THE AMOUNT of troops for which General Gage called staggered the Ministry. They had already voted him a reinforcement of ten thousand men, which had been thought more than handsome: and the troops now actually stationed in Boston amounted to about four thousand. The Earl of Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty, refused to believe that the threat was so serious as was made out. He pronounced the Americans cowards (though unknown to him personally) and regretted that there was no probability of our troops encountering without delay two hundred thousand of such a rabble, armed with old rusty firelocks, pistols, staves, clubs, and broomsticks; and of exterminating them at one blow Colonel Grant, in the Commons, agreed with the noble Lord: ‘the colonists possess not a single military trait and would never stand to meet the English bayonet’. He had been in America, he said, and disliked their manner of speaking equally with their way of life, and held them to be ‘entirely out of humanity’s reach’. Colonel Grant was taken up by Mr Cruger, an American-born member, and reminded that his own services in the Alleghany mountains had been of no very triumphant character. (The speaker called Mr Cruger to order before he could say more.) However, Lord North considered these views too sanguine; and since it was impossible to send the troops that General Gage demanded, without stripping the whole Empire, he made a new attempt at conciliating the Americans. He undertook to exempt from taxation any province which would of its own free will make a reasonable contribution to the common defence of America and provision for the support of the civil government.
The Whig Opposition had encouraged their friends in America to believe that England could not or would not make war on them, the country in general being so averse to this, or at least would not venture more than a short campaign. It was true that England stood to lose by the conflict immensely more than she could gain; for the prosperity of the manufacturing towns in the North of England depended largely on the continuance of close relations with the colonies, and the London merchants alone were owed close on a million pounds by their American customers. The chief Opposition speaker, Mr Fox, now assured the House that the Americans must and would reject Lord North’s offer with contempt. To accept exemption from a tax, as an indulgence, and on condition of performing an act equivalent to paying it, would be to admit a principle of liability which every American would oppose with his life’s blood. In the Lords, the Earl of Chatham, the gout still heavy on him, spoke of the disdain with which the whole world and Heaven itself regarded the forces entrenched behind Boston Neck: ‘An impotent general and a dishonoured army, trusting solely to the pick-axe and the spade for security against the just indignation of an injured and insulted people.’
But Lord North’s offer of exemption from taxation came too late in any case; for the first skirmish of the war had already been fought, with the loss of many lives, and from either side complaints of barbarities done contrary to English usage. This was the Lexington affair and it gave an interesting foretaste of the style of fighting that our armies might expect when the campaign began in earnest.
General Gage, having been informed that an important quantity of military stores had been collected by the revolutionaries at Concord, about twenty miles from Boston, decided to seize these by the sudden secret descent of a large body of troops. At ten o’clock on the night of April 18th 1775 a contingent of some seven hundred picked men, namely, the flank companies (the Grenadier and Light Infantry companies) of the twelve or thirteen battalions of the garrison were rowed over in boats with muffled oars from the town, and up Charles River for a mile or two. They were there disembarked and began a silent march on Concord. Though they proceeded with the greatest caution, securing every person whom they met, in order to prevent the alarm being spread, they soon found by the continual firing of guns and ringing of bells that they were discovered. By five o’clock in the morning they had reached Lexington, after a march of fifteen miles: where militia and minute-men (troops so-called from their readiness to rise to arms at a minute’s notice, though continuing meanwhile at their ordinary trades) were drawn up on the green to oppose them.
Major Pitcairne, who commanded the advance guard, rode forward and called on them in the King’s name to disperse. But they would not. At this moment some shots were fired from a house facing the green, wounding one man and striking the Major’s horse in two places. The Americans, however, declare that the Major fired first, with a pistol, and that the English in consequence were to blame for the sequel. Our people at once returned the fire, killing and wounding eighteen of the militiamen, who broke and fled. The march to Concord was then resumed, where the advance guard found no muskets or ammunition, but spoilt some barrels of flour, knocked the trunnions off three old field-pieces, and cut down a Liberty pole – a sort of May pole which was used by the Sons of Liberty as a standard and rallying point of rebellion. There then ensued a sharp skirmish for the possession of a bridge over a river beyond the town. Many Americans and British were killed. It was declared by our people, and furiously denied by the other side, that some of the dead and wounded were scalped by Americans who had adopted this savage and singular custom from the Red Indians. If this was indeed so, it was not remarkable. The Government of Pennsylvania, of which the respectable Governor Penn and Dr Benjamin Franklin were members, had, but a few years before, offered a bounty for Indian scalps, male and female. Also there was precedent for the taking of white scalps: many had been lifted from Frenchmen in the late war by the Rangers of Connecticut, an act which they glorified.
Here I may interpolate a few remarks upon scalp-taking. The Indians set so much store upon the taking of scalps that it was regarded as of less honour to kill three men in battle and leave them undespoiled than to take the scalp of one, even if he had fallen to another’s tomahawk. It was not, as is supposed, the general practice of the scalper to remove the whole fleece of hair, but only the central lock. This, twisted and grasped in the left hand, gave the needed purchase for scaring and scooping from around it, with a knife, a little piece of the skin, about the size of a priest’s tonsure. Should the victim be bald, however, or short-haired, the Indians would rip off more, often using their teeth to loosen the skin from the bone. If the scalp were taken in revenge for some injury, as was almost always the case, that of a woman or child was prized more highly than that of a man. A wounded person who has been scalped very often recovers, though the hair never grows again on the crown of the head. I observed one or two scalped men in the back parts of Virginia when I was in captivity there, and lodged with a settler who proudly showed me a pair of scalps that he had himself ripped from Cherokee Indians that he had shot. He had dressed them in Indian fashion by sewing them upon a hoop with deer sinews, and painting them red for the sake of show.
On their retirement from Concord, after two hours’ halt, the British troops were shot at, the whole length of the march, by Americans concealed behind stone walls, of which there were many in the cleared land, or behind trees in the uncleared parts, and taking every advantage that the face of the country afforded them. They never showed themselves in bodies of more than a few men at a time, and immediately retired when any movement was made against them, yet persisted about the column like a swarm of mosquitoes. The column being confined to the road and unable to extend to protect their flanks, because of the continual obstacles of stone walls, dense woods, and morasses to be encountered, suffered very heavily. A minute-man, supported perhaps by a single neighbour or kinsman, would conceal himself behind a bush at fifty paces from the road, and as the tail of the column was passing would discharge his single shot, his companion holding his fire in case there were retaliation. Then they would lie still until the danger had passed.
These countrymen were bred to the musket or rifle-gun from boyhood, and their experience of fighting against the Indians, or of stalking bears, deer, and other game, had taught them a mode of fighting which to our people seemed mean and skulking; but it certainly caused us much damage and themselves very little and transgressed no rule of civilized warfare. In Europe, to be sure, armies advance towards each other in solid mass, the lines perfectly dressed, with standards flying, drums beating; and tear away at each other with disciplined and simultaneous volleys. But that manner is only a custom of warfare, not a rule; and the Americans saw no reason why they should adopt it to their own disadvantage. Whenever during the war their Continental Line, who were trained in European style, dared to engage our people in a pitched battle they were almost invariably routed; for the British Army was second to none in the formal manner of fighting.
It was surprising that our men escaped as they did. They had already marched twenty-five miles, with smart fighting thrown in, and on empty stomachs, too, for their provision carts were captured. When they reached Lexington again, where a force of eight hundred men, including the main body of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, came hurrying up to their relief, they had expended all their ammunition; and their tongues were hanging out, like dogs’, for thirst and weariness. There were two six-pounder field-pieces with the newly arrived troops, which were used with deterrent effect against the Americans; who were by now treading close on the heels of the exhausted column, groaning in derision, ‘Britons Strike Home!’ and uttering their war-cry of ‘King Hancock for Ever!’ Despite these guns, the Americans continued with irregular shooting from flanks, front, and rear. Our men threw away their fire very inconsiderately and without being certain of its effect; for many of them were young soldiers, who had been taught that quick firing struck terror into the enemy. But, on the contrary, doing so little execution, it emboldened the Americans to come closer. The noise of battle now brought up fresh reinforcements of Mohairs (as these soldiers without uniforms were contemptuously called in the English ranks) from all the surrounding countryside; and the fatigued column must run the gauntlet of successive companies of cool marksmen, who were often commanded by the Congregational minister of their township, dressed in his preaching clothes. It is said that for want of material these warlike men of God had suffered their religious books to be converted into wadding for their cartridges, especially the hymnals of Dr Isaac Watts. Then: ‘Put a little Watts into ’em, Brethren’ was a catchword of the day.
The firing was now heavy from the houses on the roadside, and the British were so enraged at suffering from an unseen enemy that they forced open many of these buildings and put to death all the defenders; in some cases, seven or eight men. Often they found these houses apparently deserted; but soon as the march was resumed, the defenders climbed out of their hiding-places and the popping shots began again from the rear. Before the day was out the enemy numbered some four thousand men, yet no more than fifty were ever seen together at a time, out of respect for the six-pounder guns. No women and children were, I believe, encountered during the day, all such having doubtless been removed from the neighbourhood at the first warning of battle; certainly none were deliberately killed in the houses, as the American leaders alleged against us to incite the vengeance of their followers. It is true that, notwithstanding the efforts of the officers, a few soldiers carried off small articles of plunder from the houses thus broken into; but the day was too hot and the men too weary for the practice to become general.
At length the straggling column reached Charlestown Neck, near Boston, where the guns of the men-of-war anchored close by protected them, and the rebel fire ceased. The Grenadiers and Light Infantry had marched forty miles and eaten nothing for a day and a night; and it was past midnight of the 19th before they reached barracks and bed. Our casualties were near three hundred men killed and wounded, including a number of officers; the Americans lost only a third of that number. Many providential escapes from death were reported. The Earl of Percy, who commanded the relieving force, lost a button shot off his waistcoat; a man of my acquaintance had his cap blown three times off his head and two bullets through his coat, one of these carrying away his bayonet. Lieutenant Hawkshaw of the Fifth Fusiliers received a bullet through both cheeks, which also removed several teeth; but did not by any means regard this as a providential escape. He had been accounted the greatest beauty in the Army and was now bitterly mortified in the sad alteration to his appearance.
The affair at Lexington animated the courage of the Americans to the highest degree, insomuch that in a few days their army amounted to twenty thousand men and was continually increasing. Congress appointed George Washington to be Commander-in-Chief of the American armies. His fighting service had ended sixteen years previously, nor had he ever commanded above twelve hundred men. He was chosen chiefly as being a wealthy aristocrat from Virginia, in order to flatter the South into common action with the revolutionary North. John Adams proposed his name. He first enumerated the high qualities that a commander-in-chief should possess, and then remarked that, fortunately, such qualities resided in a member of their own body. At this ‘King’ Hancock was all satisfaction and smiles, believing that the speaker could only be pointing at him, and Mr Adams afterwards wrote that never in his life had he seen so sudden a change on any man’s face as on John Hancock’s when George Washington’s name was mentioned in place of his own. Samuel Adams seconded the nomination, which was passed unanimously. General Washington, in accepting, declined to take any payment for his services: which gave him much popularity.
Boston was now completely invested and those critics were confounded who held that a regiment or two could force their way through any part of the continent, and that the very sight of a grenadier’s cap would be sufficient to put an American army to flight. The news was especially gratifying to Colonel Hancock, who was to have been charged on the day of the battle with defrauding the customs by smuggling to the tune of half a million dollars. The lawyer he had briefed for his defence was Samuel Adams.
There was worse to come: the battle miscalled that of Bunker’s Hill. About the end of May 1775 reinforcements of British troops arrived in Boston under the command of Generals Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne, whose services in the preceding war had gained them great reputation: bringing up the number of troops in the town to some seven thousand men. A few days later General Gage issued a proclamation to the Americans who ‘with a preposterous parade of military arrangement affect to hold the Royal Army besieged’: in which he offered pardon to all who would lay down their arms, and thus stand separate and distinct from the parricides of the Constitution The only persons excepted from this pardon were Colonel Hancock and Mr Samuel Adams. No revolutionaries offered their submission in reply.
Opposite the city of Boston and separated from it by the Charles River, which was about the breadth of the Thames at London Bridge, another peninsula of much the same size as Boston’s jutted towards it, and was similarly joined to the main land by a narrow neck. Charlestown lay at one corner of the flat head of this other peninsula, which was formed mainly of a steep ridge, Charlestown Heights, whose two humps were known as Bunker’s Hill and Breed’s Pasture; of which Bunker’s Hill was both the loftier and the farther from Boston. General Gage, observing that Charlestown Heights commanded the whole of Boston, decided on the precaution of occupying Bunker’s Hill. He was, however, forestalled by the revolutionaries, who had spies everywhere. Learning of his intention, they decided to seize the hill and fortify it themselves: to show their power and provoke the British to a battle in conditions favouring defence rather than attack.
On the night of June 16th 1775, then, a detachment of some twelve hundred Massachusetts militia crossed Charlestown Neck with entrenching tools and set hastily to work under the orders of an engineer. Because of some mistake it was the lesser hill, Breed’s Pasture, close to Charlestown, that they pitched upon; which was a less defensible position and did not offer so ready an escape over the Neck. Here they worked with such diligence and silence that before dawn they had nearly completed a strong redoubt, mounting ten cannon, and a six-foot high entrenchment which extended one hundred paces to their left, facing Boston.
When discovered by the British troops at about five o’clock the redoubt was plied with an incessant cannonade from the line-of-battle ships and floating batteries in the river, besides the cannon that could carry across from Boston, three-quarters of a mile distant. Most of the Americans soon ran, including all the gunners, who took four guns off with them, crying that this was murder and that they had been betrayed. However, about five hundred of them coolly continued their work, which they completed about noon; for because of the steep elevation the damage done by our cannonade was not so severe as was predicted.
Meanwhile General Gage as Commander-in-Chief called his major-generals together for a council of war. General Sir Henry Clinton, supported by Generals Sir William Howe and John Burgoyne, proposed (very correctly) sending round a picked force of Grenadiers, supported by artillery, to make a landing on the neck of the Charlestown peninsula, which was not two hundred paces wide, and so cut off the retreat of the Americans. This might well have been done without loss. We held command of the water, which was navigable to shallow craft on either side of the Neck, and the Americans encamped on the Neck were in no posture to stand an attack with bayonets. Those on the peninsula must then have chosen between starvation or surrender.
But General Gage opposed this plan. He resolved instead to land a considerable force at Moulton’s Point (the right-hand corner of the peninsula, as you look across from Boston) and drive the rebels off the heights by force of arms. He could not resist giving the troops the chance for which they had been so long clamouring: which was to come to grips with the enemy and give them a good drubbing. Boston had lately been a cramped and miserable station, a by-word for high prices and low fever. All longed for a sortie. ‘Once let us get into the back country,’ cried General Burgoyne, ‘and we’ll soon find elbow-room!’
Two thousand five hundred troops were therefore landed at Moulton’s Point under the command of Major-General Sir William Howe. At three o’clock in the afternoon the advance began, one division deploying against the enemy’s left, intending to turn it and seize Bunker’s Hill in the rear; another making a frontal attack against the Redoubt on Breed’s Pasture.
The day was exceedingly hot, the grass stood knee-high. Yet the men, dressed in their heavy greatcoats, were burdened, besides their rifles and ammunition, with blankets, heavy full packs and three days’ provisions a man – the whole weighing above 100 pounds; Mr Commissary Stedman, the historian, rates it at 125 pounds. They advanced very slowly, the ground being broken by a succession of high fences; and the ridge, though at its highest point it rose no more than one hundred and ten feet above the river, seemed to them like Snowdon or the Pyrenees.
The Americans had now been greatly reinforced and, before the close of the battle, numbered more than three thousand men. Of these a thousand from New Hampshire and Connecticut, good men, went to line a long fence, of stone below and rails above, which protected their left. This barricade lay ‘refused’ – that is, somewhat behind the line of the entrenchment – and along lower ground. They had stuffed the interstices with grass, and the front was protected by another rail fence of the zigzag or Virginian sort. The advance was not supported by artillery as strongly as it should have been; for at least four reasons. In the first place, the guns that fired grape, that most horrific shot, were mired in a soft patch. In the second, the shot in the side boxes of our six-pounders were, by an error, twelve-pound balls. In the third, the Chief of Artillery, Colonel Cleaveland, was not with the batteries, being absent at a Latin lesson, which is to say that he was spending his morning in company with pretty Miss Lovell, daughter of the master of the Latin School. In the fourth, General Gage had failed to arrange with Admiral Samuel Graves, with whom he was not on the most cordial terms, to cover his advance on the right. Gun-boats of light draught or the Symmetry transport, which mounted several eighteen-pounder guns, might have raked the enemy position from end to end.
The battle was joined near simultaneously along the whole half-mile of the position, but our men were allowed to fire their volley too soon – the Americans not yet even showing their hats above the entrenchments, except for a few look-out men and officers. General Putnam, who was mounted and seemed to be in effective command of the American forces – though there was no hierarchy of rank as yet in this disorderly army – galloped from point to point and swore to shoot any man who fired before the enemy came within point-blank range. The Americans feared and obeyed this violent man, who, by the bye, claimed to have killed and scalped a number of Frenchmen in the previous war. Guided by him, the Massachusetts officers ran very boldly along the parapet, kicking up their men’s muskets.
When at length the American volley was permitted, the execution done was terrible. Not only was the general fire well aimed – ‘Aim at the waist-belt’ was their cry – but they had marksmen armed with rifle-guns whose sole charge it was to pick off the royal officers, conspicuous in the bright sun by the glittering gorgets at their throats. The attack was broken all along the line, the front ranks withering away; the remainder, finding themselves leaderless, retired out of range, re-formed and again advanced against the enemy, the companies being now generally commanded by sergeants. The oldest officers and soldiers engaged, among them some who had fought at Minden and other great battles of the Seven Years’ War, declared it was the hottest service they had ever seen. The enemy were employing slugs and buckshot in their firelocks, and the wounds that ensued were the despair of our surgeons.
The second attack failed, as the first had done, though personally led by General Howe. It was he who had taken the forlorn-hope up the Heights of Abraham on the glorious day that General Wolfe captured Quebec from the French and made Canada ours. He soon found himself standing alone, before the rail-fence, the whole of his staff of twelve officers having been either killed or wounded, though he was unhurt. He was a tall, large, swarthy man, somewhat of a voluptuary; and very German in appearance, being descended, like Lord North, from George I and a German mistress, though she was a different one from Lord North’s grand-dam. His coolness and officer-like behaviour on this occasion cannot be too much applauded. He went over to the troops who had been flung back from the Redoubt and ordered them to unbuckle their packs and remove their greatcoats, together with all other impediments to action. ‘The third try is lucky, my brave boys,’ he is reported to have said, ‘and this time we’ll take the bayonet to ’em only.’ If he said this, it was a long speech for him: for he was almost as silent a man as his brother Admiral Sir Richard Howe, whom the sailors called ‘Black Dick’. He kept his self-possession so wonderfully that when a certain general officer, meeting him later upon the field of battle, made a teasing remark about the costliness of ‘this new sort of light infantry tactics’ he only grinned in reply.
The British batteries in Boston, and the ships’ guns, now punished Charlestown with red-hot balls and carcasses (or incendiary shells), for enemy musket-fire from the houses and the meeting-house steeple had been galling our left. Soon five hundred wooden houses were in one great blaze. The smoke and cinders blew into our soldiers’ eyes, already sore with the sweat pouring from their brows, and made them swear loudly; yet they answered General Howe’s summons with a cheer and, for the third time, advanced intrepidly against the Redoubt. This time the Americans, who were pretty short of ammunition and lacked bayonets, would not face the assault, though outnumbering our people by two to one. With their trousers rolled high above their naked feet and ankles, they scrambled out of the trenches. The majority of them got safe back across the Neck, which was now swept by the ships’ fire, but many were caught. The Grenadier company of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, with which in after years I had the honour to serve, had the post of honour on this occasion, and lost every man but five of its three-and-thirty: nevertheless these five managed to make good an oath of vengeance sworn after the first attack against a certain sharp-shooter. He stood upon a cask placed on the banquette of the Redoubt, three feet above his fellows, and was known to have wounded their company officer, Captain Blakeny, and accounted for three subaltern officers besides. He was perfect at a hundred paces and was kept constantly nourished with loaded rifles by his comrades. This champion maintained his fire to the last; but the Grenadiers, when they came up with him, and he fought with his rifle-butt, drove their bayonets through his vitals again and again. It was said that three of our officers were in the first assault shot in the back by men behind. This was not deliberately done, the men’s loyalty being beyond question: it was, I believe, due to crowding and overlapping at the corner of the Redoubt.
So exhausted were the troops, and their losses so calamitous, that General Howe did not pursue the enemy over Charlestown Neck and on to their headquarters to Cambridge. He contented himself with occupying Bunker’s Hill and fortifying it. The Americans thereupon fortified Prospect Hill, at a little distance beyond the Neck (a place with which I was two years later to form a long and miserable acquaintance), and gave our people to understand that they were prepared to sell this eminence at the same price as the last. Our casualties were nearly one thousand men, and ninety-two officers, among these Major Pitcairne, who fell with four balls in his body, the last one fired by a negro soldier. The Americans lost something more than four hundred killed and wounded, and five guns out of the six that remained.
The general comment among the men was that we had taken the bull by the horns, but would have been better advised to sneak round behind, as mastiffs do in bull-baiting, and fasten upon a softer part. It was also commonly agreed that it had been a mere libel on common sense to take post at Boston of all places in the whole continent, unless in overwhelming strength; for the city was commanded all round – a mere target or Man of the Almanack, with the points of the swords directed at every feature. It was not many weeks before the rebels also seized and fortified Dorchester Heights to the southward, and so served us notice to quit.
There were innumerable other complaints of blunders committed by our generals: for example, that General Gage had permitted all his cabinet papers, Ministers’ letters, etc., and private correspondence with Loyalists to be stolen out of a large closet, or wardrobe up one pair of stairs on the landing at Government House; and that his wife was a prime treasoner, in secret communication with the enemy, to whom she disclosed all his military plans and dispositions. It was also urged that we should have lost no time in purchasing the American generals. I have heard Captain Montrésor, an American Loyalist and at this time Chief Engineer in America, declare that even General Israel Putnam could to his certain knowledge have been bought for one dollar a day, or eight shillings New York currency. He added that the following generals could have been obtained at a still more modest expense, viz. Lasher, the New York shoemaker; Heard, the Woodbridge tavern-keeper; Pribble, also a tavern-keeper from Canterbury in England; Seth Pomeroy, the gunsmith, and the other Putnam, namely Rufus, a carpenter of Connecticut. This Captain Montrésor was a bitter man, with a burden of grievances against fate and the British Government: he was six times wounded and six times lost his baggage in twenty-four American campaigns, yet was refused the rank corresponding with his important and extensive command; a restless ball was roaming in his body, resisting excision; he suffered from a hydrocele, a fistula, and a nervous spasm; the revolutionaries had burned to the ground his house and his out-houses, barns, and offices on Montrésor’s Island, afterwards Talbot Island, eight miles from New York, for which he could obtain no restitution – and all these troubles were not one-half of his tale of woe. I expect that a modest allowance for exaggeration must therefore be made in his assessment of the venality of these Americans. He hated them so prodigiously for being tradesmen, rebels, and generals all together. I think that he had a grudge against Israel Putnam who had served with him at Niagara in 1764 in the Indian War. Yet he was one of the best-informed men and clearest speakers upon the situation in America to whom I ever had the privilege to listen. I later served under his son, a courageous officer of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and heard many praises in many quarters of the old Captain and his wife: they kept open table in New York throughout the Revolution, when provisions were excessively dear, and converted their large mansion into a hospital for wounded Officers. The whole family was ruined by the war.