Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  But while Britain prospered, her army in Boston was in danger of freezing to death. Howe ordered that the city’s older structures be torn down and used as fuel. In the months ahead, the Old North Meetinghouse and the parsonage of the Old South Meetinghouse, which had been built in the seventeenth century by Governor John Winthrop, were demolished, along with dozens of other buildings. Boston was, in fact, being burned by the British, one historic structure at a time.

  Back in August some regulars had cut down that revered patriot icon, the Liberty Tree. In October the Old South Meetinghouse was taken over by the British light dragoons and converted into a riding school. The soldiers ripped out the pulpit, pews, and seats (one particularly finely carved pew was turned into a hog sty) and laid down a layer of tanbark cloth and manure. The sacred place where patriots such as Josiah Quincy Jr. and Joseph Warren had once spoken before crowds of thousands had become an echoing barn full of horses.

  At the direction of Massachusetts lieutenant governor Thomas Oliver, the Green Dragon Tavern, yet another patriot shrine, was turned into a hospital. But perhaps the ultimate indignity came when Faneuil Hall, Boston’s hallowed seat of town government, was turned into a theater—an institution that proper Bostonians had shunned as immoral since the town’s founding.

  Gage was gone, but his counterpart in the British navy, Admiral Graves, remained, despite the fact that no one seemed to have anything good to say about him. Indeed, if there was anyone who embodied the venality and corruption of the British Empire, it was Graves. During the summer, when all of Boston’s inhabitants—civilians and regulars alike—were desperate for fresh foodstuffs, Graves added to their miseries by refusing to grant fishing permits unless his secretary was paid “a dollar for each boat.” “You may guess what execrations were poured forth,” an officer wrote. That summer, Graves refused to grant customs commissioner Benjamin Hallowell permission to harvest his own hay from Gallup’s Island. During the Battle of Bunker Hill, Hallowell had suggested that Graves place his ships where they could have done some good on the Mystic River; the admiral angrily refused and “from thence sprang a dislike.” “Are we not sufficiently oppressed by the enemies without,” Hallowell wrote Graves on July 20, “but must suffer by those who are sent for our protection?” In August Hallowell confronted Graves in the streets of Boston; Graves drew his sword on the unarmed commissioner, who proceeded to snap the blade in half and pummel the admiral until his face was black and blue. Graves responded by sending one of his young nephews after Hallowell, who was blindsided by a bludgeon as he walked on Cornhill near School Street. The nephew was eventually court-martialed and found guilty of nothing more than “an error in judgment.”

  Throughout the summer and fall, Graves suffered humiliation after humiliation as packs of provincial whaleboats managed to elude his many warships stationed throughout Boston Harbor. A fleet of thirty boats led by Major Benjamin Tupper attacked and burned the Boston lighthouse on Little Brewster Island not once but twice. Finally, in response to a hint from Lord Sandwich that “you may be blamed for doing too little but can never be censured for doing too much,” Graves was moved to act. In October he gave Captain Henry Mowat of the Canceaux orders to put towns up and down the New England coast to the torch as a demonstration of the fearsome might of the British navy. After determining that the houses in Gloucester were spread too far apart to allow him to burn the settlement, Mowat settled on Falmouth (modern Portland, Maine), whose patriots had a few months before briefly kidnapped him. At first, the town’s inhabitants did not appear to take the British captain’s threats seriously, and they were thrown into a panic when he finally began to bombard the town. It took a while for Mowat’s two fourteen-gun vessels to lay the town to waste, but by 6:00 p.m. of October 18, about two thirds of the town—almost all of its waterfront—was “one flame.”

  The burning of this particular town at the edge of the Massachusetts wilderness did more to unite the opposition than it did to support the king’s cause. The British were experiencing the dilemma that afflicts any empire—ancient or modern—that is reduced to attacking an essentially defenseless civilian population. Even the successes are viewed as moral failures.

  But Admiral Graves’s ultimate indignity was yet to come. By the end of November, Washington’s nascent navy of armed schooners was beginning to have an impact on British attempts to supply the troops in Boston. “We are now almost as much blocked up by the sea,” one officer complained, “as we have been for these eight months by the land.”

  John Manley of Marblehead had received his commission directly from Washington and was captain of a schooner that had been recently renamed the Lee in honor of General Charles Lee. On November 29, Manley and his crew, pretending to be a Boston pilot boat, captured the British ordnance ship Nancy. Stored inside the Nancy’s hold was a virtual armory of artillery and munitions. “There was on board,” William Heath enthused in his diary, “one 13-inch brass mortar, 2,000 stand of arms, 100,000 flints, 32 tons of leaden ball, etc. A fortunate capture for the Americans!” Washington’s army had been provided with exactly what it needed if it were to have any hope of successfully attacking Boston.

  Within a few days, word of the Nancy’s capture had reached the British in Boston. “There is nothing to prevent the rebels taking every vessel bound for this port,” an officer lamented. “For though there are near twenty pendants flying in this harbor, I cannot find that there is one vessel cruising the bay. Surely our admiral cannot be allowed to remain here much longer [as] a curse upon the garrison.”

  But Graves was not entirely to blame for the ineffectiveness of his squadron. The British government had failed to provide him with enough sailors to operate his ships, given the inevitable effects of disease and desertion. One naval officer estimated that if you took all the sailors in all the ships presently stationed in Boston Harbor, there wouldn’t be enough to “man one half of the ships, which are likewise in want of all sorts of stores and necessaries.” The Admiralty, under the incompetent leadership of Lord Sandwich, was the real source of the problem, this officer insisted. “You may depend on it,” he wrote, “the remissness complained of did not arise from the admiral, who frequently left his own ship in too defenseless a state (in my opinion) in order to keep his cruisers at sea. . . . [He] has been cruelly used.”

  At the end of December, with the arrival of the fifty-gun Chatham, Graves learned that, like Gage before him, he had been recalled and that Admiral Molyneux Shuldham was the new commander of the British navy in Boston.

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  Washington spent much of December peering at Boston through his spyglass, as often as not from the heights of Prospect Hill overlooking the Charlestown peninsula, the Mystic River, the harbor, and Boston itself. He could see the British soldiers preparing for the winter ahead, building barracks both in the town and on the Charlestown peninsula. The British appeared to be there to stay. But when Washington ordered successful advances at Cobble Hill and then Cambridge’s Lechmere Point, Howe’s army barely responded. Washington was dumbfounded. “[I am] unable,” he wrote, “upon any principle whatever to account for their silence, unless it be to lull us into a fatal security.”

  Rather than playing a complex game of psychological warfare, William Howe had simply lost the will to fight. His experience at Bunker Hill had certainly stunned him, but there were other factors contributing to his lassitude. In Europe, winter was a time for armies to rest and recoup. This was not the case, however, in New England, where the ice and snow actually increased an army’s mobility. A hundred years before during King Philip’s War, an intercolonial army had marched across the frozen wetlands of Rhode Island and surprised a huge village of Narragansett Indians in what became known as the Great Swamp Fight. Washington was hopeful of using the ice around Boston to facilitate an attack later that winter. But for Howe the coming cold provided an opportunity to attend plays at Faneuil Hall and gamble with his officers, often attended b
y the beautiful blond wife of Joshua Loring, a loyalist who’d been appointed the town’s sheriff, at his side.

  Some have blamed the distractions provided by Howe’s affair with Elizabeth Loring for his lack of initiative during the winter of 1775–76. But perhaps the real reason Howe could not bring himself to venture out of Boston was that, like Gage before him, he did not know how to proceed against an enemy composed of British subjects, many of them from a colony that had built a memorial in Westminster Abbey to his beloved older brother. Howe’s ambivalence is revealed in the letter he sent Lord Dartmouth in January. Washington’s army was not “by any means to be despised,” he wrote, “having in it many European soldiers, and all or most of the young men of spirit in the country.” Rather than launching a full-scale attack, might it not be “better policy,” he continued, “to withdraw entirely from the delinquent provinces, and leave the colonists to war with each other for sovereignty.” That Howe was probably correct in his assessment does not change the fact that this was a general who had little interest in a war.

  —

  Washington tried to be philosophical about the approaching reenlistment crisis, reassuring both a fellow general and himself that “order and subordination in time will take place of confusion, and command be rendered more agreeable.” He knew that many of the soldiers were unhappy about the changes he had put in place for the new Continental Army. As former militiamen, they were used to serving with soldiers from their own colony, but that was not how it necessarily was going to be in the future. “Connecticut wants no Massachusetts man in their corps,” Washington wrote; “Massachusetts thinks there is no necessity for a Rhode-Islander to be introduced amongst them; and New Hampshire says, it’s very hard, that her valuable and experienced officers . . . should be discarded because her own regiments under the new establishment, cannot provide for them.”

  Some of the regiments from Connecticut had decided that they were technically free to depart as early as December 1, and that day the excitable and blasphemous General Lee ordered them to form into what Simeon Lyman described as “a hollow square.” Lee, no doubt followed by his black Pomeranian dog Spado, stepped into the square’s center. “He flung and curst and swore at us,” Lyman wrote, “and said if we would not stay he would order us to go on Bunker Hill and if we would not go he would order the rifleman to fire at us.” Lee’s tantrum did little to change the soldiers’ minds. On December 10, Nathanael Greene reported that the “Connecticut men are going home in shoals this day.” As anyone from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, or Connecticut knew, this was the way the region’s militia had worked for more than a century. “’Tis the cast of the New Englanders to enlist for a certain time,” Reverend William Gordon wrote, “and when the time is expired to quit the service and return home, let the call for their continuance be ever so urgent.”

  Nathanael Greene understood the phenomenon but could not help but share in his commander’s frustration and anger. “If neither the love of liberty nor dread of slavery will rouse them from the present stupid state they are in,” he wrote, “and they obstinately persist in quitting the service, they will deserve the curses of the present and future generations to the latest ages. . . . What can equal such an infamous desertion . . . ? We that have boasted so loud of our private virtue and public spirit, do not have the very vital principles of liberty.”

  Greene admitted, however, that Washington bore part of the blame for the reenlistment crisis by expecting too much of the army he had inherited. “His Excellency has been taught to believe the people here a superior race of mortals and finding them of the same temper and disposition . . . of the common people of other governments, they sink in his esteem.” As Greene rightly pointed out, “you cannot expect [to make] veterans [from] a raw militia [after] only a few months’ service.”

  Not surprisingly, the army’s first commander in chief, Artemas Ward, was even more critical of Washington and his lack of appreciation for the soldiers from New England. At one point, Ward wrote of his

  great concern about the raising [of] a new army, for the genius of this people is different from those to the southward. Our people are jealous and are not inclinable to act upon implicit faith; they choose to see and judge for themselves. They remember what was said of them by some that came from the southward last summer, which makes them backward in enlisting or manifesting a willingness to enlist. . . . Some have said hard things of the officers belonging to this colony and despised them, but I think as mean as they have represented them to be, there has been no one action with the enemy, which has not been conducted by an officer of this colony.

  One can only wonder what would have happened if at the outset Washington had had a New England general with the polish and empathy of Joseph Warren on his staff. Warren might have provided the perspective that allowed Washington to recognize the provincial army’s considerable strengths. At least one biographer has criticized Washington for not taking a direct role in addressing the recruitment problem. With someone such as Warren (as opposed to the excitable, foulmouthed Charles Lee) exhorting the men to reenlist, the conversion from the old into the new army might have gone much more smoothly.

  There is evidence that Washington had begun to recognize the error of his ways. By December, his highly valued secretary Joseph Reed had returned to Philadelphia. In the months ahead, Reed served as his epistolary confidant, and on December 15, Washington responded to a letter in which Reed apparently reported that some of the general’s negative comments about the New Englanders had caused grumblings among the delegates in Congress. “I am much obliged to you for the hints . . . ,” he wrote. “I will endeavor a reformation, as I can assure you my dear Reed that I wish to walk in such a line as will give most general satisfaction.” In the weeks to come, Washington continued to thank Reed for passing along anything he heard about him—good or bad. “I can bear to hear of imputed or real errors,” he wrote; “the man who wishes to stand well in the opinion of others must do this, because he is thereby enabled to correct his faults . . . for as I have but one capitol object in view, I could wish to make my conduct coincide with the wishes of mankind as far as I can consistently.”

  Washington had spent his life attempting to control his emotions. He was accustomed to adjusting his behavior in ways that were more congenial to the wishes of those he sought to impress. In the past, he had succeeded in winning an honorable reputation among his peers in Virginia. Now it was the delegates of the Continental Congress whose expectations he sought to fulfill. This meant that he was no longer just a Virginian; he was attempting to be something that did not yet exist—an American. But already he had taken steps toward achieving that possible future. Through the creation of an army representative of the “continent,” he had provided a tangible, if admittedly imperfect, example of how thirteen autonomous colonies might one day become a new nation.

  Washington had long since come to the conclusion that a reconciliation with the mother country was a virtual impossibility, and in this he was not alone. As early as October 19, after having dinner with a group of Continental officers, the minister Jeremy Belknap recorded in his journal, “I found that the plan of independence was become a favorite point in the army, and that it was offensive to pray for the king.” Finally, after more than a decade of clinging to the fiction that the king remained America’s most stalwart friend, the colonists were beginning to see the truth. The policies of King George and his ministers were one and the same. The only alternative left was what Nathanael Greene termed, in a letter written on December 20, “a declaration of independence.”

  By the end of the month, Washington had decided to reverse himself on the issue of African American soldiers and allow free blacks into the army. Back in Virginia, royal governor John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, had offered the colony’s slaves freedom if they fought on the side of the British, and this may have contributed to Washington’s change of heart. But the most compelling reason he deci
ded to put aside the prejudices of his southern upbringing had to do with what had transpired six months before at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

  On December 5, thirteen of Washington’s officers filed a petition to the Massachusetts General Court, requesting that the African American Salem Poor be rewarded for his bravery on June 17, 1775. Poor had “behaved,” the petition read, “like an experienced officer as well as an excellent soldier.” It had been Poor, many claimed, who had shot Major Pitcairn as the British officer mounted the wall of the redoubt, shouting “The day is ours!”

  The New Englanders in Washington’s army were making a statement: If during a battle when so many white officers had displayed irresolution and outright cowardice, an African American private had fought with such distinction, then certainly such a man should not be denied the ability to fight for his country. Washington appears to have taken this kind of testimony to heart, and by the beginning of the new year Salem Poor, who had purchased his freedom for the price of twenty-seven pounds in 1769, was a soldier in the Continental Army.

  —

  On December 22, the Continental Congress responded to Washington’s query about whether he could attack Boston even if it meant the total destruction of the city. His Excellency, Congress informed him, was free to make an assault on the British “in any manner he may think expedient, notwithstanding the town and property in it may thereby be destroyed.”

  Washington was going to need every soldier—white or black—that he could get.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Clap of Thunder