Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  —

  Tensions among provincial leaders reached a crescendo during the beginning of the second week in May. Many of the militiamen who had arrived in Cambridge in the days immediately following Lexington and Concord had begun to drift back to their homes. Some never returned. Others only needed to make arrangements with their loved ones and perhaps plant their spring crops before they enlisted in the provincial army for the next eight months. If the officers were going to recruit new men, they, too, had to return to their hometowns. All of this meant that there was an alarming, if temporary, drop in the number of soldiers in the lines around Boston. When word reached headquarters in Cambridge that Gage was planning to attack the undermanned American forces, General Ward was deeply concerned. By May 10, fears of an imminent British initiative prompted the Provincial Congress to consider evacuating Cambridge. Instead, they decided to put out the call to the local militias with the hope of hurriedly assembling as many as two thousand men to come to General Thomas’s aid in Roxbury.

  During this anxious and desperate time, Benjamin Church committed an act that might have had disastrous consequences. On May 10 letters were sent out by the Committee of Safety over Church’s signature requesting that officers “repair to the town of Cambridge with the men enlisted under your command.” This was all well and good except for the fact that one of these letters was sent to General John Thomas in Roxbury. If Thomas had obeyed the order, there would have been no one left to oppose a British advance out of Boston. Thomas had the good sense to check directly with Joseph Warren, who was initially baffled by how such an order could have been made in the first place. Once he’d figured out that Thomas’s letter was one of many that had been sent out on the same day, he attempted to put the embarrassing gaffe in the best possible light. “Sending the order to your camp was certainly a very great error . . . ,” he wrote Thomas. “Your readiness to obey orders does you great honor, and your prudence in sending to headquarters upon receiving so extraordinary an order convinces me of your judgment.”

  Once again, Warren seems to have given Church the benefit of the doubt. One has to wonder, however, whether the letter to Thomas had really been an honest mistake. Shortly before May 10, Church had been given reason to fear that the provincials were on to him. He sent Gage a garbled, scribbled-over description of an incident in which someone “mentioned distrust of me, that he suspected my going into Boston.” What’s more, the accuser had made something of a spectacle of himself. “All this uttered with the fury of a demon before the whole camp,” Church wrote. “I do not perceive that he made any great impression upon the people. I left him abruptly . . . [and] destroyed my papers. . . . Caution on my part is doubly necessary as instant death would be my portion should a discovery be made. . . . Secrecy respecting me on the part of [General Gage] is indispensable to rendering him any services, and . . . necessary to the preservation of my life.” Whether or not Church sent the letter to General Thomas on purpose, he wanted, more than anything else, a resolution of the present crisis before he was discovered to be a spy. “May I never see the day when I shall not dare to call myself a British American . . . ,” he wrote Gage. “Oh for peace and [honor] once more.”

  As it turned out, Gage was not planning an assault on the American lines, and in the days ahead, as more and more provincials returned from their visits home, the size of the army once again began to increase. Thursday, May 11, the day following the mix-up initiated by Church, had been designated a provincewide day of public humiliation, fasting, and prayer. The Provincial Congress adjourned at four that afternoon, and at some point Joseph Warren was on his way to Dedham.

  —

  Boston was a city under siege, but its hills still provided views of stunning beauty. Captain George Harris and his regiment had just left their winter quarters and were now living in tents on the common, where they dug fortifications to defend the town from an assault from the Back Bay. He was, he wrote his cousin in England, “twenty yards from a piece of water, nearly a mile broad, with the country beyond most beautifully tumbled about in hills and valleys, rocks and woods, interspersed with straggling villages, with here and there a spire peeping over the trees, and the country of the most charming green that delighted eyes ever gazed on. Pity these infatuated people cannot be content to enjoy such a country in peace. But, alas, this moment their advanced sentinels are in sight.”

  On the evening of May 11, Joseph Warren made his way through this green, rural world. According to the diary of Dr. Nathaniel Ames, the owner of the tavern in Dedham where Sally Edwards, now seven and a half months pregnant, was staying, the day was sunny and cloudless. Ames also recorded that Warren made an appearance at the tavern that day, undoubtedly to see his “fair incognita pregnans.” Secrets were nothing new to Warren. Just the day before, he had written Gage in confidence, urging him to ignore the loyalists, who “care not if they ruin you or this empire,” and honor his agreement with the people of Boston. In a postscript, he wrote, “As no person living knows or ever will know from me of my writing this, I hope you will excuse a freedom which I very well know would be improper in a letter which was exposed to general view.” A secret between himself and General Gage was one thing; the paternity of a baby delivered by an unwed teenage girl was quite another.

  For more than a century the people of New England had been using the ceremony of the fast to repent for their sins even as they girded their loins for the battle to come—that was what they had done during King Philip’s War and the many conflicts that followed it, and that was what they were doing now as they spent this lovely spring day abasing themselves before God so that they and their country might enjoy better days to come. How much Warren took these traditions to heart as he visited the girl who was now the living embodiment of, if not his own personal failings, at least someone else’s, will never be known. We do know that by the following day, he was back in Watertown and presiding over the discussion of whether the time was right to assume “a civil government for Massachusetts.” The army they had worked so assiduously to assemble was proving to be a most unruly and dangerous invention, and something had to be done to control it.

  —

  From the first, the patriots had feared that the provincial army might ultimately destroy the liberties it was supposed to protect by establishing a military dictatorship. That was what had happened in Rome when Caesar became emperor, and that was what had happened during the English Revolution when Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector of the British Commonwealth.

  Civil leaders in Massachusetts in May 1775 were in an especially precarious position. The First Continental Congress had instructed them not to establish a formal government, since the other colonies would view this as an unnecessarily provocative repudiation of British sovereignty. But now, after Lexington and Concord, with an army of thousands assembling in Cambridge and Roxbury, a recognized civil authority must be allowed to assert some sort of control. Otherwise this army—already fidgety for something to do after the excitement of April 19—might take matters into its own hands.

  By all accounts, the soldiers were eating well—feasting on what food and alcohol they could pillage from the abandoned homes of the loyalists and the stream of provisions that flowed in from the country. Hygiene, however, was a problem. The dormitory at Harvard and other buildings in Cambridge and Roxbury had been turned into barracks, and one loyalist claimed that the soldiers were not only dirty but “lousy.” There were not enough latrines, and the growing number of recruits who died of typhus, or “putrid fever” (as many as two or three a day by early June), suggests that as spring turned to summer, a most unpleasant smell had arisen in Cambridge and Roxbury.

  That these primarily young men from the country were not accustomed to taking orders from anyone made the enforcement of discipline difficult. Not only did the members of a typical company all know each other (indeed, many were related by blood), they were accustomed to making decisions by c
onsensus at town meetings. This meant that the soldiers, not their officers, decided any issues that might have a direct impact on their welfare. On May 10, Private James Stevens complained in his diary that Captain Thomas Poor “spoke very rash concerning our choosing a sergeant and said that we had no right.” Taking umbrage, the soldiers decided to “do no duty that day.” Captain Poor had no choice but to apologize to his men, and after his “recantation,” Stevens and the others returned to duty. This army was a dangerous thing—a budding democracy of young men with firearms.

  Inevitably adding to the surliness of the recruits was the availability of large quantities of rum. Muskets kept going off—sometimes accidentally, sometimes for the fun of it, injuring and, in at least one instance, killing American soldiers. “Four guns were discharged in camp and endangered men’s lives,” David Avery recorded in his diary on May 8. “One out of our window, one at the picket guard. Two others hurt. An awful day!” The New Englanders could be raucous, but they also tended to be exceedingly religious, attending prayers on an almost daily basis and listening to one, sometimes two sermons each Sunday. The diary kept by Private Amos Farnsworth is as much a record of his spiritual life as it is an account of his experiences in the provincial army. “I was filled with love to God. . . . ,” he wrote at one point, “and lifted up my soul to God in ejaculation, prayers, and praise.” These men were fighting for liberty, but they also believed that the Lord was, in his own inscrutable way, working through each and every one of them.

  Spiritual, ornery, and clannish, the New Englanders defined their struggle in profoundly local terms. They refused to serve under an officer they did not know or like. They also seemed intent on having a good time. Ezekiel Price of Stoughton visited Roxbury in early June and found the soldiers “in high spirits and healthy; being mostly young men and many of them persons of wealth and reputable yeomen.” That was not the impression of a surgeon from a man-of-war who had been given permission to cross the provincial lines to attend to wounded British prisoners. He found the streets of Cambridge “crowded with carts and carriages, bringing them rum, cider, etc., from the neighboring towns, for without New England rum, a New England army could not be kept together. . . . They drink at least a bottle of it a man a day.” The surgeon had his obvious biases, but there was more than a little truth in his description of an army that was barely under anyone’s control: “nothing but a drunken, canting, lying, praying, hypocritical rabble, without order, subjection, discipline, or cleanliness; and must fall to pieces of itself in the course of three months. They are . . . the descendants of Oliver Cromwell’s army, who truly inherit the spirit which was the occasion of so much bloodshed in [England].”

  When the Provincial Congress and Committee of Safety proved slow in providing commissions not only for General Ward’s officers but for Ward himself, there was much grumbling within the army about the inefficiency of what passed for civil government in Massachusetts. One of Gage’s spies reported that he heard the provincial soldiers “complaining much of the private men having the superiority over the officers, rather than the officers over the men. I plainly saw there was no kind of subordination observed among them.” Jonathan Brewer was a well-respected veteran of the French and Indian War, and when the Provincial Congress turned down his request to lead an expedition to Quebec (something George Washington would in fact decide to do in just a few months’ time), there were those in the provincial army who were not happy. “By God,” one soldier was overheard to say, “if this province is to be governed in this manner, it is time for us to look out; and it is all owing to the Committee of Safety, a pack of sappy-headed fellows; I know three of them myself.” In Waltham, Lieutenant Colonel Abijah Brown insisted that the Provincial Congress should not be allowed to take the gunpowder from the town’s arsenal, claiming “that the Congress had no power to do as they did; for all the power was and would be in the army; and if the Congress behaved as they did, that within 48 hours the army would turn upon the Congress, and they would settle matters as they pleased.”

  Some in Massachusetts blamed General Ward for the army’s lack of discipline, but Warren realized that they could not impose, at this early stage, too much restraint. “Subordination is absolutely necessary in an army,” he admitted; “but the strings must not be drawn too tight at first . . . amongst men who know not of any distinction but what arises from some superior merit. . . . Our soldiers . . . will not be brought to obey any person of whom they do not themselves entertain a high opinion.” Given the unsettled and tentative state of civil government in Massachusetts, the time was not right to impose stricter discipline among the troops. Indeed, too much oversight on the part of the Provincial Congress might instigate a wholesale mutiny. Before there could be a proper army, there had to be a proper government; otherwise, Warren wrote Samuel Adams in Philadelphia, “a military government must certainly take place.”

  Legitimacy was the real issue. How could a self-created legislative body of questionable legal authority expect to impose its will on a group of soldiers who had the power to overthrow it? And besides, who were these soldiers fighting for—for Massachusetts, for the Continental Congress, for the king? No matter what the British regulars might call them, the soldiers of the provincial army refused to consider themselves “rebels,” claiming that they remained loyal to their still beloved monarch. It was his advisers and legislators with whom they had an issue. Liberty—not independence—was what they were fighting for, and as proud Englishmen they still flew the British flag.

  Their counterparts in Boston regarded such claims as patently absurd. On May 1, Lieutenant John Barker recorded in his diary, “The Rebels have erected the standard at Cambridge; they call themselves the King’s Troops and us the Parliament’s. Pretty burlesque!” Even the provincial leaders had to admit that the logic of their position was more than a little tortured, and to provide at least some clarity in this time of uncertain allegiances, Warren felt that the Continental Congress must allow Massachusetts to form its own civil government. He also insisted that the Congress in Philadelphia should appoint “a generalissimo” to take control of the provincial army.

  Warren was greatly concerned about the threat of a military coup, but he wanted to make sure that Samuel Adams understood that he was not “angry with my countrymen.” Unlike many revolutionaries, including Adams himself, whose commitment to the cause could be disturbingly cold-blooded, Warren continued to have an abiding affection for even the most unruly of Massachusetts’s citizens. “I love—I admire them,” he wrote. He might be president of the Provincial Congress, but that did not prevent him from spending as much time as possible with these men. “He mingled in the ranks . . . ,” one commentator wrote, “and succeeded in a most wonderful manner in imparting to them a portion of the flame which glowed in his own breast.” But he was more than just a cheerleader. Warren’s contemporary John Eliot (son of the Boston minister Andrew Eliot) claimed that he “did wonders in preserving order among the troops” and was “perhaps the man who had the most influence.”

  As a kind of surrogate civilian general, Warren came to have a deep sympathy for the men who comprised what was optimistically referred to as the Grand American Army. “The errors they have fallen into are natural and easily accounted for,” he explained to Samuel Adams. “A sudden alarm brought them together, animated with the noblest spirit. They left their houses, their families, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, without a day’s provision and many without a farthing in their pockets.” Much of the current problem lay with the fact that all of them—soldiers and civil office holders alike—were traveling in uncharted territory. “It is not easy for men, especially when interest and the gratification of appetite are considered, to know how far they may continue to tread in the path where there are no landmarks to direct them.” That said, a dangerous metamorphosis was occurring among the recruits in Cambridge and Roxbury. “It is with our countrymen as with all other men, when they are in
arms, they think the military should be uppermost.” If something was not done quickly, “what was not good at first will be soon insupportable . . . as the infection is caught by every new corps that arrives. . . . For the honor of my country, I wish the disease may be cured before it is known to exist.”

  In a consummate irony, Joseph Warren entrusted the delivery of the letter communicating this desperate plea to Benjamin Church. But this was not another instance in which Warren proved remarkably obtuse as to Church’s true character. On the contrary, by sending Church to Philadelphia, Warren was getting someone who had proved to be both erratic and, on occasion, incompetent as far away from Cambridge as possible. “I am appointed to my vexation to carry the dispatches to Philadelphia,” Church complained in a dispatch to Gage on May 24, “and must set out tomorrow which will prevent my writing for some time unless an opportunity should be found thence by water.”