Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  As it turned out, Church did not return to New England until the day of the Battle of Bunker Hill.

  —

  Israel Putnam was the provincial army’s most beloved officer. Grizzled and battle-scarred as an old whale, he exuded an aura of rustic belligerence. While his superior General Ward wanted to do nothing that might endanger a possible reconciliation with Britain, Putnam was impatient for action. On May 13, he led two thousand men on what could only be taken as a brazen taunt when he and his soldiers marched across the Neck at Charlestown, up Bunker Hill, where according to Lieutenant Barker, watching from Boston, “they kept parading a long time” before they marched into the virtually abandoned village of Charlestown on the Boston side of the peninsula. Once at the waterfront, with the British man-of-war Somerset anchored less than a quarter mile away, the soldiers gave “the war-whoop” and, Barker wrote, “returned as they came.” Putnam’s boyish love of adventure had made for a strange and most unmilitary display. “It was expected the body of [soldiers] in Charlestown would have fired on the Somerset, at least it was wished for,” Barker mused, “as she had everything ready for action and must have destroyed great numbers of them, besides putting the town in ashes.”

  The march to Charlestown may have been foolish but was no doubt good for morale as the siege appeared to be settling into an unsatisfactory stalemate. With no clear military objective except for keeping the British bottled up in Boston, the men had little to do other than build earthen fortifications (known as “fatigue” duty) and serve as sentries. For the New Englanders watching from the hills of Roxbury and Cambridge, any activity on the part of the British, no matter how inconsequential, provided a welcome distraction from the growing tedium. On the night of May 17, fire erupted in Boston’s Dock Square when, it was reported, a spark from a candle fell among a pile of cartridges of gunpowder. The regulars refused to allow the town’s inhabitants to help put out the fire, and by 3:00 a.m. the barracks and an estimated thirty warehouses, at least some of which undoubtedly contained goods owned by patriot merchants, had burned to the ground.

  On Saturday, May 21, Gage ordered four sloops to sail to tiny Grape Island near the town of Weymouth to pick up some recently harvested hay. The appearance of this little British fleet along the shores of Braintree and Weymouth immediately created concern among the local inhabitants. Thinking this might be the prelude to a full-scale invasion, people living along the coast south of Boston began to flee into the countryside. General Thomas dispatched three companies from Roxbury, and once they, along with President Joseph Warren, had arrived at the Weymouth shore, the first skirmish of the post–Lexington and Concord era was under way.

  Although many shots were fired, the distance to the island was too great for those onshore to do much more than watch as the regulars on the island gathered the hay and prepared to load it on the sloops. Finally the tide came in enough to float several boats that had been stranded along the Weymouth shore, and the provincials raised sail and set off for the island. The regulars loaded what hay they could and quickly departed, but not without trading fire with the provincials who made sure to burn what they estimated to be eighty tons of abandoned hay.

  —

  To the east of Charlestown were two contiguous islands, Hog and the much larger Noddle’s Island, which together formed a peninsula that reached southwest from the town of Chelsea toward Boston to the southwest, with the town of Winnisimmet on the opposite shore directly to the north. Hundreds of sheep, cattle, and horses grazed on both Hog and Noddle’s islands, and the provincials decided that before the British could get their hands on the livestock and hay, they must drive the animals off the islands, which were separated from one another and the mainland by creeks that were only knee-high at low tide.

  On the evening of May 26, Colonel John Nixon of Sudbury and Colonel John Stark of Dunbarton, New Hampshire, led a party of about six hundred men to the town of Chelsea, where on the morning of May 27 they waded across Belle Isle Creek to Hog Island. As the provincials surreptitiously rounded up the sheep and cattle, Admiral Graves happened to be celebrating his promotion to vice admiral of the white squadron. At precisely 8:00 a.m. his new white flag was raised to the masthead of the Preston, followed by a thirteen-gun salute. Soon after, his nephew Lieutenant Thomas Graves, commander of the schooner Diana, sailed into Boston Harbor after a cruise to Maine. The lieutenant promptly anchored near his uncle’s flagship and had joined in the festivities when around 2:00 p.m., the admiral was notified that smoke could be seen rising from Noddle’s Island. By that time, Nixon’s and Stark’s men had moved on to that most outlying of the two islands and besides killing some of the livestock had set a barn full of hay on fire.

  Graves ordered his nephew to sail the Diana up the narrow waterway that lay between the islands and the shore to the north, known as Chelsea Creek, so as “to prevent [the rebels’] escape,” while approximately 170 marines were sent to pursue the provincials by foot on Noddle’s Island. By about five in the afternoon, the provincials were hurrying back across the creek to Hog Island with the marines in close pursuit and the guns of the Diana blasting away at them from Chelsea Creek to the north. Half the provincials continued on with the livestock as the other half jumped into a ditch and commenced a rearguard action designed to keep both the schooner and the marines at bay. “We had a hot fire,” Amos Farnsworth recorded in his diary. Two marines were wounded before the British commander gave the order to retreat, allowing the provincials to direct all their fire at the Diana, which continued sailing up the ever-narrowing creek until she’d reached the confines of Haley’s Landing. Under heavy fire from the provincials and with an outgoing tide threatening to leave his schooner high and dry, Lieutenant Graves sought the aid of a dozen or so longboats, which began towing him back down the creek in the dying breeze. In hopes of ambushing the Diana before she reached the safety of the harbor, the provincials rushed down the north shore of Chelsea Creek toward Winnisimmet. By 9:00 p.m., reinforcements led by General Putnam had joined the provincials stationed at the mouth of Chelsea Creek, only to discover that the British marines had transported several cannons to a hill on Noddle’s Island. Soon cannonballs were whistling down at them out of the deepening darkness as the provincials waded into the creek and fired at the longboats towing the schooner past the Winnisimmet shore.

  Through it all, General Putnam was his usual adventurous self, leading his men, one witness recounted, “up to his middle in mud and water.” Putnam later boasted that “there was nothing between them and the fire of the enemy but pure air” as he and his men, who were joined by President Joseph Warren, did their best to disable the schooner and the longboats. They fired with such deadly effectiveness that the longboat crews were forced to abandon the Diana, which, with her crew huddling belowdecks to escape the unceasing rain of musket balls, soon drifted toward shore, grounding itself on the wooden rails extending from the ferry dock around 10:00 p.m. Lieutenant Graves and his men attempted to use their anchor to drag the schooner to deeper water, but as the tide continued to ebb and the vessel began to roll onto her side, they had no choice but to abandon her for the sloop Britannia, which had been waiting in the deeper water to the south. The firing continued as the provincials plundered the schooner of her guns, rigging, and equipment and, with the help of some strategically placed hay, set her on fire. Around 3:00 a.m. the flames reached the vessel’s powder magazine, and the Diana exploded.

  For the newly promoted vice admiral of the white and his nephew, the former commander of the Diana, what came to be known as the Battle of Chelsea Creek was a humiliating defeat. For the provincials, however, the encounter was nothing short of “astonishing.” Not only had they taken their first British vessel; they had put Graves’s marines on the run. At least two marines had been killed in the action (although the provincials remained convinced that they had killed dozens more), while the Americans suffered just four wounded. “Thanks be to God that so l
ittle hurt was done us,” the ever-devout Amos Farnsworth wrote, “when the balls sung like bees round our heads.” That night Putnam and Warren returned to Cambridge to report to General Ward. “I wish we could have something of this kind to do every day,” Putnam crowed. “It would teach our men how little danger there is from cannonballs.”

  Ward countered with the concern that the engagement might provoke the British to launch a sortie from Boston they would all come to regret, but Putnam remained unrepentant. Turning to the president of the Provincial Congress, he said, “You know, Dr. Warren, we shall have no peace worth anything till we gain it by the sword.”

  The skirmish at Chelsea Creek had been a clear provincial victory, but it had also consumed a worrisome amount of gunpowder. Since those first overheated days after Lexington and Concord, when Joseph Warren had been in favor of an assault on Boston, he now had a more realistic view of his army’s preparedness for a major offensive against the British. Rather than agree with Putnam, Warren demurred. “I admire your spirit and respect General Ward’s prudence,” he said diplomatically. “Both will be necessary for us, and one must temper the other.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Redoubt

  The next day, May 28, Captain John Derby was guiding the Quero along the southern coast of England when he sighted the Isle of Wight. Once he’d found a safe place to leave his schooner, he hired a boat to row him to nearby Portsmouth, and after passing the docks of the massive naval shipyard, he was in a coach headed for London. By Monday, May 29, as Derby’s account of the fighting at Lexington and Concord circulated throughout the city, Lord North and his fellow ministers were, according to one writer, “in total confusion and consternation.” Secretary of State Dartmouth issued a statement insisting that the provincial account was not to be believed, but former governor Thomas Hutchinson, who knew Derby to be a reliable man, insisted that there was in all likelihood a disturbing amount of truth behind the captain’s claims.

  They called him the “accidental captain.” He seemed to have appeared out of thin air with his typeset account of the fighting, along with a sheaf of depositions from not only Massachusetts militiamen but a handful of British prisoners. Some claimed that Derby had first arrived in Southampton, the point of departure 155 years before of the Pilgrims’ Mayflower, but there was no sign of his vessel along that port’s docks. Edward Gibbon, then at work on his monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (which is as much about the British Empire as it is about Rome), wrote that “it is pretty clear [Derby] is no imposter” and theorized that his schooner was probably hidden “in some creek of the Isle of Wight.”

  Derby let it be known that he had left Salem four days after the departure of the vessel carrying General Gage’s account of Lexington and Concord. But the Quero had not only managed to pass the much larger Sukey, she had put twelve days between her and the British vessel. This meant that for almost two weeks, the king’s ministers were unable to refute the patriot version of events. Lord Dartmouth grew so frustrated by the seemingly endless wait that on June 1 he penned a letter to Thomas Gage in Boston: “It is very much to be lamented that we have not some account from you of this transaction. . . . We expect the arrival of that vessel with great impatience, but till she arrives I can form no decisive judgment of what has happened.”

  Gage’s account turned out to be quite similar to the provincial version of events. There was the unresolved question of who fired first, but that did not change the fact that men, on both sides, had been killed. Contrary to the ministry’s expectations, the Americans had proved themselves to be more than willing to fight.

  —

  Even as the schooner Quero was approaching England with word of Lexington and Concord, Major Generals William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne were headed to Boston on the man-of-war Cerberus. Somewhere in the Atlantic, the Quero (with her report of Lexington) and the Cerberus (with the commanders sent to bolster Gage) passed each other. The irony of three well-known British generals sailing to America on a vessel named for the mythical three-headed dog that guarded the gates of hell was simply too obvious to escape comment in the English press:

  Behold the Cerberus the Atlantic plow,

  Her precious cargo—Burgoyne, Clinton, Howe.

  Bow, wow, wow!

  General John Burgoyne, the first named in this little ditty, had both an ego and a way with words. In addition to being a military officer who’d established a reputation for bravery in Europe, he was a playwright, whose The Maid of the Oaks had been produced recently in London by David Garrick, and Burgoyne, for one, wasn’t going to let the name of the ship crimp his notorious flair for the dramatic. As the Cerberus approached Boston Harbor, she came upon a packet bound for Newport. The two vessels luffed into the wind so that their crews could speak, and Burgoyne shouted out to the packet’s captain, “What news?” The captain responded that Gage’s army in Boston was surrounded by ten thousand country people. Burgoyne cried out in astonishment. “What! Ten thousand peasants keep five thousand king’s troops shut up! Well, let us get in, and we’ll soon find elbowroom.” Burgoyne was to regret the boast, to which Gage (when he later heard of it) must have responded with a knowing and weary smile.

  As Gage was well aware, sending Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne (who arrived in Boston on May 25, just in time to witness the debacle at the Battle of Chelsea Creek) was hardly a vote of confidence on the part of the king and Lord North. What’s more, their arrival required him to recount, in all its dreary detail, the even more embarrassing debacle at Lexington and Concord.

  Burgoyne was the showman (and a classmate of Gage’s at Westminster), but it was William Howe who had the reputation as a fighter. When Wolfe led the victorious assault on Quebec during the French and Indian War, he had looked to Howe to find a way to scale the near-vertical cliffs fronting the Plains of Abraham. A year earlier, Howe’s greatly admired older brother George had died in the arms of Israel Putnam at the failed assault at Fort Ticonderoga; indeed, George had been so beloved by the soldiers from Massachusetts that the colony had paid for a memorial in Westminster Abbey. Given both his own and his brother’s legacies in America, William Howe was an inspired choice on the part of the British ministry.

  Henry Clinton was a bit of a mystery to his fellow officers. Although he’d been born in New York, his professional reputation had been made fighting in the European theater of the Seven Years’ War. Intelligent and ambitious, he was also socially awkward (he described himself in a letter written during the passage to Boston as a “shy bitch”) and had a reputation for working badly with his peers—an unfortunate characteristic given that the British army in Boston now had more than its share of major generals.

  By early June, Gage had determined that there was no longer any “prospect of any offers of accommodation” from the provincials. It was therefore time, he decided, to issue a proclamation instituting martial law in Massachusetts. Given Burgoyne’s reputation as a wordsmith, Gage requested that his old Westminster schoolmate ghostwrite a proclamation that offered clemency to all patriot leaders who promptly surrendered, with the exceptions of Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Written with an arrogant, overblown pomposity (at one point, Burgoyne ridiculed the provincials as rebels “who with a preposterous parade of military arrangement, affected to hold the army besieged”), the proclamation only strengthened the provincials’ resolve to oppose the ministry’s forces.

  When these three officers weren’t writing their friends and patrons back in England about the commander in chief’s incompetence and their own dismal prospects (Burgoyne complained of a “motionless, drowsy, irksome medium, or rather vacuum, too low for the honor of command, too high for that of execution”), they were in discussions with Gage about the best way to break out of their current dilemma. Howe, who was the senior of the major generals and could be expected to lead whatever plan was finally put into action, appears to have had a key role
in coming up with a strategy that he, at least, felt could turn the tables on the provincial army. In a letter written on June 12 to his brother Richard, an admiral in the British navy, he outlined how it was to be done.

  On Sunday, June 18, when a significant portion of the provincial forces were attending religious services, Burgoyne would begin cannonading Roxbury from Boston Neck as Howe led a detachment to Dorchester Heights, to the east of Roxbury, and Clinton led the attack in “the center.” Once Howe had thrown together two redoubts on Dorchester Heights, he’d attack General Thomas’s army in Roxbury. As Thomas’s force fled in retreat, Howe would turn his attention to Charlestown on the other side of Boston. After he’d secured the hills overlooking that town, it was on to Cambridge. “I suppose the rebels will move from Cambridge,” he wrote his brother confidently, “and that we shall take and keep possession of it.”

  And so they agreed. In six days the British would break out of Boston and become the masters of Roxbury, Charlestown, and most important of all, Cambridge, the headquarters of the provincial army.

  —

  About the time Howe wrote his brother of their plan to move against the rebels, Joseph Warren set out in a small boat, its oars muffled so that he might row undetected past the many warships anchored between Charlestown and Boston. For the president of the Provincial Congress to be on a boat headed for the Boston waterfront was extremely ill advised, but Warren had spent the last sixty days putting himself at risk. Whether he was rallying the men at Menotomy, Grape Island, or Chelsea Creek, he had made sure to be wherever the danger was greatest. In addition to the musket-ball-whizzing thrills of the skirmishes, Warren had come to enjoy the daily hustle from one make-or-break meeting in the Provincial Congress or the Committee of Safety to another as all of Massachusetts wavered on the edge of chaos and confusion. Warren appears to have thrived under conditions that most found overwhelming. Indeed, his addictive love of life in the balance may have led him to carry on a dalliance with Sally Edwards even as he courted the woman who seems to have been his soul mate, Mercy Scollay. Now, in early June, not only his own life but the lives of everyone in New England were teetering on the brink, and Warren was in his element.