Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  So it should come as no surprise that on a night in the middle of June he was headed to a secret rendezvous in British-occupied Boston. Mitigating the risk was the location of the meeting at Hudson’s Point in the North End, described in a spy report to General Gage as “a nest of very wicked fellows, ship carpenters and caulkers” who used red signal flags to pass messages to the provincial troops on the other side of the harbor. Yet another spy report claimed that so many “rebels get out [of Boston] without passes” because the men who ran the two ferries that docked in the North End “let them go.” Given the alternatives, the North End was the safest portion of the Boston waterfront for a clandestine meeting.

  Warren needed a doctor to serve as the army’s surgeon general. Dr. Benjamin Church, now in Philadelphia, was the obvious choice, but Warren’s confidence in Church appears to have been badly shaken over the course of the last month. With Church conveniently out of town, Warren had decided to seek out an alternative. Dr. John Jeffries had an excellent professional reputation and was a fellow member of the St. Andrew’s Masonic Lodge at the Green Dragon; both he and Warren had served their apprenticeships under Dr. James Lloyd. Indeed, Dr. John Jeffries was the perfect candidate, except for the fact that he was, by all accounts, a loyalist. Warren, however, believed he had an offer that Jeffries, who was waiting for him on the docks, could not refuse.

  In his dual roles as leader of the Congress and the Committee of Safety, Warren was the one to whom prospective officers appealed when they were angling for a commission in the provincial army. John Adams later recalled how Warren “often said that he never had till then any idea or suspicion of selfishness of this people, or their impatient eagerness for commissions.” In the British army, an officer came from the English upper class and had to purchase his commission. In the new American army, however, no such social and financial qualifications existed. Instead of paying for a commission, an officer was expected to earn it by recruiting the sufficient number of men. This meant that, in the words of John Adams, “the lowest can aspire as freely as the highest.” And as Warren now knew from firsthand experience, “there is no people on earth so ambitious as the people of America.”

  But when he offered Jeffries one of these coveted commissions, he received an unexpected response. “I thought, Warren, that you knew me better,” the doctor said.

  “Don’t be so quick, Jeffries,” Warren replied, “I have a general’s commission in my pocket. We want you to be at the head of the medical service.” But even this was not enough, and the offer was declined.

  Jeffries, it turned out, was not interested in making it to the top of the provincial pecking order; he was a loyalist and therefore wanted to be a member of the British upper class in the larger imperial realm. In the years to come, he moved to London and did his best to work the English patronage system, attaching himself to anyone who might further a career that ultimately included being a part of the two-man crew that completed the first balloon flight across the English Channel in 1785. It was a fundamentally different approach to life from what was emerging in America, where the absence of a deeply rooted aristocracy meant that ambition had replaced deference as the way to get ahead.

  A few weeks before, Warren had written to Samuel Adams about just these issues. Soldiers searching Thomas Hutchinson’s house in Milton had come across a trunk of letters that revealed, Warren claimed, what had gone wrong with the former governor. Like Jeffries, Hutchinson was not content with what was available to him in provincial Massachusetts; he aspired to use his political office as a stepping-stone to greater glory that could only be found in England. The fault was not necessarily with Hutchinson, who, like all of them, was ambitious; the fault was with a government that required him to go against the wishes of his own people if he was to attain the ultimate prize of a lordship or some other royal preferment. “It is probable,” Warren wrote Samuel Adams, “that [Hutchinson] would have remained firm in [the people’s] interest . . . had there not been a higher station to which his ambitious mind aspired . . . ; in order to obtain this, he judged it necessary to sacrifice the people.” What was needed in America was a government in which “the only road to promotion may be through the affection of the people.” Instead of attaining membership in a group that existed above the people, the highest office in government should require an official to serve those people. “This being the case,” he wrote, “the interest of the governor and the governed will be the same.”

  Warren was describing a government whose leaders were beholden to what we have come to call “the will of the people.” An eight-year war and many additional years of compromise and struggle would be required to create a political system that approximated the ideal described in Warren’s letter to Samuel Adams. But as it turned out, Warren, caught in the paroxysms of a revolution even as he searched for his own place in that revolution, had seen the future.

  —

  Jeffries’s refusal to accept the surgeon generalship put Warren in a temporary bind, especially when Congress offered the post to him. Even before Lexington and Concord, Warren had “fully resolved that his future service should be in the military line.” Like General John Thomas, a doctor who had spurned the medical corps during the French and Indian War and become one of America’s finest officers, he wanted to fight. Congress dutifully submitted to their president’s will, and on June 14, he was chosen by ballot to be a major general. Warren might have complained to John Adams about the overweening ambitions of his countrymen, but that had not prevented him from claiming a rank that put him ahead of William Heath, the officer to whom he had attached himself during the fighting in Menotomy just two months before.

  On June 16, Ezekiel Price of Stoughton recorded in his diary that “Dr. Warren was chosen a major general” and that “Heath was not chosen any office, but it was supposed that no difficulty would arise from it.” This may have been wishful thinking on Price’s part. If the last surviving letter Warren ever wrote is any indication, he had to work very hard to make sure that Heath was not put out by his own good fortune. We’ll never know the exact nature of the deal that was finally agreed upon, but Warren was careful to assure Heath in this June 16 letter that “everything is now going agreeable to our wishes.” That said, Warren made sure to remind Heath that he needed to submit the required paperwork to Congress “without a moment’s delay.” One gets the sense that Heath had been sullenly dragging his feet in the wake of Warren’s sudden rise past him. It was just the beginning of the jockeying and infighting that was to plague the new army’s officer corps for months to come.

  Before Warren was officially a major general, he had to be formally commissioned by Congress. Up until that point, Warren was the one who delivered the oath to the new officers—“a harangue in the form of a charge in the presence of the assembly,” John Adams remembered, “[that] never failed to make the officer, as well as the assembly, shudder.” If Warren were to become a major general, the Provincial Congress must select a new president. But before that particular bridge could be crossed, yet another new and desperate crisis had arisen. “A gentleman of undoubted veracity,” who had “frequent opportunity of conversing with the principal officers in General Gage’s army,” had revealed that on June 18, the British planned to take Dorchester Heights and Bunker Hill.

  —

  Even before the skirmish at Chelsea Creek, General Israel Putnam had been impatient for some kind of action, claiming “that the army wished to be employed, and the country was growing dissatisfied at the inactivity of it.” It was time, he declared in a council of war on May 12 attended by not only Artemas Ward and the other generals but also the members of the Committee of Safety, to occupy the high ground at Charlestown so as to “draw the enemy from [Boston], where we might meet them on equal terms.” Joseph Palmer of the Committee of Safety agreed with Putnam, but both Ward and Warren felt that it was too risky, especially since there was “no powder to spare and no battering cann
on.” Putnam insisted, his son Daniel remembered, that no matter how the British responded to a move to the hills above Charlestown, “We will set our country an example of which it shall not be ashamed.” Years later, Daniel Putnam recounted how Warren had paced the room in Hastings House, considering Putnam’s proposal. “Almost thou persuadest me, General Putnam,” he said, leaning over the back of the general’s chair, “but I must think the project a rash one. Nevertheless, if it should ever be adopted and the strife becomes hard, you must not be surprised to find me with you in the midst of it.”

  By June 15, with the British about to strike at Dorchester and Charlestown, Warren and the others were finally convinced that the provincial army must make a preemptive move of its own. After determining that General Thomas’s forces in Roxbury were not strong enough to take and hold nearby Dorchester Heights, the Committee of Safety decided to implement a plan along the lines first proposed by Putnam. In the early-morning hours of June 17—a day before the British were to begin their assault on Dorchester Heights—the provincial army would seize the currently unoccupied high ground above Charlestown.

  —

  At 6:00 p.m. on Friday, June 16, about one thousand provincial soldiers under the command of Colonel William Prescott assembled on the common in Cambridge, opposite Hastings House—the headquarters of General Ward and the Committee of Safety. Clutching an odd assortment of muskets and dressed in homespun clothes with sweat-stained hats on their disheveled heads, they looked just like the militiamen who had fought at Lexington and Concord. The only difference was that after almost two months away from home, much of it spent digging fortifications and marching up and down Cambridge Common, they were much dirtier than the farmers who had rushed to action on April 19. None of them knew what lay ahead that night, but once they’d gathered around the Reverend Samuel Langdon in prayer and headed out toward Charlestown in the deepening dusk accompanied by a wagon full of entrenching tools and several horse-drawn fieldpieces, they must have known that they were about to get dirtier still.

  Soon after leaving Cambridge, they paused to meet up with about two hundred soldiers from Connecticut under the command of Captain Thomas Knowlton. At some point during the march, which took them past the common in Charlestown where the body of the slave Mark had once hung in chains, they were joined by General Israel Putnam. Also accompanying them was Lieutenant Colonel Richard Gridley, the noted engineer and commander of the artillery regiment.

  Soon they were crossing Charlestown’s narrow neck—only thirty feet wide in some places at high tide, with the Mystic River to their left and the shallows of a tidal mill pond to their right—before they mounted the gentle rise of Bunker Hill. They were without a moon that night, with only the stars to reveal the contours of the 110-foot-high hill that just two months before had provided General Percy’s men with the protection they so desperately needed on the evening of April 19. Gage had decided to abandon these heights, but not until after his engineer Captain John Montresor had thrown up a fortification, and this hastily built, arrow-shaped wall still stood on the rounded and otherwise empty summit of Bunker Hill.

  Colonel Prescott’s orders told him to fortify this hill, which overlooked the roads from Cambridge to the west and from Medford to the north, as well as the waters of the Mystic River to the east. A fort built here would go a long way to stymieing a British attempt to take Charlestown to the south and then Cambridge. What’s more, the British had given Colonel Gridley a head start by constructing a defensive wall. And since it was already well past 10:00 p.m. when they reached the heights overlooking Charlestown, with dawn set to arrive a little past 4:00 a.m., time was of the essence if they were to have any chance of building a fort before the morning light revealed their efforts to the British in Boston.

  But instead of remaining on the grassy summit of Bunker Hill, they continued along the road toward Charlestown, following a ridge that led them to the smaller, seventy-five-foot-high Breed’s Hill, almost half a mile to the southeast. Directly to the south lay the almost completely abandoned settlement of Charlestown. In the days after Lexington and Concord, General Gage had delivered an ultimatum to the selectmen of this little city of approximately three hundred houses, dozens of commercial structures, and wharves. If any provincial soldiers should venture onto the Charlestown peninsula, he would do as Admiral Graves had wanted to do on April 19 and consign the city to the flames. Since then almost all of Charlestown’s residents had sought refuge elsewhere, and the streets and homes of the community that had been settled a year before Boston in the early seventeenth century were now quiet, dark, and strangely empty.

  Just a quarter mile to the south lay the wharves of Boston, with Admiral Graves’s fleet of warships anchored in the waters in between and, even more menacing, the mammoth cannons of the Copp’s Hill battery pointed in their direction. To place a fort overlooking Charlestown on Breed’s Hill—right in the figurative face of the British—was an entirely different undertaking than had been ordered by the Committee of Safety. Instead of a defensive position, this was an unmistakable act of defiance. A fort built here, especially one equipped with provincial cannons that could rake British shipping and the Boston waterfront, invited a forceful response from the British army. Given the provincials’ almost nonexistent reserves of gunpowder, this was not what the Committee of Safety had in mind. But this was where Prescott, Putnam, and Gridley began to build the fort.

  We will never know exactly why they arrived at this decision. According to the only account we have of what transpired among the three officers that night, Gridley, the engineer, and one of the other officers wanted to begin by fortifying Bunker Hill, but “on the pressing importunity” of the third officer, they started with Breed’s Hill instead. Given Putnam’s aggressive personality—he was the one, after all, who led the brazen march down to the Charlestown waterfront back in May—many have assumed that he browbeat the others into disregarding Ward’s orders and building the fort in a place that General Gage could not ignore. But as the events of the following day revealed, Prescott was just as forceful, if not more so, than Putnam, who appears to have been there only as a volunteer. No matter whose idea it was, Prescott was in charge of the operation and was therefore the one who assumed ultimate responsibility for the location of the fort. In the day to come he would fight with a ruthless, often inspiring ferocity, but that did not change the fact that dysfunction came to define a battle that was ultimately named—perhaps appropriately, given its befuddled beginnings—for the wrong hill. As John Pitts later wrote to Samuel Adams, “Never was more confusion and less command.”

  And so they began. Around midnight, with only four hours between them and the approach of morning, Gridley began to sketch out the contours of a quadrangular fort on Breed’s Hill. In addition to pickaxes and shovels, the men had been provided with fascines (cylindrical bundles of brushwood), gabions (cages filled with rocks or soil), and empty barrels that were used to build the fort’s earthen walls, the two longest of which stretched approximately 132 feet and met to form a west-facing V. A ditch surrounded the roofless, fully enclosed fort, known technically as a redoubt, which could be accessed from the rear, east-facing wall by what was called a sally port.

  The redoubt (which means, ironically enough, “place of retreat”) was about as simple a structure as could be designed but still required hours of backbreaking labor to build. They wanted their efforts to remain a secret for as long as possible. Unfortunately, only a few hundred yards away were several men-of-war, floating cities of sailors whose watches stood on the decks gazing across the warm, unruffled harbor. The absence of wind meant that the sounds of shovels and pickaxes banging against rocks and pebbles echoed unimpeded across the dark emptiness toward Boston. Fearful that they were about to be discovered, Prescott sent a group of sixty men, which included that devout veteran of the Battle of Chelsea Creek, Amos Farnsworth, down into the empty village of Charlestown to act as sentinels. Those
who were not patrolling the waterfront were told to wait in the town house and, Farnsworth recorded, “not to shut our eyes.” Prescott’s concern was so great that he descended the hill several times that night to make sure they were still undetected. He later told his son about how relieved he felt when he heard the watch aboard the sloop-of-war Lively report, “All’s well.”

  —

  As it turned out, they were detected. General Henry Clinton, living in John Hancock’s house on Beacon Hill, was having trouble sleeping that night. So he went for a walk along the northern margins of Boston and quickly realized that something was going on in the direction of Charlestown. He could hear it—the unmistakable sounds of digging. He stood either on a wharf or, more likely, on a well-positioned hill and stared into the darkness through his spyglass. Sure enough, he “saw them at work.”

  He rushed to Province House and awakened Thomas Gage. In an early-morning meeting with Gage and Howe, Clinton urged “a landing in two divisions at day break.” Howe appeared to think it was a good idea, but as he so often did when presented with a plan for immediate action, Gage demurred. They would wait to see what the light of day revealed.

  —

  It came gradually—the brightening of the sky in the east toward the islands of Boston Harbor, the fading of the stars overhead into a gray, increasingly bluish sky, and then the sudden realization that they were digging a fortification that might very well become their collective grave. When the provincial soldiers paused to look around, they could now see that instead of being set back on the distant height of Bunker Hill, they were here, on the little knoll of Breed’s Hill, overlooking Charlestown. Peter Brown of Westford, Massachusetts, was appalled. He estimated that they were surrounded by eight cannon-equipped ships, along with “all Boston fortified against us.” “The danger we were in,” he wrote to his mother in Newport, Rhode Island, “made us think . . . that we were brought there to be all slain, and I must and will venture to say that there was treachery, oversight, or presumption in the conduct of our officers.”