Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Somehow, however, Baldwin was close to achieving the unachievable, and during an inspection of the site on February 13, Washington saw that the bitter cold had finally reached the point that the ice might help rather than hinder his plans. As Baldwin recorded in his diary, they “found a good bridge of ice to Boston.” The time had come, Washington decided, to launch an attack on Boston.

  At the council of war in Cambridge on February 16, Washington made his case before his generals. They now had cannons, but they still did not have enough gunpowder to bombard the British regulars in Boston with any effectiveness. The only way to dislodge the troops, given the lack of powder, was to rely on “small arms” through “a general assault upon the town” across the ice. “[A] stroke well aimed at this critical juncture,” he insisted, “might put a final end to the war and restore peace and tranquility.” And since they had no way of knowing how long the cold might last, they had to launch the attack as soon as possible.

  According to the minister William Gordon, who appears to have spoken to Artemas Ward and perhaps others who attended the meeting on February 16, Ward “opposed the idea, saying, ‘The attack must be made with a view of bringing on an engagement, or of driving the enemy out of Boston and either end will be answered much better by possessing Dorchester Heights.’” This, of course, was what Ward had been saying since August, and it was not what Washington wanted to hear now that the harbor was frozen in February. Even worse, Washington’s trusted adjutant, General Horatio Gates, agreed with Ward, maintaining that “our present army has neither the numbers, the arm[s] nor the discipline necessary to secure success in the assault of Boston” and that “our defeat may risk the entire loss of the liberties of America forever.” The vote of Washington’s generals was unanimous; instead of attacking Boston across the ice, they should occupy Dorchester Heights.

  According to Gordon, “the commander-in-chief could not refrain from showing that he was greatly dissatisfied.” Stifling his anger and frustration, he agreed to support Ward’s plan to “possess Dorchester Heights, with a view of drawing the enemy out.” As it so happened, Ward, “unknown to General Washington . . . had been for some time collecting fascines, gabions, etc., . . . in expectation that the same would be wanted for this purpose.” Gordon recounted how Washington, no doubt somewhat sullenly, left “the conducting of the business [at Dorchester Heights] . . . to General Ward.”

  Washington, however, refused to wholly abandon his plan to attack and destroy the British in Boston. If after the Americans occupied Dorchester Heights, the British should do as they did on June 17, 1775, and launch an assault on the hastily constructed fortifications, Washington proposed that they then launch a backdoor assault of their own on the western side of Boston, using boats to transport soldiers from Roxbury and Cambridge. Since a significant portion of the British force would be engaged in the attack on Dorchester, the odds would now be in the Americans’ favor. With luck, they would have succeeded in taking the city before the British troops had a chance to return from Dorchester Heights.

  Even Ward and Gates appear to have believed that this modified plan to take Boston had merit, but there was one general who insisted that such an attack “would most assuredly produce only defeat and disgrace to the American army.” William Heath had been there with Joseph Warren during the British retreat from Lexington, and he now maintained that even if the enemy was “induce[d] to make a sally” from Boston, General Howe could be counted on to “provide for the defense of the town.” The Americans in Cambridge would not simply row across the Back Bay to the shores of an undefended city; they would most assuredly face stiff and potentially devastating opposition. To expect these soldiers to cross a mile and a half of open water in the face of British artillery was ludicrous; to expect them to “effect a landing . . . under such a tremendous fire” was madness. Washington’s unnecessarily aggressive plan would in all likelihood turn a victory into a humiliating defeat.

  Whether or not Washington’s unceasing six-month campaign to oust the British by force had finally worn down his council of war, the majority of the generals voted in support of his latest proposal. At long last, a committee was formed to draw up a detailed plan for attacking Boston.

  Washington had gotten at least a portion of what he wanted, but he remained resentful that his original plan to attack the city across the ice had been rejected. As late as February 26, he wrote Joseph Reed, “But behold! though we had been waiting all the year for this favorable event, the enterprise was thought too dangerous!” But even Washington had to admit that he might have allowed his own mounting frustrations to interfere with his better judgment. In one of the most confiding letters he ever wrote to a member of the Continental Congress, he acknowledged to John Hancock that “the irksomeness of my situation . . . might have inclined me to put more to hazard than was consistent with prudence.” The immense pressures of conducting a siege without the resources required to win it had, he confessed, taken a toll. “To have the eyes of the whole continent fixed with anxious expectation of hearing of some great event and to be restrained in every military operation for want of the necessary means of carrying it on, is not very pleasing; especially as the means used to conceal my weakness from the enemy conceals it also from our friends, and adds to their wonder.” In the meantime, he would do his best to embrace the plan “to take post on Dorchester” and see whether, he wrote Reed, “the enemy will be so kind as to come out to us.”

  Nathanael Greene was Washington’s youngest general, but no one on the council of war had a better appreciation of the dilemma facing their commander in chief. An attack on Boston, Greene wrote his brother, “would be horrible if it succeeded and still more horrible if it failed.” And yet, he continued, “the advantage that America would derive from making ourselves masters of the garrison at this time would be inconceivable. It would damp the spirits of Great Britain and give ours a new spring. In a word, it would put a finishing stroke to the war; it would heal all the divisions among ourselves, silence the Tories and work a general reformation throughout the continent.” No wonder Washington yearned to attack Boston.

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  Artemas Ward may have been the earliest and most forceful proponent of the plan to take Dorchester Heights, but Washington acted quickly to give the operation his own personal stamp. As he had witnessed during the construction of the fortifications at Lechmere Point, the freezing temperatures meant that building a redoubt atop the bare, wind-swept hills of Dorchester was going to be no easy matter. By this time a self-taught engineer of unusual promise, thirty-eight-year-old Rufus Putnam of Braintree (and a cousin of General Israel Putnam), had come to his attention. Unlike Henry Knox, everything Putnam knew about the subject of fortifications came not from books but from practical experience, which was admittedly slight. Despite having worked beside several British engineers during the French and Indian War, he “pretended no knowledge of laying works” and had been reluctant to volunteer his services at the beginning of the siege. At the insistence of William Heath, he agreed to try his hand at building the fortifications at Roxbury, and he was soon overseeing the construction of works at Cobble Hill and other critical locations.

  Around the time of the February council of war, Washington invited Putnam to dine at his headquarters, asking that he “tarry after dinner.” Once the two of them were alone, the general “entered in a free conversation on the subject of storming the town of Boston.” By this point, Washington was at least publicly stating that it would be best to begin such an operation by occupying Dorchester; what he wanted Putnam to figure out was how to quickly build a fortification on ground that was frozen solid. “If I could think of any way in which it could be done,” Putnam wrote, “[I was] to make a report to him immediately.”

  That evening, Putnam was on his way back to his quarters in Roxbury when he decided to stop by the residence of General Heath and “pay my respects.” Heath happened to be in, and the officers wer
e soon enjoying a companionable chat when Putnam noticed a book on Heath’s table by the noted British military engineer John Muller. “I immediately requested the general to lend it me,” he wrote. But Heath refused, claiming that “he never lent his books.” “I then told him,” Putnam related, “that he must recollect that he was the one who at Roxbury in a measure compelled [me] to undertake a business of which at the time I confessed I never had read a word about and that he must let me have the book.” After “some more excuses on his part,” Heath finally allowed Putnam to borrow the book.

  Not until the next morning did Putnam finally open John Muller’s Attack and Defense of Fortified Places. On page 4 he discovered an engineering term he had never heard before: “chandelier.” Upon reading the definition, he quickly realized that he had found the solution for building a fort on Dorchester Heights.

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  A chandelier (the fortification frame, not the lighting ornament) is a double-ended wooden scaffold that sits on the ground; when it is placed beside another chandelier, the open space between the two frames is then filled up with fascines, bundles of tree branches that when covered with dirt form the basis of a cannon-proof bulwark. With the help of dozens of precut chandeliers and many more fascines, the Americans could almost instantly create the beginnings of a fort atop Dorchester Heights. With the addition of some of the cannons that had been brought down from Ticonderoga, they would be able to present the British with the illusion, if not the reality (since they still lacked the gunpowder required to do any significant damage with their artillery), of an armed fortress capable of bombarding into oblivion both Boston and the many men-of-war in the harbor. The British would have only two alternatives: launch a desperate sortie against the fort or evacuate.

  Once Washington heard of Rufus Putnam’s plan, he directed both Henry Knox and the man whom Knox had superseded as head of the artillery regiment, Richard Gridley, to consult with Putnam and determine whether chandeliers might provide a feasible solution to the problem. According to Putnam, “They fell in with my plan.” The general approved their report, and “preparations [were] immediately set on foot to carry it into effect.”

  Plenty of challenges still remained. The road from Roxbury to Dorchester traversed a neck of lowland that was in plain view of the British sentries stationed in Boston. The darkness would help, but some sort of blind needed to be built on the city side of the road that somehow managed to conceal both the sights and the sounds of hundreds of ox-driven carts carrying materials to the Heights. Rufus Putnam initially recommended using stones, since the surrounding terrain was crisscrossed by so many walls, but eventually decided to go with seven-hundred-pound bundles of compressed hay.

  In addition to preparing chandeliers and other materials typically used in constructing a fortress, such as fascines and gabions, the Americans built, at the suggestion of the Boston merchant William Davis, barrels. Once filled with stone, gravel, and sand, the barrels could be used to shore up the fort’s walls. However, in the event of a British attack, the barrels had yet another, potentially devastating use. As the regulars climbed up the steep, almost treeless hillside, the barrels could be, in the words of William Heath, “rolled down the hill [and] must have thrown the assailants into the utmost confusion and have killed and wounded great numbers.” Even as the barrels and other materials were being prepared in and around Roxbury, carpenters in Cambridge were building forty-five flat-bottomed bateaux—each capable of carrying eighty men—along with two floating batteries, in anticipation of an American amphibious assault on Boston.

  The Americans might not have much powder, but all agreed that some kind of cannonade of Boston was necessary on the night they took Dorchester Heights. With cannons blazing in Cobble Hill, Lechmere Point, and Roxbury, the British might be too preoccupied to notice what was happening to the southeast in Dorchester. Knox had already begun to install some of his newly acquired cannons in these three sites, and plans were put in place to begin firing on the British several days prior to the move on Dorchester. Not only would this provide Knox’s artillery teams with some practice prior to the main event, it would further the illusion that the Americans had finally secured ample stores of powder. The trick was to fire as few shots as possible while still engaging the British army’s attention.

  All that remained to be decided was the date of the move on Dorchester. For the first time, Quartermaster Thomas Mifflin was invited to a council of war—no doubt because the operation was proving to be as much a logistical as a military challenge. During the meeting, Mifflin related how a friend had suggested that the night of March 4 would be the most appropriate for the move to the Heights. If, as hoped, the British attacked the next day, what might be the battle to end all battles would occur on March 5, the anniversary of the Boston Massacre. Mifflin said that this “would have a wonderful effect upon the spirits of the New Englanders.” For some reason, Horatio Gates “deemed it an improper time,” but after a spirited debate the council decided, “by a majority of one,” to launch the operation on the night of March 4.

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  Washington’s great fear was that the British might learn of the intended advance and seize Dorchester Heights before the Americans could make their move. The near-constant arrival of militiamen and the cutting of trees for fascines and abatis (the Warren family apple orchard in Roxbury was soon sacrificed to the cause) meant that just about everyone living in the towns surrounding Boston knew that something significant was about to happen. On the night of February 26, what Washington described as “a rascally rifleman” deserted to the British. Convinced that the enemy now knew of their plans, Washington ordered Artemas Ward in Roxbury to station “six or eight trusty men by way of lookouts” while preparing several regiments “to be ready to march at a moment’s warning to the heights of Dorchester; for should the enemy get possession of those hills before us they would render it a difficult task to dispossess them.”

  On February 27, he issued an order intended to prepare the army for the impending confrontation while making it clear that instances of cowardice similar to those that had marred the Battle of Bunker Hill were not to be tolerated:

  As the season is now fast approaching, [he wrote,] when every man must expect to be drawn into the field of action, it is highly necessary that he should prepare his mind, as well as everything necessary for it. It is a noble cause we are engaged in; it is the cause of virtue and mankind. Every temporal advantage and comfort to us and our posterity depends upon the vigor of our exertions; in short, freedom or slavery must be the result of our conduct. There can therefore be no greater inducement to men to behave well. But it may not be amiss for the troops to know that if any man in action shall presume to skulk, hide himself, or retreat from the enemy, without the orders of his commanding officer, he will be instantly shot down as an example of cowardice, cowards having too frequently disconcerted the best formed troops by their dastardly behavior.

  In anticipation of the confrontation that might win or lose the siege and perhaps even the war, Washington began to clear his desk of the considerable paperwork that had accumulated over the last eight months. Back in October, the African American poet Phillis Wheatley had sent a poem she had written praising him. “Not knowing whether it might not be considered rather as a mark of my own vanity than as a compliment to her,” he explained in a letter to Joseph Reed, “I laid it aside till I came across it . . . while searching over a parcel of papers the other day in order to destroy such as were useless.” On February 28, in the midst of the feverish preparation for the move on Dorchester, he wrote the poet a letter, apologizing for the delay and praising her poem as “striking proof of your great poetical talents.” Then Washington, the owner of several hundred slaves in Virginia, did something remarkable. He invited the young black woman to pay him a visit. “If you should ever come to Cambridge or near headquarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favored by the muses.”

  H
e attended to personal business as well, writing to his wife’s brother-in-law, Burwell Bassett, about “my landed affairs on the Ohio.” Washington had originally purchased this vast tract of land as an investment. He was now beginning to look to the property as a possible refuge. If “the worst event” should occur on March 5—if the war should be lost and he was stripped of his estate at Mount Vernon—this land along the Ohio River “will,” he explained to Bassett, “serve for an asylum.”

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  On the night of March 2, cannons in Lechmere Point began lobbing in both shot (solid cannonballs) and shells (hollow projectiles containing explosives) into Boston. Archibald Robertson, a thirty-year-old British engineer stationed at the newly constructed battery on what he and his fellow countrymen called Mount Whoredom, just beside Beacon Hill, estimated that the rebels fired “11 shots and 13 shells without hurting anybody.” He also noted that a few equally harmless shells had been fired from Roxbury.

  The next morning Washington was chagrined to learn that the only significant damage sustained that night had been self-inflicted. Three American mortars had split open, probably because they had been improperly bedded on the frozen ground. On the following night, the much-ballyhooed “Congress”—the cannon that had come with the taking of the Nancy—split open after firing only its third shell. The American artillery regiment’s already limited ability to cannonade Boston had been severely curtailed. Apparently Knox and his officers still had much to learn.

  But on the night of March 4, Knox’s regiment exonerated itself. At 7:00 p.m. the firing began from Roxbury, Lechmere Point, and Cobble Hill at almost ten times the rate of the previous nights as the British responded with a furious cannonade of their own. One observer reported that there were instances when the fiery trails of as many as seven shells could be seen crisscrossing the night sky. In Braintree, Abigail Adams arose from bed around one in the morning. “I could no more sleep,” she wrote her husband, “than if I had been in the engagement. The rattling of the windows, the jar of the house and the continual roar of 24-pounders, the bursting of shells . . . realize a scene to us of which we could scarcely form any conception.” Samuel Webb on Cobble Hill reported that “our shell raked the houses terribly, and the cries of poor women and children frequently reached our ears.” According to Archibald Robertson in Boston, the American artillery succeeded in killing or wounding six British regulars, with one officer writing, “it is agreed on all hands that their artillery officers are at least equal to our own.”