Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution Part 13

Everywhere the news was received, it caused a sensation. At Brunswick, North Carolina, word of the fighting at Lexington was forwarded to Charleston, South Carolina, with the note, "I request, for the good of our country and the welfare of our lives and liberties and fortunes, you will not lose a moment's time." By the first week in May the news had spread south to Georgia and west across the Blue Ridge into the Shenandoah Valley. When a group of frontiersmen camped on the middle fork of Elkhorn Creek heard about the militiamen's deaths in Ma.s.sachusetts, they decided to name their outpost for the historic event. That is why what was then a part of Virginia is known today as Lexington, Kentucky.

On Sat.u.r.day, April 22, the Provincial Congress of Ma.s.sachusetts convened for the first time since the outbreak of violence, meeting briefly at Concord before adjourning to Watertown so as to be closer to what was becoming the center of provincial activity in Cambridge. That afternoon the Congress formed a committee to take depositions "from which a full account of the transactions of the troops, under General Gage, in their route to and from Concord, on Wednesday the last, may be collected, to be sent to England, by the first s.h.i.+p from Salem." General Gage was already preparing his own official account, which would soon be on its way to London. Ma.s.sachusetts must prove that the British not only had fired the first shot but were now waging a most brutal and inhumane war against innocent New England citizens.

Even though the next day was a Sunday, Congress convened at 7:00 a.m. With John Hanc.o.c.k about to head for Philadelphia, they needed a new president. That afternoon an election was held for a "president pro tempore," and the committee appointed to count the ballots reported that "the vote was full for Doctor Warren."

That same day, even as Admiral Graves oversaw the construction of a battery of cannons amid the cemetery stones of Copp's Hill in the North End, the fate of many of Boston's still-remaining patriots was being decided at an emergency town meeting. Gage had offered the town's inhabitants a proposal that had been approved by Warren and the Committee of Safety. If the Bostonians agreed to surrender their weapons, he would allow anyone who was so inclined to exit the city with whatever baggage they could take with them. It was humiliating to have to hand over their guns, but after a day-long town meeting in Faneuil Hall, they reluctantly agreed. In the days ahead a staggering 1,778 muskets, 634 pistols, 973 bayonets, and 38 blunderbusses were collected and labeled for eventual return.

Gage appears to have initially offered the proposal in good faith. With no more foodstuffs coming into Boston from the country, the fewer mouths to feed the better. The loyalists in the city, however, saw it differently. They were convinced that the presence of a sizable number of patriots in Boston had prevented their rebellious brethren from mounting an attack. They needed what were in effect hostages to ensure that the ever-increasing hordes in Roxbury and Cambridge did not come rampaging across the Neck and kill them all. Bowing to the loyalists' demands, Gage ultimately refused to honor the agreement he had made with the town's inhabitants, one of the few instances during his tenure in Boston when he did not keep his word.

Eventually Gage settled on a kind of compromise. A limited number of people were allowed to leave as long as they did not take any of their possessions with them. Those who were prepared to depart at all costs, such as John Andrews's wife, Ruthy (who was as incapacitated by fear as Sarah Deming had been), eventually left the city. Her husband, however, decided to stay. If he left, there would be no one to watch over their home and personal effects, and he was, at least for now, unwilling to lose everything. Reverend Andrew Eliot was the minister of the New North Meeting; his wife and children and most of his congregation had already left the city, as had almost every other Congregational minister, but he resolved to stay. Someone, he decided, needed to look after the spiritual life of those few remaining residents. "I have been prevailed with to officiate to those who are still left to tarry," he explained, "but my situation is uncomfortable to the last degree-friends perpetually coming to bid me adieu, much the greater parts of the inhabitants gone out of town-the rest following as fast as the general will give leave." Patriots and loyalists alike found it both sad and terrifying to watch as the city was, in the words of Peter Oliver, "reduced to a perfect skeleton."

Over the course of the next few months more than nine thousand people left Boston as the provincial army that surrounded the city grew to the point that it came close to approaching Boston's former population of fifteen thousand. A city had been turned inside out: flushed of its inhabitants and artificially stuffed, as if by a taxidermist, with a British army that, as military transports continued to arrive in Boston Harbor, eventually approached nine thousand men.

With the economic life of the city having come to a standstill, Boston quickly became a ragged ghost of what it had once been. "Gra.s.s growing in the public walks and streets of this once populous and flouris.h.i.+ng place," the Reverend Andrew Eliot wrote, "shops and warehouses shut up. Business at an end and everyone in anxiety and distress. The provincial army at our doors. The [British] troops absolutely confined in this town which is almost an island and surrounded with s.h.i.+ps which [are] its greatest security... . These things ... keep us in perpetual alarm and make this a very unquiet habitation. I cannot stand it long."

As Eliot observed, Boston was "almost an island," actually one of dozens of islands dotting a huge harbor that was in many places dangerously shallow and difficult to navigate. And as he also observed, the British wars.h.i.+ps that lay anch.o.r.ed around the city were "its greatest security." However, the sheer size of these s.h.i.+ps meant that while their cannons provided plenty of protection, their depth of draft curtailed their mobility in this harbor of mudflats and lurking rocks to the point that smaller vessels-in particular those indigenous American watercraft such as schooners and the even smaller and rowable whaleboats-could literally sail circles around these ponderous men-of-war. The British were quick to see the advantage of the close-winded schooner, and Graves had added several of these vessels to his fleet, highlighted by the new and well-equipped Diana, commanded by Graves's nephew, Lieutenant Thomas Graves.

The provincials realized that if they were ever going to mount an a.s.sault on Boston, they must do it primarily by water. General Putnam had come up with the idea of storming Boston Neck behind bales of tightly packed hay, but most of the a.s.sault force must approach by boats-and small boats at that, given the shallowness of the immense Back Bay, which lay between Cambridge and Boston's western sh.o.r.e. And so the call had gone out throughout coastal Ma.s.sachusetts for whaleboats. Over the course of the next few weeks dozens upon dozens of these canoelike craft-some of them confiscated from the largely loyalist whaling port of Nantucket-headed toward Boston Harbor like a flock of migrating birds. Paul Litchfield lived in the coastal town of Scituate, and one day that spring he stopped to watch as "a number of whaleboats went along the sh.o.r.e from the southward for the use of our army." Boat-building operations were begun in Cambridge to add to the fleet that was to include what were known as "fire boats," raftlike vessels designed to transport an explosive blaze of devastating fire to the men-of-war anch.o.r.ed around Boston. When Gage learned of the provincials' plans (a spy report claimed that as many as three hundred whaleboats had already been collected), he ordered Admiral Graves to take any small craft his officers might come across as they patrolled the reaches of Boston Harbor.

Besides preparing for a possible provincial invasion, the most immediate concerns Gage had were not only providing his army with food but also procuring hay, which was used as bedding for his men. Since he no longer had access to the surrounding countryside, he was forced to look to the harbor's gra.s.s-covered islands, many of which were dotted with unguarded herds of sheep and cattle. In the weeks to come, as the size of the army grew and the quant.i.ty of provisions diminished, the British forces found themselves in a kind of nautical chess game as they competed with the provincials for access to these resource-rich islands.

By Friday, April 28, the maritime focus of the provincial army had temporarily s.h.i.+fted to a single vessel-a little schooner of sixty or so feet named the Quero, captained by thirty-four-year-old John Derby of Salem. On Monday, April 24, Gage had sent his official account of Lexington and Concord to London aboard the Sukey. Since then the provincials had been hard at work collecting depositions that had been condensed into a report written, in part, by none other than Benjamin Church. Warren had addressed the cover letter to Benjamin Franklin (who, unknown to the patriots, had already left London for Philadelphia), and now the package was ready for transport to England. Four years before, a loyalist account of the Boston Ma.s.sacre had been the first to reach London, putting the patriots at an immediate disadvantage. This time, the provincials vowed, their account would be the one to reach London first, even though Gage already had a four-day head start. The Quero might be less than a third of the displacement of the Sukey, but she was fast. To get the absolute most out of her performance, she was "in ballast," which meant that instead of a cargo she carried nothing but ballast stones in her hold, carefully positioned by Captain Derby so as to optimize the schooner's trim and speed through the water. In the early hours of Sat.u.r.day, April 29, the Quero sneaked out of Salem Harbor, beginning a race that might very well change the course of history.

Almost lost in this furious rush of events was the arrival just three days before of a vessel from England bearing Josiah Quincy Jr. After his months in London observing the workings of the ministry and Parliament, combined with his many conversations with Benjamin Franklin and other Americans with a deep understanding of British policy, he felt he had information that was of immense importance to the future of Ma.s.sachusetts. He must speak directly with either Samuel Adams or Joseph Warren.

The pa.s.sage had been long and miserable, made all the more agonizing by Quincy's rapidly deteriorating health. By the time the vessel came within sight of land, Quincy knew he did not have long to live and expressed his last wishes to one of the s.h.i.+p's sailors, who dutifully wrote a transcript of the young lawyer's dying soliloquy. Quincy was convinced that what he had to tell Adams and Warren might have been of "great service to my country," but he dared not commit his message to paper. We will never know what Quincy wanted to say. However, given the drastic changes that had occurred since Lexington and Concord, Quincy's almost two-month-old insights were probably no longer relevant. In the end, Quincy, like virtually everyone who had attempted to improve relations between Great Britain and her rebellious colonies, was defeated by the sea.

The following day, April 27, Joseph Warren wrote to their mutual friend Arthur Lee in London. "Our friend Quincy just lived to come on sh.o.r.e to die in his own country," he wrote. "He expired yesterday morning. His virtues rendered him dear, and his abilities useful, to his country." And that was it.

Without a paragraph break, Warren launched into a description of New England at this critical juncture. "I think it probable," he wrote, "that the rage of the people ... will lead them to attack General Gage, and burn the s.h.i.+ps in the harbor... . The next news from England must be conciliatory, or the connection between us ends, however fatal the consequences may be."

Despite the posturing that had so troubled Timothy Pickering on the day after Lexington and Concord, Warren still felt that a reconciliation was possible. "If anything is proposed that may be for the honor and safety of Great Britain and these colonies," he wrote, "my utmost efforts shall not be wanting." Warren ended this brief, hurriedly dashed-off expression of grief, resolve, anger, and hope-which appears to have been personally delivered to Lee by Captain Derby of the Quero-with a glimpse of himself amid the provincial army in Cambridge. He was, he wrote Lee, "in the utmost haste, surrounded by fifteen or twenty thousand men."

Even before the outbreak of fighting, the provincial forces realized that the secret to ousting the British from Boston required something they did not have: a suitable number of cannons. They also realized that they needed officers with the artillery skills required to fire these cannons. Two Boston men fit the bill perfectly: Colonel Richard Gridley, sixty-five, a hero of the 1745 Siege of Louisbourg, and Lieutenant Colonel William Burbeck, fifty-nine, who had been serving at the Castle for a number of years. Both officers had already worked extensively with the British army; in fact, Gridley was one of the handful of Americans with a commission in that army-a prize that not even George Was.h.i.+ngton had been able to win. To secure these two valuable officers, the Provincial Congress offered Gridley and Burbeck not only salaries but lifetime annuities. But if the provincial army now had two experienced artillery officers, it still did not have a sufficient number of cannons.

On Sunday, April 29, a new arrival from New Haven, Connecticut, named Benedict Arnold told Joseph Warren and the Committee of Safety exactly what they wanted to hear. At the poorly defended British stronghold of Fort Ticonderoga at the southern end of Lake Champlain there were "80 pieces of heavy cannon, 20 bra.s.s and 4 18-pounders and 1012 mortars." In retrospect it was an almost eerie moment of historical synchronicity. The weekend after the spy Benjamin Church had met not-so-secretly with General Gage in Boston, the man destined to become the Revolution's most notorious traitor was in Cambridge convincing Joseph Warren to finance his genuinely patriotic bid to take Fort Ticonderoga.

In 1775, Captain Benedict Arnold was a long way from betraying his country. A successful and self-made merchant captain with a specialty in trading horses, he had forced the New Haven selectmen, at virtual gunpoint, to provide his "Governor's Footguards" with the powder and weapons they needed from the town's a.r.s.enal and then marched his men to Cambridge. At thirty-four, he was almost exactly Warren's age; he was bright, charismatic, and ambitious, and the two men seem to have struck up an almost instant friends.h.i.+p. Within a few days Warren had ordered Arnold to mount an attack on Fort Ticonderoga.

Unknown to both Warren and Arnold, another group from Connecticut was at that very moment enlisting the aid of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys to do exactly the same thing, thus making the Ma.s.sachusetts effort instantly redundant. There was also the question of jurisdiction. What gave Ma.s.sachusetts-or Connecticut, for that matter-the right to attack a fort outside their colony, let alone confiscate the cannons from that fort? But the most serious strike against this misguided mission into the New York wilderness had to do with what was already a well-known deficiency in Ma.s.sachusetts. More than anything else-more than cannons and mortars-the province needed gunpowder. On May 1, as Warren considered Arnold's proposal, he wrote Committee of Supplies member Elbridge Gerry on this very issue. Without more powder, they might very well "trifle away this only moment we have to employ for the salvation of our country." Even knowing this, Warren equipped Arnold with two hundred pounds of this valuable substance for his mission to Fort Ticonderoga.

As it turned out, Arnold had no use for the gunpowder. Soon after learning of the rival expedition, he raced toward Lake Champlain and presented Ethan Allen with his orders from the Committee of Safety of Ma.s.sachusetts. Since Allen had no official orders of his own, he reluctantly agreed to allow Arnold to serve with him as a coleader, and unopposed, the two men strode side by side through the entrance of the British fort.

The two hundred pounds of Ma.s.sachusetts gunpowder proved unnecessary at Fort Ticonderoga but might have changed the course of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Instead of an example of farsighted strategic planning, the decision to send Benedict Arnold to the Champlain Valley was the mistake that may have cost Joseph Warren his life.

By the first week of May, Warren had learned that Connecticut was sending a delegation to talk to General Gage about the possibility of "a cessation of hostilities." Warren had been able to marginalize Timothy Pickering and the other equivocators among the provincial officer corps, but a rival colony from New England was something else altogether. If Connecticut should break ranks and negotiate its own separate agreement with the British, it would mean the end to a New Englandwide army. Unlike Ma.s.sachusetts, Connecticut had in Jonathan Trumbull a governor elected by the people of his colony rather than appointed by the king, making Connecticut's potential defection all the more damaging. If a reconciliation was to happen, it had to be initiated not by the Americans but by the British. Until then, they must all agree to prepare for war. "We fear our brethren in Connecticut are not even yet convinced of the cruel designs of Administration against America ... ," Warren wrote Trumbull. "We have lost the town, and we greatly fear, the inhabitants of Boston, as we find the general is perpetually making new conditions, and forming the most unreasonable pretenses for r.e.t.a.r.ding their removal from the garrison... . Our people have been barbarously murdered by an insidious enemy, who under cover of the night, have marched into the heart of the country, spreading destruction with fire and sword. No business but that of war is either done or thought of in this colony."

The Connecticut delegation met with Gage, who was quite persuasive in pointing out that with thousands of militiamen surrounding Boston, the British, not the provincials, were the ones on the defensive. In the end, however, Gage's decision to renege on his original agreement with the townspeople of Boston was what brought Connecticut over to Ma.s.sachusetts's way of thinking. Having misled the poor beleaguered people of Boston, Gage was, a Connecticut officer in Cambridge wrote, "wicked, infamous, and base without parallel." Governor Trumbull ultimately decided that he must stand by Ma.s.sachusetts, and on May 4 he wrote Warren, a.s.suring him of his colony's support.

As Warren moved from crisis to crisis, he was unable to fulfill his obligations to both the Committee of Safety and to the Provincial Congress, which often required him to be in two places at once. At one point, the Provincial Congress was forced to adjourn several times in a single day as its members impatiently waited for a report from the Committee of Safety "respecting the inhabitants of Boston." Frustrations reached the point that on May 2, the Congress elected a new president-James Warren of Plymouth (no close relation to Joseph Warren). When that same day James Warren declined to serve, a committee was formed to go to Hastings House, home of the Committee of Safety, to see if Joseph Warren "can now attend the Congress." On the back of a letter he'd just received from the Boston selectmen, Warren hurriedly drafted his reply, "Doct. Warren presents his respects to the honorable Provincial Congress; informs them that he will obey their order, and attend his duty in congress in the afternoon." Despite the fact that he was spread dangerously thin, the consensus appeared to be that there was no one better suited to serve as president than Joseph Warren.

Tensions among provincial leaders reached a crescendo during the beginning of the second week in May. Many of the militiamen who had arrived in Cambridge in the days immediately following Lexington and Concord had begun to drift back to their homes. Some never returned. Others only needed to make arrangements with their loved ones and perhaps plant their spring crops before they enlisted in the provincial army for the next eight months. If the officers were going to recruit new men, they, too, had to return to their hometowns. All of this meant that there was an alarming, if temporary, drop in the number of soldiers in the lines around Boston. When word reached headquarters in Cambridge that Gage was planning to attack the undermanned American forces, General Ward was deeply concerned. By May 10, fears of an imminent British initiative prompted the Provincial Congress to consider evacuating Cambridge. Instead, they decided to put out the call to the local militias with the hope of hurriedly a.s.sembling as many as two thousand men to come to General Thomas's aid in Roxbury.

During this anxious and desperate time, Benjamin Church committed an act that might have had disastrous consequences. On May 10 letters were sent out by the Committee of Safety over Church's signature requesting that officers "repair to the town of Cambridge with the men enlisted under your command." This was all well and good except for the fact that one of these letters was sent to General John Thomas in Roxbury. If Thomas had obeyed the order, there would have been no one left to oppose a British advance out of Boston. Thomas had the good sense to check directly with Joseph Warren, who was initially baffled by how such an order could have been made in the first place. Once he'd figured out that Thomas's letter was one of many that had been sent out on the same day, he attempted to put the embarra.s.sing gaffe in the best possible light. "Sending the order to your camp was certainly a very great error ... ," he wrote Thomas. "Your readiness to obey orders does you great honor, and your prudence in sending to headquarters upon receiving so extraordinary an order convinces me of your judgment."

Once again, Warren seems to have given Church the benefit of the doubt. One has to wonder, however, whether the letter to Thomas had really been an honest mistake. Shortly before May 10, Church had been given reason to fear that the provincials were on to him. He sent Gage a garbled, scribbled-over description of an incident in which someone "mentioned distrust of me, that he suspected my going into Boston." What's more, the accuser had made something of a spectacle of himself. "All this uttered with the fury of a demon before the whole camp," Church wrote. "I do not perceive that he made any great impression upon the people. I left him abruptly ... [and] destroyed my papers... . Caution on my part is doubly necessary as instant death would be my portion should a discovery be made... . Secrecy respecting me on the part of [General Gage] is indispensable to rendering him any services, and ... necessary to the preservation of my life." Whether or not Church sent the letter to General Thomas on purpose, he wanted, more than anything else, a resolution of the present crisis before he was discovered to be a spy. "May I never see the day when I shall not dare to call myself a British American ... ," he wrote Gage. "Oh for peace and [honor] once more."

As it turned out, Gage was not planning an a.s.sault on the American lines, and in the days ahead, as more and more provincials returned from their visits home, the size of the army once again began to increase. Thursday, May 11, the day following the mix-up initiated by Church, had been designated a provincewide day of public humiliation, fasting, and prayer. The Provincial Congress adjourned at four that afternoon, and at some point Joseph Warren was on his way to Dedham.

Boston was a city under siege, but its hills still provided views of stunning beauty. Captain George Harris and his regiment had just left their winter quarters and were now living in tents on the common, where they dug fortifications to defend the town from an a.s.sault from the Back Bay. He was, he wrote his cousin in England, "twenty yards from a piece of water, nearly a mile broad, with the country beyond most beautifully tumbled about in hills and valleys, rocks and woods, interspersed with straggling villages, with here and there a spire peeping over the trees, and the country of the most charming green that delighted eyes ever gazed on. Pity these infatuated people cannot be content to enjoy such a country in peace. But, alas, this moment their advanced sentinels are in sight."

On the evening of May 11, Joseph Warren made his way through this green, rural world. According to the diary of Dr. Nathaniel Ames, the owner of the tavern in Dedham where Sally Edwards, now seven and a half months pregnant, was staying, the day was sunny and cloudless. Ames also recorded that Warren made an appearance at the tavern that day, undoubtedly to see his "fair incognita pregnans." Secrets were nothing new to Warren. Just the day before, he had written Gage in confidence, urging him to ignore the loyalists, who "care not if they ruin you or this empire," and honor his agreement with the people of Boston. In a postscript, he wrote, "As no person living knows or ever will know from me of my writing this, I hope you will excuse a freedom which I very well know would be improper in a letter which was exposed to general view." A secret between himself and General Gage was one thing; the paternity of a baby delivered by an unwed teenage girl was quite another.

For more than a century the people of New England had been using the ceremony of the fast to repent for their sins even as they girded their loins for the battle to come-that was what they had done during King Philip's War and the many conflicts that followed it, and that was what they were doing now as they spent this lovely spring day abasing themselves before G.o.d so that they and their country might enjoy better days to come. How much Warren took these traditions to heart as he visited the girl who was now the living embodiment of, if not his own personal failings, at least someone else's, will never be known. We do know that by the following day, he was back in Watertown and presiding over the discussion of whether the time was right to a.s.sume "a civil government for Ma.s.sachusetts." The army they had worked so a.s.siduously to a.s.semble was proving to be a most unruly and dangerous invention, and something had to be done to control it.

From the first, the patriots had feared that the provincial army might ultimately destroy the liberties it was supposed to protect by establis.h.i.+ng a military dictators.h.i.+p. That was what had happened in Rome when Caesar became emperor, and that was what had happened during the English Revolution when Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector of the British Commonwealth.

Civil leaders in Ma.s.sachusetts in May 1775 were in an especially precarious position. The First Continental Congress had instructed them not to establish a formal government, since the other colonies would view this as an unnecessarily provocative repudiation of British sovereignty. But now, after Lexington and Concord, with an army of thousands a.s.sembling in Cambridge and Roxbury, a recognized civil authority must be allowed to a.s.sert some sort of control. Otherwise this army-already fidgety for something to do after the excitement of April 19-might take matters into its own hands.

By all accounts, the soldiers were eating well-feasting on what food and alcohol they could pillage from the abandoned homes of the loyalists and the stream of provisions that flowed in from the country. Hygiene, however, was a problem. The dormitory at Harvard and other buildings in Cambridge and Roxbury had been turned into barracks, and one loyalist claimed that the soldiers were not only dirty but "lousy." There were not enough latrines, and the growing number of recruits who died of typhus, or "putrid fever" (as many as two or three a day by early June), suggests that as spring turned to summer, a most unpleasant smell had arisen in Cambridge and Roxbury.

That these primarily young men from the country were not accustomed to taking orders from anyone made the enforcement of discipline difficult. Not only did the members of a typical company all know each other (indeed, many were related by blood), they were accustomed to making decisions by consensus at town meetings. This meant that the soldiers, not their officers, decided any issues that might have a direct impact on their welfare. On May 10, Private James Stevens complained in his diary that Captain Thomas Poor "spoke very rash concerning our choosing a sergeant and said that we had no right." Taking umbrage, the soldiers decided to "do no duty that day." Captain Poor had no choice but to apologize to his men, and after his "recantation," Stevens and the others returned to duty. This army was a dangerous thing-a budding democracy of young men with firearms.

Inevitably adding to the surliness of the recruits was the availability of large quant.i.ties of rum. Muskets kept going off-sometimes accidentally, sometimes for the fun of it, injuring and, in at least one instance, killing American soldiers. "Four guns were discharged in camp and endangered men's lives," David Avery recorded in his diary on May 8. "One out of our window, one at the picket guard. Two others hurt. An awful day!" The New Englanders could be raucous, but they also tended to be exceedingly religious, attending prayers on an almost daily basis and listening to one, sometimes two sermons each Sunday. The diary kept by Private Amos Farnsworth is as much a record of his spiritual life as it is an account of his experiences in the provincial army. "I was filled with love to G.o.d... . ," he wrote at one point, "and lifted up my soul to G.o.d in e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, prayers, and praise." These men were fighting for liberty, but they also believed that the Lord was, in his own inscrutable way, working through each and every one of them.

Spiritual, ornery, and clannish, the New Englanders defined their struggle in profoundly local terms. They refused to serve under an officer they did not know or like. They also seemed intent on having a good time. Ezekiel Price of Stoughton visited Roxbury in early June and found the soldiers "in high spirits and healthy; being mostly young men and many of them persons of wealth and reputable yeomen." That was not the impression of a surgeon from a man-of-war who had been given permission to cross the provincial lines to attend to wounded British prisoners. He found the streets of Cambridge "crowded with carts and carriages, bringing them rum, cider, etc., from the neighboring towns, for without New England rum, a New England army could not be kept together... . They drink at least a bottle of it a man a day." The surgeon had his obvious biases, but there was more than a little truth in his description of an army that was barely under anyone's control: "nothing but a drunken, canting, lying, praying, hypocritical rabble, without order, subjection, discipline, or cleanliness; and must fall to pieces of itself in the course of three months. They are ... the descendants of Oliver Cromwell's army, who truly inherit the spirit which was the occasion of so much bloodshed in [England]."

When the Provincial Congress and Committee of Safety proved slow in providing commissions not only for General Ward's officers but for Ward himself, there was much grumbling within the army about the inefficiency of what pa.s.sed for civil government in Ma.s.sachusetts. One of Gage's spies reported that he heard the provincial soldiers "complaining much of the private men having the superiority over the officers, rather than the officers over the men. I plainly saw there was no kind of subordination observed among them." Jonathan Brewer was a well-respected veteran of the French and Indian War, and when the Provincial Congress turned down his request to lead an expedition to Quebec (something George Was.h.i.+ngton would in fact decide to do in just a few months' time), there were those in the provincial army who were not happy. "By G.o.d," one soldier was overheard to say, "if this province is to be governed in this manner, it is time for us to look out; and it is all owing to the Committee of Safety, a pack of sappy-headed fellows; I know three of them myself." In Waltham, Lieutenant Colonel Abijah Brown insisted that the Provincial Congress should not be allowed to take the gunpowder from the town's a.r.s.enal, claiming "that the Congress had no power to do as they did; for all the power was and would be in the army; and if the Congress behaved as they did, that within 48 hours the army would turn upon the Congress, and they would settle matters as they pleased."

Some in Ma.s.sachusetts blamed General Ward for the army's lack of discipline, but Warren realized that they could not impose, at this early stage, too much restraint. "Subordination is absolutely necessary in an army," he admitted; "but the strings must not be drawn too tight at first ... amongst men who know not of any distinction but what arises from some superior merit... . Our soldiers ... will not be brought to obey any person of whom they do not themselves entertain a high opinion." Given the unsettled and tentative state of civil government in Ma.s.sachusetts, the time was not right to impose stricter discipline among the troops. Indeed, too much oversight on the part of the Provincial Congress might instigate a wholesale mutiny. Before there could be a proper army, there had to be a proper government; otherwise, Warren wrote Samuel Adams in Philadelphia, "a military government must certainly take place."

Legitimacy was the real issue. How could a self-created legislative body of questionable legal authority expect to impose its will on a group of soldiers who had the power to overthrow it? And besides, who were these soldiers fighting for-for Ma.s.sachusetts, for the Continental Congress, for the king? No matter what the British regulars might call them, the soldiers of the provincial army refused to consider themselves "rebels," claiming that they remained loyal to their still beloved monarch. It was his advisers and legislators with whom they had an issue. Liberty-not independence-was what they were fighting for, and as proud Englishmen they still flew the British flag.

Their counterparts in Boston regarded such claims as patently absurd. On May 1, Lieutenant John Barker recorded in his diary, "The Rebels have erected the standard at Cambridge; they call themselves the King's Troops and us the Parliament's. Pretty burlesque!" Even the provincial leaders had to admit that the logic of their position was more than a little tortured, and to provide at least some clarity in this time of uncertain allegiances, Warren felt that the Continental Congress must allow Ma.s.sachusetts to form its own civil government. He also insisted that the Congress in Philadelphia should appoint "a generalissimo" to take control of the provincial army.

Warren was greatly concerned about the threat of a military coup, but he wanted to make sure that Samuel Adams understood that he was not "angry with my countrymen." Unlike many revolutionaries, including Adams himself, whose commitment to the cause could be disturbingly cold-blooded, Warren continued to have an abiding affection for even the most unruly of Ma.s.sachusetts's citizens. "I love-I admire them," he wrote. He might be president of the Provincial Congress, but that did not prevent him from spending as much time as possible with these men. "He mingled in the ranks ... ," one commentator wrote, "and succeeded in a most wonderful manner in imparting to them a portion of the flame which glowed in his own breast." But he was more than just a cheerleader. Warren's contemporary John Eliot (son of the Boston minister Andrew Eliot) claimed that he "did wonders in preserving order among the troops" and was "perhaps the man who had the most influence."

As a kind of surrogate civilian general, Warren came to have a deep sympathy for the men who comprised what was optimistically referred to as the Grand American Army. "The errors they have fallen into are natural and easily accounted for," he explained to Samuel Adams. "A sudden alarm brought them together, animated with the n.o.blest spirit. They left their houses, their families, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, without a day's provision and many without a farthing in their pockets." Much of the current problem lay with the fact that all of them-soldiers and civil office holders alike-were traveling in uncharted territory. "It is not easy for men, especially when interest and the gratification of appet.i.te are considered, to know how far they may continue to tread in the path where there are no landmarks to direct them." That said, a dangerous metamorphosis was occurring among the recruits in Cambridge and Roxbury. "It is with our countrymen as with all other men, when they are in arms, they think the military should be uppermost." If something was not done quickly, "what was not good at first will be soon insupportable ... as the infection is caught by every new corps that arrives... . For the honor of my country, I wish the disease may be cured before it is known to exist."

In a consummate irony, Joseph Warren entrusted the delivery of the letter communicating this desperate plea to Benjamin Church. But this was not another instance in which Warren proved remarkably obtuse as to Church's true character. On the contrary, by sending Church to Philadelphia, Warren was getting someone who had proved to be both erratic and, on occasion, incompetent as far away from Cambridge as possible. "I am appointed to my vexation to carry the dispatches to Philadelphia," Church complained in a dispatch to Gage on May 24, "and must set out tomorrow which will prevent my writing for some time unless an opportunity should be found thence by water."

As it turned out, Church did not return to New England until the day of the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Israel Putnam was the provincial army's most beloved officer. Grizzled and battle-scarred as an old whale, he exuded an aura of rustic belligerence. While his superior General Ward wanted to do nothing that might endanger a possible reconciliation with Britain, Putnam was impatient for action. On May 13, he led two thousand men on what could only be taken as a brazen taunt when he and his soldiers marched across the Neck at Charlestown, up Bunker Hill, where according to Lieutenant Barker, watching from Boston, "they kept parading a long time" before they marched into the virtually abandoned village of Charlestown on the Boston side of the peninsula. Once at the waterfront, with the British man-of-war Somerset anch.o.r.ed less than a quarter mile away, the soldiers gave "the war-whoop" and, Barker wrote, "returned as they came." Putnam's boyish love of adventure had made for a strange and most unmilitary display. "It was expected the body of [soldiers] in Charlestown would have fired on the Somerset, at least it was wished for," Barker mused, "as she had everything ready for action and must have destroyed great numbers of them, besides putting the town in ashes."

The march to Charlestown may have been foolish but was no doubt good for morale as the siege appeared to be settling into an unsatisfactory stalemate. With no clear military objective except for keeping the British bottled up in Boston, the men had little to do other than build earthen fortifications (known as "fatigue" duty) and serve as sentries. For the New Englanders watching from the hills of Roxbury and Cambridge, any activity on the part of the British, no matter how inconsequential, provided a welcome distraction from the growing tedium. On the night of May 17, fire erupted in Boston's Dock Square when, it was reported, a spark from a candle fell among a pile of cartridges of gunpowder. The regulars refused to allow the town's inhabitants to help put out the fire, and by 3:00 a.m. the barracks and an estimated thirty warehouses, at least some of which undoubtedly contained goods owned by patriot merchants, had burned to the ground.

On Sat.u.r.day, May 21, Gage ordered four sloops to sail to tiny Grape Island near the town of Weymouth to pick up some recently harvested hay. The appearance of this little British fleet along the sh.o.r.es of Braintree and Weymouth immediately created concern among the local inhabitants. Thinking this might be the prelude to a full-scale invasion, people living along the coast south of Boston began to flee into the countryside. General Thomas dispatched three companies from Roxbury, and once they, along with President Joseph Warren, had arrived at the Weymouth sh.o.r.e, the first skirmish of the postLexington and Concord era was under way.