife and her companions out of the city in a chaise before he returned to make sure their home and personal effects were safe. Soon the Demings had joined a long line of carriages and carts waiting to exit the city. After making it past four different British sentries, they were finally on the road to Roxbury. Deming’s husband asked where she wanted to go next; Sarah told him to let the horse decide. The horse followed the road up to Meetinghouse Hill, which was crowded, Deming wrote, with militiamen “old, young, and middle-aged.” She was struck by the “pleasant sedateness on all their countenances.” Instead of being encouraged by the provincials’ presence, Deming was reminded of “sheep going to the slaughter.”

  Harvard professor John Winthrop and his wife Hannah had spent the night in a house in Fresh Pond, about a mile from their home in Cambridge, with between seventy and eighty anguished wives and their children. As Cambridge filled up with militiamen from as far away as Worcester, they and three others decided to head to Andover. They took turns riding and then walking beside “one poor tired horse chaise” as they made their way through what Hannah described as “the bloody field at Menotomy . . . strewn with mangled bodies.” “We met one affectionate father with a cart,” she wrote, “looking for his murdered son and picking up his neighbors who had fallen in battle.” Another New Englander traveling in the opposite direction noted that the houses “were all perforated with balls and the windows broken. Horses, cattle and swine lay dead around. Such were the dreadful trophies of war for twenty miles.” It was no wonder “all [was] confusion,” Deacon William Tudor of Brighton reported. “The rumor was that if the soldiers came out again they would burn, kill, and destroy all as they marched.” Like Sarah Deming, who spent the night with the Reverend William Gordon in Roxbury before traveling to Rhode Island and then to Connecticut, they must turn their backs on the city that had once been the center of their lives.

  —

  Panic and confusion had also gripped the British soldiers in Boston. It was close to midnight by the time Lieutenant Jeremy Lister, his right arm swollen and caked in blood, crossed the harbor and staggered up the crooked street to the house where he lived with several officers. As he sat on a chair, stunned and famished, waiting for a pot of tea to brew, he was besieged by people wanting to know about the events of that terrible day. By his own estimation, he had marched “about sixty miles in [the] course of twenty-four hours,” almost half of those miles “after I was wounded and without a morsel of victuals.” It was no wonder, then, that when someone asked about Lieutenant Sutherland, who had received a musket ball in the chest at the North Bridge, Lister dispensed with all tact and said exactly what he assumed to be the case. “I replied [that] I supposed by that time he was dead.” Unknown to Lister, Sutherland’s wife was standing behind him, and she “immediately dropped down in [a] swoon.”

  That night Admiral Graves urged General Gage to allow his warships to blast Charlestown and Roxbury to pieces so that the British army could seize the high ground to the north and south. Gage insisted that his army was not strong enough to undertake such a bold move. The best that they could do was to dig in and prepare for the attack that they all assumed was about to come from the provincials.

  —

  On the morning of Thursday, April 20, Captain Timothy Pickering was asked to attend a meeting in Cambridge. In addition to key militia officers, the group included members of the Committee of Safety, most notably Dr. Joseph Warren. The topic for discussion that morning was nothing less than what to do next.

  After watching Percy’s retreat into Charlestown the night before, Pickering had assumed that the fighting at Lexington and Concord was the equivalent of the Stamp Act Riots of 1765 and the Boston Massacre of 1770: an eruption of violence that was soon to be followed by a gesture of British forbearance. There was no need to assemble an army until after they had first seen whether General Gage wanted to negotiate. Some of those present agreed with Pickering, but only some. “Others thought that now was the time to strike,” he wrote, “and cut off the troops before they were reinforced; and then, said they, the day will be our own.” Pickering believed such talk was recklessly unrealistic. “I do not see,” he wrote, “what mighty advantage can accrue to us by getting possession of Boston; none, I am sure, which can countervail the loss of thousands in storming the town, which will immediately be beat to pieces by the men-of-war.”

  But what troubled Pickering the most about the meeting was not the wildness of the rhetoric; it was the motives of the more radical patriot leaders. Up until that moment, Pickering had assumed they were driven by an honest love of country; but now he had the unsettling suspicion that “ambition . . . was as powerful a stimulus as the former.” And with John Hancock and Samuel Adams soon to depart for Philadelphia, Joseph Warren had emerged as the de facto leader of what Pickering described as “the intended revolution.”

  —

  That day Warren issued a circular letter for distribution throughout the colony under the auspices of the Committee of Safety, urging men to enlist in the provincial army. It was not a moderate document. “Our all is at stake,” he wrote. “Death and devastation are the instant consequences of delay. Every moment is infinitely precious. An hour lost may deluge your country in blood, and entail perpetual slavery upon the few of your posterity
who may survive the carnage. We beg and entreat, as you will answer to your country, to your own consciences, and, above all, as you will answer to God himself, that you will hasten and encourage by all possible means the enlistment of men to form the army, and send them forward to headquarters at Cambridge.”

  Warren took a different tone when he turned his attention to what he referred to as “my ever-adored town.” Since the first tumultuous hours after Lexington and Concord—during which Sarah Deming and her friends had been lucky enough to escape—Boston had been almost completely sealed off from the surrounding countryside. Across from the fortifications at Boston Neck, Roxbury had quickly become a town populated chiefly by militiamen, making it impossible for Gage and his army to receive any provisions or supplies from the city’s only access point to the mainland. Before the many patriots trapped inside Boston could get out and the loyalists outside the city could get in, some kind of agreement had to be reached with Gage. That day, Warren wrote the general a letter about the need to settle on a policy regarding Boston. Instead of the hysteria and bluster of the earlier call for recruits, Warren addressed his counterpart as a leader he both respected and was willing to trust. “Your Excellency, I believe, knows very well the part I have taken in public affairs,” he wrote. “I ever scorned disguise. I think I have done my duty. Some may think otherwise; but be assured, sir, as far as my influence goes, everything which can reasonably be required of us to do shall be done, and everything promised shall be religiously performed.” Warren was just thirty-three years old and hardly a career politician. A doctor who had been raised on a farm in Roxbury, he had first assumed elective office less than a year before, yet he apparently had no qualms about writing the man at the apex of political and military power in British North America as an equal. Perhaps Timothy Pickering was right; perhaps there was more than a modicum of ambition behind Warren’s commitment to the patriot cause. But exactly this kind of ambition was to become the driving force—both for good and for bad—behind the United States.

  The next day, Friday, April 21, the Committee of Safety determined to raise an army of eight thousand Massachusetts soldiers to serve until the end of the year, even though no one was yet sure how the soldiers were going to be paid. By that time the provincial army had a new leader, General Artemas Ward, forty-seven, from Shrewsbury. A veteran of the French and Indian War and a former member of the upper chamber of the General Court, Ward had been languishing in bed with an attack of kidney stones when he received word of Lexington and Concord. That had not prevented him from riding almost forty miles to Cambridge, where he presided over his first council of war on the night of April 20. Over the course of the next few days, Ward began to organize his rudimentary army.

  General John Thomas, fifty-one, a doctor from Kingston who had served with distinction in the French and Indian War, was put in charge of the provincials stationed in Roxbury. Israel Putnam was the already mythologized warrior from Connecticut who had visited Boston the year before. He had been plowing his fields on April 20 when, at a little before noon, he received word of Lexington and Concord. He handed the plow over to his son and was in Cambridge by the following day. He was soon ranging restlessly up and down the lines stretching from the ridge of hills overlooking the Mystic River to the inner reaches of the Charles River.

  In the days to come, militiamen arrived from towns in not only Massachusetts and Connecticut but Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine. The Provincial Congress eventually decided to raise a New England–wide army of as many as 30,000 men, with Massachusetts’s quota increased to 13,600. Having raised armies in the past for the many wars against the French and Indians, the region’s leaders had considerable experience in recruiting soldiers. Traditionally, the officers did the actual recruiting, with the officer’s rank based on how many soldiers he could convince to enlist (a captain, for example, had to raise fifty men; a lieutenant, twenty-five). Since officers typically recruited in their hometowns, each company tended to be made up of neighbors, friends, and relatives, all of whom looked with considerable suspicion on anyone whom they didn’t already know. And yet with companies of militiamen already beginning to arrive from towns throughout the colony and beyond, Cambridge and Roxbury were rapidly becoming the chaotic centers of what was, for New England, a remarkably diverse gathering of humanity. Included in this new army would be farmers, sailors, artisans, merchants, doctors, lawyers, some free African Americans (the Provincial Congress quickly determined that the recruitment of slaves was “inconsistent with the principles that are to be supported and reflect dishonor on this colony”), and Native Americans from western Massachusetts and Connecticut.

  It was an exciting time—the kind of time when no one knew what was going to happen next. Benjamin Russell was the thirteen-year-old student at Boston’s Queen Street School who had followed Percy’s brigade out of Boston. Once in Cambridge he and his classmates had decided to spend the afternoon playing games on the town’s common, only to discover on the evening of April 19 that they were now trapped outside Boston with no way to communicate with their parents. Instead of despairing, they volunteered to serve as errand boys for the officers of the emerging army. Russell would not hear from his parents for another three months.

  —

  Around sunset on Friday, April 21, as a meeting of the Committee of Safety drew to a close in Cambridge, Benjamin Church announced, “I am determined to go into Boston tomorrow.” The other committee members were dumbfounded. “Are you serious, Dr. Church?” Joseph Warren asked. “They will hang you if they catch you in Boston.” Church was insistent. “I am serious,” he said, “and am determined to go at all adventures.”

  The discussion continued, and when Church, who like many of them had family in the city, insisted that he was willing to risk possible capture, Warren said, “If you are determined, let us make some business for you.” The provincial army was in desperate need of medical equipment to tend to the wounded, which included several British prisoners, and Church was given the mission to secure whatever Gage and his medical staff might be willing to give.

  Church appears to have prepared the way for this announcement by providing what he hoped was incontrovertible proof that he was a man to be trusted. Paul Revere was serving as the committee’s messenger, and the morning after Lexington and Concord, Church had shown him “some blood on his stocking,” claiming that it had “spurted on him from a man who was killed near him as he was urging the militia on.” “I argued with myself,” Revere later remembered, “if a man will risk his life in a cause, he must be a friend to that cause.”

  Still, the decision to cross the British lines was a bold one, even by the standards of Benjamin Church, who would have the audacity to meet with Gage the next day at the governor’s residence in Province House. But as Church knew better than anyone, Warren and the other patriot leaders were too preoccupied with trying to stay ahead of each new and potentially catastrophic development to question his motivations. For now at least, they were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  —

  Gage had been reluctant to do anything more than hunker down for a siege—with one notable exception. On Thursday, April 20, he launched a rescue mission. Back in January, he had sent a force of about a hundred regulars under the command of Captain Nesbitt Balfour to Marshfield, where they had based themselves at the estate of Nathaniel Ray Thomas (a distant relative of provincial general John Thomas). Balfour and his men had enjoyed a quiet winter and spring (even finding the time to construct an elaborate wine cabinet in the cellar of Thomas’s house) until the fighting at Lexington and Concord inspired more than a thousand militiamen from the towns surrounding Marshfield to descend on the loyalist stronghold.

  On the morning of April 20, Gage ordered Admiral Graves to provide the vessels needed to extract Balfour and his men from Marshfield. Soon the schooner Hope and two recently confiscated wood sloops were on their way to the rugged piece of co
astline at the mouth of the Cut River known as Brant Rock. Despite having an overwhelming numerical advantage, the militiamen surrounding the Thomas estate were reluctant to engage the British regulars. A message was sent to General Thomas in Roxbury requesting that he lead them in what might prove to be a battle that put the previous day’s fighting to shame. Although General Ward needed him in Roxbury, Thomas was able to provide the militia forces in Marshfield with “eleven hundred brave men and cannon.” By the time the provincial reinforcements arrived, Balfour’s detachment, along with a hundred or so loyalists, had bluffed their way onto the three rescue vessels and were headed for Boston. The lesson was clear: even the most enthusiastic and well-meaning militiamen were military amateurs who needed competent officers to lead them.

  —

  Back on the morning of April 19, Committee of Safety member Joseph Palmer had given a professional post rider named Isaac Bissell a letter with a brief description of the engagement at Lexington Green. Paul Revere may have helped spread the word that the regulars were coming on the night of April 18, but Bissell helped to spread the news of the fighting at Lexington across the Atlantic seaboard. According to tradition, he was in Worcester by early that afternoon, his exhausted horse falling down dead in front of the town’s meetinghouse. From there, Bissell went to Hartford, Connecticut, and by the evening of the next day, Thursday, April 20, another rider had carried the message to New London. By the evening of April 21 the message had reached New York City; by 5:00 p.m. of April 24, it had reached Philadelphia.