Chapter 22

What Course Now, Gentlemen?

As Margaret Gage packed her trunks and prepared to leave Boston, the deliberations of the Second Continental Congress continued in Philadelphia. President John Hancock was feeling increasingly comfortable in the presiding chair, but then again Hancock rarely felt uncomfortable anywhere. Some of the delegates were on a fast track to declaring independence; others still harbored hopes for reconciliation or at least a peaceful parting. Hancock’s task was to keep a steady rein on the body and maintain some sense of unity and cooperation among all factions. It was, as John Adams remembered, like driving “a Coach and six—the swiftest Horses must be slackened and the slowest quickened, that all may keep an even Pace.”¹

Two matters continued to command the attention of all delegates: an army and the means to pay for it. On Monday, June 12, in recognition of “the present critical, alarming and calamitous state of these colonies,” the congress voted July 20 to be “a day of public humiliation, fasting and prayer” and “recommended to Christians, of all denominations, to assemble for public worship, and to abstain from servile labour and recreations.” Then it resolved itself into a committee of the whole to “take into consideration the ways and means of raising money.”²

These matters occupied the attention of the congress during the following two days, and at the day’s adjournment on June 14, it was ordered that consideration of the ways and means of raising money “be a standing order, until the business is compleated.” But even if they were not yet agreed on how to pay for it, the delegates also authorized “six companies of expert riflemen, be immediately raised in Pennsylvania; two in Maryland, and two in Virginia.” John Adams went to some length to explain to Abigail that the difference between smoothbore muskets and rifled bores made these men “the most accurate Marksmen in the World.” Each company was to consist of eighty-one men—a captain, three lieutenants, four sergeants, four corporals, a drummer or trumpeter, and sixty-eight privates. As soon as it was formed, each unit was to march to Boston for service as light infantry. Perhaps somewhat optimistically, the term of enlistment was to be one year.³ At the time, few could imagine a longer conflict.

These ten companies, totaling slightly more than eight hundred men, were hardly an army, but added to the provincial troops in the field around Boston—the leaders of which were clamoring for some sort of continental structure—they were proof that the Continental Congress was slowly but surely assuming a national role. Who was to command this assemblage was another matter.

In making this decision, the congress faced its strongest test of colonial unity since the economic sanctions it had passed the previous fall. From New Hampshire to South Carolina and initially reluctant Georgia, there were men on the same page for revolution, but would Virginia or Maryland soldiers take orders from a Massachusetts general and vice versa?

On June 15, the congress debated the matter at length and resolved “that a General be appointed to command all the continental forces, raised, or to be raised, for the defence of American liberty.”⁴ This description of the proceedings in the journal of the Continental Congress is almost maddening in its brevity. The truth is, there had already been a flurry of private conversations—“canvassing this Subject out of Doors,” as John Adams termed it—and Adams and his Massachusetts comrades were well aware that a commander in chief of a Continental Army from Massachusetts would be met with “a Jealousy” by the southern colonies.

Adams, his cousin Samuel, and John Hancock were equally aware at the political level that binding Virginia and the southern colonies to Massachusetts and the rest of New England was in their long-term interests. If John Adams’s later recollections are to be taken at face value—he did have a tendency in retrospect to place himself at the center of every event—Adams promoted a Massachusetts-Virginia accord and particularly ingratiated himself with Virginia’s George Washington. John Hancock had already been the beneficiary of this Massachusetts-Virginia alliance when Adams helped to broker Hancock’s election as president to succeed Peyton Randolph. Now that it was time to appoint a commander in chief, many reasoned it was Virginia’s turn.

“Whether this Jealousy was sincere, or whether it was mere pride and a haughty Ambition, of furnishing a Southern General to command the northern Army,” Adams recalled, “the Intention was very visible to me, that Col. Washington was their Object, and so many of our staunchest Men were in the Plan that We could carry nothing without conceeding to it.”⁵

A further wrinkle was John Hancock’s aspirations to be appointed commander in chief himself—or at least to have the opportunity to decline the honor of the position. John Adams was polite enough to term Hancock “an excellent Militia Officer” for his showy service with Boston’s First Corps of Cadets, but Adams found Hancock’s “entire Want of Experience in actual Service” to be a decisive objection to him.⁶

Once again, John Adams claimed that he took a walk with his cousin Samuel “for a little Exercise and fresh Air” to ponder this situation and propose a plan. Samuel was noncommittal, but John nonetheless returned to the session and called for the appointment of a commander in chief, further declaring that he “had but one Gentleman in my Mind for that important command.” According to Adams’s recollections, which are not readily supported by other participants, John Hancock’s ears perked up at this, and he waited expectantly for Adams to put forth his name. But the name that rolled off the tongue of Hancock’s fellow Massachusetts delegate was that of “a Gentleman from Virginia who was among Us and very well known to all of Us.” According to John Adams, when George Washington heard his name mentioned in this manner, he rose from his seat and with “his Usual Modesty darted into the Library Room” to escape attention.⁷

John Hancock just as quickly was said by John Adams to have undergone a “sudden and sinking Change of Countenance” that covered his face with “Mortification and resentment.” If this was indeed the case, it added insult to injury that Hancock’s mentor, Samuel Adams, quickly seconded his cousin’s motion to appoint a commander in chief and said nothing to detract from the suggestion that, once the position was created, Washington should be the obvious choice to fill it.⁸

The congress then passed the resolution to appoint a commanding general and provide five hundred dollars per month for his pay and expenses. Next, Thomas Johnson of Maryland, a lawyer whom George Washington would one day appoint to the Supreme Court, rose to nominate the Virginian for the position. In spite of some lingering sentiments in favor of appointing a New Englander, Washington appears to have been unopposed and “was unanimously elected.”⁹

Eliphalet Dyer of Connecticut wrote home to his future son-in-law, Joseph Trumbull, that Washington had received “the Universal Voice of the Congress.” Dyer speculated that Washington would be “Very agreable to our officers and Soldiery” and called him a gentleman “highly Esteemed by those acquainted with him.” As to Washington’s military service, Dyer didn’t believe that “he knows more than some of ours” but was satisfied that his appointment “removes all jealousies [and] more firmly Cements the Southern to the Northern.”¹⁰

If he did indeed carry some of the resentment that John Adams later attributed to him, John Hancock certainly did not show it when he notified Joseph Warren of Washington’s appointment. “He is a gentleman who all will like,” Hancock assured his Massachusetts friend. “Pray do him every honor.”¹¹

The day after his election, forty-three-year-old George Washington, who as yet had somewhat of a dubious military record, rose to accept his appointment. “Tho’ I am truly sensible of the high Honour done me, in this Appointment,” Washington began, “yet I feel great distress, from a consciousness that my abilities and military experience may not be equal to the extensive and important Trust.”¹² Perhaps Washington was merely being modest, but perhaps he was also truthfully remembering his surrender of Fort Necessity in the opening days of the French and Indian War, his role in Braddock’s Defeat the following year, and his less-than-enthusiastic participation in the retaking of Fort Duquesne as a disgruntled subordinate under General John Forbes.¹³

“Lest some unlucky event should happen, unfavourable to my reputation,” Washington continued, “I beg it may be remembered, by every Gentleman in the room, that I, this day declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the Command I am honored with.” But he would accept it, of course, and take pains to assure the congress that, “as no pecuniary consideration could have tempted me to have accepted this arduous employment, at the expence of my domestic ease,” he would serve without compensation, save for his expenses, which he was never shy about submitting.¹⁴

Congress officially passed Washington’s commission as “General and Commander in chief, of the army of the United Colonies,” and the new general sat down to write a lengthy letter to his wife. For reasons known best to her, Martha Washington burned most of the letters she received from her husband. The one he wrote from Philadelphia two days after accepting command of the Continental Army survives as an exception. Saying that he was writing on a subject that filled him “with inexpressable concern,” Washington acknowledged in his first sentence that this concern was “greatly aggravated and Increased” by “the uneasiness I know it will give you.”

Telling Martha that duty required him “to proceed immediately to Boston,” Washington tried to assure her “that, so far from seeking this appointment I have used every endeavour in my power to avoid it, not only from my unwillingness to part with you and the Family, but from a consciousness of its being a trust too far great for my Capacity.”¹⁵

Here again was a shade of modesty, perhaps, but far from evidence of genuine reluctance on Washington’s part, this letter was much more the careful communication of a husband to a wife assuring her that he had at least tried to avoid a situation where he would be both in danger and away from her for an extended period. His requisite modesty and spousal attentiveness aside, Washington had accepted command of Virginia militia units and routinely worn his military uniform to sessions of the congress. He may have been somewhat humbled when the moment came, but it was a role he welcomed.

The congress went on to appoint two major generals, including Artemas Ward as first major general, eight brigadier generals, and assorted officers to staff the new army. And there would be funds with which to fight a war. The ways and means debate resulted in an agreement to issue the sum of two million dollars (almost sixty million in 2010 dollars) in bills of credit—essentially continental paper currency—that were due in seven years. These were backed by all the colonies, except Georgia, in proportion to the number of inhabitants in each colony: thus New York was on the hook for a much larger share of the debt than tiny Delaware.¹⁶

On Tuesday, June 20, the congress gave Washington his marching orders. He was “to repair with all expedition to the colony of Massachusetts bay and take charge of the army of the united colonies.”¹⁷ That same morning the man who was now General Washington reviewed about two thousand troops from nearby militias, including Philadelphia’s artillery company and a troop of light horse assembled on the town common. They were said to have gone through the manual of arms and various maneuvers “with great Dexterity and exactness.”¹⁸ The next day, Washington left Philadelphia for Boston not knowing that several days earlier a bloody battle had occurred on the hills above the town.

MEANWHILE, AS MUCH AS DELEGATES to the Second Continental Congress accomplished in those hectic days of May and June, 1775, there was no attempt—and apparently little, if any, discussion on the matter—to broaden the reach of their cherished concepts of liberty and freedom to a wider segment of the population. There were white males in low social and economic classes who were accorded lesser rights than men of property, but the major categories of people who had little hope of achieving equality were women and slaves. It is difficult to say which group then stood the better chance.

As early as 1771, after abolitionists had introduced an antislavery bill into the Massachusetts legislature, James Warren told John Adams that if it was passed, “it should have a bad effect on the union of the colonies.” How could Warren and the Adams cousins court Virginia and South Carolina to their cause against Great Britain, Warren asked, if they allowed slavery to become “a disruptive side issue?”¹⁹ Their answer was to ignore it, even as men of color and servitude, including Prince Estabrook and Peter Salem, were regularly drilling with their militia units. (At some point, it appears, both Estabrook and Salem were granted their freedom in return for their military service.)

Looking for ways to bolster their fledgling provincial forces, the Massachusetts committee of safety drew a distinction between free men of color and slaves. The discussion was less about race than about the members’ underlying concept of freedom—however misguided in retrospect. Since the colonies were fighting Great Britain over their “liberties and privileges,” committee members considered the recruitment of slaves “into the army now raising” to be “inconsistent with the principals that are to be supported, and [would] reflect dishonor on this colony.” Consequently, they agreed “that no slaves be admitted into this army upon any consideration whatever.”²⁰ Nothing was said about free men of color.

This is not to say that abolition was not a topic of discussion in both the northern and southern colonies. In the northern provinces, particularly among the Quaker enclaves of Philadelphia, rural New Jersey, and coastal Rhode Island, some took the matter into their own hands and quietly emancipated their slaves by ones, twos, or threes. Other owners simply refused to purchase replacement slaves or to break up family units with further trading. Rarely, others, such as the Quaker merchant Joshua Fisher, embarked on quests to track down slaves he had previously sold, repurchase them, and grant them their freedom.²¹

Even in Virginia, where Lord Dunmore was threatening to employ the slave population against the rebels, there had been some discussion of limiting slavery. Thomas Jefferson, who arrived in Philadelphia to take Peyton Randolph’s seat in the Second Continental Congress the same day that George Washington departed for Boston, was on record as asserting that “the abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.” Jefferson wrote this in 1774 in the context of an example of George III’s heavy-handedness—in this case his government’s refusal to pass laws banning the slave trade despite the wishes of some colonies. Jefferson’s prohibition against the importation of new slaves—“No person hereafter coming into this country shall be held in slavery under any pretext whatever”—survived into the early drafts of Virginia’s 1776 constitution, though it would be dropped from the final version.²²

As noble talk about freedom and individual rights trickled down and spread among New England domestics and Carolina field hands, those slaves who understood came to take the words even more personally than whites did. But short of individual efforts, such as those of Prince Estabrook and Peter Salem, or a mass insurrection of slaves on behalf of the British Crown, slaves lacked enough political allies to effect a change in their status. Women, on the other hand, had earned some measure of political influence by their aggressive support of the nonimportation and nonconsumption measures that traced their roots to the original boycotts of the mid-1760 s.

This emerging influence may have encouraged Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren to participate in political debates—even if only with other women or within family circles—but it did not begin to grant them the independent equality so fervently sought by their husbands. John Adams was particularly adamant on that point. The most documented and pointed exchange between John and Abigail on the subject would not occur until the spring of 1776, but there is no reason to suspect that the feelings they each expressed then had not been ingrained in John or bubbling in Abigail years before.

How real was the “passion for Liberty” among those who kept fellow humans enslaved? Abigail wondered. Then she turned her attention to the predicament of her own sex. Noting that she assumed John was at work on a legal code in the congress, Abigail beseeched him to “remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.” As if to underscore the seriousness of her charge, Abigail, only partially in jest, went on to assert: “If perticular care and attention is not paid to the Laidies, we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice or Representation.”²³ Her words intentionally echoed those her husband and his rebel friends had been spouting for years.

“I cannot but laugh,” John Adams told her in reply. Then, alluding to potential unrest among children, workers, Indians, and slaves, John went on to say that Abigail’s letter was his first intimation “that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented.” This was “rather too coarse a Compliment,” he told her, “but you are so saucy, I wont blot it out.”²⁴ Abigail’s response was to withhold her normal reply to John for longer than usual and vent her frustrations in a letter to Mercy Otis Warren instead.

As for John, he was adamant in cautioning James Sullivan, a Massachusetts lawyer, that no good could come from enfranchising more Americans no matter what the category. “Depend upon it, sir,” Adams told Sullivan. “It is dangerous to open So fruitfull a Source of Controversy and Altercation, as would be opened by attempting to alter the Qualifications of Voters. There will be no End to it. New Claims will arise. Women will demand a Vote. Lads from 12 to 21 will think their Rights not enough attended to, and every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other, in all Acts of State. It tends to confound and destroy all Distinctions, and prostrate all Ranks to one common Levell.”²⁵ It remained to be seen if the rebel cause would be successful, but even if it was, the fruits of liberty were to be heavily restricted.

MEANWHILE, MANY LOYALISTS IN BOSTON remained focused on just one goal: to get out of town as quickly as possible. Some believed they would soon return and “left friends or relatives behind to guard their abandoned homes or businesses.” Others were certain that a chapter of their lives—perhaps an entire volume—was closing. In Boston, acrimony among former neighbors and friends divided by political loyalties reached as high a level as anywhere in the colonies. As loyalists continued to depart, one rebel ditty ran: “The Tories with their brats and wives, have fled to save their wretched lives.”²⁶

Where they would go was another matter. Increasingly, throughout the late spring and summer of 1775, Halifax, Nova Scotia, became the first port of refuge. It was convenient and more a matter of expedience than of choice. In time, some fleeing loyalists would stay there or make their way farther into Canada, to England, or to other parts of the British Empire. For most, their lives would never be the same. Anglican clergy, who were almost all loyalists, did not find a warm welcome in the greater Church of England. The Reverend Henry Caner, the seventy-six-year-old rector of King’s Chapel, was among the loyalists to leave Boston. He recalled that upon his arrival in England, he heard considerable expressions of compassion from the archbishop of Canterbury and bishop of London but received no offer of an appointment to an English parish. “We can’t think of your residing here,” Caner was told. “We want such men as you in America.”²⁷ America, of course, had thrown them out.

The exodus of loyalists was not confined to Boston, and those who felt forced to leave their homes and hometowns did so with a decided taste of bitterness. Thomas and Mary Robie of Marblehead didn’t want to go, but being closely allied with former governor Hutchinson and as such in the decided minority in pro-rebel Marblehead, they had little choice. Sailing first for Nova Scotia, they would eventually end up in England. As they were rowed from the dock in Marblehead to their ship anchored in the harbor, they were jeered by loud catcalls from an assembled group of rebels. Far from being cowed, Mary Robie looked shoreward from the rowboat and shouted back: “I hope that I shall live to return, find this wicked Rebellion crushed, and see the streets of Marblehead run with Rebel blood.”²⁸

IN THE SHORT TERM, PERHAPS the most consequential discussions of what course to take occurred between General Gage and his newly arrived triumvirate of reputation. On the grand scale, General Howe advocated a plan to reduce Boston to a mere garrison and move the principal thrust of British military operations to New York and the Hudson River Valley. No doubt swayed by his oldest brother’s colonial experience as well as his own, Howe recognized the strategic importance of the New York–Champlain corridor. Boston was New England’s major seaport, but it led nowhere and had become a vortex sucking in resources. The Hudson River corridor led to Canada and could sever radical New England from the other colonies.

Howe speculated that such an effort would require nineteen thousand troops in addition to a strong force of Canadians and Indians. (It is interesting that both sides anticipated an outpouring of men and assistance from Canada that never materialized.) Such large numbers—roughly three times the number of troops that Gage now had in Boston after reinforcements had arrived—appalled Lord North’s government, but Howe presciently advised, “With a Less Force than I have mentioned, I apprehend this war may be spun out untill England shall be heartily sick of it.”²⁹

England’s dismay would indeed come to pass, but Howe’s cohorts, Clinton and Burgoyne, were preoccupied with more immediate concerns. The initial shock that had gripped the survivors of Lord Percy’s retreat from Lexington was ebbing. Bolstered by reinforcements, there was a renewed sense of confidence among the regulars that a lesson must and could be taught to these upstart rebels. Clinton and Burgoyne agreed and urged General Gage to undertake operations that would secure some of Burgoyne’s desired “elbow room.” Given the largely unsuccessful forays at Grape and Noddle’s Islands, they recommended seizing the heights across the Charles River at Charlestown and those adjacent to Roxbury at Dorchester. The question that must be asked, however, is why General Gage hadn’t done something about these heights long before this.

According to the memoirs of Admiral Samuel Graves, on the evening of April 19 or shortly thereafter, as Lord Percy’s beleaguered column hunkered down in Charlestown and began its evacuation across the Charles River, Graves went to General Gage and proposed a plan that in retrospect seems quite out of character with the normally disinclined admiral. Graves “advised the burning of Charlestown and Roxbury, and the seizing of the Heights of Roxbury and Bunkers Hill.”³⁰

Doing so would have left the rebels—short of an amphibious assault, for which they were not readily equipped—only two narrow and heavily defended routes against Boston had they opted to make such an attack. But Admiral Graves was certainly not thinking about the safety of Boston and General Gage’s army. The admiral was chiefly concerned about his fleet. Rebel cannons placed either above Charlestown or near Roxbury would be within range of his ships.

According to Graves, General Gage replied that his forces were far too weak for such ventures, even after the admiral’s offer of marine reinforcements from the fleet. That was possibly true about an advance south from Boston Neck to Roxbury and Dorchester Heights, given the openness of the terrain there. But on the Charlestown peninsula, the geography was reversed, and Charlestown Neck afforded a defensive strongpoint against rebels attacking from the mainland. In fact, fearing just such an assault against the retreating British column on the evening of April 19, Captain John Montresor of the engineers had begun work on fortifications on Bunker Hill that faced away from Boston and commanded the approaches across Charlestown Neck.

Even if Gage was correct in his fear of spreading his forces too thin at Roxbury—at that point he had yet to broker the agreement with the Boston citizens in his midst to turn in their arms—the Charlestown situation was entirely different. British troops already controlled that ground; the populace was preparing to abandon the town, and there was little concern for a successful rebel attack from Cambridge, particularly given Admiral Graves’s warships at anchor in the Charles River. But Gage said no. He dismissed the admiral’s plans as “too rash and sanguinary” and proceeded to complete the Charlestown evacuation and hunker his troops down in Boston proper—which was, of course, the condition Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne found upon their arrival.³¹

In the meantime, however, Admiral Graves remained worried about the safety of his fleet—in part because the larger ships of his line could only maneuver easily at high tide. He was particularly concerned about the seventy-gun Somerset, which Paul Revere had rowed past on the evening of April 18 and which still stood guard near the Charlestown ferry crossing. Consequently, on April 23, Graves received permission from Gage to place a battery of twenty-four-pound cannons from his ships atop Copp’s Hill in the North End, almost in the shadow of the Old North Church. This battery looked out across the Charles River at Charlestown and was about the same height as the hills above the town. It provided a stout backup to the Somerset and other vessels and was under the navy’s direct control.

Army officers made an immediate joke about the effort, and even Admiral Graves recounted their reaction with humor. “The erection of this battery by the Commander at Sea afforded much pleasantry to the Garrison,” Graves acknowledged—“particularly among those who did not readily perceive the intent; it was christened soon by the name of the Admiral’s battery and always spoke of with a smile.”³²

As it turned out, Admiral Graves almost got to unlimber those guns a few days before Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne sailed into town. There were commanders on the rebel side just as anxious for action as Clinton and Burgoyne, and one of them was that old Connecticut firebrand Israel Putnam. The man couldn’t be idle, and he didn’t expect his troops to be, either. Idleness was an enemy. Putnam may have been the original proponent of the old army saw that it was “better to dig a ditch every morning and fill it up at evening than to have the men idle.”³³

One May afternoon Putnam apparently took it upon himself to lead a ramble from Cambridge to Charlestown. With fifes blaring and drums beating, a column of some 2,200 men followed Putnam across Charlestown Neck, over the heights behind the town, and then down to the waterfront at the ferry landing. They did so, according to one Connecticut volunteer, “to Shoe themselves to the Regulars.”³⁴ They were certainly seen, but it provoked no response.

Lieutenant John Barker of the Fourth Regiment heard the rebels give a war whoop opposite the anchored Somerset and expected them to fire on the ship. When they didn’t, Barker wished that they had, because the Somerset “had everything ready for Action, and must have destroyed great numbers of them besides putting the Town in Ashes.”³⁵

The admiral’s battery on Copp’s Hill would have likely joined in the cannonade, but no commands to fire were given on either side. Putnam was only making a demonstration, and those in command on the Somerset and atop Copp’s Hill evidently lacked the authority to engage unless fired upon. If nothing else, the absence of an exchange shows that there was still some tentativeness to this entire drama on both sides.

Putnam returned his men to Cambridge without firing a shot, but he had caused quite a stir among loyalists in Boston. “This movement,” James Warren wrote Mercy, “produced a Terror in Boston hardly to be described.”³⁶

Such terror aside, the heights above Charlestown and at Dorchester remained unoccupied when Howe, Clinton, and Burgoyne sat down with General Gage to devise a course of action to seize them. “Why a situation, from which the town of Boston was so liable to be annoyed, was so long neglected,” British historian Charles Stedman wrote critically a few years later, “it is not easy to assign a reason.” But at that point, according to Burgoyne, “my two colleagues and myself… never differed in one jot of military sentiment” and formed the plan “in concert with General Gage.” They proposed to begin with the Dorchester front because, with the support of Admiral Graves’s fleet, “it would evidently be effected without any considerable loss.”³⁷

Howe, as the senior man of the trio, would lead the assault. On June 12—by coincidence the very day that Gage’s proclamation was nailing shut the last door of local reconciliation—Howe wrote his brother Richard, the admiral, the broad outline of the plan. Under the guns of the Royal Navy, Howe’s troops would make an amphibious landing on Dorchester Neck and secure the heights. Then, pivoting to the west and joining forces with more troops, who would emerge from Boston via Boston Neck, they would sweep through the rebel lines at Roxbury and be poised to advance upon Cambridge from the south.

Once the Dorchester attack was assured of success, Clinton would lead a similar assault “with all we can muster” to take the heights above Charlestown. From there, Clinton would “either attack the Rebels at Cambridge” directly or encircle that post, perhaps linking up with Howe in a great pincerlike movement. “In either case,” Howe wrote his brother, “I suppose the Rebels will move from Cambridge, And that we shall take, and keep possession of it.”³⁸

The opening assault was planned against Dorchester on the morning of June 18—once again a Sunday. Given Howe’s confidence in the matter, no one on the British side seems to have been terribly concerned about what the rebels might be doing in the interim. Much would later be made of various reports that reached Cambridge about the British plan. One came in a roundabout way from the New Hampshire committee of safety. It forwarded a warning from “a gentleman of undoubted veracity” who had left Boston even before Gage and his generals drafted their plan. After reinforcements arrived, the informant reported, Gage was expected to “secure some advantageous posts near Boston, viz: Dorchester and Charlestown.” The friendly New Hampshire missive went on to say: “We are unacquainted with the importance of those posts, but if this hint should be in any degree useful, it will give us pleasure.”³⁹

Of course, just about everyone within a hundred miles of Boston was well acquainted with the importance of those posts, even if to date both sides had been frozen in any attempt to occupy them. On the very day the New Hampshire warning was written, the Massachusetts committee of safety noted that “it is daily expected that General Gage will attack our Army now in the vicinity of Boston, in order to penetrate into the country” and warned that the army should therefore “be in every respect prepared for action.”⁴⁰ And one of the officers of a New Hampshire regiment stationed near Cambridge wrote home that while “it is still times with the Regular Troops at present; we expect they will make a push for Bunker’s Hill or Dorchester Neck very soon.”⁴¹

It was indeed obvious to any informed observer that something major was about to happen either in the direction of Dorchester or Charlestown or both. Despite this, one twenty-first-century writer pulled Margaret Gage into this matter, too, and claimed the rebels learned of the British plan because the general’s “American wife probably again leaked the information.”⁴² It makes great fiction, but it didn’t take spies or clandestine reports to confirm the obvious. Boston remained the leaky sieve of information it had always been, and with the town swelling with reinforcements something was going to happen.

Like the British, the rebels had also recognized the importance of the hills above Charlestown and Dorchester, but except for Israel Putnam’s parade through Charlestown they had been as slow to act as General Gage. The first call for action came from a joint committee organized to reconnoiter “the Highlands in Cambridge and Charlestown.” On May 12, after its examination, the committee recommended erecting breastworks flanking the Cambridge-to-Charlestown road on the Cambridge side of the neck and building redoubts with “three or four nine-pounders planted there” atop Winter Hill on the Cambridge side of the neck and Bunker Hill on the Charlestown side of the neck. “A strong Redoubt raised on Bunker’s Hill” was calculated “to annoy the enemy coming out of Charlestown, also to annoy them going by water to Medford.” The report concluded with the prediction that “when these are finished, we apprehend the country will be safe from all sallies of the enemy in that quarter.”⁴³

The breastworks were soon erected—perhaps as part of Putnam’s “keep ’em busy” digging campaign—but the larger redoubts recommended on Winter Hill and Bunker Hill were not. In part this was attributable to limited time and resources, but there was also a difference of opinion about putting forces in an exposed forward position on Bunker Hill. The firebrands, including Putnam and Colonel William Prescott of Massachusetts, were all in favor and sought to provoke the British into coming out of Boston and fighting rather than settling in for a protracted siege.

General Artemas Ward and Joseph Warren were among those who thought the army’s resources too limited to maintain so extended a post. With long-range military concerns in mind, Ward and Warren weren’t eager to bring on a general action until the colonial army might be better organized and supplied. For one thing, there never seemed to be enough gunpowder. Warren reportedly told Putnam that he thought the plan to build a redoubt on Bunker Hill was “a rash one.” Nevertheless, Warren vowed, “If the project be adopted, and the strife becomes hard, you must not be surprised to find me near you in the midst of it.”⁴⁴

This difference of opinion on the rebel side continued until June 15, by which time an avalanche of information signaled that Gage was preparing for imminent action. That day, as the full body of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress agreed to pay for the removal of the Harvard College library to the safety of Andover, its committee of safety issued direct orders about the heights at both Charlestown and Dorchester. Citing the “importance to the safety of this Colony, that possession of the hill called Bunker’s Hill, in Charlestown, be securely kept and defended,” the committee recommended that it be “maintained by sufficient force being posted there.” Of Dorchester Heights, the committee had less detailed knowledge, and it merely ordered officers to Roxbury to reconnoiter the situation there.⁴⁵

It has never been answered with absolute certainty whether the Charlestown action was simply a long-overdue rebel move to fortify Bunker Hill or an attempt to forestall the anticipated British move against Dorchester with a more ominous threat to Boston than seizing Dorchester Heights would have been. Charlestown was less than a mile from Boston’s North End and the Royal Navy ships in the Charles, whereas Dorchester Heights was a good two miles from Boston Harbor. The rebel decision was likely a combination of those goals—clear action on Charlestown and a distraction from Dorchester.

There is a report by Artemas Ward’s principal biographer that the rebel general himself hurried to Bunker Hill about noon on June 16 with members of his staff.⁴⁶ This may or may not have been the case, but the result of rebel reconnaissance was that Colonel William Prescott was given command of three regiments, several companies from Putnam’s Connecticut regiment, and an artillery company—a total force of about twelve hundred men—and ordered to march to Bunker Hill and construct fortifications. The march as well as the work was to be undertaken after dark so as not to alarm the British in Boston or on the ships in the Charles. Significantly, Ward also ordered that a relief party of a like number of men—three regiments and another two hundred of the Connecticut troops—be ready to march the following evening “with two days provisions and well equipped with arms and ammunition” to relieve Prescott’s command.⁴⁷

That evening, Friday, June 16, the bulk of Prescott’s command assembled in Cambridge. “We were orderd to parade at six ’o Clock,” a company clerk named Peter Brown later wrote to his mother, “with one days provision and Blankets ready for a March somewhere, but we knew not where but we readily and cheerfully obey’d.”⁴⁸

But there was no rush to march off immediately. The long midsummer evening would last another three hours, and it allowed ample time to view the assemblage. This was still less an army than a loose band of partisans “hearty in the cause,” as Peter Brown termed it. Few had uniforms; most were in everyday work clothes; all carried muskets they had brought from home. Some of the weapons dated from before the French and Indian War and were older than the men who shouldered them. Almost no one had bayonets. Picks, shovels, and other entrenching tools suggested a full night’s work.

Reverend Samuel Langdon, the president of Harvard College, his library secure, offered a lengthy prayer over the assembled troops. Then, as the twilight finally turned murky, Colonel Prescott and two sergeants carrying lanterns led the column east out of town. That night, the fifes and drums would be silent. Secrecy was of the utmost importance.

The column walked quietly over the wooden bridges that spanned several branches of Willis Creek and met the two hundred Connecticut men under the command of Captain Thomas Knowlton. Nearby stood the earthworks where Putnam had kept them busy digging and filling and digging. Might they be doing some more digging for Old Put? But onward Prescott and the two flickering lanterns led until they came to the crossroads at the western end of Charlestown Neck. As Prescott turned to the right, their destination suddenly became obvious to Private Brown and his comrades. The left-hand fork led back toward Winter Hill and Medford. The right-hand fork led east across the neck toward Bunker Hill.