Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution Part 14

Although many shots were fired, the distance to the island was too great for those onsh.o.r.e to do much more than watch as the regulars on the island gathered the hay and prepared to load it on the sloops. Finally the tide came in enough to float several boats that had been stranded along the Weymouth sh.o.r.e, and the provincials raised sail and set off for the island. The regulars loaded what hay they could and quickly departed, but not without trading fire with the provincials who made sure to burn what they estimated to be eighty tons of abandoned hay.

To the east of Charlestown were two contiguous islands, Hog and the much larger Noddle's Island, which together formed a peninsula that reached southwest from the town of Chelsea toward Boston to the southwest, with the town of Winnisimmet on the opposite sh.o.r.e directly to the north. Hundreds of sheep, cattle, and horses grazed on both Hog and Noddle's islands, and the provincials decided that before the British could get their hands on the livestock and hay, they must drive the animals off the islands, which were separated from one another and the mainland by creeks that were only knee-high at low tide.

On the evening of May 26, Colonel John Nixon of Sudbury and Colonel John Stark of Dunbarton, New Hamps.h.i.+re, led a party of about six hundred men to the town of Chelsea, where on the morning of May 27 they waded across Belle Isle Creek to Hog Island. As the provincials surrept.i.tiously rounded up the sheep and cattle, Admiral Graves happened to be celebrating his promotion to vice admiral of the white squadron. At precisely 8:00 a.m. his new white flag was raised to the masthead of the Preston, followed by a thirteen-gun salute. Soon after, his nephew Lieutenant Thomas Graves, commander of the schooner Diana, sailed into Boston Harbor after a cruise to Maine. The lieutenant promptly anch.o.r.ed near his uncle's flags.h.i.+p and had joined in the festivities when around 2:00 p.m., the admiral was notified that smoke could be seen rising from Noddle's Island. By that time, Nixon's and Stark's men had moved on to that most outlying of the two islands and besides killing some of the livestock had set a barn full of hay on fire.

Graves ordered his nephew to sail the Diana up the narrow waterway that lay between the islands and the sh.o.r.e to the north, known as Chelsea Creek, so as "to prevent [the rebels'] escape," while approximately 170 marines were sent to pursue the provincials by foot on Noddle's Island. By about five in the afternoon, the provincials were hurrying back across the creek to Hog Island with the marines in close pursuit and the guns of the Diana blasting away at them from Chelsea Creek to the north. Half the provincials continued on with the livestock as the other half jumped into a ditch and commenced a rearguard action designed to keep both the schooner and the marines at bay. "We had a hot fire," Amos Farnsworth recorded in his diary. Two marines were wounded before the British commander gave the order to retreat, allowing the provincials to direct all their fire at the Diana, which continued sailing up the ever-narrowing creek until she'd reached the confines of Haley's Landing. Under heavy fire from the provincials and with an outgoing tide threatening to leave his schooner high and dry, Lieutenant Graves sought the aid of a dozen or so longboats, which began towing him back down the creek in the dying breeze. In hopes of ambus.h.i.+ng the Diana before she reached the safety of the harbor, the provincials rushed down the north sh.o.r.e of Chelsea Creek toward Winnisimmet. By 9:00 p.m., reinforcements led by General Putnam had joined the provincials stationed at the mouth of Chelsea Creek, only to discover that the British marines had transported several cannons to a hill on Noddle's Island. Soon cannonb.a.l.l.s were whistling down at them out of the deepening darkness as the provincials waded into the creek and fired at the longboats towing the schooner past the Winnisimmet sh.o.r.e.

Through it all, General Putnam was his usual adventurous self, leading his men, one witness recounted, "up to his middle in mud and water." Putnam later boasted that "there was nothing between them and the fire of the enemy but pure air" as he and his men, who were joined by President Joseph Warren, did their best to disable the schooner and the longboats. They fired with such deadly effectiveness that the longboat crews were forced to abandon the Diana, which, with her crew huddling belowdecks to escape the unceasing rain of musket b.a.l.l.s, soon drifted toward sh.o.r.e, grounding itself on the wooden rails extending from the ferry dock around 10:00 p.m. Lieutenant Graves and his men attempted to use their anchor to drag the schooner to deeper water, but as the tide continued to ebb and the vessel began to roll onto her side, they had no choice but to abandon her for the sloop Britannia, which had been waiting in the deeper water to the south. The firing continued as the provincials plundered the schooner of her guns, rigging, and equipment and, with the help of some strategically placed hay, set her on fire. Around 3:00 a.m. the flames reached the vessel's powder magazine, and the Diana exploded.

For the newly promoted vice admiral of the white and his nephew, the former commander of the Diana, what came to be known as the Battle of Chelsea Creek was a humiliating defeat. For the provincials, however, the encounter was nothing short of "astonis.h.i.+ng." Not only had they taken their first British vessel; they had put Graves's marines on the run. At least two marines had been killed in the action (although the provincials remained convinced that they had killed dozens more), while the Americans suffered just four wounded. "Thanks be to G.o.d that so little hurt was done us," the ever-devout Amos Farnsworth wrote, "when the b.a.l.l.s sung like bees round our heads." That night Putnam and Warren returned to Cambridge to report to General Ward. "I wish we could have something of this kind to do every day," Putnam crowed. "It would teach our men how little danger there is from cannonb.a.l.l.s."

Ward countered with the concern that the engagement might provoke the British to launch a sortie from Boston they would all come to regret, but Putnam remained unrepentant. Turning to the president of the Provincial Congress, he said, "You know, Dr. Warren, we shall have no peace worth anything till we gain it by the sword."

The skirmish at Chelsea Creek had been a clear provincial victory, but it had also consumed a worrisome amount of gunpowder. Since those first overheated days after Lexington and Concord, when Joseph Warren had been in favor of an a.s.sault on Boston, he now had a more realistic view of his army's preparedness for a major offensive against the British. Rather than agree with Putnam, Warren demurred. "I admire your spirit and respect General Ward's prudence," he said diplomatically. "Both will be necessary for us, and one must temper the other."

CHAPTER NINE

The Redoubt

The next day, May 28, Captain John Derby was guiding the Quero along the southern coast of England when he sighted the Isle of Wight. Once he'd found a safe place to leave his schooner, he hired a boat to row him to nearby Portsmouth, and after pa.s.sing the docks of the ma.s.sive naval s.h.i.+pyard, he was in a coach headed for London. By Monday, May 29, as Derby's account of the fighting at Lexington and Concord circulated throughout the city, Lord North and his fellow ministers were, according to one writer, "in total confusion and consternation." Secretary of State Dartmouth issued a statement insisting that the provincial account was not to be believed, but former governor Thomas Hutchinson, who knew Derby to be a reliable man, insisted that there was in all likelihood a disturbing amount of truth behind the captain's claims.

They called him the "accidental captain." He seemed to have appeared out of thin air with his typeset account of the fighting, along with a sheaf of depositions from not only Ma.s.sachusetts militiamen but a handful of British prisoners. Some claimed that Derby had first arrived in Southampton, the point of departure 155 years before of the Pilgrims' Mayflower, but there was no sign of his vessel along that port's docks. Edward Gibbon, then at work on his monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (which is as much about the British Empire as it is about Rome), wrote that "it is pretty clear [Derby] is no imposter" and theorized that his schooner was probably hidden "in some creek of the Isle of Wight."

Derby let it be known that he had left Salem four days after the departure of the vessel carrying General Gage's account of Lexington and Concord. But the Quero had not only managed to pa.s.s the much larger Sukey, she had put twelve days between her and the British vessel. This meant that for almost two weeks, the king's ministers were unable to refute the patriot version of events. Lord Dartmouth grew so frustrated by the seemingly endless wait that on June 1 he penned a letter to Thomas Gage in Boston: "It is very much to be lamented that we have not some account from you of this transaction... . We expect the arrival of that vessel with great impatience, but till she arrives I can form no decisive judgment of what has happened."

Gage's account turned out to be quite similar to the provincial version of events. There was the unresolved question of who fired first, but that did not change the fact that men, on both sides, had been killed. Contrary to the ministry's expectations, the Americans had proved themselves to be more than willing to fight.

Even as the schooner Quero was approaching England with word of Lexington and Concord, Major Generals William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne were headed to Boston on the man-of-war Cerberus. Somewhere in the Atlantic, the Quero (with her report of Lexington) and the Cerberus (with the commanders sent to bolster Gage) pa.s.sed each other. The irony of three well-known British generals sailing to America on a vessel named for the mythical three-headed dog that guarded the gates of h.e.l.l was simply too obvious to escape comment in the English press:

Behold the Cerberus the Atlantic plow,

Her precious cargo-Burgoyne, Clinton, Howe.

Bow, wow, wow!

General John Burgoyne, the first named in this little ditty, had both an ego and a way with words. In addition to being a military officer who'd established a reputation for bravery in Europe, he was a playwright, whose The Maid of the Oaks had been produced recently in London by David Garrick, and Burgoyne, for one, wasn't going to let the name of the s.h.i.+p crimp his notorious flair for the dramatic. As the Cerberus approached Boston Harbor, she came upon a packet bound for Newport. The two vessels luffed into the wind so that their crews could speak, and Burgoyne shouted out to the packet's captain, "What news?" The captain responded that Gage's army in Boston was surrounded by ten thousand country people. Burgoyne cried out in astonishment. "What! Ten thousand peasants keep five thousand king's troops shut up! Well, let us get in, and we'll soon find elbowroom." Burgoyne was to regret the boast, to which Gage (when he later heard of it) must have responded with a knowing and weary smile.

As Gage was well aware, sending Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne (who arrived in Boston on May 25, just in time to witness the debacle at the Battle of Chelsea Creek) was hardly a vote of confidence on the part of the king and Lord North. What's more, their arrival required him to recount, in all its dreary detail, the even more embarra.s.sing debacle at Lexington and Concord.

Burgoyne was the showman (and a cla.s.smate of Gage's at Westminster), but it was William Howe who had the reputation as a fighter. When Wolfe led the victorious a.s.sault on Quebec during the French and Indian War, he had looked to Howe to find a way to scale the near-vertical cliffs fronting the Plains of Abraham. A year earlier, Howe's greatly admired older brother George had died in the arms of Israel Putnam at the failed a.s.sault at Fort Ticonderoga; indeed, George had been so beloved by the soldiers from Ma.s.sachusetts that the colony had paid for a memorial in Westminster Abbey. Given both his own and his brother's legacies in America, William Howe was an inspired choice on the part of the British ministry.

Henry Clinton was a bit of a mystery to his fellow officers. Although he'd been born in New York, his professional reputation had been made fighting in the European theater of the Seven Years' War. Intelligent and ambitious, he was also socially awkward (he described himself in a letter written during the pa.s.sage to Boston as a "shy b.i.t.c.h") and had a reputation for working badly with his peers-an unfortunate characteristic given that the British army in Boston now had more than its share of major generals.

By early June, Gage had determined that there was no longer any "prospect of any offers of accommodation" from the provincials. It was therefore time, he decided, to issue a proclamation inst.i.tuting martial law in Ma.s.sachusetts. Given Burgoyne's reputation as a wordsmith, Gage requested that his old Westminster schoolmate ghostwrite a proclamation that offered clemency to all patriot leaders who promptly surrendered, with the exceptions of Samuel Adams and John Hanc.o.c.k. Written with an arrogant, overblown pomposity (at one point, Burgoyne ridiculed the provincials as rebels "who with a preposterous parade of military arrangement, affected to hold the army besieged"), the proclamation only strengthened the provincials' resolve to oppose the ministry's forces.

When these three officers weren't writing their friends and patrons back in England about the commander in chief's incompetence and their own dismal prospects (Burgoyne complained of a "motionless, drowsy, irksome medium, or rather vacuum, too low for the honor of command, too high for that of execution"), they were in discussions with Gage about the best way to break out of their current dilemma. Howe, who was the senior of the major generals and could be expected to lead whatever plan was finally put into action, appears to have had a key role in coming up with a strategy that he, at least, felt could turn the tables on the provincial army. In a letter written on June 12 to his brother Richard, an admiral in the British navy, he outlined how it was to be done.

On Sunday, June 18, when a significant portion of the provincial forces were attending religious services, Burgoyne would begin cannonading Roxbury from Boston Neck as Howe led a detachment to Dorchester Heights, to the east of Roxbury, and Clinton led the attack in "the center." Once Howe had thrown together two redoubts on Dorchester Heights, he'd attack General Thomas's army in Roxbury. As Thomas's force fled in retreat, Howe would turn his attention to Charlestown on the other side of Boston. After he'd secured the hills overlooking that town, it was on to Cambridge. "I suppose the rebels will move from Cambridge," he wrote his brother confidently, "and that we shall take and keep possession of it."

And so they agreed. In six days the British would break out of Boston and become the masters of Roxbury, Charlestown, and most important of all, Cambridge, the headquarters of the provincial army.

About the time Howe wrote his brother of their plan to move against the rebels, Joseph Warren set out in a small boat, its oars m.u.f.fled so that he might row undetected past the many wars.h.i.+ps anch.o.r.ed between Charlestown and Boston. For the president of the Provincial Congress to be on a boat headed for the Boston waterfront was extremely ill advised, but Warren had spent the last sixty days putting himself at risk. Whether he was rallying the men at Menotomy, Grape Island, or Chelsea Creek, he had made sure to be wherever the danger was greatest. In addition to the musket-ball-whizzing thrills of the skirmishes, Warren had come to enjoy the daily hustle from one make-or-break meeting in the Provincial Congress or the Committee of Safety to another as all of Ma.s.sachusetts wavered on the edge of chaos and confusion. Warren appears to have thrived under conditions that most found overwhelming. Indeed, his addictive love of life in the balance may have led him to carry on a dalliance with Sally Edwards even as he courted the woman who seems to have been his soul mate, Mercy Scollay. Now, in early June, not only his own life but the lives of everyone in New England were teetering on the brink, and Warren was in his element.

So it should come as no surprise that on a night in the middle of June he was headed to a secret rendezvous in British-occupied Boston. Mitigating the risk was the location of the meeting at Hudson's Point in the North End, described in a spy report to General Gage as "a nest of very wicked fellows, s.h.i.+p carpenters and caulkers" who used red signal flags to pa.s.s messages to the provincial troops on the other side of the harbor. Yet another spy report claimed that so many "rebels get out [of Boston] without pa.s.ses" because the men who ran the two ferries that docked in the North End "let them go." Given the alternatives, the North End was the safest portion of the Boston waterfront for a clandestine meeting.

Warren needed a doctor to serve as the army's surgeon general. Dr. Benjamin Church, now in Philadelphia, was the obvious choice, but Warren's confidence in Church appears to have been badly shaken over the course of the last month. With Church conveniently out of town, Warren had decided to seek out an alternative. Dr. John Jeffries had an excellent professional reputation and was a fellow member of the St. Andrew's Masonic Lodge at the Green Dragon; both he and Warren had served their apprentices.h.i.+ps under Dr. James Lloyd. Indeed, Dr. John Jeffries was the perfect candidate, except for the fact that he was, by all accounts, a loyalist. Warren, however, believed he had an offer that Jeffries, who was waiting for him on the docks, could not refuse.

In his dual roles as leader of the Congress and the Committee of Safety, Warren was the one to whom prospective officers appealed when they were angling for a commission in the provincial army. John Adams later recalled how Warren "often said that he never had till then any idea or suspicion of selfishness of this people, or their impatient eagerness for commissions." In the British army, an officer came from the English upper cla.s.s and had to purchase his commission. In the new American army, however, no such social and financial qualifications existed. Instead of paying for a commission, an officer was expected to earn it by recruiting the sufficient number of men. This meant that, in the words of John Adams, "the lowest can aspire as freely as the highest." And as Warren now knew from firsthand experience, "there is no people on earth so ambitious as the people of America."

But when he offered Jeffries one of these coveted commissions, he received an unexpected response. "I thought, Warren, that you knew me better," the doctor said.

"Don't be so quick, Jeffries," Warren replied, "I have a general's commission in my pocket. We want you to be at the head of the medical service." But even this was not enough, and the offer was declined.

Jeffries, it turned out, was not interested in making it to the top of the provincial pecking order; he was a loyalist and therefore wanted to be a member of the British upper cla.s.s in the larger imperial realm. In the years to come, he moved to London and did his best to work the English patronage system, attaching himself to anyone who might further a career that ultimately included being a part of the two-man crew that completed the first balloon flight across the English Channel in 1785. It was a fundamentally different approach to life from what was emerging in America, where the absence of a deeply rooted aristocracy meant that ambition had replaced deference as the way to get ahead.

A few weeks before, Warren had written to Samuel Adams about just these issues. Soldiers searching Thomas Hutchinson's house in Milton had come across a trunk of letters that revealed, Warren claimed, what had gone wrong with the former governor. Like Jeffries, Hutchinson was not content with what was available to him in provincial Ma.s.sachusetts; he aspired to use his political office as a stepping-stone to greater glory that could only be found in England. The fault was not necessarily with Hutchinson, who, like all of them, was ambitious; the fault was with a government that required him to go against the wishes of his own people if he was to attain the ultimate prize of a lords.h.i.+p or some other royal preferment. "It is probable," Warren wrote Samuel Adams, "that [Hutchinson] would have remained firm in [the people's] interest ... had there not been a higher station to which his ambitious mind aspired ... ; in order to obtain this, he judged it necessary to sacrifice the people." What was needed in America was a government in which "the only road to promotion may be through the affection of the people." Instead of attaining members.h.i.+p in a group that existed above the people, the highest office in government should require an official to serve those people. "This being the case," he wrote, "the interest of the governor and the governed will be the same."

Warren was describing a government whose leaders were beholden to what we have come to call "the will of the people." An eight-year war and many additional years of compromise and struggle would be required to create a political system that approximated the ideal described in Warren's letter to Samuel Adams. But as it turned out, Warren, caught in the paroxysms of a revolution even as he searched for his own place in that revolution, had seen the future.

Jeffries's refusal to accept the surgeon generals.h.i.+p put Warren in a temporary bind, especially when Congress offered the post to him. Even before Lexington and Concord, Warren had "fully resolved that his future service should be in the military line." Like General John Thomas, a doctor who had spurned the medical corps during the French and Indian War and become one of America's finest officers, he wanted to fight. Congress dutifully submitted to their president's will, and on June 14, he was chosen by ballot to be a major general. Warren might have complained to John Adams about the overweening ambitions of his countrymen, but that had not prevented him from claiming a rank that put him ahead of William Heath, the officer to whom he had attached himself during the fighting in Menotomy just two months before.

On June 16, Ezekiel Price of Stoughton recorded in his diary that "Dr. Warren was chosen a major general" and that "Heath was not chosen any office, but it was supposed that no difficulty would arise from it." This may have been wishful thinking on Price's part. If the last surviving letter Warren ever wrote is any indication, he had to work very hard to make sure that Heath was not put out by his own good fortune. We'll never know the exact nature of the deal that was finally agreed upon, but Warren was careful to a.s.sure Heath in this June 16 letter that "everything is now going agreeable to our wishes." That said, Warren made sure to remind Heath that he needed to submit the required paperwork to Congress "without a moment's delay." One gets the sense that Heath had been sullenly dragging his feet in the wake of Warren's sudden rise past him. It was just the beginning of the jockeying and infighting that was to plague the new army's officer corps for months to come.

Before Warren was officially a major general, he had to be formally commissioned by Congress. Up until that point, Warren was the one who delivered the oath to the new officers-"a harangue in the form of a charge in the presence of the a.s.sembly," John Adams remembered, "[that] never failed to make the officer, as well as the a.s.sembly, shudder." If Warren were to become a major general, the Provincial Congress must select a new president. But before that particular bridge could be crossed, yet another new and desperate crisis had arisen. "A gentleman of undoubted veracity," who had "frequent opportunity of conversing with the princ.i.p.al officers in General Gage's army," had revealed that on June 18, the British planned to take Dorchester Heights and Bunker Hill.

Even before the skirmish at Chelsea Creek, General Israel Putnam had been impatient for some kind of action, claiming "that the army wished to be employed, and the country was growing dissatisfied at the inactivity of it." It was time, he declared in a council of war on May 12 attended by not only Artemas Ward and the other generals but also the members of the Committee of Safety, to occupy the high ground at Charlestown so as to "draw the enemy from [Boston], where we might meet them on equal terms." Joseph Palmer of the Committee of Safety agreed with Putnam, but both Ward and Warren felt that it was too risky, especially since there was "no powder to spare and no battering cannon." Putnam insisted, his son Daniel remembered, that no matter how the British responded to a move to the hills above Charlestown, "We will set our country an example of which it shall not be ashamed." Years later, Daniel Putnam recounted how Warren had paced the room in Hastings House, considering Putnam's proposal. "Almost thou persuadest me, General Putnam," he said, leaning over the back of the general's chair, "but I must think the project a rash one. Nevertheless, if it should ever be adopted and the strife becomes hard, you must not be surprised to find me with you in the midst of it."

By June 15, with the British about to strike at Dorchester and Charlestown, Warren and the others were finally convinced that the provincial army must make a preemptive move of its own. After determining that General Thomas's forces in Roxbury were not strong enough to take and hold nearby Dorchester Heights, the Committee of Safety decided to implement a plan along the lines first proposed by Putnam. In the early-morning hours of June 17-a day before the British were to begin their a.s.sault on Dorchester Heights-the provincial army would seize the currently unoccupied high ground above Charlestown.

At 6:00 p.m. on Friday, June 16, about one thousand provincial soldiers under the command of Colonel William Prescott a.s.sembled on the common in Cambridge, opposite Hastings House-the headquarters of General Ward and the Committee of Safety. Clutching an odd a.s.sortment of muskets and dressed in homespun clothes with sweat-stained hats on their disheveled heads, they looked just like the militiamen who had fought at Lexington and Concord. The only difference was that after almost two months away from home, much of it spent digging fortifications and marching up and down Cambridge Common, they were much dirtier than the farmers who had rushed to action on April 19. None of them knew what lay ahead that night, but once they'd gathered around the Reverend Samuel Langdon in prayer and headed out toward Charlestown in the deepening dusk accompanied by a wagon full of entrenching tools and several horse-drawn fieldpieces, they must have known that they were about to get dirtier still.

Soon after leaving Cambridge, they paused to meet up with about two hundred soldiers from Connecticut under the command of Captain Thomas Knowlton. At some point during the march, which took them past the common in Charlestown where the body of the slave Mark had once hung in chains, they were joined by General Israel Putnam. Also accompanying them was Lieutenant Colonel Richard Gridley, the noted engineer and commander of the artillery regiment.

Soon they were crossing Charlestown's narrow neck-only thirty feet wide in some places at high tide, with the Mystic River to their left and the shallows of a tidal mill pond to their right-before they mounted the gentle rise of Bunker Hill. They were without a moon that night, with only the stars to reveal the contours of the 110-foot-high hill that just two months before had provided General Percy's men with the protection they so desperately needed on the evening of April 19. Gage had decided to abandon these heights, but not until after his engineer Captain John Montresor had thrown up a fortification, and this hastily built, arrow-shaped wall still stood on the rounded and otherwise empty summit of Bunker Hill.

Colonel Prescott's orders told him to fortify this hill, which overlooked the roads from Cambridge to the west and from Medford to the north, as well as the waters of the Mystic River to the east. A fort built here would go a long way to stymieing a British attempt to take Charlestown to the south and then Cambridge. What's more, the British had given Colonel Gridley a head start by constructing a defensive wall. And since it was already well past 10:00 p.m. when they reached the heights overlooking Charlestown, with dawn set to arrive a little past 4:00 a.m., time was of the essence if they were to have any chance of building a fort before the morning light revealed their efforts to the British in Boston.

But instead of remaining on the gra.s.sy summit of Bunker Hill, they continued along the road toward Charlestown, following a ridge that led them to the smaller, seventy-five-foot-high Breed's Hill, almost half a mile to the southeast. Directly to the south lay the almost completely abandoned settlement of Charlestown. In the days after Lexington and Concord, General Gage had delivered an ultimatum to the selectmen of this little city of approximately three hundred houses, dozens of commercial structures, and wharves. If any provincial soldiers should venture onto the Charlestown peninsula, he would do as Admiral Graves had wanted to do on April 19 and consign the city to the flames. Since then almost all of Charlestown's residents had sought refuge elsewhere, and the streets and homes of the community that had been settled a year before Boston in the early seventeenth century were now quiet, dark, and strangely empty.