Chapter Twelve

THE SIEGE OF BOSTON

By June 1775, after a siege of two months, with all communication shut off by land, the situation in Boston was growing decidedly grim. Peter Oliver, chief justice of Massachusetts, was at least able to maintain a sense of humor. Writing to his brother-in-law in London, he said:

You who riot in pleasure in London, know nothing of the distress in Boston: you can regale upon delicacies, whilst we are in the rotations of salt beef and salt pork one day, and the next, chewing upon salt pork and salt beef. The very rats are grown so familiar that they ask you to eat them, for they say that they have ate up the sills already, and they must now go upon the clapboards. Indeed, now [and] then a hog swims across the water, and thinks it more honorable to be cut up in town, and ate at a shilling L[awful] M[oney] here per pound, than wasted out of town at 4 pence pr pound.

John Andrews, also trapped in Boston but not so sanguine about his situation, also railed against the price and scarcity of fresh food: “We have now and then a carcass offer’d for sale in the market, which formerly we would not have pick’d up in the street; but bad as it is it readily sells for eight pence Lawful money per lb … Was it not for the trifle of salt provissions that we have, ’twould be impossible for us to live.”

Nearly half of the inhabitants of Boston had already left the city, fleeing like refugees and abandoning everything they had. About 6,500 civilians remained, mostly Loyalists of the working class. “You can have no conception … of the distresses the people in general are involv’d in,” Andrews wrote to a friend in Philadelphia. “You’ll see parents that are lucky enough to procure papers [permission from Gage to leave] with bundles in one hand and a string of children in the other, wandering out of town (with only a sufferance of one day’s permission) not knowing whither they’ll go.”

Andrews was stuck. His entire net worth consisted of “between two and three thousand sterling” worth of furniture and goods that he was not allowed to remove from Boston. “I find an absolute necessity to be here myself, as the soldiery think they have license to plunder every one’s house and store who leaves the town, of which they have given convincing proofs already,” he wrote. Andrews suspected that the rule regarding merchandise was put in place specifically to detain people in Boston.

The people trapped in the city would not have been pleased to know that the siege would continue without respite for the next ten months. In those early days, however, there was nothing but uncertainty. One Loyalist trapped in the city wrote to a relative in England, “We are every hour expecting an attack by land or water. All marketing from the country stopt ever since the Battle. Fire and slaughter hourly threatened, and not out of danger from some of the inhabitants within, of setting the town of [on] fire.” These fears were shared by much of the civilian population, who were at once afraid of the Patriots still in the city and afraid to let them leave.

On June 12 Gage wrote to Dartmouth reporting that he had “issued a proclamation for the exercising of martial law”; he included a brief description of the action on Noddle’s Island and the burning of Diana. Dartmouth had in an earlier letter criticized Gage for not informing him of everything that was going on in America, and Gage sought to correct that defect. “As … it is your lordship’s command that I should write fully upon the affairs of this country,” he wrote, “I venture to give opinions I should not in any other situation take the liberty of doing.”

Gage made good on that by telling Dartmouth something he did not want to hear, that the war was quickly becoming continent-wide, and rather than the 20,000 men he had once requested, he now felt that it would take 32,000 to suppress the uprising. He believed 15,000 should be employed in Massachusetts, 10,000 in New York, and 7,000 in the Lake Champlain region.

More to the American secretary’s liking, Gage reported that the reinforcements from Ireland were beginning to arrive, including marines and part of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, with the rest expected shortly. “I do not, however, design to wait long for them before I make an attempt upon some of the rebel’s posts, which becomes every day more necessary,” he commented.

Though Gage recognized the continent-wide nature of the uprising, he intended to concentrate his force in Boston. New York was also in a state of rebellion, but he had far too few men there to do any good, and the reinforcements that Dartmouth was sending to New York would not be enough to help. Gage asked Graves to send a ship to sea to intercept those reinforcements and divert them to Boston.

This move put a crimp in Burgoyne’s plans. Gentleman Johnny, ambitious and manipulative, had been angling for command of New York since before leaving England. He had planted the idea in the mind of Lord North, expressing his “surprise and concern that in the present crisis there was no person proper to manage the affairs of government in New York” and selflessly offering his service there at the head of three or four regiments.

Now, with New York all but abandoned, he had to come up with some other idea. The one thing he did not intend to do was while away the winter in Boston with no independent command and junior to three other general officers. Two weeks after arriving in America, Burgoyne was writing to Lord North suggesting he be sent as an envoy to some of the governors and the Continental Congress to negotiate with the friends of government and then return to England with the agreements he had collected as a first step toward reconciliation. His offer was not embraced by the ministry.

With the promise of reinforcements, the military was looking forward to some sort of breakout. The defeat at Lexington and Concord was humiliating enough, but to be trapped in Boston by “a rabble in arms,” as Burgoyne put it, was too much. As the new troops arrived, the “effects on the spirit of the army was visible,” Burgoyne reported. The question remained, what to do?

Burgoyne wrote to Rochford, “The sentiments of Howe, Clinton and myself have been unanimous from the beginning.” The two primary strategic points around the city were the hills of Charlestown, in particular Bunker Hill, to the north, and Dorchester Heights, which was comprised of three hills arranged along Dorchester Neck, a truncated peninsula to the south of Boston. Both of those heights, as Burgoyne explained to his friend Lord Stanley, “command the Town, that is give an opportunity of erecting batteries above any you can make against them, and consequently are much more advantageous.”

Every military officer on both sides recognized that the two points of high ground commanding Boston were the key to controlling the town. Of the two, Dorchester Heights was the more important, since cannons placed there could reach not only the town of Boston but the harbor as well, thus making the anchorage and waterfront untenable for shipping. With communications by land shut off, the sea lanes were the town’s only supply line. Closing those would be the end for the British in Boston, as indeed it was the following March, when the Americans were at last able to mount artillery on Dorchester Heights.

In early June 1775, Dorchester Heights was unoccupied. The Americans were too focused on defending against a British attack to worry about taking an offensive position on the high ground, and they did not have the artillery to command the harbor. The four British generals, however, had little difficulty in reaching consensus on a plan. “First to possess Dorchester Neck by two redoubts,” Howe wrote to his brother, Admiral Richard Howe, on June 12. The attack on Dorchester would be launched against two places simultaneously. “Howe was to land the transports at the point” at the north end of the Dorchester peninsula, Burgoyne wrote, and “Clinton in the centre.” Burgoyne would “cannonade from the causeway or the neck,” and each general would “take advantage of circumstances.”

Once Dorchester Heights was taken, British troops would fall on Roxbury, sweeping down from Boston Neck to the northeast and Dorchester Neck to the southeast. A couple of hundred men would entrench in Roxbury, and Howe “would then go over with all we can muster to Charles Town Height, which is entirely commanded from Boston.” Once Bunker Hill was taken, they would move on the American posts in Cambridge. “In either case, I suppose the Rebels will move from Cambridge, And that we shall take, and keep possession of it.”

It was an intelligent and realistic plan, and according to Burgoyne, “the operations must have been very easy.” He was probably right. For all the order and discipline that Ward, Thomas, Putnam, and the others had managed to bring to the American army in the two months of its existence, they were by no means ready to stand up against the British regulars in an open field of battle. There is every reason to suspect that the British troops would have rolled right over the American lines, just as they envisioned. They might have scattered the nascent army; indeed, they might even have delivered a serious check to the revolutionary movement.

It was decided that operations would begin on June 18—but the Americans never gave them the chance.

AN APPEAL TO CONGRESS

The Provincial Congress was worried. It was losing control of the army.

Joseph Warren had warned about this possibility when he first wrote to the Continental Congress urging them to take control of the armed forces and suggesting the possibility of a military government. In a private letter to Sam Adams he was more direct. He warned that “unless some authority sufficient to restrain the irregularities of this army is established, we shall very soon find ourselves in greater difficulties than you can well imagine.”

Rumors and character assassinations were becoming common in the army and swept through the ranks like a communicable disease. Worse, the soldiers were beginning to take liberties with the private property of those who lived near the camps. Warren explained to Adams how the troops had first turned out with “nothing but the clothes on their backs, without a day’s provisions, and many without a farthing in their pockets.” The Patriots gave willing assistance to the soldiers, and where assistance was not given by those of a Loyalist bent, it was taken. “Prudence seemed to dictate,” Warren wrote, that such liberties, born of necessity, “should be winked at.”

Unfortunately, the attitude that the troops could simply take what they needed was becoming widespread and ingrained, and fewer distinctions were made between the property of Patriot and Loyalist. Warren, eager to find justification for the behavior of his countrymen, pointed out, somewhat weakly, “It is not easy for men, especially when interest and gratification of apatite are considered, to know how far they may continue to tread in the path where there are no land-marks to direct them.”

The troops were also becoming more defiant of the orders of the Provincial Congress. Warren urged that the Continental Congress find a solution quickly, “as the infection is caught by every new corps that arrives.” It was understood, at least by those in the Massachusetts government, what the solution required. A real civil government with the force of law had to be established in the colony, the army had to come under the direction of the Continental Congress, and the Congress needed to appoint a commander in chief who wielded more authority than Artemas Ward and who would bring the troops back into line before it was too late.

“You may possibly think I am a little angry with my countrymen,” Warren wrote, and then assured Sam Adams that he was not. Warren tried hard to be circumspect and nonjudgmental. “It is with our countrymen as with all other men,” he wrote, “when they are in arms, they think the military should be uppermost.”

Joseph Warren may have been more inclined to see the problems as a temporary aberration, given that he, more than any other political leader in Massachusetts, was drawn to the military side of the rebellion. He was certainly not the only one to perceive the problem.

Elbridge Gerry, representative to the Provincial Congress from Marblehead and later signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote to the Massachusetts delegates in early June. The people, he pointed out, had a very strong sense of their rights, since the rights of the colonies was the point that had been hammered home for so long in the growing dispute with England. Gerry wrote:

They now feel rather too much their own importance, and it requires great skill to produce such subordination as is necessary. This takes place principally in the Army. They have affected to hold the military too high, but the civil must be first supported.

The problems between the civilian leadership and the military were apparently so widespread that word even reached the Loyalists holed up in Boston. Peter Oliver wrote to a friend, “The Army at Cambridge damn the Congress Orders, and the Congress are afraid of the Army, and Putnam will manage them all.”

Gerry, like Warren, was looking to the Continental Congress to help establish a civil government in Massachusetts. Like Warren and others, too, he felt that “a regular General to assist us in disciplining the Army” was needed. Such a general, he felt, could train the Americans in a year or less “to stand against any troops, however formidable they may be with the sounding names of Welsh Fusileers, Grenadiers, &c.”

Despite his being current commander in chief of the Massachusetts army, Artemas Ward was not mentioned for command of the Continental Army, not by Gerry or anyone else. There seems to have been a tacit understanding that Ward was not the man for the job.

There also seemed to be a growing consensus, at least among a certain faction of Massachusetts’s leaders, as to who should be in the post of commander in chief. Gerry’s letter closely echoes the earlier letter by James Warren on the subject. Gerry felt Charles Lee might “render great service by his presence and councils,” though he knew “the pride of our people would prevent their submitting to be led by any General not an American.”

“I should heartily rejoice to see this way the beloved Colonel Washington,” Gerry continued, “and do not doubt the New-England Generals would acquiesce in showing to our sister colony, Virginia, the respect which she has experienced from the Continent, in making him Generalissimo.” Gerry stated that Joseph Warren agreed with him on that point. John Adams, also a supporter of Washington, later claimed to have been the one to nominate him for the post of commander in chief. With the exception of John Hancock, who wanted the job for himself, the New England leadership seemed pretty well aligned behind Washington for head of the army.

Though the Massachusetts Provincial Congress was growing frustrated and impatient, the Continental Congress was in fact considering its various requests. On June 9 the delegates passed a resolution concerning the civil government of the colony. In it, they declared that no obedience was due the act of Parliament that altered the charter of Massachusetts or to any governor or lieutenant governor who would act to subvert the charter. Therefore, those offices were to be considered vacant. There was no legislature, either, since Gage had suspended it. Taken altogether, the Congress was of the opinion that no government currently existed in Massachusetts. The situation could not continue that way; “the inconveniences, arising from the suspension of the powers of Government, are intolerable,” particularly given that General Gage had begun waging war.

The Congress was trying to tread a fine line between allowing Massachusetts to form a government and giving permission for anything that looked like a declaration of independence, which many in the Congress were wary of. It recommended, therefore, that each town in Massachusetts choose a member for an assembly, which would function as a lower house, and that assembly should then elect a council, which would form an upper house. Then the “assembly and council should exercise the powers of Government, until a Governor, of his Majesty’s appointment, will consent to govern the colony according to its charter.”

It was a decent compromise, and pretty much what Massachusetts already had with the Provincial Congress and the Committee of Safety. It gave the leaders in Massachusetts the permission they sought to form a new government, while assuring the more conservative members of Congress that they were not doing anything so radical as throwing off the authority of the king by forming a new government. The resolution ignored the fact, of which they were all perfectly aware, that Governor Thomas Gage was a governor of His Majesty’s appointment. What they wanted was a governor appointed by the king who would take their view that the king had no right to alter the charter. That was something they were not likely to get.

Congress’s adopting the army was a more ambiguous process. On June 10, Hancock, as president of the Continental Congress, wrote to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress that “the Congress have been so pressd with Business that they have been prevented Determining upon the other matters mentioned in your Letters,” by which he meant taking over the army.

Though Hancock claimed that the Congress had had no time to consider the administration of the army, it had been considering army affairs. On the day after Benjamin Church arrived in Philadelphia with letters from the Provincial Congress, a committee was appointed to “borrow the sum of six thousand pounds for the use of America … and that the sd [said] com[mittee] apply the sd sum of money to the purchase of gunpowder.” The most interesting aspect of this was that the gunpowder was, according to Congress, “for the use of the Continental Army.”

It is the first official use of the term “Continental Army.” Though there was no formal vote to adopt the army, at least none that was recorded, the Congress began increasingly to think of the troops around Boston as a national army under its direction. On June 9 it requested that New York forward to Massachusetts five thousand barrels of flour for the Continental Army. Colonies as far south as Maryland were asked to collect saltpeter and sulfur for the manufacture of gunpowder “for the use of the continent.”

On June 14 the Congress voted to raise “six companies of expert riflemen” from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia to “join the army near Boston”—the first time Congress had actually authorized men for the military—and drafted an enlistment form that signified that those who signed were enlisting as “a soldier, in the American continental army.” That same day a committee consisting of George Washington, Philip Schuyler, who would serve as a major general, Silas Deane, Thomas Cushing, and Joseph Hewes was convened to “bring in a dra’t of rules and regulations for the government of the army.”

Bit by bit the Continental Congress was taking over the organizing, running, and financing of the army around Boston. Before that transition was complete, the ad hoc force that had developed out of the Lexington Alarm would be put to one last, bloody test.

COUNTERSTROKE

British plans for an attack on Dorchester Heights were not a particularly well kept secret. On June 13 the New Hampshire Committee of Safety wrote to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, reporting:

By a gentleman of undoubted veracity (who left Boston last Friday and who had frequent opportunity of conversing with the principal officers in General Gage’s Army,) we are informed there is a great probability … that General Gage will secure some advantageous posts near Boston, vis: Dorchester and Charlestown. We are unacquainted with the importance of those posts, but if this hint should be in any degree useful, it will give us pleasure.

By the date, the “gentleman of undoubted veracity” must have heard of the plan almost as soon as it was agreed upon by the generals. On the same day that the New Hampshire committee was writing to the Provincial Congress, the Massachusetts committee of safety was reporting that “it is daily expected that General Gage will attack our Army now in the vicinity of Boston.”

This could hardly be considered proof that they were alerted to the generals’ plans, since that sort of warning had occurred frequently over the past two months. Diaries of soldiers mentioned frequent alarms. Four weeks earlier, by way of example, General John Thomas received information of a pending attack in Roxbury. “The information is Simular to what I have Recvd almost Every Day this 10 Days Past,” he wrote back to headquarters. The letter from New Hampshire was specific about the places that would be attacked, though, and they were certainly the places the Committee of Safety and the council of war would expect Gage to hit. They likely paid closer attention to this new intelligence than they would have to something more general.

Nor was that the only warning they received. In a report after the battle, the Provincial Congress wrote that days before, they had “good intelligence that General Gage was about to take possession of the advantageous posts in Charlestown and on Dorchester Point.” It is interesting to note that the Provincial Congress report specifically mentions the point, a detail that the warning from New Hampshire did not include, but one that was in Burgoyne’s description of the planned action. This would certainly suggest that there were a few loose lips in Boston. Later, Thomas Hutchinson in London would write that a gentleman who had arrived there from Boston “heard General Burgoyne, as well as inferior officers,” talking about the plan.

The Committee of Safety certainly had all the information it needed. The only realistic way to stop Gage and the regulars from taking the high ground was to take it first. The committee on June 15 wrote:

Whereas it appears of importance to the safety of this Colony, that possession of the hill called Bunker’s Hill, in Charlestown, be securely kept and defended, and also some one hill or hills on Dorchester Neck be likewise secured; therefore Resolved unanimously, that it be recommended to the Council of War that the above mentioned Bunker’s Hill be maintained by sufficient force being posted there.

The committee did not know what the situation was on Dorchester Heights and instructed the council of war to investigate, but there did not seem to be much interest on the American side for taking Dorchester. Charlestown to the north was a natural extension of the lines that ran from Roxbury all along the Back Bay, but the Dorchester peninsula was pretty well detached from the rest. In terms of creating an immediate threat to Gage, Dorchester Heights was two miles or more from Boston, whereas Charlestown was less than a mile from the city’s North End.

The Americans’ focus, therefore, was Charlestown. The idea of taking the high ground in that town was not a new one. An earlier resolve of May 12 had suggested fortifying Bunker Hill as part of the recommended fortifications between Cambridge and Charlestown, but nothing had ever been done about it. Certainly it was a provocative move. The rebels could fortify all they wanted around Cambridge, and Gage could have just as easily ignored them. A works on Bunker Hill, within long cannon range of Boston, was something else.

If there was a chief provocateur in the American ranks it was Israel Putnam, and it is no surprise that he is credited with being the foremost advocate for fortifying on Bunker Hill. According to the account written by his son Daniel some years later, Putnam had been distracted and lost in his thoughts quite often following the march he made through Charlestown to taunt the British. All of his life Putnam had been in the habit of muttering to himself, of thinking out loud, and according to Daniel that became chronic after the march. Putnam spent days wandering around saying such things as “Yes, yes, they must” or “I’ll go with my regiment anyhow” or “I know ’em of old, they fire without aim.”

The other officers, apparently, were somewhat divided on the advisability of taking Bunker Hill. While some sided with Putnam, others, such as Artemas Ward and Joseph Warren, were opposed on the grounds that they did not have any big guns to fire on Boston, and even if they did, they did not have enough gunpowder.

Putnam told them that they were mistaking his purpose. He did not want to fire on the British in Boston, he wanted to make the British come out and fight. This was exactly what the others were afraid of, and they pointed out that there was a good chance the troops on Bunker Hill could be surrounded and cut off. To this argument Putnam supposedly replied that, in that case, “we shall set our country an example of which it shall not be ashamed, and show those who seek to oppress us what men can do who are determined to live free or not live at all!”

Even if Putnam did not actually say that, it certainly was in keeping with his philosophy. Warren was supposed to have said in response, “I must still 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.”

Old Put surely would not have been surprised. Since the first gunfire of the Revolution Dr. Warren had raced off to be where the action was, at Lexington and Grape Island and Noddle’s Island. Being a civilian, and not a soldier who was part of a regiment with an assigned post, Warren had the freedom to go where he pleased, and he took advantage of it.

Warren’s passion for military affairs did not go unnoticed, and it’s likely he made his ambitions in that line known. On June 14 the Provincial Congress sent a committee to “wait on the Hon. Joseph Warren, Esq., and inform him that this congress have made choice of him for second major-general of the Massachusetts army, and desire his answer to this congress of his acceptance of this trust.”

It was an extraordinary move. Warren was thirty-four years old with no prior military experience. Every other man who held a general’s rank was a veteran of the French and Indian War, a combat veteran, and old enough to be Warren’s father. Warren of course accepted, which made him senior to everyone in the Massachusetts establishment save for Artemas Ward and John Thomas.

The Provincial Congress had apparently intended to give him the rank of “physician-general,” but Warren had preferred “a more active and hazardous employment,” which would suggest there was some negotiation going on behind the scenes. Wrangling aside, the Provincial Congress was sufficiently convinced of Warren’s abilities that they offered him the number three position in their army.

The Congress’s timing was perfect. In just days Warren would get all the active and hazardous employment anyone could want, in the first real battle of the American Revolution.