Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  As was to become clear in the months after his arrival in Boston, that victory had not yet been entirely won.

  —

  On July 20, 1775, James Thacher, a twenty-one-year-old physician from Plymouth, got his first glimpse of the army’s new commander. “I have been much gratified this day with a view of General Washington,” he recorded in his journal. “His Excellency was on horseback, in company with several military gentlemen. It was not difficult to distinguish him from all others; his personal appearance is truly noble and majestic; being tall and well proportioned. His dress is a blue coat with buff-colored facings, a rich epaulette on each shoulder, buff under dress, and an elegant small sword; a black cockade in his hat.”

  All agreed. No one looked better than Washington on a horse. He was six foot two, large-boned with thigh muscles that gave him, one observer remembered, “such a surpassing grip with his knees, that a horse might as soon disencumber itself of the saddle, as of the rider.” If there was a visceral power about Washington, there was also an undeniable elegance. The Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush claimed that Washington had “so much martial dignity in his deportment that you would distinguish him to be a general and a soldier from among ten thousand people. There is not a king in Europe that would not look like a valet de chamber by his side.”

  Washington had spent most of the last two decades as one of Virginia’s wealthiest plantation owners, managing several hundred slaves, experimenting with crops, and gradually expanding his home at Mount Vernon into one of the most impressive residences on the Potomac. He was accustomed to living with a sophistication and grace that was difficult for the average Yankee to comprehend. Underwhelmed by the first house selected for him by the Massachusetts authorities, he quickly found a grander and more appropriate alternative—the Vassall house on Cambridge’s Tory Row, about a mile from the town common. Here he installed what he called his “family,” surrounding himself with a staff that tended to be from just about anywhere but New England. One of the exceptions was his commissary general Joseph Trumbull, from Connecticut, who was joined briefly by his younger brother John, the future painter, who served as one of Washington’s aides. “I suddenly found myself in the family of one of the most distinguished and dignified men of the age,” the younger Trumbull remembered; “surrounded at his table by the principal officers of the army, and in constant intercourse with them.”

  A year before, Boston’s patriots had spoken disparagingly of the aristocratic opulence of the loyalists of Tory Row. Now their new general, whom everyone referred to as His Excellency, was living in one of the neighborhood’s grandest houses in a style befitting the home’s original owners. A revolution that had begun when several dozen yeomen farmers decided to linger defiantly at Lexington Green was now being led by a general who looked and acted suspiciously like the enemy. But whereas the provincial soldiers appear to have been for the most part pleasantly surprised by their new commander, the feeling was hardly mutual. Washington was not just disappointed by the New Englanders who had begun this war with the mother country; he was disgusted by them.

  He had been led to believe by the Continental Congress that he would find twenty thousand battle-tested soldiers. What he found instead was a northern version of the undisciplined militiamen who had made his first command in the western wilderness a nightmare. This was not a proper army; this was a mob of puritanical savages that included seventeen actual Indians from the Massachusetts town of Stockbridge as well as Native Americans from New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Even worse, from the perspective of a slaveholder from Virginia, was the presence of a significant number of African Americans in the ranks.

  Rather than tents, these soldiers lived in hovels or, in the case of the Stockbridge Indians, wigwams. “Some are made of boards,” the minister William Emerson wrote, “some of sailcloth and some partly of one and partly of the other. Others are made of stone and turf and others again of brick and others brush. Some are thrown up in a hurry and look as if they could not help it—mere necessity—others are curiously wrought with doors and windows, done with wreathes and withes in manner of a basket.” Emerson thought “the great variety of the American camp is upon the whole rather a beauty than a blemish to the army,” but Washington thought otherwise, describing the New Englanders in a letter to his cousin in Virginia as “an exceeding dirty and nasty people.” But there was more. He detected “an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people, which believe me prevails but too generally among the officers of the Massachusetts part of the army, who are nearly of the same kidney with the privates.”

  The extremity of Washington’s reaction to the army he had inherited is curious. Generals Charles Lee and Horatio Gates, two former British officers whose military experience was much more extensive than Washington’s, came to recognize that the militia model upon which this New England army was based had great potential in the peculiar kind of war that lay ahead. These farmers might lack the rigid training of the British regulars, but they knew how to fight. As Gates was overheard to say that fall, “he never desired to see better soldiers than the New England men made.” By reacting so negatively, Washington was in danger of irreparably damaging his relationship with the army before he had a chance to rebuild it.

  The problem, as Washington saw it, was in how these soldiers had been originally assembled. Since an officer’s rank was based on how many men from his hometown he could convince to serve under him, it was almost impossible for him to get these soldiers to do something they didn’t want to do. Making a bad situation even worse was the fact that the men’s enlistments ended in December, just five months away. If these churlish, unkempt Yankees weren’t happy with how they were being treated, they would undoubtedly refuse to reenlist for another year and leave for home at the end of December. He needed to do here in Massachusetts what he had done in Virginia twenty years ago. He needed to create an American version of the British army.

  As had been proven on April 19, the militia, which could be assembled in the proverbial blink of an eye, was the perfect vehicle with which to begin a revolution. But as Joseph Warren had come to realize, an army of militiamen was not built for the long haul. Each company was loyal to its specific town; given time, an army made up of dozens of competing loyalties would tear itself apart—either that, or turn on the civil government that had created it and form a military dictatorship. An army that was to remain loyal to the Continental Congress could not be based on local affiliation.

  Twenty years ago, Washington had experienced firsthand the dangerous volatility of an army made up of citizen soldiers. He knew how bad things could get when all control was lost. A war fought along the lines of what had happened only three months earlier during the British retreat through Menotomy might turn the Revolution into a ferocious orgy of bloodshed out of which America’s liberties might never emerge intact. The ultimate aim of an army was, in Washington’s view, not to generate violence but to curtail it.

  He might have recognized the dangers of an undisciplined army, but Washington was also driven by a desperate need to prove himself. Even though it might not be justified militarily by what he’d found in Cambridge and Roxbury, he wanted to attack. This meant that the Siege of Boston had entered a new phase that was as much about the conflict raging within Washington as it was a standoff between two armies. Half of him wanted to create an altogether different kind of army—a painstaking process that required time and patience. The other, more impulsive half wanted to “destroy” the British army with one cataclysmic thrust and be done with it. Boston’s fate, it turned out, depended on whether Washington could be saved from himself.

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  For the time being, Washington directed his energies to overhauling the provincial army. He pushed forward the courts-martial that had accumulated in the wake of the Battle of Bunker Hill, making, he bragged, “a pretty good slam among such kind of officers as the Massachus
etts government abound[s] in.” He issued order after order, insisting that the sentries no longer fraternize with the enemy, and that anyone swimming in the Charles River be sure to hide his nakedness—particularly when a genteel lady was crossing the bridge into Cambridge; he detailed what an officer must wear (a colorful sash across his chest or an epaulette on his shoulder or a cockade in his hat) to distinguish him from his men; perhaps most important, the men must begin using the latrines, or the dysentery that had already begun to spread through the camp would only get worse. “There is great overturning in camp,” the Reverend William Emerson wrote, “as to order and regularity. New lords new laws. . . . The strictest government is taking place. . . . Everyone is made to know his place and keep in it or be tied up and receive . . . 30 or 40 lashes. . . . Thousands are at work [digging entrenchments] every day from four till eleven in the morning. It is surprising how much work has been done.”

  Almost immediately, Washington was forced to confront a crisis among his own officers. Back in June, the Continental Congress had granted commissions that did not reflect the pecking order already established by the colonies. When Connecticut’s General Spencer learned that General Putnam now outranked him, he left for home. General Thomas of Massachusetts was outraged when he discovered that his subordinate William Heath now outranked him. After several weeks of soothing ruffled feathers and applying for new commissions from Congress, Washington eventually worked things out to just about everyone’s satisfaction. This was not possible, however, when it came to the army’s regiment of artillery, whose failings at the Battle of Bunker Hill had brought about many of the courts-martial proceedings. The real problem was the regiment’s commander, Colonel Gridley, whose insistence on promoting the fortunes of his incompetent relatives had disaffected what few good officers remained. The medical corps was in an even worse state, with little or no coordination among the many hospitals scattered along the lines. In an attempt to apply some order to this mess, the Continental Congress had appointed Dr. Benjamin Church to be the equivalent of the army’s surgeon general, but the controversial doctor had already angered and alienated a significant number of his fellow physicians.

  And then there was the issue of the riflemen from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland, who the Continental Congress had believed were going to wreak havoc with the British sentries. Thanks to their weapons’ grooved barrels (which imparted a stabilizing spin to the bullet), the riflemen could reputedly hit a tiny target two hundred yards away—more than twice the range of the average musket. Unfortunately, the riflemen proved to be even more undisciplined than the Yankees. When they weren’t threatening mutiny, they were deserting to the British. At one point a fight broke out between a group of riflemen from Virginia and a regiment of fishermen from Marblehead. Years later, Israel Trask, who was just a boy of ten at the time, remembered seeing Washington suddenly appear with his black slave Billy Lee at his side, both of them mounted on big, noble horses.

  With the spring of a deer [Trask remembered], he leaped from his saddle, threw the reins of his bridle into the hands of his servant, and rushed into the thickest of the melee [and] with an iron grip seized two tall, brawny, athletic, savage-looking riflemen by the throat, keeping them at arm’s length, alternately shaking and talking to them. In this position the eye of the belligerents caught sight of the general. Its effect on them was instantaneous flight at the top of their speed in all directions from the scene of the conflict. Less than fifteen minutes had elapsed from the commencement of the row before the general and his two criminals were the only occupants of the field of action.

  But the misbehavior of the riflemen was nothing compared to the challenge Washington faced in supplying his army with gunpowder. When he first arrived in July, he had been assured that the army had 308 barrels of the precious substance. Three weeks later he learned that there were, in actuality, only 90 barrels, meaning that each man in this army of fourteen thousand (as opposed to the advertised twenty thousand) had enough gunpowder for just nine cartridges. General Sullivan from New Hampshire reported that when Washington heard this stunning news, he was rendered speechless for the next half hour. Without powder, Washington could not attack the British. “Could I have foreseen what I have, and am like to experience,” he complained, “no consideration upon earth should have induced me to accept this command.”

  For the most part, Washington seems to have kept his frustrations to himself. The persona he had labored to create over the years—that of a dignified, modest, physically magnificent, and exquisitely dressed American nobleman—provided him with a shield to hide behind. If privately he fumed, he impressed almost everyone he met with his equanimity and willingness to listen, even if that too was an act. “[He] has so happy a faculty of appearing to accommodate and yet carrying his point,” Abigail Adams wrote, “that if he was really not one of the best-intentioned men in the world, he might be a very dangerous one.”

  And besides, this summer of disappointments had its occasional moments of promise. In hopes of quickly securing some more gunpowder, he began to look to the possibility of sending out a fleet of armed schooners that might prey on the British supply ships that continued to stream into Boston Harbor. It would take months before the schooners came up with any tangible results, but at least the creation of what was, in essence, an American navy provided Washington with a diversion from the tedium of this unrelenting siege.

  In August he decided to send Benedict Arnold, just back from Fort Ticonderoga, on an expedition first proposed by Jonathan Brewer back in May. Working his way up the Kennebec River, Arnold would eventually arrive at the Saint Lawrence River, link up with yet another advance toward Canada from New York being led by General Richard Montgomery, and take Quebec. The plan—aimed at “liberating” Canada from the British Empire—proved almost impossible to implement, but like the initiative with the schooners, the Arnold Expedition demonstrated an early willingness on Washington’s part to explore potentially innovative solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

  Closer to home, Washington was relieved to discover that not all of the officers in the army he had inherited from General Ward were the spineless, self-serving imbeciles he initially took them to be. General Nathanael Greene from Rhode Island, a thirty-three-year-old lapsed Quaker who walked with a limp, was cool, thoughtful, and refreshingly forceful for a man of his tender years. It also didn’t hurt matters that Greene had a beautiful wife from Block Island.

  Just when Washington had begun to think that he was without any competent engineers, he came upon the lumbering former bookseller Henry Knox of Boston. Knox had overseen the design and construction of the most impressive works Washington had come across so far in Roxbury. Knox was big and imposing in the manner of Washington, but there was also an almost cherubic fleshiness and good humor about him. He freely admitted that almost everything he knew about engineering and artillery had come from the books he had sold in his store. A few years earlier he had lost several fingers of his left hand when his fowling piece exploded on Noddle’s Island, and he concealed the injury by wrapping his hand in a stylish silk scarf. Although only twenty-five years of age, he might be just the one to make sense of the army’s artillery regiment. And like Nathanael Greene, he had a fetching wife, the ebullient and raven-haired former Lucy Flucker, daughter of the province’s secretary, Thomas Flucker. Washington, it seems, had a weakness for charismatic but physically damaged officers, particularly ones with beautiful spouses.

  —

  Back on the morning of April 19, thirteen-year-old Benjamin Russell and his schoolmates from the Queen Street Writing School had followed General Percy’s brigade out of Boston. Events quickly left them marooned in Cambridge with no way to communicate with their parents back in Boston. Since then, Russell had become an errand boy for the army, picking up his company’s provisions at the commissary in Cambridge and returning to the lines laden with drink and foodstuffs. He and four soldiers were makin
g their way through the town’s streets when they came upon Russell’s father and uncle, who had “just escaped from Boston.”

  Throughout the summer and fall Bostonians kept finding ways to get out of the city. Some were lucky enough to receive permits to pass across the lines. At least one inhabitant—a barber named Richard Carpenter—swam his way to freedom, only to return to Boston, once again by swimming, and get thrown into jail, where he languished for the duration of the siege as a suspected spy. The boats that daily departed from the town wharves to fish in Boston Harbor provided another way to sneak out of the city; that was how George Hewes, the shoemaker who had gotten caned by the customs agent John Malcom a year and a half before, managed to make his escape.

  Whatever method Benjamin Russell’s father used, he showed little joy at finally finding his long-lost son. Instead of wrapping the boy in a hug, Mr. Russell grabbed him by the shoulders and began to berate him “for not writing.” One of the soldiers came to Russell’s defense. “Don’t shake that boy, Sir,” he said. “He is our clerk.”

  Russell’s days with the army were numbered. His father took him to see General Putnam, who agreed to discharge the boy into his father’s custody. Soon Russell was in Worcester and indentured to the newspaper editor Isaiah Thomas.

  Around this same time in August, Mercy Scollay and two of Joseph Warren’s young daughters traveled from Worcester to the seat of the newly reinstituted General Court at Watertown. As might be expected, Scollay had been devastated by the news of Warren’s death. “For a time,” she wrote, “[I was] incapable of writing or feeling any animating sensations.” What made it particularly difficult was what she described as “my uncertain situation.” Although she and Warren had agreed to marry and she had been acting as his children’s surrogate parent for the last four months, she had no legal claim to Warren’s offspring. The Continental Congress in Philadelphia was then in recess, and with John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and John Adams back in New England, she had sought them out for advice as to what she should do. “[I] find nothing can be done respecting the children,” she reported to her friend Mrs. Dix in Worcester, “till a judge is appointed and I cannot hold them one moment after the relations claim their right.”