Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  On January 1, 1776, a British officer approached the American lines in Roxbury under a flag of truce. After more than fifteen months of continual expansion, the fortifications around Boston had been pushed to the farthest portion of the Neck, where massive earthen walls (which a Connecticut soldier compared to the fabled fortress of Gibraltar) had been augmented by the guns of a floating battery in the Back Bay as well as lines of abatis—obstacles made from the trunks and sharpened branches of trees that served the same purpose as modern-day barbed wire—to prevent the enemy from storming the bulwarks by foot. At the old town gate, well within these outer lines, a moat had been dug across the Neck, meaning that Boston, surrounded by its “chain of forts,” was now an actual island.

  Between the British and American lines was a flat marshy sweep of bottomland punctuated by the charred remnants of several burned-out buildings. Waving a white flag, the British officer, probably accompanied by one or two others, walked across the fire-scorched no-man’s-land.

  At least one of the men was carrying copies of a broadside for distribution among the soldiers of the Continental Army. This was more than the usual proclamation from General Howe; this was the King’s Speech, delivered before Parliament back on October 27. It had been published by “the Boston gentry” with the hope of putting the fear of God into the rebel army.

  Once and for all, the king had called the colonists’ bluff, declaring that their “strongest protestations of loyalty to me” were both absurd and offensive given that they were presently engaged in a “rebellious war . . . carried for the purpose of establishing an independent Empire.” The colonists could no longer pretend that they still remained loyal to their sovereign; they must either return to the British fold or admit that they were engaged in a war of independence. The loyalists felt confident that once the rebels realized that they were on the verge of permanently alienating themselves from their beloved king, they would begin to rethink this deluded adventure and plead for a reconciliation.

  As it so happened, Washington had already acted to strengthen the solidarity and resolve of his troops. January 1 was the first day of the new Continental Army, and to help celebrate this historic event, he replaced the large red flag previously raised by Israel Putnam on the heights of Prospect Hill with the “Union flag,” the red, white, and blue British standard that combined the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew. Created by King James in 1606 to symbolize his role as ruler of both England and Scotland, the Union flag had become, in recent years, a symbol of colonial unity in the face of British oppression. By raising the Union flag, Washington was announcing his army’s transition from a provincial to a truly continental army, and the ceremony was accompanied by the firing of thirteen guns and “the like number of cheers.”

  The works at Prospect Hill were the equal of any fortification in Boston and had the advantage of being situated on a broad outcropping with a commanding view of the Mystic River and all of Boston Harbor. Soon after the fighting at Noddle’s Island, Israel Putnam’s men had transformed the schooner Diana’s seventy-six-foot mainmast into a flagpole, and it was from this towering section of tar-stained pine that the Union flag of the Continental Army proudly waved.

  Washington soon learned that the “redcoats” on Bunker Hill and in Boston construed the raising of the Union flag not as a “compliment to the United Colonies,” but as “a token of the deep impression the speech had made upon us, and as a signal of submission.” “I presume,” he wrote, “they begin to think it strange that we have not made a formal surrender of our lines.” In actuality, the King’s Speech had the opposite effect on the American soldiers. When the broadsides eventually made their way from Roxbury to Cambridge, they “excited,” it was reported, “the greatest degree of rage and indignation . . . as proof of which, [a copy of the speech] was publicly burnt in the camp.”

  Washington was amused by the “farcical” nature of the confusion over the Union flag, but it also spoke to the uncomfortable ambiguity that still lingered over their cause. They might prefer to interpret the flag as representing unity among the colonies, but that did not change the fact that what we call today the Union Jack was a British flag. At some point, the Americans, if that was what they intended to call themselves, must have a flag of their own.

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  On the night of January 8, Faneuil Hall was jammed with playgoers. Present that evening were the cream of the British army, including commander in chief General William Howe. Although the siege had devolved into a stalemate and no orders had been received from the ministry since the fall, there were signs that military operations against the rebels might soon move in other and more productive directions. Back in December, General Burgoyne had departed for London, intent on finding a new role for himself that might bring about a decisive British triumph. In a few weeks’ time, General Clinton was to depart on a secret mission to the south. For now, the officers and their wives were gathered for the premiere of a play Burgoyne had completed before leaving for England: a comedy titled The Blockade of Boston.

  The curtain rose to thunderous applause as out stepped the figure of George Washington “in an uncouth gait, with a large wig, a long rusty sword, attended by a country servant with a rusty gun.” Before General Washington could get a word in edgewise, a sergeant suddenly appeared on the stage and shouted, “The Yankees are attacking our works on Bunker Hill!” This inspired more laughter and applause as the audience “clapped prodigiously.”

  Not until General Howe himself stood up and shouted, “Officers to your alarm posts!” was it realized that the sergeant was no actor. “A general scene of confusion ensued,” a playgoer recounted, “[officers] immediately hurried out of the house to their alarm posts; some skipping over the orchestra, trampling on the fiddles; and in short, everyone making his most speedy retreat, the actors (who were all officers) calling out for water to get the paint and smut off their faces; women fainting, etc.” The story of The Blockade’s premiere soon made its way across enemy lines. To the minister William Gordon of Roxbury, it seemed almost providential that a play “designed to ridicule us” had been so comically interrupted. “Thus the ridicule,” Gordon wrote, “was turned upon themselves.”

  The rebels, it was soon discovered, had not attacked the British works on Bunker Hill; they had instead sent a detachment of several hundred men under the command of Thomas Knowlton of Connecticut on a raid across the milldam that connected Cambridge to the Charlestown peninsula. The mission’s aim was to destroy what houses still remained in Charlestown so that the British soldiers stationed on the peninsula could no longer use the structures either as barracks or as a source of firewood. Under heavy fire from the guns atop Bunker Hill, Knowlton and his men retreated with five prisoners after torching eight of the houses.

  This operation had been made possible by the ice that had finally begun to form along the edges of the Charles River and would, if the cold persisted, extend across the entire river and Back Bay. With Boston surrounded by ice, Washington might finally be able to launch his long-hoped-for attack. As far as he was concerned, they should have assaulted Boston with the help of boats back in the fall—before the reenlistment crisis reduced his already undermanned army by half. “Could I have foreseen the difficulties which have come upon us,” he wrote Joseph Reed on January 14, “could I have known that such a backwardness would have been discovered in the old soldiers to the service, all the generals upon earth should not have convinced me of the propriety of delaying an attack upon Boston till this time. When it can now be attempted I will not undertake to say, but this much I will answer for, that no opportunity can present itself earlier than my wishes.”

  All December and January—despite the arrival of his wife, Martha, and her son and daughter-in-law—the tension had been building within Washington. So far his efforts to create a larger and more disciplined regular army had been a failure, forcing him to rely increasingly on the local militias. But it wasn’t
only the lack of men; there was the lack of gunpowder as well as a paucity of weapons—problems that had been exacerbated by the Continental Congress’s failure to come forth with the funds he needed to purchase muskets and pay his army. In a rare moment of candor, Washington revealed the extent of his despair to Joseph Reed:

  The reflection upon my situation and that of this army produces many an uneasy hour, when all around me are wrapped in sleep. Few people know the predicament we are in, on a thousand accounts—fewer still will believe, if any disaster happens to these lines, from what causes it flows. I have often thought how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting of a command under such circumstances, I had taken my musket upon my shoulder and entered the ranks or, if I could have justified the measure to posterity and my own conscience, had retired to the backcountry and lived in a wigwam. If I shall be able to rise superior to these and many other difficulties, which might be enumerated, I shall most religiously believe that the finger of Providence is in it, to blind the eyes of our enemies. For surely if we get well through this month, it must be for want of their knowing the disadvantages we labor under.

  At a council of war two days later, attended by his generals as well as John Adams and the president of the Massachusetts legislature, James Warren (from Plymouth, and no relation to Joseph Warren), Washington was finally able to get his generals to unanimously agree that “a vigorous attempt ought to be made upon the ministerial army in Boston, as soon as practicable.” Toward that end, it was decided to almost double the size of the existing army of about nine thousand soldiers with the temporary addition of thirteen regiments of militia from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, a process that would take at least a month.

  But there was more. Expected any day was a bonanza even greater than the windfall of armaments provided by Captain Manley’s capture of the Nancy. Back on November 15, Henry Knox, the former bookseller with an interest in artillery and a talent for building fortifications, had left Cambridge with his nineteen-year-old brother, William, on a mission to Fort Ticonderoga at the western edge of New England, on the southern end of Lake Champlain. After a journey of more than three hundred miles over the ice and snow, the Knox brothers and a primarily horse-drawn train of forty-two sledges bearing fifty-nine iron and brass cannons, howitzers, and mortars—more than sixty tons of artillery—were about to arrive in Framingham.

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  At first they had prayed for warm weather. The plan was to transport the armaments by boat from the northern tip of Lake George (only a few miles from Fort Ticonderoga) to Fort George on the lake’s southern end—a distance of about thirty-two miles. As soon as they began rowing the guns down the lake in early December, contrary winds and dropping temperatures slowed their progress, forcing them at some points to hack their way through the newly formed ice. Knox decided to push ahead of what he called his “little fleet” so that he could make preparations for the guns’ arrival at Fort George. As evening approached on December 10, he and his boat crew were making good progress down the lake, but “knowing [the men] to be exceedingly weary,” he decided it was time he allowed them to go ashore to rest. Using “very large quantities of dry wood ready cut,” they made a roaring fire. “We warmed ourselves sufficiently,” Knox recorded in his diary, “and took a comfortable nap—laying with our feet to the fire.” About a half hour before daylight, they set out once again, and after more than six hours “of excessive hard pulling against a fresh head breeze,” they finally arrived at Fort George.

  One of the scows fetched up on a rock and filled with water, but eventually all the deeply laden boats reached Fort George. Knox had made arrangements to build a group of “exceeding strong sleds” for the intended journey south over the frozen Hudson River to Albany, where they would begin to make their way east across the breadth of Massachusetts. On December 17 he wrote Washington that he hoped for “a fine fall of snow, which will enable us to proceed further and make the carriage easy. If that shall be the case I hope in 16 or 17 days’ time to be able to present to your Excellency a noble train of artillery.”

  But it was not to be. On December 28, the man who was to provide him with sleds walked off in a huff after General Philip Schuyler complained that he was charging too much for his services. Knox took some consolation in knowing that it had actually snowed too much for his cannons to have begun their journey, since the heaping drifts made it impossible for the horses and oxen to make any headway. As his brother remained at Fort George waiting for the sleds to be provided by another source, Knox ventured ahead to the Hudson River, where he took steps to strengthen the ice in anticipation of the cannons’ arrival, “getting holes cut in the different crossing places in the river” so that water flowed up through the holes and, upon freezing, added to the thickness of the ice.

  Soon they had the sleds they needed, and the cannons had begun to make their way south toward the Hudson from Fort George. But now there was a different problem. From Albany on January 5, Knox wrote Washington,

  I was in hopes that we should have been able to have had the cannon at Cambridge by this time. The want of snow detained us some days, and now a cruel thaw hinders from crossing Hudson River, which we are obliged to do four times from Lake George to this town. The first severe night will make the ice on the river sufficiently strong, till that happens the cannon and mortars must remain where they are. . . . These inevitable delays pain me exceedingly, as my mind is fully sensible of the importance of the greatest expedition in this case. . . . My utmost endeavors have been and still shall be used to forward them with the utmost dispatch.

  Logistical practicalities required Knox to break up his caravan into several smaller groups of sleds, and in early January a sled bearing one of the largest of his cannons broke through the ice of the Hudson River. After successfully getting most of the other sleds across the river, Knox was able to save “the drowned cannon” with the help of the local citizenry, and from that day forward the piece of artillery was known as “The Albany.”

  Crossing and recrossing the Hudson had proven difficult, but the hills and mountains of western and central Massachusetts were just as challenging—especially on the down slopes, when the huge sleds threatened to run ahead of the teams that were pulling them. They were also plagued by a frustrating lack of snow, and when another “cruel thaw” left them temporarily stranded in the town of Westfield, Knox took the opportunity to show the country people, many of whom had never before seen a cannon, what one of these “big shooting irons” could do, repeatedly firing a mortar that came to be known as “Old Sow.” By this time Knox had learned that with the help of Washington and John Adams—both of whom had come to believe that the embarrassing failures of the artillery regiment during the Battle of Bunker Hill required new leadership—the Continental Congress had named Knox as Richard Gridley’s replacement.

  That night in Westfield an appreciative crowd gathered around the twenty-five-year-old colonel at the town’s inn. Many of the men were members of the Westfield militia and, like most town militias throughout New England, there were a disproportionate number of officers. This imbalance had made it necessary for Washington to reduce the officer corps in the Continental Army, a move that had inevitably angered many former officers and contributed to the reenlistment crisis. Now in Westfield, as Knox was introduced to officer after officer, he could appreciate firsthand one of the many difficulties his commander in chief had been forced to confront while he had been overseeing the transportation of cannons from Fort Ticonderoga. Once the introductions had been completed in the Westfield tavern, Knox smiled broadly and said, “What a pity it is that our soldiers are not as numerous as our officers.”

  By January 25 Knox was back in Cambridge, having completed his mission. Not only had his journey made possible this windfall of artillery, it had provided the officers of Washington’s army—particularly those in the artillery regiment—with time to reconcile themse
lves to the fact that a twenty-five-year-old with minimal military experience had ascended to the rank of colonel. There had been more than a little outrage—Thomas Crafts, who had hoped the appointment might have gone to him, wrote John Adams of the “astonishment, mortification, and disappointment I was thrown into”—but at least Knox had not been around to experience it. By the time he did return to Cambridge, he had achieved a significant success that helped put Washington’s decision to promote the young artilleryman in its proper perspective. Officers might continue to grumble, but events were about to unfold that soon commanded everyone’s attention.

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  Washington had much more on his mind than the siege of Boston. By the end of January, he had decided to send General Lee to New York. Convinced that General Clinton was headed for that city, he wanted one of his generals there to prepare for the possibility of a future British attack. Word had also reached Washington of a major setback in Canada. Montgomery and Arnold’s attempt to take Quebec had failed. Montgomery was dead and Arnold injured, and the prospects were not good. The arrival of a delegation of Mohawks from the north provided a different approach to influencing the balance of power along the Canadian border, but by the beginning of February, Washington’s focus had returned to attacking Howe’s army in Boston.

  On February 16, he convened yet another council of war. Three days before he had visited the works at Lechmere Point, where the engineer Jeduthan Baldwin had been laboring since December to construct a fortification that might accommodate some of the cannons Knox had secured from Ticonderoga. The problem was the frost—which extended almost two feet below the ground—making the earth, in Baldwin’s words, “as hard as a rock.” In a single night in January, the ground had frozen an additional eight inches down, and the next morning Baldwin and his men “pried up cakes of frozen earth nine feet long and three feet broad.” As Baldwin could attest, building an adequate redoubt in these conditions was almost impossible.