by Jack Kelly
Once crews had manhandled the guns up the short portage from the fort, Knox arranged barges to carry them down Lake George and left William to supervise that phase of the journey. He hurried to Fort George at the other end of the thirty-two-mile-long lake and, improvising as he went, contracted for forty-two huge, custom-built sleds, each designed to hold as much as 5,400 pounds. He rounded up oxen from local farmers and hired experienced teamsters to drive the animals. He managed to procure more than half a mile of three-inch-thick rope for hauling the guns uphill and for keeping them from running away on downgrades.
By December 16, after an arduous trip down the lake, the guns were at Fort George. All Knox needed now was snow. “It is not easy,” Knox wrote to Washington, “to conceive the difficulties we have had.”4
Knox was a muscular man and the Revolutionary War was fought in the age of muscle. Most work during the eighteenth century was accomplished by the exertions of men or draft animals. Building, pumping, cutting, clearing, lifting, gathering, digging, hauling, plowing—all were accomplished by the strength of sinews. Muscle powered war as well. Men marched. Horses carried saber-swinging fighters. Attacking troops killed with bayonet thrusts. Draft animals hauled guns and supplies. Human hands dug trenches and piled breastworks.
But the machine age had begun to enter the military realm, and gunpowder weapons, not muscles, were swiftly becoming the key force on the battlefield. Firearms, simple machines fueled by a highly energetic mixture, significantly extended a man’s capacity to kill. When Benjamin Franklin suggested to General Charles Lee that the rebel army, strapped for gunpowder, fight with bow and arrow, the military man smiled at the antediluvian notion.
Muskets could be lethal at short range, but it was the big guns that held the most unprecedented power. Their possibilities, intricacies, and authority appealed to curious and farsighted men like Knox. Artillery pieces represented humans’ furthest advance in shaping metal on a large scale. They accelerated projectiles to speeds that surpassed the limits of human vision. The gunner was a new breed of warrior, one who has become familiar today. He fought indirectly, servicing a machine that killed and destroyed at a distance.
But moving guns, Knox knew, depended on the efforts of oxen, horses, and strong men. It depended on muscle. With the guns past the lake, Knox wrote to Washington predicting that he would arrive at Cambridge by New Year and “present your Excellency with a noble train of artillery.” To Lucy he wrote proudly, “We shall cut no small figure through the country with our cannon.”5
A lack of snow stopped the train in its tracks. Knox pushed on to Albany by himself to arrange for more draft animals and teamsters. He needed cold weather to harden the ice on the Hudson River so that his men could safely cross it with the artillery. He was elated when the temperature dropped on Christmas Eve. By morning, three feet of snow covered the ground. On January 6, the guns were in Albany. He wasn’t sure the ice would hold, but Knox, anxious to get the guns to Boston, decided to risk crossing the river.
One gun, then another and another made the perilous crossing. A crowd cheered each success. Then a dangerous cracking sound and a huge 18-pounder plunged through the ice. Townspeople spontaneously pitched in to help drag the gun back to the surface. Knox thanked them by naming the piece the Albany.
He galloped ahead to scout the road and make arrangements for the caravan. They would wind through eastern New York before entering the Berkshire Mountains and crossing the entire state of Massachusetts from west to east. In addition to presenting a formidable obstacle, the mountains appeared to the untraveled Knox as towering heights. The amazing view prompted him to write that from these peaks he could “have almost seen all the kingdoms of the earth.”6
Moving the artillery through these mountains, where roads were rudimentary or nonexistent, strained his resources. Eight horses were sometimes needed to drag the largest guns. On descents, the teamsters tied check lines and spread brush and chains under the sleds’ runners to control the weight. Men and animals quickly became exhausted. The disheartened teamsters threatened to quit. Knox engaged in “three hours of persuasion,” appealing to their patriotism to convince them to continue.
The “precious convoy” wound through mountain passes and thick forests. Sometimes the men traveled forty miles without seeing a house. When they reached Westfield, Massachusetts, twelve-year-old John Becker, the son of one of the teamsters, noted, “Our armament here was a great curiosity. We found that very few, even among the oldest inhabitants, had ever seen a cannon.” Knox fired a 24-pounder to impress the locals.7
* * *
“I am in daily expectation of colonel Knox’s arrival,” Washington wrote in January 1776. The artillery Knox was bringing “is much needed.” The commander himself was in need of good news. A paltry number of new troops were signing up to replace the militiamen whose enlistments were expiring. His army remained dangerously vulnerable to a British attack. Word had just reached him through General Schuyler of “a severe check” in the north. The assault on Quebec had failed. Many of the soldiers were in captivity. General Montgomery was dead.
Then Knox arrived at Cambridge to report that his cargo was making good time along the Boston post road. The worst of the long trip was over. He had demonstrated exactly the combination of ingenuity and persistence that Washington knew would be needed to accomplish extraordinary things and to win the war.
Knox learned that Congress had appointed him colonel and put him in charge of the Continental Army’s 635 artillerymen and of all its heavy guns, gunpowder, and ammunition. He had soared into the lofty circle of his Excellency’s confidants, and on February 1, he and Lucy dined with Washington and his wife. The expectant mother’s manners, wit, and enthusiasm endeared her to Martha.
“My charmer,” Knox called his wife.
Over in Boston, Lucy’s family waited with other loyalists for life to return to normal. Her sister Sally was acting in a cheery romance, Maid of the Oaks, written by the debonair British general John Burgoyne and staged to keep up the loyalists’ morale in the dismal, besieged city.
The arrival of the guns was a boon for Washington. But how to use them? This was no ordinary siege. Geography favored the British, who were isolated on two virtual islands and in possession of a supply line by sea. Ordinary siegecraft—extending trenches and moving guns steadily closer—could not force them out.
Mounting guns on Dorchester Heights, just south of the city, held intriguing possibilities, but Washington suspected that General Howe had left the position unoccupied as a lure. If the Americans took the bait, Dorchester might become the anvil against which the British hammer would crush the Continental Army. His Excellency kept jumping up and down on the bay ice to see if it could hold assault troops.
What to do? Washington had the machines to deliver a blow against the enemy. But with gunpowder still scarce, he lacked the fuel to operate them. Nevertheless, he preferred to attack. By February, the bay ice was firm. “A stroke well-aimed at this critical juncture might put a final end to the war,” Washington told his officers on February 16.8 He raised the possibility of a night attack led by troops on ice skates. Nathanael Greene calculated that any attack “would be horrible if it succeeded and still more horrible if it failed.” The council voted to wait for promised troops and more powder. “Powder!” cried Israel Putnam, the Connecticut veteran and oldest of the generals. “Ye gods, give us powder!”9
Two days later, word arrived that 3,000 pounds of gunpowder from Connecticut was on its way. Now Washington’s focus had pivoted to Dorchester Heights. General Howe had already declared he would not tolerate an American occupation of that strategic neck. Perhaps the lure could work both ways. If the rebels could put guns on the heights and provoke the British commander, they might defeat his forces in a decisive battle.
Knox gave his opinion. With cannon on the high ground at Dorchester, his gunners could bring
the British lines on Boston Neck under fire. They could even hit Long Wharf, two miles away, and harass British ships supplying the troops. The problem was how to shield the guns and gunners from return fire, especially from British warships, or from an assault by enemy troops. To dig trenches and pile breastworks was not feasible—the ground was frozen solid.
The solution came from a book. Lieutenant Colonel Rufus Putnam, a one-time millwright and cousin of Israel Putnam, had been reading Field Engineer, a British military manual. He came across the notion of the “chandelier,” a heavy wooden frame that could be prepared in advance for easy reassembly. The men could stuff the frame with giant baskets called gabbions and load those with stones and earth to block enemy fire. Knox thought the prefabricated fortifications might work, but only if they could be erected quickly, before the British guns had a chance to sweep the hilltop.
Now experienced at moving heavy artillery, Knox busied himself preparing to transport a portion of his armament onto the heights. His men wrangled the rest of the cannon into emplacements in Roxbury to the south of Boston and Cobble Hill to the north. He distributed ammunition and made sure his men were prepared to service their machines.
This was to be Washington’s first great gamble. If it failed, the shaky Continental Army could be crushed, the guns lost, the rebellion extinguished. Even civilians sensed an approaching climax. “Something terrible it will be,” Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, who was attending to the business of Congress in Philadelphia. “It has been said ‘tomorrow’ and ‘tomorrow’ for this month, but when the dreadful tomorrow will be, I know not.”10
On March 2, tomorrow arrived. As night descended, Knox gave orders to his gunners. They put smoldering matches to the touch holes of their cannon.
Adams went to a knoll near her home in Braintree, ten miles from Boston. She heard “the amazing roar of cannon,” a sound she described as “one of the grandest in nature.” The concussions plowed the night, the hills echoed in applause. Inside the city, a British colonel wrote, “At nine o’clock . . . they began a pretty hot cannonade and bombardment.” Shells “tore several houses to pieces.”11
Cannonballs could break through stone and reduce wooden structures to explosions of splinters. Knox’s short-barreled, high-angled mortars lobbed hollow cast-iron “shells” filled with gunpowder. He taught his gunners to fashion a fuse that delayed the explosion. When the shell came near the enemy, the vessel burst with a spray of lethal fragments and an eruption of flame capable of setting a building on fire.
The mistakes of inexperienced gunners and the fragile condition of some of the Ticonderoga barrels contributed to the explosion of three mortars during the barrage. When a barrel failed, the gun itself became a bomb, blasting metal and flames that lacerated the crew.
The British were astonished at the bombardment—the rebels had always been parsimonious in their expenditure of powder, and General Howe knew nothing of Knox’s cavalcade. His own guns in Boston, on Bunker Hill, and on ships fired back. The night sky churned. A British officer wrote, “Their shells were thrown in an excellent direction. . . . Our lines were raked from the new battery they had made and tho’ we returned shot and shell, I am very, very sorry to say with not quite so much judgment.”12 It was a high compliment to Knox and his novice gunners.
For the citizens cowering in cellars the bombardment was not spectacle but terror: the helpless, maddening wait for diabolical chance to determine life or death. An American observer noted that “the cries of poor women and children frequently reached our ears.” Knox was raining destruction on the landscape of his own boyhood. He knew the buildings, the streets, the homes, the people. A shell that exploded with a sound “like a window frame being smashed” might kill a friend or a teacher. Might set fire to his own shop. Might drop onto members of Lucy’s family.
Yet he hurried to fulfill his duty. The guns thumped on until dawn. They commenced again the next evening. The two nights of sound and fury were only a prelude to the bombardment of March 4, when the Americans began their seizure of Dorchester Heights. Abigail Adams was kept awake by “the rattling of the windows, the jar of the house.” Under the cover of the continuous roar, American general John Thomas, a doctor from Plymouth, marched three thousand men out Dorchester Neck and onto the high ground. A covering force of eight hundred riflemen took positions along the Dorchester shore. The others began a frenzy of work.
For once, everything favored the rebels. The night was mild and bright under a full moon. A low mist obscured the view from Boston. An easterly wind carried the sound of the bustle and hammering away from the city. The men worked feverishly. They put up the wooden frames and picked out frozen dirt on the heights to fill the gabbions. Knox directed the gunners and teamsters who, with the help of four hundred oxen, hauled the big guns up the hills.
Around ten o’clock, word reached a British general that “rebels were at work on Dorchester Heights.” Occupied with the intense bombardment, he chose to ignore the intelligence, perhaps imagining he would have time to deal with the matter the next day.
At three in the morning, three thousand fresh troops relieved the exhausted work crews. General Washington rode among the men, encouraging them. He noted that March 5 was the sixth anniversary of the Massacre that Knox had witnessed on the streets of Boston. “Avenge the death of your brethren,” he urged.
In return, an observer noted, his men “manifest their joy, and express a warm desire for the approach of the enemy.”13 By dawn, twenty cannon were in place on the heights, shielded by the prefabricated forts.
All this activity was preparation for the colossal battle that Washington and his officers were convinced would come that very day. Howe had no choice but to challenge the rebels’ possession of Dorchester, as he had challenged their occupation of Bunker Hill nine months earlier. But during those months, Washington had shaped the men whom Charles Lee had called “the worst of all creatures” into the Continental Army.
When the British attacked, Washington was prepared to launch an immediate counterstrike. He positioned Generals Greene, Putnam, and Sullivan at the head of four thousand men on the north shore of the bay, ready to assault the city the moment Howe made a move toward Dorchester. The ice gone, they would have to attack from small boats. All knew that an amphibious landing against regular troops manning a fortified position would be a bloody affair.
Before the operation got under way, Washington had emphasized its serious nature, insisting that each man “should prepare his mind, as well as everything necessary for it. It is a noble cause we are engaged in.” Any man who would “skulk, hide himself, or retreat from the enemy,” he declared, would be “instantly shot down.”14 In the hospitals, workers prepared thousands of bandages and beds for the anticipated casualties. A call went out for nurses to tend the wounded.
When dawn broke, the British soldiers in Boston saw the black mouths of guns gaping at them from forts that had not been there the night before. They could not believe their eyes. The structures had been put up “with an expedition equal to that of the genie belonging to Aladdin’s wonderful lamp.”
“My God,” Howe was said to have marveled, “these fellows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months.”15
He faced a dilemma. If he allowed the rebel move to stand, it would leave him with “the necessity either of exposing the army to the greatest distresses by remaining in Boston, or of withdrawing from it under such straitened circumstances.”16
Against the advice of many of his officers, the man who had led the storming of Bunker Hill chose to attack. The climactic battle that Washington had hoped for was on. British captain Archibald Robertson thought it “the most serious step ever an army of this strength in such a situation took.” He was sure “the fate of America” was at stake.
The attack had to come quickly. The rebels were still working, their position o
n the heights growing stronger by the hour. The Americans, for their part, eagerly awaited the action. As at Bunker Hill, it was the British who would have to march uphill into fire. This time, a serious array of artillery would await them. “We were in high spirits,” one of the defenders noted, “well prepared to receive the threatened attack.”17
The British troops remembered the June slaughter. As they marched to the wharfs to board the transports that would carry them against Dorchester, they appeared “pale and dejected.”
“The hills and elevations in this vicinity are covered with spectators to witness deeds of horror in the expected conflict,” one observer noted.18 A full-scale battle was the event of a lifetime, not to be missed.
Then circumstances took over. The fine weather changed abruptly. A southeast wind kicked up in the faces of the British vessels. It turned into a fierce storm, “driving the ships foul of each other, and from their anchors in utter confusion.”
No landing was possible in such weather. The gale blew all night, pelting the defenders and tossing the miserable attackers around the harbor. The tempest, Howe wrote later, “gave the enemy time to improve their works.” He called off the attack. Boston was lost.
As a teenager, Henry Knox had watched British troops march into Boston eight years earlier. Now, the frustrating, fruitless occupation ended quite suddenly. Howe sent a message under a flag of truce saying that if his men were not fired upon while leaving, he would not burn the town. Washington agreed. The victory gave the rebels “unspeakable satisfaction,” their first real thrill of the war.